The Lady in the Lake (12 page)

TWENTY-TWO

It was early evening when I got back to Hollywood and up to the office. The building had emptied out and the corridors were silent. Doors were open and the cleaning women were inside with their vacuum cleaners and their dry mops and dusters.

I unlocked the door to mine and picked up an envelope that lay in front of the mail slot and dropped it on the desk without looking at it. I ran the windows up and leaned out, looking at the early neon lights glowing, smelling the warm, foody air that drifted up from the alley ventilator of the coffee shop next door.

I peeled off my coat and tie and sat down at the desk and got the office bottle out of the deep drawer and bought myself a drink. It didn’t do any good. I had another, with the same result.

By now Webber would have seen Kingsley. There would be a general alarm out for his wife, already, or very soon. The thing looked cut and dried to them. A nasty affair between two rather nasty people, too much loving, too much drinking, too much proximity ending in a savage hatred and a murderous impulse and death.

I thought this was all a little too simple.

I reached for the envelope and tore it open. It had no stamp. It read: “Mr. Marlowe: Florence Almore’s parents are a Mr. and Mrs. Eustace Grayson, presently residing at the Rossmore Arms, 640 South Oxford Avenue. I checked this by calling the listed phone number. Yrs. Adrienne Fromsett.”

An elegant handwriting, like the elegant hand that wrote it. I pushed it to one side and had another drink. I began to feel a little less savage. I pushed things around on the desk. My hands felt thick and hot and awkward. I ran a finger across the corner of the desk and looked at the streak made by the wiping off of the dust. I looked at the dust on my finger and wiped that off. I looked at my watch. I looked at the wall. I looked at nothing.

I put the liquor bottle away and went over to the washbowl to rinse the glass out. When I had done that I washed my hands and bathed my face in cold water and looked at it. The flush was gone from the left cheek, but it looked a little swollen. Not very much, but enough to make me tighten up again. I brushed my hair and looked at the gray in it. There was getting to be plenty of gray in it. The face under the hair had a sick look. I didn’t like the face at all.

I went back to the desk and read Miss Fromsett’s note again. I smoothed it out on the glass and sniffed it and smoothed it out some more and folded it and put it in my coat pocket.

I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with it.

TWENTY-THREE

The Rossmore Arms was a gloomy pile of dark red brick built around a huge forecourt. It had a plush-lined lobby containing silence, tubbed plants, a bored canary in a cage as big as a dog-house, a smell of old carpet dust and the cloying fragrance of gardenias long ago.

The Graysons were on the fifth floor in front, in the north wing. They were sitting together in a room which seemed to be deliberately twenty years out of date. It had fat over-stuffed furniture and brass doorknobs, shaped like eggs, a huge wall mirror in a gilt frame, a marble-topped table in the window and dark red plush side drapes by the windows. It smelled of tobacco smoke and behind that the air was telling me they had had lamb chops and broccoli for dinner.

Grayson’s wife was a plump woman who might once have had big baby-blue eyes. They were faded out now and dimmed by glasses and slightly protuberant. She had kinky white hair. She sat darning socks with her thick ankles crossed, her feet just reaching the floor, and a big wicker sewing basket in her lap.

Grayson was a long stooped yellow-faced man with high shoulders, bristly eyebrows and almost no chin. The upper part of his face meant business. The lower part was just saying goodby. He wore bifocals and he had been gnawing fretfully at the evening paper. I had looked him up in the city directory. He was a C.P.A. and looked it very inch. He even had ink on his fingers and there were four pencils in the pocket of his open vest.

He read my card carefully for the seventh time and looked me up and down and said slowly:

“What is it you want to see us about, Mr. Marlowe?”

“I’m interested in a man named Lavery. He lives across the street from Dr. Almore. Your daughter was the wife of Dr. Almore. Lavery is the man who found your daughter the night she—died.”

They both pointed like bird dogs when I deliberately hesitated on the last word. Grayson looked at his wife and she shook her head.

“We don’t care to talk about that,” Grayson said promptly. “It is much too painful to us.”

I waited a moment and looked gloomy with them. Then I said: “I don’t blame you. I don’t want to make you. I’d like to get in touch with the man you hired to look into it, though.”

They looked at each other again. Mrs. Grayson didn’t shake her head this time.

Grayson asked: “Why?”

“I’d better tell you a little of my story.” I told them what I had been hired to do, not mentioning Kingsley by name. I told them the incident with Degarmo outside Almore’s house the day before. They pointed again on that.

Grayson said sharply: “Am I to understand that you were unknown to Dr. Almore, had not approached him in any way, and that he nevertheless called a police officer because you were outside his house?”

I said: “That’s right. Had been outside for at least an hour though. That is, my car had.”

“That’s very queer,” Grayson said.

“I’d say that was one very nervous man,” I said. “And Degarmo asked me if her folks—meaning your daughter’s folks—had hired me. Looks as if he didn’t feel safe yet, wouldn’t you say?”

“Safe about what?” He didn’t look at me saying this. He re-lit his pipe, slowly, then tamped the tobacco down with the end of a big metal pencil and lit it again.

I shrugged and didn’t answer. He looked at me quickly and looked away. Mrs. Grayson didn’t look at me, but her nostrils quivered.

“How did he know who you were?” Grayson asked suddenly.

“Made a note of the car license, called the Auto Club, looked up the name in the directory. At least that’s what I’d have done and I saw him through his window making some of the motions.”

“So he has the police working for him,” Grayson said.

“Not necessarily. If they made a mistake that time, they wouldn’t want it found out now.”

“Mistake!” He laughed almost shrilly.

“Okay,” I said. “The subject is painful but a little fresh air won’t hurt it. You’ve always thought he murdered her, haven’t you? That’s why you hired this dick—detective.”

Mrs. Grayson looked up with quick eyes and ducked her head down and rolled up another pair of mended socks.

Grayson said nothing.

I said: “Was there any evidence, or was it just that you didn’t like him?”

“There was evidence,” Grayson said bitterly, and with a sudden clearness of voice, as if he had decided to talk about it after all. “There must have been. We were told there was. But we never got it. The police took care of that.”

“I heard they had this fellow arrested and sent up for drunk driving.”

“You heard right.”

“But he never told you what he had to go on.”

“No.”

“I don’t like that,” I said. “That sounds a little as if this fellow hadn’t made up his mind whether to use his information for your benefit or keep it and put a squeeze on the doctor.”

Grayson looked at his wife again. She said quietly: “Mr. Talley didn’t impress me that way. He was a quiet unassuming little man. But you can’t always judge, I know.”

I said: “So Talley was his name. That was one of the things I hoped you would tell me.”

“And what were the others?” Grayson asked.

“How can I find Talley—and what it was that laid the groundwork of suspicion in your minds. It must have been there, or you wouldn’t have hired Talley without a better showing from him that
he
had grounds.”

Grayson smiled very thinly and primly. He reached for his little chin and rubbed it with one long yellow finger.

Mrs. Grayson said: “Dope.”

“She means that literally,” Grayson said at once, as if the single word had been a green light. “Almore was, and no doubt is, a dope doctor. Our daughter made that clear to us. In his hearing too. He didn’t like it.”

“Just what do you mean by a dope doctor, Mr. Grayson?”

“I mean a doctor whose practice is largely with people who are living on the raw edge of nervous collapse, from drink and dissipation. People who have to be given sedatives and narcotics all the time. The stage comes when an ethical physician refuses to treat them any more, outside a sanatorium. But not the Dr. Almores.
They
will keep on as long as the money comes in, as long as the patient remains alive and reasonably sane, even if he or she becomes a hopeless addict in the process. A lucrative practice,” he said primly, “and I imagine a dangerous one to the doctor.”

“No doubt of that,” I said. “But there’s a lot of money in it. Did you know a man named Condy?”

“No. We know who he was. Florence suspected he was a source of Almore’s narcotic supply.”

I said: “Could be. He probably wouldn’t want to write himself too many prescriptions. Did you know Lavery?”

“We never saw him. We knew who he was.”

“Ever occur to you that Lavery might have been blackmailing Almore?”

It was a new idea to him. He ran his hand over the top of his head and brought it down over his face and dropped it to his bony knee. He shook his head.

“No. Why should I?”

“He was first to the body,” I said. “Whatever looked wrong to Talley must have been equally visible to Lavery.”

“Is Lavery that kind of man?”

“I don’t know. He has no visible means of support, no job. He gets around a lot, especially with women.”

“It’s an idea,” Grayson said. “And those things can be handled very discreetly.” He smiled wryly. “I have come across traces of them in my work. Unsecured loans, long outstanding. Investments on the face of them worthless, made by men who would not be likely to make worthless investments. Bad debts that should obviously be charged off and have not been, for fear of inviting scrutiny from the income tax people. Oh yes, those things can easily be arranged.”

I looked at Mrs. Grayson. Her hands had never stopped working. She had a dozen pairs of darned socks finished. Grayson’s long bony feet would be hard on socks.

“What’s happened to Talley? Was he framed?”

“I don’t think there’s any doubt about it. His wife was very bitter. She said he had been given a doped drink in a bar and he had been drinking with a policeman. She said a police car was waiting across the street for him to start driving and that he was picked up at once. Also that he was given only the most perfunctory examination at the jail.”

“That doesn’t mean too much. That’s what he told her after he was arrested. He’d tell her something like that automatically.”

“Well, I hate to think the police are not honest,” Grayson said. “But these things are done, and everybody knows it.”

I said: “If they made an honest mistake about your daughter’s death, they would hate to have Talley show them up. It might mean several lost jobs. If they thought what he was really after was blackmail, they wouldn’t be too fussy about how they took care of him. Where is Talley now? What it all boils down to is that if there was any solid clue, he either had it or was on the track of it and knew what he was looking for.”

Grayson said: “We don’t know where he is. He got six months, but that expired long ago.”

“How about his wife?”

He looked at his own wife. She said briefly: “1618½ Westmore Street, Bay City. Eustace and I sent her a little money. She was left bad off.”

I made a note of the address and leaned back in my chair and said:

“Somebody shot Lavery this morning in his bathroom.”

Mrs. Grayson’s pudgy hands became still on the edges of the basket. Grayson sat with his mouth open, holding his pipe in front of it. He made a noise of clearing his throat softly, as if in the presence of the dead. Nothing ever moved slower than his old black pipe going back between his teeth.

“Of course it would be too much to expect,” he said and let it hang in the air and blew a little pale smoke at it, and then added, “that Dr. Almore had any connection with that.”

“I’d like to think he had,” I said. “He certainly lives at a handy distance. The police think my client’s wife shot him. They have a good case too, when they find her. But if Almore had anything to do with it, it must surely arise out of your daughter’s death. That’s why I’m trying to find out something about that.”

Grayson said: “A man who has done one murder wouldn’t have more than twenty-five per cent of the hesitation in doing another.” He spoke as if he had given the matter considerable study.

I said: “Yeah, maybe. What was supposed to be the motive for the first one?”

“Florence was wild,” he said sadly. “A wild and difficult girl. She was wasteful and extravagant, always picking up new and rather doubtful friends, talking too much and too loudly, and generally acting the fool. A wife like that can be very dangerous to a man like Albert S. Almore. But I don’t believe that was the prime motive, was it, Lettie?”

He looked at his wife, but she didn’t look at him. She jabbed a darning needle into a round ball of wool and said nothing.

Grayson sighed and went on: “We had reason to believe he was carrying on with his office nurse and that Florence had threatened him with a public scandal. He couldn’t have anything like that, could he? One kind of scandal might too easily lead to another.”

I said: “How did he do the murder?”

“With morphine, of course. He always had it, he always used it. He was an expert in the use of it. Then when she was in a deep coma he would have placed her in the garage and started the car motor. There was no autopsy, you know. But if there had been, it was known that she had been given a hypodermic injection that night.”

I nodded and he leaned back satisfied and ran his hand over his head and down his face and let it fall slowly to his bony knee. He seemed to have given a lot of study to this angle too.

I looked at them. A couple of elderly people sitting there quietly, poisoning their minds with hate, a year and a half after it had happened. They would like it if Almore had shot Lavery. They would love it. It would warm them clear down to their ankles.

After a pause I said: “You’re believing a lot of this because you want to. It’s always possible that she committed suicide, and that the cover-up was partly to protect Condy’s gambling club and partly to prevent Almore having to be questioned at a public hearing.”

“Rubbish,” Grayson said sharply. “He murdered her all right. She was in bed, asleep.”

“You don’t know that. She might have been taking dope herself. She might have established a tolerance for it. The effect wouldn’t last long in that case. She might have got up in the middle of the night and looked at herself in the glass and seen devils pointing at her. These things happen.”

“I think you have taken up enough of our time,” Grayson said.

I stood up. I thanked them both and made a yard towards the door and said: “You didn’t do anything more about it after Talley was arrested?”

“Saw an assistant district attorney named Leach,” Grayson grunted. “Got exactly nowhere. He saw nothing to justify his office in interfering. Wasn’t even interested in the narcotic angle. But Condy’s place was closed up about a month later. That might have come out of it somehow.”

“That was probably the Bay City cops throwing a little smoke. You’d find Condy somewhere else, if you knew where to look. With all his original equipment intact.”

I started for the door again and Grayson hoisted himself out of his chair and dragged across the room after me. There was a flush on his yellow face.

“I didn’t mean to be rude,”he said. “I guess Lettie and I oughtn’t to brood about this business the way we do.”

“I think you’ve both been very patient,” I said. “Was there anybody else involved in all this that we haven’t mentioned by name?”

He shook his head, then looked back at his wife. Her hands were motionless holding the current sock on the darning egg. Her head was tilted a little to one side. Her attitude was of listening, but not to us.

I said: “The way I got the story, Dr. Almore’s office nurse put Mrs. Almore to bed that night. Would that be the one he was supposed to be playing around with?”

Mrs. Grayson said sharply: “Wait a minute. We never saw the girl. But she had a pretty name. Just give me a minute.”

We gave her a minute. “Mildred something,” she said, and snapped her teeth.

I took a deep breath. “Would it be Mildred Haviland, Mrs. Grayson?”