Bill Chess lowered his wrists and said quietly: “She did it herself, you darn fool. Muriel was a fine swimmer. She dived down in and swum under the boards there and just breathed water in. Had to. No other way.”
“I wouldn’t quite say that, Bill,” Patton answered him mildly.
His eyes were as blank as new plates.
Andy shook his head. Patton looked at him with a sly grin.
“Crabbin’ again, Andy?”
“Was nine days, I tell you. I just counted back,” the man in the lion hunter’s hat said morosely.
The doctor threw his arms up and walked away, with one hand to his head. He coughed into his handkerchief again and again looked into the handkerchief with passionate attention.
Patton winked at me and spat over the railing. “Let’s get on to this one, Andy.”
“You ever try to drag a body six feet under water?”
“Nope, can’t say I ever did, Andy. Any reason it couldn’t be done with a rope?”
Andy shrugged. “If a rope was used, it will show on the corpse. If you got to give yourself away like that, why bother to cover up at all?”
“Question of time,” Patton said. “Fellow has his arrangements to make.”
Bill Chess snarled at them and reached down for the whiskey. Looking at their solemn mountain faces I couldn’t tell what they were really thinking.
Patton said absently: “Something was said about a note.”
Bill Chess rummaged in his wallet and drew the folded piece of ruled paper loose. Patton took it and read it slowly.
“Don’t seem to have any date,” he observed.
Bill Chess shook his head somberly. “No. She left a month ago, June 12th.”
“Left you once before, didn’t she?”
“Yeah.” Bill Chess stared at him fixedly. “I got drunk and stayed with a chippy. Just before the first snow last December. She was gone a week and came back all prettied up. Said she just had to get away for a while and had been staying with a girl she used to work with in L.A.”
“What was the name of this party?” Patton asked.
“Never told me and I never asked her. What Muriel did was all silk with me.”
“Sure. Note left that time, Bill?” Patton asked smoothly.
“No.”
“This note here looks middling old,” Patton said, holding it up.
“I carried it a month,” Bill Chess growled. “Who told you she left me before?”
“I forget,” Patton said. “You know how it is in a place like this. Not much folks don’t notice. Except maybe in summer time where there’s a lot of strangers about.”
Nobody said anything for a while and then Patton said absently: “June 12th you say she left? Or you thought she left? Did you say the folks across the lake were up here then?”
Bill Chess looked at me and his face darkened again. “Ask this snoopy guy—if he didn’t already spill his guts to you.”
Patton didn’t look at me at all. He looked at the line of mountains far beyond the lake. He said gently: “Mr. Marlowe here didn’t tell me anything at all, Bill, except how the body come up out of the water and who it was. And that Muriel went away, as you thought, and left a note you showed him. I don’t guess there’s anything wrong in that, is there?”
There was another silence and Bill Chess stared down at the blanket-covered corpse a few feet away from him He clenched his hands and a thick tear ran down his cheek.
“Mrs. Kingsley was here,” he said. “She went down the hill that same day. Nobody was in the other cabins. Perrys and Farquars ain’t been up at all this year.”
Patton nodded and was silent. A kind of charged emptiness hung in the air, as if something that had not been said was plain to all of them and didn’t need saying.
Then Bill Chess said wildly: “Take me in, you sons of bitches!
Sure I did it! I drowned her. She was my girl and I loved her. I’m a heel, always was a heel, always will be a heel, but just the same I loved her. Maybe you guys wouldn’t understand that. Just don’t bother to try. Take me in, damn you!”
Nobody said anything at all.
Bill Chess looked down at his hard brown fist. He swung it up viciously and hit himself in the face with all his strength.
“You rotten son of a bitch,” he breathed in a harsh whisper.
His nose began to bleed slowly. He stood and the blood ran down his lip, down the side of his mouth, to the point of his chin. A drop fell sluggishly to his shirt.
Patton said quietly: “Got to take you down the hill for questioning, Bill. You know that. We ain’t accusing you of anything, but the folks down there have got to talk to you.”
Bill Chess said heavily: “Can I change my clothes?”
“Sure. You go with him, Andy. And see what you can find to kind of wrap up what we got here.”
They went off along the path at the edge of the lake. The doctor cleared his throat and looked out over the water and sighed.
“You’ll want to send the corpse down in my ambulance, Jim, won’t you?”
Patton shook his head. “Nope. This is a poor county, Doc. I figure the lady can ride cheaper than what you get for that ambulance.”
The doctor walked away from him angrily, saying over his shoulder: “Let me know if you want me to pay for the funeral.”
“That ain’t no way to talk,” Patton sighed.
9
The Indian Head Hotel was a brown building on a corner across from the new dance hall. I parked in front of it and used its rest room to wash my face and hands and comb the pine needles out of my hair, before I went into the dining-drinking parlor that adjoined the lobby. The whole place was full to overflowing with males in leisure jackets and liquor breaths and females in high-pitched laughs, oxblood fingernails and dirty knuckles. The manager of the joint, a low budget tough guy in shirt sleeves and a mangled cigar, was prowling the room with watchful eyes. At the cash desk a pale-haired man was fighting to get the war news on a small radio that was as full of static as the mashed potatoes were full of water. In the deep back corner of the room, a hillbilly orchestra of five pieces, dressed in ill-fitting white jackets and purple shirts, was trying to make itself heard above the brawl at the bar and smiling glassily into the fog of cigarette smoke and the blur of alcoholic voices. At Puma Point summer, that lovely season, was in full swing.
I gobbled what they called the regular dinner, drank a brandy to sit on its chest and hold it down, and went out on to the main street. It was still broad daylight but some of the neon signs had been turned on, and the evening reeled with the cheerful din of auto horns, children screaming, bowls rattling, skeeballs clunking, .22’s snapping merrily in shooting galleries, juke boxes playing like crazy, and behind all this out on the lake the hard barking roar of the speedboats going nowhere at all and acting as though they were racing with death.
In my Chrysler a thin, serious-looking, brown-haired girl in dark slacks was sitting smoking a cigarette and talking to a dude ranch cowboy who sat on my running-board . I walked around the car and got into it. The cowboy strolled away hitching his jeans up. The girl didn’t move.
“I’m Birdie Keppel,” she said cheerfully, “I’m the beautician here daytimes and evenings I work on the Puma Point Banner. Excuse me sitting in your car.”
“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.