The Lady in the Lake

The Lady in the Lake

A Philip Marlowe Novel

Raymond Chandler

The Lady in the Lake

Copyright 1943 by Raymond Chandler

All rights reserved

1

The Treloar Building was, and is, on Olive Street, near Sixth, on the west side. The sidewalk in front of it had been built of black and white rubber blocks. They were taking them up now to give to the government, and a hatless pale man with a face like a building superintendent was watching the work and looking as if it was breaking his heart.

I went past him through an arcade of specialty shops into a vast black and gold lobby. The Gillerlain Company was on the seventh floor, in front, behind swinging double plate glass doors bound in platinum. Their reception room had Chinese rugs, dull silver walls, angular but elaborate furniture, sharp shiny bits of abstract sculpture on pedestals and a tall display in a triangular showcase in the corner. On tiers and steps and islands and promontories of shining mirror-glass it seemed to contain every fancy bottle and box that had ever been designed. There were creams and powders and soaps and toilet waters for every season and every occasion. There were perfumes in tall thin bottles that looked as if a breath would blow them over and perfumes in little pastel phials tied with ducky satin bows, like the little girls at a dancing class. The cream of the crop seemed to be something very small and simple in a squat amber bottle. It was in the middle at eye height, had a lot of space to itself, and was labeled Gillerlain Regal, The Champagne of Perfumes. It was definitely the stuff to get. One drop of that in the hollow of your throat and the matched pink pearls started falling on you like summer rain.

A neat little blonde sat off in a far corner at a small PBX, behind a railing and well out of harm’s way. At a flat desk in line with the doors was a tall, lean, dark haired lovely whose name, according to the tilted embossed plaque on her desk, was Miss Adrienne Fromsett.

She wore a steel gray business suit and under the jacket a dark blue shirt and a man’s tie of lighter shade. The edges of the folded handkerchief in the breast pocket looked sharp enough to slice bread. She wore a linked bracelet and no other jewelry. Her dark hair was parted and fell in loose but not unstudied waves. She had a smooth ivory skin and rather severe eyebrows and large dark eyes that looked as if they might warm up at the right time and in the right place.

I put my plain card, the one without the tommy gun in the corner, on her desk and asked to see Mr. Derace Kingsley. She looked at the card and said: “Have you an appointment?”

“No appointment.”

“It is very difficult to see Mr. Kingsley without an appointment.”

That wasn’t anything I could argue about.

“What is the nature of your business, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Personal.”

“I see. Does Mr. Kingsley know you, Mr. Marlowe?”

“I don’t think so. He may have heard my name. You might say I’m from Lieutenant M’Gee.”

“And does Mr. Kingsley know Lieutenant M’Gee?”

She put my card beside a pile of freshly typed letterheads. She leaned back and put one arm on the desk and tapped lightly with a small gold pencil.

I grinned at her. The little blonde at the PBX cocked a shell-like ear and smiled a small fluffy smile. She looked playful and eager, but not quite sure of herself, like a new kitten in a house where they don’t care much about kittens.

“I’m hoping he does,” I said. “But maybe the best way to find out is to ask him.”

She initialed three letters rapidly, to keep from throwing her pen set at me. She spoke again without looking up.

“Mr. Kingsley is in conference. I’ll send your card in when I have an opportunity.”

I thanked her and went and sat in a chromium and leather chair that was a lot more comfortable than it looked. Time passed and silence descended on the scene. Nobody came in or went out. Miss Fromsett’s elegant hand moved over her papers and the muted peep of the kitten at the PBX was audible at moments, and the little click of the plugs going in and out.

I lit a cigarette and dragged a smoking stand beside the chair.

The minutes went by on tiptoe, with their fingers to their lips. I looked the place over. You can’t tell anything about an outfit like that. They might be making millions, and they might have the sheriff in the back room, with his chair tilted against the safe.

Half an hour and three or four cigarettes later a door opened behind Miss Fromsett’s desk and two men came out backwards laughing. A third man held the door for them and helped them laugh. They all shook hands heartily and the two men went across the office and out. The third man dropped the grin off his face and looked as if he had never grinned in his life. He was a tall bird in a gray suit and he didn’t want any nonsense.

“Any calls?” he asked in a sharp bossy voice.

Miss Fromsett said softly: “A Mr. Marlowe to see you. From Lieutenant M’Gee. His business is personal.”

“Never heard of him,” the tall man barked. He took my card, didn’t even glance at me, and went back into his office. His door closed on the pneumatic closer and made a sound like “phooey.” Miss Fromsett gave me a sweet sad smile and I gave it back to her in the form, of an obscene leer. I ate another cigarette and more time staggered by. I was getting to be very fond of the Gillerlain Company.

Ten minutes later the same door opened again and the big shot came out with his hat on and sneered that he was going to get a haircut. He started off across the Chinese rug in a swinging athletic stride, made about half the distance to the door and then did a sharp cutback and came over to Where I was sitting.

“You want to see me?” he barked.

He was about six feet two and not much of it soft. His eyes were stone gray with flecks of cold light in them. He filled a large size in smooth gray flannel with a narrow chalk stripe, and filled it elegantly. His manner said he was very tough to get along with.

I stood up. “If you’re Mr. Derace Kingsley.”

“Who the hell did you think I was?”

I let him have that trick and gave him my other card, the one with the business on it. He clamped it in his paw and scowled down at it.

“Who’s M’Gee?” he snapped.

“He’s just a fellow I know.”

“I’m fascinated,” he said, glancing back at Miss Fromsett. She liked it. She liked it very much. “Anything else you would care to let drop about him?”

“Well, they call him Violets M’Gee,” I said. “On account of he chews little throat pastilles that smell of violets. He’s a big man with soft silvery hair and a cute little mouth made to kiss babies with. When last seen he was wearing a neat blue suit, wide-toed brown shoes, gray homburg hat, and he was smoking opium in a short briar pipe.”

“I don’t like your manner,” Kingsley said in a voice you could have cracked a Brazil nut on.

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not selling it.”

He reared back as if I had hung a week-old mackerel under his nose. After a moment he turned his back on me and said over his shoulder: “I’ll give you exactly three minutes. God knows why.”

He burned the carpet back past Miss Fromsett’s desk to his door, yanked it open and let it swing to in my face. Miss Fromsett liked that too, but I thought there was a little sly laughter behind her eyes now.

2

The private office was everything a private office should be. It was long and dim and quiet and air-conditioned and its windows were shut and its gray venetian blinds half-closed to keep out the July glare. Gray drapes matched the gray carpeting. There was a large black and silver safe in the corner and a low row of low filing cases that exactly matched it. On the wall there was a huge tinted photograph of an elderly party with a chiseled beak and whiskers and a wing collar. The Adam’s apple that edged through his wing collar looked harder than most people’s chins. The plate underneath the photograph read: Mr. Matthew Gillerlain 1860-1934.

Derace Kingsley marched briskly behind about eight hundred dollars worth of executive desk and planted his backside in a tall leather chair. He reached himself a panatela out of a copper and mahogany box and trimmed it and lit it with a fat copper desk lighter. He took his time about it. It didn’t matter about my time. When he had finished this, he leaned back and blew a little smoke and said: “I’m a business man. I don’t fool around. You’re a licensed detective your card says. Show me something to prove it.”

I got my wallet out and handed him things to prove it. He looked at them and threw them back across the desk. The celluloid holder with the photostat license in it fell to the floor. He didn’t bother to apologize.

“I don’t know M’Gee,” he said. “I know Sheriff Petersen. I asked for the name of a reliable man to do a job. I suppose you are the man.”

“M’Gee is in the Hollywood sub-station of the sheriff’s office,” I said. “You can check on that.”

“Not necessary. I guess you might do, but don’t get flip with me. And remember when I hire a man he’s my man. He does exactly what I tell him and he keeps his mouth shut. Or he goes out fast. Is that clear? I hope I’m not too tough for you.”

“Why not leave that an open question?” I said.

He frowned. He said sharply: “What do you charge?”

“Twenty-five a day and expenses. Eight cents a mile for my car.”

“Absurd,” he said. “Far too much. Fifteen a day flat. That’s plenty. I’ll pay the mileage, within reason, the way things are now. But no joy-riding.”

I blew a little gray cloud of cigarette smoke and fanned it with my hand. I said nothing. He seemed a little surprised that I said nothing.

He leaned over the-desk and pointed with his cigar. “I haven’t hired you yet,” he said, “but if I do, the job is absolutely confidential. No talking it over with your cop friends. Is that understood?”

“Just what do you want done, Mr. Kingsley?”

“What do you care? You do all kinds of detective work, don’t you?”

“Not all kinds. Only the fairly honest kinds.”

He stared at me level-eyed, his jaws tight. His gray eyes had an opaque look.

“For one thing I don’t do divorce business,” I said. “And I get a hundred down as a retainer—from strangers.”

“Well, well,” he said, in a voice suddenly soft. “Well, well.”

“And as for your being too tough for me,” I said, “most of the clients start out either by weeping down my shirt or bawling me out to show who’s boss. But usually they end up very reasonable—if they’re still alive.”

“Well, well,” he said again, in the same soft voice, and went on staring at me. “Do you lose very many of them? he asked.

“Not if they treat me right,” I said.

“Have a cigar,” he said.

I took a cigar and put it in my pocket.

“I want you to find my wife,” he said. “She’s been missing for a month.”

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll find your wife.”

He patted his desk with both hands. He stared at me solidly. “I think you will at that,” he said. Then he grinned. “I haven’t been called down like that in four years,” he said.

I didn’t say anything.

“Damn it all,” he said, “I liked it. I liked it fine.” He ran a hand through his thick dark hair. “She’s been gone a whole month,” he said. “From a cabin we have in the mountains. Near Puma Point. Do you know Puma Point?”

I said I knew Puma Point.

“Our place is three miles from the village,” he said, “partly over a private road. It’s on a private lake. Little Fawn Lake. There’s a dam three of us put up to improve the property. I own the tract with two other men. It’s quite large, but undeveloped and won’t be developed now for some time, of course. My friends have cabins, I have a cabin and a man named Bill Chess lives with his wife in another cabin rent-free and looks after the place. He’s a disabled veteran with a pension. That’s all there is up there. My wife went up the middle of May, came down twice for weekends, was due down the 12^th of June for a party and never showed up. I haven’t seen her since.”

“What have you done about it?” I asked.

“Nothing. Not a thing. I haven’t even been up there.” He waited, wanting me to ask why.

I said: “Why?”

He pushed his chair back to get a locked drawer open. He took out a folded paper and passed it over; I unfolded it and saw it was a Postal Telegraph form. The wire had been filed at El Paso on June 14^th at 9:19 A.M. It was addressed to Derace Kingsley, 965 Carson Drive, Beverly Hills, and read: “AM CROSSING TO GET MEXICAN DIVORCE . STOP WILL MARRY CHRIS STOP GOOD LUCK AND GOODBYE CRYSTAL.”

I put this down on my side of the desk and he was handing me a large and very clear snapshot on glazed paper which showed a man and a woman sitting on the sand under a beach umbrella. The man wore trunks and the woman what looked like a very daring white sharkskin bathing suit. She was a slim blonde, young and shapely and smiling. The man was a hefty dark handsome lad with fine shoulders and legs, sleek dark hair and white teeth. Six feet of a standard type of home wrecker. Arms to hold you close and all his brains in his face. He was holding a pair of dark glasses in his hand and smiling at the camera with a practiced and easy smile.

“That’s Crystal,” Kingsley said, “and that’s Chris Layery. She can have him and he can have her and to hell with them both.”

I put the photo down on the telegram. “All right, what’s the catch?” I asked him.

“There’s no telephone up there,” he said, “and there was nothing important about the affair she was coming down for. So I got the wire before I gave much thought to it. The wire surprised me only mildly. Crystal and I have been washed up for years. She lives her life and I live mine. She has her own money and plenty of it. About twenty thousand a year from a family holding corporation that owns valuable oil leases in Texas. She plays around and I knew Lavery was one of her playmates. I might have been a little surprised that she would actually marry him, because the man is nothing but a professional chaser. But the picture looked all right so far, you understand?”

“And then?”

“Nothing for two weeks. Then the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino got in touch with me and said a Packard Clipper registered to Crystal Grace Kingsley at my address was unclaimed in their garage and what about it. I told them to keep it and I sent them a check. There was nothing much in that either. I figured she was still out of the state and that if they had gone in a car at all, they had gone in Lavery’s car. The day before yesterday, however, I met Lavery in front of the Athletic Club down on the corner here. He said he didn’t know where Crystal was.”

Kingsley gave me a quick look and reached a bottle and two tinted glasses up on the desk. He poured a couple of drinks and pushed one over. He held his against the light and said slowly: “Lavery said he hadn’t gone away with her, hadn’t seen her in two months, hadn’t had any communications with her of any kind.”

I said, “You believed him?”

He nodded, frowning, and drank his drink and pushed the glass to one side. I tasted mine. It was Scotch. Not very good Scotch.

“If I believed him,” Kingsley said,. “—and I was probably wrong to do it—it wasn’t because he’s a fellow you have to believe. Far from it. It’s because he’s a no good son of a bitch who thinks it is smart to lay his friends wives and brag about it. I feel he would have been tickled pink to stick it into me and break it off that he had got my wife to run away with him and leave me flat. I know these tomcats and I know this one too well. He rode a route for us for a while and he was in trouble all the time. He couldn’t keep his hands off the office help. And apart from all that there was this wire from El Paso and I told him about it and why would he think it worth while to lie about it?”

“She might have tossed him out on his can,” I said. “That would have hurt him in his deep place—his Casanova complex.”

Kingsley brightened up a little, but not very much. He shook his head. “I still more than half way believe him,” he said. “You’ll have to prove me wrong. That’s part of why I wanted you. But there’s another and very worrying angle. I have a good job here, but a job is all it is. I can’t stand scandal. I’d be out of here in a hurry if my wife got mixed up with the police.”

“Police?”

“Among her other activities,” Kingsley said grimly, “my wife occasionally finds time to lift things in department stores. I think it’s just a sort of delusion of grandeur she gets when she has been hitting the bottle too hard, but it happens, and we have had some pretty nasty scenes in managers’ offices. So far I’ve been able to keep them from filing charges, but if something like that happened in a strange city where nobody knew her—” He lifted his hands and let them fall with a smack on the desk— “well, it might be a prison matter, mightn’t it?”

“Has she ever been fingerprinted?”

“She has never been arrested,” he said.

“That’s not what I mean. Sometimes in large department stores they make it a condition of dropping shoplifting charges that you give them your prints. It scares the amateurs and builds up a file of kleptomaniacs in their protective association. When the prints come in a certain number of times they call time on you.”

“Nothing like that has happened to my knowledge,” he said.

“Well, I think we might almost throw the shoplifting angle out of this for the time being,” I said. “If she got arrested, she would get searched. Even if the cops let her use a Jane Doe name on the police blotter, they would be likely to get in touch with you. Also she would start yelling for help when she found herself in a jam.” I tapped the blue and white telegraph form. “And this is a month old. If what you are thinking about happened around that time, the case would have been settled by now. If it was a first offense, she would get off with a scolding and a suspended sentence.”

He poured himself another drink to help him with his worrying.

“You’re making me feel better,” he said.

“There are too many other things that could have happened,” I said. “That she did go away with Lavery and they split up. That she went away with some other man and the wire is a gag. That she went away alone or with a woman. That she drank herself over the edge and is holed up in some private sanatorium taking a cure. That she got into some jam we have no idea of. That she met with foul play.”

“Good God, don’t say that,” Kingsley exclaimed.

“Why not? You’ve got to consider it. I get a very vague idea of Mrs. Kingsley—that she is young, pretty, reckless, and wild. That she drinks and does dangerous things when she drinks. That she is a sucker for the men and might take up with a stranger who might turn out to be a crook. Does that fit?”

He nodded. “Every word of it.”

“How much money would she have with her?”

“She liked to carry enough. She has her own bank and her own bank account. She could have any amount of money.”

“Any children?”

“No children.”

“Do you have the management of her affairs?”

He shook his head. “She hasn’t any—excepting depositing checks and drawing out money and spending it. She never invests a nickel And her money certainly never does me any good, if that’s what you are thinking.” He paused and then said: “Don’t think I haven’t tried. I’m human and it’s not fun to watch twenty thousand a year go down the drain and nothing to show for it but hangovers and boy friends of the class of Chris Lavery.”

“How are you with her bank? Could you get a detail of the checks she has drawn for the past couple of months?”

“They wouldn’t tell me. I tried to get some information of the sort once, when I had an idea she was being blackmailed. All I got was ice.”

“We can get it,” I said, “and we may have to. It will mean going to the Missing Persons Bureau. You wouldn’t like that?”

“If I had liked that, I wouldn’t have called you,” he said.

I nodded, gathered my exhibits together and put them away in my pockets. “There are more angles to this than I can even see now,” I said, “but I’ll start by talking to Lavery and then taking a run up to Little Fawn Lake and asking questions there. I’ll need Lavery’s address and a note to your man in charge at the mountain place.”

He got a letterhead out of his desk and wrote and passed it over. I read: “Dear Bill: This will introduce Mr. Philip Marlowe who wishes to look over the property. Please show him my cabin and assist him in every way. Yrs. Derace Kingsley.”

I folded this up and put it in the envelope he had addressed while I was reading it. “How about the other cabins up there?” I asked.

“Nobody up this year so far. One man’s in government service in Washington and the other is at Fort Leavenworth. Their wives are with them.”

“Now Lavery’s address,” I said.

He looked at a point well above the top of my head. “In Bay City. I could find the house but I forget the address. Miss Fromsett can give it to you, I think. She needn’t know why you want it. She probably will. And you want a hundred dollars, you said.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “That’s just something I said when you were tramping on me.”

He grinned. I stood up and hesitated by the desk looking at him. After a moment I said: “You’re not holding anything back, are you—anything important?”

He looked at his thumb. “No. I’m not holding anything back.

I’m worried and I want to know where she is. I’m damn worried.

If you get anything at all, call me any time, day or night.”

I said I would do that, and we shook hands and I went back down the long cool office and out to where Miss Fromsett sat elegantly at her desk.

“Mr. Kingsley thinks you can give me Chris Lavery’s address,” I told her and watched her face.

She reached very slowly for a brown leather address book and turned the leaves. Her voice was tight and cold when she spoke.

“The address we have is 623 Altair Street, in Bay City. Telephone Bay City 12523. Mr. Lavery has not been with us for more than a year. He may have moved.”

I thanked her and went on to the door. From there I glanced back at her. She was sitting very still, with her hands clasped on her desk, staring into space. A couple of red spots burned in her cheeks. Her eyes were remote and bitter.

I got the impression that Mr. Chris Lavery was not a pleasant thought to her.

3

Altair Street lay on the edge of the V forming the inner end of a deep canyon. To the north was the cool blue sweep of the bay out to the point above Malibu. To the south the beach town of Bay City was spread out on a bluff above the coast highway.

It was a short street, not more than three or four blocks, and ended in a tall iron fence enclosing a large estate. Beyond the gilded spikes of the fence I could see trees and shrubs and a glimpse of lawn and part of a curving driveway, but the house was out of sight. On the inland side of Altair Street the houses were well kept and fairly large, but the few scattered bungalows on the edge of the canyon were nothing much. In the short half block ended by the iron fence were only two houses, on opposite sides of the street and almost directly across from each other. The smaller was number 623.

I drove past it, turned the car in the paved half circle at the end, of the street and came back to park in front of the lot next to Lavery’s place. His house was built downwards, one of those clinging vine effects, with the front door a little below street level, the patio on the roof, the bedroom in the basement, and a garage like the corner pocket on a pool table. A crimson bougainvillea was rustling against the front wall and the flat stones of the front walk were edged with Korean moss. The door was narrow, grilled and topped by a lancet arch. Below the grill there was an iron knocker. I hammered on it.

Nothing happened. I pushed the bell at the side of the door and heard it ring inside not very far off and waited and nothing happened. I worked on the knocker again. Still nothing. I went back up the walk and along to the garage and lifted the door far enough to see that a car with white side-walled tires was inside. I went back to the front door.

A neat black Cadillac coupe came out of the garage across the way, backed, turned and came along past Lavery’s house, slowed, and a thin man in dark glasses looked at me sharply, as if I hadn’t any business to be there. I gave him my steely glare and he went on his way.

I went down Lavery’s walk again and did some more hammering on his knocker. This time I got results. The Judas window opened and I was looking at a handsome bright-eyed number through the bars of a grill.

“You make a hell of a lot of noise,” a voice said.

“Mr. Lavery?”

He said be was Mr. Lavery and what about it. I poked a card through the grill. A large brown hand took the card. The bright brown eyes came back and the voice said: “So sorry. Not needing any detectives today please.”

“I’m working for Derace Kingsley.”

“The hell with both of you,” he said, and banged the Judas window.

I leaned on the bell beside the door and got a cigarette out with my free hand and had just struck the match on the woodwork beside the door when it was yanked open and a big guy in bathing trunks, beach sandals, and a white terrycloth bathrobe started to come out at me.

I took my thumb off the bell and grinned at him. “What’s the matter?” I asked him. “Scared?”

“Ring that bell again,” he said, “and I’ll throw you clear across the street.”

“Don’t be childish,” I told him. “You know perfectly well I’m going to talk to you and you’re going to talk to me.”

I got the blue and white telegram out of my pocket and held it in front of his bright brown eyes. He read it morosely, chewed his lip and growled: “Oh for Chrissake, come on in then.”

He held the door wide and I went in past him, into a dim pleasant room with an apricot Chinese rug that looked expensive, deep-sided chairs, a number of white drum lamps, a big Capehart in the corner, a long and very wide davenport in pale tan mohair shot with dark brown, and a fireplace with a copper screen and an over mantel in white wood. A fire was laid behind the screen and partly masked by a large spray of manzanita bloom. The bloom was turning yellow in places, but was still pretty. There was a bottle of Vat 69 and glasses on a tray and a copper ice bucket on a low round burl walnut table with a glass top. The room went clear to the back of the house and ended in a flat arch through which showed three narrow windows and the top few feet of the white iron railing of the staircase going down.

Lavery swung the door shut and sat on the davenport. He grabbed a cigarette out of a hammered silver box and lit it and looked at me irritably. I sat down opposite him and looked him over. He had everything in the way of good looks the snapshot had indicated. He had a terrific torso and magnificent thighs. His eyes were chestnut brown and the whites of them slightly gray-white. His hair was rather long and curled a little over his temples. His brown skin showed no signs of dissipation. He was a nice piece of beef, but to me that was all he was. I could understand that women would think he was something to yell for.

“Why not tell us where she is?” I said. “We’ll find out eventually anyway and if you can tell us now, we won’t be bothering you.”

“It would take more than a private dick to bother me,” he said.

“No, it wouldn’t. A private dick can bother anybody. He’s persistent and used to snubs. He’s paid for his time and he would just as soon use it to bother you as any other way.”

“Look,” he said, leaning forward and pointing his cigarette at me. “I know what that wire says, but it’s the bunk. I didn’t go to El Paso with Crystal Kingsley. I haven’t seen her in a long time—long before the date of that wire. I haven’t had any contact with her. I told Kingsley that.”

“He didn’t have to believe you.”

“Why would I lie to him?” He looked surprised.

“Why wouldn’t you?”

“Look,” he said earnestly, “it might seem so to you, but you don’t know her. Kingsley has no strings on her. If he doesn’t like the way she behaves he has a remedy. These proprietary husbands make me sick.”

“If you didn’t go to El Paso with her,” I said, “why did she send this telegram?”

“I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“You can do better than that,” I said. I pointed to the spray of manzanita in the fireplace. “You pick that up at Little Fawn Lake?”

“The hills around here are full of manzanita,” he said contemptuously.

“It doesn’t bloom like that down here.”

He laughed. “I was up there the third week in May. If you have to know. I suppose you can find out. That’s the last time I saw her.”

“You didn’t have any idea of marrying her?”

He blew smoke and said through it: “I’ve thought of it, yes. She has money. Money is always useful. But it would be too tough a way to make it.”

I nodded, but didn’t say anything. He looked at the manzanita spray in the fireplace and leaned back to blow smoke in the air and show me the strong brown line of his throat. After a moment, when I still didn’t say anything, he began to get restless. He glanced down at the card I had given him and said: “So you hire yourself out to dig up dirt? Doing well at it?”

“Nothing to brag about. A dollar here, a dollar there.”

“And all of them pretty slimy,” he said.

“Look, Mr. Lavery, we don’t have to get into a fight. Kingsley thinks you know where his wife is, but won’t tell him. Either out of meanness or motives of delicacy.”

“Which way would he like it?” the handsome brown faced man sneered.

“He doesn’t care, as long as he gets the information. He doesn’t care a great deal what you and she do together or where you go or whether she divorces him or not. He just wants to feel sure that everything is all right and that she isn’t in trouble of any kind.”

Lavery looked interested. “Trouble? What kind of trouble?” He licked the word around on his brown lips, tasting it.

“Maybe you won’t know the kind of trouble he is thinking of.”

“Tell me,” he pleaded sarcastically. “I’d just love to hear about some kind of trouble I didn’t know about.”

“You’re doing fine,” I told him. “No time to talk business, but always time for a wisecrack. If you think we might try to get a hook into you because you crossed a state line with her, forget it.”

“Go climb up your thumb, wise guy. You’d have to prove I paid the freight, or it wouldn’t mean anything.”

“This wire has to mean something,” I said stubbornly. It seemed to me that I had said it before, several times.

“It’s probably just a gag. She’s full of little tricks like that. All of them silly, and some of them vicious.”

“I don’t see any point in this one.”

He flicked cigarette ash carefully at the glass top table. He gave me a quick up from under look and immediately looked away.

“I stood her up,” he said slowly. “It might be her idea of a way to get back at me. I was supposed to run up there one weekend. I didn’t go. I was—sick of her.”

I said: “Uh-huh,” and gave him a long steady stare. “I don’t like that so well. I’d like it better if you did go to El Paso with her and had a fight and split up. Could you tell it that way?”

He flushed solidly behind the sunburn.

“God damn it,” he said, “I told you I didn’t go anywhere with her. Not anywhere. Can’t you remember that?”

“I’ll remember it when I believe it.”

He leaned over to snub out his cigarette. He stood up with an easy movement, not hurried at all, pulled the belt of his robe tight, and moved out to the end of the davenport.

“All right,” he said in a clear tight voice. “Out you go. Take the air. I’ve had enough of your third-degree tripe. You’re wasting my time and your own—if it’s worth anything.”

I stood up and grinned at him. “Not a lot, but for what it’s worth I’m being paid for it. It couldn’t be, for instance, that you ran into a little unpleasantness in some department store—say at the stocking or jewelry counter.”

He looked at me very carefully, drawing his eyebrows down at the corners and making his mouth small.

“I don’t get it,” he said, but there was thought behind his voice.

“That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. “And thanks for listening. By the way, what line of business are you in—since you left Kingsley?”

“What the hell business is it of yours?”

“None. But of course I can always find out,” I said, and moved a little way towards the door, not very far.

“At the moment I’m not doing anything,” he said coldly. “I expect a commission in the navy almost any day.”

“You ought to do well at that,” I said.

“Yeah. So long, snooper. And don’t bother to come back. I won’t be at home.”

I went over to the door and pulled it open. It stuck on the lower sill, from the beach moisture. When I had it open, I looked back at him. He was standing there narrow-eyed, full of muted thunder.

“I may have to come back,” I said. “But it won’t be just to swap gags. It will be because I find something out that needs talking over.”

“So you still think I’m lying,” he said savagely.

“I think you have something on your mind. I’ve looked at too many faces not to know. It may not be any of my business. If it is, you’re likely to have to throw me out again.”

“A pleasure,” he said. “And next time bring somebody to drive you home. In case you land on your fanny and knock your brains out.”

Then without any rhyme or reason that I could see, he spat on the rug in front of his feet.

It jarred me. It was like watching the veneer peel off and leave a tough kid in an alley. Or like hearing an apparently refined woman start expressing herself in four letter words.

“So long, beautiful hunk,” I said, and left him standing there. I closed the door, had to jerk it to get it shut, and went up the path to the street. I stood on the sidewalk looking at the house across the way.

4

It was a wide shallow house with rose stucco wails faded out to a pleasant pastel shade and trimmed with dull green at the window frames. The roof was of green tiles, round rough ones. There was a deeply inset front door framed in a mosaic of multi-colored pieces of tiling and a small flower garden in front, behind a low stucco wall topped by an iron railing which the beach moisture had begun to corrode. Outside the wall to the left was the three-car garage, with a door opening inside the yard and a concrete path going from there to a side door of the house.

Set into the gatepost was a bronze tablet which read: “Albert S. Almore, M.D.”

While I was standing there staring across the street, the black Cadillac I had already seen came purring around the corner and then down the block. It slowed and started to sweep outwards to get turning space to go into the garage, decided my car was in the way of that, and went on to the end of the road and turned in the widened-out space in front of the ornamental iron railing. It came back slowly and went into the empty third of the garage across the way.

The thin man in sunglasses went along the sidewalk to the house, carrying a double-handled doctor’s bag. Halfway along he slowed down to stare across at me. I went along towards my car. At the house he used a key and as he opened the door he looked across at me again.

I got into the Chrysler and sat there smoking and trying to make up my mind whether it was worthwhile hiring somebody to pull a tail on Lavery. I decided it wasn’t, not the way things looked so far.

Curtains moved at a lower window close to the side door Dr. Almore had gone in at. A thin hand held them aside and I caught the glint of light on glasses. They were held aside for quite some time, before they fell together again.

I looked along the street at Lavery’s house. From this angle I could see that his service porch gave on a flight of painted wooden steps to a sloping concrete walk and a flight of concrete steps ending in the paved alley below.

I looked across at Dr. Almore’s house again, wondering idly if he knew Lavery and how well. He probably knew him, since theirs were the only two houses in the block. But being a doctor, he wouldn’t tell me anything about him. As I looked, the curtains which had been lifted apart were now completely drawn aside.

The middle segment of the triple window they had masked had no screen. Behind it, Dr. Almore stood staring across my way, with a sharp frown on his thin face. I shook cigarette ash out of the window and he turned abruptly and sat down at a desk. His double-handled bag was on the desk in front of him. He sat rigidly, drumming on the desk beside the bag. His hand reached for the telephone, touched it and came away again. He lit a cigarette and shook the match violently, then strode to the window and stared out at me some more.

This was interesting, if at all, only because he was a doctor. Doctors, as a rule, are the least curious of men. While they are still interns they hear enough secrets to last them a lifetime. Dr. Almore seemed interested in me. More than interested, bothered.

I reached down to turn the ignition key, then Lavery’s front door opened and I took my hand away and leaned back again. Lavery came briskly up the walk of his house, shot a glance down the street and turned to go into his garage. He was dressed as I had seen him. He had a rough towel and a steamer rug over his arm. I heard the garage door lift up, then the car door open and shut, then the grind and cough of the starting car. It backed up the steep incline to the street, white steamy exhaust pouring from its rear end. It was a cute little blue convertible, with the top folded down and Lavery’s sleek dark head just rising above it. He was now wearing a natty pair of sun-goggles with very wide white side bows. The convertible swooped off down the block and danced around the corner.

There was nothing in that for me. Mr. Christopher Lavery was bound for the edge of the broad Pacific, to lie in the sun and let the girls see what they didn’t necessarily have to go on missing.

I gave my attention back to Dr. Almore. He was on the telephone now, not talking, holding it to his ear, smoking and waiting. Then he leaned forward as you do when the voice comes back, listened, hung up and wrote something on a pad in front of him. Then a heavy book with yellow sides appeared on his desk and he opened it just about in the middle. While he was doing this he gave one quick look out of the window, straight at the Chrysler.

He found his place in the book, leaned down over it and quick puffs of smoke appeared in the air over the pages. He wrote something else, put the book away, and grabbed the telephone again. He dialed, waited, began to speak quickly pushing his head down and making gestures in the air with his cigarette.

He finished his call and hung up. He leaned back and sat there brooding, staring down at his desk, but not forgetting to look out of the window every half minute. He was waiting, and I waited with him, for no reason at all. Doctors make many phone calls, talk to many people. Doctors look out of their front windows, doctors frown, doctors show nervousness, doctors have things on their mind and show the strain. Doctors are just people, born to sorrow, fighting the long grim fight like the rest of us.

But there was something about the way this one behaved that intrigued me. I looked at my watch, decided it was time to get something to eat, lit another cigarette and didn’t move.

It took about five minutes. Then a green sedan whisked around the corner and bore down the block. It coasted to a stop in front of Dr. Almore’s house and its tall buggy whip aerial quivered. A big man with dusty blond hair got out and went up to Dr. Almore’s front door. He rang the bell and leaned down to strike a match on the step. His head came around and he stared across the street exactly at where I was sitting.

The door opened and he went into the house. An invisible hand gathered the curtains at Dr. Almore’s study window and blanked the room. I sat there and stared at the sun darkened lining of the curtains. More time trickled by.

The front door opened again and the big man loafed casually down the steps and through the gate. He snapped his cigarette end off into the distance and rumpled his hair. He shrugged once, pinched the end of his chin, and walked diagonally across the street. His steps in the quiet were leisurely and distinct. Dr. Almore’s curtains moved apart again behind him. Dr. Almore stood in his window and watched.

A large freckled hand appeared on the sill of the car door at my elbow. A large face, deeply-lined, hung above it.

The man had eyes of metallic blue. He looked at me solidly and spoke in a deep harsh voice.

“Waiting for somebody?” he asked.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Am I?”

“I’ll ask the questions.”

“Well, I’ll be damned,” I said. “So that’s the answer to the pantomime.”

“What pantomime?” He gave me a hard level unfriendly stare from his very blue eyes.

I pointed across the street with my cigarette. “Nervous Nellie and the telephone. Calling the cops, after first getting my name from the Auto Club, probably, then looking it up in the city directory. What goes on?”

“Let me see your driver’s license.”

I gave him back his stare. “You fellows ever flash a buzzer—or is acting tough all the identification you need?”

“If I have to get tough, fellow, you’ll know it.”

I leaned down and turned my ignition key and pressed the starter. The motor caught and idled down.

“Cut that motor,” he said savagely, and put his foot on the running-board .

I cut the motor again and leaned back and looked at him.

“God damn it,” he said, “do you want me to drag you out of there and bounce you on the pavement?”

I got my wallet out and handed it to him. He drew the celluloid pocket out and looked at my driver’s license, then turned the pocket over and looked at the photostat of my other license on the back. He rammed it contemptuously back into the wallet and handed me the wallet: I put it away. His hand dipped and came up with a blue and gold police badge.

“Degarmo, detective—lieutenant,” he said in his heavy brutal voice.

“Pleased to meet you, lieutenant.”

“Skip it. Now tell why you’re down here casing Almore’s place.”

“I’m not casing Almore’s place, as you put it, lieutenant. I never heard of Dr. Almore and I don’t know of any reason why I should want to case his house.”

He turned his head to spit. I was meeting the spitting boys today.

“What’s your grift then? We don’t like peepers down here. We don’t have one in town.”

“Is that so?”

“Yeah, that’s so. So come on, talk it up. Unless you want to ride down to the clubhouse and sweat it out under the bright lights.”

I didn’t answer him.

“Her folks hire you?” he asked suddenly.

I shook my head.

“The last boy that tried it ended up on the road gang, sweetheart.”

“I bet it’s good,” I said, “if only I could guess. Tried what?”

“Tried to put the bite on him,” he said thinly.

“Too bad I don’t know how,” I said. “He looks like an easy man to bite.”

“That line of talk don’t buy you anything,” he said.

“All right,” I said. “Let’s put it this way. I don’t know Dr. Almore, never heard of him, and I’m not interested in him. I’m down here visiting a friend and looking at the view. If I’m doing anything else, it doesn’t happen to be any of your business. If you don’t like that, the best thing to do is take it down to headquarters and see the day captain.”

He moved a foot heavily on the running-board and looked doubtful. “Straight goods?” he asked slowly.

“Straight goods.”

“Aw hell, the guy’s screwy,” he said suddenly and looked back over his shoulder at the house. “He ought to see a doctor.” He laughed, without any amusement in the laugh. He took his foot off my running-board and rumpled his wiry hair.

“Go on—beat it,” he said. “Stay off our reservation, and you won’t make any enemies.”

I pressed the starter again. When the motor was idling gently I said: “How’s Al Norgaard these days?”

He stared at me. “You know Al?”

“Yeah. He and I worked on a case down here a couple of years ago—when Wax was chief of police.”

“Al’s in the military police. I wish I was,” he said bitterly. He started to walk away and then swung sharply on his heel. “Go on, beat it before I change my mind,” he snapped.

He walked heavily across the street and through Dr. Almore’s front gate again.

I let the clutch in and drove away. On the way back to the city, I listened to my thoughts. They moved fitfully in and out, like Dr. Almore’s thin nervous hands pulling at the edges of his curtains.

Back in Los Angeles I ate lunch and went up to my office in the Cahuenga Building to see what mail there was. I called Kingsley from there.

“I saw Lavery,” I told him. “He told me just enough dirt to sound frank. I tried to needle him a, little, but nothing came of it. I still like the idea that they quarreled and split up and that he hopes to fix it up with her yet.”

“Then he must know where she is,” Kingsley said.

“He might, but it doesn’t follow. By the way a rather curious thing happened to me on Lavery’s street. There are only two houses. The other belongs to a Dr. Almore.” I told him briefly about the rather curious thing.

He was silent for a moment at the end and then he said: “Is this Dr. Albert Almore?”

“Yes?”

“He was Crystal’s doctor for a time. He came to the house several times when she was—well, when she had been overdrinking. I thought him a little too quick with a hypodermic needle. His wife—let me see, there was something about his wife. Oh yes, she committed suicide.”

I said, “When?”

“I don’t remember. Quite a long time ago. I never knew them socially. What are you going to do now?”

I told him I was going up to Puma Lake, although it was a little late in the day to start.

He said I would have plenty of time and that they had an hour more daylight in the mountains.

I said that was fine and we hung up.

5

San Bernardino baked and shimmered in the afternoon heat. The air was hot enough to blister my tongue. I drove through it gasping, stopped long enough to buy a pint of liquor in case I fainted before I got to the mountains, and started up the long grade to Crestline. In fifteen miles the road climbed five thousand feet, but even then it was far from cool. Thirty miles of mountain driving brought me to the tall pines and a place called Bubbling Springs. It had a clapboard store and a gas pump, but it felt like paradise. From there on it was cool all the way.

The Puma Lake dam had an armed sentry at each end and one in the middle. The first one I came to had me close all the windows of the car before crossing the dam. About a hundred yards away from the dam a rope with cork floats barred the pleasure boats from coming any closer. Beyond these details the war did not seem to have done anything much to Puma Lake.

Canoes paddled about on the blue water and rowboats with outboard motors put-putted and speedboats showing off like fresh kids made wide swathes of foam and turned on a dime and girls in them shrieked and dragged their hands in the water. Jounced around in the wake of the speedboats people who had paid two dollars for a fishing license were trying to get a dime of it back in tired-tasting fish.

The road skimmed along a high granite outcrop and dropped to meadows of coarse grass in which grew what was left of the wild irises and white and purple lupine and bugle flowers and columbine and penny-royal and desert paint brush. Tall yellow pines probed at the clear blue sky. The road dropped again to lake level and the landscape began to be full of girls in gaudy slacks and snoods and peasant handkerchiefs and rat rolls and fat soled sandals and fat white thighs. People on bicycles wobbled cautiously over the highway and now and then an anxious-looking bird thumped past on a power scooter.

A mile from the village the highway was joined by another lesser road which curved back into the mountains. A rough wooden sign under the highway sign said: Little Fawn Lake 1¾ miles. I took it. Scattered cabins were perched along the slopes for the first mile and then nothing. Presently another very narrow road debouched from this one and another rough wooden sign said: Little Fawn Lake. Private Road. No Trespassing.

I turned the Chrysler into this and crawled carefully around huge bare granite rocks and past a little waterfall and through a maze of black oak trees and ironwood and manzanita and silence. A bluejay squawked on a branch and a squirrel scolded at me and beat one paw angrily on the pinecone it was holding. A scarlet-topped woodpecker stopped probing in the dark long enough to look at me with one beady eye and then dodge behind the tree trunk to look at me with the other one. I came to a five-barred gate and another sign.

Beyond the gate the road wound for a couple of hundred yards through trees and then suddenly below me was a small oval lake deep in trees and rocks and wild grass, like a drop of dew caught in a curled leaf. At the near end of it was a rough concrete dam with a rope handrail across the top and an old millwheel at the side. Near that stood a small cabin of native pine with the bark on it.

Across the lake the long way by the road and the short way by the top of the dam a large redwood cabin overhung the water and farther along, each well separated from the others, were two others cabins. All three were shut up and quiet, with drawn curtains. The big one had orange-yellow venetian blinds and a twelve-paned window facing on the lake.

At the far end of the lake from the dam was what looked like a small pier and a band pavilion. A warped wooden sign on it was painted in large white letters: Camp Kilkare. I couldn’t see any sense in that in these surroundings, so I got out of the car and started down towards the nearest cabin. Somewhere behind it an axe thudded.

I pounded on the cabin door. The axe stopped. A man’s voice yelled from somewhere. I sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. Steps came around the corner of the cabin, uneven steps. A man with a harsh face and a swarthy skin came into view carrying a double-bitted axe.

He was heavily-built and not very tall and he limped as he walked, giving his right leg a little kick out with each step and swinging the foot in a shallow arc. He had a dark unshaven chin and steady blue eyes and grizzled hair that curled over his ears and needed cutting badly. He wore blue denim pants and a blue shirt open on a brown muscular neck. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He spoke in a tight tough city voice.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Bill Chess?”

“That’s me.”

I stood up and got Kingsley’s note of introduction out of my pocket and handed it to him. He squinted at the note, then clumped into the cabin and came back with glasses perched on his nose. He read the note carefully and then again. He put it in his shirt pocket, buttoned the flap of his pocket, and put his hand out.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlowe.”

We shook hands. He had a hand like a wood rasp.

“You want to see Kingsley’s cabin, huh? Glad to show you. He ain’t selling for Chrissake?” He eyed me steadily and jerked a thumb across the lake.

“He might,” I said. “Everything’s for sale in California.”

“Ain’t that the truth? That’s his—the redwood job. Lined with knotty pine, composition roof, stone foundations and porches, full bath and shower, venetian blinds all around, big fireplace, oil stove in the big bedroom—and brother, you need it in the spring and fall—Pilgrim combination gas and wood range, everything first class. Cost about eight thousand and that’s money for a mountain cabin. And private reservoir in the hills for water.”

“How about electric light and telephone?” I asked, just to be friendly.

“Electric light, sure. No phone. You couldn’t get one now. If you could, it would cost plenty to string the lines out here.”

He looked at me with steady blue eyes and I looked at him. In spite of his weathered appearance he looked like a drinker. He had the thickened and glossy skin, the too noticeable veins, the bright glitter in the eyes.

I said: “Anybody living there now?”

“Nope. Mrs. Kingsley was here a few weeks back. She went down the hill. Back any day, I guess. Didn’t he say?”

I looked surprised. “Why? Does she go with the cabin?”

He scowled and then put his head back and burst out laughing. The roar of his laughter was like a tractor backfiring. It blasted the woodland silence to shreds.

“Jesus, if that ain’t a kick in the pants!” he gasped. “Does she go with the—” He put out another bellow and then his mouth shut tight as a trap.

“Yeah, it’s a swell cabin,” he said, eyeing me carefully.

“The beds comfortable?” I asked.

He leaned forward and smiled. “Maybe you’d like a face full of knuckles,” he said.

I stared at him with my mouth open. “That one went by me too fast,” I said, “I never laid an eye on it.”

“How would I know if the beds are comfortable?” he snarled, bending down a little so that he could reach me with a hard right, if it worked out that way.

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t know,” I said. “I won’t press the point. I can find out for myself.”

“Yah,” he said bitterly, “think I can’t smell a dick when I meet one? I played hit and run with them in every state in the Union. Nuts to you, pal. And nuts to Kingsley. So he hires himself a dick to come up here and see am I wearing his pajamas, huh? Listen, Jack, I might have a stiff leg and all, but the women I could get—”

I put a hand out, hoping he wouldn’t pull it off and throw it in the lake.

“You’re slipping your clutch,” I told him. “I didn’t come up here to enquire into your love life. I never saw Mrs. Kingsley. I never saw Mr. Kingsley until this morning. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

He dropped his eyes and rubbed the back of his hand viciously across his mouth, as if he wanted to hurt himself. Then he held the hand in front of his eyes and squeezed it into a hard fist and opened it again and stared at the fingers. They were shaking a little.

“Sorry, Mr. Marlowe,” he said slowly. “I was out on the roof last night and I’ve got a hangover like seven Swedes. I’ve been up here alone for a month and it’s got me talking to myself. A thing happened to me.”

“Anything a drink would help?”

His eyes focused sharply on me and glinted. “You got one?”

I pulled the pint of rye out of my pocket and held it so that he could see the green label over the cap.

“I don’t deserve it,” he said. “God damn it, I don’t. Wait till I get a couple of glasses or would you come into the cabin?”

“I like it out here. I’m enjoying the view.”

He swung his stiff leg and went into his cabin and came back carrying a couple of small cheese glasses. He sat down on the rock beside me smelling of dried perspiration.

I tore the metal cap off the bottle and poured him a stiff drink and a light one for myself. We touched glasses and drank. He rolled the liquor on his tongue and a bleak smile put a little sunshine into his face.

“Man that’s from the right bottle,” he said. “I wonder what made me sound off like that. I guess a guy gets the blues up here all alone. No company, no real friends, no wife.” He paused and added with a sidewise look. “Especially no wife.”

I kept my eyes on the blue water of the tiny lake. Under an overhanging rock a fish surfaced in a lance of light and a circle of widening ripples. A light breeze moved the tops of the pines with a noise like a gentle surf.

“She left me,” he said slowly. “She left me a month ago. Friday, the 12^th of June. A day I’ll remember.”

I stiffened, but not too much to pour more whiskey into his empty glass. Friday the 12^th of June was the day Mrs. Crystal Kingsley was supposed to have come into town for a party.

“But you don’t want to hear about it,” he said. And in his faded blue eyes was the deep yearning to talk about it, as plain as anything could possibly be.

“It’s none of my business,” I said. “But if it would make you feel any better—”

He nodded sharply. “Two guys will meet, on a park bench,” he said, “and start talking about God. Did you ever notice that? Guys that wouldn’t talk about God to their best friend.”

“I know that,” I said.

He drank and looked across the lake. “She was one swell kid,” he said softly. “A little sharp in the tongue sometimes, but one swell kid. It was love at first sight with me and Muriel. I met her in a joint in Riverside, a year and three months ago. Not the kind of joint where a guy would expect to meet a girl like Muriel, but that’s how it happened. We got married. I loved her. I knew I was well off. And I was too much of a skunk to play ball with her.”

I moved a little to show him I was still there, but I didn’t say anything for fear of breaking the spell. I sat with my drink untouched in my hand. I like to drink, but not when people are using me for a diary.

He went on sadly: “But you know how it is with marriage—any marriage. After a while a guy like me, common no good guy like me, he wants to feel a leg. Some other leg. Maybe it’s lousy, but that’s the way it is.”

He looked at me and I said I had heard the idea expressed.

He tossed his second drink off. I passed him the bottle. A bluejay went up a pine tree hopping from branch to branch without moving his wings or even pausing to balance.

“Yeah,” Bill Chess said. “All these hillbillies are half crazy and I’m getting that way too. Here I am sitting pretty, no rent to pay, a good pension check every month, half my bonus money in war bonds, I’m married to as neat a little blonde as ever you clapped an eye on and all the time I’m nuts and I don’t know it. I go for that.” He pointed hard at the redwood cabin across the lake. It was turning the color of oxblood in the late afternoon light: “Right in the front yard,” he said, “right under the windows, and a showy little tart that means no more to me than a blade of grass. Jesus, what a sap a guy can be.”

He drank his third drink and steadied the bottle on a rock. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt, fired a match on his thumbnail and puffed rapidly. I breathed with my mouth open, as silent as a burglar behind a curtain.

“Hell,” he said at last, “you’d think if I had to jump off the dock, I’d go a little ways from home and pick me a change in types at least. But little round heels over there ain’t even that. She’s a blonde like Muriel, same size and weight, same type, almost the same color eyes. But, brother, how different from then on in. Pretty, sure, but no prettier to anybody and not half so pretty to me. Well, I’m over there burning trash that morning and minding my own business, as much as I ever mind it. And she comes to the back door of the cabin in peek-a-boo pajamas so thin you can see the pink of her nipples against the cloth. And she says in her lazy, no-good voice: Have a drink, Bill. Don’t work so hard on such a beautiful morning. And me, I like a drink too well and I go to the kitchen door and take it. And then I take another and then I take another and then I’m in the house. And the closer I get to her the more bedroom her eyes are.”

He paused and swept me with a hard level look.

“You asked me if the beds over there were comfortable and I got sore. You didn’t mean a thing. I was just too full of remembering. Yeah—the bed I was in was comfortable.”

He stopped talking and they fell slowly and after them was silence. He leaned to pick the bottle off the rock and stare at it. He seemed to fight with it in his mind. The whiskey won the fight, as it always does. He took a long savage drink out of the bottle and then screwed the cap on tightly, as if that meant something. He picked up a stone and flicked it into the water.

“I came back across the dam,” he said slowly, in a voice heady thick with alcohol. “I’m as smooth as a new piston head. I’m getting away with something. Us boys can be so wrong about those little things, can’t we? I’m not getting away with anything at all. Not anything at all. I listen to Muriel telling me and she don’t even raise her voice. But she tells me things about myself I didn’t even imagine. Oh, yeah, I’m getting away with it lovely.”

“So she left you,” I said, when he fell silent.

“That night. I wasn’t even here. I felt too mean to stay even half sober. I hopped into my Ford and went over to the north side of the lake and holed up with a couple of no-goods like myself and got good and stinking. Not that it did me any good. Along about 4 a.m. I got back home and Muriel is gone, packed up and gone, nothing left but a note on the bureau and some cold cream on the pillow.”

He pulled a dog-eared piece of paper out of a shabby old wallet and passed it over. It was written in pencil on blue-lined paper from a notebook. It read: “I’m sorry, Bill, but I’d rather be dead than live with you any longer. Muriel.”

I handed it back. “What about over there?” I asked, pointing across the lake with a glance.

Bill Chess picked up a flat stone and tried to skip it across the water, but it refused to skip.

“Nothing over there,” he said. “She packed up and went down the same night. I didn’t see her again. I don’t want to see her again. I haven’t heard a word from Muriel in the whole month, not a single word. I don’t have any idea at all where she’s at. With some other guy, maybe. I hope he treats her better than I did.”

He stood up and took keys out of his pocket and shook them. “So if you want to go across and look at Kingsley’s cabin, there isn’t a thing to stop you. And thanks for listening to the soap opera. And thanks for the liquor. Here.” He picked the bottle up and handed me what was left of the pint.

6

We went down the slope to the bank of the lake and the narrow top of the dam. Bill Chess swung his stiff leg in front of me, holding on to the rope handrail set in iron stanchions. At one point water washed over the concrete in a lazy swirl.

“I’ll let some out through the wheel in the morning,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s all the darn thing is good for. Some movie outfit put it up three years ago. They made a picture up here. That little pier down at the other end is some more of their work. Most of what they built is torn down and hauled away, but Kingsley had them leave the pier and the millwheel. Kind of gives the place a touch of color.”

I followed him up a flight of heavy wooden steps to the porch of the Kingsley cabin. He unlocked the door and we went into hushed warmth. The closed up room was almost hot. The light filtering through the slatted blinds made narrow bars across the floor. The living room was long and cheerful and had Indian rugs, padded mountain furniture with metal-strapped joints, chintz curtains, a plain hardwood floor, plenty of lamps and a little built-in bar with round stools in one corner. The room was neat and clean and had no look of having been left at short notice.

We went into the bedrooms. Two of them had twin beds and one a large double bed with a cream-colored spread having a design in plum-colored wool stitched over it. This was the master bedroom, Bill Chess said. On a dresser of varnished wood there were toilet articles and accessories in jade green enamel and stainless steel, and an assortment of cosmetic oddments. A couple of cold cream jars had the wavy gold brand of the Gilerlain Company on them. One whole side of the room consisted of closets with sliding doors. I slid one open and peeked inside. It seemed to be full of women’s clothes of the sort they wear at resorts. Bill Chess watched me sourly while I pawed them over. I slid the door shut and pulled open a deep shoe drawer underneath. It contained at least half a dozen pairs of new-looking shoes. I heaved the drawer shut and straightened up.

Bill Chess was planted squarely in front of me, with his chin pushed out and his hard hands in knots on his hips.

“So what did you want to look at the lady’s clothes for?” he asked in an angry voice.

“Reasons,” I said. “For instance Mrs. Kingsley didn’t go home when she left here. Her husband hasn’t seen her since. He doesn’t know where she is.”

He dropped his fists, and twisted them slowly at his sides. “Dick it is,” he snarled. “The first guess is always right. I had myself about talked out of it. Boy, did I open up to you. Nellie with her hair in her lap. Boy, am I a smart little egg!”

“I can respect a confidence as well as the next fellow,” I said, and walked around him into the kitchen.

There was a big green and white combination range, a sink of lacquered yellow pine, an automatic water heater in the service porch and opening off the other side of the kitchen a cheerful breakfast room with many windows and an expensive plastic breakfast set. The shelves were gay with colored dishes and glasses and a set of pewter serving dishes.

Everything was in apple-pie order. There were no dirty cups or plates on the drain board, no smeared glasses or empty liquor bottles hanging around. There were no ants and no flies. Whatever loose living Mrs. Derace Kingsley indulged in she managed without leaving the usual Greenwich Village slop behind her.

I went back to the living room and out on the front porch again and waited for Bill Chess to lock up. When he had done that and turned to me with his scowl well in place I said: “I didn’t ask you to take your heart out and squeeze it for me, but I didn’t try to stop you either. Kingsley doesn’t have to know his wife made a pass at you, unless there’s a lot more behind all this than I can see now.”

“The hell with you,” he said, and the scowl stayed right where it was.

“All right, the hell with me. Would there be any chance your wife and Kingsley’s wife went away together?”

“I don’t get it,” he said.

“After you went to drown your troubles they could have had a fight and made up and cried down each other’s necks. Then Mrs. Kingsley might have taken your wife down the hill. She had to have something to ride in, didn’t she?”

It sounded silly, but he took it seriously enough.

“Nope. Muriel didn’t cry down anybody’s neck. They left the weeps out of Muriel. And if she did want to cry on a shoulder, she wouldn’t have picked little roundheels. And as for transportation she has a Ford of her own. She couldn’t drive mine easily on account of the way the controls are switched over for my stiff leg.”

“It was just a passing thought,” I said.

“If any more like it pass you, let them go right on,” he said.

“For a guy that takes his long wavy hair down in front of complete strangers, you’re pretty damn touchy,” I said.

He took a step towards me. “Want to make something of it?”

“Look, pal,” I said. “I’m working hard to think you are a fundamentally good egg. Help me out a little, can’t you?”

He breathed hard for a moment and then dropped his hands and spread them helplessly. “Boy, can I brighten up anybody’s afternoon,” he sighed. “Want to walk back around the lake?”

“Sure, if your leg will stand it.”

“Stood it plenty of times before.”

We started off side-by-side, as friendly as puppies again. It would probably last all of fifty yards. The roadway, barely wide enough to pass a car, hung above the level of the lake and dodged between high rocks. About half way to the far end another smaller cabin was built on a rock foundation. The third was well beyond the end of the lake, on a patch of almost level ground. Both were closed up and had that long-empty look.

Bill Chess said after a minute or two: “That straight goods little roundheels lammed off?”

“So it seems.”

“You a real dick or just a shamus?”

“Just a shamus.”

“She go with some other guy?”

“I should think it likely.”

“Sure she did. It’s a cinch. Kingsley ought to be able to guess that. She had plenty of friends.”

“Up here?”

He didn’t answer me.

“Was one of them named Lavery?”

“I wouldn’t know,” he said.

“There’s no secret about this one,” I said.”She sent a wire from El Paso saying she and Lavery were going to Mexico.” I dug the wire out of my pocket and held it out. He fumbled his glasses loose from his shirt and stopped to read it. He handed the paper back and put his glasses away again and stared out over the blue water.

“That’s a little confidence for you to hold against some of what you gave me,” I said.

“Lavery was up here once,” he said slowly.

“He admits he saw her a couple of months ago, probably up here. He claims he hasn’t seen her since. We don’t know whether to believe him. There’s no reason why we should and no reason why we shouldn’t.”

“She isn’t with him now, then?”

“He says not.”

“I wouldn’t think she would fuss with little details like getting married,” he said soberly. “A Florida honeymoon would be more in her line.”

“But you can’t give me any positive information? You didn’t see her go or hear anything that sounded authentic?”

“Nope,” he said. “And if I did, I doubt if I would tell. I’m dirty, but not that kind of dirty.”

“Well, thanks for trying,” I said.

“I don’t owe you any favors,” he said. “The hell with you and every other God damn snooper.”

“Here we go again,” I said.

We had come to the end of the lake now. I left him standing there and walked out on a little pier. I leaned on the wooden railing at the end of it and saw that what had looked like a band pavilion was nothing but two pieces of propped up wall meeting at a flat angle towards the dam. About two feet deep of overhanging roof was stuck on the wall, like a coping. Bill Chess came up behind me and leaned on the railing at my side.

“Not that I don’t thank you for the liquor,” he said.

“Yeah. Any fish in the lake?”

“Some smart old bastard of trout. No fresh stock. I don’t go for fish much myself. I don’t bother with them. Sorry I got tough again.”

I grinned and leaned on the railing and stared down into the deep still water. It was green when you looked down into it. There was a swirl of movement down there and a swift greenish form moved in the water.

“There’s Granpa,” Bill Chess said. “Look at the size of that old bastard. He ought to be ashamed of himself getting so fat.”

Down below the water there was what looked like an underwater flooring. I couldn’t see the sense of that. I asked him.

“Used to be a boat landing before the dam was raised. That lifted the water level so far the old landing was six feet under.”

A flat-bottomed boat dangled on a frayed rope tied to a post of the pier. It lay in the water almost without motion, but not quite. The air was peaceful and calm and sunny and held a quiet you don’t get in cities. I could have stayed there for hours doing nothing but forgetting all about Derace Kingsley and his wife and her boy friends.

There was a hard movement at my side and Bill Chess said, “Look there!” in a voice that growled like mountain thunder.

His hard fingers dug into the flesh of my arm until I started to get mad. He was bending far out over the railing, staring down like a loon, his face as white as the weather tan would let it get. I looked down with him into the water at the edge of the submerged staging.

Languidly at the edge of this green and sunken shelf of wood something waved out from the darkness, hesitated, waved back again out of sight under the flooring.

The something had looked far too much like a human arm.

Bill Chess straightened his body rigidly. He turned without a sound and clumped back along the pier. He bent to a loose pile of stones and heaved. His panting breath reached me. He got a big one free and lifted it breast high and started back out on the pier with it. It must have weighed a hundred pounds. His neck muscles stood out like ropes under canvas under his taut brown skin. His teeth were clamped tight and his breath hissed between them.

He reached the end of the pier and steadied himself and lifted the rock high. He held it a moment poised, his eyes staring down now, measuring. His mouth made a vague distressful sound and his body lurched forward hard against the quivering rail and the heavy stone smashed down into the water.

The splash it made went over both of us. The rock fell straight and true and struck on the edge of the submerged planking, almost exactly where we had seen the thing wave in and out.

For a moment the water was a confused boiling, then the ripples widened off into the distance, coming smaller and smaller with a trace of froth at the middle, and there was a dim sound as of wood breaking under water, a sound that seemed to come to us a long time after it should have been audible. An ancient rotted plank popped suddenly through the surface, struck out a full foot of its jagged end, and fell back with a flat slap and floated off.

The depths cleared again. Something moved in them that was not a board. It rose slowly, with an infinitely careless languor, a long dark twisted something that rolled lazily in the water as it rose. It broke surface casually, lightly, without haste. I saw wool, sodden and black, a leather jerkin blacker than ink, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes and something that bulged nastily between the shoes and the cuffs of the slacks. I saw a wave of dark blond hair straighten out in the water and hold still for a brief instant as if with a calculated effect, and then swirl into a tangle again.

The thing rolled over once more and an arm flapped up barely above the skin of the water and the arm ended in a bloated hand that was the hand of a freak. Then the face came. A swollen pulpy gray white mass without features, without eyes, without mouth. A blotch of gray dough, a nightmare with human hair on it.

A heavy necklace of green stone showed on what had been a neck, half imbedded, large rough green stones with something that glittered joining them together.

Bill Chess held the handrail and his knuckles were polished bones.

“Muriel!” his voice said croakingly. “Sweet Christ, it’s Muriel!”

His voice seemed to come to me from a long way off, over a hill, through a thick silent growth of trees.

7

Behind the window of the board shack one end of a counter was piled with dusty folders. The glass upper half of the door was lettered in flaked black paint. Chief of Police. Fire Chief. Town Constable. Chamber of Commerce. In the lower corners a USO card and a Red Cross emblem were fastened to the glass.

I went in. There was a pot-bellied stove in the corner and a roll top desk in the other corner behind the counter. There was a large blue print map of the district on the wall and beside that a board with four hooks on it, one of which supported a frayed and much mended mackinaw. On the counter beside the dusty folders lay the usual sprung pen, exhausted blotter and smeared bottle of gummy ink. The end wall beside the desk was covered with telephone numbers written in hard-bitten figures that would last as long as the wood and looked as if they had been written by a child.

A man sat at the desk in a wooden armchair whose legs were anchored to flat boards, fore and aft, like skis. A spittoon big enough to coil a hose in was leaning against the man’s right leg. He had a sweat-stained Stetson on the back of his head and his large hairless hands were clasped comfortably over his stomach, above the waistband of a pair of khaki pants that had been scrubbed thin years ago. His shirt matched the pants except that it was even more faded. It was buttoned tight to the man’s thick neck and undecorated by a tie. His hair was mousy brown except at the temples, where it was the color of old snow. He sat more on his left hip than on his right, because there was a hip holster down inside his right hip pocket, and a half-foot of forty-five gun reared up and bored into his solid back. The star on his left breast had a bent point.

He had large ears and friendly eyes and his jaws munched slowly and he looked as dangerous as a squirrel and much less nervous. I liked everything about him. I leaned on the counter and looked at him and he looked at me and nodded and loosed half a pint of tobacco juice down his right leg into the spittoon. It made a nasty sound of something falling into water.

I lit a cigarette and looked around for an ash tray.

“Try the floor, son,” the large friendly man said.

“Are you Sheriff Patton?”

“Constable and deputy sheriff. What law we got to have around here I’m it. Come election anyways. There’s a couple of good boys running against me this time and I might get whupped. Job pays eighty a month, cabin, firewood and electricity. That ain’t hay in these little old mountains.”

“Nobody’s going to whip you,” I said. “You’re going to get a lot of publicity.”

“That so?” he asked indifferently and ruined the spittoon again.

“That is, if your jurisdiction extends over to Little Fawn Lake.”

“Kingsley’s place. Sure. Something bothering you over there, son?”

“There’s a dead woman in the lake.”

That shook him to the core. He unclasped his hands and scratched one ear. He got to his feet by grasping the arms of his chair and deftly kicking it back from under him. Standing up he was a big man and hard. The fat was just cheerfulness.

“Anybody I know?” he enquired uneasily.

“Muriel Chess. I guess you know her. Bill Chess’s wife.”

“Yep, I know Bill Chess.” His voice hardened a little.

“Looks like suicide. She left a note which sounded as if she was just going away. But it could be a suicide note just as well. She’s not nice to look at. Been in the water a long time, about a month, judging by the circumstances.”

He scratched his other ear. “What circumstances would that be?” His eyes were searching my face now, slowly and calmly, but searching. He didn’t seem in any hurry to blow his whistle.

“They had a fight a month ago. Bill went over to the north shore of the lake and was gone some hours: When he got home she was gone. He never saw her again.”

“I see. Who are you, son?”

“My name is Marlowe. I’m up from L.A. to look at the property. I had a note from Kingsley to Bill Chess. He took me around the lake and we went out on that little pier the movie people built. We were leaning on the rail and looking down into the water and something that looked like an arm waved out under the submerged flooring, the old boat landing. Bill dropped a heavy rock in and the body popped up.”

Patton looked at me without moving a muscle.

“Look, sheriff, hadn’t we better run over there? The man’s half crazy with shock and he’s there all alone.”

“How much liquor has he got?”

“Very little when I left. I had a pint but we drank most of it talking.”

He moved over to the roll top desk and unlocked a drawer. He brought up three or four bottles and held them against the light.

“This baby’s near full,” he said, patting one of them. “Mount Vernon. That ought to hold him. County don’t allow me no money for emergency liquor, so I just have to seize a little here and there. Don’t use it myself. Never could understand folks letting theirselves get gummed up with it.”

He put the bottle on his left hip and locked the desk up and lifted the flap in the counter. He fixed a card against the inside of the glass door panel. I looked at the card as we went out. It read: Back in Twenty Minutes—Maybe.

“I’ll run down and get Doc Hollis,” he said. “Be right back and pick you up. That your car?”

“Yes.”

“You can follow along then, as I come back by.”

He got into a car which had a siren on it, two red spotlights, two fog lights, a red and white fire plate, a new air raid horn on top, three axes, two heavy coils of rope and a fire extinguisher in the back seat, extra gas and oil and water cans in a frame on the running-board , an extra spare tire roped to the one on the rack, the stuffing coming out of the upholstery in dingy wads, and half an inch of dust over what was left of the paint.

Behind the right hand lower corner of the windshield there was a white card printed in block capitals. It read: “VOTERS, ATTENTION! KEEP JIM PATTON CONSTABLE. HE IS TOO OLD TO GO TO WORK”

He turned the car and went off down the street in a swirl of white dust.

8

He stopped in front of a white frame building across the road from the stage depot. He went into the white building and presently came out with a man who got into the back seat with the axes and the rope. The official car came back up the street and I fell in behind it. We sifted along the main stem through the slacks and shorts and french sailor jerseys and knotted bandannas and knobby knees and scarlet lips. Beyond the village we went up a dusty hill and stopped at a cabin. Patton touched the siren gently and a man in faded blue overalls opened the cabin door.

“Get in, Andy. Business.”

The man in blue overalls nodded morosely and ducked back into the cabin. He came back out wearing an oyster gray lion hunter’s hat and got in under the wheel of Patton’s car while Patton slid over. He was about thirty, dark, lithe, and had the slightly dirty and slightly underfed look of the native.

We drove out to Little Fawn Lake with me eating enough dust to make a batch of mud pies. At the five-barred gate Patton got out and let us through and we went on down to the lake. Patton got out again and went to the edge of the water and looked along towards the little pier. Bill Chess was sitting naked on the floor of the pier, with his head in his hands. There was something stretched out on the wet planks beside him.

“We can ride a ways more,” Patton said..

The two cars went on to the end of the lake and all four of us trooped down to the pier from behind Bill Chess’s back. The doctor stopped to cough rackingly into a handkerchief and then look thoughtfully at the handkerchief. He was an angular bug-eyed man with a sad sick face.

The thing that had been a woman lay face down on the boards with a rope under the arms. Bill Chess’s clothes lay to one side. His stiff leg, flat and scarred at the knee, was stretched out in front of him, the other leg bent up and his forehead resting against it. He didn’t move or look up as we came down behind him.

Patton took the pint bottle of Mount Vernon off his hip and unscrewed the top and handed it.

“Drink hearty, Bill.”

There was a horrible, sickening smell in the air. Bill Chess didn’t seem to notice it, nor Patton nor the doctor. The man called Andy got a dusty brown blanket out of the car and threw it over the body. Then without a word he went and vomited under a pine tree.

Bill Chess drank a long drink and sat holding the bottle against his bare bent knee. He began to talk in a stiff wooden voice, not looking at anybody, not talking to anybody in particular. He told about the quarrel and what happened after it, but not why it had happened. He didn’t mention Mrs. Kingsley even in the most casual ways. He said that after I left him he had got a rope and stripped and gone down into the water and got the thing out. He had dragged it ashore and then got it up on his back and carried it out on the pier. He didn’t know why. He had gone back into the water again then. He didn’t have to tell us why.

Patton put a cut of tobacco into his mouth and chewed on it silently, his calm eyes full of nothing. Then he shut his teeth tight and leaned down to pull the blanket off the body. He turned the body over carefully, as if it might come to pieces. The late afternoon sun winked on the necklace of large green stones that were partly imbedded in the swollen neck. They were roughly carved and lusterless, like soapstone or false jade. A gilt chain with an eagle clasp set with small brilliants joined the ends. Patton straightened his broad back and blew his nose on a tan handkerchief.

“What you say, Doc?”

“About what?” the bug-eyed man snarled.

“Cause and time of death.”

“Don’t be a damn fool, Jim Patton.”

“Can’t tell nothing, huh?”

“By looking at that? Good God!”

Patton sighed. “Looks drowned all right,” he admitted. “But you can’t always tell. There’s been cases where a victim would be knifed or poisoned or something, and they would soak him in the water to make things look different.”

“You get many like that up here?” the doctor enquired nastily.

“Only honest to God murder I ever had up here,” Patton said, watching Bill Chess out of the corner of his eye, “was old Dad Meacham over on the north shore. He had a shack in Sheedy Canyon, did a little panning in summer on an old placer claim he had back in the valley near Belltop. Folks didn’t see him around for a while in late fall, then come a heavy snow and his roof caved in to one side. So we was over there trying to prop her up a bit, figuring Dad had gone down the hill for the winter without telling anybody, the way them old prospectors do things. Well by gum, old Dad never went down the hill at all. There he was in bed with most of a kindling axe in the back of his head. We never did find out who done it. Somebody figured he had a little bag of gold hid away from the summer’s panning.”

He looked thoughtfully at Andy. The man in the lion hunter’s hat was feeling a tooth in his mouth. He said: “Course we know who done it. Guy Pope done it. Only Guy was dead nine days of pneumonia before we found Dad Meacham.”

“Eleven days,” Patton said.

“Nine,” the man in the lion hunter’s hat said.

“Was all of six years ago, Andy. Have it your own way, son. How you figure Guy Pope done it?”

“We found about three ounces of small nuggets in Guy’s cabin along with some dust. Never was anything bigger’n sand on Guy’s claim. Dad had nuggets all of a pennyweight, plenty of times.”

“Well, that’s the way it goes,” Patton said, and smiled at me in a vague manner. “Fellow always forgets something, don’t he? No matter how careful he is.”

“Cop stuff,” Bill Chess said disgustedly and put his pants on and sat down again to put on his shoes and shirt. When he had them on he stood up and reached down for the bottle and took a good drink and laid the bottle carefully on the planks. He thrust his hairy wrists out towards Patton.

“That’s the way you guys feel about it, put the cuffs on and get it over,” he said in a savage voice.

Patton ignored him and went over to the railing and looked down. “Funny place for a body to be,” he said. “No current here to mention, but what there is would be towards the dam.”

Bill Chess lowered his wrists and said quietly: “She did it herself, you darn fool. Muriel was a fine swimmer. She dived down in and swum under the boards there and just breathed water in. Had to. No other way.”

“I wouldn’t quite say that, Bill,” Patton answered him mildly.

His eyes were as blank as new plates.

Andy shook his head. Patton looked at him with a sly grin.

“Crabbin’ again, Andy?”

“Was nine days, I tell you. I just counted back,” the man in the lion hunter’s hat said morosely.

The doctor threw his arms up and walked away, with one hand to his head. He coughed into his handkerchief again and again looked into the handkerchief with passionate attention.

Patton winked at me and spat over the railing. “Let’s get on to this one, Andy.”

“You ever try to drag a body six feet under water?”

“Nope, can’t say I ever did, Andy. Any reason it couldn’t be done with a rope?”

Andy shrugged. “If a rope was used, it will show on the corpse. If you got to give yourself away like that, why bother to cover up at all?”

“Question of time,” Patton said. “Fellow has his arrangements to make.”

Bill Chess snarled at them and reached down for the whiskey. Looking at their solemn mountain faces I couldn’t tell what they were really thinking.

Patton said absently: “Something was said about a note.”

Bill Chess rummaged in his wallet and drew the folded piece of ruled paper loose. Patton took it and read it slowly.

“Don’t seem to have any date,” he observed.

Bill Chess shook his head somberly. “No. She left a month ago, June 12^th.”

“Left you once before, didn’t she?”

“Yeah.” Bill Chess stared at him fixedly. “I got drunk and stayed with a chippy. Just before the first snow last December. She was gone a week and came back all prettied up. Said she just had to get away for a while and had been staying with a girl she used to work with in L.A.”

“What was the name of this party?” Patton asked.

“Never told me and I never asked her. What Muriel did was all silk with me.”

“Sure. Note left that time, Bill?” Patton asked smoothly.

“No.”

“This note here looks middling old,” Patton said, holding it up.

“I carried it a month,” Bill Chess growled. “Who told you she left me before?”

“I forget,” Patton said. “You know how it is in a place like this. Not much folks don’t notice. Except maybe in summer time where there’s a lot of strangers about.”

Nobody said anything for a while and then Patton said absently: “June 12^th you say she left? Or you thought she left? Did you say the folks across the lake were up here then?”

Bill Chess looked at me and his face darkened again. “Ask this snoopy guy—if he didn’t already spill his guts to you.”

Patton didn’t look at me at all. He looked at the line of mountains far beyond the lake. He said gently: “Mr. Marlowe here didn’t tell me anything at all, Bill, except how the body come up out of the water and who it was. And that Muriel went away, as you thought, and left a note you showed him. I don’t guess there’s anything wrong in that, is there?”

There was another silence and Bill Chess stared down at the blanket-covered corpse a few feet away from him He clenched his hands and a thick tear ran down his cheek.

“Mrs. Kingsley was here,” he said. “She went down the hill that same day. Nobody was in the other cabins. Perrys and Farquars ain’t been up at all this year.”

Patton nodded and was silent. A kind of charged emptiness hung in the air, as if something that had not been said was plain to all of them and didn’t need saying.

Then Bill Chess said wildly: “Take me in, you sons of bitches!

Sure I did it! I drowned her. She was my girl and I loved her. I’m a heel, always was a heel, always will be a heel, but just the same I loved her. Maybe you guys wouldn’t understand that. Just don’t bother to try. Take me in, damn you!”

Nobody said anything at all.

Bill Chess looked down at his hard brown fist. He swung it up viciously and hit himself in the face with all his strength.

“You rotten son of a bitch,” he breathed in a harsh whisper.

His nose began to bleed slowly. He stood and the blood ran down his lip, down the side of his mouth, to the point of his chin. A drop fell sluggishly to his shirt.

Patton said quietly: “Got to take you down the hill for questioning, Bill. You know that. We ain’t accusing you of anything, but the folks down there have got to talk to you.”

Bill Chess said heavily: “Can I change my clothes?”

“Sure. You go with him, Andy. And see what you can find to kind of wrap up what we got here.”

They went off along the path at the edge of the lake. The doctor cleared his throat and looked out over the water and sighed.

“You’ll want to send the corpse down in my ambulance, Jim, won’t you?”

Patton shook his head. “Nope. This is a poor county, Doc. I figure the lady can ride cheaper than what you get for that ambulance.”

The doctor walked away from him angrily, saying over his shoulder: “Let me know if you want me to pay for the funeral.”

“That ain’t no way to talk,” Patton sighed.

9

The Indian Head Hotel was a brown building on a corner across from the new dance hall. I parked in front of it and used its rest room to wash my face and hands and comb the pine needles out of my hair, before I went into the dining-drinking parlor that adjoined the lobby. The whole place was full to overflowing with males in leisure jackets and liquor breaths and females in high-pitched laughs, oxblood fingernails and dirty knuckles. The manager of the joint, a low budget tough guy in shirt sleeves and a mangled cigar, was prowling the room with watchful eyes. At the cash desk a pale-haired man was fighting to get the war news on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potatoes were full of water. In the deep back corner of the room, a hillbilly orchestra of five pieces, dressed in ill-fitting white jackets and purple shirts, was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar and smiling glassily into the fog of cigarette smoke and the blur of alcoholic voices. At Puma Point summer, that lovely season, was in full swing.

I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on its chest and hold it down, and went out on to the main street. It was still broad daylight but some of the neon signs had been turned on, and the evening reeled with the cheerful din of auto horns, children screaming, bowls rattling, skeeballs clunking, .22’s snapping merrily in shooting galleries, juke boxes playing like crazy, and behind all this out on the lake the hard barking roar of the speedboats going nowhere at all and acting as though they were racing with death.

In my Chrysler a thin, serious-looking, brown-haired girl in dark slacks was sitting smoking a cigarette and talking to a dude ranch cowboy who sat on my running-board . I walked around the car and got into it. The cowboy strolled away hitching his jeans up. The girl didn’t move.

“I’m Birdie Keppel,” she said cheerfully, “I’m the beautician here daytimes and evenings I work on the Puma Point Banner. Excuse me sitting in your car.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “You want to just sit or you want me to drive you somewhere?”

“You can drive down the road a piece where it’s quieter, Mr.

Marlowe. If you’re obliging enough to talk to me.”

“Pretty good grapevine you’ve got up here,” I said and started the car.

I drove down past the post office to a corner where a blue and white arrow marked Telephone pointed down a narrow road towards the lake. I turned down that, drove past the telephone office, which was a log cabin with a tiny railed lawn in front of it, passed another small cabin and pulled up in front of a huge oak tree that flung its branches all the way across the road and a good fifty feet beyond it.

“This do, Miss Keppel?”

“Mrs. But just call me Birdie. Everybody does. This is fine. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlowe. I see you come from Hollywood, that sinful city.”

She put a firm brown hand out and I shook it. Clamping bobbie pins into fat blondes had given her a grip like a pair of iceman’s tongs.

“I was talking to Doc Hollis,” she said, “about poor Muriel Chess. I thought you could give me some details. I understand you found the body.”

“Bill Chess found it really. I was just with him. You talk to Jim Patton?”

“Not yet. He went down the hill. Anyway I don’t think Jim would tell me much.”

“He’s up for re-election,” I said. “And you’re a newspaper woman.”

“Jim’s no politician, Mr. Marlowe, and I could hardly call myself a newspaper woman. This little paper we get out up here is a pretty amateurish proposition.”

“Well, what do you want to know?” I offered her a cigarette and lit it for her.

“You might just tell me the story.”

“I came up here with a letter from Derace Kingsley to look at his property. Bill Chess showed me around, got talking to me, told me his wife had moved out on him and showed me the note she left. I had a bottle along and he punished it. He was feeling pretty blue. The liquor loosened him up, but he was lonely and aching to talk anyway. That’s how it happened. I didn’t know him. Coming back around the end of the lake we went out or the, pier and Bill spotted an arm waving out from under the planking down in the water. It turned out to belong to what was left of Muriel Chess. I guess that’s all.”

“I understand from Doc Hollis she had been in the water a long time. Pretty badly decomposed and all that.

“Yes. Probably the whole month he thought she had been gone. There’s no reason to think otherwise. The note’s a suicide note.”

“Any doubt about that, Mr. Marlowe?”

I looked at her sideways. Thoughtful dark eyes looked out at me under fluffed out brown hair. The dusk had begun to fall now, very slowly. It was no more than a slight change in the quality of the light.

“I guess the police always have doubts in these cases,” I said.

“How about you?”

“My opinion doesn’t go for anything.”

“But for what it’s worth?”

“I only met Bill Chess this afternoon,” I said. “He struck me as a quick-tempered lad and from his own account he’s no saint. But he seems to have been in love with his wife. And I can’t see hanging around here for a month knowing she was rotting down in the water under that pier. Coming out of his cabin in the sunlight and looking along that soft blue water and seeing in his mind what was under it and what was happening to it. And knowing he put it there.”

“No more can I,” Birdie Keppel said softly. “No more could anybody. And yet we know in our minds that such things have happened and will happen again. Are you in the real estate business, Mr. Marlowe?”

“No.”

“What line of business are you in, if I may ask?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“That’s almost as good as saying,” she said. “Besides Doc Hollis heard you tell Jim Patton your full name. And we have an L.A. city directory in our office. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said.

“And what’s more, I won’t,” she said. “If you don’t want me to.”

“What does it cost me?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. I don’t claim to be a very good newspaperman. And we wouldn’t print anything that would embarrass Jim Patton. Jim’s the salt of the earth. But it does open up, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t draw any wrong conclusions,” I said. “I had no interest in Bill Chess whatever.”

“No interest in Muriel Chess?”

“Why would I have any interest in Muriel Chess?”

She snuffed her cigarette out carefully into the ashtray under the dashboard. “Have it your own way,” she said. “But here’s a little item you might like to think about, if you don’t know it already. There was a Los Angeles copper named De Soto up here about six weeks back, a big roughneck with damn poor manners. We didn’t like him and we didn’t open up to him much. I mean the three of us in the Banner office didn’t. He had a photograph with him and he was looking for a woman called Mildred Haviland, he said. On police business. It was an ordinary photograph, an enlarged snapshot, not a police photo. He said he had information the woman was staying up here. The photo looked a good deal like Muriel Chess. The hair seemed to be reddish and in a very different style than she has worn it here, and the eyebrows were all plucked to narrow arches, and that changes a woman a good deal. But it did look a good deal like Bill Chess’s wife.”

I drummed on the door of the car and after a moment I said, “What did you tell him?”

“We didn’t tell him anything. First off, we couldn’t be sure. Second, we didn’t like his manner. Third, even if we had been sure and I had liked his manner, we likely would not have sicked him on to her. Why would we? Everybody’s done something to be sorry for. Take me. I was married once—to a professor of classical languages at Redlands University.” She laughed lightly.

“You might have got yourself a story,” I said.

“Sure. But up here we’re just people.”

“Did this man De Soto see Jim Patton?”

“Sure, he must have. Jim didn’t mention it.”

“Did he show you his badge?”

She thought and then shook her head. “I don’t recall that he did. We just took him for granted, from what he said. He certainly acted like a tough, city cop.”

“To me that’s a little against his being one. Did anybody tell Muriel about this guy?”

She hesitated, looking quietly out through the windshield for a long moment before she turned her head and nodded.

“I did. Wasn’t any of my damn business, was it?”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She gave a funny little embarrassed laugh, as if I had been making a bad joke. Then she walked away. But I did get the impression that there was a queer look in her eyes, just for an instant. You still not interested in Muriel Chess, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Why should I be? I never heard of her until I came up here this afternoon. Honest. And I never heard of anybody named Mildred Haviland either. Drive you back to town?”

“Oh no, thanks. I’ll walk. It’s only a few steps. Much obliged to you. I kind of hope Bill doesn’t get into a jam. Especially a nasty jam like this.”

She got out of the car and hung on one foot, then tossed her head and laughed. “They say I’m a pretty good beauty operator,” she said. “I hope I am. As an interviewer I’m terrible. Goodnight.”

I said good night and she walked off into the evening. I sat there watching her until she reached the main street and turned out of sight. Then I got out of the Chrysler and went over towards the telephone company’s little rustic building.

10

A tame doe deer with a leather dog collar on wandered across the road in front of me. I patted her rough hairy neck and went into the telephone office. A small girl in slacks sat at a small desk working on the books. She got me the rate to Beverly Hills and the change for the coin box. The booth was outside, against the front wall of the building.

“I hope you like it up here,” she said. “It’s very quiet, very restful.”

I shut myself into the booth. For ninety cents I could talk to Derace Kingsley for five minutes. He was at home and the call came through quickly but the connection was full of mountain static.

“Find anything up there?” he asked me in a three highball voice. He sounded tough and confident again.

“I’ve found too much,” I said. “And not at all what we want.

Are you alone?”

“What does that matter?”

“It doesn’t matter to me. But I know what I’m going to say. You don’t.”

“Well, get on with it, whatever it is,” he said.

“I had a long talk with Bill Chess. He was lonely. His wife had left him—a month ago. They had a fight and he went out and got drunk and when he came back she was gone. She left a note saying she would rather be dead than live with him any more.”

“I guess Bill drinks too much,” Kingsley’s voice said from very far off.

“When he got back, both the women had gone. He had no idea where Mrs. Kingsley went Lavery was up here in May, but not since. Lavery admitted that much himself. Lavery could, of course, have come up again while Bill was out getting drunk, but there wouldn’t be a lot of point to that and there would be two cars to drive down the hill. And I thought that possibly Mrs. K. and Muriel Chess might have gone away together, only Muriel also had a car of her own. But that idea, little as it was worth, has been thrown out by another development. Muriel Chess didn’t go away at all. She went down into your private lake. She came back up today. I was there.”

“Good God!” Kingsley sounded properly horrified. “You mean she drowned herself?”

“Perhaps. The note she left could be a suicide note. It would read as well that way as the other. The body was stuck down under that old submerged landing below the pier. Bill was the one who spotted an arm moving down there while we were standing on the pier looking down into the water. He got her out. They’ve arrested him. The poor guy’s pretty badly broken up.”

“Good God!” Kingsley said again. “I should think he would be. Does it look as if he—” He paused as the operator came in on the line and demanded another forty-five cents. I put in two quarters and the line cleared.

“Look as if he what?”

Suddenly very clear, Kingsley’s voice said: “Look as if he murdered her?”

I said: “Very much. Jim Patton, the constable up here, doesn’t like the note not being dated. It seems she left him once before over some woman. Patton sort of suspects Bill might have saved up an old note. Anyhow they’ve taken Bill down to San Bernardino for questioning and they’ve taken the body down to be post-mortemed.”

“And what do you think?” he asked slowly.

“Well, Bill found the body himself. He didn’t have to take me around by that pier. She might have stayed down in the water very much longer, or forever. The note could be old because Bill had carried it in his wallet and handled it from time to time, brooding over it. It could just as easily be undated this time as another time. I’d say notes like that are undated more often than not. The people who write them are apt to be in a hurry and not concerned with dates.”

“The body must be pretty far gone. What can they find out now?”

“I don’t know how well equipped they are. They can find out if she died by drowning, I guess. And whether there are any marks of violence that wouldn’t be erased by water and decomposition. They could tell if she had been shot or stabbed. If the hyoid bone in the throat was broken, they could assume she was throttled. The main thing for us is that I’ll have to tell why I came up here. I’ll have to testify at an inquest.”

“That’s bad,” Kingsley growled. “Very bad. What do you plan to do now?”

“On my way home I’ll stop at the Prescott Hotel and see if I can pick up anything there. Were your wife and Muriel Chess friendly?”

“I guess so. Crystal’s easy enough to get along with most of the time. I hardly knew Muriel Chess.”

“Did you ever know anybody named Mildred Haviland?”

“What?”

I repeated the name.

“No,” he said. “Is there any reason why I should?”

“Every question I ask you ask another right back,” I said.

“No, there isn’t any reason why you should know Mildred Haviland. Especially if you hardly knew Muriel Chess. I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Do that,” he said, and hesitated. “I’m sorry you had to walk into such a mess,” he added, and then hesitated again and said goodnight and hung up.

The bell rang again immediately and the long distance operator told me sharply I had put in five cents too much money. I said the sort of thing I would be likely to put into an opening like that. She didn’t like it.

I stepped out of the booth and gathered some air into my lungs. The tame doe with the leather collar was standing in the gap in the fence at the end of the walk. I tried to push her out of the way, but she just leaned against me and wouldn’t push. So I stepped over the fence and went back to the Chrysler and drove back to the village.

There was a hanging light in Patton’s headquarters but the shack was empty and his “Back in Twenty Minutes” sign was still against the inside of the glass part of the door. I kept on going down to the boat landing and beyond to the edge of a deserted swimming beach. A few put-puts and speedboats were still fooling around on the silky water. Across the lake tiny yellow lights began to show in toy cabins perched on miniature slopes. A single bright star glowed low in the northeast above the ridge of the mountains. A robin sat on the spike top of a hundred foot pine and waited for it to be dark enough for him to sing his goodnight song.

In a little while it was dark enough and he sang and went away into the invisible depths of sky. I snapped my cigarette into the motionless water a few feet away and climbed back into the car and started back in the direction of Little Fawn Lake.

11

The gate across the private road was padlocked. I put the Chrysler between two pine trees and climbed the gate and pussyfooted along the side of the road until the glimmer of the little lake bloomed suddenly at my feet. Bill Chess’s cabin was dark. The three cabins on the other side were abrupt shadows against the pale granite outcrop. Water gleamed white where it trickled across the top of the dam, and fell almost soundlessly along the sloping outer face to the brook below. I listened, and heard no other sound at all.

The front door of the Chess cabin was locked. I padded along to the back and found a brute of a padlock hanging at that. I went along the walls feeling window screens. They were all fastened. One window higher up was screenless, a small double cottage window half way down the north wall. This was locked too. I stood still and did some more listening. There was no breeze and the trees were as quiet as their shadows.

I tried a knife blade between the two halves of the small window. No soap. The catch refused to budge. I leaned against the wall and thought and then suddenly I picked up a large stone and smacked it against the place where the two frames met in the middle. The catch pulled out of dry wood with a tearing noise. The window swung back into darkness. I heaved up on the sill and wangled a cramped leg over and edged through the opening. I rolled and let myself down into the room. I turned, grunting a little from the exertion at that altitude, and listened again.

A blazing flash beam hit me square in the eyes.

A very calm voice said: “I’d rest right there, son. You must be all tuckered out.”

The flash pinned me against the wall like a squashed fly. Then a light switch clicked and a table lamp glowed. The flash went out. Jim Patton was sitting in an old brown Morris chair beside the table. A fringed brown scarf hung over the end of the table and touched his thick knee. He wore the same clothes he had worn that afternoon, with the addition of a leather jerkin which must have been new once, say about the time of Grover Cleveland’s first term. His hands were empty except for that flash. His eyes were empty. His jaws moved in gentle rhythm.

“What’s on your mind, son—besides breaking and entering?”

I poked a chair out and straddled it and leaned my arms on the back and looked around the cabin.

“I had an idea,” I said. “It looked pretty good for a while, but I guess I can learn to forget it.”

The cabin was larger than it had seemed from outside. The part I was in was the living room. It contained a few articles of modest furniture, a rag rug on the pine-board floor, a round table against the end wall and two chairs set against it. Through an open door the corner of a big black cook stove showed.

Patton nodded and his eyes studied me without rancor, “I heard a car coming,” he said. “I knew it had to be coming here. You walk right nice though. I didn’t hear you walk worth a darn. I’ve been a mite curious about you, son.”

I said nothing.

“I hope you don’t mind me callin’ you son,’” he said. “I hadn’t ought to be so familiar, but I got myself into the habit and I can’t seem to shake it. Anybody that don’t have a long white beard and arthritis is son to me.”

I said he could call me anything that came to mind. I wasn’t sensitive.

He grinned. “There’s a mess of detectives in the L.A. phone book,” he said. “But only one of them is called Marlowe.”

“What made you look?”

“I guess you might call it lowdown curiosity. Added to which Bill Chess told me you was some sort of dick. You didn’t bother to tell me yourself.”

“I’d have got around to it,” I said. “I’m sorry it bothered you.”

“It didn’t bother me none. I don’t bother at all easy. You got any identification with you?”

I got my wallet out and showed him this and that. “Well, you got a good build on you for the work,” he said satisfied. “And your face don’t tell a lot of stories. I guess you was aiming to search the cabin.”

“Yeah.”

“I already pawed around considerable myself. Just got back and come straight here. That is, I stopped by my shack a minute and then come. I don’t figure I could let you search the place, though.” He scratched his ear. “That is, damn if I know whether I could or not. You telling who hired you?”

“Derace Kingsley. To trace his wife. She skipped out on him a month ago. She started from here. So I started from here. She’s supposed to have gone away with a man. The man denies it.

I thought maybe something up here might give me a lead.”

“And did anything?”

“No. She’s traced pretty definitely as far as San Bernardino and then El Paso. There the trail ends. But I’ve only just started.”

Patton stood up and unlocked the cabin door. The spicy smell of the pines surged in. He spat outdoors and sat down again and rumpled the mousy brown hair under his Stetson. His head with the hat off had the indecent look of heads that are seldom without hats.

“You didn’t have no interest in Bill Chess at all?”

“None whatever.”

“I guess you fellows do a lot of divorce business,” he said. “Kind of smelly work, to my notion.”

I let that ride.

“Kingsley wouldn’t have asked help from the police to find his wife, would he?”

“Hardly,” I said. “He knows her too well.”

“None of what you’ve been saying don’t hardly explain your wanting to search Bill’s cabin,” he said judiciously.

“I’m just a great guy to poke around.”

“Hell,” he said, “you can do better than that.”

“Say I am interested in Bill Chess then. But only because he’s in trouble and rather a pathetic case—in spite of being a good deal of a heel. If he murdered his wife, there’s something here to point that way. If he didn’t, there’s something to point that way too.”

He held his head sideways, like a watchful bird. “As for instance what kind of thing?”

“Clothes, personal jewelry, toilet articles, whatever a woman takes with her when she goes away, not intending to come back.”

He leaned back slowly. “But she didn’t go away, son.”

“Then the stuff should be still here. But if it was still here, Bill would have noticed she hadn’t taken it. He would know she hadn’t gone away.”

“By gum, I don’t like it either way,” he said.

“But if he murdered her,” I said, “then he would have to get rid of the things she ought to have taken with her, if she had gone away.”

“And how do you figure he would do that, son?” The yellow lamplight made bronze of one side of his face.

“I understand she had a Ford car of her own. Except for that I’d expect him, to burn what he could burn and bury what he could not burn out in the woods. Sinking it in the lake might be dangerous. But he couldn’t burn or bury her car. Could he drive it?”

Patton looked surprised. “Sure. He can’t bend his right leg at the knee, so he couldn’t use the footbrake very handy. But he could get by with the handbrake. All that’s different on Bill’s own Ford is the brake pedal is set over on the left side of the post, close to the clutch, so he can shove them both down with one foot.”

I shook ash from my cigarette into a small blue jar that had once contained a pound of orange honey, according to the small gilt label on it.

“Getting rid of the car would be his big problem,” I said. “Wherever he took it. he would have to get back, and he would rather not be seen coming back. And if he simply abandoned it on a street, say, down in San Bernardino, it would be found and identified very quickly. He wouldn’t want that either. The best stunt would be to unload it on a hot car dealer, but he probably doesn’t know one. So the chances are he hid it in the woods within walking distance of here. And walking distance for him would not be very far.”

“For a fellow that claims not to be interested, you’re doing some pretty close figuring on all this,” Patton said dryly. “So now you’ve got the car hid out in the woods. What then?”

“He has to consider the possibility of its being found. The woods are lonely, but rangers and woodcutters get around in them from time to time. If the car is found, it would be better for Muriel’s stuff to be found in it. That would give him a couple of outs—neither one very brilliant but both at least possible. One, that she was murdered by some unknown party who fixed things to implicate Bill when and if the murder was discovered. Two, that Muriel did actually commit suicide, but fixed things so that he would be blamed. A revenge suicide.”

Patton thought all this over with calm and care. He went to the door to unload again. He sat down and rumpled his hair again. He looked at me with solid skepticism.

“The first one’s possible like you say,” he admitted. “But only just, and I don’t have anybody in mind for the job. There’s that little matter of the note to be got over.”

I shook my head. “Say Bill already had the note from another time. Say she went away, as he thought, without leaving a note. After a month had gone by without any word from her he might be just worried and uncertain enough to show the note, feeling it might be some protection to him in case anything had happened to her. He didn’t say any of this, but he could have had it in his mind.”

Patton shook his head. He didn’t like it. Neither did I. He said slowly: “As to your other notion, it’s just plain crazy.

Killing yourself and fixing things so as somebody else would get accused of murdering you don’t fit in with my simple ideas of human nature at all”

“Then your ideas of human nature are too simple,” I said. “Because it has been done, and when it has been done, it has nearly always been done by a woman.”

“Nope,” he said, “I’m a man fifty-seven years old and I’ve seen a lot of crazy people, but I don’t go for that worth a peanut shell. What I like is that she did plan to go away and did write the note, but he caught her before she got clear and saw red and finished her off. Then he would have to do all them things we been talking about.”

“I never met her,” I said. “So I wouldn’t have any idea what she would be likely to do. Bill said he met her in a place in Riverside something over a year ago. She may have had a long and complicated history before that. What kind of girl was she?”

“A mighty cute little blonde when she fixed herself up. She kind of let herself go with Bill. A quiet girl, with a face that kept its secrets. Bill says she had a temper, but I never seen any of it. I seen plenty of nasty temper in him.”

“And did you think she looked like the photo of some body called Mildred Haviland?”

His jaws stopped munching and his mouth became almost primly tight. Very slowly he started chewing again.

“By gum,” he said, “I’ll be mighty careful to look under the bed before I crawl in tonight. To make sure you ain’t there. Where did you get that information?”

“A nice little girl called Birdie Keppel told me. She was interviewing me in the course of her spare time newspaper job. She happened to mention that an L.A. cop named De Soto was showing the photo around.”

Patton smacked his thick knee and hunched his shoulders forward.

“I done wrong there,” he said soberly, “I made one of my mistakes. This big bruiser showed his picture to darn near everybody in town before he showed it to me. That made me kind of sore. It looked some like Muriel, but not enough to be sure by any manner of means. I asked him what she was wanted for. He said it was police business. I said I was in that way of business myself, in an ignorant countrified kind of way. He said his instructions were to locate the lady and that was all he knew. Maybe he did wrong to take me up short like that. So I guess I done wrong to tell him I didn’t know anybody that looked like his little picture.”

The big calm man smiled vaguely at the corner of the ceiling, then brought his eyes down and looked at me steadily.

“I’ll thank you to respect this confidence, Mr. Marlowe. You done right nicely in your figuring too. You ever happen to go over to Coon Lake?”

“Never heard of it.”

“Back about a mile,” he said, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb, “there’s a little narrow wood road turns over west. You can just drive it and miss the trees. It climbs about five hundred feet in another mile and comes out by Coon Lake. Pretty little place. Folks go up there to picnic once in a while, but not often. It’s hard on tires. There’s two three small shallow lakes full of reeds. There’s snow up there even now in the shady places. There’s a bunch of old hand-hewn log cabins that’s been falling down ever since I recall, and there’s a big broken down frame building that Montclair University used to use for a summer camp maybe ten years back. They ain’t used it in a very long time. This building sits back from the lake in heavy timber. Round at the back of it there’s a washhouse with an old rusty boiler and along of that there’s a big woodshed with a sliding door hung on rollers. It was built for a garage but they kept their wood in it and they locked it up out of season. Wood’s one of the few things people will steal up here, but folks who might steal it off a pile wouldn’t break a lock to get it. I guess you know what I found in that woodshed.”

“I thought you went down to San Bernardino.”

“Changed my mind. Didn’t seem right to let Bill ride down there with his wife’s body in the back of the car. So I sent it down in Doc’s ambulance and I sent Andy down with Bill. I figured I kind of ought to look around a little more before I put things up to the sheriff and the coroner.”

“Muriel’s car was in the woodshed?”

“Yep. And two unlocked suitcases in the car. Packed with clothes and packed kind of hasty, I thought. Women’s clothes. The point is, son, no stranger would have known about that place.”

I agreed with him. He put his hand into the slanting side pocket of his jerkin and brought out a small twist of tissue paper. He opened it up on his palm and held the hand out flat.

“Take a look at this.”

I went over and looked. What lay on the tissue was a thin gold chain with a tiny lock hardly larger than a link of the chain. The gold had been snipped through, leaving the lock intact. The chain seemed to be about seven inches long. There was white powder sticking to both chain and paper.

“Where would you guess I found that?” Patton asked.

I picked the chain up and tried to fit the cut ends together. They didn’t fit. I made no comment on that, but moistened a finger and touched the powder and tasted it.

“In a can or box of confectioner’s sugar,” I said. “The chain is an anklet. Some women never take them off, like wedding rings. Whoever took this one off didn’t have the key.”

“What do you make of it?”

“Nothing much,” I said. “There wouldn’t be any point in Bill cutting it off Muriel’s ankle and leaving that green necklace on her neck. There wouldn’t be any point in Muriel cutting it off herself—assuming she had lost the key—and hiding it to be found. A search thorough enough to find it wouldn’t be made unless her body was found first. If Bill cut it off, he would have thrown it into the lake. But if Muriel wanted to keep it and yet hide it from Bill, there’s some sense in the place where it was hidden.”

Patton looked puzzled this time. “Why is that?”

“Because it’s a woman’s hiding place. Confectioner’s sugar is used to make cake icing. A man would never look there. Pretty clever of you to find it, sheriff.”

He grinned a little sheepishly. “Hell, I knocked the box over and some of the sugar spilled,” he said. “Without that I don’t guess I ever would have found it.” He rolled the paper up again and slipped it back into his pocket. He stood up with an air of finality.

“You staying up here or going back to town, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Back to town. Until you want me for the inquest. I suppose you will.”

“That’s up to the coroner, of course. If you’ll kind of shut that window you bust in, I’ll put this lamp out and lock up.”

I did what he said and he snapped his flash on and put out the lamp. We went out and he felt the cabin door to make sure the lock had caught. He closed the screen softly and stood looking across the moonlit lake.

“I don’t figure Bill meant to kill her,” he said sadly. “He could choke a girl to death without meaning to at all. He has mighty strong hands. Once done he has to use what brain God gave him to cover up what he done. I feel real bad about it, but that don’t alter the facts and the probabilities. It’s simple and natural and the simple and natural things usually turn out to be right.”

I said: “I should think he would have run away. I don’t see how he could stand it to stay here.”

Patton spat into the black velvet shadow of a manzanita bush. He said slowly: “He had a government pension and he would have to run away from that too. And most men can stand what they’ve got to stand, when it steps up and looks them straight in the eye. Like they’re doing all over the world right now. Well, goodnight to you. I’m going to walk down to that little pier again and stand there awhile in the moonlight and feel bad. A night like this, and we got to think about murders.”

He moved quietly off into the shadows and became one of them himself. I stood there until be was out of sight and then went back to the locked gate and climbed over it. I got into the car and drove back down the road looking for a place to hide.

12

Three hundred yards from the gate a narrow track, sifted over with brown oak leaves from last fall, curved around a granite boulder and disappeared. I followed it around and bumped along the stones of the outcrop for fifty or sixty feet, then swung the car around a tree and set it pointing back the way it had come. I cut the lights and switched off the motor and sat there waiting.

Half an hour passed. Without tobacco it seemed a long time. Then far off I heard a car motor start up and grow louder and the white beam of headlights passed below me on the road. The sound faded into the distance and a faint dry tang of dust hung in the air for a while after it was gone.

I got out of my car and walked back to the gate and to the Chess cabin. A hard push opened the sprung window this time. I climbed in again and let myself down to the floor and poked the flash I had brought across the room to the table lamp. I switched the lamp on and listened moment, heard nothing, and went out to the kitchen. I switched on a hanging bulb over the sink.

The wood-box beside the stove was neatly piled with split wood. There were no dirty dishes in the sink, no foul-smelling pots on the stove. Bill Chess, lonely or not, kept his house in good order. A door opened from the kitchen into the bedroom, and from that a very narrow door led into a tiny bathroom which had evidently been built on to the cabin fairly recently. The clean celotex lining showed that. The bathroom told me nothing.

The bedroom contained a double bed, a pinewood dresser with a round mirror on the wall above it, a bureau, two straight chairs, and a tin wastebasket. There were two oval rag rugs on the floor, one on each side of the bed. On the walls Bill Chess had tacked up a set of war maps from the National Geographic. There was a silly-looking red and white flounce on the dressing table.

I poked around in the drawers. An imitation leather trinket box with an assortment of gaudy costume jewelry had not been taken away. There was the usual stuff women use on their faces and fingernails and eyebrows, and it seemed to me that there was too much of it. But that was just guessing. The bureau contained both man’s and woman’s clothes, not a great deal of either. Bill Chess had a very noisy check shirt with starched matching collar, among other things. Underneath a sheet of blue tissue paper in one corner I found something I didn’t like. A seemingly brand new peach-colored silk slip trimmed with lace. Silk slips were not being left behind that year, not by any woman in her senses.

This looked bad for Bill Chess. I wondered what Patton had thought of it. I went back to the kitchen and prowled the open shelves above and beside the sink. They were thick with cans and jars of household staples. The confectioner’s sugar was in a square brown box with a torn corner. Patton had made an attempt to clean up what was spilled. Near the sugar were salt, borax, baking soda, cornstarch, brown sugar and so on. Something might be hidden in any of them. Something that had been clipped from a chain anklet whose cut ends did not fit together.

I shut my eyes and poked a finger out at random and it came to rest on the baking soda. I got a newspaper from the back of the wood-box and spread it out and dumped the soda out of the box. I stirred it around with a spoon. There seemed to be an indecent lot of baking soda, but that was all there was. I funneled it back into the box and tried the borax. Nothing but borax. Third time lucky. I tried the cornstarch. It made too much fine dust, and there was nothing but cornstarch.

The sound of distant steps froze me to the ankles. I reached up and yanked the light out and dodged back into the living room and reached for the lamp switch. Much too late to be of any use, of course. The steps sounded again, soft and cautious. The hackles rose on my neck.

I waited in the dark, with the flash in my left hand. A deadly long two minutes crept by. I spent some of the time breathing, but not all.

It wouldn’t be Patton. He would walk up to the door and open it and tell me off. The careful quiet steps seemed to move this way and that, a movement, a long pause, another movement, another long pause. I sneaked across to the door and twisted the knob silently. I yanked the door wide and stabbed out with the flash.

It made golden lamps of a pair of eyes. There was a leaping movement and a quick thudding of hoofs back among the trees. It was only an inquisitive deer.

I closed the door again and followed my flashlight beam back into the kitchen. The small round glow rested squarely on the box of confectioner’s sugar.

I put the light on again, lifted the box down and emptied it on the newspaper.

Patton hadn’t gone deep enough. Having found one thing by accident he had assumed that was all there was. He hadn’t seemed to notice that there ought to be something else.

Another twist of white tissue showed in the fine white powdered sugar. I shook it clean and unwound it. It contained a tiny gold heart, no larger than a woman’s little fingernail.

I spooned the sugar back into the box and put the box back on the shelf and crumpled the piece of newspaper into the stove. I went back to the living room and turned the table lamp on. Under the brighter light the tiny engraving on the back of the little gold heart could just be read without a magnifying glass.

It was in script. It read: “Al to Mildred. June 28^th 1938. With all my love.”

Al to Mildred. Al somebody to Mildred Haviland. Mildred Haviland was Muriel Chess. Muriel Chess was dead—two weeks after a cop named De Soto had been looking for her.

I stood there, holding it, wondering what it had to do with me. Wondering, and not having the faintest glimmer of an idea. I wrapped it up again and left the cabin and drove back to the village.

Patton was in his office telephoning when I got around there. The door was locked. I had to wait while he talked. After a while he hung up and came to unlock the door.

I walked in past him and put the twist of tissue paper on his counter and opened it up.

“You didn’t go deep enough into the powdered sugar,” I said.

He looked at the little gold heart, looked at me, went around behind the counter and got a cheap magnifying glass off his desk. He studied the back of the heart. He put the glass down and frowned at me.

“Might have known if you wanted to search that cabin, you was going to do it,” he said gruffly. “I ain’t going to have trouble with you, am I, son?”

“You ought to have noticed that the cut ends of the chain didn’t fit,” I told him.

He looked at me sadly. “Son, I don’t have your eyes.” He pushed the little heart around with his square blunt finger. He stared at me and said nothing.

I said: “If you were thinking that anklet meant something Bill could have been jealous about, so was I—provided he ever saw it. But strictly on the cuff I’m willing to bet he never did see it and that he never heard of Mildred Haviland.”

Patton said slowly: “Looks like maybe I owe this De Soto party an apology, don’t it?”

“If you ever see him,” I said.

He gave me another long empty stare and I gave it right back to him. “Don’t tell me, son,” he said. “Let me guess all for myself that you got a brand new idea about it.”

“Yeah. Bill didn’t murder his wife.”

“No?”

“No. She was murdered by somebody out of her past. Somebody who had lost track of her and then found it again and found her married to another man and didn’t like it. Somebody who knew the country up here—as hundreds of people do who don’t live here—and knew a good place to hide the car and the clothes. Somebody who hated and could dissimulate. Who persuaded her to go away with him and when everything was ready and the note was written, took her around the throat and gave her what he thought was coming to her and put her in the lake and went his way. Like it?”

“Well,” he said judiciously, “it does make things kind of complicated, don’t you think? But there ain’t anything impossible about it. Not one bit impossible.”

“When you get tired of it, let me know. Ill have something else,” I said.

“I’ll just be doggone sure you will,” he said, and for the first time since I had met him he laughed.

I said goodnight again and went out, leaving him there moving his mind around with the ponderous energy of a homesteader digging up a stump.

13

At somewhere around eleven I got down to the bottom of the grade and parked in one of the diagonal slots at the side of the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino. I pulled an overnight bag out of the boot and had taken three steps with it when a bellhop in braided pants and a white shirt and black bow tie yanked it out of my hand.

The clerk on duty was an egg-headed man with no interest in me or in anything else. He wore parts of a white linen suit and he yawned as he handed me the desk pen and looked off into the distance as if remembering his childhood.

The hop and I rode a four by four elevator to the second floor and walked a couple of blocks around corners. As he walked it got hotter and hotter. The hop unlocked a door into a boy’s size room with one window on an airshaft. The air-conditioner inlet up in the corner of the ceiling was about the size of a woman’s handkerchief. The bit of ribbon tied to it fluttered weakly, just to show that something was moving.

The hop was tall and thin and yellow and not young and as cool as a slice of chicken in aspic. He moved his gum around in his face, put my bag on a chair, looked up at the grating and then stood looking at me. He had eyes the color of a drink of water.

“Maybe I ought to have asked for one of the dollar rooms,” I said. “This one seems a mite close-fitting.”

“I reckon you’re lucky to get one at all. This town’s fair bulgin’ at the seams.”

“Bring us up some ginger ale and glasses and ice,” I said.

“Us?”

“That is, if you happen to be a drinking man.”

“I reckon I might take a chance this late.”

He went out. I took off my coat, tie, shirt and undershirt and walked around in the warm draft from the open door. The draft smelled of hot iron. I went into the bathroom sideways—it was that kind of bathroom—and doused myself with tepid cold water. I was breathing little more freely when the tall languid hop returned with a tray. He shut the door and I brought out a bottle of rye. He mixed a couple of drinks and we made the usual insincere smiles over them and drank. The perspiration started from the back of my neck down my spine and was halfway to my socks before I put the glass down. But I felt better all the same. I sat on the bed and looked at the hop.

“How long can you stay?”

“Doin’ what?”

“Remembering.”

“I ain’t a damn bit of use at it,” he said.

“I have money to spend,” I said, “in my own peculiar way.” I got my wallet unstuck from the lower part of my back and spread tired-looking dollar bills along the bed.

“I beg yore pardon,” the cop said. “I reckon you might be a dick.”

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “You never saw a dick playing solitaire with his own money. You might call me an investigator.”

“I’m interested,” he said. “The likker makes my mind work.”

I gave him a dollar bill. “Try that on your mind. And can I call you Big Tex from Houston?”

“Amarillo,” he said. “Not that it matters. And how do you like my Texas drawl? It makes me sick, but I find people go for it.”

“Stay with it,” I said. “It never lost anybody a dollar yet.”

He grinned and tucked the folded dollar neatly into the watch pocket of his pants.

“What were you doing on Friday, June 12^th?” I asked him. “Late afternoon or evening. It was a Friday.”

He sipped his drink and thought, shaking the ice around gently and drinking past his gum. “I was right here, six to twelve shift,” he said.

“A woman, slim, pretty blonde, checked in here and stayed until time for the night train to El Paso. I think she must have taken that because she was in El Paso Sunday morning. She came here driving a Packard Clipper registered to Crystal Grace Kingsley, 965 Carson Drive, Beverly Hills. She may have registered as that, or under some other name, and she may not have registered at all. Her car is still in the hotel garage. I’d like to talk to the boys that checked her in and out. That wins another dollar—just thinking about it.”

I separated another dollar from my exhibit and it went into his pocket with a sound like caterpillars fighting.

“Can do,” he said calmly.

He put his glass down and left the room, closing the door. I finished my drink and made another. I went into the bathroom and used some more warm water on my torso. While I was doing this the telephone on the wall tinkled and I wedged myself into the minute space between the bathroom door and the bed to answer it.

The Texas voice said: “That was Sonny. He was inducted last week. Another boy we call Les checked her out. He’s here.”

“Okay. Shoot him up, will you?”

I was playing with my second drink and thinking about the third when a knock came and I opened the door to a small, green-eyed rat with a tight, girlish mouth.

He came in almost dancing and stood looking at me with a faint sneer.

“Drink?”

“Sure,” he said coldly. He poured himself a large one and added a whisper of ginger ale, put the mixture down in one long swallow, tucked a cigarette between his smooth little lips and snapped a match alight while it was coming up from his pocket. He blew smoke and went on staring at me. The corner of his eye caught the money on the bed, without looking directly at it. Over the pocket of his shirt, instead of a number, the word Captain was stitched.

“You Les?” I asked him.

“No.” He paused. “We don’t like dicks here,” he added. “We don’t have one of our own and we don’t care to bother with dicks that are working for other people.”

“Thanks,” I said. “That will be all.”

“Huh?” The small mouth twisted unpleasantly.

“Beat it,” I said.

“I thought you wanted to see me,” he sneered.

“You’re the bell captain?”

“Check.”

“I wanted to buy you a drink. I wanted to give you a buck.

Here.” I held it out to him. “Thanks for coming up.”

He took the dollar and pocketed it, without a word of thanks. He hung there, smoke trailing from his nose, his eyes tight and mean.

“What I say here goes,” he said.

“It goes as far as you can push it,” I said. “And that couldn’t be very far. You had your drink and you had your graft. Now you can scram out?”

He turned with a swift tight shrug and slipped out of the room noiselessly.

Four minutes passed, then another knock, very light. The tall boy came in grinning. I walked away from him and sat on the bed again.

“You didn’t take to Les, I reckon?”

“Not a great deal. Is he satisfied?”

“I reckon so. You know what captains are. They have to have their cut. Maybe you better call me Les, Mr. Marlowe.”

“So you checked her out.”

“No, that was all a stall. She never checked in at the desk. But I remember the Packard. She gave me a dollar to put it away for her and to look after her stuff until train time. She ate dinner here. A dollar gets you remembered in this town. And there’s been talk about the car bein’ left so long.”

“What was she like to look at?”

“She wore a black and white outfit, mostly white, and a panama hat with a black and white band. She was a neat blonde lady like you said. Later on she took a hack to the station. I put her bags into it for her. They had initials on them but I’m sorry I can’t remember the initials.”

“I’m glad you can’t,” I said. “It would be too good. Have a drink. How old would she be?”

He rinsed the other glass and mixed a civilized drink for himself.

“It’s mighty hard to tell a woman’s age these days,” he said. “I reckon she was about thirty, or a little more or a little less.”

I dug in my coat for the snapshot of Crystal and Lavery on the beach and handed it to him.

He looked at it steadily and held it away from his eyes, then close.

“You won’t have to swear to it in court,” I said.

He nodded. “I wouldn’t want to. These small blondes are so much of a pattern that a change of clothes or light or makeup makes them all alike or all different.” He hesitated, staring at the snapshot.

“What’s worrying you?” I asked.

“I’m thinking about the gent in this snap. He enter into it at all?”

“Go on with that,” I said.

“I think this fellow spoke to her in the lobby, and had dinner with her. A tall good-lookin’ jasper, built like a fast light-heavy. He went in the hack with her too.”

“Quite sure about that?”

He looked at the money on the bed.

“Okay, how much does it cost?” I asked wearily.

He stiffened, laid the snapshot down and drew the two folded bills from his pocket and tossed them on the bed.

“I thank you for the drink,” he said, “and to hell with you.”

He started for the door.

“Oh sit down and don’t be so touchy,” I growled.

He sat down and looked at me stiff-eyed.

“And don’t be so damn southern,” I said. “I’ve been knee deep in hotel hops for a lot of years. If I’ve met one who wouldn’t pull a gag, that’s fine. But you can’t expect me to expect to meet one that wouldn’t pull a gag.”

He grinned slowly and nodded quickly. He picked the snapshot up again and looked at me over it.

“This gent takes a solid photo,” he said. “Much more so than the lady. But there was another little item that made me remember him. I got the impression the lady didn’t quite like him walking up to her so openly in the lobby.”

I thought that over and decided it didn’t mean anything much.

He might have been late or have missed some earlier appointment.

I said: “There’s a reason for that. Did you notice what jewelry the lady was wearing? Rings, ear-pendants, anything that looked conspicuous or valuable?”

He hadn’t noticed, he said.

“Was her hair long or short, straight or waved or curly, natural blonde or bleached?”

He laughed. “Hell, you can’t tell that last point, Mr. Marlowe. Even when it’s natural they want it lighter. As to the rest, my recollection is it was rather long, like they’re wearing it now and turned in a little at the bottom and rather straight. But I could be wrong.” He looked at the snapshot again. “She has it bound back here. You can’t tell a thing.”

“That’s right,” I said. “And the only reason I asked you was to make sure you didn’t over-observe. The guy that sees too much detail is just as unreliable a witness as the guy that doesn’t see any. He’s nearly always making half of it up. You check just about right, considering the circumstances. Thanks very much.”

I gave him back his two dollars and a five to keep them company. He thanked me, finished his drink and left softly. I finished mine and washed off again and decided I would rather drive home than sleep in that hole. I put my shirt and coat on again and went downstairs with my bag.

The redheaded rat of a captain was the only hop in the lobby. I carried my bag over to the desk and he didn’t move to take it off my hands. The egg-headed clerk separated me from two dollars without even looking at me.

“Two bucks to spend the night in this manhole,” I said, “when for free I could have a nice airy ashcan.”

The clerk yawned, got a delayed reaction, and said brightly: “It gets quite cool here about three in the morning. From then on until eight, or even nine, it’s quite pleasant.”

I wiped the back of my neck and staggered out to the car. Even the seat of the car was hot, at midnight.

I got home about two-forty-five and Hollywood was an icebox.

Even Pasadena had felt cool.

14

I dreamed I was far down in the depths of icy green water with a corpse under my arm. The corpse had long blond hair that kept floating around in front of my face. An enormous fish with bulging eyes and a bloated body and scales shining with putrescence swam around leering like an elderly roué. Just as I was about to burst from lack of air, the corpse came alive under my arm and got away from me and then I was fighting with the fish and the corpse was rolling over and over in the water spinning its long hair.

I woke up with a mouth full of sheet and both hands hooked on the head-frame of the bed and pulling hard. The muscles ached when I let go and lowered them. I got up and walked the room and lit a cigarette, feeling the carpet with bare toes. When I had finished the cigarette, I went back to bed.

It was nine o’clock when I woke up again. The sun was on my face. The room was hot. I showered and shaved and partly dressed and made the morning toast and eggs and coffee in the dinette. While I was finishing up there, was a knock at the apartment door.

I went to open it with my mouth full of toast. It was a lean, serious looking man in a severe gray suit.

“Floyd Greer, lieutenant, Central Detective Bureau,” he said and walked into the room.

He put out a dry hand and I shook it. He sat down on the edge of a chair, the way they do, and turned his hat in his hands and looked at me with the quiet stare they have.

“We got a call from San Bernardino about that business up at Puma Lake. Drowned woman. Seems you were on hand when the body was discovered.”

I nodded and said, “Have some coffee?”

“No thanks. I had breakfast two hours ago.”

I got my coffee and sat down across the room from him.

“They asked us to look you up,” he said. “Give them a line on you.”

“Sure.”

“So we did that. Seems like you have a clean bill of health so far as we are concerned. Kind of coincidence a man in your line would be around when the body was found.”

“I’m like that,” I said. “Lucky.”

“So I just thought I’d drop around and say howdy.”

“That’s fine. Glad to know you, lieutenant.”

“Kind of coincidence,” he said again, nodding. “You up there on business, so to speak?”

“If I was,” I said, “my business had nothing to do with the girl who was drowned, so far as I know.”

“But you couldn’t be sure?”

“Until you’ve finished with a case, you can’t ever be quite sure what its ramifications are, can you?”

“That’s right.” He circled his hat brim through his fingers again, like a bashful cowboy. There was nothing bashful about his eyes. “I’d like to feel sure that if these ramifications you speak of happened to take in this drowned woman’s affairs, you would put us wise.”

“I hope you can rely on that,” I said.

He bulged his lower lip with his tongue. “We’d like a little more than a hope. At the present time you don’t care to say?”

“At the present time I don’t know anything that Patton doesn’t know.”

“Who’s he?”

“The constable up at Puma Point.”

The lean serious man smiled tolerantly. He cracked a knuckle and after a pause said: “The San Berdoo D. A. will likely want to talk to you—before the inquest. But that won’t be very soon. Right now they’re trying to get a set of prints. We lent them a technical man.”

“That will be tough. The body’s pretty far gone.”

“It’s done all the time,” he said. “They worked out the system back in New York where they’re all the time pulling in floaters. They cut patches of skin off the fingers and harden them in a tanning solution and make stamps. It works well enough as a rule.”

“You think this woman had a record of some kind?”

“Why, we always take prints of a corpse,” he said. “You ought to know that.”

I said: “I didn’t know the lady. If you thought I did and that was why I was up there, there’s nothing to it.”

“But you wouldn’t care to say just why you were up there,” he persisted.

“So you think I’m lying to you,” I said.

He spun his hat on a bony forefinger. “You got me wrong, Mr. Marlowe. We don’t think anything at all. What we do is investigate and find out. This stuff is just routine. You ought to know that. You been around long enough.” He stood up and put his hat on. “You might let me know if you have to leave town. I’d be obliged.”

I said I would and went to the door with him. He went out with a duck of his head and a sad half-smile. I watched him drift languidly down the hall and punch the elevator button.

I went back out to the dinette to see if there was any more coffee. There was about two-thirds of a cup. I added cream and sugar and carried my cup over to the telephone. I dialed Police Headquarters downtown and asked for the Detective Bureau and then for Lieutenant Floyd Greer.

The voice said: “Lieutenant Greer is not in the office. Anybody else do?”

“De Soto in?”

“Who?”

I repeated the name.

“What’s his rank and department?”

“Plain clothes something or other.”

“Hold the line.”

I waited. The burring male voice came back after a while and said: “What’s the gag? We don’t have a De Soto on the roster. Who’s this talking?”

I hung up, finished my coffee and dialed the number of Derace Kingsley’s office. The smooth and cool Miss Fromsett said he had just come in and put me through without a murmur.

“Well,” he said, loud and forceful at the beginning of a fresh day. “What did you find out at the hotel?”

“She was there all right. And Lavery met her there. The cop who gave me the dope brought Lavery into it himself, without any prompting from me. He had dinner with her and went with her in a cab to the railroad station.”

“Well, I ought to have known he was lying,” Kingsley said slowly. “I got the impression he was surprised when I told him about the telegram from El Paso. I was just letting my impression get too sharp. Anything else?”

“Not there. I had a cop calling on me this morning, giving me the usual looking over and warning me not to leave town without letting him know. Trying to find out why I went to Puma Point. I didn’t tell him and as he wasn’t even aware of Jim Patton’s existence, it’s evident that Patton didn’t tell anybody.”

“Jim would do his best to be decent about it,” Kingsley said. “Why were you asking me last night about some name—Mildred something or other?”

I told him, making it brief. I told him about Muriel Chess’s car and clothes being found and where.

“That looks bad for Bill,” he said. “I know Coon Lake myself, but it would never have occurred to me to use that old woodshed—or even that there was an old woodshed. It not only looks bad, it looks premeditated.”

“I disagree with that. Assuming he knew the country well enough it wouldn’t take him any time to search his mind for a likely hiding place. He was very restricted as to distance.”

“Maybe. What do you plan to do now?” he asked.

“Go up against Lavery again, of course.”

He agreed that that was the thing to do. He added: “This other, tragic as it is, is really no business of ours, is it?”

“Not unless your wife knew something about it.” His voice sounded sharply, saying: “Look here, Marlowe, I think I can understand your detective instinct to tie everything that happens into one compact knot, but don’t let it run away with you. Life isn’t like that at all—not life as I have known it. Better leave the affairs of the Chess family to the police and keep your brains working on the Kingsley family.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I don’t mean to be domineering,” he said.

I laughed heartily, said goodbye, and hung up. I finished dressing and went down to the basement for the Chrysler. I started for Bay City again.

15

I drove past the intersection of Altair Street to where the cross street continued to the edge of the canyon and ended in a semi-circular parking place with a sidewalk and a white wooden guard fence around it. I sat there in the car a little while, thinking, looking out to sea and admiring the blue gray fall of the foothills towards the ocean. I was trying to make up my mind whether to try handling Lavery with a feather or go on using the back of my hand and edge of my tongue. I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn’t produce for me—and I didn’t think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.

The paved alley that ran along halfway down the hill below the houses on the outer edge was empty. Below that, on the next hillside street, a couple of kids were throwing a boomerang up the slope and chasing it with the usual amount of elbowing and mutual insult. Farther down still a house was enclosed in trees and a red brick wall. There was a glimpse of washing on the line in the backyard and two pigeons strutted along the slope of the roof bobbing their heads. A blue and tan bus trundled along the street in front of the brick house and stopped and a very old man got off with slow care and settled himself firmly on the ground and tapped with a heavy cane before he started to crawl back up the slope.

The air was clearer than yesterday. The morning was full of peace. I left the car where it was and walked along Altair Street to No. 623.

The venetian blinds were down across the front windows and the place had a sleepy look. I stepped down over the Korean moss and punched the bell and saw that the door was not quite shut. It had dropped in its frame, as most of our doors do, and the spring bolt hung a little on the lower edge of the lock plate. I remembered that it had wanted to stick the day before, when I was leaving.

I gave the door a little push and it moved inward with a light click. The room beyond was dim, but there was some light from west windows. Nobody answered my ring. I didn’t ring again. I pushed the door a little wider and stepped inside.

The room had a hushed warm smell, the smell of late morning in a house not yet opened up. The bottle of Vat 69 on the round table by the davenport was almost empty and another full bottle waited beside it. The copper ice bucket had a little water in the bottom. Two glasses had been used, and half a siphon of carbonated water.

I fixed the door about as I had found it and stood there and listened. If Lavery was away I thought I would take a chance and frisk the joint. I didn’t have anything much on him, but it was probably enough to keep him from calling the cops.

In the silence time passed. It passed in the dry whirr of the electric clock on the mantel, in the far-off toot of an auto horn on Aster Drive, in the hornet drone of a plane over the foothills across the canyon, in the sudden lurch and growl of the electric refrigerator in the kitchen.

I went farther into the room and stood peering around and listening and hearing nothing except those fixed sounds belonging to the house and having nothing to do with the humans in it. I started along the rug towards the archway at the back.

A hand in a glove appeared on the slope of the white metal railing, at the edge of the archway, where the stairs went down. It appeared and stopped.

It moved and a woman’s hat showed, then her head. The woman came quietly up the stairs. She came all the way up, turned through the arch and still didn’t seem to see me. She was a slender woman of uncertain age, with untidy brown hair, a scarlet mess of a mouth, too much rouge on her cheekbones, shadowed eyes. She wore a blue tweed suit that looked like the dickens with the purple hat that was doing its best to hang on to the side of her head.

She saw me and didn’t stop or change expression in the slightest degree. She came slowly on into the room, holding her right hand away from her body. Her left hand wore the brown glove I had seen on the railing. The right hand glove that matched it was wrapped around the butt of a small automatic.

She stopped then and her body arched back and a quick distressful sound came out of her mouth. Then she giggled, a high nervous giggle. She pointed the gun at me, and came steadily on.

I kept on looking at the gun and not screaming.

The woman came close. When she was close enough to be confidential she pointed the gun at my stomach and said: “All I wanted was my rent. The place seems well taken care of. Nothing broken. He has always been a good tidy careful tenant. I just didn’t want him to get too far behind in the rent.”

A fellow with a kind of strained and unhappy voice said politely: “How far behind is he?”

“Three months,” she said. “Two hundred and forty dollars. Eighty dollars is very reasonable for a place as well furnished as this. I’ve had a little trouble collecting before, but it always came out very well. He promised me a check this morning. Over the telephone. I mean he promised to give it to me this morning.”

“Over the telephone,” I said. “This morning.”

I shuffled around a bit in an inconspicuous sort of way. The idea was to get close enough to make a side swipe at the gun, knock it outwards, and then jump in fast before she could bring it back in line. I’ve never had a lot of luck with the technique, but you have to try it once in a while. This looked like the time to try it.

I made about six inches, but not nearly enough for a first down. I said: “And you’re the owner?” I didn’t look at the gun directly. I had a faint, a very faint hope that she didn’t know she was pointing it at me.

“Why, certainly. I’m Mrs. Fallbrook. Who did you think I was?”

“Well, I thought you might be the owner,” I said. “You talking about the rent and all. But I didn’t know your name.” Another eight inches. Nice smooth work. It would be a shame to have it wasted.

“And who are you, if I may enquire?”

“I just came about the car payment,” I said. “The door was open just a teensy weensy bit and I kind of shoved in. I don’t know why.”

I made a face like a man from the finance company coming about the car payment. Kind of tough, but ready to break into a sunny smile.

“You mean Mr. Lavery is behind in his car payments?” she asked, looking worried.

“A little. Not a great deal,” I said soothingly.

I was all set now. I had the reach and I ought to have the speed. All it needed was a clean sharp sweep inside the gun and outward. I started to take my foot out of the rug.

“You know,” she said, “it’s funny about this gun. I found it on the stairs. Nasty oily things, aren’t they? And the stair carpet is a very nice gray chenille. Quite expensive.”

And she handed me the gun.

My hand went out for it, as stiff as an eggshell, almost as brittle. I took the gun. She sniffed with distaste at the glove which had been wrapped around the butt. She went on talking in exactly the same tone of cockeyed reasonableness. My knees cracked, relaxing.

“Well, of course it’s much easier for you,” she said. “About the car, I mean. You can just take it away, if you have to. But taking a house with nice furniture in it isn’t so easy. It takes time and money to evict a tenant. There is apt to be bitterness and things get damaged, sometimes on purpose. The rug on this floor cost over two hundred dollars, second hand. It’s only a jute rug, but it has a lovely coloring, don’t you think? You’d never know it was only jute, secondhand. But that’s silly too because they’re always secondhand after you’ve used them. And I walked over here too, to save my tires for the government. I could have taken a bus part way, but the darn things never come along except going in the wrong direction.”

I hardly heard what she said. It was like surf breaking beyond a point, out of sight. The gun had my interest.

I broke the magazine out. It was empty. I turned the gun and looked into the breech. That was empty too. I sniffed the muzzle. It reeked.

I dropped the gun into my pocket. A six-shot .25 caliber automatic. Emptied out. Shot empty, and not too long ago. But not in the last half hour either.

“Has it been fired?” Mrs. Fallbrook enquired pleasantly. “I certainly hope not.”

“Any reason why it should have been fired?” I asked her. The voice was steady, but the brain was still bouncing.

“Well, it was lying on the stairs,” she said. “After all, people do fire them.”

“How true that is,” I said. “But Mr. Lavery probably had a hole in his pocket. He isn’t home, is he?”

“Oh no.” She shook her head and looked disappointed. “And I don’t think it’s very nice of him. He promised me the check and I walked over—”

“When was it you phoned him?” I asked.

“Why, yesterday evening.” She frowned, not liking so many questions.

“He must have been called away,” I said.

She stared at a spot between my big brown eyes.

“Look, Mrs. Fallbrook,” I said. “Let’s not kid around any longer, Mrs. Fallbrook. Not that I don’t love it. And not that I like to say this. But you didn’t shoot him, did you—on account of he owed you three months rent?”

She sat down very slowly on the edge of a chair and worked the tip of her tongue along the scarlet slash of her mouth.

“Why, what a perfectly horrid suggestion,” she said angrily. “I don’t think you are nice at all. Didn’t you say the gun had not been fired?”

“All guns have been fired sometime. All guns have been loaded sometime. This one is not loaded now.”

“Well, then—” she made an impatient gesture and sniffed at her oily glove.

“Okay, my idea was wrong. Just a gag anyway. Mr. Lavery was out and you went through the house. Being the owner, you have a key. Is that correct?”

“I didn’t mean to be interfering,” she said, biting a finger. “Perhaps I ought not to have done it. But I have a right to see how things are kept.”

“Well, you looked. And you’re sure he’s not here?”

“I didn’t look under the beds or in the icebox,” she said coldly. “I called out from the top of the stairs when he didn’t answer my ring. Then I went down to the lower hall and called out again. I even peeped into the bedroom.” She lowered her eyes as if bashfully and twisted a hand on her knee.

“Well, that’s that,” I said.

She nodded brightly. “Yes, that’s that. And what did you say your name was?”

“Vance,” I said. “Philo Vance.”

“And what company are you employed with, Mr. Vance?”

“I’m out of work right now,” I said. “Until the police commissioner gets into a jam again.”

She looked startled. “But you said you came about a car payment.”

“That’s just part-time work,” I said. “A fill-in job.”

She rose to her feet and looked at me steadily. Her voice was cold saying: “Then in that case I think you had better leave now.”

I said: “I thought I might take a look around first, if you don’t mind. There might be something you missed.”

“I don’t think that is necessary,” she said. “This is my house. I’ll thank you to leave now, Mr. Vance.”

I said: “And if I don’t leave, you’ll get somebody who will. Take a chair again, Mrs. Falibrook. I’ll just glance through. This gun, you know, is kind of queer.”

“But I told you I found it lying on the stairs,” she said angrily. “I don’t know anything else about it. I don’t know anything about guns at all. I—I never shot one in my life.” She opened a large blue bag and pulled a handkerchief out of it and sniffled.

“That’s your story,” I said. “I don’t have to get stuck with it.”

She put her left hand out to me with a pathetic gesture, like the erring wife in East Lynne.

“Oh, I shouldn’t have come ins” she cried. “It was horrid of me. I know it was. Mr. Lavery will be furious.”

“What you shouldn’t have done,” I said, “was let me find out the gun was empty. Up to then you were holding everything in the deck.”

She stamped her foot. That was all the scene lacked. That made it perfect.

“Why, you perfectly loathsome man,” she squawked. “Don’t you dare touch me! Don’t you take a single step towards me! I won’t stay in this house another minute with you. How dare you be so insulting—”

She caught her voice and snapped it in mid-air like a rubber band. Then she put her head down, purple hat and all, and ran for the door. As she passed me she put a hand out as if to stiff arm me, but she wasn’t near enough and I didn’t move. She jerked the door wide and charged out through it and up the walk to the street. The door came slowly shut and I heard her rapid steps above the sound of its closing.

I ran a fingernail along my teeth and punched the point of my jaw with a knuckle, listening. I didn’t hear anything anywhere to listen to. A six-shot automatic, fired empty.

“Something,” I said out loud, “is all wrong with this scene.”

The house seemed now to be abnormally still. I went along the apricot rug and through the archway to the head of the stairs. I stood there for another moment and listened again.

I shrugged and went quietly down the stairs.

16

The lower hall had a door at each end and two in the middle side by side. One of these was a linen closet and the other was locked. I went along to the end and looked in at a spare bedroom with drawn blinds and no sign of being used. I went back to the other end of the hall and stepped into a second bedroom with a wide bed, a Caféau Lait rug, angular furniture in light wood, a box mirror over the dressing table and a long fluorescent lamp over the mirror. In the corner a crystal greyhound stood on a mirror-top table and beside him a crystal box with cigarettes in it.

Face powder was spilled around on the dressing table. There was a smear of dark lipstick on a towel hanging over the wastebasket. On the bed were pillows side by side, with depressions in them that could have been made by heads. A woman’s handkerchief peeped from under one pillow. A pair of sheer black pajamas lay across the foot of the bed. A rather too emphatic trace of Chypre hung in the air.

I wondered what Mrs. Falibrook had thought of all this.

I turned around and looked at myself in the long mirror of a closet door. The door was painted white and had a crystal knob. I turned the knob in my handkerchief and looked inside. The cedar-lined closet was fairly full of man’s clothes. There was a nice friendly smell of tweed. The closet was not entirely full of man’s clothes.

There was also a woman’s black and white tailored suit, mostly white, black and white shoes under it, a panama with a black and white rolled band on a shelf above it. There were other woman’s clothes, but I didn’t examine them.

I shut the closet door and went out of the bedroom, holding my handkerchief ready for more doorknobs.

The door next to the linen closet, the locked door, had to be the bathroom. I shook it, but it went on being locked. I bent down and saw there was a short, slit-shaped opening in the middle of the knob. I knew then that the door was fastened by pushing a button in the middle of the knob inside, and that the slit-like opening was for a metal key without wards that would spring the lock open in case somebody fainted in the bathroom, or the kids locked themselves in and got sassy.

The key for this ought to be kept on the top shelf of the linen closet, but it wasn’t. I tried my knife blade, but that was too thin. I went back to the bedroom and got a flat nail file off the dresser. That worked. I opened the bathroom door.

A man’s sand-colored pajamas were tossed over a painted hamper. A pair of heelless green slippers lay on the floor. There was a safety razor on the edge of the washbowl and a tube of cream with the cap off. The bathroom window was shut, and there was a pungent smell in the air that was not quite like any other smell.

Three empty shells lay bright and coppery on the Nile green tiles of the bathroom floor, and there was a nice clean hole in the frosted pane of the window. To the left and a little above the window were two scarred places in the plaster where the white showed behind the paint and where something, such as a bullet, had gone in.

The shower curtain was green and white oiled silk and it hung on shiny chromium rings and it was drawn across the shower opening. I slid it aside, the rings making a thin scraping noise, which for some reason sounded indecently loud.

I felt my neck creak a little as I bent down. He was there all right—there wasn’t anywhere else for him to be. He was huddled in the corner under the two shining faucets, and water dripped slowly on his chest, from the chromium showerhead.

His knees were drawn up but slack. The two holes in his naked chest were dark blue and both of them were close enough to his heart to have killed him. The blood seemed to have been washed away.

His eyes had a curiously bright and expectant look, as if he smelled the morning coffee and would be coming right out.

Nice efficient work. You have just finished shaving and stripped for the shower and you are leaning in against the shower curtain and adjusting the temperature of the water. The door opens behind you and somebody comes in. The somebody appears to have been a woman. She has a gun. You look at the gun and she shoots it.

She misses with three shots. It seems impossible, at such short range, but there it is. Maybe it happens all the time. I’ve been around so little.

You haven’t anywhere to go. You could lunge at her and take a chance, if you were that kind of fellow, and if you were braced for it. But leaning in over the shower faucets, holding the curtain closed, you are off balance. Also you are apt to be somewhat petrified with panic, if you are at all like other people. So there isn’t anywhere to go, except into the shower.

That is where you go. You go into it as far as you can, but a shower stall is a small place and the tiled wall stops you. You are backed up against the last wall there is now. You are all out of space, and you are all out of living. And then there are two more shots, possibly three, and you slide down the wall, and your eyes are not even frightened any more now. They are just the empty eyes of the dead.

She reaches in and turns the shower off. She sets the lock of the bathroom door. On her way out of the house she throws the empty gun on the stair carpet. She should worry. It is probably your gun.

Is that right? It had better be right.

I bent and pulled at his arm. Ice couldn’t have been any colder or any stiffer. I went out of the bathroom, leaving it unlocked. No need to lock it now. It only makes work for the cops.

I went into the bedroom and pulled the handkerchief out from under the pillow. It was a minute piece of linen rag with a scalloped edge embroidered in red. Two small initials were stitched in the corner, in red. A.F.

“Adrienne Fromsett,” I said. I laughed. It was a rather ghoulish laugh.

I shook the handkerchief to get some of the Chypre out of it and folded it up in a tissue and put it in a pocket. I went back upstairs to the living room and poked around in the desk against the wall. The desk contained no interesting letters, phone numbers or provocative match folders. Or if it did, I didn’t find them.

I looked at the phone. It was on a small table against the wall beside the fireplace. It had a long cord so that Mr. Lavery could be lying on his back on the davenport, a cigarette between his smooth brown lips, a tall cool one at the table at his side, and plenty of time for a nice long cozy conversation with a lady friend. An easy, languid, flirtatious, kidding, not too subtle and not too blunt conversation, of the sort he would be apt to enjoy.

All that wasted too. I went away from the telephone to the door and set the lock so I could come in again and shut the door tight, pulling it hard over the sill until the lock clicked. I went up the walk and stood in the sunlight looking across the street at Dr. Almore’s house.

Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It’s only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.

A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.

I walked back to the intersection and got into my car and started it and backed it and drove away from there.

17

The bellhop at the Athletic Club was back in three minutes with a nod for me to come with him. We rode up to the fourth floor and went around a corner and he showed me a half open door.

“Around to the left, sir. As quietly as you can. A few of the members are sleeping.”

I went into the club library. It contained books behind glass doors and magazines on a long central table and a lighted portrait of the club’s founder. But its real business seemed to be sleeping. Outward-jutting bookcases cut the room into a number of small alcoves and in the alcoves were high-backed leather chairs of an incredible size and softness. In a number of the chairs old boys were snoozing peacefully, their faces violet with high blood pressure, thin racking snores coming out of their pinched noses.

I climbed over a few feet and stole around to the left. Derace Kingsley was in the very last alcove in the far end of the room. He had two chairs arranged side-by-side, facing into the corner. His big dark head just showed over the top of one of them. I slipped into the empty one and gave him a quick nod.

“Keep your voice down,” he said. “This room is for after-luncheon naps. Now what is it? When I employed you it was to save me trouble, not to add trouble to what I already had. You made me break an important engagement.”

“I know,” I said, and put my face close to his. He smelled of highballs, in a nice way. “She shot him.”

His eyebrows jumped and his face got that stony look. His teeth clamped tight. He breathed softly and twisted a large hand on his kneecap.

“Go on,” he said, in a voice the size of a marble.

I looked back over the top of my chair. The nearest old geezer was sound asleep and blowing the dusty fuzz in his nostrils back and forth as he breathed.

“No answer at Lavery’s place,” I said. “Door slightly open.

But I noticed yesterday it sticks on the sill. Pushed it open. Room dark, two glasses with drinks having been in them. House very still. In a moment a slim dark woman calling herself Mrs. Fallbrook, landlady, came up the stairs with her glove wrapped around a gun. Said she found it on the stairs. Said she came to collect her three months back rent. Used her key to get in. Inference is she took the chance to snoop around and look the house over. Took the gun from her and found it had been fired recently, but didn’t tell her so. She said Lavery was not home. Got rid of her by making her mad and she departed in high dudgeon. She may call the police, but it’s much more likely she will just go out and hunt butterflies and forget the whole thing—except the rent.”

I paused. Kingsley’s head was turned towards me and his jaw muscles bulged with the way his teeth were clamped. His eyes looked sick.

“I went downstairs. Signs of a woman having spent the night. Pajamas, face powder, perfume, and so on. Bathroom locked, but got it open. Three empty shells on the floor, two shots in the wall, one in the window. Lavery in the shower stall, naked and dead.”

“My God!” Kingsley whispered. “Do you mean to say he had a woman with him last night and she shot him this morning in the bathroom?”

“Just what did you think I was trying to say?” I asked.

“Keep your voice down,” he groaned. “It’s a shock, naturally.

Why in the bathroom?”

“Keep your own voice down,” I said. “Why not the bathroom? Could you think of a place where a man would be more completely off guard?”

He said: “You don’t know that a woman shot him. I mean, you’re not sure, are you?”

“No,” I said. “That’s true. It might have been somebody who used a small gun and emptied it carelessly to look like a woman’s work. The bathroom is downhill, facing outwards on space and I don’t think shots down there would be easily heard by anyone not in the house. The woman who spent the night might have left—or there need not have been any woman at all. The appearances could have been faked. You might have shot him.”

“What would I want to shoot him for?” he almost bleated, squeezing both kneecaps hard. “I’m a civilized man.”

That didn’t seem to be worth an argument either. I said: “Does your wife own a gun?”

He turned a drawn miserable face to me and said hollowly: “Good God, man, you can’t really think that!”

“Well does she?”

He got the words out in small gritty pieces. “Yes—she does. A small automatic.”

“You buy it locally?”

“I—I didn’t buy it at all. I took it away from a drunk at a party in San Francisco a couple of years ago. He was waving it around, with an idea that that was very funny. I never gave it back to him.” He pinched his jaw hard until his knuckles whitened. “He probably doesn’t even remember how or when he lost it. He was that kind of a drunk.”

“This is working out almost too neatly,” I said. “Could you recognize this gun?”

He thought hard, pushing his jaw out and half closing his eyes. I looked back over the chairs again. One of the elderly snoozers had waked himself up with a snort that almost blew him out of his chair. He coughed, scratched his nose with a thin dried-up hand, and fumbled a gold watch out of his vest. He peered at it bleakly, put it away, and went to sleep again.

I reached in my pocket and put the gun on Kingsley’s hand. He stared down at it miserably.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’s like it, but I can’t tell.”

“There’s a serial number on the side,” I said.

“Nobody remembers the serial numbers of guns.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t,” I said. “It would have worried me very much.”

His hand closed around the gun and he put it down beside him on the chair.

“The dirty rat,” he said softly. “I suppose he ditched her.”

“I don’t get it,” I said. “The motive was inadequate for you, on account of you’re a civilized man. But it was adequate for her.”

“It’s not the same motive,” he snapped. “And women are more impetuous than men.”

“Like cats are more impetuous than dogs.”

“How?”

“Some women are more impetuous than some men. That’s all that means. We’ll have to have a better motive, if you want your wife to have done it.”

He turned his head enough to give me a level stare in which there was no amusement. White crescents were bitten into the corners of his mouth.

“This doesn’t seem to me a very good spot for the light touch”, he said. “We can’t let the police have this gun. Crystal had a permit and the gun was registered. So they will know the number, even if I don’t. We can’t let them have it.”

“But Mrs. Fallbrook knows I had the gun.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “We’ll have to chance that. Yes, I know you’re taking a risk. I intend to make it worth your while. If the set-up were possible for suicide, I’d say put the gun back. But the way you tell it, it isn’t.”

“No. He’d have to have missed himself with the first three shots. But I can’t cover up a murder, even for a ten-dollar bonus. The gun will have to go back.”

“I was thinking of more money than that,” he said quietly. “I was thinking of five hundred dollars.”

“Just what did you expect to buy with it?”

He leaned close to me. His eyes were serious and bleak, but not hard. “Is there anything in Lavery’s place apart from the gun, that might indicate Crystal has bees there lately?”

“A black and white dress and a hat like the bellhop in Bernardino described on her. There may be a dozen things I don’t know about. There almost certainly will be fingerprints. You say she was never printed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get her prints to check. Her bedroom at home will be full of them. So will the cabin at Little Fawn Lake. And her car.”

“We ought to get the car—” he started to say. I stopped him.

“No use. Too many other places. What kind of perfume does she use?”

He looked blank for an instant. “Oh—Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes,” he said woodenly. “A Chanel number once in a while.”

“What’s this stuff of yours like?”

“A kind of Chypre. Sandalwood Chypre.”

“The bedroom reeks with it,” I said. “It smelled like cheap stuff to me. But I’m no judge.”

“Cheap?” he said, stung to the quick. “My God, cheap? We get thirty dollars an ounce for it.”

“Well, this stuff smelled more like three dollars a gallon.”

He put his hands down hard on his knees and shook his head. “I’m talking about money,” he said. “Five hundred dollars. A check for it right now.”

I let the remark fall to the ground, eddying like a soiled feather. One of the old boys behind us stumbled to his feet and groped his way wearily out of the room.

Kingsley said gravely: “I hired you to protect me from scandal, and of course to protect my wife, if she needed it. Through no fault of yours the chance to avoid scandal is pretty well shot. It’s a question of my wife’s neck now. I don’t believe she shot Lavery. I have no reason for that belief. None at all. I just feel the conviction. She may even have been there last night, this gun may even be her gun. It doesn’t prove she killed him. She would be as careless with the gun as with anything else. Anybody could have got hold of it.”

“The cops down there won’t work very hard to believe that,” I said. “If the one I met is a fair specimen, they’ll just pick the first head they see and start swinging with their blackjacks. And hers will certainly be the first head they see when they look the situation over.”

He ground the heels of his hands together. His misery had a theatrical flavor, as real misery so often has.

“I’ll go along with you up to a point,” I said. “The set-up down there is almost too good, at first sight. She leaves clothes there she has been seen wearing and which can probably be traced. She leaves the gun on the stairs. It’s hard to think she would be as dumb as that.”

“You give me a little heart,” Kingsley said wearily.

“But none of that means anything,” I said. “Because we are looking at it from the angle of calculation, and people who commit crimes of passion or hatred, just commit them and walk out. Everything I have heard indicates that she is a reckless foolish woman. There’s no sign of planning in any of the scene down there. There’s every sign of a complete lack of planning.

But even if there wasn’t a thing down there to point to your wife, the cops would tie her up to Lavery. They will investigate his background, his friends, his women. Her name is bound to crop up somewhere along the line, and when it does, the fact that she has been out of sight for a month will make them sit up and rub their horny palms with glee. And of course they’ll trace the gun, and if it’s her gun—”

His hand dived for the gun in the chair beside him.

“Nope,” I said. “They’ll have to have the gun. Marlowe may be a very smart guy and very fond of you personally, but he can’t risk the suppression of such vital evidence as the gun that killed a man. Whatever I do has to be on the basis that your wife is an obvious suspect, but that the obviousness can be wrong.”

He groaned and put his big hand out with the gun on it. I took it and put it away. Then I took it out again and said: “Lend me your handkerchief. I don’t want to use mine. I might be searched.”

He handed me a stiff white handkerchief and I wiped the gun off carefully all over and dropped it into my pocket. I handed him back the handkerchief.

“My prints are all right,” I said. “But I don’t want yours on it. Here’s the only thing I can do. Go back down there and replace the gun and call the law. Ride it out with them and let the chips fall where they have to. The story will have to come out. What I was doing down there and why. At the worst they’ll find her and prove she killed him. At the best they’ll find her a lot quicker than I can and let me use my energies proving she didn’t kill him, which means, in effect, proving that somebody else did. Are you game for that?”

He nodded slowly. He said: “Yes—and the five hundred stands for showing Crystal didn’t kill him.”

“I don’t expect to earn it,” I said. “You may as well understand that now. How well did Miss Fromsett know Lavery? Out of office hours?”

His face tightened up like a charley horse. His fists went into hard lumps on his thighs. He said nothing.

“She looked kind of queer when I asked her for his address yesterday morning,” I said.

He let a breath out slowly.

“Like a bad taste in the mouth,” I said. “Like a romance that fouled out. Am I too blunt?”

His nostrils quivered a little and his breath made noise in them for a moment. Then he relaxed and said quietly: “She—she knew him rather well—at one time. She’s a girl who would do about what she pleased in that way. Lavery was, I guess, a fascinating bird—to women.”

“I’ll have to talk to her,” I said.

“Why?” he asked shortly. Red patches showed in his cheeks.

“Never mind why. It’s my business to ask all sorts of questions of all sorts of people.”

“Talk to her then,” he said tightly. “As a matter of fact she knew the Almores. She knew Almore’s wife, the one who killed herself. Lavery knew her too. Could that have any possible connection with this business?”

“I don’t know. You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”

“I’d marry her tomorrow, if I could,” he said stiffly.

I nodded and stood up. I looked back along the room. It was almost empty now. At the far end a couple of elderly relics were still blowing bubbles. The rest of the soft chair boys had staggered back to whatever it was they did when they were conscious.

“There’s just one thing,” I said, looking down at Kingsley. “Cops get very hostile when there is a delay in calling them after a murder. There’s been delay this time and there will be more. I’d like to go down there as if it was the first visit today. I think I can make it that way, if I leave the Fallbrook woman out.”

“Fallbrook?” He hardly knew what I was talking about. “Who the hell—oh yes, I remember.”

“Well, don’t remember. I’m almost certain they’ll never hear a peep from her. She’s not the kind to have anything to do with the police of her own free will.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Be sure you handle it right then. Questions will be asked you before you are told Lavery is dead, before I’m allowed to get in touch with you—so far as they know. Don’t fall into any traps. If you do, I won’t be able to find anything out. I’ll be in the clink.”

“You could call me from the house down there—before you call the police,” he said reasonably.

“I know. But the fact that I don’t will be in my favor. And they’ll check the phone calls one of the first things they do. And if I call you from anywhere else, I might just as well admit that I came up here to see you.”