The Lady in the Lake Read online

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

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

  ELEVEN

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

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

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

  A blazing flash beam hit me square in the eyes.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I said nothing.

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

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

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

  “What made you look?”

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

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

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

  I got my wallet out and showed him this and that.

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

  “Yeah.”

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

  “Derace Kingsley. To trace his wife. She skipped out on him a month ago. She started from here. So I started from here. She’s supposed to have gone away with a man. The man denies it. I thought maybe something up here might give me a lead.”

  “And did anything?”

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

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

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

  “None whatever.”

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

  I let that ride.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Patton shook his head. He didn’t like it. Neither did I. He said slowly: “As to your other notion, it’s just plain crazy. Killing yourself and fixing things so as somebody else would get accused of murdering you don’t fit in with my simple ideas of human nature at all.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  Patton smacked his thick knee and hunched his shoulders forward.

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

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

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

  “Never heard of it.”

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

  “I thought you went down to San Bernardino.”

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

  “Muriel’s car was in the woodshed?”

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

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

  “Take a look at this.”

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

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

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

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

  “What do you make of it?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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