The Drowning Pool

Chapter 17

The man behind the wire partition was speaking into a hand mike in a cheerless monotone: “Car sixteen investigate reported assault corner Padilla and Flower. Car sixteen corner Padilla and Flower.”

He switched off the microphone and drew on a wet cigarette. “Yes sir?” He leaned forward to look at me through his wicket. “You have an accident?”

“It was no accident. Where’s the Chief?”

“He’s out on a case. What’s the trouble?”

“I called you around nine. Did Knudson get my message?”

“Not me you didn’t call. I just come on at midnight.” He took another puff and scanned me impassively through the smoke. “What was this here message about?”

“It should be logged. I called at five to nine.”

He turned back the top sheet on his board and glanced at the one underneath. “You must of made a mistake. There’s nothing here between 8:45, a drunk on State, and 9:25, prowler over on Vista. Unless it was that prowler trouble?”

I shook my head.

“It wasn’t the sheriff’s branch office you called?”

“I called here. Who was on the desk?”

“Franks.”

“He’s a detective. He wouldn’t be doing desk duty.”

“He was filling in for Carmody. Carmody’s wife is going to gave a baby. Now what about this call? Name?”

“Archer. I’ll talk to Knudson.”

“You the private dick in the Slocum case?”

I nodded.

“He’s out there now. I can call him.”

“Don’t bother. I’ll drive out. Is Franks around?”

“Naw, he went home.” He leaned forward confidentially, crushing out his cigarette. “You want my honest opinion, Franks ain’t fit to handle this man’s job. He dropped the ball before now. Was the call important?”

I didn’t say. And ugly shape was taking form in the dreary, austere room, hanging almost tangibly over my head. It dragged on me, slowing my footsteps as I went out to the car. Anger and fear took over when I got my hands on the wheel. I ran through two red lights on the way out of town.

“We’re not going back there?” the boy said shakily.

“Not yet. I have to see the Chief of Police.”

“I don’t understand what’s happening. It’s terrible. You tried to save him and he turned on you.”

“He was stupid. He thought they were his friends. He didn’t have any friends.”

“It’s terrible,” he said again, to himself.

The veranda lights of the Slocum house were on, illuminating the massive walls, the clipped funereal lawn. It was a mausoleum banked with flowers and lit for company. The black police car at the foot of the terraces was fit for death to ride in, quietly and fast. I left the boy in the car and started up the walk. Knudson and Maude Slocum came to the front door together. They moved apart perceptibly when they recognized me. Mrs. Slocum stepped through the door alone, with her hand outstretched.

“Mr. Archer! Police headquarters phoned that you were coming. Where in the world have you been?”

“Too far. I could use a drink.”

“Of course, come in.” She opened the door and held it for me. “You’ll make him a drink, won’t you, Ralph?”

He glanced at her warningly—the hard and practiced glance on an old enemy, an old lover. “Glad to, Mrs. Slocum. What’s the good word, Archer?” His manner was cumbersome with a false friendliness.

“The word is all bad.”

I gave it to them over my drink, in the sitting-room where the Slocums had quarreled the night before and then made up. Mrs. Slocum had a bruise on her cheekbone, barely visible under a heavy coating of suntan powder. She wore a green wool dress which emphasized the luxury of her figure. Her eyes and mouth and temples were haggard, as if the rich hungry body had been draining them of blood. Knudson sat beside her on a chintz-covered settee. Unconsciously, as I talked, her crossed knees tilted toward him.

“I caught up with Reavis in Las Vegas—”

“Who told you he was there?” Knudson asked softly.

“Legwork. I started back with him between six and seven, with a kid I hired to drive. At nine I called your headquarters from a gas stop in the desert, and told the desk to tell you I was coming.”

“I didn’t get it. Let’s see, who was on the desk?”

“Franks. He didn’t even bother to log the call. But he leaked the information to somebody else. Seven men stopped me on the Notch Trail, less than an hour ago. They used a truck for a roadblock. I shot one. Reavis thought the men were there to spring him, and he look me from behind. They knocked me out. Then they ventilated Reavis with a dozen slugs and gave him a gasoline barbecue.”

“Please,” Maude Slocum said, her face closed like a death mask. “How horrible.”

Knudson’s teeth tore at his thick lower lip. “A dirty lynching, eh? In twenty years in police work I never had a lynching to cope with.”

“Save it for your memoirs, Knudson. This is murder. The boy in my car is a witness. I want to know what you’re going to do about it?”

He stood up. Beneath his surface show of excitement, he seemed to be taking the thing much too easily. “I’ll do what I can. Notch Trail is out of my territory. I’ll call the sheriff’s office.”

“Franks is your boy.”

“Don’t worry, I’ll get to the bottom of that. Can you give me a description of these men?”

“They were masked with handkerchiefs. They looked at me like local products, ranchhands or oilfield hoods. One of them has a bullet hole in the inside right elbow. I’d know two voices if I heard them again. The boy might tell you more.”

“I’ll let the sheriff talk to him.”

I stood up facing him. “You don’t sound very eager.”

He saw my intention of forcing a showdown, decided to stall it off. “These outbreaks of mob violence are hard to deal with, you know that. Even if the sheriff does get hold of the men, which isn’t very likely, we’ll never get a jury to convict them. Mrs. Slocum was one of the town’s most respected citizens: you’ve got to expect some pretty raw feeling over her murder.”

“I see. Mrs. Slocum’s death is murder now. And Reavis’s death is vigilante stuff, popular justice. You’re not that stupid, Knudson, and neither am I. I know a mob when I see one. Those killers were hired. Amateurs maybe, but they didn’t do it for fun.”

“We won’t get personal,” he said in a heavy tone of warning. “After all, Reavis got what was coming to him. Amateur or not, the men that lynched him saved the state some money.”

“You think he killed Mrs. Slocum.”

“There isn’t any doubt of it in my mind. The medical examiner found marks on her back, subcutaneous hemorrhages where somebody pushed her. And the somebody seems to be Reavis. We found his cap about fifty feet from the pool, behind the trees that mask the filter system. That proves that he was there. He’d just lost his job: motive enough for a psycho. And immediately after the crime he skipped out.”

“He skipped out, yes, but publicly and slowly. He thumbed a ride from me outside the gate, and stopped off at a bar for a couple of drinks.”

“Maybe he needed a couple of drinks. Killers often do.”

Knudson had the red and stubborn look of a man who closed his mind. It was time to play the card I had been saving: “The timing is wrong. The earliest possible time that Marvell heard the splashing was twenty after eight. It was 8:23 exactly when I picked Reavis up, and it’s a mile or more from the pool to the gate.”

Knudson showed his teeth. A faint reflection of the grimace passed over Maude Slocum’s face, which was intent on his. “Marvell is a very imaginative type,” he said. “I took another statement from him today, after he calmed down a bit. He couldn’t be certain when he heard the splash, or even if he heard a splash at all. It’s possible that Mrs. Slocum was murdered a full hour before he found her. There’s no way of establishing how long she was in the water.”

“Still, I don’t think Reavis did it.”

“What you don’t think isn’t evidence. I’ve given you the evidence, and it’s firm. Incidentally, it’s a little late for you to be telling me when you picked Reavis up, and going to bat for him. What happened, Archer, did he sell himself to you? I understand he was a very convincing guy.”

I held my anger. “There are other things. They can wait till you’ve done your phoning.”

With arrogant slowness, he took a cigar from his side pocket, asked the woman’s permission, bit off the end and dropped it in an ashtray, lit the cigar, blew out the match, puffed smoke in my direction. “When I need a door-knocker to tell me how to conduct my official work, I’ll send you a special-delivery letter.” He left the room, trailing cigar smoke; and came back from the hall immediately, holding Cathy Slocum by the arm. She twisted in his grasp. “Let me go, Mr. Knudson.”

He dropped her arm as if she had struck him. “I’m sorry, Cathy. I didn’t mean to be rough.”

She turned her back on him and moved toward the door, her low-heeled white fur slippers scuffing the rug. Wrapped in a pink quilted robe, with her gleaming hair brushed down her back, she looked like a child. Knudson watched her with a curious, helpless expression.

“Wait a minute, darling,” her mother said. “What are you doing up so late?”

Cathy stopped inside the door, but refused to turn. Her satin-covered shoulders were stiff and obstinate. “I was talking to father.”

“Is he still awake?”

“He couldn’t sleep, and I couldn’t either. We heard voices, and he sent me down to see who it was. Now may I go back to bed, please?”

“Of course you may, dear.”

“I’d like to ask Cathy a question,” I said. “Do you object, Mrs. Slocum?”

She raised her hand in a maternal gesture. “The poor girl’s had to answer so many questions. Can’t it wait until morning?”

“All it needs is a yes-or-no answer, and it’s a crucial question. Pat Reavis claimed her as an alibi.”

The girl turned in the doorway. “I’m not a child, mother. Of course I can answer a question.” She stood with her feet apart, her fists thrust deep into the pockets of her robe.

“All right, dear. As you wish.” I got the impression that the mother was the one who usually gave in.

I said to her: “Reavis claimed he came out here to see you last night. Was he with you before I found you in my car?”

“No. I haven’t seen him since that trouble in Quinto.”

“Is that all?” Knudson said.

“That’s all.”

“Come and kiss your mother goodnight,” Maude Slocum said.

The girl crossed the room with an unwilling awkwardness and kissed her mother on the cheek. The older woman’s arms moved up around her. The girl stepped out of them quickly, and away.

Knudson watched them as if he was unaware of the tension between them. He seemed to take a simple delight in the forced, loveless transaction of the kiss. He followed Cathy out of the room with a set smile on his face, the glowing cigar held cockily in the middle of the smile.

I sat down on the settee beside Maude Slocum: “Reavis is sewed up tight. I see what Knudson meant.”

“Are you still unsatisfied?” she asked me earnestly.

“Understand me, Reavis means nothing to me. It’s the total picture that bothers me: there are big gaps in it. For example. Do you know a man by the name of Walter Kilbourne?”

“More questions, Mr. Archer?” She reached for a silver cigarette box on the table beside her. Her hand, badly controlled, knocked the box to the floor. The cigarettes spilled out, and I started to pick them up.

“Don’t bother,” she said, “please don’t bother. It doesn’t matter. Things in general seem to be going to pieces. A few cigarettes on the floor are the least of my worries.”

I went on picking the cigarettes. “What is the greatest of your worries? Is it still that letter you gave me?”

“You ask so many questions. I wonder what it is that keep you asking them. A passion for justice, a passion for truth? You see, I’ve turned the tables on you.”

“I don’t know why you should bother to.” I set the full box on the table, lit her cigarette and one for myself.

She drew on it gratefully. Her answer was visible written in smoke on the air: “Because I don’t understand you. You have mind and presence enough for a better job, certainly one with more standing.”

“Like your friend Knudson’s? I worked in a municipal police department for five years, and then I quit. There were too many cases where the official version clashed with the facts I knew.”

“Ralph is honest. He’s been a policeman all his life, but he still has a decent conscience.”

“Two of them, probably. Most good policemen have a public conscience and a private conscience. I just have the private conscience; a poor thing, but my own.”

“I was right about you. You do have a passion for justice.” The deep eyes focused on mine and probed them, as if a passion for justice was something she could see and remember the shape of. Or a strange growth in a man that could be X-rayed out.

“I don’t know what justice is,” I said. “Truth interests me, though. Not general truth if there is any, but the truth of particular things. Who did what when why. Especially why. I wonder, for example, why you care whether I’m interested in justice. It could be an indirect way of asking me to drop out of this case.”

She was silent for a time. “No. It isn’t that. I have some regard for truth myself. I suppose it’s a woman’s regard: I want the truth if it doesn’t hurt too much. And I suppose I’m a little afraid of a man who cares strongly about something. You really care, don’t you, whether Reavis is innocent or guilty?”

“Doesn’t Knudson and his decent conscience?”

“He did, but I don’t know if he still does. There are a lot of things going on that I don’t understand.” That made two of us. “My esteemed husband, for instance, has retired to his room and refuses to emerge. He claims that he’ll spend the rest of his life in his room, like Marcel Proust.” Hatred flashed in the ocean-colored eyes and disappeared, like a shark-fin.

I crushed out my cigarette, which tasted acrid on an empty stomach. “This Marcel something-or-other, is he a friend of yours?”

“So now you’re going to play dumb again?”

“I might as well. It seems to be all the rage in this ménage. You’re perfectly willing to talk about abstractions like truth and justice. But you haven’t told me a single damned fact that might help to find the person that wrote the letter, or the person that killed your mother-in-law.”

“Ah, the letter. We’re back at the letter again.”

“Mrs. Slocum,” I said, “the letter wasn’t written about me. It was written about you. You hired me to find out who wrote it, remember?”

“So much has happened since, hasn’t it? It seems unimportant now.”

“Now that she’s dead?”

“Yes,” she answered calmly. “Now that she’s dead.”

“Has it occurred to you that the letter-writer and the murderer may be the same person?”

“It hadn’t. I can’t see any connection.”

“Neither can I. With co-operation, I might; if you’d tell me what you know about the relations between the people in this house.”

She raised her shoulders and let them fall in a gesture of weary resignation. “I can’t claim immunity to questioning on the grounds of extreme youth, like Cathy. I am most frightfully tired. What do you want to know?”

“How long you’ve known Knudson, and how well.”

She gave me a second slow and probing look. “Just the last year or so, not at all intimately.”

“Yesterday you mentioned a friend of yours, by the name of Mildred Fleming. She might be able to tell me a different story. Or don’t you confide in your friends, either?”

She answered coldly: “I think you’re being insolent, Mr. Archer.”

“Very good, ma’am. We’ll play the game according to the formal rules. Unless you want to call it on account of insolence.”

“I haven’t decided about that. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I do know Walter Kilbourne. In fact, I saw him tonight.”

Knudson’s heavy feet came down the hall, his sloping shoulders filled the doorway. “I finally routed sheriff out of bed. He’ll meet us at the Notch.”

“You,” I said, “not me. Mrs. Slocum has just been kind enough to offer me another drink, and I need it. I’ll give the sheriff a statement in the morning. Take the kid along. His name is Musselman and he’s in my car, probably sleeping by now.—You should get some good tread-marks where the truck pulled onto the shoulder to turn around.”

“Thank you very much for the masterly suggestion.” His tone was ironic, but he seemed to be relieved that I wasn’t going along. He and the sheriff could putter around the scene of the crime, gather up the remains and drive them back to town. Nothing was going to be done.

“See that the kid has a decent place to sleep, will you? And give him this for me, I owe it to him.” I handed him a ten-dollar bill.

“Whatever you say. Goodnight, Mrs. Slocum. I appreciate your co-operation.”

“It was a pleasure.”

Old lovers, I thought again, playing with double entendres. Knudson went out. My initial liking for him had changed to something quite different. Still, he was a man, and a policeman. He wouldn’t push his way to what he wanted over an old lady’s dead body. He’d choose a harder way.

Maude Slocum rose and took my empty glass. “Do you really want a drink?”

“A short one, please, with water.”

“I think I’ll join you.”

She poured me two fingers of whisky from the decanter, four fingers for herself. She took it at a gulp.

I sipped at mine. “What I really want is the dope on Kilbourne. I’ll take that straight.”

“God-damned truthoholic,” she said surprisingly. The idea of the whisky had hit her before it had time to work. She sat down beside me heavily and loosely. “I don’t know anything about Walter Kilbourne, nothing against him I mean.”

“That makes you unique, I guess. Where did you see him tonight?”

“At the Boardwalk restaurant in Quinto. I thought Cathy deserved a change after the dreary day she’d had with the police and—her father. Anyway, I drove her over to Quinto to have dinner, and I saw Walter Kilbourne in the restaurant. He was with a blonde young creature, a really lovely girl.”

“His wife. Did you have any conversation with him?”

“No. He didn’t recognize me, and I’d never particularly liked him. I did ask the headwaiter what he was doing here. Apparently his yacht is in the harbor.”

It was what I needed. Tiredness had drained my body of energy and begun to attack my will. I’d been chinning myself on the present moment, too exhausted to see beyond it. Now I could see myself crossing the pass to Quinto.

But there were more questions to ask. “How did you happen to know him in the first place?”

“He was here a couple of years ago. He made a business arrangement with my mother-in-law, to test for oil on her ranch. This was when they’d made a big strike on the other side of the valley, before they’d touched this side. A crew of men came out with Kilbourne and spent several weeks on our property, drilling holes and setting off explosive charges—I forget the technical name for it.”

“Seismographing?”

“Seismographing. They found the oil all right, but nothing came of it. Mother”—her lips moved round the word as if it tasted strange—“Mother decided that oil derricks would obstruct her precious view, and broke off relations with Kilbourne. There was more to it that that, of course: she didn’t like the man, and I don’t think she trusted him. So we’ve continued to live in genteel poverty.”

“Weren’t other companies interested? Oil’s getting pretty scarce in this part of the world.”

“She didn’t really want to lease to anyone. Besides, there was something in the original contract for the exploration; it gave Kilbourne’s company first refusal.”

“Naturally, it would.”

Her erratic hand reached blindly for a cigarette. I took one out of the box, put it between her fingers, lit it for her. She sucked on it uncontrolledly like a child. The whisky had combined with her fatigue and given her nervous system a hard one-two. Her face, her muscles, her voice, were rapidly going to pieces.

So I asked her the question that would hurt, and carefully watched her face for its effect: “You won’t be living in genteel poverty much longer, will you? I suppose that you and your husband will be getting in touch with Kilbourne. Or is that why he’s up here tonight?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me,” she said. “I imagine, though, that that’s just what we’ll do. I must talk to James about it.”

She closed her eyes. From the places where it was pinned to the durable bone, the flesh of her face fell in thin slack folds. The folds made dark lines slanting downward from the corners of her closed eyes, the wings of her nose, the edges of her jaw, deep charcoal shadows cartooning dissolution.

I said goodnight and left her.