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 teli 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?”
“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 builtin 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 this 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.”
“Unless he puts a lug in his head,” Degarmo said coldly. “Guys like him are very apt to do that.”
“You can’t stop him until you find him.”
“That’s right.”
We went back into the living room. Miss Fromsett poked her head out of her kitchenette and said she was making coffee, and did we want any. We had some coffee and sat around looking like people seeing friends off at the railroad station.
The call from Patton came through in about twenty-five minutes. There was light in the Kingsley cabin and a car was parked beside it.
36
We ate some breakfast at Aihambra and I had the tank filled. We drove out Highway 70 and started moving past the trucks into the roffing ranch country. I was driving. Degarmo sat moodily in the corner, his hands deep in his pockets.
I watched the fat straight rows of orange trees spin by like the spokes of a wheel. I listened to the whine of the tires on the pavement and I felt tired and stale from lack of sleep and too much emotion.
We reached the long slope south of San Dimas that goes up to a ridge and drops down into Pomona. This is the ultimate end of the fog belt, and the beginning of that semi-desert region where the sun is as light and dry as old sherry in the morning, as hot as a blast furnace at noon, and drops like an angry brick at nightfall.
Degarmo stuck a match in the corner of his mouth and said almost sneeringly:
“Webber gave me hell last night. He said he was talking to you and what about.”
I said nothing. He looked at me and looked away again. He waved a hand outwards. “I wouldn’t live in this damn country if they gave it to me. The air’s stale before it gets up in the morning.”
“We’ll be coming to Ontario in a minute. We’ll switch over to Foothifi Boulevard and you’ll see five miles of the finest grevillea trees in the world.”
“I wouldn’t know one from a fire plug,” Degarmo said.
We came to the center of town and turned north on Euclid, along the splendid parkway. Degarmo sneered at the grevillea trees.
After a while he said: “That was my girl that drowned in the lake up there. I haven’t been right in the head since I heard about it. All I can see is red. If I could get my hands on that guy Chess—”
“You made enough trouble,” I said, “letting her get away with murdering Almore’s wife.”
I stared straight ahead through the windshield. I knew his head moved and his eyes froze on me. I didn’t know what his hands were doing. I didn’t know what expression was on his face. After a long time his words came. They came through tight teeth and edgeways, and they scraped a little as they came out.
“You a little crazy or something?”
“No,” I said. “Neither are you. You know as well as anybody could know anything that Florence Almore didn’t get up out of bed and walk down to that garage. You know she was carried. You know that was why Talley stole her slipper, the slipper that had never walked on a concrete path. You knew that Almore gave his wife a shot in the arm at Condy’s place and that it was just enough and not any too much. He knew his shots in the arm the way you know how to rough up a bum that hasn’t any money or any place to sleep. You know that Almore didn’t murder his wife with morphine and that if he wanted to murder her, morphine would be the last thing in the world he would use. But you know that somebody else did, and that Almore carried her down to the garage and put her there—technically still alive to breathe in some monoxide, but medically just as dead as though she had stopped breathing. You know all that.”
Degarmo said softly: “Brother, how did you ever manage to live so long?”
I said: “By not falling for too many gags and not getting too much afraid of professional hard guys. Only a heel would have done what Almore did, only a heel and a badly scared man who had things on his soul that wouldn’t stand daylight. Technically he may even have been guilty of murder. I don’t think the point has ever been settled. Certainly he would have a hell of a time proving that she was in such a deep coma that she was beyond any possibility of help. But as a practical matter of who killed her, you know the girl killed her.”
Degarmo laughed. It was a grating unpleasant laugh, not only mirthless, but meaningless.
We reached Foothill Boulevard and turned east again. I thought it was still cool, but Degarmo was sweating. He couldn’t take his coat off because of the gun under his arm.
I said: “The girl, Mildred Haviland, was playing house with Almore and his wife knew it. She had threatened him. I got that from her parents. The girl, Mildred Haviland, knew all about morphine and where to get all of it she needed and how much to use. She was alone in the house with Florence Almore, after she put her to bed. She was in a perfect spot to load a needle with four or five grains and shoot it into an unconscious woman through the same puncture Almore had already made. She would die, perhaps while Almore was still out of the house, and he would come home and find her dead. The problem would be his. He would have to solve it. Nobody would believe anybody else had doped his wife to death. Nobody that didn’t know all the circumstances. But you knew. I’d have to think you much more of a damn fool than I think you are to believe you didn’t know. You covered the girl up. You were in love with her still. You scared her out of town, out of danger, out of reach, but you covered up for her. You let the murder ride. She had you that way. Why did you go up to the mountains looking for her?”
“And how did I know where to look?” he said harshly. “It wouldn’t bother you to add an explanation of that, would it?”
“Not at all,” I said. “She got sick of Bill Chess and his boozing and his tempers and his down-at-heels living. But she had to have money to make a break. She thought she was safe now, that she had something on Almore that was safe to use. So she wrote him for money. He sent you up to talk to her. She didn’t tell Almore what her present name was or any details or where or how she was living. A letter addressed to Mildred Haviland at Puma Point would reach her. All she had to do was ask for it. But no letter came and nobody connected her with Mildred Haviland. All you had was an old photo and your usual bad manners, and they didn’t get you anywhere with those people.”
Degarmo said gratingly: “Who told you she tried to get money from Almore?”
“Nobody. I had to think of something to fit what happened. If Lavery or Mrs. Kingsley had known who Muriel Chess had been, and had tipped it off, you would have known where to find her and what name she was using. You didn’t know those things. Therefore the lead had to come from the only person up there who knew who she was, and that was herself. So I assume she wrote to Almore.”
“Okay,” he said at last. “Let’s forget it. It doesn’t make any difference any more now. If I’m in a jam, that’s my business. I’d do it again, in the same circumstances.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not planning to put the bite on anybody myself. Not even on you. I’m telling you this mostly so you won’t try to hang any murders on Kingsley that don’t belong on him. If there is one that does, let it hang.”
“Is that why you’re telling me?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I thought maybe it was because you hated my guts,” he said.
“I’m all done with hating you,” I said. “It’s all washed out of me. I hate-people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.”
We were going through the grape country now, the open sandy grape country along the scarred flanks of the foothills. We came in a little while to San Bernardino and kept on through it without stopping.