The Goodbye Look

chapter 13

I had dinner in Pasadena and drove home to West Los Angeles. The air in my second-floor apartment was warm and stale. I opened a window and a bottle of beer, and sat down with the bottle in the near-darkness of my front room.

I lived in a quiet section, away from the main freeways. Still I could hear them humming, remote yet intimate, like the humming of my own blood in my veins.

Cars went by in the street from time to time, flinging brief lights across the ceiling. The case I was on seemed as hard to hold in the mind as the vanishing lights and the humming city were.

The shape and feeling of the case were changing. They always changed as you moved around in them. Eldon Swain had come into the center, pulling his whole family with him. If he was alive, he could give me some answers I needed. If he was dead, the people who knew his history would have to provide the answers.

I turned on the light and got out my black notebook and put down some notes about the people:

“The Colt .45 I took off Nick Chalmers was bought in September 1941 by Samuel Rawlinson, president of the Pasadena Occidental Bank. Around July 1, 1945, he gave it to his daughter Louise Swain. Her husband, Eldon, cashier of the bank, had just embezzled over half a million and ruined the bank. He ran off, reportedly to Mexico, with Rita Shepherd, daughter of Rawlinson’s housekeeper (and onetime ‘best friend’ of his own daughter, Jean).

“Eldon Swain turned up at his wife’s house in 1954 and took the Colt from her. How did it get from Swain to Nick Chalmers? Via Sidney Harrow, or through other people?

“N.B. San Diego: Harrow lived there, ditto Swain’s daughter Jean and her husband, George Trask, ditto Mrs. Shepherd’s ex-husband.”

When I finished writing it was nearly midnight. I called John Truttwell’s house in Pacific Point and at his request I read my notes to him, twice. I said it might be a good idea after all to turn the Colt revolver over to Lackland for testing. Truttwell said he already had. I went to bed.

At seven by my radio clock the phone jarred me awake. I picked up the receiver and pronounced my own name with a dry mouth.

“Captain Lackland here. I know it’s early to call. But I’ve been up all night myself, supervising tests on the revolver you turned in to your lawyer.”

“Mr. Truttwell isn’t my lawyer.”

“He’s been doing your talking for you. But under present circumstances that isn’t good enough.”

“What are the circumstances?”

“I don’t believe in discussing evidence over the phone. Can you be here in the station in an hour?”

“I can try.”

I skipped breakfast and walked into Lackland’s office at two minutes to eight by the electric clock on his wall. He nodded curtly. His eyes had sunk deeper into his head. Glinting gray beard had sprouted on his face, like wire growing out from a central steel core.

His desk was cluttered with photographs. The top one was a blown-up microphotograph of a pair of bullets. Lackland waved me into a hard chair opposite him.

“It’s time you and I had a meeting of minds.”

“You make it sound more like a clash of personalities, Captain.”

Lackland didn’t smile. “I’m in no mood for wisecracks. I want to know where you got hold of this gun.” He pulled the revolver on me suddenly, producing a plywood board to which it had been attached with wire.

“I can’t tell you that. The law says I don’t have to.”

“What do you know about the law?”

“I’m working under a good lawyer. I accept his interpretation.”

“I don’t.”

“You make that clear, Captain. I’m willing to cooperate in any way I can. The fact that you have the gun is proof of that.”

“The real proof would be for you to tell me where you got it.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Would it change your mind if I told you we know?”

“I doubt it. Try me.”

“Nick Chalmers was known to be carrying a gun yesterday. I have a witness. Another witness places him in the vicinity of the Sunset Motor Hotel at the approximate time of the Harrow killing.”

Lackland’s voice was dry and official, as if he was already testifying at Nick’s trial. He was watching my eyes as he spoke. I tried to keep them unresponsive, as cold as his were.

“No comment,” I said.

“You’ll have to answer in court.”

“That’s doubtful. Also, we’re not in court.”

“We may be sooner than you think. Right now I probably have enough for a Grand Jury indictment.” He slapped the pile of photographs on his desk. “I have positive proof that this revolver killed Harrow. The bullets we test-fired from it match up with the slug recovered from his brain. You want to take a look?”

I studied the microphotographs. I was no ballistics expert, but I could see that the slugs matched. The evidence against Nick was piling up.

There was almost too much evidence. Beside it, Nick’s confession that he had murdered Harrow in the hobo jungle seemed less and less real.

“You don’t waste any time, Captain.”

The compliment depressed Lackland. “I wish that that was true. I’ve been working on this case for fifteen years – nearly all of it wasted.” He gave me a long appraising look. “I really could use your help, you know. I like to cooperate as well as the next man.”

“So do I. I don’t understand what you mean about fifteen years.”

“I wish I understood it myself.” He lifted his microphotographs out of the way and produced some other pictures from the manila envelope he’d shown me yesterday. “Look here.”

The first picture was the cropped one I’d already seen. It was Eldon Swain, all right, flanked by girls’ dresses, with the girls cut away.

“Know him?”

“I may.”

“You do or you don’t,” Lackland said.

There was no reason not to tell him. Lackland would trace the Colt revolver to Samuel Rawlinson, if he hadn’t already done so. From there it was only a step to Rawlinson’s son-in-law. I said:

“His name is Eldon Swain. He used to live in Pasadena.”

Lackland smiled and nodded, like a teacher whose backward pupil is making progress. He brought out another picture from his manila envelope. It was a flash picture which showed the weary face of a sleeping man. I blinked, and saw that the sleeping man was dead.

“How about him?” Lackland said.

The man’s hair had faded almost white. There were smudges of dirt or ashes on his face, and it had been burned by harsh suns. His mouth showed broken teeth and around it the marks of broken hopes.

“It could be the same man, Captain.”

“That’s my opinion, too. It’s why I dug him out of the files.”

“Is he dead?”

“For a long time. Fifteen years.” Lackland’s voice had a certain rough tenderness, which he seemed to reserve for the dead. “He got himself knocked off down in the hobo jungle. That was in 1954 – I was a sergeant at the time.”

“Was he murdered?”

“Shot through the heart. With this gun.” He lifted the revolver on the board. “The same gun that killed Harrow.”

“How do you know that?”

“Ballistics again.” From a drawer in his desk he got out a labelled box which was lined with cotton, and took out a slug. “This bullet matches the ones we test-fired last night, and it’s the one that killed the man in the jungle. I thought of it,” he said with careful pride, “because Harrow was carrying this other picture.” He tapped the cropped photograph of Eldon Swain. “And I was struck by the resemblance to the dead man in the jungle.”

“I think the dead man is Swain,” I said. “The timing is right.” I told Lackland what I had learned about the passage of the revolver from Rawlinson’s hands, into his daughter’s, and from her hands into her wandering husband’s.

Lackland was deeply interested. “You say Swain had been in Mexico?”

“For eight or nine years, apparently.”

“That tends to confirm the identification. The dead man was dressed like a wetback, in Mexican clothes. It’s one reason we didn’t follow it up like maybe we should have. I used to be a border guard during the war, and I know how hard it is to trace a Mex.”

“No fingerprints?”

“That’s right, no fingerprints. The body was left with its hands in a fire – the coals of a bonfire.” He showed me a hideous picture of the charred hands. “I don’t know if it was accidental or not. Some wild things happen in the hobo jungle.”

“Did you have any suspects at the time?”

“We rounded up the transients, of course. One of them looked promising at first – an ex-con named Randy Shepherd. He was carrying too much money for a tramp, and he’d been seen with the decedent. But he claimed they’d just met casually on the road and shared a bottle. We couldn’t prove otherwise.”

He shifted to further questions about Eldon Swain and the revolver, which I answered. Finally he said: “We’ve covered everything except the essential point. How did you get hold of the gun yesterday?”

“Sorry, Captain. At least you’re not trying to pin this old hobo-jungle killing on Nick Chalmers. He was hardly big enough for a cap pistol at the time.”

Lackland was as implacable as a chess player: “Children have been known to fire a gun.”

“You can’t be serious.”

Lackland gave me a chilly smile which seemed to say that he knew more than I did, and always would.