“All right, we can’t make sense where there isn’t any,” I said. “So she’s in Bay City. Did you talk to her?”
“No. Miss Fromsett talked to her. She called the office. It was just after hours but that cop from the beach, Captain Webber, was with me. Miss Fromsett naturally didn’t want her to talk at all then. She told her to call back. She wouldn’t give any number we could call.”
I looked at Miss Fromsett. She brought her glance down from the ceiling and pointed it at the top of my head. There was nothing in her eyes at all. They were like drawn curtains.
Kingsley went on: “I didn’t want to talk to her. She didn’t want to talk to me. I don’t want to see her. I guess there’s no doubt she shot Lavery. Webber seemed quite sure of it.”
“That doesn’t mean anything,” I said. “What he says and what he thinks don’t even have to be on the same map. I don’t like her knowing the cops were after her. It’s a long time since anybody listened to the police short wave for amusement. So she called back later. And then?”
“It was almost half-past six,” Kingsley said. “We had to sit there in the office and wait for her to call. You tell him.” He turned his head to the girl.
Miss Fromsett said: “I took the call in Mr. Kingsley’s office. He was sitting right beside me, but he didn’t speak. She said to send the money down to the Peacock place and asked who would bring it.”
“Did she sound scared?”
“Not in the least. Completely calm. I might say, icily calm. She had it all worked out. She realized somebody would have to bring the money she might not know. She seemed to know Derry—Mr. Kingsley wouldn’t bring it.”
“Call him Derry,” I said. “I’ll be able to guess who you mean.
She smiled faintly. “She will go into this Peacock Lounge every hour about fifteen minutes past the hour. I—I guess I assumed you would be the one to go. I described you to her. And you’re to wear Derry’s scarf. I described that. He keeps some clothes at the office and this was among them. It’s distinctive enough.”
It was all of that. It was an affair of fat green kidneys laid down on an egg yolk background. It would be almost as distinctive as if I went in there wheeling a red, white and blue wheelbarrow.
“For a blimp brain she’s doing all right,” I said.
“This is no time to fool around,” Kingsley put in sharply.
“You said that before,” I told him. “You’ve got a hell of a crust assuming I’ll go down there and take a getaway stake to somebody I know the police are looking for.”
He twisted a hand on his knee and his face twisted into a crooked grin.
“I admit it’s a bit thick,” he said. “Well, how about it?”
“It makes accessories after the fact out of all three of us. That might not be too tough for her husband and his confidential secretary to talk out of, but what they would do to me would be nobody’s dream of a vacation.”
“I’m going to make it worth your while,” he said. “And we wouldn’t be accessories, if she hasn’t done anything.”
“I’m willing to suppose it,” I said. “Otherwise I wouldn’t be talking to you. And in addition to that, if I decide she did do any murder, I’m going to turn her over to the police.”
“She won’t talk to you,” he said.
I reached for the envelope and put it in my pocket. “She will, if she wants this.” I looked at my strap watch. “If I start right away, I might make the one-fifteen deadline. They must know her by heart in that bar after all these hours. That makes it nice too.”
“She’s dyed her hair dark brown,” Miss Fromsett said. “That ought to help a little.”
I said: “It doesn’t help me to think she is just an innocent wayfarer.” I finished my drink and stood up. Kingsley swallowed his at a gulp and stood up and got the scarf off his neck and handed it to me.
“What did you do to get the police on your neck down there?” he asked.
“I was using some information Miss Fromsett very kindly got for me. And that led to my looking for a man named Talley who worked on the Almore case. And that led to the clink. They had the house staked. Talley was the dick the Graysons hired,” I added, looking at the tall dark girl. “You’ll probably be able to explain to him what it’s all about. It doesn’t matter anyway. I haven’t time to go into it now. You two want to wait here?”
Kingsley shook his head. “We’ll go to my place and wait for a call from you.”
Miss Fromsett stood up and yawned. “No. I’m tired, Derry. I’m going home and going to bed.”
“You’ll come with me,” he said sharply. “You’ve got to keep me from going nuts.”
“Where do you live, Miss Fromsett?” I asked.
“Bryson Tower on Sunset Place. Apartment 716. Why?” She gave me a speculative look.
“I might want to reach you some time.”
Kingsley’s face looked bleakly irritated, but his eyes still were the eyes of a sick animal. I wound his scarf around my neck and went out to the dinette to switch off the light. When I came back they were both standing by the door. Kingsley had his arm around her shoulders. She looked very tired and rather bored.
“Well, I certainly hope—” he started to say, then took a quick step and put his hand out. “You’re a pretty level guy, Marlowe.”
“Go on, beat it,” I said. “Go away. Go far away.”
He gave a queer look and they went out.
I waited until I heard the elevator come up and stop, and the doors open and close again, and the elevator start down. Then I went out myself and took the stairs down to the basement garage and got the Chrysler awake again.
THIRTY
The Peacock Lounge was a narrow front next to a gift shop in whose window a tray of small crystal animals shimmered in the street light. The Peacock had a glass brick front and soft light glowed out around the stained-glass peacock that was set into the brick. I went in around a Chinese screen and looked along the bar and then sat at the outer edge of a small booth. The light was amber, the leather was Chinese red and the booths had polished plastic tables. In one booth four soldiers were drinking beer moodily, a little glassy in the eyes and obviously bored even with drinking beer. Across from them a party of two girls and two flashy-looking men were making the noise in the place. I saw nobody that looked like my idea of Crystal Kingsley.
A wizened waiter with evil eyes and a face like a gnawed bone put a napkin with a printed peacock on it down on the table in front of me and gave me a Bacardi cocktail. I sipped it and looked at the amber face of the bar clock. It was just past one-fifteen.
One of the men with the two girls got up suddenly and stalked along to the door and went on. The voice of the other man said:
“What did you have to insult the guy for?”
A girl’s tinny voice said: “Insult him? I like that. He propositioned me.”
The man’s voice said complainingly: “Well, you didn’t have to insult him, did you?”
One of the soldiers suddenly laughed deep in his chest and then wiped the laugh off his face with a brown hand and drank a little more beer. I rubbed the back of my knee. It was hot and swollen still but the paralyzed feeling had gone away.
A tiny, white-faced Mexican boy with enormous black eyes came in with morning papers and scuttled along the booths trying to make a few sales before the barman threw him out. I bought a paper and looked through it to see if there were any interesting murders. There were not.
I folded it and looked up as a slim, brown-haired girl in coal black slacks and a yellow shirt and a long gray coat came out of somewhere and passed the booth without looking at me. I tried to make up my mind whether her face was familiar or just such a standard type of lean, rather hard, prettiness that I must have seen it ten thousand times. She went out of the street door around the screen. Two minutes later the little Mexican boy came back in, shot a quick look at the barman, and scuttled over to stand in front of me.
“Mister,” he said, his
great big eyes shining with mischief. Then he made a beckoning sign and scuttled out again.
I finished my drink and went after him. The girl in the gray coat and yellow shirt and black slacks was standing in front of the gift shop, looking in at the window. Her eyes moved as I went out. I went and stood beside her.
She looked at me again. Her face was white and tired. Her hair looked darker than dark brown. She looked away and spoke to the window.
“Give me the money, please.” A little mist formed on the plate glass from her breath.
I said: “I’d have to know who you are.”
“You know who I am,” she said softly. “How much did you bring?”
“Five hundred.”
“It’s not enough,” she said. “Not nearly enough. Give it to me quickly. I’ve been waiting half of eternity for somebody to get here.”
“Where can we talk?”
“We don’t have to talk. Just give me the money and go the other way.”
“It’s not that simple. I’m doing this at quite a risk. I’m at least going to have the satisfaction of knowing what goes on where I stand.”
“Damn you,” she said acidly, “why couldn’t he come himself? I don’t want to talk. I want to get away as soon as I can.”
“You didn’t want him to come himself. He understood that you didn’t even want to talk to him on the phone.”
“That’s right,” she said quickly and tossed her head. “But you’ve got to talk to me,”
I said. “I’m not as easy as he is. Either to me or to the law. There’s no way out of it. I’m a private detective and I have to have some protection too.”
“Well, isn’t he charming,” she said. “Private detective and all.” Her voice held a low sneer.
“He did the best he knew how. It wasn’t easy for him to know what to do.”
“What do you want to talk about?”
“You, and what you’ve been doing and where you’ve been and what you expect to do. Things like that. Little things, but important.”
She breathed on the glass of the shop window and waited while the mist of her breath disappeared.
“I think it would be much better,” she said in the same cool empty voice, “for you to give me the money and let me work things out for myself.”
“No.”
She gave me another sharp sideways glance. She shrugged the shoulders of the gray coat impatiently.
“Very well, if it has to be that way. I’m at the Granada, two blocks north on Eighth. Apartment 618. Give me ten minutes. I’d rather go in alone.”
“I have a car.”
“I’d rather go alone.” She turned quickly and walked away.
She walked back to the corner and crossed the boulevard and disappeared along the block under a line of pepper trees. I went and sat in the Chrysler and gave her her ten minutes before I started it.
The Granada was an ugly gray building on a corner. The plate glass entrance door was level with the street. I drove around the corner and saw a milky globe with Garage painted on it. The entrance to the garage was down a ramp into the hard rubber-smelling silence of parked cars in rows. A lanky Negro came out of a glassed-in office and looked the Chrysler over.
“How much to leave this here a short time? I’m going upstairs.”
He gave me a shady leer. “Kinda late, boss. She needs a good dustin’ too. Be a dollar.”
“What goes on here?”
“Be a dollar,” he said woodenly.
I got out. He gave me a ticket. I gave him the dollar. Without asking him he said the elevator was in back of the office, by the Men’s Room.
I rode up to the sixth floor and looked at numbers on doors and listened to stillness and smelled beach air corning in at the end of corridors. The place seemed decent enough. There would be a few happy ladies in any apartment house. That would explain the lanky Negro’s dollar. A great judge of character, that boy.
I came to the door of Apartment 618 and stood outside it a moment and then kicked softly.
THIRTY-ONE
She still had the gray coat on. She stood back from the door and I went past her into a square room with twin wall beds and a minimum of uninteresting furniture. A small lamp on a window table made a dim yellowish light. The window behind it was open.
The girl said: “Sit down and talk then.”
She closed the door and went to sit in a gloomy Boston rocker across the room. I sat down on a thick davenport. There was a dull green curtain hanging across an open door space, at one end of the davenport. That would lead to dressing room and bathroom. There was a closed door at the other end. That would be the kitchenette. That would be all there was.
The girl crossed her ankles and leaned her head back against the chair and looked at me under long beaded lashes. Her eyebrows were thin and arched and as brown as her hair. It was a quiet, secret face. It didn’t look like the face of a woman who would waste a lot of motion.
“I got a rather different idea of you,” I said, “from Kingsley.”
Her lips twisted a little. She said nothing.
“From Lavery too,” I said. “It just goes to show that we talk different languages to different people.”
“I haven’t time for this sort of talk,” she said. “What is it you have to know?”
“He hired me to find you. I’ve been working on it. I supposed you would know that.”
“Yes. His office sweetie told me that over the phone. She told me you would be a man named Marlowe. She told me about the scarf.”
I took the scarf off my neck and folded it up and slipped it into a pocket. I said:
“So I know a little about your movements. Not very much. I know you left your car at the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino and that you met Lavery there. I know you sent a wire from El Paso. What did you do then?”
“All I want from you is the money he sent. I don’t see that my movements are any of your business.”
“I don’t have to argue about that,” I said. “It’s a question of whether you want the money.”
“Well, we went to El Paso,” she said, in a tired voice. “I thought of marrying him then. So I sent that wire. You saw the wire?”
“Yes.”
“Well, I changed my mind. I asked him to go home and leave me. He made a scene.”
“Did he go home and leave you?”
“Yes. Why not?”
“What did you do then?”
“I went to Santa Barbara and stayed there a few days. Over a week in fact. Then to Pasadena. Same thing. Then to Hollywood. Then I came down here. That’s all.”
“You were alone all this time?”
She hesitated a little and then said: “Yes.”
“Not with Lavery—any part of it?”
“Not after he went home.”
“What was the idea?”
“Idea of what?” Her voice was a little sharp.
“Idea of going to these places and not sending any word. Didn’t you know he would be very anxious?”
“Oh, you mean my husband,” she said coolly. “I don’t think I worried much about him. He’d think I was in Mexico, wouldn’t he? As for the idea of it all—well, I just had to think things out. My life had got to be a hopeless tangle. I had to be somewhere quite alone and try to straighten myself out.”
“Before that,” I said, “you spent a month at Little Fawn Lake trying to straighten it out and not getting anywhere. Is that it?”
She looked down at her shoes and then up at me and nodded earnestly. The wavy brown hair surged forward along her cheeks. She put her left hand up and pushed it back and then rubbed her temple with one finger.
“I seemed to need a new place,” she said. “Not necessarily an interesting place. Just a strange place. Without associations. A place where I would be very much alone. Like a hotel.”
“How are you getting on with it?”
“Not very well. But I’m not going back to Derace Kingsley. Does he want me to?”
<
br /> “I don’t know. But why did you come down here, to the town where Lavery was?”
She bit a knuckle and looked at me over her hand.
“I wanted to see him again. He’s all mixed up in my mind. I’m not in love with him, and yet—well, I suppose in a way I am. But I don’t think I want to marry him. Does that make sense?”
“That part of it makes sense. But staying away from home in a lot of crummy hotels doesn’t. You’ve lived your own life for years, as I understand it.”
“I had to be alone, to—to think things out,” she said a little desperately and bit the knuckle again, hard. “Won’t you please give me the money and go away?”
“Sure. Right away. But wasn’t there any other reason for your going away from Little Fawn Lake just then? Anything connected with Muriel Chess, for instance?”
She looked surprised. But anyone can look surprised. “Good heavens, what would there be? That frozen-faced little drip—what is she to me?”
“I thought you might have had a fight with her—about Bill.”
“Bill? Bill Chess?” She seemed even more surprised. Almost too surprised.
“Bill claims you made a pass at him.”
She put her head back and let out a tinny and unreal laugh. “Good heavens, that muddy-faced boozer?” Her face sobered suddenly. “What’s happened? Why all the mystery?”
“He might be a muddy-faced boozer,” I said. “The police think he’s a murderer too. Of his wife. She’s been found drowned in the lake. After a month.”
She moistened her lips and held her head on one side, staring at me fixedly. There was a quiet little silence. The damp breath of the Pacific slid into the room around us.
“I’m not too surprised,” she said slowly. “So it came to that in the end. They fought terribly at times. Do you think that had something to do with my leaving?”
I nodded. “There was a chance of it.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with it at all,” she said seriously, and shook her head back and forth. “It was just the way I told you. Nothing else.”
The Lady in the Lake Page 17
