ELEVEN

The gate across the private road was padlocked. I put the Chrysler between two pine trees and climbed the gate and pussy-footed along the side of the road until the glimmer of the little lake bloomed suddenly at my feet. Bill Chess’s cabin was dark. The three cabins on the other side were abrupt shadows against the pale granite outcrop. Water gleamed white where it trickled across the top of the dam, and fell almost soundlessly along the sloping outer face to the brook below. I listened, and heard no other sound at all.

The front door of the Chess cabin was locked. I padded along to the back and found a brute of a padlock hanging at that. I went along the walls feeling window screens. They were all fastened. One window higher up was screenless, a small double cottage window half way down the north wall. This was locked too. I stood still and did some more listening. There was no breeze and the trees were as quiet as their shadows.

I tried a knife blade between the two halves of the small window. No soap. The catch refused to budge. I leaned against the wall and thought and then suddenly I picked up a large stone and smacked it against the place where the two frames met in the middle. The catch pulled out of dry wood with a tearing noise. The window swung back into darkness. I heaved up on the sill and wangled a cramped leg over and edged through the opening. I rolled and let myself down into the room. I turned, grunting a little from the exertion at that altitude, and listened again.

A blazing flash beam hit me square in the eyes.

A very calm voice said: “I’d rest right there, son. You must be all tuckered out.”

The flash pinned me against the wall like a squashed fly. Then a light switch clicked and a table lamp glowed. The flash went out. Jim Patton was sitting in an old brown Morris chair beside the table. A fringed brown scarf hung over the end of the table and touched his thick knee. He wore the same clothes he had worn that afternoon, with the addition of a leather jerkin which must have been new once, say about the time of Grover Cleveland’s first term. His hands were empty except for the flash. His eyes were empty. His jaws moved in gentle rhythm.

“What’s on your mind, son—besides breaking and entering?”

I poked a chair out and straddled it and leaned my arms on the back and looked around the cabin.

“I had an idea,” I said. “It looked pretty good for a while, but I guess I can learn to forget it.”

The cabin was larger than it had seemed from outside. The part I was in was the living room. It contained a few articles of modest furniture, a rag rug on the pine-board floor, a round table against the end wall and two chairs set against it. Through an open door the corner of a big black cookstove showed.

Patton nodded and his eyes studied me without rancor. “I heard a car coming,” he said. “I knew it had to be coming here. You walk right nice though. I didn’t hear you walk worth a darn. I’ve been a mite curious about you, son.

I said nothing.

“I hope you don’t mind me callin’ you ‘son,’ ” he said. “I hadn’t ought to be so familiar, but I got myself into the habit and I can’t seem to shake it. Anybody that don’t have a long white beard and arthritis is ‘son’ to me.”

I said he could call me anything that came to mind. I wasn’t sensitive.

He grinned. “There’s a mess of detectives in the L.A. phone book,” he said. “But only one of them is called Marlowe.”

“What made you look?”

“I guess you might call it lowdown curiosity. Added to which Bill Chess told me you was some sort of dick. You didn’t bother to tell me yourself.”

“I’d have got around to it,” I said. “I’m sorry it bothered you.

“It didn’t bother me none. I don’t bother at all easy. You got any identification with you?”

I got my wallet out and showed him this and that.

“Well, you got a good build on you for the work,” he said, satisfied. “And your face don’t tell a lot of stories. I guess you was aiming to search the cabin.”

“Yeah.”

“I already pawed around considerable myself. Just got back and come straight here. That is, I stopped by my shack a minute and then come. I don’t figure I could let you search the place, though.” He scratched his ear. “That is, dum if I know whether I could or not. You telling who hired you?”

“Derace Kingsley. To trace his wife. She skipped out on him a month ago. She started from here. So I started from here. She’s supposed to have gone away with a man. The man denies it. I thought maybe something up here might give me a lead.”

“And did anything?”

“No. She’s traced pretty definitely as far as San Bernardino and then El Paso. There the trail ends. But I’ve only just started.”

Patton stood up and unlocked the cabin door. The spicy smell of the pines surged in. He spat outdoors and sat down again and rumpled the mousy brown hair under his Stetson. His head with the hat off had the indecent look of heads that are seldom without hats.

“You didn’t have no interest in Bill Chess at all?”

“None whatever.”

“I guess you fellows do a lot of divorce business,” he said. “Kind of smelly work, to my notion.”

I let that ride.

“Kingsley wouldn’t have asked help from the police to find his wife, would he?”

“Hardly,” I said. “He knows her too well.”

“None of what you’ve been saying don’t hardly explain your wanting to search Bill’s cabin,” he said judiciously.

“I’m just a great guy to poke around.”

“Hell,” he said, “you can do better than that.”

“Say I am interested in Bill Chess then. But only because he’s in trouble and rather a pathetic case—in spite of being a good deal of a heel. If he murdered his wife, there’s something here to point that way. If he didn’t, there’s something to point that way too.”

He held his head sideways, like a watchful bird. “As for instance what kind of thing?”

“Clothes, personal jewelry, toilet articles, whatever a woman takes with her when she goes away, not intending to come back.”

He leaned back slowly. “But she didn’t go away, son.”

“Then the stuff should be still here. But if it was still here, Bill would have noticed she hadn’t taken it. He would know she hadn’t gone away.”

“By gum, I don’t like it either way,” he said.

“But if he murdered her,” I said, “then he would have to get rid of the things she ought to have taken with her, if she had gone away.”

“And how do you figure he would do that, son?” The yellow lamplight made bronze of one side of his face.

“I understand she had a Ford car of her own. Except for that I’d expect him to burn what he could burn and bury what he could not burn out in the woods. Sinking it in the lake might be dangerous. But he couldn’t burn or bury her car. Could he drive it?”

Patton looked surprised. “Sure. He can’t bend his right leg at the knee, so he couldn’t use the footbrake very handy. But he could get by with the handbrake. All that’s different on Bill’s own Ford is the brake pedal is set over on the left side of the post, close to the clutch, so he can shove them both down with one foot.”