The Goodbye Look

chapter 8

We rode in my car, with Betty driving and Nick on the front seat between us. He didn’t speak or move until we stopped in front of his parents’ house. Then he begged me not to make him go in.

I had to use a little force to get him out of the car. With one hand on his arm, and Betty walking on his far side, I marched him across the courtyard. He moved with deep reluctance, as if we planned to stand him up against the white wall and execute him.

His mother came out before we reached the front door. “Nick? Are you all right?”

“I’m okay,” he said in his tape-recorder tone.

As we moved into the reception hall she said to me: “Do you have to talk to my husband?”

“Yes I do. I asked you to prepare him.”

“I just couldn’t do it,” she said. “You’ll have to tell him yourself. He’s in the garden.”

“What about the psychiatrist?”

“Dr. Smitheram had a patient with him, but he’ll be here in a little while.”

“You’d better call John Truttwell, too,” I said. “This thing has legal angles.”

I left Nick with the two women in the living room. Betty was solemn and quiet, as if Irene Chalmers’s dark beauty cast a shadow over her.

Chalmers was in the walled garden, working among the plants. In clean, sun-faded Levis he looked thin, almost fragile. He was digging vigorously with a spade around some bushes which had been cut back for the winter and looked like dead thorny stumps.

He glanced up sharply at me, then slowly straightened, striking his spade upright in the earth. Greek and Roman statues stood around like nudists pitted by years of inclement weather.

Chalmers said rather severely: “I thought it was understood that the Florentine box was not insured.”

“I wouldn’t know about that, Mr. Chalmers. I’m not in the insurance business.”

He got a little pale and tense. “I understood you to say you were.”

“It was your wife’s idea. I’m a private detective. John Truttwell called me in on your wife’s behalf.”

“Then he can damn well call you off again.” Chalmers did a mental double take. “You mean my wife went to Truttwell behind my back?”

“It wasn’t such a bad idea. I know you’re concerned about your son, and I just brought him home. He’s been running around with a gun, talking very loosely about suicide and murder.”

I filled Chalmers in on what had been said and done. He was appalled. “Nick must be out of his mind.”

“He is to a certain extent,” I said. “But I don’t think he was lying.”

“You believe he committed a murder?”

“A man named Sidney Harrow is dead. There was bad blood between him and Nick. And Nick has admitted shooting him.”

Chalmers swayed slightly and leaned on his spade, head down. There was a bald spot on the crown of his head, with a little hair brushed over it as if to mask his vulnerability. The moral beatings that people took from their children, I was thinking, were the hardest to endure and the hardest to escape.

But Chalmers wasn’t thinking of himself. “Poor Nick. He was doing so well. What’s happened to him?”

“Maybe Dr. Smitheram can tell you. It seems to have started with the gold box. Apparently Nick took it from your safe and gave it to a woman named Jean Trask.”

“I never heard of her. What would she want with my mother’s gold box?”

“I don’t know. It seems important to her.”

“Have you talked to this Trask woman?”

“Yes, I have.”

“What did she do with my letters to my mother?”

“I don’t know. I looked in the box, but it was empty.”

“Why didn’t you ask her?”

“She’s a difficult woman to deal with. And more important things kept coming up.”

Chalmers bit his mustache in chagrin. “Such as?”

“I learned that she hired Sidney Harrow to come to Pacific Point. Apparently they were searching for her father.”

Chalmers gave me a puzzled look which wandered across the garden and over the wall to the sky. “What has all this got to do with us?”

“It isn’t clear, I’m afraid. I have a suggestion, subject to John Truttwell’s approval. And yours, of course. It might be a good idea to turn the gun over to the police and let them make ballistics tests.”

“You mean give up without a fight?”

“Let’s take this a step at a time, Mr. Chalmers. If it turns out that Nick’s gun didn’t kill Harrow, his confession is probably fantasy. If it did kill Harrow, we can decide then what to do next.”

“We’ll take it up with John Truttwell. I don’t seem to be thinking too clearly.” Chalmers put his fingers to his forehead.

“It still wouldn’t be hopeless,” I said, “even if Nick did kill him. I believe there may have been mitigating circumstances.”

“How so?”

“Harrow had been throwing his weight around. He threatened Nick with a gun, possibly the same gun. This happened in front of your house the other night, when the box was stolen.”

Chalmers gave me a doubtful look. “I don’t see how you can possibly know that.”

“I have an eyewitness.” But I didn’t name her.

“Do you have the gun with you?”

“It’s in the trunk of my car. I’ll show it to you.”

We went through a screened lanai into the house and down a corridor to the reception hall. Nick and his mother and Betty were sitting in a stiff little group on a sofa in the living room, like people at a party that had died some time ago. Nick had put on his dark glasses again, like a black bandage over his eyes.

Chalmers went into the living room and stood in front of him looking down as if from a great height. “Is it true that you shot a man?”

Nick nodded dully. “I’m sorry. I didn’t want to come home. I meant to kill myself.”

“That’s cowardly talk,” Chalmers said. “You’ve got to act like a man.”

“Yes, Dad,” he said without hope.

“We’ll do everything we can for you. Don’t despair. Promise me that, Nick.”

“I promise, Dad. I’m sorry.”

Chalmers turned with a kind of military abruptness and came back to me. His face was stoical. Both he and Nick must have been aware that no real communication had taken place.

We went out the front door. On the sidewalk Chalmers looked down at his gardening clothes self-consciously.

“I hate to appear like this in public,” he said, as if the neighbors might be watching him.

I opened the trunk of my car and showed him the revolver without removing it from the evidence case. “Have you ever seen it before?”

“No. As a matter of fact Nick never owned a gun. He’s always detested the whole business of guns.”

“Why?”

“I suppose he got it by osmosis from me. My father taught me to hunt when I was a boy. But the war destroyed my pleasure in hunting.”

“I hear you had quite a lot of war experience.”

“Who told you that?”

“John Truttwell.”

“I wish John would keep his own counsel. And mine. I prefer not to talk about my part in the war.” He looked down at the revolver with a kind of sad contempt, as if it symbolized all the forms of violence. “Do you really think we should entrust this gun to John?”

“What do you suggest?”

“I know what I’d like to do. Bury it ten feet deep and forget about it.”

“We’d only have to dig it up again.”

“I suppose you’re right,” he said.

Truttwell’s Cadillac came into view, far down Pacific Street. He parked it in front of his own house and came across the street at a half-trot. He absorbed the bad news about Nick as if his mind had been tuned in to receive it.

“And this is the gun. It’s loaded.” I handed him the case with the key in the lock. “You better take charge of it until we decide what to do. I have a query in on its original ownership.”

“Good.” He turned to Chalmers. “Where’s Nick?”

“In the house. We’re expecting Dr. Smitheram.”

Truttwell laid his hand on Chalmers’s bony shoulder. “Too bad you and Irene have to go through it again.”

“Please. We won’t discuss it.” Chalmers pulled away from Truttwell’s hand. He turned abruptly and marched in his stoical way toward the front door.

I followed Truttwell across the street to his house. In his study, he locked the evidence case in a fireproof steel cabinet. I said:

“I’m glad to get that off my hands. I didn’t want Lackland to catch me with it.”

“Do you think I should turn it over to him today?”

“Let’s see what Sacramento says about ownership. What did you mean, by the way, about Chalmers going through it all again? Has Nick been in this kind of trouble before?”

Truttwell took his time about answering. “It depends on what you mean by this kind of trouble. He’s never been mixed up in a homicide before, at least not to my knowledge. But he’s had one or two episodes – isn’t that what the psychiatrists call them? A few years ago he ran away, and it took a nationwide search to bring him home.”

“Was he on the hippie kick?”

“Not really. Actually he was trying to support himself. When the Pinkertons finally tracked him down on the east coast, he was working as a busboy in a restaurant. We managed to persuade him that he should come home and finish his education.”

“How does he feel about his parents?”

“He’s very close to his mother,” Truttwell said dryly, “if that’s desirable. I think he idolizes his father, but feels he can’t measure up. Which is exactly how Larry Chalmers felt about his own father, the Judge. I suppose these patterns have to go on repeating themselves.”

“You mentioned more than one episode,” I prompted him.

“So I did.” He sat down facing me. “It goes much further back, fourteen or fifteen years, and it may be the root of Nick’s trouble. Dr. Smitheram seems to think so. But beyond a certain point he won’t discuss it with me.”

“What happened?”

“That’s what Smitheram won’t discuss. I think Nick was picked up by some sort of sexual psychopath. His family got him back in a hurry, but not before Nick was frightened out of his wits. He was only eight years old at the time. You can understand why nobody likes to talk about it.”

I wanted to ask Truttwell some more questions, but the housekeeper tapped on the study door and opened it. “I heard you come in, Mr. Truttwell. Is there anything I can get you?”

“No thanks, Mrs. Glover. I’m going right out again. Where’s Betty, by the way?”

“I don’t know, sir.” But the woman looked at me, rather accusingly.

“She’s at the Chalmers house,” I said.

Truttwell got to his feet, his entire body making an angry gesture. “I don’t like that at all.”

“It couldn’t be helped. She was with me when I took Nick. She handled herself very well. And handled him.”

Truttwell struck his thigh with his fist. “I didn’t bring her up to be nurse to a psycho.”

The housekeeper had a terrified expression. She withdrew and closed the door without any sound.

“I’m going over there and bring her home,” Truttwell said. “She’s wasted her entire girlhood on that weakling.”

“She doesn’t seem to think it was all waste.”

“So you’re on his side?” He sounded like a rival.

“No. I’m on Betty’s side, and probably yours. This is a hell of a time to force a decision on her.”

Truttwell got the message after a moment’s thought. “You’re right, of course.”