The Goodbye Look

chapter 3

I stopped at a gas station on the way to the university, and called Nick’s apartment from an outdoor pay phone. A girl’s voice answered:

“Nicholas Chalmers’s residence.”

“Is Mr. Chalmers there?”

“No he is not.” She spoke with a professional lilt. “This is his answering service.”

“How can I get in touch with him? It’s important.”

“I don’t know where he is.” An unprofessional note of anxiety had entered her voice. “Is this connected with his missing his exams?”

“It may very well be,” I said in an open-ended way. “Are you a friend of Nick’s?”

“Yes I am. Actually I’m not his answering service. I’m his fiancée.”

“Miss Truttwell?”

“Do I know you?”

“Not yet. Are you in Nick’s apartment?”

“Yes. Are you a counselor?”

“Roughly speaking, yes. My name is Archer. Will you wait there in the apartment for me, Miss Truttwell? And if Nick turns up, will you ask him to wait for me, too?”

She said she would. “I’ll do anything that will help Nick.” The implication seemed to be that he needed all the help he could get.

The university stood on a mesa a few miles out of town, beyond the airport. From a distance its incomplete oval of new buildings looked ancient and mysterious as Stonehenge. It was the third week in January, and I gathered that the midyear exams were in progress. The students I saw as I circled the campus had a driven preoccupied air.

I’d been there before, but not for several years. The student body had multiplied in the meantime, and the community attached to the campus had turned into a city of apartment buildings. It was strange, after Los Angeles, to drive through a city where everyone was young.

Nick lived in a five-storied building which called itself the Cambridge Arms. I rode the self-service elevator to the fifth floor and found the door of his apartment, which was number 51.

The girl opened the door before I knocked. Her eyes flickered when she saw it was only me. She had clean straight yellow hair that brushed the shoulders of her dark slacks suit. She looked about twenty.

“No Nick?” I said.

“I’m afraid not. You’re Mr. Archer?”

“Yes.”

She gave me a quick probing look, and I realized she was older than I’d thought. “Are you really a counselor, Mr. Archer?”

“I said roughly speaking. I’ve done a lot of counseling in an amateur sort of way.”

“What do you do in a professional sort of way?”

Her voice wasn’t unfriendly. But her eyes were honest and sensitive, ready to be affronted. I didn’t want that to happen. She was the nicest thing I’d come across in some time.

“I’m afraid if I tell you, Miss Truttwell, you won’t talk to me.”

“You’re a policeman, aren’t you?”

“I used to be. I’m a private investigator.”

“Then you’re perfectly right. I don’t want to talk to you.”

She was showing signs of alarm. Her eyes and nostrils were dilated. Her face had a kind of sheen or glare on it. She said:

“Did Nick’s parents send you here to talk to me?”

“How could they have? You’re not supposed to be here. Since we are talking, by the way, we might as well do it inside.”

After some hesitation, she stepped back and let me in. The living room was furnished in expensive but dull good taste. It looked like the kind of furniture the Chalmerses might have bought for their son without consulting him.

The whole room gave the impression that Nick had kept himself hidden from it. There were no pictures on the walls. The only personal things of any kind were the books in the modular bookcase, and most of these were textbooks, in politics, law, psychology, and psychiatry.

I turned to the girl. “Nick doesn’t leave much evidence of himself lying around.”

“No. He’s a very secret boy – man.”

“Boy or man?”

“He may be trying to make up his mind about that.”

“Just how old is he, Miss Truttwell?”

“He just turned twenty-three last month – December 14. He’s graduating half a year late because he missed a semester a few years ago. That is, he’ll graduate if they let him make up his exams. He’s missed three out of four now.”

“Why?”

“It’s not a school problem. Nick’s quite brilliant,” she said as though I’d denied it. “He’s a whizz in poli sci, which is his major, and he’s planning to study law next year.” Her voice was a little unreal, like that of a girl reciting a dream or trying to recall a hope.

“What kind of a problem is it, Miss Truttwell?”

“A life problem, as they call it.” She took a step toward me and stood with her hands hanging loose, palms facing me. “All of a sudden he quit caring.”

“About you?”

“If that was all, I could stand it. But he cut loose from everything. His whole life has changed in the last few days.”

“Drugs?”

“No. I don’t think so. Nick knows how dangerous they are.”

“Sometimes that’s an attraction.”

“I know, I know what you mean.”

“Has he discussed it with you?”

She seemed confused for a second. “Discussed what?”

“The change in his life in the last few days.”

“Not really. You see, there’s another woman involved. An older woman.” The girl was wan with jealousy.

“He must be out of his mind,” I said by way of complimenting her.

She took it literally. “I know. He’s been doing things he couldn’t do if he were completely sane.”

“Tell me about the things he’s been doing.”

She gave me a look, the longest one so far. “I can’t tell you. I don’t even know you.”

“Your father does.”

“Really?”

“Call him up if you don’t believe me.”

Her gaze wandered to the telephone, which stood on an end table by the chesterfield, then came back to my face. “That means you are working for the Chalmerses. They’re Dad’s clients.”

I didn’t answer her.

“What did Nick’s parents hire you to do?”

“No comment. We’re wasting time. You and I both want to see Nick get back inside his skin. We need each other’s help.”

“How can I help?”

I felt I was reaching her. “You obviously want to talk to someone. Tell me what Nick’s been up to.”

I was still standing like an unwanted guest. I sat down on the chesterfield. The girl approached it carefully, perching on one arm beyond my reach.

“If I do, you won’t repeat it to his parents?”

“No. What have you got against his parents?”

“Nothing, really. They’re nice people, I’ve known them all my life as friends and neighbors. But Mr. Chalmers is pretty hard on Nick; they’re such different types, you know. Nick is very critical of the war, for example, and Mr. Chalmers considers that unpatriotic. He served with distinction in the last war, and it’s made him kind of rigid in his thinking.”

“What did he do in the war?”

“He was a naval pilot when he was younger than Nick is now. He thinks Nick is a terrible rebel.” She paused. “He isn’t really. I admit he was pretty wild-eyed at one time. That was several years ago, before Nick settled down to study. He was doing so well until last week. Then everything went smash.”

I waited. Tentative as a bird, she slid off the arm of the chesterfield and plopped down beside me. She made a sour face and shut her eyes tight, holding back tears. In a minute she went on:

“I think that woman is at the bottom of it. I know what that makes me. But how can I help being jealous? He dropped me like a hotcake and took up with a woman old enough to be his mother. She’s even married.”

“How do you know that?”

“He introduced her to me as Mrs. Trask. I’m pretty sure she’s from out of town – there are no Trasks in the phone book.”

“He introduced you?”

“I forced him to. I saw them together in the Lido Restaurant. I went to their table and stayed there until Nick introduced me to her and the other man. His name was Sidney Harrow. He’s a bill collector from San Diego.”

“Did he tell you that?”

“Not exactly. I found out.”

“You’re quite a finder-outer.”

“Yes,” she said, “I am. Ordinarily I don’t believe in snooping.” She gave me a half-smile. “But there are times when snooping is called for. So when Mr. Harrow wasn’t looking I picked up his parking ticket, which was lying on the table beside his plate. I took it out to the Lido parking lot and got the attendant to show me which was his car. It was a junky old convertible, with the back window torn out. The rest was easy. I got his name and address from the car registration in the front and put in a call to his place in San Diego, which turned out to be a collection agency. They said he was on his vacation. Some vacation.”

“How do you know he isn’t?”

“I haven’t finished.” For the first time she was impatient, carried along by her story. “It was Thursday noon when I met them in the restaurant. I saw the old convertible again on Friday night. It was parked in front of the Chalmerses’ house. We live diagonally across the street and I can see their house from the window of my workroom. Just to make sure that it was Mr. Harrow’s car, I went over there to check on the registration. This was about nine o’clock Friday night.

“It was his, all right. He must have heard me close the car door. He came rushing out of the Chalmerses’ house and asked me what I was doing there. I asked him what he was doing. Then he slapped my face and started to twist my arm. I must have let out some kind of a noise, because Nick came out of the house and knocked Mr. Harrow down. Mr. Harrow got a revolver out of his car and I thought for a minute he was going to shoot Nick. They had a funny look on both their faces, as if they were both going to die. As if they really wanted to kill each other and be killed.”

I knew that goodbye look. I had seen it in the war, and too many times since the war.

“But the woman,” the girl said, “came out of the house and stopped them. She told Mr. Harrow to get into his car. Then she got in and they drove away. Nick said that he was sorry, but he couldn’t talk to me right then. He went into the house and closed the door and locked it.”

“How do you know he locked it?”

“I tried to get in. His parents were away, in Palm Springs, and he was terribly upset. Don’t ask me why. I don’t understand it at all, except that that woman is after him.”

“Do you know that?”

“She’s that kind of woman. She’s a phony blonde with a big red sloppy mouth and poisonous eyes. I can’t understand why he would flip over her.”

“What makes you think he has?”

“The way she talked to him, as if she owned him.”

“Have you told your father about this woman?”

She shook her head. “He knows I’m having trouble with Nick. But I can’t tell him what it is. It makes Nick look so bad.”

“And you want to marry Nick.”

“I’ve waited for a long time.” She turned and faced me. I could feel the pressure of her cool insistence, like water against a dam. “I intend to marry him, whether my father wants me to or not. I’d naturally prefer to have his approval.”

“But he’s opposed to Nick?”

Her face thinned. “He’d be opposed to any man whom I wanted to marry. My mother was killed in 1945. She was younger then than I am now,” she added in faint surprise. “Father never remarried, for my sake. I wish for my sake he had.”

She spoke with the measured emphasis of a young woman who had suffered. “How old are you, Betty?”

“Twenty-five.”

“How long is it since you’ve seen Nick?”

“Not since Friday night, at his house.”

“And you’ve been waiting for him here since then?”

“Part of the time. Dad would worry himself sick if I didn’t come home at night. Incidentally, Nick hasn’t slept in his own bed since I started waiting for him here.”

“When was that?”

“Saturday afternoon.” She added with a seasick look: “If he wants to sleep with her, let him.”

At this point the telephone rang. She rose quickly and answered it. After listening for a moment she spoke rather grimly into the receiver:

“This is Mr. Chalmers’ answering service … No, I don’t know where he is … Mr. Chalmers does not provide me with that information.”

She listened again. From where I sat I could hear a woman’s emotional voice on the line, but I couldn’t make out her words. Betty repeated them: “ ‘Mr. Chalmers is to stay away from the Montevista Inn.’ I see. Your husband has followed you there. Shall I tell him that? … All right.”

She put the receiver down, very gently, as if it was packed with high explosives. The blood mounted from her neck and suffused her face in a flush of pure emotion.

“That was Mrs. Trask.”

“I was wondering. I gather she’s at the Montevista Inn.”

“Yes. So is her husband.”

“I may pay them a visit.”

She rose abruptly. “I’m going home. I’m not going to wait here any longer. It’s humiliating.”

We went down together in the elevator. In its automatic intimacy she said:

“I’ve spilled all my secrets. How do you make people do it?”

“I don’t. People like to talk about what’s hurting them. It takes the edge off the pain sometimes.”

“May I ask you one more painful question?”

“This seems to be the day for them.”

“How was your mother killed?”

“By a car, right in front of our house on Pacific Street.”

“Who was driving?”

“Nobody knows, least of all me. I was just a small baby.”

“Hit-run?”

She nodded. The doors slid open at the ground floor, terminating our intimacy. We went out together to the parking lot. I watched her drive off in a red two-seater, burning rubber as she turned into the street.