The Lady in the Lake

“I understand,” he said again. “You can trust me to handle it.”

We shook hands and I left him standing there.

18

The Athletic Club was on a corner across the street and half a block down from the Treloar Building. I crossed and walked north to the entrance. They had finished laying rose-colored concrete where the rubber sidewalk had been. It was fenced around, leaving a narrow gangway in and out of the building. The space was clotted with office help going in from lunch.

The Gifierlain Company’s reception room looked even emptier than the day before. The same fluffy little blonde was tucked in behind the PBX in the corner. She gave me a quick smile and I gave her the gunman’s salute, a stiff forefinger pointing at her, the three lower fingers tucked back under it, and the thumb wiggling up and down like a western gun fighter fanning his hammer. She laughed heartily, without making a sound. This was more fun than she had had in a week.

I pointed to Miss Fromsett’s empty desk and the little blonde nodded and pushed a plug in and spoke. A door opened and Miss Fromsett swayed elegantly out to her desk and sat down and gave me her cool expectant eyes.

“Yes, Mr. Marlowe? Mr. Kingsley is not in, I’m afraid.”

“I just came from him. Where do we talk?”

“Talk?”

“I have something to show you.”

“Oh, yes?” She looked me over thoughtfully. A lot of guys had probably tried to show her things, including etchings. At another time I wouldn’t have been above taking a flutter at it myself.

“Business,” I said. “Mr. Kingsley’s business.”

She stood up and opened the gate in the railing. “We may as well go into his office then.”

We went in. She held the door for me. As I passed her I sniffed. Sandalwood. I said: “Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes?”

She smiled faintly, holding the door. “On my salary?”

“I didn’t say anything about your salary. You don’t look like a girl who has to buy her own perfume.”

“Yes, that’s what it is,” she said. “And if you want to know, I detest wearing perfume in the office. He makes me.”

We went down the long dim office and she took a chair at the end of the desk. I sat where I had sat the day before. We looked at each other. She was wearing tan today, with a ruffled jabot at her throat. She looked a little warmer, but still no prairie fire.

I offered her one of Kingsley’s cigarettes. She took it, took a light from his lighter, and leaned back.

“We needn’t waste time being cagey,” I said. “You know by now who I am and what I am doing. If you didn’t know yesterday morning, it’s only because he loves to play big shot.”

She looked down at the hand that lay on her knee, then lifted her eyes and smiled almost shyly.

“He’s a great guy,” she said. “In spite of the heavy executive act he likes to put on. He’s the only guy that gets fooled by it after all. And if you only knew what he has stood from that little tramp”—she waved her cigarette—“well, perhaps I’d better leave that out. What was it you wanted to see me about?”

“Kingsley said you knew the Almores.”

“I knew Mrs. Almore. That is, I met her a couple of times.”

“Where?”

“At a friend’s house. Why?”

“At Lavery’s house?”

“You’re not going to be insolent, are you, Mr. Marlowe?”

“I don’t know what your definition of that would be. I’m going to talk business as if it were business, not international diplomacy.”

“Very well.” She nodded slightly. “At Chris Lavery’s house, yes. I used to go there—once in a while. He had cocktail parties.”

“Then Lavery knew the Almores—or Mrs. Almore.”

She flushed very slightly. “Yes. Quite well.”

“And a lot of other women—quite well, too. I don’t doubt that. Did Mrs. Kingsley know her too?”

“Yes, better than I did. They called each other by their first names. Mrs. Almore is dead, you know. She committed suicide, about a year and a half ago.”

“Any doubt about that?”

She raised her eyebrows, but the expression looked artificial to me, as if it just went with the question I asked, as a matter of form.

She said: “Have you any particular reason for asking that question in that particular way? I mean, has it anything to do with—with what you are doing?”

“I didn’t think so. I still don’t know that it has. But yesterday Dr. Almore called a cop just because I looked at his house. After he had found out from my car license who I was. The cop got pretty tough with me, just for being there. He didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t tell him I had been calling on Lavery. But Dr. Almore must have known that. He had seen me in front of Lavery’s house. Now why would he think it necessary to call a cop? And why would the cop think it smart to say that the last fellow who tried to put the bite on Almore ended up on the road gang? And why would the cop ask me if her folks—meaning Mrs. Almore’s folks, I suppose—had hired me? If you can answer any of those questions, I might know whether it’s any of my business.”

She thought about it for a moment, giving me one quick glance while she was thinking, and then looking away again.

“I only met Mrs. Almore twice,” she said slowly. “But I think I can answer your questions—all of them. The last time I met her was at Lavery’s place, as I said, and there were quite a lot of people there. There was a lot of drinking and loud talk. The women were not with their husbands and the men were not with their wives, if any. There was a man there named Brownwell who was very tight. He’s in the navy now, I heard. He was ribbing Mrs. Almore about her husband’s practice. The idea seemed to be that he was one of those doctors who run around all night with a case of loaded hypodermic needles, keeping the local fast set from having pink elephants for breakfast. Florence Almore said she didn’t care how her husband got his money so long as he got plenty of it and she had the spending of it. She was tight too and not a very nice person sober, I should imagine. One of those slinky glittering females who laugh too much and sprawl all over their chairs, showing a great deal of leg. A very light blonde with a high color and indecently large baby-blue eyes. Well, Brownwell told her not to worry, it would always be a good racket. In and out of the patient’s house in fifteen minutes and anywhere from ten to fifty bucks a trip. But one thing bothered him, he said, how even a doctor could get hold of so much dope without contacts. He asked Mrs. Almore if they had many nice gangsters to dinner at their house. She threw a glass of liquor in his face.”

I grinned, but Miss Fromsett didn’t. She crushed her cigarette out in Kingsley’s big copper and glass tray and looked at me soberly.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Who wouldn’t, unless he had a large hard fist to throw?”

“Yes. A few weeks later Florence Almore was found dead in the garage late at night. The door of the garage was shut and the car motor was running.” She stopped and moistened her lips slightly. “It was Chris Lavery who found her. Coming home at God knows what o’clock in the morning. She was lying on the concrete floor in pajamas, with her head under a blanket which was also over the exhaust pipe of the car. Dr. Almore was out. There was nothing about the affair in the papers, except that she had died suddenly. It was well hushed up.”

She lifted her clasped hands a little and then let them fall slowly into her lap again. I said: “Was something wrong with it, then?”

“People thought so, but they always do. Some time later I heard what purported to be the lowdown. I met this man Brownwell on Vine Street and he asked me to have a drink with him. I didn’t like him, but I had half an hour to kill. We sat at the back of Levy’s bar and he asked me if I remembered the babe who threw the drink in his face. I said I did. The conversation then went something very like this. I remember it very well.

“Brownwell said: ‘Our pal Chris Lavery is sitting pretty, if he ever runs out of girl friends he can touch for dough’”

“I said: ‘I don’t think I understand.’”

“He said: ‘Hell, maybe you don’t want to. The night the Almore woman died she was over at Lou Condy’s place losing her shirt at roulette. She got into a tantrum and said the wheels were crooked and made a scene. Condy practically had to drag her into his office. He got hold of Dr. Almore through the Physicians’ Exchange and after a while the doc came over. He shot her with one of his busy little needles. Then he went away, leaving Condy to get her home. It seems he had a very urgent case. So Condy took her home and the doc’s office nurse showed up, having been called by the doc, and Condy carried her upstairs and the nurse put her to bed. Condy went back to his chips. So she had to be carried to bed and yet the same night she got up and walked down to the family garage and finished herself off, with monoxide. What do you think of that?’ Brownwell was asking me.”

“I said: ‘I don’t know anything about it. How do you?’”

“He said: ‘I know a reporter on the rag they call a newspaper down there. There was no inquest and no autopsy. If any tests were made, nothing was told about them. They don’t have a regular coroner down there. The undertakers take turns at being acting coroner, a week at a time. They’re pretty well subservient to the political gang naturally. It’s easy to fix a thing like that in a small town, if anybody with any pull wants it fixed. And Condy had plenty at that time. He didn’t want the publicity of an investigation and neither did the doctor.’”

Miss Fromsett stopped talking and waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, she went on: “I suppose you know what all this meant to Brownwell.”

“Sure. Almore finished her off and then he and Condy between them bought a fix. It has been done in cleaner little cities than Bay City ever tried to be. But that isn’t all the story, is it?”

“No. It seems Mrs. Almore’s parents hired a private detective. He was a man who ran a night watchman service down there and he was actually the second man on the scene that night, after Chris. Brownwell said he must have had something in the way of information but he never got a chance to use it. They arrested him for drunk driving and he got a jail sentence.”

I said: “Is that all?”

She nodded. “And if you think I remember it too well, it’s part of my job to remember conversations.”

“What I was thinking was that it doesn’t have to add up to very much. I don’t see where it has to touch Lavery, even if he was the one who found her. Your gossipy friend Brownwell seems to think what happened gave somebody a chance to blackmail the doctor. But there would have to be some evidence, especially when you’re trying to put the bite on a man who has already cleared himself with the law.”

Miss Fromsett said: “I think so too. And I’d like to think blackmail was one of the nasty little tricks Chris Lavery didn’t quite run to. I think that’s all I can tell you, Mr. Marlowe. And I ought to be outside.”

She started to get up. I said: “It’s not quite all. I have something to show you.”

I got the little perfumed rag that had been under Layery’s pillow out of my pocket and leaned over to drop it on the desk in front of her.

19

She looked at the handkerchief, looked at me, picked up a pencil and pushed the little piece of linen around with the eraser end.

“What’s on it?” she asked. “Fly spray?”

“Some kind of sandalwood, I thought.”

“A cheap synthetic. Repulsive is a mild word for it. And why did you want me to look at this handkerchief, Mr. Marlowe?” She leaned back again and stared at me with level cool eyes.

“I found it in Chris Lavery’s house, under the pillow on his bed. It has initials on it.”

She unfolded the handkerchief without touching it by using the rubber tip of the pencil. Her face got a little grim and taut.

“It has two letters embroidered on it,” she said in a cold angry voice. “They happen to be the same letters as my initials. Is that what you mean?”

“Right,” I said. “He probably knows half a dozen women with the same initials.”

“So you’re going to be nasty after all,” she said quietly.

“Is it your handkerchief—or isn’t it?”

She hesitated. She reached out to the desk and very quietly got herself another cigarette and lit it with a match. She shook the match slowly, watching the small flame creep along the wood.

“Yes, it’s mine,” she said. “I must have dropped it there. It’s a long time ago. And I assure you I didn’t put it under a pillow on his bed. Is that what you wanted to know?”

I didn’t say anything, and she added: “He must have lent it to some woman who—who would like this kind of perfume.”

“I get a mental picture of the woman,” I said. “And she doesn’t quite go with Lavery.”

Her upper lip curled a little. It was a long upper lip. I liked long upper lips.

“I think,” she said, “you ought to do a little work on your mental picture of Chris Lavery. Any touch of refinement you may have noticed is purely coincidental.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say about a dead man,” I said.

For a moment she just sat there and looked at me as if I hadn’t said anything and she was waiting for me to say something. Then a slow shudder started at her throat and passed over her whole body. Her hands clenched and the cigarette bent into a crook. She looked down at it and threw it into the ashtray with a quick jerk of her arm.

“He was shot in his shower,” I said. “And it looks as if it was done by some woman who spent the night there. He had just been shaving. The woman left a gun on the stairs and this handkerchief on the bed.”

She moved very slightly in her chair. Her eyes were perfectly empty now. Her face was as cold as a carving.

“And did you expect me to be able to give you information about that?” she asked me bitterly.

“Look, Miss Fromsett, I’d like to be smooth and distant and subtle about all this too. I’d like to play this sort of game just once the way somebody like you would like it to be played. But nobody will let me—not the clients, nor the cops, nor the people I play against. However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.”

She nodded as if she had only just barely heard me. “When was he shot?” she asked, and then shuddered slightly again.

“This morning, I suppose. Not long after he got up. I said he had just shaved and was going to take a shower.”

“That,” she said, “would probably have been quite late. I’ve been here since eight-thirty.”

“I didn’t think you shot him.”

“Awfully kind of you,” she said. “But it is my handkerchief, isn’t it? Although not my perfume. But I don’t suppose policemen are very sensitive to quality in perfume—or in anything else.”

“No—and that goes for private detectives too,” I said. “Are you enjoying this a lot?”

“God,” she said, and put the back of her hand hard against her mouth.

“He was shot at five or six times,” I said. “And missed all but twice. He was cornered in the shower stall. It was a pretty grim scene, I should think. There was a lot of hate on one side of it. Or a pretty cold-blooded mind.”

“He was quite easy to hate,” she said emptily. “And poisonously easy to love. Women—even decent women—make such ghastly mistakes about men.”

“All you’re telling me is that you once thought you loved him, but not any more, and that you didn’t shoot him.”

“Yes.” Her voice was light and dry now, like the perfume she didn’t like to wear at the office. “I’m sure you’ll respect the confidence.” She laughed shortly and bitterly. “Dead,” she said. “The poor, egotistical, cheap, nasty, handsome, treacherous guy. Dead and cold and done with. No, Mr. Marlowe, I didn’t shoot him.”

I waited, letting her work it out of her. After a moment she said quietly: “Does Mr. Kingsley know?”

I nodded.

“And the police, of course.”

“Not yet. At least not from me. I found him. The house door wasn’t quite shut. I went in. I found him.”

She picked the pencil up and poked at the handkerchief again.

“Does Mr. Kingsley know about this scented rag?”

“Nobody knows about that, except you and I, and whoever put it there.”

“Nice of you,” she said dryly. “And nice of you to think what you thought.”

“You have a certain quality of aloofness and dignity that I like,” I said. “But don’t run it into the ground. What would you expect me to think? Do I pull the hankie out from under the pillow and sniff it and hold it out and say, Well, well, Miss Adrienne Fromsett’s initials and all. Miss Fromsett must have known Lavery, perhaps very intimately. Let’s say, just for the book, as intimately as my nasty little mind can conceive. And that would be pretty damn intimately. But this is cheap synthetic sandalwood and Miss Fromsett wouldn’t use cheap scent.

And this was under Lavery’s pillow and Miss Fromsett just never keeps her hankies under a man’s pillow. Therefore this has absolutely nothing to do with Miss Fromsett. It’s just an optical delusion.’”

“Oh shut up,” she said.

I grinned.

“What kind of girl do you think I am?” she snapped.

“I came in too late to tell you.”

She flushed, but delicately and all over her face this time.

Then, “Have you any idea who did it?”

“Ideas, but that’s all they are. I’m afraid the police are going to find it simple. Some of Mrs. Kingsley’s clothes are hanging in Lavery’s closet. And when they know the whole story—including what happened at Little Fawn Lake yesterday—I’m afraid they’ll just reach for the handcuffs. They have to find her first. But that won’t be so hard for them.”

“Crystal Kingsley,” she said emptily. “So he couldn’t be spared even that.”

I said: “It doesn’t have to be. It could be an entirely different motivation, something we know nothing about. It could have been somebody like Dr. Almore.”

She looked up quickly, then shook her head. “It could be,” I insisted. We don’t know anything against it. He was pretty nervous yesterday for a man who has nothing to be afraid of. But, of course, it isn’t only the guilty who are afraid.”

I stood up and tapped on the edge of the desk looking down at her. She had a lovely neck. She pointed to the handkerchief.

“What about that?” she asked dully.

“If it was mine, I’d wash that cheap scent out of it.”

“It has to mean something, doesn’t it? It might mean a lot.”

I laughed. “I don’t think it means anything at all. Women are always leaving their handkerchiefs around. A fellow like Lavery would collect them and keep them in a drawer with a sandalwood sachet. Somebody would find the stock and take one out to use. Or he would lend them, enjoying the reactions to the other girl’s initials. I’d say he was that kind of a heel. Goodbye, Miss Fromsett, and thanks for talking to me.”

I started to go, then I stopped and asked her: “Did you hear the name of the reporter down there who gave Brownwell all his information?”

She shook her head.

“Or the name of Mrs. Almore’s parents?”

“Not that either. But I could probably find that out for you. I’d be glad to try.”

“How?”

“Those things are usually printed in death notices, aren’t they? There is pretty sure to have been a death notice in the Los Angeles papers.”

“That would be very nice of you,” I said. I ran a finger along the edge of the desk and looked at her sideways. Pale ivory skin, dark arid lovely eyes, hair as light as hair can be and as dark as night can be.

I walked back down the room and out. The little blonde at the PBX looked at me expectantly, her small red lips parted, waiting for more fun.

I didn’t have any more. I went on out.

20

No police cars stood in front of Lavery’s house, nobody hung around on the sidewalk and when I pushed the front door open there was no smell of cigar or cigarette smoke inside. The sun had gone away from the windows and a fly buzzed softly over one of the liquor glasses. I went down to the end and hung over the railing that led downstairs. Nothing moved in Mr. Lavery’s house. Nothing made sound except very faintly down below in the bathroom the quiet trickle of water dripping on a dead man’s shoulder.

I went to the telephone and looked up the number of the police department in the directory. I dialed and while I was waiting for an answer, I took the little automatic out of my pocket and laid it on the table beside the telephone.

When the male voice said: “Bay City Police—Smoot talking,” I said: “There’s been a shooting at 623 Altair Street. Man named Lavery lives there. He’s dead.”

“Six-two-three Altair. Who are you?”

“The name is Marlowe.”

“You right there in the house?”

“Right.”

“Don’t touch anything at all.”

I hung up, sat down on the davenport and waited.

Not very long. A siren whined far off, growing louder with great surges of sound. Tires screamed at a corner, and the siren wail died to a metallic growl, then to silence, and the tires screamed again in front of the house. The Bay City police conserving rubber. Steps hit the sidewalk and I went over to the front door and opened it.

Two uniformed cops barged into the room. They were the usual large size and they had the usual weathered faces and suspicious eyes. One of them had a carnation tucked under his cap, behind his right ear. The other one was older, a little gray and grim. They stood and looked at me warily, then the older one said briefly: “All right, where is it?”

“Downstairs in the bathroom, behind the shower curtain.”

“You stay here with him, Eddie.”

He went rapidly along the room and disappeared. The other one looked at me steadily and said out of the corner of his mouth: “Don’t make any false moves, buddy.”

I sat down on the davenport again. The cop ranged the room with his eyes. There were sounds below stairs, feet walking. The cop with me suddenly spotted the gun lying on the telephone table. He charged at it violently, like a downfield blocker.

“This the death gun?” he almost shouted.

“I should imagine so. It’s been fired.”

“Ha!” He leaned over the gun, baring his teeth at me, and put his hand to his holster. His finger tickled the flap off the stud and he grasped the butt of the black revolver.

“You should what?” he barked.

“I should imagine so.”

“That’s very good,” he sneered. “That’s very good indeed.”

“It’s not that good,” I said.

He reeled back a little. His eyes were being careful of me.

“What you shoot him for?” he growled.

“I’ve wondered and wondered.”

“Oh, a wisenheimer.”

“Let’s just sit down and wait for the homicide boys,” I said. “I’m reserving my defense.”

“Don’t give me none of that,” he said.

“I’m not giving you any of anything. If I had shot him, I wouldn’t be here. I wouldn’t have called up. You wouldn’t have found the gun. Don’t work so hard on the case. You won’t be on it more than ten minutes.”

His eyes looked hurt. He took his cap off and the carnation dropped to the floor. He bent and picked it up and twirled it between his fingers, then dropped it behind the fire screen.

“Better not do that,” I told him. “They might think it’s a clue and waste a lot of time on it.”

“Aw hell.” He bent over the screen and retrieved the carnation and put it in his pocket. “You know all the answers, don’t you, buddy?”

The other cop came back up the stairs, looking grave. He stood in the middle of the floor and looked at his wrist watch and made a note in a notebook and then looked out of the front windows, holding the venetian blinds to one side to do it.

The one who had stayed with me said: “Can I look now?”

“Let it lie, Eddie. Nothing in it for us. You call the coroner?”

“I thought homicide would do that.”

“Yeah, that’s right. Captain Webber will be on it and he likes to do everything himself.” He looked at me and said: “You’re a man named Marlowe?”

I said I was a man named Marlowe.

“He’s a wise guy, knows all the answers,” Eddie said.

The older one looked at me absently, looked at Eddie absently, spotted the gun lying on the telephone table and looked at that not at all absently.

“Yeah, that’s the death gun,” Eddie said. “I ain’t touched it.”

The other nodded. “The boys are not so fast today. What’s your line, mister? Friend of his?” He made a thumb towards the floor.

“Saw him yesterday for the first time. I’m a private operative from L.A.”

“Oh.” He looked at me very sharply. The other cop looked at me with deep suspicion.

“Cripes, that means everything will be all balled up,” he said.

That was the first sensible remark he had made. I grinned at him affectionately.

The older cop looked out of the front window again. “That’s the Almore place across the street, Eddie,” he said.

Eddie went and looked with him. “Sure is,” he said. “You can read the plate. Say, this guy downstairs might be the guy—”

“Shut up,” the other one said and dropped the venetian blind.

They both turned around and stared at me woodenly.

A car came down the block and stopped and a door slammed and more steps came down the walk. The older of the prowl car boys opened the door to two men in plain clothes, one of whom I already knew.

21

The one who came first was a small man for a cop, middle-aged, thin-faced, with a permanently tired expression. His nose was sharp and bent a little to one side, as if somebody had given it the elbow one time when it was into something. His blue pork pie hat was set very square on his head and chalk-white hair showed under it. He wore a dull brown suit and his hands were in the side pockets of the jacket, with the thumbs outside the seam.

The man behind him was Degarmo, the big cop with the dusty blond hair and the metallic blue eyes and the savage, lined face who had not liked my being in front of Dr. Almore’s house.

The two uniformed men looked at the small man and touched their caps.

“The body’s in the basement, Captain Webber. Been shot twice after a couple of misses, looks like. Dead quite some time. This party’s name is Marlowe. He’s a private eye from Los Angeles. I didn’t question him beyond that.”

“Quite right,” Webber said sharply. He had a suspicious voice. He passed a suspicious eye over my face and nodded briefly. “I’m Captain Webber,” he said. “This is Lieutenant Degarmo. We’ll look at the body first.”

He went along the room. Degarmo looked at me as if he had never seen me before and followed him. They went downstairs, the older of the two prowl car men with them. The cop called Eddie and I stared each other down for a while.

I said: “This is right across the street from Dr. Almore’s place, isn’t it?”

All the expression went out of his face. There hadn’t been much to go. “Yeah. So what?”

“So nothing,” I said.

He was silent. The voices came up from below, blurred and indistinct. The cop cocked his ear and said in a more friendly tone: “You remember that one?”

“A little.”

He laughed. “They killed that one pretty,” he said. “They wrapped it up and hid it in back of the shelf. The top shelf in the bathroom closet. The one you can’t reach without standing on a chair.”

“So they did,” I said. “I wonder why.”

The cop looked at me sternly. “There was good reasons, pal. Don’t think there wasn’t. You know this Lavery well?”

“Not well.”

“On to him for something?”

“Working on him a little,” I said. “You knew him?”

The cop called Eddie shook his head. “Nope. I just remembered it was a guy from this house found Almore’s wife in the garage that night.”

“Lavery may not have been here then,” I said.

“How long’s he been here?”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“Would be about a year and a half,” the cop said, musingly.

“The L.A. papers give it any play?”

“Paragraph on the Home Counties page,” I said, just to be moving my mouth.

He scratched his ear and listened. Steps were coming back up the stairs. The cop’s face went blank and he moved away from me and straightened up.

Captain Webber hurried over to the telephone and dialed the number and spoke, then held the phone away from his ear and looked back over his shoulder.

“Who’s deputy coroner this week, Al?”

“Ed Garland,” the big lieutenant said woodenly.

“Call Ed Garland,” Webber said into the phone. “Have him come over right away. And tell the flash squad to step on it.”

He put the phone down and barked sharply: “Who handled this gun?”

I said: “I did.”

He came over and teetered on his heels in front of me and pushed his small sharp chin up at me. He held the gun delicately on a handkerchief in his hand.

“Don’t you know enough not to handle a weapon found at the scene of a crime?”

“Certainly,” I said. “But when I handled it I didn’t know there had been a crime. I didn’t know the gun had been fired. It was lying on the stairs and I thought it had been dropped.”

“A likely story,” Webber said bitterly. “You get a lot of that sort of thing in your business?”

“A lot of what sort of thing?”

He kept his hard stare on me and didn’t answer.

I said: “How would it be for me to tell you my story as it happened?”

He bridled at me like a cockerel. “Suppose you answer my questions exactly as I choose to put them.”

I didn’t say anything to that. Webber swivelled sharply and said to the two uniformed men: “You boys can get back to your car and check in with the dispatcher.”

They saluted and went out, closing the door softly until, it stuck, then getting as mad at it as anybody else. Webber listened until their car went away. Then he put the bleak and callous eye on me once more.

“Let me see your identification.”

I handed him my wallet and he rooted in it. Degarmo sat in a chair and crossed his legs and stared up blankly at the ceiling. He got a match out of his pocket and chewed the end of it. Webber gave me back my wallet. I put it away.

“People in your line make a lot of trouble,” he said.

“Not necessarily,” I said.

He raised his voice. It had been sharp enough before. “I said they made a lot of trouble, and a lot of trouble is what I meant. But get this straight. You’re not going to make any in Bay City.”

I didn’t answer him. He jabbed a forefinger at me.

“You’re from the big town,” he said. “You think you’re tough and you think you’re wise. Don’t worry. We can handle you. We’re a small place, but we’re very compact. We don’t have any political tug-of-war down here. We work on the straight line and we work fast. Don’t worry about us, mister.”

“I’m not worrying,” I said. “I don’t have anything to worry about. I’m just trying to make a nice clean dollar.”

“And don’t give me any of the flip talk,” Webber said. “I don’t like it.”

Degarmo brought his eyes down from the ceiling and curled a forefinger to stare at the nail. He spoke in a heavy bored voice.

“Look, chief, the fellow downstairs is called Lavery. He’s dead. I knew him a little. He was a chaser.”

“What of it?” Webber snapped, not looking away from me.

“The whole set-up indicates a dame,” Degarmo said. “You know what these private eyes work at. Divorce stuff. Suppose we’d let him tie into it, instead of just trying to scare him dumb.”

“If I’m scaring him,” Webber said, “I’d like to know it. I don’t see any signs of it.”

He walked over to the front window and yanked the venetian blind up. Light poured into the room almost dazzlingly, after the long dimness. He came back bouncing on his heels and poked a thin hard finger at me and said: “Talk.”

I said, “I’m working for a Los Angeles business man who can’t take a lot of loud publicity. That’s why he hired me. A month ago his wife ran off and later a telegram came which indicated she had gone with Lavery. But my client met Lavery in town a couple of days ago and he denied it. The client believed him enough to get worried. It seems the lady is pretty reckless. She might have taken up with some bad company and got into a jam. I came down to see Lavery and he denied to me that he had gone with her. I half believed him but later I got reasonable proof that he had been with her in a San Bernardino hotel the night she was believed to have left the mountain cabin where she had been staying. With that in my pocket I came down to tackle Lavery again. No answer to the bell, the door was slightly open. I came inside, looked around, found the gun and searched the house. I found him. Just the way he is now.”

“You had no right to search the house,” Webber said coldly.

“Of course not,” I agreed. “But I wouldn’t be likely to pass up the chance either.”

“The name of this man you’re working for?”

“Kingsley.” I gave him the Beverly Hills address. “He manages a cosmetic company in the Treloar Building on Olive. The Gillerlain Company.”

Webber looked at Degarmo. Degarmo wrote lazily on an envelope.

Webber looked back at me and said: “What else?”

“I went up to this mountain cabin where the lady had been staying. It’s at a place called Little Fawn Lake, near Puma Point, forty-six miles into the mountains from San Bernardino.”

I looked at Degarmo. He was writing slowly. His hand stopped a moment and seemed to hang in the air stiffly, then it dropped to the envelope and wrote again. I went on: “About a month ago the wife of the caretaker at Kingsley’s place up there had a fight with him and left as everybody thought. Yesterday she was found drowned in the lake.”

Webber almost closed his eyes and rocked on his heels. Almost softly he asked: “Why are you telling me this? Are you implying a connection?”

“There’s a connection in time. Lavery had been up there. I don’t know of any other connection, but I thought I’d better mention it.”

Degarmo was sitting very still, looking at the floor in front of him. His face was tight and he looked even more savage than usual. Webber said: “This woman that was drowned? Suicide?”

“Suicide or murder. She left a goodbye note. But her husband has been arrested on suspicion. The name is Chess. Bill and Muriel Chess, his wife.”

“I don’t want any part of that,” Webber said sharply. “Let’s confine ourselves to what went on here.”

“Nothing went on here,” I said, looking at Degarmo. “I’ve been down here twice. The first time I talked to Lavery and didn’t get anywhere. The second time I didn’t talk to him and didn’t get anywhere.”

Webber said slowly: “I’m going to ask you a question and I want an honest answer. You won’t want to give it, but now will be as good a time as later. You know I’ll get it eventually. The question is this. You have looked through the house and I imagine pretty thoroughly. Have you seen anything that suggests to you that this Kingsley woman has been here?”

“That’s not a fair question,” I said. “It calls for a conclusion of the witness.”

“I want an answer to it,” he said grimly. “This isn’t a court of law.”

“The answer is yes,” I said. “There are women’s clothes hanging in a closet downstairs that have been described to me as being worn by Mrs. Kingsley at San Bernardino the night she met Lavery there. The description was not exact though. A black and white suit, mostly white, and a panama hat with a rolled black and white band.”

Degarmo snapped a finger against the envelope he was holding. “You must be a great guy for a client to have working for him,” he said. “That puts the woman right in this house where a murder has been committed and she is the woman he’s supposed to have gone away with. I don’t think we’ll have to look far for the killer, chief.”

Webber was staring at me fixedly, with little or no expression on his face but a kind of tight watchfulness. He nodded absently to what Degarmo had said.

I said: “I’m assuming you fellows are not a pack of damn fools. The clothes are tailored and easy to trace. I’ve saved you an hour by telling you, perhaps even no more than a phone call.”

“Anything else?” Webber asked quietly.

Before I could answer, a car stopped outside the house, and then another. Webber skipped over to open the door. Three men came in, a short curly-haired man and a large ox-like man, both carrying heavy black leather cases. Behind them a tall thin man in a dark gray suit and black tie. He had very bright eyes and a poker face.

Webber pointed a finger at the curly-haired man and said: “Downstairs in the bathroom, Busoni. I want a lot of prints from all over the house, particularly any that seem to be made by a woman. It will be a long job.”

“I do all the work,” Busoni grunted. He and the ox-like man went along the room and down the stairs.

“We have a corpse for you, Garland,” Webber said to, the third man. “Let’s go down and look at him. You’ve ordered the wagon?”

The bright-eyed man nodded briefly and he and Webber went downstairs after the other two.

Degarmo put the envelope and pencil away. He stared at me woodenly.

I said: “Am I supposed to talk about our conversation yesterday—or is that a private transaction?”

“Talk about it all you like,” he said. “It’s our job to protect the citizen.”

“You talk about it,” I said. “I’d like to know more about the Almore case.”

He flushed slowly and his eyes got mean. “You said you didn’t know Almore.”

“I didn’t yesterday, or know anything about him. Since then I’ve learned that Lavery knew Mrs. Almore, that she committed suicide, that Lavery found her dead, and that Lavery has at least been suspected of blackmailing him—or of being in a position to blackmail him. Also both your prowl-car boys seemed interested in the fact that Almore’s house was across the street from here. And one of them remarked that the case had been killed pretty, or words to that effect.”

Degarmo said in a slow deadly tone: “I’ll have the badge off the son of a bitch. All they do is flap their mouths. God damn empty-headed bastards.”

“Then there’s nothing in it,” I said.

He looked at his cigarette. “Nothing in what?”

“Nothing in the idea that Almore murdered his wife, and had enough pull to get it fixed.”

Degarmo came to his feet and walked over to lean down at me.

“Say that again,” he said softly.

I said it again.

He hit me across the face with his open hand. It jerked my head around hard. My face felt hot and large.

“Say it again,” he said softly.

I said it again. His hand swept and knocked my head to one side again.

“Say it again.”

“Nope. Third time lucky. You might miss.” I put a hand up and rubbed my cheek.

He stood leaning down, his lips drawn back over his teeth, a hard animal glare in his very blue eyes.

“Any time you talk like that to a cop,” he said, “you know what you got coming. Try it on again and it won’t be the flat of a hand I’ll use on you.”

I bit hard on my lips and rubbed my cheek.

“Poke your big nose into our business and you’ll wake up in an alley with the cats looking at you,” he said.

I didn’t say anything. He went and sat down again, breathing hard. I stopped rubbing my face and held my hand out and worked the fingers slowly, to get the hard clench out of them.

“I’ll remember that,” I said. “Both ways.”

22

It was early evening when I got back to Hollywood and up to the office. The building had emptied out and the corridors were silent. Doors were open and the cleaning women were inside with their vacuum cleaners and their dry mops and dusters.

I unlocked the door to mine and picked up an envelope that lay in front of the mail slot and dropped it on the desk without looking at it. I ran the windows up and leaned out, looking at the early neon lights glowing, smelling the warm, foody air that drifted up from the alley ventilator of the coffee shop next door.

I peeled off my coat and tie and sat down at the desk and got the office bottle out of the deep drawer and bought myself a drink. It didn’t do any good. I had another, with the same result.

By now Webber would have seen Kingsley. There would be a general alarm out for his wife, already, or very soon. The thing looked cut and dried to them. A nasty affair between two rather nasty people, too much loving, too much drinking, too much proximity ending in a savage hatred and a murderous impulse and death.

I thought this was all a little too simple.

I reached for the envelope and tore it open. It had no stamp. It read: “Mr. Marlowe: Florence Almore’s parents are a Mr. and Mrs. Eustace Grayson, presently residing at the Rossmore Arms, 640 South Oxford Avenue. I checked this by calling the listed phone number. Yrs. Adrienne Fromsett.”

An elegant handwriting, like the elegant hand that wrote it. I pushed it to one side and had another drink. I began to feel a little less savage. I pushed things around on the desk. My hands felt thick and hot and awkward. I ran a finger across the corner of the desk and looked at the streak made by the wiping off of the dust. I look at the dust on my finger and wiped that off. I looked at my watch. I looked at the wall. I looked at nothing.

I put the liquor bottle away and went over to the washbowl to rinse the glass out. When I had done that I washed my hands and bathed my face in cold water and looked at it. The flush was gone from the left cheek, but it looked a little swollen. Not very much, but enough to make me tighten up again. I brushed my hair and looked at the gray in it. There was getting to be plenty of gray in it. The face under the hair had a sick look.

I didn’t like the face at all.

I went back to the desk and read Miss Fromsett’s note again. I smoothed it out on the glass and sniffed it and smoothed it out some more and folded it and put it in my coat pocket.

I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.

23

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog-house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrant of gardenias long ago.

The Graysons were on the fifth floor in front, in the north wing. They were sitting together in a room which seemed to be deliberately twenty years out of date. It had fat over-stuffed furniture and brass doorknobs, shaped like eggs, a huge wall mirror in a gilt frame, a marble-topped table in the window and dark red plush side drapes by the windows. It smelled of tobacco smoke and behind that the air was telling me they had had lamb chops and broccoli for dinner.

Grayson’s wife was a plump woman who might once have had big baby-blue eyes. They were faded out now and dimmed by glasses and slightly protuberant. She had kinky white hair. She sat darning socks with her thick ankles crossed, her feet just reaching the floor, and a big wicker sewing basket in her lap.

Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodbye. He wore bifocals and he had been gnawing fretfully at the evening paper. I had looked him up in the city directory. He was a C.P.A. and looked it very inch. He even had ink on his fingers and there were four pencils in the pocket of his open vest.

He read my card carefully for the seventh time and looked me up and down and said slowly: “What is it you want to see us about, Mr. Marlowe?”

“I’m interested in a man named Lavery. He lives across the street from Dr. Almore. Your daughter was the wife of Dr. Almore. Lavery is the man who found your daughter the night she—died.”

They both pointed like bird dogs when I deliberately hesitated on the last word. Grayson looked at his wife and she shook her head.

“We don’t care to talk about that,” Grayson said promptly. “It is much too painful to us.”

I waited a moment and looked gloomy with them. Then I said: “I don’t blame you. I don’t want to make you. I’d like to get in touch with the man you hired to look into it, though.”

They looked at each other again. Mrs. Grayson didn’t shake her head this time.

Grayson asked: “Why?”

“I’d better tell you a little of my story.” I told them what I had been hired to do, not mentioning Kingsley by name. I told them the incident with Degarmo outside Almore’s house the day before. They pointed again on that.

Grayson said sharply: “Am I to understand that you were unknown to Dr. Almore, had not approached him in any way, and that he nevertheless called a police officer because you were outside his house?”

I said: “That’s right. Had been outside for at least an hour though. That is, my car had.”

“That’s very queer,” Grayson said.

“I’d say that was one very nervous man,” I said. “And Degarmo asked me if her folks—meaning your daughter’s folks—had hired me. Looks as if he didn’t feel safe yet, wouldn’t you say?”

“Safe about what?” He didn’t look at me saying this. He re-lit his pipe, slowly, then tamped the tobacco down with the end of a big metal pencil and lit it again.

I shrugged and didn’t, answer. He looked at me quickly and looked away. Mrs. Grayson didn’t look at me, but her nostrils quivered.

“How did he know who you were?” Grayson asked suddenly.

“Made a note of the car license, called the Auto Club, looked up the name in the directory. At least that’s what I’d have done and I saw him through his window making some of the motions.”

“So he has the police working for him,” Grayson said.

“Not necessarily. If they made a mistake that time, they wouldn’t want it found out now.”

“Mistake!” He laughed almost shrilly.

“Okay,” I said. “The subject is painful but a little fresh air won’t hurt it. You’ve always thought he murdered her, haven’t you? That’s why you hired this dick—detective.”

Mrs. Grayson looked up with quick eyes and ducked her head down and rolled up another pair of mended socks.

Grayson said nothing.

I said: “Was there any evidence, or was it just that you didn’t like him?”

“There was evidence,” Grayson said bitterly, and with a sudden clearness of voice, as if he had decided to talk about it after all. “There must have been. We were told there was. But we never got it. The police took care of that.”

“I heard they had this fellow arrested and sent up for drunk driving.”

“You heard right.”

“But he never told you what he had to go on.”

“No.”

“I don’t like that,” I said. “That sounds a little as if this fellow hadn’t made up his mind whether to use his information for your benefit or keep it and put a squeeze on the doctor.”

Grayson looked at his wife again. She said quietly: “Mr. Talley didn’t impress me that way. He was a quiet unassuming little man. But you can’t always judge, I know.”

I said: “So Talley was his name. That was one of the things I hoped you would tell me.”

“And what were the others?” Grayson asked.

“How can I find Talley—and what it was that laid the groundwork of suspicion in your minds. It must have been there, or you wouldn’t have hired Talley without a better showing from him that he had grounds.”

Grayson smiled very thinly and primly. He reached for his little chin and rubbed it with one long yellow finger.

Mrs. Grayson said: “Dope.”

“She means that literally,” Grayson said at once, as if the single word had been a green light. “Almore was, and no doubt is, a dope doctor. Our daughter made that clear to us. In his hearing too. He didn’t like it.”

“Just what do you mean by a dope doctor, Mr. Grayson?”

“I mean a doctor whose practice is largely with people who are living on the raw edge of nervous collapse, from drink and dissipation. People who have to be given sedatives and narcotics all the time. The stage comes when an ethical physician refuses to treat them any more, outside a sanatorium. But not the Dr. Almores. They will keep on as long as the money comes in, as long as the patient remains alive and reasonably sane, even if he or she becomes a hopeless addict in the process. A lucrative practice,” he said primly, “and I imagine a dangerous one to the doctor.”

“No doubt of that,” I said. “But there’s a lot of money in it. Did you know a man named Condy?”

“No. We know who he was. Florence suspected he was a source of Almore’s narcotic supply.”

I said: “Could be. He probably wouldn’t want to write himself too many prescriptions. Did you know Lavery?”

“We never saw him. We knew who he was.”

“Ever occur to you that Lavery might have been blackmailing Almore?”

It was a new idea to him. He ran his hand over the top of his head and brought it down over his face and dropped it to his bony knee. He shook his head.

“No. Why should I?”

“He was first to the body,” I said. “Whatever looked wrong to Talley must have been equally visible to Lavery.”

“Is Lavery that kind of man?”

“I don’t know. He has no visible means of support, no job. He gets around a lot, especially with women.”

“It’s an idea,” Grayson said. “And those things can be handled very discreetly.” He smiled wryly. “I have come across traces of them in my work. Unsecured loans, long outstanding. Investments on the face of them worthless, made by men who would not be likely to make worthless investments. Bad debts that should obviously be charged off and have not been, for fear of inviting scrutiny from the income tax people. Oh yes, those things can easily be arranged.”

I looked at Mrs. Grayson. Her hands had never stopped working. She had a dozen pairs of darned socks finished. Grayson’s long bony feet would be hard on socks.

“What’s happened to Tailey? Was he framed?”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. His wife was very bitter. She said he had been given a doped drink in a bar and he had been drinking with a policeman. She said a police car was waiting across the street for him to start driving and that he was picked up at once. Also that he was given only the most perfunctory examination at the jail.”

“That doesn’t mean too much. That’s what he told her after he was arrested. He’d tell her something like that automatically.”

“Well, I hate to think the police are not honest,” Grayson said. “But these things are done, and everybody knows it.”

I said: “If they made an honest mistake about your daughter’s death, they would hate to have Talley show them up. It might mean several lost jobs. If they thought what he was really after was blackmail, they wouldn’t be too fussy about how they took care of him. Where is Talley now? What is all boils down to is that if there was any solid clue, he either had it or was on the track of it and knew what he was looking for.”

Grayson said: “We don’t know where he is. He got six months, but that expired long ago.”

“How about his wife?”

He looked at his own wife. She said briefly: “1618½ Westmore Street, Bay City. Eustace and I sent her a little money. She was left bad off.”

I made a note of the address and leaned back in my chair and said: “Somebody shot Lavery this morning in his bathroom.” Mrs. Grayson’s pudgy hands became still on the edges of the basket.

Grayson sat with his mouth open, holding his pipe in front of it. He made a noise of clearing his throat softly, as if in the presence of the dead. Nothing ever moved slower than his old black pipe going back between his teeth.

“Of course it would be too much to expect,” he said and let it hang in the air and blew a little pale smoke at it, and then added, “that Dr. Almore had any connection with that.”

“I’d like to think he had,” I said. “He certainly lives at a handy distance. The police think my client’s wife shot him. They have a good case too, when they find her. But if Almore had anything to do with it, it must surely arise out of your daughter’s death. That’s why I’m trying to find out something about that.”

Grayson said: “A man who has done one murder wouldn’t have more than twenty-five per cent of the hesitation in doing another.” He spoke as if he had given the matter considerable study.

I said: “Yeah, maybe. What was supposed to be the motive for the first one?”

“Florence was wild,” he said sadly. “A wild and difficult girl. She was wasteful and extravagant, always picking up new and rather doubtful friends, talking too much and too loudly, and generally acting the fool. A wife like that can be very dangerous to a man like Albert S. Almore. But I don’t believe that was the prime motive, was it, Lettie?”

He looked at his wife, but she didn’t look at him. She jabbed a darning needle into a round ball of wool and said nothing.

Grayson sighed and went on: “We had reason to believe he was carrying on with his office nurse and that Florence had threatened him with a public scandal. He couldn’t have anything like that, could he? One kind of scandal might too easily lead to another.”

I said: “How did he do the murder?”

“With morphine, of course. He always had it, he always used it. He was an expert in the use of it. Then when she was in a deep coma he would have placed her in the garage and started the car motor. There was no autopsy, you know. But if there had been, it was known that she had been given a hypodermic injection that night.”

I nodded and he leaned back satisfied and ran his hand over his head and down his face and let it fall slowly to his bony knee. He seemed to have given a lot of study to this angle too.

I looked at them. A couple of elderly people sitting there quietly, poisoning their minds with hate, a year and a half after it had happened. They would like it if Almore had shot Lavery. They would love it. It would warm them clear down to their ankles.

After a pause I said: “You’re believing a lot of this because you want to. It’s always possible that she committed suicide, and that the cover-up was partly to protect Condy’s gambling club and partly to prevent Almore having to be questioned at a public hearing.”

“Rubbish,” Grayson said sharply. “He murdered her all right. She was in bed, asleep.”

“You don’t know that. She might have been taking dope herself. She might have established a tolerance for it. The effect wouldn’t last long in that case. She might have got up in the middle of the night and looked at herself in the glass and seen devils pointing at her. These things happen.”

“I think you have taken up enough of our time,” Grayson said.

I stood up. I thanked them both and made a yard towards the door and said: “You didn’t do anything more about it after Talley was arrested?”

“Saw an assistant district attorney named Leach,” Grayson grunted. “Got exactly nowhere. He saw nothing to justify his office in interfering. Wasn’t even interested in the narcotic angle. But Condy’s place was closed up about a month later. That might have come out of it somehow.”

“That was probably the Bay City cops throwing a little smoke. You’d find Condy somewhere else, if you knew where to look. With all his original equipment intact.”

I started for the door again and Grayson hoisted himself out of his chair and dragged across the room after me. There was a flush on his yellow face.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,” he said. “I guess Lettie and I oughtn’t to brood about this business the way we do.”

“I think you’ve both been very patient,” I said. “Was there anybody else involved in all this that we haven’t mentioned by name?”

He shook his head, then looked back at his wife. Her hands were motionless holding the current sock on the darning egg. Her head was tilted a little to one side. Her attitude was of listening, but not to us.

I said: “The way I got the story, Dr. Almore’s office nurse put Mrs. Almore to bed that night. Would that be the one he was supposed to be playing around with?”

Mrs. Grayson said sharply: “Wait a minute. We never saw the girl. But she had a pretty name. Just give me a minute.”

We gave her a minute. “Mildred something,” she said, and snapped her teeth.

I took a deep breath. “Would it be Mildred Haviland, Mrs. Grayson?”

She smiled brightly and nodded. “Of course, Mildred Haviland.

Don’t you remember, Eustace?”

He didn’t remember. He looked at us like a horse that has got into the wrong stable. He opened the door and said: “What does it matter?”

“And you said Talley was a small man,” I bored on. “He wouldn’t for instance be a big loud bruiser with an overbearing manner?”

“Oh no,” Mrs. Grayson said. “Mr. Talley is a man of not more than medium height, middle-aged, with brownish hair and a very quiet voice. He had a sort of worried expression. I mean, he looked as if he always had it.”

“Looks as if he needed it,” I said.

Grayson put his bony hand out and I shook it. It felt like shaking hands with a towel rack.

“If you get him,” he said and clamped his mouth hard on his pipe stem, “call back with a bill. If you get Almore, I mean, of course.”

I said I knew he meant Almore, but that there wouldn’t be any bill.

I went back along the silent hallway. The self-operating elevator was carpeted in red plush. It had an elderly perfume in it, like three widows drinking tea.

24

The house on Westmore Street was a small frame bungalow behind a larger house. There was no number visible on the smaller house, but the one in front showed a stenciled 1618 beside the door, with a dim light behind the stencil. A narrow concrete path led along under windows to the house at the back. It had a tiny porch with a single chair on it. I stepped up on the porch and rang the bell.

It buzzed not very far oft. The front door was open behind the screen but there was no light. From the darkness a querulous voice said: “What is it?”

I spoke into the darkness. “Mr. Talley in?”

The voice became flat and without tone. “Who wants him?”

“A friend.”

The woman sitting inside in the darkness made a vague sound in her throat which might have been amusement. Or she might just have been clearing her throat.

“All right,” she said. “How much is this one?”

“It’s not a bill, Mrs. Talley. I suppose you are Mrs. Talley?”

“Oh, go away and let me alone,” the voice said. “Mr. Talley isn’t here. He hasn’t been here. He won’t be here.”

I put my nose against the screen and tried to peer into the room. I could see the vague outlines of its furniture. From where the voice came from also showed the shape of a couch. A woman was lying on it. She seemed to be lying on her back and looking up at the ceiling. She was quite motionless.

“I’m sick,” the voice said. “I’ve had enough trouble. Go away and leave me be.”

I said: “I’ve just come from talking to the Graysons.” There was a little silence, but no movement, then a sigh. “I never heard of them.”

I leaned against the frame of the screen door and looked back along the narrow walk to the street. There was a car across the way with parking lights burning. There were other cars along the block.

I said: “Yes, you have, Mrs. Talley. I’m working for them. They’re still in there pitching. How about you? Don’t you want something back?”

The voice said. “I want to be let alone.”

“I want information,” I said. “I’m going to get it. Quietly if I can. Loud, if it can’t be quiet.”

The voice said: “Another copper, eh?”

“You know I’m not a copper, Mrs. Talley. The Graysons wouldn’t talk to a copper. Call them up and ask them.”

“I never heard of them,” the voice said. “I don’t have a phone, if I knew them. Go away, copper. I’m sick. I’ve been sick for a month.”

“My name is Marlowe,” I said. “Philip Marlowe. I’m a private eye in Los Angeles, I’ve been talking to the Graysons. I’ve got something, but I want to talk to your husband.”

The woman on the couch let out a dim laugh which barely reached across the room. “You’ve got something,” she said. “That sounds familiar. My God it does! You’ve got something. George Talley had something too—once.”

“He can have it again,” I said, “if he plays his cards right.”

“If that’s what it takes,” she said, “you can scratch him off right now.”

I leaned against the doorframe and scratched my chin instead. Somebody back on the street had clicked a flashlight on. I didn’t know why. It went off again. It seemed to be near my car.

The pale blur of face on the couch moved and disappeared. Hair took its place. The woman had turned her face to the wall.

“I’m tired,” she said, her voice now muffled by talking at the wall. “I’m so damn tired. Beat it, mister. Be nice and go away.”

“Would a little money help any?”

“Can’t you smell the cigar smoke?”

I sniffed. I didn’t smell any cigar smoke. I said, “No.”

“They’ve been here. They were here two hours. God, I’m tired of it all. Go away.”

“Look, Mrs. Talley—”

She rolled on the couch and the blur of her face showed again.

I could almost see her eyes, not quite.

“Look yourself,” she said. “I don’t know you. I don’t want to know you. I have nothing to tell you. I wouldn’t tell it, if I had. I live here, mister, if you call it living. Anyway it’s the nearest I can get to living. I want a little peace and quiet. Now you get out and leave me alone.”

“Let me in the house,” I said. “We can talk this over. I think I can show you—”

She rolled suddenly on the couch again and feet struck the floor. A tight anger came into her voice.

“If you don’t get out,” she said, “I’m going to start yelling my head off. Right now. Now!”

“Okay,” I said quickly. “I’ll stick my card in the door. So you won’t forget my name. You might change your mind.”

I got the card out and wedged it into the crack of the screen door. I said: “Well goodnight, Mrs. Talley.”

No answer. Her eyes were looking across the room at me, faintly luminous in the dark. I went down off the porch and back along the narrow walk to the street.

Across the way a motor purred gently in the car with the parking lights on it. Motors purl gently in thousands of cars on thousands of streets, everywhere.

I got into the Chrysler and started it up.

25

Westmore was a north and south street on the wrong side of town. I drove north. At the next corner I bumped over disused interurban tracks and on into a block of junkyards. Behind wooden fences the decomposing carcasses of old automobiles lay in grotesque designs, like a modern battlefield. Piles of rusted parts looked lumpy under the moon. Roof high piles, with alleys between them.

Headlights glowed in my rear view mirror. They got larger. I stepped on the gas and reached keys out of my pocket and unlocked the glove compartment. I took a .38 out and laid it on the car seat close to my leg.

Beyond the junkyards there was a brick field. The tall chimney of the kiln was smokeless, far off over wasteland. Piles of dark bricks, a low wooden building with a sign on it, emptiness, no one moving, no light.

The car behind me gained. The low whine of a lightly touched siren growled through the night. The sound loafed over the fringes of a neglected golf course to the east, across the brickyard to the west. I speeded up a bit more, but it wasn’t any use. The car behind me came up fast and a huge red spotlight suddenly glared all over the road.

The car came up level and started to cut in. I stood the Chrysler on its nose, swung out behind the police car, and made a U turn with half an inch to spare. I gunned the motor the other way. Behind me sounded the rough clashing of gears, the howl of an infuriated motor, and the red spotlight swept for what seemed miles over the brickyard.

It wasn’t any use. They were behind me and coming fast again. I didn’t have any idea of getting away. I wanted to get back where there were houses and people to come out and watch and perhaps to remember.

I didn’t make it. The police car heaved up alongside again and a hard voice yelled: “Pull over, or we’ll blast a hole in you!”

I pulled over to the curb and set the brake. I put the gun back in the glove compartment and snapped it shut. The police car jumped on its springs just in front of my left front fender. A fat man slammed out of it roaring.

“Don’t you know a police siren when you hear one? Get out of that car!”

I got out of the car and stood beside it in the moonlight. The fat man had a gun in his hand.

“Gimme your license!” he barked in a voice as hard as the blade of a shovel.

I took it out and held it out. The other cop in the car slid out from under the wheel and came around beside me and took what I was holding out. He put a flash on it and read.

“Name of Marlowe,” he said. “Hell, the guy’s a shamus. Just think of that, Cooney.”

Cooney said: “Is that all? Guess I won’t need this.” He tucked the gun back in his holster and buttoned the leather flap down over it. “Guess I can handle this with my little flippers,” he said. “Guess I can at that.”

The other one said: “Doing fifty-five. Been drinking, I wouldn’t wonder.”

“Smell the bastard’s breath,” Cooney said.

The other one leaned forward with a polite leer. “Could I smell the breath, shamus?”

I let him smell the breath.

“Well,” he said judiciously, “he ain’t staggering. I got to admit that.”

“’S a cold night for summer. Buy the boy a drink, Officer Dobbs.”

“Now that’s a sweet idea,” Dobbs said. He went to the car and got a half-pint bottle out of it. He held it up. It was a third full. “No really solid drinking here,” he said. He held the bottle out. “With our compliments, pal.”

“Suppose I don’t want a drink,” I said.

“Don’t say that,” Cooney whined. “We might get the idea you wanted feet-prints on your stomach.”

I took the bottle and unscrewed the cap and sniffed. The liquor in the bottle smelled like whiskey. Just whiskey.

“You can’t work the same gag all the time,” I said.

Cooney said: “Time is eight twenty-seven. Write it down, Officer Dobbs.”

Dobbs went to the car and leaned in to make a note on his report. I held the bottle up and said to Cooney: “You insist that I drink this?”

“Naw. You could have me jump on your belly instead.”

I tilted the bottle, locked my throat, and filled my mouth with whiskey. Cooney lunged forward and sank a fist in my stomach. I sprayed the whiskey and bent over choking. I dropped the bottle.

I bent to get it and saw Cooney’s fat knee rising at my face. I stepped to one side and straightened and slammed him on the nose with everything I had. His left hand went to his face and his voice howled and his right hand jumped to his gun holster. Dobbs ran at me from one side and his arm swung low. The blackjack hit me behind the left knee, the leg went dead and I sat down hard on the ground, gritting my teeth and spitting whiskey.

Cooney took his hand away from his face full of blood.

“Jesus,” he cracked in a thick horrible voice. “This is blood. My blood.” He let out a wild roar and swung his foot at my face.

I rolled far enough to catch it on my shoulder. It was bad enough taking it there.

Dobbs pushed between us and said: “We got enough, Charlie. Better not get it all gummed up.”

Cooney stepped backwards three shuffling steps and sat down on the running-board of the police car and held his face. He groped for a handkerchief and used it gently on his nose.

“Just gimme a minute,” he said through the handkerchief.

“Just a minute, pal. Just one little minute.”

Dobbs said, “Pipe down. We got enough. That’s the way it’s going to be.” He swung the blackjack slowly beside his leg. Cooney got up off the running-board and staggered forward. Dobbs put a hand against his chest and pushed him gently. Cooney tried to knock the hand out of his way.

“I gotta see blood,” he croaked. “I gotta see more blood.”

Dobbs said sharply, “Nothing doing. Pipe down. We got all we wanted.”

Cooney turned and moved heavily away to the other side of the police car. He leaned against it muttering through his handkerchief. Dobbs said to me: “Up on the feet, boy friend.”

I got up and rubbed behind my knee. The nerve of the leg was jumping like an angry monkey.

“Get in the car,” Dobbs said. “Our car.”

I went over and climbed into the police car.

Dobbs said: “You drive the other heap, Charlie.”

“I’ll tear every god damn fender off’n it,” Cooney roared.

Dobbs picked the whiskey bottle off the ground, threw it over the fence, and slid into the car beside me. He pressed the starter.

“This is going to cost you,” he said. “You hadn’t ought to have socked him.”

I said: “Just why not?”

“He’s a good guy,” Dobbs said. “A little loud.”

“But not funny,” I said. “Not at all funny.”

“Don’t tell him,” Dobbs said. The police car began to move. “You’d hurt his feelings.”

Cooney slammed into the Chrysler and started it and clashed the gears as if he was trying to strip them. Dobbs tooled the police car smoothly around and started north again along the brickyard.

“You’ll like our new jail,” he said.

“What will the charge be?”

He thought a moment, guiding the car with a gentle hand and watching in the mirror to see that Cooney followed along behind.

“Speeding,” he said. “Resisting arrest. H.B.D.” H.B.D. is police slang for “had been drinking.”

“How about being slammed in the belly, kicked in the shoulder, forced to drink liquor under threat of bodily harm, threatened with a gun and struck with a blackjack while unarmed? Couldn’t you make a little something more out of that?”

“Aw forget it,” he said wearily. “You think this sort of thing is my idea of a good time?”

“I thought they cleaned this town up,” I said. “I thought they had it so that a decent man could walk the streets at night without wearing a bullet proof vest.”

“They cleaned it up some,” he said. “They wouldn’t want it too clean. They might scare away a dirty dollar.”

“Better not talk like that,” I said. “You’ll lose your union card.”

He laughed. “The hell with them,” he said. “I’ll be in the army in two weeks.”

The incident was over for him. It meant nothing. He took it as a matter of course. He wasn’t even bitter about it.

26

The cellblock was almost brand new. The battleship gray paint on the steel walls and door still had the fresh gloss of newness disfigured in two or three places by squirted tobacco juice. The overhead light was sunk in the ceiling behind a heavy frosted panel. There were two bunks on one side of the cell and a man snored in the top bunk, with a dark gray blanket wrapped around him. Since he was asleep that early and didn’t smell of whiskey or gin and had chosen the top berth where he would be out of the way, I judged he was an old lodger.

I sat on the lower bunk. They had tapped me for a gun but they hadn’t stripped my pockets. I got out a cigarette and rubbed the hot swelling behind my knee. The pain radiated all the way to the ankle. The whiskey I had coughed on my coat front had a rank smell. I held the cloth up and breathed smoke into it. The smoke floated up around the flat square of lighted glass in the ceiling. The jail seemed very quiet. A woman was making a shrill racket somewhere very far off, in another part of the jail. My part was as peaceful as a church.

The woman was screaming, wherever she was. The screaming had a thin sharp unreal sound, something like the screaming of coyotes in the moonlight, but it didn’t have the rising keening note of the coyote. After a while the sound stopped.

I smoked two cigarettes through and dropped the butts into the small toilet in the corner. The man in the upper berth still snored. All I could see of him was damp greasy hair sticking out over the edge of the blanket. He slept on his stomach. He slept well. He was one of the best.

I sat down on the bunk again. It was made of flat steel slats with a thin hard mattress over them. Two dark gray blankets were folded on it quite neatly. It was a very nice jail. It was on the twelfth floor of the new city hall. It was a very nice city hall. Bay City was a very nice place. People lived there and thought so. If I lived there, I would probably think so. I would see the nice blue bay and the cliffs and the yacht harbor and the quiet streets of houses, old houses brooding under old trees and new houses with sharp green lawns and wire fences and staked saplings set into the parkway in front of them. I knew a girl who lived on Twenty-fifty Street. It was a nice street. She was a nice girl. She liked Bay City.

She wouldn’t think about the Mexican and Negro slums stretched out on the dismal flats south of the old interurban tracks. Nor of the waterfront dives along the flat shore south of the cliffs, the sweaty little dance halls on the pike, the marihuana joints, the narrow fox faces watching over the tops of newspapers in far too quiet hotel lobbies, nor the pickpockets and grifters and con men and drunk rollers and pimps and queens on the board walk.

I went over to stand by the door. There was nobody stirring across the way. The lights in the cell block were bleak and silent. Business in the jail was rotten.

I looked at my watch. Nine fifty-four. Time to go home and get your slippers on and play over a game of chess. Time for a tall cool drink and a long quiet pipe. Time to sit with your feet up and think of nothing. Time to start yawning over your magazine. Time to be a human being, a householder, a man with nothing to do but rest and suck in the night air and rebuild the brain for tomorrow.

A man in the blue-gray jail uniform came along between the cells reading numbers. He stopped in front of mine and unlocked the door and gave me the hard stare they think they have to wear on their pans forever and forever and forever. I’m a cop, brother, I’m tough, watch your step, brother, or we’ll fix you up so you’ll crawl on your hands and knees, brother, snap out of it, brother, let’s get a load of the truth, brother, let’s go, and let’s not forget we’re tough guys, we’re cops, and we do what we like with punks like you.

“Out,” he said.

I stepped out of the cell and he relocked the door and jerked his thumb and we went along to a wide steel gate and he unlocked that and we went through and he relocked it and the keys tinkled pleasantly on the big steel ring and after a while we went through a steel door that was painted like wood on the outside and battleship gray on the inside.

Degarmo was standing there by the counter talking to the desk sergeant.

He turned his metallic blue eyes on me and said: “How you doing?”

“Fine.”

“Like our jail?”

“I like your jail fine.”

“Captain Webber wants to talk to you.”

“That’s fine,” I said.

“Don’t you know any words but fine?”

“Not right now,” I said. “Not in here.”

“You’re limping a little,” he said. “You trip over something?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I tripped over a blackjack. It jumped up and bit me behind the left knee.”

“That’s too bad,” Degarmo said, blank-eyed. “Get your stuff from the property clerk.”

“I’ve got it,” I said. “It wasn’t taken away from me.”

“Well, that’s fine,” he said.

“It sure is,” I said. “It’s fine.”

The desk sergeant lifted his shaggy head and gave us both a long stare. “You ought to see Cooney’s little Irish nose,” he said. “If you want to see something fine. It’s spread over his face like syrup on a waffle.”

Degarmo said absently: “What’s the matter? He get in a fight?”

“I wouldn’t know,” the desk sergeant said. “Maybe it was the same blackjack that jumped up and bit him.”

“For a desk sergeant you talk too damn much,” Degarmo said.

“A desk sergeant always talks too God damn much,” the desk sergeant said. “Maybe that’s why he isn’t a lieutenant on homicide.”

“You see how we are here,” Degarmo said. “Just one great big happy family.”

“With beaming smiles on our faces,” the desk sergeant said, “and our arms spread wide in welcome, and a rock in each hand.”

Degarmo jerked his head at me and we went out.

27

Captain Webber pushed his sharp bent nose across the desk at me and said: “Sit down.”

I sat down in a round-backed wooden armchair and eased my left leg away from the sharp edge of the seat. It was a large neat corner office. Degarmo sat at the end of the desk and crossed his legs and rubbed his ankle thoughtfully, looked out of a window.

Webber went on: “You asked for trouble, and you got it. You were doing fifty-five miles an hour in a residential zone and you attempted to get away from a police car that signaled you to stop with its siren and red spotlight. You were abusive when stopped and you struck an officer in the face.”

I said nothing. Webber picked a match off his desk and broke it in half and threw the pieces over his shoulder.

“Or are they lying—as usual?” he asked.

“I didn’t see their report,” I said. “I was probably doing fifty-five in a residential district, or anyhow within city limits. The police car was parked outside a house I visited. It followed me when I drove away and I didn’t at that time know it was a police car. It had no good reason to follow me and I didn’t like the look of it. I went a little fast, but all I was trying to do was get to a better lighted part of town.”

Degarmo moved his eyes to give me a bleak meaningless stare.

Webber snapped his teeth impatiently.

He said: “After you knew it was a police car you made a half turn in the middle of the block and still tried to get away. Is that right?”

I said: “Yes. It’s going to take a little frank talk to explain that.”

“I’m not afraid of a little frank talk,” Webber said. “I tend to kind of specialize in frank talk.”

I said: “These cops that picked me up were parked in front of the house where George Talley’s wife lives. They were there before I got there. George Talley is the man. who used to be a private detective down here. I wanted to see him. Degarmo knows why I wanted to see him.”

Degarmo picked a match out of his pocket and chewed on the soft end of it quietly. He nodded, without expression. Webber didn’t look at him.

I said: “You are a stupid man, Degarmo. Everything you do is stupid, and done in a stupid way. When you went up against me yesterday in front of Almore’s house you had to get tough when there was nothing to get tough about. You had to make me curious when I had nothing to be curious about. You even had to drop hints which showed me how I could satisfy that curiosity, if it became important. All you had to do to protect your friends was keep your mouth shut until I made a move. I never would have made one, and you would have saved all this.”

Webber said: “What the devil has all this got to do with your being arrested in the twelve hundred block on Westmore Street?”

“It has to do with the Almore case,” I said. “George Talley worked on the Almore case—until he was pinched for drunk driving.”

“Well, I never worked on the Almore case,” Webber snapped. “I don’t know who stuck the first knife into Julius Caesar either. Stick to the point, can’t you?”

“I am sticking to the point. Degarmo knows about the Almore case and he doesn’t like it talked about. Even your prowl car boys know about it. Cooney and Dobbs had no reason to follow me unless it was because I visited the wife of a man who had worked on the Almore case. I wasn’t doing fifty-five miles an hour when they started to follow me. I tried to get away from them because I had a good idea I might get beaten up for going there. Degarmo had given me that idea.”

Webber looked quickly at Degarmo. Degarmo’s hard blue eyes looked across the room at the wall in front of him.

I said: “And I didn’t bust Cooney in the nose until after he had forced me to drink whiskey and then hit me in the stomach when I drank it, so that I would spill it down my coat front and smell of it. This can’t be the first time you have heard of that trick, captain.”

Webber broke another match. He leaned back and looked at his small tight knuckles. He looked again at Degarmo and said: “If you got made chief of police today, you might let me in on it.”

Degarmo said: “Hell, the shamus just got a couple of playful taps. Kind of kidding. If a guy can’t take a joke—”

Webber said: “You put Cooney and Dobbs over there?”

“Well—yes, I did,” Degarmo said. “I don’t see where we have to put up with these snoopers coming into our town and stirring up a lot of dead leaves just to promote themselves a job and work a couple of old suckers for a big fee. Guys like that need a good sharp lesson.”

“Is that how it looks to you?” Webber asked.

“That’s exactly how it looks to me,” Degarmo said.

“I wonder what fellows like you need,” Webber said. “Right now I think you need a little air. Would you please take it, lieutenant?”

Degarmo opened his mouth slowly. “You mean you want me to breeze on out?”

Webber leaned forward suddenly and his sharp little chin seemed to cut the air like the forefoot of a cruiser. “Would you be so kind?”

Degarmo stood up slowly, a dark flush staining his cheekbones.

He leaned a hard hand flat on the desk and looked at Webber.

There was a little charged silence. He said: “Okay, captain. But you’re playing this wrong.”

Webber didn’t answer him. Degarmo walked to the door and out.

Webber waited for the door to close before he spoke.

“Is it your line that you can tie this Almore business a year and a half ago to the shooting in Lavery’s place today? Or is it just a smoke screen you’re laying down because you know damn well Kingsley’s wife shot Layery?”

I said: “It was tied to Lavery before he was shot. In a rough sort of way, perhaps only with a granny knot. But enough to make a man think.”

“I’ve been into this matter a little more thoroughly than you might think,” Webber said coldly. “Although I never had anything personally to do with the death of Almore’s wife and I wasn’t chief of detectives at that time. If you didn’t even know Almore yesterday morning, you must have heard a lot about him since.”

I told him exactly what I had heard, both from Miss Fromsett and from the Graysons.

“Then it’s your theory that Lavery may have blackmailed Dr. Almore?” he asked at the end. “And that that may have something to do with the murder?”

“It’s not a theory. It’s no more than a possibility. I wouldn’t be doing a job if I ignored it. The relations, if any, between Lavery and Almore might have been deep and dangerous or just the merest acquaintance, or not even that. For all I positively know they may never even have spoken to each other. But if there was nothing funny about the Almore case, why get so tough with anybody who shows an interest in it? It could be coincidence that George Talley was hooked for drunk driving just when he was working on it. It could be coincidence that Almore called a cop because I stared at his house, and that Lavery was shot before I could talk to him a second time. But it’s no coincidence that two of your men were watching Talley’s home tonight, ready, willing and able to make trouble for me, if I went there.”

“I grant you that,” Webber said. “And I’m not done with that incident. Do you want to file charges?”

“Life’s too short for me to be filing charges of assault against police officers,” I said.

He winced a little. “Then we’ll wash all that out and charge it to experience,” he said. “And as I understand you were not even booked, you’re free to go home any time you want to. And if I were you, I’d leave Captain Webber to deal with the Lavery case and with any remote connection it might turn out to have with the Almore case.”

I said: “And with any remote connection it might have with a woman named Muriel Chess being found drowned in a mountain lake near Puma Point yesterday?”

He raised his little eyebrows. “You think that?”

“Only you might not know her as Muriel Chess. Supposing that you knew her at all you might have known her as Mildred Haviland, who used to be Dr. Almore’s office nurse. Who put Mrs. Almore to bed the night she was found dead in the garage, and who, if there was any hanky-panky about that, might know who it was, and be bribed or scared into leaving town shortly thereafter.”

Webber picked up two matches and broke them. His small bleak eyes were fixed on my face. He said nothing.

“And at that point,” I said, “you run into a real basic coincidence, the only one I’m willing to admit in the whole picture. For this Mildred Haviland met a man named Bill Chess in a Riverside beer parlor and for reasons of her own married him and went to live with him at Little Fawn Lake. And Little Fawn Lake was the property of a man whose wife was intimate with Lavery, who had found Mrs. Almore’s body. That’s what I call a real coincidence. It can’t be anything else but, but it’s basic, fundamental. Everything else flows from it.”

Webber got up from his desk and went over to the water cooler and drank two paper cups of water. He crushed the cups slowly in his hand and twisted them into a bail and dropped the ball into a brown metal basket under the cooler. He walked to the windows and stood looking out over the bay. This was before the dim-out went into effect, and there were many lights in the yacht harbor.

He came slowly back to the desk and sat down. He reached up and pinched his nose. He was making up his mind about something.

He said slowly: “I can’t see what the hell sense there is in trying to mix that up with something that happened a year and a half later.”

“Okay,” I said, “and thanks for giving me so much of your time.” I got up to go.

“Your leg feel pretty bad?” he asked, as I leaned down to rub it.

“Bad enough, but it’s getting better.”

“Police business,” he said almost gently, “is a hell of a problem. It’s a good deal like politics. It asks for the highest type of men, and there’s nothing in it to attract the highest type of men. So we have to work with what we get—and we get things like this.”

“I know,” I said. “I’ve always known that. I’m not bitter about it. Goodnight, Captain Webber.”

“Wait a minute,” he said. “Sit down a minute. If we’ve got to have the Almore case in this, let’s drag it out into the open and look at it.”

“It’s about time somebody did that,” I said. I sat down again.

28

Webber said quietly: “I suppose some people think we’re just a bunch of crooks down here. I suppose they think a fellow kills his wife and then calls me up on the phone and says: ‘Hi, Cap, I got a little murder down here cluttering up the front room. And I’ve got five hundred iron men that are not working.’ And then I say: ‘Fine. Hold everything and I’ll be right down with a

blanket.’”

“Not quite that bad,” I said.

“What did you want to see Talley about when you went to his house tonight?”

“He had some line on Florence Almore’s death. Her parents hired him to follow it up, but he never told them what it was.”

“And you thought he would tell you?” Webber asked sarcastically.

“All I could do was try.”

“Or was it just that Degarmo getting tough with you made you feel like getting tough right back at him?”

“There might be a little of that in it too,” I said.

“Talley was a petty blackmailer,” Webber said contemptuously. “On more than one occasion. Any way to get rid of him was good enough. So I’ll tell you what it was he had. He had a slipper he had stolen from Florence Almore’s foot.”

“A slipper?”

He smiled faintly. “Just a slipper. It was later found hidden in his house. It was a green velvet dancing pump with some little stones set into the heel. It was custom made, by a man in Hollywood who makes theatrical footwear and such. Now ask me what was important about this slipper?”

“What was important about it, captain?”

“She had two pair of them, exactly alike, made on the same order. It seems that is not unusual. In case one of them gets scuffed or some drunken ox tries to walk up a lady’s leg.” He paused and smiled thinly. “It seems that one pair had never been worn.”

“I think I’m beginning to get it,” I said.

He leaned back and tapped the arms of his chair. He waited.

“The walk from the side door of the house to the garage is rough concrete,” I said. “Fairly rough. Suppose she didn’t walk it, but was carried. And suppose whoever carried her put her slippers on—and got one that had not been worn.”

“Yes?”

“And suppose Talley noticed this while Lavery was telephoning to the doctor, who was out on his rounds. So he took the unworn slipper, regarding it as evidence that Florence Almore had been murdered.”

Webber nodded his head. “It was evidence if he left it where it was, for the police to find it. After he took it, it was just evidence that he was a rat.”

“Was a monoxide test made of her blood?”

He put his hands flat on his desk and looked down at them. “Yes,” he said. “And there was monoxide all right. Also the investigating officers were satisfied with appearances. There was no sign of violence. They were satisfied that Dr. Alrnore had not murdered his wife. Perhaps they were wrong. I think the investigation was a little superficial.”

“And who was in charge of it?” I asked.

“I think you know the answer to that.”

“When the police came, didn’t they notice that a slipper was missing?”

“When the police came there was no slipper missing. You must remember that Dr. Almore was back at his home, in response to Lavery’s call, before the police were called. All we know about the missing shoe is from Talley himself. He might have taken the unworn shoe from the house. The side door was unlocked. The maids were asleep. The objection to that is that he wouldn’t have been likely to know there was an unworn slipper to take. I wouldn’t put it past him to think of it. He’s a sharp sneaky little devil. But I can’t fix the necessary knowledge on him.”

We sat there and looked at each other, thinking about it.

“Unless,” Webber said slowly, “we can suppose that this nurse of Almore’s was involved with Talley in a scheme to put the bite on Almore. It’s possible. There are things in favor of it. There are more things against it. What reason have you for claiming that the girl drowned up in the mountains was this nurse?”

“Two reasons, neither one conclusive separately, but pretty powerful taken together. A tough guy who looked and acted like Deganno was up there a few weeks ago showing a photograph of Mildred Haviland that looked something like Muriel Chess. Different hair and eyebrows and so on, but a fair resemblance. Nobody helped him much. He called himself De Soto and said he was a Los Angeles cop. There isn’t any Los Angeles cop named De Soto. When Muriel Chess heard about it, she looked scared. If it was Degarmo, that’s easily established. The other reason is that a golden anklet with a heart on it was hidden in a box of powdered sugar in the Chess cabin. It was found after her death, after her husband had been arrested. On the back of the heart was engraved: Al to Mildred. June 28^th, 1938. With all my love.”

“It could have been some other Al and some other Mildred,” Webber said.

“You don’t really believe that, captain.”

He leaned forward and made a hole in the air with his forefinger. “What do you want to make of all this exactly?”

“I want to make it that Kingsley’s wife didn’t shoot Lavery. That his death had something to do with the Almore business. And with Mildred Haviland. And possibly with Dr. Almore. I want to make it that Kingsley’s wife disappeared because something happened that gave her a bad fright, that she may or may not have guilty knowledge, but that she hasn’t murdered anybody. There’s five hundred dollars in it for me, if I can determine that. It’s legitimate to try.”

He nodded. “Certainly it is. And I’m the man that would help you, if I could see any grounds for it. We haven’t found the woman, but the time has been very short. But I can’t help you put something on one of my boys.”

I said: “I heard you call Degarmo Al. But I was thinking of Almore. His name’s Albert.”

Webber looked at his thumb. “But he was never married to the girl,” he said quietly. “Degarmo was. I can tell you she led him a pretty dance. A lot of what seems bad in him is the result of it.”

I sat very still. After a moment I said: “I’m beginning to see things I didn’t know existed. What kind of a girl was she?”.

“Smart, smooth and no good. She had a way with men. She could make them crawl over her shoes. The big boob would tear your head off right now, if you said anything against her. She divorced him, but that didn’t end it for him.”

“Does he know she is dead?”

Webber sat quiet for a long moment before he said: “Not from anything he has said. But how could he help it, if it’s the same girl?”

“He never found her in the mountains—so far as we know.”

I stood up and leaned down on the desk. “Look, captain, you’re not kidding me, are you?”

“No. Not one damn bit. Some men are like that and some women can make them like it. If you think Degarmo went up there looking for her because he wanted to hurt her, you’re as wet as a bar towel.”

“I never quite thought that,” I said. “It would be possible, provided Degarmo knew the country up there pretty well. Whoever murdered the girl did.”

“This is all between us,” he said. “I’d like you to keep it that way.”

I nodded, but I didn’t promise him. I said goodnight again and left. He looked after me as I went down the room. He looked hurt and sad.

The Chrysler was in the police lot at the side of the building with the keys in the ignition and none of the fenders smashed. Cooney hadn’t made good on his threat. I drove back to Hollywood and went up to my apartment in the Bristol. It was late, almost midnight.

The green and ivory hallway was empty of all sound except that a telephone bell was ringing in one of the apartments. It rang insistently and got louder as I came near to my door. I unlocked the door. It was my telephone.

I walked across the room in darkness to where the phone stood on the ledge of an oak desk against the side wall. It must have rung at least ten times before I got to it.

I lifted it out of the cradle and answered, and it was Derace Kingsley on the line.

His voice sounded tight and brittle and strained. “Good Lord, where in hell have you been?” he snapped. “I’ve been trying to reach you for hours.”

“All right. I’m here now,” I said. “What is it?”

“I’ve heard from her.”

I held the telephone very tight and drew my breath in slowly and let it out slowly. “Go ahead,” I said.

“I’m not far away. I’ll be over there in five or six minutes. Be prepared to move.” He hung up.

I stood there holding the telephone halfway between my ear and the cradle. Then I put it down very slowly and looked at the hand that had held it. It was half open and clenched stiff, as if it was still holding the instrument.

29

The discreet midnight tapping sounded on the door and I went over and opened it. Kingsley looked as big as a horse in a creamy shetland sports coat with a green and yellow scarf around the neck inside the loosely turned up collar. A dark reddish brown snapbrim hat was pulled low on his forehead and under its brim, his eyes looked like the eyes of a sick animal.

Miss Fromsett was with him. She was wearing slacks and sandals and dark green coat and no hat and her hair had a wicked luster. In her ears hung ear drops made of a pair of tiny artificial gardenia blooms, hanging one above the other, two on each ear. Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes, came in at the door with her.

I shut the door and indicated the furniture and said: “A drink will probably help.”

Miss Fromsett sat in an armchair and crossed her legs and looked around for cigarettes. She found one and lit it with a long casual flourish and smiled bleakly at a corner of the ceiling.

Kingsley stood in the middle of the floor trying to bite his chin. I went out to the dinette and mixed three drinks and brought them in and handed them. I went over to the chair by the chess table with mine.

Kingsley said: “What have you been doing and what’s the matter with the leg?”

I said: “A cop kicked me. A present from the Bay City police department. It’s a regular service they give down there. As to where I’ve been—in jail for drunk driving. And from the expression on your face, I think I may be right back there soon.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said shortly. “I haven’t the foggiest idea. This is no time to kid around.”

“All right, don’t,” I said. “What did you hear and where is she?”

He sat down with his drink and flexed the fingers of his right hand, and put it inside his coat. It came out with an envelope, a long one.

“You have to take this to her,” he said. “Five hundred dollars. She wanted more, but this is all I could raise. I cashed a check at a nightclub. It wasn’t easy. She has to get out of town.”

I said: “Out of what town?”

“Bay City somewhere. I don’t know where. She’ll meet you at a place called the Peacock Lounge, on Arguello Boulevard, at Eighth Street, or near it.”

I looked at Miss Fromsett. She was still looking at the corner of the ceiling as if she had just come along for the ride.

Kingsley tossed the envelope across and it fell on the chess table. I looked inside. It was money all right. That much of his story made sense. I let it lie on the small polished table with its inlaid squares of brown and pale gold.

I said: “What’s the matter with her drawing her own money? Any hotel would clear a check for her. Most of them would cash one. Has her bank account got lockjaw or something?”

“That’s no way to talk,” Kingsley said heavily. “She’s in trouble. I don’t know how she knows she’s in trouble. Unless a pickup order has been broadcast. Has it?”

I said I didn’t know. I hadn’t had much time to listen to police calls. I had been too busy listening to live policemen.

Kingsley said: “Well, she won’t risk cashing a check now. It was all right before. But not now.” He lifted his eyes slowly and gave me one of the emptiest stares I had ever seen.

“All right, we can’t make sense where there isn’t any,” I said.

“So she’s in Bay City. Did you talk to her?”

“No. Miss Fromsett talked to her. She called the office. It was just after hours but that cop from the beach, Captain Webber, was with me. Miss Fromsett naturally didn’t want her to talk at all then. She told her to call back. She wouldn’t give any number we could call.”

I looked at Miss Fromsett. She brought her glance down from the ceiling and pointed it at the top of my head. There was nothing in her eyes at all. They were like drawn curtains.

Kingsley went on: “I didn’t want to talk to her. She didn’t want to talk to me. I don’t want to see her. I guess there’s no doubt she shot Lavery. Webber seemed quite sure of it.”

“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “What he says and what he thinks don’t even have to be on the same map. I don’t like her knowing the cops were after her. It’s a long time since anybody listened to the police short wave for amusement. So she called back later. And then?”

“It was almost half-past six,” Kingsley said. “We had to sit there in the office and wait for her to call. You tell him.” He turned his head to the girl.

Miss Fromsett said: “I took the call in Mr. Kingsley’s office. He was sitting right beside me, but he didn’t speak. She said to send the money down to the Peacock place and asked who would bring it.”

“Did she sound scared?”

“Not in the least. Completely calm. I might say, icy calm. She had it all worked out. She realized somebody would have to bring the money she might not know. She seemed to know Derry—Mr. Kingsley wouldn’t bring it.”

“Call him Derry,” I said. “I’ll be able to guess who you mean.”

She smiled faintly. “She will go into this Peacock Lounge every hour about fifteen minutes past the hour. I—I guess I assumed you would be the one to go. I described you to her. And you’re to wear Derry’s scarf. I described that. He keeps some clothes at the office and this was among them. It’s distinctive enough.”

It was all of that. It was an affair of fat green kidneys laid down on an egg yolk background. It would be almost as distinctive as if I went in there wheeling a red, white and blue wheelbarrow.

“For a blimp brain she’s doing all right,” I said.

“This is no time to fool around,” Kingsley put in sharply.

“You said that before,” I told him. “You’ve got a hell of a crust assuming I’ll go down there and take a getaway stake to somebody I know the police are looking for.”

He twisted a hand on his knee and his face twisted into a crooked grin.

“I admit it’s a bit thick,” he said. “Well, how about it?”

“It makes accessories after the fact out of all three of us. That might not be too tough for her husband and his confidential secretary to talk out of, but what they would do to me would be nobody’s dream of a vacation.”

“I’m going to make it worth your while,” he said. “And we wouldn’t be accessories, if she hasn’t done anything.”

“I’m willing to suppose it,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you. And in addition to that, if I decide she did do any murder, I’m going to turn her over to the police.”

“She won’t talk to you,” he said.

I reached for the envelope and put it in my pocket. “She will, if she wants this.” I looked at my strap watch. “If I start right away, I might make the one-fifteen deadline. They must know her by heart in that bar after all these hours. That makes it nice too.”

“She’s dyed her hair dark brown,” Miss Fromsett said. “That ought to help a little.”

I said: “It doesn’t help me to think she is just an innocent wayfarer.” I finished my drink and stood up. Kingsley swallowed his at a gulp and stood up and got the scarf off his neck and handed it to me.

“What did you do to get the police on your neck down there?” he asked.

“I was using some information Miss Fromsett very kindly got for me. And that led to my looking for a man named Talley who worked on the Almore case. And that led to the clink. They had the house staked. Talley was a dick the Graysons hired,” I added, looking at the tall dark girl. “You’ll probably be able to explain to him what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter anyway. I haven’t time to go into it now. You two want to wait here?”

Kingsley shook his head. “We’ll go to my place and wait for a call from you.”

Miss Fromsett stood up and yawned. “No. I’m tired, Derry.

I’m going home and going to bed.”

“You’ll come with me,” he said sharply. “You’ve got to keep me from going nuts.”

“Where do you live, Miss Fromsett?” I asked.

“Bryson Tower on Sunset Place. Apartment 716. Why?” She gave me a speculative look.

“I might want to reach you some time.”

Kingsley’s face looked bleakly irritated, but his eyes still were the eyes of a sick animal. I wound his scarf around my neck and went out to the dinette to switch off the light. When I came back they were both standing by the door. Kingsley had his arm around her shoulders. She looked very tired and rather bored.

“Well, I certainly hope—” he started to say, then took a quick step and put his hand out. “You’re a pretty level guy, Marlowe.”

“Go on, beat it,” I said. “Go away. Go far away.”

He gave a queer look and they went out.

I waited until I heard the elevator come up and stop, and the doors open and close again, and the elevator start down. Then I went out myself and took the stairs down to the basement garage and got the Chrysler awake again.

30

The Peacock Lounge was a narrow front next to a gift shop in whose window a tray of small crystal animals shimmered in the streetlight. The Peacock had a glass brick front and soft light glowed out around the stained-glass peacock that was set into the brick. I went in around a Chinese screen and looked along the bar and then sat at the outer edge of a small booth. The light was amber, the leather was Chinese red and the booths had polished plastic tables. In one booth four soldiers were drinking beer moodily, a little glassy in the eyes and obviously bored even with drinking beer. Across from them a party of two girls and two flashy-looking men were making the noise in the place. I saw nobody that looked like my idea of Crystal Kingsley.

A wizened waiter with evil eyes and a face like a gnawed bone put a napkin with a printed peacock on it down on the table in front of me and gave me a Bacardi cocktail. I sipped it and looked at the amber face of the bar clock. It was just past one-fifteen.

One of the men with the two girls got up suddenly and stalked along to the door and went on. The voice of the other man said:

“What did you have to insult the guy for?”

A girl’s tinny voice said: “Insult him? I like that. He propositioned me.”

The man’s voice said complainingly: “Well, you didn’t have to insult him, did you?”

One of the soldiers suddenly laughed deep in his chest and then wiped the laugh off his face with a brown hand and drank a little more beer. I rubbed the back of my knee. It was hot and swollen still but the paralyzed feeling had gone away.

A tiny, white-faced Mexican boy with enormous black eyes came in with morning papers and scuttled along the booths trying to make a few sales before the barman threw him out. I bought a paper and looked through it to see if there were any interesting murders. There were not.

I folded it and looked up as a slim, brown-haired girl in coal black slacks and a yellow shirt and a long gray coat came out of somewhere and passed the booth without looking at me. I tried to make up my mind whether her face was familiar or just such a standard type of lean, rather hard, prettiness that I must have seen it ten thousand times. She went out of the street door around the screen. Two minutes later the little Mexican boy came back in, shot a quick look at the barman, and scuttled over to stand in front of me.

“Mister,” he said, his great big eyes shining with mischief.

Then he made a beckoning sign and scuttled out again.

I finished my drink and went after him. The girl in the gray coat and yellow shirt and black slacks was standing in front of the gift shop, looking in at the window. Her eyes moved as I went out. I went and stood beside her.

She looked at me again. Her face was white and tired. Her hair looked darker than dark brown. She looked away and spoke to the window.

“Give me the money, please.” A little mist formed on the plate glass from her breath.

I said: “I’d have to know who you are.”

“You know who I am,” she said softly. “How much did you bring?”

“Five hundred.”

“It’s not enough,” she said. “Not nearly enough. Give it to me quickly. I’ve been waiting half of eternity for somebody to get here.”

“Where can we talk?”

“We don’t have to talk. Just give me the money and go the other way.”

“It’s not that simple. I’m doing this at quite a risk. I’m at least going to have the satisfaction of knowing what goes on where I stand.”

“Damn you,” she said acidly, “why couldn’t he come himself? I don’t want to talk. I want to get away as soon as l can.”

“You didn’t want him to come himself. He understood that you didn’t even want to talk to him on the phone.”

“That’s right,” she said quickly and tossed her head.

“But you’ve got to talk to me,” I said. “I’m not as easy as he is. Either to me or to the law. There’s no way out of it. I’m a private detective and I have to have some protection too.”

“Well, isn’t he charming,” she said. “Private detective and all.” Her voice held a low sneer.

“He did the best he knew how. It wasn’t easy for him to know what to do.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“You, and what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been and what you expect to do. Things like that. Little things, but important.”

She breathed on the glass of the shop window and waited while the mist of her breath disappeared.

“I think it would be much better,” she said in the same cool empty voice, “for you to give me the money and let me work things out for myself.”

“No.”

She gave me another sharp sideways glance. She shrugged the shoulders of the gray coat impatiently.

“Very well, if it has to be that way. I’m at the Granada, two blocks north on Eighth. Apartment 618. Give me ten minutes. I’d rather go in alone.”

“I have a car.”

“I’d rather go alone.” She turned quickly and walked away.

She walked back to the corner and crossed the boulevard and disappeared along the block under a line of pepper trees. I went and sat in the Chrysler and gave her her ten minutes before I started it.

The Granada was an ugly gray building on a corner. The plate glass entrance door was level with the street. I drove around the corner and saw a milky globe with Garage painted on it. The entrance to the garage was down a ramp into the hard rubber-smelling silence of parked cars in rows. A lanky Negro came out of a glassed-in office and looked the Chrysler over.

“How much to leave this here a short time? I’m going upstairs.”

He gave me a shady leer. “Kinda late, boss. She needs a good dustin’ too. Be a dollar.”

“What goes on here?”

“Be a dollar,” he said woodenly.

I got out. He gave me a ticket. I gave him the dollar. Without asking him he said the elevator was in back of the office, by the Men’s Room.

I rode up to the sixth floor and looked at numbers on doors and listened to stillness and smelled beach air coming in at the end of corridors. The place seemed decent enough. There would be a few happy ladies in any apartment house. That would explain the lanky Negro’s dollar. A great judge of character, that boy.

I came to the door of Apartment 618 and stood outside it a moment and then kicked softly.

31

She still had the gray coat on. She stood back from the door and I went past her into a square room with twin wall beds and a minimum of uninteresting furniture. A small lamp on a window table made a dim yellowish light. The window behind it was open.

The girl said: “Sit down and talk then.”

She closed the door and went to sit in a gloomy Boston rocker across the room. I sat down on a thick davenport. There was a dull green curtain hanging across an open door space, at one end of the davenport. That would lead to dressing room and bathroom. There was a closed door at the other end. That would be the kitchenette. That would be all there was.

The girl crossed her ankles and leaned her head back against the chair and looked at me under long beaded lashes. Her eyebrows were thin and arched and as brown as her hair. It was a quiet, secret face. It didn’t look like the face of a woman who would waste a lot of motion.

“I got a rather different idea of you,” I said, “from Kingsley.”

Her lips twisted a little. She said nothing.

“From Lavery too,” I said. “It just goes to show that we talk different languages to different people.”

“I haven’t time for this sort of talk,” she said. “What is it you have to know?”

“He hired me to find you. I’ve been working on it. I supposed you would know that.”

“Yes. His office sweetie told me that over the phone. She told me you would be a man named Marlowe. She told me about the scarf.”

I took the scarf off my neck and folded it up and slipped it into a pocket. I said: “So I know a little about your movements. Not very much. I know you left your car at the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino and that you met Lavery there. I know you sent a wire from El Paso. What did you do then?”

“All I want from you is the money he sent. I don’t see that my movements are any of your business.”

“I don’t have to argue about that,” I said. “It’s a question of whether you want the money.”

“Well, we went to El Paso,” she said, in a tired voice. “I thought of marrying him then. So I sent that wire. You saw the wire?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I changed my mind. I asked him to go home and leave me. He made a scene.”

“Did he go home and leave you?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“What did you do then?”

“I went to Santa Barbara and stayed there a few days. Over a week in fact. Then to Pasadena. Same thing. Then to Hollywood. Then I came down here. That’s all.”

“You were alone all this time?”

She hesitated a little and then said: “Yes.”

“Not with Lavery—any part of it?”

“Not after he went home.”

“What was the idea?”

“Idea of what?” Her voice was a little sharp.

“Idea of going to these places and not sending any word. Didn’t you know he would be very anxious?”

“Oh, you mean my husband,” she said coolly. “I don’t think I worried much about him. He’d think I was in Mexico, wouldn’t he? As for the idea of it all—well, I just had to think things out. My life had got to be a hopeless tangle. I had to be somewhere quite alone and try to straighten myself out.”

“Before that,” I said, “you spent a month at Little Fawn Lake trying to straighten it out and not getting anywhere. Is that it?”

She looked down at her shoes and then up at me and nodded earnestly. The wavy brown hair surged forward along her cheeks. She put her left hand up and pushed it back and then rubbed her temple with one finger.

“I seemed to need a new place,” she said. “Not necessarily an interesting place. Just a strange place. Without associations. A place where I would be very much alone. Like a hotel.”

“How are you getting on with it?”

“Not very well. But I’m not going back to Derace Kingsley. Does he want me to?”

“I don’t know. But why did you come down here, to the town where Lavery was?”

She bit a knuckle and looked at me over her hand. “I wanted to see him again. He’s all mixed up in my mind. I’m not in love with him, and yet—well, I suppose in a way I am. But I don’t think I want to marry him. Does that make sense?”

“That part of it makes sense. But staying away from home in a lot of crummy hotels doesn’t. You’ve lived your own life for years, as I understand it.”

“I had to be alone, to—to think things out,” she said a little desperately and bit the knuckle again, hard. “Won’t you please give me the money and go away?”

“Sure. Right away. But wasn’t there any other reason for your going away from Little Fawn Lake just then? Anything connected with Muriel Chess, for instance?”

She looked surprised. But anyone can look surprised. “Good heavens, what would there be? That frozen-faced little drip—what is she to me?”

“I thought you might have had a fight with her—about Bill.”

“Bill? Bill Chess?” She seemed even more surprised. Almost too surprised.

“Bill claims you made a pass at him.”

She put her head back and let out a tinny and unreal laugh. “Good heavens, that muddy-faced boozer?” Her face sobered suddenly. “What’s happened? Why all the mystery?”

“He might be a muddy-faced boozer,” I said. “The police think he’s a murderer too. Of his wife. She’s been found drowned in the lake. After a month.”

She moistened her lips and held her head on one side, staring at me fixedly. There was a quiet little silence. The damp breath of the Pacific slid into the room around us.

“I’m not too surprised,” she said slowly. “So it came to that in the end. They fought terribly at times. Do you think that had something to do with my leaving?”

I nodded. “There was a chance of it.”

“It didn’t have anything to do with it at all,” she said seriously, and shook her head back and forth. “It was just the way I told you. Nothing else.”

“Muriel’s dead,” I said. “Drowned in the lake. You don’t get much of a boot out of that, do you?”

“I hardly knew the girl,” she said. “Really. She kept to herself. After all—”

“I don’t suppose you knew she had once worked in Dr. Almore’s office?”

She looked completely puzzled now. “I was never in Dr. Almore’s office,” she said slowly. “He made a few house calls a long time ago. I—what are you talking about?”

“Muriel Chess was really a girl called Mildred Haviland, who had been Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”

“That’s a queer coincidence,” she said wonderingly. “I knew Bill met her in Riverside. I didn’t know how or under what circumstances or where she came from. Dr. Almore’s office, eh? It doesn’t have to mean anything, does it?”

I said. “No. I guess it’s a genuine coincidence. They do happen. But you see why I had to talk to you. Muriel being found drowned and you having gone away and Muriel being Mildred Haviland who was connected with Dr. Almore at one time—as Lavery was also, in a different way. And of course Lavery lives across the street from Dr. Almore. Did he, Lavery, seem to know Muriel from somewhere else?”

She thought about it, biting her lower lip gently. “He saw her up there,” she said finally. “He didn’t act as if he had ever seen her before.”

“And he would have,” I said. “Being the kind of guy he was.”

“I don’t think Chris had anything to do with Dr. Almore,” she said. “He knew Dr. Almore’s wife. I don’t think he knew the doctor at all. So he probably wouldn’t know Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”

“Well, I guess there’s nothing in all this to help me,” I said. “But you can see why I had to talk to you. I guess I can give you the money now.”

I got the envelope out and stood up to drop it on her knee.

She let it lie there. I sat down again.

“You do this character very well,” I said. “This confused innocence with an undertone of hardness and bitterness. People have made a bad mistake about you. They have been thinking of you as a reckless little idiot with no brains and no control. They have been very wrong.”

She stared at me, lifting her eyebrows. She said nothing. Then a small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. She reached for the envelope, tapped it on her knee, and laid it aside on the table. She stared at me all the time.

“You did the Fallbrook character very well too,” I said. “Looking back on it, I think it was a shade overdone. But at the time it had me going all right. That purple hat that would have been all right on blond hair but looked like hell on straggly brown, that messed-up makeup that looked as if it had been put on in the dark by somebody with a sprained wrist, the jittery screwball manner. All very good. And when you put the gun in my hand like that—I fell like a brick.”

She snickered and put her hands in the deep pockets of her coat. Her heels tapped on the floor.

“But why did you go back at all?” I asked. “Why take such a risk in broad daylight, in the middle of the morning?”

“So you think I shot Chris Lavery?” she said quietly.

“I don’t think it. I know it.”

“Why did I go back? Is that what you want to know?”

“I don’t really care,” I said.

She laughed. A sharp cold laugh. “He had all my money,” she said. “He had stripped my purse. He had it all, even silver. That’s why I went back. There wasn’t any risk at all. I know how he lived. It was really safer to go back. To take in the milk and newspaper for instance. People lose their heads in these situations. I don’t, I didn’t see why I should. It’s so very much safer not to.”

“I see,” I said. “Then of course you shot him the night before. I ought to have thought of that, not that it matters. He had been shaving. But guys with dark beards and lady friends sometimes shave the last thing at night, don’t they?”

“It has been heard of,” she said almost gaily. “And just what are you going to do about it?”

“You’re a cold-blooded little bitch if I ever saw one,” I said. “Do about it? Turn you over to the police naturally. It will be a pleasure.”

“I don’t think so.” She threw the words out, almost with a lilt. “You wondered why I gave you the empty gun. Why not? I had another one in my bag. Like this.”

Her right hand came up from her coat pocket and she pointed it at me.

I grinned. It may not have been the heartiest grin in the world, but it was a grin.

“I’ve never liked this scene,” I said. “Detective confronts murderer. Murderer produces gun, points same at detective. Murderer tells detective the whole sad story, with the idea of shooting him at the end of it. Thus wasting a lot of valuable time, even if in the end murderer did shoot detective. Only murderer never does. Something always happens to prevent it. The gods don’t like this scene either. They always manage to spoil it.”

“But this time,” she said softly and got up and moved towards me softly across the carpet, “suppose we make it a little different. Suppose I don’t tell you anything and nothing happens and I do shoot you?”

“I still wouldn’t like the scene,” I said.

“You don’t seem to be afraid,” she said, and slowly licked her lips coming towards me very gently without any sound of footfalls on the carpet.

“I’m not afraid,” I lied. “It’s too late at night, too still, and the window is open and the gun would make too much noise. It’s too long a journey down to the street and you’re not good with guns. You would probably miss me. You missed Lavery three times.”

“Stand up,” she said.

I stood up.

“I’m going to be too close to miss,” she said. She pushed the gun against my chest. “Like this. I really can’t miss now, can I? Now be very still. Hold your hands up by your shoulders and then don’t move at all. If you move at all, the gun will go off.”

I put my hands up beside my shoulders, I looked down at the gun. My tongue felt a little thick, but I could still wave it.

Her probing left hand didn’t find a gun on me. It dropped and she bit her lip, staring at me. The gun bored into my chest. “You’ll have to turn around now,” she said, polite as a tailor at a fitting.

“There’s something a little off key about everything you do,” I said. “You’re definitely not good with guns. You’re much too close to me, and I hate to bring this up—but there’s that old business of the safety catch not being off. You’ve overlooked that too.”

So she started to do two things at once. To take a long step backwards and to feel with her thumb for the safety catch, without taking her eyes off my face. Two very simple things, needing only a second to do. But she didn’t like my telling her. She didn’t like my thought riding over hers. The minute confusion of it jarred her.

She let out a small choked sound and I dropped my right hand and yanked her face hard against my chest. My left hand smashed down on her right wrist, the heel of my hand against the base of her thumb. The gun jerked out of her hand to the floor. Her face writhed against my chest and I think she was trying to scream.

Then she tried to kick me and lost what little balance she had left. Her hands came up to claw at me. I caught her wrist and began to twist it behind her back. She was very strong, but I was very much stronger. So she decided to go limp and let her whole weight sag against the hand that was holding her head. I couldn’t hold her up with one hand. She started to go down and I had to bend down with her.

There were vague sounds of our scuffling on the floor by the davenport, and hard breathing, and if a floorboard creaked I didn’t hear it. I thought a curtain ring checked sharply on a rod. I wasn’t sure and I had no time to consider the question. A figure loomed up suddenly on my left, just behind, and out of range of clear vision. I knew there was a man there and that he was a big man.

That was all I knew. The scene exploded into fire and darkness. I didn’t even remember being slugged. Fire and darkness and just before the darkness a sharp flash of nausea.

32

I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.

My coat was off and I was lying flat on my back beside the davenport on somebody’s carpet and I was looking at a framed picture. The frame was of cheap soft wood varnished and the picture showed part of an enormously high pale yellow viaduct across which a shiny black locomotive was dragging a Prussian blue train. Through one lofty arch of the viaduct a wide yellow beach showed and was dotted with sprawled bathers and striped beach umbrellas. Three girls walked close up, with paper parasols, one girl in cerise, one in pale blue, one in green. Beyond the beach a curving bay was bluer than any bay has any right to be. It was drenched with sunshine and flecked and dotted with arching white sails. Beyond the inland curve of the bay three ranges of hills rose in three precisely opposed colors; gold and terra cotta and lavender.

Across the bottom of the picture was printed in large capitals SEE THE FRENCH RIVIERA BY THE BLUE TRAIN.

It was a fine time to bring that up.

I reached up wearily and felt the back of my head. It felt pulpy. A shoot of pain from the touch went clear to the soles of my feet. I groaned, and made a grunt out of the groan, from professional pride—what was left of it. I rolled over slowly and carefully and looked at the foot of a pulled down wall bed; one twin, the other being still up. in the wall. The flourish of design on the painted wood was familiar. The picture had hung over the davenport and I hadn’t even looked at it.

When I rolled a square gin bottle rolled off my chest and hit the floor. It was water white, and empty. It didn’t seem possible there could be so much gin in just one bottle.

I got my knees under me and stayed on all fours for a while, sniffing like a dog who can’t finish his dinner, but hates to leave it. I moved my head around on my neck. It hurt. I moved it around some more and it still hurt, so I climbed up on my feet and discovered I didn’t have any shoes on.

The shoes were lying against the baseboard, looking as dissipated as shoes ever looked. I put them on wearily. I was an old man now. I was going down the last long hill. I still had a tooth left though. I felt it with my tongue. It didn’t seem to taste of gin.

“It will all come back to you,” I said. “Some day it will all come back to you. And you won’t like it.”

There was the lamp on the table by the open window. There was the fat green davenport. There was the doorway with the green curtains across it. Never sit with your back to a green curtain. It always turns out badly. Something always happens. Who had I said that to? A girl with a gun. A girl with a clear empty face and dark brown hair that had been blond.

I looked around for her. She was still there. She was lying on the pulled-down twin bed.

She was wearing a pair of tan stockings and nothing else. Her hair was tumbled. There were dark bruises on her throat. Her mouth was open and a swollen tongue filled it to over-flowing. Her eyes bulged and the whites of them were not white.

Across her naked belly four angry scratches leered crimson red against the whiteness of flesh. Deep angry scratches, gouged out by four bitter fingernails.

On the davenport there were tumbled clothes, mostly hers. My coat was there also. I disentangled it and put it on. Something crackled under my hand in the tumbled clothes. I drew out a long envelope with money still in it. I put it in my pocket. Marlowe, five hundred dollars. I hoped it was all there. There didn’t seem much else to hope for.

I stepped on the balls of my feet softly, as if walking on very thin ice. I bent down to rub behind my knee and wondered which hurt most, my knee, or my head when I bent down to nib the knee.

Heavy feet came along the hallway and there was a hard mutter of voices. The feet stopped. A hard fist knocked on the door.

I stood there leering at the door, with my lips drawn back tight against my teeth. I waited for somebody to open the door and walk in. The knob was tried, but nobody walked in. The knocking began again, stopped, the voices muttered again. The steps went away. I wondered how long it would take to get the manager with a pass key. Not very long.

Not nearly long enough for Marlowe to get home from the French Riviera.

I went to the green curtain and brushed it aside and looked down a short dark hallway into a bathroom. I went in there and put the light on. Two wash rugs on the floor, a bath mat folded over the edge of the tub, a pebbled glass window at the corner of the tub. I shut the bathroom door and stood on the edge of the tub and eased the window up. This was the sixth floor. There was no screen. I put my head out and looked into darkness and a narrow glimpse of a street with trees. I looked sideways and saw that the bathroom window of the next apartment was not more than three feet away. A well nourished mountain goat could make it without any trouble at all.

The question was whether a battered private detective could make it, and if so, what the harvest would be.

Behind me a rather remote and muffled voice seemed to be chanting the policeman’s litany: “Open it up or we’ll kick it in.” I sneered back at the voice. They wouldn’t kick it in because kicking in a door is hard on the feet. Policemen are kind to their feet. Their feet are about all they are kind to.

I grabbed a towel off the rack and pulled the two halves of the window down and eased out on the sill. I swung half of me over to the next sill, holding on to the frame of the open window. I could just reach to push the next window down, if it was unlocked. It wasn’t unlocked. I got my foot over there and kicked the glass over the catch. It made a noise that ought to have been heard in Reno. I wrapped the towel around my left hand and reached in to turn the catch. Down on the street a car went by, but nobody yelled at me.

I pushed the broken window down and climbed across to the other side. The towel fell out of my hand and fluttered down into the darkness to a strip of grass far below, between the two wings of the building.

I climbed in at the window of the other bathroom.

33

I climbed down into darkness and groped through darkness to a door and opened it and listened. Filtered moonlight coming through north windows showed a bedroom with twin beds, made up and empty. Not wall beds. This was a larger apartment. I moved past the beds to another door and into a living room. Both rooms were closed up and smelled musty. I felt my way to a lamp and switched it on. I ran a finger along the wood of a table edge. There was a light film of dust, such as accumulates in the cleanest room when it is left shut up.

The room contained a library dining table, an armchair radio, a book rack built like a hod, a big bookcase full of novels with their jackets still on them, a dark wood highboy with a siphon and a cut glass bottle of liquor and four striped glasses upside down on an Indian brass tray. Besides this paired photographs in a double silver frame, a youngish middle-aged man and woman, with round healthy faces and cheerful eyes. They looked out at me as if they didn’t mind my being there at all.

I sniffed the liquor, which was Scotch, and used some of it. It made my head feel worse but it made the rest of me feel better. I put light on the bedroom and poked into closets. One of them had a man’s clothes, tailor-made, plenty of them. The tailor’s label inside a coat pocket declared the owner’s name to be H. G. Talbot. I went to the bureau and poked around and found a soft blue shirt that looked a little small for me. I carried it into the bathroom and stripped mine off and washed my face and chest and wiped my hair off with a wet towel and put the blue shirt on. I used plenty of Mr. Talbot’s rather insistent hair tonic on my hair and used his brush and comb to tidy it up. By that time I smelled of gin only remotely, if at all.

The top button of the shirt wouldn’t meet its buttonhole so I poked into the bureau again and found a dark blue crepe tie and strung it around my neck. I got my coat back on and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked slightly too neat for that hour of the night, even for as careful a man as Mr. Talbot’s clothes indicated him to be. Too neat and too sober.

I rumpled my hair a little and pulled the tie close, and went back to the whisky decanter and did what I could about being too sober. I lit one of Mr. Talbot’s cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them.

I went to the living room door, the one giving on the hallway, and opened it and leaned in the opening smoking. I didn’t think it was going to work. But I didn’t think waiting there for them to follow my trail through the window was going to work any better.

A man coughed a little way down the hall and I poked my head out farther and he was looking at me. He came towards me briskly, a small sharp man in a neatly pressed police uniform. He had reddish hair and red-gold eyes.

I yawned and said languidly: “What goes on, officer?”

He stared at me thoughtfully. “Little trouble next door to you. Hear anything?”

“I thought I heard knocking. I just got home a little while ago.”

“Little late,” he said.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” I said. “Trouble next door, ah?”

“A dame,” he said. “Know her?”

“I think I’ve seen her.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You ought to see her now . . .” He put his hands to his throat and bulged his eyes out and gulped unpleasantly. “Like that,” he said. “You didn’t hear nothing, huh?”

“Nothing I noticed—except the knocking.”

“Yeah. What was the name?”

“Talbot.”

“Just a minute, Mr. Talbot. Wait there just a minute.”

He went along the hallway and leaned into an open doorway through which light streamed out. “Oh, lieutenant,” he said. “The man next door is on deck.”

A tall man came out of the doorway and stood looking along the hall straight at me. A tall man with rusty hair and very blue, blue eyes. Degarmo. That made it perfect.

“Here’s the guy lives next door,” the small neat cop said helpfully. “His name’s Talbot.”

Degarmo looked straight at me, but nothing in his acid blue eyes showed that he had ever seen me before. He came quietly along the hall and put a hard hand against my chest and pushed me back into the room. When he had me half a dozen feet from the door he said over his shoulder: “Come in here and shut the door, Shorty.”

The small cop came in and shut the door.

“Quite a gag,” Deganno said lazily. “Put a gun on him, Shorty.”

Shorty flicked his black belt holster open and had his .38 in his hand like a flash. He licked his lips.

“Oh boy,” he said softly, whistling a little. “Oh boy. How’d you know, lieutenant?”

“Know what?” Degarmo asked, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. “What were you thinking of doing, pal—going down to get a paper—to find out if she was dead?”

“Oh boy,” Shorty said. “A sex-killer. He pulled the girl’s clothes off and choked her with his hands, lieutenant. How’d you know?”

Degarmo didn’t answer him. He just stood there, rocking a little on his heels, his face empty and granite-hard.

“Yah, he’s the killer, sure,” Shorty said suddenly. “Sniff the air in here, lieutenant. The place ain’t been aired out for days. And look at the dust on those bookshelves. And the clock on the mantel’s stopped, lieutenant. He come in through the—lemme look a minute, can I, lieutenant?”

He ran out of the room into the bedroom. I heard him fumbling around. Degarmo stood woodenly.

Shorty came back. “Come in at the bathroom window. There’s broken glass in the tub. And something stinks of gin in there something awful. You remember how that apartment smelled of gin when we went in? Here’s a shirt, lieutenant. Smells like it was washed in gin.”

He held the shirt up. It perfumed the air rapidly. Degarmo looked at it vaguely and then stepped forward and yanked my coat open and looked at the shirt I was wearing.

“I know what he done,” Shorty said. “He stole one of the guy’s shirts that lives here. You see what he done, lieutenant?”

“Yeah.” Degarmo held his hand against my chest and let it fall slowly. They were talking about me as if I was a piece of wood.

“Frisk him, Shorty.”

Shorty ran around me feeling here and there for a gun.

“Nothing on him,” he said.

“Let’s get him out the back way,” Degarmo said. “It’s our pinch, if we make it before Webber gets here. That lug Reed couldn’t find a moth in a shoe box.”

“You ain’t even detailed on the case,” Shorty said doubtfully.

“Didn’t I hear you was suspended or something?”

“What can I lose?” Degarmo asked, “if I’m suspended?”

“I can lose this here uniform,” Shorty said.

Degarmo looked at him wearily. The small cop blushed and his bright red-gold eyes were anxious.

“Okay, Shorty. Go and tell Reed.”

The small cop licked his lip. “You say the word, lieutenant, and I’m with you. I don’t have to know you got suspended.”

“We’ll take him down ourselves, just the two of us,” Degarmo said.

“Yeah, sure.”

Degarmo put his finger against my chin. “A sex-killer,” he said quietly. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He smiled at me thinly, moving only the extreme corners of his wide brutal mouth.

34

We went out of the apartment and along the hall the other way from Apartment 618. Light streamed from the still open door. Two men in plain clothes now stood outside it smoking cigarettes inside their cupped hands, as if a wind was blowing. There was a sound of wrangling voices from the apartment.

We went around the bend of the hall and came to the elevator. Degarmo opened the fire door beyond the elevator shaft and we went down echoing concrete steps, floor after floor. At the lobby floor Degarmo stopped and held his hand on the doorknob and listened. He looked back over his shoulder.

“You got a car?” he asked me.

“In the basement garage.”

“That’s an idea.”

We went on down the steps and came out into the shadowy basement. The lanky Negro came out of the little office and I gave him my car check. He looked furtively at the police uniform on Shorty. He said nothing. He pointed to the Chrysler.

Degarmo climbed under the wheel of the Chrysler. I got in beside him and Shorty got into the back seat. We went up the ramp and out into the damp cool night air. A big car with twin red spotlights was charging towards us from a couple of blocks away.

Degarmo spat out of the car window and yanked the Chrysler the other way. “That will be Webber,” he said. “Late for the funeral again. We sure skinned his nose on that one, Shorty.”

“I don’t like it too well, lieutenant. I don’t, honest.”

“Keep the chin up, kid. You might get back on homicide.”

“I’d rather wear buttons and eat,” Shorty said. The courage was oozing out of him fast.

Degarmo drove the car hard for ten blocks and then slowed a little. Shorty said uneasily: “I guess you know what you’re doing, lieutenant, but this ain’t the way to the Hall.”

“That’s right,” Degarmo said. “It never was, was it?”

He let the car slow down to a crawl and then turned into a residential street of small exact houses squatting behind small exact lawns. He braked the car gently and coasted over to the curb and stopped about the middle of the block. He threw an arm over the back of the seat and turned his head to look back at Shorty.

“You think this guy killed her, Shorty?”

“I’m listening,” Shorty said in a tight voice.

“Got a flash?”

I said: “There’s one in the car pocket on the left side.”

Shorty fumbled around and metal clicked and the white beam of the flashlight came on. Degarmo said: “Take a look at the back of this guy’s head.”

The beam moved and settled. I heard the small man’s breathing behind me and I felt it on my neck. Something felt for and touched the bump on my head. I grunted. The light went off and the darkness of the street rushed in again.

Shorty said: “I guess maybe he was sapped, lieutenant. I don’t get it.”

“So was the girl,” Degarmo said. “It didn’t show much but it’s there. She was sapped so she could have her clothes pulled off and be clawed up before she was killed. So the scratches would bleed. Then she was throttled. And none of this made any noise. Why would it? And there’s no telephone in that apartment. Who reported it, Shorty?”

“How the hell would I know? A guy called up and said a woman had been murdered in 618 Granada Apartments on Eighth. Reed was still looking for a cameraman when you came in. The desk said a guy with a thick voice, likely disguised. Didn’t give any name at all.”

“All right then,” Degarmo said. “If you had murdered the girl, how would you get out of there?”

“I’d walk out,” Shorty said. “Why not? Hey,” he barked at me suddenly, “why didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer him. Degarmo said tonelessly: “You wouldn’t climb out of a bathroom window six floors up and then burst in another bathroom window into a strange apartment where people would likely be sleeping, would you? You wouldn’t pretend to be the guy that lived there and you wouldn’t throw away a lot of your time by calling the police, would you? Hell, that girl could have laid there for a week. You wouldn’t throw away the chance of a start like that, would you, Shorty?”

“I don’t guess I would,” Shorty said cautiously. “I don’t guess I would call up at all But you know these sex fiends do funny things, lieutenant. They ain’t normal like us. And this guy could have had help and the other guy could have knocked him out to put him in the middle.”

“Don’t tell me you thought that last bit up all by yourself,” Degarmo grunted. “So here we sit, and the fellow that knows all the answers is sitting here with us and not saying a word.” He turned his big head and stared at me. “What were you doing there?”

“I can’t remember,” I said. “The crack on the head seems to have blanked me out.”

“We’ll help you to remember,” Degarmo said. “We’ll take you up back in the hills a few miles where you can be quiet and look at the stars and remember. You’ll remember all right.”

Shorty said: “That ain’t no way to talk, lieutenant. Why don’t we just go back to the Hall and play this the way it says in the rule book?”

“To hell with the rule book,” Degarmo said. “I like this guy. I want to have one long sweet talk with him. He just needs a little coaxing, Shorty. He’s just bashful.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” Shorty said.

“What do you want to do, Shorty?”

“I want to go back to the Hall.”

“Nobody’s stopping you, kid. You want to walk?”

Shorty was silent for a moment. “That’s right,” he said at last, quietly. “I want to walk.” He opened the car door and stepped out on to the curbing. “And I guess you know I have to report all this, lieutenant.”

“Right,” Degarmo said. “Tell Webber I was asking for him. Next time he buys a hamburger, tell him to turn down an empty plate for me.”

“That don’t make any sense to me,” the small cop said. He slammed the car door shut. Degarmo let the clutch in and gunned the motor and hit forty in the first block and a half. In the third block he hit fifty. He slowed down at the boulevard and turned east and began to cruise along at a legal speed. A few late cars drifted by both ways, but for the most part the world lay in the cold silence of early morning.

After a little while we passed the city limits and Degarmo spoke. “Let’s hear you talk,” he said quietly. “Maybe we can work this out.”

The car topped a long rise and dipped down to where the boulevard wound through the park-like grounds of the veterans hospital. The tall triple electroliers had halos from the beach fog that had drifted in during the night. I began to talk.

“Kingsley came over to my apartment tonight and said he had heard from his wife over the phone. She wanted some money quick. The idea was I was to take it to her and get her out of whatever trouble she was in. My idea was a little different. She was told how to identify me and I was to be at the Peacock Lounge at Eighth and Arguello at fifteen minutes past the hour. Any hour.”

Degarmo said slowly: “She had to breeze and that meant she had something to breeze from, such as murder.” He lifted his hands lightly and let them fall on the wheel again.

“I went down there, hours after she had called. I had been told her hair was dyed brown. She passed me going out of the bar, but I didn’t know her. I had never seen her in the flesh. All I had seen was what looked like a pretty good snapshot, but could be that and still not a very good likeness. She sent a Mexican kid in to call me out. She wanted the money and no conversation. I wanted her story. Finally she saw she would have to talk a little and told me she was at the Granada. She made me wait ten minutes before I followed her over.”

Degarmo said: “Time to fix up a plant.”

“There was a plant all right, but I’m not sure she was in on it. She didn’t want me to come up there, didn’t want to talk. Yet she ought to have known I would insist on some explanation before I gave up the money, so her reluctance could have been just an act, to make me feel that I was controlling the situation. She could act all right. I found that out. Anyhow I went and we talked. Nothing she said made very much sense until we talked about Lavery getting shot. Then she made too much sense too quick. I told her I was going to turn her over to the police.”

Westwood Village, dark except for one all night service station and a few distant windows in apartment houses, slid away to the north of us.

“So she pulled a gun,” I said. “I think she meant to use it, but she got too close to me and I got a headlock on her. While we were wrestling around, somebody came out from behind a green curtain and slugged me. When I came out of that the murder was done.”

Degarmo said slowly: “You get any kind of a look at who slugged you?”

“No. I felt or half saw he was a man and a big one. And this lying on the davenport, mixed in with clothes.” I reached Kingsley’s yellow and green scarf out of my pocket and draped it over his knee. “I saw Kingsley wearing this earlier this evening,” I said.

Degarmo looked down at the scarf. He lifted it under the dash light. “You wouldn’t forget that too quick,” he said. “It steps right up and smacks you in the eye. Kingsley, huh? Well, I’m damned. What happened then?”

“Knocking on the door. Me still woozy in the head, not too bright and a bit panicked. I had been flooded with gin and my shoes and coat stripped off and maybe I looked and smelled a little like somebody who would yank a woman’s clothes off and strangle her. So I got out through the bathroom window, cleaned myself up as well as I could, and the rest you know.”

Degarmo said: “Why didn’t you lie dormy in the place you climbed into?”

“What was the use? I guess even a Bay City cop would have found the way I had gone in a little while. If I had any chance at all, it was to walk before that was discovered. If nobody was there who knew me, I had a fair chance of getting out of the building.”

“I don’t think so,” Degarmo said. “But I can see where you didn’t lose much trying. What’s your idea of the motivation here?”

“Why did Kingsley kill her—if he did? That’s not hard. She had been cheating on him, making him a lot of trouble, endangering his job and now she had killed a man. Also, she had money and Kingsley wanted to marry another woman. He might have been afraid that with money to spend she would beat the rap and be left laughing at him. If she didn’t beat the rap, and got sent up, her money would be just as thoroughly beyond his reach. He’d have to divorce her to get rid of her. There’s plenty of motive for murder in all that. Also he saw a chance to make me the goat. It wouldn’t stick, but it would make confusion and delay. If murderers didn’t think they could get away with their murders, very few would be committed.”

Degarmo said: “All the same it could be somebody else, somebody who isn’t in the picture at all. Even if he went down there to see her, it could still be somebody else. Somebody else could have killed Lavery too.”

“If you like it that way.”

He turned his head. “I don’t like it any way at all. But if I crack the case, I’ll get by with a reprimand from the police board. If I don’t crack it, I’ll be thumbing a ride out of town. You said I was dumb. Okay, I’m dumb. Where does Kingsley live? One thing I know is how to make people talk.”

“965 Carson Drive, Beverly Hills. About five blocks on you turn north to the foothills. It’s on the left side, just below Sunset. I’ve never been there, but I know how the block numbers run.”

He handed me the green and yellow scarf. “Tuck that back into your pocket until we want to spring it on him.”

35

It was a two-storied white house with a dark roof, bright moonlight lay against its wall like a fresh coat of paint. There were wrought iron grilles against the lower halves of the front windows A level lawn swept up to the front door, which was set diagonally into the angle of a jutting wall. All the visible windows were dark.

Degarmo got out of the car and walked along the parkway and looked back along the drive to the garage. He moved down the driveway and the corner of the house hid him. I heard the sound of a garage door going up, then the thud as it was lowered again. He reappeared at the corner of the house, shook his head at me, and walked across the grass to the front door. He leaned his thumb on the bell and juggled a cigarette out of his pocket with one hand and put it between his lips.

He turned away from the door to light it and the flare of the match cut deep lines into his face. After a while there was light on the fan over the door. The peephole in the door swung back. I saw Degarmo holding up his shield. Slowly and as if unwillingly the door was opened. He went in.

He was gone four or five minutes. Light went on behind various windows, then off again. Then he came out of the house and while he was walking back to the car the light went off in the fan and the whole house was again as dark as we had found it.

He stood beside the car smoking and looking off down the curve of the street.

“One small car in the garage,” he said. “The cook says it’s hers. No sign of Kingsley. They say they haven’t seen him since this morning. I looked in all the rooms. I guess they told the truth. Webber and a print man were there late this afternoon and the dusting powder is still all over the main bedroom. Webber would be getting prints to check against what we found in Lavery’s house. He didn’t tell me what he got. Where would he be—Kingsley?”

“Anywhere,” I said. “On the road, in a hotel, in a Turkish bath getting the kinks out of his nerves. But we’ll have to try his girl friend first. Her name is Fromsett and she lives at the Bryson Tower on Sunset Place. That’s away downtown, near Bullock’s Wilshire.”

“She does what?” Degarmo asked, getting in under the wheel.

“She holds the fort in this office and holds his hand out of office hours. She’s no office cutie, though. She has brains and style.”

“This situation is going to use all she has,” Degarmo said. He drove down to Wilshire and we turned east again.

Twenty-five minutes brought us to the Bryson Tower, a white stucco palace with fretted lanterns in the forecourt and tall date palms. The entrance was in an L, up marble steps, through a Moorish archway, and over a lobby that was too big and a carpet that was too blue. Blue Ali-Baba oil jars were dotted around, big enough to keep tigers in. There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those mustaches that get stuck under your fingernail.

Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier.

“One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?”

Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say whom’?”

“Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.”

Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it. Look, buddy,” he said to the clerk, “we want up to seven-sixteen. Any objection?”

“Certainly I have,” the clerk said coldly. “We don’t announce guests at—” he lifted his arm and turned it neatly to look at the narrow oblong watch on the inside of his wrist—”at twenty-three minutes past four in the morning.”

“That’s what I thought,” Degarmo said. “So I wasn’t going to bother you. You get the idea?” He took his shield out of his pocket and held it so that the light glinted on the gold and the blue enamel, “I’m a police lieutenant.”

The clerk shrugged. “Very well. I hope there isn’t going to be any trouble. I’d better announce you then. What names?”

“Lieutenant Degarmo and Mr. Marlowe.”

“Apartment 716. That will be Miss Fromsett. One moment.”

He went behind a glass screen and we heard him talking on the phone after a longish pause. He came back and nodded.

“Miss Fromsett is in. She will receive you.”

“That’s certainly a load off my mind,” Degarmo said. “And don’t bother to call your house peeper and send him up to the scatter. I’m allergic to house peepers.”

The clerk gave a small cold smile and we got into the elevator.

The seventh floor was cool and quiet. The corridor seemed a mile long. We came at last to a door with 716 on it in gilt numbers in a circle of gilt leaves. There was an ivory button beside the door. Degarmo pushed it and chimes rang inside the door and it was opened.

Miss Fromsett wore a quilted blue robe over her pajamas. On her feet were small tufted slippers with high heels. Her dark hair was fluffed out engagingly and the cold cream had been wiped from her face and just enough makeup applied.

We went past her into a rather narrow room with several handsome oval mirrors and gray period furniture upholstered in blue damask. It didn’t look like apartment house furniture. She sat down on a slender love seat and leaned back and waited calmly for somebody to say something.

I said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police. We’re looking for Kingsley. He’s not at his house. We thought you might be able to give us an idea where to find him.”

She spoke to me without looking at me. “Is it that urgent?”

“Yes. Something has happened.”

“What has happened?”

Degarmo said bluntly: “We just want to know where Kingsley is, sister. We don’t have time to build up a scene.”

The girl looked at him with a complete absence of expression.

She looked back at me and said: “I think you had better tell me, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I went down there with the money,” I said. “I met her as arranged. I went to her apartment to talk to her. While there I was slugged by a man who was hidden behind a curtain. I didn’t see the man. When I came out of it she had been murdered.”

“Murdered?”

I said: “Murdered.”

She closed her fine eyes and the corners of her lovely mouth drew in. Then she stood up with a quick shrug and went over to a small, marble-topped table with spindly legs. She took a cigarette out of a small embossed silver box and lit it, staring emptily down at the table. The match in her hand was waved more and more slowly until it stopped, still burning, and she dropped it into a tray. She turned and put her back to the table.

“I suppose I ought to scream or something,” she said. “I don’t seem to have any feeling about it at all.”

Degarmo said: “We don’t feel so interested in your feelings right now. What we want to know is where Kingsley is. You can tell us or not tell us. Either way you can skip the attitudes. Just make your mind up.”

She said to me quietly: “The lieutenant here is a Bay City officer?”

I nodded. She turned at him slowly, with a lovely contemptuous dignity. “In that case,” she said, “he has no more right in my apartment than any other loud-mouthed bum that might try to toss his weight around.”

Degarmo looked at her bleakly. He grinned and walked across the room and stretched his long legs from a deep downy chair. He waved his hand at me.

“Okay, you work on her. I can get all the co-operation I need from the L.A. boys, but by the time I had things explained to them, it would be a week from next Tuesday.”

I said: “Miss Fromsett, if you know where he is, or where he started to go, please tell us. You can understand that he has to be found.”

She said calmly: “Why?”

Degarmo put his head back and laughed. “This babe is good,” he said. “Maybe she thinks we should keep it a secret from him that his wife has been knocked off.”

“She’s better than you think,” I told him. His face sobered and he bit his thumb. He looked her up and down insolently.

She said: “Is it just because he has to be told?”

I took the yellow and green scarf out of my pocket and shook it out loose and held it in front of her.

“This was found in the apartment where she was murdered. I think you have seen it.”

She looked at the scarf and she looked at me, and in neither of the glances was there any meaning. She said: “You ask for a great deal of confidence, Mr. Marlowe. Considering that you haven’t been such a very smart detective after all.”

“I ask for it,” I said, “and I expect to get it. And how smart I’ve been is something you don’t really know anything about.”

“This is cute,” Degarmo put in. “You two make a nice team. All you need is acrobats to follow you. But right now “

She cut through his voice as if he didn’t exist. “How was she murdered?”

“She was strangled and stripped naked and scratched up.”

“Derry wouldn’t have done anything like that,” she said quietly.

Degarmo made a noise with his lips. “Nobody ever knows what anybody else will do, sister. A cop knows that much.”

She still didn’t look at him. In the same level tone she asked: “Do you want to know where we went after we left your apartment and whether he brought me home—things like that? Because if he did, he wouldn’t have had time to go down to the beach and kill her? Is that it?”

I said, “That’s a good part of it.”

“He didn’t bring me home,” she said slowly. “I took a taxi on Hollywood Boulevard, not more than five minutes after we left your place. I didn’t see him again. I supposed he went home.”

Degarmo said: “Usually the bum tries to give her boy friend a bit more alibi than that. But it takes all kinds, don’t it?”

Miss Fromsett said to me: “He wanted to bring me home, but it was a long way out of his way and we were both tired. The reason I was telling you this is because I know it doesn’t matter in the least. If I thought it did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“So he did have time,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know how much time was needed. I don’t know how he could have known where to go. Not from me, not from her through me. She didn’t tell me.” Her dark eyes were on mine, searching, probing. “Is this the kind of confidence you ask for?”

I folded the scarf up and put it back in my pocket. “We want to know where he is now.”

“I can’t tell you because I have no idea.” Her eyes had followed the scarf down to my pocket. They stayed there. “You say you were slugged. You mean knocked unconscious?”

“Yes. By somebody who was hidden out behind a curtain. We still fall for it. She pulled a gun on me and I was busy trying to take it away from her. There’s no doubt she shot Lavery.”

Degarmo stood up suddenly: “You’re making yourself a nice smooth scene, fellow,” he growled. “But you’re not getting anywhere. Let’s blow.”

I said: “Wait a minute. I’m not finished. Suppose he had something on his mind, Miss Fromsett something that was eating pretty deep into him. That was how he looked tonight. Suppose he knew more about all this than we realized—or than I realized—and knew things were coming to a head. He would want to go somewhere quietly and try to figure out what to do. Don’t you think he might?”

I stopped and waited, looking sideways at Degarmo’s impatience. After a moment the girl said tonelessly: “He wouldn’t run away or hide, because it wasn’t anything he could run away or hide from. But he might want a time to himself to think.”

“In a strange place, in a hotel,” I said, thinking of the story that had been told me in the Granada. “Or in a much quieter place than that.”

I looked around for the telephone.

“It’s in my bedroom,” Miss Fromsett said, knowing at once what I was looking for.

I went down the room and through the door at the end. Degarmo was right behind me. The bedroom was ivory and ashes of roses. There was a big bed with no footboard and a pillow with the rounded hollow of a head. Toilet articles glistened on a built-in dresser with paneled mirrors on the wall above it. An open door showed mulberry bathroom tiles. The phone was on a night table by the bed.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the place where Miss Fromsett’s head had been and lifted the phone and dialed long distance. When the operator answered I asked for Constable Jim Patton at Puma Point, person to person, very urgent. I put the phone back in the cradle and lit a cigarette. Degarmo glowered down at me, standing with his legs apart, tough and tireless and ready to be nasty. “What now?” he grunted.

“Wait and see.”

“Who’s running this show?”

“Your asking me shows that I am—unless you want the Los Angeles police to run it.”

He scratched a match on this thumbnail and watched it burn and tried to blow it out with a long steady breath that just bent the flame over. He got rid of that match and put another between his teeth and chewed on it. The phone rang in a moment.

“Ready with your Puma Point call.”

Patton’s sleepy voice came on the line. “Yes? This is Patton at Puma Point.”

“This is Marlowe in Los Angeles,” I said. “Remember me?”

“Sure I remember you, son. I ain’t only half awake though.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Although I don’t know why you should. Go or send over to Little Fawn Lake and see if Kingsley is there. Don’t let him see you. You can spot his car outside the cabin or maybe see lights. And see that he stays put. Call me back as soon as you know. I’m coming up. Can you do that?”

Patton said: “I got no reason to stop him if he wants to leave.”

“I’ll have a Bay City police officer with me who wants to question him about a murder. Not your murder, another one.”

There was a drumming silence along the wire. Patton said: “You ain’t just bein’ tricky, are you, son?”

“No. Call me back at Tunbridge 2722.”

“Should likely take me half an hour,” he said.

I hung up. Degarmo was grinning now. “This babe flash you a signal I couldn’t read?”

I stood up off the bed. “No. I’m just trying to read his mind. He’s no cold killer. Whatever fire there was is all burned out of him by now. I thought he might go to the quietest and most remote place he knows—just to get a grip of himself. In a few hours he’ll probably turn himself in. It would look better for you if you got to him before he did that.”

“Unless he puts a slug in his head,” Degarmo said coldly. “Guys like him are very apt to do that.”

“You can’t stop him until you find him.”

“That’s right.”

We went back into the living room. Miss Fromsett poked her head out of her kitchenette and said she was making coffee, and did we want any. We had some coffee and sat around looking like people seeing friends off at the railroad station.

The call from Patton came through in about twenty-five minutes. There was light in the Kingsley cabin and a car was parked beside it.

36

We ate some breakfast at Aihambra and I had the tank filled. We drove out Highway 70 and started moving past the trucks into the rolling ranch country. I was driving. Degarmo sat moodily in the corner, his hands deep in his pockets.

I watched the fat straight rows of orange trees spin by like the spokes of a wheel. I listened to the whine of the tires on the pavement and I felt tired and stale from lack of sleep and too much emotion.

We reached the long slope south of San Dimas that goes up to a ridge and drops down into Pomona. This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.

Degarmo stuck a match in the corner of his mouth and said almost sneeringly: “Webber gave me hell last night. He said he was talking to you and what about.”

I said nothing. He looked at me and looked away again. He waved a hand outwards. “I wouldn’t live in this damn country if they gave it to me. The air’s stale before it gets up in the morning.”

“We’ll be coming to Ontario in a minute. We’ll switch over to Foothill Boulevard and you’ll see five miles of the finest grevillea trees in the world.”

“I wouldn’t know one from a fire plug,” Degarmo said.

We came to the center of town and turned north on Euclid, along the splendid parkway. Degarmo sneered at the grevillea trees.

After a while he said: “That was my girl that drowned in the lake up there. I haven’t been right in the head since I heard about it. All I can see is red. If I could get my hands on that guy Chess—”

“You made enough trouble,” I said, “letting her get away with murdering Almore’s wife.”

I stared straight ahead through the windshield. I knew his head moved and his eyes froze on me. I didn’t know what his hands were doing. I didn’t know what expression was on his face. After a long time his words came. They came through tight teeth and edgeways, and they scraped a little as they came out.

“You a little crazy or something?”

“No,” I said. “Neither are you. You know as well as anybody could know anything that Florence Almore didn’t get up out of bed and walk down to that garage. You know she was carried. You know that was why Talley stole her slipper, the slipper that had never walked on a concrete path. You knew that Almore gave his wife a shot in the arm at Condy’s place and that it was just enough and not any too much. He knew his shots in the arm the way you know how to rough up a bum that hasn’t any money or any place to sleep. You know that Almore didn’t murder his wife with morphine and that if he wanted to murder her, morphine would be the last thing in the world he would use. But you know that somebody else did, and that Almore carried her down to the garage and put her there—technically still alive to breathe in some monoxide, but medically just as dead as though she had stopped breathing. You know all that.”

Degarmo said softly: “Brother, how did you ever manage to live so long?”

I said: “By not falling for too many gags and not getting too much afraid of professional hard guys. Only a heel would have done what Almore did, only a heel and a badly scared man who had things on his soul that wouldn’t stand daylight. Technically he may even have been guilty of murder. I don’t think the point has ever been settled. Certainly he would have a hell of a time proving that she was in such a deep coma that she was beyond any possibility of help. But as a practical matter of who killed her, you know the girl killed her.”

Degarmo laughed. It was a grating unpleasant laugh, not only mirthless, but meaningless.

We reached Foothill Boulevard and turned east again. I thought it was still cool, but Degarmo was sweating. He couldn’t take his coat off because of the gun under his arm.

I said: “The girl, Mildred Haviland, was playing house with Almore and his wife knew it. She had threatened him. I got that from her parents. The girl, Mildred Haviland, knew all about morphine and where to get all of it she needed and how much to use. She was alone in the house with Florence Almore, after she put her to bed. She was in a perfect spot to load a needle with four or five grains and shoot it into an unconscious woman through the same puncture Almore had already made. She would die, perhaps while Almore was still out of the house, and he would come home and find her dead. The problem would be his. He would have to solve it. Nobody would believe anybody else had doped his wife to death. Nobody that didn’t know all the circumstances. But you knew. I’d have to think you much more of a damn fool than I think you are to believe you didn’t know. You covered the girl up. You were in love with her still. You scared her out of town, out of danger, out of reach, but you covered up for her. You let the murder ride. She had you that way. Why did you go up to the mountains looking for her?”

“And how did I know where to look?” he said harshly. “It wouldn’t bother you to add an explanation of that, would it?”

“Not at all,” I said. “She got sick of Bill Chess and his boozing and his tempers and his down-at-heels living. But she had to have money to make a break. She thought she was safe now, that she had something on Almore that was safe to use. So she wrote him for money. He sent you up to talk to her. She didn’t tell Almore what her present name was or any details or where or how she was living. A letter addressed to Mildred Haviland at Puma Point would reach her. All she had to do was ask for it. But no letter came and nobody connected her with Mildred Haviland. All you had was an old photo and your usual bad manners, and they didn’t get you anywhere with those people.”

Degarmo said gratingly: “Who told you she tried to get money from Almore?”

“Nobody. I had to think of something to fit what happened. If Lavery or Mrs. Kingsley had known who Muriel Chess had been, and had tipped it off, you would have known where to find her and what name she was using. You didn’t know those things. Therefore the lead had to come from the only person up there who knew who she was, and that was herself. So I assume she wrote to Almore.”

“Okay,” he said at last. “Let’s forget it. It doesn’t make any difference any more now. If I’m in a jam, that’s my business. I’d do it again, in the same circumstances.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not planning to put the bite on anybody myself. Not even on you. I’m telling you this mostly so you won’t try to hang any murders on Kingsley that don’t belong on him. If there is one that does, let it hang.”

“Is that why you’re telling me?” he asked.

“Yeah.”

“I thought maybe it was because you hated my guts,” he said.

“I’m all done with hating you,” I said. “It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.”

We were going through the grape country now, the open sandy grape country along the scarred flanks of the foothills. We came in a little while to San Bernardino and kept on through it without stopping.

37

At Crestline, elevation 5000 feet, it had not yet started to warm up. We stopped for a beer. When we got back into the car, Degarmo took the gun from his underarm holster and looked it over. It was a .38 Smith and Wesson on a .44 frame, a wicked weapon with a kick like a .45 and a much greater effective range.

“You won’t need that,” I said. “He’s big and strong, but he’s not that kind of tough.”

He put the gun back under his arm and grunted. We didn’t talk any more now. We had no more to talk about. We rolled around the curves and along the sharp sheer edges walled with white guard rails and in some places with walls of field stone and heavy iron chains. We climbed through the tall oaks and on to the altitudes where the oaks are not so tall and the pines are taller and taller. We came at last to the dam at the end of Puma Lake.

I stopped the car and the sentry threw his piece across his body and stepped up to the window.

“Close all the windows of your car before proceeding across the dam, please.”

I reached back to wind up the rear window on my side. Degarmo held his shield up. “Forget it, buddy. I’m a police officer,” he said with his usual tact.

The sentry gave him a solid expressionless stare. “Close all windows, please,” he said in the same tone he had used before.

“Nuts to you,” Degarmo said. “Nuts to you, soldier boy.”

“It’s an order.” the sentry said. His jaw muscles bulged very slightly. His dull grayish eyes stared at Degarmo. “And I didn’t write the order, mister. Up with the windows.”

“Suppose I told you to go jump in the lake,” Degarmo sneered.

The sentry said: “I might do it. I scare easily.” He patted the breech of his rifle with a leathery hand.

Degarmo turned and closed the windows on his side. We drove across the dam. There was a sentry in the middle and one at the far end. The first one must have flashed them some kind of signal. They looked at us with steady watchful eyes, without friendliness.

I drove on through the piled masses of granite and down through the meadows of coarse grass. The same gaudy slacks and short shorts and peasant handkerchiefs as the day before yesterday, the same light breeze and golden sun and clear blue sky, the same smell of pine needles, the same cool softness of a mountain summer. But that was a hundred years ago, something crystallized in time, like a fly in amber.

I turned off on the road to Little Fawn Lake and wound around the huge rocks and past the little gurgling waterfall. The gate into Kingsley’s property was open and Patton’s car was standing in the road pointing towards the lake, which was invisible from that point. There was nobody in it. The card sign on the windshield still read: “Keep Jim Patton Constable. He Is Too Old to Go to Work.”

Close to it and pointed the other way was a small battered coupe. Inside the coupe a lion hunter’s hat. I stopped my car behind Patton’s and locked it and got out. Andy got out of the coupe and stood staring at us woodenly.

I said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police.”

Andy said: “Jim’s just over the ridge. He’s waiting for you. He ain’t had any breakfast.”

We walked up the road to the ridge as Andy got back into his coupe. Beyond it the road dropped to the tiny blue lake. Kingsley’s cabin across the water seemed to be without life.

“That’s the lake,” I said.

Degarmo looked down at it silently. His shoulders moved in a heavy shrug. “Let’s go get the bastard,” was all he said.

We went on and Patton stood up from behind a rock. He was wearing the same old Stetson and khaki pants and shirt buttoned to his thick neck. The star on his left breast still had a bent point. His jaws moved slowly, munching.

“Nice to see you again,” he said, not looking at me, but at Degarmo.

He put his hand out and shook Degarmo’s hard paw. “Last time I seen you, lieutenant, you was wearing another name. Kind of undercover, I guess you’d call it. I guess I didn’t treat you right neither. I apologize. Guess I knew who that photo of yours was all the time.”

Degarmo nodded and said nothing.

“Likely if I’d of been on my toes and played the game right, a lot of trouble would have been saved,” Patton said. “Maybe a life would have been saved. I feel kind of bad about it, but then again I ain’t a fellow that feels too bad about anything very long. Suppose we sit down here and you tell me what it is we’re supposed to be doing now.”

Degarmo said: “Kingsley’s wife was murdered in Bay City last night. I have to talk to him about it.”

“You mean you suspect him?” Patton asked.

“And how,” Degarmo grunted.

Patton rubbed his neck and looked across the lake. “He ain’t showed outside the cabin at all. Likely he’s still asleep. Early this morning I snuck around the cabin. There was a radio goin’ then and I heard sounds like a man would make playing with a bottle and a glass. I stayed away from him. Was that right?”

“We’ll go over there now,” Degarmo said.

“You got a gun, lieutenant?”

Degarmo patted under his left arm. Patton looked at me. I shook my head, no gun.

“Kingsley might have one too,” Patton said. “I don’t hanker after no fast shooting around here, lieutenant. It wouldn’t do me no good to have a gunfight. We don’t have that kind of community up here. You look to me like a fellow who would jack his gun out kind of fast.”

“I’ve got plenty of swift, if that’s what you mean,” Degarmo said. “But I want this guy talking.”

Patton looked at Degarmo, looked at me, looked back at Degarmo and spat tobacco juice in a long stream to one side.

“I ain’t heard enough to even approach him,” he said stubbornly.

So we sat down on the ground and told him the story. He listened silently, not blinking an eye. At the end he said to me: “You got a funny way of working for people, seems to me. Personally I think you boys are plumb misinformed. We’ll go over and see. I’ll go in first—in case you would know what you are talking about and Kingsley would have a gun and would be a little desperate. I got a big belly. Makes a nice target.”

We stood up off the ground and started around the lake the long way. When we came to the little pier I said: “Did they autopsy her yet, sheriff?”

Patton nodded. “She drowned all right. They say they’re satisfied that’s how she died. She wasn’t knifed or shot or had her head cracked in or anything. There’s marks on her body, but too many to mean anything. And it ain’t a very nice body to work with.”

Degarmo looked white and angry.

“I guess I oughtn’t to have said that, lieutenant,” Patton added mildly. “Kind of tough to take. Seeing you knew the lady pretty well.”

Degarmo said: “Let’s get it over and do what we have to do.”

We went on along the shore of the lake and came to Kingsley’s cabin. We went up the heavy steps. Patton went quietly across the porch to the door. He tried the screen. It was not hooked. He opened it and tried the door. That was unlocked also. He held the door shut, with the knob turned in his hand, and Degarmo took hold of the screen and pulled it wide. Patton opened the door and we walked into the room.

Derace Kingsley lay back in a deep chair by the cold fireplace with his eyes closed. There was an empty glass and an almost empty whiskey bottle on the table beside him. The room smelled of whiskey. A dish near the bottle was choked with cigarette stubs. Two crushed empty packs lay on top of the stubs.

All the windows in the room were shut. It was already close and hot in there. Kingsley was wearing a sweater and his face was flushed and heavy. He snored and his hands hung lax outside the arms of the chair, the fingertips touching the floor.

Patton moved to within a few feet of him and stood looking silently down at him for a long moment before he spoke.

“Mr. Kingsley,” he said then, in a calm steady voice, “we got to talk to you a little.”

38

Kingsley moved with a kind of jerk, and opened his eyes and moved them without moving his head. He looked at Patton, then at Degarmo, lastly at me. His eyes were heavy, but the light sharpened in them. He sat up slowly in the chair and rubbed his hands up and down the sides of his face.

“I was asleep,” he said. “Fell asleep a couple of hours ago. I was as drunk as a skunk, I guess. Anyway, much drunker than I like to be.” He dropped his hands and let them hang.

Patton said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police. He has to talk to you.”

Kingsley looked briefly at Degarmo and his eyes came around to stare at me. His voice when he spoke again sounded sober and quiet and tired to death.

“So you let them get her?” he said.

I said: “I would have, but I didn’t.”

Kingsley thought about that, looking at Degarmo. Patton had left the front door open. He pulled the brown venetian blinds up at two front windows and pulled the windows up. He sat in a chair near one of them and clasped his hands over his stomach. Degarmo stood glowering down at Kingsley.

“Your wife is dead, Kingsley,” he said brutally. “If it’s any news to you.”

Kingsley stared at him and moistened his lips.

“Takes it easy, don’t he?” Degarmo said. “Show him the scarf.”

I took the green and yellow scarf out and dangled it. Degarmo jerked a thumb. “Yours?”

Kingsley nodded. He moistened his lips again.

“Careless of you to leave it behind you,” Degarmo said. He was breathing a little hard. His nose was pinched and deep lines ran from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth. Kingsley said very quietly: “Leave it behind me where?” He had barely glanced at the scarf. He hadn’t looked at all at me.

“In the Granada Apartments, on Eighth Street, in Bay City. Apartment 716. Am I telling you something?”

Kingsley now very slowly lifted his eyes to meet mine. “Is that where she was?” he breathed.

I nodded. “She didn’t want me to go there. I wouldn’t give her the money until she talked to me. She admitted she killed Lavery. She pulled a gun and planned to give me the same treatment. Somebody came from behind the curtain and knocked me out without letting me see him. When I came to she was dead.” I told him how she was dead and how she looked. I told him what I had done and what had been done to me.

He listened without moving a muscle of his face. When I had done talking he made a vague gesture towards the scarf.

“What has that got to do with it?”

“The lieutenant regards it as evidence that you were the party hidden out in the apartment.”

Kingsley thought that over. He didn’t seem to get the implications of it very quickly. He leaned back in the chair and rested his head against the back. “Go on,” he said at length. “I suppose you know what you’re talking about. I’m sure I don’t.”

Degarmo said: “All right, play dumb. See what it gets you. You could begin by accounting for your time last night after you dropped your biddy at her apartment house.”

Kingsley said evenly: “If you mean Miss Fromsett, I didn’t.

She went home in a taxi. I was going home myself, but I didn’t. I came up here instead. I thought the trip and the night air and the quiet might help me to get straightened out.”

“Just think of that,” Degarmo jeered. “Straightened out from what, if I might ask?”

“Straightened out from all the worry I had been having.”

“Hell,” Degarmo said, “a little thing like strangling your wife and clawing her belly wouldn’t worry you that much, would it?”

“Son, you hadn’t ought to say things like that,” Patton put in from the background. “That ain’t no way to talk. You ain’t produced anything yet that sounds like evidence.”

“No?” Degarmo swung his hard head at him. “What about this scarf, fatty? Isn’t that evidence?”

“You didn’t fit it in to anything—not that I heard,” Patton said peacefully. “And I ain’t fat either, just well covered.”

Degarmo swung away from him disgustedly. He jabbed his finger at Kingsley.

“I suppose you didn’t go down to Bay City at all,” he said harshly.

“No. Why should I? Marlowe was taking care of that. And I don’t see why you are making a point of the scarf. Marlowe was wearing it.”

Degarmo stood rooted and savage. He turned very slowly and gave me his bleak angry stare.

“I don’t get this,” he said. “Honest, I don’t. It wouldn’t be that somebody is kidding me, would it? Somebody like you?”

I said: “All I told about the scarf was that it was in the apartment and that I had seen Kingsley wearing it earlier this evening. That seemed to be all you wanted. I might have added that I had later worn the scarf myself, so the girl I was to meet could identify me that much easier.”

Degarmo backed away from Kingsley and leaned against the wall at the end of the fireplace. He pulled his lower lip out with thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His right hand hung lax at his side, the fingers slightly curved.

I said: “I told you all I had ever seen of Mrs. Kingsley was a snapshot. One of us had to be sure of being able to identify the other. The scarf seemed obvious enough for identification. As a matter of fact I had seen her once before, although I didn’t know it when I went to meet her. But I didn’t recognize her at once.” I turned to Kingsley. “Mrs. Fallbrook,” I said.

“I thought you said Mrs. Fallbrook was the owner of the house,” he answered slowly.

“That’s what she said at the time. That’s what I believed at the time. Why shouldn’t I?”

Degarmo made a sound in his throat. His eyes were a little crazy. I told him about Mrs. Fallbrook and her purple hat and her fluttery manner and the empty gun she had been holding and how she gave it to me.

When I stopped, he said very carefully: “I didn’t hear you tell Webber any of that.”

“I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to admit I had already been in the house three hours before. That I had gone to talk it over with Kingsley before I reported it to the police.”

“That’s something we’re going to love you for,” Degarmo said with a cold grin. “Jesus, what a sucker I’ve been. How much you paying this shamus to cover up your murders for you, Kingsley?”

“His usual rates,” Kingsley told him emptily. “And a five hundred dollar bonus if he can prove my wife didn’t murder Lavery.”

“Too bad he can’t earn that,” Degarmo sneered.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve already earned it.”

There was a silence in the room. One of those charged silences which seem about to split apart with a peal of thunder. It didn’t. It remained, hung heavy and solid, like a wall. Kingsley moved a little in his chair, and after a long moment, he nodded his head.

“Nobody could possibly know that better than you know it, Degarmo,” I said.

Patton had as much expression on his face as a chunk of wood.

He watched Degarmo quietly. He didn’t look at Kingsley at all. Degarmo looked at a point between my eyes, but not as if that was anything in the room with him. Rather as if he was looking at something very far away, like a mountain across a valley.

After what seemed a very long time, Degarmo said quietly: “I don’t see why. I don’t know anything about Kingsley’s wife. To the best of my knowledge I never laid eyes on her—until last night.”

He lowered his eyelids a little and watched me broodingly. He knew perfectly well what I was going to say. I said it anyway.

“And you never saw her last night. Because she had already been dead for over a month. Because she had been drowned in Little Fawn Lake. Because the woman you saw dead in the Granada Apartments was Mildred Haviland, and Mildred Haviland was Muriel Chess. And since Mrs. Kingsley was dead long before Lavery was shot, it follows that Mrs. Kingsley did not shoot him.”

Kingsley clenched his fists on the arms of his chair, but he made no sound, no sound at all.