“What would I want to shoot him for?” he almost bleated, squeezing both kneecaps hard. “I’m a civilized man.”
That didn’t seem to be worth an argument either. I said: “Does your wife own a gun?”
He turned a drawn miserable face to me and said hollowly: “Good God, man, you can’t really think that!”
“Well does she?”
He got the words out in small gritty pieces. “Yes—she does. A small automatic.”
“You buy it locally?”
“I—I didn’t buy it at all. I took it away from a drunk at a party in San Francisco a couple of years ago. He was waving it around, with an idea that that was very funny. I never gave it back to him.” He pinched his jaw hard until his knuckles whitened. “He probably doesn’t even remember how or when he lost it. He was that kind of a drunk.”
“This is working out almost too neatly,” I said. “Could you recognize this gun?”
He thought hard, pushing his jaw out and half closing his eyes. I looked back over the chairs again. One of the elderly snoozers had waked himself up with a snort that almost blew him out of his chair. He coughed, scratched his nose with a thin dried-up hand, and fumbled a gold watch out of his vest. He peered at it bleakly, put it away, and went to sleep again.
I reached in my pocket and put the gun on Kingsley’s hand. He stared down at it miserably.
“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’s like it, but I can’t tell.”
“There’s a serial number on the side,” I said.
“Nobody remembers the serial numbers of guns.”
“I was hoping you wouldn’t,” I said. “It would have worried me very much.”
His hand closed around the gun and he put it down beside him on the chair.
“The dirty rat,” he said softly. “I suppose he ditched her.”
“I don’t get it,” I said. “The motive was inadequate f or you, on account of you’re a civilized man. But it was adequate for her.”
“It’s not the same motive,” he snapped. “And women are more impetuous than men.”
“Like cats are more impetuous than dogs.”
“How?”
“Some women are more impetuous than some men. That’s all that means. We’ll have to have a better motive, if you want your wife to have done it.”
He turned his head enough to give me a level stare in which there was no amusement. White crescents were bitten into the corners of his mouth.
“This doesn’t seem to me a very good spot for the light touch”, he said. “We ‘can’t let the police have this gun. Crystal had a permit and the gun was registered. So they will know the number, even if I don’t. We can’t let them have it.”
“But Mrs. Fallbrook knows I had the gun.”
He shook his head stubbornly. “We’ll have to chance that. Yes, I know you’re taking a risk. I intend to make it worth your while. If the set-up were possible for suicide, I’d say put the gun back. But the way you tell it, it isn’t.”
“No. He’d have to have missed himself with the first three shots. But I can’t cover up a murder, even for a ten-dollar bonus. The gun will have to go back.”
“I was thinking of more money than that,” he said quietly. “I was thinking of five hundred dollars.”
“Just what did you expect to buy with it?”
He leaned close to me. His eyes were serious and bleak, but not hard. “Is there anything in Lavery’s place apart from the gun, that might indicate Crystal has bees there lately?”
“A black and white dress and a hat like the bellhop in Bernardino described on her. There may be a dozen things I don’t know about. There almost certainly will be fingerprints. You say she was never printed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get her prints to check. Her bedroom at home will be full of them. So will the cabin at Little Fawn Lake. And her car.”
“We ought to get the car—” he started to say. I stopped him.
“No use. Too many other places. What kind of perfume does she use?”
He looked blank for an instant. “Oh—Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes,” he said woodenly. “A Chanel number once in a while.”
“What’s this stuff of yours like?”
“A kind of chypre. Sandalwood chypre.”
“The bedroom reeks with it,” I said. “It smelled like cheap stuff to me. But I’m no judge.”
“Cheap?” he said, stung to the quick. “My God, cheap? We get thirty dollars an ounce for it.”
“Well, this stuff smelled more like three dollars a gallon.”
He put his hands down hard on his knees and shook his head. “I’m talking about money,” he said. “Five hundred dollars. A check for it right now.”
I let the remark fall to the ground, eddying like a soiled feather. One of the old boys behind us stumbled to his feet and groped his way wearily out of the room.
Kingsley said gravely: “I hired you to protect me from scandal, and of course to protect my wife, if she needed it. Through no fault of yours the chance to avoid scandal is pretty well shot. It’s a question of my wife’s neck now. I don’t believe she shot Lavery. I have no reason for that belief. None at all. I just feel the conviction. She may even have been there last night, this gun may even be her gun. It doesn’t prove she killed him. She would be as careless with the gun as with anything else. Anybody could have got hold of it.”
“The cops down there won’t work very hard to believe that,” I said. “If the one I met is a fair specimen, they’ll just pick the first head they see and start swinging with their blackjacks. And hers wifi certainly be the first head they see when they look the situation over.”
He ground the heels of his hands together. His misery had a theatrical flavor, as real misery so often has.
“I’ll go along with you up to a point,” I said. “The set-up down there is almost too good, at first sight. She leaves clothes there she has been seen wearing and which can probably be traced. She leaves the gun on the stairs. It’s hard to think she would be as dumb as that.”
“You give me a little heart,” Kingsley said wearily.
“But none of that means anything,” I said. “Because we are looking at it from the angle of calculation, and people who commit crimes of passion or hatred, just commit them and walk out. Everything I have heard indicates that she is a reckless foolish woman. There’s no sign of planning in any of the scene down there. There’s every sign of a complete lack of planning. But even if there wasn’t a thing down there to point to your wife, the cops would tie her up to L�very. They wifi investigate his background, his friends, his women. Her name is bound to crop up somewhere along the line, and when it does, the fact that she has been out of sight for a month will make them sit up and rub their horny palms with glee. And of course they’ll trace the gun, and if it’s her gun—”
His hand dived for’ the gun in the chair beside him.
“Nope,” I said. “They’ll have to have the gun. Marlowe may be a very smart guy and very fond of you personally, but he can’t risk the suppression of such vital evidence as the gun that killed a man. Whatever I do has to be on the basis that your wife is an obvious suspect, but that the obviousness can be wrong.”
He groaned and put his big hand out with the gun on it. I took it and put it away. Then I took it out again and said: “Lend me your handkerchief. I don’t want to use mine. I might be searched.”
He handed me a stiff white handkerchief and I wiped the gun off carefully all over and dropped it into my pocket. I handed him back the handkerchief.
“My prints are all right,” I said. “But I don’t want yours on it. Here’s the only thing I can do. Go back down there and replace the gun and call the law. Ride it out with them and let the chips fall where they have to. The story will have to come out. What I was doing down there and why. At the worst they’ll find her and prove she killed him. At the best they’ll find her a lot quicker than I can and let me use my energies proving she didn’t kill him, which means, in effect, proving that somebody else did. Are you game for that?”
He nodded slowly. He said: “Yes—and the five hundred stands. For showing Crystal didn’t kill him.”
“I don’t expect to earn it,” I said. “You may as well understand that now. How well did Miss Fromsett know Lavery? Out of office hours?”
His face tightened up like a charleyhorse. His fists went into hard lumps on his thighs. He said nothing.
“She looked kind of queer when I asked her for his address yesterday morning,” I said.
He let a breath out slowly.
“Like a bad taste in the mouth,” I said. “Like a ro.mance that fouled out. Am I too blunt?”
His nostrils quivered a little and his breath made noise in them for a moment. Then he relaxed and said quietly:
“She—she knew him rather well—at one time. She’s a girl who would do about what she pleased in that way. Lavery was, I guess, a fascinating bird—to women.”
“I’ll have to talk to her,” I said.
“Why?” he asked shortly. Red patches showed in his cheeks.
“Never mind why. It’s my business to ask all sorts of questions of all sorts of people.”
“Talk to her then,” he said tightly. “As’ a matter of fact she knew the Almores. She knew Almore’s wife, the one who killed herself. Lavery knew her too. Could that have any possible connection with this business?”
“I don’t know. You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”
“I’d marry her tomorrow, if I could” he said stiffly.
I nodded and stood up. I looked back along the room. It was almost empty now. At the far end a couple of elderly relics were still blowing bubbles. The rest of the soft chair boys had staggered back to whatever it was they did when they were conscious.
“There’s just one thing,” I said, looking down at Kingsley. “Cops’ get very hostile when there is a delay in calling them after a murder. There’s been delay this time and there will be more. I’d like to go down there as if it was the first visit today. I think I can make it that way, if I leave the Fallbrook womamout.”
“Fallbrook?” He hardly knew what I was talking about. “Who the hell—oh yes, I remember.”
“Well, don’t remember. I’m almost certain they’ll never hear a peep from her. She’s not the kind to have anything to do with the police of her own free wifi.”
“I understand,” he said.
“Be sure you handle it right then. Questions will be asked you before you are told Lavery is dead, before I’m allowed to get in touch with you—so far as they know. Don’t fall into any traps. If you do, I won’t be able to find anything out. I’ll be in the’ clink.”
“You could call me from the house down there—before you call the police,” he said reasonably.
“I know. But the fact that I don’t will be in my favor. And they’ll check the phone calls one of the first things they do. And if I call you from anywhere else, I might just as well admit that I came up here to see you.”
“I understand,” he said again. “You can trust me to handle it.”
We shook hands and I left him standing there.
18
The Athletic Club was on a corner across the street and half a block down from the Treloar Building. I crossed and walked north to the entrance. They had finished laying rose-colored concrete where the rubber sidewalk had been. It was fenced around, leaving a narrow gangway in and out of the building. The space was clotted with office help going in from lunch.
The Gifierlain Company’s reception room looked even emptier than the day before. The same fluffy little blonde was tucked in behind the PBX in the corner. She gave me a quick smile and I gave her the gunman’s salute, a stiff forefinger pointing at her, the three lower fingers tucked back under it, and the thumb wiggling up and down like a western gun fighter fanning his hammer. She laughed heartily, without making a sound. This was more fun than she had had in a week.
I pointed to Miss Fromsett’s empty desk and the little blonde nodded and pushed a plug in and spoke. A door opened and Miss Fromsett swayed elegantly out to her desk and sat down and gave me her cool expectant eyes.
“Yes, Mr. Marlowe? Mr. Kingsley is not in, I’m afraid.”
“I just came from him. Where do we talk?”