Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

“You should have let him shoot himself,” Truttwell said.

“And me too? Not on your life. I wasn’t ready to die. I’m still not ready.”

She still had passion, if only for herself. Truttwell and I were silent. She said to him:

“Look, are you still my lawyer? You said you were.”

He shook his head. His eyes seemed to be looking through and beyond her, into a sad past or a cold future.

“You can’t go back on me now,” she said. “You think I haven’t suffered enough? I’m sorry about your wife. I still wake up in the middle of the night and see her in the road, poor woman, laying there like a bundle of old clothes.”

Truttwell struck her face with the back of his hand. A little blood spilled from her mouth, drawing a line across her chin like a crack in marble.

I stepped between them so that he couldn’t hit her again. It wasn’t the sort of thing that Truttwell should be doing.

She took some courage from my gesture. “You don’t have to hurt me, John. I feel bad enough without that. My whole time here, it’s been like living in a haunted house. I mean it. The very first night we came, when we were here in the study, putting the packages of money in the safe – Larry’s blind old mother came down in the dark. She said: ‘Is that you, Sonny?’ I don’t know how she knew who it was. It was creepy.”

“What happened then?” I said.

“He took her back to her room and talked to her. He wouldn’t tell me what he said to her, but she didn’t bother us after that.”

“Estelle never mentioned it,” Truttwell said to me. “She died without mentioning it to anyone.”

“Now we know what she died of,” I said. “She found out what had become of her son.”

As though he had overheard me, the dead man seemed to have cocked his head in an attitude of stiff embarrassment. His widow moved toward him like a sleepwalker and stood beside him. She touched his hair.

I stayed with her while Truttwell phoned the police.

Ross Macdonald’s real name was Kenneth Millar. Born near San Francisco in 1915 and raised in Ontario, Millar returned to the United States as a young man and published his first novel in 1944. He served as the president of the Mystery Writers of America and was awarded their Grand Master Award as well as the Mystery Writers of Great Britain’s Gold Dagger Award. He died in 1983.