Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

“Please don’t do that, Nick.” The girl was kneeling beside him again. “What happened? Please tell me what happened.”

“No. You wouldn’t love me any more.”

“Nothing could stop me loving you.”

“Even if I killed somebody?” he said between his hands.

“Did you kill somebody?” I said.

He nodded slowly, once, keeping his head down and his face hidden.

“With this revolver?”

His head jerked downward in the affirmative. Betty said: “He’s in no condition to talk. You mustn’t force him.”

“I think he wants to get it off his chest. Why do you suppose he phoned you from the club?”

“To say goodbye.”

“This is better than saying goodbye. Isn’t it?”

She answered soberly: “I don’t know. I don’t know how much I can stand.”

I turned to Nick again. “Where did you get the revolver?”

“It was in his car.”

“Sidney Harrow’s car?”

He dropped his hands from his face. His eyes were puzzled and fearful. “Yes. It was in his car.”

“Did you shoot him in his car?”

His whole face clenched like a frightened baby’s getting ready to cry. “I don’t remember.” He struck himself on the forehead with his fist. Then he struck himself in the mouth, hard.

“You’re tormenting him,” the girl said. “Can’t you see he’s sick?”

“Stop mothering him. He already has a mother.”

His head came up in a startled movement. “You mustn’t tell my mother. Or my father. Dad will kill me.”

I made no promises. His parents would have to be told. “You were going to tell me where the shooting occurred, Nick.”

“Yes. I remember now. We went to the hobo jungle back of Ocean Boulevard. Someone had left a fire burning and we sat by the coals. He wanted me to do a bad thing.” His voice was naïve, like a child’s. “I took his gun and shot him.”

He made another scowling baby-face, so tight that it hid his eyes. He began to sob and moan, but no tears came. It was hard to watch his dry crying.

Betty put her arms around him. I said across the rhythms of his noise:

“He’s had breakdowns before, hasn’t he?”

“Not like this.”

“Did he stay at home, or was he hospitalized?”

“Home.” She spoke to Nick. “Will you come home with me?”

He said something that might have been yes. I called the Chalmerses’ number and got the servant, Emilio. He brought Irene Chalmers to the phone.

“This is Archer. I’m with your son in his apartment. He’s not in a good way, and I’m bringing him home.”

“Is he hurt?”

“He’s mentally hurt, and talking about suicide.”

“I’ll get in touch with his psychiatrist,” she said. “Dr. Smitheram.”

“Is your husband there?”

“He’s in the garden. Do you want to talk to him?”

“It isn’t necessary. But you’d better prepare him for this.”

“Can you handle Nick?”

“I think so. I have Betty Truttwell with me.”

Before we left the apartment I called the Bureau of Criminal Investigation in Sacramento. I gave the number of the revolver to a man I knew named Roy Snyder. He said he’d try to check the name of the original owner. When we went down to my car I put the revolver in the trunk, locked in an evidence case.

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.”