Текст книги "The Lady in the Lake"

Автор книги: Raymond Thornton Chandler

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Текущая страница: 7 (всего у книги 17 страниц)

FIFTEEN

I drove past the intersection of Altair Street to where the cross street continued to the edge of the canyon and ended in a semi-circular parking place with a sidewalk and a white wooden guard fence around it. I sat there in the car a little while, thinking, looking out to sea and admiring the blue-gray fall of the foothills towards the ocean. I was trying to make up my mind whether to try handling Lavery with a feather or go on using the back of my hand and edge of my tongue. I decided I could lose nothing by the soft approach. If that didn’t produce for me—and I didn’t think it would—nature could take its course and we could bust up the furniture.

The paved alley that ran along halfway down the hill below the houses on the outer edge was empty. Below that, on the next hillside street, a couple of kids were throwing a boomerang up the slope and chasing it with the usual amount of elbowing and mutual insult. Farther down still a house was enclosed in trees and a red brick wall. There was a glimpse of washing on the line in the backyard and two pigeons strutted along the slope of the roof bobbing their heads. A blue and tan bus trundled along the street in front of the brick house and stopped and a very old man got off with slow care and settled himself firmly on the ground and tapped with a heavy cane before he started to crawl back up the slope.

The air was clearer than yesterday. The morning was full of peace. I left the car where it was and walked along Altair Street to No. 623.

The venetian blinds were down across the front windows and the place had a sleepy look. I stepped down over the Korean moss and punched the bell and saw that the door was not quite shut. It had dropped in its frame, as most of our doors do, and the spring bolt hung a little on the lower edge of the lock plate. I remembered that it had wanted to stick the day before, when I was leaving.

I gave the door a little push and it moved inward with a light click. The room beyond was dim, but there was some light from west windows. Nobody answered my ring. I didn’t ring again. I pushed the door a little wider and stepped inside.

The room had a hushed warm smell, the smell of late morning in a house not yet opened up. The bottle of Vat 69 on the round table by the davenport was almost empty and another full bottle waited beside it. The copper ice bucket had a little water in the bottom. Two glasses had been used, and half a siphon of carbonated water.

I fixed the door about as I had found it and stood there and listened. If Lavery was away I thought I would take a chance and frisk the joint. I didn’t have anything much on him, but it was probably enough to keep him from calling the cops.

In the silence time passed. It passed in the dry whirr of the electric clock on the mantel, in the far-off toot of an auto horn on Aster Drive, in the hornet drone of a plane over the foothills across the canyon, in the sudden lurch and growl of the electric refrigerator in the kitchen.

I went farther into the room and stood peering around and listening and hearing nothing except those fixed sounds belonging to the house and having nothing to do with the humans in it. I started along the rug towards the archway at the back.

A hand in a glove appeared on the slope of the white metal railing, at the edge of the archway, where the stairs went down. It appeared and stopped.

It moved and a woman’s hat showed, then her head. The woman came quietly up the stairs. She came all the way up, turned through the arch and still didn’t seem to see me. She was a slender woman of uncertain age, with untidy brown hair, a scarlet mess of a mouth, too much rouge on her cheekbones, shadowed eyes. She wore a blue tweed suit that looked like the dickens with the purple hat that was doing its best to hang on to the side of her head.

She saw me and didn’t stop or change expression in the slightest degree. She came slowly on into the room, holding her right hand away from her body. Her left hand wore the brown glove I had seen on the railing. The righthand glove that matched it was wrapped around the butt of a small automatic.

She stopped then and her body arched back and a quick distressful sound came out of her mouth. Then she giggled, a high nervous giggle. She pointed the gun at me, and came steadily on.

I kept on looking at the gun and not screaming.

The woman came close. When she was close enough to be confidential she pointed the gun at my stomach and said:

“All I wanted was my rent. The place seems well taken care of. Nothing broken. He has always been a good tidy careful tenant. I just didn’t want him to get too far behind in the rent.”

A fellow with a kind of strained and unhappy voice said politely: “How far behind is he?”

“Three months,” she said. “Two hundred and forty dollars. Eighty dollars is very reasonable for a place as well furnished as this. I’ve had a little trouble collecting before, but it always came out very well. He promised me a check this morning. Over the telephone. I mean he promised to give it to me this morning.”

“Over the telephone,” I said. “This morning.”

I shuffled around a bit in an inconspicuous sort of way. The idea was to get close enough to make a side swipe at the gun, knock it outwards, and then jump in fast before she could bring it back in line. I’ve never had a lot of luck with the technique, but you have to try it once in a while. This looked like the time to try it.

I made about six inches, but not nearly enough for a first down. I said: “And you’re the owner?” I didn’t look at the gun directly. I had a faint, a very faint hope that she didn’t know she was pointing it at me.

“Why, certainly. I’m Mrs. Fallbrook. Who did you think I was?”

“Well, I thought you might be the owner,” I said. “You talking about the rent and all. But I didn’t know your name.” Another eight inches. Nice smooth work. It would be a shame to have it wasted.

“And who are you, if I may enquire?”

“I just came about the car payment,” I said. “The door was open just a teensy weensy bit and I kind of shoved in. I don’t know why.”

I made a face like a man from the finance company coming about the car payment. Kind of tough, but ready to break into a sunny smile.

“You mean Mr. Lavery is behind in his car payments?” she asked, looking worried.

“A little. Not a great deal,” I said soothingly.

I was all set now. I had the reach and I ought to have the speed. All it needed was a clean sharp sweep inside the gun and outwards. I started to take my foot out of the rug.

“You know,” she said, “it’s funny about this gun. I found it on the stairs. Nasty oily things, aren’t they? And the stair carpet is a very nice gray chenille. Quite expensive.”

And she handed me the gun.

My hand went out for it, as stiff as an eggshell, almost as brittle. I took the gun. She sniffed with distaste at the glove which had been wrapped around the butt. She went on talking in exactly the same tone of cockeyed reasonableness. My knees cracked, relaxing.

“Well, of course it’s much easier for you,” she said. “About the car, I mean. You can just take it away, if you have to. But taking a house with nice furniture in it isn’t so easy. It takes time and money to evict a tenant. There is apt to be bitterness and things get damaged, sometimes on purpose. The rug on this floor cost over two hundred dollars, secondhand. It’s only a jute rug, but it has a lovely coloring, don’t you think? You’d never know it was only jute, secondhand. But that’s silly too because they’re always secondhand after you’ve used them. And I walked over here too, to save my tires for the government. I could have taken a bus part way, but the darn things never come along except going in the wrong direction.”

I hardly heard what she said. It was like surf breaking beyond a point, out of sight. The gun had my interest.

I broke the magazine out. It was empty. I turned the gun and looked into the breech. That was empty too. I sniffed the muzzle. It reeked.

I dropped the gun into my pocket. A six-shot .25caliber automatic. Emptied out. Shot empty, and not too long ago. But not in the last half hour either.

“Has it been fired?” Mrs. Fallbrook enquired pleasantly. “I certainly hope not.”

“Any reason why it should have been fired?” I asked her. The voice was steady, but the brain was still bouncing.

“Well, it was lying on the stairs,” she said. “After all, people do fire them.”

“How true that is,” I said. “But Mr. Lavery probably had a hole in his pocket. He isn’t home, is he?”

“Oh no.” She shook her head and looked disappointed. “And I don’t think it’s very nice of him. He promised me the check and I walked over—”

“When was it you phoned him?” I asked. “Why, yesterday evening.” She frowned, not liking so many questions.

“He must have been called away,” I said.

She stared at a spot between my big brown eyes.

“Look, Mrs. Fallbrook,” I said. “Let’s not kid around any longer, Mrs. Fallbrook. Not that I don’t love it. And not that I like to say this. But you didn’t shoot him, did you—on account of he owed you three months’ rent?”

She sat down very slowly on the edge of a chair and worked the tip of her tongue along the scarlet slash of her mouth.

“Why, what a perfectly horrid suggestion,” she said angrily. “I don’t think you are nice at all. Didn’t you say the gun had not been fired?”

“All guns have been fired sometime. All guns have been loaded sometime. This one is not loaded now.”

“Well, then—” she made an impatient gesture and sniffed at her oily glove.

“Okay, my idea was wrong. Just a gag anyway. Mr. Lavery was out and you went through the house. Being the owner, you have a key. Is that correct?”

“I didn’t mean to be interfering,” she said, biting a finger. “Perhaps I ought not to have done it. But I have a right to see how things are kept.”

“Well, you looked. And you’re sure he’s not here?”

“I didn’t look under the beds or in the icebox,” she said coldly. “I called out from the top of the stairs when he didn’t answer my ring. Then I went down to the lower hall and called out again. I even peeped into the bedroom.” She lowered her eyes as if bashfully and twisted a hand on her knee.

“Well, that’s that,” I said.

She nodded brightly. “Yes, that’s that. And what did you say your name was?”

“Vance,” I said. “Philo Vance.”

“And what company are you employed with, Mr. Vance?”

“I’m out of work right now,” I said. “Until the police commissioner gets into a jam again.”

She looked startled. “But you said you came about a car payment.”

“That’s just part-time work,” I said. “A fill-in job.”

She rose to her feet and looked at me steadily. Her voice was cold saying: “Then in that case I think you had better leave now.”

I said: “I thought I might take a look around first, if you don’t mind. There might be something you missed.”

“I don’t think that is necessary,” she said. “This is my house. I’ll thank you to leave now, Mr. Vance.”

I said: “And if I don’t leave, you’ll get somebody who will. Take a chair again, Mrs. Fallbrook. I’ll just glance through. This gun, you know, is kind of queer.”

“But I told you I found it lying on the stairs,” she said angrily. “I don’t know anything else about it. I don’t know anything about guns at all. I—I never shot one in my life.” She opened a large blue bag and pulled a handkerchief out of it and sniffled.

“That’s your story,” I said. “I don’t have to get stuck with it.”

She put her left hand out to me with a pathetic gesture, like the erring wife in East Lynne.

“Oh, I shouldn’t have come in!” she cried. “It was horrid of me. I know it was. Mr. Lavery will be furious.”

“What you shouldn’t have done,” I said, “was let me find out the gun was empty. Up to then you were holding everything in the deck.”

She stamped her foot. That was all the scene lacked. That made it perfect.

“Why, you perfectly loathsome man,” she squawked. “Don’t you dare touch me! Don’t you take a single step towards me! I won’t stay in this house another minute with you. How dare you be so insulting—”

She caught her voice and snapped it in mid-air like a rubber band. Then she put her head down, purple hat and all, and ran for the door. As she passed me she put a hand out as if to stiff-arm me, but she wasn’t near enough and I didn’t move. She jerked the door wide and charged out through it and up the walk to the street. The door came slowly shut and I heard her rapid steps above the sound of its closing.

I ran a fingernail along my teeth and punched the point of my jaw with a knuckle, listening. I didn’t hear anything anywhere to listen to. A six-shot automatic, fired empty.

“Something,” I said out loud, “is all wrong with this scene.

The house seemed now to be abnormally still. I went along the apricot rug and through the archway to the head of the stairs. I stood there for another moment and listened again.

I shrugged and went quietly down the stairs.

SIXTEEN

The lower hall had a door at each end and two in the middle side by side. One of these was a linen closet and the other was locked. I went along to the end and looked in at a spare bedroom with drawn blinds and no sign of being used. I went back to the other end of the hall and stepped into a second bedroom with a wide bed, a caféau-lait rug, angular furniture in light wood, a box mirror over the dressing table and a long fluorescent lamp over the mirror. In the corner a crystal greyhound stood on a mirror-top table and beside him a crystal box with cigarettes in it.

Face powder was spilled around on the dressing table. There was a smear of dark lipstick on a towel hanging over the waste basket. On the bed were pillows side by side, with depressions in them that could have been made by heads. A woman’s handkerchief peeped from under one pillow. A pair of sheer black pajamas lay across the foot of the bed. A rather too emphatic trace of chypre hung in the air.

I wondered what Mrs. Fallbrook had thought of all this.

I turned around and looked at myself in the long mirror of a closet door. The door was painted white and had a crystal knob. I turned the knob in my handkerchief and looked inside. The cedar-lined closet was fairly full of man’s clothes. There was a nice friendly smell of tweed. The closet was not entirely full of man’s clothes.

There was also a woman’s black and white tailored suit, mostly white, black and white shoes under it, a Panama with a black and white rolled band on a shelf above it. There were other woman’s clothes, but I didn’t examine them.

I shut the closet door and went out of the bedroom, holding my handkerchief ready for more doorknobs.

The door next to the linen closet, the locked door, had to be the bathroom. I shook it, but it went on being locked. I bent down and saw there was a short, slit-shaped opening in the middle of the knob. I knew then that the door was fastened by pushing a button in the middle of the knob inside, and that the slit-like opening was for a metal key without wards that would spring the lock open in case somebody fainted in the bathroom, or the kids locked themselves in and got sassy.

The key for this ought to be kept on the top shelf of the linen closet, but it wasn’t. I tried my knife blade, but that was too thin. I went back to the bedroom and got a flat nail file off the dresser. That worked. I opened the bathroom door.

A man’s sand-colored pajamas were tossed over a painted hamper. A pair of heelless green slippers lay on the floor. There was a safety razor on the edge of the washbowl and a tube of cream with the cap off. The bathroom window was shut, and there was a pungent smell in the air that was not quite like any other smell.

Three empty shells lay bright and coppery on the Nile green tiles of the bathroom floor, and there was a nice clean hole in the frosted pane of the window. To the left and a little above the window were two scarred places in the plaster where the white showed behind the paint and where something, such as a bullet, had gone in.

The shower curtain was green and white oiled silk and it hung on shiny chromium rings and it was drawn across the shower opening. I slid it aside, the rings making a thin scraping noise, which for some reason sounded indecently loud.

I felt my neck creak a little as I bent down. He was there all right-there wasn’t anywhere else for him to be. He was huddled in the corner under the two shining faucets, and water dripped slowly on his chest, from the chromium showerhead.

His knees were drawn up but slack. The two holes in his naked chest were dark blue and both of them were close enough to his heart to have killed him. The blood seemed to have been washed away.

His eyes had a curiously bright and expectant look, as if he smelled the morning coffee and would be coming right out.

Nice efficient work. You have just finished shaving and stripped for the shower and you are leaning in against the shower curtain and adjusting the temperature of the water. The door opens behind you and somebody comes in. The somebody appears to have been a woman. She has a gun. You look at the gun and she shoots it.

She misses with three shots. It seems impossible, at such short range, but there it is. Maybe it happens all the time. I’ve been around so little.

You haven’t anywhere to go. You could lunge at her and take a chance, if you were that kind of fellow, and if you were braced for it. But leaning in over the shower faucets, holding the curtain closed, you are off balance. Also you are apt to be somewhat petrified with panic, if you are at all like other people. So there isn’t anywhere to go, except into the shower.

That is where you go. You go into it as far as you can, but a shower stall is a small place and the tiled wall stops you. You are backed up against the last wall there is now. You are all out of space, and you are all out of living. And then there are two more shots, possibly three, and you slide down the wall, and your eyes are not even frightened any more now. They are just the empty eyes of the dead.

She reaches in and turns the shower off. She sets the lock of the bathroom door. On her way out of the house she throws the empty gun on the stair carpet. She should worry. It is probably your gun.

Is that right? It had better be right.

I bent and pulled at his arm. Ice couldn’t have been any colder or any stiffer. I went out of the bathroom, leaving it unlocked. No need to lock it now. It only makes work for the cops.

I went into the bedroom and pulled the handkerchief out from under the pillow. It was a minute piece of linen rag with a scalloped edge embroidered in red. Two small initials were stitched in the corner, in red. A.F.

“Adrienne Fromsett,” I said. I laughed. It was a rather ghoulish laugh.

I shook the handkerchief to get some of the chypre out of it and folded it up in a tissue and put it in a pocket. I went back upstairs to the living room and poked around in the desk against the wall. The desk contained no interesting letters, phone numbers or provocative match folders. Or if it did, I didn’t find them.

I looked at the phone. It was on a small table against the wall beside the fireplace. It had a long cord so that Mr. Lavery could be lying on his back on the davenport, a cigarette between his smooth brown lips, a tall cool one at the table at his side, and plenty of time for a nice long cosy conversation with a lady friend. An easy, languid, flirtatious, kidding, not too subtle and not too blunt conversation, of the sort he would be apt to enjoy.

All that wasted too. I went away from the telephone to the door and set the lock so I could come in again and shut the door tight, pulling it hard over the sill until the lock clicked. I went up the walk and stood in the sunlight looking across the street at Dr. Almore’s house.

Nobody yelled or ran out of the door. Nobody blew a police whistle. Everything was quiet and sunny and calm. No cause for excitement whatever. It’s only Marlowe, finding another body. He does it rather well by now. Murder-a-day Marlowe, they call him. They have the meat wagon following him around to follow up on the business he finds.

A nice enough fellow, in an ingenuous sort of way.

I walked back to the intersection and got into my car and started it and backed it and drove away from there.