Authors: Ross Macdonald
Chalmers sat up rigidly. “Who suggested that, for heaven’s sake?”
“Another figure in the case—a convicted burglar named Randy Shepherd.”
“And you’d take the word of a man like that, and let him blacken my mother’s name?”
“Who said anything about your mother?”
“Aren’t you about to offer me the precious theory that my mother took stolen money from that whoremaster? Isn’t that what you have on your rotten mind?”
Hot wet rage had flooded his eyes. He stood up blinking and swung an open hand at my face. It was a feeble attempt. I caught his arm by the wrist and handed it back to him.
“I’m afraid we can’t talk, Mr. Chalmers. I’m sorry.”
I went out to my car and turned downhill toward the freeway. Fog still lay in a grey drift across the foot of the town.
Inland in Pasadena the sun was hot. Children were playing in the road in front of Mrs. Swain’s house. Truttwell’s Cadillac, which stood at the curb, acted like a magnet on the children.
Truttwell was sitting in the front seat, engrossed in business papers. He glanced up impatiently at me.
“You took your time about getting here.”
“Something came up. Also, I can’t afford a Cadillac.”
“I can’t afford to waste hours waiting for people. The woman said she’d be here at twelve.”
It was twelve thirty by my wristwatch. “Is Mrs. Swain driving from San Diego?”
“I presume so. I’ll give her until one o’clock to get here.”
“Maybe her car broke down, it’s pretty old. I hope nothing’s happened to her.”
“I’m sure nothing has.”
“I wish I could be sure. The leading suspect in her daughter’s death was seen in Hemet last night. Apparently, he was heading this way in a stolen car.”
“Who are you talking about?”
“Randy Shepherd. He’s the ex-con who used to work for Mrs. Swain and her husband.”
Truttwell didn’t seem much interested. He turned to his
papers, and rattled them at me. From what I could see of them, they were Xeroxed copies of the articles of incorporation of something called the Smitheram Foundation.
I asked Truttwell what it was. He didn’t answer me, or even look up. Irritated by his bad manners, I went and got the envelope of letters out of the trunk of my car.
“Have I mentioned,” I said in a casual voice, “that I recovered the letters?”
“Chalmers’s letters? You know very well you haven’t. Where did you get hold of them?”
“They were in Nick’s apartment.”
“I’m not surprised,” he said. “Let’s have a look at them.”
I slid into the front seat beside him and handed him the envelope. He opened it and peered at its contents:
“God, but this brings back the past. Estelle Chalmers lived for these letters, you know. The early ones were nothing much, as I recall. But Larry’s epistolary style improved with practice.”
“You’ve read them?”
“Some of them. Estelle gave me no choice. She was so proud of her young hero.” His tone was just faintly ironic. “Toward the end, when her sight failed completely, she asked us—my wife and me—to read them aloud to her as they came. We tried to persuade her to hire a nurse-companion, but she refused. Estelle had a very strong sense of privacy, and it got stronger as she got older. The main burden of looking after her fell on my wife.” He added in quiet regret: “I shouldn’t have let it happen to my young wife.”
He fell into a silence, which I finally broke: “What was the matter with Mrs. Chalmers?”
“I believe she had glaucoma.”
“She didn’t die of glaucoma.”
“No. I think she died of grief—grief for my wife. She gave up eating, she gave up everything. I took the liberty of calling
a doctor, very much against her wishes. She lay in bed with her face to the wall and wouldn’t let the doctor examine her, or even look at her. And she wouldn’t let me try to get Larry home from overseas.”
“Why not?”
“She claimed to be perfectly well, though obviously she wasn’t. She wanted to die alone and unseen, I think. Estelle had been a real beauty, and some of it lasted almost to the end. Also, as she grew older, she became a bit of a miser. You’d be surprised how many older women do. The idea of having a doctor come to the house, or hiring a nurse, seemed like a horrible extravagance to Estelle. Her poor-mouthing actually had me convinced. But of course she’d been quite wealthy all along.
“I’ll never forget the day following her funeral. Larry was finally en route home after the usual snafu, and in fact he arrived a couple of days later. But the County Administrator didn’t want to wait to check the house and its contents. As a member of the courthouse crowd he’d known Estelle all his life, I think he knew or suspected that she kept her money in the house, as Judge Chalmers had before her. And of course there had been the attempted burglary. If I had been in full possession of my faculties, I’d have checked the safe the morning after the break-in. But I had troubles of my own.”
“You mean your wife’s death?”
“The loss of my wife was the main disaster, of course. It left me with full responsibility for an infant girl.” He looked at me with painful candor. “A responsibility I haven’t handled too well.”
“The point is that it’s over. Betty’s grown up. She has to make her own choices.”
“But I can’t let her marry Nick Chalmers.”
“She will if you keep saying that.”
Truttwell went into another of his silences. He seemed to
be catching up at last with great stretches of lost time. When his eyes changed back to present time, I said:
“Do you have any idea who killed your wife?”
He shook his white head. “The police failed to come up with a single suspect.”
“What was the date of her death?”
“July 3, 1945.”
“Exactly how did it happen?”
“I’m afraid I don’t really know. Estelle Chalmers was the only surviving witness, and she was blind and saw nothing. Apparently my wife noticed something wrong at the Chalmers house and went over there to investigate. The thieves chased her out into the road and ran her down with their car. Actually it wasn’t their car—it had been stolen. The police recovered it in the tules below San Diego. There were—physical evidences on the bumper that proved it had been used to murder my wife. The murderers probably escaped over the border.”
Truttwell’s forehead was shining with sweat. He wiped it with a silk handkerchief.
“I’m afraid I can’t tell you anything more about the events of that night. I was in Los Angeles on business. I got home in the small hours and found my wife in the morgue and my little girl being cared for by a policewoman.”
His voice broke, and for once I saw through Truttwell’s surface into his hidden self. He lived with a grief so central and consuming that it drained the energy from his external life, and made him seem a smaller man than he was, or had once been.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Truttwell. I had to ask you these questions.”
“I don’t quite see their relevance.”
“Neither do I, yet. When I interrupted you, you were telling me about the County Administrator checking the house.”
“So I was. As the representative of the Chalmers family I
opened the house for him. I also turned over the combination of the safe, which Estelle had given me some time before. It turned out to be stuffed with money, of course.”
“How much?”
“I don’t recall the exact figure. Certainly it was up in the hundreds of thousands. It took the Administrator most of the day to count it, even though some of the notes were in large denominations, up to ten thousand.”
“Where did it all come from, do you know?”
“Her husband probably left her some of it. But Estelle was widowed when she was still quite young, and it’s not exactly a secret that there were other men in her life. One or two of them were very successful men. I suppose they gave her money, or told her how to make it.”
“And how to avoid taxes on it?”
Truttwell shifted uneasily in the car seat. “It hardly seems necessary to raise that question. All this is far away and long ago.”
“It seems here and now to me.”
“If you must know,” he said impatiently, “the tax issue is dead. I persuaded the government to settle for inheritance taxes on the full amount. They had no way of proving the source of the money.”
“The source is what interests me. I understand the Pasadena banker Rawlinson was one of the men in Mrs. Chalmers’s life.”
“He was, for many years. But that was a long time before her death.”
“Not so very,” I said. “In one of these letters, written in the fall of 1943, Larry asked to be remembered to him. Which means that his mother was still seeing Rawlinson.”
“Really? How did Larry feel about Rawlinson?”
“The letter was noncommittal.”
I could have given Truttwell a fuller answer, but I had decided to suppress my interview with Chalmers, at least for
the present. I knew that Truttwell wouldn’t approve of it.
“What are you getting at, Archer? You’re not suggesting that Rawlinson was the source of Mrs. Chalmers’s money?”
As if he had pushed a significant button which closed a circuit, the phone began to ring in Mrs. Swain’s front room. It rang ten times, and stopped.
“It was your idea,” I said.
“But I was speaking generally about the men in Estelle’s life. I didn’t single out Samuel Rawlinson. As you perfectly well know, he was ruined by the embezzlement.”
“His bank was.”
Truttwell’s face twisted in surprise. “You can’t mean he embezzled the money himself.”
“The idea has come up.”
“Seriously?”
“I hardly know. I got it from Randy Shepherd. It originated with Eldon Swain. Which doesn’t help to make it true.”
“I should think not. We
know
that Swain ran off with the money.”
“We know that he ran off. But the truth isn’t always so obvious; in fact, it’s usually just as complex as the people who make it. Consider the possibility that Swain took some of the bank’s money and Rawlinson caught him at it and took a great deal more. He used Mrs. Chalmers’s safe to cache the money, but she died before he could recover it.”
Truttwell gave me a look of appalled interest. “You have a tortuous imagination, Archer.” But he added: “What was the date of the embezzlement?”
I consulted my black notebook. “July 1, 1945.”
“That was just a couple of weeks before Estelle Chalmers died. It rules out the possibility you suggest.”
“Does it? Rawlinson didn’t know she was going to die. They may have been planning to use the money, go someplace and live together.”
“An old man and a blind woman? It’s ridiculous!”
“That still doesn’t rule it out. People are always doing ridiculous things. Anyway, Rawlinson wasn’t so very old in 1945. He was about the age that you are now.”
Truttwell flushed. He was self-conscious about his age. “You’d better not mention this wild idea of yours to anyone else. He’d slap a libel suit on you.” He turned and gave me another curious look. “You don’t think much of bankers, do you?”
“They’re no different from anyone else. But you can’t help noticing that a high proportion of embezzlers are bankers.”
“That’s a simple matter of opportunity.”
“Exactly.”
The phone in Mrs. Swain’s house began to ring again. I counted fourteen rings before it stopped. At the moment my sensibility was pretty highly keyed, and I felt as if the house had been trying to say something to me.
It was one o’clock. Truttwell climbed out of the car and began to pace the broken sidewalk. A clownish youngster walked behind him, aping his movements, until Truttwell shooed him away. I got the envelope of letters out of the front seat and locked them in a metal evidence case in the trunk of my car.
When I looked up, Mrs. Swain’s old black Volkswagen had entered the little street. It turned onto the strips of concrete that formed her driveway. Some of the children lifted their hands to her and said: “Hi.”
Mrs. Swain got out and walked toward us across the brown January grass. She moved awkwardly in her high heels and tight black dress. I introduced her to Truttwell and they shook hands stiffly.
“I’m awfully sorry to keep you waiting,” she said. “A policeman came to my son-in-law’s house just as I was about to leave. He asked me questions for over an hour.”
“What about?” I asked her.
“Several matters. He wanted a full history of Randy Shepherd from the time he was our gardener in San Marino. He seemed to think that Randy might come after me next. But I’m not afraid of Randy, and I don’t believe he killed Jean.”
“Who do you suspect?” I said.
“My husband is capable of it, if he’s alive.”
“It’s pretty definite that he’s dead, Mrs. Swain.”
“What happened to the money, if he’s dead?” She leaned toward me, both hands out, like a starving beggar.
“Nobody knows.”
She shook my arm. “We’ve got to find the money. I’ll give you half if you find it for me.”
There was a high shrieking in my head. I thought I was having a bad reaction to poor old Mrs. Swain. Then I realized that the shrieking wasn’t in me.
It came from a siren whirling its whip of sound over the city. The sound grew louder but it was still far away and irrelevant.
On the boulevard there was another, nearer, sound of tires shuddering and squealing. An open black Mercury convertible turned into the little street. It skidded wide on the turn and scattered the children like confetti, nearly running some of them down.
The man at the wheel had a beardless face and bright red synthetic-looking hair. In spite of it I recognized Randy Shepherd. And he recognized me. He kept on going past us to the end of the block, and turned north out of sight. At the other end of the block a police car appeared for an instant. Without turning or pausing, it fled on up the boulevard.
I followed Shepherd, but it was a hopeless chase. He was on home territory, and his stolen convertible had more speed than my almost-paid-for car. Once I caught a glimpse of it crossing a bridge far ahead, with Shepherd’s bright red hair like artificial fire in the front seat.