The Lady in the Lake Page 5

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  SEVEN

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

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

  A man sat at the desk in a wooden armchair whose legs were anchored to flat boards, fore and aft, like skis. A spittoon big enough to coil a hose in was leaning against the man’s right leg. He had a sweat-stained Stetson on the back of his head and his large hairless hands were clasped comfortably over his stomach, above the waistband of a pair of khaki pants that had been scrubbed thin years ago. His shirt matched the pants except that it was even more faded. It was buttoned tight to the man’s thick neck and undecorated by a tie. His hair was mousy brown except at the temples, where it was the color of old snow. He sat more on his left hip than on his right, because there was a hip holster down inside his right hip pocket, and a half foot of .45 gun reared up and bored into his solid back. The star on his left breast had a bent point.

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

  I lit a cigarette and looked around for an ashtray.

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

  “Are you Sheriff Patton?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “There’s a dead woman in the lake.”

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

  “Anybody I know?” he enquired uneasily.

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

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

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

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

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

  “I see. Who are you, son?”

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

  Patton looked at me without moving a muscle.

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

  “How much liquor has he got?”

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

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

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

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

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

  “Yes.”

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

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

  Behind the right-hand lower corner of the windshield there was a white card printed in block capitals. It read:

  “VOTERS, ATTENTION! KEEP JIM PATTON CONSTABLE. HE IS TOO OLD TO GO TO WORK.”

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

  EIGHT

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

  “Get in, Andy. Business.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Drink hearty, Bill.”

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

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

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

  “What you say, Doc?”

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

  “Cause and time of death.”

  “Don’t be a damn fool, Jim Patton.”

  “Can’t tell nothing, huh?”

  “By looking at that? Good God!”

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

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

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

  He looked thoughtfully at Andy. The man in the lion hunter’s hat was feeling a tooth in his mouth. He said:

  “ ’Course we know who done it. Guy Pope done it. Only Guy was dead nine days of pneumonia before we found Dad Meacham.”

  “Eleven days,” Patton said.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “I wouldn’t quite say that, Bill,” Patton answered him mildly. His eyes were as
blank as new plates.

  Andy shook his head. Patton looked at him with a sly grin. “Crabbin’ again, Andy?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Left you once before, didn’t she?”

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

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

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

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

  “No.”

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