Read The Goodbye Look for Free Online Page B

caught?”
    “I’m afraid not. The Highway Patrol found the car, near San Diego, but it was a stolen car. Strangely enough, whoever it was had made an attempt to burglarize the Chalmerses’ house. My wife apparently saw them enter the house and scared them out of there. They ran her down when they made their getaway.”
    He gave me a bleak look which resisted further questions. We drove in silence the rest of the way to his house, whichwas diagonally across the street from the Chalmerses’ Spanish mansion. He dropped me at the curb, said he had a client waiting, and drove away.
    The architecture on upper Pacific Street was traditional but eclectic. Truttwell’s house was a white colonial one, with green shutters upstairs and down.
    I knocked on the green front door. It was answered by a gray little woman in a housekeeper’s dim quasi-uniform. The formal lines which bracketed her mouth softened when I told her who I was.
    “Yes. Miss Truttwell is expecting you.” She led me up a curving stair to the door of a front room. “Mr. Archer is here to see you.”
    “Thanks, Mrs. Glover.”
    “Can I get you anything, dear?”
    “No thanks.”
    Betty delayed her appearance till Mrs. Glover had gone. I could see why. Her eyes were swollen and her color was bad. She held her body tensely, like a kicked animal expecting to be kicked again.
    She stood back to let me enter the room, and closed the door behind me. It was a young woman’s study, bright with chintz and Chagall, its shelves loaded with books. She faced me standing up, with her back to the windows overlooking the street.
    “I’ve heard from Nicholas.” She indicated the orange telephone on the worktable. “You won’t tell Father, will you?”
    “He already suspects it, Betty.”
    “But you won’t tell him anything more?”
    “Don’t you trust your father?”
    “About anything else, yes. But you mustn’t tell him what I’m going to tell you.”
    “I’ll do my best, that’s all I can promise. Is Nick in trouble?”
    “Yes.” She hung her head, and her bright hair curtained her face. “I think he intends to kill himself. I don’t want to live, either, if he does.”
    “Did he say why?”
    “He’s done something terrible, he says.”
    “Like kill a man?”
    She flung her hair back and looked at me with blazing dislike. “How can you say such a thing?”
    “Sidney Harrow was shot on the waterfront last night. Did Nick mention him?”
    “Of course not.”
    “What
did
he say?”
    She was quiet for a minute, remembering. Then she recited slowly: “That he didn’t deserve to live. That he’d let me down, and let his parents down, and he couldn’t face any of us again. Then he said goodbye to me—a final goodbye.” A hiccup of grief shook her.
    “How long ago did he make the call?”
    She looked at the orange phone, and then at her watch. “About an hour. It seems like forever, though.”
    She moved vaguely past me to the other side of the room and took a framed photograph down from a wall bracket. I moved up behind her and looked at it over her shoulder. It was a larger copy of the photograph in my pocket, which I had found in the closet of Harrow’s motel room. I noticed now that in spite of his smiling mouth, the young man in the picture had somber eyes.
    “I take it that’s Nick,” I said.
    “Yes. It’s his graduation picture.”
    She replaced it on its bracket, with a faintly ritual air, and went to the front windows. I followed her. She was looking out across the street toward the closed white front of the Chalmers house.
    “I don’t know what to do.”
    “We’ve got to find him,” I said. “Did he say where he was calling from?”
    “No, he didn’t.”
    “Or anything else at all?”
    “I don’t remember anything else.”
    “Did he say what suicide method he had in mind?”
    She hid her face behind her hair again and answered in a hushed voice: “He didn’t say, this time.”
    “You mean he’s gone through this