The Dark and Deadly Pool

by Joan Lowery Nixon

  “We’re losing something here,” he said. “Let me think of another example.”

  I heard the whirr of the camera in the corner as it swept the room. In a few seconds the telephone in the office began to ring.

  “I know just who that is,” I said, and ran toward the office, turning on the light. I was right.

  “What happened to you, Liz?” Tina asked. “I knew you were scared, so I kept you on camera. You turned off the lights, but you didn’t leave the room. Are you still testing your subconscious mind’s resistance to the dark?”

  “Something like that,” I said.

  “Well, after this, warn me,” she said. “I got worried about you, and I couldn’t leave the camera, because Lamar’s on duty checking the bar.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “You were right,” she said. “He’s married.”

  “Lamar?”

  “No, the guy with red hair. There was another cute one, though. Broad shoulders, brown hair. If he’s still here tomorrow I’ll take a look at his card.”

  Tina hung up.

  “Let’s go,” I said to Fran.

  We locked up and headed for the employee check-out. Lamar was there, chatting with his assistant at the desk. He was leaning casually against the wall, although he managed to give the impression of being ready to spring into action. I don’t know how he did it. Maybe it was the way he made his eyes into slits and looked at us down the end of his nose.

  “We may soon have to insist on body searches,” Lamar said.

  “I think that would be illegal,” Fran told him.

  “Illegal!” Lamar straightened and glared down at Fran. “We’re talking about major theft, and you’re bringing up trivia.”

  “But there are laws protecting human rights.”

  Lamar sighed. “Human? With the amount of stuff being snatched out of this hotel, it couldn’t be done by any human.”

  “Hmmm,” Fran said. “Trained dogs?”

  Lamar gave Fran a withering look that would have made Clint Eastwood jealous. “This is serious business,” he said. “Yesterday someone made it out of here with an antique silver tray, a Waterford vase from the presidential suite, fourteen boxes of Brie cheese, and five standing rib roasts. This is the only employee exit to the hotel. Now you tell me how the thief managed it.”

  “Maybe he threw everything out of a window,” Fran said.

  “A Waterford vase?” Lamar sneered. “Besides, the hotel is designed for air-conditioning. None of the windows open.”

  “Then maybe he just walked out the front door.”

  “No way. One of my assistants is at the front door at all times.”

  Fran rubbed his chin and his eyes began to gleam. I could tell he was enjoying matching his wits against the thief’s. “Maybe the guests are stealing the things you talked about.”

  “Guests do a lot of stealing, that’s true,” Lamar said, “but we can tell when the thief is a guest and when it’s an employee, because guests will steal from their own rooms or restaurant tables. Employees steal from places the guests don’t go.”

  “Suppose the thief disguised himself, dressed like a guest, and walked out with a suitcase full of stuff.”

  “It wouldn’t work,” Lamar said. “Remember our photo-ID cards? We’d spot anyone who didn’t match one of the cards.”

  “Okay, then,” Fran said. “This guy’s got an accomplice. They meet in the bar, and he passes the stuff to him. Or maybe it’s a her.”

  “Nope,” Lamar said. “My scrutinizing system’s too good to let that one go by.”

  Fran thought so hard his forehead wrinkled. Finally he said, “Let me work on it. I’ll come up with something.”

  “Sure you will,” Lamar said. “You ready to check out of here?”

  “Yes.” I stepped forward. Lamar carefully examined my plastic handbag, although it was obvious there was nothing in it but a very thin wallet, a lipstick, a comb, and my car keys. I walked through the metal detector, which remained silent. It wouldn’t be possible to sneak anything out under my pink health-club T-shirt and shorts, but Lamar scowled at me as though I’d managed to pull a fast one.

  Fran sauntered through, and again the detector was silent, so we said good-night to Lamar and left the hotel.

  “The evening is early,” Fran said as we walked toward my car. “Want to meet somewhere for a Coke?”

  “Fran, it’s eleven-thirty. That is not early.”

  “It’s all in the point of view,” Fran said. “Besides, how can we go home and sleep, knowing that while we are secure in our beds a thief is robbing the Ridley Hotel and sneaking out through a secret exit unknown to our vigilant chief of security?”

  Secret exit? I abruptly stopped, gasped, and clutched Fran’s arm.

  “What? Where? What’s the matter?” His head twisted from side to side as he tried to take in the entire parking lot.

  “I didn’t see anything. I thought of something.”

  “Don’t think so violently. Think gently. When you bugged out your eyes and made a kind of fish noise, you scared me. I thought something was creeping up on us.”

  “Stop trying to be funny and listen to me,” I said. “There is a secret exit from the hotel. Remember when I told you that somebody in the pool had sneaked in, and it scared me? Well, I found the way he got in. There’s a one-foot gap where two walls don’t meet, but they’re covered with vines, so the gap can’t be seen.”

  Fran’s eyes widened. “Show me.”

  “Let’s tell Lamar first. I can show both of you.”

  We walked back to the employee entrance. Lamar was still there, talking to the guard behind the desk. In a rush of words I told Lamar about the wall.

  For a few moments he contemplated what I had said, and as he thought he became even more of a tall, straight line. “We’ll check it out,” he told us, “although I’m looking at one flaw and one distinct impossibility.”

  “You’re talking about Liz and me. Right?” Fran asked.

  Lamar stared down his nose at Fran as though he were something he’d found on his shoe. “Come with me,” he answered. “We’ll take a look.”

  He picked up the health-club keys and a flashlight from the desk and strode briskly down the hall, across the side lobby, and into the hall leading to the health club. Fran and I trotted after him, trying to keep up.

  First, Lamar tried the door, but it was locked, just as I had left it. He opened it and went inside. Fran and I were right on his heels. Literally. Because it was dark, Lamar suddenly stopped and we smashed into him.

  “Ouch!” he said. “Where’s the light switch?”

  “They didn’t put it near the door,” I said. “The switches are all inside the office.”

  By this time our eyes were becoming adjusted to the darkness. It helped that a large moon had turned the outside section of the pool into a frosted mirror. We could see the shapes of the tables and chairs and each other. The limbs and leaves of the large potted plants and trees jutted out in every direction, as though they were doing a crazy dance. I moved a little closer to Fran and took his hand.

  Lamar gave a couple of hops as he pulled up the back of his left shoe, which I had unfortunately stepped on. He strode to the door of the health-club office, tried the door, then fiddled with the keys until he found the one that unlocked it, while I stared into the glimmering black water of the indoor section of the pool and the puddled tiles near my feet. I got that peculiar, uncomfortable feeling that something was wrong; but what it was I didn’t know.

  The office door swung open, and in an instant the indoor and outdoor lights flashed on. There was no one in the pool. Of course there wouldn’t be.

  “Where’s this gap in the walls?” Lamar asked.

  We pushed open the door in the glass divider wall to get outside, propping it open so it wouldn’t close and lock us out. We circled the far end of the pool. With his flashlight Lamar led the way, following my directions. He pulled back the vines and
swept his light over the wall and the surrounding area. He focused on the spongy humus-earth mixture near the wall.

  “Plenty of footprints,” he said. “This soft earth is good for prints.”

  “Some of them might be mine,” I told him.

  “Yep,” he answered. “Those narrow size nine with the herringbone imprint. Let’s see the bottom of your tennis shoes.”

  I wished he hadn’t been so explicit. I held up one foot and he nodded.

  “Okay,” he said. “Let’s go back inside, and I’ll go over my findings.”

  “What findings?” Fran asked. “All we came up with was a gap between two walls, and not a very big one at that.”

  “Big enough for someone to squeeze through,” I said.

  “Art Mart was probably right. It must have been a kid,” Fran said.

  Lamar didn’t answer. He just strode back to the inside section of the health club, looking as controlled as ever. Even struggling through the shrubbery hadn’t put a wrinkle in his suit, although I had to pull a few more leaves out of my hair and tug my T-shirt back into place.

  He locked the glass door and turned to us. “All right. This is what we found. Although there were no complete footprints, we could see a number of fresh partial ones. Between the walls were adult-sized shoeprints heading toward the pool, and part of a bare footprint on top of one of them heading out, which tells us that someone had entered wearing shoes, but had taken them off before returning.”

  “Oh!” I interrupted. “He took off his shoes and dived into the pool. That’s when we saw each other. So he swam back and got out of there in a hurry, not waiting to put his shoes back on again.”

  “And it wasn’t a kid,” Fran said.

  “That’s right,” Lamar told him.

  Fran rubbed his hands together. I could tell he was getting excited. “There were a number of prints, so we can tell that the guy’s been here before. He sneaks in, robs the hotel, then sneaks out with the stuff the same way.”

  “Wrong,” Lamar said. “He could get into the pool area, but there’s no way he could get from there into the main part of the hotel.”

  “The door would be locked,” I told him. “And, for that matter, so would the door into the health-club office.”

  “The office door could be jimmied,” Lamar said, “which is the flaw I spoke of. The door into the hotel, however, has a dead-bolt type of lock, and it couldn’t be opened without a key. That’s the impossibility I mentioned.”

  “You’re very clever.” I was really impressed.

  Lamar’s eyes narrowed and his upper lip curled modestly. Clint Eastwood would have loved this expression. “It’s my job,” Lamar said.

  He walked into the office, turned out all the lights, and locked the office door.

  “Wait a minute,” Fran said. “What does all this mean?”

  “That somebody just wanted a swim,” Lamar said.

  “Could there be something in the office this guy was after?”

  “There’s nothing valuable in there,” I told him, “except the equipment. It’s heavy, and it’s too big to get through anything but a full-sized door.”

  “Forget it,” Lamar said. “And put a move on. I’ve got other things to do here, and your parents are going to start wondering why you didn’t get home on time.”

  He locked the main door behind us and handed me the keys. “Turn these in when you leave. I’ve got to do another bar check.”

  Lamar strode off, but I turned to Fran. “Something’s bothering me.”

  “Probably your conscience. Have you changed your mind about meeting me for a Coke?”

  “Be serious, and be quiet. I’m trying to think.” I spoke aloud. “The pool, the pool. The water in the pool. The puddles on the tiles.” I stared at Fran. “That’s it! The water on the tiles! It shouldn’t have been there!”

  “Go on,” Fran said, and I was glad that he was paying attention and not trying to be funny.

  “What I’m saying is that my last job is to put the club in order. I put away used towels, throw out the used soap in the showers, toss away paper cups and napkins and rubbish people leave around, and do a last-minute inspection around the pool. Usually there aren’t many people at the pool during the last hour, and the puddles on the tiles drain and dry fast. By the time I leave, those tiles don’t even have wet footprints on them. And I could swear there were no puddles on the tiles when I locked up tonight. But when we went back there with Lamar I noticed water on the tiles near where we were standing.”

  “Can we go back and look again?”

  I nodded. “Let’s hurry.”

  We unlocked the door to the pool area. Once inside the room we kept our backs to the door, breathing in the smell of warm chlorine and jungle dampness until our eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

  “No one’s here now,” Fran whispered. “That is, I can’t see anyone except us.”

  As fast as possible I scurried to the office door, fumbled the keys, and finally got it open. I stepped inside and turned on the lights.

  Fran was standing outside the office door staring at a spot on the tiles around the pool. “Right over there,” he said, and pointed.

  “Yes. Someone used the pool to sneak in here.” I looked at the puddle of water that dripped across the tiles. Automatically Fran and I moved forward, following it.

  It stopped abruptly in front of one of the large potted ficus trees.

  “What happened to him?” Fran murmured. “He couldn’t just dissolve. He had to go somewhere.”

  I held my breath as I slowly looked upward into the slender branches over our heads.

  No one was there.

  If someone had been looking back at me, I think I would have fainted or screamed or maybe fallen in the pool and drowned, I was that frightened.

  Fran wasn’t any braver. As he felt around the top of the big brass planter, I could see his fingers tremble. “Funny,” he said. His voice cracked and he started over, speaking a little more slowly and a little deeper. “It’s funny, but it’s damp right here and around the trunk of the tree in this one spot.”

  I put my hand where he showed me. “It’s like someone took hold of the trunk of the tree.”

  Fran let out a long sigh. “Maybe we’ve come across some kind of a relay tag race that involves diving into the pool, climbing out, touching the tree, diving in again, and—oh, well. It’s an idea.”

  “Not a very good one.”

  “Have you got a better one?”

  The telephone in the office rang, and I jumped straight up in the air.

  I ran to answer, and it was Tina. “Your mother called from Dallas, and because the club is officially closed the switchboard referred the call to me. She was all excited because you hadn’t got home yet. Anyhow, I saw you on camera with Lamar, so I told her you were helping the chief of security on a special project and would be home in half an hour. What are you doing in the health club?”

  “Fran and I were investigating a puddle.”

  “There are better things to do with your spare time. You’d better get on home right away and call your mother.”

  “I thought you were off duty,” I said.

  “I will be as soon as Harvey gets here for his shift. He forgot to get his car inspected and had to take a bus.”

  “Thanks for covering for me, Tina,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

  I turned off the lights and locked the office door. Fran and I left the club and the hotel and the parking lot, the latter only after I convinced Fran I didn’t want to go somewhere for a Coca-Cola.

  “Have you ever heard of the theory of relativity?” Fran asked.

  “Of course. Einstein. But I don’t understand it.”

  “Very few people do,” Fran said. “Sometime I’ll explain it to you. It has to do with height.”

  “No, it doesn’t.”

  “Yes, it does. You said you didn’t understand it, and you were right. Basically, when you get past all the equations
, it boils down to the fact that if two people like each other, relative heights between them are meaningless.”

  “Good night, Fran,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I couldn’t imagine why, but I was looking forward to it.

  With gusto and flair I conducted the most dramatic part of Wagner’s Ride of the Valkyries as I drove home.

  As soon as I got inside the house I called Mom at their hotel in Dallas. She was still wide awake.

  “I’m fine,” I said.

  “I just wanted to make sure,” Mom said.

  “You don’t need to worry about me.”

  “Oh, darling, I wouldn’t! Not for a minute!” Mom answered, then began a list of questions, beginning with “Are you eating a nourishing breakfast?” and ending with “Are you sure you’re fine? I just had this strange, shivery feeling that everything might not be quite all right.”

  “Relax, Mom. Things are okay,” I said. I didn’t tell Mom that I was carrying around a strange, shivery feeling too.

  I arrived at the Ridley the next afternoon at the same time as four men dressed in white duck jumpsuits. A fifth man had backed a large van up to the double doors next to the employee entrance. The men followed me into the hotel. I planned to hold out my plastic handbag to be examined, but I dropped it, and as I suddenly stopped to pick it up, one of the men fell over me.

  “I’m very sorry,” I said, trying to help him up, pick myself up, and get a grip on my handbag at the same time.

  “No problem,” he grumbled, and glared at me.

  He was young and tall and kind of cute. I smiled and started to say something casually friendly. But it’s hard to be casually friendly to someone who’s rubbing his elbow because it hurts, and it’s all your fault, so I let the whole thing drop and held my handbag out to the guard at the desk.

  But the man who was carrying a clipboard leaned over the desk and said to the security guard, “Somebody gotta sign this order form.”

  “The manager’s always out for lunch at this time, so I’ll get Mr. Boudry for you,” the guard said, and he pressed a couple of buttons.

  “Will you please look at my handbag?” I asked the guard.