“Muriel’s dead,” I said. “Drowned in the lake. You don’t get much of a boot out of that, do you?”
“I hardly knew the girl,” she said. “Really. She kept to herself. After all—”
“I don’t suppose you knew she had once worked in Dr. Almore’s office?”
She looked completely puzzled now. “I was never in Dr. Almore’s office,” she said slowly. “He made a few house calls a long time ago. I—what are you talking about?”
“Muriel Chess was really a girl called Mildred Haviland, who had been Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”
“That’s a queer coincidence,” she said wonderingly. “I knew Bill met her in Riverside. I didn’t know how or under what circumstances or where she came from. Dr. Almore’s office, eh? It doesn’t have to mean anything, does it?”
I said. “No. I guess it’s a genuine coincidence. They do happen. But you see why I had to talk to you. Muriel being found drowned and you having gone away and Muriel being Mildred Haviland who was connected with Dr. Almore at one time—as Lavery was also, in a different way. And of course Lavery lives across the street from Dr. Almore. Did he, Lavery, seem to know Muriel from somewhere else?”
She thought about it, biting her lower lip gently. “He saw her up there,” she said finally. “He didn’t act as if he had ever seen her before.”
“And he would have,” I said. “Being the kind of guy he was.”
“I don’t think Chris had anything to do with Dr. Almore,” she said. “He knew Dr. Almore’s wife. I don’t think he knew the doctor at all. So he probably wouldn’t know Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”
“Well, I guess there’s nothing in all this to help me,” I said. “But you can see why I had to talk to you. I guess I can give you the money now.”
I got the envelope out and stood up to drop it on her knee. She let it lie there. I sat down again.
“You do this character very well,” I said. “This confused innocence with an undertone of hardness and bitterness. People have made a bad mistake about you. They have been thinking of you as a reckless little idiot with no brains and no control. They have been very wrong.”
She stared at me, lifting her eyebrows. She said nothing. Then a small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. She reached for the envelope, tapped it on her knee, and laid it aside on the table. She stared at me all the time.
“You did the Fallbrook character very well too,” I said. “Looking back on it, I think it was a shade overdone. But at the time it had me going all right. That purple hat that would have been all right on blond hair but looked like hell on straggly brown, that messed-up makeup that looked as if it had been put on in the dark by somebody with a sprained wrist, the jittery screwball manner. All very good. And when you put the gun in my hand like that—I fell like a brick.”
She snickered and put her hands in the deep pockets of her coat. Her heels tapped on the floor.
“But why did you go back at all?” I asked. “Why take such a risk in broad daylight, in the middle of the morning?”
“So you think I shot Chris Lavery?” she said quietly.
“I don’t think it. I know it.”
“Why did I go back? Is that what you want to know?”
“I don’t really care,” I said.
She laughed. A sharp cold laugh. “He had all my money,” she said. “He had stripped my purse. He had it all, even silver. That’s why I went back. There wasn’t any risk at all. I know how he lived. It was really safer to go back. To take in the milk and newspaper for instance. People lose their heads in these situations. I don’t, I didn’t see why I should. It’s so very much safer not to.”
“I see,” I said. “Then of course you shot him the night before. I ought to have thought of that, not that it matters. He had been shaving. But guys with dark beards and lady friends sometimes shave the last thing at night, don’t they?”
“It has been heard of,” she said almost gaily. “And just what are you going to do about it?”
“You’re a cold-blooded little bitch if I ever saw one,” I said. “Do about it? Turn you over to the police, naturally. It will be a pleasure.”
“I don’t think so.” She threw the words out, almost with a lilt. “You wondered why I gave you the empty gun. Why not? I had another one in my bag. Like this.” Her right hand came up from her coat pocket and she pointed it at me.
I grinned. It may not have been the heartiest grin in the world, but it was a grin.
“I’ve never liked this scene,” I said. “Detective confronts murderer. Murderer produces gun, pints same at detective. Murderer tells detective the whole sad story, with the idea of shooting him at the end of it. Thus wasting a lot of valuable time, even if in the end murderer did shoot detective. Only murderer never does. Something always happens to prevent it. The gods don’t like this scene either. They always manage to spoil it.”
“But this time,” she said softly and got up and moved towards me softly across the carpet, “suppose we make it a little different. Suppose I don’t tell you anything and nothing happens and I do shoot you?”
“I still wouldn’t like the scene,” I said.
“You don’t seem to be afraid,” she said, and slowly licked her lips coming towards me very gently without any sound of footfalls on the carpet.
“I’m not afraid,” I lied. “It’s too late at night, too still, and the window is open and the gun would make too much noise. It’s too long a journey down to the street and you’re not good with guns. You would probably miss me. You missed Lavery three times.”
“Stand up,” she said.
I stood up.
“I’m going to be too close to miss,” she said. She pushed the gun against my chest. “Like this. I really can’t miss now, can I? Now be very still. Hold your hands up by your shoulders and then don’t move at all. If you move at all, the gun will go off.”
I put my hands up beside my shoulders, I looked down at the gun. My tongue felt a little thick, but I could still wave it.
Her probing left hand didn’t find a gun on me. It dropped and she bit her lip, staring at me. The gun bored into my chest. “You’ll have to turn around now,” she said, polite as a tailor at a fitting.
“There’s something a little off key about everything you do,” I said. “You’re definitely not good with guns. You’re much too close to me, and I hate to bring this up—but there’s that old business of the safety catch not being off. You’ve overlooked that too.”
So she started to do two things at once. To take a long step backwards and to feel with her thumb for the safety catch, without taking her eyes off my face. Two very simple things, needing only a second to do. But she didn’t like my telling her. She didn’t like my thought riding over hers. The minute confusion of it jarred her.
She let out a small choked sound and I dropped my right hand and yanked her face hard against my chest. My left hand smashed down on her right wrist, the heel of my hand against the base of her thumb. The gun jerked out of her hand to the floor. Her face writhed against my chest and I think she was trying to scream.
Then she tried to kick me and lost what little balance she had left. Her hands came up to claw at me. I caught her wrist and began to twist it behind her back. She was very strong, but I was very much stronger. So she decided to go limp and let her whole weight sag against the hand that was holding her head. I couldn’t hold her up with one hand. She started to go down and I had to bend down with her.
There were vague sounds of our scuffling on the floor by the davenport, and hard breathing, and if a floorboard creaked I didn’t hear it. I thought a curtain ring checked sharply on a rod. I wasn’t sure and I had no time to consider the question. A figure loomed up suddenly on my left, just behind, and out of range of clear vision. I knew there was a man there and that he was a big man.
That was all I knew. The scene exploded into fire and darkness. I didn’t even remember being slugged. Fire and darkness and just before the darkness a sh
arp flash of nausea.
THIRTY-TWO
I smelled of gin. Not just casually, as if I had taken four or five drinks of a winter morning to get out of bed on, but as if the Pacific Ocean was pure gin and I had nosedived off the boat deck. The gin was in my hair and eyebrows, on my chin and under my chin. It was on my shirt. I smelled like dead toads.
My coat was off and I was lying flat on my back beside the davenport on somebody’s carpet and I was looking at a framed picture. The frame was of cheap soft wood varnished and the picture showed part of an enormously high pale yellow viaduct across which a shiny black locomotive was dragging a Prussian blue train. Through one lofty arch of the viaduct a wide yellow beach showed and was dotted with sprawled bathers and striped beach umbrellas. Three girls walked close up, with paper parasols, one girl in cerise, one in pale blue, one in green. Beyond the beach a curving bay was bluer than any bay has any right to be. It was drenched with sunshine and flecked and dotted with arching white sails. Beyond the inland curve of the bay three ranges of hills rose in three precisely opposed colors; gold and terra cotta and lavender.
Across the bottom of the picture was printed in large capitals SEE THE FRENCH RIVIERA BY THE BLUE TRAIN.
It was a fine time to bring that up.
I reached up wearily and felt the back of my head. It felt pulpy. A shoot of pain from the touch went clear to the soles of my feet. I groaned, and made a grunt out of the groan, from professional pride-what was left of it. I rolled over slowly and carefully and looked at the foot of a pulled-down wall bed; one twin, the other being still up in the wall. The flourish of design on the painted wood was familiar. The picture had hung over the davenport and I hadn’t even looked at it.
When I rolled a square gin bottle rolled off my chest and hit the floor. It was water white, and empty. It didn’t seem possible there could be so much gin in just one bottle.
I got my knees under me and stayed on all fours for a while, sniffing like a dog who can’t finish his dinner, but hates to leave it. I moved my head around on my neck. It hurt. I moved it around some more and it still hurt, so I climbed up on my feet and discovered I didn’t have any shoes on.
The shoes were lying against the baseboard, looking as dissipated as shoes ever looked. I put them on wearily. I was an old man now. I was going down the last long hill. I still had a tooth left though. I felt it with my tongue. It didn’t seem to taste of gin.
“It will all come back to you,” I said. “Some day it will all come back to you. And you won’t like it.”
There was the lamp on the table by the open window. There was the fat green davenport. There was the doorway with the green curtains across it. Never sit with your back to a green curtain. It always turns out badly. Something always happens. Who had I said that to? A girl with a gun. A girl with a clear empty face and dark brown hair that had been blond.
I looked around for her. She was still there. She was lying on the pulled-down twin bed.
She was wearing a pair of tan stockings and nothing else. Her hair was tumbled. There were dark bruises on her throat. Her mouth was open and a swollen tongue filled it to over-flowing. Her eyes bulged and the whites of them were not white. Across her naked belly four angry scratches leered crimson red against the whiteness of flesh. Deep angry scratches, gouged out by four bitter fingernails.
On the davenport there were tumbled clothes, mostly hers. My coat was there also. I disentangled it and put it on. Something crackled under my hand in the tumbled clothes. I drew out a long envelope with money still in it. I put it in my pocket. Marlowe, five hundred dollars. I hoped it was all there. There didn’t seem much else to hope for.
I stepped on the balls of my feet softly, as if walking on very thin ice. I bent down to rub behind my knee and wondered which hurt most, my knee, or my head when I bent down to rub the knee.
Heavy feet came along the hallway and there was a hard mutter of voices. The feet stopped. A hard fist knocked on the door.
I stood there leering at the door, with my lips drawn back tight against my teeth. I waited for somebody to open the door and walk in. The knob was tried, but nobody walked in. The knocking began again, stopped, the voices muttered again. The steps went away. I wondered how long it would take to get the manager with a pass key. Not very long.
Not nearly long enough for Marlowe to get home from the French Riviera.
I went to the green curtain and brushed it aside and looked down a short dark hallway into a bathroom. I went in there and put the light on. Two wash rugs on the floor, a bath mat folded over the edge of the tub, a pebbled glass window at the corner of the tub. I shut the bathroom door and stood on the edge of the tub and eased the window up. This was the sixth floor. There was no screen. I put my head out and looked into darkness and a narrow glimpse of a street with trees. I looked sideways and saw that the bathroom window of the next apartment was not more than three feet away. A well-nourished mountain goat could make it without any trouble at all.
The question was whether a battered private detective could make it, and if so, what the harvest would be. Behind me a rather remote and muffled voice seemed to be chanting the policeman’s litany: “Open it up or we’ll kick it in.” I sneered back at the voice. They wouldn’t kick it in because kicking in a door is hard on the feet. Policemen are kind to their feet. Their feet are about all they are kind to.
I grabbed a towel off the rack and pulled the two halves of the window down and eased out on the sill. I swung half of me over to the next sill, holding on to the frame of the open window. I could just reach to push the next window down, if it was unlocked. It wasn’t unlocked. I got my foot over there and kicked the glass over the catch. It made a noise that ought to have been heard in Reno. I wrapped the towel around my left hand and reached in to turn the catch. Down on the street a car went by, but nobody yelled at me.
I pushed the broken window down and climbed across to the other sill. The towel fell out of my hand and fluttered down into the darkness to a strip of grass far below, between the two wings of the building.
I climbed in at the window of the other bathroom.
THIRTY-THREE
I climbed down into darkness and groped through darkness to a door and opened it and listened. Filtered moonlight coming through north windows showed a bedroom with twin beds, made up and empty. Not wall beds. This was a larger apartment. I moved past the beds to another door and into a living room. Both rooms were closed up and smelled musty. I felt my way to a lamp and switched it on. I ran a finger along the wood of a table edge. There was a light film of dust, such as accumulates in the cleanest room when it is left shut up.
The room contained a library dining table, an armchair radio, a book rack built like a hod, a big bookcase full of novels with their jackets still on them, a dark wood highboy with a siphon and a cut-glass bottle of liquor and four striped glasses upside down on an Indian brass tray. Besides this paired photographs in a double silver frame, a youngish middle-aged man and woman, with round healthy faces and cheerful eyes. They looked out at me as if they didn’t mind my being there at all.
I sniffed the liquor, which was Scotch, and used some of it. It made my head feel worse but it made the rest of me feel better. I put light on the bedroom and poked into closets. One of them had a man’s clothes, tailor-made, plenty of them. The tailor’s label inside a coat pocket declared the owner’s name to be H. G. Talbot. I went to the bureau and poked around and found a soft blue shirt that looked a little small for me. I carried it into the bathroom and stripped mine off and washed my face and chest and wiped my hair off with a wet towel and put the blue shirt on. I used plenty of Mr. Talbot’s rather insistent hair tonic on my hair and used his brush and comb to tidy it up. By that time I smelled of gin only remotely, if at all.
The top button of the shirt wouldn’t meet its buttonhole so I poked into the bureau again and found a dark blue crepe tie and strung it around my neck. I got my coat back on and looked at myself in the mirror. I looked s
lightly too neat for that hour of the night, even for as careful a man as Mr. Talbot’s clothes indicated him to be. Too neat and too sober.
I rumpled my hair a little and pulled the tie close, and went back to the whiskey decanter and did what I could about being too sober. I lit one of Mr. Talbot’s cigarettes and hoped that Mr. and Mrs. Talbot, wherever they were, were having a much better time than I was. I hoped I would live long enough to come and visit them.
I went to the living room door, the one giving on the hallway, and opened it and leaned in the opening smoking. I didn’t think it was going to work. But I didn’t think waiting there for them to follow my trail through the window was going to work any better.
A man coughed a little way down the hall and I poked my head out farther and he was looking at me. He came towards me briskly, a small sharp man in a neatly pressed police uniform. He had reddish hair and red-gold eyes.
I yawned and said languidly: “What goes on, officer?”
He stared at me thoughtfully. “Little trouble next door to you. Hear anything?”
“I thought I heard knocking. I just got home a little while ago.”
“Little late,” he said.
“That’s a matter of opinion,” I said. “Trouble next door, ah?”
“A dame,” he said. “Know her?”
“I think I’ve seen her.”
“Yeah,” he said. “You ought to see her now . . .” He put his hands to his throat and bulged his eyes out and gurgled unpleasantly. “Like that,” he said. “You didn’t hear nothing, huh?”
“Nothing I noticed—except the knocking.”
“Yeah. What was the name?”
“Talbot.”
“Just a minute, Mr. Talbot. Wait there just a minute.”
He went along the hallway and leaned into an open doorway through which light streamed out. “Oh, lieutenant,” he said. “The man next door is on deck.”
A tall man came out of the doorway and stood looking along the hall straight at me. A tall man with rusty hair and very blue, blue eyes. Degarmo. That made it perfect.