The Goodbye Look

chapter 27

The movement of a car below the window drew my thoughts out of the past. It was Chalmers’s black Rolls. He got out and moved rather uncertainly across the courtyard to his house. He unlocked the front door and went in.

“Now you’ve got me doing it,” I said to Betty.

“Doing what?”

“Watching the Chalmers house. They’re not all that interesting.”

“Maybe not. But they’re special people, the kind other people watch.”

“Why don’t they watch us?”

She entered into my mood. “Because they’re more interested in themselves. They couldn’t care less about us.” She smiled not very cheerfully. “Okay, I get the message. I have to become more interested in myself.”

“Or something. What are you interested in?”

“History. I’ve been offered a traveling fellowship. But I felt I was needed here.”

“To pursue a career of house-watching.”

“You’ve made your point, Mr. Archer. Don’t spoil it now.”

I left her and, after putting the letters in the trunk of my car, crossed the street to the Chalmers house. I was having a delayed reaction to the death of Betty’s mother, which seemed now to be an integral part of the case. If Chalmers was willing, he might be able to help me understand it.

He came to the door himself. A worried look had lengthened his bony brown face. His tan looked rather sallow, and his eyes were reddish and tired.

“I wasn’t expecting to see you, Mr. Archer.” His tone was polite and neutral. “I understood my wife had severed diplomatic relations.”

“We’re still talking to each other, I hope. How is Nick doing?”

“Quite well.” He went on in a careful voice: “My wife and I have reason to be grateful for your help. I want you to know that. Unfortunately, you were caught in the middle, between Truttwell and Dr. Smitheram. They can’t cooperate, and under the circumstances we have to stay with Smitheram.”

“The doctor’s assuming a great deal of responsibility.”

“I suppose he is. But that’s not your affair.” Chalmers was getting a little edgy. “And I hope you didn’t come here to make an attack on Dr. Smitheram. In a situation like this, a man has to lean on someone. We’re not islands, you know,” he said surprisingly. “We can’t bear the weight of these problems all alone.”

His angry sorrow bothered me. “I agree with you, Mr. Chalmers. I’d still like to help if I can.”

He looked at me suspiciously. “In what way?”

“I’m getting the feeling of the case. I think it started before Nick was born, and that his part in it is fairly innocent. I can’t promise to get him off the hook entirely. But I hope to prove that he’s a victim, a patsy.”

“I’m not sure I understand you,” Chalmers said. “But come inside.”

He took me into the study where the case had begun. I felt slightly cramped and smothered, as if everything that had happened in the room was still going on, using up space and air. I was struck by the thought that Chalmers, with family history breathing down his neck, may have felt smothered and cramped most of the time.

“Will you have some sherry, old man?”

“No thanks.”

“Then neither will I.” He turned the swivel chair in front of the desk and sat facing me across the refectory table. “You were going to give me an overview of the situation, I think.”

“I’ll try, with your help, Mr. Chalmers.”

“How can I help? Events have gone quite beyond me.” He made a helpless gesture with his hands.

“With your forbearance, then. I’ve just been talking to Betty Truttwell about her mother’s death.”

“That was a tragic accident.”

“I think it may have been more than an accident. I understood Mrs. Truttwell was your mother’s closest friend.”

“She was indeed. Mrs. Truttwell was wonderfully kind to my mother in her last days. If I have any criticism at all, it has to do with her failure to tell me how bad things were with Mother. I was still overseas that summer, and I had no idea that Mother was close to death. You can imagine my feelings when my ship came back to the West Coast in mid-July, and I found that both of them were dead.” His troubled blue gaze came up to mine. “Now you tell me Mrs. Truttwell’s death may not have been an accident.”

“I’m raising the question, anyway. The question of accident versus murder isn’t crucial, really. When someone is killed in the course of a felony, it’s murder under the law, in any case. But I’m beginning to suspect Mrs. Truttwell was intentionally killed. She was your mother’s closest friend, she must have known all her secrets.”

“My mother had no secrets. The whole community looked up to her.”

Chalmers rose angrily, spinning the creaky swivel chair. He took up a stance with his back to me, which reminded me oddly of a stubborn boy. Facing him was the primitive picture that concealed the door of the safe: the sailing ship, the naked Indians, the Spanish soldiers marching in the sky.

“If the Truttwells have been maligning my mother,” he said, “I’ll sue them for slander.”

“Nothing like that happened, Mr. Chalmers. Nothing’s been said against your mother by anyone. I’m trying to get at who the people were that broke into the house in 1945.”

He turned. “They certainly wouldn’t have been known to my mother. Her friends were the best people in California.”

“I don’t doubt it. But your mother was probably known to the burglars, and they probably knew what was in the house that made it worth breaking into.”

“I can answer that,” Chalmers said. “My mother kept her money in the house. It was a habit she inherited from my father, along with the money itself. I repeatedly urged her to put it in the bank, but she wouldn’t.”

“Did the burglars get it?”

“No. The money was intact when I got home from overseas. But Mother was dead. And Mrs. Truttwell, too.”

“Was there very much money involved?”

“Quite a sum, yes. Several hundred thousand.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I told you: Mother inherited it from my father.” He gave me a pale suspicious look, as if I was planning to insult her again. “Are you suggesting the money wasn’t hers?”

“Certainly not. Couldn’t we forget her for a bit?”

“I can’t.” He added in a kind of gloomy pride: “I live with the thought of my mother constantly.”

I waited, and tried again: “What I’m trying to get at is this. Two burglaries or at least two thefts occurred in this house, in this very room, over twenty-three years apart. I think they were connected.”

“In what way?”

“Through the people involved.”

Chalmers’s eyes were puzzled. He sat down opposite me again. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“I’m simply trying to say that some of the same people, with the same motives, may have been involved in both these burglaries. We know who did the recent one. It was your son Nick, acting under pressure from a couple of other people, Jean Trask and Sidney Harrow.”

Chalmers leaned forward, resting his forehead on his hand. His bald spot gleamed, defenseless as a tonsure.

“Did he kill those people?”

“I doubt it, as you know, but I can’t prove he didn’t. Yet. Let’s stick to the burglaries for now. Nick took a gold box which had your letters in it.” I was being careful not to name his mother. “The letters were probably incidental. The gold box was the main thing: Mrs. Trask wanted it. Do you know why?”

“Presumably because she was a thief.”

“She didn’t think so, though. She was quite open about the box. Apparently, it had belonged to Mrs. Trask’s grandmother, and after her grandmother’s death it was given to your mother by her grandfather.”

Chalmers’s head sank lower. The fingers supporting it raked up through his hair. “You’re talking about Mr. Rawlinson, aren’t you?”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“This is infinitely depressing to me,” he said. “You’re twisting a harmless relationship between an elderly man and a mature woman–”

“Let’s forget about the relationship.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t forget about it.” His head had sunk closer to the table, guarded by his hands and arms.

“I’m not judging anyone, Mr. Chalmers, certainly not your mother. The point is simply that there was a connection between her and Samuel Rawlinson. Rawlinson ran a bank, the Pasadena Occidental, and it was ruined by embezzlement around the time of the burglary. His son-in-law, Eldon Swain, was blamed for the embezzlement, perhaps correctly. But it’s been suggested to me that Mr. Rawlinson may have looted his own bank.”

Chalmers sat up rigidly. “Who suggested that, for heaven’s sake?”

“Another figure in the case – a convicted burglar named Randy Shepherd.”

“And you’d take the word of a man like that, and let him blacken my mother’s name?”

“Who said anything about your mother?”

“Aren’t you about to offer me the precious theory that my mother took stolen money from that whoremaster? Isn’t that what you have on your rotten mind?”

Hot wet rage had flooded his eyes. He stood up blinking and swung an open hand at my face. It was a feeble attempt. I caught his arm by the wrist and handed it back to him.

“I’m afraid we can’t talk, Mr. Chalmers. I’m sorry.”

I went out to my car and turned downhill toward the freeway. Fog still lay in a grey drift across the foot of the town.