Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

His gaze turned inward. “I was pretty confused, wasn’t I? The trouble was I really felt like killing Harrow. I went to his motel room that night to have a showdown with him. Jean told me where he was staying. He wasn’t there, but I found him in his car on the beach.”

“Alive or dead?”

“He was dead. The gun that killed him was lying beside his car. I picked it up to look at it and something clicked in my head. And the ground literally shifted under my feet. I thought at first it was an earthquake. Then I realized it was in me. I was confused for a long time, and suicidal.” He added: “The gun seemed to want me to do something with it.”

“You already had done something with it,” I said. “It was the same gun that you left in the railroad yards.”

“How could that be?”

“I don’t know how it could be. But it was the same gun. The police have ballistic records that prove it. Are you sure you left the gun beside the body?”

Nick was confused again. His eyes looked at our faces in naked helplessness. He reached for his dark glasses and put them on. “Harrow’s body?”

“Eldon Swain’s body. The man in the railroad yards who said he was your father. Did you leave the gun there beside him, Nick?”

“Yes. I know I didn’t take it home with me.”

“Then someone else picked it up and kept it for fifteen years and used it on Harrow. Who would that be?”

“I don’t know.” The young man shook his head slowly from side to side.

Smitheram stepped forward. “He’s had enough. And you’re not learning anything.” His eyes were full of anxiety, but whether it was for Nick I couldn’t tell.

“I’m learning a good deal, doctor. So is Nick.”

“Yes.” The young man looked up. “Was the man in the railroad yards really my father as he said?”

“You’ll have to ask your mother.”

“Was he, mother?”

Irene Chalmers looked around the room as if another trap had closed on her. The pressure of our silence forced words out of her:

“I don’t have to answer that and I’m not going to.”

“That means he was my father.”

She didn’t answer Nick or look at him. She sat with her head bowed. Truttwell stood up and put a hand on her shoulder. She inclined her head sideways so that her cheek rested against his knuckles. In contrast with her flawless skin, his hand was spotted with age.

Nick said insistently: “I knew that Lawrence Chalmers couldn’t be my father.”

“How did you know that?” I asked him.

“The letters he wrote from overseas – I don’t remember the dates exactly, but the timing wasn’t right.”

“Is that why you took the letters out of the safe?”

“Not really. I stumbled onto that aspect of it. Sidney Harrow and Jean Trask came to me with a wild story that my father – that Lawrence Chalmers had committed a crime. I took the letters to prove to them that they were mistaken. He was overseas at the time the theft occurred.”

“What theft?”

“Jean said he stole some money from her family – from her father – actually an enormous amount of money, half a million or so. But his letters proved that Jean and Harrow were wrong. On the day of the alleged theft – I think it was July 1, 1945 – my fa – Mr. Chalmers was at sea aboard his carrier.” He added with a look of sad irony: “In proving that I also proved that he couldn’t be my father. I was born on December 14, 1945, and nine months before, when I must have been–” He looked at his mother, and couldn’t find the word.

“Conceived?” I said.

“When I must have been conceived, he was aboard his ship in the forward area. Do you hear that, Mother?”

“I hear you.”

“Haven’t you any other comment?”

“You don’t have to turn against me,” she said in a low tone. “I’m your mother. What does it matter who your father was?”

“It matters to me.”

“Forget it. Why don’t you forget it?”

“I have some of the letters here.” I brought out my wallet and showed Nick the three letters. “I think these are the ones you were particularly interested in.”

“Yes. Where did you get them?”

“From your apartment,” I said.

“May I have them for a minute?”

I handed him the letters. He went through them quickly.

“This is the one he wrote on March 15, 1945: ‘Dearest Mother: Here I am in the forward area again so my letter won’t go off for a while.’ That would seem to prove conclusively that whoever my father was, he wasn’t and isn’t Lieutenant (j.g.) L. Chalmers.” He looked at his mother again in murky speculation: “Was it the man in the railroad yards, Mother? The man I killed?”

“You don’t want an answer,” she said.

“That means the answer is yes,” he said in bleak satisfaction. “At least I know that much for certain. What did you say his name was? My father’s name?”

She didn’t answer.

“Eldon Swain,” I said. “He was Jean Trask’s father.”

“She said we were brother and sister. You mean it’s really true?”

“I don’t have the answers. You’re the one who seems to have them.” I paused, and went on: “There’s one very important answer I have to ask you for, Nick. What took you to Jean Trask’s house in San Diego?”

He shook his head. “I don’t recall. The whole thing is a blank. I don’t even remember going to San Diego.”

Dr. Smitheram came forward again. “I have to call a halt now. I’m not going to let you undo what we’ve done for Nick in the last couple of days.”

“Let’s finish it off,” Truttwell said. “After all, it’s been dragging on now for most of Nick’s young life.”

“I want to finish it, too,” Nick said, “if I can.”

“And so do I.” It was Moira coming out of a long silence.

The doctor turned on her coldly. “I don’t remember asking for your opinion.”

“You have it, anyway. Let’s get it over with.”

Moira’s voice had overtones of weary guilt. The two of them confronted each other for a moment as if they were the only ones in the room.

I said to Nick: “When did you start remembering in San Diego?”

“When I woke up in the hospital that night. I was missing the whole day.”

“And what was the last you remembered before that?”

“When I got up that morning. I’d been awake all night, with one thing and another, and I was feeling awfully depressed. That horrible scene in the railroad yards kept coming back. I could smell the fire and the whisky.

“I decided to turn off my mind with a sleeping pill or two, and I got up and went into the bathroom where they kept them. When I saw the red and yellow capsules in the bottles I changed my mind. I decided to take a lot of them and turn off my mind for good.”

“Was that when you wrote your suicide note?”

He considered my question. “I wrote it just before I took the pills. Yes.”

“How many did you take?”

“I didn’t count them. A couple of handfuls, I guess, enough to kill me. But I couldn’t just sit in the bathroom and wait. I was afraid they’d find me and not let me die. I climbed out the bathroom window and dropped to the ground. I must have fallen and hit my head on something.” He balanced the letters on his knee and touched the side of his head tenderly. “Next thing I knew I was in the San Diego hospital. I’ve already told Dr. Smitheram all this.”

I glanced at Smitheram. He wasn’t listening. He was talking in intense, low tones to his wife.

“Dr. Smitheram?”

He turned abruptly, but not in response to me. He reached for the letters in Nick’s lap. “Let’s have a look at these, eh?”

Smitheram riffled through the flimsy pages and began to read aloud to his wife: “ ‘There’s something about pilots that reminds you of racehorses – developed almost to an unhealthy point. I hope I’m not that way to other eyes.