At the far end of the lake from the dam was what looked like a small pier and a band pavilion. A warped wooden sign on it was painted in large white letters: Camp Kilkare. I couldn’t see any sense in that in these surroundings, so I got out of the car and started down towards the nearest cabin. Somewhere behind it an axe thudded.
I pounded on the cabin door. The axe stopped. A man’s voice yelled from somewhere. I sat down on a rock and lit a cigarette. Steps came around the corner of the cabin, uneven steps. A man with a harsh face and a swarthy skin came into view carrying a double-bitted axe.
He was heavily-built and not very tall and he limped as he walked, giving his right leg a little kick out with each step and swinging the foot in a shallow arc. He had a dark unshaven chin and steady blue eyes and grizzled hair that curled over his ears and needed cutting badly. He wore blue denim pants and a blue shirt open on a brown musuclar neck. A cigarette hung from the corner of his mouth. He spoke in a tight tough city voice.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Bill Chess?”
“That’s me.”
I stood up and got Kingsley’s note of introduction out of my pocket and handed it to him. He squinted at the note, then clumped into the cabin and came back with glasses perched on his nose. He read the note carefully and then again. He put it in his shirt pocket, buttoned the flap of his pocket, and put his hand out.
“Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlowe.”
We shook hands. He had a hand like a wood rasp.
“You want to see Kingsley’s cabin, huh? Glad to show you. He ain’t selling for Chrissake?” He eyed me steadily and jerked a thumb across the lake.
“He might,” I said. “Everything’s for sale in California.”
“Ain’t that the truth? That’s his—the redwood job. Lined with knotty pine, composition roof, stone foundations and porches, full bath and shower, venetian blinds all around, big fireplace, oil stove in the big bedroom— and brother, you need it in the spring and fall—Pilgrim combination gas and wood range, everything first class. Cost about eight thousand and that’s money for a mountain cabin. And private reservoir in the hills for water.” –
“How about electric light and telephone?” I asked, just to be friendly.
“Electric light, sure. No phone. You couldn’t get one now. If you could, it would cost plenty to string the lines out here.”
He looked at me with steady blue eyes and I looked at him. In spite of his weathered appearance he looked like a drinker. He had the thickened and glossy skin, the too noticeable veins, the bright glitter in the eyes.
I said: “Anybody living there now?”
“Nope. Mrs. Kingsley was here a few weeks back. She went down the hill. Back any day, I guess, Didn’t he say?”
I looked surprised. “Why? Does she go with the cabin?”
He scowled and then put his head back and burst out laughing. The roar of his laughter was like a tractor backfiring. It blasted the woodland silence to shreds.
“Jesus, if that ain’t a kick in the pants!” he gasped. “Does she go with the—” He put out another bellow and then his mouth shut tight as a trap.
“Yeah, it’s a swell cabin,” he said, eyeing me carefully.
“The beds comfortable?” I asked.
He leaned forward and smiled. “Maybe you’d like a face full of knuckles,” he said.
I stared at him with my mouth open. “That one went by me too fast,” I said, “I never laid an eye on it.”
“How would I know if the beds are comfortable?” he snarled, bending down a little so that he could reach me with a hard right, if it worked out that way.
“I don’t know why you wouldn’t know,” I said.. “I won’t press the point. I can find out for myself.”
“Yah,” he said bitterly, “think I can’t smell a dick when I meet one? I played hit and run with them in every state in the Union. Nuts to you, pal. And nuts to Kingsley. So he hires himself a dick to come up here and see am I wearing his pajamas, huh? Listen, Jack, I might have a stiff leg and all, but the women I could get—”
I put a hand out, hoping he wouldn’t pull it off and throw it in the lake.
“You’re slipping your clutch,” I told him. “I didn’t come up here to enquire into your love life. I never saw Mrs. Kingsley. I never saw Mr. Kingsley until this morning. What the hell’s the matter with you?”
He dropped his eyes and rubbed the back of his hand viciously across his mouth, as if he wanted to hurt himself. Then he held the hand in front of his eyes and squeezed it into a hard fist and opened it again and stared at the fingers. They were shaking a little.
“Sorry, Mr. Marlowe,” he said slowly. “I was out on the roof last night and I’ve got a hangover like seven Swedes. I’ve been up here alone for a month and it’s got me talking to myself. A thing happened to me.”
“Anything a drink would help?”
His eyes focussed sharply on me and glinted. “You got one?”
I pulled the pint of rye out of my pocket and held it so that he could see the green label over the cap.
“I don’t deserve it,” he said. “God damn it, I don’t. Wait till I get a couple of glasses or would you come into the cabin?”
“I like it out here. I’m enjoying the view.”
He swung his stiff leg and went into his cabin and came back carrying a couple of small cheese glasses. He sat down on the rock beside me smelling of dried perspiration.
I tore the metal cap off the bottle and poured him a stiff drink and a light one for myself. We touched glasses and drank. He rolled the liquor on his tongue and a bleak smile put a little sunshine into his face.
“Man that’s from the right bottle,” he said. “I wonder what made me sound off like that. I guess a guy gets the blues up here all alone. No company, no real friends, no wife.” He paused and added with a sidewise look. “Especially no wife.” ‘
I kept my eyes on the blue water of the tiny lake. Under an overhanging rock a fish surfaced in a lance of light and a circle of widening ripples. A light breeze moved the tops of the pines with a noise like a gentle surf.
“She left me,” he said slowly. “She left me a month ago. Friday, the 12th of June. A day I’ll remember.”
I stiffened, but not too much to pour more whiskey into his empty glass. Friday the 12th of June was the day Mrs. Crystal Kingsley was supposed to have come into town for’ a party.
“But you don’t want to hear about it,” he said. And in his faded blue eyes was the deep yearning to talk about it, as plain as anything could possibly be.
“It’s none ,of my business,” I said. “But if it would make you feel any better—”
He nodded sharply. “Two guys will meet, on a park bench,” he said, “and start talking about God. Did you ever notice that? Guys that wouldn’t talk about God to their best friend.”
“I know that,” I said.
He drank and looked across the lake. “She was one swell kid,” he said softly. “A little sharp in the tongue sometimes, but one swell kid. It was love at first sight with me and Muriel. I met her in a joint in Riverside, a year and three months ago. Not the kind of joint where a guy would expect to meet a girl like Muriel, but that’s how it happened. We got married. I loved her. I knew I was well off. And I was too much of a skunk to play ball with her.”
I moved a little to show him I was stifi there, but I didn’t say anything for fear of breaking the spell. I sat with my drink untouched in my hand. I like to drink, but not when people are using me for a diary.
He went on sadly: “But you know how it is with marriage—any marriage. After a while a guy like me, common no good guy like me, he wants to feel a leg. Some other leg. Maybe it’s lousy, but that’s the way it is.”
He looked at me and I said I had heard the idea expressed.
He tossed his second drink off. I passed him the bottle. A bluejay went up a pine tree hopping from branch tc branch without moving his wings or even pausing to balance.
“Yeah,” Bill Chess said. “All these hillbillies are half crazy and I’m getting that way too. Here I am sitting pretty, no rent to pay, a good pension check every month, half my bonus money in war bonds, I’m married to as neat a little blonde as ever you clapped an eye on and all the time I’m nuts and I don’t know it. I go for that.” He pointed hard at the redwood cabin across the lake. It was turning the color of oxblood in the late afternoon light: “Right in the front yard,” he said, “right under the windows, and a showy little tart that means no more to me than a blade of grass. Jesus, what a sap a guy can be.”
He drank his third drink and steadied the bottle on a rock. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt, fired a match on his thumbnail and puffed rapidly. I breathed with my mouth open, as silent as a burglar behind a curtain.
“Hell,” he said at last, “you’d think if I had to jump off the dock, I’d go a little ways from home and pick me a change in types at least. But little roundheels over there ain’t even that. She’s a blonde like Muriel, same size and weight, same type, almost the same color eyes. But, brother, how different from then on in. Pretty, sure, but no prettier to anybody and not half so pretty to me. Well, I’m over there burning trash that morning and minding my own business, as much as I ever mind it. And she comes to the back door of the cabin in peekaboo pajamas so thin you can see the pink of her nipples against the cloth. And she says in her lazy, no-good voice: ‘Have a drink, Bill. Don’t work so hard on such a beautiful morning.’ And me, I like a drink too well and I go to the kitchen door and take it. And then I take another and then I take another and then I’m in the house. And the closer I get to her the more bedroom her eyes are.”
He paused and swept me with a hard level look.
“You asked me if the beds over there were comfortable and I got sore. You didn’t mean a thing. I was just too full of remembering. Yeah—the bed I was in was comfortable.”
He stopped talking and they fell slowly and after them was silence. He leaned to pick the bottle off the rock and stare at it. He seemed to fight with it in his mind. The whiskey won the fight, as it always does. He took a long savage drink out of the bottle and then screwed the cap on tightly, as if that meant something. He picked up a stone and flicked it into the water.
“I came back across the dam,” he said slowly, in a voice aheady thick with alcohol. “I’m as smooth as a new piston head. I’m getting away with something. Us boys can be so wrong about those little things, can’t we? I’m not getting away with anything at all. Not anything at all. I listen to Muriel telling me and she don’t even raise her voice. But she tells me things about myself I didn’t even imagine. Oh, yeah, I’m getting away with it lovely.”
“So she left you,” I said, when he fell silent.
“That night. I wasn’t even here. I felt too mean to stay even half sober. I hopped into my Ford and went over to the north side of the lake and holed up with a couple of no-goods like myself and got good and stinking. Not that it did me any good. Along about 4 a.m. I got back home and Muriel is gone, packed up and gone, nothing left but a note on the bureau and some cold cream on the pifiow.”
He pulled a dog-eared piece of paper out of a shabby old wallet and passed it over. It was written in pencil on blue-lined paper from a note book. It read:
“I’m sorry, Bill, but I’d rather be dead than live with you any longer. Muriel.”
I handed it back. “What about over there?” I asked, pointing across the lake with a glance.
Bill Chess picked up a flat stone and tried to skip it across the water, but it refused to skip.
“Nothing over there,” he said. “She packed up and went down the same night. I didn’t see her again. I don’t want to see her again. I haven’t heard a word from Muriel in the whole month, not a single word. I don’t have any idea at all where she’s at. With some other guy, maybe. I hope he treats her better than I did.”
He stood up and took keys out of his pocket and shook them. “So if you want to go across and look at Kingsley’s cabin, there isn’t a thing to stop you. And thanks for listening to the soap opera. And thanks for the liquor. Here.” He picked the bottle up and handed me what was left of the pint.
6
We went down the slope to the bank of the lake and the narrow top of the dam. Bill Chess swung his stiff leg in front of me, holding on to the rope handrail set in iron stanchions. At one point water washed over the concrete in a lazy swirl.
“I’ll let some out through the wheel in the morning,” he said over his shoulder. “That’s all the darn thing is good for. Some movie outfit put it up three years ago. They made a picture up here. That little pier down at the other end is some more of their work. Most of what they built is torn down and hauled away, but Kingsley had them leave the pier and the millwheel. Kind of gives the place a touch of color.”
I followed him up a flight of heavy wooden steps to the porch of the Kingsley cabin. He unlocked the door and we went into hushed warmth. The closed up room was almost hot. The light ifitering through the slatted blinds made narrow bars across the floor. The living room was long and cheerful and had Indian rugs, padded mountain furniture with metal-strapped joints, chintz curtains, a plain hardwood floor, plenty of lamps and a little builtin bar with round stools in one corner. The room was neat and clean and had no look of having been left at short notice.
We went into the bedrooms. Two of them had twin beds and one a large double bed with a cream-colored spread having a design in plum-colored wool stitched over it. This was the master bedroom, Bifi Chess said. On a dresser of varnished wood there were toilet articles and accessories in jade green enamel and stainless steel, and an assortment of cosmetic oddments. A couple of cold cream jars had the wavy gold brand of the Gilerlain Company on them. One whole side of the room consisted of closets with sliding doors. I slid one open and peeked inside. It seemed to be full of women’s clothes of the sort they wear at resorts. Bill Chess watched me sourly while I pawed them over. I slid the door shut and pulled open a deep shoe drawer underneath. It contained at least half a dozen pairs of new-looking shoes. I heaved the drawer shut and straightened up.
Bill Chess was planted squarely in front of me, with his chin pushed out and his hard hands in knots on his hips.
“So what did you want to look at the lady’s clothes for?” he asked in an angry voice.
“Reasons,” I said. “For instance Mrs. Kingsley didn’t go home when she left here. Her husband hasn’t seen her since. He doesn’t know where she is.”