Read The Lady in the Lake for Free Online Page A

of glasses or would you come into the cabin?”
    “I like it out here. I’m enjoying the view.”
    He swung his stiff leg and went into his cabin and came back carrying a couple of small cheese glasses. He sat down on the rock beside me smelling of dried perspiration.
    I tore the metal cap off the bottle and poured him a stiff drink and a light one for myself. We touched glasses and drank. He rolled the liquor on his tongue and a bleak smile put a little sunshine into his face.
    “Man that’s from the right bottle,” he said. “I wonder what made me sound off like that. I guess a guy gets the blues up here all alone. No company, no real friends, no wife.” He paused and added with a sidewise look. “Especially no wife.”
    I kept my eyes on the blue water of the tiny lake. Under an overhanging rock a fish surfaced in a lance of light and a circle of widening ripples. A light breeze moved the tops of the pines with a noise like a gentle surf.
    “She left me,” he said slowly. “She left me a month ago. Friday, the 12th of June. A day I’ll remember.”
    I stiffened, but not too much to pour more whiskey into his empty glass. Friday the 12th of June was the day Mrs. Crystal Kingsley was supposed to have come into town for a party.
    “But you don’t want to hear about that,” he said. And in his faded blue eyes was the deep yearning to talk about it, as plain as anything could possibly be.
    “It’s none of my business,” I said. “But if it would make you feel any better—”
    He nodded sharply. “Two guys will meet on a park bench,” he said, “and start talking about God. Did you ever notice that? Guys that wouldn’t talk about God to their best friend.”
    “I know that,” I said.
    He drank and looked across the lake. “She was one swell kid,” he said softly. “A little sharp in the tongue sometimes, but one swell kid. It was love at first sight with me and Muriel. I met her in a joint in Riverside, a year and three months ago. Not the kind of joint where a guy would expect to meet a girl like Muriel, but that’s how it happened. We got married. I loved her. I knew I was well off. And I was too much of a skunk to play ball with her.”
    I moved a little to show him I was still there, but I didn’t say anything for fear of breaking the spell. I sat with my drink untouched in my hand. I like to drink, but not when people are using me for a diary.
    He went on sadly: “But you know how it is with marriage—any marriage. After a while a guy like me, a common no-good guy like me, he wants to feel a leg. Some other leg. Maybe it’s lousy, but that’s the way it is.”
    He looked at me and I said I had heard the idea expressed.
    He tossed his second drink off. I passed him the bottle. A bluejay went up a pine tree hopping from branch to branch without moving his wings or even pausing to balance.
    “Yeah,” Bill Chess said. “All these hillbillies are half crazy and I’m getting that way too. Here I am sitting pretty, no rent to pay, a good pension check every month, half my bonus money in war bonds, I’m married to as neat a little blonde as ever you clapped an eye on and all the time I’m nuts and I don’t know it. I go for
that.”
He pointed hard at the redwood cabin across the lake. It was turning the color of oxblood in the late afternoon light. “Right in the front yard,” he said, “right under the windows, and a showy little tart that means no more to me than a blade of grass. Jesus, what a sap a guy can be.”
    He drank his third drink and steadied the bottle on a rock. He fished a cigarette out of his shirt, fired a match on his thumbnail and puffed rapidly. I breathed with my mouth open, as silent as a burglar behind a curtain.
    “Hell,” he said at last, “you’d think if I had to jump off the dock, I’d go a little ways from home and pick me a change in types at least. But little roundheels over there ain’t even that. She’s a blonde like Muriel, same size and weight,