“Okay,” he said at last. “Let’s forget it. It doesn’t make any difference any more now. If I’m in a jam, that’s my business. I’d do it again, in the same circumstances.”
“That’s all right,” I said. “I’m not planning to put the bite on anybody myself. Not even on you. I’m telling you this mostly so you won’t try to hang any murders on Kingsley that don’t belong on him. If there is one that does, let it hang.”
“Is that why you’re telling me?” he asked.
“Yeah.”
“I thought maybe it was because you hated my guts,” he said.
“I’m all done with hating you,” I said. “It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.”
We were going through the grape country now, the open sandy grape country along the scarred flanks of the foothills. We came in a little while to San Bernardino and I kept on through it without stopping.
THIRTY-SEVEN
At Crestline, elevation 5000 feet, it had not yet started to warm up. We stopped for a beer. When we got back into the car, Degarmo took the gun from his underarm holster and looked it over. It was a .38 Smith and Wesson on a .44 frame, a wicked weapon with a kick like a .45 and a much greater effective range.
“You won’t need that,” I said. “He’s big and strong, but he’s not that kind of tough.”
He put the gun back under his arm and grunted. We didn’t talk any more now. We had no more to talk about. We rolled around the curves and along the sharp sheer edges walled with white guard rails and in some places with walls of field stone and heavy iron chains. We climbed through the tall oaks and on to the altitudes where the oaks are not so tall and the pines are taller and taller. We came at last to the dam at the end of Puma Lake.
I stopped the car and the sentry threw his piece across his body and stepped up to the window.
“Close all the windows of your car before proceeding across the dam, please.”
I reached back to wind up the rear window on my side. Degarmo held his shield up. “Forget it, buddy. I’m a police officer,” he said with his usual tact. The sentry gave him a solid expressionless stare. “Close all windows, please,” he said in the same tone he had used before.
“Nuts to you,” Degarmo said. “Nuts to you, soldier boy.”
“It’s an order,” the sentry said. His jaw muscles bulged very slightly. His dull grayish eyes stared at Degarmo. “And I didn’t write the order, mister. Up with the windows.”
“Suppose I told you to go jump in the lake,” Degarmo sneered.
The sentry said: “I might do it. I scare easily.” He patted the breech of his rifle with a leathery hand.
Degarmo turned and closed the windows on his side. We drove across the dam. There was a sentry in the middle and one at the far end. The first one must have flashed them some kind of signal. They looked at us with steady watchful eyes, without friendliness.
I drove on through the piled masses of granite and down through the meadows of coarse grass. The same gaudy slacks and short shorts and peasant handkerchiefs as the day before yesterday, the same light breeze and golden sun and clear blue sky, the same smell of pine needles, the same cool softness of a mountain summer. But that was a hundred years ago, something crystallized in time, like a fly in amber.
I turned off on the road to Little Fawn Lake and wound around the huge rocks and past the little gurgling waterfall. The gate into Kingsley’s property was open and Patton’s car was standing in the road pointing towards the lake, which was invisible from that point. There was nobody in it. The card sign on the windshield still read: “Keep Jim Patton Constable. He Is Too Old to Go to Work.”
Close to it and pointed the other way was a small battered coupe. Inside the coupe a lion hunter’s hat. I stopped my car behind Patton’s and locked it and got out. Andy got out of the coupe and stood staring at us woodenly.
I said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police.”
Andy said: “Jim’s just over the ridge. He’s waiting for you. He ain’t had any breakfast.”
We walked up the road to the ridge as Andy got back into his coupe. Beyond it the road dropped to the tiny blue lake. Kingsley’s cabin across the water seemed to be without life.
“That’s the lake,” I said.
Degarmo looked down at it silently. His shoulders moved in a heavy shrug. “Let’s go get the bastard,” was all he said.
We went on and Patton stood up from behind a rock. He was wearing the same old Stetson and khaki pants and shirt buttoned to his thick neck. The star on his left breast still had a bent point. His jaws moved slowly, munching.
“Nice to see you again,” he said, not looking at me, but at Degarmo.
He put his hand out and shook Degarmo’s hard paw. “Last time I seen you, lieutenant, you was wearing another name. Kind of undercover, I guess you’d call it. I guess I didn’t treat you right neither. I apologize. Guess I knew who that photo of yours was all the time.”
Degarmo nodded and said nothing.
“Likely if I’d of been on my toes and played the game right, a lot of trouble would have been saved,” Patton said. “Maybe a life would have been saved. I feel kind of bad about it, but then again I ain’t a fellow that feels too bad about anything very long. Suppose we sit down here and you tell me what it is we’re supposed to be doing now.”
Degarmo said: “Kingsley’s wife was murdered in Bay City last night. I have to talk to him about it.”
“You mean you suspect him?” Patton asked.
“And how,” Degarmo grunted.
Patton rubbed his neck and looked across the lake. “He ain’t showed outside the cabin at all. Likely he’s still asleep. Early this morning I snuck around the cabin. There was a radio goin’ then and I heard sounds like a man would make playing with a bottle and a glass. I stayed away from him. Was that right?”
“We’ll go over there now,” Degarmo said.
“You got a gun, lieutenant?”
Degarmo patted under his left arm. Patton looked at me. I shook my head, no gun.
“Kingsley might have one too,” Patton said. “I don’t hanker after no fast shooting around here, lieutenant. It wouldn’t do me no good to have a gunfight. We don’t have that kind of community up here. You look to me like a fellow who would jack his gun out kind of fast.”
“I’ve got plenty of swift, if that’s what you mean,” Degarmo said. “But I want this guy talking.”
Patton looked at Degarmo, looked at me, looked back at Degarmo and spat tobacco juice in a long stream to one side.
“I ain’t heard enough to even approach him,” he said stubbornly.
So we sat down on the ground and told him the story. He listened silently, not blinking an eye. At the end he said to me: “You got a funny way of working for people, seems to me. Personally I think you boys are plumb misinformed. We’ll go over and see. I’ll go in first—in case you would know what you are talking about and Kingsley would have a gun and would be a little desperate. I got a big belly. Makes a nice target.”
We stood up off the ground and started around the lake the long way. When we came to the little pier I said:
“Did they autopsy her yet, sheriff?”
Patton nodded. “She drowned all right. They say they’re satisfied that’s how she died. She wasn’t knifed or shot or had her head cracked in or anything. There’s marks on her body, but too many to mean anything. And it ain’t a very nice body to work with.”
Degarmo looked white and angry.
“I guess I oughtn’t to have said that, lieutenant,” Patton added mildly. “Kind of tough to take. Seeing you knew the lady pretty well.”
Degarmo said: “Let’s get it over and do what we have to do.”
We went on along the shore of the lake and came to Kingsley’s cabin. We went up the heavy steps. Patton went quietly across the porch to the door. He tried the screen. It was not hooked. He opened it and tried the door. That was unlocked al
so. He held the door shut, with the knob turned in his hand, and Degarmo took hold of the screen and pulled it wide. Patton opened the door and we walked into the room.
Derace Kingsley lay back in a deep chair by the cold fireplace with his eyes closed. There was an empty glass and an almost empty whiskey bottle on the table beside him. The room smelled of whiskey. A dish near the bottle was choked with cigarette stubs. Two crushed empty packs lay on top of the stubs.
All the windows in the room were shut. It was already close and hot in there. Kingsley was wearing a sweater and his face was flushed and heavy. He snored and his hands hung lax outside the arms of the chair, the fingertips touching the floor.
Patton moved to within a few feet of him and stood looking silently down at him for a long moment before he spoke.
“Mr. Kingsley,” he said then, in a calm steady voice, “we got to talk to you a little.”
THIRTY-EIGHT
Kingsley moved with a kind of jerk, and opened his eyes and moved them without moving his head. He looked at Patton, then at Degarmo, lastly at me. His eyes were heavy, but the light sharpened in them. He sat up slowly in the chair and rubbed his hands up and down the sides of his face.
“I was asleep,” he said. “Fell asleep a couple of hours ago. I was as drunk as a skunk, I guess. Anyway, much drunker than I like to be.” He dropped his hands and let them hang.
Patton said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police. He has to talk to you.”
Kingsley looked briefly at Degarmo and his eyes came around to stare at me. His voice when he spoke again sounded sober and quiet and tired to death.
“So you let them get her?” he said.
I said: “I would have, but I didn’t.”
Kingsley thought about that, looking at Degarmo. Patton had left the front door open. He pulled the brown venetian blinds up at two front windows and pulled the windows up. He sat in a chair near one of them and clasped his hands over his stomach. Degarmo stood glowering down at Kingsley.
“Your wife is dead, Kingsley,” he said brutally. “If it’s any news to you.”
Kingsley stared at him and moistened his lips.
“Takes it easy, don’t he?” Degarmo said. “Show him the scarf.”
I took the green and yellow scarf out and dangled it. Degarmo jerked a thumb. “Yours?”
Kingsley nodded. He moistened his lips again.
“Careless of you to leave it behind you,” Degarmo said. He was breathing a little hard. His nose was pinched and deep lines ran from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth.
Kingsley said very quietly: “Leave it behind me where?” He had barely glanced at the scarf. He hadn’t looked at all at me.
“In the Granada Apartments, on Eighth Street, in Bay City. Apartment 716. Am I telling you something?”
Kingsley now very slowly lifted his eyes to meet mine. “Is that where she was?” he breathed.
I nodded. “She didn’t want me to go there. I wouldn’t give her the money until she talked to me. She admitted she killed Lavery. She pulled a gun and planned to give me the same treatment. Somebody came from behind the curtain and knocked me out without letting me see him. When I came to she was dead.” I told him how she was dead and how she looked. I told him what I had done and what had been done to me.
He listened without moving a muscle of his face. When I had done talking he made a vague gesture towards the scarf.
“What has that got to do with it?”
“The lieutenant regards it as evidence that you were the party hidden out in the apartment.”
Kingsley thought that over. He didn’t seem to get the implications of it very quickly. He leaned back in the chair and rested his head against the back. “Go on,” he said at length. “I suppose you know what you’re talking about. I’m sure I don’t.”
Degarmo said: “All right, play dumb. See what it gets you. You could begin by accounting for your time last night after you dropped your biddy at her apartment house.”
Kingsley said evenly: “If you mean Miss Fromsett, I didn’t. She went home in a taxi. I was going home myself, but I didn’t. I came up here instead. I thought the trip and the night air and the quiet might help me to get straightened out.”
“Just think of that,” Degarmo jeered. “Straightened out from what, if I might ask?”
“Straightened out from all the worry I had been having.”
“Hell,” Degarmo said, “a little thing like strangling your wife and clawing her belly wouldn’t worry you that much, would it?”
“Son, you hadn’t ought to say things like that,” Patton put in from the background. “That ain’t no way to talk. You ain’t produced anything yet that sounds like evidence.”
“No?” Degarmo swung his hard head at him. “What about this scarf, fatty? Isn’t that evidence?”
“You didn’t fit it in to anything—not that I heard,” Patton said peacefully. “And I ain’t fat either, just well covered.”
Degarmo swung away from him disgustedly. He jabbed his finger at Kingsley.
“I suppose you didn’t go down to Bay City at all,” he said harshly.
“No. Why should I? Marlowe was taking care of that. And I don’t see why you are making a point of the scarf. Marlowe was wearing it.”
Degarmo stood rooted and savage. He turned very slowly and gave me his bleak angry stare.
“I don’t get this,” he said. “Honest, I don’t. It wouldn’t be that somebody is kidding me, would it? Somebody like you?”
I said: “All I told about the scarf was that it was in the apartment and that I had seen Kingsley wearing it earlier this evening. That seemed to be all you wanted. I might have added that I had later worn the scarf myself, so the girl I was to meet could identify me that much easier.”
Degarmo backed away from Kingsley and leaned against the wall at the end of the fireplace. He pulled his lower lip out with thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His right hand hung lax at his side, the fingers slightly curved.
I said: “I told you all I had ever seen of Mrs. Kingsley was a snapshot. One of us had to be sure of being able to identify the other. The scarf seemed obvious enough for identification. As a matter of fact I had seen her once before, although I didn’t know it when I went to meet her. But I didn’t recognize her at once.” I turned to Kingsley. “Mrs. Fallbrook,” I said.
“I thought you said Mrs. Fallbrook was the owner of the house,” he answered slowly.
“That’s what she said at the time. That’s what I believed at the time. Why shouldn’t I?”
Degarmo made a sound in his throat. His eyes were a little crazy. I told him about Mrs. Fallbrook and her purple hat and her fluttery manner and the empty gun she had been holding and how she gave it to me.
When I stopped, he said very carefully: “I didn’t hear you tell Webber any of that.”
“I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to admit I had already been in the house three hours before. That I had gone to talk it over with Kingsley before I reported it to the police.”
“That’s something we’re going to love you for,” Degarmo said with a cold grin. “Jesus, what a sucker I’ve been. How much you paying this shamus to cover up your murders for you, Kingsley?”
“His usual rates,” Kingsley told him emptily. “And a five-hundred-dollar bonus if he can prove my wife didn’t murder Lavery.”
“Too bad he can’t earn that,” Degarmo sneered.
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve already earned it.”
There was a silence in the room. One of those charged silences which seem about to split apart with a peal of thunder. It didn’t. It remained, hung heavy and solid, like a wall. Kingsley moved a little in his chair, and after a long moment, he nodded his head.
“Nobody could possibly know that better than you know it, Degarmo,” I said.
Patton had as much expression on his face as a chunk of wood. He watched Degarmo quietly. He didn’t look at Kingsley at all. Degar
mo looked at a point between my eyes, but not as if that was anything in the room with him. Rather as if he was looking at something very far away, like a mountain across a valley.
After what seemed a very long time, Degarmo said quietly: “I don’t see why. I don’t know anything about Kingsley’s wife. To the best of my knowledge I never laid eyes on her—until last night.”
He lowered his eyelids a little and watched me broodingly. He knew perfectly well what I was going to say. I said it anyway.
“And you never saw her last night. Because she had already been dead for over a month. Because she had been drowned in Little Fawn Lake. Because the woman you saw dead in the Granada Apartments was Mildred Haviland, and Mildred Haviland was Muriel Chess. And since Mrs. Kingsley was dead long before Lavery was shot, it follows that Mrs. Kingsley did not shoot him.”
Kingsley clenched his fists on the arms of his chair, but he made no sound, no sound at all.
THIRTY-NINE
There was another heavy silence. Patton broke it by saying in his careful slow voice: “That’s kind of a wild statement, ain’t it? Don’t you kind of think Bill Chess would know his own wife?”
I said: “After a month in the water? With his wife’s clothes on her and some of his wife’s trinkets? With water-soaked blond hair like his wife’s hair and almost no recognizable face? Why would he even have a doubt about it? She left a note that might be a suicide note. She had gone away. They had quarreled. Her clothes and car had gone away. During the month she was gone, he had heard nothing from her. He had no idea where she had gone. And then this corpse comes up out of the water with Muriel’s clothes on it. A blond woman about his wife’s size. Of course there would be differences and if any substitution had been suspected, they would have been found and checked. But there was no reason to suspect any such thing. Crystal Kingsley was still alive. She had gone off with Lavery. She had left her car in San Bernardino. She had sent a wire to her husband from El Paso. She was all taken care of, so far as Bill Chess was concerned. He had no thoughts about her at all. She didn’t enter the picture anywhere for him. Why should she?”