“Until you’ve finished with a case, you can’t ever be quite sure what its ramifications are, can you?”
“That’s right.” He circled his hat brim through his fingers again, like a bashful cowboy. There was nothing bashful about his eyes. “I’d like to feel sure that if these ramifications you speak of happened to take in this drowned woman’s affairs, you would put us wise.”
“I hope you can rely on that,” I said.
He bulged his lower lip with his tongue. “We’d like a little more than a hope. At the present time you don’t care to say?”
“At the present time I don’t know anything that Patton doesn’t know.”
“Who’s he?”
“The constable up at Puma Point.”
The lean serious man smiled tolerantly. He cracked a knuckle and after a pause said: “The San Berdoo D. A. will likely want to talk to you—before the inquest. But that won’t be very soon. Right now they’re trying to get a set of prints. We lent them a technical man.”
“That will be tough. The body’s pretty far gone.”
“It’s done all the time,” he said. “They worked out the system back in New York where they’re all the time pulling in floaters. They cut patches of skin off the fingers and harden them in a tanning solution and make stamps. It works well enough as a rule.”
“You think this woman had a record of some kind?”
“Why, we always take prints of a corpse,” he said. “You ought to know that.”
I said: “I didn’t know the lady. If you thought I did and that was why I was up there, there’s nothing to it.”
“But you wouldn’t care to say just why you were up there,” he persisted.
“So you think I’m lying to you,” I said.
He spun his hat on a bony forefinger. “You got me wrong, Mr. Marlowe. We don’t think anything at all. What we do is investigate and find out. This stuff is just routine. You ought to know that. You been around long enough.” He stood up and put his hat on. “You might let me know if you have to leave town. I’d be obliged.”
I said I would and went to the door with him. He went out with a duck of his head and a sad half-smile. I watched him drift languidly down the hall and punch the elevator button.
I went back out to the dinette to see if there was any more coffee. There was about two-thirds of a cup. I added cream and sugar and carried my cup over to the telephone. I dialed Police Headquarters downtown and asked for the Detective Bureau and then for Lieutenant Floyd Greer.
The voice said: “Lieutenant Greer is not in the office. Anybody else do?”
“De Soto in?”
“Who?”
I repeated the name.
“What’s his rank and department?”
“Plain clothes something or other.”
“Hold the line.”
I waited. The burring male voice came back after a while and said: “What’s the gag? We don’t have a De Soto on the roster. Who’s this talking?”
I hung up, finished my coffee and dialed the number of Derace Kingsley’s office. The smooth and cool Miss Fromsett said he had just come in and put me through without a murmur.
“Well,” he said, loud and forceful at the beginning of a fresh day. “What did you find out at the hotel?”
“She was there all right. And Lavery met her there. The cop who gave me the dope brought Lavery into it himself, without any prompting from me. He had dinner with her and went with her in a cab to the railroad station.”
“Well, I ought to have known he was lying,” Kingsley said slowly. “I got the impression he was surprised when I told him about the telegram from El Paso. I was just letting my impression get too sharp. Anything else?”
“Not there. I had a cop calling on me this morning, giving me the usual looking over and warning me not to leave town without letting him know. Trying to find out why I went to Puma Point. I didn’t tell him and as he wasn’t even aware of Jim Patton’s existence, it’s evident that Patton didn’t tell anybody.”
“Jim would do his best to be decent about it,” Kingsley said. “Why were you asking me last night about some name—Mildred something or other?”
I told him, making it brief. I told him about Muriel Chess’s car and clothes being found and where.
“That looks bad for Bill,” he said. “I know Coon Lake myself, but it would never have occurred to me to use that old woodshed—or even that there was an old woodshed. It not only looks bad, it looks premeditated.”
“I disagree with that. Assuming he knew the country well enough it wouldn’t take him any time to search his mind for a likely hiding place. He was very restricted as to distance.”
“Maybe. What do you plan to do now?” he asked.
“Go up against Lavery again, of course.”
He agreed that that was the thing to do. He added: “This other, tragic as it is, is really no business of ours, is it?”
