The Lady in the Lake (5 page)

EIGHT

He stopped in front of a white frame building across the road from the stage depot. He went into the white building and presently came out with a man who got into the back seat with the axes and the rope. The official car came back up the street and I fell in behind it. We sifted along the main stem through the slacks and shorts and French sailor jerseys and knotted bandannas and knobby knees and scarlet lips. Beyond the village we went up a dusty hill and stopped at a cabin. Patton touched the siren gently and a man in faded blue overalls opened the cabin door.

“Get in, Andy. Business.”

The man in blue overalls nodded morosely and ducked back into the cabin. He came back out wearing an oystergray lion hunter’s hat and got in under the wheel of Patton’s car while Patton slid over. He was about thirty, dark, lithe, and had the slightly dirty and slightly underfed look of the native.

We drove out to Little Fawn Lake with me eating enough dust to make a batch of mud pies. At the fivebarred gate Patton got out and let us through and we went on down to the lake. Patton got out again and went to the edge of the water and looked along towards the little pier. Bill Chess was sitting naked on the floor of the pier, with his head in his hands. There was something stretched out on the wet planks beside him.

“We can ride a ways more,” Patton said.

The two cars went on to the end of the lake and all four of us trooped down to the pier from behind Bill Chess’s back. The doctor stopped to cough rackingly into a handkerchief and then look thoughtfully at the handkerchief. He was an angular bug-eyed man with a sad sick face.

The thing that had been a woman lay face down on the boards with a rope under the arms. Bill Chess’s clothes lay to one side. His stiff leg, flat and scarred at the knee, was stretched out in front of him, the other leg bent up and his forehead resting against it. He didn’t move or look up as we came down behind him.

Patton took the pint bottle of Mount Vernon off his hip and unscrewed the top and handed it.

“Drink hearty, Bill.”

There was a horrible, sickening smell in the air. Bill Chess didn’t seem to notice it, nor Patton nor the doctor. The man called Andy got a dusty brown blanket out of the car and threw it over the body. Then without a word he went and vomited under a pine tree.

Bill Chess drank a long drink and sat holding the bottle against his bare bent knee. He began to talk in a stiff wooden voice, not looking at anybody, not talking to anybody in particular. He told about the quarrel and what happened after it, but not why it had happened. He didn’t mention Mrs. Kingsley even in the most casual way. He said that after I left him he had got a rope and stripped and gone down into the water and got the thing out. He had dragged it ashore and then got it up on his back and carried it out on the pier. He didn’t know why. He had gone back into the water again then. He didn’t have to tell us why.

Patton put a cut of tobacco into his mouth and chewed on it silently, his calm eyes full of nothing. Then he shut his teeth tight and leaned down to pull the blanket off the body. He turned the body over carefully, as if it might come to pieces. The late afternoon sun winked on the necklace of large green stones that were partly imbedded in the swollen neck. They were roughly carved and lustreless, like soapstone or false jade. A gilt chain with an eagle clasp set with small brilliants joined the ends. Patton straightened his broad back and blew his nose on a tan handkerchief.

“What you say, Doc?”

“About what?” the bug-eyed man snarled.

“Cause and time of death.”

“Don’t be a damn fool, Jim Patton.”

“Can’t tell nothing, huh?”

“By looking at that? Good God!”

Patton sighed. “Looks drowned all right,” he admitted. “But you can’t always tell. There’s been cases where a victim would be knifed or poisoned or something, and they would soak him in the water to make things look different.”

“You get many like that up here?” the doctor enquired nastily.

“Only honest to God murder I ever had up here,” Patton said, watching Bill Chess out of the corner of his eye, “was old Dad Meacham over on the north shore. He had a shack in Sheedy Canyon, did a little panning in summer on an old placer claim he had back in the valley near Belltop. Folks didn’t see him around for a while in late fall, then come a heavy snow and his roof caved in to one side. So we was over there trying to prop her up a bit, figuring Dad had gone down the hill for the winter without telling anybody, the way them old prospectors do things. Well by gum, old Dad never went down the hill at all. There he was in bed with most of a kindling axe in the back of his head. We never did find out who done it. Somebody figured he had a little bag of gold hid away from the summer’s panning.”

He looked thoughtfully at Andy. The man in the lion hunter’s hat was feeling a tooth in his mouth. He said:

“ ’Course we know who done it. Guy Pope done it. Only Guy was dead nine days of pneumonia before we found Dad Meacham.”

“Eleven days,” Patton said.

“Nine,” the man in the lion hunter’s hat said.

“Was all of six years ago, Andy. Have it your own way, son. How you figure Guy Pope done it?”

“We found about three ounces of small nuggets in Guy’s cabin along with some dust. Never was anything bigger’n sand on Guy’s claim. Dad had nuggets all of a pennyweight, plenty of times.”

“Well, that’s the way it goes,” Patton said, and smiled at me in a vague manner. “Fellow always forgets something, don’t he? No matter how careful he is.”

“Cop stuff,” Bill Chess said disgustedly and put his pants on and sat down again to put on his shoes and shirt. When he had them on he stood up and reached down for the bottle and took a good drink and laid the bottle carefully on the planks. He thrust his hairy wrists out towards Patton.

“That’s the way you guys feel about it, put the cuffs on and get it over,” he said in a savage voice.

Patton ignored him and went over to the railing and looked down. “Funny place for a body to be,” he said. “No current here to mention, but what there is would be towards the dam.”

Bill Chess lowered his wrists and said quietly: “She did it herself, you darn fool. Muriel was a fine swimmer. She dived down in and swum under the boards there and just breathed water in. Had to. No other way.”

“I wouldn’t quite say that, Bill,” Patton answered him mildly. His eyes were as blank as new plates.

Andy shook his head. Patton looked at him with a sly grin. “Crabbin’ again, Andy?”

“Was nine days, I tell you. I just counted back,” the man in the lion hunter’s hat said morosely.

The doctor threw his arms up and walked away, with one hand to his head. He coughed into his handkerchief again and again looked into the handkerchief with passionate attention.

Patton winked at me and spat over the railing. “Let’s get on to this one, Andy.”

“You ever try to drag a body six feet under water?”

“Nope, can’t say I ever did, Andy. Any reason it couldn’t be done with a rope?”

Andy shrugged. “If a rope was used, it will show on the corpse. If you got to give yourself away like that, why bother to cover up at all?”

“Question of time,” Patton said. “Fellow has his arrangements to make.”

Bill Chess snarled at them and reached down for the whiskey. Looking at their solemn mountain faces I couldn’t tell what they were really thinking.

Patton said absently: “Something was said about a note.”

Bill Chess rummaged in his wallet and drew the folded piece of ruled paper loose. Patton took it and read it slowly.

“Don’t seem to have any date,” he observed.

Bill Chess shook his head somberly. “No. She left a month ago, June 12th.”

“Left you once before, didn’t she?”

“Yeah.” Bill Chess stared at him fixedly. “I got drunk and stayed with a chippy. Just before the first snow last December. She was gone a week and came back all prettied up. Said she just had to get away for a while and had been staying with a girl she used to work with in L.A.”

“What was the name of this party?” Patton asked.

“Never told me and I never asked her. What Muriel did was all silk with me.”

“Sure. Note left that time, Bill?” Patton asked smoothly.

“No.”

“This note here looks middling old,” Patton said, holding it up.

“I carried it a month,” Bill Chess growled. “Who told you she left me before?”

“I forget,” Patton said. “You know how it is in a place like this. Not much folks don’t notice. Except maybe in summertime where there’s a lot of strangers about.”

Nobody said anything for a while and then Patton said absently: “June 12th you say she left? Or you thought she left? Did you say the folks across the lake were up here then?”

Bill Chess looked at me and his face darkened again. “Ask this snoopy guy—if he didn’t already spill his guts to you.”

Patton didn’t look at me at all. He looked at the line of mountains far beyond the lake. He said gently: “Mr. Marlowe here didn’t tell me anything at all, Bill, except how the body come up out of the water and who it was. And that Muriel went away, as you thought, and left a note you showed him. I don’t guess there’s anything wrong in that, is there?”

There was another silence and Bill Chess stared down at the blanket-covered corpse a few feet away from him. He clenched his hands and a thick tear ran down his cheek.

“Mrs. Kingsley was here,” he said. “She went down the hill that same day. Nobody was in the other cabins. Perrys and Farquars ain’t been up at all this year.”

Patton nodded and was silent. A kind of charged emptiness hung in the air, as if something that had not been said was plain to all of them and didn’t need saying.

Then Bill Chess said wildly: “Take me in, you sons of bitches! Sure I did it! I drowned her. She was my girl and I loved her. I’m a heel, always was a heel, always will be a heel, but just the same I loved her. Maybe you guys wouldn’t understand that. Just don’t bother to try. Take me in, damn you!”

Nobody said anything at all.

Bill Chess looked down at his hard brown fist. He swung it up viciously and hit himself in the face with all his strength.

“You rotten son of a bitch,” he breathed in a harsh whisper.

His nose began to bleed slowly. He stood and the blood ran down his lip, down the side of his mouth, to the point of his chin. A drop fell sluggishly to his shirt.

Patton said quietly: “Got to take you down the hill for questioning, Bill. You know that. We ain’t accusing you of anything, but the folks down there have got to talk to you.”

Bill Chess said heavily: “Can I change my clothes?”

“Sure. You go with him, Andy. And see what you can find to kind of wrap up what we got here.”

They went off along the path at the edge of the lake. The doctor cleared his throat and looked out over the water and sighed.

“You’ll want to send the corpse down in my ambulance, Jim, won’t you?”

Patton shook his head. “Nope. This is a poor county, Doc. I figure the lady can ride cheaper than what you get for that ambulance.”

The doctor walked away from him angrily, saying over his shoulder: “Let me know if you want me to pay for the funeral.”

“That ain’t no way to talk,” Patton sighed.

NINE

The Indian Head Hotel was a brown building on a corner across from the new dance hall. I parked in front of it and used its rest room to wash my face and hands and comb the pine needles out of my hair, before I went into the dining-drinking parlor that adjoined the lobby. The whole place was full to overflowing with males in leisure jackets and liquor breaths and females in high-pitched laughs, oxblood fingernails and dirty knuckles. The manager of the joint, a low-budget tough guy in shirt-sleeves and a mangled cigar, was prowling the room with watchful eyes. At the cash desk a pale-haired man was fighting to get the war news on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potatoes were full of water. In the deep back corner of the room, a hillbilly orchestra of five pieces, dressed in ill-fitting white jackets and purple shirts, was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar and smiling glassily into the fog of cigarette smoke and the blur of alcoholic voices. At Puma Point, summer, that lovely season, was in full swing.

I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on its chest and hold it down, and went out on to the main street. It was still broad daylight but some of the neon signs had been turned on, and the evening reeled with the cheerful din of auto horns, children screaming, bowls rattling, skeeballs clunking, .22’s snapping merrily in shooting galleries, juke boxes playing like crazy, and behind all this out on the lake the hard barking roar of the speedboats going nowhere at all and acting as though they were racing with death.

In my Chrysler a thin, serious-looking, brown-haired girl in dark slacks was sitting smoking a cigarette and talking to a dude ranch cowboy who sat on my running board. I walked around the car and got into it. The cowboy strolled away hitching his jeans up. The girl didn’t move.

“I’m Birdie Keppel,” she said cheerfully, “I’m the beautician here daytimes and evenings I work on the Puma Point
Banner.
Excuse me sitting in your car.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “You want to just sit or you want me to drive you somewhere?”

“You can drive down the road a piece where it’s quieter, Mr. Marlowe. If you’re obliging enough to talk to me.”

“Pretty good grapevine you’ve got up here,” I said and started the car.

I drove down past the post office to a corner where a blue and white arrow marked
Telephone
pointed down a narrow road towards the lake. I turned down that, drove past the telephone office, which was a log cabin with a tiny railed lawn in front of it, passed another small cabin and pulled up in front of a huge oak tree that flung its branches all the way across the road and a good fifty feet beyond it.

“This do, Miss Keppel?”

“Mrs. But just call me Birdie. Everybody does. This is fine. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlowe. I see you come from Hollywood, that sinful city.”

She put a firm brown hand out and I shook it. Clamping bobbie pins into fat blondes had given her a grip like a pair of iceman’s tongs.

“I was talking to Doc Hollis,” she said, “about poor Muriel Chess. I thought you could give me some details. I understand you found the body.”

“Bill Chess found it really. I was just with him. You talk to Jim Patton?”

“Not yet. He went down the hill. Anyway I don’t think Jim would tell me much.”

“He’s up for re-election,” I said. “And you’re a newspaper woman.”

“Jim’s no politician, Mr. Marlowe, and I could hardly call myself a newspaper woman. This little paper we get out up here is a pretty amateurish proposition.”

“Well, what do you want to know?” I offered her a cigarette and lit it for her.

“You might just tell me the story.”

“I came up here with a letter from Derace Kingsley to look at his property. Bill Chess showed me around, got talking to me, told me his wife had moved out on him and showed me the note she left. I had a bottle along and he punished it. He was feeling pretty blue. The liquor loosened him up, but he was lonely and aching to talk anyway. That’s how it happened. I didn’t know him. Coming back around the end of the lake we went out on the pier and Bill spotted an arm waving out from under the planking down in the water. It turned out to belong to what was left of Muriel Chess. I guess that’s all.”

“I understand from Doc Hollis she had been in the water a long time. Pretty badly decomposed and all that.”

“Yes. Probably the whole month he thought she had been gone. There’s no reason to think otherwise. The note’s a suicide note.”

“Any doubt about that, Mr. Marlowe?”

I looked at her sideways. Thoughtful dark eyes looked out at me under fluffed-out brown hair. The dusk had begun to fall now, very slowly. It was no more than a slight change in the quality of the light.

“I guess the police always have doubts in these cases,” I said.

“How about you?”

“My opinion doesn’t go for anything.”

“But for what it’s worth?”

“I only met Bill Chess this afternoon,” I said. “He struck me as a quick-tempered lad and from his own account he’s no saint. But he seems to have been in love with his wife. And I can’t see him hanging around here for a month knowing she was rotting down in the water under that pier. Coming out of his cabin in the sunlight and looking along that soft blue water and seeing in his mind what was under it and what was happening to it. And knowing he put it there.”

“No more can I,” Birdie Keppel said softly. “No more could anybody. And yet we know in our minds that such things have happened and will happen again. Are you in the real estate business, Mr. Marlowe?”

“No.”

“What line of business are you in, if I may ask?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“That’s almost as good as saying,” she said. “Besides Doc Hollis heard you tell Jim Patton your full name. And we have an L.A. city directory in our office. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said.

“And what’s more, I won’t,” she said. “If you don’t want me to.”

“What does it cost me?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. I don’t claim to be a very good newspaper woman. And we wouldn’t print anything that would embarrass Jim Patton. Jim’s the salt of the earth. But it does open up, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t draw any wrong conclusions,” I said. “I had no interest in Bill Chess whatever.”

“No interest in Muriel Chess?”

“Why would I have any interest in Muriel Chess?”

She snuffed her cigarette out carefully into the ashtray under the dashboard. “Have it your own way,” she said. “But here’s a little item you might like to think about, if you don’t know it already. There was a Los Angeles copper named De Soto up here about six weeks back, a big roughneck with damn poor manners. We didn’t like him and we didn’t open up to him much. I mean the three of us in the Banner office didn’t. He had a photograph with him and he was looking for a woman called Mildred Haviland, he said. On police business. It was an ordinary photograph, an enlarged snapshot, not a police photo. He said he had information the woman was staying up here. The photo looked a good deal like Muriel Chess. The hair seemed to be reddish and in a very different style than she has worn it here, and the eyebrows were all plucked to narrow arches, and that changes a woman a good deal. But it did look a good deal like Bill Chess’s wife.”

I drummed on the door of the car and after a moment I said, “What did you tell him?”

“We didn’t tell him anything. First off, we couldn’t be sure. Second, we didn’t like his manner. Third, even if we had been sure and I had liked his manner, we likely would not have sicked him on to her. Why would we? Everybody’s done something to be sorry for. Take me. I was married once—to a professor of classical languages at Redlands University.” She laughed lightly.

“You might have got yourself a story,” I said.

“Sure. But up here we’re just people.”

“Did this man De Soto see Jim Patton?”

“Sure, he must have. Jim didn’t mention it.”

“Did he show you his badge?”

She thought and then shook her head. “I don’t recall that he did. We just took him for granted, from what he said. He certainly acted like a tough city cop.”

“To me that’s a little against his being one. Did anybody tell Muriel about this guy?”

She hesitated, looking quietly out through the windshield for a long moment before she turned her head and nodded.

“I did. Wasn’t any of my damn business, was it?”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She gave a funny little embarrassed laugh, as if I had been making a bad joke. Then she walked away. But I did get the impression that there was a queer look in her eyes, just for an instant. You still not interested in Muriel Chess, Mr. Marlowe?”

“Why should I be? I never heard of her until I came up here this afternoon. Honest. And I never heard of anybody named Mildred Haviland either. Drive you back to town?”

“Oh no, thanks. I’ll walk. It’s only a few steps. Much obliged to you. I kind of hope Bill doesn’t get into a jam. Especially a nasty jam like this.”

She got out of the car and hung on one foot, then tossed her head and laughed. “They say I’m a pretty good beauty operator,” she said. “I hope I am. As an interviewer I’m terrible. Goodnight.”

I said goodnight and she walked off into the evening. I sat there watching her until she reached the main street and turned out of sight. Then I got out of the Chrysler and went over towards the telephone company’s little rustic building.