The Goodbye Look

chapter 16

I got to San Diego shortly before noon. The Trask house on Bayview Avenue stood near the base of Point Loma, overlooking North Island and the bay. It was a solid hillside ranchhouse with a nicely tended lawn and flowerbeds.

I knocked on the front door with an iron knocker shaped like a seahorse. No answer. I knocked and waited, and tried the knob. The door didn’t open.

I walked around the outside of the house, peering into the windows, trying to act like a prospective purchaser. The windows were heavily draped. Apart from a glimpse of birch cupboards and a stainless-steel sink pagodaed with dirty dishes, I couldn’t see anything. The attached garage was latched on the inside.

I went back to my car, which I’d parked diagonally across the street, and settled down to wait. The house was ordinary enough, but somehow it gripped my attention. The traffic of the harbor and the sky, ferries and fishing boats, planes and gulls, all seemed to move in relation to it.

The waiting minutes were long-drawn-out. Delivery vans went by, and a few carsful of children chauffeured by mothers. The street wasn’t much used by the people who lived on it, except for transportation. The people kept to their houses, as if to express a sense of property, and a sense of isolation.

An old car that didn’t belong on the street came up the hill trailing oil smoke and preceded by the clatter of a fan belt that needed lubrication. A big rawboned man wearing a dirty gray windbreaker and a dirty gray beard got out and crossed the street, silent in worn sneakers. He was carrying a round Mexican basket under one arm. He knocked, as I had, on the Trask’s front door. He tried the knob, as I had.

He looked up and down the street and at me, the movements of his head as quick and instinctive as an old animal’s. I was reading a San Diego County road map. When I looked at the man again, he had opened the door and was closing it behind him.

I got out of my car and noted the registration of his: Randolph Shepherd, Conchita’s Cabins, Imperial Beach. His keys were in the ignition. I put them in the same pocket as my keys.

A folded copy of the Los Angeles Times lay on the right side of the front seat, open at the third page. Under a two-column head there was an account of Sidney Harrow’s death and a picture of his young swinger’s face, which I had never really seen.

I was named as the discoverer of the body, nothing more. Nick Chalmers wasn’t named. But Captain Lackland was quoted as saying that he expected to make an arrest within the next twenty-four hours.

My head was still in Shepherd’s car when he opened the door of the Trask house. He came out furtively but rapidly, almost with abandon, as if he’d been pushed out by an explosion in the house. For a moment his eyes were perfectly round, like clouded marbles, and his mouth a round red hole in his beard.

He stopped short when he saw me. He looked up and down the open sunlit street as if he was in a cul-de-sac surrounded by high walls.

“Hello, Randy.”

He showed his brown teeth in a grin of puzzlement. With enormous unwillingness, like a man wading into a cold deepening sea, he came across the road toward me. He let his grin become loose and foolish.

“I was just bringing Miss Jean some tomatoes. I used to tend the garden for Miss Jean’s daddy. I got a real green thumb, see.”

He raised his thumb. It was big and spatulate, grained with dirt, and armed with a jagged dirty nail.

“Do you always pick the lock when you make a delivery, Randy?”

“How come you know my name? Are you a cop?”

“Not exactly.”

“How come you know my name?”

“You’re famous. I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

“Who are you? A cop?”

“A private cop.”

He made a quick bad decision. He had been making them all his life: his scarred face bore the record of them. He jabbed at my eyes with his thumbnail. At the same time he tried to knee me.

I caught his jabbing hand and twisted it. For a moment we were perfectly poised and still. Shepherd’s eyes were bright with rage. He couldn’t sustain it, though. His face went through a series of transformations, like stop-time pictures of a man growing tired and old. His hand went limp, and I let go of it.

“Listen, boss, is it all right if I go now? I got a lot of other deliveries to make.”

“What are you delivering? Trouble?”

“No sir. Not me.” He glanced at the Trask house as if its presence on the street had caught him by surprise. “I got a quick temper but I wouldn’t hurt nobody. I didn’t hurt you. You were the one hurt me. I’m the one that’s always getting hurt.”

“But not the only one.”

He winced as if I had made a cruel remark. “What are you getting at, mister?”

“There’ve been a couple of killings. That isn’t news to you.” I reached for the newspaper on the seat of his car and showed him Harrow’s picture.

“I never saw him in my life,” he said.

“You had the paper open at this story.”

“Not me. I picked it up that way at the station. I always pick up my papers at the station.” He leaned toward me, sweaty and jumpy. “Listen, I got to go now, okay? I got a serious call of nature.”

“This is more important.”

“Not to me it isn’t.”

“To you, too. You know a young man named Nick Chalmers?”

“He isn’t–” He caught himself, and started over: “What did you say?”

“You heard me. I’m looking for Nick Chalmers. He may be looking for you.”

“What for? I never touched him. When I found out that Swain was planning a snatch–” He caught himself again and covered his mouth with his hand, as if he could force the words back in or hide them like birds in his beard.

“Did Swain snatch the Chalmers boy?”

“Why ask me? I’m as clean as a whistle.” But he peered up at the sky with narrowed eyes as if he could see a sky hook or a noose descending toward him. “I gotta get out of this sun. It gives me skin cancer.”

“It’s a nice slow death. Swain died a quicker one.”

“You’ll never pin it on me, ’bo. Even the cops at the Point turned me loose.”

“They wouldn’t have if they’d known what I do.”

He moved closer to me, cringing on bent knees, making himself look smaller. “I’m clean, honest to God. Please let me go now, mister.”

“We’ve barely started.”

“But we can’t just stand here.”

“Why not?”

His head turned on his neck like an automatic mechanism, and he looked at the Trask house once again. My gaze followed his. I noticed that the front door was a few inches ajar.

“You left the front door open. We better go over and shut it.”

“You shut it,” he said. “I got a bad charley horse in my leg. I gotta sit down or I’ll fall down.”

He climbed in behind the wheel of his jalopy. He wouldn’t get far without an ignition key, I thought, and I crossed the street. Looking through the crack between the door and the lintel, I could see red tomatoes scattered on the floor of the hallway. I went in, stepping carefully to avoid them.

There was a smell of burning from the kitchen. I found that a glass coffeemaker on an electric plate had boiled dry and cracked. Jean Trask was lying near it on the green vinyl floor.

I pulled the plug of the electric plate, and knelt down beside Jean. She had stab wounds in her breast and one great gash in her throat. Her body was clothed in pajamas and a pink nylon robe, and it was still warm.

Even though Jean was dead, I could hear breathing somewhere. It sounded as if the house itself was breathing. An open door led through the back kitchen, past the washer and dryer, into the attached garage.

George Trask’s Ford sedan was standing in the garage. Nick Chalmers was lying face up beside it on the concrete floor. I loosened his shirt collar. Then I looked at his eyes: they were turned up. I slapped him hard, once on each side of his face. No response. I heard myself groan.

Three empty drugstore tubes of varying sizes lay near him on the floor. I picked them up and put them in my pocket. There was no time for any further search. I had to get Nick to a stomach pump.

I raised the garage door, crossed the street for my car, and backed it into the driveway. I lifted Nick in my arms – he was a big man and it wasn’t easy – and laid him on the back seat. I closed the garage. I pulled the front door of the house shut.

I noticed then that Randy Shepherd and his jalopy had gone. No doubt he was just as good at starting keyless cars as he was at opening locked doors. Under the circumstances, I could hardly blame him for leaving.