The Drowning Pool

Chapter 10

I stopped at a lunch-bar east of the cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, for a sandwich and coffee and a look at the telephone book. It hung by a chain from the pay telephone on the wall beside the front window. A Graham Court on Laredo Lane was listed. I dialed the number and watched the sidewalk roamers. The young hepcats high on music or weed, the middle-aged men on the town, the tourists waiting for something to fulfill their fantasies, the hopeful floozies and the despairing ones, the quick, light, ageless grifters walked the long Hollywood beat on the other side of the plate glass. The sign above the window was red on one side, green on the other, so that they passed from ruddy youth to sickly age as they crossed my segment of sidewalk, from green youth to apoplexy.

A dim voice answered on the twelfth ring. Pat Reavis didn’t live at Graham Court, he never had, goodnight.

The counterman slid a thin white sandwich and a cup of thick brown coffee across the black Lucite bar. He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage.

“I couldn’t help hearing,” he said moistly. “You’re looking for a contract, I know a good number to call.”

“Write it in blood on a piece of rag-content paper and eat it with your breakfast.”

“Huh?” he said. “Blood?”

“What makes you think that sex is the important thing in life?”

He laughed through his nose. “Name another.”

“Money.”

“Sure, but what does a guy want money for, answer me that.”

“So he can retire to a lamasery in Tibet.” I showed him a Special Deputy badge which I’d saved from a wartime case on the Pedro docks. “Pimping will get you a couple of years up north.”

“Jesus.” His face underwent a sudden and shocking change. Old age ran crooked fingers over it, and held it crooked. “I was only kidding, I didn’t mean nothing, I don’t now any number. Honest to God.”

His whine followed me onto the sidewalk. The closing door shut it off. I was in an unpleasant mood.

Laredo Lane was one of the little lost stucco-and-frame streets between the two big boulevards. Its street lights, one to a block, spaced long patches of gloom. There were occasional houselights where after-midnight parties were going on. I caught fragments of music and laughter, glimpses of dancing couples in the windows as I drove past. Some of the dancers were black, some white; some had brown Indian faces. Most of the small marginal houses were dark behind closed blinds. One entire block was empty, its broken row of concrete foundations bared by an old fire.

I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter.

The letters GRAHAM COURT were cut in the front of a rectangular metal box lit from inside by an electric bulb. Nailed to the post which supported the sign was a piece of white-painted board on which an unsteady hand had lettered VACANCY. The NO was hidden by a weathered cardboard flap. I parked two hundred feet past the sign and left my engine running. The exhaust made little blue puffs like pipe-smoke in the chilling air.

The Court was a row of decaying shacks bent around a strip of withering grass. A worn gravel drive brought the world to their broken-down doorsteps, if the world was interested. A few of the shacks leaked light through chinks in their warped frame sides. The building marked Office, which was nearest the street, was closed and dark. It looked abandoned, as if the proprietor had given up for good. Over my head a red-flowering eucalyptus moved in a wind as soft as night-time breathing, and dropped its thin small petals to the ground. I picked one off the sidewalk for no good reason and ground it to red powder between my fingers.

I was deciding between the direct approach and a long dull wait in the car, when the door of one of the cottages opened, halfway down the row. It dropped a yellow plank of light across the grass. A man’s shadow moved in it, and then the light went out. I walked on up the street, away from my car. After an interval, quick footsteps followed me.

At the corner, the man crossed under the streetlight. It was Reavis, walking with an eager swagger, chin up and shoulders held back consciously as if he was pied-piping a bevy of girls at broad noon. When he had turned the corner, I ran back to my car and drove it around the block in time to shut off the lights and see the one-man parade cross the next intersection.

I took no chances. Because he knew my car, I locked it and left it parked where it was. I let him stay nearly a block ahead and used whatever cover was convenient: trees, hedges, parked cars. He never looked back; he moved like a man whose conscience was clear, or lacking. When he got to Sunset, he turned left. I crossed the boulevard and closed the distance between us. He had on a hound-tooth suit in clashing black and tan. I could practically hear the suit across the wide traffic-humming thoroughfare.

Reavis headed for a taxi stand, where several cabs stood in line along the curb. I expected him to take one, and was set to follow him in another. Instead, he sat down on the bench at the bus-stop, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette. I went a few yards up the building on the corner. Off to my left, the tall apartment hotels stood against a sky whose moving reddish color was like the inside of closed eyelids. The late night traffic flowed between me and Reavis at a steady thirty-five to forty.

A long black car nosed out of the stream and into the red curb where Reavis was sitting. He stood up and flipped his cigarette away. A man in a dark gray livery got out of the chauffeur’s seat and opened the back door for him. I was halfway across the street, in the thin aisle of safety between the moving lanes, when the limousine got under way again. I opened the door of the first cab in the line and told the driver to follow it.

“Double fare?” he said above the starting roar of his motor.

“Sure thing. And an extra buck for the license number.”

The cab left the curb in a jet-propelled takeoff that threw me back in the seat, and went up to fifty in second. Cutting in and out of traffic, it gained on the black limousine.

“Don’t pull up on him too fast. Drop back when you get the number.”

He slowed a bit, but gradually narrowed the space between the two cars. “The number is 23P708,” he said after a while. “You tailing the guy or what?”

“This is a game I play.”

“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 undertaker’s 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 especially 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 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 double-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 as 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.”