The Goodbye Look Read Online Free PDF Page A

me. I showed him an old Special Deputy badge I carried. He examined it closely, as if it was a curio.
    “Very well, I’ll go.” He turned and walked away, pausing at the corner of the building to call back: “I’m not going very far.”
    The woman turned to me, sighing. Her hair had been disarranged,and she was fixing it with nervous fingers. It was done in a fluffy doll-like fashion that didn’t go with her forty years or so. But in spite of Betty’s description of her, she wasn’t a bad-looking woman. She had a good figure under her blouse, and a handsome, heavy face.
    She also had a quality that bothered me, a certain doubt and dimness about the eyes, as if she had lost her way a long time ago.
    “That was good timing,” she said to me. “You never know what George is going to do.”
    “Or anybody else.”
    “Are you the security man around here?”
    “I’m filling in.”
    She looked me up and down, like a woman practicing to be a divorcee. “I owe you a drink. Do you like Scotch?”
    “On the rocks, please.”
    “I have some ice. My name is Jean Trask, by the way.”
    I told her my name. She took me into the living room of the cottage and left me there while she went into the kitchen. Around the walls of the room a series of English hunting prints followed some red-coated hunters and their hounds over hills and through valleys to the death of the fox.
    Ostensibly studying the prints, I circled the room to the open door of the bedroom and looked in. On the nearest of the two beds a woman’s blue weekend case lay open, and the gold box was in it. On its painted lid a man and a woman in skimpy antique clothes disported themselves.
    I was tempted to walk in and take the box, but John Truttwell wouldn’t have liked that. Even without him, I’d probably have let the thing lie. I was beginning to sense that the theft of the box was just a physical accident of the case. Any magic it possessed, black or white or gold, was soaked up from the people who handled it.
    But I took two steps into the bedroom and lifted the heavylid of the box. It was empty. I heard Mrs. Trask crossing the living room, and I retreated in her direction. She slammed the bedroom door.
    “We won’t be using that room.”
    “What a pity.”
    She gave me a startled look, as if she was unaware of her own rough candor. Then she shoved a lowball glass at me. “Here.”
    She went into the kitchen and returned with a dark-brown drink for herself. As soon as she had taken a swallow or two, her eyes turned moist and bright and her color rose. She was a drinker, I thought, and I was there essentially because she didn’t want to drink alone.
    She knocked her drink back in a hurry and made herself another, while I nursed mine. She sat down in an armchair facing me across a coffee table. I was almost enjoying myself. The room was large and tranquil, and through the open front door I could hear quail muttering and puttering.
    I had to spoil it. “I was admiring your gold box. Is it Florentine?”
    “I suppose it is,” she said, offhandedly.
    “Don’t you know? It looks quite valuable.”
    “Really? Are you an expert?”
    “No. I was thinking in terms of security. I wouldn’t leave it lying around like that.”
    “Thanks for your advice,” she said unthankfully. She was quiet for a minute, sipping her drink. “I didn’t mean to be rude just now; I have things on my mind.” She leaned toward me in a show of interest. “Have you been in the security business long?”
    “Over twenty years, counting my time with the police.”
    “You used to be a policeman?”
    “That’s right.”
    “Perhaps you can help me. I’m involved in a kind of nastySituation. I don’t feel up to explaining it all right now, but I hired a man named Sidney Harrow to come here with me. He claimed to be a private detective but it turned out his main experience is repossessing cars. He’s a fast man with a tow bar. Also he’s dangerous.” She finished her