The Lady in the Lake Page 8

  TWELVE

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

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

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

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

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

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

  This looked bad for Bill Chess. I wondered what Patton had thought of it.

  I went back to the kitchen and prowled the open shelves above and beside the sink. They were thick with cans and jars of household staples. The confectioner’s sugar was in a square brown box with a torn corner. Patton had made an attempt to clean up what was spilled. Near the sugar were salt, borax, baking soda, cornstarch, brown sugar and so on. Something might be hidden in any of them.

  Something that had been clipped from a chain anklet whose cut ends did not fit together.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  I stood there, holding it, wondering what it had to do with me. Wondering, and not having the faintest glimmer of an idea.

  I wrapped it up again and left the cabin and drove back to the village.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “If you ever see him,” I said.

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

  “Yeah. Bill didn’t murder his wife.”

  “No?”

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

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

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

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

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

  THIRTEEN

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Us?”

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

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

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

  “How long can you stay?”

  “Doin’ what?”

  “Remembering.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “Can do,” he said calmly.

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

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

  “Okay. Shoot him up, will you?”

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

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

  “Drink?”

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

  “You Les?” I asked him.

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

  “Thanks,” I said. “That will be all.”

  “Huh?” The small mouth twisted unpleasantly.

  “Beat it,” I said.

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

  “You’re the bell captain?”

  “Check.”

  “I wanted to buy you a drink. I wanted to give you a buck. Here.” I held it out to him. “Thanks for coming up.”

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

  “What I say here goes,” he said.

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

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

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

  “You didn’t take to Les, I reckon?”

  “Not a great deal. Is he satisfied?”

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

  “So you checked her out.”

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

  “What was she like to look at?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

  “What’s worrying you?” I asked.

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

  “Go on with that,” I said.

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

  “Quite sure about that?”

  He looked at the money on the bed.

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

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

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

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

  He sat down and looked at me stiff-eyed.

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

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

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

  I thought that over and decided it didn’t mean anything much. He might have been late or have missed some earlier appointment. I said: