Росс Макдональд - The Goodbye Look

“I’ll do my best, that’s all I can promise. Is Nick in trouble?”

“Yes.” She hung her head, and her bright hair curtained her face. “I think he intends to kill himself. I don’t want to live, either, if he does.”

“Did he say why?”

“He’s done something terrible, he says.”

“Like kill a man?”

She flung her hair back and looked at me with blazing dislike. “How can you say such a thing?”

“Sidney Harrow was shot on the waterfront last night. Did Nick mention him?”

“Of course not.”

“What did he say?”

She was quiet for a minute, remembering. Then she recited slowly: “That he didn’t deserve to live. That he’d let me down, and let his parents down, and he couldn’t face any of us again. Then he said goodbye to me – a final goodbye.” A hiccup of grief shook her.

“How long ago did he make the call?”

She looked at the orange phone, and then at her watch. “About an hour. It seems like forever, though.”

She moved vaguely past me to the other side of the room and took a framed photograph down from a wall bracket. I moved up behind her and looked at it over her shoulder. It was a larger copy of the photograph in my pocket, which I had found in the closet of Harrow’s motel room. I noticed now that in spite of his smiling mouth, the young man in the picture had somber eyes.

“I take it that’s Nick,” I said.

“Yes. It’s his graduation picture.”

She replaced it on its bracket, with a faintly ritual air, and went to the front windows. I followed her. She was looking out across the street toward the closed white front of the Chalmers house.

“I don’t know what to do.”

“We’ve got to find him,” I said. “Did he say where he was calling from?”

“No, he didn’t.”

“Or anything else at all?”

“I don’t remember anything else.”

“Did he say what suicide method he had in mind?”

She hid her face behind her hair again and answered in a hushed voice: “He didn’t say, this time.”

“You mean he’s gone through this routine before?”

“Not really. And you mustn’t speak of it in that way. He’s terribly serious.”

“So am I.” But I was angry at the boy for what he had done and was doing to the girl. “What did he do or say the other times?”

“He often talked about suicide when he got depressed. I don’t mean that he threatened to do it. But he talked about ways and means. He never held anything back from me.”

“Maybe it’s time he started.”

“You sound like Father. You’re both prejudiced against him.”

“Suicide is a cruel business, Betty.”

“Not if you love the person. A depressed person can’t help the way he feels.”

I didn’t argue any further. “You were going to tell me how he planned to do it.”

“It wasn’t a plan. He was simply talking. He said a gun was too messy, and pills were uncertain. The cleanest way would be to swim out to sea. But the thing that really haunted him, he said, was the thought of the rope.”

“Hanging?”

“He told me he’d thought of hanging himself ever since he was a child.”

“Where did he get that idea?”

“I don’t know. But his grandfather was a Superior Court judge, and some people in town considered him a hanging judge – one who liked to sentence people to death. It may have influenced Nick, in a negative way. I’ve read of stranger things in history.”

“Did Nick ever mention the hanging judge in the family?”

She nodded.

“And suicide?”

“Many times.”

“That’s quite a courtship he’s been treating you to.”

“I’m not complaining. I love Nick, and I want to be of some use to him.”

I was beginning to understand the girl, and the more I understood the better I liked her. She had a serviceability that I had noticed before in widowers’ daughters.

“Think back to his telephone call,” I said. “Did he give any indication of where he was?”

“I don’t remember any.”

“Give it some time. Go and sit by the telephone.” She sat in a chair beside the table, with one hand on the instrument as if to keep it quiet.

“I could hear noises in the background.”

“What kind of noises?”

“Wait a minute.” She raised her hand for silence, and sat listening. “Children’s voices, and splashing. Pool noises. I think he must have called me from the public booth at the Tennis Club.”

Though I’d visited the Tennis Club before, the woman at the front desk was strange to me. But she knew Betty Truttwell, and greeted her warmly.

“We never see you any more, Miss Truttwell.”

“I’ve been terribly busy. Has Nick been here today?”

The woman answered with some reluctance: “As a matter of fact, he has been. He came in an hour or so ago, and went into the bar for a while. He wasn’t looking too well when he came out.”

“Do you mean that he was drunk?”

“I’m afraid he was, Miss Truttwell, since you asked me. The woman with him, the blonde, was under the weather, too. After they left I gave Marco a piece of my mind. But he said he only served them two drinks each. He said the woman was tight when they arrived, and Mr. Chalmers can’t handle liquor.”

“He never could,” Betty agreed. “Who was the woman?”

“I forget her name – he’s brought her in once before.” She consulted the guest register which lay on the desk in front of her. “ ‘Jean Swain.’ ”

“Not Jean Trask?” I said.

“It looks like ‘Swain’ to me.”

She pushed the register toward me, indicating with her red fingertips where Nick had signed the woman’s name and his own. It looked like ‘Swain’ to me, too. Her home address was given as San Diego. “Is she a fairly large blonde with a good figure, fortyish?”

“That’s her. A good figure,” she added, “if you like the fleshy type.” She herself was very thin.

Betty and I walked toward the bar along the gallery that overlooked the pool. The children were still making pool noises. A few adults were stretched out on long chairs in corners, catching the thin warmth of the January sun.

The bar was empty except for a couple of men prolonging their lunch. The bartender and I exchanged nods of recognition. Marco was a short, quick, dark man in a red waistcoat. He admitted gloomily that Nick had been there.

“Matter of fact, I asked him to leave.”

“Did he have a lot to drink?”

“Not here he didn’t. I served him two single shots of bourbon, you can’t make a federal case out of that. What happened, did he wreck his car?”

“I hope not. I’m trying to catch up with him before he wrecks anything. Do you know where he went?”

“No, but I’ll tell you one thing, he was in a hell of a mood. When I wouldn’t give him a third drink, he wanted to put up a fight. I had to show him my pool cue.” Marco reached under the bar and showed it to us: the sawed-off butt of a heavy cue about two feet long. “I hated to pull it on a member, you know, but he was carrying a gun and I wanted him out of here, fast. Anyone else, I would have called the sheriff.”

“He had a gun?” Betty said in a small, high voice.

“Yeah, it was in the pocket of his jacket. He kept it out of sight but you can’t hide a big heavy gun like that.” He leaned across the bar and peered into Betty’s eyes. “What’s the matter with him, anyway, Miss Truttwell? He never acted like this before.”

“He’s in trouble,” she said.

“Does the dame have anything to do with his trouble? The blonde dame? She drinks like she’s got a hollow leg. She shouldn’t be making him drink.”