He jumped at her with the slugs in him, and fell hard against her and carried her to the floor. She ought to have thought of that too. They crashed together, his big body pinning her down. She wailed and an arm waved up towards me holding the gun. I smacked it out of her hand. I grabbed at his pockets and got my gun out and jumped away from them. I sat down. The back of my neck felt like a piece of ice. I sat down and held the gun on my knee and waited.
His big hand reached out and took hold of the clawshaped leg of a davenport and whitened on the wood. His body arched and rolled and the woman wailed again. His body rolled back and sagged and the hand let go of the davenport leg. The fingers uncurled quietly and lay limp on the nap of the carpet. There was a choking rattle — and silence.
She fought her way out from under him and got to her feet panting, glaring like an animal. She turned without a sound and ran. I didn’t move. I just let her go.
I went over and bent down above the big, sprawled man and held a finger hard against the side of his neck. I stood there silently, leaning down, feeling for a pulse, and listening. I straightened up slowly and listened some more. No sirens, no car, no noise. Just the dead stillness of the room. I put my gun back under my arm and put the light out and opened the front door and walked down the path to the sidewalk. Nothing moved on the street. A big car stood at the curb, beside the fireplug, up at the dead-end beyond Goodwin’s place. I crossed the street to the new house and got my car out of its garage and shut the garage up again and started for Puma Lake again.
EIGHT
KEEP TINCHFIELD CONSTABLE
The cabin stood in a hollow, in front of a growth of jackpines. A big barnlike garage with cordwood piled on one side was open to the morning sun and Tinchfield’s car glistened inside it. There was a cleated walk down to the front door and smoke lisped from the chimney.
Tinchfleld opened the door himself. He wore an old gray roll-collar sweater and his khaki pants. He was fresh-shaved and as smooth as a baby.
«Well, step in, son,» he said peacefully. «I see you go to work bright and early. So you didn’t go down the hill last night, eh?»
I went past him into the cabin and sat in an old Boston rocker with a crocheted antimacassar over its back. I rocked in it and it gave out a homey squeak.
«Coffee’s just about ready to pour,» Tinchfleld said genially. «Emma’ll lay a plate for you. You got a kind of tuckered-out look, son.»
«I went back down the hill,» I said. «I just came back up. That wasn’t Beryl Haines in the lake yesterday.»
Tinchfleld said: «Well, I swan.»
«You don’t seem a hell of a lot surprised,» I growled.
«I don’t surprise right easy, son. Particularly before breakfast.»
«It was Julia Melton,» I said. «She was murdered — by Howard Melton and Beryl Haines. She was dressed in Beryl’s clothes and put down under those boards, six feet under water, so that she would stay long enough not to look like Julia Melton. Both the women were blondes, of the same size and general appearance. Bill said they were enough alike to be sisters. Not twin sisters, probably.»
«They were some alike,» Tinchfleld said, staring at me gravely. He raised his voice. «Emma!»
A stout woman in a print dress opened the inner door of the cabin. An enormous white apron was tied around what had once been her waist. A smell of coffee and frying bacon rushed out.
«Emma, this is Detective Dalmas from Los Angeles. Lay another plate and I’ll pull the table out from the wall a ways. He’s a mite tired and hungry.»
The stout woman ducked her head and smiled and put silver on the table.
We sat down and ate bacon and eggs and hot cakes and drank coffee by the quart. Tinchfleld ate like four men and his wife ate like a bird and kept hopping up and down like a bird to get more food.
We finished at last and Mrs. Tinchfleld gathered up the dishes and shut herself in the kitchen. Tinchfleld cut a large slice of plug and tucked it carefully into his face and I sat down in the Boston rocker again.
«Well, son,» he said, «I guess I’m ready for the word. I was a mite anxious about that piece of gold chain bein’ hid where it was, what with the lake so handy. But I’m a slow thinker. What makes you think Mellon murdered his wife?»
«Because Beryl Haines is still alive, with her hair dyed red.»
I told him my story, all of it, fact by fact, concealing nothing. He said nothing until I had finished.
«Well, son,» he said then, «you done a mighty smart piece of detectin’ work there — what with a little luck in a couple of places, like we all have to have. But you didn’t have no business to be doin’ it at all, did you?»
«No. But Mellon took me for a ride and played me for a sucker. I’m a stubborn sort of guy.»
«What for do you reckon Melton hired you?»
«He had to. It was a necessary part of his plan to have the body correctly identified in the end, perhaps not for some time, perhaps not until after it had been buried and the case closed. But he had to have it identified in the end in order to get his wife’s money. That or wait for years to have the courts declare her legally dead. When it was correctly identified, he would have to show that he had made an effort to find her. If his wife was a kleptomaniac, as he said, he had a good excuse for hiring a private dick instead of going to the police. But he had to do something. Also there was the menace of Goodwin. He might have planned to kill Goodwin and frame me for it. He certainly didn’t know Beryl had beat him to it, or he wouldn’t have let me go to Goodwin’s house.
«After that — and I was foolish enough to come up here before I had reported Goodwin’s death to the Glendale police — he probably thought I could be handled with money. The murder itself was fairly simple, and there was an angle to it that Beryl didn’t know or think about. She was probably in love with him. An underprivileged woman like that, with a drunken husband, would be apt to go for a guy like Melton.
«Melton couldn’t have known the body would be found yesterday, because that was pure accident, but he would have kept me on the job and kept hinting around until it was found. He knew Haines would be suspected of murdering his wife and the note she left was worded to sound a bit unlike a real suicide note. Melton knew his wife and Haines were getting tight together up here and playing games.
«He and Beryl just waited for the right time, when Haines had gone off to the north shore on a big drunk. Beryl must have telephoned him from somewhere. You’ll be able to check that. He could make it up here in three hours’ hard driving. Julia was probably still drinking. Melton knocked her out, dressed her in Beryl’s clothes and put her down in the lake. He was a big man and could do it alone, without much trouble. Beryl would be acting as lookout down the only road into the property. That gave him a chance to plant the anklet in the Haines cabin. Then he rushed back to town and Beryl put on Julia’s clothes and took Julia’s car and luggage and went to the hotel in San Bernardino.
«There she was unlucky enough to be seen and spoken to by Goodwin, who must have known something was wrong, by her clothes or her bags or perhaps hearing her spoken to as Mrs. Melton. So he followed her into town and you know the rest. The fact that Melton had her lay this trail shows two things, as I see it. One, that he intended to wait some time before having the body properly identified. It would be almost certain to be accepted as the body of Beryl Haines on Bill’s say-so, especially as that put Bill in a very bad spot.
«The other thing is that when the body was identified as Julia Melton, then the false trail laid by Beryl would make it look as though she and Bill had committed the murder to collect her insurance. I think Mellon made a bad mistake by planting that anklet where he did. He should have dropped it into the lake, tied to a bolt or something, and later on, accidentally on purpose, fished it out. Putting it in Haines’ cabin and then asking me if Haines’ cabin had been searched was a little too sloppy. But planned murders are always like that.»