The Lady in the Lake Read Online Free Page A

you tell it that way?”
    He flushed solidly behind the sunburn.
    “God damn it,” he said, “I told you I didn’t go anywhere with her. Not anywhere. Can’t you remember that?”
    “I’ll remember it when I believe it.”
    He leaned over to snub out his cigarette. He stood up with an easy movement, not hurried at all, pulled the belt of his robe tight, and moved out to the end of the davenport.
    “All right,” he said in a clear tight voice. “Out you go. Take the air. I’ve had enough of your third-degree tripe. You’re wasting my time and your own—if it’s worth anything.”
    I stood up and grinned at him. “Not a lot, but for what it’s worth I’m being paid for it. It couldn’t be, for instance, that you ran into a little unpleasantness in some department store—say at the stocking or jewelry counter.”
    He looked at me very carefully, drawing his eyebrows down at the corners and making his mouth small.
    “I don’t get it,” he said, but there was thought behind his voice.
    “That’s all I wanted to know,” I said. “And thanks for listening. By the way, what line of business are you in—since you left Kingsley?”
    “What the hell business is it of yours?”
    “None. But of course I can always find out,” I said, and moved a little way towards the door, not very far.
    “At the moment I’m not doing anything,” he said coldly. “I expect a commission in the navy almost any day.”
    “You ought to do well at that,” I said.
    “Yeah. So long, snooper. And don’t bother to come back. I won’t be at home.”
    I went over to the door and pulled it open. It stuck on the lower sill, from the beach moisture. When I had it open, I looked back at him. He was standing there narrow-eyed, full of muted thunder.
    “I may have to come back,” I said. “But it won’t be just to swop gags. It will be because I find something out that needs talking over.”
    “So you still think I’m lying,” he said savagely.
    “I think you have something on your mind. I’ve looked at too many faces not to know. It may not be any of my business. If it is, you’re likely to have to throw me out again.”
    “A pleasure,” he said. “And next time bring somebody to drive you home. In case you land on your fanny and knock your brains out.”
    Then without any rhyme or reason that I could see, he spat on the rug in front of his feet.
    It jarred me. It was like watching the veneer peel off and leave a tough kid in an alley. Or like hearing an apparently refined woman start expressing herself in four-letter words.
    “So long, beautiful hunk,” I said, and left him standing there. I closed the door, had to jerk it to get it shut, and went up the path to the street. I stood on the sidewalk looking at the house across the way.

 
    FOUR
    It was a wide shallow house with rose stucco walls faded out to a pleasant pastel shade and trimmed with dull green at the window frames. The roof was of green tiles, round rough ones. There was a deeply inset front door framed in a mosaic of multi-colored pieces of tiling and a small flower garden in front, behind a low stucco wall topped by an iron railing which the beach moisture had begun to corrode. Outside the wall to the left was the three-car garage, with a door opening inside the yard and a concrete path going from there to a side door of the house.
    Set into the gate post was a bronze tablet which read: “Albert S. Almore, M.D.”
    While I was standing there staring across the street, the black Cadillac I had already seen came purring around the corner and then down the block. It slowed and started to sweep outwards to get turning space to go into the garage, decided my car was in the way of that, and went on to the end of the road and turned in the widened-out space in front of the ornamental iron railing. It came back slowly and went into the empty third of the garage across the way.
    The thin man in sun glasses went along the sidewalk to the house, carrying a