The Lady in the Lake (9 page)

SIXTEEN

The lower hall had a door at each end and two in the middle side by side. One of these was a linen closet and the other was locked. I went along to the end and looked in at a spare bedroom with drawn blinds and no sign of being used. I went back to the other end of the hall and stepped into a second bedroom with a wide bed, a caféau-lait rug, angular furniture in light wood, a box mirror over the dressing table and a long fluorescent lamp over the mirror. In the corner a crystal greyhound stood on a mirror-top table and beside him a crystal box with cigarettes in it.

Face powder was spilled around on the dressing table. There was a smear of dark lipstick on a towel hanging over the waste basket. On the bed were pillows side by side, with depressions in them that could have been made by heads. A woman’s handkerchief peeped from under one pillow. A pair of sheer black pajamas lay across the foot of the bed. A rather too emphatic trace of chypre hung in the air.

I wondered what Mrs. Fallbrook had thought of all this.

I turned around and looked at myself in the long mirror of a closet door. The door was painted white and had a crystal knob. I turned the knob in my handkerchief and looked inside. The cedar-lined closet was fairly full of man’s clothes. There was a nice friendly smell of tweed. The closet was not entirely full of man’s clothes.

There was also a woman’s black and white tailored suit, mostly white, black and white shoes under it, a Panama with a black and white rolled band on a shelf above it. There were other woman’s clothes, but I didn’t examine them.

I shut the closet door and went out of the bedroom, holding my handkerchief ready for more doorknobs.

The door next to the linen closet, the locked door, had to be the bathroom. I shook it, but it went on being locked. I bent down and saw there was a short, slit-shaped opening in the middle of the knob. I knew then that the door was fastened by pushing a button in the middle of the knob inside, and that the slit-like opening was for a metal key without wards that would spring the lock open in case somebody fainted in the bathroom, or the kids locked themselves in and got sassy.

The key for this ought to be kept on the top shelf of the linen closet, but it wasn’t. I tried my knife blade, but that was too thin. I went back to the bedroom and got a flat nail file off the dresser. That worked. I opened the bathroom door.

A man’s sand-colored pajamas were tossed over a painted hamper. A pair of heelless green slippers lay on the floor. There was a safety razor on the edge of the washbowl and a tube of cream with the cap off. The bathroom window was shut, and there was a pungent smell in the air that was not quite like any other smell.

Three empty shells lay bright and coppery on the Nile green tiles of the bathroom floor, and there was a nice clean hole in the frosted pane of the window. To the left and a little above the window were two scarred places in the plaster where the white showed behind the paint and where something, such as a bullet, had gone in.

The shower curtain was green and white oiled silk and it hung on shiny chromium rings and it was drawn across the shower opening. I slid it aside, the rings making a thin scraping noise, which for some reason sounded indecently loud.

I felt my neck creak a little as I bent down. He was there all right-there wasn’t anywhere else for him to be. He was huddled in the corner under the two shining faucets, and water dripped slowly on his chest, from the chromium showerhead.

His knees were drawn up but slack. The two holes in his naked chest were dark blue and both of them were close enough to his heart to have killed him. The blood seemed to have been washed away.

His eyes had a curiously bright and expectant look, as if he smelled the morning coffee and would be coming right out.

Nice efficient work. You have just finished shaving and stripped for the shower and you are leaning in against the shower curtain and adjusting the temperature of the water. The door opens behind you and somebody comes in. The somebody appears to have been a woman. She has a gun. You look at the gun and she shoots it.

She misses with three shots. It seems impossible, at such short range, but there it is. Maybe it happens all the time. I’ve been around so little.

You haven’t anywhere to go. You could lunge at her and take a chance, if you were that kind of fellow, and if you were braced for it. But leaning in over the shower faucets, holding the curtain closed, you are off balance. Also you are apt to be somewhat petrified with panic, if you are at all like other people. So there isn’t anywhere to go, except into the shower.

That is where you go. You go into it as far as you can, but a shower stall is a small place and the tiled wall stops you. You are backed up against the last wall there is now. You are all out of space, and you are all out of living. And then there are two more shots, possibly three, and you slide down the wall, and your eyes are not even frightened any more now. They are just the empty eyes of the dead.

She reaches in and turns the shower off. She sets the lock of the bathroom door. On her way out of the house she throws the empty gun on the stair carpet. She should worry. It is probably your gun.

Is that right? It had better be right.

I bent and pulled at his arm. Ice couldn’t have been any colder or any stiffer. I went out of the bathroom, leaving it unlocked. No need to lock it now. It only makes work for the cops.

I went into the bedroom and pulled the handkerchief out from under the pillow. It was a minute piece of linen rag with a scalloped edge embroidered in red. Two small initials were stitched in the corner, in red. A.F.

“Adrienne Fromsett,” I said. I laughed. It was a rather ghoulish laugh.

I shook the handkerchief to get some of the chypre out of it and folded it up in a tissue and put it in a pocket. I went back upstairs to the living room and poked around in the desk against the wall. The desk contained no interesting letters, phone numbers or provocative match folders. Or if it did, I didn’t find them.

I looked at the phone. It was on a small table against the wall beside the fireplace. It had a long cord so that Mr. Lavery could be lying on his back on the davenport, a cigarette between his smooth brown lips, a tall cool one at the table at his side, and plenty of time for a nice long cosy conversation with a lady friend. An easy, languid, flirtatious, kidding, not too subtle and not too blunt conversation, of the sort he would be apt to enjoy.

All that wasted too. I went away from the telephone to the door and set the lock so I could come in again and shut the door tight, pulling it hard over the sill until the lock clicked. I went up the walk and stood in the sunlight looking across the street at Dr. Almore’s house.

Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It’s only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.

A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.

I walked back to the intersection and got into my car and started it and backed it and drove away from there.

SEVENTEEN

The bellhop at the Athletic Club was back in three minutes with a nod for me to come with him. We rode up to the fourth floor and went around a corner and he showed me a half-open door.

“Around to the left, sir. As quietly as you can. A few of the members are sleeping.”

I went into the club library. It contained books behind glass doors and magazines on a long central table and a lighted portrait of the club’s founder. But its real business seemed to be sleeping. Outward-jutting bookcases cut the room into a number of small alcoves and in the alcoves were high-backed leather chairs of an incredible size and softness. In a number of the chairs old boys were snoozing peacefully, their faces violet with high blood pressure, thin racking snores coming out of their pinched noses.

I climbed over a few feet and stole around to the left. Derace Kingsley was in the very last alcove in the far end of the room. He had two chairs arranged side by side, facing into the corner. His big dark head just showed over the top of one of them. I slipped into the empty one and gave him a quick nod.

“Keep your voice down,” he said. “This room is for after-luncheon naps. Now what is it? When I employed you it was to save me trouble, not to add trouble to what I already had. You made me break an important engagement.”

“I know,” I said, and put my face close to his. He smelled of highballs, in a nice way. “She shot him.”

His eyebrows jumped and his face got that stony look. His teeth clamped tight. He breathed softly and twisted a large hand on his kneecap.

“Go on,” he said, in a voice the size of a marble.

I looked back over the top of my chair. The nearest old geezer was sound asleep and blowing the dusty fuzz in his nostrils back and forth as he breathed.

“No answer at Lavery’s place,” I said. “Door slightly open. But I noticed yesterday it sticks on the sill. Pushed it open. Room dark, two glasses with drinks having been in them. House very still. In a moment a slim dark woman calling herself Mrs. Fallbrook, landlady, came up the stairs with her glove wrapped around a gun. Said she found it on the stairs. Said she came to collect her three months’ back rent. Used her key to get in. Inference is she took the chance to snoop around and look the house over. Took the gun from her and found it had been fired recently, but didn’t tell her so. She said Lavery was not home. Got rid of her by making her mad and she departed in high dudgeon. She may call the police, but it’s much more likely she will just go out and hunt butterflies and forget the whole thing—except the rent.”

I paused. Kingsley’s head was turned towards me and his jaw muscles bulged with the way his teeth were clamped. His eyes looked sick.

“I went downstairs. Signs of a woman having spent the night. Pajamas, face powder, perfume, and so on. Bathroom locked, but got it open. Three empty shells on the floor, two shots in the wall, one in the window. Lavery in the shower stall, naked and dead.”

“My God!” Kingsley whispered. “Do you mean to say he had a woman with him last night and she shot him this morning in the bathroom?”

“Just what did you think I was trying to say?” I asked.

“Keep your voice down,” he groaned. “It’s a shock, naturally. Why in the bathroom?”

“Keep your own voice down,” I said. “Why not in the bathroom? Could you think of a place where a man would be more completely off guard?”

He said: “You don’t know that a woman shot him. I mean, you’re not sure, are you?”

“No,” I said. “That’s true. It might have been somebody who used a small gun and emptied it carelessly to look like a woman’s work. The bathroom is downhill, facing outwards on space and I don’t think shots down there would be easily heard by anyone not in the house. The woman who spent the night might have left-or there need not have been any woman at all. The appearances could have been faked.
You
might have shot him.”

“What would I want to shoot him for?” he almost bleated, squeezing both kneecaps hard. “I’m a civilized man.”

That didn’t seem to be worth an argument either. I said: “Does your wife own a gun?”

He turned a drawn miserable face to me and said hollowly: “Good God, man, you can’t really think that!”

“Well does she?”

He got the words out in small pieces. “Yes—she does. A small automatic.”

“You buy it locally?”

“I—I didn’t buy it at all. I took it away from a drunk at a party in San Francisco a couple of years ago. He was waving it around, with an idea that that was very funny. I never gave it back to him.” He pinched his jaw hard until his knuckles whitened. “He probably doesn’t even remember how or when he lost it. He was that kind of a drunk.”

“This is working out almost too neatly,” I said. “Could you recognize this gun?”

He thought hard, pushing his jaw out and half closing his eyes. I looked back over the chairs again. One of the elderly snoozers had waked himself up with a snort that almost blew him out of his chair. He coughed, scratched his nose with a thin dried-up hand, and fumbled a gold watch out of his vest. He peered at it bleakly, put it away, and went to sleep again.

I reached in my pocket and put the gun on Kingsley’s hand. He stared down at it miserably.

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’s like it, but I can’t tell.”

“There’s a serial number on the side,” I said.

“Nobody remembers the serial numbers of guns.”

“I was hoping you wouldn’t,” I said. “It would have worried me very much.”

His hand closed around the gun and he put it down beside him on the chair.

“The dirty rat,” he said softly. “I suppose he ditched her.”

“I don’t get it,” I said.

“The motive was inadequate for you, on account of you’re a civilized man. But it was adequate for her.”

“It’s not the same motive,” he snapped. “And women are more impetuous than men.”

“Like cats are more impetuous than dogs.”

“How?”

“Some women are more impetuous than some men. That’s all that means. We’ll have to have a better motive, if you want your wife to have done it.”

He turned his head enough to give me a level stare in which there was no amusement. White crescents were bitten into the corners of his mouth.

“This doesn’t seem to me a very good spot for the light touch,” he said. “We can’t let the police have this gun. Crystal had a permit and the gun was registered. So they will know the number, even if I don’t. We can’t let them have it.”

“But Mrs. Fallbrook knows I had the gun.”

He shook his head stubbornly. “We’ll have to chance that. Yes, I know you’re taking a risk. I intend to make it worth your while. If the set-up were possible for suicide, I’d say put the gun back. But the way you tell it, it isn’t.”

“No. He’d have to have missed himself with the first three shots. But I can’t cover up a murder, even for a ten-dollar bonus. The gun will have to go back.”

“I was thinking of more money than that,” he said quietly. “I was thinking of five hundred dollars.”

“Just what did you expect to buy with it?”

He leaned close to me. His eyes were serious and bleak, but not hard. “Is there anything in Lavery’s place, apart from the gun, that might indicate Crystal has been there lately?”

“A black and white dress and a hat like the bellhop in Bernardino described on her. There may be a dozen things I don’t know about. There almost certainly will be fingerprints. You say she was never printed, but that doesn’t mean they won’t get her prints to check. Her bedroom at home will be full of them. So will the cabin at Little Fawn Lake. And her car.”

“We ought to get the car—” he started to say. I stopped him.

“No use. Too many other places. What kind of perfume does she use?”

He looked blank for an instant. “Oh—Gillerlain Regal, the Champagne of Perfumes,” he said woodenly. “A Chanel number once in a while.”

“What’s this stuff of yours like?”

“A kind of chypre. Sandalwood chypre.”

“The bedroom reeks with it,” I said. “It smelled like cheap stuff to me. But I’m no judge.”

“Cheap?”he said, stung to the quick. “My God, cheap? We get thirty dollars an ounce for it.”

“Well, this stuff smelled more like three dollars a gallon.”

He put his hands down hard on his knees and shook his head. “I’m talking about money,” he said. “Five hundred dollars. A check for it right now.”

I let the remark fall to the ground, eddying like a soiled feather. One of the old boys behind us stumbled to his feet and groped his way wearily out of the room.

Kingsley said gravely: “I hired you to protect me from scandal, and of course to protect my wife, if she needed it. Through no fault of yours the chance to avoid scandal is pretty well shot. It’s a question of my wife’s neck now. I don’t believe she shot Lavery. I have no reason for that belief. None at all. I just feel the conviction. She may even have been there last night, this gun may even be her gun. It doesn’t prove she killed him. She would be as careless with the gun as with anything else. Anybody could have got hold of it.”

“The cops down there won’t work very hard to believe that,” I said. “If the one I met is a fair specimen, they’ll just pick the first head they see and start swinging with their blackjacks. And hers will certainly be the first head they see when they look the situation over.”

He ground the heels of his hands together. His misery had a theatrical flavor, as real misery so often has.

“I’ll go along with you up to a point,” I said. “The setup down there is almost too good, at first sight. She leaves clothes there she has been seen wearing and which can probably be traced. She leaves the gun on the stairs. It’s hard to think she would be as dumb as that.”

“You give me a little heart,” Kingsley said wearily.

“But none of that means anything,” I said. “Because we are looking at it from the angle of calculation, and people who commit crimes of passion or hatred, just commit them and walk out. Everything I have heard indicates that she is a reckless foolish woman. There’s no sign of planning in any of the scene down there. There’s every sign of a complete lack of planning. But even if there wasn’t a thing down there to point to your wife, the cops would tie her up to Lavery. They will investigate his background, his friends, his women. Her name is bound to crop up somewhere along the line, and when it does, the fact that she has been out of sight for a month will make them sit up and rub their horny palms with glee. And of course they’ll trace the gun, and if it’s her gun—”

His hand dived for the gun in the chair beside him.

“Nope,” I said. “They’ll have to have the gun. Marlowe may be a very smart guy and very fond of you personally, but he can’t risk the suppression of such vital evidence as the gun that killed a man. Whatever I do has to be on the basis that your wife is an obvious suspect, but that the obviousness can be wrong.”

He groaned and put his big hand out with the gun on it. I took it and put it away. Then I took it out again and said: “Lend me your handkerchief. I don’t want to use mine. I might be searched.”

He handed me a stiff white handkerchief and I wiped the gun off carefully all over and dropped it into my pocket. I handed him back the handkerchief.

“My prints are all right,” I said. “But I don’t want yours on it. Here’s the only thing I can do. Go back down there and replace the gun and call the law. Ride it out with them and let the chips fall where they have to. The story will have to come out. What I was doing down there and why. At the worst they’ll find her and prove she killed him. At the best they’ll find her a lot quicker than I can and let me use my energies proving she didn’t kill him, which means, in effect, proving that somebody else did. Are you game for that?”

He nodded slowly. He said: “Yes—and the five hundred stands. For showing Crystal didn’t kill him.”

“I don’t expect to earn it,” I said. “You may as well understand that now. How well did Miss Fromsett know Lavery? Out of office hours?”

His face tightened up like a charleyhorse. His fists went into hard lumps on his thighs. He said nothing. “She looked kind of queer when I asked her for his address yesterday morning,” I said.

He let a breath out slowly.

“Like a bad taste in the mouth,” I said. “Like a romance that fouled out. Am I too blunt?”

His nostrils quivered a little and his breath made noise in them for a moment. Then he relaxed and said quietly:

“She—she knew him rather well—at one time. She’s a girl who would do about what she pleased in that way. Lavery was, I guess, a fascinating bird—to women.”

“I’ll have to talk to her,” I said.

“Why?” he asked shortly. Red patches showed in his cheeks.

“Never mind why. It’s my business to ask all sorts of questions of all sorts of people.”

“Talk to her then,” he said tightly. “As a matter of fact she knew the Almores. She knew Almore’s wife, the one who killed herself. Lavery knew her too. Could that have any possible connection with this business?”

“I don’t know. You’re in love with her, aren’t you?”

“I’d marry her tomorrow, if I could,” he said stiffly.

I nodded and stood up. I looked back along the room. It was almost empty now. At the far end a couple of elderly relics were still blowing bubbles. The rest of the soft chair boys had staggered back to whatever it was they did when they were conscious.

“There’s just one thing,” I said, looking down at Kingsley. “Cops get very hostile when there is a delay in calling them after a murder. There’s been delay this time and there will be more. I’d like to go down there as if it was the first visit today. I think I can make it that way, if I leave the Fallbrook woman out.”

“Fallbrook?” He hardly knew what I was talking about. “Who the hell—oh yes, I remember.”

“Well, don’t remember. I’m almost certain they’ll never hear a peep from her. She’s not the kind to have anything to do with the police of her own free will.”

“I understand,” he said.

“Be sure you handle it right then. Questions will be asked you
before
you are told Lavery is dead, before I’m allowed to get in touch with you—so far as they know. Don’t fall into any traps. If you do, I won’t be able to find anything out. I’ll be in the clink.”