The Drowning Pool

Chapter 14

From the highway the Staffordshire Estates were a discreet brass marker bolted to a stone arch, through which a new blacktop turned off the public road. A metal sign on one side of the arch informed me further that they were PROTECTED BY PRIVATE PATROL. The rustic redwood gates stood open, and I drove through them. Morning haze was drifting slowly up the canyon ahead, a translucent curtain between the outside world and the privately patrolled world I was entering. There were trees along the road, tall cypresses and elms, and small birds singing in them. Behind adobe walls and thick square-cut hedges, sprinklers were whirling lariats of spray. The houses, massive and low and bright among banks of flowers set in billiard-table lawns, were spaced out of sight of each other, so that no one but the owners could enjoy them. In this corner of the San Fernando Valley, property had become a fine art that was an end in itself. There were no people in sight, and I had a queer feeling that the beautiful squatting houses had taken over the canyon for their own purposes.

Valmy, Arbuthnot, Romanovsky, the mailboxes announced as I drove by them: Lewisohn, Tappingham, Wood, Farrington, Von Esch. WALTER J. KILBOURNE was neatly stenciled on the ninth mailbox and I turned up the drive beside it. The house was built of pink brick and glass, with a flat jutting redwood roof. The drive was lined with twenty shades of begonia. I parked in the gravelled loop that went past the front door, and pressed the button beside it. Chimes echoed through the house. The place was as noisy as a funeral parlor at midnight, and I liked it almost as well.

The door was opened silently by a small Japanese whose footsteps made no sound. “You wish something, sir?” His lips were very careful with the sibilants. Over his white linen shoulder I could see an entrance loggia containing a white grand piano and a white-upholstered Hepplewhite sofa. A pool beyond the white-columned windows threw rippling sapphire shadows on the white walls.

“Mr. Kilbourne,” I said. “He told me he’d be home.”

“But he is not. I am sorry, sir.”

“It has to do with an oil lease. I need his signature.”

“He is not at home, sir. Do you wish to leave a message?”

There was no way to tell if he was lying. His black eyes were unblinking and opaque. “If you can tell me where he is—?”

“I do not know, sir. He has gone for a cruise. Perhaps if you were to try his office, sir. They have direct telephone communication with the yacht.”

“Thanks. May I call the office from here?”

“I am sorry, sir. Mr. Kilbourne has not authorized me to admit unknown persons to his home.” He ducked his bootbrush hair at me in a token bow, and shut the door in my face.

I climbed into my car, closing the door very gently so as not to start an avalanche of money. The loop in the drive took me past the garages. They contained an Austin, a jeep, and a white roadster, but no black limousine.

The limousine met me halfway back to the highway. I held the middle of the road and showed three fingers of my left hand. The black car braked to a stop a few feet short of my bumpers, and the chauffeur got out. His scarred eyes blinked in the brightening sun.

“What’s the trouble, mac? You give me the sign.”

I hitched the gun from my shoulder-holster as I stepped out of the car, and showed it to him. He raised his hands to shoulder level and smiled. “You’re screwy to try it, punk. I got nothing worth taking. I’m an old con myself but I got wise. Get wise like me and put away the iron.” The smile sat strangely, like a crooked Santa Claus mask, on his battered face.

“Save it for Wednesday night meeting.” I moved up to him, not too close. He was old, but strong and fast, and I didn’t want to shoot him.

He recognized me then. His face was expressive, like a concrete block. “I thought you was in the refrigerator.” The large hands closed and opened.

“Keep them up. What did you do with Reavis? Refrigerate him, too?”

“Reavis?” he said with laborious foxiness. “Who’s Reavis? I don’t know any Reavis.”

“You will, when they take you down to the morgue to look at him.” I improvised: “The Highway Patrol found him by the road outside of Quinto this morning. His throat was cut.”

“Uh?” The air issued from his mouth and nostrils as if I’d body-punched him.

“Let me see your knife,” I said, to keep his fifty points of I.Q. occupied.

“I got no knife. I had nothing to do with it. I dropped him over the Nevada line. He couldn’t come back that fast.”

“You came back that fast.”

His face worked with the terrible effort of thought. “You’re feeding me a sucker’s line,” he said. “He never went back to Quinto, they never found him.”

“Where is he now, then?”

“I ain’t talking,” the concrete block announced. “You might as well put your iron away and lam.”

We were in a dark-green valley walled with close-set laurel on both sides. The only sound was the hum of our idling cars. “You have a deceptive face,” I said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was alive. You want it gun-whipped.”

“Try it on,” he said stolidly. “See where it gets you.”

I wanted to hurt him, but the memory of the night was ugly in my mind. There had to be a difference between me and the opposition, or I’d have to take the mirror out of my bathroom. It was the only mirror in the house, and I needed it for shaving.

“Run along, quiz kid.” I slanted the gun at the road. He went back to his car.

“Punk,” he shouted in his thick, expressionless voice as he swerved in the ditch to pass me. His wrap-around bumper nicked the left rear fender of my car, and he blasted my ears with him horn to show it was deliberate. The roar of his accelerating motor rose like a sound of triumph.

I put mine in gear. All the way across the desert I scanned the side of the road for blind cripples and old ladies that I could help across and minister to with potions of camomile tea.