Chandler, Raymond – Trouble Is My Business (Collection)

“Haines up there?”

“Yeah. I came down because he’s pretty badly shaken.”

“Ain’t surprised at that, son.” Tinchfleld opened a drawer in his desk and took out a full pint of whisky. He slipped it inside his shirt and buttoned the shirt again. “We’ll get Doc Menzies,” he said. “And Paul Loomis.” He moved calmly around the end of the counter. The situation seemed to bother him slightly less than a fly.

We went out. Before going out he adjusted a clock card hanging inside the glass to read–Back at 6 p.m. He locked the door and got into a car that had a siren on it, two red spotlights, two amber foglights, a red-and-white fire plate, and various legends on the side which I didn’t bother to read.

“You wait here, son. I’ll be back in a frog squawk.”

He swirled the car around in the street and went off down the road towards the lake and pulled up at a frame building opposite the stage depot. He went into this and came out with a tall, thin man. The car came slowly swirling back and I fell in behind it. We went through the village, dodging girls in shorts and men in trunks, shorts and pants, most of them naked and brown from the waist up. Tinchfield stood on his horn, but didn’t use his siren. That would have started a mob of cars after him. We went up a dusty hill and stopped at a cabin. Tinchfleld honked his horn and yelled. A man in blue overalls opened the door.

“Get in, Paul.”

The man in overalls nodded and ducked back into the cabin and came out with a dirty lion hunter’s hat on his head. We went back to the highway and along to the branch road and so over to the gate on the private road. The man in overalls got out and opened it and closed it after our cars had gone through.

When we came to the lake, smoke was no longer rising from the small cabin. We got out.

Doc Menzies was an angular yellow-faced man with bug eyes and nicotine-stained fingers. The man in blue overalls and the lion hunter’s hat was about thirty, dark, swarthy, lithe, and looked underfed.

We went to the edge of the lake and looked towards the pier. Bill Haines was sitting on the floor of the pier, stark naked, with his head in his hands. There was something beside him on the pier.

“We can ride a ways more,” Tinchfleld said. We got back into the cars and went on, stopped again, and all trooped down to the pier.

The thing that had been a woman lay on its face on the pier with a rope under the arms. Haines’ clothes lay to one side. His artificial leg, gleaming with leather and metal, lay beside them. Without a word spoken Tinchfleld slipped the bottle of whisky out of his shirt and uncorked it and handed it to Haines.

“Drink hearty, Bill,” he said casually. There was a sickening, horrible smell on the air. Haines didn’t seem to notice it, nor Tinchfleld and Menzies. Loomis got a blanket from the car and threw it over the body, then he and I backed away from it.

Haines drank from the bottle and looked up with dead eyes. He held the bottle down between his bare knee and his stump and began to talk. He spoke in a dead voice, without looking at anybody or anything. He spoke slowly and told everything he had told me. He said that after I went he had got the rope and stripped and gone into the water and got the thing out. When he had finished he stared at the wooden plank and became as motionless as a statue.

Tinchfleld put a cut of tobacco in his mouth and chewed on it for a moment. Then he shut his teeth tight and leaned down and turned the body over carefully, as if he was afraid it would come apart in his hands. The late sun shone on the loose necklace of green stones I had noticed in the water. They were roughly carved and lustreless, like soapstone. A gilt chain joined them. Tinchfleld straightened his broad back and blew his nose hard on a tan handkerchief.

“What you say, Doe?”

Menzies spoke in a tight, high, irritable voice. “What the hell do you want me to say?”

“Cause and time of death,” Tinchfleld said mildly.

“Don’t be a damn fool, Jim,” the doctor said nastily.

“Can’t tell nothing, eh?”

“By looking at that? Good God!”

Tinchfleld sighed and turned to me. “Where was it when you first seen it?”

I told him. He listened with his mouth motionless and his eyes blank. Then he began to chew again. “Funny place to be. No current here. If there was any, ‘twould be towards the dam.”

Bill Haines got to his foot, hopped over to his clothes and strapped his leg on. He dressed slowly, awkwardly; dragging his shirt over his wet skin. He spoke again without looking at anybody.

“She done it herself. Had to. Swum under the boards there and breathed water in. Maybe got stuck. Had to. No other way.”

“One other way, Bill,” Tinchfleld said mildly, looking at the sky.

Haines rummaged in his shirt and got out his dog-eared note. He gave it to Tinchfleld. By mutual consent everybody moved some distance away from the body. Then Tinchfleld went back to get his bottle of whisky and put it away under his shirt. He joined us and read the note over and over.

“It don’t have a date. You say this was a couple of weeks ago?”

“Two weeks come Friday.”

“She left you once before, didn’t she?”

“Yeah,” Haines didn’t look at him. “Two years ago. I got drunk and stayed with a chippy.” He laughed wildly.

The sheriff calmly read the note once more. “Note left that time?” he inquired.

“I get it,” Haines snarled. “I get it. You don’t have to draw me pictures.”

“Note looks middlin’ old,” Tinchfleld said gently.

“I had it in my shirt ten days,” Haines yelled. He laughed wildly again.

“What’s amusing you, Bill?”

“You ever try to drag a person six feet under water?”

“Never did, Bill.”

“I swim pretty good–for a guy with one leg. I don’t swim that good.”

Tinchfleld sighed. “Now that don’t mean anything, Bill. Could have been a rope used. She could have been weighted down with a stone, maybe two stones, head and foot. Then after she’s under them boards the rope could be cut loose. Could be done, son.”

“Sure. I done it,” Haines said and roared laughing. “Me– I done it to Beryl. Take me in, you– s –!”

“I aim to,” Tinchfleld said mildly. “For investigation. No charges yet, Bill. You could have done it. Don’t tell me different. I ain’t saying you did, though. I’m just sayin’ you could.”

Haines sobered as quickly as he had gone to pieces.

“Any insurance?” Tinchfield asked, looking at the sky.

Haines started. “Five thousand. That does it. That hangs me. Okay. Let’s go.”

Tinchfleld turned slowly to Loomis. “Go back there in the cabin, Paul, and get a couple of blankets. Then we better all get some whisky inside our nose.”

Loomis turned and walked back along the path that skirted the lake towards the Haines’ cabin. The rest of us just stood. Haines looked down at his hard brown hands and clenched them. Without a word he swept his right fist up and hit himself a terrible blow in the face.

“You!” he said in a harsh whisper.

His nose began to bleed. He stood lax. The blood ran down his lip, down the side of his mouth to the point of his chin. It began to drip off his chin.

That reminded me of something I had almost forgotten.

FIVE

THE GOLDEN ANKLET

I telephoned Howard Melton at his Beverly Hills home an hour after dark. I called from the telephone company’s little logcabin office half a block from the main street of Puma Point, almost out of hearing of the .22’s at the shooting gallery, the rattle of the ski balls, the tooting of fancy auto horns, and the whine of hillbilly music from the dining room of the Indian Head Hotel.

When the operator got him she told me to take the call in the manager’s office. I went in and shut the door and sat down at a small desk and answered the phone.

“Find anything up there?” Melton’s voice asked. It had a thickish edge to it, a three-highball edge.

“Nothing I expected. But something has happened up here you won’t like. Want it straight–or wrapped in Christmas paper?”

I could hear him cough. I didn’t hear any other sounds from the room in which he was talking. “I’ll take it straight,” he said steadily.

“Bill Haines claims your wife made passes at him–and they scored. They got drunk together the very morning of the day she went away. Haines had a row with his wife about it afterwards, and then he went over to the north shore of Puma Lake to get drunk some more. He was gone until two A.M. I’m just telling you what he says, you understand.”

I waited. Melton’s voice said finally: “I heard you. Go on, Dalmas.” It was a toneless voice, as flat as a piece of slate.

“When he got home both the women had gone. His wife Beryl had left a note saying she’d rather be dead than live with a lousy cheater any more. He hasn’t seen her since–until today.”

Melton coughed again. The sound made a sharp noise in my ear. There were buzzes and crackles on the wire. An operator broke in and I asked her to go brush her hair. After the interruption Melton said: “Haines told all this to you, a complete stranger?”

“I brought some liquor with me. He likes to drink and he was aching to talk to somebody. The liquor broke down the barriers. There’s more. I said he didn’t see his wife again until today. Today she came up out of your little lake. I’ll let you guess what she looked like.”

“Good God!” Melton cried.

“She was stuck down under the underwater boarding below the pier the movie people built. The constable here, Jim Tinchfield, didn’t like it too well. He’s taken Haines in. I think they’ve gone down to see the D.A. in San Bernardino and have an autopsy and so on.”

“Tinchfleld thinks Haines killed her?”

“He thinks it could have happened that way. He’s not saying everything he thinks. Haines put on a swell broken-hearted act, but this Tinchfleld is no fool. He may know a lot of things around Haines that I don’t know.”

“Did they search Haines’ cabin?”

“Not while I was around. Maybe later.”

“I see.” He sounded tired now, spent.

“It’s a nice dish for a county prosecutor close to election time,” I said. “But it’s not a nice dish for us. If I have to appear at an inquest, I’ll have to state my business, on oath. That means telling what I was doing up there, to some extent, at least. And that means pulling you in.”

“It seems,” Melton’s voice said flatly, “that I’m pulled in already. If my wife–” He broke off and swore. He didn’t speak again for a long time. Wire noises came to me and a sharper crackling, thunder somewhere in the mountains along the lines.

I said at last: “Beryl Haines had a Ford of her own. Not Bill’s. His was fixed up for his left leg to do the heavy work. The car is gone. And that note didn’t sound like a suicide note to me.”

“What do you plan to do now?”

“It looks as though I’m always being sidetracked on this job. I may come down tonight. Can I call you at your home?”

“Any time,” he said. “I’ll be home all evening and all night. Call me any time. I didn’t think Haines was that sort of a guy at all.”

“But you knew your wife had drinking spells and you left her up here alone.”

“My God,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “A man with a wooden–”

“Oh let’s skip that part of it,” I growled. “It’s dirty enough without. Goodbye.”

I hung up and went back to the outer office and paid the girl for the call. Then I walked back to the main street and got into my car parked in front of the drugstore. The street was full of gaudy neon signs and noise and glitter. On the dry mountain air every sound seemed to carry a mile. I could hear people talking a block away. I got out of my car again and bought another pint at the drugstore and drove away from there.

When I got to the place back along the highway where the road turned off to Little Fawn Lake, I pulled over to the side and thought. Then I started up the road into the mountains towards Melton’s place.

The gate across the private road was shut and padlocked now. I tucked my car off to the side in some bushes and climbed over the gate and pussyfooted along the side of the road until the starlit glimmer of the lake suddenly bloomed at my feet. Haines’ cabin was dark. The cabins on the other side of the lake were vague shadows against the slope. The old mill wheel beside the dam looked funny as hell up there all alone. I listened–didn’t hear a sound. There are no night birds in the mountains.

I padded along to Haines’ cabin and tried the door–locked. I went around to the back and found another locked door. I prowled around the cabin walking like a cat on a wet floor. I pushed on the one screenless window. That was locked also. I stopped and listened some more. The window was not very tight. Wood dries out in that air and shrinks. I tried my knife between the two sashes, which opened inward, like small cottage windows. No dice. I leaned against the wall and looked at the hard shimmer of the lake and took a drink from my pint. That made me tough. I put the bottle away and picked up a big stone and smacked the window frame in without breaking the glass. I heaved up on the sill and climbed into the cabin.

A flash hit me in the face.

A calm voice said: “I’d rest right there, son. You must be all tired out.”

The flash pinned me against the wall for a moment and then a light switch clicked and a lamp went on. The flash died. Tinchfield sat there peacefully in a leather Morris chair beside a table over the edge of which a brown-fringed shawl dangled foolishly. Tinchfield wore the same clothes as he had worn that afternoon, and the addition of a brown wool windbreaker over his shirt. His jaws moved quietly.

“That movie outfit strung two miles of wire up here,” he said reflectively. “Kind of nice for the folks. Well, what’s on your mind, son–besides breakin’ and enterin’?”

I picked out a chair and sat down and looked around the cabin. The room was a small square room with a double bed and a rag rug and a few modest pieces of furniture. An open door at the back showed the corner of a cookstove.

“I had an idea,” I said. “From where I sit now it looks lousy.”

Tinchfield nodded and his eyes studied me without rancor. “I heard your car,” he said. “I knew you was on the private road and comin’ this way. You walk right nice, though. I didn’t hear you walk worth a darn. I’ve been mighty curious about you, son.”

“Why?”

“Ain’t you kind of heavy under the left arm, son?”

I grinned at him. “Maybe I better talk,” I said.

“Well, you don’t have to bother a lot about pushin’ in that winder. I’m a tolerant man. I figure you got a proper right to carry that six-gun, eh?”

I reached into my pocket and laid my open billfold on his thick knee. He lifted it and held it carefully to the lamp-light, looking at the photostat license behind the celluloid window. He handed the billfold back to me.

“I kind of figured you was interested in Bill Haines,” he said. “A private detective, eh? Well, you got a good hard build on you and your face don’t tell a lot of stories. I’m kind of worried about Bill myself. You aim to search the cabin?”

“I did have the idea.”

“It’s all right by me, but there ain’t really no necessity. I already pawed around considerable. Who hired you?”

“Howard Melton.”

He chewed a moment in silence. “Might I ask to do what?”

“To find his wife. She skipped out on him a couple of weeks back.”

Tinchfleld took his flat-crowned Stetson off and rumpled his mousy hair. He stood up and unlocked and opened the door. He sat down again and looked at me in silence.

“He’s very anxious to avoid publicity,” I said. “On account of a certain failing his wife has which might lose him his job.” Tinchfleld eyed me unblinkingly. The yellow lamp-light made bronze out of one side of his face. “I don’t mean liquor or Bill Haines,” I added.

“None of that don’t hardly explain your wantin’ to search Bill’s cabin,” he said mildly.

“I’m just a great guy to poke around.”

He didn’t budge for a long minute, during which he was probably deciding whether or not I was kidding him, and if I was, whether he cared.

He said at length: “Would this interest you at all, son?” He took a folded piece of newspaper from the slanting pocket of his windbreaker and opened it up on the table under the lamp. I went over and looked. On the newspaper lay a thin gold chain with a tiny lock. The chain had been snipped through neatly by a pair of cutting pliers. The lock was not unlocked. The chain was short, not more than four or five inches long and the lock was tiny and hardly any larger around than the chain itself. There was a little white powder on both chain and newspaper.

“Where would you guess I found that?” Tinchfleld asked.

I moistened a finger and touched the white powder and tasted it. “In a sack of flour. That is, in the kitchen here. It’s an anklet. Some women wear them and never take them off. Whoever took this one off didn’t have the key.”

Tinchfleld looked at me benignly. He leaned back and patted one knee with a large hand and smiled remotely at the pineboard ceiling. I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and sat down again.

Tinchfleld refolded the piece of newspaper and put it back in his pocket. “Well, I guess that’s all–unless you care to make a search in my presence.”

“No,” I said.

“It looks like me and you are goin’ to do our thinkin’ separate.”

“Mrs. Haines had a car, Bill said. A Ford.”

“Yep. A blue coupé. It’s down the road a piece, hid in some rocks.”

“That doesn’t sound much like a planned murder.”

“1 don’t figure anything was planned, son. Just come over him sudden. Maybe choked her, and he has awful powerful hands. There he is–stuck with a body to dispose of. He done it the best way he could think of and for a pegleg he done pretty damn well.”

“The car sounds more like a suicide,” I said. “A planned suicide. People have been known to commit suicide in such a way as to make a murder case stick against somebody they were mad at. She wouldn’t take the car far away, because he had to walk back.”

Tinchfleld said: “Bill wouldn’t neither. That car would be mighty awkward for him to drive, him being used to use his left foot.”

“He showed me that note from Beryl before we found the body,” I said. “And I was the one that walked out on the pier first.”

“You and me could get along, son. Well, we’ll see. Bill’s a good feller at heart–except these veterans give themselves too many privileges in my opinion. Some of ’em did three weeks in a camp and act like they was wounded nine times. Bill must have been mighty sentimental about this piece of chain I found.”

He got up and went to the open door. He spat his chaw out into the dark. “I’m a man sixty-two years of age,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve known folks to do all manner of funny things. I would say offhand that jumpin’ into a cold lake with all your clothes on, and swimmin’ hard to get down under that board, and then just dyin’ there was a funny thing to do. On the other hand, since I’m tellin’ you all my secrets and you ain’t tellin’ me nothing, I’ve had to speak to Bill a number of times for slapping his wife around when he was drunk. That ain’t goin’ to sound good to a jury. And if this here little chain come off Beryl Haines’ leg, it’s just about enough to set him in that nice new gas chamber they got up north. And you and me might as well mosey on home, son.,’

I stood up.

“And don’t go smokin’ that cigarette on the highway,” he added. “It’s contrary to the law up here.”

I put the unlit cigarette back in my pocket and stepped out into the night. Tinchfleld switched the lamp off and locked up the cabin and put the key in his pocket. “Where at are you stain’, son?”

“I’m going down to the Olympia in San Bernardino.”

“It’s a nice place, but they don’t have the climate we have up here. Too hot.”

“I like it hot,” I said.

We walked back to the road and Tinchfleld turned to the right. “My car’s up a piece towards the end of the lake. I’ll say good night to you, son.”

“Good night, Sheriff. I don’t think he murdered her.”

He was already walking off. He didn’t turn. “Well, we’ll see,” he said quietly.

I went back to the gate and climbed it and found my car and started back down the narrow road past the waterfall. At the highway I turned west towards the dam and the grade to the valley.

On the way I decided that if the citizens around Puma Lake didn’t keep Tinchfleld constable, they would be making a very bad mistake.

SIX

MELTON UPS THE ANTE

It was past ten-thirty when I got to the bottom of the grade and parked in one of the diagonal slots in front of the Hotel Olympia in San Bernardino. I pulled an overnight bag out of the back of my car and had taken about four steps with it when a bellhop in braided pants and a white shirt and black bow tie had it out of my hand.

The clerk on duty was an egg-headed man with no interest in me. I signed the register.

The hop and I rode a four-by-four elevator to the second floor and walked a couple of blocks around the corners. As we walked it got hotter and hotter. The hop unlocked a door into a boy’s-size room with one window on an airshaft.

The hop, who was tall, thin, yellow, and as cool as a slice of chicken in aspic, moved his gum around in his face, put my bag on a chair, opened the window and stood looking at me. He had eyes the color of a drink of water.

“Bring us up some ginger ale and glasses and ice,” I said.

“Us?”

“That is, if you happen to be a drinking man.”

“After eleven I reckon I might take a chance.”

“It’s now ten thirty-nine,” I said. “If I give you a dime, will you say ‘I sho’ly do thank you’?”

He grinned and snapped his gum.

He went out, leaving the door open. I took off my coat and unstrapped my holster. It was wearing grooves in my hide. I removed my tie, shirt, undershirt and walked around the room in the draft from the open door. The draft smelled of hot iron. I went into the bathroom sideways–it was that kind of bathroom–doused myself with cold water and was breathing more freely, when the tall, languid hop returned with a tray. He shut the door and I brought out my bottle. He mixed a couple of drinks and we drank. The perspiration started from the back of my neck down my spine, but I felt better all the same. I sat on the bed holding my glass and looking at the hop.

“How long can you stay?”

“Doing what?”

“Remembering.”

“I ain’t a damn bit of use at it.”

“I have money to spend,” I said, “in my own peculiar way.” I took my wallet from my coat and spread bills along the bed.

“I beg yore pardon,” the hop said. “You’re a copper?”

“Private.”

“I’m interested. This likker makes my mind work.”

I gave him a dollar bill. “Try that on your mind. Can I call you Tex?”

“You done guessed it,” he drawled, tucking the bill neatly into the watch pocket of his pants.

“Where were you on Friday the twelfth of August, in the late afternoon?”

He sipped his drink and thought, shaking the ice very gently and drinking past his gum. “Here. Four-to-twelve shift,” he answered finally.

“A lady named Mrs. George Atkins, a small, slim, pretty blonde, checked in and stayed until time for the night train east. She put her car in the hotel garage and I believe it is still there. I want the lad that checked her in. That wins another dollar.” I separated it from my stake and laid it by itself on the bed.

“I sho’ly do thank you,” the hop said, grinning. He finished his drink and left the room, closing the door quietly. I finished my drink and made another. Time passed. Finally the wall telephone rang. I wedged myself into a small space between the bathroom door and the bed and answered it.

“That was Sonny. Off at eight tonight. He can be reached, I reckon.”

“How soon?”

“You want him over?”

“Yeah.”

“Half an hour, if he’s home. Another boy checked her out. A fellow we call Les. He’s here.”

“Okay. Shoot him up.”

I finished my second drink and thought well enough of it to mix a third before the ice melted. I was stirring it when the knock came, and I opened to a small, wiry, carrot-headed, green-eyed rat with a tight little girlish mouth.

“Drink?”

“Sure,” he said. He poured himself a large one and added a whisper of mixer. He put the mixture down in one swallow, tucked a cigarette between his lips and snapped a match alight while it was still coming up from his pocket. He blew smoke, fanned it with his hand, and stared at me coldly. I noticed, stitched over his pocket instead of a number, the word Captain.

“Thanks,” I said. “That will be all.”

“Huh?” His mouth twisted unpleasantly.

“Beat it.”

“I thought you wanted to see me,” he snarled.

“You’re the night bell captain?”

“Check.”

“I wanted to buy you a drink. I wanted to give you a buck. Here. Thanks for coming up.”

He took the dollar and hung there, smoke trailing from his nose, his eyes beady and mean. He turned then with a swift, tight shrug and slipped out of the room soundlessly.

Ten minutes passed, then another knock, very light. When I opened the lanky lad stood there grinning. I walked away from him and he slipped inside and came over beside the bed. He was still grinning.

“You didn’t take to Les, huh?”

“No. Is he satisfied?”

“I reckon so. You know what captains are. Have to have their cut. Maybe you better call me Les, Mr. Dalmas.”

“So you checked her out.”

“Not if Mrs. George Atkins was her name, I didn’t.”

I took the photo of Julia from my pocket and showed it to him. He looked at it carefully, for a long time. “She looked like that,” he said. “She gave me four bits, and in this little town that gets you remembered. Mrs. Howard Melton was the name. There’s been talk about her car. I guess we just don’t have much to talk about here.”

“Uh-huh. Where did she go from here.”

“She took a hack to the depot. You use nice likker, Mr. Dalmas.”

“Excuse me. Help yourself.” When he had I said: “Remember anything about her? She have any visitors?”

“No, sir. But I do recall something. A tall, good-lookin’ jasper. She didn’t seem pleased to see him.”

“Ah.” I took another photo out of my pocket and showed it to him. He studied that carefully also.

“This don’t look quite so much like her. But I’m sure it’s the gentleman I spoke of.”

He picked up both photos again and held them side by side. He looked a little puzzled. “Yes, sir. That’s him all right,” he said.

“You’re an accommodating guy,” I said. “You’d remember almost anything, wouldn’t you?”

“I don’t get you, sir.”

“Take another drink. I owe you four bucks. That’s five in all. It’s not worth it. You hops are always trying to pull some gag.”

He took a very small one and balanced it in his hand, his yellow face puckered. “I do the best I can,” he said stiffly. He drank his drink, put the glass down silently and moved to the door. “You can keep your goddam money,” he said. He took the dollar out of his watch pocket and threw it on the floor. “To hell with you, you–” he said softly.

He went out.

I picked up the two photos and held them side by side and scowled at them. After a long moment an icy finger touched my spine. It had touched it once before, very briefly, but I had shaken off the feeling. It came back now to stay.

I went to the tiny desk and got an envelope and put a fivedollar bill in it and sealed it and wrote “Les” on it. I put my clothes on and my bottle on my hip and picked up my overnight bag and left the room.

Down in the lobby the redhead jumped at me. Les stayed back by a pillar, his arms folded, silent. I went to the desk and asked for my bill.

“Anything wrong, sir?” The clerk looked troubled.

I paid the bill and walked out to my car and then turned and went back to the desk. I gave the clerk the envelope with the five in it. “Give this to the Texas boy, Les. He’s mad at me, but he’ll get over it.”

I made Glendale before 2 a. m. and looked around for a place where I could phone. I found an all-night garage.

I got out dimes and nickels, and dialed the operator and got Melton’s number in Beverly Hills. His voice, when it finally came over the wire, didn’t sound very sleepy.

“Sorry to call at this hour,” I said, “but you told me to. I traced Mrs. Melton to San Bernardino and to the depot there.”

“We knew that already,” he said crossly.

“Well, it pays to be sure. Haines’ cabin has been searched. Nothing much found. If you thought he knew where Mrs. Melton–”

“I don’t know what I thought,” he broke in sharply. “After what you told me I thought the place ought to be searched. Is that all you have to report?”

“No.” I hesitated a little. “I’ve had a bad dream. I dreamed there was a woman’s bag in a chair in that Chester Lane house this morning. It was pretty dark in there from the trees and I forgot to remove it.”

“What color bag?” His voice was as stiff as a clam shell.

“Dark blue–maybe black. The light was bad.”

“You’d better go back and get it,” he snapped.

“Why?”

“That’s what I’m paying you five hundred dollars for–among other things.”

“There’s a limit to what I have to do for five hundred bucks–even if I had them.”

He swore. “Listen, fella. I owe you a lot, but this is up to you and you can’t let me down.”

“Well, there might be a flock of cops on the front step. And then again the place might be quiet as a pet flea. Either way I don’t like it. I’ve had enough of that house.”

There was a deep silence from Melton’s end. I took a long breath and gave him some more: “What’s more, I think you know where you wife is, Melton. Goodwin ran into her in the hotel in San Bernardino. He had a check of hers a few days ago. You met Goodwin on the street. You helped him get the check cashed, indirectly. I think you know. I think you just hired me to backtrack over her trail and see that it was properly covered.”

There was more heavy silence from him. When he spoke again it was in a small, chastened voice. “You win, Dalmas. Yeah–it was blackmail all right, on that check business. But I don’t know where she is. That’s straight. And that bag has to be got. How would seven hundred and fifty sound to you?”

“Better. When do I get it?”

“Tonight, if you’ll take a check. I can’t make better than eighty dollars in cash before tomorrow.”

I hesitated again. I knew by the feel of my face that I was grinning. “Okay,” I said at last. “It’s a deal. I’ll get the bag unless there’s a flock of johns there.”

“Where are you now?” He almost whistled with relief.

“Azusa. It’ll take me about an hour to get there,” I lied.

“Step on it,” he said. “You’llfind me a good guy to play ball with. You’re in this pretty deep yourself, fella.”

“I’m used to jams,” I said, and hung up.

SEVEN

A PAIR OF FALL GUYS

I drove back to Chevy Chase Boulevard and along it to the foot of Chester Lane where I dimmed my lights and turned in. I drove quickly up around the curve to the new house across from Goodwin’s place. There was no sign of life around it, no cars in front, no sign of a stakeout that I could spot. That was a chance I had to take, like another and worse one I was taking.

I drove into the driveway of the house and got out and lifted up the unlocked swing-up garage door. I put my car inside, lowered the door and snaked back across the street as if Indians were after me. I used all the cover of Goodwin’s trees to the back yard and put myself behind the biggest of them there. I sat down on the ground and allowed myself a sip from my pint of rye.

Time passed, with a deadly slowness. I expected company, but I didn’t know how soon. It came sooner than I expected.

In about fifteen minutes a car came up Chester Lane and I caught a faint glisten of it between the trees, along the side of the house. It was running without lights. I liked that. A shadow moved without sound at the corner of the house. It was a small shadow, a foot shorter than Melton’s would have been. He couldn’t have driven from Beverly Hills in that time anyway.

Then the shadow was at the back door, the back door opened, and the shadow vanished through it into deeper darkness. The door closed silently. I got up on my feet and sneaked across the soft, moist grass. I stepped silently into Mr. Goodwin’s porch and from there into his kitchen. I stood still, listening hard. There was no sound, no light beyond me. I took the gun out from under my arm and squeezed the butt down at my side. I breathed shallowly, from the top of my lungs. Then a funny thing happened. A crack of light appeared suddenly under the swing door to the dining room. The shadow had turned the lights up. Careless shadow! I walked across the kitchen and pushed the swing door open and left it that way. The light poured into the alcove dining room from beyond the living-room arch. I went that way, carelessly–much too carelessly. I stepped past the arch.

A voice at my elbow said: “Drop it–and keep on walking.” I looked at her. She was small, pretty after a fashion, and her gun pointed at my side very steadily.

“You’re not clever,” she said. “Are you?”

I opened my hand and let the gun fall. I walked four steps beyond it and turned.

“No,” I said.

The woman said nothing more. She moved away, circling a little, leaving the gun on the floor. She circled until she faced me. I looked past her at the corner chair with the footstool. White buck shoes still rested on the footstool. Mr. Lance Goodwin still sat negligently in the chair, with his left hand on the wide brocaded arm and his right trailing to the small gun on the floor. The last blood drop had frozen on his chin. It looked black and hard and permanent. His face had a waxy look now.

I looked at the woman again. She wore well-pressed blue slacks and a double-breasted jacket and a small tilted hat. Her hair was long and curled in at the ends and it was a dark red color with glints of blue in the shadows–dyed. Red spots of hastily applied rouge burned on her cheeks too high up. She pointed her gun and smiled at me. It wasn’t the nicest smile I had ever seen.

I said: “Good evening, Mrs. Melton. What a lot of guns you must own.”

“Sit down in the chair behind you and clasp your hands behind your neck and keep them there. That’s important. Don’t get careless about it.” She showed me her teeth to her gums.

I did as she suggested. The smile dropped from her face– a hard little face, even though pretty in a conventional sort of way. “Just wait,” she said. “That’s important, too. Maybe you could guess how important that is.”

“This room smells of death,” I said. “I suppose that’s important, too.”

“Just wait, smart boy.”

“They don’t hang women any more in this state,” I said. “But two cost more than one. A lot more. About fifteen years more. Think it over.”

She said nothing. She stood firmly, pointing the gun. This was a heavier gun, but it didn’t seem to bother her. Her ears were busy with the distance. She hardly heard me. The time passed, as it does, in spite of everything. My arms began to ache.

At last he came. Another car drifted quietly up the street outside and stopped and its door closed quietly. Silence for a moment, then the house door at the back opened. His steps were heavy. He came through the open swing door and into the lighted room. He stood silent, looking around it, a hard frown on his big face. He looked at the dead man in the chair, at the woman with her gun, last of all at me. He stooped and picked up my gun and dropped it into his side pocket. He came to me quietly, almost without recognition in his eyes, stepped behind me and felt my pockets. He took out the two photos and the telegram. He stepped away from me, near the woman. I put my arms down and rubbed them. They both stared at me quietly.

At last he said softly: “A gag, eh? First off I checked your call and found out it came from Glendale–not from Azusa. I don’t know just why I did that, but I did. Then I made another call. The second call told me there wasn’t any bag left in this room. Well?”

“What do you want me to say?”

“Why the trick-work? What’s it all about?” His voice was heavy, cold, but more thougtful than menacing. The woman stood beside him, motionless, holding her gun.

“I took a chance,” I said. “You took one too–coming here. I hardly thought it would work. The idea, such as it was, that you would call her quickly about the bag. She would know there wasn’t one. You would both know then that I was trying to pull something. You’d be very anxious to know what it was. You’d be pretty sure I wasn’t working with any law, because I knew where you were and you could have been jumped there without any trouble at all. I wanted to bring the lady out of hiding–that’s all. I took a long chance. If it didn’t work, I had to think up a better way.”

The woman made a contemptuous sound and said: “I’d like to know why you hired this snooper in the first place, Howie.”

He ignored her. He looked at me steadily out of stony black eyes. I turned my head and gave him a quick, hard wink. His mouth got rigid at once. The woman didn’t see it. She was too far to the side.

“You need a fall guy, Melton,” I said. “Bad.”

He turned his body a little so that his back was partly to the woman. His eyes ate my face. He lifted his eyebrows a little and half nodded. He still thought I was for sale.

He did it nicely. He put a smile on his face and turned towards her and said, “How about getting out of here and talking it over in a safer place?” and while she was listening and her mind was on the question his big hand struck down sharply at her wrist. She yelped and the gun dropped. She reeled back and clenched both her fists and spat at him.

“Aw, go sit down and get wise to yourself,” he said dryly.

He stooped and picked up her gun and dropped it into his other pocket. He smiled then, a large confident smile. He had forgotten something completely. I almost laughed–in spite of the spot I was in. The woman sat down in a chair behind him and leaned her head in her hands broodingly.

“You can tell me about it now,” Melton said cheerfully. “Why I need a fall guy, as you say.”

“I lied to you over the phone a little. About Haines’ cabin. There’s a wise old country cop up there who went through it with a sifter. He found a gold anklet in the flour bag, cut through with pliers.”

The woman let out a queer yelp. Melton didn’t even bother to look at her. She was staring at me with all her eyes now.

“He might figure it out,” I said, “and he might not. He doesn’t know Mrs. Melton stayed over at the Hotel Olympia, for one thing, and that she met Goodwin there. If he knew that, he’d be wise in a second. That is, if he had photos to show the bellhops, the way I had. The hop who checked Mrs. Melton out and remembered her on account of her leaving her car there without any instructions remembered Goodwin, remembered him speaking to her. He said she was startled. He wasn’t so sure about Mrs. Mellon from the photos. He knew Mrs. Melton.”

Mellon opened his mouth a little in a queer grimace and grated the edges of his teeth together. The woman stood up noiselessly behind him and drifted back, inch by inch, into the dark back part of the room. I didn’t look at her. Melton didn’t seem to hear her move.

I said: “Goodwin trailed her into town. She must have come by bus or in a rent car, because she left the other in San Bernardino. He trailed her to her hideout without her knowing it, which was pretty smart, since she must have been on her guard, and then he jumped her. She stalled him for a while–I don’t know with what story–and he must have had her watched every minute, because she didn’t slip away from him. Then she couldn’t stall him any longer and she gave him that check. That was just a retainer. He came back for more and she fixed him up permanently–over there in the chair. You didn’t know that, or you would never have let me come out here this morning.”

Melton smiled grimly. “Right, I didn’t know that,” he said. “Is that what I need a fall guy for?”

I shook my head. “You don’t seem to want to understand me,” I said. “I told you Goodwin knew Mrs. Melton personally. That’s not news, is it? What would Goodwin have on Mrs. Melton to blackmail her for? Nothing. He wasn’t blackmailing Mrs. Melton. Mrs. Melton is dead. She has been dead for eleven days. She came up out of Little Fawn Lake today–in Beryl Haines’ clothes. That’s what you need a fall guy for– and you have one, two of them, made to order.”

The woman in the shadows of the room stooped and picked something up and rushed. She panted as she rushed. Mellon turned hard and his hands jerked at his pockets, but he hesitated just too long, looking at the gun she had snatched up from the floor beside Goodwin’s dead hand, the gun that was the thing he had forgotten about.

“You

!” she said.

He still wasn’t very scared. He made placating movements with his empty hands. “Okay, honey, we’ll play it your way,” he said softly. He had a long arm. He could reach her now. He had done it already when she held a gun. He tried it once more. He leaned towards her quickly and swept his hand. I put my feet under me and dived for his legs. It was a long dive–too long.

“I’d make a swell fall guy, wouldn’t I?” she said raspingly, and stepped back. The gun banged three times.

He jumped at her with the slugs in him, and fell hard against her and carried her to the floor. She ought to have thought of that too. They crashed together, his big body pinning her down. She wailed and an arm waved up towards me holding the gun. I smacked it out of her hand. I grabbed at his pockets and got my gun out and jumped away from them. I sat down. The back of my neck felt like a piece of ice. I sat down and held the gun on my knee and waited.

His big hand reached out and took hold of the clawshaped leg of a davenport and whitened on the wood. His body arched and rolled and the woman wailed again. His body rolled back and sagged and the hand let go of the davenport leg. The fingers uncurled quietly and lay limp on the nap of the carpet. There was a choking rattle–and silence.

She fought her way out from under him and got to her feet panting, glaring like an animal. She turned without a sound and ran. I didn’t move. I just let her go.

I went over and bent down above the big, sprawled man and held a finger hard against the side of his neck. I stood there silently, leaning down, feeling for a pulse, and listening. I straightened up slowly and listened some more. No sirens, no car, no noise. Just the dead stillness of the room. I put my gun back under my arm and put the light out and opened the front door and walked down the path to the sidewalk. Nothing moved on the street. A big car stood at the curb, beside the fireplug, up at the dead-end beyond Goodwin’s place. I crossed the street to the new house and got my car out of its garage and shut the garage up again and started for Puma Lake again.

EIGHT

KEEP TINCHFIELD CONSTABLE

The cabin stood in a hollow, in front of a growth of jackpines. A big barnlike garage with cordwood piled on one side was open to the morning sun and Tinchfield’s car glistened inside it. There was a cleated walk down to the front door and smoke lisped from the chimney.

Tinchfleld opened the door himself. He wore an old gray roll-collar sweater and his khaki pants. He was fresh-shaved and as smooth as a baby.

“Well, step in, son,” he said peacefully. “I see you go to work bright and early. So you didn’t go down the hill last night, eh?”

I went past him into the cabin and sat in an old Boston rocker with a crocheted antimacassar over its back. I rocked in it and it gave out a homey squeak.

“Coffee’s just about ready to pour,” Tinchfleld said genially. “Emma’ll lay a plate for you. You got a kind of tuckered-out look, son.”

“I went back down the hill,” I said. “I just came back up. That wasn’t Beryl Haines in the lake yesterday.”

Tinchfleld said: “Well, I swan.”

“You don’t seem a hell of a lot surprised,” I growled.

“I don’t surprise right easy, son. Particularly before breakfast.”

“It was Julia Melton,” I said. “She was murdered–by Howard Melton and Beryl Haines. She was dressed in Beryl’s clothes and put down under those boards, six feet under water, so that she would stay long enough not to look like Julia Melton. Both the women were blondes, of the same size and general appearance. Bill said they were enough alike to be sisters. Not twin sisters, probably.”

“They were some alike,” Tinchfleld said, staring at me gravely. He raised his voice. “Emma!”

A stout woman in a print dress opened the inner door of the cabin. An enormous white apron was tied around what had once been her waist. A smell of coffee and frying bacon rushed out.

“Emma, this is Detective Dalmas from Los Angeles. Lay another plate and I’ll pull the table out from the wall a ways. He’s a mite tired and hungry.”

The stout woman ducked her head and smiled and put silver on the table.

We sat down and ate bacon and eggs and hot cakes and drank coffee by the quart. Tinchfleld ate like four men and his wife ate like a bird and kept hopping up and down like a bird to get more food.

We finished at last and Mrs. Tinchfleld gathered up the dishes and shut herself in the kitchen. Tinchfleld cut a large slice of plug and tucked it carefully into his face and I sat down in the Boston rocker again.

“Well, son,” he said, “I guess I’m ready for the word. I was a mite anxious about that piece of gold chain bein’ hid where it was, what with the lake so handy. But I’m a slow thinker. What makes you think Mellon murdered his wife?”

“Because Beryl Haines is still alive, with her hair dyed red.”

I told him my story, all of it, fact by fact, concealing nothing. He said nothing until I had finished.

“Well, son,” he said then, “you done a mighty smart piece of detectin’ work there–what with a little luck in a couple of places, like we all have to have. But you didn’t have no business to be doin’ it at all, did you?”

“No. But Mellon took me for a ride and played me for a sucker. I’m a stubborn sort of guy.”

“What for do you reckon Melton hired you?”

“He had to. It was a necessary part of his plan to have the body correctly identified in the end, perhaps not for some time, perhaps not until after it had been buried and the case closed. But he had to have it identified in the end in order to get his wife’s money. That or wait for years to have the courts declare her legally dead. When it was correctly identified, he would have to show that he had made an effort to find her. If his wife was a kleptomaniac, as he said, he had a good excuse for hiring a private dick instead of going to the police. But he had to do something. Also there was the menace of Goodwin. He might have planned to kill Goodwin and frame me for it. He certainly didn’t know Beryl had beat him to it, or he wouldn’t have let me go to Goodwin’s house.

“After that–and I was foolish enough to come up here before I had reported Goodwin’s death to the Glendale police–he probably thought I could be handled with money. The murder itself was fairly simple, and there was an angle to it that Beryl didn’t know or think about. She was probably in love with him. An underprivileged woman like that, with a drunken husband, would be apt to go for a guy like Melton.

“Melton couldn’t have known the body would be found yesterday, because that was pure accident, but he would have kept me on the job and kept hinting around until it was found. He knew Haines would be suspected of murdering his wife and the note she left was worded to sound a bit unlike a real suicide note. Melton knew his wife and Haines were getting tight together up here and playing games.

“He and Beryl just waited for the right time, when Haines had gone off to the north shore on a big drunk. Beryl must have telephoned him from somewhere. You’ll be able to check that. He could make it up here in three hours’ hard driving. Julia was probably still drinking. Melton knocked her out, dressed her in Beryl’s clothes and put her down in the lake. He was a big man and could do it alone, without much trouble. Beryl would be acting as lookout down the only road into the property. That gave him a chance to plant the anklet in the Haines cabin. Then he rushed back to town and Beryl put on Julia’s clothes and took Julia’s car and luggage and went to the hotel in San Bernardino.

“There she was unlucky enough to be seen and spoken to by Goodwin, who must have known something was wrong, by her clothes or her bags or perhaps hearing her spoken to as Mrs. Melton. So he followed her into town and you know the rest. The fact that Melton had her lay this trail shows two things, as I see it. One, that he intended to wait some time before having the body properly identified. It would be almost certain to be accepted as the body of Beryl Haines on Bill’s say-so, especially as that put Bill in a very bad spot.

“The other thing is that when the body was identified as Julia Melton, then the false trail laid by Beryl would make it look as though she and Bill had committed the murder to collect her insurance. I think Mellon made a bad mistake by planting that anklet where he did. He should have dropped it into the lake, tied to a bolt or something, and later on, accidentally on purpose, fished it out. Putting it in Haines’ cabin and then asking me if Haines’ cabin had been searched was a little too sloppy. But planned murders are always like that.”

Tinchfleld switched his chaw to the other side of his face and went to the door to spit. He stood in the open door with his big hands clasped behind him.

“He couldn’t have pinned nothing on Beryl,” he said over his shoulder. “Not without her talkin’ a great deal, son. Did you think of that?”

“Sure. Once the police were looking for her and the case broke wide open in the papers–I mean the real case–he would have had to bump Beryl off and make it look like a suicide. I think it might have worked.”

“You hadn’t ought to have let that there murderin’ woman get away, son. There’s other things you hadn’t ought to have done, but that one was bad.”

“Whose case is this?” I growled. “Yours–or the Glendale police’s? Beryl will be caught all right. She’s killed two men and she’ll flop on the next trick she tries to pull. They always do. And there’s collateral evidence to be dug up. That’s police work–not mine. I thought you were running for re-election, against a couple of younger men. I didn’t come back up here just for the mountain air.”

He turned and looked at me slyly. “I kind of figured you thought old man Tinchfleld might be soft enough to keep you out of jail, son.” Then he laughed and slapped his leg. “Keep Tinchfleld Constable,” he boomed at the big outdoors. “You’re darn right they will. They’d be dum fools not to–after this. Let’s mosey on over to the office and call the ‘cutor down in Berdoo.” He sighed. “Just too dum smart that Melton was,” he said. “I like simple folks.”

“Me too,” I said. “That’s why I’m here.”

They caught Beryl Haines on the California-Oregon line, doubling back south to Yreka in a rent car. The highway patrol stopped her for a routine border fruit inspection, but she didn’t know that. She pulled another gun. She still had Julia Melton’s luggage and Julia Melton’s clothes and Julia Melton’s checkbook, with nine blank checks in it traced from one of Julia Melton’s genuine signatures. The check cashed by Goodwin proved to be another forgery.

Tinchfield and the county prosecutor went to bat for me with the Glendale police, but I got hell from them just the same. From Violets M’Gee I got the large and succulent razzberry, and from the late Howard Melton I got what was left of the fifty dollars he had advanced me. They kept Tinchfleld constable, by a landslide.

* * *

NO CRIME

IN THE

MOUNTAINS

* * *

ONE

The letter came just before noon, special delivery, a dimestore envelope with the return address F. S. Lacey, Puma Point, California. Inside was a check for a hundred dollars, made out to cash and signed Frederick S. Lacey, and a sheet of plain white bond paper typed with a number of strikeovers. It said:

Mr. John Evans.

Dear Sir:

I have your name from Len Esterwald. My business

is urgent and extremely confidential. I enclose a retainer.

Please come to Puma Point Thursday afternoon or evening,

if at all possible, register at the Indian Head Hotel,

and call me at 2306.

Yours,

FRED LACEY

There hadn’t been any business in a week, but this made it a nice day. The bank on which the check was drawn was about six blocks away. I went over and cashed it, ate lunch, and got the car out and started off.

It was hot in the valley, hotter still in San Bernardino, and it was still hot at five thousand feet, fifteen miles up the high-gear road to Puma Lake. I had done forty of the fifty miles of curving, twisting highway before it started to cool off, but it didn’t get really cool until I reached the dam and started along the south shore of the lake past the piled-up granite boulders and the sprawled camps in the flats beyond. It was early evening when I reached Puma Point and I was as empty as a gutted fish.

The Indian Head Hotel was a brown building on a corner, opposite a dance halt. I registered, carried my suitcase upstairs and dropped it in a bleak, hard-looking room with an oval rug on the floor, a double bed in the corner, and nothing on the bare pine wall but a hardware-store calendar all curled up from the dry mountain summer. I washed my face and hands and went downstairs to eat.

The dining-drinking parlor that adjoined the lobby was full to overflowing with males in sports clothes and liquor breaths and females in slacks and shorts with blood-red fingernails and dirty knuckles. A fellow with eyebrows like John L. Lewis was prowling around with a cigar screwed into his face. A lean, pale-eyed cashier in shirt-sleeves was fighting to get the race results from Hollywood Park on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potato was full of water. In the deep, black corner of the room a hillbilly symphony of five defeatists in white coats and purple shirts was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar.

I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on it, and went out on to the main stem. It was still broad daylight, but the neon lights were turned on and the evening was full of the noise of auto horns, shrill voices, the rattle of bowls, the snap of .22’s at the shooting gallery, jukebox music, and behind all this the hoarse, hard mutter of speedboats on the lake. At a corner opposite the post office a blue-andwhite arrow said Telephone. I went down a dusty side road that suddenly became quiet and cool and piney. A tame doe deer with a leather collar on its neck wandered across the road in front of me. The phone office was a log cabin, and there was a booth in the corner with a coin-in-the-slot telephone. I shut myself inside and dropped my nickel and dialed 2306. A woman’s voice answered.

I said: “Is Mr. Fred Lacey there?”

“Who is calling, please?”

“Evans is the name.”

“Mr. Lacey is not here right now, Mr. Evans. Is he expecting you?”

That gave her two questions to my one. I didn’t like it. I said: “Are you Mrs. Lacey?”

“Yes. I am Mrs. Lacey.” I thought her voice was taut and overstrung, but some voices are like that all the time.

“It’s a business matter,” I said. “When will he be back?”

“I don’t know exactly. Some time this evening, I suppose. What did you–”

“Where is your cabin, Mrs. Lacey?”

“It’s … it’s on Ball Sage Point, about two miles west of the village. Are you calling from the village? Did you–”

“I’ll call back in an hour, Mrs. Lacey,” I said, and hung up. I stepped out of the booth. In the other corner of the room a dark girl in slacks was writing in some kind of account book at a little desk. She looked up and smiled and said: “How do you like the mountains?”

I said: “Fine.”

“It’s very quiet up here,” she said. “Very restful.”

“Yeah. Do you know anybody named Fred Lacey?”

“Lacey? Oh, yes, they just had a phone put in. They bought the Baldwin cabin. It was vacant for two years, and they just bought it. It’s out at the end of Ball Sage Point, a big cabin on high ground, looking out over the lake. It has a marvelous view. Do you know Mr. Lacey?”

“No,” I said, and went out of there.

The tame doe was in the gap of the fence at the end of the walk. I tried to push her out of the way. She wouldn’t move, so I stepped over the fence and walked back to the Indian Head and got into my car.

There was a gas station at the east end of the village. I pulled up for some gas and asked the leathery man who poured it where Ball Sage Point was.

“Well,” he said. “That’s easy. That ain’t hard at all. You won’t have no trouble finding Ball Sage Point. You go down here about a mile and a half past the Catholic church and Kincaid’s Camp, and at the bakery you turn right and then you keep on the road to Willerton Boys’ Camp, and it’s the first road to the left after you pass on by. It’s a dirt road, kind of rough. They don’t sweep the snow off in winter, but it ain’t winter now. You know somebody out there?”

“No.” I gave him money. He went for the change and came back.

“It’s quiet out there,” he said. “Restful. What was the name?”

“Murphy,” I said.

“Glad to know you, Mr. Murphy,” he said, and reached for my hand. “Drop in any time. Glad to have the pleasure of serving you. Now, for Ball Sage Point you just keep straight on down this road–”

“Yeah,” I said, and left his mouth flapping.

I figured I knew how to find Ball Sage Point now, so I turned around and drove the other way. It was just possible Fred Lacey would not want me to go to his cabin.

Half a block beyond the hotel the paved road turned down towards a boat landing, then east again along the shore of the lake. The water was low. Cattle were grazing in the sourlooking grass that had been under water in the spring. A few patient visitors were fishing for bass or bluegill from boats with outboard motors. About a mile or so beyond the meadows a dirt road wound out towards a long point covered with junipers. Close inshore there was a lighted dance pavilion. The music was going already, although it still looked like late afternoon at that altitude. The band sounded as if ,t was in my pocket. I could hear a girl with a throaty voice singing “The Woodpecker’s Song.” I drove on past and the music faded and the road got rough and stony. A cabin on the shore slid past me, and there was nothing beyond it but pines and junipers and the shine of the water. I stopped the car out near the tip of the point and walked over to a huge tree fallen with its roots twelve feet in the air. I sat down against it on the bone-dry ground and lit a pipe. It was peaceful and quiet and far from everything. On the far side of the lake a couple of speedboats played tag, but on my side there was nothing but silent water, very slowly getting dark in the mountain dusk. I wondered who the hell Fred Lacey was and what he wanted and why he didn’t stay home or leave a message if his business was so urgent. I didn’t wonder about it very long. The evening was too peaceful. I smoked and looked at the lake and the sky, and at a robin waiting on the bare spike at the top of a tall pine for it to get dark enough so he could sing his good-night song.

At the end of half an hour I got up and dug a hole in the soft ground with my heel and knocked my pipe out and stamped down the dirt over the ashes. For no reason at all, I walked a few steps towards the lake, and that brought me to the end of the tree. So I saw the foot.

It was in a white duck shoe, about size nine. I walked around the roots of the tree.

There was another foot in another white duck shoe. There were pinstriped white pants with legs in them, and there was a torso in a pale-green sport shirt of the kind that hangs outside and has pockets like a sweater. It had a buttonless V-neck and chest hair showed through the V. The man was middle-aged, half bald, had a good coat of tan and a line mustache shaved up from the lip. His lips were thick, and his mouth, a little open as they usually are, showed big strong teeth. He had the kind of face that goes with plenty of food and not too much worry. His eyes were looking at the sky. I couldn’t seem to meet them.

The left side of the green sport shirt was sodden with blood in a patch as big as a dinner plate. In the middle of the patch there might have been a scorched hole. I couldn’t be sure. The light was getting a little tricky.

I bent down and felt matches and cigarettes in the pockets of the shirt, a couple of rough lumps like keys and silver in his pants pockets at the sides. I rolled him a little to get at his hip. He was still limp and only a little cooled off. A wallet of rough leather made a tight fit in his right hip pocket. I dragged it out, bracing my knee against his back.

There was twelve dollars in the wallet and some cards, but what interested me was the name on his photostat driver’s license. I lit a match to make sure I read it right in the fading daylight.

The name on the license was Frederick Shield Lacey.

TWO

I put the wallet back and stood up and made a full circle, staring hard. Nobody was in sight, on land or on the water. In that light, nobody could have seen what I was doing unless he was close.

I walked a few steps and looked down to see if I was making tracks. No. The ground was half pine needles of many years past, and the other half pulverized rotten wood.

The gun was about four feet away, almost under the fallen tree. I didn’t touch it. I bent down and looked at it. It was a .22 automatic, a Colt with a bone grip. It was half buried in a small pile of the powdery, brown, rotted wood. There were large black ants on the pile, and one of them was crawling along the barrel of the gun.

I straightened up and took another quick look around. A boat idled offshore out of sight around the point. I could hear an uneven stutter from the throttled-down motor, but I couldn’t see it. I started back toward the car. I was almost up to it. A small figure rose silently behind a heavy manzanita bush. The light winked on glasses and on something else, lower down in a hand.

A voice said hissingly: “Placing the hands up, please.”

It was a nice spot for a very fast draw. I didn’t think mine would be fast enough. I placed the hands up.

The small figure came around the manzanita bush. The shining thing below the glasses was a gun. The gun was large enough. It came towards me.

A gold tooth winked out of a small mouth below a black mustache.

“Turning around, please,” the nice little voice said soothingly. “You seeing man lie on ground?”

“Look,” I said, “I’m a stranger here. I–”

“Turning around very soon,” the man said coldly. I turned around.

Then end of the gun made a nest against my spine. A light, deft hand prodded me here and there, rested on the gun under my arm. The voice cooed. The hand went to my hip. The pressure of my wallet went away. A very neat pick-pocket. I could hardly feel him touch me.

“I look at wallet now. You very still,” the voice said. The gun went away.

A good man had a chance now. He would fall quickly to the ground, do a back flip from a kneeling position, and come up with his gun blazing his hand. It would happen very fast. The good man would take the little man with glasses the way a dowager takes her teeth out, in an even smooth motion. I somehow didn’t think I was that good.

The wallet went back on my hip, the gun barrel back into my back.

“So,” the voice said softly. “You coming here you making mistake.”

“Brother, you said it,” I told him.

“Not matter,” the voice said. “Go away now, go home. Five hundred dollars. Nothing being said five hundred dollars arriving one week from today.”

“Fine,” I said. “You having my address?”

“Very funny,” the voice cooed. “Ha, ha.”

Something hit the back of my right knee, and the leg folded suddenly the way it will when hit at that point. My head began to ache from where it was going to get a crack from the gun, but he fooled me. It was the old rabbit punch, and it was a honey of its type. Done with the heel of a very hard little hand. My head came off and went halfway across the lake and did a boomerang turn and came back and slammed on top of my spine with a sickening jar. Somehow on the way it got a mouthful of pine needles.

There was an interval of midnight in a small room with the windows shut and no air. My chest labored against the ground. They put a ton of coal on my back. One of the hard lumps pressed into the middle of my back. I made some noises. but they must have been unimportant. Nobody bothered about them. I heard the sound of a boat motor get louder, and a soft thud of feet walking on the pine needles, making a dry, slithering sound. Then a couple of heavy grunts and steps going away. Then steps coming back and a hurry voice, with a sort of accent.

“What did you get there, Charlie?”

“Oh nothing,” Charlie said cooingly. “Smoking pipe, not doing anything. Summer visitor, ha, ha.”

“Did he see the stiff?”

“Not seeing,” Charlie said. I wondered why.

“Okay, let’s go.”

“Ah, too bad,” Charlie said. “Too bad.” The weight got off my back and the lumps of hard coal went away from my spine. “Too bad,” Charlie said again. “But must do.”

He didn’t fool this time. He hit me with the gun. Come around and I’ll let you feel the lump under my scalp. I’ve got several of them.

Time passed and I was up on my knees, whining. I put a foot on the ground and hoisted myself on it and wiped my face off with the back of my hand and put the other foot on the ground and climbed out of the hole it felt like I was in.

The shine of water, dark now from the sun but silvered by the moon, was directly in front of me. To the right was the big fallen tree. That brought it back. I moved cautiously towards it, rubbing my head with careful fingertips. It was swollen and soft, but not bleeding. I stopped and looked back for my hat, and then remembered I had left it in the car.

I went around the tree. The moon was bright as it can only be in the mountains or on the desert. You could almost see that there was no body on the ground now and no gun lying against the tree with ants crawling on it. The ground had a sort of smoothed-out, raked look.

I stood there and listened, and all I heard was the blood pounding in my head, and all I felt was my head aching. Then my hand jumped for the gun and the gun was there. And the hand jumped again for my wallet and the wallet was there. I hauled it out and looked at my money. That seemed to be there, too.

I turned around and plowed back to the car. I wanted to go back to the hotel and get a couple of drinks and lie down. I wanted to meet Charlie after a while, but not right away. First I wanted to lie down for a while. I was a growing boy and I needed rest.

I got into the car and started it and tooled it around on the soft ground and back on to the dirt road and back along that to the highway. I didn’t meet any cars. The music was still going well in the dancing pavilion off to the side, and the throaty-voiced singer was giving out “I’ll Never Smile Again.”

When I reached the highway I put the lights on and drove back to the village. The local law hung out in a one-room pineboard shack halfway up the block from the boat landing, across the street from the firehouse. There was a naked light buring inside, behind a glass-paneled door.

I stopped the car on the other side of the street and sat there for a minute looking into the shack. There was a man inside, sitting bareheaded in a swivel chair at an old rolltop desk. I opened the car door and moved to get out, then stopped and shut the door again and started the motor and drove on.

I had a hundred dollars to earn, after all.

THREE

I drove two miles past the village and came to the bakery and turned on a newly oiled road towards the lake. I passed a couple of camps and then saw the brownish tents of the boys’ camp with lights strung between them and a clatter coming from a big tent where they were washing dishes. A little beyond that the road curved around an inlet and a dirt road branched off. It was deeply rutted and full of stones half embedded in the dirt, and the trees barely gave it room to pass. I went by a couple of lighted cabins, old ones built of pine with the bark left on. Then the road climbed and the place got emptier, and after a while a big cabin hung over the edge of the bluff looking down on the lake at its feet. The cabin had two chimneys and a rustic fence, and a double garage outside the fence. There was a long porch on the lake side, and steps going down to the water. Light came from the windows. My headlights tilted up enough to catch the name Baldwin painted on a wooden board nailed to a tree. This was the cabin, all right.

The garage was open and a sedan was parked in it. I stopped a little beyond and went far enough into the garage to feel the exhaust pipe of the car. It was cold. I went through a rustic gate up a path outlined in stones to the porch. The door opened as I got there. A tall woman stood there, framed against the light. A little silky dog rushed out past her, tumbled down the steps and hit me in the stomach with two front paws, then dropped to the ground and ran in circles making noises of approval.

“Down, Shiny!” the woman called. “Down! Isn’t she a funny little dog? Funny itty doggie. She’s half coyote.”

The dog ran back into the house. I said: “Are you Mrs. Lacey? I’m Evans. I called you up about an hour ago.”

“Yes, I’m Mrs. Lacey,” she said. “My husband hasn’t come in yet. I–well, come in, won’t you?” Her voice had a remote sound, like a voice in the mist.

She closed the door behind me after I went in and stood there looking at me, then shrugged a little and sat down in a wicker chair. I sat down in another just like it. The dog appeared from nowhere, jumped in my lap, wiped a neat tongue across the end of my nose and jumped down again. It was a small grayish dog with a sharp nose and a long, feathery tail.

It was a long room with a lot of windows and not very fresh curtains at them. There was a big fireplace, Indian rugs, two davenports with faded cretonne slips over them, more wicker furniture, not too comfortable. There were some antlers on the wall, one pair with six points.

“Fred isn’t home yet,” Mrs. Lacey said again. “I don’t know what’s keeping him.”

I nodded. She had a pale face, rather taut, dark hair that was a little wild. She was wearing a double-breasted scarlet coat with brass buttons, gray flannel slacks, pigskin clog sandals, and no stockings. There was a necklace of cloudy amber around her throat and a bandeau of old-rose material in her hair. She was in her middle thirties, so it was too late for her to learn how to dress herself.

“You wanted to see my husband on business?”

“Yes. He wrote me to come up and stay at the Indian Head and phone him.”

“Oh–at the Indian Head,” she said, as if that meant something. She crossed her legs, didn’t like them that way, and uncrossed them again. She leaned forward and cupped a long chin in her hand. “What kind of business are you in, Mr. Evans?”

“I’m a private detective.”

“It’s … it’s about the money?” she asked quickly.

I nodded. That seemed safe. It was usually about money. It was about a hundred dollars that I had in my pocket, anyhow.

“Of course,” she said. “Naturally. Would you care for a drink?”

“Very much.”

She went over to a little wooden bar and came back with two glasses. We drank. We looked at each other over the rims of our glasses.

“The Indian Head,” she said. “We stayed there two nights when we came up. While the cabin was being cleaned up. It had been empty for two years before we bought it. They get so dirty.”

“I guess so,” I said.

“You say my husband wrote to you?” She was looking down into her glass now. “I suppose he told you the story.”

I offered her a cigarette. She started to reach, then shook her head and put her hand on her kneecap and twisted it. She gave me the careful up-from-under look.

“He was a little vague,” I said. “In spots.”

She looked at me steadily and I looked at her steadily. I breathed gently into my glass until it misted.

“Well, I don’t think we need be mysterious about it,” she said. “Although as a matter of fact I know more about it than Fred thinks I do. He doesn’t know, for example, that I saw that letter.”

“The letter he sent me?”

“No. The letter he got from Los Angeles with the report on the ten-dollar bill.”

“How did you get to see it?” I asked.

She laughed without much amusement. “Fred’s too secretive. It’s a mistake to be too secretive with a woman. I sneaked a look at it while he was in the bathroom. I got it out of his pocket.”

I nodded and drank some more of my drink. I said: “Uhhuh.” That didn’t commit me very far, which was a good idea as long as I didn’t know what we were talking about. “But how did you know it was in his pocket?” I asked.

“He’d just got it at the post office. I was with him.” She laughed, with a little more amusement this time. “I saw that there was a bill in it and that it came from Los Angeles. I knew he had sent one of the bills to a friend there who is an expert on such things. So of course I knew this letter was a report. It was.”

“Seems like Fred doesn’t cover up very well,” I said. “What did the letter say?”

She flushed slightly. “I don’t know that I should tell you. I don’t really know that you are a detective or that your name is Evans.”

“Well, that’s something that can be settled without violence,” I said. I got up and showed her enough to prove it. When I sat down again the little dog came over and sniffed at the cuffs on my trousers. I bent down to pat her head and got a handful of spit.

“It said that the bill was beautiful work. The paper, in particular, was just about perfect. But under a comparison microscope there were very small differences of registration. What does that mean?”

“It means that the bill he sent hadn’t been made from a government plate. Anything else wrong?”

“Yes. Under black light–whatever that is–there appeared to be slight differences in the composition of the inks. But the letter added that to the naked eye the counterfeit was practically perfect. It would fool any bank teller.”

I nodded. This was something I hadn’t expected. “Who wrote the letter, Mrs. Lacey?”

“He signed himself Bill. It was on a plain sheet of paper. I don’t know who wrote it. Oh, there was something else. Bill said that Fred ought to turn it in to the Federal people right away, because the money was good enough to make a lot of trouble if much of it got into circulation. But, of course, Fred wouldn’t want to do that if he could help it. That would be why he sent for you.”

“Well, no, of course not,” I said. This was a shot in the dark, but it wasn’t likely to hit anything. Not with the amount of dark I had to shoot into.

She nodded, as if I had said something.

“What is Fred doing now, mostly?” I asked.

“Bridge and poker, like he’s done for years. He plays bridge almost every afternoon at the athletic club and poker at night a good deal. You can see that he couldn’t afford to be connected with counterfeit money, even in the most innocent way. There would always be someone who wouldn’t believe it was innocent. He plays the races, too, but that’s just fun. That’s how he got the five hundred dollars he put in my shoe for a present for me. At the Indian Head.”

I wanted to go out in the yard and do a little yelling and breast beating, just to let off steam. But all I could do was sit there and look wise and guzzle my drink. I guzzled it empty and made a lonely noise with the ice cubes and she went and got me another one. I took a slug of that and breathed deeply and said: “If the bill was so good, how did he know it was bad, if you get what I mean?”

Her eyes widened a little. “Oh–I see. He didn’t, of course. Not that one. But there were fifty of them, all ten-dollar bills, all new. And the money hadn’t been that way when he put it in the shoe.”

I wondered if tearing my hair would do me any good. I didn’t think–my head was too sore. Charlie. Good old Charlie! Okay, Charlie, after a while I’ll be around with my gang.

“Look,” I said. “Look, Mrs. Lacey. He didn’t tell me about the shoe. Does he always keep his money in a shoe, or was this something special on account of he won it at the races and horses wear shoes?”

“I told you it was a surprise present for me. When I put the shoe on I would find it, of course.”

“Oh.” I gnawed about half an inch off my upper lip. “But you didn’t find it?”

“How could I when I sent the maid to take the shoes to the shoemaker in the village to have lifts put on them? I didn’t look inside. I didn’t know Fred had put anything in the shoe.”

A little light was coming. It was very far off and coming very slowly. It was a very little light, about half a firefly’s worth.

I said: “And Fred didn’t know that. And this maid took the shoes to the shoemaker. What then?”

“Well, Gertrude–that’s the maid’s name–said she hadn’t noticed the money, either. So when Fred found out about it and had asked her, he went over to the shoemaker’s place, and he hadn’t worked on the shoes and the roll of money was still stuffed down into the toe of the shoe. So Fred laughed and took the money out and put it in his pocket and gave the shoemaker five dollars because he was lucky.”

I finished my second drink and leaned back. “I get it now. Then Fred took the roll out and looked it over and he saw it wasn’t the same money. It was all new ten-dollar bills, and before it had probably been various sizes of bills and not new or not all new.”

She looked surprised that I had to reason it out. I wondered how long a letter she thought Fred had written me. I said: “Then Fred would have to assume that there was some reason for changing the money. He thought of one and sent a bill to a friend of his to be tested. And the report came back that it was very good counterfeit, but still counterfeit. Who did he ask about it at the hotel?”

“Nobody except Gertrude, I guess. He didn’t want to start anything. I guess he just sent for you.”

I snubbed my cigarette out and looked out of the open front windows at the moonlit lake. A speedboat with a hard white headlight slid muttering along in the water, far off over the water, and disappeared behind a wooded point.

I looked back at Mrs. Lacey. She was still sitting with her chin propped in a thin hand. Her eyes seemed far away.

“I wish Fred would come home,” she said.

“Where is he?”

“I don’t know. He went out with a man named Frank Luders, who is staying at the Woodland Club, down at the far end of the lake. Fred said he owned an interest in it. But I called Mr. Luders up a while ago and he said Fred had just ridden uptown with him and got off at the post office. I’ve been expecting Fred to phone and ask me to pick him up somewhere. He left hours ago.”

“They probably have some card games down at the Woodland Club. Maybe he went there.”

She nodded. “He usually calls me, though.”

I stared at the floor for a while and tried not to feel like a heel. Then I stood up. “I guess I’ll go on back to the hotel. I’ll be there if you want to phone me. I think I’ve met Mr. Lacey somewhere. Isn’t he a thickset man about forty-five, going a little bald, with a small mustache?”

She went to the door with me. “Yes,” she said. “That’s Fred, all right.”

She had shut the dog in the house and was standing outside herself as I turned the car and drove away. God, she looked lonely.

FOUR

I was lying on my back on the bed, wobbling a cigarette around and trying to make up my mind just why I had to play cute with this affair, when the knock came at the door. I called out. A girl in a working uniform came in with some towels. She had dark, reddish hair and a pert, nicely made-up face and long legs. She excused herself and hung some towels on the rack and started back to the door and gave me a sidelong look with a good deal of fluttering eyelash in it.

I said, “Hello, Gertrude,” just for the hell of it.

She stopped, and the dark-red head came around and the mouth was ready to smile.

“How’d you know my name?”

“I didn’t. But one of the maids is Gertrude. I wanted to talk to her.”

She leaned against the door frame, towels over her arm. Her eyes were lazy. “Yeah?”

“Live up here, or just up here for the summer?” I asked.

Her lip curled. “I should say I don’t live up here. With these mountain screwballs? I should say not.”

“You doing all right?”

She nodded. “And I don’t need any company, mister.” She sounded as if she could be talked out of that.

I looked at her for a minute and said: “Tell about that money somebody hid in a shoe.”

“Who are you?” she asked coolly.

“The name is Evans. I’m a Los Angeles detective.” I grinned at her, very wise.

Her face stiffened a little. The hand holding the towels clutched and her nails made a scratching sound on the cloth. She moved back from the door and sat down in a straight chair against the wall. Trouble dwelt in her eyes.