The Goodbye Look Read Free Page A

spoiled.”
    I promised her to be tactful. Without any further persuasion she gave me Nick Chalmers’s phone number and his address in the university community. She wrote them on a slip of paper in a childish unformed hand. Then she glanced at her watch.
    “This has taken longer than I thought. My husband will be coming home for lunch.”
    She was flushed and brilliant-eyed, as if she was terminating an assignation. She hurried me out to the reception hall, where the dark-suited servant was standing with a blank respectful face. He opened the front door, and Mrs. Chalmers practically pushed me out.
    A middle-aged man in a fine tweed suit got out of a black Rolls Royce in front of the house. He crossed the courtyard with a kind of military precision, as if each step he took, each movement of his arms, was separately controlled by orders sent down from on high. The eyes in his lean brown face had a kind of bright blue innocence. The lower part of his face was conventionalized by a square-cut, clipped brown mustache.
    His pale gaze drifted past me. “What’s going on here, Irene?”
    “Nothing. I mean—” She drew in her breath. “This is the insurance man. He came about the burglary.”
    “You sent for him?”
    “Yes.” She gave me a shame-faced look. She was lying openly and asking me to go along with it.
    “That was rather a silly thing to do,” her husband said. “The Florentine box wasn’t insured, at least not to my knowledge.” He looked at me in polite inquiry.
    “No,” I said in a wooden voice.
    I was angry with the woman. She had wrecked my rapport with her, and any possible rapport with her husband.
    “Then we won’t keep you further,” he said to me. “I apologize for Mrs. Chalmers’s blunder. I’m sorry your time has been wasted.”
    Chalmers moved toward me smiling patiently under his mustache. I stepped to one side. He edged past me in the deep doorway, taking care not to brush against me. I was a commoner, and it might be catching.

chapter
3
    I stopped at a gas station on the way to the university, and called Nick’s apartment from an outdoor pay phone. A girl’s voice answered:
    “Nicholas Chalmers’s residence.”
    “Is Mr. Chalmers there?”
    “No he is not.” She spoke with a professional lilt. “This is his answering service.”
    “How can I get in touch with him? It’s important.”
    “I don’t know
where
he is.” An unprofessional note of anxiety had entered her voice. “Is this connected with his missing his exams?”
    “It may very well be,” I said in an open-ended way. “Are you a friend of Nick’s?”
    “Yes I am. Actually I’m not his answering service. I’m his fiancée.”
    “Miss Truttwell?”
    “Do I know you?”
    “Not yet. Are you in Nick’s apartment?”
    “Yes. Are you a counselor?”
    “Roughly speaking, yes. My name is Archer. Will you wait there in the apartment for me, Miss Truttwell? And if Nick turns up, will you ask him to wait for me, too?”
    She said she would. “I’ll do anything that will help Nick.” The implication seemed to be that he needed all the help he could get.
    The university stood on a mesa a few miles out of town, beyond the airport. From a distance its incomplete oval of new buildings looked ancient and mysterious as Stonehenge. It was the third week in January, and I gathered that the midyear exams were in progress. The students I saw as I circled the campus had a driven preoccupied air.
    I’d been there before, but not for several years. The student body had multiplied in the meantime, and the community attached to the campus had turned into a city of apartment buildings. It was strange, after Los Angeles, to drive through a city where everyone was young.
    Nick lived in a five-storied building which called itself the Cambridge Arms. I rode the self-service elevator to the fifth floor and found the door of his apartment, which was number 51.
    The girl opened the door before I knocked. Her eyes flickered when she