The Lady in the Lake (17 page)

THIRTY-TWO

I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.

My coat was off and I was lying flat on my back beside the davenport on somebody’s carpet and I was looking at a framed picture. The frame was of cheap soft wood varnished and the picture showed part of an enormously high pale yellow viaduct across which a shiny black locomotive was dragging a Prussian blue train. Through one lofty arch of the viaduct a wide yellow beach showed and was dotted with sprawled bathers and striped beach umbrellas. Three girls walked close up, with paper parasols, one girl in cerise, one in pale blue, one in green. Beyond the beach a curving bay was bluer than any bay has any right to be. It was drenched with sunshine and flecked and dotted with arching white sails. Beyond the inland curve of the bay three ranges of hills rose in three precisely opposed colors; gold and terra cotta and lavender.

Across the bottom of the picture was printed in large capitals SEE THE FRENCH RIVIERA BY THE BLUE TRAIN.

It was a fine time to bring that up.

I reached up wearily and felt the back of my head. It felt pulpy. A shoot of pain from the touch went clear to the soles of my feet. I groaned, and made a grunt out of the groan, from professional pride-what was left of it. I rolled over slowly and carefully and looked at the foot of a pulled-down wall bed; one twin, the other being still up in the wall. The flourish of design on the painted wood was familiar. The picture had hung over the davenport and I hadn’t even looked at it.

When I rolled a square gin bottle rolled off my chest and hit the floor. It was water white, and empty. It didn’t seem possible there could be so much gin in just one bottle.

I got my knees under me and stayed on all fours for a while, sniffing like a dog who can’t finish his dinner, but hates to leave it. I moved my head around on my neck. It hurt. I moved it around some more and it still hurt, so I climbed up on my feet and discovered I didn’t have any shoes on.

The shoes were lying against the baseboard, looking as dissipated as shoes ever looked. I put them on wearily. I was an old man now. I was going down the last long hill. I still had a tooth left though. I felt it with my tongue. It didn’t seem to taste of gin.

“It will all come back to you,” I said. “Some day it will all come back to you. And you won’t like it.”

There was the lamp on the table by the open window. There was the fat green davenport. There was the doorway with the green curtains across it. Never sit with your back to a green curtain. It always turns out badly. Something always happens. Who had I said that to? A girl with a gun. A girl with a clear empty face and dark brown hair that had been blond.

I looked around for her. She was still there. She was lying on the pulled-down twin bed.

She was wearing a pair of tan stockings and nothing else. Her hair was tumbled. There were dark bruises on her throat. Her mouth was open and a swollen tongue filled it to over-flowing. Her eyes bulged and the whites of them were not white. Across her naked belly four angry scratches leered crimson red against the whiteness of flesh. Deep angry scratches, gouged out by four bitter fingernails.

On the davenport there were tumbled clothes, mostly hers. My coat was there also. I disentangled it and put it on. Something crackled under my hand in the tumbled clothes. I drew out a long envelope with money still in it. I put it in my pocket. Marlowe, five hundred dollars. I hoped it was all there. There didn’t seem much else to hope for.

I stepped on the balls of my feet softly, as if walking on very thin ice. I bent down to rub behind my knee and wondered which hurt most, my knee, or my head when I bent down to rub the knee.

Heavy feet came along the hallway and there was a hard mutter of voices. The feet stopped. A hard fist knocked on the door.

I stood there leering at the door, with my lips drawn back tight against my teeth. I waited for somebody to open the door and walk in. The knob was tried, but nobody walked in. The knocking began again, stopped, the voices muttered again. The steps went away. I wondered how long it would take to get the manager with a pass key. Not very long.

Not nearly long enough for Marlowe to get home from the French Riviera.

I went to the green curtain and brushed it aside and looked down a short dark hallway into a bathroom. I went in there and put the light on. Two wash rugs on the floor, a bath mat folded over the edge of the tub, a pebbled glass window at the corner of the tub. I shut the bathroom door and stood on the edge of the tub and eased the window up. This was the sixth floor. There was no screen. I put my head out and looked into darkness and a narrow glimpse of a street with trees. I looked sideways and saw that the bathroom window of the next apartment was not more than three feet away. A well-nourished mountain goat could make it without any trouble at all.

The question was whether a battered private detective could make it, and if so, what the harvest would be. Behind me a rather remote and muffled voice seemed to be chanting the policeman’s litany: “Open it up or we’ll kick it in.” I sneered back at the voice. They wouldn’t kick it in because kicking in a door is hard on the feet. Policemen are kind to their feet. Their feet are about all they are kind to.

I grabbed a towel off the rack and pulled the two halves of the window down and eased out on the sill. I swung half of me over to the next sill, holding on to the frame of the open window. I could just reach to push the next window down, if it was unlocked. It wasn’t unlocked. I got my foot over there and kicked the glass over the catch. It made a noise that ought to have been heard in Reno. I wrapped the towel around my left hand and reached in to turn the catch. Down on the street a car went by, but nobody yelled at me.

I pushed the broken window down and climbed across to the other sill. The towel fell out of my hand and fluttered down into the darkness to a strip of grass far below, between the two wings of the building.

I climbed in at the window of the other bathroom.

THIRTY-THREE

I climbed down into darkness and groped through darkness to a door and opened it and listened. Filtered moonlight coming through north windows showed a bedroom with twin beds, made up and empty. Not wall beds. This was a larger apartment. I moved past the beds to another door and into a living room. Both rooms were closed up and smelled musty. I felt my way to a lamp and switched it on. I ran a finger along the wood of a table edge. There was a light film of dust, such as accumulates in the cleanest room when it is left shut up.

The room contained a library dining table, an armchair radio, a book rack built like a hod, a big bookcase full of novels with their jackets still on them, a dark wood highboy with a siphon and a cut-glass bottle of liquor and four striped glasses upside down on an Indian brass tray. Besides this paired photographs in a double silver frame, a youngish middle-aged man and woman, with round healthy faces and cheerful eyes. They looked out at me as if they didn’t mind my being there at all.

I sniffed the liquor, which was Scotch, and used some of it. It made my head feel worse but it made the rest of me feel better. I put light on the bedroom and poked into closets. One of them had a man’s clothes, tailor-made, plenty of them. The tailor’s label inside a coat pocket declared the owner’s name to be H. G. Talbot. I went to the bureau and poked around and found a soft blue shirt that looked a little small for me. I carried it into the bathroom and stripped mine off and washed my face and chest and wiped my hair off with a wet towel and put the blue shirt on. I used plenty of Mr. Talbot’s rather insistent hair tonic on my hair and used his brush and comb to tidy it up. By that time I smelled of gin only remotely, if at all.

The top button of the shirt wouldn’t meet its buttonhole so I poked into the bureau again and found a dark blue crepe tie and strung it around my neck. I got my coat back on and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked slightly too neat for that hour of the night, even for as careful a man as Mr. Talbot’s clothes indicated him to be. Too neat and too sober.

I rumpled my hair a little and pulled the tie close, and went back to the whiskey decanter and did what I could about being too sober. I lit one of Mr. Talbot’s cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them.

I went to the living room door, the one giving on the hallway, and opened it and leaned in the opening smoking. I didn’t think it was going to work. But I didn’t think waiting there for them to follow my trail through the window was going to work any better.

A man coughed a little way down the hall and I poked my head out farther and he was looking at me. He came towards me briskly, a small sharp man in a neatly pressed police uniform. He had reddish hair and red-gold eyes.

I yawned and said languidly: “What goes on, officer?”

He stared at me thoughtfully. “Little trouble next door to you. Hear anything?”

“I thought I heard knocking. I just got home a little while ago.”

“Little late,” he said.

“That’s a matter of opinion,” I said. “Trouble next door, ah?”

“A dame,” he said. “Know her?”

“I think I’ve seen her.”

“Yeah,” he said. “You ought to see her now . . .” He put his hands to his throat and bulged his eyes out and gurgled unpleasantly. “Like that,” he said. “You didn’t hear nothing, huh?”

“Nothing I noticed—except the knocking.”

“Yeah. What was the name?”

“Talbot.”

“Just a minute, Mr. Talbot. Wait there just a minute.”

He went along the hallway and leaned into an open doorway through which light streamed out. “Oh, lieutenant,” he said. “The man next door is on deck.”

A tall man came out of the doorway and stood looking along the hall straight at me. A tall man with rusty hair and very blue, blue eyes. Degarmo. That made it perfect.

“Here’s the guy lives next door,” the small neat cop said helpfully. “His name’s Talbot.”

Degarmo looked straight at me, but nothing in his acid blue eyes showed that he had ever seen me before. He came quietly along the hall and put a hard hand against my chest and pushed me back into the room. When he had me half a dozen feet from the door he said over his shoulder:

“Come in here and shut the door, Shorty.”

The small cop came in and shut the door.

“Quite a gag,” Degarmo said lazily. “Put a gun on him, Shorty.”

Shorty flicked his black belt holster open and had his .38 in his hand like a flash. He licked his lips.

“Oh boy,” he said softly, whistling a little. “Oh boy. How’d you know, lieutenant?”

“Know what?” Degarmo asked, keeping his eyes fixed on mine. “What were you thinking of doing, pal—going down to get a paper—to find out if she was dead?”

“Oh boy,” Shorty said. “A sex-killer. He pulled the girl’s clothes off and choked her with his hands, lieutenant. How’d you know?”

Degarmo didn’t answer him. He just stood there, rocking a little on his heels, his face empty and granite-hard.

“Yah, he’s the killer, sure,” Shorty said suddenly. “Sniff the air in here, lieutenant. The place ain’t been aired out for days. And look at the dust on those bookshelves. And the clock on the mantel’s stopped, lieutenant. He come in through the—lemme look a minute, can I, lieutenant?”

He ran out of the room into the bedroom. I heard him fumbling around. Degarmo stood woodenly.

Shorty came back. “Come in at the bathroom window. There’s broken glass in the tub. And something stinks of gin in there something awful. You remember how that apartment smelled of gin when we went in? Here’s a shirt, lieutenant. Smells like it was washed in gin.”

He held the shirt up. It perfumed the air rapidly. Degarmo looked at it vaguely and then stepped forward and yanked my coat open and looked at the shirt I was wearing.

“I know what he done,” Shorty said. “He stole one of the guy’s shirts that lives here. You see what he done, lieutenant?”

“Yeah.” Degarmo held his hand against my chest and let it fall slowly. They were talking about me as if I was a piece of wood.

“Frisk him, Shorty.”

Shorty ran around me feeling here and there for a gun. “Nothing on him,” he said.

“Let’s get him out the back way,” Degarmo said. “It’s our pinch, if we make it before Webber gets here. That lug Reed couldn’t find a moth in a shoe box.”

“You ain’t even detailed on the case,” Shorty said doubtfully. “Didn’t I hear you was suspended or something?”

“What can I lose?” Degarmo asked, “if I’m suspended?”

“I can lose this here uniform,” Shorty said.

Degarmo looked at him wearily. The small cop blushed and his bright red-gold eyes were anxious.

“Okay, Shorty. Go and tell Reed.”

The small cop licked his lip. “You say the word, lieutenant, and I’m with you. I don’t have to know you got suspended.”

“We’ll take him down ourselves, just the two of us,” Degarmo said.

“Yeah, sure.”

Degarmo put his finger against my chin. “A sex-killer,” he said quietly. “Well, I’ll be damned.” He smiled at me thinly, moving only the extreme corners of his wide brutal mouth.

THIRTY-FOUR

We went out of the apartment and along the hall the other way from Apartment 618. Light streamed from the still open door. Two men in plain clothes now stood outside it smoking cigarettes inside their cupped hands, as if a wind was blowing. There was a sound of wrangling voices from the apartment.

We went around the bend of the hall and came to the elevator. Degarmo opened the fire door beyond the elevator shaft and we went down echoing concrete steps, floor after floor. At the lobby floor Degarmo stopped and held his hand on the doorknob and listened. He looked back over his shoulder.

“You got a car?” he asked me.

“In the basement garage.”

“That’s an idea.”

We went on down the steps and came out into the shadowy basement. The lanky Negro came out of the little office and I gave him my car check. He looked furtively at the police uniform on Shorty. He said nothing. He pointed to the Chrysler.

Degarmo climbed under the wheel of the Chrysler. I got in beside him and Shorty got into the back seat. We went up the ramp and out into the damp cool night air. A big car with twin red spotlights was charging towards us from a couple of blocks away.

Degarmo spat out of the car window and yanked the Chrysler the other way. “That will be Webber,” he said. “Late for the funeral again. We sure skinned his nose on that one, Shorty.”

“I don’t like it too well, lieutenant. I don’t, honest.”

“Keep the chin up, kid. You might get back on homicide.”

“I’d rather wear buttons and eat,” Shorty said. The courage was oozing out of him fast.

Degarmo drove the car hard for ten blocks and then slowed a little. Shorty said uneasily:

“I guess you know what you’re doing, lieutenant, but this ain’t the way to the Hall.”

“That’s right,” Degarmo said. “It never was, was it?”

He let the car slow down to a crawl and then turned into a residential street of small exact houses squatting behind small exact lawns. He braked the car gently and coasted over to the curb and stopped about the middle of the block. He threw an arm over the back of the seat and turned his head to look back at Shorty.

“You think this guy killed her, Shorty?”

“I’m listening,” Shorty said in a tight voice.

“Got a flash?”

“No.”

I said: “There’s one in the car pocket on the left side.”

Shorty fumbled around and metal clicked and the white beam of the flashlight came on.

Degarmo said: “Take a look at the back of this guy’s head.”

The beam moved and settled. I heard the small man’s breathing behind me and felt it on my neck. Something felt for and touched the bump on my head. I grunted. The light went off and the darkness of the street rushed in again.

Shorty said:
“I
guess maybe he was sapped, lieutenant. I don’t get it.”

“So was the girl,” Degarmo said. “It didn’t show much but it’s there. She was sapped so she could have her clothes pulled off and be clawed up before she was killed. So the scratches would bleed. Then she was throttled. And none of this made any noise. Why would it? And there’s no telephone in that apartment. Who reported it, Shorty?”

“How the hell would I know? A guy called up and said a woman had been murdered in 618 Granada Apartments on Eighth. Reed was still looking for a cameraman when you came in. The desk said a guy with a thick voice, likely disguised. Didn’t give any name at all.”

“All right then,” Degarmo said. “If you had murdered the girl, how would you get out of there?”

“I’d walk out,” Shorty said. “Why not? Hey,” he barked at me suddenly, “why didn’t you?”

I didn’t answer him. Degarmo said tonelessly: “You wouldn’t climb out of a bathroom window six floors up and then burst in another bathroom window into a strange apartment where people would likely be sleeping, would you? You wouldn’t pretend to be the guy that lived there and you wouldn’t throw away a lot of your time by calling the police, would you? Hell, that girl could have laid there for a week. You wouldn’t throw away the chance of a start like that, would you, Shorty?”

“I don’t guess I would,” Shorty said cautiously. “I don’t guess I would call up at all. But you know these sex fiends do funny things, lieutenant. They ain’t normal like us. And this guy could have had help and the other guy could have knocked him out to put him in the middle.”

“Don’t tell me you thought that last bit up all by yourself,” Degarmo grunted. “So here we sit, and the fellow that knows all the answers is sitting here with us and not saying a word.” He turned his big head and stared at me. “What were you doing there?”

“I can’t remember,” I said. “The crack on the head seems to have blanked me out.”

“We’ll help you to remember,” Degarmo said. “We’ll take you up back in the hills a few miles where you can be quiet and look at the stars and remember. You’ll remember all right.”

Shorty said: “That ain’t no way to talk, lieutenant. Why don’t we just go back to the Hall and play this the way it says in the rule book?”

“To hell with the rule book,” Degarmo said. “I like this guy. I want to have one long sweet talk with him. He just needs a little coaxing, Shorty. He’s just bashful.”

“I don’t want any part of it,” Shorty said.

“What do you want to do, Shorty?”

“I want to go back to the Hall.”

“Nobody’s stopping you, kid. You want to walk?”

Shorty was silent for a moment. “That’s right,” he said at last, quietly. “I want to walk.” He opened the car door and stepped out on to the curbing. “And I guess you know I have to report all this, lieutenant.”

“Right,” Degarmo said. “Tell Webber I was asking for him. Next time he buys a hamburger, tell him to turn down an empty plate for me.”

“That don’t make any sense to me,” the small cop said. He slammed the car door shut. Degarmo let the clutch in and gunned the motor and hit forty in the first block and a half. In the third block he hit fifty. He slowed down at the boulevard and turned east and began to cruise along at a legal speed. A few late cars drifted by both ways, but for the most part the world lay in the cold silence of early morning.

After a little while we passed the city limits and Degarmo spoke. “Let’s hear you talk,” he said quietly. “Maybe we can work this out.”

The car topped a long rise and dipped down to where the boulevard wound through the parklike grounds of the veterans’ hospital. The tall triple electroliers had halos from the beach fog that had drifted in during the night. I began to talk.

“Kingsley came over to my apartment tonight and said he had heard from his wife over the phone. She wanted some money quick. The idea was I was to take it to her and get her out of whatever trouble she was in. My idea was a little different. She was told how to identify me and I was to be at the Peacock Lounge at Eighth and Arguello at fifteen minutes past the hour. Any hour.”

Degarmo said slowly: “She had to breeze and that meant she had something to breeze from, such as murder.” He lifted his hands lightly and let them fall on the wheel again.

“I went down there, hours after she had called. I had been told her hair was dyed brown. She passed me going out of the bar, but I didn’t know her. I had never seen her in the flesh. All I had seen was what looked like a pretty good snapshot, but could be that and still not a very good likeness. She sent a Mexican kid in to call me out. She wanted the money and no conversation. I wanted her story. Finally she saw she would have to talk a little and told me she was at the Granada. She made me wait ten minutes before I followed her over.”

Degarmo said: “Time to fix up a plant.”

“There was a plant all right, but I’m not sure she was in on it. She didn’t want me to come up there, didn’t want to talk. Yet she ought to have known I would insist on some explanation before I gave up the money, so her reluctance could have been just an act, to make me feel that I was controlling the situation. She could act all right. I found that out. Anyhow I went and we talked. Nothing she said made very much sense until we talked about Lavery getting shot. Then she made too much sense too quick. I told her I was going to turn her over to the police.”

Westwood Village, dark except for one all-night service station and a few distant windows in apartment houses, slid away to the north of us.

“So she pulled a gun,” I said. “I think she meant to use it, but she got too close to me and I got a headlock on her. While we were wrestling around, somebody came out from behind a green curtain and slugged me. When I came out of that the murder was done.”

Degarmo said slowly: “You get any kind of a look at who slugged you?”

“No. I felt or half saw he was a man and a big one. And this lying on the davenport, mixed in with clothes.” I reached Kingsley’s yellow and green scarf out of my pocket and draped it over his knee. “I saw Kingsley wearing this earlier this evening,” I said.

Degarmo looked down at the scarf. He lifted it under the dashlight. “You wouldn’t forget that too quick,” he said. “It steps right up and smacks you in the eye. Kingsley, huh? Well, I’m damned. What happened then?”

“Knocking on the door. Me still woozy in the head, not too bright and a bit panicked. I had been flooded with gin and my shoes and coat stripped off and maybe I looked and smelled a little like somebody who would yank a woman’s clothes off and strangle her. So I got out through the bathroom window, cleaned myself up as well as I could, and the rest you know.”

Degarmo said: “Why didn’t you lie dormy in the place you climbed into?”

“What was the use? I guess even a Bay City cop would have found the way I had gone in a little while. If I had any chance at all, it was to walk before that was discovered. If nobody was there who knew me, I had a fair chance of getting out of the building.”

“I don’t think so,” Degarmo said. “But I can see where you didn’t lose much trying. What’s your idea of the motivation here?”

“Why did Kingsley kill her—if he did? That’s not hard. She had been cheating on him, making him a lot of trouble, endangering his job and now she had killed a man. Also, she had money and Kingsley wanted to marry another woman. He might have been afraid that with money to spend she would beat the rap and be left laughing at him. If she didn’t beat the rap, and got sent up, her money would be just as thoroughly beyond his reach. He’d have to divorce her to get rid of her. There’s plenty of motive for murder in all that. Also he saw a chance to make me the goat. It wouldn’t stick, but it would make confusion and delay. If murderers didn’t think they could get away with their murders, very few would be committed.”

Degarmo said: “All the same it could be somebody else, somebody who isn’t in the picture at all. Even if he went down there to see her, it could still be somebody else. Somebody else could have killed Lavery too.”

“If you like it that way.”

He turned his head. “I don’t like it any way at all. But if I crack the case, I’ll get by with a reprimand from the police board. If I don’t crack it, I’ll be thumbing a ride out of town. You said I was dumb. Okay, I’m dumb. Where does Kingsley live? One thing I know is how to make people talk.”

“965 Carson Drive, Beverly Hills. About five blocks on you turn north to the foothills. It’s on the left side, just below Sunset. I’ve never been there, but I know how the block numbers run.”

He handed me the green and yellow scarf. “Tuck that back into your pocket until we want to spring it on him.”