The Goodbye Look

chapter 6

A man in plain dark clothes came quietly into the room. Both the sergeants stood up, and he dismissed them. He had clipped gray hair, eyes that were hard and sober on either side of a scarred and broken nose. His mouth was chewed and ravaged by lifelong doubt and suspicion, and it kept working now. He sat down facing me across the table.

“I’m Lackland, Captain of Detectives. I hear you been giving our boys a bad time.”

“I thought it was the other way around.”

His eyes searched my face. “I don’t see any marks on you.”

“I have a right to a lawyer.”

“We have a right to your cooperation. Try bucking us and you could end up flat on your rear end without a license.”

“That reminds me, I want my photostat back.”

Instead, he took a manila envelope out of his inside pocket and opened it. Among other things it contained a snapshot, or a piece of snapshot, which Lackland pushed across the table to me.

It was a picture of a man in his forties. He had fair thinning hair, bold eyes, a wry mouth. He looked like a poet who had missed his calling and had had to settle for grosser satisfactions.

His picture had been cut from a larger picture which had included other people. I could see girls’ dresses on either side of him, but not the girls. The thing looked like a blown-up snapshot at least twenty years old.

“Know him?” Captain Lackland said.

“No.”

He thrust his scarred face toward me like a warning of what my face might become. “You’re sure about that, are you?”

“I’m sure.” There was no use mentioning my unsupported guess that this was a picture Jean Trask had given Harrow, and that it was a picture of her father.

He leaned toward me again. “Come on now, Mr. Archer, help us out. Why was Sidney Harrow carrying this?” His forefinger jabbed at the blown-up snapshot.

“I don’t know.”

“You must have some idea. Why were you interested in Harrow?”

“I have to talk to John Truttwell. After that I may be able to say something.”

Lackland got up and left the room. In about ten minutes he came back accompanied by Truttwell. The lawyer looked at me with concern.

“I understand you’ve been here for some time, Archer. You should have got in touch with me before.” He turned to Lackland. “I’ll talk to Mr. Archer in private. He’s employed by me in a confidential capacity.”

Lackland retreated slowly. Truttwell sat down across from me. “Why are they holding you, anyway?”

“A part-time bill collector named Sidney Harrow was shot last night. Lackland knows I was following Harrow. He doesn’t know that Harrow was one of several people involved in the theft of the gold box.”

Truttwell was startled. “You’ve found that out already?”

“It wasn’t hard. This is the sloppiest burglary in history. The woman who has the box now keeps it lying around in plain view.”

“Who is she?”

“Her married name is Jean Trask. Who she really is is another question. Apparently Nick stole the box and gave it to her. Which is why I can’t talk freely, to Lackland or anyone else.”

“I should certainly say you can’t. Are you sure about all this?”

“Unless I’ve been having delusions.” I stood up. “Can’t we finish this outside?”

“Of course. Wait here for a minute.”

Truttwell went out, closing the door behind him. He came back smiling and handed me the photostat of my license. “You’re sprung. Oliver Lackland’s a fairly reasonable man.”

In the narrow corridor that led to the parking lot, I ran the gauntlet of Lackland and his sergeants. They nodded at me, too many times for comfort.

I told Truttwell what had happened as we drove across town in his Cadillac. He turned up Pacific Street.

“Where are we going?”

“To my house. You made quite an impression on Betty. She wants to ask your advice.”

“What about?”

“It’s probably something to do with Nick. He’s all she thinks about.” Truttwell added after a long pause: “Betty seems to believe I’m prejudiced against him. That’s really not the case. But I don’t want her to make any unnecessary mistakes. She’s the only daughter I have.”

“She told me she’s twenty-five.”

“Betty’s very young for her age, though. Very young and vulnerable.”

“Superficially, maybe. She struck me as a resourceful woman.”

Truttwell gave me a look of pleased surprise. “I’m glad you think so. I brought her up by myself, and it’s been quite a responsibility.” After another pause he added: “My wife died when Betty was only a few months old.”

“She told me her mother was killed by a hit-run driver.”

“Yes, that’s true.” Truttwell’s voice was almost inaudible.

“Was the driver ever caught?”

“I’m afraid not. The Highway Patrol found the car, near San Diego, but it was a stolen car. Strangely enough, whoever it was had made an attempt to burglarize the Chalmerses’ house. My wife apparently saw them enter the house and scared them out of there. They ran her down when they made their getaway.”

He gave me a bleak look which resisted further questions. We drove in silence the rest of the way to his house, which was diagonally across the street from the Chalmerses’ Spanish mansion. He dropped me at the curb, said he had a client waiting, and drove away.

The architecture on upper Pacific Street was traditional but eclectic. Truttwell’s house was a white colonial one, with green shutters upstairs and down.

I knocked on the green front door. It was answered by a gray little woman in a housekeeper’s dim quasi-uniform. The formal lines which bracketed her mouth softened when I told her who I was.

“Yes. Miss Truttwell is expecting you.” She led me up a curving stair to the door of a front room. “Mr. Archer is here to see you.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Glover.”

“Can I get you anything, dear?”

“No thanks.”

Betty delayed her appearance till Mrs. Glover had gone. I could see why. Her eyes were swollen and her color was bad. She held her body tensely, like a kicked animal expecting to be kicked again.

She stood back to let me enter the room, and closed the door behind me. It was a young woman’s study, bright with chintz and Chagall, its shelves loaded with books. She faced me standing up, with her back to the windows overlooking the street.

“I’ve heard from Nicholas.” She indicated the orange telephone on the worktable. “You won’t tell Father, will you?”

“He already suspects it, Betty.”

“But you won’t tell him anything more?”

“Don’t you trust your father?”

“About anything else, yes. But you mustn’t tell him what I’m going to tell you.”

“I’ll do my best, that’s all I can promise. Is Nick in trouble?”

“Yes.” She hung her head, and her bright hair curtained her face. “I think he intends to kill himself. I don’t want to live, either, if he does.”

“Did he say why?”

“He’s done something terrible, he says.”

“Like kill a man?”

She flung her hair back and looked at me with blazing dislike. “How can you say such a thing?”

“Sidney Harrow was shot on the waterfront last night. Did Nick mention him?”

“Of course not.”

“What did he say?”

She was quiet for a minute, remembering. Then she recited slowly: “That he didn’t deserve to live. That he’d let me down, and let his parents down, and he couldn’t face any of us again. Then he said goodbye to me – a final goodbye.” A hiccup of grief shook her.

“How long ago did he make the call?”

She looked at the orange phone, and then at her watch. “About an hour. It seems like forever, though.”

She moved vaguely past me to the other side of the room and took a framed photograph down from a wall bracket. I moved up behind her and looked at it over her shoulder. It was a larger copy of the photograph in my pocket, which I had found in the closet of Harrow’s motel room. I noticed now that in spite of his smiling mouth, the young man in the picture had somber eyes.

“I take it that’s Nick,” I said.

“Yes. It’s his graduation picture.”

She replaced it on its bracket, with a faintly ritual air, and went to the front windows. I followed her. She was looking out across the street toward the closed white front of the Chalmers house.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“We’ve got to find him,” I said. “Did he say where he was calling from?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Or anything else at all?”

“I don’t remember anything else.”

“Did he say what suicide method he had in mind?”

She hid her face behind her hair again and answered in a hushed voice: “He didn’t say, this time.”

“You mean he’s gone through this routine before?”

“Not really. And you mustn’t speak of it in that way. He’s terribly serious.”

“So am I.” But I was angry at the boy for what he had done and was doing to the girl. “What did he do or say the other times?”

“He often talked about suicide when he got depressed. I don’t mean that he threatened to do it. But he talked about ways and means. He never held anything back from me.”

“Maybe it’s time he started.”

“You sound like Father. You’re both prejudiced against him.”

“Suicide is a cruel business, Betty.”

“Not if you love the person. A depressed person can’t help the way he feels.”

I didn’t argue any further. “You were going to tell me how he planned to do it.”

“It wasn’t a plan. He was simply talking. He said a gun was too messy, and pills were uncertain. The cleanest way would be to swim out to sea. But the thing that really haunted him, he said, was the thought of the rope.”

“Hanging?”

“He told me he’d thought of hanging himself ever since he was a child.”

“Where did he get that idea?”

“I don’t know. But his grandfather was a Superior Court judge, and some people in town considered him a hanging judge – one who liked to sentence people to death. It may have influenced Nick, in a negative way. I’ve read of stranger things in history.”

“Did Nick ever mention the hanging judge in the family?”

She nodded.

“And suicide?”

“Many times.”

“That’s quite a courtship he’s been treating you to.”

“I’m not complaining. I love Nick, and I want to be of some use to him.”

I was beginning to understand the girl, and the more I understood the better I liked her. She had a serviceability that I had noticed before in widowers’ daughters.

“Think back to his telephone call,” I said. “Did he give any indication of where he was?”

“I don’t remember any.”

“Give it some time. Go and sit by the telephone.” She sat in a chair beside the table, with one hand on the instrument as if to keep it quiet.

“I could hear noises in the background.”

“What kind of noises?”

“Wait a minute.” She raised her hand for silence, and sat listening. “Children’s voices, and splashing. Pool noises. I think he must have called me from the public booth at the Tennis Club.”