The Black-Eyed Blonde

19

It wasn’t the first time in my life I’d been slipped a Mickey Finn, and it probably won’t be the last. As in everything else, you learn to cope with it, or at least with the aftermath. Like now, for instance, when I came around and knew better than to open my eyes straight off. For one thing, when you’re in that state, even the most muted shaft of daylight can hit your eyes like a splash of acid. For another, it’s always better to let whoever it was that slipped you the dose think you’re still out cold — that way you get a while to mull things over and maybe figure out your next move, while your body readjusts itself to whatever surroundings and circumstances it finds itself in.

The first thing I realized was that I was tied up. I was sitting on a straight-backed chair and lashed to it with loops of rope. My hands were bound too, behind my back. I didn’t make a move, just stayed slumped there with my chin on my chest and my eyes shut. The air around me had a warm, woolly feel to it, and I seemed to hear water lapping gently with a hollow, echoing sound. Was I in a bathroom? No, the place was bigger than that. Then I noticed the chlorine smell. A swimming pool, then.

My head felt as if it had been jammed full of cotton wool, and the bruise at the back that López had given me had taken on a whole new lease on life.

Someone groaned nearby. The groan had a rattle in it that told me the groaner was in a lot of distress, maybe even dying. For a second I wondered if it was myself I had heard. Then a voice spoke a few yards away: “Give him some water, bring him around.”

I didn’t recognize the voice. It was the voice of a man, not young. There was a harsh edge to it. Whoever he was, he was used to giving orders and being obeyed.

There were gagging sounds then, and a hoarse cough, and the sound of water splashing on stone. “He’s almost done for, Mr. C.,” another voice said. This one I seemed to know, or to have heard before, at least. The accent was familiar but not the tone.

“Don’t let him go yet,” the first voice said. “He has to pay some more, before he gets his release.” There was a pause, and I heard footsteps approaching, with sharp, echoing clicks of shoe leather on what had to be a marble floor, and stop in front of me. “What about this one? He should be awake by now.”

A hand suddenly grasped my hair at the back and jerked my head upright, so that my eyes snapped open like a doll’s. The light didn’t hit me too hard, but for the first few seconds all I could see in front of me was a burning whitish mist with some blurred figures moving in it. “He’s awake, all right,” the first voice said. “That’s good.”

The mist began to clear. I was in the swimming pool room. The space was large and long and had a high, domed glass roof through which the sunlight streamed. The walls and floor were covered with big tiles of veined white marble. The pool must have been fifty feet long. I couldn’t see who was behind me, still holding on to a handful of my hair. In front of me and off a little to one side was Hanson, pale and sick-looking in his light blue jacket and his string tie with the bull’s-head fastener.

Next to Hanson was a short, thickset, elderly man, entirely bald, with a pointed skull and heavy black eyebrows that looked as if they’d been painted on. He wore knee-high brown boots as shiny as new-shucked chestnuts, twill pants, and a black shirt with an open collar. Around his neck he had a set of wolf’s teeth threaded on a string, along with an Indian amulet made of some kind of bone with a big, slanted blue eye painted in the middle of it. In his right hand he was holding a malacca cane, what the British call a swagger stick, I believe. He looked like a scaled-down version of Cecil B. DeMille crossed with a retired lion tamer.

Now he approached me, peering at me with his bald head held to one side and slapping himself lightly on the thigh with his bamboo stick. He stopped and leaned down and put his face close to mine, his flinty blue eyes seeming to look into my very soul. “I’m Wilberforce Canning,” he said.

I had to do some work unscrambling my lips and tongue before I could get my voice in operation again. “I guessed that,” I said.

“Did you, now. Good for you.” Hanson was hovering at his shoulder anxiously, as if he thought I might break free of my bonds and go for the little guy. Fat chance of that. Aside from the ropes holding me fast to the chair, I had about as much strength in me as a cat with the mange. “How did you get that scar on your cheek?” Canning asked.

“Mosquito bit me.”

“Mosquitoes don’t bite, they sting.”

“Well, this one had teeth.”

I squinted past Canning to the swimming pool. The blue water looked painfully inviting. I pictured myself floating on its cool, silken surface, calmed and soothed.

“Floyd here tells me you’re a very inquisitive man, Mr. Marlowe,” Canning said, still leaning forward and gazing into my face. He touched the end of his stick almost caressingly against my cheek and the scar there. “That can be an awkward thing, inquisitiveness.” There was another groan; it came from somewhere off to my right. I tried to look in that direction, but Canning pressed the swagger stick hard against my cheek and would not let me turn my head. “You just pay attention to me, now,” he said. “Just concentrate on the matter in hand. Why are you asking all these questions about Nico Peterson?”

“All what questions?” I said. “There’s only one, so far as I can see.”

“And what’s that?”

“Whether he’s dead or just pretending to be.”

Canning nodded and took a step back, and the one behind me at last let go of my hair. Free to look now, I turned my head. Gómez and López were there, a dozen feet away down the right-hand side of the pool and facing the water, seated side by side on straight-backed chairs to which, like me, they’d been tied with lengths of slender, tightly braided rope. López, I could see, was already dead. His head was a mass of gashes and bruises, and there was a cascade of half-dried, glistening blood down the front of his Hawaiian shirt. His right eye was swollen shut, while the left one bulged out of its socket, bloodshot and wildly staring. Someone had hit him very hard on the side of the head, hard enough to pop out that eyeball. His harelip was split in a dozen places now.

Gómez too was a mess, his powder-blue suit ripped and spattered all over with blood. At least one of them had soiled himself, and the smell wasn’t pleasant. It was Gómez who was doing the groaning. He sounded half-conscious and terrified, like a man dreaming that he was falling from the roof of a high building. It looked to me as if it was only a matter of time before he joined his compañero in the happier hereafter. A man beaten to death and another one on the way there is a terrible sight, but I wasn’t about to go into mourning for this pair. I recalled Lynn Peterson laid out on the pine needles in the clearing by the side of the road that night with her throat cut and Bernie Ohls telling me what had been done to her before she died.

Now the one who had been holding on to my hair stepped out where I could see him. It was Bartlett the butler, the old guy who had served tea to Hanson and me that first time I came to the club. He was wearing his striped vest and black morning pants under a long white apron, the strings of which were tied in a neat bow at the back, and his shirt sleeves had been rolled up. He didn’t look any younger than he had before, and his skin was still gray and slack-looking, but otherwise he was a different man. How had I missed how tough he was, hard and muscular, with short thick arms and a chest like a barrel? A onetime boxer, I guessed. There were spills of blood down the front of his apron. In his right hand he was holding a blackjack, as neat a little number as you’ve ever seen, polished and gleaming from frequent use. Well, I guess butlers get called on to perform all kinds of duties in the course of their work. I wondered if he had taken the blackjack from López, the one López had used on me.

“You remember these gentlemen, I’m sure.” Canning gestured toward the Mexicans. “Mr. Bartlett here has been in serious consultation with them, as you see. It’s just as well you were in so deep a sleep, for it was a noisy exchange and at times painful to witness.” He turned to the butler. “Get them out of here, will you, Clarence? Floyd will help you.”

Hanson stared at him in horror but was ignored.

“Right-oh, Mr. Canning,” Bartlett said. He turned to Hanson briskly. “I’ll take this gentleman, you bring the other.”

He went behind Gómez’s chair and grasped the back of it and tilted it on two legs and began dragging it toward the door at the other side of the pool, the door Lynn Peterson had come through the day I’d glimpsed her here, with the towel wrapped around her head. Hanson, with a look of deep distaste, took López’s chair and tilted it back and followed after Bartlett. The chair legs made a noise on the marble tiles like fingernails being dragged down a blackboard. Lopez’s head fell sideways, that eyeball dangling.

Canning turned to me again, and again gave himself a light slap on the thigh with his swagger stick. “They weren’t very forthcoming,” he said, jerking his head in the direction of the departing Mexicans.

“Forthcoming about what?” I asked. I had a sudden, sharp craving for a cigarette. I wondered if I would end up like the Mexicans, beaten to a pulp and dragged out of here still strapped to this damned chair. What a lousy, undignified way to go.

Canning was shaking his bald head from side to side. “To tell you the truth, I didn’t expect to get much out of them in the first place,” he said.

“That must have been a relief to them.”

“I wasn’t in the business of offering them relief.”

“No, I can see that.”

“You feel sympathy for them, Mr. Marlowe? They were just a pair of animals. No, not animals — animals don’t kill for fun.”

He began to pace up and down in front of me, three tight steps this way, three tight steps that, his heels clicking on the tiles. He was one of those coiled, restless little guys, and right now he looked awfully agitated. I had that familiar metallic taste at the back of my tongue, as if I had been sucking on a penny. It was the taste of fear.

“You think I could have a cigarette?” I said. “I promise not to use it to burn through these ropes, or anything like that.”

“I don’t smoke,” Canning said. “Filthy habit.”

“You’re right, it is.”

“Have you got cigarettes? Where are they?”

I pointed with my chin toward the breast pocket of my suit jacket. “In there. Matches, too.”

He reached inside my jacket and brought out my silver case with the monogram, as well as a matchbook I’d forgotten I’d picked up in Barney’s Beanery. He took a cigarette from the case and fitted it between my lips, lit a match, applied the flame. I drew a long, deep lungful of hot smoke.

Canning dropped the case back in my pocket and resumed his pacing. “The Latin races,” he said, “I haven’t much respect for them. Singing, bullfighting, squabbling over women, that’s about their limit. You agree?”

“Mr. Canning,” I said, working the cigarette to one side of my mouth, “I’m not exactly in a position to disagree with anything you say.”

He laughed, making a thin, piping sound. “That’s true,” he said, “you’re not.” He paced again. It seemed he had to keep moving, like a shark. I wondered how he had made his money. Oil, I guessed, or maybe water, which was almost as precious in this dry gulch the early Angelenos chose to build a city in. “There are only two worthwhile races, in my opinion,” he said. “Not even races, in fact — specimens, rather. Know what they are?” I shook my head, and immediately the pain made me regret it. A flurry of cigarette ash tumbled silently down the front of my shirt and landed in my lap. “The American Indian,” he said, “and the English gentleman.” He glanced at me with a merry eye. “A strange pairing, you suppose?”

“Oh, I don’t know,” I said. “I can see things they would have in common.”

“Such as?” Canning had stopped pacing and turned to me with one of those thick black eyebrows lifted.

“Devotion to the land?” I said. “Fondness for tradition? Enthusiasm for the hunt—?”

“That’s right, you’re right!”

“—plus a tendency to slaughter anyone who gets in their way.”

He shook his head and waved a reproving finger at me. “Now you’re being naughty, Mr. Marlowe. And I don’t like naughtiness, any more than I like inquisitiveness.” He paced again, turning and turning about. I was keeping an eye on that swagger stick; a slash across the face from that would be a thing I wouldn’t forget in a hurry.

“Killing is sometimes necessary,” he said. “Or, rather, call it elimination.” His expression darkened. “Some people don’t deserve to live — that’s a simple fact.” He approached nearer again and squatted down on his heels beside the chair I was tied to. I had the uneasy feeling that he was going to make a confession. “You knew Lynn Peterson, didn’t you,” he said.

“I didn’t know her, no. I met her—”

He nodded dismissively. “You were the last human being to see her alive. That’s not counting”—he nodded toward the door—“those two pieces of crud.”

“I suppose I was,” I said. “I liked her. I mean I liked what I saw of her.”

He looked into my face from the side. “Did you?” A muscle was twitching in his left temple.

“Yes. She seemed a decent sort.”

He nodded absently. A strange, tense expression had come into his eyes. “She was my daughter,” he said.

That took a while to absorb. I couldn’t think of anything to say, so I said nothing. Canning was still watching me. There was a far, deep sorrow in his face; it came and went in a matter of moments. He rose to his feet and walked to the edge of the pool and stood there in silence for a while with his back to me, looking down into the water. Then he turned. “Don’t pretend you’re not surprised, Mr. Marlowe.”

“I’m not pretending,” I said. “I am surprised. Only I don’t know what to say to you.”

I had smoked my cigarette to the end, and now Canning came and with an expression of disgust extracted the butt from my mouth and carried it to a table in the corner, holding it in front of him nipped between a finger and thumb, as if it were the corpse of a cockroach, and dropped it in an ashtray there. Then he came back.

“How is it your daughter’s name was Peterson?” I asked.

“She took her mother’s name, who knows why. My wife was not an admirable woman, Mr. Marlowe. She was part Mexican, so maybe I should have known. She married me for my money, and when she’d spent enough of it — or, I should say, when I put a stop to her spending — she ran off with a fellow who turned out to be a con man. Not an attractive history, I know. I can’t say I’m proud of that particular passage of my life. All I can offer in my defense is that I was young and, I suppose, bewitched.” He grinned suddenly, showing his teeth. “Or is that what all cuckolds say?”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“Then you’re a lucky man.”

“There’s luck and there’s luck, Mr. Canning.” I glanced down at the ropes. “Mine doesn’t seem to be much in operation just now.”

My mind was foggy again, probably due to a drop in circulation because of the ropes. But my strength was coming back, I could feel it, unless it was just the effect of the nicotine. I wondered how long all this was likely to go on for. I wondered too — again — how it might be going to end. I thought of López’s bulging eye and the blood on his shirtfront. Wilber Canning was playing the part of the soft old boy, but I knew there was nothing soft about him, except maybe in his regard for his dead daughter.

“Listen,” I said, “can I take it that if Lynn was your daughter, then Nico is your son?”

“They were both my offspring, yes,” he said, not looking at me.

“Then I’m sorry,” I said. “Your son I never met, but like I said, Lynn seemed all right to me. How come you weren’t at her funeral?”

He shrugged. “She was a tramp.” He spoke without emphasis. “And Nico was a gigolo, when he wasn’t being worse. They both had a lot of their mother in them.” Now he did look in my direction. “You’re shocked by my attitude toward my son and daughter, Mr. Marlowe, even though I’ve lost them both?”

“I’m hard to shock.”

He wasn’t listening. He had started pacing again, and it made me feel dizzy, watching him. “I can’t complain,” he said. “I wasn’t exactly a perfect father. First they ran wild, then they ran off. I didn’t try to find them. Afterward, it was too late to make it up to them. Lynn hated me. Nico probably did, too, only there were things he needed from me.”

“What sort of things?” He didn’t bother to answer that. “Maybe you weren’t as bad as you thought,” I said. “Fathers often judge themselves too harshly.”

“You have children, Marlowe?” I shook my head, and again what felt like a set of big wooden dice rattled together inside my skull. “Then you don’t know what you’re talking about,” he said, sounding more sad than anything else.

Though the day must have been waning, the heat in the big, high-ceilinged room was rising. It felt a little like an August afternoon in Savannah. Plus the dampness in the air seemed to have a tightening effect on the ropes around my chest and my wrists. I wasn’t sure I’d ever get the feeling back in my upper arms.

“Look, Mr. Canning,” I said, “either tell me what you want from me or let me go. I don’t care a damn about the Mexicans — they deserved all they got from your man Jeeves. Rough justice is enough justice, in their case. But you’ve got no reason to keep me trussed up here like a Sunday chicken. I’ve done nothing to you, or to your son or daughter. I’m just a gumshoe bent on making a living, and not doing too well at it.”

If nothing else, my words had the effect of getting Canning to stop pacing, which was a relief. He walked up and stood in front of me with his hands on his hips and his swagger stick clamped under his arm. “The thing is, Marlowe,” he said, “I know who you’re working for.”

“You do?”

“Come on — what do you take me for?”

“I don’t take you for anything, Mr. Canning. But I have to say, I very much doubt you know the identity of my client.”

He leaned forward and held out to me the amulet that was hanging on the string around his neck. “Know what this is? It’s the eye of a Cahuilla god. Very interesting tribe, the Cahuilla. They have powers of divination that are scientifically attested to. No point in lying to these folks — they see right through you. I was privileged to be inducted as an honorary brave. Part of the ceremony was the presentation of this precious image, this all-seeing eye. So don’t try telling me lies or try to sidetrack me by playing the innocent. Talk.”

“I don’t know what you want me to talk about.”

He shook his head sadly. “My man Jeeves, as you call him, is going to be back here shortly. You saw what he did to the Mexicans. I wouldn’t want to be forced to have him do the same to you. Despite the circumstances, I have a certain respect for you. I like a man who keeps a cool head.”

“The problem is, Mr. Canning,” I said, “I don’t know what you want from me.”

“No?”

“Really, I don’t. I was hired to find Nico Peterson. My client thought, like everybody else, that Nico was dead but then saw him on the street and came to me and asked me to track him down. It’s a private matter.”

“Where is he supposed to have seen Nico, your client, as you call him?”

Him. So he didn’t know what he thought he knew. It was a relief. I wouldn’t have wanted to think of Clare Cavendish here, tied to a chair with this murderous little madman strutting up and down in front of her.

“In San Francisco,” I said.

“So he’s up here, is he?”

“Who?”

“You know who. What was he doing in San Francisco? Was he looking for Nico? What made him suspect Nico wasn’t dead?”

“Mr. Canning,” I said, as patiently and gently as I could, “none of what you’re saying makes sense to me. You’ve got it wrong. It was a chance sighting of Nico — if it was Nico.”

Canning was again standing in front of me with his fists planted on his hips. He gazed at me in silence for a long time. “What do you think?” he said finally. “Do you think it was Nico?”

“I don’t know — I can’t say.”

There was another silence. “Floyd tells me you mentioned Lou Hendricks. Why did you?”

“Hendricks picked me up on the street and took me for a drive in his fancy car.”

“And?”

“He’s looking for Nico too. Popular boy, your son.”

“Hendricks thinks Nico is alive?”

“He didn’t seem to know one way or the other. Like you, he’d heard I was sniffing around, trying to pick up Nico’s trail.” I didn’t mention the suitcase, which to my regret I had mentioned to Hendricks. “There was nothing I could tell him, either.”

Canning sighed. “All right, Marlowe, have it your way.”

The door at the other end of the pool opened then, right on cue, and Bartlett and Floyd Hanson came back in. Hanson was looking more troubled than ever. His face was gray with tinges of green. He had bloodstains on his nice linen jacket and on his previously spotless white pants, too. Disposing of a couple of badly roughed-up corpses — I thought it a pretty fair assumption that the second Mexican was dead by the time he got to wherever it was he was taken — would be hell on your clothes, especially if you were as natty a dresser as Floyd Hanson. Clearly he wasn’t used to the sight of gore, at least not in the quantities shed by the two Mexicans. But hadn’t he said he had fought in the Ardennes? I should have known to take that with a shovelful of salt.

Bartlett came forward. “That’s all fixed then, Mr. Canning,” he said in his Cockney voice.

Canning nodded. “Two down,” he said, “one to go. Mr. Marlowe here isn’t being cooperative. Maybe a good soaking would clear his head. Floyd, give Mr. Bartlett a hand, will you?”

Bartlett went behind me again and began untying the ropes. When he got them off, he had to help me stand since my legs were too numb to support me. He had released my hands, too, and I flexed my arms to get the blood flowing in them. Now he walked me to the edge of the pool and put a hand on my shoulder and made me kneel on the marble tiles. The water level was only an inch or two below the edge. Bartlett held one of my arms, and Hanson came forward and took the other. I thought they were going to tip me into the pool, but instead they yanked my arms behind my back and Bartlett grabbed my hair again and pushed my head forward and plunged it into the water. I hadn’t taken a deep enough breath, and right away I began to experience the panic of a drowning man. I tried to get my face turned sideways so I could snatch some air, but Bartlett’s fingers were as strong as a pit bull’s jaws, and I couldn’t move. Very soon I felt as if my lungs were about to burst. Then at last I was hauled upright again, with water streaming in under my collar. Canning came and stood beside me, leaning down with his hands braced on his knees and his face close to mine. “Now,” he said, “are you ready to tell us what you know?”

“You’re making a mistake, Canning,” I said between gasps. “I don’t know anything.”

He sighed again and nodded to Bartlett, and once more I was underwater. Funny the things you notice, even in the most desperate circumstances. I had my eyes open and could see, far down, on the pale blue bottom of the pool, a small ring, a plain gold band, that must have slipped off some woman bather’s finger without her noticing. At least this time I had been smart enough to fill my lungs, but it didn’t make much difference, and after a minute or so I was a drowning man all over again. I’d never gone in the water much and certainly had never learned to hold my breath the way champion swimmers do. I wondered if maybe that ring down there would be the last thing I’d ever see. I could think of worse sights to have your eye fixed on while you were breathing — or, in my case, not breathing — your last.

Bartlett could feel when I began to panic and was close to opening my mouth and letting my lungs fill up, and he wasn’t ready to let me die, not yet. He and Hanson pulled me up again. Canning leaned down, peering into my face. “You ready to talk, Marlowe? You know what they say about going down for the third time. You don’t want to join those two spics on the rubbish heap, now do you?”

I said nothing, only hung my dripping head. Hanson was on my right, holding my arm twisted behind me; I could see his nifty loafers and the cuffs of his white linen pants. Bartlett was on the other side, grasping my left arm and with his right hand still clutching the back of my head. I reckoned they would probably drown me this time. I had to do something. I thought I’d rather be beaten to death than die underwater. But what could I do?

I’ve never been much of a fighter — when you’re past forty, you’re past it. I’ve been in fights, quite a few, but only when I was forced. There’s a big difference between defending yourself against an assault and launching an assault yourself. One thing I have learned, though, is the importance of balance. Even the hardest of cases — and Bartlett, despite his age and his low stature, was as hard as they come — can be knocked off their feet if you get them at just the right moment, in just the right position. Bartlett, as he prepared to push me under again, was concentrating his strength in his right hand, the one that was grasping the back of my head, and for a second he relaxed his grip on my arm. Pushing me toward the water, he had to rise up on his toes. I whipped my arm free of his grasp and flexed my elbow and rammed it into his ribs. He gave a low grunt and let go of my head. Hanson still had hold of my right arm, but his heart wasn’t in it, and I pulled away from him and he took a step back, afraid that I would do to him what I’d already done to Bartlett.

Behind me Canning shouted something, I don’t know what. I was concentrating on Bartlett. Rising from my knees, I brought my left fist around in a wide arc and caught him square on the side of the neck, and with another muffled grunt he teetered on the side of the pool, waving his arms in a way that would have been funny if this were the movies, then toppled over backward, headfirst, into the water. The splash he made was amazing, the water rising up in a great transparent funnel and falling back again with strange slowness — my brain must still have been sluggish from the dope.

I turned. It had all taken no more than a couple of seconds. I knew I’d probably have even less time than that before Canning and Hanson recovered enough to throw themselves on me. But they didn’t need to. Hanson, I saw, had a gun in his hand, a pistol, a big black job with a long barrel — a Webley, I thought. Where had it come from? It was probably Canning’s; he’d favor a British-made weapon, the sort of gun employed by your superior English gentleman.

“Stop right where you are,” Hanson said, just like all the baddies he’d seen in so many B pictures.

I studied him carefully. He didn’t have the eyes of a killer. I stepped forward. The gun barrel wavered.

“Shoot him!” Canning yelled. “Go on, pull the damned trigger!” He could shout, all right, but still he held back.

“You’re not going to kill me, Hanson,” I said. “We both know it.”

I could see the sweat glistening on his forehead and on his upper lip. It doesn’t make you a coward that you won’t shoot a man. Killing is never easy. Out of the corner of my eye, I could see Bartlett hauling himself out of the pool. I took another step. The gun was pointing at my breastbone. I grabbed the barrel and wrenched it sideways. Maybe Hanson was too surprised to resist, or maybe he just wanted to be rid of the weapon, but he let go of it and stepped back, lifting his hands and extending them toward me as if they would ward off a bullet. That crazy gun weighed about as much as an anvil, and I had to hold it in both hands. It wasn’t a Webley, and it wasn’t British. In fact, it was German-made, a Weihrauch.38. An ugly weapon, but awfully effective.

I turned and shot Bartlett in the right knee. I don’t know if it was his knee I was aiming at, but that was what I hit. He made a strange mewling noise and toppled over on his side and lay there hunched over and squirming. A big bloodstain was spreading down the leg of his sodden trousers. There was a sound behind me. I stepped quickly to one side and Canning stumbled past, cursing, his arms reaching out helplessly in front of him. He stopped and spun around and seemed about to lunge at me again. I thought of shooting him, too, but didn’t. “I don’t want to kill you, Canning,” I said, “but I will if I have to.” I waved the gun in Hanson’s direction. “Get over here, Floyd,” I said.

He came and stood beside his boss. “You lousy milksop!” Canning hissed at him.

I laughed. I didn’t think I’d ever heard anyone actually say the word milksop before, in real life. Then I kept on laughing. I suppose I was in some sort of shock. All the same, the events of the past half minute or so, seen from a certain angle, would have looked as comical, and as grotesque, as a Charlie Chaplin routine.

Bartlett was clutching his leg just below his shattered knee and moving the other leg in a circle around and around on the tiles, like a slow-motion cyclist. He was still making those mewling sounds. No matter how tough you are, a smashed kneecap can only hurt like hell. It would be quite a while, I thought, before he got back to serving afternoon tea.

My arms, still tingling with pins and needles, ached from holding up the weight of that kraut cannon and keeping the barrel in a more or less horizontal plane. Canning was watching me with a nasty gleam of contempt. “Well, Marlowe,” he said, “what are you going to do now? I guess you’ll have to kill me, after all. Not to mention my loyal majordomo here.” Hanson threw him a look of rancid hatred.

“Get in the pool,” I said to the two of them. They both stared at me. “Now,” I said, gesturing with the gun. “Get in the water.”

“I–I can’t swim,” Hanson said.

“Here’s your chance to learn,” I said, and laughed again. It was more of a giggle. I wasn’t myself. Hanson swallowed hard and began to ease off his shiny shoes. “No,” I said, “leave them on — leave everything on.”

Canning was still glaring at me. His little mad eyes were icy with rage, yet there was something fixed and almost dreamy in his look. I suppose he was lovingly picturing the things he would have Bartlett — or, more likely, Bartlett’s successor — do to me if he ever got the chance.

“Come on, Canning,” I said, “into the water, unless you want me to do to you what I did to jolly old Jeeves here. And drop the cane, by the way.”

Canning threw the swagger stick on the marble, like a kid throwing down someone else’s toy he’s been told to give back, and turned and set off walking toward the other, shallow end of the pool. I hadn’t noticed before how bowlegged he was. He had his fists clenched at his sides. Fellows like him don’t quite know how to behave, how to carry themselves, when suddenly they’re the ones being told what to do and are powerless not to do it.

Hanson gave me a pleading look and started to say something. I waved the gun barrel in his face to shut him up — I was tired of listening to his voice, so jaded and cool before, so thin and whiny now. “Go on in, Floyd,” I said, “the water’s lovely.” He nodded miserably and turned away and followed Canning. “Atta boy,” I said to his back.

When Canning got to the far end of the pool, he turned and looked at me along the length of it. I could almost hear him asking himself if there might still be a way to get the jump on me. “I can shoot you just as well from here,” I called to him, my voice making watery echoes under the high glass dome of the roof. He hesitated another moment, then stepped into the pool, stumping with his bandy gait down the white steps that led under the water. “Now keep going,” I said, “right out into the middle.” Floyd Hanson had reached the end of the pool now, and after hanging back for a few seconds, he too descended gingerly into the water. “Keep walking till you’re in it up to your chin,” I said to him, “then you can stop. We wouldn’t want you to drown.”

Canning waded toward me until the water had reached his chest, then breaststroked forward and swam the rest of the way to the center of the pool, where he stopped and bobbed up and down, moving his arms and treading water. Hanson too waded out, halting when his shoulders were covered. “Come on, Floyd,” I called. “Like I said, till it’s up to your chin.” He advanced another agonized step. Even at that distance I could see the panic in his eyes. At least he hadn’t claimed it was the navy he’d been in. “That’s right,” I said. “Now stop.” It looked eerie, the way his bodiless head seemed to float there on the water. I thought of John the Baptist.

There are moments in life that you know you’ll never forget, that you’ll remember ever afterward in bright, hard-edged, hallucinatory detail.

“All right,” I said. “I’m going to step outside the door here and wait for a certain time — you won’t know for how long — and in that time if I hear one of you climbing out of the pool, I’ll come back in and shoot whichever of you it is. You got that?” I pointed the gun at Canning. “You got that, old man?”

“You think you’ll get away with this?” he said. “Wherever you run, I’ll hunt you down.”

“You’re not going to be doing any hunting for a while, Mr. Canning,” I said. “Not when you’re in the slammer wearing a suit with stripes on it and making your own bed at night.”

“To hell with you, Marlowe,” he said. He was breathing hard already, floating and kicking there. If he had to stay in for much longer, he might drown. I didn’t really care if he did.

Of course, once I was out the door, I didn’t hang around. Canning probably hadn’t believed that I would, anyway. I decided not to risk leaving by the front door — there might be a button the receptionist could push that would summon a whole pack of goons — so I looked for a side exit instead. I found one straight off, and one that I knew, at that. I had opened a couple of doors and hurried through a couple of rooms when I turned into a corridor that looked familiar and pushed open another door — at random, I thought — and there I was in the drawing room with the chintz armchairs and the head-high fireplace, where that other time Hanson had brought me after our walk and where Bartlett, in his role as venerable retainer, had served us tea. I crossed the room and opened the glass-paneled door and stumbled out into sunlight and the delicate perfume of orange trees.

The Shriners were still staggering around the grounds. Half of them were drunk and the other half were well on the way. Their fezzes sat askew now, and their voices sounded more raucous. In my drug-heightened state, I thought for a minute I’d barged into a scene from Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves. I set off along the path beside the hanging bougainvillea in all its exaggerated glory.

I had a vague notion of how to get to where I had parked my car, and I was headed in that direction when, at a bend in the path, I found my way blocked by a redheaded, red-faced fellow in a slightly battered fez, who was built on the scale of a family-sized refrigerator. He was wearing a lime-green shirt and purple shorts and clutching a highball glass in his big pink paw. He looked at me with a broad, happy grin, then frowned in mock disapproval and pointed at my head. “You’re bare up there, brother,” he said. “That’s not allowed. Where’s your fez?”

“A monkey stole it and ran off with it into the trees,” I said.

This caused the fat man to laugh heartily, and his belly shook under his blindingly bright green shirt. I realized I was still carrying the Weihrauch, and now he spotted it. “Why, lookee here!” he said. “Ain’t that a dandy weapon you’re packing. Where’d you get it from?”

“They’re handing them out at the clubhouse,” I said. “The manager embezzled the club funds, and there’s a posse being formed to go after him. Hurry up and you might get to join.”

He looked at me open-mouthed; then a sly grin spread over his face, which was the color and glistening texture of a Christmas ham. He wagged a roguish finger at me. “You’re teasing me, brother,” he said. “Ain’t you? I know you are.”

“You’re right,” I said and hefted the gun in my hand. “This thing is just a model of the real item. The big chief here, man by the name of Canning, collects ’em — model guns, that is. You should ask him to let you see his gun room. It’s quite something.”

The fat man put his head back and squinted at me. “Why,” he said broadly, “I might just do that. Where can I find him?”

“He’s in the swimming pool,” I said.

“He’s where?”

“In the pool. Cooling off. Go along that way”—I jerked a thumb over my shoulder—“and you’ll find him. He’ll be happy to see you.”

“Well, thank you, brother. That’s mighty friendly of you.”

And he waddled off happily in the direction of the clubhouse.

When he had rounded the bend and was out of sight, I looked about — a bit wildly, I imagine. I was wondering what to do with the gun. My brain still wasn’t working so well, given all the insults it had suffered in the past few days and hours. I was standing beside a high wall with heavy hangings of the official flower of San Clemente, and now I just heaved the weapon away from me. I heard it strike the wall and fall into the dirt at the base of it with a soft thud. Later, it would take Bernie Ohls’s men nearly two days to find it.

The sun was shining full on the car, of course, and inside it was as hot as a steam oven. I didn’t care — the steering wheel could sear my palms to the bone and I’d hardly feel it. I drove in the direction of the front gate. On one of the turns in the roadway I felt suddenly woozy, and the car nearly slammed into a tree. My arms still ached from those ropes. Marvin the gatekeeper gave me a leery look and pulled a gargoyle face, but he raised the barrier without a challenge. I stopped at the first phone booth I spotted and called Bernie. My voice wasn’t working so well, and at first he couldn’t make out what I was saying. Then he did.