The Goodbye Look (19 page)

It was a fairly impressive letter, with a certain sadness running gray through its perceptions. One sentence stayed in my mind—“He has given his best to the war, and will never become the man he was meant to be”—because it seemed to apply to Chalmers himself as well as his squadron commander. The third letter was dated 4 July 1945:

I put the letters back in the envelope. They seemed to mark points on a curve. The boy or man who had written them had passed from the eager idealism of the first letter into the rather impressive quick maturity of the second, and declined in the third into a kind of tiredness. I wondered what Chalmers himself could see in his letters that made him want to read them aloud to his son.

I turned to the girl, who hadn’t moved from her hassock: “Have you read these letters, Betty?”

She raised her head. The look in her eyes was very dark and far. “I beg your pardon? I was thinking.”

“Have you read these letters?”

“Some of them. I wanted to see what all the shouting was about.
I
think they’re boring. I
hated
the one about bombing Okinawa.”

“May I keep the three I’ve read?”

“Keep them all, why don’t you? If Father finds them here, I’ll have to explain where I got them. And it will be just another nail in Nick’s coffin.”

“He isn’t in his coffin. It doesn’t help matters to talk as if he is.”

“Don’t fatherize, please, Mr. Archer.”

“Why not? I don’t believe people know everything at birth and forget it as they get older.”

She reacted positively to my sharp tone. “That’s the doctrine of Platonic reminiscence. I don’t believe it, either.” She slid off the hassock and out of her lethargy and came toward me. “Why don’t you give the letters to Mr. Chalmers? You wouldn’t have to tell him where you got them.”

“Is he at home?”

“I’m afraid I have no idea. I don’t really spend all my time at this window watching the Chalmers house.” She added with a quick wan smile: “Not more than six or eight hours a day, anyway.”

“Don’t you think it’s time you broke the habit?”

She gave me a disappointed look. “Are you against Nick, too?”

“Obviously I’m not. But I hardly know him. You’re the one I know. And I hate to see you caught here, between two fairly dismal alternatives.”

“You mean Nick and my father, don’t you? I’m not caught.”

“You are, though, like a maiden in a tower. This low-grade war of attrition with your father may feel like a battle for freedom, but it isn’t. You just get more and more deeply engaged with him. Even if you do succeed in breaking away, it won’t be into freedom. You’ve got it arranged so another
demanding male will take you over. And I do mean Nick.”

“You’ve got no right to attack him—”

“I’m attacking you,” I said. “Or rather the situation you’ve put yourself in. Why don’t you move out of the middle?”

“Where could I go?”

“You shouldn’t have to ask me. You’re twenty-five.”

“But I’m afraid.”

“What of?”

“I don’t know. I’m just afraid.” After a silence she said in a hushed voice: “You know what happened to my mother. I told you, didn’t I? She looked out this very window—this used to be her sewing room—and she saw a light in the Chalmers house when there wasn’t supposed to be one. She went over there and the burglars chased her out and ran over her and killed her.”

“Why did they kill her?”

“I don’t know. It may have been just an accident.”

“What did the burglars want from the Chalmers house?”

“I don’t know.”

“When did it happen, Betty?”

“In the summer of 1945.”

“You were too young to remember, weren’t you?”

“Yes, but my father told me about it. I’ve been afraid ever since.”

“I don’t believe you. You didn’t act afraid the other night, when Mrs. Trask and Harrow came to Chalmers house.”

“I was afraid, though, terribly. And I should never have gone there. They’re both dead.”

I was beginning to understand the fear that held her. She believed or suspected that Nick had killed both Harrow and Mrs. Trask, and that she herself had acted as a catalyst. Perhaps in some dark place of her mind, back beyond memory and below the level of speech, was the false but guilty knowledge that her infant self had somehow killed her mother in the street.

The movement of a car below the window drew my thoughts out of the past. It was Chalmers’s black Rolls. He got out and moved rather uncertainly across the courtyard to his house. He unlocked the front door and went in.

“Now you’ve got me doing it,” I said to Betty.

“Doing what?”

“Watching the Chalmers house. They’re not all that interesting.”

“Maybe not. But they’re special people, the kind other people watch.”

“Why don’t they watch us?”

She entered into my mood. “Because they’re more interested in themselves. They couldn’t care less about us.” She smiled not very cheerfully. “Okay, I get the message. I have to become more interested in myself.”

“Or something. What
are
you interested in?”

“History. I’ve been offered a traveling fellowship. But I felt I was needed here.”

“To pursue a career of house-watching.”

“You’ve made your point, Mr. Archer. Don’t spoil it now.”

I left her and, after putting the letters in the trunk of my car, crossed the street to the Chalmers house. I was having a
delayed reaction to the death of Betty’s mother, which seemed now to be an integral part of the case. If Chalmers was willing, he might be able to help me understand it.

He came to the door himself. A worried look had lengthened his bony brown face. His tan looked rather sallow, and his eyes were reddish and tired.

“I wasn’t expecting to see
you,
Mr. Archer.” His tone was polite and neutral. “I understood my wife had severed diplomatic relations.”

“We’re still talking to each other, I hope. How is Nick doing?”

“Quite well.” He went on in a careful voice: “My wife and I have reason to be grateful for your help. I want you to know that. Unfortunately, you were caught in the middle, between Truttwell and Dr. Smitheram. They can’t cooperate, and under the circumstances we have to stay with Smitheram.”

“The doctor’s assuming a great deal of responsibility.”

“I suppose he is. But that’s not your affair.” Chalmers was getting a little edgy. “And I hope you didn’t come here to make an attack on Dr. Smitheram. In a situation like this, a man has to lean on someone. We’re not islands, you know,” he said surprisingly. “We can’t bear the weight of these problems all alone.”

His angry sorrow bothered me. “I agree with you, Mr. Chalmers. I’d still like to help if I can.”

He looked at me suspiciously. “In what way?”

“I’m getting the feeling of the case. I think it started before Nick was born, and that his part in it is fairly innocent. I can’t promise to get him off the hook entirely. But I hope to prove that he’s a victim, a patsy.”

“I’m not sure I understand you,” Chalmers said. “But come inside.”

He took me into the study where the case had begun. I felt
slightly cramped and smothered, as if everything that had happened in the room was still going on, using up space and air. I was struck by the thought that Chalmers, with family history breathing down his neck, may have felt smothered and cramped most of the time.

“Will you have some sherry, old man?”

“No thanks.”

“Then neither will I.” He turned the swivel chair in front of the desk and sat facing me across the refectory table. “You were going to give me an overview of the situation, I think.”

“I’ll try, with your help, Mr. Chalmers.”

“How can I help? Events have gone quite beyond me.” He made a helpless gesture with his hands.

“With your forbearance, then. I’ve just been talking to Betty Truttwell about her mother’s death.”

“That was a tragic accident.”

“I think it may have been more than an accident. I understood Mrs. Truttwell was your mother’s closest friend.”

“She was indeed. Mrs. Truttwell was wonderfully kind to my mother in her last days. If I have any criticism at all, it has to do with her failure to tell me how bad things were with Mother. I was still overseas that summer, and I had no idea that Mother was close to death. You can imagine my feelings when my ship came back to the West Coast in mid-July, and I found that both of them were dead.” His troubled blue gaze came up to mine. “Now you tell me Mrs. Truttwell’s death may not have been an accident.”

“I’m raising the question, anyway. The question of accident versus murder isn’t crucial, really. When someone is killed in the course of a felony, it’s murder under the law, in any case. But I’m beginning to suspect Mrs. Truttwell was intentionally killed. She was your mother’s closest friend, she must have known all her secrets.”

“My mother had no secrets. The whole community looked up to her.”

Chalmers rose angrily, spinning the creaky swivel chair. He took up a stance with his back to me, which reminded me oddly of a stubborn boy. Facing him was the primitive picture that concealed the door of the safe: the sailing ship, the naked Indians, the Spanish soldiers marching in the sky.

“If the Truttwells have been maligning my mother,” he said, “I’ll sue them for slander.”

“Nothing like that happened, Mr. Chalmers. Nothing’s been said against your mother by anyone. I’m trying to get at who the people were that broke into the house in 1945.”

He turned. “They certainly wouldn’t have been known to my mother. Her friends were the best people in California.”

“I don’t doubt it. But your mother was probably known to the burglars, and they probably knew what was in the house that made it worth breaking into.”

“I can answer that,” Chalmers said. “My mother kept her money in the house. It was a habit she inherited from my father, along with the money itself. I repeatedly urged her to put it in the bank, but she wouldn’t.”

“Did the burglars get it?”

“No. The money was intact when I got home from overseas. But Mother was dead. And Mrs. Truttwell, too.”

“Was there very much money involved?”

“Quite a sum, yes. Several hundred thousand.”

“Where did it come from?”

“I told you: Mother inherited it from my father.” He gave me a pale suspicious look, as if I was planning to insult her again. “Are you suggesting the money wasn’t hers?”

“Certainly not. Couldn’t we forget her for a bit?”

“I can’t.” He added in a kind of gloomy pride: “I live with the thought of my mother constantly.”

I waited, and tried again: “What I’m trying to get at is this. Two burglaries or at least two thefts occurred in this house, in this very room, over twenty-three years apart. I think they were connected.”

“In what way?”

“Through the people involved.”

Chalmers’s eyes were puzzled. He sat down opposite me again. “I’m afraid you’ve lost me.”

“I’m simply trying to say that some of the same people, with the same motives, may have been involved in both these burglaries. We know who did the recent one. It was your son Nick, acting under pressure from a couple of other people, Jean Trask and Sidney Harrow.”

Chalmers leaned forward, resting his forehead on his hand. His bald spot gleamed, defenseless as a tonsure.

“Did he kill those people?”

“I doubt it, as you know, but I can’t prove he didn’t. Yet. Let’s stick to the burglaries for now. Nick took a gold box which had your letters in it.” I was being careful not to name his mother. “The letters were probably incidental. The gold box was the main thing: Mrs. Trask wanted it. Do you know why?”

“Presumably because she was a thief.”

“She didn’t think so, though. She was quite open about the box. Apparently, it had belonged to Mrs. Trask’s grandmother, and after her grandmother’s death it was given to your mother by her grandfather.”

Chalmers’s head sank lower. The fingers supporting it raked up through his hair. “You’re talking about Mr. Rawlinson, aren’t you?”

“I’m afraid I am.”

“This is infinitely depressing to me,” he said. “You’re twisting a harmless relationship between an elderly man and a mature woman—”

“Let’s forget about the relationship.”

“I can’t,” he said. “I can’t forget about it.” His head had sunk closer to the table, guarded by his hands and arms.

“I’m not judging anyone, Mr. Chalmers, certainly not your
mother. The point is simply that there was a connection between her and Samuel Rawlinson. Rawlinson ran a bank, the Pasadena Occidental, and it was ruined by embezzlement around the time of the burglary. His son-in-law, Eldon Swain, was blamed for the embezzlement, perhaps correctly. But it’s been suggested to me that Mr. Rawlinson may have looted his own bank.”