The Drowning Pool

Chapter 13

The alarm made a noise which reminded me of dentists, which reminded me of optometrists, which reminded me of thick-lensed spectacles, which reminded me of Morris Cramm: the man I had been trying to think about when I woke up.

Hilda met me on the third-floor landing with her finger to her lips. “Be quiet now, Morris is sleeping, and he had a hard night.” She was blonde and fat and doe-eyed, radiating through her housecoat the warmth and gentleness of Jewish women who are happily married.

“Wake him up for me, will you? Just a minute?”

“No, I couldn’t do that.” She looked at me more closely. The only light came from a burlap-curtained French door that opened on a fire escape at the end of the hall. “What happened to you, Lew? You look God-awful.”

“You look swell. It’s wonderful to see nice people again.”

“Where have you been?”

“To hell and back. Glendale, that is. But I’ll never leave you again.” I kissed her on the cheek, which smelt of Palmolive soap.

She gave me a friendly little push that almost sent me backwards over the rail. “Don’t do that. Morris might hear you, and he’s awful jealous. Anyway, I’m not nice people. I’m a sloppy housekeeper, and I haven’t done my nails for two whole weeks. Why? Because I’m lazy.”

“I’m crazy about your nails. They never scratch.”

“They will if you don’t quiet down. And don’t think you’re going to flatter me into waking him up. Morris needs his sleep.”

Morris Cramm was night legman for a columnist and worked the graveyard shift. He knew everybody worth knowing in the metropolitan area, and enough about them to set up a blackmailing syndicate bigger than Sears Roebuck. To Morris, that idea would never have occurred.

“Look at it this way, Hilda. I am searching for the long-lost son of a wealthy English nobleman. The bereaved father is offering a fantastic reward for the prodigal’s Los Angeles address. With Morris, I go halves. If he can give me the address, it will entitle him to this valuable gift certificate, bearing an engraved portrait of Alexander Hamilton and personally autographed by the Secretary of the Treasury.” I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet.

“You sound like a radio program. A couple of radio programs, all mixed up.”

“For five minutes of his personal sleeping time, I offer ten dollars in cash. Two dollars a minute, a hundred and twenty dollars an hour. Show me the movie star that gets nine hundred and sixty dollars for eight-hour day.”

“Well,” she said dubiously, “if there’s money involved. They’re selling Beethoven quartets fifty per cent off down at the record shop— Only what if Morris doesn’t know the answer?”

“He knows all the answers, doesn’t he?”

She turned with her hand on the doorknob and said quite seriously: “Sometimes I think he does. He knows so much it saps the energy right out of him.”

Hilda adjusted the blind and let a little light into the bedroom-sittingroom. The floor was covered with newspapers, the walls with shelves of books and record albums. A large Capehart dominated the room and the lives of the two people who lived in it. Morris was sleeping on an uncovered studio bed opposite the window, a small dark man in candy-striped pyjamas. He rolled over and sat up blinking. His eyes looked huge and emotional without his glasses.

He stared at me blindly: “What time is it? Who is it?”

“Nearly nine o’clock, dear. Lew came to ask you a question.” She handed him his glasses from a shelf above the bed.

“My God, so early?” He refused to look at me. He put his hands on opposite shoulders and rocked himself and groaned.

“I’m sorry, Morris. It will only take a minute. Can you give me Walter Kilbourne’s address? He isn’t in the phone book. I have his car license, but this is a personal matter.”

“Never heard of him.”

“For ten dollars, darling,” Hilda said very gently.

“If you don’t know where Kilbourne lives, admit it. He looks like money to me, and he’s married to the most beautiful woman in town.”

“Ten million dollars, more or less,” he said resentfully. “As for Mrs. Kilbourne, I don’t go for ash blondes myself. My aesthetic taste demands a ruddier coloration.” He smiled with frank admiration at his wife.

“Fool.” She sat down beside him and ruffled his black wire hair.

“If Mavis Kilbourne was as beautiful as all that, she’d have got on in pictures, wouldn’t she? But no, she married Kilbourne.”

“Kilbourne or the ten million?”

“More than ten million, come to think of it. Fifty-one per cent of Pacific Refining Company, current quotation 26-7/8 figure it out for yourself.”

“Pacific Refining Company,” I said slowly and distinctly, thinking of the woman who was drowned. “I thought he was in the taxi business.”

“He has some over in Glendale. His finger’s in several pies, but Pareco’s his plum. They got in early on the Nopal Valley strike.” He yawned, and leaned his head against his wife’s plump shoulder. “This bores me, Lew.”

“Go on. You are cooking electronically. Where does he live?”

“In the Valley.” His eyes were closed, and Hilda stroked with maternal awe the forehead that enclosed the filing-cabinet brain. “Staffordshire Estate, one of those private communities you need a special visa to get in. I was out there for a Fourth of July party. They had a Senator for guest of honor.”

“U.S. or State?”

“U.S. Senator, what do you think? State Senators are a dime a dozen.”

“Democratic or Republican?”

“What’s the difference? Haven’t I earned my ten dollars, brain-picker? Sweat-shopper?”

“One more question, asphalt intellectual. Where did the money come from in the first place?”

“Am I the Bureau of Internal Revenue?” He started to shrug, but found it required too much effort. “I am not.”

“You know things they don’t know.”

“I know nothing. All I hear is rumors. You are inciting me to commit a libel.”

“Spill it,” I said.

“Storm-trooper.”

“Now that isn’t nice to call anybody,” Hilda said soothingly.

I reminded him of the question: “The money. Where did it come from?”

“It didn’t grow on trees,” he said, and smothered a yawn. “I heard that Kilbourne made a fine thing out of black-market cars in Detroit during the war. Then he rushed down here to invest his money legitimately before somebody took it away from him. Now he’s grand old California stock and politicians go to his parties. Don’t quote me, it’s only a rumor. He might have spread it himself to cover up something worse, now that I come to think of it.”

Morris looked around the room with a dreaming smile and went to sleep sitting up. Removing his glasses, Hilda laid the limp boyish body out on the bed. I handled her the ten and moved to the door.

She followed me. “Come round in the daytime, Lew, we got the new Strauss from Paris.”

“I will when I have some time. I’m on my way to Nevada at the moment.”

“Seriously?”

“It looks like it.”

“That’s where Sue’s living, isn’t she?” Her round fat face lit up. “You’re going to have a reconciliation!”

“Not a chance. This is business.”

“I know you’ll come back together. Wait and see.”

“The bottom dropped out. All the king’s horses couldn’t put it back in for us.”

“Oh, Lew.” She looked ready to cry. “You made such a nice couple together.”

I patted her arm. “You are lovely and good, Hilda.” Morris groaned in his sleep. I went.