The Goodbye Look (12 page)

I went back to my car, which I’d parked diagonally across the street, and settled down to wait. The house was ordinary enough, but somehow it gripped my attention. The traffic of the harbor and the sky, ferries and fishing boats, planes and gulls, all seemed to move in relation to it.

The waiting minutes were long-drawn-out. Delivery vans went by, and a few carsful of children chauffeured by mothers. The street wasn’t much used by the people who lived on it, except for transportation. The people kept to their houses, as if to express a sense of property, and a sense of isolation.

An old car that didn’t belong on the street came up the hill trailing oil smoke and preceded by the clatter of a fan belt that needed lubrication. A big rawboned man wearing a dirty gray windbreaker and a dirty gray beard got out and crossed the street, silent in worn sneakers. He was carrying a round Mexican basket under one arm. He knocked, as I had, on the Trask’s front door. He tried the knob, as I had.

He looked up and down the street and at me, the movements of his head as quick and instinctive as an old animal’s. I was reading a San Diego County road map. When I looked at the man again, he had opened the door and was closing it behind him.

I got out of my car and noted the registration of his: Randolph Shepherd, Conchita’s Cabins, Imperial Beach. His keys were in the ignition. I put them in the same pocket as my keys.

A folded copy of the Los Angeles
Times
lay on the right side of the front seat, open at the third page. Under a two-column head there was an account of Sidney Harrow’s death and a picture of his young swinger’s face, which I had never really seen.

I was named as the discoverer of the body, nothing more. Nick Chalmers wasn’t named. But Captain Lackland was quoted as saying that he expected to make an arrest within the next twenty-four hours.

My head was still in Shepherd’s car when he opened the door of the Trask house. He came out furtively but rapidly, almost with abandon, as if he’d been pushed out by an explosion in the house. For a moment his eyes were perfectly round, like clouded marbles, and his mouth a round red hole in his beard.

He stopped short when he saw me. He looked up and down the open sunlit street as if he was in a cul-de-sac surrounded by high walls.

“Hello, Randy.”

He showed his brown teeth in a grin of puzzlement. With enormous unwillingness, like a man wading into a cold deepening sea, he came across the road toward me. He let his grin become loose and foolish.

“I was just bringing Miss Jean some tomatoes. I used to tend the garden for Miss Jean’s daddy. I got a real green thumb, see.”

He raised his thumb. It was big and spatulate, grained with dirt, and armed with a jagged dirty nail.

“Do you always pick the lock when you make a delivery, Randy?”

“How come you know my name? Are you a cop?”

“Not exactly.”

“How come you know my name?”

“You’re famous. I’ve been wanting to meet you.”

“Who are you? A cop?”

“A private cop.”

He made a quick bad decision. He had been making them all his life: his scarred face bore the record of them. He jabbed at my eyes with his thumbnail. At the same time he tried to knee me.

I caught his jabbing hand and twisted it. For a moment we were perfectly poised and still. Shepherd’s eyes were bright with rage. He couldn’t sustain it, though. His face went through a series of transformations, like stop-time pictures of a man growing tired and old. His hand went limp, and I let go of it.

“Listen, boss, is it all right if I go now? I got a lot of other deliveries to make.”

“What are you delivering? Trouble?”

“No sir. Not me.” He glanced at the Trask house as if its presence on the street had caught him by surprise. “I got a quick temper but I wouldn’t hurt nobody. I didn’t hurt
you.
You were the one hurt me. I’m the one that’s always getting hurt.”

“But not the only one.”

He winced as if I had made a cruel remark. “What are you getting at, mister?”

“There’ve been a couple of killings. That isn’t news to you.” I reached for the newspaper on the seat of his car and showed him Harrow’s picture.

“I never saw him in my life,” he said.

“You had the paper open at this story.”

“Not me. I picked it up that way at the station. I always pick up my papers at the station.” He leaned toward me, sweaty and jumpy. “Listen, I got to go now, okay? I got a serious call of nature.”

“This is more important.”

“Not to me it isn’t.”

“To you, too. You know a young man named Nick Chalmers?”

“He isn’t—” He caught himself, and started over: “What did you say?”

“You heard me. I’m looking for Nick Chalmers. He may be looking for you.”

“What for? I never touched him. When I found out that Swain was planning a snatch—” He caught himself again and covered his mouth with his hand, as if he could force the words back in or hide them like birds in his beard.

“Did Swain snatch the Chalmers boy?”

“Why ask me? I’m as clean as a whistle.” But he peered up at the sky with narrowed eyes as if he could see a sky hook or a noose descending toward him. “I gotta get out of this sun. It gives me skin cancer.”

“It’s a nice slow death. Swain died a quicker one.”

“You’ll never pin it on me, ’
bo.
Even the cops at the Point turned me loose.”

“They wouldn’t have if they’d known what I do.”

He moved closer to me, cringing on bent knees, making himself look smaller. “I’m clean, honest to God.
Please
let me go now, mister.”

“We’ve barely started.”

“But we can’t just stand here.”

“Why not?”

His head turned on his neck like an automatic mechanism, and he looked at the Trask house once again. My gaze followed his. I noticed that the front door was a few inches ajar.

“You left the front door open. We better go over and shut it.”

“You shut it,” he said. “I got a bad charley horse in my leg. I gotta sit down or I’ll fall down.”

He climbed in behind the wheel of his jalopy. He wouldn’t get far without an ignition key, I thought, and I crossed the street. Looking through the crack between the door and the lintel, I could see red tomatoes scattered on the floor of the hallway. I went in, stepping carefully to avoid them.

There was a smell of burning from the kitchen. I found that a glass coffeemaker on an electric plate had boiled dry and cracked. Jean Trask was lying near it on the green vinyl floor.

I pulled the plug of the electric plate, and knelt down beside Jean. She had stab wounds in her breast and one great gash in her throat. Her body was clothed in pajamas and a pink nylon robe, and it was still warm.

Even though Jean was dead, I could hear breathing somewhere. It sounded as if the house itself was breathing. An open door led through the back kitchen, past the washer and dryer, into the attached garage.

George Trask’s Ford sedan was standing in the garage. Nick Chalmers was lying face up beside it on the concrete
floor. I loosened his shirt collar. Then I looked at his eyes: they were turned up. I slapped him hard, once on each side of his face. No response. I heard myself groan.

Three empty drugstore tubes of varying sizes lay near him on the floor. I picked them up and put them in my pocket. There was no time for any further search. I had to get Nick to a stomach pump.

I raised the garage door, crossed the street for my car, and backed it into the driveway. I lifted Nick in my arms—he was a big man and it wasn’t easy—and laid him on the back seat. I closed the garage. I pulled the front door of the house shut.

I noticed then that Randy Shepherd and his jalopy had gone. No doubt he was just as good at starting keyless cars as he was at opening locked doors. Under the circumstances, I could hardly blame him for leaving.

I drove down Rosecrans to Highway 80 and delivered Nick at the ambulance entrance of the hospital. There had been a recent auto accident, and everybody on the emergency ward was busy. Looking for a stretcher, I opened a door and saw a dead man and closed the door again.

I found a wheeled stretcher in another room, took it outside and heaved Nick onto it. I pushed him up to the emergency desk.

“This boy needs a stomach pump. He’s full of barbiturates.”

“Another one?” the nurse said.

She produced a paper form to be filled out. Then she glanced at Nick’s face and I think she was touched by his inert good looks. She dispensed with red tape for the present. She helped me to wheel Nick into a treatment room and called in a young doctor with an Armenian name.

The doctor checked Nick’s pulse and respiration, and looked at the pupils of his eyes, which were contracted. He turned to me.

“What did he take, do you know?”

I showed him the drug containers I had picked up in the Trasks’ garage. They had Lawrence Chalmers’s name on them, and the names and amounts of the three drugs they had contained: chloral hydrate, Nembutal and Nembu-Serpin.

He looked at me inquiringly. “He hasn’t taken all of these?”

“I don’t know if the prescriptions were full. I don’t think they were.”

“Let’s hope the chloral hydrate wasn’t, anyway. Twenty of those capsules are enough to kill two men.”

As he spoke, the doctor began to thread a flexible plastic tube into Nick’s nostril. He told the nurse to cover him with a blanket, and prepare a glucose injection. Then he turned to me again.

“How long ago did he swallow the stuff?”

“I don’t know exactly. Maybe two hours. What’s Nembu-Serpin, by the way?”

“A combination of Nembutal and reserpine. It’s a tranquilizer used in treating hypertension, also in psychiatric treatment.” His eyes met mine. “Is the boy emotionally disturbed?”

“Somewhat.”

“I see. Are you a relative?”

“A friend,” I said.

“The reason I ask, he’ll have to be admitted. In suicide attempts like this the hospital requires round-the-clock nurses. That costs money.”

“It shouldn’t be any problem. His father’s a millionaire.”

“No kidding.” He was unimpressed. “Also, his regular doctor should see him before he’s admitted. Okay?”

“I’ll do my best, doctor.”

I found a telephone booth and called the Chalmerses’ house in Pacific Point. Irene Chalmers answered.

“This is Archer. May I speak to your husband?”

“Lawrence isn’t here. He’s out looking for Nick.”

“He can stop looking. I found him.”

“Is he all right?”

“No. He took the drugs, and he’s having his stomach pumped out. I’m calling from the San Diego Hospital. Have you got that?”

“The San Diego Hospital, yes. I know the place, I’ll be there as soon as I can.”

“Bring Dr. Smitheram with you, and John Truttwell.”

“I’m not sure I can do that.”

“Tell them it’s a major emergency. It really is, Mrs. Chalmers.”

“Is he dying?”

“He could die. Let’s hope he doesn’t. Incidentally you’d better bring a checkbook. He’s going to need special nurses.”

“Yes, of course. Thank you.” Her voice was blank, and I couldn’t tell if she had really heard me.

“You’ll bring a checkbook, then, or some cash.”

“Yes.
Certainly. I was just thinking, life is so strange, it seems to go in circles. Nick was born in that same hospital, and now you say he may die there.”

“I don’t think he will, Mrs. Chalmers.”

But she had begun to cry. I listened to her for a little while, until she hung up on me.

Because it wasn’t good policy to leave a murder unreported, I called the San Diego Police Department and gave the sergeant on duty George Trask’s address on Bayview Avenue. “There’s been an accident.”

“What kind of an accident?”

“A woman got cut.”

The sergeant’s voice became louder and more interested: “What is your name, please?”

I hung up and leaned on the wall. My head was empty. I think I almost fainted. Remembering that I’d missed my breakfast, I wandered through the hospital and found the cafeteria. I drank a couple of glasses of milk and had some toast with a soft-boiled egg, like an invalid. The morning’s events had hit me in the stomach.

I went back to the emergency ward where Nick was still being worked on.

“How is he?”

“It’s hard to tell,” the doctor said. “If you’ll fill out his form we’ll admit him provisionally and put him in a private room. Okay?”

“That’s fine. His mother and his psychiatrist should be here within an hour or so.”

The doctor raised his eyebrows. “How sick is he?”

“You mean in the head? Sick enough.”

“I was wondering.” He reached under his white coat and produced a torn scrap of paper. “This fell out of his breast pocket.”

He handed it to me. It was a penciled note: “I am a murderer and deserve to die. Forgive me, Mother and Dad. I love you Betty.”

“He isn’t a murderer, is he?” the doctor said.

“No.”

My denial sounded unconvincing to me, but the doctor accepted it. “Ordinarily the police would want to see that suicide note. But there’s no use making further trouble for the guy.”

I folded the note and put it in my wallet and got out of there before he changed his mind.

I drove south to Imperial Beach. The cashier of a drive-in restaurant told me how to find Conchita’s Cabins. “You wouldn’t want to stay in them, though,” she advised me.

I saw what she meant when I got there. It was a ruined place, as ancient-looking as an archeological digging. A sign on the office said: “One dollar per person. Children free.” The cabins were small stucco cubes that had taken a beating from the weather. The largest building, with “Beer and Dancing” inscribed across its front, had long since been boarded up.

The place was redeemed by a soft green cottonwood tree and its soft gray shade. I stood under it for a minute, waiting for somebody to discover me.

A heavy-bodied woman came out of one of the cabins. She wore a sleeveless dress which showed her large brown arms, and a red cloth on her head.