The Goodbye Look

chapter 22

Moira left me at the hospital entrance to fix her face, as she said. I took the elevator to the second floor and found Nick’s parents in the visitors’ room. Chalmers was snoring in an armchair with his head thrown back. His wife sat near him, dressed in elegant black.

“Mrs. Chalmers?”

She rose with her finger to her lips, moving toward the door. “This is the first rest Larry’s had.” She followed me into the corridor. “We’re both deeply grateful to you, for finding Nick.”

“I hope it wasn’t too late.”

“It wasn’t.” She managed a pale smile. “Dr. Smitheram and the other doctors are most encouraging. Apparently Nick regurg–” She stumbled over the word. “He vomited some of the pills before they could take effect.”

“What about his concussion?”

“I don’t think it’s too serious. Do you have any idea how he got it?”

“He fell or was hit,” I said.

“Who hit him?”

“I don’t know.”

“Where did you find him, Mr. Archer?”

“Here in San Diego.”

“But where?”

“I’d rather report the details through Mr. Truttwell.”

“But he’s not here. He refused to come. He said he had other clients to attend to.” Her feelings had risen close to the surface, and anger broke through. “If he thinks he can give us the brush-off, he’ll be sorry.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean that.” I changed the subject. “Since Truttwell isn’t available, I should probably tell you I’ve been talking to a Mrs. Swain. She’s Jean Trask’s mother and she has some family pictures that I’d like to have a look at. But Mrs. Swain wants money for them.”

“How much money?”

“Quite a lot. I may be able to get them for a thousand or so.”

“That’s ridiculous! The woman must be crazy.”

I didn’t press the point. Nurses were coming and going in the corridor. They already knew Mrs. Chalmers, and they smiled and nodded and looked inquiringly at her hot black eyes. Breathing deeply, she got herself under some control.

“I insist that you tell me where you found Nick. If he was the victim of foul play–”

I cut her short: “I wouldn’t get off on that kick, Mrs. Chalmers.”

“What do you mean?”

“Let’s take a little walk.”

We turned a corner and loitered along a hallway past offices that had been closed for the night. I told her in detail where I had found her son, in the garage next to the kitchen where Jean Trask had been murdered. She leaned on the white wall, her head hanging sideways as if I had struck her violently in the face. Without her coloring, her foreshortened shadow looked like that of a hunched old woman.

“You think he killed her, don’t you?”

“There are other possibilities. But I haven’t reported any of this to the police, for obvious reasons.”

“Am I the only one you’ve told?”

“So far.”

She straightened up, using her hands to push herself away from the wall. “Let’s keep it that way. Don’t tell John Truttwell – he’s turned against Nick on account of that girl of his. Don’t even tell my husband. His nerves are exhausted as it is, and he can’t take it.”

“But you can?”

“I have to.” She was quiet for a moment, getting her thoughts in order. “You said there were other possibilities.”

“One is that your son was framed. Say the murderer found him drugged and put him in the Trask garage as a patsy. It would be hard to convince the police of that one.”

“Do they have to be brought in?”

“They’re in. The question is how much we have to tell them. We’ll need legal advice on that. My neck is out a mile as it is.”

She wasn’t much interested in the state of my neck. “What are the other possibilities?”

“I can think of one other. We’ll get to that in a minute.” I took out my wallet and produced the suicide note which had fallen from Nick’s pocket. “Is this Nick’s writing?”

She held it up to the light. “Yes, it is. It means he’s guilty, doesn’t it?”

I took it back. “It means he feels guilty of something. He may have stumbled across Mrs. Trask’s body and had an overwhelming guilt reaction. That’s the other possibility that occurred to me. I’m no psychiatrist, and I’d like your permission to talk this over with Dr. Smitheram.”

“No! Not even Dr. Smitheram.”

“Don’t you trust him?”

“He knows too much about my son already.” She leaned toward me urgently. “You can’t trust anybody, don’t you know that?”

“No,” I said, “I don’t know that. I was hoping we’d reached a point where the people responsible for Nick could do some candid talking with each other. The hush-hush policy hasn’t been working too well.”

She looked at me with a kind of wary surprise. “Do you like Nick?”

“I’ve had no chance to like him, or get to know him. I feel responsible for him. I hope you do, too.”

“I love him dearly.”

“You may love him too damn dearly. I think you and your husband have been giving him a bad break in trying to over-protect him. If he actually killed anyone the facts are going to have to be brought out.”

She shook her head resignedly. “You don’t know the circumstances.”

“Then tell me.”

“I can’t.”

“You might save yourself a lot of time and money, Mrs. Chalmers. You might save your son’s sanity, or his life.”

“Dr. Smitheram says his life is not in danger.”

“Dr. Smitheram hasn’t been talking to the people I’ve been talking to. There have been three killings over a period of fifteen years–”

“Be quiet.”

Her voice was low and frantic. She looked up and down the corridor, her gesture mocked and cartooned by her shadow on the wall. In spite of her sex and her elegance I was reminded of Randy Shepherd’s furtive sidelong peerings.

“I won’t be quiet,” I said. “You’ve lived in fear so long you need a taste of reality. There have been three killings, as I said, and they all seem to be connected. I didn’t say that Nick was guilty of all three. He may not have done any of them.”

She shook her head despairingly.

I went on: “Even if he killed the man in the railroad yards, it was a far cry from murder. He was protecting himself against a kidnapper, a wanted man named Eldon Swain who was carrying a gun. As I reconstruct the shooting, he made a rough pass at your little boy. The boy got hold of his gun and shot him in the chest.”

She looked up in surprise. “How do you know all this?”

“I don’t know all of it. It’s partly reconstruction from what Nick told me himself. And I had a chance to talk today with an old con named Randy Shepherd. If I can believe him at all, he went to Pacific Point with Eldon Swain but got cold feet when Swain started planning the kidnapping.”

“Why did they pick on us?” she said intently.

“That didn’t come out. I suspect Randy Shepherd was more deeply involved than he admits. Shepherd seems to be connected with all three killings, at least as a catalyst. Sidney Harrow was a friend of Shepherd’s, and Shepherd was the one who got Jean Trask interested in looking for her father.”

“Her father?”

“Eldon Swain was her father.”

“And you say that this Swain person was carrying a gun?”

“Yes. We know it was the same gun that killed him, and the same gun that killed Sidney Harrow. All of which makes me doubt that Nick killed Harrow. He couldn’t very well have kept that gun hidden for the last fifteen years.”

“No.” Her eyes were wide and bright yet somehow abstract, like a hawk’s, looking over the entire span of those years. “I’m sure he didn’t,” she said finally.

“Did he ever mention the gun to you?”

She nodded. “When he came home – he found his own way home. He said a man picked him up on our street and took him to the railroad yards. He said he grabbed a gun and shot the man. Larry and I didn’t believe him – we thought it was little-boy talk – till we saw it in the paper next day, about the body being found in the yards.”

“Why didn’t you go to the police?”

“By that time it was too late.”

“It’s not too late even now.”

“It is for me – for all of us.”

“Why?”

“The police wouldn’t understand.”

“They’d understand very well if he killed in self-defense. Did he ever tell you why he shot the man?”

“He never did.” She paused, and her eyes were suffused with feeling.

“And what happened to the gun?”

“He left it lying there, I guess. The police said in the paper the weapon couldn’t be found, and Nicky certainly didn’t bring it home with him. Some hobo must have picked it up.”

My mind went back to Randy Shepherd. He had been on or near the spot, and he had been very eager to disconnect himself from the kidnapping. I shouldn’t have let him go, I thought: a half million dollars was a critical mass of money, enough to convert any thief into a murderer.