The Goodbye Look (18 page)

“How did you find that out?” he asked me finally.

“I’ve been doing some digging in Pasadena, as I told you. But I still don’t see how Nick comes into this. He’s not responsible for his grandmother.”

For once Lackland failed to offer an argument. But I thought as I left the police station that perhaps the reverse was true, and Nick’s dead grandmother was responsible for him. Certainly there had to be a meaning in the old connection between the Rawlinson family and the Chalmers family.

I passed the courthouse on my way downtown. In a cast stone bas-relief above the entrance, a big old Justice with bandaged eyes fumbled at her scales. She needed a seeing-eye man, I told her silently. I was feeling dangerously good.

After a breakfast of steak and eggs I went into a barbershop and had a shave. By this time it was close to ten o’clock, and Truttwell should be in his office.

He wasn’t, though. The receptionist told me that he had just left and hadn’t said when he’d be back. She was wearing a black wig this morning, and took my troubled stare as a compliment.

“I like to change my personality. I get sick of having the same old personality.”

“Me, too.” I made a face at her. “Did Mr. Truttwell go home?”

“I don’t know. He received a couple of long-distance calls and then he just took off. If he goes on this way, he’ll end up losing his practice.” The girl smiled intensely up at me, as if
she was already looking for a new opening. “Do you think black hair goes well with my complexion? Actually I’m a natural brownette. But I like to keep experimenting with myself.”

“You look fine.”

“I thought so, too,” she said, overconfidently.

“Where did the distance calls come from?”

“The one call came from San Diego—that was Mrs. Chalmers. I don’t know who the other one was, she wouldn’t give her name. It sounded like an older woman.”

“Calling from where?”

“She didn’t say, and it was dialed direct.”

I asked her to call Truttwell’s house for me. He was there, but he wouldn’t or couldn’t come to the phone. I talked to Betty instead.

“Is your father all right?”

“I guess he is. I hope so.” The young woman’s voice was serious and subdued. “Are you?”

“Yes.” But she sounded doubtful.

“If I come right over, will he be willing to talk to me?”

“I don’t know. You’d better hurry. He’s going out of town.”

“Where out of town?”

“I don’t know,” she repeated glumly. “If you do miss him, Mr. Archer, I’d still like to talk to you myself.”

Truttwell’s Cadillac was standing in front of his house when I got there. Betty opened the front door for me. Her eyes were rather dull and unresponsive. Even her bright hair looked a little tarnished.

“Have you seen Nick?” she said.

“I’ve seen him. The doctor gave him a fairly good report.”

“But what did Nick say?”

“He wasn’t talkable.”

“He’d talk to me. I wanted so badly to go to San Diego.”

She raised her fists and pressed them against her breast. “Father wouldn’t let me.”

“Why not?”

“He’s jealous of Nick. I know that’s a disloyal thing to say. But Father made it very clear. He said when Mrs. Chalmers dismissed him this morning that I would have to choose between him and Nick.”

“Why did Mrs. Chalmers dismiss him?”

“You’ll have to ask Father. He and I are not communicating.”

Truttwell appeared in the hallway behind her. Though he must have heard what she’d just said, he made no reference to it. But he gave her a hard impatient look that I saw and she didn’t.

“What’s this, Betty? We don’t keep visitors standing in the doorway.”

She turned away without speaking, moving into another room and shutting the door behind her. Truttwell spoke in a complaining way, with a thin note of malice running through his complaint:

“She’s losing her mind over that sad sack. She wouldn’t listen to me. Maybe she will now. But come in, Archer. I have news for you.”

Truttwell took me into his study. He was even more carefully dressed and groomed than usual. He wore a fresh sharkskin suit, a button-down shirt with matching silk tie and handkerchief, and the odors of bay rum and masculine scent.

“Betty tells me you’re parting company with the Chalmerses. You look as if you’re celebrating.”

“Betty shouldn’t have told you. She’s losing all sense of discretion.”

His handsome pink face was fretful. He pressed and patted his white hair. Betty had hurt him in his vanity, I thought, and apparently he didn’t have much else to fall back on.

I was more disturbed by the change in Truttwell than by the change in his daughter. She was young, and would change again before she settled on a final self.

“She’s a good girl,” I said.

Truttwell closed the study door and stood against it. “Don’t sell her to me. I know what she is. She let that creep get to her and poison her mind against me.”

“I don’t think so.”

“You’re not her father,” he said, as if paternity conferred the gift of second sight. “She’s put herself down on his level. She’s even using the same crude Freudian jargon.” His face was red now and his voice was choked. “She actually accused me of taking an unhealthy interest in her.”

I said to myself: This is a healthy interest?

Truttwell went on: “I know where she picked up those ideas—from Dr. Smitheram via Nick. I also know,” he said, “why Irene Chalmers terminated their association with me. She made it quite clear on the telephone that the great and good Dr. Smitheram insisted on it. He was probably standing at her elbow telling her what to say.”

“What reason did she give?”

“I’m afraid you were one reason, Archer. I don’t mean to be critical,” though he did. “I gathered that you asked too many questions to suit Dr. Smitheram. He seems determined to mastermind the entire show, and that could be disastrous. No lawyer can defend Nick without knowing what he’s done.”

Truttwell gave me a careful look. As our talk moved back onto more familiar ground, he had regained some of his lawyer’s poise. “You’re better acquainted with the facts than I could possibly be.”

It was a question. I didn’t answer it right away. My attitude to Truttwell was undergoing an adjustment. It wasn’t a radical one, since I had to admit to myself that from the
beginning of the case I hadn’t wholly understood or trusted his motivations.

It was becoming fairly evident now that Truttwell had been using me and intended to go on using me. In the same way as Harrow had served as Randy Shepherd’s cat’s-paw, I was Truttwell’s. He was waiting now, handsome and quick-eyed and well-groomed as a cat, for me to spill the dirt on his daughter’s friend. I said:

“Facts are hard to come by in this case. I don’t even know who I’m working for. Or if I’m working.”

“Of course you are,” he said benevolently. “You’ll be paid in full for everything you’ve done, and I’ll guarantee payment through today at least.”

“Who will be doing the paying?”

“The Chalmerses, naturally.”

“But you don’t represent them any more.”

“Don’t let that worry you. Just submit your bill through me, and they’ll pay it. You’re not exactly a migratory worker, and I won’t let them treat you as one.”

His good will was self-serving, I thought, and would probably last only as long as he could use me. I was embarrassed by it, and by the conflict that had risen. In cases like this, I was usually the expendable one.

“Shouldn’t I report to the Chalmerses?”

“No. They’ve already dismissed you. They don’t want the truth about Nick.”

“How is he?”

Truttwell shrugged. “His mother didn’t say.”

“Who do I report to now?”

“Report to me. I’ve represented the Chalmers family for nearly thirty years, and they’re going to find that I’m not so very readily dispensable.” He made the prediction with a smile, but there was the hint of a threat in it.

“What if they don’t?”

“They will, I guarantee it. But if you’re concerned about your money, I’ll undertake to pay you personally as of today.”

“Thanks. I’ll give it some thought.”

“You’d better think in a hurry,” he said smiling. “I’m on my way to Pasadena to meet Mrs. Swain. She phoned me this morning about investing in her family pictures—after Mrs. Chalmers dismissed me. I’d like to have you come along, Archer.”

In my trade you don’t often have your own way. If I refused to deal with John Truttwell, he could push me off the case and probably close the county to me. I said:

“I’ll take my own car and meet you at Mrs. Swain’s house. That’s where you’re going, isn’t it?—Pasadena?”

“Yes, I can count on you to follow me then?”

I said he could, but I didn’t follow him right away. There was something more to be said between me and his daughter.

Betty came to the front door, as if by prearrangement, and asked me in again. “I have the letters,” she said quietly, “the letters that Nick took from his father’s safe.”

She led me upstairs to her workroom and brought a manila envelope out of a drawer. It was stuffed with airmail letters arranged for the most part in serial order. There must have been a couple of hundred of them.

“How do you know Nick took them from the safe?”

“He told me so himself the night before last. Dr. Smitheram left us alone for awhile. Nick told me where he’d hidden them in his apartment. I went and got them yesterday.”

“Did Nick say why he took them?”

“No.”

“Do you know why?”

She perched on a large multicolored hassock. “I’ve had a lot of different thoughts,” she said. “It has to do with the whole father-son business, I suppose. In spite of all the trouble, Nick has always had a lot of respect for his father.”

“Does that go for you and your father?”

“We aren’t talking about me,” she said in a stiff-mouthed way. “Anyway, girls are different—we’re much more ambiguous. A boy either wants to be like his father or he doesn’t. I think Nick does.”

“It still doesn’t explain why Nick stole the letters.”

“I didn’t say I could explain it. But maybe he was trying, you know, to steal his father’s bravery and so on. The letters were important to him.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Chalmers made them important. He used to read them aloud to Nick—parts of them, anyway.”

“Recently?”

“No. When Nick was a little boy.”

“Eight?”

“It started about that age. I think Mr. Chalmers was trying to indoctrinate him, make a man of him and all like that.” Her tone was a little contemptuous, not so much of Nick or his father as of the indoctrination.

“When Nick was eight,” I said, “he had a serious accident. Do you know about it, Betty?”

She nodded deeply. Her hair slid forward, covering most of her face. “He shot a man, he told me the other night. But I
don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

“Just one question. What was Nick’s attitude toward that shooting?”

She hugged herself as if she was chilly. Encircled by her arms and masked by her hair, she huddled on the hassock like a gnome. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She pulled up her knees and rested her face against them, almost as if she was imitating Nick in his posture of despair.

I carried the letters to a table by a front window. From where I sat I could see the façade of the Chalmerses’ house glistening white under its red tile roof. It looked like a building with a history, and I read the first of the letters in the hope of filling in my knowledge of it.

I suppose I had been expecting some further light on the case, and the letter was a disappointment to me. It had evidently been written by an idealistic and rather conceited boy who was unnaturally eager to get into the war. The only remarkable thing about it was the fact that the boy had since become a dry stick of a man like Chalmers.

The second letter from the top had been written about eighteen months after the first. It was longer and more interesting, the work of a more mature personality sobered by the war.