The Lady in the Lake (3 page)

FIVE

San Bernardino baked and shimmered in the afternoon heat. The air was hot enough to blister my tongue. I drove through it gasping, stopped long enough to buy a pint of liquor in case I fainted before I got to the mountains, and started up the long grade to Crestline. In fifteen miles the road climbed five thousand feet, but even then it was far from cool. Thirty miles of mountain driving brought me to the tall pines and a place called Bubbling Springs. It had a clapboard store and a gas pump, but it felt like paradise. From there on it was cool all the way.

The Puma Lake dam had an armed sentry at each end and one in the middle. The first one I came to had me close all the windows of the car before crossing the dam. About a hundred yards away from the dam a rope with cork floats barred the pleasure boats from coming any closer. Beyond these details the war did not seem to have done anything much to Puma Lake.

Canoes paddled about on the blue water and rowboats with outboard motors put-putted and speedboats showing off like fresh kids made wide swathes of foam and turned on a dime and girls in them shrieked and dragged their hands in the water. Jounced around in the wake of the speedboats people who had paid two dollars for a fishing license were trying to get a dime of it back in tired-tasting fish.

The road skimmed along a high granite outcrop and dropped to meadows of coarse grass in which grew what was left of the wild irises and white and purple lupine and bugle flowers and columbine and penny-royal and desert paint brush. Tall yellow pines probed at the clear blue sky. The road dropped again to lake level and the landscape began to be full of girls in gaudy slacks and snoods and peasant handkerchiefs and rat rolls and fat-soled sandals and fat white thighs. People on bicycles wobbled cautiously over the highway and now and then an anxious-looking bird thumped past on a power-scooter.

A mile from the village the highway was joined by another lesser road which curved back into the mountains. A rough wooden sign under the highway sign said:
Little Fawn Lake 1¾ miles.
I took it. Scattered cabins were perched along the slopes for the first mile and then nothing. Presently another very narrow road debouched from this one and another rough wooden sign said:
Little Fawn Lake. Private Road. No Trespassing.

I turned the Chrysler into this and crawled carefully around huge bare granite rocks and past a little waterfall and through a maze of black oak trees and ironwood and manzanita and silence. A bluejay squawked on a branch and a squirrel scolded at me and beat one paw angrily on the pine cone it was holding. A scarlet-topped woodpecker stopped probing in the dark long enough to look at me with one beady eye and then dodge behind the tree trunk to look at me with the other one. I came to a five-barred gate and another sign.

Beyond the gate the road wound for a couple of hundred yards through trees and then suddenly below me was a small oval lake deep in trees and rocks and wild grass, like a drop of dew caught in a curled leaf. At the near end of it was a rough concrete dam with a rope handrail across the top and an old millwheel at the side. Near that stood a small cabin of native pine with the bark on it.

Across the lake the long way by the road and the short way by the top of the dam a large redwood cabin overhung the water and farther along, each well separated from the others, were two other cabins. All three were shut up and quiet, with drawn curtains. The big one had orange-yellow venetian blinds and a twelve-paned window facing on the lake.

At the far end of the lake from the dam was what looked like a small pier and a band pavilion. A warped wooden sign on it was painted in large white letters:
Camp Kilkare.
I couldn’t see any sense in that in these surroundings, so I got out of the car and started down towards the nearest cabin. Somewhere behind it an axe thudded.

I pounded on the cabin door. The axe stopped. A man’s voice yelled from somewhere. I sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. Steps came around the corner of the cabin, uneven steps. A man with a harsh face and a swarthy skin came into view carrying a double-bitted axe.

He was heavily built and not very tall and he limped as he walked, giving his right leg a little kick out with each step and swinging the foot in a shallow arc. He had a dark unshaven chin and steady blue eyes and grizzled hair that curled over his ears and needed cutting badly. He wore blue denim pants and a blue shirt open on a brown muscular neck. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He spoke in a tight tough city voice.

“Yeah?”

“Mr. Bill Chess?”

“That’s me.”

I stood up and got Kingsley’s note of introduction out of my pocket and handed it to him. He squinted at the note, then clumped into the cabin and came back with glasses perched on his nose. He read the note carefully and then again. He put it in his shirt pocket, buttoned the flap of his pocket, and put his hand out.

“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlowe.”

We shook hands. He had a hand like a wood rasp.

“You want to see Kingsley’s cabin, huh? Glad to show you. He ain’t selling for Chrissake?” He eyed me steadily and jerked a thumb across the lake.

“He might,” I said. “Everything’s for sale in California.”

“Ain’t that the truth? That’s his—the redwood job. Lined with knotty pine, composition roof, stone foundations and porches, full bath and shower, venetian blinds all around, big fireplace, oil stove in the big bedroom—and brother, you need it in the spring and fall—Pilgrim combination gas and wood range, everything first class. Cost about eight thousand and that’s money for a mountain cabin. And private reservoir in the hills for water.”

“How about electric light and telephone?” I asked, just to be friendly.

“Electric light, sure. No phone. You couldn’t get one now. If you could, it would cost plenty to string the lines out here.”

He looked at me with steady blue eyes and I looked at him. In spite of his weathered appearance he looked like a drinker. He had the thickened and glossy skin, the too noticeable veins, the bright glitter in the eyes.

I said: “Anybody living there now?”

“Nope. Mrs. Kingsley was here a few weeks back. She went down the hill. Back any day, I guess. Didn’t he say?”

I looked surprised. “Why? Does she go with the cabin?”

He scowled and then put his head back and burst out laughing. The roar of his laughter was like a tractor backfiring. It blasted the woodland silence to shreds.

“Jesus, if that ain’t a kick in the pants!” he gasped. “Does she go with the—” He put out another bellow and then his mouth shut tight as a trap.

“Yeah, it’s a swell cabin,” he said, eyeing me carefully.

“The beds comfortable?” I asked.

He leaned forward and smiled. “Maybe you’d like a face full of knuckles,” he said.

I stared at him with my mouth open. “That one went by me too fast,” I said, “I never laid an eye on it!”

“How would I know if the beds are comfortable?” he snarled, bending down a little so that he could reach me with a hard right, if it worked out that way.

“I don’t know why you wouldn’t know,” I said. “I won’t press the point. I can find out for myself.”

“Yah,” he said bitterly, “think I can’t smell a dick when I meet one? I played hit and run with them in every state in the Union. Nuts to you, pal. And nuts to Kingsley. So he hires himself a dick to come up here and see am I wearing his pajamas, huh? Listen, Jack, I might have a stiff leg and all, but the women I could get—”

I put a hand out, hoping he wouldn’t pull it off and throw it in the lake.

“You’re slipping your clutch,” I told him. “I didn’t come up here to enquire into your love life. I never saw Mrs. Kingsley. I never saw Mr. Kingsley until this morning. What the hell’s the matter with you?”

He dropped his eyes and rubbed the back of his hand viciously across his mouth, as if he wanted to hurt himself. Then he held the hand in front of his eyes and squeezed it into a hard fist and opened it again and stared at the fingers. They were shaking a little.

“Sorry, Mr. Marlowe,” he said slowly. “I was out on the roof last night and I’ve got a hangover like seven Swedes. I’ve been up here alone for a month and it’s got me talking to myself. A thing happened to me.”

“Anything a drink would help?”

His eyes focused sharply on me and glinted. “You got one?” I pulled the pint of rye out of my pocket and held it so that he could see the green label over the cap.

“I don’t deserve it,” he said. “God damn it, I don’t. Wait till I get a couple of glasses or would you come into the cabin?”

“I like it out here. I’m enjoying the view.”

He swung his stiff leg and went into his cabin and came back carrying a couple of small cheese glasses. He sat down on the rock beside me smelling of dried perspiration.

I tore the metal cap off the bottle and poured him a stiff drink and a light one for myself. We touched glasses and drank. He rolled the liquor on his tongue and a bleak smile put a little sunshine into his face.

“Man that’s from the right bottle,” he said. “I wonder what made me sound off like that. I guess a guy gets the blues up here all alone. No company, no real friends, no wife.” He paused and added with a sidewise look. “Especially no wife.”

I kept my eyes on the blue water of the tiny lake. Under an overhanging rock a fish surfaced in a lance of light and a circle of widening ripples. A light breeze moved the tops of the pines with a noise like a gentle surf.

“She left me,” he said slowly. “She left me a month ago. Friday, the 12th of June. A day I’ll remember.”

I stiffened, but not too much to pour more whiskey into his empty glass. Friday the 12th of June was the day Mrs. Crystal Kingsley was supposed to have come into town for a party.

“But you don’t want to hear about that,” he said. And in his faded blue eyes was the deep yearning to talk about it, as plain as anything could possibly be.

“It’s none of my business,” I said. “But if it would make you feel any better—”

He nodded sharply. “Two guys will meet on a park bench,” he said, “and start talking about God. Did you ever notice that? Guys that wouldn’t talk about God to their best friend.”

“I know that,” I said.

He drank and looked across the lake. “She was one swell kid,” he said softly. “A little sharp in the tongue sometimes, but one swell kid. It was love at first sight with me and Muriel. I met her in a joint in Riverside, a year and three months ago. Not the kind of joint where a guy would expect to meet a girl like Muriel, but that’s how it happened. We got married. I loved her. I knew I was well off. And I was too much of a skunk to play ball with her.”

I moved a little to show him I was still there, but I didn’t say anything for fear of breaking the spell. I sat with my drink untouched in my hand. I like to drink, but not when people are using me for a diary.

He went on sadly: “But you know how it is with marriage—any marriage. After a while a guy like me, a common no-good guy like me, he wants to feel a leg. Some other leg. Maybe it’s lousy, but that’s the way it is.”

He looked at me and I said I had heard the idea expressed.

He tossed his second drink off. I passed him the bottle. A bluejay went up a pine tree hopping from branch to branch without moving his wings or even pausing to balance.

“Yeah,” Bill Chess said. “All these hillbillies are half crazy and I’m getting that way too. Here I am sitting pretty, no rent to pay, a good pension check every month, half my bonus money in war bonds, I’m married to as neat a little blonde as ever you clapped an eye on and all the time I’m nuts and I don’t know it. I go for
that.”
He pointed hard at the redwood cabin across the lake. It was turning the color of oxblood in the late afternoon light. “Right in the front yard,” he said, “right under the windows, and a showy little tart that means no more to me than a blade of grass. Jesus, what a sap a guy can be.”

He drank his third drink and steadied the bottle on a rock. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt, fired a match on his thumbnail and puffed rapidly. I breathed with my mouth open, as silent as a burglar behind a curtain.

“Hell,” he said at last, “you’d think if I had to jump off the dock, I’d go a little ways from home and pick me a change in types at least. But little roundheels over there ain’t even that. She’s a blonde like Muriel, same size and weight, same type, almost the same color eyes. But, brother, how different from then on in. Pretty, sure, but no prettier to anybody and not half so pretty to me. Well, I’m over there burning trash that morning and minding my own business, as much as I ever mind it. And she comes to the back door of the cabin in peekaboo pajamas so thin you can see the pink of her nipples against the cloth. And she says in her lazy, no-good voice: ‘Have a drink, Bill. Don’t work so hard on such a beautiful morning.’ And me, I like a drink too well and I go to the kitchen door and take it. And then I take another and then I take another and then I’m in the house. And the closer I get to her the more bedroom her eyes are.”

He paused and swept me with a hard level look.

“You asked me if the beds over there were comfortable and I got sore. You didn’t mean a thing. I was just too full of remembering. Yeah—the bed I was in was comfortable.”

He stopped talking and I let his words hang in the air. They fell slowly and after them was silence. He leaned to pick the bottle off the rock and stare at it. He seemed to fight with it in his mind. The whiskey won the fight, as it always does. He took a long savage drink out of the bottle and then screwed the cap on tightly, as if that meant something. He picked up a stone and flicked it into the water.

“I came back across the dam,” he said slowly, in a voice already thick with alcohol. “I’m as smooth as a new piston head. I’m getting away with something. Us boys can be so wrong about those little things, can’t we? I’m not getting away with anything at all. Not anything at all. I listen to Muriel telling me and she don’t even raise her voice. But she tells me things about myself I didn’t even imagine. Oh, yeah, I’m getting away with it lovely.”