The Goodbye Look

chapter 25

In the morning I left early without waking Moira. Fog had moved in from the sea, blanketing the cliff-top house and the whole Montevista shore. I drove up the road very slowly between lines of phantom trees. I came to the end of the fog suddenly. The sky was cloudless except for a couple of smeared jet contrails. I drove downtown and checked in at the police station.

Lackland was in his office. The electric clock on the wall above his head said that it was exactly eight o’clock. It bothered me for a minute. It made me feel as if Lackland had brought me in again at this particular time by the exertion of some occult force.

“Glad you dropped by,” he said. “Sit down. I was wondering where everybody was.”

“I went to San Diego on a lead.”

“And you took your clients with you?”

“Their son had an accident. They went to San Diego to look after him.”

“I see.” He waited for a while, twisting and biting his lips as if to punish his mouth for asking questions. “What kind of an accident did he have, or is it a family secret?”

“Barbiturate, mainly. He also has a head injury.”

“Was it a suicide attempt?”

“Could be.”

Lackland leaned forward abruptly, pushing his face toward mine. “After he knocked off Mrs. Trask?”

I wasn’t ready for the question, and I avoided answering it directly. “The prime suspect in the Trask killing is Randy Shepherd.”

“I know that,” Lackland said, making it clear that I hadn’t given him anything. “We have an APB on Shepherd from San Diego.”

“Does it mention that Shepherd knew Eldon Swain from ’way back?”

Lackland gnawed at his upper lip. “Do you know that for a fact?”

“Yes. I talked to Shepherd yesterday, before he was regarded as a suspect. He told me that Swain ran off with his daughter Rita and half a million dollars. Apparently Shepherd has spent his life trying to latch onto a piece of that money. It’s fairly clear, by the way, that Shepherd talked Mrs. Trask into hiring Sidney Harrow and coming here to the Point. He was using them as cat’s-paws to find out what he could without the risk of coming here himself.”

“So Shepherd had a motive to kill Swain after all.” Lackland’s voice was low, as if his fifteen years on the case had used up all his energy at last. “And he had a motive to burn off Swain’s fingerprints. Where did you talk to him?”

“On the Mexican border near Imperial Beach. He wouldn’t be there any more.”

“No. As a matter of fact, Shepherd was seen in Hemet last night. He stopped for gas, heading north in a stolen car, a late-model Merc convertible, black.”

“Better check Pasadena. Shepherd came from there, and so did Eldon Swain.”

I filled Lackland in on the Pasadena end of the case, on Swain and Mrs. Swain and their murdered daughter, and Swain’s embezzlement from Rawlinson’s bank. “Once you know these facts,” I concluded, “you can’t seriously go on blaming Nick Chalmers for everything. He wasn’t even born when Eldon Swain took the money from the bank. But that was the real beginning of the case.”

Lackland was silent for a while. His face in repose was like an eroded landscape in a dry season. “I know some history, too. Rawlinson, the man who owned the bank, used to spend his summers here back in the twenties and thirties. I could tell you more.”

“Please do.”

Lackland produced one of his rare smiles. It wasn’t very different from his mouth-gnawings, except that a shy light flickered in his eyes. “I hate to disappoint you, Archer. But no matter how far back you go, Nick Chalmers is in the picture. Sam Rawlinson had a girl friend here in town, and after her husband died they spent their summers together. You want to know who his girl friend was?”

“Nick’s grandmother,” I said. “Judge Chalmers’s widow.”

Lackland was disappointed. He lifted a typed sheet from his in-basket, read it carefully, crushed it up in a ball, and threw it at a trash can in the corner of the office. It missed. I scooped it up and dropped it in.

“How did you find that out?” he asked me finally.

“I’ve been doing some digging in Pasadena, as I told you. But I still don’t see how Nick comes into this. He’s not responsible for his grandmother.”

For once Lackland failed to offer an argument. But I thought as I left the police station that perhaps the reverse was true, and Nick’s dead grandmother was responsible for him. Certainly there had to be a meaning in the old connection between the Rawlinson family and the Chalmers family.

I passed the courthouse on my way downtown. In a cast stone bas-relief above the entrance, a big old Justice with bandaged eyes fumbled at her scales. She needed a seeing-eye man, I told her silently. I was feeling dangerously good.

After a breakfast of steak and eggs I went into a barbershop and had a shave. By this time it was close to ten o’clock, and Truttwell should be in his office.

He wasn’t, though. The receptionist told me that he had just left and hadn’t said when he’d be back. She was wearing a black wig this morning, and took my troubled stare as a compliment.

“I like to change my personality. I get sick of having the same old personality.”

“Me, too.” I made a face at her. “Did Mr. Truttwell go home?”

“I don’t know. He received a couple of long-distance calls and then he just took off. If he goes on this way, he’ll end up losing his practice.” The girl smiled intensely up at me, as if she was already looking for a new opening. “Do you think black hair goes well with my complexion? Actually I’m a natural brownette. But I like to keep experimenting with myself.”

“You look fine.”

“I thought so, too,” she said, overconfidently.

“Where did the distance calls come from?”

“The one call came from San Diego – that was Mrs. Chalmers. I don’t know who the other one was, she wouldn’t give her name. It sounded like an older woman.”

“Calling from where?”

“She didn’t say, and it was dialed direct.”

I asked her to call Truttwell’s house for me. He was there, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t come to the phone. I talked to Betty instead.

“Is your father all right?”

“I guess he is. I hope so.” The young woman’s voice was serious and subdued.

“Are you?”

“Yes.” But she sounded doubtful.

“If I come right over, will he be willing to talk to me?”

“I don’t know. You’d better hurry. He’s going out of town.”

“Where out of town?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated glumly. “If you do miss him, Mr. Archer, I’d still like to talk to you myself.”

Truttwell’s Cadillac was standing in front of his house when I got there. Betty opened the front door for me. Her eyes were rather dull and unresponsive. Even her bright hair looked a little tarnished.

“Have you seen Nick?” she said.

“I’ve seen him. The doctor gave him a fairly good report.”

“But what did Nick say?”

“He wasn’t talkable.”

“He’d talk to me. I wanted so badly to go to San Diego.”

She raised her fists and pressed them against her breast. “Father wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“He’s jealous of Nick. I know that’s a disloyal thing to say. But Father made it very clear. He said when Mrs. Chalmers dismissed him this morning that I would have to choose between him and Nick.”

“Why did Mrs. Chalmers dismiss him?”

“You’ll have to ask Father. He and I are not communicating.”

Truttwell appeared in the hallway behind her. Though he must have heard what she’d just said, he made no reference to it. But he gave her a hard impatient look that I saw and she didn’t.

“What’s this, Betty? We don’t keep visitors standing in the doorway.”

She turned away without speaking, moving into another room and shutting the door behind her. Truttwell spoke in a complaining way, with a thin note of malice running through his complaint:

“She’s losing her mind over that sad sack. She wouldn’t listen to me. Maybe she will now. But come in, Archer. I have news for you.”

Truttwell took me into his study. He was even more carefully dressed and groomed than usual. He wore a fresh sharkskin suit, a button-down shirt with matching silk tie and handkerchief, and the odors of bay rum and masculine scent.

“Betty tells me you’re parting company with the Chalmerses. You look as if you’re celebrating.”

“Betty shouldn’t have told you. She’s losing all sense of discretion.”

His handsome pink face was fretful. He pressed and patted his white hair. Betty had hurt him in his vanity, I thought, and apparently he didn’t have much else to fall back on.

I was more disturbed by the change in Truttwell than by the change in his daughter. She was young, and would change again before she settled on a final self.

“She’s a good girl,” I said.

Truttwell closed the study door and stood against it. “Don’t sell her to me. I know what she is. She let that creep get to her and poison her mind against me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re not her father,” he said, as if paternity conferred the gift of second sight. “She’s put herself down on his level. She’s even using the same crude Freudian jargon.” His face was red now and his voice was choked. “She actually accused me of taking an unhealthy interest in her.”

I said to myself: This is a healthy interest?

Truttwell went on: “I know where she picked up those ideas – from Dr. Smitheram via Nick. I also know,” he said, “why Irene Chalmers terminated their association with me. She made it quite clear on the telephone that the great and good Dr. Smitheram insisted on it. He was probably standing at her elbow telling her what to say.”

“What reason did she give?”

“I’m afraid you were one reason, Archer. I don’t mean to be critical,” though he did. “I gathered that you asked too many questions to suit Dr. Smitheram. He seems determined to mastermind the entire show, and that could be disastrous. No lawyer can defend Nick without knowing what he’s done.”

Truttwell gave me a careful look. As our talk moved back onto more familiar ground, he had regained some of his lawyer’s poise. “You’re better acquainted with the facts than I could possibly be.”

It was a question. I didn’t answer it right away. My attitude to Truttwell was undergoing an adjustment. It wasn’t a radical one, since I had to admit to myself that from the beginning of the case I hadn’t wholly understood or trusted his motivations.

It was becoming fairly evident now that Truttwell had been using me and intended to go on using me. In the same way as Harrow had served as Randy Shepherd’s cat’s-paw, I was Truttwell’s. He was waiting now, handsome and quick-eyed and well-groomed as a cat, for me to spill the dirt on his daughter’s friend. I said:

“Facts are hard to come by in this case. I don’t even know who I’m working for. Or if I’m working.”

“Of course you are,” he said benevolently. “You’ll be paid in full for everything you’ve done, and I’ll guarantee payment through today at least.”

“Who will be doing the paying?”

“The Chalmerses, naturally.”

“But you don’t represent them any more.”

“Don’t let that worry you. Just submit your bill through me, and they’ll pay it. You’re not exactly a migratory worker, and I won’t let them treat you as one.”

His good will was self-serving, I thought, and would probably last only as long as he could use me. I was embarrassed by it, and by the conflict that had risen. In cases like this, I was usually the expendable one.

“Shouldn’t I report to the Chalmerses?”

“No. They’ve already dismissed you. They don’t want the truth about Nick.”

“How is he?”

Truttwell shrugged. “His mother didn’t say.”

“Who do I report to now?”

“Report to me. I’ve represented the Chalmers family for nearly thirty years, and they’re going to find that I’m not so very readily dispensable.” He made the prediction with a smile, but there was the hint of a threat in it.

“What if they don’t?”

“They will, I guarantee it. But if you’re concerned about your money, I’ll undertake to pay you personally as of today.”

“Thanks. I’ll give it some thought.”

“You’d better think in a hurry,” he said smiling. “I’m on my way to Pasadena to meet Mrs. Swain. She phoned me this morning about investing in her family pictures – after Mrs. Chalmers dismissed me. I’d like to have you come along, Archer.”

In my trade you don’t often have your own way. If I refused to deal with John Truttwell, he could push me off the case and probably close the county to me. I said:

“I’ll take my own car and meet you at Mrs. Swain’s house. That’s where you’re going, isn’t it? – Pasadena?”

“Yes, I can count on you to follow me then?”

I said he could, but I didn’t follow him right away. There was something more to be said between me and his daughter.