The Lady in the Lake (16 page)

THIRTY

The Peacock Lounge was a narrow front next to a gift shop in whose window a tray of small crystal animals shimmered in the street light. The Peacock had a glass brick front and soft light glowed out around the stained-glass peacock that was set into the brick. I went in around a Chinese screen and looked along the bar and then sat at the outer edge of a small booth. The light was amber, the leather was Chinese red and the booths had polished plastic tables. In one booth four soldiers were drinking beer moodily, a little glassy in the eyes and obviously bored even with drinking beer. Across from them a party of two girls and two flashy-looking men were making the noise in the place. I saw nobody that looked like my idea of Crystal Kingsley.

A wizened waiter with evil eyes and a face like a gnawed bone put a napkin with a printed peacock on it down on the table in front of me and gave me a Bacardi cocktail. I sipped it and looked at the amber face of the bar clock. It was just past one-fifteen.

One of the men with the two girls got up suddenly and stalked along to the door and went on. The voice of the other man said:

“What did you have to insult the guy for?”

A girl’s tinny voice said: “Insult him? I like that. He propositioned me.”

The man’s voice said complainingly: “Well, you didn’t have to insult him, did you?”

One of the soldiers suddenly laughed deep in his chest and then wiped the laugh off his face with a brown hand and drank a little more beer. I rubbed the back of my knee. It was hot and swollen still but the paralyzed feeling had gone away.

A tiny, white-faced Mexican boy with enormous black eyes came in with morning papers and scuttled along the booths trying to make a few sales before the barman threw him out. I bought a paper and looked through it to see if there were any interesting murders. There were not.

I folded it and looked up as a slim, brown-haired girl in coal black slacks and a yellow shirt and a long gray coat came out of somewhere and passed the booth without looking at me. I tried to make up my mind whether her face was familiar or just such a standard type of lean, rather hard, prettiness that I must have seen it ten thousand times. She went out of the street door around the screen. Two minutes later the little Mexican boy came back in, shot a quick look at the barman, and scuttled over to stand in front of me.

“Mister,” he said, his great big eyes shining with mischief. Then he made a beckoning sign and scuttled out again.

I finished my drink and went after him. The girl in the gray coat and yellow shirt and black slacks was standing in front of the gift shop, looking in at the window. Her eyes moved as I went out. I went and stood beside her.

She looked at me again. Her face was white and tired. Her hair looked darker than dark brown. She looked away and spoke to the window.

“Give me the money, please.” A little mist formed on the plate glass from her breath.

I said: “I’d have to know who you are.”

“You know who I am,” she said softly. “How much did you bring?”

“Five hundred.”

“It’s not enough,” she said. “Not nearly enough. Give it to me quickly. I’ve been waiting half of eternity for somebody to get here.”

“Where can we talk?”

“We don’t have to talk. Just give me the money and go the other way.”

“It’s not that simple. I’m doing this at quite a risk. I’m at least going to have the satisfaction of knowing what goes on where I stand.”

“Damn you,” she said acidly, “why couldn’t he come himself? I don’t want to talk. I want to get away as soon as I can.”

“You didn’t want him to come himself. He understood that you didn’t even want to talk to him on the phone.”

“That’s right,” she said quickly and tossed her head. “But you’ve got to talk to me,”

I said. “I’m not as easy as he is. Either to me or to the law. There’s no way out of it. I’m a private detective and I have to have some protection too.”

“Well, isn’t he charming,” she said. “Private detective and all.” Her voice held a low sneer.

“He did the best he knew how. It wasn’t easy for him to know what to do.”

“What do you want to talk about?”

“You, and what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been and what you expect to do. Things like that. Little things, but important.”

She breathed on the glass of the shop window and waited while the mist of her breath disappeared.

“I think it would be much better,” she said in the same cool empty voice, “for you to give me the money and let me work things out for myself.”

“No.”

She gave me another sharp sideways glance. She shrugged the shoulders of the gray coat impatiently.

“Very well, if it has to be that way. I’m at the Granada, two blocks north on Eighth. Apartment 618. Give me ten minutes. I’d rather go in alone.”

“I have a car.”

“I’d rather go alone.” She turned quickly and walked away.

She walked back to the corner and crossed the boulevard and disappeared along the block under a line of pepper trees. I went and sat in the Chrysler and gave her her ten minutes before I started it.

The Granada was an ugly gray building on a corner. The plate glass entrance door was level with the street. I drove around the corner and saw a milky globe with
Garage
painted on it. The entrance to the garage was down a ramp into the hard rubber-smelling silence of parked cars in rows. A lanky Negro came out of a glassed-in office and looked the Chrysler over.

“How much to leave this here a short time? I’m going upstairs.”

He gave me a shady leer. “Kinda late, boss. She needs a good dustin’ too. Be a dollar.”

“What goes on here?”

“Be a dollar,” he said woodenly.

I got out. He gave me a ticket. I gave him the dollar. Without asking him he said the elevator was in back of the office, by the Men’s Room.

I rode up to the sixth floor and looked at numbers on doors and listened to stillness and smelled beach air corning in at the end of corridors. The place seemed decent enough. There would be a few happy ladies in any apartment house. That would explain the lanky Negro’s dollar. A great judge of character, that boy.

I came to the door of Apartment 618 and stood outside it a moment and then kicked softly.

THIRTY-ONE

She still had the gray coat on. She stood back from the door and I went past her into a square room with twin wall beds and a minimum of uninteresting furniture. A small lamp on a window table made a dim yellowish light. The window behind it was open.

The girl said: “Sit down and talk then.”

She closed the door and went to sit in a gloomy Boston rocker across the room. I sat down on a thick davenport. There was a dull green curtain hanging across an open door space, at one end of the davenport. That would lead to dressing room and bathroom. There was a closed door at the other end. That would be the kitchenette. That would be all there was.

The girl crossed her ankles and leaned her head back against the chair and looked at me under long beaded lashes. Her eyebrows were thin and arched and as brown as her hair. It was a quiet, secret face. It didn’t look like the face of a woman who would waste a lot of motion.

“I got a rather different idea of you,” I said, “from Kingsley.”

Her lips twisted a little. She said nothing.

“From Lavery too,” I said. “It just goes to show that we talk different languages to different people.”

“I haven’t time for this sort of talk,” she said. “What is it you have to know?”

“He hired me to find you. I’ve been working on it. I supposed you would know that.”

“Yes. His office sweetie told me that over the phone. She told me you would be a man named Marlowe. She told me about the scarf.”

I took the scarf off my neck and folded it up and slipped it into a pocket. I said:

“So I know a little about your movements. Not very much. I know you left your car at the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino and that you met Lavery there. I know you sent a wire from El Paso. What did you do then?”

“All I want from you is the money he sent. I don’t see that my movements are any of your business.”

“I don’t have to argue about that,” I said. “It’s a question of whether you want the money.”

“Well, we went to El Paso,” she said, in a tired voice. “I thought of marrying him then. So I sent that wire. You saw the wire?”

“Yes.”

“Well, I changed my mind. I asked him to go home and leave me. He made a scene.”

“Did he go home and leave you?”

“Yes. Why not?”

“What did you do then?”

“I went to Santa Barbara and stayed there a few days. Over a week in fact. Then to Pasadena. Same thing. Then to Hollywood. Then I came down here. That’s all.”

“You were alone all this time?”

She hesitated a little and then said: “Yes.”

“Not with Lavery—any part of it?”

“Not after he went home.”

“What was the idea?”

“Idea of what?” Her voice was a little sharp.

“Idea of going to these places and not sending any word. Didn’t you know he would be very anxious?”

“Oh, you mean my husband,” she said coolly. “I don’t think I worried much about him. He’d think I was in Mexico, wouldn’t he? As for the idea of it all—well, I just had to think things out. My life had got to be a hopeless tangle. I had to be somewhere quite alone and try to straighten myself out.”

“Before that,” I said, “you spent a month at Little Fawn Lake trying to straighten it out and not getting anywhere. Is that it?”

She looked down at her shoes and then up at me and nodded earnestly. The wavy brown hair surged forward along her cheeks. She put her left hand up and pushed it back and then rubbed her temple with one finger.

“I seemed to need a new place,” she said. “Not necessarily an interesting place. Just a strange place. Without associations. A place where I would be very much alone. Like a hotel.”

“How are you getting on with it?”

“Not very well. But I’m not going back to Derace Kingsley. Does he want me to?”

“I don’t know. But why did you come down here, to the town where Lavery was?”

She bit a knuckle and looked at me over her hand.

“I wanted to see him again. He’s all mixed up in my mind. I’m not in love with him, and yet—well, I suppose in a way I am. But I don’t think I want to marry him. Does that make sense?”

“That part of it makes sense. But staying away from home in a lot of crummy hotels doesn’t. You’ve lived your own life for years, as I understand it.”

“I had to be alone, to—to think things out,” she said a little desperately and bit the knuckle again, hard. “Won’t you please give me the money and go away?”

“Sure. Right away. But wasn’t there any other reason for your going away from Little Fawn Lake just then? Anything connected with Muriel Chess, for instance?”

She looked surprised. But anyone can look surprised. “Good heavens, what would there be? That frozen-faced little drip—what is she to me?”

“I thought you might have had a fight with her—about Bill.”

“Bill? Bill Chess?” She seemed even more surprised. Almost too surprised.

“Bill claims you made a pass at him.”

She put her head back and let out a tinny and unreal laugh. “Good heavens, that muddy-faced boozer?” Her face sobered suddenly. “What’s happened? Why all the mystery?”

“He might be a muddy-faced boozer,” I said. “The police think he’s a murderer too. Of his wife. She’s been found drowned in the lake. After a month.”

She moistened her lips and held her head on one side, staring at me fixedly. There was a quiet little silence. The damp breath of the Pacific slid into the room around us.

“I’m not too surprised,” she said slowly. “So it came to that in the end. They fought terribly at times. Do you think that had something to do with my leaving?”

I nodded. “There was a chance of it.”

“It didn’t have anything to do with it at all,” she said seriously, and shook her head back and forth. “It was just the way I told you. Nothing else.”

“Muriel’s dead,” I said. “Drowned in the lake. You don’t get much of a boot out of that, do you?”

“I hardly knew the girl,” she said. “Really. She kept to herself. After all—”

“I don’t suppose you knew she had once worked in Dr. Almore’s office?”

She looked completely puzzled now. “I was never in Dr. Almore’s office,” she said slowly. “He made a few house calls a long time ago. I—what are you talking about?”

“Muriel Chess was really a girl called Mildred Haviland, who had been Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”

“That’s a queer coincidence,” she said wonderingly. “I knew Bill met her in Riverside. I didn’t know how or under what circumstances or where she came from. Dr. Almore’s office, eh? It doesn’t have to mean anything, does it?”

I said. “No. I guess it’s a genuine coincidence. They do happen. But you see why I had to talk to you. Muriel being found drowned and you having gone away and Muriel being Mildred Haviland who was connected with Dr. Almore at one time—as Lavery was also, in a different way. And of course Lavery lives across the street from Dr. Almore. Did he, Lavery, seem to know Muriel from somewhere else?”

She thought about it, biting her lower lip gently. “He saw her up there,” she said finally. “He didn’t act as if he had ever seen her before.”

“And he would have,” I said. “Being the kind of guy he was.”

“I don’t think Chris had anything to do with Dr. Almore,” she said. “He knew Dr. Almore’s wife. I don’t think he knew the doctor at all. So he probably wouldn’t know Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”

“Well, I guess there’s nothing in all this to help me,” I said. “But you can see why I had to talk to you. I guess I can give you the money now.”

I got the envelope out and stood up to drop it on her knee. She let it lie there. I sat down again.

“You do this character very well,” I said. “This confused innocence with an undertone of hardness and bitterness. People have made a bad mistake about you. They have been thinking of you as a reckless little idiot with no brains and no control. They have been very wrong.”

She stared at me, lifting her eyebrows. She said nothing. Then a small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. She reached for the envelope, tapped it on her knee, and laid it aside on the table. She stared at me all the time.

“You did the Fallbrook character very well too,” I said. “Looking back on it, I think it was a shade overdone. But at the time it had me going all right. That purple hat that would have been all right on blond hair but looked like hell on straggly brown, that messed-up makeup that looked as if it had been put on in the dark by somebody with a sprained wrist, the jittery screwball manner. All very good. And when you put the gun in my hand like that—I fell like a brick.”

She snickered and put her hands in the deep pockets of her coat. Her heels tapped on the floor.

“But why did you go back at all?” I asked. “Why take such a risk in broad daylight, in the middle of the morning?”

“So you think I shot Chris Lavery?” she said quietly.

“I don’t think it. I know it.”

“Why did I go back? Is that what you want to know?”

“I don’t really care,” I said.

She laughed. A sharp cold laugh. “He had all my money,” she said. “He had stripped my purse. He had it all, even silver. That’s why I went back. There wasn’t any risk at all. I know how he lived. It was really safer to go back. To take in the milk and newspaper for instance. People lose their heads in these situations. I don’t, I didn’t see why I should. It’s so very much safer not to.”

“I see,” I said. “Then of course you shot him the night before. I ought to have thought of that, not that it matters. He had been shaving. But guys with dark beards and lady friends sometimes shave the last thing at night, don’t they?”

“It has been heard of,” she said almost gaily. “And just what are you going to do about it?”

“You’re a cold-blooded little bitch if I ever saw one,” I said. “Do about it? Turn you over to the police, naturally. It will be a pleasure.”

“I don’t think so.” She threw the words out, almost with a lilt. “You wondered why I gave you the empty gun. Why not? I had another one in my bag. Like this.” Her right hand came up from her coat pocket and she pointed it at me.

I grinned. It may not have been the heartiest grin in the world, but it was a grin.

“I’ve never liked this scene,” I said. “Detective confronts murderer. Murderer produces gun, pints same at detective. Murderer tells detective the whole sad story, with the idea of shooting him at the end of it. Thus wasting a lot of valuable time, even if in the end murderer did shoot detective. Only murderer never does. Something always happens to prevent it. The gods don’t like this scene either. They always manage to spoil it.”

“But this time,” she said softly and got up and moved towards me softly across the carpet, “suppose we make it a little different. Suppose I don’t tell you anything and nothing happens and I do shoot you?”

“I still wouldn’t like the scene,” I said.

“You don’t seem to be afraid,” she said, and slowly licked her lips coming towards me very gently without any sound of footfalls on the carpet.

“I’m not afraid,” I lied. “It’s too late at night, too still, and the window is open and the gun would make too much noise. It’s too long a journey down to the street and you’re not good with guns. You would probably miss me. You missed Lavery three times.”

“Stand up,” she said.

I stood up.

“I’m going to be too close to miss,” she said. She pushed the gun against my chest. “Like this. I really can’t miss now, can I? Now be very still. Hold your hands up by your shoulders and then don’t move at all. If you move at all, the gun will go off.”

I put my hands up beside my shoulders, I looked down at the gun. My tongue felt a little thick, but I could still wave it.

Her probing left hand didn’t find a gun on me. It dropped and she bit her lip, staring at me. The gun bored into my chest. “You’ll have to turn around now,” she said, polite as a tailor at a fitting.

“There’s something a little off key about everything you do,” I said. “You’re definitely not good with guns. You’re much too close to me, and I hate to bring this up—but there’s that old business of the safety catch not being off. You’ve overlooked that too.”

So she started to do two things at once. To take a long step backwards and to feel with her thumb for the safety catch, without taking her eyes off my face. Two very simple things, needing only a second to do. But she didn’t like my telling her. She didn’t like my thought riding over hers. The minute confusion of it jarred her.

She let out a small choked sound and I dropped my right hand and yanked her face hard against my chest. My left hand smashed down on her right wrist, the heel of my hand against the base of her thumb. The gun jerked out of her hand to the floor. Her face writhed against my chest and I think she was trying to scream.

Then she tried to kick me and lost what little balance she had left. Her hands came up to claw at me. I caught her wrist and began to twist it behind her back. She was very strong, but I was very much stronger. So she decided to go limp and let her whole weight sag against the hand that was holding her head. I couldn’t hold her up with one hand. She started to go down and I had to bend down with her.

There were vague sounds of our scuffling on the floor by the davenport, and hard breathing, and if a floorboard creaked I didn’t hear it. I thought a curtain ring checked sharply on a rod. I wasn’t sure and I had no time to consider the question. A figure loomed up suddenly on my left, just behind, and out of range of clear vision. I knew there was a man there and that he was a big man.

That was all I knew. The scene exploded into fire and darkness. I didn’t even remember being slugged. Fire and darkness and just before the darkness a sharp flash of nausea.