The Goodbye Look

chapter 17

I drove down Rosecrans to Highway 80 and delivered Nick at the ambulance entrance of the hospital. There had been a recent auto accident, and everybody on the emergency ward was busy. Looking for a stretcher, I opened a door and saw a dead man and closed the door again.

I found a wheeled stretcher in another room, took it outside and heaved Nick onto it. I pushed him up to the emergency desk.

“This boy needs a stomach pump. He’s full of barbiturates.”

“Another one?” the nurse said.

She produced a paper form to be filled out. Then she glanced at Nick’s face and I think she was touched by his inert good looks. She dispensed with red tape for the present. She helped me to wheel Nick into a treatment room and called in a young doctor with an Armenian name.

The doctor checked Nick’s pulse and respiration, and looked at the pupils of his eyes, which were contracted. He turned to me.

“What did he take, do you know?”

I showed him the drug containers I had picked up in the Trasks’ garage. They had Lawrence Chalmers’s name on them, and the names and amounts of the three drugs they had contained: chloral hydrate, Nembutal and Nembu-Serpin.

He looked at me inquiringly. “He hasn’t taken all of these?”

“I don’t know if the prescriptions were full. I don’t think they were.”

“Let’s hope the chloral hydrate wasn’t, anyway. Twenty of those capsules are enough to kill two men.”

As he spoke, the doctor began to thread a flexible plastic tube into Nick’s nostril. He told the nurse to cover him with a blanket, and prepare a glucose injection. Then he turned to me again.

“How long ago did he swallow the stuff?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe two hours. What’s Nembu-Serpin, by the way?”

“A combination of Nembutal and reserpine. It’s a tranquilizer used in treating hypertension, also in psychiatric treatment.” His eyes met mine. “Is the boy emotionally disturbed?”

“Somewhat.”

“I see. Are you a relative?”

“A friend,” I said.

“The reason I ask, he’ll have to be admitted. In suicide attempts like this the hospital requires round-the-clock nurses. That costs money.”

“It shouldn’t be any problem. His father’s a millionaire.”

“No kidding.” He was unimpressed. “Also, his regular doctor should see him before he’s admitted. Okay?”

“I’ll do my best, doctor.”

I found a telephone booth and called the Chalmerses’ house in Pacific Point. Irene Chalmers answered.

“This is Archer. May I speak to your husband?”

“Lawrence isn’t here. He’s out looking for Nick.”

“He can stop looking. I found him.”

“Is he all right?”

“No. He took the drugs, and he’s having his stomach pumped out. I’m calling from the San Diego Hospital. Have you got that?”

“The San Diego Hospital, yes. I know the place, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Bring Dr. Smitheram with you, and John Truttwell.”

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“Tell them it’s a major emergency. It really is, Mrs. Chalmers.”

“Is he dying?”

“He could die. Let’s hope he doesn’t. Incidentally you’d better bring a checkbook. He’s going to need special nurses.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you.” Her voice was blank, and I couldn’t tell if she had really heard me.

“You’ll bring a checkbook, then, or some cash.”

“Yes. Certainly. I was just thinking, life is so strange, it seems to go in circles. Nick was born in that same hospital, and now you say he may die there.”

“I don’t think he will, Mrs. Chalmers.”

But she had begun to cry. I listened to her for a little while, until she hung up on me.

Because it wasn’t good policy to leave a murder unreported, I called the San Diego Police Department and gave the sergeant on duty George Trask’s address on Bayview Avenue. “There’s been an accident.”

“What kind of an accident?”

“A woman got cut.”

The sergeant’s voice became louder and more interested: “What is your name, please?”

I hung up and leaned on the wall. My head was empty. I think I almost fainted. Remembering that I’d missed my breakfast, I wandered through the hospital and found the cafeteria. I drank a couple of glasses of milk and had some toast with a soft-boiled egg, like an invalid. The morning’s events had hit me in the stomach.

I went back to the emergency ward where Nick was still being worked on.

“How is he?”

“It’s hard to tell,” the doctor said. “If you’ll fill out his form we’ll admit him provisionally and put him in a private room. Okay?”

“That’s fine. His mother and his psychiatrist should be here within an hour or so.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows. “How sick is he?”

“You mean in the head? Sick enough.”

“I was wondering.” He reached under his white coat and produced a torn scrap of paper. “This fell out of his breast pocket.”

He handed it to me. It was a penciled note: “I am a murderer and deserve to die. Forgive me, Mother and Dad. I love you Betty.”

“He isn’t a murderer, is he?” the doctor said.

“No.”

My denial sounded unconvincing to me, but the doctor accepted it. “Ordinarily the police would want to see that suicide note. But there’s no use making further trouble for the guy.”

I folded the note and put it in my wallet and got out of there before he changed his mind.