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. Degarmo 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.
39
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?”
Patton said: “I ought to of thought of it myself. But if I had, it would be one of those ideas a fellow would throw away almost as quick as he thought of it. It would look too kind of far-fetched.”
“Superficially yes,” I said. “But only superficially. Suppose the body had not come up out of the lake for a year, or not at all, unless the lake was dragged for it. Muriel Chess was gone and nobody was going to spend much time looking for her. We might never have heard of her again. Mrs. Kingsley was a different proposition. She had money and connections and an anxious husband. She would be searched for, as she was, eventually. But not very soon, unless something happened to start suspicion. It might have been a matter of months before anything was found out. The lake might have been dragged, but if a search along her trail seemed to indicate that she had actually left the lake and gone down the hill, even as far as San Bernardino, and the train from there east, then the lake might never have been dragged. And even if it was and the body was found, there was rather better than an even chance that the body would not be correctly identified. Bill Chess was arrested for his wife’s murder. For all I know he might even have been convicted of it, and that would have been that, as far as the body in the lake was concerned. Crystal Kingsley would still be missing, and it would be an unsolved mystery. Eventually it would be assumed that something had happened to her and that she was no longer alive. But nobody would know where or when or how it had happened. If it hadn’t been for Lavery, we might not be here talking about it now. Lavery is the key to the whole thing. He was in the Prescott Hotel in San Bernardino the night Crystal Kingsley was supposed to have left here. He saw a woman there who had Crystal Kingsley’s car, who was wearing Crystal Kingsley’s clothes, and of course he knew who she was. But he didn’t have to know there was anything wrong. He didn’t have to know they were Crystal Kingsley’s clothes or that the woman had put Crystal Kingsley’s car in the hotel garage. All he had to know was that he met Muriel Chess. Muriel took care of the rest.”