The Goodbye Look (24 page)

He settled her in the armchair, leaning over her from behind, withdrawing his hands lingeringly from her upper arms.

“Turn off the lights, will you, Archer?”

I flicked the switch and sat down beside Irene Chalmers. The projector whirred. Its quiet shotgun blast of light filled the screen with images. A large rectangular pool with a diving board and a slide reflected a blue old-fashioned sky.

A young blonde girl with a mature figure and an immature face climbed onto the diving board. She waved at the camera, bounced excessively, and did a comic dive with her legs apart and kicking like a frog’s. She came up with a mouthful of water and spurted it at the camera. Jean Trask, young.

Irene Chalmers, née Rita Shepherd, was next on the diving board. She walked to the end of it gravely, as if the eye of the camera was judging her. The black rubber helmet in which her hair was hidden made her look oddly archaic.

She stood for quite a while with the camera on her, not once returning its stare. Then she bounced and did a swan dive, cutting the water without much splash. It wasn’t until she disappeared from sight that I realized how beautiful she had been.

The camera caught her coming up, and she smiled and turned onto her back directly under it. Jean came up behind and ducked her, shouting or laughing, splashing water at the camera with her hands.

A third young person, a boy of eighteen or so whom I didn’t immediately recognize, climbed up onto the board. Slowly, he walked to the forward end, with many backward looks, as if there were pirates behind him. There was one. Jean rushed him and shoved him into the water, laughing
or shouting. He came up floundering, his eyes closed. A woman wearing a wide-brimmed hat held out a padded hook to him at the end of a long pole. She used it to tow him to the shallow end. He stood there, in water up to his waist, with his narrow back turned to the camera. His rescuer took off her floppy hat and bowed toward unseen spectators.

The woman was Mrs. Swain, but Swain’s camera failed to linger on her. It shifted to the spectators, a handsome older couple who were sitting together on a shaded swing. In spite of the shadow falling across him, I recognized Samuel Rawlinson and guessed that the woman beside him was Estelle Chalmers. The camera moved again before I had a chance to study her thin, passionate face.

Rita and Jean went down the slide, singly and together. They raced the length of the pool, with Jean coming out ahead. She splashed the hydrophobic boy still standing as if rooted in waist-deep water. Then she splashed Rita.

I caught a fuzzy background glimpse of Randy Shepherd, red-headed and red-bearded in gardener’s dungarees, looking over a hedge at his daughter taking her place in the sun. I glanced sideways at Irene Chalmers’s face, which was fitfully lit by the flickering inexact colors reflected from the screen. She looked as if she were dying under the soft bombardment of the past.

When my eyes returned to the screen, Eldon Swain was on the diving board. He was a man of middle size with a large handsome head. He bounced and did a swan dive. The camera met him coming up and followed him back onto the diving board. He performed flips, front and back.

Next came a double dive with Jean on his shoulders, and finally a double dive with Rita. As if controlled by a documentary interest, the camera followed the pair as Rita stood spraddled on the diving board, and Eldon Swain inserted his head between her legs and lifted her. Tottering slightly, he
carried her out to the end of the board and stood for a long moment with his head projecting from between her thighs like the head of a giant smiling baby being born again.

The two fell off the board together and stayed underwater for what seemed a long time. The eye of the camera looked for them but caught only sparkling surfaces netted with light and underlaid by colored shadows dissolving in the water.

After the reel ended, none of us spoke for a while. I turned on the lights. Irene Chalmers stirred and roused herself. I could sense her fear, so powerful it seemed to make her drowsy.

She said in an effort to throw it off: “I was pretty in those days, wasn’t I?”

“More than pretty,” Truttwell said. “The word is beautiful.”

“A lot of good it ever did me.” Her voice and language were changing, as if she was falling back on her earlier self. “Where did you get this movie—from Mrs. Swain?”

“Yes. She gave me others.”

“She would. She’s always hated me.”

“Because you took up with her husband?” I said.

“She hated me long before that. It was almost as if she knew it was going to happen. Or maybe she
made
it happen,
I don’t know. She sat around and watched Eldon, waiting for him to jump. If you do that to a man, sooner or later he’s going to jump.”

“What made you jump?” I said.

“We won’t talk about me.” She looked at me and then at Truttwell and then at nothing. “I’m taking the fifth.”

Truttwell moved closer to her, gentle and suave as a lover. “Don’t be foolish, Irene. You’re among friends here.”

“I bet.”

“It’s true,” he said. “I went to enormous trouble, and so did Mr. Archer, to get hold of this evidence, get it out of the hands of potential enemies. In my hands it can’t be used against you. I think I can guarantee it never will be.”

She sat up straight, meeting him eye to eye. “What is this? Blackmail?”

Truttwell smiled. “You’re getting me confused with Dr. Smitheram, I’m afraid. I don’t want anything from you at all, Irene. I do think we should have a free and frank discussion.”

She looked in my direction. “What about him?”

“Mr. Archer knows this case better than I do. I rely completely on his discretion.”

Truttwell’s praise made me uneasy: I wasn’t prepared to say the same things about him.

“I don’t trust his discretion,” the woman said. “Why should I? I hardly know him.”

“You know me, Irene. As your attorney—”

“So you’re our lawyer again?”

“I never ceased to be, really. It must be clear to you by now that you need my help, and Mr. Archer’s help. Everything we’ve learned about the past is strictly in confidence among the three of us.”

“That is,” she said, “if I go along. What if I don’t?”

“I’m ethically bound to keep your secrets.”

“But they’d slip out anyway, is that the idea?”

“Not through me or Archer. Perhaps through Dr. Smitheram. Obviously I can’t protect your interests unless you let me.”

She considered Truttwell’s proposition. “I didn’t want to break with you myself. Especially not at this time. But I can’t speak for my husband.”

“Where is he?”

“I left him at home. These last few days have been awfully hard on Larry. He doesn’t look it, but he’s the nervous type.”

Her words touched a closed place in my mind. “Was that your husband in the film? The boy who got pushed into the water?”

“Yes it was. It was the first day I met Larry. And his last free weekend before he went into the Navy. I could tell that he was interested in me, but I didn’t get to know him that day, not really. I wish I had.”

“When did you get to know him?”

“A couple of years later. He grew up in the meantime.”

“What happened to you in the meantime?”

She turned away from me abruptly, her white neck ridged with strain. “I’m not going to answer that,” she said to Truttwell. “I didn’t hire a lawyer and a detective to dig up all the dirt in my own life. What kind of sense would that make?”

He answered her in a quiet careful voice: “It makes more sense than trying to keep it secret. It’s time the dirt, as you call it, was laid out on the table, among the three of us. I needn’t remind you there have been several murders.”

“I didn’t kill anybody.”

“Your son did,” I reminded her. “We’ve already discussed that death in the hobo jungle.”

She turned back to me. “It was a kidnapping. He killed in self-defense. You said yourself the police would understand.”

“I may have to take that back, now that I know more about it. You held back part of the story—all the really important parts. For example, when I told you that Randy Shepherd
was involved in the kidnapping you didn’t mention that Randy was your father.”

“A woman doesn’t have to tell on her husband,” she said. “Isn’t it the same for a girl and her father?”

“No, but it doesn’t matter now. Your father was shot dead in Pasadena yesterday afternoon.”

Her head came up. “Who shot him?”

“The police. Your mother called them.”

“My mother did?” She was silent for a while. “That doesn’t really surprise me. The first thing I remember in my life is the two of them fighting like animals. I had to get away from that kind of life, even if it meant—” Our eyes met, and the sentence died under the impact.

I continued it for her: “Even if it meant running off to Mexico with an embezzler.”

She shook her head. Her black hair fluffed out a little, and made her look both younger and cheaper.

“I never did.”

“You never ran off with Eldon Swain?”

She was silent.

“What did happen, Mrs. Chalmers?”

“I can’t tell you—not even at this late date. There are other people involved.”

“Eldon Swain?”

“He’s the most important one.”

“You don’t have to worry about protecting him, as you very well know. He’s as safe as your father, and for the same reason.”

She gave me a lost look, as if her game with time had failed for a moment and she was caught in the limbo between her two lives. “Is Eldon really dead?”

“You know he is, Mrs. Chalmers. He was the dead man in the railroad yards. You must have known or suspected it at the time.”

Her eyes darkened. “I swear to God I didn’t.”

“You had to know. The body was left with its hands in the fire so that the fingerprints would be erased. No eight-year-old boy did that.”

“That doesn’t mean it was me.”

“You were the one with the motivation,” I said. “If the dead man was identified as Swain, your whole life would collapse. You’d lose your house and your husband and your social standing. You’d be Rita Shepherd again, back on your uppers.”

She was silent, her face working with thought. “You said my father was involved with Eldon. It must have been my father who burned the body—did you say he burned the body?”

“The fingers.”

She nodded. “It must have been my father. He was always talking about getting rid of his own fingerprints. He was a nut on the subject.”

Her voice was unreflective, almost casual. It stopped suddenly. Perhaps she had heard herself as Rita Shepherd, daughter of an ex-con, trapped again in that identity without any possible escape.

The knowledge of her predicament seemed to be striking down into her body and penetrating her mind through layers of indifference, years of forgetfulness. It struck a vital place and crumpled her in the chair, her face in her hands. Her hair fell forward from her nape and sifted over her fingers like black water.

Truttwell stood over her looking down with an intensity that didn’t seem to include any kind of love. Perhaps it was pity he felt, laced with possession. She had passed through several hands and been slightly scorched by felony, but she was still very beautiful.

Forgetful of me, and of himself, Truttwell put his hands on her. He stroked her head very gently, and then her long
tapering back. His caresses weren’t sexual in any ordinary sense. Perhaps, I thought, his main feeling was an abstract legal passion which satisfied itself by having her as a client. Or a widower’s underground desire held in check by the undead past.

Mrs. Chalmers recovered after a while, and asked for water. Truttwell went to another room to fetch it. She spoke to me in an urgent whisper:

“Why did my mother call the police on Randy? She must have had a reason.”

“She had. He stole her picture of Nick.”

“The graduation picture I sent her?”

“Yes.”

“I shouldn’t have sent it. But I thought for once in my life I could act like a normal human being.”

“You couldn’t, though. Your father took it to Jean Trask and talked her into hiring Sidney Harrow. That’s how the whole thing started.”

“What did the old man want?”

“Your husband’s money, just like everyone else.”

“But not you, eh?” Her voice was sardonic.

“Not me,” I said. “Money costs too much.”

Truttwell brought her a paper cup of water and watched her drink it. “Are you feeling up to a little drive?”

Her body jerked in alarm. “Where to?”

“The Smitheram Clinic. It’s time we had a chat with Nick.”

She looked profoundly unwilling. “Dr. Smitheram won’t let you in.”

“I think he will. You’re Nick’s mother. I’m his attorney. If Dr. Smitheram won’t cooperate, I’ll slap a writ of
habeas corpus
on him.”

Truttwell wasn’t entirely serious, but her mood of alarm persisted. “No. Please, don’t do anything like that I’ll talk to Dr. Smitheram.”

On the way out I asked the switchboard girl if Betty had come back with the lab report. She hadn’t. I left word for her that I’d be at the clinic.

Irene Chalmers dismissed Emilio. She rode between Truttwell and me in the front seat of his Cadillac. When she got out of the car in the parking lot of the clinic she moved like a drugged woman. Truttwell gave her his arm and guided her into the reception room.

Moira Smitheram was behind the desk, as she had been the day I met her. It seemed like a long time ago. Her face had aged and deepened, or maybe I could see more deeply into her. She looked from Truttwell to me.

“You didn’t give me much time.”

“We’re running out of time.”

Truttwell said: “It’s very important that we talk to Nick Chalmers. Mrs. Chalmers agrees.”

“You’ll have to take that up with Dr. Smitheram.”

Moira went and got her husband. He came through the inner door, striding angrily in his white smock.

“You don’t give up easily, do you?” he said to Truttwell.

“I don’t give up at all, old man. We’re here to see Nick, and I’m very much afraid that you can’t stop us.”