The Drowning Pool

Chapter 18

There was only one light in the lower part of the house, a shaded wall-lamp in the hall midway between the front door and the kitchen. It cast a brownish glow into the alcove under the stairs where the telephone was. A copy of the Quinto-Nopal Valley telephone directory lay on the low table beside the telephone. I flipped through it to the F’s. Only one Franks was listed, a Simeon J. residing at 467 Tanner Terrace. I called his number and listened to half-a-dozen rings at the other end. Then a voice answered, harsh and surly:

“Franks speaking. That the station?”

I had opinions to express, but I kept them to myself.

“Hello,” he said, “this is Franks.”

I hung up. And heard the soft susurrus of feet descending the stairs above my head, a whispering amplified by the sounding-board of the stairs and my keyed-up senses. A face like a pale moon against a cloud of hair leaned over the banister.

“Who is it?” the girl said.

“Archer.” I moved out into the hall where she could see me plainly. “Aren’t you in bed yet, Cathy?”

“I daren’t close my eyes. I keep seeing Grandma’s face.” Both of her hands clung to the oaken rail, as if she needed a grip on solid reality. “What are you doing?”

“Telephoning. I’m finished now.”

“I heard Mr. Knudson telephoning before. Is it true that Pat is dead?”

“Yes. You liked him?”

“Sometimes, when he was nice. He was a lot of fun. He taught me how to dance, but don’t tell father. He didn’t really kill Grandma, did he?”

“I don’t know. I don’t think so.”

“Neither do I.” She glanced furtively down the hall, which was choked with shadows. “Where are the others?”

“Knudson has gone. Your mother’s in the sitting-room. I think she’s asleep.”

She drew her hand back further into the soft folds of her robe. “I’m glad that he’s gone anyway.”

“I have to go now, too. Will you be all right?”

“Yes, I’ll be all right.” She came down the rest of the way, her forearm sliding on the banister. “I’d better wake mother up and send her to bed.”

“Maybe you’d better.”

She followed me to the door. “Goodnight, Mr. Archer. I’m sorry I was rude to you last night. I must have felt that something was going to happen. I’m very sensitive, you know, at least that’s what people tell me. I’m like a dog that howls at the moon when there’s trouble in the air.”

“But you didn’t see Reavis last night.”

“No. I was kind of afraid that he might come—I hate emotional scenes—but he didn’t.” Her finger described a cross on her silken breast. “Cross my heart and hope to die.” She giggled in sudden strained mirth: “What a ghastly thing to say: ‘hope to die’.”

I said: “Goodnight, Cathy.”

Number 467 Tanner Terrace was white frame bungalow in one of the cheaper suburbs, standing among a dozen houses like it. They all had slanting roofs, useless green shutters on the two front windows, and the rootless temporary air of a row of trailers in a vacant lot. You told them apart by the numbers stenciled on the curb. Also, Sergeant Franks’s house contained light. It leaked around the edges of the closed Venetian blinds in the front windows and sprinkled the struggling lawn.

I drove on past, U-turned at the first intersection and parked a hundred feet short of the house. Franks was a policeman. In his own territory he could make trouble for me. I wasn’t the one I wanted trouble to be made for. I turned off engine and lights, slid down in the seat, dozed off with my consciousness slightly ajar. The sound of a nearing motor woke me a moment before bright headlights swept the street.

They straightened out and came to rest in front of Franks’s bungalow. There were three blue taxi-lights above the windshield. A man climbed awkwardly out of the back seat and started up the walk. His gait was a little lopsided; in the dim light I thought he was a cripple. The front door opened before he reached the low concrete stoop. He moved forward into the light, a short thick man in a brown horsehide windbreaker. Its right side bulged, and its right sleeve dangled empty. The front door closed on him.

The taxi turned in a driveway and rolled back to the curb in front of the house. Its lights winked out. I waited for a minute or two and left my car without slamming the door. The taxi-driver was stretched out in his seat, waiting for sleep.

I asked him: “Are you busy?”

He answered me with his eyes half-closed: “Sorry. I’m on a return trip.”

“To where?”

“Quinto.”

“That’s where I’m going.”

“Sorry, mister. This is a Quinto cab. I can’t take Nopal fares.”

“You can if you don’t charge me.”

“Then what’s the percentage?” He sat up straight, and his eyes snapped all the way open. They were blue and bulging in a hollow face. “Listen, what goes on?”

I showed him a ten-dollar bill. “Your percentage.” I said.

The bill crackled in my fingers, as if it was taking fire under the intensity of his gaze. “Okay, I guess it’s okay, if the other guy don’t object.” He leaned back to open the door for me.

I got in. “He shouldn’t object. Where is he going in Quinto?”

“I don’t know, where I picked him up, I guess. Down by the boardwalk.”

“Ever see him before?”

It was one question too many. He turned in his seat and looked me over. “You’re a cop?”

“It didn’t used to show.”

“Look’it here, I didn’t take your money. I didn’t say for sure I would take your money. Matter of fact, I wouldn’t touch your money. So how about just getting out and leaving me be. I’m trying to make an honest living, for gosh sakes.”

“All right. I’ll get out, and you beat it back to Quinto.”

“For gosh sakes, have a heart. This is a seven-dollar run.”

“Take it out of this.” I held out the ten-dollar bill.

He shied from it wall-eyed. “Uh-uh. No thanks.”

“Then beat it fast. There’s going to be trouble here, and you don’t want to wait for it.”

Before I got out, I tucked the bill between the cushions and the back of the seat, where taxi-drivers had a habit of looking. The forward motion of the cab closed the door. I went back to my car and waited. The man with the bulky right side and the empty sleeve came out almost immediately. He said goodnight to someone and turned toward the street. He was on the sidewalk before he noticed that the cab was gone.

He looked up and down the road, and I slid lower in my seat. His left hand pantomimed disgust in an outward-pushing gesture. His voice announced clearly that he would be fornicated with. I recognized his voice. When he turned to look at the house, the lights were gone. Shrugging lopsidedly, he started to walk in the direction of the highway. I let him walk a block before I started my motor, and pulled even with him as he reached the second corner. My gun was on the seat beside me.

“You want a lift?” I blurred my voice.

“I sure could use one, Jack.” He stepped off the curb into the road, within the circle of light from the streetlamp overhead. An oil-stained fedora cast a shadow over his dark broad face, from which the eye-whites gleamed.

“Quinto?”

“This is my lucky—” He recognized me or my car, and the sentence was never finished. His left hand dropped to the leather-flapped pocket of his windbreaker.

I swung the door wide open and waved my gun. His fingers were twisting at the leather button that held the flap over the pocket.

“Get in,” I said. “You don’t want it happen to the other arm? I have a passion for symmetry.”

He got in. I drove left-handed in low to a dark lacuna between streetlights, and parked at the curb. I shifted the gun to my left hand and held it low to his body. The gun I took from his pocket was a heavy revolver which smelt of fresh oil. I added it to the arsenal in my glove compartment and said: “Well.”

The man beside me was breathing like a bull. “You won’t get far with this, Archer. Better get back to your hunting-grounds before it happens to you.”

I told him I liked it where I was. My right hand found the wallet in his left hip-pocket, flipped it open under the dashlights. His driver’s license bore the name Oscar Ferdinand Schmidt.

I said: “Oscar Ferdinand Schmidt is a very euphonious name. It will go well in a murder indictment.”

He advised me to commit sodomy. I held my impulse to hurt him. Next to the driver’s license, and envelope of transparent celluloid held a small blue card which identified Oscar F. Schmidt as a Special Officer of the Company Police of the Pacific Refining Company. There were bills in the folding-money compartment, but nothing bigger than a twenty. I tucked the bills in his pocket, and the wallet in mine.

“I want my wallet back,” he said, “or I slap a charge on you.”

“You’re going to be busy fighting one of your own. The sheriff is going to find your wallet in the brush by the Notch Trail.”

He was silent for a minute, except that the horsehide jacket creaked like a bellows with his breathing. “The sheriff will give it back to me, without no questions asked. How do you think the sheriff gets elected?”

“I know now, Oscar. But it happens the FBI is interested in lynchings. Do you have an in with the Justice Department, too?”

His husky voice had changed when he answered. It had sick and frightened overtones. “You’re crazy if you try to buck us, Archer.”

I prodded him hard with the gun, so that he grunted. “You’ll sit in the cyanide room before I reserve a bed at Camarillo. Meanwhile I want you to talk. How much did you give Franks for the information, and who gave you the money?”

His brain worked cumbrously. I could almost hear it turn over and stall, turn over slowly again. “You let me go if I tell you?”

“For the present. I couldn’t be bothered with you.”

“And give me back the wallet?”

“I keep the wallet, and the gun.”

“I never fired the gun.”

“You never will.”

His brain turned over again. He was sweating, and starting to smell. I wanted him out of the car.

“Kilbourne gave me the money,” he said finally. “Five C’s, I think it was. You’re crazy if you buck him.”

I said: “Get out of my car.”

Where Tanner Terrace met the highway, I turned left back into Nopal Valley, instead of right to Quinto. The case was breaking faster than I had expected, faster than I could handle by myself. From where I sat, it looked as if Kilbourne had sparked a double play that would never be recorded on the sports pages: paid Reavis to dispose of Mrs. Slocum, then paid to have Reavis disposed of before he could talk. I didn’t like this theory: it explained the more obvious things, the deaths and the money, and gave no clue to the rest, but it was the best I had to go on. In any case, I couldn’t act on it without consulting my client. James Slocum’s wife was not above suspicion, but she hadn’t called me in to tie a noose around her handsome neck.

It was after closing-time, and the main street was almost deserted. A few late drunks were cruising the sidewalks, unwilling to end the night and face the morning. Some had female companions to assure them that fun was still to be had, that there were still doors in the dark walls that would open on romance for a nominal payment. The women were the kind that seldom appear in daylight and look dead when they do. Two plain-clothes men were trying doors on opposite sides of the street.

Passing Antonio’s place, I saw a small light behind the bar, half eclipsed by a man’s head. I braked the car and nosed in to the curb. I had ten thousand dollars in my breast pocket, which would be hard to explain if I was shaken down by the cops, harder to survive if anyone else found it on my. I wrapped the torn brown package in a piece of newspaper and tied it with friction tape. I’d talked to Antonio once, and didn’t know his last name, but he was the man I trusted in Nopal Valley.

He came to the blinded door when I rapped on the plate glass, opened it four inches on a chain. “Who is it, please?” His face was in the shadow.

I showed him mine.

“I am very sorry, I cannot sell after hours.”

“I don’t want a drink, I want you to do me a favor.”

“What kind of a favor?”

“Keep this in your safe until tomorrow.” I pushed one end of the package through the narrow opening.

He looked at it without touching it. “What is in the parcel?”

“Money. A lot of money.”

“Who is the owner of the money?”

“I’m trying to find out. Will you keep it?”

“You should take it to the police.”

“I don’t trust the police.”

“Yet you trust me?”

“Apparently.”

He took the package from my hands and said: “I will keep it for you. Also, I must apologize for what happened in my bar last night.”

I told him to forget it.