THIRTY-EIGHT

Kingsley moved with a kind of jerk, and opened his eyes and moved them without moving his head. He looked at Patton, then at Degarmo, lastly at me. His eyes were heavy, but the light sharpened in them. He sat up slowly in the chair and rubbed his hands up and down the sides of his face.

“I was asleep,” he said. “Fell asleep a couple of hours ago. I was as drunk as a skunk, I guess. Anyway, much drunker than I like to be.” He dropped his hands and let them hang.

Patton said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police. He has to talk to you.”

Kingsley looked briefly at Degarmo and his eyes came around to stare at me. His voice when he spoke again sounded sober and quiet and tired to death.

“So you let them get her?” he said.

I said: “I would have, but I didn’t.”

Kingsley thought about that, looking at Degarmo. Patton had left the front door open. He pulled the brown venetian blinds up at two front windows and pulled the windows up. He sat in a chair near one of them and clasped his hands over his stomach. Degarmo stood glowering down at Kingsley.

“Your wife is dead, Kingsley,” he said brutally. “If it’s any news to you.”

Kingsley stared at him and moistened his lips.

“Takes it easy, don’t he?” Degarmo said. “Show him the scarf.”

I took the green and yellow scarf out and dangled it. Degarmo jerked a thumb. “Yours?”

Kingsley nodded. He moistened his lips again.

“Careless of you to leave it behind you,” Degarmo said. He was breathing a little hard. His nose was pinched and deep lines ran from his nostrils to the corners of his mouth.

Kingsley said very quietly: “Leave it behind me where?” He had barely glanced at the scarf. He hadn’t looked at all at me.

“In the Granada Apartments, on Eighth Street, in Bay City. Apartment 716. Am I telling you something?”

Kingsley now very slowly lifted his eyes to meet mine. “Is that where she was?” he breathed.

I nodded. “She didn’t want me to go there. I wouldn’t give her the money until she talked to me. She admitted she killed Lavery. She pulled a gun and planned to give me the same treatment. Somebody came from behind the curtain and knocked me out without letting me see him. When I came to she was dead.” I told him how she was dead and how she looked. I told him what I had done and what had been done to me.

He listened without moving a muscle of his face. When I had done talking he made a vague gesture towards the scarf.

“What has that got to do with it?”

“The lieutenant regards it as evidence that you were the party hidden out in the apartment.”

Kingsley thought that over. He didn’t seem to get the implications of it very quickly. He leaned back in the chair and rested his head against the back. “Go on,” he said at length. “I suppose you know what you’re talking about. I’m sure I don’t.”

Degarmo said: “All right, play dumb. See what it gets you. You could begin by accounting for your time last night after you dropped your biddy at her apartment house.”

Kingsley said evenly: “If you mean Miss Fromsett, I didn’t. She went home in a taxi. I was going home myself, but I didn’t. I came up here instead. I thought the trip and the night air and the quiet might help me to get straightened out.”

“Just think of that,” Degarmo jeered. “Straightened out from what, if I might ask?”

“Straightened out from all the worry I had been having.”

“Hell,” Degarmo said, “a little thing like strangling your wife and clawing her belly wouldn’t worry you that much, would it?”

“Son, you hadn’t ought to say things like that,” Patton put in from the background. “That ain’t no way to talk. You ain’t produced anything yet that sounds like evidence.”

“No?” Degarmo swung his hard head at him. “What about this scarf, fatty? Isn’t that evidence?”

“You didn’t fit it in to anything—not that I heard,” Patton said peacefully. “And I ain’t fat either, just well covered.”

Degarmo swung away from him disgustedly. He jabbed his finger at Kingsley.

“I suppose you didn’t go down to Bay City at all,” he said harshly.

“No. Why should I? Marlowe was taking care of that. And I don’t see why you are making a point of the scarf. Marlowe was wearing it.”

Degarmo stood rooted and savage. He turned very slowly and gave me his bleak angry stare.

“I don’t get this,” he said. “Honest, I don’t. It wouldn’t be that somebody is kidding me, would it? Somebody like you?”

I said: “All I told about the scarf was that it was in the apartment and that I had seen Kingsley wearing it earlier this evening. That seemed to be all you wanted. I might have added that I had later worn the scarf myself, so the girl I was to meet could identify me that much easier.”

Degarmo backed away from Kingsley and leaned against the wall at the end of the fireplace. He pulled his lower lip out with thumb and forefinger of his left hand. His right hand hung lax at his side, the fingers slightly curved.

I said: “I told you all I had ever seen of Mrs. Kingsley was a snapshot. One of us had to be sure of being able to identify the other. The scarf seemed obvious enough for identification. As a matter of fact I had seen her once before, although I didn’t know it when I went to meet her. But I didn’t recognize her at once.” I turned to Kingsley. “Mrs. Fallbrook,” I said.

“I thought you said Mrs. Fallbrook was the owner of the house,” he answered slowly.

“That’s what she said at the time. That’s what I believed at the time. Why shouldn’t I?”

Degarmo made a sound in his throat. His eyes were a little crazy. I told him about Mrs. Fallbrook and her purple hat and her fluttery manner and the empty gun she had been holding and how she gave it to me.

When I stopped, he said very carefully: “I didn’t hear you tell Webber any of that.”

“I didn’t tell him. I didn’t want to admit I had already been in the house three hours before. That I had gone to talk it over with Kingsley before I reported it to the police.”

“That’s something we’re going to love you for,” Degarmo said with a cold grin. “Jesus, what a sucker I’ve been. How much you paying this shamus to cover up your murders for you, Kingsley?”

“His usual rates,” Kingsley told him emptily. “And a five-hundred-dollar bonus if he can prove my wife didn’t murder Lavery.”

“Too bad he can’t earn that,” Degarmo sneered.

“Don’t be silly,” I said. “I’ve already earned it.”

There was a silence in the room. One of those charged silences which seem about to split apart with a peal of thunder. It didn’t. It remained, hung heavy and solid, like a wall. Kingsley moved a little in his chair, and after a long moment, he nodded his head.

“Nobody could possibly know that better than you know it, Degarmo,” I said.

Patton had as much expression on his face as a chunk of wood. He watched Degarmo quietly. He didn’t look at Kingsley at all. Degarmo looked at a point between my eyes, but not as if that was anything in the room with him. Rather as if he was looking at something very far away, like a mountain across a valley.

After what seemed a very long time, Degarmo said quietly: “I don’t see why. I don’t know anything about Kingsley’s wife. To the best of my knowledge I never laid eyes on her—until last night.”

He lowered his eyelids a little and watched me broodingly. He knew perfectly well what I was going to say. I said it anyway.

“And you never saw her last night. Because she had already been dead for over a month. Because she had been drowned in Little Fawn Lake. Because the woman you saw dead in the Granada Apartments was Mildred Haviland, and Mildred Haviland was Muriel Chess. And since Mrs. Kingsley was dead long before Lavery was shot, it follows that Mrs. Kingsley did not shoot him.”