Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

“Yes. She called herself Rita Shepherd in those days.”

“How do you know?”

“Sonny told me about her. He’d met her at a swimming party in San Marino a couple of years before. Then one day she walked into the post office where he worked. He was terribly upset by the meeting at first, and now I can understand why. He was afraid his secret would leak out, and his mother would learn he was just a postal clerk instead of a Navy pilot.”

“Did you know about the deception?”

“Naturally I knew he was living a fantasy life. He used to dress up in officers’ clothes and walk the streets at night. But I didn’t know about his mother – there were some things he didn’t talk about, even to me.”

“How much did he tell you about Rita Shepherd?”

“Enough. She was living with an older man who kept her stashed in Imperial Beach.”

“Eldon Swain.”

“Was that his name?” She added after a thinking pause: “It all comes together, doesn’t it? I didn’t realize how much life, and death, I was involved with. I guess we never do until afterwards. Anyway, Rita shifted to Sonny and I moved to the sidelines. By then I didn’t much care. It was pretty wearing, looking after Sonny, and I was willing to pass him on to the next girl.”

“What I don’t understand is how you could stay interested in him for over two years. Or why a woman like his wife would fall for him.”

“Women don’t always go for the solid virtues,” she said. “Sonny had a wild psychotic streak. He would try almost anything once.”

“I’ll have to cultivate my wild psychotic streak. But I must say Chalmers keeps his pretty well hidden.”

“He’s older now, and under tranquilizers all the time.”

“Tranquilizers like Nembu-Serpin?”

“I see you’ve been boning up.”

“Just how sick is he?”

“Without supportive therapy, and drugs, he’d probably have to be hospitalized. But with these things he manages to lead a fairly well-adjusted life.” She sounded like a salesman who didn’t quite believe in her product.

“Is he dangerous, Moira?”

“He could be dangerous, under certain circumstances.”

“If somebody found out that he was a fake, for example?”

“Perhaps.”

“You’re very perhapsy all of a sudden. He’s been your husband’s patient for twenty-five years, as you pointed out. You must know something about him.”

“We know a good deal. But the doctor-patient relationship involves a right to privacy.”

“Don’t lean too heavily on that. It doesn’t apply to a patient’s crimes, or potential crimes. I want to know if you and Dr. Smitheram considered him a threat to Nick.”

She sidestepped the question. “What kind of a threat?”

“A mortal threat,” I said. “You and your husband knew that he was dangerous to Nick, didn’t you?”

Moira didn’t answer me in words. She moved around her office and began to take the pictures down from the walls and pile them on the desk. In a token way she seemed to be trying to dismantle the clinic and her place in it.

A knock on the door interrupted her work. It was the young receptionist. “Miss Truttwell wants to speak to Mr. Archer. Shall I send her in?”

“I’ll go out,” I said.

The receptionist looked around in dismay at the empty walls. “What happened to all your pictures?”

“I’m moving out. You could help me.”

“I’ll be glad to, Mrs. Smitheram,” the young woman said brightly.

Betty was standing in the middle of the outer room. She looked windblown and excited.

“The lab said there was quite a lot of Nembutal in the sample. Also some chloral hydrate, but they couldn’t tell how much without further testing.”

“I’m not surprised.”

“What does it mean, Mr. Archer?”

“It means that Nick was in the back of the family Rolls some time after he took his overdose of pills. He vomited some of them up, and that may have saved his life.”

“How is he?”

“Doing quite well. I had a talk with him just now.”

“Can I see him?”

“That isn’t up to me. His mother, and your father, are with him right now.”

“I’ll wait.”

I waited with her, each of us thinking his own thoughts. I needed quiet. The case was coming together in my mind, constructing itself in inner space like a movie of a falling building reversed.

The inner door opened, and Irene Chalmers came through on Truttwell’s arm, leaning on him heavily, like a survivor. She had shifted her weight from Chalmers to Truttwell, I thought, as she had once shifted it from Eldon Swain to Chalmers.

Truttwell became aware of his daughter. His eyes moved nervously, but he didn’t try to disengage himself from Irene Chalmers. Betty gave them a so-that’s-how-it-is look.

“Hello, Dad. Hello, Mrs. Chalmers. I hear Nick is much better.”

“Yes, he is,” her father said.

“Can I talk with him for a minute?”

He hesitated for a thoughtful moment. His gaze flicked across my face, and back to his daughter’s. He answered her in a careful, gentle voice: “We’ll take it up with Dr. Smitheram.”

He led Betty through the inner door and closed it carefully behind them.

I was alone in the reception room with Irene Chalmers. As she knew. She looked at me with a kind of dull formality, in the hope that nothing real would be said between us.

“I’d like to ask you a few questions, Mrs. Chalmers.”

“That doesn’t mean I have to answer them.”

“Once and for all, now, was Eldon Swain Nick’s father?”

She faced me in passive stubbornness. “Probably. Anyway he thought he was. But you can’t expect me to tell Nick he killed his own natural father–”

“He knows it now,” I said. “And you can’t go on using Nick to hide behind.”

“I don’t understand what you mean.”

“You suppressed the facts about Eldon Swain and his death for your own sake, not for Nick’s. You let him carry the burden of the guilt, and take the rap for you.”

“There isn’t any rap. We kept everything quiet.”

“And let Nick live in mental torment for fifteen years. It was a lousy trick to pull on your own son, or anybody’s son.”

She bowed her head as if in shame. But what she said was: “I’m not admitting anything.”

“You don’t have to. I’ve got enough physical evidence, and enough witnesses, to make a case against you. I’ve talked to your father and your mother, and Mr. Rawlinson, and Mrs. Swain. I’ve talked to Florence Williams.”

“Who in hell is she?”

“She owns Conchita’s Cabins, in Imperial Beach.”

Mrs. Chalmers raised her head and swept her fingers across her face, as if there was dust or cobwebs in her eyes. “I’m sorry I ever set foot in that dump, I can tell you. But you can’t make anything out of it, not at this late date. I was just a juvenile at the time. And anything I did away back then – the statute of limitations ran out on it long ago.”

“What did you do away back then?”

“I’m not going to testify against myself. I said before that I was taking the fifth.” She added in a stronger voice: “John Truttwell will be back in a minute, and this is his department. If you want to get rough, he can get rougher.”

I knew I was on uncertain ground. But this might be the only chance I would have to reach Mrs. Chalmers. And both her responses to my accusations, and her failures to respond, had tended to confirm my picture of her. I said:

“If John Truttwell knew what I know about you, he wouldn’t touch you with a sterilized stick.”

She had no answer this time. She moved to a chair near the inner door and sat down inexactly and abruptly. I followed and stood over her.