The Drowning Pool

Chapter 15

It was late afternoon when I crossed the great level pass. The shadow of my car was running ahead in fleet silence, and slowly increasing its lead. The sun was yellow on the arid slopes, the air so clear that the mountains lacked perspective. They looked like surrealist symbols painted on the shallow desert sky. The heat, which had touched 110 at one, was slackening off, but my hood was still hot enough to fry the insects that splattered it.

The Rush Apartments occupied a two-story frame building on the east side of Las Vegas. Jaundiced with yellow paint, it stood tiredly between a parking lot and a chain grocery store. An outside wooden staircase with a single sagging rail led up to a narrow veranda on which the second-floor apartments opened. An old man was sitting in a kitchen chair tipped back against the wall under the stairs. He had a faded bandana handkerchief around his scrawny neck, and was sucking on a corncob pipe. A week’s beard grew on his folded cheeks like the dusty gray plush in old-fashioned railway coaches.

I asked him where Mrs. Schneider lived.

“She lives right here,” he mumbled.

“Is she in now?”

He removed his empty pipe from his mouth and spat on the cement floor. “How do you expect me to know? I don’t keep track of women’s comings and goings.”

I laid a fifty-cent piece on the bony knee. “Buy yourself a bag of tobacco.”

He picked it up sulkily, and slipped it into a pocket of his food-crusted vest. “I s’pose her husband sent you? At least she says he’s her husband, looks more like her bully to me. Anyway, you’re out of luck now, slicker. She went out a while ago.”

“You wouldn’t know where?”

“To the den of iniquity, what do you think? Where she spends all her time.” He tipped his chair forward and pointed far down the street. “You see that green sign? You can’t make it out from here, but it says ‘Green Dragon’ on it. That’s the den of iniquity. And you want me to tell you the name of this town? Sodom and Gonorrhea.” He laughed an old man’s laugh, high-pitched and unamused.

“Is that Elaine Schneider?”

“I dont know any other Mrs. Schneiders.”

“What does she look like?” I said. “I never saw her.”

“She looks like Jezebel.” His watery eyes glittered like melting ice. “She looks like what she is, the whore of Babylon rolling her eyes and shaking her privates at Christian young men. Are you a Christian, son?”

I backed away thanking him and crossed the street, leaving my car at the curb. I walked the two blocks to the Green Dragon and worked some of the stiffness out of my legs. It was another seedy-looking bar. Signs in the dirty half-curtained windows advertised LIQUOR, BEER, HOT and COLD SANDWICHES and SHORT ORDERS. I pulled the screen door open and went in. A semi-circular bar with slot machines. Kitchen smells, the smell of stale spilled beer, the sick-sour smell of small-time gamblers’ sweat, were slowly mixed by a four-bladed fan suspended from the fly-specked ceiling.

There was only one customer at the bar, a thin boy with uncombed red hair hunched desolately over a short beer. The bartender sat on a stool in a corner, as far away from the desolate youth as possible. His greased black head leaned against a table radio. “Three nothing,” he announced to anyone who cared. “Top of the seventh.” No sign of Jezebel.

I took a seat beside the redheaded boy, ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle of beer. The bartender went out reluctantly through the swinging door to the kitchen.

“Look at me, eh,” the man beside me said. The words twisted his mouth as if they hurt. “How do you like me?”

His thin unshaven face looked dirty. His eyes had blue hollows under them and red rims around them. One of his ears was caked with dry blood.

“I like you very much,” I said. “You have that beaten look that everybody admires.”

It took the raw edge off his mood of self-pity. He even managed a smile which made him look five years younger, hardly more than a kid. “Well, I asked for it.”

“Any time,” I said, “any time.”

“I asked for it in more ways than one, I guess. I should know better than to go on a bat in Las Vegas, but I guess I’ll never learn.”

“You have a few more years before you die. What happened to your ear?”

He looked sheepish. “I don’t even know. I met a guy in a bar last night and he roped me into a game in a poker-parlor on the other side of town. All I remember, I lost my money and my car. I had three aces when I lost my car, and somebody started an argument: I guess it was me. I woke up in a parking lot.”

“Hungry?”

“Naw. Thanks, though. I had a little change. The hell of it is I got to get back to L.A., and I got no car.”

The bartender brought my food and drink. “Stick around,” I told the young Dostoevsky. “I’ll give you a lift if I can.”

While I was eating, a woman came through a door at the end of the bar. She was tall and big-boned, with more than flesh enough to cover her bones. The skirt of her cheap black suit was wrinkled where her hips and thighs bulged out. Her feet and ankles spilled over the tops of very tight black pumps. Her north end was decorated with a single gray fox, a double strand of imitation pearls approximately the same color, and enough paint to preserve a battleship. Her chest was like a battleship’s prow, massive and sharp and uninviting. She gave me a long hard searchlight look, her heavy mouth held loose, all ready to smile. I took a bite of my sandwich and munched at her. The searchlights clicked off, almost audibly.

She turned to the bar and snapped open a shiny black plastic bag. The yellow hair which she wore in a braided coronet was dark at the roots, obviously dyed. Turn it back to brown, take off a few years and a few more pounds, chip the paint off her face, and she could be Reavis’s twin. They had the same eyes, the same thick handsome features.

The bartender clinched it: “Something for you: Elaine?”

She tossed a bill on the pitted woodstone surface. “Twenty quarters,” she growled in a whisky voice that wasn’t unpleasant. “For a change.”

“Your luck is bound to change.” He smiled insincerely. “The one you been playing is loaded to pay anytime.”

“What the hell,” she said, deadpan. “Easy come, easy go.”

“Especially easy go,” the boy beside me said to the beer-foam in the bottom of his glass.

Mechanically, without excitement or any sign of interest, she fed the quarters one by one into a machine near the door. Somebody phoning long-distance to somebody else who had been dead for years. Some twos and fours, a single twelve, stretched her money out. They went back in as a matter of course. She played the machine as if it was a toneless instrument made to express despair. When the jackpot came in a jangling rush of metal, I thought the machine had simply broken down. Then the slugs and quarters overflowed the bowl and rolled on the floor.

“I told you,” the bartender said. “I said she was set to pay.”

Paying no attention to her winnings, she crossed to the bar and took the seat beside me. He gave her a double whisky in a shot-glass without being asked.

“You pick it up, Simmie.” Her voice had a trace of weary coquetry. “I’m wearing a girdle.”

“Sure, but I don’t need to count them. I’ll give you the twenty-five.”

“I put thirty-five in.” The double shot went down like water down a drain.

“That’s the percentage, kid. You got to pay something for all the fun you get.”

“Yeah, fun.” She folded the twenty and the five he gave her, and tucked them away in her bag.

A newsboy came in with an armful of Evening Review-Journal’s and I bought one. The third page carried the story I was looking for, under the heading: EX-MARINE SOUGHT IN NOPAL VALLEY DEATH. It gave no information I didn’t have, except that the police were maintaining an open mind as to the cause of death. Accompanying the story was a picture of Reavis, smiling incongruously over the caption: WANTED FOR QUESTIONING.

I folded the paper open at the third page and laid it on the bar between me and the big synthetic blonde. She didn’t notice it for a minute or two; she was watching the bartender gather up her jackpot. Then her gaze strayed back to the bar and saw the picture, tool hold of it. The breath wheezed asthmatically in her nostrils, and stopped entirely for a period of seconds. She took a pair of spectacles from her bag. With them on her face, she looked oddly like a schoolteacher gone astray.

“You mind if I look at your paper?” she asked me huskily. There was more south in her voice than there had been before.

“Go ahead.”

The bartender looked up from sorting the slugs and quarters on the bar. “Say, I didn’t know you wore glasses, Elaine. Very becoming.”

She didn’t hear him. With the aid of a scarlet-tipped finger moving slowly from word to word, she was spelling out the newspaper story to herself. When the slow finger reached the final period, she was silent and still for an instant. Then she said aloud: “Well I’ll be—!”

She flung the paper down, its edges crumpled by the moist pressure of her hands, and went to the street door. Her hips rolled angrily, her high heels spiked the floor. The screen door slammed behind her.

I waited thirty seconds and went after her. Rotating on his stool, the desolate youth followed me with his eyes, like a stray dog I had befriended and betrayed.

“Stick around,” I told him over my shoulder.

The woman was already halfway up the block. Though they were hobbled by her skirt, her legs were moving like pistons. The gray foxtail hung down her back, fluttering nervously. I followed her more slowly when I saw where she was going. She went up the outside door, and went in, leaving it open. I crossed the street and slid behind the wheel of my car.

She came out immediately. Something metallic in her hand caught a ray of sunlight. She pushed it into her bag as she came down the stairs. The forgotten glasses on her face gave it a purposeful air. I hid my face behind a road map.

She crossed the parking lot to an old Chevrolet sedan. Its original blue paint had faded to brownish green. The fenders were crumpled and dirty like paper napkins on a restaurant table. The starter jammed, the exhaust came out in spasms of dark blue smoke. I followed the pillar of smoke to the main highway junction in the middle of town, where it turned south towards Boulder City. I let it get well ahead as we passed out of town onto the open highway.

Between Boulder City and the dam an asphalt road turned off to the left toward Lake Mead, skirting the public beaches along the shore. Children were playing on the gravel below the road, splashing in the shallow waveless water. Further out a fast red hydroplane was skittering back and forth like a waterbug, describing esses on the paper-flat, paper-gray surface.

The Chevrolet turned off the blacktop, to the left again, up a gravel road which wound through low scrub oak. The brush and the innumerable branching lanes made an accidental maze. I had to move up on the woman to keep her in sight. She was too busy holding her car on the road to notice me. Her smooth old tires skidded and ground among the loose stones as she came out of one curve only to enter another.

We passed a public camping-ground where families were eating in the open among parked cars, tents, tear-drop trailers. A few hundred yards further on, the Chevrolet left the gravel road, turning up a brush-crowded lane which was no more than two ruts in the earth. Seconds later, I heard its motor stop.

I left my car where it was and went up the lane on foot. The Chevrolet was parked in front of a small cabin faced with peeled saplings. The woman tried the screen door, found it locked, pounded it with her fist.

“What gives?” It was Reavis’s voice, coming from inside the cabin.

I crouched behind a scrub-oak, feeling as if I should be wearing a coonskin cap.

Reavis unhooked the door and stepped outside. His hounds-tooth suit was dusty, and creased in all the wrong places. His hair curled down in his eyes. He pushed it back with an irritable hand. “What’s the trouble, sis?”

“You tell me, you lying little crumb.” He overshadowed her by half a head, but her passionate energy made him look helpless. “You told me you were having woman trouble, so I said I’d hide you out. You didn’t tell me that the woman was dead.”

He stalled for time to think: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Elaine. Who’s dead? This dame I was talking about isn’t dead. She’s perfectly okay only she says she’s missed two months in a row and I don’t want any part of it. She was cherry.”

“Yeah, a grandmother and cherry.” Her voice rasped with ugly irony. “This is one thing you can’t lie out of, sprout. You’re in too deep for me to try and help you. I wouldn’t help you even if I could. You can go to the gas chamber and I wouldn’t lift a finger to save your neck. Your neck ain’t worth the trouble to me or to anybody else.”

Reavis whined and whimpered: “What the hell are you talking about, Elaine. I didn’t do nothing wrong. Are the police after me?”

“You know damn well they are. This time you’re going to get it, sonny boy. And I want no part of it unnerstan’? I want no part of you from now on.”

“Come on now, Elaine, settle down. That’s no kind of talk to use on your little brother.” He forced his voice into an ingratiating rhythm and put one hand on her shoulder. She took it off and held her purse in both hands.

“You can save it. You’ve talked me into too much trouble in my life. Ever since you stole that dollar bill from maw’s purse and tried to shift it onto me, I knew you were heading for a bad end.”

“You’ve done real good for yourself, Elaine. Selling it for two-bits in town on Saturday night before you was out of pigtails. You still charging for it, or do you pay them?”

The concussion of her palm against his cheek cracked like a twenty-two among the trees. His fist answered the blow, thudding into her neck. She staggered, and her sharp heels gouged holes in the sandy earth. When she recovered her balance, the gun was in her hand.

Reavis looked at it uncomprehendingly, and took a step toward her. “You don’t have to go off your rocker. I’m sorry I hit you, Elaine. Hell, you hit me first.”

Her whole body was leaning and focused on the gun: the handle of a door that had always resisted her efforts, and still resisted. “Stay away from me.” Her low whisper buzzed like a rattler’s tail. “I’ll put you on the Salt Lake highway and I never want to see you again in my life. You’re a big boy now, Pat, big enough to kill people. Well, I’m a big enough girl.”

“You got me all wrong, sis.” But he stayed where he was, his hands loose and futile at his sides. “I didn’t do nothing wrong.”

“You lie. You’d kill me for the gold in my teeth. I seen you going through my purse this afternoon.”

He laughed shortly. “You’re crazy. I’m loaded, sis, I could put you on easy street.” He reached for his left hip pocket.

“Keep your hands where I can see them,” she said.

“Don’t be crazy, I want to show you—”

The safety clicked. The door that had resisted her was about to open. Her whole body bent tensely over the gun. Reavis’s hands rose from his side of their own accord, like huge brown butterflies. He looked sullen and stupid in the face of death.

“Are you coming?” she said. “Or do you want to die? You’re wanted by the cops, they wouldn’t even touch me if I killed you. What loss would it be to anybody? You never gave nothing but misery to a single soul since you got out of the cradle.”

“I’ll go along, Elaine.” His nerve had broken, suddenly and easily. “But you’ll be sorry, I warn you. You don’t know what you’re doing. Anyway, you can put away that gun.”

I wasn’t likely to get a better cue. I stepped from behind my tree with my gun ready. “A good idea. Drop the gun, Mrs. Schneider. You, Reavis, keep up your hands.”

Her whole body jerked. “Augh!” she said viciously. The small bright automatic fell from her hand, rustled and gleamed in the leaves in front of her feet.

Reavis glanced at me, the color mounting floridly in his face. “Archer?”

I said: “The name is Leatherstocking.”

He turned on his sister: “So you had to bring a cop along, you had to wreck everything?”

“What if I did?” she growled.

“Hold it, Reavis.” I picked up the woman’s gun. “And you, Mrs. Schneider, go away.”

“Are you a cop?”

“This isn’t question period. I could haul you in for accessory. Now go away, before I change my mind.”

I kept my gun on Reavis, dropped hers into the pocket of my jacket. She turned awkwardly on her heels and went to the Chevrolet, her hard face kneaded by the first indications of regret at what she had done.