The Lady in the Lake (11 page)

TWENTY

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.

TWENTY-ONE

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 porkpie 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 swiveled sharply and said to the two uniformed men: “You boys can get back to your car and check in with the despatcher.”

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 businessman 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 goodby 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 oxlike 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.”