The Lady in the Lake (10 page)

“You could call me from the house down there—before you call the police,” he said reasonably.

“I know. But the fact that I don’t will be in my favor. And they’ll check the phone calls one of the first things they do. And if I call you from anywhere else, I might just as well admit that I came up here to see you. ”

“I understand,” he said again. “You can trust me to handle it.”

We shook hands and I left him standing there.

EIGHTEEN

The Athletic Club was on a corner across the street and half a block down from the Treloar Building. I crossed and walked north to the entrance. They had finished laying rose-colored concrete where the rubber sidewalk had been. It was fenced around, leaving a narrow gangway in and out of the building. The space was clotted with office help going in from lunch.

The Gillerlain Company’s reception room looked even emptier than the day before. The same fluffy little blonde was tucked in behind the PBX in the corner. She gave me a quick smile and I gave her the gunman’s salute, a stiff forefinger pointing at her, the three lower fingers tucked back under it, and the thumb wiggling up and down like a western gun fighter fanning his hammer. She laughed heartily, without making a sound. This was more fun than she had had in a week.

I pointed to Miss Fromsett’s empty desk and the little blonde nodded and pushed a plug in and spoke. A door opened and Miss Fromsett swayed elegantly out to her desk and sat down and gave me her cool expectant eyes.

“Yes, Mr. Marlowe? Mr. Kingsley is not in, I’m afraid.”

“I just came from him. Where do we talk?”

“Talk?”

“I have something to show you.”

“Oh, yes?” She looked me over thoughtfully. A lot of guys had probably tried to show her things, including etchings. At another time I wouldn’t have been above taking a flutter at it myself.

“Business,” I said. “Mr. Kingsley’s business.”

She stood up and opened the gate in the railing. “We may as well go into his office then.”

We went in. She held the door for me. As I passed her I sniffed. Sandalwood. I said:

“Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes?”

She smiled faintly, holding the door. “On my salary?”

“I didn’t say anything about your salary. You don’t look like a girl who has to buy her own perfume.”

“Yes, that’s what it is,” she said. “And if you want to know, I detest wearing perfume in the office. He makes me.”

We went down the long dim office and she took a chair at the end of the desk. I sat where I had sat the day before. We looked at each other. She was wearing tan today, with a ruffled jabot at her throat. She looked a little warmer, but still no prairie fire.

I offered her one of Kingsley’s cigarettes. She took it, took a light from his lighter, and leaned back.

“We needn’t waste time being cagey,” I said. “You know by now who I am and what I am doing. If you didn’t know yesterday morning, it’s only because he loves to play big shot.”

She looked down at the hand that lay on her knee, then lifted her eyes and smiled almost shyly.

“He’s a great guy,” she said. “In spite of the heavy executive act he likes to put on. He’s the only guy that gets fooled by it after all. And if you only knew what he has stood from that little tramp”—she waved her cigarette—“well, perhaps I’d better leave that out. What was it you wanted to see me about?”

“Kingsley said you knew the Almores.”

“I knew Mrs. Almore. That is, I met her a couple of times.”

“Where?”

“At a friend’s house. Why?”

“At Lavery’s house?”

“You’re not going to be insolent, are you, Mr. Malowe?”

“I don’t know what your definition of that would be. I’m going to talk business as if it were business, not international diplomacy.”

“Very well.” She nodded slightly. “At Chris Lavery’s house, yes. I used to go there—once in a while. He had cocktail parties.”

“Then Lavery knew the Almores—or Mrs. Almore.”

She flushed very slightly. “Yes. Quite well.”

“And a lot of other women—quite well, too. I don’t doubt that. Did Mrs. Kingsley know her too?”

“Yes, better than I did. They called each other by their first names. Mrs. Almore is dead, you know. She committed suicide, about a year and a half ago.”

“Any doubt about that?”

She raised her eyebrows, but the expression looked artificial to me, as if it just went with the question I asked, as a matter of form.

She said: “Have you any particular reason for asking that question in that particular way? I mean, has it anything to do with—with what you are doing?”

“I didn’t think so. I still don’t know that it has. But yesterday Dr. Almore called a cop just because I looked at his house. After he had found out from my car license who I was. The cop got pretty tough with me, just for being there. He didn’t know what I was doing and I didn’t tell him I had been calling on Lavery. But Dr. Almore must have known that. He had seen me in front of Lavery’s house. Now why would he think it necessary to call a cop? And why would the cop think it smart to say that the last fellow who tried to put the bite on Almore ended up on the road gang? And why would the cop ask me if her folks—meaning Mrs. Almore’s folks, I suppose—had hired me? If you can answer any of those questions, I might know whether it’s any of my business.”

She thought about it for a moment, giving me one quick glance while she was thinking, and then looking away again.

“I only met Mrs. Almore twice,” she said slowly. “But I think I can answer your questions—all of them. The last time I met her was at Lavery’s place, as I said, and there were quite a lot of people there. There was a lot of drinking and loud talk. The women were not with their husbands and the men were not with their wives, if any. There was a man there named Brownwell who was very tight. He’s in the navy now, I heard. He was ribbing Mrs. Almore about her husband’s practice. The idea seemed to be that he was one of those doctors who run around all night with a case of loaded hypodermic needles, keeping the local fast set from having pink elephants for breakfast. Florence Almore said she didn’t care how her husband got his money so long as he got plenty of it and she had the spending of it. She was tight too and not a very nice person sober, I should imagine. One of these slinky glittering females who laugh too much and sprawl all over their chairs, showing a great deal of leg. A very light blonde with a high color and indecently large baby-blue eyes. Well, Brownwell told her not to worry, it would always be a good racket. In and out of the patient’s house in fifteen minutes and anywhere from ten to fifty bucks a trip. But one thing bothered him, he said, how ever a doctor could get hold of so much dope without underworld contacts. He asked Mrs. Almore if they had many nice gangsters to dinner at their house. She threw a glass of liquor in his face.”

I grinned, but Miss Fromsett didn’t. She crushed her cigarette out in Kingsley’s big copper and glass tray and looked at me soberly.

“Fair enough,” I said. “Who wouldn’t, unless he had a large hard fist to throw?”

“Yes. A few weeks later Florence Almore was found dead in the garage late at night. The door of the garage was shut and the car motor was running.” She stopped and moistened her lips slightly. “It was Chris Lavery who found her. Coming home at God knows what o’clock in the morning. She was lying on the concrete floor in pajamas, with her head under a blanket which was also over the exhaust pipe of the car. Dr. Almore was out. There was nothing about the affair in the papers, except that she had died suddenly. It was well hushed up.”

She lifted her clasped hands a little and then let them fall slowly into her lap again. I said:

“Was something wrong with it, then?”

“People thought so, but they always do. Some time later I heard what purported to be the lowdown. I met this man Brownwell on Vine Street and he asked me to have a drink with him. I didn’t like him, but I had half an hour to kill. We sat at the back of Levy’s bar and he asked me if I remembered the babe who threw the drink in his face. I said I did. The conversation then went something very like this. I remember it very well.

“Brownwell said: ‘Our pal Chris Lavery is sitting pretty, if he ever runs out of girl friends he can touch for dough.’

“I said: ‘I don’t think I understand.’

“He said: ‘Hell, maybe you don’t want to. The night the Almore woman died she was over at Lou Condy’s place losing her shirt at roulette. She got into a tantrum and said the wheels were crooked and made a scene. Condy practically had to drag her into his office. He got hold of Dr. Almore through the Physicians’ Exchange and after a while the doc came over. He shot her with one of his busy little needles. Then he went away, leaving Condy to get her home. It seems he had a very urgent case. So Condy took her home and the doc’s office nurse showed up, having been called by the doc, and Condy carried her upstairs and the nurse put her to bed. Condy went back to his chips. So she had to be carried to bed and yet the same night she got up and walked down to the family garage and finished herself off with monoxide. What do you think of that?’ Brownwell was asking me.

“I said: ‘I don’t know anything about it. How do you?’

“He said: ‘I know a reporter on the rag they call a newspaper down there. There was no inquest and no autopsy. If any tests were made, nothing was told about them. They don’t have a regular coroner down there. The undertakers take turns at being acting coroner, a week at a time. They’re pretty well subservient to the political gang, naturally. It’s easy to fix a thing like that in a small town, if anybody with any pull wants it fixed. And Condy had plenty at that time. He didn’t want the publicity of an investigation and neither did the doctor.’ ”

Miss Fromsett stopped talking and waited for me to say something. When I didn’t, she went on: “I suppose you know what all this meant to Brownwell.”

“Sure. Almore finished her off and then he and Condy between them bought a fix. It has been done in cleaner little cities than Bay City ever tried to be. But that isn’t all the story, is it?”

“No. It seems Mrs. Almore’s parents hired a private detective. He was a man who ran a night watchman service down there and he was actually the second man on the scene that night, after Chris. Brownwell said he must have had something in the way of information but he never got a chance to use it. They arrested him for drunk driving and he got a jail sentence.”

I said: “Is that all?”

She nodded. “And if you think I remember it too well, it’s part of my job to remember conversations.”

“What I was thinking was that it doesn’t have to add up to very much. I don’t see where it has to touch Lavery, even if he was the one who found her. Your gossipy friend Brownwell seems to think what happened gave somebody a chance to blackmail the doctor. But there would have to be some evidence, especially when you’re trying to put the bite on a man who has already cleared himself with the law.”

Miss Fromsett said: “I think so too. And I’d like to think blackmail was one of the nasty little tricks Chris Lavery didn’t quite run to. I think that’s all I can tell you, Mr. Marlowe. And I ought to be outside.”

She started to get up. I said: “It’s not quite all. I have something to show you.”

I got the little perfumed rag that had been under Lavery’s pillow out of my pocket and leaned over to drop it on the desk in front of her.

NINETEEN

She looked at the handkerchief, looked at me, picked up a pencil and pushed the little piece of linen around with the eraser end.

“What’s on it?” she asked. “Fly spray?”

“Some kind of sandalwood, I thought.”

“A cheap synthetic. Repulsive is a mild word for it. And why did you want me to look at this handkerchief, Mr. Marlowe?” She leaned back again and stared at me with level cool eyes.

“I found it in Chris Lavery’s house, under the pillow on his bed. It has initials on it.”

She unfolded the handkerchief without touching it by using the rubber tip of the pencil. Her face got a little grim and taut.

“It has two letters embroidered on it,” she said in a cold angry voice. “They happen to be the same letters as my initials. Is that what you mean?”

“Right,” I said. “He probably knows half a dozen women with the same initials.”

“So you’re going to be nasty after all,” she said quietly.

“Is it your handkerchief—or isn’t it?”

She hesitated. She reached out to the desk and very quietly got herself another cigarette and lit it with a match. She shook the match slowly, watching the small flame creep along the wood.

“Yes, it’s mine,” she said. “I must have dropped it there. It’s a long time ago. And I assure you I didn’t put it under a pillow on his bed. Is that what you wanted to know?”

I didn’t say anything, and she added: “He must have lent it to some woman who—who would like this kind of perfume.”

“I get a mental picture of the woman,” I said. “And she doesn’t quite go with Lavery.”

Her upper lip curled a little. It was a long upper lip. I like long upper lips.

“I think,” she said, “you ought to do a little work on your mental picture of Chris Lavery. Any touch of refinement you may have noticed is purely coincidental.”

“That’s not a nice thing to say about a dead man,” I said.

For a moment she just sat there and looked at me as if I hadn’t said anything and she was waiting for me to say something. Then a slow shudder started at her throat and passed over her whole body. Her hands clenched and the cigarette bent into a crook. She looked down at it and threw it into the ashtray with a quick jerk of her arm.

“He was shot in his shower,” I said. “And it looks as if it was done by some woman who spent the night there. He had just been shaving. The woman left a gun on the stairs and this handkerchief on the bed.”

She moved very slightly in her chair. Her eyes were perfectly empty now. Her face was as cold as a carving.

“And did you expect me to be able to give you information about that?” she asked me bitterly.

“Look, Miss Fromsett, I’d like to be smooth and distant and subtle about all this too. I’d like to play this sort of game just once the way somebody like you would like it to be played. But nobody will let me—not the clients, nor the cops, nor the people I play against. However hard I try to be nice I always end up with my nose in the dirt and my thumb feeling for somebody’s eye.”

She nodded as if she had only just barely heard me. “When was he shot?” she asked, and then shuddered slightly again.

“This morning, I suppose. Not long after he got up. I said he had just shaved and was going to take a shower.”

“That,” she said, “would probably have been quite late. I’ve been here since eight-thirty.”

“I didn’t think you shot him.”

“Awfully kind of you,” she said. “But it is my handkerchief, isn’t it? Although not my perfume. But I don’t suppose policemen are very sensitive to quality in perfume—or in anything else.”

“No—and that goes for private detectives too,” I said. “Are you enjoying this a lot?”

“God,” she said, and put the back of her hand hard against her mouth.

“He was shot at five or six times,” I said. “And missed all but twice. He was cornered in the shower stall. It was a pretty grim scene, I should think. There was a lot of hate on one side of it. Or a pretty cold-blooded mind.”

“He was quite easy to hate,” she said emptily. “And poisonously easy to love. Women—even decent women—make such ghastly mistakes about men.”

“All you’re telling me is that you once thought you loved him, but not any more, and that you didn’t shoot him.”

“Yes.” Her voice was light and dry now, like the perfume she didn’t like to wear at the office. “I’m sure you’ll respect the confidence.” She laughed shortly and bitterly. “Dead,” she said. “The poor, egotistical, cheap, nasty, handsome, treacherous guy. Dead and cold and done with. No, Mr. Marlowe, I didn’t shoot him.”

I waited, letting her work it out of her. After a moment she said quietly: “Does Mr. Kingsley know?”

I nodded.

“And the police, of course.”

“Not yet. At least not from me. I found him. The house door wasn’t quite shut. I went in. I found him.”

She picked the pencil up and poked at the handkerchief again. “Does Mr. Kingsley know about this scented rag?”

“Nobody knows about that, except you and I, and whoever put it there.”

“Nice of you,” she said dryly. “And nice of you to think what you thought.”

“You have a certain quality of aloofness and dignity that I like,” I said. “But don’t run it into the ground. What would you expect me to think? Do I pull the hankie out from under the pillow and sniff it and hold it out and say, ‘Well, well, Miss Adrienne Fromsett’s initials and all. Miss Fromsett must have known Lavery, perhaps very intimately. Let’s say, just for the book, as intimately as my nasty little mind can conceive. And that would be pretty damn intimately. But this is cheap synthetic sandalwood and Miss Fromsett wouldn’t use cheap scent. And this was under Lavery’s pillow and Miss Fromsett just never keeps her hankies under a man’s pillow. Therefore this has absolutely nothing to do with Miss Fromsett. It’s just an optical delusion.’ ”

“Oh shut up,” she said.

I grinned.

“What kind of girl do you think I am?” she snapped.

“I came in too late to tell you.”

She flushed, but delicately and all over her face this time. Then, “Have you any idea who did it?”

“Ideas, but that’s all they are. I’m afraid the police are going to find it simple. Some of Mrs. Kingsley’s clothes are hanging in Lavery’s closet. And when they know the whole story—including what happened at Little Fawn Lake yesterday—I’m afraid they’ll just reach for the handcuffs. They have to find her first. But that won’t be so hard for them.”

“Crystal Kingsley,” she said emptily. “So he couldn’t be spared even that.”

I said: “It doesn’t have to be. It could be an entirely different motivation, something we know nothing about. It could have been somebody like Dr. Almore.”

She looked up quickly, then shook her head. “It could be,” I insisted. “We don’t know anything against it. He was pretty nervous yesterday, for a man who has nothing to be afraid of. But, of course, it isn’t only the guilty who are afraid.”

I stood up and tapped on the edge of the desk looking down at her. She had a lovely neck. She pointed to the handkerchief.

“What about that?” she asked dully.

“If it was mine, I’d wash that cheap scent out of it.”

“It has to mean something, doesn’t it? It might mean a lot.”

I laughed. “I don’t think it means anything at all. Women are always leaving their handkerchiefs around. A fellow like Lavery would collect them and keep them in a drawer with a sandalwood sachet. Somebody would find the stock and take one out to use. Or he would lend them, enjoying the reactions to the other girls’ initials. I’d say he was that kind of a heel. Goodby, Miss Fromsett, and thanks for talking to me.”

I started to go, then I stopped and asked her: “Did you hear the name of the reporter down there who gave Brownwell all his information?”

She shook her head.

“Or the name of Mrs. Almore’s parents?”

“Not that either. But I could probably find that out for you. I’d be glad to try.”

“How?”

“Those things are usually printed in death notices, aren’t they? There is pretty sure to have been a death notice in the Los Angeles papers.”

“That would be very nice of you,” I said. I ran a finger along the edge of the desk and looked at her sideways. Pale ivory skin, dark and lovely eyes, hair as light as hair can be and as dark as night can be.

I walked back down the room and out. The little blonde at the PBX looked at me expectantly, her small red lips parted, waiting for more fun.

I didn’t have any more. I went on out.