“A mighty cute little blonde when she fixed herself up. She kind of let herself go with Bill. A quiet girl, with a face that kept its secrets. Bill says she had a temper, but I never seen any of it. I seen plenty of nasty temper in him.”
“And did you think she looked like the photo of some body called Mildred Haviland?”
His jaws stopped munching and his mouth became almost primly tight. Very slowly he started chewing again.
“By gum,” he said, “I’ll be mighty careful to look under the bed before I crawl in tonight. To make sure you ain’t there. Where did you get that information?”
“A nice little girl called Birdie Keppel told me. She was interviewing me in the course of her spare time newspaper job. She happened to mention that an L.A. cop named De Soto was showing the photo around.”
Patton smacked his thick knee and hunched his shoulders forward.
“I done wrong there,” he said soberly, “I made one of my mistakes. This big bruiser showed his picture to darn near everybody in town before he showed it to me. That made me kind of sore. It looked some like Muriel, but not enough to be sure by any manner of means. I asked him what she was wanted for. He said it was police business. I said I was in that way of business myself, in an ignorant countrified kind of way. He said his instructions were to locate the lady and that was all he knew. Maybe he did wrong to take me up short like that. So I guess I done wrong to tell him I didn’t know anybody that looked like his little picture.”
The big calm man smiled vaguely at the corner of the ceiling, then brought his eyes down and looked at me steadily.
“I’ll thank you to respect this confidence, Mr. Marlowe. You done right nicely in your figuring too. You ever happen to go over to Coon Lake?”
“Never heard of it.”
“Back about a mile,” he said, pointing over his shoulder with a thumb, “there’s a little narrow wood road turns over west. You can just drive it and miss the trees. It climbs about five hundred feet in another mile and comes out by Coon Lake. Pretty little place. Folks go up there to picnic once in a while, but not often. It’s hard on tires. There’s two three small shallow lakes full of reeds. There’s snow up there even now in the shady places. There’s a bunch of old hand-hewn log cabins that’s been falling down ever since I recall, and there’s a big broken down frame building that Montclair University used to use for a summer camp maybe ten years back. They ain’t used it in a very long time. This building sits back from the lake in heavy timber. Round at the back of it there’s a washhouse with an old rusty boiler and along of that there’s a big woodshed with a sliding door hung on rollers. It was built for a garage but they kept their wood in it and they locked it up out of season. Wood’s one of the few things people will steal up here, but folks who might steal it off a pile wouldn’t break a lock to get it. I guess you know what I found in that woodshed.”
“I thought you went down to San Bernardino.”
“Changed my mind. Didn’t seem right to let Bill ride down there with his wife’s body in the back of the car. So I sent it down in Doc’s ambulance and I sent Andy down with Bill. I figured I kind of ought to look around a little more before I put things up to the sheriff and the coroner.”
“Muriel’s car was in the woodshed?”
“Yep. And two unlocked suitcases in the car. Packed with clothes and packed kind of hasty, I thought. Women’s clothes. The point is, son, no stranger would have known about that place.”
I agreed with him. He put his hand into the slanting side pocket of his jerkin and brought out a small twist of tissue paper. He opened it up on his palm and held the hand out flat.
“Take a look at this.”
I went over and looked. What lay on the tissue was a thin gold chain with a tiny lock hardly larger than a link of the chain. The gold had been snipped through, leaving the lock intact. The chain seemed to be about seven inches long. There was white powder sticking to both chain and paper.
“Where would you guess I found that?” Patton asked.
I picked the chain up and tried to fit the cut ends together. They didn’t fit. I made no comment on that, but moistened a finger and touched the powder and tasted it.
“In a can or box of confectioner’s sugar,” I said. “The chain is an anklet. Some women never take them off, like wedding rings. Whoever took this one off didn’t have the key.”
“What do you make of it?”
“Nothing much,” I said. “There wouldn’t be any point in Bill cutting it off Muriel’s ankle and leaving that green necklace on her neck. There wouldn’t be any point in Muriel cutting it off herself—assuming she had lost the key—and hiding it to be found. A search thorough enough to find it wouldn’t be made unless her body was found first. If Bill cut it off, he would have thrown it into the lake. But if Muriel wanted to keep it and yet hide it from Bill, there’s some sense in the place where it was hidden.”
Patton looked puzzled this time. “Why is that?”
“Because it’s a woman’s hiding place. Confectioner’s sugar is used to make cake icing. A man would never look there. Pretty clever of you to find it, sheriff.”
He grinned a little sheepishly. “Hell, I knocked the box over and some of the sugar spilled,” he said. “Without that I don’t guess I ever would have found it.” He rolled the paper up again and slipped it back into his pocket. He stood up with an air of finality.
“You staying up here or going back to town, Mr. Marlowe?”
“Back to town. Until you want me for the inquest. I suppose you will.”
“That’s up to the coroner, of course. If you’ll kind of shut that window you bust in, I’ll put this lamp out and lock up.”
I did what he said and he snapped his flash on and put out the lamp. We went out and he felt the cabin door to make sure the lock had caught. He closed the screen softly and stood looking across the moonlit lake.
“I don’t figure Bill meant to kill her,” he said sadly. “He could choke a girl to death without meaning to at all. He has mighty strong hands. Once done he has to use what brain God gave him to cover up what he done. I feel real bad about it, but that don’t alter the facts and the probabilities. It’s simple and natural and the simple and natural things usually turn out to be right.”
I said: “I should think he would have run away. I don’t see how he could stand it to stay here.”
Patton spat into the black velvet shadow of a manzanita bush. He said slowly: “He had a government pension and he would have to run away from that too. And most men can stand what they’ve got to stand, when it steps up and looks them straight in the eye. Like they’re doing all over the world right now. Well, goodnight to you. I’m going to walk down to that little pier again and stand there awhile in the moonlight and feel bad. A night like this, and we got to think about murders.”
He moved quietly off into the shadows and became one of them himself. I stood there until be was out of sight and then went back to the locked gate and climbed over it. I got into the car and drove back down the road looking for a place to hide.
12
Three hundred yards from the gate a narrow track, sifted over with brown oak leaves from last fall, curved around a granite boulder and disappeared. I followed it around and bumped along the stones of the outcrop for fifty or sixty feet, then swung the car around a tree and set it pointing back the way it had come. I cut the lights and switched off the motor and sat there waiting.
Half an hour passed. Without tobacco it seemed a long time. Then far off I heard a car motor start up and grow louder and the white beam of headlights passed below me on the road. The sound faded into the distance and a faint dry tang of dust hung in the air for a while after it was gone.