The Lady in the Lake (18 page)

THIRTY-FIVE

It was a two-storied white house with a dark roof. Bright moonlight lay against its wall like a fresh coat of paint. There were wrought-iron grills against the lower halves of the front windows. A level lawn swept up to the front door, which was set diagonally into the angle of a jutting wall. All the visible windows were dark.

Degarmo got out of the car and walked along the parkway and looked back along the drive to the garage. He moved down the driveway and the corner of the house hid him. I heard the sound of a garage door going up, then the thud as it was lowered again. He reappeared at the corner of the house, shook his head at me, and walked across the grass to the front door. He leaned his thumb on the bell and juggled a cigarette out of his pocket with one hand and put it between his lips.

He turned away from the door to light it and the flare of the match cut deep lines into his face. After a while there was light on the fan over the door. The peephole in the door swung back. I saw Degarmo holding up his shield. Slowly and as if unwillingly the door was opened. He went in.

He was gone four or five minutes. Light went on behind various windows, then off again. Then he came out of the house and while he was walking back to the car the light went off on the fan and the whole house was again as dark as we had found it.

He stood beside the car smoking and looking off down the curve of the street.

“One small car in the garage,” he said. “The cook says it’s hers. No sign of Kingsley. They say they haven’t seen him since this morning. I looked in all the rooms. I guess they told the truth. Webber and a print man were there late this afternoon and the dusting powder is still all over the main bedroom. Webber would be getting prints to check against what we found in Lavery’s house. He didn’t tell me what he got. Where would he be—Kingsley?”

“Anywhere,” I said. “On the road, in a hotel, in a Turkish bath getting the kinks out of his nerves. But we’ll have to try his girl friend first. Her name is Fromsett and she lives at the Bryson Tower on Sunset Place. That’s away downtown, near Bullock’s Wilshire.”

“She does what?” Degarmo asked, getting in under the wheel.

“She holds the fort in his office and holds his hand out of office hours. She’s no office cutie, though. She has brains and style.”

“This situation is going to use all she has,” Degarmo said. He drove down to Wilshire and we turned east again.

Twenty-five minutes brought us to the Bryson Tower, a white stucco palace with fretted lanterns in the forecourt and tall date palms. The entrance was in an L, up marble steps, through a Moorish archway, and over a lobby that was too big and a carpet that was too blue. Blue Ali Baba oil jars were dotted around, big enough to keep tigers in. There was a desk and a night clerk with one of those mustaches that get stuck under your fingernail.

Degarmo lunged past the desk towards an open elevator beside which a tired old man sat on a stool waiting for a customer. The clerk snapped at Degarmo’s back like a terrier.

“One moment, please. Whom did you wish to see?”

Degarmo spun on his heel and looked at me wonderingly. “Did he say ‘whom’?”

“Yeah, but don’t hit him,” I said. “There is such a word.”

Degarmo licked his lips. “I knew there was,” he said. “I often wondered where they kept it. Look, buddy,” he said to the clerk, “we want up to 716. Any objection?”

“Certainly I have,” the clerk said coldly. “We don’t announce guests at—” he lifted his arm and turned it neatly to look at the narrow oblong watch on the inside of his wrist—“at twenty-three minutes past four in the morning.”

“That’s what I thought,” Degarmo said. “So I wasn’t going to bother you. You get the idea?” He took his shield out of his pocket and held it so that the light glinted on the gold and the blue enamel. “I’m a police lieutenant.”

The clerk shrugged. “Very well. I hope there isn’t going to be any trouble. I’d better announce you then. What names?”

“Lieutenant Degarmo and Mr. Marlowe.”

“Apartment 716. That will be Miss Fromsett. One moment.”

He went behind a glass screen and we heard him talking on the phone after a longish pause. He came back and nodded.

“Miss Fromsett is in. She will receive you.”

“That’s certainly a load off my mind,” Degarmo said. “And don’t bother to call your house peeper and send him up to the scatter. I’m allergic to house peepers.”

The clerk gave a small cold smile and we got into the elevator.

The seventh floor was cool and quiet. The corridor seemed a mile long. We came at last to a door with 716 on it in gilt numbers in a circle of gilt leaves. There was an ivory button beside the door. Degarmo pushed it and chimes rang inside the door and it was opened.

Miss Fromsett wore a quilted blue robe over her pajamas. On her feet were small tufted slippers with high heels. Her dark hair was fluffed out engagingly and the cold cream had been wiped from her face and just enough makeup applied.

We went past her into a rather narrow room with several handsome oval mirrors and gray period furniture upholstered in blue damask. It didn’t look like apartment house furniture. She sat down on a slender love seat and leaned back and waited calmly for somebody to say something.

I said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police. We’re looking for Kingsley. He’s not at his house. We thought you might be able to give us an idea where to find him.”

She spoke to me without looking at me. “Is it that urgent?”

“Yes. Something has happened.”

“What has happened?”

Degarmo said bluntly: “We just want to know where Kingsley is, sister. We don’t have time to build up a scene.”

The girl looked at him with a complete absence of expression. She looked back at me and said:

“I think you had better tell me, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I went down there with the money,” I said. “I met her as arranged. I went to her apartment to talk to her. While there I was slugged by a man who was hidden behind a curtain. I didn’t see the man. When I came out of it she had been murdered.”

“Murdered?”

I said: “Murdered.”

She closed her fine eyes and the corners of her lovely mouth drew in. Then she stood up with a quick shrug and went over to a small, marble-topped table with spindly legs. She took a cigarette out of a small embossed silver box and lit it, staring emptily down at the table. The match in her hand was waved more and more slowly until it stopped, still burning, and she dropped it into a tray. She turned and put her back to the table.

“I suppose I ought to scream or something,” she said. “I don’t seem to have any feeling about it at all.”

Degarmo said: “We don’t feel so interested in your feelings right now. What we want to know is where Kingsley is. You can tell us or not tell us. Either way you can skip the attitudes. Just make your mind up.”

She said to me quietly: “The lieutenant here is a Bay City officer?”

I nodded. She turned at him slowly, with a lovely contemptuous dignity. “In that case,” she said, “he has no more right in my apartment than any other loud-mouthed bum that might try to toss his weight around.”

Degarmo looked at her bleakly. He grinned and walked across the room and stretched his long legs from a deep downy chair. He waved his hand at me.

“Okay, you work on her. I can get all the co-operation I need from the L. A. boys, but by the time I had things explained to them, it would be a week from next Tuesday.”

I said: “Miss Fromsett, if you know where he is, or where he started to go, please tell us. You can understand that he has to be found.”

She said calmly: “Why?”

Degarmo put his head back and laughed. “This babe is good,” he said. “Maybe she thinks we should keep it a secret from him that his wife has been knocked off.”

“She’s better than you think,” I told him. His face sobered and he bit his thumb. He looked her up and down insolently.

She said: “Is it just because he has to be told?”

I took the yellow and green scarf out of my pocket and shook it out loose and held it in front of her.

“This was found in the apartment where she was murdered. I think you have seen it.”

She looked at the scarf and she looked at me, and in neither of the glances was there any meaning. She said: “You ask for a great deal of confidence, Mr. Marlowe. Considering that you haven’t been such a very smart detective after all.”

“I ask for it,” I said, “and I expect to get it. And how smart I’ve been is something you don’t really know anything about.”

“This is cute,” Degarmo put in. “You two make a nice team. All you need is acrobats to follow you. But right now—”

She cut through his voice as if he didn’t exist. “How was she murdered?”

“She was strangled and stripped naked and scratched up.”

“Derry wouldn’t have done anything like that,” she said quietly.

Degarmo made a noise with his lips. “Nobody ever knows what anybody else will do, sister. A cop knows that much.”

She still didn’t look at him. In the same level tone she asked: “Do you want to know where we went after we left your apartment and whether he brought me home—things like that?”

“Yes.”

“Because if he did, he wouldn’t have had time to go down to the beach and kill her? Is that it?”

I said, “That’s a good part of it.”

“He didn’t bring me home,” she said slowly. “I took a taxi on Hollywood Boulevard, not more than five minutes after we left your place. I didn’t see him again. I supposed he went home.”

Degarmo said: “Usually the bim tries to give her boy friend a bit more alibi than that. But it takes all kinds, don’t it?”

Miss Fromsett said to me: “He wanted to bring me home, but it was a long way out of his way and we were both tired. The reason I was telling you this is because I know it doesn’t matter in the least. If I thought it did, I wouldn’t tell you.”

“So he did have time,” I said.

She shook her head. “I don’t know. I don’t know how much time was needed. I don’t know how he could have known where to go. Not from me, not from her through me. She didn’t tell me.” Her dark eyes were on mine, searching, probing. “Is this the kind of confidence you ask for?”

I folded the scarf up and put it back in my pocket. “We want to know where he is now.”

“I can’t tell you because I have no idea.” Her eyes had followed the scarf down to my pocket. They stayed there. “You say you were slugged. You mean knocked unconscious?”

“Yes. By somebody who was hidden out behind a curtain. We still fall for it. She pulled a gun on me and I was busy trying to take it away from her. There’s no doubt she shot Lavery.”

Degarmo stood up suddenly: “You’re making yourself a nice smooth scene, fellow,” he growled. “But you’re not getting anywhere. Let’s blow.”

I said: “Wait a minute. I’m not finished. Suppose he had something on his mind, Miss Fromsett, something that was eating pretty deep into him. That was how he looked tonight. Suppose he knew more about all this than we realized—or than I realized—and knew things were coming to a head. He would want to go somewhere quietly and try to figure out what to do. Don’t you think he might?”

I stopped and waited, looking sideways at Degarmo’s impatience. After a moment the girl said tonelessly: “He wouldn’t run away or hide, because it wasn’t anything he could run away or hide from. But he might want a time to himself to think.”

“In a strange place, in a hotel,” I said, thinking of the story that had been told me in the Granada. “Or in a much quieter place than that.”

I looked around for the telephone.

“It’s in my bedroom,” Miss Fromsett said, knowing at once what I was looking for.

I went down the room and through the door at the end. Degarmo was right behind me. The bedroom was ivory and ashes of roses. There was a big bed with no footboard and a pillow with the rounded hollow of a head. Toilet articles glistened on a built-in dresser with paneled mirrors on the wall above it. An open door showed mulberry bathroom tiles. The phone was on a night table by the bed.

I sat down on the edge of the bed and patted the place where Miss Fromsett’s head had been and lifted the phone and dialed long distance. When the operator answered I asked for Constable Jim Patton at Puma Point, person to person, very urgent. I put the phone back in the cradle and lit a cigarette. Degarmo glowered down at me, standing with his legs apart, tough and tireless and ready to be nasty. “What now?” he grunted.

“Wait and see.”

“Who’s running this show?”

“Your asking me shows that I am—unless you want the Los Angeles police to run it.”

He scratched a match on his thumbnail and watched it burn and tried to blow it out with a long steady breath that just bent the flame over. He got rid of that match and put another between his teeth and chewed on it. The phone rang in a moment.

“Ready with your Puma Point call.”

Patton’s sleepy voice came on the line. “Yes? This is Patton at Puma Point.”

“This is Marlowe in Los Angeles,” I said. “Remember me?”

“Sure I remember you, son. I ain’t only half awake though.”

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Although I don’t know why you should. Go or send over to Little Fawn Lake and see if Kingsley is there. Don’t let him see you. You can spot his car outside the cabin or maybe see lights. And see that he stays put. Call me back as soon as you know. I’m coming up. Can you do that?”

Patton said: “I got no reason to stop him if he wants to leave.”

“I’ll have a Bay City police officer with me who wants to question him about a murder. Not your murder, another one.”

There was a drumming silence along the wire. Patton said: “You ain’t just bein’ tricky, are you, son?”

“No. Call me back at Tunbridge 2722.”

“Should likely take me half an hour,” he said.

I hung up. Degarmo was grinning now. “This babe flash you a signal I couldn’t read?”

I stood up off the bed. “No. I’m just trying to read his mind. He’s no cold killer. Whatever fire there was is all burned out of him by now. I thought he might go to the quietest and most remote place he knows—just to get a grip of himself. In a few hours he’ll probably turn himself in. It would look better for you if you got to him before he did that.”