The Lady in the Lake (20 page)

THIRTY-EIGHT

Kingsley moved with a kind of jerk, and opened his eyes and moved them without moving his head. He looked at Patton, then at Degarmo, lastly at me. His eyes were heavy, but the light sharpened in them. He sat up slowly in the chair and rubbed his hands up and down the sides of his face.

“I was asleep,” he said. “Fell asleep a couple of hours ago. I was as drunk as a skunk, I guess. Anyway, much drunker than I like to be.” He dropped his hands and let them hang.

Patton said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police. He has to talk to you.”

Kingsley looked briefly at Degarmo and his eyes came around to stare at me. His voice when he spoke again sounded sober and quiet and tired to death.

“So you let them get her?” he said.

I said: “I would have, but I didn’t.”

Kingsley thought about that, looking at Degarmo. Patton had left the front door open. He pulled the brown venetian blinds up at two front windows and pulled the windows up. He sat in a chair near one of them and clasped his hands over his stomach. Degarmo stood glowering down at Kingsley.

“Your wife is dead, Kingsley,” he said brutally. “If it’s any news to you.”

Kingsley stared at him and moistened his lips.

“Takes it easy, don’t he?” Degarmo said. “Show him the scarf.”

I took the green and yellow scarf out and dangled it. Degarmo jerked a thumb. “Yours?”

Kingsley nodded. He moistened his lips again.

“Careless of you to leave it behind you,” Degarmo said. He was breathing a little hard. His nose was pinched and deep lines ran from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth.

Kingsley said very quietly: “Leave it behind me where?” He had barely glanced at the scarf. He hadn’t looked at all at me.

“In the Granada Apartments, on Eighth Street, in Bay City. Apartment 716. Am I telling you something?”

Kingsley now very slowly lifted his eyes to meet mine. “Is that where she was?” he breathed.

I nodded. “She didn’t want me to go there. I wouldn’t give her the money until she talked to me. She admitted she killed Lavery. She pulled a gun and planned to give me the same treatment. Somebody came from behind the curtain and knocked me out without letting me see him. When I came to she was dead.” I told him how she was dead and how she looked. I told him what I had done and what had been done to me.

He listened without moving a muscle of his face. When I had done talking he made a vague gesture towards the scarf.

“What has that got to do with it?”

“The lieutenant regards it as evidence that you were the party hidden out in the apartment.”

Kingsley thought that over. He didn’t seem to get the implications of it very quickly. He leaned back in the chair and rested his head against the back. “Go on,” he said at length. “I suppose you know what you’re talking about. I’m sure I don’t.”

Degarmo said: “All right, play dumb. See what it gets you. You could begin by accounting for your time last night after you dropped your biddy at her apartment house.”

Kingsley said evenly: “If you mean Miss Fromsett, I didn’t. She went home in a taxi. I was going home myself, but I didn’t. I came up here instead. I thought the trip and the night air and the quiet might help me to get straightened out.”

“Just think of that,” Degarmo jeered. “Straightened out from what, if I might ask?”

“Straightened out from all the worry I had been having.”

“Hell,” Degarmo said, “a little thing like strangling your wife and clawing her belly wouldn’t worry you that much, would it?”

“Son, you hadn’t ought to say things like that,” Patton put in from the background. “That ain’t no way to talk. You ain’t produced anything yet that sounds like evidence.”

“No?” Degarmo swung his hard head at him. “What about this scarf, fatty? Isn’t that evidence?”

“You didn’t fit it in to anything—not that I heard,” Patton said peacefully. “And I ain’t fat either, just well covered.”

Degarmo swung away from him disgustedly. He jabbed his finger at Kingsley.

“I suppose you didn’t go down to Bay City at all,” he said harshly.

“No. Why should I? Marlowe was taking care of that. And I don’t see why you are making a point of the scarf. Marlowe was wearing it.”

Degarmo stood rooted and savage. He turned very slowly and gave me his bleak angry stare.

“I don’t get this,” he said. “Honest, I don’t. It wouldn’t be that somebody is kidding me, would it? Somebody like you?”

I said: “All I told about the scarf was that it was in the apartment and that I had seen Kingsley wearing it earlier this evening. That seemed to be all you wanted. I might have added that I had later worn the scarf myself, so the girl I was to meet could identify me that much easier.”

Degarmo backed away from Kingsley and leaned against the wall at the end of the fireplace. He pulled his lower lip out with thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His right hand hung lax at his side, the fingers slightly curved.

I said: “I told you all I had ever seen of Mrs. Kingsley was a snapshot. One of us had to be sure of being able to identify the other. The scarf seemed obvious enough for identification. As a matter of fact I had seen her once before, although I didn’t know it when I went to meet her. But I didn’t recognize her at once.” I turned to Kingsley. “Mrs. Fallbrook,” I said.

“I thought you said Mrs. Fallbrook was the owner of the house,” he answered slowly.

“That’s what she said at the time. That’s what I believed at the time. Why shouldn’t I?”

Degarmo made a sound in his throat. His eyes were a little crazy. I told him about Mrs. Fallbrook and her purple hat and her fluttery manner and the empty gun she had been holding and how she gave it to me.

When I stopped, he said very carefully: “I didn’t hear you tell Webber any of that.”

“I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to admit I had already been in the house three hours before. That I had gone to talk it over with Kingsley before I reported it to the police.”

“That’s something we’re going to love you for,” Degarmo said with a cold grin. “Jesus, what a sucker I’ve been. How much you paying this shamus to cover up your murders for you, Kingsley?”

“His usual rates,” Kingsley told him emptily. “And a five-hundred-dollar bonus if he can prove my wife didn’t murder Lavery.”

“Too bad he can’t earn that,” Degarmo sneered.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve already earned it.”

There was a silence in the room. One of those charged silences which seem about to split apart with a peal of thunder. It didn’t. It remained, hung heavy and solid, like a wall. Kingsley moved a little in his chair, and after a long moment, he nodded his head.

“Nobody could possibly know that better than you know it, Degarmo,” I said.

Patton had as much expression on his face as a chunk of wood. He watched Degarmo quietly. He didn’t look at Kingsley at all. Degarmo looked at a point between my eyes, but not as if that was anything in the room with him. Rather as if he was looking at something very far away, like a mountain across a valley.

After what seemed a very long time, Degarmo said quietly: “I don’t see why. I don’t know anything about Kingsley’s wife. To the best of my knowledge I never laid eyes on her—until last night.”

He lowered his eyelids a little and watched me broodingly. He knew perfectly well what I was going to say. I said it anyway.

“And you never saw her last night. Because she had already been dead for over a month. Because she had been drowned in Little Fawn Lake. Because the woman you saw dead in the Granada Apartments was Mildred Haviland, and Mildred Haviland was Muriel Chess. And since Mrs. Kingsley was dead long before Lavery was shot, it follows that Mrs. Kingsley did not shoot him.”

Kingsley clenched his fists on the arms of his chair, but he made no sound, no sound at all.

THIRTY-NINE

There was another heavy silence. Patton broke it by saying in his careful slow voice: “That’s kind of a wild statement, ain’t it? Don’t you kind of think Bill Chess would know his own wife?”

I said: “After a month in the water? With his wife’s clothes on her and some of his wife’s trinkets? With water-soaked blond hair like his wife’s hair and almost no recognizable face? Why would he even have a doubt about it? She left a note that might be a suicide note. She had gone away. They had quarreled. Her clothes and car had gone away. During the month she was gone, he had heard nothing from her. He had no idea where she had gone. And then this corpse comes up out of the water with Muriel’s clothes on it. A blond woman about his wife’s size. Of course there would be differences and if any substitution had been suspected, they would have been found and checked. But there was no reason to suspect any such thing. Crystal Kingsley was still alive. She had gone off with Lavery. She had left her car in San Bernardino. She had sent a wire to her husband from El Paso. She was all taken care of, so far as Bill Chess was concerned. He had no thoughts about her at all. She didn’t enter the picture anywhere for him. Why should she?”

Patton said: “I ought to of thought of it myself. But if I had, it would be one of those ideas a fellow would throw away almost as quick as he thought of it. It would look too kind of far-fetched.”

“Superficially yes,” I said. “But only superficially. Suppose the body had not come up out of the lake for a year, or not at all, unless the lake was dragged for it. Muriel Chess was gone and nobody was going to spend much time looking for her. We might never have heard of her again. Mrs. Kingsley was a different proposition. She had money and connections and an anxious husband. She would be searched for, as she was, eventually. But not very soon, unless something happened to start suspicion. It might have been a matter of months before anything was found out. The lake might have been dragged, but if a search along her trail seemed to indicate that she had actually left the lake and gone down the hill, even as far as San Bernardino, and the train from there east, then the lake might never have been dragged. And even if it was and the body was found, there was rather better than an even chance that the body would not be correctly identified. Bill Chess was arrested for his wife’s murder. For all I know he might even have been convicted of it, and that would have been that, as far as the body in the lake was concerned. Crystal Kingsley would still be missing, and it would be an unsolved mystery. Eventually it would be assumed that something had happened to her and that she was no longer alive. But nobody would know where or when or how it had happened. If it hadn’t been for Lavery, we might not be here talking about it now. Lavery is the key to the whole thing. He was in the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino the night Crystal Kingsley was supposed to have left here. He saw a woman there who had Crystal Kingsley’s car, who was wearing Crystal Kingsley’s clothes, and of course he knew who she was. But he didn’t have to know there was anything wrong. He didn’t have to know they were Crystal Kingsley’s clothes or that the woman had put Crystal Kingsley’s car in the hotel garage. All he had to know was that he met Muriel Chess. Muriel took care of the rest.”

I stopped and waited for somebody to say anything. Nobody did. Patton sat immovable in his chair, his plump, hairless hands clasped comfortably across his stomach. Kingsley leaned his head back and he had his eyes half closed and he was not moving. Degarmo leaned against the wall by the fireplace, taut and white-faced and cold, a big hard solemn man whose thoughts were deeply hidden.

I went on talking.

“If Muriel Chess impersonated Crystal Kingsley, she murdered her. That’s elementary. All right, let’s look at it. We know who she was and what kind of woman she was. She had already murdered before she met and married Bill Chess. She had been Dr. Almore’s office nurse and his little pal and she had murdered Dr. Almore’s wife in such a neat way that Almore had to cover up for her. And she had been married to a man in the Bay City police who also was sucker enough to cover up for her. She got the men that way, she could make them jump through hoops. I didn’t know her long enough to see why, but her record proves it. What she was able to do with Lavery proves it. Very well, she killed people who got in her way, and Kingsley’s wife got in her way too. I hadn’t meant to talk about this, but it doesn’t matter much now. Crystal Kingsley could make the men do a little jumping through hoops too. She made Bill Chess jump and Bill Chess’s wife wasn’t the girl to take that and smile. Also, she was sick to death of her life up here—she must have been—and she wanted to get away. But she needed money. She had tried to get it from Almore, and that sent Degarmo up here looking for her. That scared her a little. Degarmo is the sort of fellow you are never quite sure of. She was right not to be sure of him, wasn’t she, Degarmo?”

Degarmo moved his foot on the ground. “The sands are running against you, fellow,” he said grimly. “Speak your little piece while you can.”

“Mildred didn’t positively have to have Crystal Kingsley’s car and clothes and credentials and what not, but they helped. What money she had must have helped a great deal, and Kingsley says she liked to have a good deal of money with her. Also she must have had jewelry which could eventually be turned into money. All this made killing her a rational as well as an agreeable thing to do. That disposes of motive, and we come to means and opportunity.

“The opportunity was made to order for her. She had quarreled with Bill and he had gone off to get drunk. She knew her Bill and how drunk he could get and how long he would stay away. She needed time. Time was of the essence. She had to assume that there was time. Otherwise the whole thing flopped. She had to pack her own clothes and take them in her car to Coon Lake and hide them there, because they had to be gone. She had to walk back. She had to murder Crystal Kingsley and dress her in Muriel’s clothes and get her down in the lake. All that took time. As to the murder itself, I imagine she got her drunk or knocked her on the head and drowned her in the bathtub in this cabin. That would be logical and simple too. She was a nurse, she knew how to handle things like bodies. She knew how to swim—we have it from Bill that she was a fine swimmer. And a drowned body will sink. All she had to do was guide it down into the deep water where she wanted it. There is nothing in all this beyond the powers of one woman who could swim. She did it, she dressed in Crystal Kingsley’s clothes, packed what else of hers she wanted, got into Crystal Kingsley’s car and departed. And at San Bernardino she ran into her first snag, Lavery.”

“Lavery knew her as Muriel Chess. We have no evidence and no reason whatever to assume that he knew her as anything else. He had seen her up here and he was probably on his way up here again when he met her. She wouldn’t want that. All he would find would be a locked-up cabin but he might get talking to Bill and it was part of her plan that Bill should not know positively that she had ever left Little Fawn Lake. So that when, and if, the body was found, he would identify it. So she put her hooks into Lavery at once, and that wouldn’t be too hard. If there is one thing we know for certain about Lavery, it is that he couldn’t keep his hands off the women. The more of them, the better. He would be easy for a smart girl like Mildred Haviland. So she played him and took him away with her. She took him to El Paso and there sent a wire he knew nothing about. Finally she played him back to Bay City. She probably couldn’t help that. He wanted to go home and she couldn’t let him get too far from her. Because Lavery was dangerous to her. Lavery alone could destroy all the indications that Crystal Kingsley had actually left Little Fawn Lake. When the search for Crystal Kingsley eventually began, it had to come to Lavery, and at that moment Lavery’s life wasn’t worth a plugged nickel. His first denials might not be believed, as they were not, but when he opened up with the whole story, that would be believed, because it could be checked. So the search began and immediately Lavery was shot dead in his bathroom, the very night after I went down to talk to him. That’s about all there is to it, except why she went back to the house the next morning. That’s just one of those things that murderers seem to do. She said he had taken her money, but I don’t believe it. I think more likely she got to thinking he had some of his own hidden away, or that she had better edit the job with a cool head and make sure it was all in order and pointing the right way; or perhaps it was just what she said, and to take in the paper and the milk. Anything is possible. She went back and I found her there and she put on an act that left me with both feet in my mouth.”

Patton said: “Who killed her, son? I gather you don’t like Kingsley for that little job.”

I looked at Kingsley and said: “You didn’t talk to her on the phone, you said. What about Miss Fromsett? Did she think she was talking to your wife?”

Kingsley shook his head. “I doubt it. It would be pretty hard to fool her that way. All she said was that she seemed very changed and subdued. I had no suspicion then. I didn’t have any until I got up here. When I walked into this cabin last night, I felt there was something wrong. It was too clean and neat and orderly. Crystal didn’t leave things that way. There would have been clothes all over the bedroom, cigarette stubs all over the house, bottles and glasses all over the kitchen. There would have been unwashed dishes and ants and flies. I thought Bill’s wife might have cleaned up, and then I remembered that Bill’s wife wouldn’t have, not on that particular day. She had been too busy quarreling with Bill and being murdered, or committing suicide, whichever it was. I thought about all this in a confused sort of way, but I don’t claim I actually made anything of it.”

Patton got up from his chair and went out on the porch. He came back wiping his lips with his tan handkerchief. He sat down again, and eased himself over on his left hip, on account of the hip holster on the other side. He looked thoughtfully at Degarmo. Degarmo stood against the wall, hard and rigid, a stone man. His right hand still hung down at his side, with the fingers curled.

Patton said: “I still ain’t heard who killed Muriel. Is that part of the show or is that something that still has to be worked out?”

I said: “Somebody who thought she needed killing, somebody who had loved her and hated her, somebody who was too much of a cop to let her get away with any more murders, but not enough of a cop to pull her in and let the whole story come out. Somebody like Degarmo.”