Free The Lady in the Lake by Raymond Chandler Page A

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.
    “I’ve found too much,” I said. “And not at all what we want. Are you alone?”
    “What does that matter?”
    “It doesn’t matter to me. But I know what I’m going to say. You don’t.”
    “Well, get on with it, whatever it is,” he said.
    “I had a long talk with Bill Chess. He was lonely. His wife had left him—a month ago. They had a fight and he went out and got drunk and when he came back she was gone. She left a note saying she would rather be dead than live with him any more.”
    “I guess Bill drinks too much,” Kingsley’s voice said from very far off.
    “When he got back, both the women had gone. He has no idea where Mrs. Kingsley went. Lavery was up here in May, but not since. Lavery admitted that much himself. Lavery could, of course, have come up again while Bill was out getting drunk, but there wouldn’t be a lot of point to that and there would be two cars to drive down the hill. And I thought that possibly Mrs. K. and Muriel Chess might have gone away together, only Muriel also had a car of her own. But that idea, little as it was worth, has been thrown out by another development. Muriel Chess didn’t go away at all. She went down into your private lake. She came back up today. I was there.”
    “Good God!” Kingsley sounded properly horrified. “You mean she drowned herself?”
    “Perhaps. The note she left could be a suicide note. It would read as well that way as the other. The body was stuck down under that old submerged landing below the pier. Bill was the one who spotted an arm moving down there while we were standing on the pier looking down into the water. He got her out. They’ve arrested him. The poor guy’s pretty badly broken up.”
    “Good God!” Kingsley said again. “I should think he would be. Does it look as if he—” He paused as the operator came in on the line and demanded another forty-five cents. I put in two quarters and the line cleared.
    “Look as if he what?”
    Suddenly very clear, Kingsley’s voice said: “Look as if he murdered her?”
    I said: “Very much. Jim Patton, the constable up here, doesn’t like the note not being dated. It seems she left him once before over some woman. Patton sort of suspects Bill might have saved up an old note. Anyhow they’ve taken Bill down to San Bernardino for questioning and they’ve taken the body down to be post-mortemed.”
    “And what do you think?” he asked slowly.
    “Well, Bill found the body himself. He didn’t have to take me around by that pier. She might have stayed down in the water very much longer, or forever. The note could be old because Bill had carried it in his wallet and handled it from time to time, brooding over it. It could just as easily be undated this time as another time. I’d say notes like that are undated more often than not. The people who write them are apt to be in a hurry and not concerned with dates.”
    “The body must be pretty far gone. What can they find out now?”
    “I don’t know how well equipped they are. They can find out if she died by drowning, I guess. And whether there are any marks of violence that wouldn’t be erased by water and decomposition. They could tell if she had been shot or stabbed. If the hyoid bone in the throat was broken, they could assume she was throttled. The main thing for us is that I’ll have to tell why I came up here. I’ll have to testify at an inquest.”
    “That’s bad,” Kingsley growled. “Very bad. What do you plan to do now?”
    “On my way home I’ll stop at the Prescott Hotel and see if I can pick up anything there. Were your wife and Muriel Chess friendly?”
    “I guess so. Crystal’s easy enough