The Goodbye Look

chapter 4

Montevista lay on the sea just south of Pacific Point. It was a rustic residential community for woodland types who could afford to live anywhere.

I left the freeway and drove up an oak-grown hill to the Montevista Inn. From its parking lot the rooftops below seemed to be floating in a flood of greenery. I asked the young man in the office for Mrs. Trask. He directed me to Cottage Seven, on the far side of the pool.

A bronze dolphin spouted water at one end of the big old-fashioned pool. Beyond it a flagstone path meandered through live oaks toward a white stucco cottage. A red-shafted flicker took off from one of the trees and crossed a span of sky, wings opening and closing like a fan lined with vivid red.

It was a nice place to be, except for the sound of the voices from the cottage. The woman’s voice was mocking. The man’s was sad and monotonous. He was saying:

“It isn’t so funny, Jean. You can wreck your life just so many times. And my life, it’s my life, too. Finally you reach a point where you can’t put it back together. You should learn a lesson from what happened to your father.”

“Leave my father out of this.”

“How can I? I called your mother in Pasadena last night, and she says you’re still looking for him. It’s a wild-goose chase, Jean. He’s probably been dead for years.”

“No! Daddy’s alive. And this time I’m going to find him.”

“So he can ditch you again?”

“He never ditched me.”

“That’s the way I heard it from your mother. He ditched you both and took off with a piece of skirt.”

“He did not.” Her voice was rising. “You mustn’t say such things about my father.”

“I can say them if they’re true.”

“I won’t listen!” she cried. “Get out of here. Leave me alone.”

“I will not. You’re coming home to San Diego with me and put up a decent front. You owe me that much after twenty years.”

The woman was silent for a moment. The sounds of the place lapped in like gentle waves: a towhee foraging in the underbrush, a kinglet rattling. Her voice, when she spoke again, was calmer and more serious:

“I’m sorry, George, I truly am, but you might as well give up. I’ve heard everything you’re saying so often, it just goes by like wind.”

“You always came back before,” he said with a note of hopefulness in his voice.

“This time I’m not.”

“You have to, Jean.”

His voice had thinned. Its hopefulness had twisted into a kind of threat. I began to move around the side of the cottage.

“Don’t you dare touch me,” she said.

“I have a legal right to. You’re my wife.”

He was saying and doing all the wrong things. I knew, because I’d said and done them in my time. The woman let out a small scream, which sounded as if she was tuning up for a bigger one.

I looked around the corner of the cottage, where the flagstone path ran into a patio. The man had pinned the woman in his arms and was kissing the side of her blond head. She had turned her face away, in my direction. Her eyes were chilly, as if her husband’s kisses were freezing cold.

“Let go of me, George. We have company.”

He released her and backed away, red-faced and wet-eyed. He was a large middle-aged man who moved awkwardly, as if he was the intruder instead of me.

“This is my wife,” he said, more in self-excuse than introduction.

“What was she yelling about?”

“It’s all right,” the woman said. “He wasn’t hurting me. But you better leave now, George, before something does happen.”

“I have to talk to you some more.” He reached out a thick red hand toward her. The gesture was both menacing and touching, like something done by Frankenstein’s innocent monster.

“You’d only get stirred up again.”

“But I’ve got a right to plead my case. You can’t cut me off without a hearing. I’m not a criminal like your father was. But even a criminal gets his day in court. You’ve got to give me a hearing.”

He was getting very excited, and it was the kind of spinning excitement that could change to violence if it came up tails.

“You better go, Mr. Trask.”

His wild wet gaze roved to me. I showed him an old Special Deputy badge I carried. He examined it closely, as if it was a curio.

“Very well, I’ll go.” He turned and walked away, pausing at the corner of the building to call back: “I’m not going very far.”

The woman turned to me, sighing. Her hair had been disarranged, and she was fixing it with nervous fingers. It was done in a fluffy doll-like fashion that didn’t go with her forty years or so. But in spite of Betty’s description of her, she wasn’t a bad-looking woman. She had a good figure under her blouse, and a handsome, heavy face.

She also had a quality that bothered me, a certain doubt and dimness about the eyes, as if she had lost her way a long time ago.

“That was good timing,” she said to me. “You never know what George is going to do.”

“Or anybody else.”

“Are you the security man around here?”

“I’m filling in.”

She looked me up and down, like a woman practicing to be a divorcee. “I owe you a drink. Do you like Scotch?”

“On the rocks, please.”

“I have some ice. My name is Jean Trask, by the way.”

I told her my name. She took me into the living room of the cottage and left me there while she went into the kitchen. Around the walls of the room a series of English hunting prints followed some red-coated hunters and their hounds over hills and through valleys to the death of the fox.

Ostensibly studying the prints, I circled the room to the open door of the bedroom and looked in. On the nearest of the two beds a woman’s blue weekend case lay open, and the gold box was in it. On its painted lid a man and a woman in skimpy antique clothes disported themselves.

I was tempted to walk in and take the box, but John Truttwell wouldn’t have liked that. Even without him, I’d probably have let the thing lie. I was beginning to sense that the theft of the box was just a physical accident of the case. Any magic it possessed, black or white or gold, was soaked up from the people who handled it.

But I took two steps into the bedroom and lifted the heavy lid of the box. It was empty. I heard Mrs. Trask crossing the living room, and I retreated in her direction. She slammed the bedroom door.

“We won’t be using that room.”

“What a pity.”

She gave me a startled look, as if she was unaware of her own rough candor. Then she shoved a lowball glass at me. “Here.”

She went into the kitchen and returned with a dark-brown drink for herself. As soon as she had taken a swallow or two, her eyes turned moist and bright and her color rose. She was a drinker, I thought, and I was there essentially because she didn’t want to drink alone.

She knocked her drink back in a hurry and made herself another, while I nursed mine. She sat down in an armchair facing me across a coffee table. I was almost enjoying myself. The room was large and tranquil, and through the open front door I could hear quail muttering and puttering.

I had to spoil it. “I was admiring your gold box. Is it Florentine?”

“I suppose it is,” she said, offhandedly.

“Don’t you know? It looks quite valuable.”

“Really? Are you an expert?”

“No. I was thinking in terms of security. I wouldn’t leave it lying around like that.”

“Thanks for your advice,” she said unthankfully. She was quiet for a minute, sipping her drink. “I didn’t mean to be rude just now; I have things on my mind.” She leaned toward me in a show of interest. “Have you been in the security business long?”

“Over twenty years, counting my time with the police.”

“You used to be a policeman?”

“That’s right.”

“Perhaps you can help me. I’m involved in a kind of nasty situation. I don’t feel up to explaining it all right now, but I hired a man named Sidney Harrow to come here with me. He claimed to be a private detective but it turned out his main experience is repossessing cars. He’s a fast man with a tow bar. Also he’s dangerous.” She finished her drink, and shivered.

“How do you know he’s dangerous?”

“He almost killed my boyfriend. He’s a fast man with a gun, too.”

“You also have a boyfriend?”

“I call him my boyfriend,” she said with a half-smile. “Actually we’re more like brother and sister, or father and daughter – I mean mother and son.” Her smile turned to a simper.

“What’s his name?”

“That has no bearing on what I’m telling you. The point is that Sidney Harrow nearly shot him the other night.”

“Where did this happen?”

“Right out in front of my boyfriend’s house. I realized then that Sidney was a wild man, and he’s been no use to me since. He has the picture and stuff but he’s not doing anything with them. I’m afraid to go and ask for it back.”

“And you want me to?”

“Maybe. I’m not committing myself yet.” She spoke with the foolish wisdom of a woman who had no feeling for men and would always make the wrong decisions about them.

“What should Sidney be doing with the picture and stuff?”

“Finding out facts,” she said carefully. “That’s what I hired him to do. But I made the mistake of giving him some money and all he does is sit in his motel room and drink. I haven’t even heard from him in two days.”

“Which motel?”

“The Sunset, on the beach.”

“How did you get involved with Sidney Harrow?”

“I’m not involved with him. A man I know brought him to the house last week and he seemed so lively and alert, just the man I was looking for.” As if to renew the promise of that occasion, she raised her glass and drained the last few drops, coaxing them with her tongue. “He reminded me of my father when he was a young man.”

For a moment she seemed at ease in the double memory. But her feelings were very shifty, and she couldn’t hold this one long. I could see her quick-remembered happiness dying in her eyes.

She rose and started for the kitchen, then stopped abruptly, as if she’d come up against invisible glass. “I’m drinking too much,” she said. “And I’m talking too much.”

She left her glass in the kitchen and came back and stood over me. Her unhappy eyes regarded me suspiciously, as if I was the source of the unhappiness.

“Please get out of here, will you? Forget what I said to you, eh?”

I thanked her for the drink and drove downhill to the Ocean Boulevard and along it to the Sunset Motor Hotel.