Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

Irene Chalmers lifted her face to me as I entered the waiting room. She didn’t seem to know me right away. The switchboard girl spoke to me in a whisper, like someone speaking in the presence of illness or mental retardation:

“I didn’t think you were going to make it. Mr. Truttwell is in the library. He said to send you right in.”

“I’ve just been talking to him.”

“I see.”

I sat next to Irene Chalmers. She turned and looked at me with slow recognition, almost like a woman coming awake from a dream. As if the dream had been frightening, her mood was apologetic and subdued:

“I’m sorry, my mind’s been wandering. You’re Mr. Archer. But I thought you weren’t with us any more.”

“I’m still on the case, Mrs. Chalmers. By the way, I’ve recovered your husband’s letters.”

She said without much interest: “Do you have them with you?”

“Just a few of them. I’ll return them through Mr. Truttwell.”

“But he isn’t our lawyer any longer.”

“I’m sure you can trust him to give you the letters, anyway.”

“I don’t know.” She looked around the little room with a kind of primitive suspicion. “We all used to be the best of friends. But we aren’t any more.”

“On account of Nick and Betty?”

“I guess that was the last straw,” she said. “But we had our real trouble some time ago, over money. It always seems to be over money, doesn’t it? Sometimes I almost wish I was poor again.”

“You say you had trouble over money?”

“Yes, when Larry and I set up the Smitheram Foundation. John Truttwell refused to draw the papers for us. He said we were being taken by Dr. Smitheram, setting him up in a free clinic. But Larry wanted to do it, and I thought it was a nice idea myself. I don’t know where we’d be without Dr. Smitheram.”

“He’s done a lot for you, has he?”

“You know he has. He saved Nick from – you know what. I think John Truttwell is jealous of Dr. Smitheram. Anyway, he isn’t our friend any more. I only came here this afternoon because he threatened me.”

I wanted to ask her what she meant, but the girl at the switchboard was listening openly. I said to the girl:

“Go and ask Mr. Truttwell if he’s ready for us, please.”

Unwillingly, she went. I turned back to Mrs. Chalmers.

“What did he threaten you with?”

She didn’t respond defensively. She was acting as if a numbing blow had knocked all discretion out of her:

“It was Nick again. Truttwell went to San Diego today and dug up some new dirt. I don’t think I should tell you what it was.”

“Did it have to do with Nick’s birth?”

“He told you, then.”

“No, but I read some of your husband’s letters. Apparently he was overseas when Nick was conceived. Is that true, Mrs. Chalmers?”

She looked at me in confusion and then with hard disdain. “You have no right to ask me that. You’re trying to strip me naked, aren’t you?”

Even in her anger there was an ambiguous erotic underplay, which seemed to ask for my complicity. I offered her a smile which felt strange from inside.

The switchboard girl came back and said that Mr. Truttwell was waiting for us. We found him alone in the library, standing behind the projector.

Irene Chalmers reacted to the machine as if it was a complex weapon pointed at her. Her fearful gaze moved from Truttwell to me, standing between her and the door. I closed the door. Her face and body froze.

“You didn’t say anything about movies,” she complained to Truttwell. “You said you wanted to review the case with me.”

He answered smoothly, very much in command of the situation. “This film is a part of the case. It was taken at a swimming party in San Marino in the summer of 1943. Eldon Swain, who gave the party, shot most of it himself. The bit at the end, where he appears, was taken by Mrs. Swain.”

“Have you talked to Mrs. Swain?”

“Somewhat. Frankly, I’m much more interested in your reaction.” He tapped the back of an armchair near the projector. “Come and sit down and be comfortable, Irene.”

She remained stubbornly unmoving. Truttwell approached her smiling and took her arm. She moved slowly and heavily like a statue thawing reluctantly into flesh.

He settled her in the armchair, leaning over her from behind, withdrawing his hands lingeringly from her upper arms.

“Turn off the lights, will you, Archer?”

I flicked the switch and sat down beside Irene Chalmers. The projector whirred. Its quiet shotgun blast of light filled the screen with images. A large rectangular pool with a diving board and a slide reflected a blue old-fashioned sky.

A young blonde girl with a mature figure and an immature face climbed onto the diving board. She waved at the camera, bounced excessively, and did a comic dive with her legs apart and kicking like a frog’s. She came up with a mouthful of water and spurted it at the camera. Jean Trask, young.

Irene Chalmers, née Rita Shepherd, was next on the diving board. She walked to the end of it gravely, as if the eye of the camera was judging her. The black rubber helmet in which her hair was hidden made her look oddly archaic.

She stood for quite a while with the camera on her, not once returning its stare. Then she bounced and did a swan dive, cutting the water without much splash. It wasn’t until she disappeared from sight that I realized how beautiful she had been.

The camera caught her coming up, and she smiled and turned onto her back directly under it. Jean came up behind and ducked her, shouting or laughing, splashing water at the camera with her hands.

A third young person, a boy of eighteen or so whom I didn’t immediately recognize, climbed up onto the board. Slowly, he walked to the forward end, with many backward looks, as if there were pirates behind him. There was one. Jean rushed him and shoved him into the water, laughing or shouting. He came up floundering, his eyes closed. A woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat held out a padded hook to him at the end of a long pole. She used it to tow him to the shallow end. He stood there, in water up to his waist, with his narrow back turned to the camera. His rescuer took off her floppy hat and bowed toward unseen spectators.

The woman was Mrs. Swain, but Swain’s camera failed to linger on her. It shifted to the spectators, a handsome older couple who were sitting together on a shaded swing. In spite of the shadow falling across him, I recognized Samuel Rawlinson and guessed that the woman beside him was Estelle Chalmers. The camera moved again before I had a chance to study her thin, passionate face.

Rita and Jean went down the slide, singly and together. They raced the length of the pool, with Jean coming out ahead. She splashed the hydrophobic boy still standing as if rooted in waist-deep water. Then she splashed Rita.

I caught a fuzzy background glimpse of Randy Shepherd, red-headed and red-bearded in gardener’s dungarees, looking over a hedge at his daughter taking her place in the sun. I glanced sideways at Irene Chalmers’s face, which was fitfully lit by the flickering inexact colors reflected from the screen. She looked as if she were dying under the soft bombardment of the past.

When my eyes returned to the screen, Eldon Swain was on the diving board. He was a man of middle size with a large handsome head. He bounced and did a swan dive. The camera met him coming up and followed him back onto the diving board. He performed flips, front and back.

Next came a double dive with Jean on his shoulders, and finally a double dive with Rita. As if controlled by a documentary interest, the camera followed the pair as Rita stood spraddled on the diving board, and Eldon Swain inserted his head between her legs and lifted her. Tottering slightly, he carried her out to the end of the board and stood for a long moment with his head projecting from between her thighs like the head of a giant smiling baby being born again.