The Goodbye Look

chapter 30

I ended up high on pentothal in a Pasadena hospital room. A surgeon had had to dig for the slug, and my arm and shoulder would be immobilized for some time.

Fortunately, it was the left shoulder. This was pointed out more than once by the police and D.A.’s men who came to visit me late that afternoon. The police apologized for the incident, while managing to suggest at the same time that I had collided with the bullet, not it with me. They offered to do what they could for me, and agreed at my suggestion to have my car brought to the hospital parking lot.

Still, their visit made me angry and concerned. I felt as if my case had run away and left me lying. I had a bedside phone, and I used it to make a call to Truttwell’s house. The housekeeper said he wasn’t at home, and neither was Betty. I put in a call to Truttwell’s office and left my name and number with his answering service.

Later, as night was coming on, I got out of bed and opened the door of the closet. I was feeling a little lightheaded but I was worried about my black notebook. My jacket was hanging in the closet with my other clothes and in spite of the blood and the bullet hole the notebook was in the pocket where I’d put it. So was Nick’s picture.

As I was on my way back to bed the floor tilted up and smacked me on the right side of the face. I blacked out for a while. Then I sat up with my back against a leg of the bed.

The night nurse looked in. She was pretty and dedicated and wore a Los Angeles General cap. Her name was Miss Cowan.

“What in the world are you doing?”

“Sitting on the floor.”

“You can’t do that.” She helped me to get to my feet and into bed. “I hope you weren’t trying to get out of here.”

“No, but it’s a good idea. When do you think I’ll be sprung?”

“It’s up to the doctor. He may be able to tell you in the morning. Now do you feel up to a visitor?”

“It depends on who it is.”

“She’s an elderly woman. Her name is Shepherd. Is that the same Shepherd–?” Delicately, she left the question unfinished.

“Same Shepherd.” My pentothal high had changed to a pentothal low, but I told the nurse to send the woman in. “You’re not afraid she’ll try to pull something on you?”

“No. She’s not the type.”

Miss Cowan went away. Shortly afterwards, Mrs. Shepherd came in. Gray pallor seemed to have become her permanent color. Her dark eyes were very large, as if they had been distended by the events they’d witnessed.

“I’m sorry you were injured, Mr. Archer.”

“I’ll survive. It’s too bad about Randy.”

“Shepherd was no loss to anybody,” she said. “I just finished telling that to the police and now I’m telling you. He was a bad husband and a bad father, and he came to a bad end.”

“That’s a lot of badness.”

“I know whereof I speak.” Her voice was solemn. “Whether he killed Miss Jean or not, I know what Shepherd did to his own daughter. He ruined her life and drove her to her death.”

“Is Rita dead?”

My use of the name stopped her. “How do you know my daughter’s name?”

“Somebody mentioned it. Mrs. Swain, I think.”

“Mrs. Swain was no friend of Rita’s. She blamed my daughter for everything that happened. It wasn’t fair. Rita was beneath the age of consent when Mr. Swain got interested in her. And her own father pandered to Mr. Swain and took money from him for her.”

The words came pouring out of her under pressure, as if Shepherd’s death had opened a deep volcanic fissure in her life.

“Did Rita go to Mexico with Swain?”

“Yes.”

“And died there?”

“Yes. She died there.”

“How do you know that, Mrs. Shepherd?”

“Mr. Swain told me himself. Shepherd brought him to see me when he came back from Mexico. He said she died and was buried in Guadalajara.”

“Did she leave any children?”

Her dark eyes wavered and then held firm, meeting mine. “No. I have no grandchildren of any kind.”

“Who’s the boy in the picture?”

“The picture?” she said with a show of puzzlement.

“If you want to refresh your memory, it’s in my jacket in the closet.”

She glanced at the closet door. I said:

“I mean the one Randy Shepherd stole from your room.”

Her puzzlement became real. “How do you know that? How come you’re digging so deep in my family affairs?”

“You know why, Mrs. Shepherd. I’m trying to wrap up a case that started nearly a quarter of a century ago. On July 1, 1945.”

She blinked. Apart from this tiny movement of her eyelids, her face had recovered its immobility. “That was the date that Mr. Swain robbed Mr. Rawlinson’s bank.”

“Is that what really happened?”

“What other story did you hear?”

“I’ve found a few bits and pieces of evidence pointing another way. And I’m beginning to wonder if Eldon Swain ever got the money.”

“Who else could have taken it?”

“Your daughter Rita, for one.”

She reacted angrily, but not as angrily as she should have. “Rita was sixteen years old in 1945. Children don’t plan bank robberies. You know it had to be somebody in the bank.”

“Like Mr. Rawlinson?”

“That’s just plain silly, and you know it.”

“I thought I’d try it on you.”

“You’ll have to try harder than that. I don’t know why you’re straining so hard to make Mr. Swain into a whited sepulchre. I know he took that money, and I know Mr. Rawlinson didn’t. Why, the poor man lost everything. He’s lived from hand to mouth ever since.”

“On what?”

She answered quietly: “He has a little pension, and I have my savings. For a long time I worked as a nurse’s aide. That helped to keep him going.”

What she said sounded like the truth. Anyway, I couldn’t help believing her.

Mrs. Shepherd was looking at me more kindly, as if she sensed a change in our relations. Very gently, she touched my bandaged shoulder with her fingers. “Poor man, you need a rest. You oughtn’t to be troubling your head with all these questions. Aren’t you tired?”

I admitted that I was.

“Then why don’t you get some sleep?” Her voice was soporific. She laid her palm on my forehead. “I’ll stay in the room and watch for a while if you don’t mind. I like the smell of hospitals. I used to work in this very hospital.”

She sat down in the armchair between the closet and the window. The imitation-leather cushions creaked under her weight.

I closed my eyes and slowed down my breathing. But I was very far from going to sleep. I lay and listened to Mrs. Shepherd. She was completely still. Sounds drifted in through the window: the sounds of cars, a mockingbird tuning up for a night song. He kept postponing his song until the sense of something about to happen had screwed my nerves up tight.

The imitation-leather cushions of the chair emitted a tiny noise. There was the faintest possible sibilance from Mrs. Shepherd’s feet sliding across the composition floor, the rattle of a doorknob, the paired whispers of a door opening and closing.

I opened my eyes. Mrs. Shepherd wasn’t visible. Apparently she had shut herself up in the closet. Then its door began to open slowly again. She came out sideways, and held the picture of Nick up to the light. Her face was full of love and longing.

She glanced at me, and saw that my eyes were open. But she thrust the picture under her coat and left the room quietly, without a word.

I didn’t say anything to her, or do anything. After all, it was her picture.

I turned out the light and lay listening to the mockingbird. He was singing all-out now, and still singing when I went to sleep. I dreamed that I was Nick and that Mrs. Shepherd was my grandmother who use to live with birds in the garden in Contra Costa County.