Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

“Business protection. He was the president of a bank,” Snyder added dryly. “The Pasadena Occidental Bank.”

I thanked him and dialed Pasadena Information. The Pasadena Occidental Bank was not listed, but Samuel Rawlinson was.

I put in a person-to-person call to Rawlinson. A woman answered. Her voice was rough and warm.

“I’m sorry,” she explained to the operator. “It’s hard for Mr. Rawlinson to come to the phone. Arthritis.”

“I’ll talk to her,” I said.

“Go ahead, sir,” the operator said.

“This is Lew Archer. Who am I talking to?”

“Mrs. Shepherd. I look after Mr. Rawlinson.”

“Is he ill?”

“He’s old,” she said. “We all get old.”

“You’re so right, Mrs. Shepherd. I’m trying to trace possession of a gun which Mr. Rawlinson bought in 1941. A .45 Colt revolver. Will you ask him what he did with it?”

“I’ll ask him.”

She left the phone for a minute or two. It was a noisy line, and I could hear distant babblings, scraps of conversation fading just before I could grasp their meaning.

“He wants to know who you are,” Mrs. Shepherd said. “And what right you have to ask him about any gun.” She added apologetically: “I’m only quoting what Mr. Rawlinson said. He’s a stickler.”

“So am I. Tell him I’m a detective. The gun may or may not have been used last night to commit a crime.”

“Where?”

“In Pacific Point.”

“He used to spend his summers there,” she said. “I’ll ask him again.” She went away and came back. “I’m sorry, Mr. Archer, he won’t talk. But he says if you want to come here and explain what it’s all about, he’ll discuss it with you.”

“When?”

“This evening if you want. He never goes out evenings. The number is 245 on Locust Street.”

I said I’d be there as soon as I could make it.

I was in my car, ready to go, when I realized I couldn’t leave just yet. A black Cadillac convertible with a medical caduceus was parked just ahead of me. I wanted to have a word with Dr. Smitheram.

The front door of the Chalmers house was standing open, as if its security had been breached. I walked into the reception hall. Truttwell stood with his back to me, arguing with a large balding man who had to be the psychiatrist. Lawrence and Irene Chalmers were on the fringes of the argument.

“The hospital is contraindicated,” Truttwell was saying. “We can’t be sure what the boy will say, and hospitals are always full of leaks.”

“My clinic isn’t,” the large man said.

“Possibly, just possibly, it isn’t. Even so, if you or one of your employees were asked a question in court, you’d have to answer it. Unlike the legal profession–”

The doctor interrupted Truttwell: “Has Nick committed a crime of some sort?”

“I’m not going to answer that question.”

“How can I look after a patient without information?”

“You have plenty of information, more than I have.” Truttwell’s voice seemed to buzz with an old resentment. “You’ve sat on that information for fifteen years.”

“At least you recognize,” Smitheram said, “that I haven’t gone running to the police with it.”

“Would the police be interested, doctor?”

“I’m not going to answer that question.”

The two men faced each other in a quiet fury. Lawrence Chalmers tried to say something to them but they paid no attention.

His wife moved toward me, and drew me to one side. Her eyes were dull and unsurprised, as if she’d been hit by something that she’d seen coming from a long way off.

“Dr. Smitheram wants to take Nick to his clinic. What do you think we should do?”

“I agree with Mr. Truttwell. Your son needs legal security as well as medical.”

“Why?” she said bluntly.

“He killed a man last night, he says, and he’s been talking about it quite freely.”

I paused to let the fact sink in. She handled it almost as if she’d been expecting it. “Who is the man?”

“Sidney Harrow is his name. He was involved in the theft of your Florentine box. So was Nick, apparently.”

“Nick was?”

“I’m afraid so. With all these things on his mind, I don’t think you should put him in any kind of clinic or hospital. Hospitals are always full of leaks, as Truttwell says. Couldn’t you keep him at home?”

“Who would watch him?”

“You and your husband.”

She glanced at her husband, appraisingly. “Maybe. I don’t know if Larry is up to it. It doesn’t show but he’s terribly emotional, especially where Nick is concerned.” She moved closer, letting me feel the influence of her body. “Would you, Mr. Archer?”

“Would I what?”

“Stand watch over Nick tonight?”

“No.” The word came out hard and definite.

“We’re paying your salary, you know.”

“And I’ve been earning it. But I’m not a psychiatric nurse.”

“I’m sorry I asked you.”

There was a sting in her words. She turned her back on me and moved away. I decided I’d better get out of town before she had me fired. I went and told John Truttwell where I was going and why.

Truttwell’s argument with the doctor had cooled down. He introduced me to Smitheram, who gave me a soft handclasp and a hard look. There was a troubled intelligence in his eyes.

I said: “I’d like to ask you some questions about Nick.”

“This isn’t the time or the place.”

“I realize that, doctor. I’ll see you at your office tomorrow.”

“If you insist. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have a patient to attend to.”

I followed him as far as the living-room gates, and glanced in. Betty and Nick were sitting on a rug, not together but near each other. Her body was turned toward him, supported by one straight arm. Nick’s face was pressed against his own raised knees.

Neither of them seemed to move, even to breathe. They looked like people lost in space, frozen forever in their separate poses, his of despair, hers of caring.

Dr. Smitheram went and sat down near them on the floor.

I drove inland by way of Anaheim. It was a bad time of day, and in places the traffic crawled like a wounded snake. It took me ninety minutes to get from Chalmers’s house to Rawlinson’s house in Pasadena.

I parked in front of the place and sat for a minute, letting the freeway tensions drip off my nerve ends. It was one of a block of three-storied frame houses. They were ancient, as time went in California, ornamented with turn-of-the-century gables and cupolas.

Half a block further on, Locust Street came to an end at a black-and-white-striped barricade. Beyond it a deep wooded ravine opened. Twilight was overflowing the ravine, flooding the yards, soaking up into the thick yellow sky.

A light showed in Rawlinson’s house as the front door opened and closed. A woman crossed the veranda and came down the steps skipping a broken one.

I saw as she approached my car that she must have been close to sixty. She moved with the confidence of a much younger woman. Her eyes were bright black behind her glasses. Her skin was dark, perhaps with a tincture of Indian or Negro blood. She wore a staid gray dress and a multicolored Mexican apron.

“Are you the gentleman who wants to see Mr. Rawlinson?”

“Yes. I’m Archer.”

“I’m Mrs. Shepherd. He’s just sitting down to dinner and he won’t mind if you join him. He likes to have some company with his food. I only prepared enough for the two of us, but I’ll be glad to pour you a cup of tea.”

“I could use a cup of tea, Mrs. Shepherd.”

I followed her into the house. The entrance hall was impressive if you didn’t look too closely. But the parquetry floor was buckling and loose underfoot, and the walls were dark with mold.