to the small gilt label on it.
“Getting rid of the car would be his big problem,” I said. “Wherever he took it. he would have to get back, and he would rather not be seen coming back. And if he simply abandoned it on a street, say, down in San Bernardino, it would be found and identified very quickly. He wouldn’t want that either. The best stunt would be to unload it on a hot car dealer, but he probably doesn’t know one. So the chances are he hid it in the woods within walking distance of here. And walking distance for him would not be very far.”
“For a fellow that claims not to be interested, you’re doing some pretty close figuring on all this,” Patton said dryly. “So now you’ve got the car hid out in the woods. What then?”
“He has to consider the possibility of its being found. The woods are lonely, but rangers and woodcutters get around in them from time to time. If the car is found, it would be better for Muriel’s stuff to be found in it. That would give him a couple of outs—neither one very brilliant but both at least possible. One, that she was murdered by some unknown party who fixed things to implicate Bill when and if the murder was discovered. Two, that Muriel did actually commit suicide, but fixed things so that he would be blamed. A revenge suicide.”
Patton thought all this over with calm and care. He went to the door to unload again. He sat down and rumpled his hair again. He looked at me with solid skepticism.
“The first one’s possible like you say,” he admitted. “But only just, and I don’t have anybody in mind for the job. There’s that little matter of the note to be got over.”
I shook my head. “Say Bill already had the note from another time. Say she went away, as he thought, without leaving a note. After a month had gone by without any word from her he might be just worried and uncertain enough to show the note, feeling it might be some protection to him in case anything had happened to her. He didn’t say any of this, but he could have had it in his mind.”
Patton shook his head. He didn’t like it. Neither did I. He said slowly: “As to your other notion, it’s just plain crazy.
Killing yourself and fixing things so as somebody else would get accused of murdering you don’t fit in with my simple ideas of human nature at all”
“Then your ideas of human nature are too simple,” I said. “Because it has been done, and when it has been done, it has nearly always been done by a woman.”
“Nope,” he said, “I’m a man fifty-seven years old and I’ve seen a lot of crazy people, but I don’t go for that worth a peanut shell. What I like is that she did plan to go away and did write the note, but he caught her before she got clear and saw red and finished her off. Then he would have to do all them things we been talking about.”
“I never met her,” I said. “So I wouldn’t have any idea what she would be likely to do. Bill said he met her in a place in Riverside something over a year ago. She may have had a long and complicated history before that. What kind of girl was she?”
“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
