The Drowning Pool

Chapter 19

The house on the mesa was dark and silent. Nothing stirred, inside or out, but the shrill sighing of the cicadas rising and falling in the empty fields. I knocked on the front door and waited, shivering in my clothes. There was no wind, but the night was cold. The insect cry sounded like wind in autumn trees.

I tried the door. It was locked. I knocked on it again. After a long time a light appeared in the hall, footsteps dragged themselves toward the door. The porch light over my head was switched on, and the door opened, inch by inch. It was Mrs. Strang, the housekeeper, her time-bleached hair in double braids, her eyes puffed and reddened from sleep.

The old eyes peered at me: “Is it Mr. Archer?”

“Yes. I have to see Mrs. Slocum.”

Her hands plucked at the collar of her blue rayon wrapper. A pink-flowered flannel nightgown showed beneath it. “Mrs. Slocum is dead,” she said with a frown of grief.

“Not Maude Slocum. I saw her less than two hours ago.”

“Oh, you mean young Mrs. Slocum. She’s in bed, I guess. Which is where you should be. This is no hour of the night—”

“I know. I have to see her. Will you wake her for me?”

“I don’t know whether I ought to. She’ll be displeased.”

“I’ll wake her myself if you don’t.”

“Gracious, no.” She moved as if to bar the door against me, then changed her mind: “Is it as important as all that?”

“A matter of life and death.” I didn’t know whose life, or whose death.

“Very well, come in. I’ll ask her to come down.”

She left me in the sitting-room and shuffled out. The twin braids down her back looked stiff and dry, like flowers pressed in an old forgotten book.

When she returned her face and body were sagging with anxiety. “Her door is locked. She doesn’t answer.”

I moved toward her, hurried her with me into the hall and along it to the stairs. “Do you have a key?”

“There is no key for that door.” She was panting. “It’s bolted on the inside.”

“Show me.”

She toiled up the stairs ahead of me and led me down the upstairs hall to the last door. It was made of heavy oak panels. I set my shoulder against it and failed to move it.

The housekeeper took my place at the door and cried out, “Mrs. Slocum!” on a cracked note of despair.

“You’re sure she’s in there,” I said.

“She must be in there. The door is bolted.”

“I’ll have to break it down. Do you have a crowbar or a pinchbar? Anything.”

“I’ll go and see. There are tools in the back kitchen.”

I switched off the light in the hall and saw that there was light behind the door. I leaned against it again and listened. No snore, no sound of drunken breathing, no sound of any kind. Maude Slocum was sleeping very soundly.

Mrs. Strang came back, her body moving like a lumpy bundle of terror and compunction. Her veined hands held a short steel bar with one flat end, the kind that is used to open packing cases. I took it from her and inserted the flat end between the door and the frame. Something cracked and gave when I pulled on it. I shifted the bar and pulled hard once again. Wood tore, and the door sprang open.

There was a triple-mirrored dressing-table against the wall to my right, an oversize Hollywood bed, its chenille surface uncrumpled, to my left beside the windows. Maude Slocum lay between them. Her face was dark gray shaded with blue, like a Van Gogh portrait at its maddest. The fine white teeth glaring in rictus between the purple lips gave it a grotesque blackface touch. I kneeled beside her, felt for pulse and heartbeat. She was dead.

I stood up and turned to the housekeeper. She was advancing into the room slowly against great pressure. “Has something happened?” she whimpered, knowing the answer.

“The lady is dead. Call the police, and try to contact Knudson.”

“Augh!” She turned away, and the pressure of death drove her scuttling to the door.

Cathy Slocum passed her coming in. I moved to shield the corpse with my body. Something in my face stopped the girl in her tracks. She stood facing me, slim and soft in a white silk nightgown. Her eyes were dark and accusing.

“What is it?” she demanded.

“Your mother is dead. Go back to your room.”

All her muscles tightened, drawing her body erect. Her face was a white tragic mask. “I have a right to stay.”

“You’re getting out of here.” I took a step toward her.

She caught a glimpse of the thing that lay behind me. The white mask crumbled like plaster suddenly. She spread one hand across her blind face. “How can she be dead? I—” Grief took her by the throat and choked her into silence.

I laid an arm across her shuddering back, turned her toward the door, propelled her our. “Look, Cathy, I can’t do anything for you. Go and get your father, why don’t you?”

She blubbered between sobs: “He won’t get out of bed—he says he can’t.”

“Well, get into bed with him then.”

It wasn’t the right thing to say, but her reaction shocked me. Both of her small fists exploded against my face and sent me off balance. “How dare you say a dirty thing like that?” She followed it up with every Anglo-Saxon word that every schoolgirl knows.

I retreated into the room where the silent woman lay, and shut the door on Cathy. The heavy iron bolt hung loose and useless in its socket; the screws that held it had been torn out of the moulding, but the latch still worked. It clicked, and I heard the girl’s bare feet go down the hall. I went to the windows, which stood in a row of three above the bed. They were steel-framed casements, opening outward above the tiled roof of the veranda, and all of them were open. But there were copper screens inside the glass set in metal frames and fastened firmly with screws. No one could have entered the room or left it after the door was bolted.

I returned to the woman on the floor. A lambswool rug was wadded under one shoulder, as if she had crumpled it up in a convulsion. She had on the same dress I had seen her in, pulled high up on her dingy-colored thighs. I had an impulse to pull it down, to cover the sprawling legs I had admired. My training wouldn’t let me. Maude Slocum belonged to strychnine and policemen and black death.

The light in the room came from a double-barreled fluorescent desk-lamp on a writing-table opposite the door. A portable typewriter stood uncovered directly under the lamp, a sheet of plain white paper curling from the roller. There were a few lines of typing on the paper. I stepped around the body to read them.

That was all.

A small green medicine bottle stood open by the typewriter, its black metal cap beside it. The label bore a red skull-and-crossbones. It stated that the prescription, ordered by Dr. Sanders for Mrs. Olivia Slocum, had been made up by the Nopal Valley Pharmacy on May 4 of that year, and was to be taken as directed. I looked into the bottle without touching it and saw that it was empty.

There was nothing else on the top of the table, but there was a wide drawer in its front. I pushed a chair out of the way, and using a handkerchief to cover my fingers, pulled the drawer halfway out. It contained some sharpened pencils, a used lipstick, hairpins and paperclips, a scrambled mass of papers. Most of these were receipted bills from shops and doctors. A book from a Nopal Valley bank showed a balance of three hundred and thirty-six dollars and some cents, after a withdrawal of two hundred dollars two days before. Flipping through the papers with the point of a broken pencil, I found one personal letter, typed on a single sheet with a Warner Brothers letterhead.

It started out with a bang:

The letter was undated, and was signed “Millie.” I looked at the woman on the floor, and wondered if she had ever had that lunch. I also wondered if Mildred Fleming had left for England yet, and how much she knew about “Him.” “Him” sounded more like Knudson than the deity. And Knudson would soon be here.

I pulled the drawer out further. A folded newspaper clipping, stuck in the crack between the bottom of the drawer and the back, had slipped down almost out of sight. I pulled it out, unfolded it under the light. It was a long newspaper column headed by a two-column picture of two men. One was Knudson, the other a dark young man in a torn white shirt. “Captor and Escapee,” the caption said. “Lieutenant of Detectives Ralph Knudson, of the Chicago police, holds Charles “Cappie” Mariano, convicted slayer of three, who escaped from Joliet Penitentiary last Monday. Lieutenant Knudson tracked him into custody the following day.” The news story gave details of the exploit, and I read it slowly and carefully. The dateline was April 12, but there was no indication of the year. I folded the clipping again, put it back where I found it, and closed the drawer.

The message in the typewriter drew me back. There was something funny about it I couldn’t name, something that needed explaining. Without a clear idea of what I was doing, I took the letter Maude Slocum had given me out of my inside pocket, and spread it out on the table beside the typewriter. “Dear Mr. Slocum.” It was like a memory of something I had heard a long time ago, way back before the war. “Lilies that fester smell far worse than weeds.” The woman on the floor would fester soon; the letter didn’t matter now.

My attention fastened on the first word of the salutation, “Dear;” shifted to the note in the typewriter, “Dear Heart;” came back to the letter on the table. The two “Dears” were identical: the initial D of each was slightly out of line, and the ‘a’ had a barely perceptible break in the middle of the curve. Though I was no typewriter expert, it looked to me as if Maude Slocum’s suicide note and the letter to her husband had been typed on the same machine.

I was trying to make sense of it when heavy footsteps sounded in the hall. The door opened and Knudson came into the room. I stood and watched him like a vivisectionist studying an animal under the knife. But his reaction was a man’s. When he saw the darkened face on the floor, his entire body buckled. He almost went down, but caught himself and leaned upright against the door-frame. A uniformed policeman looked over his shoulder into the room. Knudson shut the door on the questioning face.

He turned to me. His bloodless skin was a dirty yellow and his eyes glared. “Maude is dead?” The big voice came out small and furred with pain.

“She’s dead. Strychnine takes them fast.”

“How do you know it’s strychnine?”

“It shows on her. And there’s a note in the typewriter. I think it was meant for you.”

He looked at the woman on the floor between us, and flinched. “Give me the note.” His shoulder stayed against the door-frame. He would not walk over or past her.

I pulled the sheet from the roller and brought it to him.

He read it over and over to himself, his heavy lips forming the syllables. Sweat came out on his face and gathered in its crevices like tears.

“Why did she want to kill herself?” The effort of speaking wrenched his mouth sideways and left it that way.

“You tell me. You knew her better than I did.”

“I loved her. I guess she didn’t love me. Not enough.”

Grief worked on him like truth serum. He had forgotten that I was there, or who I was. Perhaps he had forgotten who he was.

Slowly he remembered. His forces regrouped themselves around a stony core of ego. I could see hard masculine pride come into his face, straightening the mouth and jaw, masking the hurt eyes. He folded the suicide note with large and gentle fingers, thrust it away in a pocket.

“I just got here,” he said. “Nothing was said. You didn’t find this paper.” He patted the pocket.

“And you are George the Sixth, the King of England. Not ex-Lieutenant Knudson of the Chicago police.”

His right hand reached for me, took hold of the front of my coat and tried to shake me. “You’ll do as I say.”

I struck the hand down. The letter I had been holding tore from my fingers and slid to the floor. He stooped and had it in a single movement. “What’s this?”

“The letter I was hired to investigate. It was written on the same typewriter as the suicide note. Think about that. When you’ve finished thinking about that, think about this. Your boy Franks got paid five hundred for the information that I was on my way here with Reavis. Walter Kilbourne paid him. I can identify the leader of the lynching party as one of Kilbourne’s men.”

“You talk too much.” He read the letter, grunting impatiently, then crushed it into a ball and put it away with the other.

“You’re destroying evidence, Knudson.”

“I said you talk too much. I’m the judge of what’s evidence around here.”

“You won’t be for long. You can take that as a threat if you want to.”

He leaned toward me with his teeth bared. “Who’s threatening who? I’ve had enough from you. Now you can get out of town.”

“I’m staying.”

He leaned closer. His breath was fetid and hot like a carnivore’s. “You’re getting out of town tonight, now, and you’re not coming back. I can send you up for a long time, Archer. You brought Reavis across a state line under duress. You know what that is in the law.”

He had me. I’d tied myself up and handed myself to him. Bitter water squeezed from my eyes and burned on my face.

His right hand moved under his coat, loosening the gun in his shoulder holster. “Are you going, or are you staying to take the rap?”

I didn’t answer.

He opened the door and I went out past the policeman in the hall. Times and places went through my head in a red rush. There had to be another time and place for me and Knudson.