“This do, Miss Keppel?”
“Mrs. But just call me Birdie. Everybody does. This is fine. Pleased to meet you, Mr. Marlowe. I see you come from Hollywood, that sinful city.”
She put a firm brown hand out and I shook it. Clamping bobbie pins into fat blondes had given her a grip like a pair of iceman’s tongs.
“I was talking to Doc Hollis,” she said, “about poor Muriel Chess. I thought you could give me some details. I understand you found the body.”
“Bill Chess found it really. I was just with him. You talk to Jim Patton?”
“Not yet. He went down the hill. Anyway I don’t think Jim would tell me much.”
“He’s up for re-election,” I said. “And you’re a newspaper woman.”
“Jim’s no politician, Mr. Marlowe, and I could hardly call myself a newspaper woman. This little paper we get out up here is a pretty amateurish proposition.”
“Well, what do you want to know?” I offered her a cigarette and lit it for her.
“You might just tell me the story.”
“I came up here with a letter from Derace Kingsley to look at his property. Bill Chess showed me around, got talking to me, told me his wife had moved out on him and showed me the note she left. I had a bottle along and he punished it. He was feeling pretty blue. The liquor loosened him up, but he was lonely and aching to talk anyway. That’s how it happened. I didn’t know him. Coming back around the end of the lake we went out or the, pier and Bill spotted an arm waving out from under the planking down in the water. It turned out to belong to what was left of Muriel Chess. I guess that’s all.”
“I understand from Doc Hollis she had been in the water a long time. Pretty badly decomposed and all that.
“Yes. Probably the whole month he thought she had been gone. There’s no reason to think otherwise. The note’s a suicide note.”
“Any doubt about that, Mr. Marlowe?”
I looked at her sideways. Thoughtful dark eyes looked out at me under fluffed out brown hair. The dusk had begun to fall now, very slowly. It was no more than a slight change in the quality of the light.
“I guess the police always have doubts in these cases,” I said.
“How about you?”
“My opinion doesn’t go for anything.”
“But for what it’s worth?”
“I only met Bill Chess this afternoon,” I said. “He struck me as a quick-tempered lad and from his own account he’s no saint. But he seems to have been in love with his wife. And I can’t see hanging around here for a month knowing she was rotting down in the water under that pier. Coming out of his cabin in the sunlight and looking along that soft blue water and seeing in his mind what was under it and what was happening to it. And knowing he put it there.”
“No more can I,” Birdie Keppel said softly. “No more could anybody. And yet we know in our minds that such things have happened and will happen again. Are you in the real estate business, Mr. Marlowe?”
“No.”
“What line of business are you in, if I may ask?”
“I’d rather not say.”
“That’s almost as good as saying,” she said. “Besides Doc Hollis heard you tell Jim Patton your full name. And we have an L.A. city directory in our office. I haven’t mentioned it to anyone.”
“That’s nice of you,” I said.
“And what’s more, I won’t,” she said. “If you don’t want me to.”
“What does it cost me?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Nothing at all. I don’t claim to be a very good newspaperman. And we wouldn’t print anything that would embarrass Jim Patton. Jim’s the salt of the earth. But it does open up, doesn’t it?”
“Don’t draw any wrong conclusions,” I said. “I had no interest in Bill Chess whatever.”
“No interest in Muriel Chess?”
“Why would I have any interest in Muriel Chess?”
She snuffed her cigarette out carefully into the ashtray under the dashboard. “Have it your own way,” she said. “But here’s a little item you might like to think about, if you don’t know it already. There was a Los Angeles copper named De Soto up here about six weeks back, a big roughneck with damn poor manners. We didn’t like him and we didn’t open up to him much. I mean the three of us in the Banner office didn’t. He had a photograph with him and he was looking for a woman called Mildred Haviland, he said. On police business. It was an ordinary photograph, an enlarged snapshot, not a police photo. He said he had information the woman was staying up here. The photo looked a good deal like Muriel Chess. The hair seemed to be reddish and in a very different style than she has worn it here, and the eyebrows were all plucked to narrow arches, and that changes a woman a good deal. But it did look a good deal like Bill Chess’s wife.”
I drummed on the door of the car and after a moment I said, “What did you tell him?”
“We didn’t tell him anything. First off, we couldn’t be sure. Second, we didn’t like his manner. Third, even if we had been sure and I had liked his manner, we likely would not have sicked him on to her. Why would we? Everybody’s done something to be sorry for. Take me. I was married once—to a professor of classical languages at Redlands University.” She laughed lightly.
“You might have got yourself a story,” I said.
“Sure. But up here we’re just people.”
“Did this man De Soto see Jim Patton?”
“Sure, he must have. Jim didn’t mention it.”
“Did he show you his badge?”
She thought and then shook her head. “I don’t recall that he did. We just took him for granted, from what he said. He certainly acted like a tough, city cop.”
“To me that’s a little against his being one. Did anybody tell Muriel about this guy?”
She hesitated, looking quietly out through the windshield for a long moment before she turned her head and nodded.
“I did. Wasn’t any of my damn business, was it?”
“What did she say?”
“She didn’t say anything. She gave a funny little embarrassed laugh, as if I had been making a bad joke. Then she walked away. But I did get the impression that there was a queer look in her eyes, just for an instant. You still not interested in Muriel Chess, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Why should I be? I never heard of her until I came up here this afternoon. Honest. And I never heard of anybody named Mildred Haviland either. Drive you back to town?”
“Oh no, thanks. I’ll walk. It’s only a few steps. Much obliged to you. I kind of hope Bill doesn’t get into a jam. Especially a nasty jam like this.”
She got out of the car and hung on one foot, then tossed her head and laughed. “They say I’m a pretty good beauty operator,” she said. “I hope I am. As an interviewer I’m terrible. Goodnight.”
I said good night and she walked off into the evening. I sat there watching her until she reached the main street and turned out of sight. Then I got out of the Chrysler and went over towards the telephone company’s little rustic building.
10
A tame doe deer with a leather dog collar on wandered across the road in front of me. I patted her rough hairy neck and went into the telephone office. A small girl in slacks sat at a small desk working on the books. She got me the rate to Beverly Hills and the change for the coin box. The booth was outside, against the front wall of the building.
“I hope you like it up here,” she said. “It’s very quiet, very restful.”
I shut myself into the booth. For ninety cents I could talk to Derace Kingsley for five minutes. He was at home and the call came through quickly but the connection was full of mountain static.
“Find anything up there?” he asked me in a three highball voice. He sounded tough and confident again.