The Lady in the Lake

“That’s all right,” I said. “You want to just sit or you want me to drive you somewhere?”

“You can drive down the road a piece where it’s quieter, Mr. Marlowe. If you’re obliging enough to talk to me.”

“Pretty good grapevine you’ve got up here,” I said and started the car.

I drove down past the post office to a corner where a blue and white arrow marked Telephone pointed down a narrow road towards the lake. I turned down that, drove past the telephone office, which was a log cabin with a tiny railed lawn in front of it, passed another small cabin and pulled up in front of a huge oak tree that flung its branches all the way across the road and a good fifty feet beyond it.

“This do, Miss Keppel?”

“Mrs. But just call me Birdie. Everybody does. This is fine. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlowe. I see you come from Hollywood, that sinful city.”

She put a firm brown hand out and I shook it. Clamping bobbie pins into fat blondes had given her a grip like a pair of iceman’s tongs.

“I was talking to Doc Hollis,” she said, “about poor Muriel Chess. I thought you could give me some details. I understand you found the body.”

“Bill Chess found it really. I was just with him. You talk to Jim Patton?”

“Not yet. He went down the hill. Anyway I don’t think Jim would tell me much.”

“He’s up for re-election,” I said. “And you’re a newspaper woman.”

“Jim’s no politician, Mr. Marlowe, and I could hardly call myself a newspaper woman. This little paper we get out up here is a pretty amateurish proposition.”

“Well, what do you want to know?” I offered her a cigarette and lit it for her.

“You might just tell me the story.”

“I came up here with a letter from Derace Kingsley to look at his property. Bill Chess showed me around, got talking to me, told me his wife had moved out on him and showed me the note she left. I had a bottle along and he punished it. He was feeling pretty blue. The liquor loosened him up, but he was lonely and aching to talk anyway. That’s how it happened. I didn’t know him. Coming back around the end of the lake we went out on the pier and Bill spotted an arm waving out from under the planking down in the water. It turned out to belong to what was left of Muriel Chess. I guess that’s all.”

“I understand from Doc Hollis she had been in the water a long time. Pretty badly decomposed and all that.”

“Yes. Probably the whole month he thought she had been gone. There’s no reason to think otherwise. The note’s a suicide note.”

“Any doubt about that, Mr. Marlowe?”

I looked at her sideways. Thoughtful dark eyes looked out at me under fluffed-out brown hair. The dusk had begun to fall now, very slowly. It was no more than a slight change in the quality of the light.

“I guess the police always have doubts in these cases,” I said.

“How about you?”

“My opinion doesn’t go for anything.”

“But for what it’s worth?”

“I only met Bill Chess this afternoon,” I said. “He struck me as a quick-tempered lad and from his own account he’s no saint. But he seems to have been in love with his wife. And I can’t see him hanging around here for a month knowing she was rotting down in the water under that pier. Coming out of his cabin in the sunlight and looking along that soft blue water and seeing in his mind what was under it and what was happening to it. And knowing he put it there.”

“No more can I,” Birdie Keppel said softly. “No more could anybody. And yet we know in our minds that such things have happened and will happen again. Are you in the real estate business, Mr. Marlowe?”

“No.”

“What line of business are you in, if I may ask?”

“I’d rather not say.”

“That’s almost as good as saying,” she said. “Besides Doc Hollis heard you tell Jim Patton your full name. And we have an L.A. city directory in our office. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone.”

“That’s nice of you,” I said.

“And what’s more, I won’t,” she said. “If you don’t want me to.”

“What does it cost me?”

“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. I don’t claim to be a very good newspaper woman. And we wouldn’t print anything that would embarrass Jim Patton. Jim’s the salt of the earth. But it does open up, doesn’t it?”

“Don’t draw any wrong conclusions,” I said. “I had no interest in Bill Chess whatever.”

“No interest in Muriel Chess?”

“Why would I have any interest in Muriel Chess?”

She snuffed her cigarette out carefully into the ashtray under the dashboard. “Have it your own way,” she said. “But here’s a little item you might like to think about, if you don’t know it already. There was a Los Angeles copper named De Soto up here about six weeks back, a big roughneck with damn poor ma

I drummed on the door of the car and after a moment I said, “What did you tell him?”

“We didn’t tell him anything. First off, we couldn’t be sure. Second, we didn’t like his ma

“You might have got yourself a story,” I said.

“Sure. But up here we’re just people.”

“Did this man De Soto see Jim Patton?”

“Sure, he must have. Jim didn’t mention it.”

“Did he show you his badge?”

She thought and then shook her head. “I don’t recall that he did. We just took him for granted, from what he said. He certainly acted like a tough city cop.”

“To me that’s a little against his being one. Did anybody tell Muriel about this guy?”

She hesitated, looking quietly out through the windshield for a long moment before she turned her head and nodded.

“I did. Wasn’t any of my damn business, was it?”

“What did she say?”

“She didn’t say anything. She gave a fu

“Why should I be? I never heard of her until I came up here this afternoon. Honest. And I never heard of anybody named Mildred Haviland either. Drive you back to town?”