The old man whooshed the doors shut and rode us up slowly and gingerly and whooshed the doors open again and sat like a piece of gray driftwood carved to look like a man.
De Spain reached up and lifted down the passkey that hung over the old man’s head.
“Hey, you can’t do that,” the old man said.
“Who says I can’t?”
The old man shook his head angrily, said nothing.
“How old are you, Pop?” De Spain said.
“Goin’ on sixty.”
“Goin’ on sixty hell. You’re a good juicy seventy. How come you got an elevator licence?”
The old man didn’t say anything. He clicked his false teeth. “That’s better,” De Spain said. “Just keep the old trap buttoned that way and everything will be wicky-wacky. Take hen down, Pop.”
We got out of the elevator and it dropped quietly in the enclosed shaft and De Spain stood looking down the hallway, jiggling the loose passkey on the ring. “Now listen,” he said. “His suite is at the end, four rooms. There’s a reception room made out of an office cut in half to make two reception rooms for adjoining suites. Out of that there’s a narrow hall inside the wall of this hall, a couple small rooms and the doc’s room. Got that?”
“Yeah,” I said. “What did you plan to do–burgle it?”
“I kept an eye on the guy for a while, after his wife died.”
“Too bad you didn’t keep an eye on the redheaded office nurse,” I said. “The one that got bumped off tonight.”
He looked at me slowly, out of his deep black eyes, out of his dead-pan face.
“Maybe I did,” he said. “As much as I had a chance.”
“Hell, you didn’t even know her name,” I said, and stared at him. “I had to tell you.”
He thought that over. “Well, seeing her in a white office uniform and seeing her naked and dead on a bed is kind of different, I guess.”
“Sure,” I said, and kept on looking at him.
“Okay. Now–you knock at the doc’s office, which is the third door from the end, and when he opens up I’ll sneak in at the reception room and come along inside and get an earful of whatever he says.”
“It sounds all right,” I said. “But I don’t feel lucky.”
We went down the corridor. The doors were solid wood and well fitted and no light showed behind any of them. I put my ear against the one De Spain indicated and heard faint movement inside. I nodded to De Spain down at the end of the hail. He fitted the passkey slowly into the lock and I rapped hard on the door and saw him go in out of the tail of my eye. The door shut behind him almost at once. I rapped on my door again.
It opened almost suddenly then, and a tall man was standing about a foot away from me with the ceiling light glinting on his pale sand-colored hair. He was in his shirtsleeves and he held a flat leather case in his hand. He was rail-thin, with dun eyebrows and unhappy eyes. He had beautiful hands, long and slim, with square but not blunt fingertips. The nails were highly polished and cut very close.
I said: “Dr. Austrian?”
He nodded. His Adam’s apple moved vaguely in his lean throat.
“This is a funny hour for me to come calling,” I said, “but you’re a hard man to catch up with. I’m a private detective from Los Angeles. I have a client named Harry Matson.”
He was either not startled or so used to hiding his feelings that it didn’t make any difference. His Adam’s apple moved around again and his hand moved the leather case he was holding, and he looked at it in a puzzled sort of way and then stepped back.
“I have no time to talk to you now,” he said. “Come back tomorrow.”
“That’s what Greb told me,” I said.
He got a jolt out of that. He didn’t scream on fall down in a fit but I could see it jarred him. “Come in,” he said thickly.
I went in and he shut the door. There was a desk that seemed to be made of black glass. The chains were chromium tubing with rough wool upholstery. The door to the next room was half open and the room was dark. I could see the stretched white sheet on an examination table and the stinnuplike things at the foot of it. I didn’t hear any sound from that direction.
On top of the black glass desk a clean towel was laid out and on the towel a dozen on so hypodermic syringes lay with needles separate. There was an electric sterilizing cabinet on the wall and inside there must have been another dozen needles and syringes. The juice was turned on. I went over and looked at the thing while the tall, nail-thin man walked around behind his desk and sat down.
“That’s a lot of needles working,” I said, and pulled one of the chairs near the desk.
“What’s your business with mc?” His voice was still thick.
“Maybe I could do you some good about your wife’s death,” I said.
“That’s very kind of you,” he said calmly. “What kind of good?”
“I might be able to tell you who murdered her,” I said.
His teeth glinted in a queer, unnatural half-smile. Then he shrugged and when he spoke his voice was no more dramatic than if we had been discussing the weather. “That would be kind of you. I had thought she committed suicide. The coroner and the police seemed to agree with me. But of course a private detective–”
“Greb didn’t think so,” I said, without any particular attempt at the truth. “The lab man who switched a sample of your wife’s blood for a sample from a real monoxide case.”
He stared at me levelly, out of deep, sad, remote eyes under the dun-colored eyebrows. “You haven’t seen Grcb,” he said, almost with an inner amusement. “I happen to know he went East this noon. His father died in Ohio.” He got up and went to the electric sterilizer and looked at his strap watch and then switched the juice off. He came back to the desk then and opened a flat box of cigarettes and put one in his mouth and pushed the box across the desk. I reached and took one. I half glanced at the dark examination room, but I saw nothing that I hadn’t seen the last time I looked at it.
“That’s funny,” I said. “His wife didn’t know that. Big Chin didn’t know it. He was sitting there with her all tied up on the bed tonight, waiting for Grcb to come back home, so he could bump him off.”
Dr. Austrian looked at mc vaguely now. He pawed around on his desk for a match and then opened a side drawer and took out a small white-handled automatic, and held it on the flat of his hand. Then he tossed a packet of matches at me with his other hand.
“You won’t need the gun,” I said. “This is a business talk which I’m going to show you it will pay to keep a business talk.”
He took the cigarette out of his mouth and dropped it on the desk. “I don’t smoke,” he said. “That was just what one might call the necessary gesture. I’m glad to hear I won’t need the gun. But I’d rather be holding it and not need it than be needing it and not hold it. Now, who is Big Chin, and what else important have you to say before I call the police?”
“Let mc tell you,” I said. “That’s what I’m here for. Your wife played a lot of roulette at Vance Conned’s club and lost the money you made with your little needles almost as fast as you made it. There’s some talk she was going around with Conned in an intimate way also. You maybe didn’t care about that, being out all night and too busy to bother being much of a husband to her. But you probably did care about the money, because you were risking a lot to get it. I’ll come to that later.
“On the night your wife died she got hysterical oven at Conried’s and you were sent for and went over and needled her in the arm to quiet hen. Conned took her home. You phoned your office nurse, Helen Matson–Matson’s ex-wife–to go into your house and see if she was all right. Then later on Matson found hen dead under the car in the garage and got hold of you, and you got hold of the chief of police, and there was a hush put on it that would have made a Southern senator sound like a deaf mute asking for a second plate of mush. But Matson, the first guy on the scene, had something. He didn’t have any luck trying to peddle it to you, because you in your quiet way have a lot of guts. And perhaps your friend, Chief Anders, told you it wasn’t evidence. So Matson tried to put the bite on Conned, figuring that if the case got opened up before the tough grand jury that’s sitting now it would all bounce back on Conned’s gambling joint, and he would be closed up tighter than a frozen piston, and the people behind him might get sore at him and take his polo ponies away from him.
“So Conned didn’t like that idea and he told a mug named Moss Lorenz, the mayor’s chauffeur now but formerly a strongarm for Conned–he’s the fellow I called Big Chin–to take cane of Matson. And Matson lost his licence and was run out of Bay City. But he had his own brand of guts too, and he holed up in an apartment house in L.A. and kept on trying. The apartment house manager got wise to him somehow–I don’t know how but the L.A. police will find out–and put him on the spot, and tonight Big Chin went up to town and bumped Matson off.”
I stopped talking and looked at the thin, tall man. Nothing had changed in his face. His eyes flicked a couple of times and he turned the gun over on his hand. The office was very silent. I listened for breathing from the next room but I didn’t hear anything.
“Matson is dead?” Dr. Austrian said very slowly. “I hope you don’t think I had anything to do with that.” His face glistened a little.
“Well, I don’t know,” I said. “Greb was the weak link in your setup and somebody got him to leave town today–fast– before Matson was killed, if it was at noon. And probably somebody gave him money, because I saw where he lived and it didn’t look like the home of a fellow who was taking in any dough.”
Dr. Austrian said very swiftly. “Conned, damn him! He called me up early this morning and told me to get Greb out of town. I gave him the money to go, but–” he stopped talking and looked mad at himself and then looked down at the gun again.
“But you didn’t know what was up. I believe you, Doc. I really do. Put ‘that gun down, won’t you, just for a little while?”
“Go on,” he said tensely. “Go on with your story.”
“Okay,” I said. “There’s plenty more. First off the L.A. police have found Matson’s body but they won’t be down here before tomorrow; first, because it’s too late, and second, because when they put the story together they won’t want to bust the case. The Club Conned is within the L.A. city limits and the grand jury I was telling you about would just love that. They’ll get Moss Lorenz and Moss will cop a plea and take a few years up in Quentin. That’s the way those things are handled when the law wants to handle them. Next point is how I know what Big Chin did. He told us. A pal and I went around to see Greb and Big Chin was squatting there in the dark with Mrs. Greb all taped up on the bed and we took him. We took him up in the hills and gave him the boot and he talked. I felt kind of sorry for the poor guy. Two murders and he didn’t even get paid.”
“Two murders?” Dr. Austrian said queerly.
“I’ll get to that after a while. Now you see where you stand. In a little while you are going to tell me who murdered your wife. And the funny thing is I am not going to believe you.”
“My God!” he whispered. “My God!” He pointed the gun at mc and immediately dropped it again, before I had time to start dodging.
“I’m a miracle man,” I said. “I’m the great American detective–unpaid. I never talked to Matson, although he was trying to hire me. Now I’m going to tell you what he had on you, and how your wife was murdered, and why you didn’t do it. All from a pinch of dust, just like the Vienna police.”
He was not amused. He sighed between still lips and his face was old and gray and drawn under the pale sand-colored hair that painted his bony skull.
“Matson had a green velvet slipper on you,” I said. “It was made for your wife by Vcrschoyle of Hollywood–custom-made, with her last number on it. It was brand-new and had never been worn. They made her two pairs exactly the same. She had it on one of her feet when Matson found her. And you know where he found her–on the floor of a garage to get to which she had to go along a concrete path from a side door of the house. So she couldn’t have walked in that slipper. So she was carried. So she was murdered. Whoever put the slippers on her got one that had been worn and one that had not. And Matson spotted it and swiped the slipper. And when you sent him into the house to phone the chief you sneaked up and got the other worn slipper and put it on her bare foot. You knew Matson must have swiped that slipper. I don’t know whether you told anybody or not. Okay?”
He moved his head half an inch downward. He shivered slightly, but the hand holding the bone-handled automatic didn’t shiver.
“This is how she was murdered. Grcb was dangerous to somebody, which proves she did not die of monoxide poisoning. She was dead when she was put under the car. She died of morphine. That’s guessing. I admit, but it’s a swell guess, because that would be the only way to kill her which would force you to cover up for the killer. And it was easy, to somebody who had the morphine and got a chance to use it. All they had to do was give her a second fatal dose in the same spot where you had shot hen earlier in the evening. Then you came home and found her dead. And you had to cover up because you knew how she had died and you couldn’t have that come out. You’re in the morphine business.”
He smiled now. The smile hung at the corners of his mouth like cobwebs in the corners of an old ceiling. He didn’t even know it was there. “You interest me,” he said. “I am going to kill you, I think, but you interest me.”
I pointed to the electric sterilizer. “There arc a couple dozen medicos like you around Hollywood–needle-pushers. They run around at night with leather cases full of loaded hypodermics. They keep dopes and drunks from going screwy–for a while. Once in a while onc.of them becomes an addict and then there’s trouble. Maybe most of the people you fix up would land in the hoosegow or the psycho ward, if you didn’t take cane of them. It’s a cinch they would lose their jobs, if they have jobs. And some of them have pretty big jobs. But it’s dangerous because any sorehead can stick the Feds onto you and once they start checking your patients they’ll find one that will talk. You try to protect yourself. Part of the way by not getting all of your dope through legitimate channels. I’d say Conned got some of it for you, and that was why you had to let him take your wife and your money.”
Dr. Austrian said almost politely: “You don’t hold very much back, do you?”
“Why should I? This is just a man-to-man talk. I can’t prove any of it. That slipper Matson stole is good for a buildup, but it wouldn’t be worth a nickel in court. And any defense attorney would make a monkey out of a little squirt like this Greb, even if they ever brought him back to testify. But it might cost you a lot of money to keep your medical licence.”
“So it would be better for me to give you pant of it now. Is that it?” he asked softly.
“No. Keep your money to buy life insurance. I have one more point to make. Will you admit, just man to man, that you killed your wife?”
“Yes,” he said. He said it simply and directly, as though I had asked him if he had a cigarette.
“I thought you would,” I said. “But you don’t have to. You see the party that did kill your wife, because your wife was wasting money somebody else could have fun spending, also knew what Matson knew and was trying to shake Conned down herself. So she got bumped off–last night, on Brayton Avenue, and you don’t have to cover up for hen any more. I saw your photo on her mantel–With all my love–Leland–and I hid it. But you don’t have to cover up for her any more. Helen Matson is dead.”
I went sideways out of the chair as the gun went off. I had kidded myself by this time that he wouldn’t try to shoot mc, but there must have been part of me that wasn’t sold on the idea. The chair tipped over and I was on my hands and knees on the floor, and then another much louder gun went off from the dark room with the examination table in it.
De Spain stepped through the door with the smoking police gun in his big right hand. “Boy, was that a shot,” he said, and stood there grinning.
I came up on my feet and looked across the desk. Dr. Austrian sat there perfectly still, holding his night hand with his left, shaking it gently. There was no gun in his hand. I looked along the floor and saw it at the corner of the desk.
“Geez, I didn’t even hit him,” De Spain said. “All I hit was the gun.”
“That’s perfectly lovely,” I said. “Suppose all he had hit was my head?”
De Spain looked at me levelly and the grin left his face. “You put him through it, I will say that for you,” he growled. “But what was the idea of holding out on me on that green-slipper angle?”
“I got tired of being your stooge,” I said. “I wanted a little play out of my own hand.”
“How much of it was true?”
“Matson had the slipper. It must have meant something. Now that I’ve made it up I think it’s all true.”
Dr. Austrian got up slowly out of his chair and De Spain swung the gun on him. The thin, haggard man shook his head slowly and walked over to the wall and leaned against it.
“I killed her,” he said in a dead voice to nobody at all. “Not Helen. I killed hen. Call the police.”
De Spain’s face twisted and he stooped down and picked up the gun with the bone handle and dropped it into his pocket. He put his police gun back under his arm and sat down at the desk and pulled the phone towards him.
“Watch me get Chief of Homicide out of this,” he drawled.
NINE
A GUY WITH GUTS
The little chief of police came in springily, with his hat on the back of his head and his hands in the pockets of a thin dank overcoat. There was something in the right-hand overcoat pocket that he was holding on to, something large and heavy. There were two plainclothes men behind him and one of them was Wccms, the chunky fat-faced man who had followed me over to Altair Street. Shorty, the uniformed cop we had ditched on Arguello Boulevard, brought up the rear.
Chief Anders stopped a little way inside the door and smiled at me unpleasantly. “So you’ve had a lot of fun in our town, I hear. Put the cuffs on him, Wccms.”
The fat-faced man stepped around him and pulled handcuffs out of his left hip pocket. “Nice to meet you again–with your pants down,” he told me in an oily voice.
De Spain leaned against the wall beyond the door of the examination room. He rolled a match across his lips and stared silently. Dr. Austrian was in his desk chain again, holding his head in his hands, staring at the polished black top of the desk and the towel of hypodermic needles and the small black perpetual calendar and the pen set and the hero doodads that were on the desk. His face was stone pale and he sat without moving, without even seeming to breathe.
De Spain said: “Don’t be in too much of a hurry, Chief. This lad has friends in L.A. who are working on the Matson kill night now. And that kid reporter has a brother-in-law who is a cop. You didn’t know that.”
The chief made a vague motion with his chin. “Wait a minute, Weems.” He turned to De Spain. “You mean they know in town that Helen Matson has been murdered?”
Dr. Austrian’s face jerked up, haggard and drawn. Then he dropped it into his hands and covered his whole face with his long fingers.
De Spain said: “I meant Harry Matson, Chief. He was bumped off in L.A. tonight–last night–now–by Moss Loncnz.”
The chief seemed to pull his thin lips back into his mouth, almost out of sight. He spoke with them like that. “How do you know that?”
“The shamus and me picked off Moss. He was hiding out in the house of a man named Greb, the lab man who did a job on the Austrian death. He was hiding there because it looked like somebody was going to open up the Austrian case wide enough for the mayor to think it was a new boulevard and come out with a bunch of flowers and make a speech. That is, if Greb and the Matsons didn’t get took care of. It seems the Matsons were workin’ together, in spite of being divorced, shaking Conried down, and Conried put the pencil on them.”
The chief turned his head and snarled at his stooges. “Get out in the hall and wait.”
The plainclothes man I didn’t know opened the door and went out, and after a slight hesitation Weems followed him. Shorty had his hand on the door when De Spain said: “I want Shorty to stay. Shorty’s a decent cop–not like them two vice squad grafters you been sleepin’ with lately.”
Shorty let go of the door and went and leaned against the wall and smiled behind his hand. The chief’s face colored. “Who detailed you to the Brayton Avenue death?” he barked.
“I detailed myself, Chief. I was in the dicks’ room a minute or so after the call come in and I went over with Reed. He picked Shorty up too. Shorty and me was both off duty.”
De Spain grinned, a hard, lazy grin that was neither amused nor triumphant. It was just a grin.
The chief jerked a gun out of his overcoat pocket. It was a foot long, a regular hogleg, but he seemed to know how to hold it. He said tightly: “Where’s Lonenz?”
“He’s hid. We got him all ready for you. I had to bruise him a little, but he talked. That right, shamus?”
I said: “He says something that might be yes or no, but he makes the sounds in the right places.”
“That’s the way I like to hear a guy talk,” De Spain said. “You oughtn’t to be wasting your strength on that homicide stuff, Chief. And them toy dicks you run around with don’t know nothing about police work except to go through apartment houses and shake down all the women that live alone. Now, you give me back my job and eight men and I’ll show you some homicide work.”
The chief looked down at his big gun and then he looked at Dr. Austrian’s bowed head. “So he killed his wife,” he said softly. “I knew there was a chance of it, but I didn’t believe it.”
“Don’t believe it now,” I said. “Helen Matson killed her. Dr. Austrian knows that. He covered up for her, and you covered up for him, and he’s still willing to cover up for her. Love is like that with some people. And this is some town, Chief, where a gal can commit a murder, get her friends and the police to coven it, and then start out to blackmail the very people that kept her out of trouble.”
The chief bit his lip. His eyes were nasty, but he was thinking–thinking hand. “No wonder she got rubbed out,” he said quietly. “Lorenz–”
I said: “Take a minute to think. Lorenz didn’t kill Helen Matson. He said he did, but De Spain beat him up to the point where he would have confessed shooting McKinley.”
De Spain straightened from the wall. He had both hands lazily in the pockets of his suit coat. He kept them there. He stood straight on wide-planted feet, a wick of black hair showing under the side of his hat.
“Huh?” he said almost gently. “What was that?”
I said: “Lorenz didn’t kill Helen Matson for several reasons. It was too fussy a job for his type of mind. He’d have knocked her off and let hen lay. Second, he didn’t know Greb was leaving town, tipped off by Dr. Austrian who was tipped off, in turn, by Vance Conned, who is now up north providing himself with all the necessary alibis. And if Lonenz didn’t know that much, he didn’t know anything about Helen Matson. Especially as Helen Matson had never really got to Conned at all. She had just tried to. She told mc that and she was drunk enough to be telling the truth. So Conned wouldn’t have taken the silly risk of having her knocked off in her own apartment by the sort of man anybody would remember seeing if they saw him anywhere near that apartment. Knocking off Matson up in L.A. was something else again. That was way off the home grounds.”
The chief said tightly: “The Club Conned is in L.A.”
“Legally,” I admitted. “But by position and clientele it’s just outside Bay City. It’s part of Bay City–and it helps to run Bay City.”
Shorty said: “That ain’t no way to talk to the chief.”
“Let him alone,” the chief said. “It’s so long since I heard a guy think I didn’t know they did it any more.”
I said: “Ask De Spain who killed Helen Matson.”
De Spain laughed harshly. He said: “Sure. I killed her.”
Dr. Austrian lifted his face off his hands and turned his head slowly and looked at De Spain. His face was as dead, as expressionless as the big dead-pan copper’s. Then he reached over and opened the night-hand drawer of his desk. Shorty flipped his gun out and said: “Hold it, Doe.”
Dr. Austrian shrugged and quietly took a wide-mouthed bottle with a glass stopper out of the drawer. He loosened the stopper and held the bottle close to his nose. “Just smelling salts,” he said dully.
Shorty relaxed and dropped the gun to his side. The chief stared at me and chewed his lip. De Spain stared at nothing, at nobody. He grinned loosely, kept on grinning.
I said: “He thinks I’m kidding. You think I’m kidding. I’m not kidding. He knew Helen–well enough to give hen a gilt cigarette case with his photo on it. I saw it. It was a small hand-tinted photo and not very good and I had only seen him once. She told mc it was an old sweet that wore out. Afterwards it came back to me who that photo was. But he concealed the fact that he knew her and he didn’t act very much like a copper tonight, in a lot of ways. He didn’t get me out of a jam and run around with me in order to be nice. He did it to find out what I knew before I was put under the lamps down at headquarters. He didn’t beat Lorenz half to death just in order to make Lorcnz tell the truth. He did it to make Lorcnz tell anything De Spain wanted him to tell, including confessing to the murder of the Matson girl whom Lorenz probably didn’t even know.
“Who called up headquarters and tipped the boys about the murder? De Spain. Who walked in there immediately afterwards and horned in on the investigation? De Spain. Who scratched the girl’s body up in a fit of jealous rage because she had ditched him for a better prospect? De Spain. Who still has blood and cuticle under the nails of his night hand which a good police chemist can do a lot with? De Spain. Take a look. I took several.”
The chief turned his head very slowly, as if it were on a pivot. He whistled and the door opened and the other men came back into the room. De Spain didn’t move. The grin stayed on his face, carved there, a meaningless hollow grin that meant and looked as if it would never go away again.
He said quietly: “And you the guy I thought was my pal. Well, you have some wild ideas, shamus. I will say that for you.”
The chief said sharply: “It doesn’t make sense. If De Spain did kill her, then he was the one who tried to put you in a frame and the one that got you out of it. How come?”
I said: “Listen. You can find out if De Spain knew the girl and how well. You can find out how much of his time tonight is not accounted for and make him account for it. You can find out if there is blood and cuticle under his nails and, within limits, whether it is or could be the girl’s blood and the girl’s skin. And whether it was there before De Spain hit Moss Lorenz, before he hit anybody. And he didn’t scratch Lorenz. That’s all you need and all you can use–except a confession. And I don’t think you’ll get that.
“As to the frame, I would say De Spain followed the girl over to the Club Conned, or knew she had gone there and went oven himself. He saw her come out with me and he saw me put her in my car. That made him mad. He sapped me and the girl was too scared not to help him get me to her apartment and up into it. I don’t remember any of that. It would be nice if I did, but I don’t. They got me up there somehow, and they had a fight, and De Spain knocked her out and then he deliberately murdered her. He had some clumsy idea of making it look like a rape murder and making mc the fall guy. Then he beat it, turned in an alarm, horned in on the investigation, and I got out of the apartment before I was caught there.
“He realized by this time that he had done a foolish thing. He knew I was a private dick from L.A., that I had talked to Dolly Kincaid, and from the girl he probably knew that I had gone to see Conned. And he may easily have known I was interested in the Austrian case. Okay. He turned a foolish play into a smart one by stringing along with me on the investigation I was trying to make, helping me on it, getting my story, and then finding himself another and much better fall guy for the murder of the Matson girl.”
De Spain said tonelessly: “I’m goin’ to start climbing on this guy in a minute, Chief. Okay?”
The chief said: “Just a minute. What made you suspect De Spain at all?”
“The blood and skin under his nails, and the brutal way he handled Lorenz, and the fact that the girl told mc he had been hen sweet and he pretended not to know who she was. What the hell more would I want?”
De Spain said: “This.”
He shot from his pocket with the white-handled gun he had taken from Dr. Austrian. Shooting from the pocket takes a lot of practice of a kind cops don’t get. The slug went a foot over my head and I sat down on the floor and Dr. Austrian stood up very quickly and swung his right hand into De Spain’s face, the hand that held the wide-mouthed brown bottle. A colorless liquid splashed into his eyes and smoked down his face. Any other man would have screamed. De Spain pawed the air with his left hand and the gun in his pocket banged three times more and Dr. Austrian fell sideways across the end of the desk and then collapsed to the floor, out of range. The gun went on banging.
The other men in the room had all dropped to their knees. The chief jerked his hogleg up and shot De Spain twice in the body. Once would have been enough with that gun. De Spain’s body twisted in the air and hit the floor like a safe. The chief went over and knelt beside him and looked at him silently. He stood up and came back around the desk, then went back and stooped over Dr. Austrian.
“This one’s alive,” he snapped. “Get on the phone, Weems.” The chunky, fat-faced man went around the far side of the desk and scooped the telephone towards him and started to dial. There was a sharp smell of acid and scorched flesh in the air, a nasty smell. We were standing up again now, and the little police chief was looking at me bleakly.
“He oughtn’t to have shot at you,” he said. “You couldn’t have proved a- thing. We wouldn’t have let you.”
I didn’t say anything. Weems put the phone down and looked at Dr. Austrian again.
“I think he’s croaked,” he said, from behind the desk.
The chief kept on looking at me. “You take some awful chances, Mn. Dalmas. I don’t know what your game is, but I hope you like your chips.”
“I’m satisfied,” I said. “I’d like to have had a chance to talk to my client before he was bumped off, but I guess I’ve done all I could for him. The hell of it is I liked De Spain. He had all the guts they ever made.”
The chief said: “If you want to know about guts, try being a small-town chief of police some day.”
I said: “Yeah. Tell somebody to tie a handkerchief around De Spain’s night hand, Chief. You kind of need the evidence yourself now.”
A siren wailed distantly on Arguello Boulevard. The sound came faintly through the closed windows, like a coyote howling in the hills.
* * *
THE LADY
IN THE LAKE
* * *
ONE
NOT FOR MISSING PERSONS
I was breaking a new pair of shoes in on my desk that morning when Violets M’Gee called me up. It was a dull, hot, damp August day and you couldn’t keep your neck dry with a bath towel.
“How’s the boy?” Violets began, as usual. “No business in a week, huh? There’s a guy named Howard Melton over in the Avenant Building lost track of his wife. He’s district manager for the Doreme Cosmetic Company. He don’t want to give it to Missing Persons for some reason. The boss knows him a little. Better get over there, and take your shoes off before you go in. It’s a pretty snooty outfit.”
Violets M’Gee is a homicide dick in the sheriff’s office, and if it wasn’t for all the charity jobs he gives mc, I might be able to make a living. This looked a little different, so I put my feet on the floor and swabbed the back of my neck again and went oven there.
The Avenant Building is on Olive near Sixth and has a blackand-white rubber sidewalk out in front. The elevator girls wear gray silk Russian blouses and the kind of flop-over berets artists used to wear to keep the paint out of their hair. The Doncme Cosmetic Company was on the seventh floor and had a good piece of it. There was a big glass-walled reception room with flowers and Persian rugs and bits of nutty sculpture in glazed wane. A neat little blonde sat in a built-in switchboard at a big desk with flowers on it and a tilted sign reading: MISS VAN DE GRAAF. She wore Harold Lloyd cheaters and her hair was dragged back to where her forehead looked high enough to have snow on it.
She said Mr. Howard Melton was in conference, but she would take my card in to him when she had an opportunity, and what was my business, please? I said I didn’t have a card, but the name was John Dalmas, from Mr. West.
“Who is Mn. West?” she inquired coldly. “Does Mr. Melton know him?”
“That’s past me, sister. Not knowing Mr. Melton I would not know his friends.”
“What is the nature of your business?”
“Personal.”
“I see.” She initialed three papers on her desk quickly, to keep from throwing her pen set at mc. I went and sat in a blue leather chair with chromium arms. It felt, looked and smelled very much like a barber’s chair.
In about half an hour a door opened beyond a bronze railing and two men came out backwards laughing. A third man held the door and echoed their laughter. They shook hands and the two men went away and the third man wiped the grin off his face in nothing flat and looked at Miss Van De Graaf. “Any calls?” he asked in a bossy voice.
She fluttered papers and said: “No, sir. A Mr. –Dalmas to see you–from a Mr–West. His business is personal.”
“Don’t know him,” the man barked. “I’ve got more insurance than I can pay for.” He gave me a swift, hard look and went into his room and slammed the door. Miss Van De Gnaaf smiled at me with delicate regret. I lit a cigarette and crossed my legs the other way. In another five minutes the door beyond the railing opened again and he came out with his hat on and sneered that he was going out for half an hour.
He came through a gate in the railing and started for the entrance and then did a nice cutback and came striding over to mc. He stood looking down at me–a big man, two inches over six feet and built to proportion. He had a well-massaged face that didn’t hide the lines of dissipation. His eyes were black, hard, and tricky.
“You want to see mc?”
I stood up, got out my billfold and gave him a card. He stared at the card and palmed it. His eyes became thoughtful.
“Who’s Mr. West?”
“Search me.”
He gave mc a hard, direct, interested look. “You have the right idea,” he said. “Let’s go into my office.”
The receptionist was so mad she was trying to initial three papers at once when we went past her through the railing.
The office beyond was long, dim and quiet, but not cool. There was a large photo on the wall of a tough-looking old bird who had held lots of noses to lots of grindstones in his time. The big man went behind about eight hundred dollars’ worth of desk and tilted himself back in a padded high-backed director’s chair. He pushed a cigar humidor at mc. I lit a cigar and he watched mc light it with cool, steady eyes.
“This is very confidential,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
He read my card again and put it away in a gold-plated wallet. “Who sent you?”
“A friend in the sheriff’s office.”
“I’d have to know a little more about you than that.”
I gave him a couple of names and numbers. He reached for his phone, asked for a line and dialed them himself. He got both the parties I had mentioned and talked. In four minutes he had hung up and tilted his chair again. We both wiped the backs of our necks.
“So far, so good,” he said. “Now show me you’re the man you say you arc.”
I got my billfold out and showed him a small photostat of my license. He seemed pleased. “How much do you charge?”
“Twenty-five bucks a day and expenses.”
“That’s too much. What is the nature of the expenses?”
“Gas and oil, maybe a bribe or two, meals and whisky. Mostly whisky.”
“Don’t you cat when you’re not working?”
“Yeah–but not so well.”
He grinned. His grin like his eyes had a stony cast to it. “I think maybe we’ll get along,” he said.
He opened a drawer and brought out a Scotch bottle. We had a drink. He put the bottle on the floor, wiped his lips, lit a monogrammed cigarette and inhaled comfortably. “Better make it fifteen a day,” he said. “In times like these. And go easy on the liquor.”
“I was just kidding you,” I said. “A man you can’t kid is a man you can’t trust.”
He grinned again. “It’s a deal. First off though, your promise that in no circumstances you have anything to do with any cop friends you may happen to have.”
“As long as you haven’t murdered anybody, it suits me.”
He laughed. “Not yet. But I’m a pretty tough guy still. I want you to trace my wife and find out where she is and what she’s doing, and without her knowing it.
“She disappeared eleven days ago–August twelfth–from a cabin we have at Little Fawn Lake. That’s a small lake owned by myself and two other men. It’s three miles from Puma Point. Of course you know where that is.”
“In the San Bernardino Mountains, about forty miles from San Bernardino.”
“Yes.” He flicked ash from his cigarette on the desk top and leaned over to blow it off. “Little Fawn Lake is only about three-eighths of a mile long. It has a small dam we built for real estate development–just at the wrong time. There arc four cabins up there. Mine, two belonging to my friends, neither of them occupied this summer, and a fourth on the near side of the lake as you come in. That one is occupied by a man named William Haines and his wife. He’s a disabled veteran with a pension. He lives there rent free and looks after the place. My wife has been spending the summer up there and was to leave on the twelfth to come in to town for some social activity over the weekend. She never came.”
I nodded. He opened a locked drawer and took out an envelope. He took a photo and a telegram from the envelope, and passed the telegram across the desk. It had been sent from El Paso, Texas, on August 15th at 9:18 AM. It was addressed to Howard Melton, 715 Avenant Building, Los Angeles. It read: Am crossing to get Mexican divorce. Will marry Lance. Good luck and goodbye. Julia.
I put the yellow form down on the desk. “Julia is my wife’s name,” Melton said.
“Who’s Lance?”
“Lancelot Goodwin. He used to be my confidential secretary up to a year ago. Then he came into some money and quit. I have known for a long time that Julia and he were a bit soft on each other, if I may put it that way.”
“It’s all right with me,” I said.
He pushed the photo across the desk. It was a snapshot On glazed paper showing a slim, small blonde and a tall, lean, dark, handsome guy, ‘about thirty-five, a shade too handsome. The blonde could have been anything from eighteen to forty. She was that type. She had a figure and didn’t act stingy with it. She wore a swimsuit which didn’t strain the imagination and the man wore trunks. They sat against a striped beach umbrella on the sand. I put the snapshot down on top of the telegram.
“That’s all the exhibits,” Melton said, “but not all the facts. Another drink?” He poured it and we drank it. He put the bottle dowm on the floor again and his telephone rang. He talked a moment, then juggled the hood and told the operator to hold his calls for a while.
“So far there would be nothing much to it,” he said. “But I met Lance Goodwin on the street last Friday. He said he hadn’t seen Julia in months. I believed him, because Lance is a fellow without many inhibitions, and he doesn’t scare. He’d be apt to tell me the truth about a thing like that. And I think he’ll keep his mouth shut.”
“Were there other fellows you thought of?”
“No. If there are any, I don’t know them. My hunch is, Julia has been arrested and is in jail somewhere and has managed, by bribery or otherwise, to hide her identity.”
“In jail for what?”
He hesitated a moment and then said very quietly: “Julia is a kleptomaniac. Not bad, and not all the time. Mostly when she is drinking too much. She has spells of that, too. Most of her tricks have been here in Los Angeles in the big stores where we have accounts. She’s been caught a few times and been able to bluff out and have the stuff put on the bill. No scandal so far that I couldn’t take care of. But in a strange town–” He stopped and frowned hard. “I have my job with the Doreme people to worry about,” he said.
“She ever been printed?”
“How?”
“Had her fingerprints taken and filed?”
“Not that I know of.” He looked worried at that.
“This Goodwin know about the sideline she worked?”
“I couldn’t say. I hope not. He’s never mentioned it, of course.”
“I’d like his address.”
“He’s in the book. Has a bungalow over in the Chevy Chase district, near Glendale. Very secluded place. I’ve a hunch Lance is quite a chaser.”
It looked like a very nice setup, but I didn’t say so out loud. I could see a little honest money coming my way for a change. “You’ve been up to this Little Fawn Lake since your wife disappeared, of course.”
He looked surprised. “Well, no. I’ve had no reason to. Until I met Lance in front of the Athletic Club I supposed he and Julia were together somewhere–perhaps even married already. Mexican divorces are quick.”
“How about money? She have much with her?”
“I dont know. She has quite a lot of money of her own, inherited from her father. I guess she can get plenty of money.”
“I see. How was she dressed–or would you know?”
He shook his head. “I hadnt seen her in two weeks. She wore rather dark clothes as a rule. Haines might be able to tell you. I suppose he’ll have to know she disappeared. I think he can be trusted to keep his mouth shut.” Melton smiled wryly. “She had a small octagonal platinum wrist watch with a chain of large links. A birthday present. It had her name inside. She had a diamond and emerald ring and a platinum wedding ring engraved inside: Howard and Julia Melton. July 27th, 1926.”
“But you don’t suspect foul play, do you?”
“No.” His large cheekbones reddened a little. “I told you what I suspected.”
“If she’s in somebody’s jailhouse, what do I do? Just report back and wait?”
“Of course. If she’s not, keep her in sight until I can get there, wherever it is. I think I can handle the situation,”
“Uh-huh. You look big enough. You said she left Little Fawn Lake on August twelfth. But you haven’t been up there. You mean she did–or she was just supposed to–or you guess it from the date of the telegram?’
“Right. There’s one more thing I forgot. She did leave on the twelfth. She never drove at night, so she drove down the mountain in the afternoon and stopped at the Olympia Hotel until train time. I know that because they called me up a week later and said her car was in their garage and did I want to call for it. I said I’d be over and get it when I had time.”
“Okay, Mr. Mellon. I think I’ll run around and check over this Lancelot Goodwin a little first, He might happen not to have told you the truth.”
He handed me the Other Cities phone book and I looked it up. Lancelot Goodwin lived at 3416 Chester Lane. I didn’t know where that was, but I had a map in the car.
I said: “I’m going out there and snoop around. I’d better have a little money on account. Say a hundred bucks.”
“Fifty should do to start,” he said. He took out his gold-plated wallet and gave me two twenties and a ten. “I’ll get you to sign a receipt–just as a matter of form.”
He had a receipt book in his desk and wrote out what he wanted and I signed it. I put the two exhibits in my pocket and stood up. We shook hands.
I left him with the feeling that he was a guy who would not make many small mistakes, especially about money. As I went out the receptionist gave me the nasty eye. I worried about it almost as far as the elevator.
TWO
THE SILENT HOUSE
My car was in a lot across the street, so I took it north to Fifth and west to Flower and from there down to Glendale Boulevard and so on into Glendale. That made it about lunch time, so I stopped and ate a sandwich.
Chevy Chase is a deep canyon in the foothills that separate Glendale from Pasadena. It is heavily wooded, and the streets branching off the main drag are apt to be pretty shut-in and dark. Chester Lane was one of them, and was dark enough to be in the middle of a redwood forest. Goodwin’s house was at the deep end, a small English bungalow with a peaked roof and leaded windowpanes that wouldn’t have let much light in, even if there had been any to let in. The house was set back in a fold of the hills, with a big oak tree practically on the front porch. It was a nice little place to have fun.
The garage at the side was shut up. I walked along a twisted path made of steppingstones and pushed the bell. I could hear it ring somewhere in the rear with that sound bells seem to have in an empty house. I rang it twice more. Nobody came to the door. A mockingbird flew down on the small, neat front lawn and poked a worm out of the sod and went away with it. Somebody started a car out of sight down the curve of the street. There was a brand-new house across the street with a For Sale sign stuck into the manure and grass seed in front of it. No other house was in sight.
I tried the bell one more time and did a snappy tattoo with the knocker, which was a ring held in the mouth of a lion. Then I left the front door and put an eye to the crack between the garage doors. There was a car in there, shining dimly in the faint light. I prowled around to the back yard and saw two more oak trees and a rubbish burner and three chairs around a green garden table under one of the trees. It looked so shady and cool and pleasant back there, I would have liked to stay. I went to the back door, which was half glass but had a spring lock. I tried turning the knob, which was silly. It opened and I took a deep breath and walked in.
This Lancelot Goodwin ought to be willing to listen to a little reason, if he caught me. If he didn’t, I wanted to glance around his effects. There was something about him maybe just his first name–that worried me.
The back door opened on a porch with high, narrow screens. From that another unlocked door, also with a spring lock, opened into a kitchen with gaudy tiles and an enclosed gas stove. There were a lot of empty bottles on the sink. There were two swing doors. I pushed the one towards the front of the house. It gave on an alcove dining room with a buffet on which there were more liquor bottles but not empty.
The living room was to my right under an arch. It was dark even in the middle of the day. It was nicely furnished, with built-in bookshelves and books that hadn’t been bought in sets. There was a highboy radio in the corner, with a half-empty glass of amber fluid on top of it. And there was ice in the amber fluid. The radio made a faint humming sound and light glowed behind the dial. It was on, but the volume was down to nothing.
That was funny. I turned around and looked at the back corner of the room and saw something funnier.
A man was sitting in a deep brocade chair with slippered feet on a footstool that matched the chair. He wore an open-neck polo shirt and ice-cream pants and a white belt. His left hand rested easily on the wide arm of the chair and his right hand drooped languidly outside the other arm to the carpet, which was a solid dull rose. He was a lean, dark, handsome guy, rangily built. One of those lads who move fast and are much stronger than they look. His mouth was slightly open showing the edges of his teeth. His head was a little sideways, as though he had dozed off as he sat there, having himself a few drinks and listening to the radio.
There was a gun on the floor beside his right hand and there was a scorched red hole in the middle of his forehead.
Blood dripped very quietly from the end of his chin and fell on his white polo shirt.
For all of a minute–which in a spot like that can be as long as a chiropractor’s thumb–I didn’t move a muscle. If I drew a full breath, it was a secret. I just hung there, empty as a busted flush, and watched Mr. Lancelot Goodwin’s blood form small pear-shaped globules on the end of his chin and then very slowly and casually drop and add themselves to the large patch of crimson that changed the whiteness of his polo shirt. It seemed to me that even in that time the blood dripped slower. I lifted a foot at last, dragged it out of the cement it was stuck in, took a step, and then hauled the other foot after it like a ball and chain. I moved across the dark and silent room.
His eyes glittered as I got close. I bent over to stare into them, to try and meet their look. It couldn’t be done. It never can, with dead eyes. They are always pointed a little to one side or up or down. I touched his face. It was warm and slightly moist. That would be from his drink. He hadn’t been dead more than twenty minutes.
I swung around hard, as if somebody were trying to sneak up behind me with a blackjack, but nobody was. The silence held. The room was full of it, brimming over with it. A bird chirped outdoors in a tree, but that only made the silence thicker. You could have cut slices of it and buttered them.
I started looking at other things in the room. There was a silver-framed photo lying on the floor, back up, in front of the plaster mantel. I went over and lifted it with a handkerchief and turned it. The glass was cracked neatly from corner to corner. The photo showed a slim, light-haired lady with a dangerous smile. I took out the snapshot Howard Melton had given me and held it beside the photo. I was sure it was the same face, but the expression was different, and it was a very common type of face.
I took the photograph carefully into a nicely furnished bedroom and opened a drawer in a long-legged chest. I removed the photo from the frame, polished the frame off nicely with my handkerchief and tucked it under some shirts. Not very clever, but as clever as I felt.
Nothing seemed very pressing now. If the shot had been heard, and recognized as a shot, radio cops would have been there long ago. I took my photo into the bathroom and trimmed it close with my pocketknife and flushed the scraps down the toilet. I added the photo to what I had in my breast pocket, and went back to the living room.
There was an empty glass on the low table beside the dead man’s left hand. It would have his prints. On the other hand somebody else might have taken a sip out of it and left other prints. A woman, of course. She would have been sitting on the arm of the chair, with a soft, sweet smile on her face, and the gun down behind her back. It had to be a woman. A man couldn’t have shot him in just that perfectly relaxed position. I gave a guess what woman it was–but I didn’t like her leaving her photo on the floor. That was bad publicity.
I couldn’t risk the glass. I wiped it off and did something I didn’t enjoy. I made his hand hold it again, then put it back on the table. I did the same thing with the gun. When I let his hand fall–the trailing hand this time–it swung and swung, like a pendulum on a grandfather’s clock. I went to the glass on the radio and wiped it off. That would make them think she was pretty wise, a different kind of woman altogether–if there are different kinds. I collected four cigarette stubs with lipstick about the shade called “Carmen,” a blond shade. I took them to the bathroom and gave them to the city. I wiped off a few shiny fixtures with a towel, did the same for the front doorknob, and called it a day. I couldn’t wipe over the whole damn house.
I stood and looked at Lancelot Goodwin a moment longer. The blood had stopped flowing. The last drop on his chin wasn’t going to fall. It was going to hang there and get dark and shiny and as permanent as a wart.
I went back through the kitchen and porch, wiping a couple more doorknobs as I went, strolled around the side of the house and took a quick gander up and down the street. Nobody being in sight, I tied the job up with ribbon by ringing the front doorbell again and smearing the button and knob well while I did it. I went to my car, got in and drove away. This had all taken less than half an hour. I felt as if I had fought all the way through the Civil War.
Two-thirds of the way back to town I stopped at the foot of Alesandro Street and tucked myself into a drugstore phone booth. I dialed Howard Mellon’s office number.
A chirpy voice said: “Doreme Cosmetic Company. Good afternoowun.”
“Mr. Melton.”
“I’ll connect you with his secretary,” sang the voice of the little blonde who had been off in the corner, out of harm’s way.
“Miss Van De Graaf speaking.” It was a nice drawl that could get charming or snooty with the change of a quartertone. “Who is calling Mr. Melton, please?”
“John Dalmas.”
“Ah–does Mr. Melton know you, Mr.–ah–Dalmas?”
“Don’t start that again,” I said. “Ask him, girlie. I can get all the ritzing I need at the stamp window.”
Her intaken breath almost hurt my eardrum.
There was a wait, a click, and Melton’s burly businesslike voice said: “Yes? Melton talking. Yes?”
“I have to see you quick.”
“What’s that?” he barked.
“I said what you heard. There have been what the boys call developments. You know who you’re talking to, don’t you?”
“Oh–yes. Yes. Well, let me see. Let me look at my desk calendar.”
“To hell with your desk calendar,” I said. “This is serious. I have enough sense not to break in on your day, if it wasn’t.”
“Athletic Club–ten minutes,” he said crisply. “Have me paged in the reading room.”
“I’ll be a little longer than that.” I hung up before he could argue.
I was twenty minutes as a matter of fact.
The hop in the lobby of the Athletic Club scooted neatly into one of the old open-cage elevators they have there and was back in no time at all with a nod. He took me up to the fourth floor and showed me the reading room.
“Around to the left, sir.”
The reading room was not built principally for reading. There were papers and magazines on a long mahogany table and leather bindings behind glass on the walls and a portrait of the club’s founder in oil, with a hooded light over it. But mostly the place was little nooks and corners with enormous sloping high-backed leather chairs, and old boys snoozing in them peacefully, their faces violet with old age and high blood pressure.
I sneaked quietly around to the left. Melton sat there, in a private nook between shelves, with his back to the room, and the chair, high as it was, not high enough to hide his big dark head. He had another chair drawn up beside him. I slipped into it and gave him the eye.
“Keep your voice down,” he said. “This place is for afterluncheon naps. Now, what is it? When I employed you, it was to save me bother, not to add bother to what I already have.”
“Yeah,” I said, and put my face close to his. He smelled of highballs, but nicely. “She shot him.”
His stiff eyebrows went up a little. His eyes got the stony look. His teeth clamped. He breathed softly and twisted one large hand on his knee and looked down at it.
“Go on,” he said, in a voice the size of a marble.
I craned back over the top of the chair. The nearest old geezer was snoozling lightly and blowing the fuzz in his nostrils back and forth with each breath.
“I went out there to Goodwin’s place. No answer. Tried the back door. Open. Walked in. Radio turned on, but muted. Two glasses with drinks. Smashed photo on floor below mantel. Goodwin in chair shot dead at close range. Contact wound. Gun on floor by his right hand. Twenty-five automatic–a woman’s gun. He sat there as if he had never known it. I wiped glasses, gun, doorknobs, put his prints where they should be, left.”
Melton opened and shut his mouth. His teeth made a grating noise. He made fists of both hands. Then he looked steadily at me with hard black eyes.
“Photo,” he said thickly.
I reached it out of my pocket and showed it to him, but I held on to it.
“Julia,” he said. His breath made a queer, sharp keening sound and his hand went limp. I slipped the photo back into my pocket. “What then?” he whispered.
“All. I may have been seen, but not going in or coming out. Trees in back. The place is well shaded. She have a gun like that?”
His head drooped and he held it in his hands. He held still for a while, then pushed it up and spread his fingers on his face and spoke through them at the wall we were facing.
“Yes. But I never knew her to carry it. I suppose he ditched her, the dirty rat.” He said it quietly without heat.
“You’re quite a guy,” he said. “It’s a suicide now, eh?”
“Can’t tell. Without a suspect they’re apt to handle it that way. They’ll test his hand with paraffin to see if he fired the gun. That’s routine now. But it sometimes doesn’t work, and without a suspect they may let it ride anyway. I don’t get the photo angle.”
“I don’t either,” he whispered, still talking between his fingers. “She must have got panicked up very suddenly.”
“Uh-huh. You realize I’ve put my head in a bag, don’t you? It’s my licence if I’m caught. Of course there’s a bare chance it was suicide. But he doesn’t seem the type. You’ve got to play ball, Melton.”
He laughed grimly. Then he turned his head enough to look at me, but still kept his hands on his face. The gleam of his eyes shot through his fingers.
“Why did you fix it up?” he asked quietly.
“Damned if I know. I guess I took a dislike to him–from that photo. He didn’t look worth what they’d do to her–and to you.”
“Five hundred, as a bonus,” he said.
I leaned back and gave him a stony stare. “I’m not trying to pressure you. I’m a fairly tough guy–but not in spots like this. Did you give me everything you had?”
He said nothing for a long minute. He stood up and looked along the room, put his hands in his pockets, jingled something, and sat down again.
“That’s the wrong approach–both ways,” he said. “I wasn’t thinking of blackmail–or offering to pay it. It isn’t enough money. These are hard times. You take an extra risk, I offer you an extra compensation. Suppose Julia had nothing to do with it. That might explain the photo being left. There were plenty of other women in Goodwin’s life. But if the story comes out and I’m connected with it at all, the home offices will bounce me. I’m in a sensitive business, and it hasn’t been doing too well. They might be glad of the excuse.”
“That’s different,” I said. “I asked you, did you give me everything you had.”
He looked at the floor. “No. I suppressed something. It didn’t seem important then. And it hurts the position badly now. A few days ago, just after I met Goodwin downtown, the bank called me and said a Mr. Lancelot Goodwin was there to cash a check for one thousand dollars made out to cash by Julia Melton. I told them Mrs. Melton was out of town, but that I knew Mr. Goodwin very well and I saw no objection to cashing the check, if it was in order and he was properly identified. I couldn’t say anything else–in the circumstances. I suppose they cashed it. I don’t know.”
“I thought Goodwin had dough.”
Melton shrugged stiffly.
“A blackmailer of women, huh? And a sappy one at that, to be taking checks. I think I’ll play with you on it, Melton. I hate like hell to see these newspaper ghouls go to town on a yam like that. But if they get to you, I’m out–if I can get out.”
He smiled for the first time. “I’ll give you the five hundred right now,” he said.
“Nothing doing. I’m hired to find her. If I find her I get five hundred flat–all other bets off.”
“You’ll find me a good man to trust,” he said.
“I want a note to this Haines up at your place at Little Fawn Lake. I want into your cabin. My only way to go at it is as if I’d never been to Chevy Chase.”
He nodded and stood up. He went over to a desk and came back with a note on the club stationery.
Mr. William Haines,
Little Fawn Lake.
Dear Bill– Please allow bearer, Mr. John Dalmas, to
view mycabin and assist him in all ways to look over
the property.
Sincerely,
HOWARD MELTON
I folded the note and put it away with my other gatherings from the day. Melton put a hand on my shoulder. “I’ll never forget this,” he said. “Are you going up there now?”
“I think so.”
“What do you expect to find?”
“Nothing. But I’d be a sap not to start where the trail starts.”
“Of course. Haines is a good fellow, but a little surly. He has a pretty blond wife that rides him a lot. Good luck.”
We shook hands. His hand felt clammy as a pickled fish.
THREE
THE MAN WITH THE PEG LEG
I made San Bernardino in less than two hours and for once in its life it was almost as cool as Los Angeles, and not nearly as sticky. I took on a cup of coffee and bought a pint of rye and gassed up and started up the grade. It was overcast all the way to Bubbling Springs. Then it suddenly got dry and bright and cool air blew down the gorges, and I finally came to the big dam and looked along the level blue reaches of Puma Lake. Canoes paddled on it, and rowboats with outboard motors and speedhoats churned up the water and made a lot of fuss over nothing. Jounced around in their wake, people who had paid two dollars for a fishing license wasted their time trying to catch a dime’s worth of fish.
The road turned two ways from the dam. My way was the south shore. It skimmed along high among piled-up masses of granite. Hundred-foot yellow pines probed at the clear blue sky. In the open spaces grew bright green manzanita and what was left of the wild irises and white and purple lupine and bugle flowers and desert paintbrush. The road dropped to the lake level and I began to pass flocks of camps and flocks of girls in shorts on bicycles, on motor scooters, walking all over the highway, or just sitting under trees showing off their legs. I saw enough beef on the hoof to stock a cattle ranch.
Howard Melton had said to turn away from the lake at the old Redlands road, a mile short of Puma Point. It was a frayed asphalt ribbon that climbed into the surrounding mountains. Cabins were perched here and there on the slopes. The asphalt gave out and after a while a small, narrow dirt road sneaked off to my right. A sign at its entrance said: Private Road to Little Fawn Lake. No Trespassing. I took it and crawled around big bare stones and past a little waterfall and through yellow pines and black oaks and silence. A squirrel sat on a branch and tore a fresh pine cone to pieces and sent the pieces fluttering down like confetti. He scolded at me and beat one paw angrily on the cone.
The narrow road swerved sharply around a big tree trunk and then there was a five-barred gate across it with another sign. This one said: Private–No Admittance.
I got out and opened the gate and drove through and closed it again. I wound through trees for another couple of hundred yards. Suddenly below me was a small oval lake that lay deep in trees and rocks and wild grass, like a drop of dew caught in a furled leaf. At the near end there was a yellow concrete dam with a rope handrail across the top and an old mill wheel at the side. Near that stood a small cabin of native wood covered with rough bark. It had two sheet-metal chimneys and smoke lisped from one of them. Somewhere an axe thudded.
Across the lake, a long way by the road and the short way over the dam, there was a large cabin close to the water and two others not so large, spaced at wide intervals. At the far end, opposite the dam, was what looked like a small pier and band pavilion. A warped wooden sign on it read: Camp Kilkare. I couldn’t see any sense in that, so I walked down a path to the bark-covered cabin and pounded on the door.
The sound of the axe stopped. A man’s voice yelled from somewhere behind. I sat down on a big stone and rolled an unlit cigarette around in my fingers. The owner of the cabin came around its side with an axe in his hands. He was a thickbodied man, not very tall, with a dark, rough, unshaven chin, steady brown eyes and grizzled hair that curled. He wore blue denim pants and a blue shirt open on a muscular brown neck. When he walked he seemed to give his right foot a little kick outwards with each step. It swung out from his body in a shallow arc. He walked slowly and came up to me, a cigarette dangling from his thick lips. He had a city voice.
“Yeah?”
“Mr. Haines?”
“That’s me.”
“I have a note for you.” I took it out and gave it to him. He threw the axe to one side and looked squintingly at the note, then turned and went into the cabin. He came out wearing glasses, reading the note as he came.
“Oh, yeah,” he said, “From the boss.” He studied the note again. “Mr. John Dalmas, huh? I’m Bill Haines. Glad to know you.” We shook hands. He had a hand like a steel trap.
“You want to look around and see Melton’s cabin, huh? What’s the matter? He ain’t selling, for God’s sake?”
I lit my cigarette and flipped the match into the lake. “He has more than he needs here,” I said.
“Land sure. But it says the cabin–”
“He wanted me to look it over. It’s a pretty nice cabin, he says.”
He pointed. “That one over there, the big one. Milled redwood walls, celarex lined and then knotty pine inside. Composition shingle roof, stone foundations and porches, bathroom, shower and toilet. He’s got a spring-filled reservoir back in the hill behind. I’ll say it’s a nice cabin.”
I looked at the cabin, but I looked at Bill Haines more. His eyes had a glitter and there were pouches under his eyes, for all his weathered look.
“You wanta go over now? I’ll get the keys.”
“I’m kind of tired after that long drive up. I sure could use a drink, Haines.”
He looked interested, but shook his head. “I’m sorry, Mr. Dalmas, I just finished up a quart.” He licked his broad lips and smiled at me.
“What’s the mill wheel for?”
“Movie stuff. They make a picture up here once in a while. That’s another set down at the end. They made Love Among the Pines with that. The rest of the sets are tore down. I heard the picture flopped.”
“Is that so? Would you join me in a drink?” I brought out my pint of rye.
“Never been heard to say no. Wait’ll I get some glasses.”
“Mrs. Haines away?”
He stared at me with sudden coldness. “Yeah,” he said very slowly. “Why?”
“On account of the liquor.”
He relaxed, but kept an eye on me for a moment longer. Then he turned and walked his stiff-legged walk back into the cabin. He came out with a couple of the little glasses they pack fancy cheese in. I opened my bottle and poured a couple of stiff ones and we sat holding them, Haines with his right leg almost straight out in front of him, the foot twisted a little outwards.
“I copped that in France,” he said, and drank. “Old Peg-leg Haines. Well, it got me a pension and it ain’t hurt me with the ladies. Here’s to crime.” He finished his drink.
We set our glasses down and watched a bluejay go up a big pine, hopping from branch to branch without pausing to balance, like a man running upstairs.
“Cold and nice here, but lonely,” Haines said. “Too damn lonely.” He watched me with the corners of his eyes. He had something on his mind.
“Some people like that.” I reached for the glasses and did my duty with them.
“Gets me. I been drinkin’ too much account of it gets me. It gets me at night.”
I didn’t say anything. He put his second drink down in a swift, hard gulp. I passed the bottle to him silently. He sipped his third drink, cocked his head on one side, and licked at his lip.
“Kind of funny what you said there–about Mrs. Haines bein’ away.”
“I just thought maybe we ought to take our bottle out of sight of the cabin.”
“Uh-huh. You a friend of Melton’s?”
“I know him. Not intimately.”
Haines looked across at the big cabin.
“That damn floozie!” he snarled suddenly, his face twisted.
I stared at him. “Lost me Beryl, the damn tart,” he said bitterly. “Had to have even one-legged guys like me. Had to get me drunk and make me forget I had as cute a little wife as ever a guy had.”
I waited, nerves taut.
“The hell with him, too! Leavin’ that tramp up here all alone. I don’t have to live in his goddam cabin. I can live anywheres I like. I got a pension. War pension.”
“It’s a nice place to live,” I said. “Have a drink.”
He did that, turned angry eyes on me. “It’s a lousy place to live,” he snarled. “When a guy’s wife moves out on him and he don’t know where she’s at–maybe with some other guy.” He clenched an iron left fist.
After a moment he unclenched it slowly and poured his glass half full. The bottle was looking pretty peaked by this time. He put his big drink down in a lump.
“I don’t know you from a mule’s hind leg,” he growled, “but what the hell! I’m sick of bein’ alone. I been a sucker–but I ain’t just human. She has looks–like Beryl. Same size, same hair, same walk as Beryl. Hell, they coulda been sisters. Only just enough different–if you get what I mean.” He leered at me, a little drunk now.
I looked sympathetic.
“I’m over there to burn trash,” he scowled, waving an arm. “She comes out on the back porch in pajamas like they was made of cellophane. With two drinks in her hands. Smiling at me, with them bedroom eyes. ‘Have a drink, Bill.’ Yeah. I had a drink. I had nineteen drinks. I guess you know what happened.”
“It’s happened to a lot of good men.”
“Leaves her alone up here, the
! While he plays around in L.A. And Beryl walks out on me–two weeks come Friday.”
I stiffened. I stiffened so hard that I could feel my muscles strain all over my body. Two weeks come Friday would be a week ago last Friday. That would be August twelfth–the day Mrs. Julia Melton was supposed to have left for El Paso, the day she had stopped over at the Olympia Hotel down at the foot of the mountains.
Haines put his empty glass down and reached into his buttoned shirt pocket. He passed me a dog-eared piece of paper. I unfolded it carefully. It was written in pencil.
I’d rather be dead than live with you any longer, you lousy cheater–Beryl. That was what it said.
“Wasn’t the first time,” Haines said, with a rough chuckle. “Just the first time I got caught.” He laughed. Then he scowled again. I gave him back his note and he buttoned it up in the pocket. “What the hell am I tellin’ you for?” he growled at me.
A bluejay scolded at a big speckled woodpecker and the woodpecker said “Cr-racker!” just like a parrot.
“You’re lonely,” I said. “You need to get it off your chest. Have another drink. I’ve had my share. You were away that afternoon–when she left you?”
He nodded moodily and sat holding the bottle between his legs. “We had a spat and I drove on over to the north shore to a guy I know. I felt meaner than flea dirt. I had to get good and soused. I done that. I got home maybe two AM–plenty stinko. But I drive slow account of this trick pin. She’s gone. Just the note left.”
“That was a week ago last Friday, huh? And you haven’t heard from her since?”
I was being a little too exact. He gave me a hard questioning glance, but it went away. He lifted the bottle and drank moodily and held it against the sun. “Boy, this is damn near a dead soldier,” he said. “She scrammed too.” He jerked a thumb towards the other side of the lake.
“Maybe they had a fight.”
“Maybe they went together.”
He laughed raucously. “Mister, you don’t know my little Beryl. She’s a hell cat when she starts.”
“Sounds as if they both are. Did Mrs. Haines have a car? I mean, you drove yours that day, didn’t you?”
“We got two Fords. Mine has to have the foot throttle and brake pedal over on the left, under the good leg. She took her own.”
I stood up and walked to the water and threw my cigarette stub into it. The water was dark blue and looked deep. The level was high from the spring flood and in a couple of places the water licked across the top of the dam.
I went back to Haines. He was draining the last of my whisky down his throat. “Gotta get some more hooch,” he said quickly. “Owe you a pint. You ain’t drunk nothing.”
“Plenty more where it came from,” I said. “When you feel like it I’ll go over and look at that cabin.”
“Sure. We’ll walk around the lake. You don’t mind me soundin’ off that way at you–about Beryl?”
“A guy sometimes has to talk his troubles to somebody,” I said. “We could go across the dam. You wouldn’t have to walk so far.”
‘Hell, no. I walk good, even if it don’t look good. I ain’t been around the lake in a month.” He stood up and went into the cabin and came out with some keys. “Let’s go.”
We started towards the little wooden pier and pavilion at the far end of the lake. There was a path close to the water, winding in and out among big rough granite boulders. The dirt road was farther back and higher up. Haines walked slowly, kicking his right foot. He was moody, just drunk enough to be living in his own world. He hardly spoke. We reached the little pier and I walked out on it. Haines followed me, his foot thumping heavily on the planks. We reached the end, beyond the little open band pavilion, and leaned against a weathered dark green railing.
“Any fish in here?” I asked.
“Sure. Rainbow trout, black bass. I ain’t no fish-eater myself. I guess there’s too many of them.”
I leaned out and looked down into the deep still water. There was swirl down there and a greenish form moved under the pier. Haines leaned beside me. His eyes stared down into the depths of the water. The pier was solidly built and had an underwater flooring–wider than the pier itself–as if the lake had once been at a much lower level, and this underwater flooring had been a boat landing. A flat-bottomed boat dangled in the water on a frayed rope.
Haines took hold of my arm. I almost yelled. His fingers bit into my muscles like iron claws. I looked at him. He was bent over, staring like a loon, his face suddenly white and glistening. I looked down into the water.
Languidly, at the edge of the underwater flooring, something that looked vaguely like a human arm and hand in a dark sleeve waved out from under the submerged boarding, hesitated, waved back out of sight.
Haines straightened his body slowly and his eyes were suddenly sober and frightful. He turned from me without a word and walked back along the pier. He went to a pile of rocks and bent down and heaved. His panting breath came to me. He got a rock loose and his thick back straightened. He lifted the rock breast high. It must have weighed a hundred pounds. He walked steadily back out on the pier with it, game leg and all, reached the end railing and lifted the rock high above his head. He stood there a moment holding it, his neck muscles bulging above his blue shirt. His mouth made some vague distressful sound. Then his whole body gave a hard lurch and the big stone smashed down into the water.
It made a huge splash that went over both of us. It fell straight and true through the water and crashed on the edge of the submerged planking. The ripples widened swiftly and the water boiled. There was a dim sound of boards breaking underwater. Waves rippled off into the distance and the water down there under our eyes began to clear. An old rotten plank suddenly popped up above the surface and sank back with a flat slap and floated off.
The depths cleared still more. In them something moved. It rose slowly, a long, dark, twisted something that rolled as it came up. It broke surface. I saw wool, sodden black now–a sweater, a pair of slacks. I saw shoes, and something that bulged shapeless and swollen over the edges of the shoes. I saw a wave of blond hair straighten out in the water and lie still for an instant.
The thing rolled then and an arm flapped in the water and the hand at the end of the arm was no decent human hand. The face came rolling up. A swollen, pulpy, gray-white mass of bloated flesh, without features, without eyes, without mouth. A thing that had once been a face. Haines looked down at it. Green stones showed below the neck that belonged to the face. Haines’ right hand took hold of the railing and his knuckles went as white as snow under the hard brown skin.
“Beryl!” His voice seemed to come to me from a long way off, over a hill, through a thick growth of trees.
FOUR
THE LADY IN THE LAKE
A large white card in the window, printed in heavy block capitals, said: KEEP TINCHFLELD CONSTABLE. Behind the window was a narrow counter with piles of dusty folders on it. The door was glass and lettered in black paint: Chief of Police. Fire Chief. Town Constable. Chamber of Commerce. Enter.
I entered and was in what was nothing but a small one-room pineboard shack with a potbellied stove in the corner, a littered rolltop desk, two hard chairs, and the counter. On the wall hung a large blueprint map of the district, a calendar, a thermometer. Beside the desk telephone numbers had been written laboriously on the wood in large deeply bitten figures.
A man sat tilted back at the desk in an antique swivel chair, with a flat-brimmed Stetson on the back of his head and a huge spittoon beside his right foot. His large hairless hands were clasped comfortably on his stomach. He wore a pair of brown pants held by suspenders, a faded and much washed tan shirt buttoned tight to his fat neck, no tie. What I could see of his hair was mousy-brown except the temples, which were snow-white. On his left breast there was a star. He sat more on his left hip than his right, because he wore a leather hip holster with a big black gun in it down inside his hip pocket.
I leaned on the counter and looked at him. He had large ears and friendly gray eyes and he looked as if a child could pick his pocket.
“Are you Mr. Tinchfleld?”
“Yep. What law we got to have, I’m it–come election anyways. There’s a couple good boys running against me and they might up and whip me.” He sighed.
“Does your jurisdiction extend to Little Fawn Lake?”
“What was that, son?”
“Little Fawn Lake, back in the mountains. You cover that?”
“Yep. Guess I do. I’m deppity sheriff. Wasn’t no more room on the door.” He eyed the door, without displeasure. “I’m all them things there. Melton’s place, eh? Something botherin’ there, son?”
“There’s a dead woman in the lake.”
“Well, I swan.” He unclasped his hands and scratched his ear and stood up heavily. Standing up he was a big, powerful man. His fat was just cheerfulness. “Dead, you said? Who is it?”
“Bill Haines’ wife, Beryl. Looks like suicide. She’s been in the water a long time, Sheriff. Not nice to look at. She left him ten days ago, he said. I guess that’s when she did it.”
Tinchfleld bent over the spittoon and discharged a tangled mass of brown fiber into it. It fell with a soft plop. He worked his lips and wiped them with the back of his hand.
“Who are you, son?”
“My name is John Dalmas. I came up from Los Angeles with a note to Haines from Mr. Melton–to look at the property. Haines and I were walking around the lake and we went out on the little pier the movie people built there once. We saw something down in the water underneath. Haines threw a large rock in and the body came up. It’s not nice to look at, Sheriff.”