The Lady in the Lake

“Oh no, thanks. I’ll walk. It’s only a few steps. Much obliged to you. I kind of hope Bill doesn’t get into a jam. Especially a nasty jam like this.”

She got out of the car and hung on one foot, then tossed her head and laughed. “They say I’m a pretty good beauty operator,” she said. “I hope I am. As an interviewer I’m terrible. Goodnight.”

I said goodnight and she walked off into the evening. I sat there watching her until she reached the main street and turned out of sight. Then I got out of the Chrysler and went over towards the telephone company’s little rustic building.

TEN

A tame doe deer with a leather dog collar on wandered across the road in front of me. I patted her rough hairy neck and went into the telephone office. A small girl in slacks sat at a small desk working on the books. She got me the rate to Beverly Hills and the change for the coin box. The booth was outside, against the front wall of the building.

“I hope you like it up here,” she said. “It’s very quiet, very restful.”

I shut myself into the booth. For ninety cents I could talk to Derace Kingsley for five minutes. He was at home and the call came through quickly but the co

“Find anything up there?” he asked me in a three-highball voice. He sounded tough and confident again.

“I’ve found too much,” I said. “And not at all what we want. Are you alone?”

“What does that matter?”

“It doesn’t matter to me. But I know what I’m going to say. You don’t.”

“Well, get on with it, whatever it is,” he said.

“I had a long talk with Bill Chess. He was lonely. His wife had left him—a month ago. They had a fight and he went out and got drunk and when he came back she was gone. She left a note saying she would rather be dead than live with him any more.”

“I guess Bill drinks too much,” Kingsley’s voice said from very far off.

“When he got back, both the women had gone. He has no idea where Mrs. Kingsley went. Lavery was up here in May, but not since. Lavery admitted that much himself. Lavery could, of course, have come up again while Bill was out getting drunk, but there wouldn’t be a lot of point to that and there would be two cars to drive down the hill. And I thought that possibly Mrs. K. and Muriel Chess might have gone away together, only Muriel also had a car of her own. But that idea, little as it was worth, has been thrown out by another development. Muriel Chess didn’t go away at all. She went down into your private lake. She came back up today. I was there.”

“Good God!” Kingsley sounded properly horrified. “You mean she drowned herself?”

“Perhaps. The note she left could be a suicide note. It would read as well that way as the other. The body was stuck down under that old submerged landing below the pier. Bill was the one who spotted an arm moving down there while we were standing on the pier looking down into the water. He got her out. They’ve arrested him. The poor guy’s pretty badly broken up.”

“Good God!” Kingsley said again. “I should think he would be. Does it look as if he—” He paused as the operator came in on the line and demanded another forty-five cents. I put in two quarters and the line cleared.

“Look as if he what?”

Suddenly very clear, Kingsley’s voice said: “Look as if he murdered her?”

I said: “Very much. Jim Patton, the constable up here, doesn’t like the note not being dated. It seems she left him once before over some woman. Patton sort of suspects Bill might have saved up an old note. Anyhow they’ve taken Bill down to San Bernardino for questioning and they’ve taken the body down to be post-mortemed.”

“And what do you think?” he asked slowly.

“Well, Bill found the body himself. He didn’t have to take me around by that pier. She might have stayed down in the water very much longer, or forever. The note could be old because Bill had carried it in his wallet and handled it from time to time, brooding over it. It could just as easily be undated this time as another time. I’d say notes like that are undated more often than not. The people who write them are apt to be in a hurry and not concerned with dates.”

“The body must be pretty far gone. What can they find out now?”

“I don’t know how well equipped they are. They can find out if she died by drowning, I guess. And whether there are any marks of violence that wouldn’t be erased by water and decomposition. They could tell if she had been shot or stabbed. If the hyoid bone in the throat was broken, they could assume she was throttled. The main thing for us is that I’ll have to tell why I came up here. I’ll have to testify at an inquest.”

“That’s bad,” Kingsley growled. “Very bad. What do you plan to do now?”

“On my way home I’ll stop at the Prescott Hotel and see if I can pick up anything there. Were your wife and Muriel Chess friendly?”

“I guess so. Crystal’s easy enough to get along with most of the time. I hardly knew Muriel Chess.”

“Did you ever know anybody named Mildred Haviland?”

“What?” I repeated the name.

“No,” he said. “Is there any reason why I should?”

“Every question I ask you ask another right back,” I said. “No, there isn’t any reason why you should know Mildred Haviland. Especially if you hardly knew Muriel Chess. I’ll call you in the morning.”

“Do that,” he said, and hesitated. “I’m sorry you had to walk into such a mess,” he added, and then hesitated again and said goodnight and hung up.

The bell rang again immediately and the long-distance operator told me sharply I had put in five cents too much money. I said the sort of thing I would be likely to put into an opening like that. She didn’t like it.

I stepped out of the booth and gathered some air into my lungs. The tame doe with the leather collar was standing in the gap in the fence at the end of the walk. I tried to push her out of the way, but she just leaned against me and wouldn’t push. So I stepped over the fence and went back to the Chrysler and drove back to the village.

There was a hanging light in Patton’s headquarters but the shack was empty and his “Back in Twenty Minutes” sign was still against the inside of the glass part of the door. I kept on going down to the boat landing and beyond to the edge of a deserted swimming beach. A few put-puts and speedboats were still fooling around on the silky water. Across the lake tiny yellow lights began to show in toy cabins perched on miniature slopes. A single bright star glowed low in the northeast above the ridge of the mountains. A robin sat on the spike top of a hundred-foot pine and waited for it to be dark enough for him to sing his goodnight song.

In a little while it was dark enough and he sang and went away into the invisible depths of sky. I snapped my cigarette into the motionless water a few feet away and climbed back into the car and started back in the direction of Little Fawn Lake.