The Goodbye Look

chapter 34

After the reel ended, none of us spoke for a while. I turned on the lights. Irene Chalmers stirred and roused herself. I could sense her fear, so powerful it seemed to make her drowsy.

She said in an effort to throw it off: “I was pretty in those days, wasn’t I?”

“More than pretty,” Truttwell said. “The word is beautiful.”

“A lot of good it ever did me.” Her voice and language were changing, as if she was falling back on her earlier self. “Where did you get this movie – from Mrs. Swain?”

“Yes. She gave me others.”

“She would. She’s always hated me.”

“Because you took up with her husband?” I said.

“She hated me long before that. It was almost as if she knew it was going to happen. Or maybe she made it happen, I don’t know. She sat around and watched Eldon, waiting for him to jump. If you do that to a man, sooner or later he’s going to jump.”

“What made you jump?” I said.

“We won’t talk about me.” She looked at me and then at Truttwell and then at nothing. “I’m taking the fifth.”

Truttwell moved closer to her, gentle and suave as a lover. “Don’t be foolish, Irene. You’re among friends here.”

“I bet.”

“It’s true,” he said. “I went to enormous trouble, and so did Mr. Archer, to get hold of this evidence, get it out of the hands of potential enemies. In my hands it can’t be used against you. I think I can guarantee it never will be.”

She sat up straight, meeting him eye to eye. “What is this? Blackmail?”

Truttwell smiled. “You’re getting me confused with Dr. Smitheram, I’m afraid. I don’t want anything from you at all, Irene. I do think we should have a free and frank discussion.”

She looked in my direction. “What about him?”

“Mr. Archer knows this case better than I do. I rely completely on his discretion.”

Truttwell’s praise made me uneasy: I wasn’t prepared to say the same things about him.

“I don’t trust his discretion,” the woman said. “Why should I? I hardly know him.”

“You know me, Irene. As your attorney–”

“So you’re our lawyer again?”

“I never ceased to be, really. It must be clear to you by now that you need my help, and Mr. Archer’s help. Everything we’ve learned about the past is strictly in confidence among the three of us.”

“That is,” she said, “if I go along. What if I don’t?”

“I’m ethically bound to keep your secrets.”

“But they’d slip out anyway, is that the idea?”

“Not through me or Archer. Perhaps through Dr. Smitheram. Obviously I can’t protect your interests unless you let me.”

She considered Truttwell’s proposition. “I didn’t want to break with you myself. Especially not at this time. But I can’t speak for my husband.”

“Where is he?”

“I left him at home. These last few days have been awfully hard on Larry. He doesn’t look it, but he’s the nervous type.”

Her words touched a closed place in my mind. “Was that your husband in the film? The boy who got pushed into the water?”

“Yes it was. It was the first day I met Larry. And his last free weekend before he went into the Navy. I could tell that he was interested in me, but I didn’t get to know him that day, not really. I wish I had.”

“When did you get to know him?”

“A couple of years later. He grew up in the meantime.”

“What happened to you in the meantime?”

She turned away from me abruptly, her white neck ridged with strain. “I’m not going to answer that,” she said to Truttwell. “I didn’t hire a lawyer and a detective to dig up all the dirt in my own life. What kind of sense would that make?”

He answered her in a quiet careful voice: “It makes more sense than trying to keep it secret. It’s time the dirt, as you call it, was laid out on the table, among the three of us. I needn’t remind you there have been several murders.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

“Your son did,” I reminded her. “We’ve already discussed that death in the hobo jungle.”

She turned back to me. “It was a kidnapping. He killed in self-defense. You said yourself the police would understand.”

“I may have to take that back, now that I know more about it. You held back part of the story – all the really important parts. For example, when I told you that Randy Shepherd was involved in the kidnapping you didn’t mention that Randy was your father.”

“A woman doesn’t have to tell on her husband,” she said. “Isn’t it the same for a girl and her father?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter now. Your father was shot dead in Pasadena yesterday afternoon.”

Her head came up. “Who shot him?”

“The police. Your mother called them.”

“My mother did?” She was silent for a while. “That doesn’t really surprise me. The first thing I remember in my life is the two of them fighting like animals. I had to get away from that kind of life, even if it meant–” Our eyes met, and the sentence died under the impact.

I continued it for her: “Even if it meant running off to Mexico with an embezzler.”

She shook her head. Her black hair fluffed out a little, and made her look both younger and cheaper.

“I never did.”

“You never ran off with Eldon Swain?”

She was silent.

“What did happen, Mrs. Chalmers?”

“I can’t tell you – not even at this late date. There are other people involved.”

“Eldon Swain?”

“He’s the most important one.”

“You don’t have to worry about protecting him, as you very well know. He’s as safe as your father, and for the same reason.”

She gave me a lost look, as if her game with time had failed for a moment and she was caught in the limbo between her two lives. “Is Eldon really dead?”

“You know he is, Mrs. Chalmers. He was the dead man in the railroad yards. You must have known or suspected it at the time.”

Her eyes darkened. “I swear to God I didn’t.”

“You had to know. The body was left with its hands in the fire so that the fingerprints would be erased. No eight-year-old boy did that.”

“That doesn’t mean it was me.”

“You were the one with the motivation,” I said. “If the dead man was identified as Swain, your whole life would collapse. You’d lose your house and your husband and your social standing. You’d be Rita Shepherd again, back on your uppers.”

She was silent, her face working with thought. “You said my father was involved with Eldon. It must have been my father who burned the body – did you say he burned the body?”

“The fingers.”

She nodded. “It must have been my father. He was always talking about getting rid of his own fingerprints. He was a nut on the subject.”

Her voice was unreflective, almost casual. It stopped suddenly. Perhaps she had heard herself as Rita Shepherd, daughter of an ex-con, trapped again in that identity without any possible escape.

The knowledge of her predicament seemed to be striking down into her body and penetrating her mind through layers of indifference, years of forgetfulness. It struck a vital place and crumpled her in the chair, her face in her hands. Her hair fell forward from her nape and sifted over her fingers like black water.

Truttwell stood over her looking down with an intensity that didn’t seem to include any kind of love. Perhaps it was pity he felt, laced with possession. She had passed through several hands and been slightly scorched by felony, but she was still very beautiful.

Forgetful of me, and of himself, Truttwell put his hands on her. He stroked her head very gently, and then her long tapering back. His caresses weren’t sexual in any ordinary sense. Perhaps, I thought, his main feeling was an abstract legal passion which satisfied itself by having her as a client. Or a widower’s underground desire held in check by the undead past.

Mrs. Chalmers recovered after a while, and asked for water. Truttwell went to another room to fetch it. She spoke to me in an urgent whisper:

“Why did my mother call the police on Randy? She must have had a reason.”

“She had. He stole her picture of Nick.”

“The graduation picture I sent her?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have sent it. But I thought for once in my life I could act like a normal human being.”

“You couldn’t, though. Your father took it to Jean Trask and talked her into hiring Sidney Harrow. That’s how the whole thing started.”

“What did the old man want?”

“Your husband’s money, just like everyone else.”

“But not you, eh?” Her voice was sardonic.

“Not me,” I said. “Money costs too much.”

Truttwell brought her a paper cup of water and watched her drink it. “Are you feeling up to a little drive?”

Her body jerked in alarm. “Where to?”

“The Smitheram Clinic. It’s time we had a chat with Nick.”

She looked profoundly unwilling. “Dr. Smitheram won’t let you in.”

“I think he will. You’re Nick’s mother. I’m his attorney. If Dr. Smitheram won’t cooperate, I’ll slap a writ of habeas corpus on him.”

Truttwell wasn’t entirely serious, but her mood of alarm persisted. “No. Please, don’t do anything like that I’ll talk to Dr. Smitheram.”

On the way out I asked the switchboard girl if Betty had come back with the lab report. She hadn’t. I left word for her that I’d be at the clinic.