The Goodbye Look

chapter 31

In the morning, as I was eating a poached egg on a damp piece of toast, the resident surgeon came in.

“How are you feeling?”

“Fine,” I lied. “But I’ll never build up my strength on this kind of rations. When can I get out of here?”

“Don’t be in such a hurry. I’m going to have to ask you to take it easy for at least a week.”

“I can’t stay here for a week.”

“I didn’t say you had to. You’re going to have to look after yourself, though. Regular hours, mild exercise followed by rest, no rough stuff.”

“Sure,” I said.

I rested very carefully all morning. Truttwell failed to return my call, and the waiting began to get in the way of the resting and finally displaced it.

Shortly before noon I called his office again. The switchboard girl informed me that he wasn’t there.

“Really not there?”

“Really. I don’t know where he is.”

I did some more resting and waiting. A Pasadena motorcycle officer brought me the keys to my car and told me where to find it in the hospital parking lot. I took this as an omen.

After an early lunch I got out of bed and to a certain extent put on my clothes. By the time I had on underwear, trousers, and shoes I was wet and shaking. I sort of draped my bloody shirt over my chest and shoulders and covered it with my jacket.

In the corridor, the nurses and nurses’ aides were still busy with lunch. I crossed the corridor to a gray metal door that opened on the fire stairs and walked down three stories to the ground floor.

A side exit let me out into the parking lot. I found my car and got in and sat for a while. Mild exercise followed by rest.

The freeway was crowded and slow. Even with all the concentration I was giving it, my driving wasn’t too good. My attention kept slipping away from the traffic I was moving in. Once I had to burn rubber to avoid running into the rear end of another car.

I’d originally intended to drive to Pacific Point. I barely made it to West Los Angeles. In the last block of the trip, on my home street, I caught a glimpse in the rear-view mirror of a bearded man carrying a bedroll. But when I turned to look at him directly he wasn’t there.

I left my car at the curb and climbed the outside stairs to my apartment. The phone started to ring, like an aural booby-trap, just as I opened the door. I picked it up and carried it to my armchair.

“Mr. Archer? This is Helen at the answering service. You’ve had a couple of urgent calls, from a Mr. Truttwell and a Miss Truttwell. I’ve been ringing your office.”

I looked at the electric clock. It was just two o’clock. Helen gave me the number of Truttwell’s office, and the less familiar number his daughter had left.

“Anything else?”

“Yes, but there must be some mistake about this call, Mr. Archer. A hospital in Pasadena claims that you owe them a hundred and seventy dollars. That includes the cost of the operating room, they said.”

“It’s no mistake. If they call again, tell them I’m putting a check in the mail.”

“Yessir.”

I got out my checkbook and looked at the balance and decided to call Truttwell first. Before I did, I went out to the kitchen and put a frozen steak in the gas broiler. I tasted the milk in the refrigerator, found that it was still sweet, and drank half of the remaining quart. I wanted a shot of whisky as a chaser, but it was exactly what I didn’t need.

My call to Truttwell’s office was taken by a junior member of the firm named Eddie Sutherland. Truttwell wasn’t in at the moment, he said, but he had set up an appointment for me at four thirty. It was very important that I should be there, though Sutherland didn’t seem to know why.

I remembered as I was dialing the number Betty had left that it belonged to the phone in Nick’s apartment.

Betty answered. “Hello?”

“This is Archer speaking.”

She drew in her breath. “I’ve been trying to get you all day.”

“Is Nick with you?”

“No. I only wish he were. I’m very concerned about him. I went to San Diego yesterday afternoon to try and see him. They wouldn’t let me into his room.”

“Who wouldn’t?”

“The guard on the door, backed up by Dr. Smitheram. They seemed to think I was spying for my father. I did manage to get a glimpse of Nick, and let him see me. He asked me to get him out. He said they were holding him against his will.”

“ ‘They’?”

“I think he meant Dr. Smitheram. Anyway, it was Dr. Smitheram who ordered him to be moved last night.”

“Moved where?”

“I don’t know for certain, Mr. Archer. I think they’re holding him prisoner in the Smitheram Clinic. That’s where the ambulance took him.”

“And you seriously believe that he’s a prisoner?”

“I don’t know what I believe. But I’m afraid. Will you help me?”

I said that she would have to help me first, since I wasn’t up to driving. She agreed to pick me up in an hour.

I went out to the kitchen and turned my steak. It was hot and sizzling on one side, frozen solid on the other, like schizophrenic people I had known. I wondered just how crazy Nick Chalmers was.

The immediate problem was clothes. My not very extensive wardrobe included a stretchable nylon shirt that I managed to get into without putting the left arm in the armhole. I completed my costume with a soft cardigan jacket.

By this time my schizoid steak was brown on both sides and red in the center. It bled on the plate when I stabbed it. I let it cool and ate it with my fingers.

I finished the quart of milk. Then I went back to the armchair in the front room and rested. For just about the first time in my life I knew how it must feel to get old. My body was demanding special privileges and offering not much in return.

The yelp of Betty’s horn brought me out of a half-sleep. She gave me a hard look as I climbed rather awkwardly into her car.

“Are you sick, Mr. Archer?”

“Not exactly. I took a slug in the shoulder.”

“Why didn’t you tell me?”

“You mightn’t have come. I want to be in at the end of this thing.”

“Even if it kills you?”

“It won’t.”

If I was looking worse, she was looking better. She had decided after all not to be a gnome who lived in the gray underground.

“Who on earth shot you?”

“A Pasadena cop. He was aiming at another man. I got in the way. Didn’t your father tell you any of this?”

“I haven’t seen my father since yesterday.” She spoke these words rather formally, as if they constituted an announcement.

“Are you leaving home?”

“Yes, I am. Father said I had to choose between him and Nick.”

“I’m sure he didn’t mean it.”

“Yes, he did.”

She made her engine roar. At the last moment I remembered that Chalmers’s war letters were still in the trunk of my car. I went back to get them, and looked over the top ones again as Betty drove me to the freeway.

The heading of the second letter stopped me:

I turned to Betty. “You mentioned Nick’s birthday the other day. Didn’t you say it was in December?”

“December 14,” she said.

“And what year was he born?”

“Nineteen forty-five. He was twenty-three last month. Is it important?”

“It could be. Did Nick rearrange these letters, with certain ones up front and out of chronological order?”

“He may have. I think he had been reading them. Why?”

“Mr. Chalmers wrote a letter at sea in the forward area, dated March 15, 1945.”

“I’m not too good at arithmetic, especially when I’m driving. Is it nine months from March 15 to December 14?”

“Exactly.”

“Isn’t that strange? Nick always suspected that his fa – that Mr. Chalmers wasn’t his real father. He used to think he was adopted.”

“Maybe he was.”

I put the three top letters in my wallet. The girl turned up the on-ramp to the freeway. She drove with angry speed under a brown firmament of smog.