The Collected Raymond Chandler

by Raymond Chandler

“When he got home both the women had gone. His wife Beryl had left a note saying she’d rather be dead than live with a lousy cheater any more. He hasn’t seen her since—until today.”

  Melton coughed again. The sound made a sharp noise in my ear. There were buzzes and crackles on the wire. An operator broke in and I asked her to go brush her hair. After the interruption Melton said: “Haines told all this to you, a complete stranger?”

  “I brought some liquor with me. He likes to drink and he was aching to talk to somebody. The liquor broke down the barriers. There’s more. I said he didn’t see his wife again until today. Today she came up out of your little lake. I’ll let you guess what she looked like.”

  “Good God!” Melton cried.

  “She was stuck down under the underwater boarding below the pier the movie people built. The constable here, Jim Tinchfield, didn’t like it too well. He’s taken Haines in. I think they’ve gone down to see the D.A. in San Bernardino and have an autopsy and so on.”

  “Tinchfield thinks Haines killed her?”

  “He thinks it could have happened that way. He’s not saying everything he thinks. Haines put on a swell brokenhearted act, but this Tinchfield is no fool. He may know a lot of things about Haines that I don’t know.”

  “Did they search Haines’ cabin?”

  “Not while I was around. Maybe later.”

  “I see.” He sounded tired now, spent.

  “It’s a nice dish for a county prosecutor close to election time,” I said. “But it’s not a nice dish for us. If I have to appear at an inquest, I’ll have to state my business, on oath. That means telling what I was doing up there, to some extent, at least. And that means pulling you in.”

  “It seems,” Melton’s voice said flatly, “that I’m pulled in already. If my wife—” He broke off and swore. He didn’t speak again for a long time. Wire noises came to me and a sharper crackling, thunder somewhere in the mountains along the lines.

  I said at last: “Beryl Haines had a Ford of her own. Not Bill’s. His was fixed up for his left leg to do the heavy work. The car is gone. And that note didn’t sound like a suicide note to me.”

  “What do you plan to do now?”

  “It looks as though I’m always being sidetracked on this job. I may come down tonight. Can I call you at your home?”

  “Any time,” he said. “I’ll be home all evening and all night. Call me any time. I didn’t think Haines was that sort of a guy at all.”

  “But you knew your wife had drinking spells and you left her up here alone.”

  “My God,” he said, as if he hadn’t heard me. “A man with a wooden—”

  “Oh let’s skip that part of it,” I growled. “It’s dirty enough without. Goodbye.”

  I hung up and went back to the outer office and paid the girl for the call. Then I walked back to the main street and got into my car parked in front of the drugstore. The street was full of gaudy neon signs and noise and glitter. On the dry mountain air every sound seemed to carry a mile. I could hear people talking a block away. I got out of my car again and bought another pint at the drugstore and drove away from there.

  When I got to the place back along the highway where the road turned off to Little Fawn Lake, I pulled over to the side and thought. Then I started up the road into the mountains towards Melton’s place.

  The gate across the private road was shut and padlocked now. I tucked my car off to the side in some bushes and climbed over the gate and pussyfooted along the side of the road until the starlit glimmer of the lake suddenly bloomed at my feet. Haines’ cabin was dark. The cabins on the other side of the lake were vague shadows against the slope. The old mill wheel beside the dam looked funny as hell up there all alone. I listened—didn’t hear a sound. There are no night birds in the mountains.

  I padded along to Haines’ cabin and tried the door—locked. I went around to the back and found another locked door. I prowled around the cabin walking like a cat on a wet floor. I pushed on the one screenless window. That was locked also. I stopped and listened some more. The window was not very tight. Wood dries out in that air and shrinks. I tried my knife between the two sashes, which opened inward, like small cottage windows. No dice. I leaned against the wall and looked at the hard shimmer of the lake and took a drink from my pint. That made me tough. I put the bottle away and picked up a big stone and smacked the window frame in without breaking the glass. I heaved up on the sill and climbed into the cabin. A flash hit me in the face.

  A calm voice said: “I’d rest right there, son. You must be all tired out.”

  The flash pinned me against the wall for a moment and then a light switch clicked and a lamp went on. The flash died. Tinchfield sat there peacefully in a leather Morris chair beside a table over the edge of which a brown-fringed shawl dangled foolishly. Tinchfield wore the same clothes as he had worn that afternoon, and the addition of a brown wool windbreaker over his shirt. His jaws moved quietly.

  “That movie outfit strung two miles of wire up here,” he said reflectively. “Kind of nice for the folks. Well, what’s on your mind, son—besides breakin’ and enterin’?”

  I picked out a chair and sat down and looked around the cabin. The room was a small square room with a double bed and a rag rug and a few modest pieces of furniture. An open door at the back showed the corner of a cookstove.

  “I had an idea,” I said. “From where I sit now it looks lousy.”

  Tinchfield nodded and his eyes studied me without rancor. “I heard your car,” he said. “I knew you was on the private road and comin’ this way. You walk right nice, though. I didn’t hear you walk worth a darn. I’ve been mighty curious about you, son.”

  “Why?”

  “Ain’t you kind of heavy under the left arm, son?”

  I grinned at him. “Maybe I better talk,” I said.

  “Well, you don’t have to bother a lot about pushin’ in that winder. I’m a tolerant man. I figure you got a proper right to carry that six-gun, eh?”

  I reached into my pocket and laid my open billfold on his thick knee. He lifted it and held it carefully to the lamplight, looking at the photostat license behind the celluloid window. He handed the billfold back to me.

  “I kind of figured you was interested in Bill Haines,” he said. “A private dective, eh? Well, you got a good hard build on you and your face don’t tell a lot of stories. I’m kind of worried about Bill myself. You aim to search the cabin?”

  “I did have the idea.”

  “It’s all right by me, but there ain’t really no necessity. I already pawed around considerable. Who hired you?”

  “Howard Melton.”

  He chewed a moment in silence. “Might I ask to do what?”

  “To find his wife. She skipped out on him a couple of weeks back.”

  Tinchfield took his flat-crowned Stetson off and rumpled his mousy hair. He stood up and unlocked and opened the door. He sat down again and looked at me in silence.

  “He’s very anxious to avoid publicity,” I said. “On account of a certain failing his wife has which might lose him his job.” Tinchfield eyed me unblinkingly. The yellow lamplight made bronze out of one side of his face. “I don’t mean liquor or Bill Haines,” I added.

  “None of that don’t hardly explain your wantin’ to search Bill’s cabin,” he said mildly.

  “I’m just a great guy to poke around.”

  He didn’t budge for a long minute, during which he was probably deciding whether or not I was kidding him, and if I was, whether he cared.

  He said at length: “Would this interest you at all, son?” He took a folded piece of newspaper from the slanting pocket of his windbreaker and opened it up on the table under the lamp. I went over and looked. On the newspaper lay a thin gold chain with a tiny lock. The chain had been snipped through neatly by a pair of cutting pliers. The lock was not unlocked. The chain was short, not more than four or five inches long and the lock was tiny and hardly any larger around than the c
hain itself. There was a little white powder on both chain and newspaper.

  “Where would you guess I found that?” Tinchfield asked.

  I moistened a finger and touched the white powder and tasted it. “In a sack of flour. That is, in the kitchen here. It’s an anklet. Some women wear them and never take them off. Whoever took this one off didn’t have the key.”

  Tinchfield looked at me benignly. He leaned back and patted one knee with a large hand and smiled remotely at the pineboard ceiling. I rolled a cigarette around in my fingers and sat down again.

  Tinchfield refolded the piece of newspaper and put it back in his pocket. “Well, I guess that’s all—unless you care to make a search in my presence.”

  “No,” I said.

  “It looks like me and you are goin’ to do our thinkin’ separate.”

  “Mrs. Haines had a car, Bill said. A Ford.”

  “Yep. A blue coupe. It’s down the road a piece, hid in some rocks.”

  “That doesn’t sound much like a planned murder.”

  “I don’t figure anything was planned, son. Just come over him sudden. Maybe choked her, and he has awful powerful hands. There he is—stuck with a body to dispose of. He done it the best way he could think of and for a pegleg he done pretty damn well.”

  “The car sounds more like a suicide,” I said. “A planned suicide. People have been known to commit suicide in such a way as to make a murder case stick against somebody they were mad at. She wouldn’t take the car far away, because she had to walk back.”

  Tinchfield said: “Bill wouldn’t neither. That car would be mighty awkward for him to drive, him being used to use his left foot.”

  “He showed me that note from Beryl before we found the body,” I said. “And I was the one that walked out on the pier first.”

  “You and me could get along, son. Well, we’ll see. Bill’s a good feller at heart—except these veterans give themselves too many privileges in my opinion. Some of ’em did three weeks in a camp and act like they was wounded nine times. Bill must have been mighty sentimental about this piece of chain I found.”

  He got up and went to the open door. He spit his chaw out into the dark. “I’m a man sixty-two years of age,” he said over his shoulder. “I’ve known folks to do all manner of funny things. I would say offhand that jumpin’ into a cold lake with all your clothes on, and swimmin’ hard to get down under that board, and then just dyin’ there was a funny thing to do. On the other hand, since I’m tellin’ you all my secrets and you ain’t tellin’ me nothing, I’ve had to speak to Bill a number of times for slapping his wife around when he was drunk. That ain’t goin’ to sound good to a jury. And if this here little chain come off Beryl Haines’ leg, it’s just about enough to set him in that nice new gas chamber they got up north. And you and me might as well mosey on home, son.”

  I stood up.

  “And don’t go smokin’ that cigarette on the highway,” he added. “It’s contrary to the law up here.”

  I put the unlit cigarette back in my pocket and stepped out into the night. Tinchfield switched the lamp off and locked up the cabin and put the key in his pocket. “Where at are you stayin’, son?”

  “I’m going down to the Olympia in San Bernardino.”

  “It’s a nice place, but they don’t have the climate we have up here. Too hot.”

  “I like it hot,” I said.

  We walked back to the road and Tinchfield turned to the right. “My car’s up a piece towards the end of the lake. I’ll say good night to you, son.”

  “Good night, Sheriff. I don’t think he murdered her.”

  He was already walking off. He didn’t turn. “Well, we’ll see,” he said quietly.

  I went back to the gate and climbed it and found my car and started back down the narrow road past the waterfall. At the highway I turned west towards the dam and the grade to the valley.

  On the way I decided that if the citizens around Puma Lake didn’t keep Tinchfield constable, they would be making a very bad mistake.

  6: MELTON UPS THE ANTE

  It was past ten-thirty when I got to the bottom of the grade and parked in one of the diagonal slots in front of the Hotel Olympia in San Bernardino. I pulled an overnight bag out of the back of my car and had taken about four steps with it when a bellhop in braided pants and a white shirt and black bow tie had it out of my hand.

  The clerk on duty was an egg-headed man with no interest in me. I signed the register.

  The hop and I rode a four-by-four elevator to the second floor and walked a couple of blocks around corners. As we walked it got hotter and hotter. The hop unlocked a door into a boy’s-size room with one window on an air-shaft.

  The hop, who was tall, thin, yellow, and as cool as a slice of chicken in aspic, moved his gum around in his face, put my bag on a chair, opened the window and stood looking at me. He had eyes the color of a drink of water.

  “Bring us up some ginger ale and glasses and ice,” I said.

  “Us?”

  “That is, if you happen to be a drinking man.”

  “After eleven I reckon I might take a chance.”

  “It’s now ten-thirty-nine,” I said. “If I give you a dime, will you say ‘I sho’ly do thank you’?”

  He grinned and snapped his gum.

  He went out, leaving the door open. I took off my coat and unstrapped my holster. It was wearing grooves in my hide. I removed my tie, shirt, undershirt and walked around the room in the draft from the open door. The draft smelled of hot iron. I went into the bathroom sideways—it was that kind of bathroom—doused myself with cold water and was breathing more freely, when the tall, languid hop returned with a tray. He shut the door and I brought out my bottle. He mixed a couple of drinks and we drank. The perspiration started from the back of my neck down my spine, but I felt better all the same. I sat on the bed holding my glass and looking at the hop.

  “How long can you stay?”

  “Doing what?”

  “Remembering.”

  “I ain’t a damn bit of use at it.”

  “I have money to spend,” I said, “in my own peculiar way.” I took my wallet from my coat and spread bills along the bed.

  “I beg yore pardon,” the hop said. “You’re a copper?”

  “Private.”

  “I’m interested. This likker makes my mind work.”

  I gave him a dollar bill. “Try that on your mind. Can I call you Tex?”

  “You done guessed it,” he drawled, tucking the bill neatly into the watch pocket of his pants.

  “Where were you on Friday the twelfth of August, in the late afternoon?”

  He sipped his drink and thought, shaking the ice very gently and drinking past his gum. “Here. Four-to-twelve shift,” he answered finally.

  “A lady named Mrs. George Atkins, a small, slim, pretty blonde, checked in and stayed until time for the night train east. She put her car in the hotel garage and I believe it is still there. I want the lad that checked her in. That wins another dollar.” I separated it from my stake and laid it by itself on the bed.

  “I sho’ly do thank you,” the hop said, grinning. He finished his drink and left the room, closing the door quietly. I finished my drink and made another. Time passed. Finally the wall telephone rang. I wedged myself into a small space between the bathroom door and the bed and answered it.

  “That was Sonny. Off at eight tonight. He can be reached, I reckon.”

  “How soon?”

  “You want him over?”

  “Yeah.”

  “Half an hour, if he’s home. Another boy checked her out.

  A fellow we call Les. He’s here.”

  “Okay. Shoot him up.”

  I finished my second drink and thought well enough of it to mix a third before the ice melted. I was stirring it when the knock came, and I opened to a small, wiry, carrot-headed, green-eyed rat with a tight little girlish mouth.

  “Drink?”

  “Sure,” he sa
id. He poured himself a large one and added a whisper of mixer. He put the mixture down in one swallow, tucked a cigarette between his lips and snapped a match alight while it was still coming up from his pocket. He blew smoke, fanned it with his hand, and stared at me coldly. I noticed, stitched over his pocket instead of a number, the word Captain.

  “Thanks,” I said. “That will be all.”

  “Huh?” His mouth twisted unpleasantly.

  “Beat it.”

  “I thought you wanted to see me,” he snarled.

  “You’re the night bell captain?”

  “Check.”

  “I wanted to buy you a drink. I wanted to give you a buck. Here. Thanks for coming up.”

  He took the dollar and hung there, smoke trailing from his nose, his eyes beady and mean. He turned then with a swift, tight shrug and slipped out of the room soundlessly.

  Ten minutes passed, then another knock, very light. When I opened the lanky lad stood there grinning. I walked away from him and he slipped inside and came over beside the bed. He was still grinning.

  “You didn’t take to Les, huh?”

  “No. Is he satisfied?”

  “I reckon so. You know what captains are. Have to have their cut. Maybe you better call me Les, Mr. Dalmas.”

  “So you checked her out.”

  “Not if Mrs. George Atkins was her name, I didn’t.”

  I took the photo of Julia from my pocket and showed it to him. He looked at it carefully, for a long time. “She looked like that,” he said. “She gave me four bits, and in this little town that gets you remembered. Mrs. Howard Melton was the name. There’s been talk about her car. I guess we just don’t have much to talk about here.”

  “Uh-huh. Where did she go from here?”

  “She took a hack to the depot. You use nice likker, Mr. Dalmas.”

  “Excuse me. Help yourself.” When he had I said: “Remember anything about her? She have any visitors?”

  “No, sir. But I do recall something. She was addressed by a gentleman in the lobby. A tall, good-lookin’ jasper. She didn’t seem pleased to see him.”

  “Ah.” I took the other photo out of my pocket and showed it to him. He studied that carefully also.