“Yes. Why not?”
“What did you do then?”
“I went to Santa Barbara and stayed there a few days. Over a week in fact. Then to Pasadena. Same thing. Then to Hollywood. Then I came down here. That’s all.”
“You were alone all this time?”
She hesitated a little and then said: “Yes.”
“Not with Lavery—any part of it?”
“Not after he went home.”
“What was the idea?”
“Idea of what?” Her voice was a little sharp.
“Idea of going to these places and not sending any word. Didn’t you know he would be very anxious?”
“Oh, you mean my husband,” she said coolly. “I don’t think I worried much about him. He’d think I was in Mexico, wouldn’t he? As for the idea of it all—well, I just had to think things out. My life had got to be a hopeless tangle. I had to be somewhere quite alone and try to straighten myself out.”
“Before that,” I said, “you spent a month at Little Fawn Lake trying to straighten it out and not getting anywhere. Is that it?”
She looked down at her shoes and then up at me and nodded earnestly. The wavy brown hair surged forward along her cheeks. She put her left hand up and pushed it back and then rubbed her temple with one finger.
“I seemed to need a new place,” she said. “Not necessarily an interesting place. Just a strange place. Without associations. A place where I would be very much alone. Like a hotel.”
“How are you getting on with it?”
“Not very well. But I’m not going back to Derace Kingsley. Does he want me to?”
“I don’t know. But why did you come down here, to the town where Lavery was?”
She bit a knuckle and looked at me over her hand.
“I wanted to see him again. He’s all mixed up in my mind. I’m not in love with him, and yet—well, I suppose in a way I am. But I don’t think I want to marry him. Does that make sense?”
“That part of it makes sense. But staying away from home in a lot of crummy hotels doesn’t. You’ve lived your own life for years, as I understand it.”
“I had to be alone, to—to think things out,” she said a little desperately and bit the knuckle again, hard. “Won’t you please give me the money and go away?”
“Sure. Right away. But wasn’t there any other reason for your going away from Little Fawn Lake just then? Anything connected with Muriel Chess, for instance?”
She looked surprised. But anyone can look surprised. “Good heavens, what would there be? That frozen-faced little drip—what is she to me?”
“I thought you might have had a fight with her—about Bill.”
“Bill? Bifi Chess?” She seemed even more surprised. Almost too surprised.
“Bill claims you made a pass at him.”
She put her head back and let out a tinny and unreal laugh. “Good heavens, that muddy-faced boozer?” Her face sobered suddenly. “What’s happened? Why all the mystery?”
“He might be a muddy-faced boozer,” I said. “The police think he’s a murderer too. Of his wife. She’s been found drowned in the lake. After a month.”
She moistened her lips and held her head on one side, staring at me fixedly. There was a quiet little silence. The damp breath of the Pacific slid into the room around us.
“I’m not too surprised,” she said slowly. “So it came to that in the end. They fought terribly at times. Do you think that had something to do with my leaving?”
I nodded. “There was a chance of it.”
“It. didn’t have anything to do with it at all,” she said seriously, and shook her head back and forth. “It was just the way I told you. Nothing else.”
“Muriel’s dead,” I said. “Drowned in the lake. You don’t get much of a boot out of that, do you?”
“I hardly knew the girl,” she said. “Really. She kept to herself.. After all—”
“I don’t suppose you knew she had once worked in Dr. Almore’s office?”
She looked completely puzzled now. “I was never in Dr. Almore’s office,” she said slowly. “He made a few house calls a long time ago. I—what are you talking about?”
“Muriel Chess was really a girl called Mildred Haviland, who had been Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”
“That’s a queer coincidence,” she said wonderingly. “I knew Bill met her in Riverside. I didn’t know how or under what circumstances or where she came from. Dr. Almore’s office, eh? It doesn’t have to mean anything, does it?”
I said. “No. I guess it’s a genuine coincidence. They do happen. But you see why I had to talk to you. Muriel being found drowned and you having gone away and Muriel being Mildred Haviland who was connected with Dr. Almore at one time—as Lavery was also, in a different way. And of course Lavery lives across the street from Dr. Almore. Did he, Lavery, seem to know Muriel from somewhere else?”
She thought about it, biting her lower lip gently. “He saw her up there,” she said finally. “He didn’t act as if he had ever seen her before.”
“And he would have,” I said. “Being the kind of guy he was.”
“I don’t think Chris had anything to do with Dr. Almore,” she said. “He knew Dr. Almore’s wife. I don’t think he knew the doctor at all. So he probably wouldn’t know Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”
“Well, I guess there’s nothing in all this to help me,” I said. “But you can see why I had to talk to you. I guess I can give you the money now.”
I got the envelope out and stood up to drop it on her knee. She let it lie there. I sat down again.
“You do this character very well,” I said. “This confused innocence with an undertone of hardness and bitterness. People have made a bad mistake about you. They have been thinking of you as a reckless little idiot with no brains and no control. They have been very wrong.”
She stared at me, lifting her eyebrows. She said nothing. Then a small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. She reached for the envelope, tapped it on her knee, and laid it aside on the table. She stared at me all the time.
“You did the Fallbrook character very well too,” I said. “Looking back on it, I think it was a shade overdone. But at the time it had me going all right. That purple hat that would have been all right on blond hair but looked like hell on straggly brown, that messed-up makeup that looked as if it had been put on in the dark by somebody with a sprained wrist, the jittery screwball manner. All very good. And when you put the gun in my hand like that—I fell like a brick.”
She snickered and put her hands in the deep pockets of her coat. Her heels tapped on the floor.
“But why did you go back at all?” I asked. “Why take such a risk in broad daylight, in the middle of the morning?”
“So you think I shot Chris Lavery?” she said quietly.
“I don’t think it. I know it.”
“Why did I go back? Is that what you want to know?”
“I don’t really care,” I said.
She laughed. A sharp cold laugh. “He had all my money,” she said. “He had stripped my purse. He had it all, even silver. That’s why I went back. There wasn’t any risk at all. I know how he lived. It was really safer to go back. To take in the milk and newspaper for instance. People lose their heads in these situations. I don’t, I didn’t see why I should. It’s so very much safer not to.”
“I see,” I said. “Then of course you shot him the night before. I ought to have thought of that, not that it matters. He had been shaving. But guys with dark beards and lady friends sometimes shave the last thing at night, don’t they?”
“It has been heard of,” she said almost gaily. “And just what are you going to do about it?”
“You’re a cold-blooded little bitch if I ever saw one,” I said. “Do about it? Turn you over to the police naturally. It will be a pleasure.”
“I don’t think so.” She threw the words out, almost with a lilt. “You wondered why I gave you the empty gun. Why not? I had another one in my bag. Like this.”
Her right hand came up from her coat pocket and she pointed it at me.
I grinned. It may not have been the heartiest grin in the world, but it was a grin.
“I’ve never liked this scene,” I said. “Detective confronts murderer. Murderer produces gun, points same at detective. Murderer tells detective the whole sad story, with the idea of shooting him at the end of it. Thus wasting a lot of valuable time, even if in the end murderer did shoot detective. Only murderer never does. Something always happens to prevent it. The gods don’t like this scene either. They always manage to spoil it.”
“But this time,” she said softly and got up and moved towards me softly across the carpet, “suppose we make it a little different. Suppose I don’t tell you anything and nothing happens and I do shoot you?”
“I stifi wouldn’t like the scene,” I said.
“You don’t seem to be afraid,” she said, and slowly licked her lips coming towards me very gently without any sound of footfalls on the carpet.
“I’m not afraid,” I lied. “It’s too late at night, too still, and the window is open and the gun would make too much noise. It’s too long a journey down to the street and you’re not good with guns. You would probably miss me. You missed Lavery three times.”
“Stand up,” she said.
I stood up.
“I’m going to be too close to miss,” she said. She pushed the gun against my chest. “Like this. I really can’t miss now, can I? Now be very still. Hold your hands up by your shoulders and then don’t move at all. If you move at all, the gun will go off.”
I put my hands up beside my shoulders, I looked down at the gun. My tongue felt a little thick, but I could still wave it.
Her probing left hand didn’t find a gun on me. It dropped and she bit her lip, staring at me. The gun bored into my chest. “You’ll have to turn around now,” she said, polite as a tailor at a fitting.
“There’s something a little off key about everything you do,” I said. “You’re definitely not good with guns. You’re much too close to me, and I hate to bring this up—but there’s that old business of the safety catch not being off. You’ve overlooked that too.”
So she started to do two things at once. To take a long step backwards and to feel with her thumb for the safety catch, without taking her eyes off my face. Two very simple things, needing only a second to do. But she didn’t like my telling her. She didn’t like my thought riding over hers. The minute confusion of it jarred her.
She let out a small choked sound and I dropped my right hand and yanked her face hard against my chest. My left hand smashed down on her right wrist, the heel of my hand against the base of her thumb. The gun jerked out of her hand to the floor. Her face writhed against my chest and I think she was trying to scream.
Then she tried to kick me and lost what little balance she had left. Her hands came up to claw at me. I caught her wrist and began to twist it behind her back. She was very strong, but I was very much stronger. So she decided to go limp and let her whole weight sag against the hand that was holding her head. I couldn’t hold her up with one hand. She started to go down and I had to bend down with her.
There were vague sounds of our scuffling on the floor by the davenport, and hard breathing, and if a floor board creaked I didn’t hear it. I thought a curtain ring checked sharply on a rod. I wasn’t sure and I had no time to consider the question. A figure loomed up suddenly on my left, just behind, and out of range of clear vision. I knew there was a man there and that he was a big man.
That was all I knew. The scene exploded into fire and darkness. I didn’t even remember being slugged. Fire and darkness and just before the darkness a sharp flash of nausea.
32
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 overflowing. Her eyes bulged and the whites of them were not white.