She looked surprised. But anyone can look surprised. “Good heavens, what would there be? That frozen-faced little drip—what is she to me?”
“I thought you might have had a fight with her—about Bill.”
“Bill? Bill Chess?” She seemed even more surprised. Almost too surprised.
“Bill claims you made a pass at him.”
She put her head back and let out a tinny and unreal laugh. “Good heavens, that muddy-faced boozer?” Her face sobered suddenly. “What’s happened? Why all the mystery?”
“He might be a muddy-faced boozer,” I said. “The police think he’s a murderer too. Of his wife. She’s been found drowned in the lake. After a month.”
She moistened her lips and held her head on one side, staring at me fixedly. There was a quiet little silence. The damp breath of the Pacific slid into the room around us.
“I’m not too surprised,” she said slowly. “So it came to that in the end. They fought terribly at times. Do you think that had something to do with my leaving?”
I nodded. “There was a chance of it.”
“It didn’t have anything to do with it at all,” she said seriously, and shook her head back and forth. “It was just the way I told you. Nothing else.”
“Muriel’s dead,” I said. “Drowned in the lake. You don’t get much of a boot out of that, do you?”
“I hardly knew the girl,” she said. “Really. She kept to herself. After all—”
“I don’t suppose you knew she had once worked in Dr. Almore’s office?”
She looked completely puzzled now. “I was never in Dr. Almore’s office,” she said slowly. “He made a few house calls a long time ago. I—what are you talking about?”
“Muriel Chess was really a girl called Mildred Haviland, who had been Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”
“That’s a queer coincidence,” she said wonderingly. “I knew Bill met her in Riverside. I didn’t know how or under what circumstances or where she came from. Dr. Almore’s office, eh? It doesn’t have to mean anything, does it?”
I said. “No. I guess it’s a genuine coincidence. They do happen. But you see why I had to talk to you. Muriel being found drowned and you having gone away and Muriel being Mildred Haviland who was connected with Dr. Almore at one time—as Lavery was also, in a different way. And of course Lavery lives across the street from Dr. Almore. Did he, Lavery, seem to know Muriel from somewhere else?”
She thought about it, biting her lower lip gently. “He saw her up there,” she said finally. “He didn’t act as if he had ever seen her before.”
“And he would have,” I said. “Being the kind of guy he was.”
“I don’t think Chris had anything to do with Dr. Almore,” she said. “He knew Dr. Almore’s wife. I don’t think he knew the doctor at all. So he probably wouldn’t know Dr. Almore’s office nurse.”
“Well, I guess there’s nothing in all this to help me,” I said. “But you can see why I had to talk to you. I guess I can give you the money now.”
I got the envelope out and stood up to drop it on her knee.
She let it lie there. I sat down again.
“You do this character very well,” I said. “This confused innocence with an undertone of hardness and bitterness. People have made a bad mistake about you. They have been thinking of you as a reckless little idiot with no brains and no control. They have been very wrong.”
She stared at me, lifting her eyebrows. She said nothing. Then a small smile lifted the corners of her mouth. She reached for the envelope, tapped it on her knee, and laid it aside on the table. She stared at me all the time.
“You did the Fallbrook character very well too,” I said. “Looking back on it, I think it was a shade overdone. But at the time it had me going all right. That purple hat that would have been all right on blond hair but looked like hell on straggly brown, that messed-up makeup that looked as if it had been put on in the dark by somebody with a sprained wrist, the jittery screwball manner. All very good. And when you put the gun in my hand like that—I fell like a brick.”
She snickered and put her hands in the deep pockets of her coat. Her heels tapped on the floor.
“But why did you go back at all?” I asked. “Why take such a risk in broad daylight, in the middle of the morning?”
“So you think I shot Chris Lavery?” she said quietly.
“I don’t think it. I know it.”
“Why did I go back? Is that what you want to know?”
“I don’t really care,” I said.
She laughed. A sharp cold laugh. “He had all my money,” she said. “He had stripped my purse. He had it all, even silver. That’s why I went back. There wasn’t any risk at all. I know how he lived. It was really safer to go back. To take in the milk and newspaper for instance. People lose their heads in these situations. I don’t, I didn’t see why I should. It’s so very much safer not to.”
“I see,” I said. “Then of course you shot him the night before. I ought to have thought of that, not that it matters. He had been shaving. But guys with dark beards and lady friends sometimes shave the last thing at night, don’t they?”
“It has been heard of,” she said almost gaily. “And just what are you going to do about it?”
