Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

“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.”

Before he left the house, Truttwell filled a pipe and lit it with a kitchen match. I stayed behind in his study to make a phone call to Roy Snyder in Sacramento. It was five minutes to five by my watch, and I was just in time to catch Snyder before he quit for the night.

“Archer again. Do you have any information on the ownership of the Colt?”

“Yes, I do. It was bought new by a Pasadena man named Rawlinson. Samuel Rawlinson.” Snyder spelled out the surname. “He made the purchase in September of 1941, and at the same time he got a permit to carry it from the Pasadena police. The permit was allowed to lapse in 1945. That’s all I have.”

“What reason did Rawlinson give for carrying a gun?”