The Drowning Pool

by Ross Macdonald

  “Okay, I was only asking a natural question.”

  “I don’t know the answer.” That ended our conversation. I wrote the number inside a match-folder and slipped it into my watch-pocket.

  The black car drew into the curb unexpectedly, dropped Reavis, and pulled away again. He swaggered across the sidewalk under a sign which spelled out Hunt Club. The leather-padded door swung to behind him.

  “Let me out here,” I said to the driver. “Park as near as you can and wait for me.”

  He raised his right hand and brushed the ball of his thumb back and forth across the first two fingers. “Show me a little green first, eh?”

  I handed him a five.

  He looked at the bill and turned to look at me over the back of the seat. His face was Sicilian, black-eyed, sharp-nosed. “This wouldn’t be a heist or nothing like that?”

  I told him: “I’m a private cop. There won’t be any trouble.” I hoped there wouldn’t.

  Dennis’s Hunt Club was dim and chilly and crowded. Indirect lights shone with discretion on polished brass and wood, on polished pates and highly polished faces. The photographs that lined the panelled walls were signed by all the big names and the names that had once been big. Dennis himself was near the door, a gray-haired man wearing undertakers clothes, clown’s nose, financier’s mouth. He was talking with an air of elegant condescension to one of the names that had once been big. The fading name glanced at me from under his fine plucked eyebrows. No competition. He registered relief and condescension.

  The place was built on two levels, so that the bar commanded a view of the dining-room. It was nearly two o’clock. The bar was doing a rush-hour business before the curfew knelled. I found an empty stool, ordered a Guinness stout for energy, and looked around me.

  The hounds-tooth suit was raising its visual din in the middle of the dining-room. Reavis, his back to me, was at a table with a woman and a man. The man leaned across his four-inch steak in Reavis’s direction, a blue dinner-jacket constricting his heavy shoulders. The wide neck that grew through his soft white collar supported an enormous head, covered with skin as pink and smooth as a baby’s. Pinkish hair lay in thin ringlets on the massive scalp. The eyes were half-closed, listening: bright slits of intelligence in the great soft, chewing face.

  The third at the table was a young ash blonde, wearing a gown of white pleated chiffon and the beauty to outshine it. When she inclined her head, her short bright hair swung forward, framing her features chastely like a wimple. Her features were fine.

  She was trying to hear what the men were talking about. The big face looked at her and opened its eyes a little wider and didn’t like what it saw. A babyish petulance drove a wedge between the invisible eyebrows and plucked at the munching mouth, which spoke to her. The woman rose and moved in the direction of the bar. People noticed her. She slid onto the empty stool beside me, and was served before I was. The bartender called her by name, “Mrs. Kilbourne,” and would have tugged at his forelock if he’d had one. Her drink was straight bourbon.

  Finally the bartender brought me my stout, foaming in a chilled copper mug. “Last call, sir.”

  “This will do.”

  I stole a look at the woman, to confirm my first impression. Her atmosphere was like pure oxygen; if you breathed it deep it could make you dizzy and gay, or poison you. Her eyes were melancholy under heavy lashes, her cheeks faintly hollowed as if she had been feeding on her own beauty. Her flesh had that quality of excess drawn fine, which men would turn and follow in the street.

  Her hands fumbled with the diamond clasp of a gold lamé bag, and groped inside. “God damn and blast it,” she said. Her voice was level and low.

  “Trouble?” I said it not too hopefully.

  She didn’t turn, or even move her eyes. I thought it was a brush-off, and didn’t expecially mind, since I’d asked for it. But she answered after a while, in the same flat level tone: “Night after night after night, the run-around. If I had taxi fare I’d walk out on him.”

  “Be glad to help.”

  She turned and looked at me—the kind of look that made me wish I was younger and handsomer and worth a million, and assured me that I wasn’t. “Who are you?”

  “Unknown admirer. For the last five minutes, that is.”

  “Thank you, Unknown Admirer.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows. Her smile was like an arrow. “Are you sure it isn’t father of five?”

  “Vox populi,” I said, “vox dei. I also have a fleet of taxis at my disposal.”

  “It’s funny, but I really have. My husband has, anyway. And I don’t have taxi fare.”

  “I have a taxi waiting. You can have it.”

  “Such sweetness, and self-denial to boot. So many unknown admirers want to be known.”

  “Kidding aside.”

  “Forget it, I was just talking. I haven’t the guts to do anything else but talk.”

  She glanced at her table, and the large head jerked peremptorily, beckoning her. Downing her drink, she left the bar and went back to the table. The large head called for its check in a rich, carrying voice.

  The bartender spread his arms and addressed the people at the bar: “Sorry now, good people, it’s time to close now, you know.”

  “Who’s the Palomino?” I asked him quietly.

  “Mrs. Kilbourne, you mean?”

  “Yeah, who’s she?”

  “Mrs. Walter Kilbourne,” he stated with finality. “That’s Walter Kilbourne with her.” The name had connotations of money for me, but I couldn’t place it definitely.

  I was waiting in the taxi across the street when they appeared on the sidewalk. Simultaneously, the limousine drew up to the curb. Kilbourne’s legs were small for his giant torso. As they crossed the sidewalk, his great head moved level with his wife’s. This time Reavis sat up front with the chauffeur.

  My driver said: “You want to play tag some more?

  “Might as well, it’s barely two o’clock.”

  “Some guys,” he grumbled, “got a very peculiar sense of humor.”

  He made a U-turn at the corner and came back fast. The traffic had thinned, and it was easy to keep the widely spaced red tail-lights in sight. In the center of the Strip, the black car pulled into the curb again. The blonde woman and her husband got out and entered The Flamenco. Reavis stayed where he was, beside the chauffeur. The black car U-turned suddenly, and passed us going in the opposite direction.

  My driver had doubled-parked a hundred yards short of The Flamenco. He slammed the gear-shift savagely into low and wrestled with the steering wheel. “How long does this go on?”

  “We’ll have to wait and see.”

  “I usually get myself a bite and java round about two o’clock.”

  “Yeah, it’s sure hell. Murder certainly breaks up a man’s schedule.”

  The speedometer needle jumped ten miles, as if it was attached directly to his heartbeat. “Did you say murder?”

  “Right.”

  “Somebody get it, or somebody going to get it?”

  “Somebody got it.”

  “I don’t like messing with killings.”

  “Nobody does. Just keep that car in sight, and vary your distance.”

  The black car stopped with a blaze of brake-lights at the Cahuenga stoplight, and my driver made a mistake. Before it turned left, he pulled up close to it. Reavis looked back, his eyes wide and black in our headlights, and spoke to the chauffeur. I cursed under my breath, and hoped that he was discussing the beauty of the night.

  He wasn’t. Once the limousine got onto the Freeway, it began to move at the speed it was built for. Our speedometer needle moved up to eighty and stayed there like the hand of a stopped clock. The tail-lights disappeared around a curve and were gone when we rounded the next curve on whining tires.

  “Sorry,” the driver said, his head and body rigid over the wheel. “That Caddie can hold a hundred from here to San Francisco. Anyway, it probably turned off on Lankershim.”
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  chapter 11

  Graham Court had changed in the hour or so since I had seen it last. The place had the same abandoned ugliness, the same foul-breathed atmosphere of people living desperately on their uppers, but these things had lost a part of their reality. By stepping out of it into a limousine which took him into the company of Mrs. Kilbourne, Reavis had given the place a new dimension: the possibility that there was more behind the thin warped walls than drinking and poverty, copulation and despair. For Reavis, at least, Graham Court was a place where anything could happen: the low-life set where actors played at being poor for a thousand dollars a day; the slum where the handsome prince lived incognito.

  In the first cottage, a woman sighed mournfully in her sleep, and a man’s blurred growl instructed her to shut her big loud yap. A radio chirped like a frenzied cricket in the shack at the front of the row, where someone was listening to an all-night disc-jockey or had forgotten to turn it off. Reavis’s was the third from the street on the left. The door opened at the first try with an ordinary passkey. I closed it behind me and found the light-switch beside it.

  The room precipitated out of darkness and enclosed me in a dingy wallboard cube. The light was a paper-shaded bulb in a hanging double socket, drawn sideways by a cord which ran to a nail in the wall and down the wall to a two-burner electric plate. There were dark crumbs on the oilcloth-covered table beside the burner, and some of them were moving. A chest of drawers sagged against the opposite wall, its veneer flaked like crackleware. Its top, indented with charred cigarette burns, held a bottle of barbershop hair-oil and a pair of military brushes in a pigskin case initialed P.M.R.

  I went through the drawers and found two laundered shirts, two pairs of cotton socks in brilliant patterns, a change of underclothes, a cardboard box bearing a Sheik label and a colored picture of the Sheik himself, a blue silk ribbon signifying second place in Junior Field and Track at Camp Mackenzie, wherever that was, in 1931; and a carton of cardboard matchfolders. The carton was nearly full, and each of the folders bore the legend, printed in gold on black: Compliments of Patrick “Pat” Reavis. The bottom drawer contained dirty clothes, including the Hawaiian shirt.

  An iron bed in the left-hand corner of the room opposite the door took up about a quarter of the floor space. It was covered with a U.S. Navy blanket. The pictures on the wall above the bed seemed to go with the blanket. They were photographs of nude women, both glossy prints and cutouts, perhaps a dozen of each. Gretchen Keck was among them, the face above the soft young body set in a smiling tetany of embarrassment. The pictures in the drawer of the table by the bed were more unusual. They included a set of the Herculaneum murals, which did not mean that Reavis was an amateur archaeologist. There was nobody there that I knew. Opposite the bed a faded green curtain, hung from a curved iron pipe, enclosed a sink and toilet and a portable shower stall sheathed with rusting metal. A pool of dirty water spread across the rotting linoleum and darkened the hem of the curtain.

  Without getting down on my knees, I reached far under the bed and brought out a cardboard suitcase with scuffed leather corners. It was locked, but the cheap clasp loosened when I gave the lid a sharp upward kick with my heel. I dragged it under the light and wrenched it open. Beneath a mouldy smelling tangle of dirty shirts and socks, the bottom of the suitcase was lined with disordered papers. Most of them were personal letters written in unformed hands and signed with girls’ names or nicknames; exceedingly personal letters. I sampled one which began: “My Dearest Darling: You drove me just wild the other night,” and ended: “Now that I know what love is all about, my Dearest Darling, you won’t go away and leave me—write and say you won’t.” Another, in a different hand, began: “Dear Mister Reavis,” and ended: “I love you pashunitly with all my haert.”

  There were official discharge papers which stated that one Patrick Murphy Ryan, born in Bear Lake County, Kentucky, on February 12, 1921, had enlisted in the U.S. Marine Corps on June 23, 1942, in San Antonio, Texas, and been discharged in San Diego in December of the same year, dishonorably. Ryan’s civilian experience was listed as agriculturalist, garage mechanic, and oil well maintenance apprentice, and his preferred occupation as commercial airplane pilot. There was a copy of an application for National Service Life Insurance in the amount of two thousand dollars, made out by the same Patrick Ryan, and dated July 2, 1942. It requested that the policy be mailed to Elaine Ryan Cassidy, R.R. 2, Bear Lake, Kentucky. She could be his mother, his sister, or his ex-wife.

  The name Elaine appeared again, this time with a different surname, on a torn and empty envelope crumpled in a corner of the suitcase. The envelope was addressed to Mr. Patrick Ryan, Graham Court, Los Angeles, and postmarked Las Vegas, July 10, that year. The return address was scribbled across the ripped flap: Mrs. Elaine Schneider, Rush apts., Las Vegas, Nev. If this was the same Elaine who had been sent Pat’s insurance policy, she was one woman he trusted. And Las Vegas wasn’t far, as the buzzard flies. I memorized the address.

  I was going through the bundle of letters, looking for the one that matched the empty envelope, when a breeze blew light and cold on the back of my neck. I picked up one of the letters and straightened slowly without turning, as if to have light to read by; then slowly turned with the letter in my hands. The door was ajar a few inches, pure darkness beyond.

  I reached for the light-switch. The step I took threw me a little off balance. A hand came through the aperture, pushing it wider, and closed on my wrist: fingers like curled white sausages, speckled with short black bristles. It pulled me further off balance and my head slammed against the wall. The wallboard crunched. A second hand closed on my arm and began to bend it around the edge of the door. I set one foot against the door-jamb and brought the hands into the room. The hands, then the arms, then the shoulders. When the whole man came, he brought the door along with him. It fell against the green curtain with very little noise.

  His nose and brows were brown fungus growing on a thick stump of face. Small eyes like shiny black beetles lived in it. They burrowed out of sight when I struck at them with my free hand, and reappeared again. I hurt my hand on the thick chin. The head rolled away with the punch and came back grinning at me.

  He turned suddenly, raised his arms and swung me off balance. His fingers ground on my wristbones. His heavy shoulders labored. I would not turn in to his hold. His coat split up the back with a sharp report. I twisted my hand free, joined both hands under his chin, and set my knee in the small of his back. Gradually he straightened, came over backwards and down. The floor cracked against the back of his head, then the ceiling fell on the back of mine.

  I came to, lying face down in darkness. The surface under my face seemed to be vibrating, and the same vibration beat savagely at the base of my skull. When I opened my mouth I tasted dusty cloth. Something heavy and hard pressed down on the small of my back. I tried to move and found that my shoulders and hips were tightly enclosed on both sides. My hands were tied together, pressed hard into my stomach. Coffin fear took me by the back of the neck and shook me. When the shaking subsided my head was clearer and more painful. I was on the floor of a moving car, wedged face down between the front and back seats.

  The wheels bumped and slid across two sets of car tracks. I raised my head from the floor.

  “Take it easy, buster,” a man’s voice said. One heavy object was removed from the small of my back and placed on the nape of my neck.

  I said: “Take your feet off me.”

  The foot on my neck shifted, pressing my face into the floor. “Or what will you do, buster? Nothing? That’s what I thought.”

  I lay still, trying to memorize pitch, tone, inflection, so that I would not mistake them if I ever heard them again. The voice was soft and liquid in the way that molasses is liquid, with a fruity tremor of vanity running through it. A voice like the stuff cheap barbers put on your hair before you can stop them.

  It said: “That’s right, buster, you can do your talking later. And
you will.”

  More car tracks. A left turn. Pitted city pavement. Another turn. The blood was roaring angrily in my ears. Then there was no sound but the roaring of my blood. The feet were lifted, a car door opened. I struggled upright to my knees and tore at my bound wrists with my teeth. They were bound with wire.

  “Now take it easy. This is a gun I have at your back. Don’t you feel it?”

  I felt it. I took it easy.

  “Backwards out of the car, buster. Don’t raise a hullabaloo or you’ll take another ride and never know it. Now you can stand up and let me look at you. Frankly, you look like hell.”

  I looked at him, first at the steady black gun. He was slender and tall, pinched at the waist by overelaborate tailoring, heavily padded at the shoulders. The hair on top of his head was thick and black and glossy, but it didn’t match the gray hair over his ears. I said: “You’re showing a little middle-aged sag yourself.”

  He nicked me under the chin with the front sight of his gun. My head snapped back and I fell against the open door of the car, slamming it shut. The sound rang out along the deserted street. I didn’t know where I was, but I had the Glendale feeling: end of the line. No lights went on in any of the dark houses. Nothing happened at all, except that the man pressed his gun to my sternum and made threats like cello music into my face.

  The other man leaned out of the front window. A little blood flowed from a cut over his right beetle. “You’re sure you can handle this screw?”

  “It will be a pleasure,” the tall man said to both of us.

  “Don’t mark him up unless he asks for it. We just want to get his story and put him on ice for a while.”

  “How long?”

  “You’ll hear in the morning.”

  “I’m not a baby-sitter,” the tall man grumbled. “What about your place, Meli?”

  “I’m going on a trip. Goodnight sweetheart.” The car went away.

  “Quick march,” the tall man said.

  “Goosestep, or plain?”

  He put one heel on my instep and his weight on the heel. His eyes were dark and small. They picked up the light of a distant streetlamp and reflected it like a cat’s.