The Goodbye Look

chapter 36

I caught Moira at the locked door beside the suicide room. For the second time in our acquaintance she was having trouble unlocking a door. I mentioned this.

She turned on me with hard bright eyes. “We won’t talk about the other night. It’s all in the past – so long ago I hardly remember your name.”

“I thought we were friends.”

“So did I. But you broke that.”

She flung one arm out toward Nick’s room. The woman in the suicide room began to moan and cry.

Moira unlocked the door which let us out of the wing and took me to her office. The first thing she did there was to take her handbag out of a drawer and set it on top of the desk, ready to go.

“I’m leaving Ralph. And don’t say anything, please, about my going with you. You don’t like me well enough.”

“Do you always think people’s thoughts for them?”

“All right – I don’t like myself well enough.” She paused and looked around her office. The glowing paintings on the walls seemed to reflect her anger with herself, like subtle mirrors. “I don’t like making money from other people’s suffering. Do you know what I mean?”

“I ought to. It’s how I live.”

“But you don’t do it for the money, do you?”

“I try not to,” I said. “When your income passes a certain point you lose touch. All of a sudden the other people look like geeks or gooks, expendables.”

“That happened to Ralph. I won’t let it happen to me.” She sounded like a woman in flight, but more hopeful than afraid. “I’m going back to social work. It’s what I really love. I was never happier than when I lived in La Jolla in one room.”

“Next door to Sonny.”

“Yes.”

“Sonny was Lawrence Chalmers, of course.”

She nodded.

“And the other girl he took up with was Irene Chalmers?”

“Yes. She called herself Rita Shepherd in those days.”

“How do you know?”

“Sonny told me about her. He’d met her at a swimming party in San Marino a couple of years before. Then one day she walked into the post office where he worked. He was terribly upset by the meeting at first, and now I can understand why. He was afraid his secret would leak out, and his mother would learn he was just a postal clerk instead of a Navy pilot.”

“Did you know about the deception?”

“Naturally I knew he was living a fantasy life. He used to dress up in officers’ clothes and walk the streets at night. But I didn’t know about his mother – there were some things he didn’t talk about, even to me.”

“How much did he tell you about Rita Shepherd?”

“Enough. She was living with an older man who kept her stashed in Imperial Beach.”

“Eldon Swain.”

“Was that his name?” She added after a thinking pause: “It all comes together, doesn’t it? I didn’t realize how much life, and death, I was involved with. I guess we never do until afterwards. Anyway, Rita shifted to Sonny and I moved to the sidelines. By then I didn’t much care. It was pretty wearing, looking after Sonny, and I was willing to pass him on to the next girl.”

“What I don’t understand is how you could stay interested in him for over two years. Or why a woman like his wife would fall for him.”

“Women don’t always go for the solid virtues,” she said. “Sonny had a wild psychotic streak. He would try almost anything once.”

“I’ll have to cultivate my wild psychotic streak. But I must say Chalmers keeps his pretty well hidden.”

“He’s older now, and under tranquilizers all the time.”

“Tranquilizers like Nembu-Serpin?”

“I see you’ve been boning up.”

“Just how sick is he?”

“Without supportive therapy, and drugs, he’d probably have to be hospitalized. But with these things he manages to lead a fairly well-adjusted life.” She sounded like a salesman who didn’t quite believe in her product.

“Is he dangerous, Moira?”

“He could be dangerous, under certain circumstances.”

“If somebody found out that he was a fake, for example?”

“Perhaps.”

“You’re very perhapsy all of a sudden. He’s been your husband’s patient for twenty-five years, as you pointed out. You must know something about him.”

“We know a good deal. But the doctor-patient relationship involves a right to privacy.”

“Don’t lean too heavily on that. It doesn’t apply to a patient’s crimes, or potential crimes. I want to know if you and Dr. Smitheram considered him a threat to Nick.”

She sidestepped the question. “What kind of a threat?”

“A mortal threat,” I said. “You and your husband knew that he was dangerous to Nick, didn’t you?”

Moira didn’t answer me in words. She moved around her office and began to take the pictures down from the walls and pile them on the desk. In a token way she seemed to be trying to dismantle the clinic and her place in it.

A knock on the door interrupted her work. It was the young receptionist. “Miss Truttwell wants to speak to Mr. Archer. Shall I send her in?”

“I’ll go out,” I said.

The receptionist looked around in dismay at the empty walls. “What happened to all your pictures?”

“I’m moving out. You could help me.”

“I’ll be glad to, Mrs. Smitheram,” the young woman said brightly.

Betty was standing in the middle of the outer room. She looked windblown and excited.

“The lab said there was quite a lot of Nembutal in the sample. Also some chloral hydrate, but they couldn’t tell how much without further testing.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“What does it mean, Mr. Archer?”

“It means that Nick was in the back of the family Rolls some time after he took his overdose of pills. He vomited some of them up, and that may have saved his life.”

“How is he?”

“Doing quite well. I had a talk with him just now.”

“Can I see him?”

“That isn’t up to me. His mother, and your father, are with him right now.”

“I’ll wait.”

I waited with her, each of us thinking his own thoughts. I needed quiet. The case was coming together in my mind, constructing itself in inner space like a movie of a falling building reversed.

The inner door opened, and Irene Chalmers came through on Truttwell’s arm, leaning on him heavily, like a survivor. She had shifted her weight from Chalmers to Truttwell, I thought, as she had once shifted it from Eldon Swain to Chalmers.

Truttwell became aware of his daughter. His eyes moved nervously, but he didn’t try to disengage himself from Irene Chalmers. Betty gave them a so-that’s-how-it-is look.

“Hello, Dad. Hello, Mrs. Chalmers. I hear Nick is much better.”

“Yes, he is,” her father said.

“Can I talk with him for a minute?”

He hesitated for a thoughtful moment. His gaze flicked across my face, and back to his daughter’s. He answered her in a careful, gentle voice: “We’ll take it up with Dr. Smitheram.”

He led Betty through the inner door and closed it carefully behind them.

I was alone in the reception room with Irene Chalmers. As she knew. She looked at me with a kind of dull formality, in the hope that nothing real would be said between us.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Chalmers.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to answer them.”

“Once and for all, now, was Eldon Swain Nick’s father?”

She faced me in passive stubbornness. “Probably. Anyway he thought he was. But you can’t expect me to tell Nick he killed his own natural father–”

“He knows it now,” I said. “And you can’t go on using Nick to hide behind.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You suppressed the facts about Eldon Swain and his death for your own sake, not for Nick’s. You let him carry the burden of the guilt, and take the rap for you.”

“There isn’t any rap. We kept everything quiet.”

“And let Nick live in mental torment for fifteen years. It was a lousy trick to pull on your own son, or anybody’s son.”

She bowed her head as if in shame. But what she said was: “I’m not admitting anything.”

“You don’t have to. I’ve got enough physical evidence, and enough witnesses, to make a case against you. I’ve talked to your father and your mother, and Mr. Rawlinson, and Mrs. Swain. I’ve talked to Florence Williams.”

“Who in hell is she?”

“She owns Conchita’s Cabins, in Imperial Beach.”

Mrs. Chalmers raised her head and swept her fingers across her face, as if there was dust or cobwebs in her eyes. “I’m sorry I ever set foot in that dump, I can tell you. But you can’t make anything out of it, not at this late date. I was just a juvenile at the time. And anything I did away back then – the statute of limitations ran out on it long ago.”

“What did you do away back then?”

“I’m not going to testify against myself. I said before that I was taking the fifth.” She added in a stronger voice: “John Truttwell will be back in a minute, and this is his department. If you want to get rough, he can get rougher.”

I knew I was on uncertain ground. But this might be the only chance I would have to reach Mrs. Chalmers. And both her responses to my accusations, and her failures to respond, had tended to confirm my picture of her. I said:

“If John Truttwell knew what I know about you, he wouldn’t touch you with a sterilized stick.”

She had no answer this time. She moved to a chair near the inner door and sat down inexactly and abruptly. I followed and stood over her.

“What happened to the money?”

She twisted sideways away from me. “Which money do you mean?”

“The money Eldon Swain embezzled from the bank.”

“He took it across the Mexican border with him. I stayed behind in Dago. He said he’d send for me but he never did. So I married Larry Chalmers. That’s the whole story.”

“What did Eldon do with the money in Mexico?”

“I heard he lost it. He ran into a couple of bandits in Baja and they took it off him and that was that.”

“What were the bandits’ names, Rita?”

“How should I know? It was just a rumor I heard.”

“I’ll tell you a better rumor. The bandits’ names were Larry and Rita, and they didn’t steal the money in Mexico. Eldon Swain never got it across the border. You set him up for a highjacking, and fingered him for Larry. And the two bandits lived happily ever after. Until now.”

“You’ll never prove that! You can’t!”

She was almost shouting, as if she hoped to drown out the sound of my voice and the rumors of the past. Truttwell opened the inner door.

“What’s going on?” He gave me a stern look. “What are you trying to prove?”

“We were discussing what happened to Swain’s half million. Mrs. Chalmers claims that Mexican bandits got it. But I’m fairly certain she and Chalmers highjacked it from Swain. It must have happened a day or two after Swain embezzled the money and brought it to San Diego, where she was waiting for him.”

Mrs. Chalmers glanced up, as if my freewheeling reconstruction had touched on a factual detail. Truttwell noticed the giveaway movement of her eyes. His whole face opened and closed like a grasping hand.

“They stole a car,” I went on, “and brought the money here to Pacific Point, to his mother’s house. This was July 3, 1945, Larry and Rita staged a burglary in reverse. It wasn’t hard, since Larry’s mother was blind and Larry must have had keys to the house, as well as the combination of the safe. They put the money in the safe and left it.”

Mrs. Chalmers got to her feet and went to Truttwell and took hold of his arm. “Don’t believe him. I wasn’t within fifty miles of here that night.”

“Was Larry?” Truttwell said.

“Yes! It was all Larry’s doing. His mother never used the safe after she lost her sight and he figured it was a perfect place to stash – I mean–”

Truttwell took her by the shoulders with both hands and held her at arm’s length.

“You were here with Larry that night. Weren’t you?”

“He forced me to come along. He held a gun on me.”

“That means you were driving,” Truttwell said. “You killed my wife.”

The woman hung her head. “It was Larry’s fault. She recognized him, see. He twisted the wheel and stomped on my foot and speeded up the car. I couldn’t stop it. It went right over her. He wouldn’t let me stop till we got back to Dago.”

Truttwell shook her. “I don’t want to hear that. Where is your husband now?”

“At home. I already told you he isn’t feeling well. He’s just sitting around in a daze.”

“He’s still dangerous,” I said to Truttwell. “Don’t you think we better call Lackland?”

“Not until I’ve had a chance to talk to Chalmers. You come along with me, eh? You too, Mrs. Chalmers.”

Once again she sat between us in the front seat of Truttwell’s car. She peered far ahead along the freeway like an accident-prone subject living in dread of still further disasters.

“The other morning,” I said, “when Nick took all those sleeping pills and tranquilizers, where were you?”

“In bed asleep. I took a couple of chloral hydrates myself the night before.”

“Was your husband in bed asleep?”

“I wouldn’t know. We have separate rooms.”

“When did he take off to look for Nick?”

“Right after you left that morning.”

“Driving the Rolls?”

“That’s right.”

“Where did he go?”

“All over the place, I guess. When he gets excited he runs around like a maniac. Then he sits around like a dummy for a week.”

“He went to San Diego, Mrs. Chalmers. And there’s evidence that Nick rode along with him, lying unconscious under a rug in the back seat.”

“That doesn’t make sense.”

“I’m afraid it did to your husband. When Nick climbed out the bathroom window, your husband intercepted him in the garden. He knocked him out with a spade or some other tool and hid him in the Rolls until he was ready to leave for San Diego.”

“Why would he do a thing like that to his own son?”

“Nick wasn’t his son. He was Eldon Swain’s son, and your husband knew it. You’re forgetting your own life history, Mrs. Chalmers.”

She gave me a quick sideways look. “Yeah, I wish I could.”

“Nick knew or suspected whose son he was,” I said. “In any case, he was trying to get at the truth about Eldon Swain’s death. And he was getting closer all the time.”

“Nick shot Eldon himself.”

“We all know that now. But Nick didn’t drag the dead man into the fire to burn off his fingerprints. That took adult strength, and adult motives. Nick didn’t keep Swain’s gun, to use it on Sidney Harrow fifteen years later. Nick didn’t kill Jean Trask, though your husband did his best to frame him for it. That was why he took Nick to San Diego.”

The woman said in a kind of awe: “Did Larry kill all those people?”

“I’m afraid he did.”

“But why?”

“They knew too much about him. He was a sick man protecting his fantasy.”

“Fantasy?”

“The pretend world he lived in.”

“Yeah, I see what you mean.”

We left the freeway at Pacific Street and drove up the long slope. Behind us at the foot of the town the low red sun was glaring on the water. In the queer, late light the Chalmers mansion looked insubstantial and dreamlike, a castle in Spain referring to a past that had never existed.

The front door was unlocked, and we went in. Mrs. Chalmers called her husband –“Larry!”– and got no answer.

Emilio appeared laggingly in the corridor that led to the back of the house. Mrs. Chalmers rushed toward him.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know, ma’am. He ordered me to stay in the kitchen.”

“Did you tell him I searched the Rolls?” I said.

Emilio’s black eyes slid away from mine. He didn’t answer me.

The woman had climbed the short flight of stairs to the study. She pounded with her fist on the carved oak door, sucked her bleeding knuckles, and pounded again.

“He’s in there!” she cried. “You’ve got to get him out. He’ll do away with himself.”

I pushed her to one side and tried the door. It was locked. The room beyond it was terribly still.

Emilio went back to the kitchen for a screwdriver and a hammer. He used them to unhinge the door of the study.

Chalmers was sitting in the judge’s swivel chair, his head inclined rather oddly to one side. He had on a blue naval uniform with a full commander’s three gold stripes. Blood from his cut throat had run down over his row of battle ribbons, making them all one color. An old straight razor lay open beside his dangling hand.

His wife stood back from his body as if it gave off mortal laser rays.

“I knew he was going to do it. He wanted to do it the day they came to the front door.”

“Who came to the front door?” I said.

“Jean Trask and that muscle boy she traveled with. Sidney Harrow. I slammed the door in their faces, but I knew they’d be coming back. So did Larry. He got out Eldon’s gun that he’d kept in the safe all those years. What he had in mind was a suicide pact. He wanted to shoot me and then himself. Dr. Smitheram and I talked him into a trip to Palm Springs instead.”

“You should have let him shoot himself,” Truttwell said.

“And me too? Not on your life. I wasn’t ready to die. I’m still not ready.”

She still had passion, if only for herself. Truttwell and I were silent. She said to him:

“Look, are you still my lawyer? You said you were.”

He shook his head. His eyes seemed to be looking through and beyond her, into a sad past or a cold future.

“You can’t go back on me now,” she said. “You think I haven’t suffered enough? I’m sorry about your wife. I still wake up in the middle of the night and see her in the road, poor woman, laying there like a bundle of old clothes.”

Truttwell struck her face with the back of his hand. A little blood spilled from her mouth, drawing a line across her chin like a crack in marble.

I stepped between them so that he couldn’t hit her again. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Truttwell should be doing.

She took some courage from my gesture. “You don’t have to hurt me, John. I feel bad enough without that. My whole time here, it’s been like living in a haunted house. I mean it. The very first night we came, when we were here in the study, putting the packages of money in the safe – Larry’s blind old mother came down in the dark. She said: ‘Is that you, Sonny?’ I don’t know how she knew who it was. It was creepy.”

“What happened then?” I said.

“He took her back to her room and talked to her. He wouldn’t tell me what he said to her, but she didn’t bother us after that.”

“Estelle never mentioned it,” Truttwell said to me. “She died without mentioning it to anyone.”

“Now we know what she died of,” I said. “She found out what had become of her son.”

As though he had overheard me, the dead man seemed to have cocked his head in an attitude of stiff embarrassment. His widow moved toward him like a sleepwalker and stood beside him. She touched his hair.

I stayed with her while Truttwell phoned the police.