The Drowning Pool

by Ross Macdonald

  “I see you’re from Los Angeles,” she said, taking my money.

  “Temporarily. As a matter of fact, I’d like to settle here.”

  “Would you really?” she gushed. “Do you hear that, Henry? The gentleman here would like to settle in Quinto.”

  A tired-looking man half-turned from his desk at the back of the room, and grunted.

  “Oh, but you’d love it,” she said. “The sea. The mountains. The clear, cool air. The nights. Henry and I are awfully glad we decided to buy this place. And it’s full every night in the summer, no-vacancy sign up long before it’s dark. Henry and I make quite a game out of it, don’t we, Henry?”

  Henry grunted again.

  “Are there many ways to make a living here?”

  “Why, there are the stores, and real estate, all sorts of things. No industry, of course, the Council won’t permit it. After all, look what happened to Nopal Valley when they let the oil wells in.”

  “What happened to Nopal Valley?”

  “It was ruined, absolutely ruined. Great hordes of low-class people, Mexicans and dirty oil crews, came in from gosh knows where, and simply blighted the town. We can’t let it happen here.”

  “Absolutely not,” I said with a phoniness she had no ear to catch. “Quinto must remain a natural beauty spot and cultural centre. I’ve heard quite a lot about the Quinto Players, by the way.”

  “Now have you really, Mr. Archer?” Her voice sank to a simpering whisper: “You’re not a Hollywood personage, are you?”

  “Not exactly.” I left the question open. “I’ve done a good deal of work in and about Hollywood.” Peeping on fleabag hotel rooms, untying marital knots, blackmailing blackmailers out of business. Dirty, heavy, hot work on occasion.

  She narrowed her eyes and pressed her lips together as if she understood me. “I sensed you were from Hollywood. Of course you’ll be wanting to see the new play this weekend. Mr. Marvell wrote it himself—he’s a very brilliant man—and he’s directing it, too. Rita Treadwith, a very dear friend of mine, is helping with the costumes, and she says it has great possibilities: movies, Broadway, anything.”

  “Yes,” I said. “I’ve had reports of it. Where’s the theater they’re rehearsing in?”

  “Right off the highway in the center of town. Just turn right at the courthouse, and you’ll see the sign: Quinto Theatre.”

  “Thank you,” I said, and went out. The screen door slammed a second time before I reached my car, and Henry came plodding toward me across the gravel. He was leathery and lean, beaten and parched by long summers. He came up so close to me that I could smell him.

  “Listen, friend, you mean it what you said about settling down here?” He looked behind him to make sure that his wife was out of earshot, and spat in the gravel. “I got an income proposition if you’re interested. Ten thousand down and the rest out of earnings. Fifty thousand for the works, that’s twelve good cottages and the good will.”

  “You want to sell this place? To me?”

  “You’ll never get a better at the price.”

  “I thought you were mad about Quinto.”

  He shot a contemptuous yellow glance at the door of the office. “That’s what she thinks. Thinks, hell. She lets the Chamber of Commerce do her thinking for her. I got a chance for a liquor license in Nopal.”

  “Money in Nopal, I hear.”

  “You can say it again. The Valley’s lousy with money since they struck oil, and there’s no spenders like oilmen. Easy come, easy go.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m not interested.”

  “That’s O.K., I just thought I’d raise the question. She won’t let me put up a sign, or list the god-damn place.” He plodded back to the office.

  The men and women in the streets had the rumpled, sun-worshipping look of people on holiday. Many of them were very young or very old, and most of the former wore bathing-suits. The white Spanish buildings seemed unreal, a stage-setting painted upon the solid blue sky. To the left at the bottom of the cross-streets the placid sea rose up like a flat blue wall.

  I parked in front of a restaurant near the courthouse and went in for a cold lunch. The waitress had a red-checked apron that matched the tablecloth, and a complexion that matched the coffee. I tipped her very lightly, and walked around the block to the Quinto Theatre. It was two o’clock by my watch, time for the rehearsal to be under way. If the play was scheduled for the week end, they’d be running the whole thing through by Wednesday.

  The theatre stood back from the street in a plot of yellowing grass: a massive windowless box of a building with its stucco scabbing off in patches to show the aged plaster. Two weather-pocked plaster pillars supported the roof of the portico. On each of the pillars a playbill announced the World Premiere of The Ironist, a New Play by Francis Marvell. On the wall beside the box office there was a layout of photographs mounted on a large sheet of blue cardboard. Miss Jeanette Dermott as Clara: a young blonde with luminous dreaming eyes. Mrs. Leigh Galloway as The Wife: a hard-faced woman smiling professionally, her bright teeth ready to eat an imaginary audience.

  The third of the glossy trio interested me. It was a man in his late thirties, with light hair waving over a pale and noble brow. The eyes were large and sorrowful, the mouth small and sensitive. The picture had been taken in three-quarters face to show the profile, which was very fine. Mr. James Slocum, the caption said, as “The Ironist.” If the picture could be believed, Mr. James Slocum’s pan was a maiden’s dream. Not mine.

  A prewar Packard sedan drew up to the curb in front of the theatre, and a young man got out. His long legs were tightly encased in a pair of faded levis, his heavy shoulders bulged in a flowered Hawaian shirt. The levis and the shirt didn’t go with the black chauffeur’s cap on his head. He must have been conscious of the cap, because he tossed it on the front seat of the Packard before he came up the walk. The glistening dark hair frothed on his head in tight curls. He looked at me from eyes that were paled by the deep tan of his face. Another maiden’s dream. They pastured in herds in the California resorts.

  Dream Two opened the heavy door to my left, and it swung shut behind him. I waited a minute and followed him into the lobby. It was small and close and dimly lit by the red glow of the Exit lamps. The young man had disappeared, but there was a murmur of voices beyond a further door. I crossed the lobby and entered the main auditorium. It was blacked out except for the stage, where there were lights and people. I sat down in an aisle seat in the back row, and wondered what the hell I was doing there.

  The set had been erected, an English drawing-room with period furniture, but the players were not yet in costume. James Slocum, looking as pretty as his picture, in a yellow turtleneck sweater, shared the stage with the blonde girl, in slacks. They were talking at each other in center stage.

  “Roderick,” the girl was saying, “have you honestly been aware of my love for you, and never breathed a word of it to me?”

  “Why should I have?” Slocum shrugged his shoulders in weary amusement. “You were content to love, and I was content to be loved. Naturally, I did my best to encourage you.”

  “You encouraged me?” She overdid the surprise, and her voice screeched slightly. “But I never knew.”

  “I took care that you should not, until you had passed the narrow line that lies between admiration and passion. But I was always ready with a match for your cigarette, a compliment for your gown, a touch of the hand at parting.” He moved his hand in the air, and unconsciously underlined the corn.

  “But your wife! What of her? It seems incredible that you should deliberately lead me on to the dark edge of adultery.”

  “Dark, my dear? On the contrary, passion is radiant with the radiance of a thousand suns, luminous as the dayspring, shot through with rainbow splendors!” He spoke the words as if he meant them, in a ringing voice which held only a trace of reediness. “Beside the love that we may have—shall have—the legal mating of the married is the coupling of
frightened rabbits in a hutch.”

  “Roderick, I hate and fear and adore you,” the girl announced. She cast herself at his feet like a ballerina.

  He gave her both his hands and lifted her to her feet. “I adore to be adored,” he answered lightly. Clinch.

  A thin figure had been pacing nervously in the orchestra pit, silhouetted against the reflection of the footlights. Now he vaulted onto the stage in a single antelope bound, and circled the mugging pair like a referee.

  “Very fine,” he said. “Very fine, indeed. You’ve caught my intention beautifully, both of you. But would it be possible, Miss Dermott, to bring out just a shade more emphatically the contrast between hate and fear on the one hand, and adore on the other? After all, that’s the very keynote of the first act: the ambivalence of Clara’s response to the Ironist, externalizing the ambivalence of his attitude to love and life. Would you take it again from ‘rabbits in a hutch’?”

  “Of course, Mr. Marvell.”

  Which made him the author of the play, as I’d suspected. It was the kind of play that only a mother or an actor could love, the kind of stuff that parodied itself. Phony sophistication with a high gloss, and no insides at all.

  I turned my attention to the darkened auditorium, which seemed larger than it was because it was almost empty. A few people were clustered in the first rows, silently watching the actors rehash their tripe. The rest of the plywood seats were unoccupied, except for a couple a few rows ahead of me. As my eyes became used to the dim light, I could make out a boy and a girl, their heads leaning close together. At least the boy was leaning toward her; the girl sat straight in the seat. When he raised his arm and placed it along the back, she moved to the next seat.

  I saw his face as he leaned sideways to speak to her: Dream Two. “God damn you,” he said. “You treat me as if I was dirt. I think I’m getting someplace with you, and then you crawl into your little igloo and slam the door in my face.”

  “Igloos don’t have doors, you crawl in through a tunnel.” Her voice was soft and prim.

  “That’s another thing.” He was trying to whisper, but anger jerked at his vocal cords and made the words uneven. “You think you’re so damn superior, the big brain. I could tell you things you never even heard of.”

  “I don’t care to hear of them. I’m very interested in the play, Mr. Reavis, and I wish you’d leave me alone.”

  “Mr. Reavis! What makes you so bloody formal all of a sudden. You were hot enough last night when I took you home, but now it’s ‘Mr. Reavis’.”

  “I was not! And I won’t be talked to like that.”

  “That’s what you think. You can’t play around with me, do you understand? I’m big stuff, and I got ideas, and there’s plenty of women I can have if I want them, see?”

  “I know you’re irresistible, Mr. Reavis. My failure to respond is unquestionably pathological.”

  “Two-bit words don’t mean nothing,” he cried in frustration and fury. “I’ll show you something that does mean something.”

  Before she could move again, he was crouching in front of her, holding her down in her seat. She let out a stifled squawk and beat his face with closed hands. But he found her mouth and held on, with one of his large hands on either side of her head. I could hear their breath whistling, the seat creaking under the weight of their struggling bodies. I stayed where I was. They knew each other better than I knew them, and nothing could happen to her where they were.

  He released her finally, but stayed bending over her, with something hopeful in the arch of his shoulders.

  “Dirt!” she said. “You dirt.”

  The words hit him hard, a spatter of mud in the face. “You can’t call me that!” He had forgotten about whispering. His hands were groping for her shoulders, or her neck.

  I was halfway out of my seat when the overhead lights came on. The dialogue on the stage had ceased, and everyone in the theatre was running up the aisle, with Marvell at their head. He was a flaxen-haired man in Harris tweeds and a dither. The trace of an English accent fogged his voice:

  “Really! What on earth is happening here?” He sounded like a spinster schoolteacher who has caught a pupil in the act.

  The boy had scrambled to his feet and half-turned, leaning over the back of a seat. There was shamed awkwardness in his movements, but danger, too. His muscles were strained taut, and his eyes were black ice.

  Slocum stepped forward and laid his hand on Marvell’s shoulder. “Let me handle this, Francis.” He turned to the girl, who was sitting tense in her seat. “Now, Cathy, what’s been going on?”

  “Nothing, father.” Her voice was demure again. “We were sitting here talking, and Pat got mad, that’s all.”

  “He was kissing you,” Slocum said. “I saw you from the stage. You’d better wipe your face, and I’ll talk to you later.”

  Her hand flew up to her mouth. “Yes, father,” she said between her fingers. She was a pretty girl, much younger than I’d thought from the words she used. The auburn hair blossomed at the back of her neck into curls that were alive with copper glints.

  The boy looked down at her head, and back to her father. “No,” he said. “She had nothing to do with it. I tried to kiss her, and she wouldn’t let me.”

  “You admit that, do you, Reavis?”

  The boy walked up to Slocum, and dwarfed him. With his thin shoulder-blades projecting under the yellow sweater, it was Slocum who looked like the youngster. He stood where he was, unbending and outraged.

  “Why shouldn’t I admit it?” Reavis said. “There’s no law against kissing a girl—”

  Slocum spoke in deliberate cold fury: “Where my young daughter is concerned, certain things are impossible and inconceivable and”—he groped for a word and found it—“foul. No lout of a chauffeur—”

  “I won’t always be a chaffeur—”

  “You’re quite right. You’re not one now.”

  “I suppose you mean I’m fired.” His tone was flat and scornful.

  “Absolutely.”

  “Why, you poor damn ninny, you can’t fire me. You never paid my wages, anyway. Not that I want your friggin’ job. You can stick it.”

  The two men were facing each other, so close they were almost touching. The rest of the people in the aisle surged forward around them. Marvell insinuated himself between them, and laid a graceful hand on Reavis’s chest. “That will be about enough of that.” He omitted the “my man” tag, but it was implied. “I advise you to get out of here before I summon the police.”

  “For calling a phony’s bluff?” Reavis tried to laugh, and almost succeeded. “I’d of walked out months ago if it wasn’t for Cathy. The little buzzard’s doing me a favor.”

  The girl Cathy got out of her seat, her eyes bright with tears about to spill. “Go away, Pat. You mustn’t say these dreadful things to father.”

  “You heard her, Reavis.” Slocum was flushed in the neck and white around the mouth. “Get out of here, and don’t come back. We’ll send your things to you.”

  The tension was leaking out of the situation as Reavis, its center, gradually relaxed. He knew that he was beaten, and his shoulders showed it. He turned to look at Cathy, and she wouldn’t meet his eyes. Before the focus of attention could shift to me, I slid out of my $7.70 seat and into the lobby.

  The photograph of the Ironist on the portico was staring unblinkingly into the afternoon sun. The offstage drama in Quinto, I told it silently, was better than the kind they rehearsed. It didn’t answer; it was lost in a dream of its own loveliness.

  chapter 3

  I found a phone booth in a drugstore down the block. There was no James Slocum in the Nopal Valley section of the directory, but there was a Mrs. Olivia Slocum, presumably his mother. I made the ten-cent toll call and got a cracked dry voice which could have belonged to man or woman:

  “The Slocum residence.”

  “Mrs. James Slocum, please.”

  There was a click on the line: “All
right, Mrs. Strang. I’ll take it on my extension.”

  Mrs. Strang grunted and went off the line.

  “Archer speaking,” I said. “I’m in Quinto.”

  “I hoped you would call. Yes?”

  “Look here, Mrs. Slocum, I’m practically handcuffed. I can’t ask questions, or I’ll start talk where there isn’t any. I have no lead and no contacts. Isn’t there some way I can meet your family—your husband, at least?”

  “But he has nothing to do with it. You’ll only rouse suspicion.”

  “Not necessarily. If I float around without an explanation, I’ll rouse suspicion for sure. And I won’t find anything out if I can’t talk to anybody.”

  “You sound discouraged,” she said.

  “I was never encouraged, I told you that. Operating in a vacuum, I don’t stand much chance of helping you. Even a list of suspects—”

  “But there are none. I can’t name a single person. Is the case really so hopeless?”

  “Unless I get a lucky break, like somebody running up to me in the street and confessing. This is a very intimate business, there’s nothing overt in it like the ordinary divorce setup, and I need to get closer to your life.”

  Very softly, she said: “Are you proposing to spy on me, Mr. Archer?”

  “Hardly. I’m working for you. But I need a center to work from, and you and your family are it. I got a look at your husband and daughter just now, but a look is not enough.”

  “I specifically instructed you not to approach my husband.”

  Her moods were hard to follow and match. I changed mine: “If you don’t let me handle the thing my own way, I’ll have to drop it. I’ll mail you your money.”

  In the silence that followed, I could hear her tapping with a pencil on the base of the telephone. “No,” she said finally. “I want you to do what you can. If you have any reasonable suggestion—”

  “It’s not very reasonable, but it should do. Do you have any friends in Hollywood? Picture people?”