Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

I listened to her, without entirely believing her. According to her own story, she hadn’t seen her husband since 1954. Her account of him had the swooping certainty of a mind tracking on fantasy. A woman could do a lot of dreaming in twenty years of demonstrating sewing machines.

“Are you still married to him, Mrs. Swain?”

“Yes, I am. He may have gotten a Mexican divorce but if he did I never heard of it. He’s still living in sin with that Shepherd girl. Which is the way I want it.”

“You’re talking about Mrs. Shepherd’s daughter?”

“That’s right. Like mother like daughter. I allowed Rita Shepherd into my home and treated her like my own daughter. So she stole my husband.”

“Which theft came first?”

She was puzzled for a moment. Then her brow cleared. “I see what you mean. Yes, Eldon was carrying on with Rita before he stole the money. I caught on to them very early in the game. It was during a swimming party at our house – we had a forty-foot pool where we lived in San Marino.” Her voice sank almost out of hearing. “I can’t bear to think about it.”

The woman had been punished severely in the past hour, and I was weary of my part in it. I rose to go, and thanked her. But she wouldn’t let me leave.

She got up heavily. “Do detectives ever do things on a contingency basis?”

“What do you have in mind?”

“I don’t have the money to pay you. But if I could get back some of the money Eldon took–” Her sentence dangled in the air, hopefully, hopelessly. “We’d all be rich again,” she said in a hushed and prayerful voice. “And of course I’d pay you very generously.”

“I’m sure you would.” I edged toward the door. “I’ll keep my eyes open for your husband.”

“Do you know what he looks like?”

“No.”

“Wait. I’ll get a picture of him, if my daughter left me any.”

She went into a back room where I could hear her lifting and shoving things around. When she came back she had a dusty photograph in her hand and a smear of grime on her cheek, like a miner. “Jean took all my good family pictures, all my San Marino albums,” she complained. “She used to sit and study them the way other young women read movie magazines. George tells me – George is her husband – that she’s still watching the home movies we took in San Marino.”

I took the photograph from her: a man of thirty-five or so, fair-haired, bold-eyed. He looked like the man whose picture Captain Lackland had found on Sidney Harrow. But the photograph wasn’t clear enough to be absolutely certain.

I had dinner in Pasadena and drove home to West Los Angeles. The air in my second-floor apartment was warm and stale. I opened a window and a bottle of beer, and sat down with the bottle in the near-darkness of my front room.

I lived in a quiet section, away from the main freeways. Still I could hear them humming, remote yet intimate, like the humming of my own blood in my veins.

Cars went by in the street from time to time, flinging brief lights across the ceiling. The case I was on seemed as hard to hold in the mind as the vanishing lights and the humming city were.

The shape and feeling of the case were changing. They always changed as you moved around in them. Eldon Swain had come into the center, pulling his whole family with him. If he was alive, he could give me some answers I needed. If he was dead, the people who knew his history would have to provide the answers.

I turned on the light and got out my black notebook and put down some notes about the people:

“The Colt .45 I took off Nick Chalmers was bought in September 1941 by Samuel Rawlinson, president of the Pasadena Occidental Bank. Around July 1, 1945, he gave it to his daughter Louise Swain. Her husband, Eldon, cashier of the bank, had just embezzled over half a million and ruined the bank. He ran off, reportedly to Mexico, with Rita Shepherd, daughter of Rawlinson’s housekeeper (and onetime ‘best friend’ of his own daughter, Jean).

“Eldon Swain turned up at his wife’s house in 1954 and took the Colt from her. How did it get from Swain to Nick Chalmers? Via Sidney Harrow, or through other people?

“N.B. San Diego: Harrow lived there, ditto Swain’s daughter Jean and her husband, George Trask, ditto Mrs. Shepherd’s ex-husband.”

When I finished writing it was nearly midnight. I called John Truttwell’s house in Pacific Point and at his request I read my notes to him, twice. I said it might be a good idea after all to turn the Colt revolver over to Lackland for testing. Truttwell said he already had. I went to bed.

At seven by my radio clock the phone jarred me awake. I picked up the receiver and pronounced my own name with a dry mouth.

“Captain Lackland here. I know it’s early to call. But I’ve been up all night myself, supervising tests on the revolver you turned in to your lawyer.”

“Mr. Truttwell isn’t my lawyer.”

“He’s been doing your talking for you. But under present circumstances that isn’t good enough.”

“What are the circumstances?”

“I don’t believe in discussing evidence over the phone. Can you be here in the station in an hour?”

“I can try.”

I skipped breakfast and walked into Lackland’s office at two minutes to eight by the electric clock on his wall. He nodded curtly. His eyes had sunk deeper into his head. Glinting gray beard had sprouted on his face, like wire growing out from a central steel core.

His desk was cluttered with photographs. The top one was a blown-up microphotograph of a pair of bullets. Lackland waved me into a hard chair opposite him.

“It’s time you and I had a meeting of minds.”

“You make it sound more like a clash of personalities, Captain.”

Lackland didn’t smile. “I’m in no mood for wisecracks. I want to know where you got hold of this gun.” He pulled the revolver on me suddenly, producing a plywood board to which it had been attached with wire.

“I can’t tell you that. The law says I don’t have to.”

“What do you know about the law?”

“I’m working under a good lawyer. I accept his interpretation.”

“I don’t.”

“You make that clear, Captain. I’m willing to cooperate in any way I can. The fact that you have the gun is proof of that.”

“The real proof would be for you to tell me where you got it.”

“I can’t do that.”

“Would it change your mind if I told you we know?”

“I doubt it. Try me.”

“Nick Chalmers was known to be carrying a gun yesterday. I have a witness. Another witness places him in the vicinity of the Sunset Motor Hotel at the approximate time of the Harrow killing.”

Lackland’s voice was dry and official, as if he was already testifying at Nick’s trial. He was watching my eyes as he spoke. I tried to keep them unresponsive, as cold as his were.

“No comment,” I said.

“You’ll have to answer in court.”

“That’s doubtful. Also, we’re not in court.”

“We may be sooner than you think. Right now I probably have enough for a Grand Jury indictment.” He slapped the pile of photographs on his desk. “I have positive proof that this revolver killed Harrow. The bullets we test-fired from it match up with the slug recovered from his brain. You want to take a look?”

I studied the microphotographs. I was no ballistics expert, but I could see that the slugs matched. The evidence against Nick was piling up.

There was almost too much evidence. Beside it, Nick’s confession that he had murdered Harrow in the hobo jungle seemed less and less real.

“You don’t waste any time, Captain.”

The compliment depressed Lackland. “I wish that that was true. I’ve been working on this case for fifteen years – nearly all of it wasted.” He gave me a long appraising look. “I really could use your help, you know. I like to cooperate as well as the next man.”