The Lady in the Lake (8 page)

FOURTEEN

I dreamed I was far down in the depths of icy green water with a corpse under my arm. The corpse had long blond hair that kept floating around in front of my face. An enormous fish with bulging eyes and a bloated body and scales shining with putrescence swam around leering like an elderly roué. Just as I was about to burst from lack of air, the corpse came alive under my arm and got away from me and then I was fighting with the fish and the corpse was rolling over and over in the water spinning its long hair.

I woke up with a mouth full of sheet and both hands hooked on the head-frame of the bed and pulling hard. The muscles ached when I let go and lowered them. I got up and walked the room and lit a cigarette, feeling the carpet with bare toes. When I had finished the cigarette, I went back to bed.

It was nine o’clock when I woke up again. The sun was on my face. The room was hot. I showered and shaved and partly dressed and made the morning toast and eggs and coffee in the dinette. While I was finishing up there was a knock at the apartment door.

I went to open it with my mouth full of toast. It was a lean, serious-looking man in a severe gray suit.

“Floyd Greer, lieutenant, Central Detective Bureau,” he said and walked into the room.

He put out a dry hand and I shook it. He sat down on the edge of a chair, the way they do, and turned his hat in his hands and looked at me with the quiet stare they have.

“We got a call from San Bernardino about that business up at Puma Lake. Drowned woman. Seems you were on hand when the body was discovered.”

I nodded and said, “Have some coffee?”

“No thanks. I had breakfast two hours ago.”

I got my coffee and sat down across the room from him.

“They asked us to look you up,” he said. “Give them a line on you.”

“Sure.”

“So we did that. Seems like you have a clean bill of health so far as we are concerned. Kind of coincidence a man in your line would be around when the body was found.”

“I’m like that,” I said. “Lucky.”

“So I just thought I’d drop around and say howdy.”

“That’s fine. Glad to know you, lieutenant.”

“Kind of a coincidence,” he said again, nodding. “You up there on business, so to speak?”

“If I was,” I said, “my business had nothing to do with the girl who was drowned, so far as I know.”

“But you couldn’t be sure?”

“Until you’ve finished with a case, you can’t ever be quite sure what its ramifications are, can you?”

“That’s right.” He circled his hat brim through his fingers again, like a bashful cowboy. There was nothing bashful about his eyes. “I’d like to feel sure that if these ramifications you speak of happened to take in this drowned woman’s affairs, you would put us wise.”

“I hope you can rely on that,” I said.

He bulged his lower lip with his tongue. “We’d like a little more than a hope. At the present time you don’t care to say?”

“At the present time I don’t know anything that Patton doesn’t know.”

“Who’s he?”

“The constable up at Puma Point.”

The lean serious man smiled tolerantly. He cracked a knuckle and after a pause said: “The San Berdoo D.A. will likely want to talk to you—before the inquest. But that won’t be very soon. Right now they’re trying to get a set of prints. We lent them a technical man.”

“That will be tough. The body’s pretty far gone.”

“It’s done all the time,” he said. “They worked out the system back in New York where they’re all the time pulling in floaters. They cut patches of skin off the fingers and harden them in a tanning solution and make stamps. It works well enough as a rule.”

“You think this woman had a record of some kind?”

“Why, we always take prints of a corpse,” he said. “You ought to know that.”

I said: “I didn’t know the lady. If you thought I did and that was why I was up there, there’s nothing to it.”

“But you wouldn’t care to say just why you were up there,” he persisted.

“So you think I’m lying to you,” I said.

He spun his hat on a bony forefinger. “You got me wrong, Mr. Marlowe. We don’t think anything at all. What we do is investigate and find out. This stuff is just routine. You ought to know that. You been around long enough.” He stood up and put his hat on. “You might let me know if you have to leave town. I’d be obliged.”

I said I would and went to the door with him. He went out with a duck of his head and a sad half-smile. I watched him drift languidly down the hall and punch the elevator button.

I went back out to the dinette to see if there was any more coffee. There was about two-thirds of a cup. I added cream and sugar and carried my cup over to the telephone. I dialed Police Headquarters downtown and asked for the Detective Bureau and then for Lieutenant Floyd Greer.

The voice said: “Lieutenant Greer is not in the office. Anybody else do?”

“De Soto in?”

“Who?”

I repeated the name.

“What’s his rank and department?”

“Plain-clothes something or other.”

“Hold the line.”

I waited. The burring male voice came back after a while and said: “What’s the gag? We don’t have a De Soto on the roster. Who’s this talking?”

I hung up, finished my coffee and dialed the number of Derace Kingsley’s office. The smooth and cool Miss Fromsett said he had just come in and put me through without a murmur.

“Well,” he said, loud and forceful at the beginning of a fresh day. “What did you find out at the hotel?”

“She was there all right. And Lavery met her there. The hop who gave me the dope brought Lavery into it himself, without any prompting from me. He had dinner with her and went with her in a cab to the railroad station.”

“Well, I ought to have known he was lying,” Kingsley said slowly. “I got the impression he was surprised when I told him about the telegram from El Paso. I was just letting my impression get too sharp. Anything else?”

“Not there. I had a cop calling on me this morning, giving me the usual looking over and warning not to leave town without letting him know. Trying to find out why I went to Puma Point. I didn’t tell him and as he wasn’t even aware of Jim Patton’s existence, it’s evident that Patton didn’t tell anybody.”

“Jim would do his best to be decent about it,” Kingsley said. “Why were you asking me last night about some name—Mildred something or other?”

I told him, making it brief. I told him about Muriel Chess’s car and clothes being found and where.

“That looks bad for Bill,” he said. “I know Coon Lake myself, but it would never have occurred to me to use that old woodshed—or even that there was an old woodshed. It not only looks bad, it looks premeditated.”

“I disagree with that. Assuming he knew the country well enough it wouldn’t take him any time to search his mind for a likely hiding place. He was very restricted as to distance.”

“Maybe. What do you plan to do now?” he asked.

“Go up against Lavery again, of course.”

He agreed that that was the thing to do. He added: “This other, tragic as it is, is really no business of ours, is it?”

“Not unless your wife knew something about it.”

His voice sounded sharply, saying: “Look here, Marlowe, I think I can understand your detective instinct to tie everything that happens into one compact knot, but don’t let it run away with you. Life isn’t like that at all—not life as I have known it. Better leave the affairs of the Chess family to the police and keep your brains working on the Kingsley family.”

“Okay,” I said.

“I don’t mean to be domineering,” he said.

I laughed heartily, said goodby, and hung up. I finished dressing and went down to the basement for the Chrysler. I started for Bay City again.

FIFTEEN

I drove past the intersection of Altair Street to where the cross street continued to the edge of the canyon and ended in a semi-circular parking place with a sidewalk and a white wooden guard fence around it. I sat there in the car a little while, thinking, looking out to sea and admiring the blue-gray fall of the foothills towards the ocean. I was trying to make up my mind whether to try handling Lavery with a feather or go on using the back of my hand and edge of my tongue. I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn’t produce for me—and I didn’t think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.

The paved alley that ran along halfway down the hill below the houses on the outer edge was empty. Below that, on the next hillside street, a couple of kids were throwing a boomerang up the slope and chasing it with the usual amount of elbowing and mutual insult. Farther down still a house was enclosed in trees and a red brick wall. There was a glimpse of washing on the line in the backyard and two pigeons strutted along the slope of the roof bobbing their heads. A blue and tan bus trundled along the street in front of the brick house and stopped and a very old man got off with slow care and settled himself firmly on the ground and tapped with a heavy cane before he started to crawl back up the slope.

The air was clearer than yesterday. The morning was full of peace. I left the car where it was and walked along Altair Street to No. 623.

The venetian blinds were down across the front windows and the place had a sleepy look. I stepped down over the Korean moss and punched the bell and saw that the door was not quite shut. It had dropped in its frame, as most of our doors do, and the spring bolt hung a little on the lower edge of the lock plate. I remembered that it had wanted to stick the day before, when I was leaving.

I gave the door a little push and it moved inward with a light click. The room beyond was dim, but there was some light from west windows. Nobody answered my ring. I didn’t ring again. I pushed the door a little wider and stepped inside.

The room had a hushed warm smell, the smell of late morning in a house not yet opened up. The bottle of Vat 69 on the round table by the davenport was almost empty and another full bottle waited beside it. The copper ice bucket had a little water in the bottom. Two glasses had been used, and half a siphon of carbonated water.

I fixed the door about as I had found it and stood there and listened. If Lavery was away I thought I would take a chance and frisk the joint. I didn’t have anything much on him, but it was probably enough to keep him from calling the cops.

In the silence time passed. It passed in the dry whirr of the electric clock on the mantel, in the far-off toot of an auto horn on Aster Drive, in the hornet drone of a plane over the foothills across the canyon, in the sudden lurch and growl of the electric refrigerator in the kitchen.

I went farther into the room and stood peering around and listening and hearing nothing except those fixed sounds belonging to the house and having nothing to do with the humans in it. I started along the rug towards the archway at the back.

A hand in a glove appeared on the slope of the white metal railing, at the edge of the archway, where the stairs went down. It appeared and stopped.

It moved and a woman’s hat showed, then her head. The woman came quietly up the stairs. She came all the way up, turned through the arch and still didn’t seem to see me. She was a slender woman of uncertain age, with untidy brown hair, a scarlet mess of a mouth, too much rouge on her cheekbones, shadowed eyes. She wore a blue tweed suit that looked like the dickens with the purple hat that was doing its best to hang on to the side of her head.

She saw me and didn’t stop or change expression in the slightest degree. She came slowly on into the room, holding her right hand away from her body. Her left hand wore the brown glove I had seen on the railing. The righthand glove that matched it was wrapped around the butt of a small automatic.

She stopped then and her body arched back and a quick distressful sound came out of her mouth. Then she giggled, a high nervous giggle. She pointed the gun at me, and came steadily on.

I kept on looking at the gun and not screaming.

The woman came close. When she was close enough to be confidential she pointed the gun at my stomach and said:

“All I wanted was my rent. The place seems well taken care of. Nothing broken. He has always been a good tidy careful tenant. I just didn’t want him to get too far behind in the rent.”

A fellow with a kind of strained and unhappy voice said politely: “How far behind is he?”

“Three months,” she said. “Two hundred and forty dollars. Eighty dollars is very reasonable for a place as well furnished as this. I’ve had a little trouble collecting before, but it always came out very well. He promised me a check this morning. Over the telephone. I mean he promised to give it to me this morning.”

“Over the telephone,” I said. “This morning.”

I shuffled around a bit in an inconspicuous sort of way. The idea was to get close enough to make a side swipe at the gun, knock it outwards, and then jump in fast before she could bring it back in line. I’ve never had a lot of luck with the technique, but you have to try it once in a while. This looked like the time to try it.

I made about six inches, but not nearly enough for a first down. I said: “And you’re the owner?” I didn’t look at the gun directly. I had a faint, a very faint hope that she didn’t know she was pointing it at me.

“Why, certainly. I’m Mrs. Fallbrook. Who did you think I was?”

“Well, I thought you might be the owner,” I said. “You talking about the rent and all. But I didn’t know your name.” Another eight inches. Nice smooth work. It would be a shame to have it wasted.

“And who are you, if I may enquire?”

“I just came about the car payment,” I said. “The door was open just a teensy weensy bit and I kind of shoved in. I don’t know why.”

I made a face like a man from the finance company coming about the car payment. Kind of tough, but ready to break into a sunny smile.

“You mean Mr. Lavery is behind in his car payments?” she asked, looking worried.

“A little. Not a great deal,” I said soothingly.

I was all set now. I had the reach and I ought to have the speed. All it needed was a clean sharp sweep inside the gun and outwards. I started to take my foot out of the rug.

“You know,” she said, “it’s funny about this gun. I found it on the stairs. Nasty oily things, aren’t they? And the stair carpet is a very nice gray chenille. Quite expensive.”

And she handed me the gun.

My hand went out for it, as stiff as an eggshell, almost as brittle. I took the gun. She sniffed with distaste at the glove which had been wrapped around the butt. She went on talking in exactly the same tone of cockeyed reasonableness. My knees cracked, relaxing.

“Well, of course it’s much easier for you,” she said. “About the car, I mean. You can just take it away, if you have to. But taking a house with nice furniture in it isn’t so easy. It takes time and money to evict a tenant. There is apt to be bitterness and things get damaged, sometimes on purpose. The rug on this floor cost over two hundred dollars, secondhand. It’s only a jute rug, but it has a lovely coloring, don’t you think? You’d never know it was only jute, secondhand. But that’s silly too because they’re always secondhand after you’ve used them. And I walked over here too, to save my tires for the government. I could have taken a bus part way, but the darn things never come along except going in the wrong direction.”

I hardly heard what she said. It was like surf breaking beyond a point, out of sight. The gun had my interest.

I broke the magazine out. It was empty. I turned the gun and looked into the breech. That was empty too. I sniffed the muzzle. It reeked.

I dropped the gun into my pocket. A six-shot .25caliber automatic. Emptied out. Shot empty, and not too long ago. But not in the last half hour either.

“Has it been fired?” Mrs. Fallbrook enquired pleasantly. “I certainly hope not.”

“Any reason why it should have been fired?” I asked her. The voice was steady, but the brain was still bouncing.

“Well, it was lying on the stairs,” she said. “After all, people do fire them.”

“How true that is,” I said. “But Mr. Lavery probably had a hole in his pocket. He isn’t home, is he?”

“Oh no.” She shook her head and looked disappointed. “And I don’t think it’s very nice of him. He promised me the check and I walked over—”

“When was it you phoned him?” I asked. “Why, yesterday evening.” She frowned, not liking so many questions.

“He must have been called away,” I said.

She stared at a spot between my big brown eyes.

“Look, Mrs. Fallbrook,” I said. “Let’s not kid around any longer, Mrs. Fallbrook. Not that I don’t love it. And not that I like to say this. But you didn’t shoot him, did you—on account of he owed you three months’ rent?”

She sat down very slowly on the edge of a chair and worked the tip of her tongue along the scarlet slash of her mouth.

“Why, what a perfectly horrid suggestion,” she said angrily. “I don’t think you are nice at all. Didn’t you say the gun had not been fired?”

“All guns have been fired sometime. All guns have been loaded sometime. This one is not loaded now.”

“Well, then—” she made an impatient gesture and sniffed at her oily glove.

“Okay, my idea was wrong. Just a gag anyway. Mr. Lavery was out and you went through the house. Being the owner, you have a key. Is that correct?”

“I didn’t mean to be interfering,” she said, biting a finger. “Perhaps I ought not to have done it. But I have a right to see how things are kept.”

“Well, you looked. And you’re sure he’s not here?”

“I didn’t look under the beds or in the icebox,” she said coldly. “I called out from the top of the stairs when he didn’t answer my ring. Then I went down to the lower hall and called out again. I even peeped into the bedroom.” She lowered her eyes as if bashfully and twisted a hand on her knee.

“Well, that’s that,” I said.

She nodded brightly. “Yes, that’s that. And what did you say your name was?”

“Vance,” I said. “Philo Vance.”

“And what company are you employed with, Mr. Vance?”

“I’m out of work right now,” I said. “Until the police commissioner gets into a jam again.”

She looked startled. “But you said you came about a car payment.”

“That’s just part-time work,” I said. “A fill-in job.”

She rose to her feet and looked at me steadily. Her voice was cold saying: “Then in that case I think you had better leave now.”

I said: “I thought I might take a look around first, if you don’t mind. There might be something you missed.”

“I don’t think that is necessary,” she said. “This is my house. I’ll thank you to leave now, Mr. Vance.”

I said: “And if I don’t leave, you’ll get somebody who will. Take a chair again, Mrs. Fallbrook. I’ll just glance through. This gun, you know, is kind of queer.”

“But I told you I found it lying on the stairs,” she said angrily. “I don’t know anything else about it. I don’t know anything about guns at all. I—I never shot one in my life.” She opened a large blue bag and pulled a handkerchief out of it and sniffled.

“That’s your story,” I said. “I don’t have to get stuck with it.”

She put her left hand out to me with a pathetic gesture, like the erring wife in East Lynne.

“Oh, I shouldn’t have come in!” she cried. “It was horrid of me. I know it was. Mr. Lavery will be furious.”

“What you shouldn’t have done,” I said, “was let me find out the gun was empty. Up to then you were holding everything in the deck.”

She stamped her foot. That was all the scene lacked. That made it perfect.

“Why, you perfectly loathsome man,” she squawked. “Don’t you dare touch me! Don’t you take a single step towards me! I won’t stay in this house another minute with you. How
dare
you be so insulting—”

She caught her voice and snapped it in mid-air like a rubber band. Then she put her head down, purple hat and all, and ran for the door. As she passed me she put a hand out as if to stiff-arm me, but she wasn’t near enough and I didn’t move. She jerked the door wide and charged out through it and up the walk to the street. The door came slowly shut and I heard her rapid steps above the sound of its closing.

I ran a fingernail along my teeth and punched the point of my jaw with a knuckle, listening. I didn’t hear anything anywhere to listen to. A six-shot automatic, fired empty.

“Something,” I said out loud, “is all wrong with this scene.

The house seemed now to be abnormally still. I went along the apricot rug and through the archway to the head of the stairs. I stood there for another moment and listened again.

I shrugged and went quietly down the stairs.