The Goodbye Look

chapter 24

Moira wasn’t waiting downstairs or in my car. I found her eventually in a parking lot reserved for doctors’ cars. She was sitting behind the wheel of her husband’s Cadillac convertible.

“I got tired of waiting,” she said lightly. “I thought I’d test your investigative skills.”

“This is a hell of a time to be playing hide-and-seek.”

My voice must have been rough. She closed her eyes in reaction. Then she climbed out of the convertible. “I was only kidding. But not really. I wanted to see if you would look for me.”

“I looked. Okay?”

She took my arm and shook it gently. “You’re still angry.”

“I’m not angry at you. It’s your goddam husband.”

“What did Ralph do now?”

“He pulled rank on me and called me a junior G-man. That’s the personal part. The other part is more serious. He refused to let me talk to Nick, now or ever. If I could have just five minutes with Nick, I could clear up a lot of points.”

“I hope you’re not asking me to take it up with Ralph?”

“No.”

“I don’t want to be caught in the middle between you.”

“If you don’t want that,” I said, “you better go and find a better place to hide.”

She looked up at me slantwise. I caught a glint of her naked self, shy and mercurial and afraid of being hurt. “Did you mean that? You want me to get lost?”

I took hold of her and answered her without words. After a minute, she broke away.

“I’m ready to go home now. Are you?”

I said I was, but I wasn’t quite. My feeling about Smitheram, anger deepened now by suspicion, got in the way of my feeling for his wife. And it started me thinking along less pleasant lines: the possibility that I might use her to get back at him, or get at him. I pushed these thoughts away but they crouched like unwanted children in the shadows, waiting for the lights to be turned out.

We headed north on the highway. Moira noticed my preoccupation. “If you’re tired I can drive.”

“It’s not that kind of tired.” I tapped my skull. “I have a few problems to work through, and my computer is a fairly early pre-binary model. It doesn’t say yes and no. It says mainly maybe.”

“About me?”

“About everything.”

We rode in silence past San Onofre. The great sphere of the atomic reactor loomed in the darkness like a dead and fallen moon. The actual moon hung in the sky above it.

“Is this computer of yours programmed for questions?”

“Some questions. Others put it completely out of whack.”

“Okay.” Moira’s voice became soft and serious. “I think I know what’s on you mind, Lew. You gave it away when you said five minutes with Nick could clear up everything.”

“Not everything. A lot.”

“You think he killed all three of them, don’t you? Harrow and poor Mrs. Trask and the man in the railroad yards?”

“Maybe.”

“Tell me what you really think.”

“What I really think is maybe. I’m reasonably sure he killed the man in the railroad yards. I’m not sure about the others, and I’m getting less sure all the time. Right now I’m going on the assumption that Nick was framed for the others and may know who framed him. Which means he may be next.”

“Is that why you didn’t want to come with me?”

“I didn’t say that.”

“I felt it, though. Look, if you feel you have to turn around and go back there, I’ll understand.” She added: “I can always leave my body to medical science. Or put in an application for equal time.”

I laughed.

“It’s not so funny,” Moira said. “Things keep happening, and the world keeps moving so fast, it’s hard for a woman to compete.”

“Anyway,” I said, “there’s no point in going back. Nick is well guarded. He can’t get out, and nobody can get in.”

“Which takes care of both your maybes, doesn’t it?”

We were silent for a long time. I would have liked to question her at length, about both Nick and her husband. But if I started to use the woman and the occasion, I’d be using a part of myself and my life that I tried to keep unused: the part that made the difference between me and a computer, or a spy.

The unasked questions simmered down after a while, and my mind hung loose in silence. The sense of living inside the case, which I sometimes used as a drug to keep me going, slowly left me.

The woman beside me had sensitive antennae. As if I’d withdrawn a protective shield, she moved in close to me. I drove with her warmth all down my right side and spreading through my body.

She lived on the Montevista shore in a rectilinear cliff-top house made of steel and glass and money.

“Put your car in the carport if you like. You will come in for a drink?”

“A short one.”

She couldn’t unlock the front door.

“You’re using your car key,” I told her.

She paused to consider. “I wonder what that means?”

“That you probably need glasses.”

“I do use glasses for reading.”

She let me in and turned on a light in the hall. We went down some steps into an octagonal room which was mostly window. I could see the moon almost close enough to touch, and, far below, the scrawled white lines of the breakers.

“It’s a nice place.”

“Do you think so?” She seemed surprised. “God knows the place was beautiful before we built on it, and when we were planning it with the architect. But the house never seemed to capture it.” She went on after a moment: “Building a house is like putting a bird in a cage. The bird being yourself, I guess.”

“Is that what they tell you at the clinic?” She turned to me with a quick smile. “Am I being terribly talky?”

“You did mention a drink.”

She leaned toward me, silver-faced, dark-eyed, and dark-mouthed in the thin light from outside. “What will you have?”

“Scotch.” Then her eyes moved and I caught that naked glint of her again, like a light hidden deep in a building. I said: “May I change my mind?”

She was willing to be taken. We shed our clothes, more or less, and lay down like wrestlers going to the mat under special rules, where pinning and being pinned were equally lucky and meritorious.

She said at one point, between falls, that I was a gentle lover.

“There are some advantages in getting older.”

“It isn’t that. You remind me of Sonny, and he was only twenty. You make me feel like Eve in the garden again.”

“That’s pretty fancy talk.”

“I don’t care.” She rose on one elbow, and her silver breast lay heavy on me. “Does it upset you when I mention Sonny?”

“Oddly enough, it doesn’t.”

“It shouldn’t, either. He was a poor little nothing boy. But we were happy together. We lived like silly angels doing things for each other. He’d never been with a girl before, and I’d only been with Ralph.”

Her voice changed on her husband’s name, and my feeling also changed. “Ralph was always so terribly technical and self-assured. He came on in bed like an army pacifying an undeveloped country. But with Sonny it was different. He was so gentle and nutty. Love was like a game, a fantasy that we lived in, playing house together. Sometimes he pretended to be Ralph. Sometimes I pretended to be his mother. Does that sound sick?” she said with a nervous little laugh.

“Ask Ralph.”

“I’m boring you, aren’t I?”

“On the contrary. How long did this affair go on?”

“Nearly two years.”

“Then Ralph came home?”

“Eventually he did. But I’d already broken with Sonny. The fantasy was running out of control and so was he. Besides, I couldn’t just leap from his bed into Ralph’s. As it was the guilt nearly killed me.”

I looked down along her body. “You don’t strike me as the guilt-ridden type.”

She answered after a moment. “You’re right. It wasn’t guilt. It was simple pain. I’d given up my one true love. For what? A hundred-thousand-dollar house and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar clinic. In neither of which I’d be caught dead if I could help it. I’d rather be back in one room at the Magnolia.”

“It isn’t there any more,” I said. “Aren’t you building up the past a little large?”

She answered thoughtfully. “Maybe I am exaggerating, especially the good parts. Women do tend to make up stories featuring ourselves.”

“I’m glad men never do.”

She laughed. “I bet Eve made up the story of the apple.”

“And Adam made up the story of the garden.” She crawled close against me. “You’re a nut. That’s a diagnosis. I’m glad I told you all this. Are you?”

“I can stand it. Why did you?”

“Various reasons. Also you have the advantage of not being my husband.”

“That’s the finest thing any woman ever said to me.”

“I mean it seriously. If I told Ralph what I’ve told you, it would be the end of me as a person. I’d become just another of his famous psychiatric trophies. He’d probably have me stuffed and hang me up on the office wall with his diplomas.” She added: “In a way that’s what he has done.”

There were questions I wanted to ask her about her husband but the time and place were wrong, and I was still determined not to use them. “Forget about Ralph. Whatever happened to Sonny?”

“He found another girl and married her.”

“And you’re jealous?”

“No. I’m lonely. I have no one.”

We merged our lonelinesses once again, in something less than love but sweeter than self. I didn’t get home to West Los Angeles after all.