“So nothing,” I said.
He was silent. The voices came up from below, blurred and indistinct. The cop cocked his ear and said in a more friendly tone: “You remember that one?”
“A little.”
He laughed. “They killed that one pretty,” he said. “They wrapped it up and hid it in back of the shelf. The top shelf in the bathroom closet. The one you can’t reach without standing on a chair.”
“So they did,” I said. “I wonder why.”
The cop looked at me sternly. “There was good reasons, pal. Don’t think there wasn’t. You know this Lavery well?”
“Not well.”
“On to him for something?”
“Working on him a little,” I said. “You knew him?”
The cop called Eddie shook his head. “Nope. I just remembered it was a guy from this house found Almore’s wife in the garage that night.”
“Lavery may not have been here then,” I said.
“How long’s he been here?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Would be about a year and a half,” the cop said, musingly. “The L.A. papers give it any play?”
“Paragraph on the Home Counties page,” I said, just to be moving my mouth.
He scratched his ear and listened. Steps were coming back up the stairs. The cop’s face went blank and he moved away from me and straightened up.
Captain Webber hurried over to the telephone and dialed the number and spoke, then held the phone away from his ear and looked back over his shoulder.
“Who’s deputy coroner this week, Al?”
“Ed Garland,” the big lieutenant said woodenly. “Call Ed Garland,” Webber said into the phone. “Have him come over right away. And tell the flash squad to step on it.”
He put the phone down and barked sharply: “Who handled this gun?”
I said: “I did.”
He came over and teetered on his heels in front of me and pushed his small sharp chin up at me. He held the gun delicately on a handkerchief in his hand.
“Don’t you know enough not to handle a weapon found at the scene of a crime?”
“Certainly,”I said. “But when I handled it I didn’t know there had been a crime. I didn’t know the gun had been fired. It was lying on the stairs and I thought it had been dropped.”
“A likely story,” Webber said bitterly. “You get a lot of that sort of thing in your business?”
“A lot of what sort of thing?”
He kept his hard stare on me and didn’t answer.
I said: “How would it be for me to tell you my story as it happened?”
He bridled at me like a cockerel. “Suppose you answer my questions exactly as I choose to put them.”
I didn’t say anything to that. Webber swiveled sharply and said to the two uniformed men: “You boys can get back to your car and check in with the despatcher.”
They saluted and went out, closing the door softly until it stuck, then getting as mad at it as anybody else. Webber listened until their car went away. Then he put the bleak and callous eye on me once more.
“Let me see your identification.”
I handed him my wallet and he rooted in it. Degarmo sat in a chair and crossed his legs and stared up blankly at the ceiling. He got a match out of his pocket and chewed the end of it. Webber gave me back my wallet. I put it away.
“People in your line make a lot of trouble,” he said.
“Not necessarily,” I said.
He raised his voice. It had been sharp enough before. “I said they made a lot of trouble, and a lot of trouble is what I meant. But get this straight. You’re not going to make any in Bay City.”
I didn’t answer him. He jabbed a forefinger at me.
“You’re from the big town,” he said. “You think you’re tough and you think you’re wise. Don’t worry. We can handle you. We’re a small place, but we’re very compact. We don’t have any political tug-of-war down here. We work on the straight line and we work fast. Don’t worry about us, mister.”
“I’m not worrying,” I said. “I don’t have anything to worry about. I’m just trying to make a nice clean dollar.”
“And don’t give me any of the flip talk,”Webber said. “I don’t like it.”
Degarmo brought his eyes down from the ceiling and curled a forefinger to stare at the nail. He spoke in a heavy bored voice.
“Look, chief, the fellow downstairs is called Lavery. He’s dead. I knew him a little. He was a chaser.”
“What of it?” Webber snapped, not looking away from me.
“The whole set-up indicates a dame,” Degarmo said. “You know what these private eyes work at. Divorce stuff. Suppose we’d let him tie into it, instead of just trying to scare him dumb.”
“If I’m scaring him,” Webber said, “I’d like to know it. I don’t see any signs of it.”
He walked over to the front window and yanked the venetian blind up. Light poured into the room almost dazzlingly, after the long dimness. He came back bouncing on his heels and poked a thin hard finger at me and said:
“Talk.”
I said, “I’m working for a Los Angeles businessman who can’t take a lot of loud publicity. That’s why he hired me. A month ago his wife ran off and later a telegram came which indicated she had gone with Lavery. But my client met Lavery in town a couple of days ago and he denied it. The client believed him enough to get worried. It seems the lady is pretty reckless. She might have taken up with some bad company and got into a jam. I came down to see Lavery and he denied to me that he had gone with her. I half believed him but later I got reasonable proof that he had been with her in a San Bernardino hotel the night she was believed to have left the mountain cabin where she had been staying. With that in my pocket I came down to tackle Lavery again. No answer to the bell, the door was slightly open. I came inside, looked around, found the gun and searched the house. I found him. Just the way he is now.”
“You had no right to search the house,” Webber said coldly.
“Of course not,” I agreed. “But I wouldn’t be likely to pass up the chance either.”
“The name of this man you’re working for?”
“Kingsley.” I gave him the Beverly Hills address. “He manages a cosmetic company in the Treloar Building on Olive. The Gillerlain Company.”
Webber looked at Degarmo. Degarmo wrote lazily on an envelope. Webber looked back at me and said: “What else?”
“I went up to this mountain cabin where the lady had been staying. It’s at a place called Little Fawn Lake, near Puma Point, forty-six miles into the mountains from San Bernardino.”
I looked at Degarmo. He was writing slowly. His hand stopped a moment and seemed to hang in the air stiffly, then it dropped to the envelope and wrote again. I went on:
“About a month ago the wife of the caretaker at Kingsley’s place up there had a fight with him and left as everybody thought. Yesterday she was found drowned in the lake.”
Webber almost closed his eyes and rocked on his heels. Almost softly he asked: “Why are you telling me this? Are you implying a connection?”
“There’s a connection in time. Lavery had been up there. I don’t know of any other connection, but I thought I’d better mention it.”
Degarmo was sitting very still, looking at the floor in front of him. His face was tight and he looked even more savage than usual. Webber said:
“This woman that was drowned? Suicide?”
“Suicide or murder. She left a goodby note. But her husband has been arrested on suspicion. The name is Chess. Bill and Muriel Chess, his wife.”
“I don’t want any part of that,” Webber said sharply. “Let’s confine ourselves to what went on here.”
“Nothing went on here,” I said, looking at Degarmo. “I’ve been down here twice. The first time I talked to Lavery and didn’t get anywhere. The second time I didn’t talk to him and didn’t get anywhere.”
Webber said slowly: ??
?I’m going to ask you a question and I want an honest answer. You won’t want to give it, but now will be as good a time as later. You know I’ll get it eventually. The question is this. You have looked through the house and I imagine pretty thoroughly. Have you seen anything that suggests to you that this Kingsley woman has been here?”
“That’s not a fair question,” I said. “It calls for a conclusion of the witness.”
“I want an answer to it,” he said grimly. “This isn’t a court of law.”
“The answer is yes,” I said. “There are women’s clothes hanging in a closet downstairs that have been described to me as being worn by Mrs. Kingsley at San Bernardino the night she met Lavery there. The description was not exact though. A black and white suit, mostly white, and a Panama hat with a rolled black and white band.”
Degarmo snapped a finger against the envelope he was holding. “You must be a great guy for a client to have working for him,” he said. “That puts the woman right in this house where a murder has been committed and she is the woman he’s supposed to have gone away with. I don’t think we’ll have to look far for the killer, chief.”
Webber was staring at me fixedly, with little or no expression on his face but a kind of tight watchfulness. He nodded absently to what Degarmo had said.
I said: “I’m assuming you fellows are not a pack of damn fools. The clothes are tailored and easy to trace. I’ve saved you an hour by telling you, perhaps even no more than a phone call.”
“Anything else?” Webber asked quietly.
Before I could answer, a car stopped outside the house, and then another. Webber skipped over to open the door. Three men came in, a short curly-haired man and a large ox-like man, both carrying heavy black leather cases. Behind them a tall thin man in a dark gray suit and black tie. He had very bright eyes and a poker face.
Webber pointed a finger at the curly-haired man and said: “Downstairs in the bathroom, Busoni. I want a lot of prints from all over the house, particularly any that seem to be made by a woman. It will be a long job.”
“I do all the work,” Busoni grunted. He and the oxlike man went along the room and down the stairs.
“We have a corpse for you, Garland,” Webber said to the third man. “Let’s go down and look at him. You’ve ordered the wagon?”
The bright-eyed man nodded briefly and he and Webber went downstairs after the other two.
Degarmo put the envelope and pencil away. He stared at me woodenly.
I said: “Am I supposed to talk about our conversation yesterday—or is that a private transaction?”
“Talk about it all you like,” he said. “It’s our job to protect the citizen.”
“You talk about it,” I said. “I’d like to know more about the Almore case.”
He flushed slowly and his eyes got mean. “You said you didn’t know Almore.”
“I didn’t yesterday, or know anything about him. Since then I’ve learned that Lavery knew Mrs. Almore, that she committed suicide, that Lavery found her dead, and that Lavery has at least been suspected of blackmailing him—or of being in a position to blackmail him. Also both your prowl car boys seemed interested in the fact that Almore’s house was across the street from here. And one of them remarked that the case had been killed pretty, or words to that effect.”
Degarmo said in a slow deadly tone: “I’ll have the badge off the son of a bitch. All they do is flap their mouths. God damn empty-headed bastards.”
“Then there’s nothing in it,” I said.
He looked at his cigarette. “Nothing in what?”
“Nothing in the idea that Almore murdered his wife, and had enough pull to get it fixed.”
Degarmo came to his feet and walked over to lean down at me. “Say that again,” he said softly.
I said it again.
He hit me across the face with his open hand. It jerked my head around hard. My face felt hot and large.
“Say it again,” he said softly.
I said it again. His hand swept and knocked my head to one side again.
“Say it again.”
“Nope. Third time lucky. You might miss.” I put a hand up and rubbed my cheek.
He stood leaning down, his lips drawn back over his teeth, a hard animal glare in his very blue eyes.
“Any time you talk like that to a cop,” he said, “you know what you got coming. Try it on again and it won’t be the flat of a hand I’ll use on you.”
I bit hard on my lips and rubbed my cheek.
“Poke your big nose into our business and you’ll wake up in an alley with the cats looking at you,” he said.
I didn’t say anything. He went and sat down again, breathing hard. I stopped rubbing my face and held my hand out and worked the fingers slowly, to get the hard clench out of them.
“I’ll remember that,” I said. “Both ways.”
TWENTY-TWO
It was early evening when I got back to Hollywood and up to the office. The building had emptied out and the corridors were silent. Doors were open and the cleaning women were inside with their vacuum cleaners and their dry mops and dusters.
I unlocked the door to mine and picked up an envelope that lay in front of the mail slot and dropped it on the desk without looking at it. I ran the windows up and leaned out, looking at the early neon lights glowing, smelling the warm, foody air that drifted up from the alley ventilator of the coffee shop next door.
I peeled off my coat and tie and sat down at the desk and got the office bottle out of the deep drawer and bought myself a drink. It didn’t do any good. I had another, with the same result.
By now Webber would have seen Kingsley. There would be a general alarm out for his wife, already, or very soon. The thing looked cut and dried to them. A nasty affair between two rather nasty people, too much loving, too much drinking, too much proximity ending in a savage hatred and a murderous impulse and death.
I thought this was all a little too simple.
I reached for the envelope and tore it open. It had no stamp. It read: “Mr. Marlowe: Florence Almore’s parents are a Mr. and Mrs. Eustace Grayson, presently residing at the Rossmore Arms, 640 South Oxford Avenue. I checked this by calling the listed phone number. Yrs. Adrienne Fromsett.”
An elegant handwriting, like the elegant hand that wrote it. I pushed it to one side and had another drink. I began to feel a little less savage. I pushed things around on the desk. My hands felt thick and hot and awkward. I ran a finger across the corner of the desk and looked at the streak made by the wiping off of the dust. I looked at the dust on my finger and wiped that off. I looked at my watch. I looked at the wall. I looked at nothing.
I put the liquor bottle away and went over to the washbowl to rinse the glass out. When I had done that I washed my hands and bathed my face in cold water and looked at it. The flush was gone from the left cheek, but it looked a little swollen. Not very much, but enough to make me tighten up again. I brushed my hair and looked at the gray in it. There was getting to be plenty of gray in it. The face under the hair had a sick look. I didn’t like the face at all.
I went back to the desk and read Miss Fromsett’s note again. I smoothed it out on the glass and sniffed it and smoothed it out some more and folded it and put it in my coat pocket.
I sat very still and listened to the evening grow quiet outside the open windows. And very slowly I grew quiet with i