Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

It was a question. I didn’t answer it right away. My attitude to Truttwell was undergoing an adjustment. It wasn’t a radical one, since I had to admit to myself that from the beginning of the case I hadn’t wholly understood or trusted his motivations.

It was becoming fairly evident now that Truttwell had been using me and intended to go on using me. In the same way as Harrow had served as Randy Shepherd’s cat’s-paw, I was Truttwell’s. He was waiting now, handsome and quick-eyed and well-groomed as a cat, for me to spill the dirt on his daughter’s friend. I said:

“Facts are hard to come by in this case. I don’t even know who I’m working for. Or if I’m working.”

“Of course you are,” he said benevolently. “You’ll be paid in full for everything you’ve done, and I’ll guarantee payment through today at least.”

“Who will be doing the paying?”

“The Chalmerses, naturally.”

“But you don’t represent them any more.”

“Don’t let that worry you. Just submit your bill through me, and they’ll pay it. You’re not exactly a migratory worker, and I won’t let them treat you as one.”

His good will was self-serving, I thought, and would probably last only as long as he could use me. I was embarrassed by it, and by the conflict that had risen. In cases like this, I was usually the expendable one.

“Shouldn’t I report to the Chalmerses?”

“No. They’ve already dismissed you. They don’t want the truth about Nick.”

“How is he?”

Truttwell shrugged. “His mother didn’t say.”

“Who do I report to now?”

“Report to me. I’ve represented the Chalmers family for nearly thirty years, and they’re going to find that I’m not so very readily dispensable.” He made the prediction with a smile, but there was the hint of a threat in it.

“What if they don’t?”

“They will, I guarantee it. But if you’re concerned about your money, I’ll undertake to pay you personally as of today.”

“Thanks. I’ll give it some thought.”

“You’d better think in a hurry,” he said smiling. “I’m on my way to Pasadena to meet Mrs. Swain. She phoned me this morning about investing in her family pictures – after Mrs. Chalmers dismissed me. I’d like to have you come along, Archer.”

In my trade you don’t often have your own way. If I refused to deal with John Truttwell, he could push me off the case and probably close the county to me. I said:

“I’ll take my own car and meet you at Mrs. Swain’s house. That’s where you’re going, isn’t it? – Pasadena?”

“Yes, I can count on you to follow me then?”

I said he could, but I didn’t follow him right away. There was something more to be said between me and his daughter.

Betty came to the front door, as if by prearrangement, and asked me in again. “I have the letters,” she said quietly, “the letters that Nick took from his father’s safe.”

She led me upstairs to her workroom and brought a manila envelope out of a drawer. It was stuffed with airmail letters arranged for the most part in serial order. There must have been a couple of hundred of them.

“How do you know Nick took them from the safe?”

“He told me so himself the night before last. Dr. Smitheram left us alone for awhile. Nick told me where he’d hidden them in his apartment. I went and got them yesterday.”

“Did Nick say why he took them?”

“No.”

“Do you know why?”

She perched on a large multicolored hassock. “I’ve had a lot of different thoughts,” she said. “It has to do with the whole father-son business, I suppose. In spite of all the trouble, Nick has always had a lot of respect for his father.”

“Does that go for you and your father?”

“We aren’t talking about me,” she said in a stiff-mouthed way. “Anyway, girls are different – we’re much more ambiguous. A boy either wants to be like his father or he doesn’t. I think Nick does.”

“It still doesn’t explain why Nick stole the letters.”

“I didn’t say I could explain it. But maybe he was trying, you know, to steal his father’s bravery and so on. The letters were important to him.”

“Why?”

“Mr. Chalmers made them important. He used to read them aloud to Nick – parts of them, anyway.”

“Recently?”

“No. When Nick was a little boy.”

“Eight?”

“It started about that age. I think Mr. Chalmers was trying to indoctrinate him, make a man of him and all like that.” Her tone was a little contemptuous, not so much of Nick or his father as of the indoctrination.

“When Nick was eight,” I said, “he had a serious accident. Do you know about it, Betty?”

She nodded deeply. Her hair slid forward, covering most of her face. “He shot a man, he told me the other night. But I don’t want to talk about it, okay?”

“Just one question. What was Nick’s attitude toward that shooting?”

She hugged herself as if she was chilly. Encircled by her arms and masked by her hair, she huddled on the hassock like a gnome. “I don’t want to talk about it.”

She pulled up her knees and rested her face against them, almost as if she was imitating Nick in his posture of despair.

I carried the letters to a table by a front window. From where I sat I could see the façade of the Chalmerses’ house glistening white under its red tile roof. It looked like a building with a history, and I read the first of the letters in the hope of filling in my knowledge of it.

Pearl Harbor

October 9, 1943

Mrs. Harold Chalmers

2124 Pacific Street

Pacific Point, Calif.

Dear Mother:

All I have time for is a short letter. But I wanted you to know as soon as possible that I have got my exact wish. This letter will be censored for military details, I am told, so I will simply mention the sea and the air, and you will understand what kind of duty I have been assigned to. I feel as if I had just been knighted, Mother. Please tell Mr. Rawlinson my good news.

The trip from the mainland was dull but rather pleasant. A number of my fellow pilots spent their time on the fantail shooting at flying fish. I finally told some of them that they were wasting their time and spoiling the beauty of the day. I thought for a while that I might have to fight four or five of them at once. But they recognized the moral superiority of my view, and retreated from the fantail.

I hope you are well and happy, dear Mother. I have never been happier in my life. Your affectionate son,

Larry

I suppose I had been expecting some further light on the case, and the letter was a disappointment to me. It had evidently been written by an idealistic and rather conceited boy who was unnaturally eager to get into the war. The only remarkable thing about it was the fact that the boy had since become a dry stick of a man like Chalmers.

The second letter from the top had been written about eighteen months after the first. It was longer and more interesting, the work of a more mature personality sobered by the war.

Lt. (j.g.) L. Chalmers

SS Sorrel Bay (CVE 185)

March 15, 2945

Mrs. Harold Chalmers

2124 Pacific Street

Pacific Point, Calif.

Dearest Mother:

Here I am in the forward area again so my letter won’t go off for a while. I find it hard to write a letter that I have to hold on to. It’s like keeping a diary, which I detest, or carrying on a conversation with a dictaphone. But writing to you, my dearest, is another matter.

Apart from the things that wouldn’t get past the censor, the news about me is very much the same. I fly, sleep, read, eat, dream of home. We all do. For a nation that has built up not only the most powerful but the most expert Navy in the world, we Americans are a bunch of awful landlubbers. All we want is to get back to Mother Earth.