Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

The woman beside me had sensitive antennae. As if I’d withdrawn a protective shield, she moved in close to me. I drove with her warmth all down my right side and spreading through my body.

She lived on the Montevista shore in a rectilinear cliff-top house made of steel and glass and money.

“Put your car in the carport if you like. You will come in for a drink?”

“A short one.”

She couldn’t unlock the front door.

“You’re using your car key,” I told her.

She paused to consider. “I wonder what that means?”

“That you probably need glasses.”

“I do use glasses for reading.”

She let me in and turned on a light in the hall. We went down some steps into an octagonal room which was mostly window. I could see the moon almost close enough to touch, and, far below, the scrawled white lines of the breakers.

“It’s a nice place.”

“Do you think so?” She seemed surprised. “God knows the place was beautiful before we built on it, and when we were planning it with the architect. But the house never seemed to capture it.” She went on after a moment: “Building a house is like putting a bird in a cage. The bird being yourself, I guess.”

“Is that what they tell you at the clinic?” She turned to me with a quick smile. “Am I being terribly talky?”

“You did mention a drink.”

She leaned toward me, silver-faced, dark-eyed, and dark-mouthed in the thin light from outside. “What will you have?”

“Scotch.” Then her eyes moved and I caught that naked glint of her again, like a light hidden deep in a building. I said: “May I change my mind?”

She was willing to be taken. We shed our clothes, more or less, and lay down like wrestlers going to the mat under special rules, where pinning and being pinned were equally lucky and meritorious.

She said at one point, between falls, that I was a gentle lover.

“There are some advantages in getting older.”

“It isn’t that. You remind me of Sonny, and he was only twenty. You make me feel like Eve in the garden again.”

“That’s pretty fancy talk.”

“I don’t care.” She rose on one elbow, and her silver breast lay heavy on me. “Does it upset you when I mention Sonny?”

“Oddly enough, it doesn’t.”

“It shouldn’t, either. He was a poor little nothing boy. But we were happy together. We lived like silly angels doing things for each other. He’d never been with a girl before, and I’d only been with Ralph.”

Her voice changed on her husband’s name, and my feeling also changed. “Ralph was always so terribly technical and self-assured. He came on in bed like an army pacifying an undeveloped country. But with Sonny it was different. He was so gentle and nutty. Love was like a game, a fantasy that we lived in, playing house together. Sometimes he pretended to be Ralph. Sometimes I pretended to be his mother. Does that sound sick?” she said with a nervous little laugh.

“Ask Ralph.”

“I’m boring you, aren’t I?”

“On the contrary. How long did this affair go on?”

“Nearly two years.”

“Then Ralph came home?”

“Eventually he did. But I’d already broken with Sonny. The fantasy was running out of control and so was he. Besides, I couldn’t just leap from his bed into Ralph’s. As it was the guilt nearly killed me.”

I looked down along her body. “You don’t strike me as the guilt-ridden type.”

She answered after a moment. “You’re right. It wasn’t guilt. It was simple pain. I’d given up my one true love. For what? A hundred-thousand-dollar house and a four-hundred-thousand-dollar clinic. In neither of which I’d be caught dead if I could help it. I’d rather be back in one room at the Magnolia.”

“It isn’t there any more,” I said. “Aren’t you building up the past a little large?”

She answered thoughtfully. “Maybe I am exaggerating, especially the good parts. Women do tend to make up stories featuring ourselves.”

“I’m glad men never do.”

She laughed. “I bet Eve made up the story of the apple.”

“And Adam made up the story of the garden.” She crawled close against me. “You’re a nut. That’s a diagnosis. I’m glad I told you all this. Are you?”

“I can stand it. Why did you?”

“Various reasons. Also you have the advantage of not being my husband.”

“That’s the finest thing any woman ever said to me.”

“I mean it seriously. If I told Ralph what I’ve told you, it would be the end of me as a person. I’d become just another of his famous psychiatric trophies. He’d probably have me stuffed and hang me up on the office wall with his diplomas.” She added: “In a way that’s what he has done.”

There were questions I wanted to ask her about her husband but the time and place were wrong, and I was still determined not to use them. “Forget about Ralph. Whatever happened to Sonny?”

“He found another girl and married her.”

“And you’re jealous?”

“No. I’m lonely. I have no one.”

We merged our lonelinesses once again, in something less than love but sweeter than self. I didn’t get home to West Los Angeles after all.

In the morning I left early without waking Moira. Fog had moved in from the sea, blanketing the cliff-top house and the whole Montevista shore. I drove up the road very slowly between lines of phantom trees. I came to the end of the fog suddenly. The sky was cloudless except for a couple of smeared jet contrails. I drove downtown and checked in at the police station.

Lackland was in his office. The electric clock on the wall above his head said that it was exactly eight o’clock. It bothered me for a minute. It made me feel as if Lackland had brought me in again at this particular time by the exertion of some occult force.

“Glad you dropped by,” he said. “Sit down. I was wondering where everybody was.”

“I went to San Diego on a lead.”

“And you took your clients with you?”

“Their son had an accident. They went to San Diego to look after him.”

“I see.” He waited for a while, twisting and biting his lips as if to punish his mouth for asking questions. “What kind of an accident did he have, or is it a family secret?”

“Barbiturate, mainly. He also has a head injury.”

“Was it a suicide attempt?”

“Could be.”

Lackland leaned forward abruptly, pushing his face toward mine. “After he knocked off Mrs. Trask?”

I wasn’t ready for the question, and I avoided answering it directly. “The prime suspect in the Trask killing is Randy Shepherd.”

“I know that,” Lackland said, making it clear that I hadn’t given him anything. “We have an APB on Shepherd from San Diego.”

“Does it mention that Shepherd knew Eldon Swain from ’way back?”

Lackland gnawed at his upper lip. “Do you know that for a fact?”

“Yes. I talked to Shepherd yesterday, before he was regarded as a suspect. He told me that Swain ran off with his daughter Rita and half a million dollars. Apparently Shepherd has spent his life trying to latch onto a piece of that money. It’s fairly clear, by the way, that Shepherd talked Mrs. Trask into hiring Sidney Harrow and coming here to the Point. He was using them as cat’s-paws to find out what he could without the risk of coming here himself.”

“So Shepherd had a motive to kill Swain after all.” Lackland’s voice was low, as if his fifteen years on the case had used up all his energy at last. “And he had a motive to burn off Swain’s fingerprints. Where did you talk to him?”

“On the Mexican border near Imperial Beach. He wouldn’t be there any more.”