“I thought maybe it was because you hated my guts,” he said.
“I’m all done with hating you,” I said. “It’s all washed out of me. I hate people hard, but I don’t hate them very long.”
We were going through the grape country now, the open sandy grape country along the scarred flanks of the foothills. We came in a little while to San Bernardino and kept on through it without stopping.
37
At Crestline, elevation 5000 feet, it had not yet started to warm up. We stopped for a beer. When we got back into the car, Degarmo took the gun from his underarm holster and looked it over. It was a .38 Smith and Wesson on a .44 frame, a wicked weapon with a kick like a .45 and a much greater effective range.
“You won’t need that,” I said. “He’s big and strong, but he’s not that kind of tough.”
He put the gun back under his arm and grunted. We didn’t talk any more now. We had no more to talk about. We rolled around the curves and along the sharp sheer edges walled with white guard rails and in some places with walls of field stone and heavy iron chains. We climbed through the tall oaks and on to the altitudes where the oaks are not so tall and the pines are taller and taller. We came at last to the dam at the end of Puma Lake.
I stopped the car and the sentry threw his piece across his body and stepped up to the window.
“Close all the windows of your car before proceeding across the dam, please.”
I reached back to wind up the rear window on my side. Degarmo held his shield up. “Forget it, buddy. I’m a police officer,” he said with his usual tact.
The sentry gave him a solid expressionless stare. “Close all windows, please,” he said in the same tone he had used before.
“Nuts to you,” Degarmo said. “Nuts to you, soldier boy.”
“It’s an order.” the sentry said. His jaw muscles bulged very slightly. His dull grayish eyes stared at Degarmo. “And I didn’t write the order, mister. Up with the windows.”
“Suppose I told you to go jump in the lake,” Degarmo sneered.
The sentry said: “I might do it. I scare easily.” He patted the breech of his rifle with a leathery hand.
Degarmo turned and closed the windows on his side. We drove across the dam. There was a sentry in the middle and one at the far end. The first one must have flashed them some kind of signal. They looked at us with steady watchful eyes, without friendliness.
I drove on through the piled masses of granite and down through the meadows of coarse grass. The same gaudy slacks and short shorts and peasant handkerchiefs as the day before yesterday, the same light breeze and golden sun and clear blue sky, the same smell of pine needles, the same cool softness of a mountain summer. But that was a hundred years ago, something crystallized in time, like a fly in amber.
I turned off on the road to Little Fawn Lake and wound around the huge rocks and past the little gurgling waterfall. The gate into Kingsley’s property was open and Patton’s car was standing in the road pointing towards the lake, which was invisible from that point. There was nobody in it. The card sign on the windshield still read:
Close to it and pointed the other way was a small battered coupe. Inside the coupe a lion hunter’s hat. I stopped my car behind Patton’s and locked it and got out. Andy got out of the coupe and stood staring at us woodenly.
I said: “This is Lieutenant Degarmo of the Bay City police.”
Andy said: “Jim’s just over the ridge. He’s waiting for you. He ain’t had any breakfast.”
We walked up the road to the ridge as Andy got back into his coupe. Beyond it the road dropped to the tiny blue lake. Kingsley’s cabin across the water seemed to be without life.
“That’s the lake,” I said.
Degarmo looked down at it silently. His shoulders moved in a heavy shrug. “Let’s go get the bastard,” was all he said.
We went on and Patton stood up from behind a rock. He was wearing the same old Stetson and khaki pants and shirt buttoned to his thick neck. The star on his left breast still had a bent point. His jaws moved slowly, munching.
“Nice to see you again,” he said, not looking at me, but at Degarmo.
He put his hand out and shook Degarmo’s hard paw. “Last time I seen you, lieutenant, you was wearing another name. Kind of undercover, I guess you’d call it. I guess I didn’t treat you right neither. I apologize. Guess I knew who that photo of yours was all the time.”
Degarmo nodded and said nothing.
“Likely if I’d of been on my toes and played the game right, a lot of trouble would have been saved,” Patton said. “Maybe a life would have been saved. I feel kind of bad about it, but then again I ain’t a fellow that feels too bad about anything very long. Suppose we sit down here and you tell me what it is we’re supposed to be doing now.”
Degarmo said: “Kingsley’s wife was murdered in Bay City last night. I have to talk to him about it.”
“You mean you suspect him?” Patton asked.
“And how,” Degarmo grunted.
Patton rubbed his neck and looked across the lake. “He ain’t showed outside the cabin at all. Likely he’s still asleep. Early this morning I snuck around the cabin. There was a radio goin’ then and I heard sounds like a man would make playing with a bottle and a glass. I stayed away from him. Was that right?”
“We’ll go over there now,” Degarmo said.
