“Where did this alleged shooting take place, Mr. Archer?”
“In the local hobo jungle. Apparently it was done with the same gun that killed Harrow.”
Chalmers came up behind his wife. “How can you know that?” he said to me.
“The police have ballistic evidence.”
“And they suspect Nick? Fifteen years ago he was only eight.”
“I pointed that out to Captain Lackland.”
Truttwell turned on me in surprise. “You’ve already discussed this with him?”
“Not in the sense that I answered his questions. He’s the source for most of my information about that earlier killing.”
“How did it come up between you?” Truttwell said.
“Lackland brought it up. I mentioned it just now because I thought I should.”
“I see.” Truttwell’s manner to me was smooth and neutral. “If you don’t mind, I’d like to discuss this in private with Mr. and Mrs. Chalmers.”
I waited outside in my car. It was a bright January day, with enough wind to put an edge on its sparkle. But the weight of what had happened in the house, and what had been said, lay heavily on my mind. I was afraid the Chalmerses were going to fire me off the case. It wasn’t an easy case, but after a day and a night with the people involved in it, I wanted to finish it.
Truttwell came out eventually and got into the front seat of my car. “They asked me to dismiss you. I talked them out of it.”
“I don’t know if I should thank you.”
“Neither do I. They’re not easy people to deal with. They had to be convinced you weren’t playing footsie with Lackland.”
He meant it as a question, which I answered: “I wasn’t. I do have to cooperate with him, though. He’s been on this case for fifteen years. I’ve been on it less than one day.”
“Did he specifically accuse Nick of anything?”
“Not quite. He mentioned that a child could fire a gun.”
Truttwell’s eyes grew small and bright, like little pellets of ice. “Do you think that really happened?”
“Lackland seems to be playing with the idea. Unfortunately, he has a dead man to back him up.”
“Do you know who the dead man was?”
“It isn’t definitely established. It may have been a wanted man named Eldon Swain.”
“Wanted for what?”
“Embezzlement. There’s one other thing which I hate to mention but I have to.” I paused. I really did hate to mention it. “Before I brought Nick in yesterday he made a sort of confession to a shooting. His confession fits the old shooting, the Swain shooting, better than the shooting of Harrow. Actually he may have been confessing both at once.”
Truttwell rapped his fists together several times. “We have to get him back before he talks his life away.”
“Is Betty at home?”
Her father glanced sharply at me. “You are not going to use her as a decoy, or a bird dog.”
“Or a woman? She is one.”
“Before everything else she’s my daughter.” It was one of Truttwell’s more self-revealing statements. “She’s not getting mixed up in a murder case.”
I didn’t bother reminding him that she already was. “Does Nick have any other friends I could talk to?”
“I doubt it. He’s always been pretty much of a loner. Which was one of my objections—” Truttwell cut himself short. “Dr. Smitheram may be your best bet, if you can get him to talk. I’ve been trying to for fifteen years.” He added dryly: “He and I suffer from professional incompatibility, I’m afraid.”
“When you say fifteen years—?”
Truttwell answered my half-finished question: “I remember that something did happen involving Nick when he was in second or third grade. One day he didn’t come home from school. His mother phoned me and asked me what to do. I gave her some standard advice. Whether or not she followed it I still don’t know. But the boy was home the following day. And Smitheram’s been treating him off and on ever since. Not too successfully, I might add.”
“Did Mrs. Chalmers give you any idea of what happened?”
“Nick either ran away or was abducted, I think the latter. And I think—” Truttwell wrinkled his nose as if at a bad smell—“sex was involved.”
“So you said yesterday. What kind of sex?”
“Abnormal,” he said shortly.
“Did Mrs. Chalmers say so?”
“Not explicitly. It was everyone’s deep silence on the subject.” His voice trailed off.
“Murder makes for even deeper silence.”
Truttwell sniffed. “An eight-year-old boy is incapable of murder, in any real sense.”
“I know that. But eight-year-old boys don’t know it, especially if the whole thing is hushed up around them.”
Truttwell moved uncomfortably in the seat, as if he was being crowded by ugly images. “I’m afraid you’re jumping to conclusions, Archer.”
“These aren’t conclusions. They’re hypotheses.”
“Aren’t we getting rather far afield from your initial assignment?”
“We always expected to, didn’t we? Incidentally, I wish you’d reconsider about Betty. She may know where Nick is.”
“She doesn’t,” Truttwell said shortly. “I asked her myself.”
chapter 15
I dropped Truttwell off downtown. He told me how to get ta Dr. Smitheram’s clinic, which turned out to be a large new building on the fashionable borders of Montevista. “Smitheram Clinic, 1967” was cut in the stone facing over the main door.
A handsome woman with dark-brown hair came out into the windowless waiting room and asked me if I had an appointment.
I said I hadn’t. “There’s an emergency involving one of Dr. Smitheram’s patients.”
“Which one?”
Her blue eyes were concerned. There was a slash of grey in her brown hair, as if time had thrust a loving hand through it.
“I’d rather tell the doctor,” I said.
“You can discuss it with me. I’m Mrs. Smitheram, and I work professionally with my husband.” She gave me a smile which may have been professional but felt real. “Are you a relative?”
“No. My name is Archer—”
“Of course,” she said. “The detective. Dr. Smitheram has been expecting you to call.” She scanned my face, and frowned a little. “Has something else happened?”
“All hell has been breaking loose. I wish you’d let me talk to the doctor.”
She looked at her watch. “I simply can’t. He has a patient with him, with half an hour to go. I can’t interrupt them except in a serious emergency.”
“This is one. Nick’s run away again. And I think the police are getting ready to make a move.”
She reacted as if she was Nick’s co-conspirator: “To arrest him?”
“Yes.”
“That’s foolish and unfair. He was just a small boy—” She cut the sentence in half, as if a censor had come awake in her head.
“Just a small boy when he did what, Mrs. Smitheram?”
She drew a deep angry breath and let it out in a faint droning sound of resignation. She went through an inner door and closed it behind her.
Eventually Smitheram came out, enormous in a white smock. He looked slightly remote, like a man coming out of a a waking dream, and he shook hands with me impatiently.
“Where has Nick gone to, anyway?”
“I have no idea. He just took off.”
“Who was looking after him?”
“His father.”
“That’s preposterous. I warned them that the boy needed security, but Truttwell vetoed that.” His anger was running on, finding new objects, as if it was really anger with himself. “If they refuse to take my advice I’ll wash my hands of the business.”
“You can’t do that and you know it,” his wife said from the doorway. “The police are after Nick.”
“Or soon will be,” I said.
“What have
they got on him?”
“Suspicion of two killings. You probably know more about the details than I do.”
Dr. Smitheram’s eyes met mine in a kind of confrontation. I could feel that I was up against a strong devious will.
“You’re assuming a good deal.”
“Look, doctor. Couldn’t we put down the foils and talk like human beings? We both want to bring Nick home safe, keep him out of jail, get his sickness cured—whatever it is.”
“That’s a large order,” he said with a cheerless smile. “And we don’t seem to be making much progress, do we?”
“All right. Where would he go?”
“That’s hard to say. Three years ago he was gone for several months. He wandered all over the country as far as the east coast.”
“We don’t have three months, or three days. He took along several batches of sleeping pills and tranquilizers—chloral hydrate, Nembutal, Nembu-Serpin.”
Smitheram’s eyes wavered and darkened. “That’s bad. He’s sometimes suicidal, as you undoubtedly know.”
“Why is he suicidal?”
“He’s had an unfortunate life. He blames himself, as if he was criminally responsible for his misfortunes.”
“You mean he isn’t?”
“I mean that no one is.” He said it as if he believed it. “But you and I shouldn’t be standing here talking. In any case, I’m not going to divulge my patient’s secrets.” He made a move toward the inner door.
“Wait a minute, doctor. Just one minute. Your patient’s life may be in danger, you know that.”
“Please,” Mrs. Smitheram said. “Talk to the man, Ralph.”
Dr. Smitheram turned back to me, bowing his head in a slightly exaggerated attitude of service. I didn’t ask him the question I wanted to, about the dead man in the hobo jungle; it would only produce widening circles of silence.
“Did Nick talk to you at all last night?” I said.
“He did to some extent. His parents and his fiancée were present most of the time. They were an inhibiting influence, naturally.”
“Did he mention any names, of people or places? I’m trying to get a line on where he might have-gone.”
The doctor nodded. “I’ll get my notes.”
He left the room and brought back a couple of sheets of paper, illegibly scrawled over. He put on reading glasses and scanned them rapidly.
“He mentioned a woman named Jean Trask whom he’s been seeing.”
“How did he feel about her?”
“Ambivalent. He seemed to blame her for his troubles—it wasn’t clear why. At the same time he seemed rather interested in her.”
“Sexually interested?”
“I wouldn’t put it that way. His feeling was more fraternal. He also referred to a man named Randy Shepherd. In fact he wanted my help in finding Shepherd.”
“Did he say why?”
“Apparently Shepherd was or may have been a witness to something that happened long ago.”
Smitheram left me before I could ask any further questions. His wife and I exchanged the numbers of our respective telephone-answering services. But she wouldn’t let me go just yet. Her eyes were slightly wilted, as if she’d disappointed herself in some way.
“I know it’s exasperating,” she said, “not to be given the facts. We operate this way because we have to. My husband’s patients hold nothing back, you see. It’s essential to treatment.”
“I understand that.”
“And please believe me when I say that we’re very much in Nick’s corner. Both Dr. Smitheram and I are very fond of him—of his whole family. They’ve had more than their share of misfortune, as he said.”
Both the Smitherams were masters of the art of talking quite a lot without saying much. But Mrs. Smitheram seemed to be a lively woman who would have liked to talk freely. She followed me to the door, still dissatisfied with what she’d said or left unsaid.
“Believe me, Mr. Archer, there are things in my files you wouldn’t want to know.”
“And in mine. Someday we’ll exchange histories.”
“That will be a day,” she said with a smile.
There was a public phone in the lobby of the Smitheram building. I called San Diego Information, got George Trask’s number, and put in a call to his home. The phone rang many times before the receiver was lifted
“Hello?” It was Jean Trask’s voice, and it sounded scared and dim. “Is that you, George?”
“This is Archer. If Nick Chalmers shows up there—”
“He better not. I don’t want anything more to do with him.”
“If he does, though, keep him with you. He’s carrying a pocketful of barbiturates, and I think he plans to take them.”
“I suspected he was psycho,” the woman said. “Did he kill Sidney Harrow?”
“I doubt it.”
“He did, though, didn’t he? Is he after me? Is that why you called?” The quick forced rhythms of fear had entered her voice.
“I have no reason to think so.” I changed the subject: “Do you know a Randy Shepherd, Mrs. Trask?”
“It’s funny you should ask me that. I was just—” Her voice stopped dead.
“You were just what?”
“Nothing. I was thinking of something else. I don’t know anybody by that name.”
She was lying. But you can’t unravel lies on the telephone. San Diego was an easy trip, and I decided to go there, unannounced.
“Too bad,” I said, and hung up.
I tried Information again. Randy Shepherd had no phone listed in the San Diego area. I called Rawlinson’s house in Pasadena, and Mrs. Shepherd answered.
“Archer speaking. Remember me?”
“Naturally, I remember you. If it’s Mr. Rawlinson you want, he’s still in bed.”
“It’s you I want, Mrs. Shepherd. How can I get in touch with your former husband?”
“You can’t through me. Has he done wrong again?”
“Not to my knowledge. A boy I know is carrying a lot of sleeping pills and planning suicide. Shepherd may be able to lead me to him.”
“What boy are you talking about?” she said in a guarded tone.
“Nick Chalmers. You wouldn’t know him.”
“No, I wouldn’t. And I can’t give you Shepherd’s address, I doubt he has one. He lives someplace in the Tijuana River Valley, down by the Mexican border.”
chapter 16
I got to San Diego shortly before noon. The Trask house on Bayview Avenue stood near the base of Point Loma, overlooking North Island and the bay. It was a solid hillside ranchhouse with a nicely tended lawn and flowerbeds.
I knocked on the front door with an iron knocker shaped like a seahorse. No answer. I knocked and waited, and tried the knob. The door didn’t open.
I walked around the outside of the house, peering into the windows, trying to act like a prospective purchaser. The windows were heavily draped. Apart from a glimpse of birch cupboards and a stainless-steel sink pagodaed with dirty dishes, I couldn’t see anything. The attached garage was latched on the inside.
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 do
or. 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.
The Goodbye Look Page 9
