«What do you plan to do now?»
«It looks as though I’m always being sidetracked on this job. I may come down tonight. Can I call you at your home?»
«Any time,» he said. «I’ll be home all evening and all night. Call me any time. I didn’t think Haines was that sort of a guy at all.»
«But you knew your wife had drinking spells and you left her up here alone.»
«My God,» he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. «A man with a wooden —»
«Oh let’s skip that part of it,» I growled. «It’s dirty enough without. Goodbye.»
I hung up and went back to the outer office and paid the girl for the call. Then I walked back to the main street and got into my car parked in front of the drugstore. The street was full of gaudy neon signs and noise and glitter. On the dry mountain air every sound seemed to carry a mile. I could hear people talking a block away. I got out of my car again and bought another pint at the drugstore and drove away from there.
When I got to the place back along the highway where the road turned off to Little Fawn Lake, I pulled over to the side and thought. Then I started up the road into the mountains towards Melton’s place.
The gate across the private road was shut and padlocked now. I tucked my car off to the side in some bushes and climbed over the gate and pussyfooted along the side of the road until the starlit glimmer of the lake suddenly bloomed at my feet. Haines’ cabin was dark. The cabins on the other side of the lake were vague shadows against the slope. The old mill wheel beside the dam looked funny as hell up there all alone. I listened — didn’t hear a sound. There are no night birds in the mountains.
I padded along to Haines’ cabin and tried the door — locked. I went around to the back and found another locked door. I prowled around the cabin walking like a cat on a wet floor. I pushed on the one screenless window. That was locked also. I stopped and listened some more. The window was not very tight. Wood dries out in that air and shrinks. I tried my knife between the two sashes, which opened inward, like small cottage windows. No dice. I leaned against the wall and looked at the hard shimmer of the lake and took a drink from my pint. That made me tough. I put the bottle away and picked up a big stone and smacked the window frame in without breaking the glass. I heaved up on the sill and climbed into the cabin.
A flash hit me in the face.
A calm voice said: «I’d rest right there, son. You must be all tired out.»
The flash pinned me against the wall for a moment and then a light switch clicked and a lamp went on. The flash died. Tinchfield sat there peacefully in a leather Morris chair beside a table over the edge of which a brown-fringed shawl dangled foolishly. Tinchfield wore the same clothes as he had worn that afternoon, and the addition of a brown wool windbreaker over his shirt. His jaws moved quietly.
«That movie outfit strung two miles of wire up here,» he said reflectively. «Kind of nice for the folks. Well, what’s on your mind, son — besides breakin’ and enterin’?»
I picked out a chair and sat down and looked around the cabin. The room was a small square room with a double bed and a rag rug and a few modest pieces of furniture. An open door at the back showed the corner of a cookstove.
«I had an idea,» I said. «From where I sit now it looks lousy.»
Tinchfield nodded and his eyes studied me without rancor. «I heard your car,» he said. «I knew you was on the private road and comin’ this way. You walk right nice, though. I didn’t hear you walk worth a darn. I’ve been mighty curious about you, son.»
«Why?»
«Ain’t you kind of heavy under the left arm, son?»
I grinned at him. «Maybe I better talk,» I said.
«Well, you don’t have to bother a lot about pushin’ in that winder. I’m a tolerant man. I figure you got a proper right to carry that six-gun, eh?»
I reached into my pocket and laid my open billfold on his thick knee. He lifted it and held it carefully to the lamp-light, looking at the photostat license behind the celluloid window. He handed the billfold back to me.
«I kind of figured you was interested in Bill Haines,» he said. «A private detective, eh? Well, you got a good hard build on you and your face don’t tell a lot of stories. I’m kind of worried about Bill myself. You aim to search the cabin?»
«I did have the idea.»
«It’s all right by me, but there ain’t really no necessity. I already pawed around considerable. Who hired you?»
«Howard Melton.»
He chewed a moment in silence. «Might I ask to do what?»
«To find his wife. She skipped out on him a couple of weeks back.»
Tinchfleld took his flat-crowned Stetson off and rumpled his mousy hair. He stood up and unlocked and opened the door. He sat down again and looked at me in silence.
«He’s very anxious to avoid publicity,» I said. «On account of a certain failing his wife has which might lose him his job.» Tinchfleld eyed me unblinkingly. The yellow lamp-light made bronze out of one side of his face. «I don’t mean liquor or Bill Haines,» I added.
«None of that don’t hardly explain your wantin’ to search Bill’s cabin,» he said mildly.
«I’m just a great guy to poke around.»
He didn’t budge for a long minute, during which he was probably deciding whether or not I was kidding him, and if I was, whether he cared.
He said at length: «Would this interest you at all, son?» He took a folded piece of newspaper from the slanting pocket of his windbreaker and opened it up on the table under the lamp. I went over and looked. On the newspaper lay a thin gold chain with a tiny lock. The chain had been snipped through neatly by a pair of cutting pliers. The lock was not unlocked. The chain was short, not more than four or five inches long and the lock was tiny and hardly any larger around than the chain itself. There was a little white powder on both chain and newspaper.
«Where would you guess I found that?» Tinchfleld asked.
I moistened a finger and touched the white powder and tasted it. «In a sack of flour. That is, in the kitchen here. It’s an anklet. Some women wear them and never take them off. Whoever took this one off didn’t have the key.»
Tinchfleld looked at me benignly. He leaned back and patted one knee with a large hand and smiled remotely at the pineboard ceiling. I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and sat down again.
Tinchfleld refolded the piece of newspaper and put it back in his pocket. «Well, I guess that’s all — unless you care to make a search in my presence.»
«No,» I said.
«It looks like me and you are goin’ to do our thinkin’ separate.»
«Mrs. Haines had a car, Bill said. A Ford.»
«Yep. A blue coupé. It’s down the road a piece, hid in some rocks.»
«That doesn’t sound much like a planned murder.»
«1 don’t figure anything was planned, son. Just come over him sudden. Maybe choked her, and he has awful powerful hands. There he is — stuck with a body to dispose of. He done it the best way he could think of and for a pegleg he done pretty damn well.»
«The car sounds more like a suicide,» I said. «A planned suicide. People have been known to commit suicide in such a way as to make a murder case stick against somebody they were mad at. She wouldn’t take the car far away, because he had to walk back.»
Tinchfleld said: «Bill wouldn’t neither. That car would be mighty awkward for him to drive, him being used to use his left foot.»
«He showed me that note from Beryl before we found the body,» I said. «And I was the one that walked out on the pier first.»
«You and me could get along, son. Well, we’ll see. Bill’s a good feller at heart — except these veterans give themselves too many privileges in my opinion. Some of ’em did three weeks in a camp and act like they was wounded nine times. Bill must have been mighty sentimental about this piece of chain I found.»