The Drowning Pool

Chapter 20

Mrs. Strang met me at the foot of the stairs. “Mr. Archer, somebody wants to speak to you on the telephone. A woman. She’s been on the line some time but I didn’t like to interrupt when you were talking to the Chief of Police.”

“No,” I said. “That would be lèse majesté.”

She looked at me strangely. “At least I hope she’s still on the line. She said she’d wait. Are you all right, Mr. Archer?”

“I feel fine.” There was a roaring hollowness in my head, a tight sour ball at the bottom of my stomach. My case had been taken away from me just as it started to break. I felt fine.

I said, “This is Archer,” into the telephone.

“Well, you needn’t bite my head off. Were you sleeping?” The voice was sweet and lingering, like a fragrance: Mavis Kilbourne in a melting mood.

“Yeah, I was having nightmares. About a fancy broad who turned out to be a pickpocket whose surname was Trouble.”

She laughed: a mountain stream just below the snowline. “I’m not really a pickpocket, or even a broad. After all, I took what was mine. You’re not in a very pleasant mood, are you?”

“Improve it for me if you can. Tell me how you knew I was here.”

“I didn’t. I called your house and office in Los Angeles. Your answering service gave me the number. I don’t even know where you are, except that it’s Nopal Valley. I’m in Quinto.”

The operator cut in and asked for another ten cents please. The bell on the pay telephone sounded clearly over the line.

“I’m running out of dimes,” Mavis said. “Will you come to Quinto and talk to me?”

“Why the sudden interest at three in the morning? There’s nothing in my pocket but a gun.”

“It’s three-thirty.” Her yawn rustled in the mouthpiece. “I’m dead.”

“You’re not the only one.”

“Anyway, I’m glad you have a gun. You may need it.”

“For what?”

“I can’t tell you over the phone. I need you to do something for me. Will you accept me as a client?” The siren note again, like distant violins at a fine feast.

“I already have a client,” I lied.

“Couldn’t you work for both of us? I’m not proud.”

“I am.”

She lowered her voice. “I know it was a dirty trick to play on you. I had to do it, though. I burned the film, and it didn’t explode like you said.”

“Forget that. The trouble is that this could be another dirty trick.”

“It isn’t. I really need you. I may not sound afraid, but I actually am.”

“Of what?”

“I said I can’t tell you. Come to Quinto and I will. Please come.” We were talking in circles.

“Where are you in Quinto?”

“In a lunchroom by the beach, but I better not meet you here. You know the big pier by the yacht basin?”

“Yeah,” I said. “A perfect setup for an ambush.”

“Don’t be like that. I’ll be out at the end of the pier. There’s nobody there at this time of night. Will you come?”

“Give me half an hour.”

Quinto was any small seaport at four o’clock in the morning. Dark and empty streets slanted down to the dark and empty ocean. The air was fairly clear but droplets of water formed on my windshield and a sea smell, bitter and fresh, invaded the unpeopled town. At night it was an outpost of the sea, filled by cold tidal winds and shifting submarine blackness.

The reflection of a stop-light made a long red smudge on the asphalt where 101 Alternate crossed the foot of the town. Four or five heavy trucks had gathered at the truckstop on the corner like buffalo at a waterhole. As I turned right onto the freeway, I could see the drivers bent over early breakfast, and a thin-browed, pug-faced waitress smoking a cigarette by the kitchen door. It would have been very pleasant to stop and eat three eggs and talk a while and then go back to bed in the motel. I cut my wheels sharp left at the next crossing, and the tires whined in self-pity: so late, so weary. I said aloud, to myself and the whining tires: “Get it over with.”

The Quinto pier was a continuation of the street, carrying the blacktop road two hundred yards beyond the concrete sea well. Below the pier the long white surges mumbled the sand, lapped at the ancient pilings that supported it, in a work of slow sure destruction. My brights lit up the white railings along the sides. They were bare from end to end, and the road was naked between them. Toward the outer end a group of small buildings huddled against the night: a bait-and-tackle booth, a hot-dog stand, a seashell-souvenir store, a ship’s carpenter shop, all closed and lightless. I parked on their landward side, by a ten-cent public telescope, and walked on. The polished wooden butt of my automatic was wet-cold in my palm.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

I turned my back on Hawaii and started for shore. Mavis had changed her mind and stood me up. A final goodbye to Mavis, my cold brain chattered; she was unaccountable no-account not-to-be-counted-on. Or had her mind been changed for her. My feet dragged on the planking. Too late, too old, too tired, the deep surge at the back of my mind was sighing.

False dawn was spreading like spilt milk in the sky above the mountains. At their foot the streets of Quinto lay like an unseen cobweb beaded with lights. The highballing trucks from San Francisco and Portland and Seattle went south on 101 like shooting stars. To my right the long arc of the breakwater curved toward the pier. A light on a tower at its end flashed on and off, stroking the narrow channel with intermittent stripes of grayish green. Forty or fifty vessels, of high and low degree, lay in the sheltered basin behind the breakwater. There were swans and ugly ducklings, arrowy racing sloops and broad-beamed Monterey fishing-boats, cabin cruisers and flatties, Star-boats and dinghies. One or two of the fishing-boats showed early-morning lights.

Another light went on as I watched, bringing a triple window into sharp yellow contrast with a low dark cabin. The long hull below it had lines of movement even though it was anchored and dead in the water. It was painted so white that it seemed to shine with its own luminescence. From a quarter mile away it looked like a small neat cruiser. But comparing it with the other boats I guessed it was seventy feet long: except for the purse-seiners, the biggest boat in the harbor. Kilbourne would choose that kind of coracle to ride in.

The light went out, as if by telepathy. I strained my eyes, trying to guess what went on behind the three oblong windows that I could no longer see. A hand from nowhere plucked at my trousers leg. I stepped out of reach, jerked my gun out, snapped a cartridge into the chamber. The wind whistled in my throat.

A head appeared above the planking at the edge of the pier. Light hair frothed out from under a beret. A light voice whispered: “It’s me.”

“Don’t play hiding-games.” I snarled, because she’d unnerved me. “A forty-five slug would play hell with your constitution.”

She stood up and showed herself, a dark slim shape in sweater and slacks against the dark gray water. With racing lines for a long fast voyage by night, and a sweet full spinnaker bosom. “I like my constitution the way it is.” She half-turned into another pose, held it like a model. “Don’t you, Archer?”

“You’ll get by,” I said, and lied in my teeth: “You fascinate me as a source of income solely.”

“Very well, sir. We’d better go below. We’ll be seen up here.” She held out her hand for mine. It was as cold as a fish.

She was standing on a railed gangway which slanted down to the water below the pier. We descended to a floating platform at the edge of the forest of pilings. A little plywood boat was tied to a rusty iron ring at the edge of the platform. Boat and platform rose and fell together with the waves.

“Whose boat?”

“It’s a tender from the yacht. I came ashore in it.”

“Why?”

“The water-taxis make so much commotion, and besides they’d know where I went.”

“I see. Now I know everything.”

“Please don’t be nasty, Archer. What’s your first name, anyway?”

“Lew. You can call me Archer.”

“I’m sorry if I frightened you, Lew,” in that small, contrite, aphrodisiac voice. “I didn’t really mean to. I had to be sure it was you.”

“Who else were you expecting?”

“Well. It might have been Melliotes.”

“Who in hell,” I said, “is Melliotes? Or did you invent the name?”

“If you think the Melliotes is a figment, come out to the boat and meet him.”

“Is that the family boat?” I pointed to the long white hull on the other side of the basin.

“It is.” She thumbed her nose at it. “Some family. Take my husband’s dear good friend Melliotes, for example. Last night my dear good husband held me down in my bunk while dear good Dr. Melliotes gave me a shot of morphine to put me to sleep.”

I offered her a cigarette, which she took automatically. Lighting if for her, I looked into her eyes. The dark gray pupils were as tiny as a bird’s.

“You see,” she said, “I’m no liar. Feel my heart.” Her hand pressed mine against her ribs below the left breast. There was a pounding in the tips of my fingers, but it was my own heart I felt. “You see?”

“Why aren’t you still asleep?”

“I didn’t go to sleep. Morphine just stimulates me, I’m like a cat. I feel the hangover now, though. I think I’d better sit down.” Still with her hand on my wrist, she sat on the foot of the gangway and drew me down beside her. “I could show you the mark of the needle but that wouldn’t be ladylike, would it?”

“Always the lady,” I said. “Who are you, Mavis?”

She yawned and stretched herself. I didn’t look at her, and she subsided. “A working girl. Used to be, anyway. I wish I still was. Only I was going to tell you about Dr. Melliotes. He was driving the car when Rico brought you home.”

I remembered the man I had fought with in Reavis’s shack. “He didn’t look like a medical man to me.”

“He calls himself a doctor, but Folsom’s his alma mater if he has one. He’s some kind of hydrotherapist, and he runs a sanitarium in Venice. Walter has a spastic colon and he’s been going to Melliotes for years. He even brings him along on cruisers, which is very convenient when he wants me put to sleep. I fooled them tonight, though. I didn’t go to sleep, and I heard what went on.”

“I heard my husband conspiring to murder a man. Pat Ryan, the man you asked me about. Walter gave orders to a man called Schmidt to have Pat Ryan killed. A couple of hours later Schmidt came aboard again and said that it was done.” She peered into my face. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all?”

“Plenty. Did anybody say why Reavis had to be shot?”

“Nobody said why, but I know why.” She tilted her head toward me, her soft lower lip protruding. “You haven’t promised me you’d go to work for me.”

“You haven’t told me what you want done. I’m not a hired gun like Schmidt.”

“I only want justice done. I want you to pin Pat’s murder on Schmidt, and on my husband.”

“You’ll have to tell me why.”

“I’ll tell you everything if it will help. I want my husband dead or put away, and I haven’t nerve enough to do it myself.”

“I’m afraid he’s too big for me to take alone, but we might get at him through Schmidt. One thing I don’t understand, how Kilbourne got you buffaloed. You’re frightened to death of him.”

“I was. Not any more. I wouldn’t be here if I was frightened, would I?” But her voice was light and tinny, and she glanced towards the yacht across the water. A Monterey seiner moved in a semi-circle and nosed towards the channel. Thin shreds of light like metal foil were falling on the water and dissolving.

“Give me the straight story, Mavis. We don’t have time to argue.”

“Yes. The straight story.” Her mouth closed over the words. Her face and body were tense, fighting off sleep. “I feel like a junkie, Archer. The morphine’s getting me.”

“Let’s walk.”

“No. We’ll stay here. I have to get back to the boat soon. They don’t know I’m gone.”

I remembered the light that had gone on and off, and wondered.

But she had begun to talk in a steady flow of words, like a pentothal subject:

“I’m partly to blame for what happened. I did a sluttish thing. I suppose, and anyway I wasn’t naïve when I married him. I’d been living on the fringes for too long, taking what I could get, waiting on tables, doing extra work and trying for a bit part. I met him at a party in Bel-Air last year. I was doing some modeling at the time, and I was paid to be at the party, but Kilbourne didn’t know that, at least I don’t think he did. Anyway, he took to me, and he was loaded with money, and I had lost my nerve, and I took to him. He wanted a hostess and a clothes-horse and a bed-companion and he bought me the way he’d buy a filly for his stable. We did the town for ten nights running and married in Palm Springs. We found out over the weekend that we didn’t like each other at all. I asked him why he married me and he said that it was cheaper in the end. So I tortured his vanity: Kilbourne’s colossally vain. I’d have let him alone if I’d known how nasty he could get.

“I found out later. In the meantime I had new toys to play with and no real kick coming. Then Patrick Ryan turned up last winter. He’d dated me during the war a couple of times, and I liked the guy. I met him at Ciro’s one night. We ditched Kilbourne and I went home with Ryan. His place was horribly crummy, but he was good. He reminded me that even sex could be good, and I guess I fell in love with him in an unguarded moment.” Her voice was breathless and dry. Her shoulder moved against me restlessly. “You asked for the straight story. It doesn’t make me look nice.”

“Nobody’s straight story ever does. Go on.”

“Yes.” She leaned against me lightly, and I held her across the shoulders. Her bones were small and sharp in the rounded flesh. “We needed a chauffeur at the time; our old one had been picked up for violating parole. Kilbourne has a weakness for ex-convicts: he says they make faithful servants. I talked him into hiring Pat Ryan so I could have him around. I needed someone, and Pat said he loved me. We were going to run away together and start a new life somewhere. I guess where men are concerned I’m a lousy picker. I haven’t told you about the pre-Kilbourne ones, and I don’t intend to. Anyway, Kilbourne found out about us. Pat may have told him himself, to curry a little favor. So Kilbourne got me drunk one day and left me alone with Pat and hired a man to take pictures of us together. They were very pretty pictures. He ran them for me the next night, with running commentary, and I haven’t got over it yet. I never will.”

“But the pictures are gone now?”

“Yes. I destroyed them last night.”

“He doesn’t need the film to get a divorce.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Divorce is not what he wants. I’ve begged him for a divorce every day for the last six months. He wanted to keep me under his fat thumb for the rest of his life, and that was his way of doing it. If I stepped out of line just once, he was going to let Rico sell the film for distribution. They’d be showing it for years at stag parties and conventions and after-hours nightclubs. My face is known. What could I do?”

“What you did. Does he know the film is gone?”

“I haven’t told him. I don’t know how he’ll react. He could do anything.”

“Then leave him. He can’t touch you any more, if you’re sure there was only one copy.”

“There was only one copy. I made up to Rico one night and got that much out of him. But I’m afraid of Kilbourne.” She didn’t notice the contradiction: her feeling was too real.

“It’s a bad habit you have.”

“You don’t know Kilbourne,” she flared. “There’s nothing he won’t do, and he has the money and men to do it. He killed Pat last night—”

“Not over you, Mavis, though that might have helped. Maybe Kilbourne couldn’t forget the pictures, either, but he had more reasons than that. Pat was working for Kilbourne, did you know that? Taking his money up to the day he died.”

“No!”

“You still cared for Pat?”

“Not after he ran out on me. But he didn’t deserve to die.”

“Neither do you. You married one wrong one, and went to bed with another. Why don’t you take yourself out of circulation for a while?”

“Stay with you?” She half-turned toward me and her right breast trembled against my arm.

“That’s not what I mean. You wouldn’t be safe with me. I have some friends in Mexico who are safe, and I’ll put you on a plane.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” Her voice wandered in the scale. Her skin in the growing light was blanched by fatigue. Her eyes moved uncertainly, huge and heavy and dark, with morphine dragging down hard on the lids.

She couldn’t make a decision. I made it for her, hoisting her to her feet with my hands in her armpits. “You’re going to Mexico. I’ll stay at the airport with you till you can get a plane.”

“You’re nice, you’re good to me.” She lolled against me, clutching at my arms and sliding down my chest.

The first explosions of a choked motor barked and spluttered on the other side of the basin. The spluttering settled into a steady roar, and a speedboat rounded the stern of the yacht and headed for the pier. Its dark shape prow cut like shears through the metal water. A man in the cockpit was watching me through binoculars. They made him look like a large goggle-eyed toad.

Mavis hung limp across my arm. I jerked her upright and shook her. “Mavis! We have to run for it.” Her eyes came partly open, but showed only white.

I lifted her in both arms and took her up the gangway. A man in a striped linen suit and a washable linen hat was squatting on the pier near the top of the gangway. It was Melliotes. He straightened up, moved quickly to bar my way. He was built like a grand piano, low and wide, but his movements were light as a dancer’s. Black eyes peered brightly from the gargoyle face.

I said: “Get out of my way.”

“I don’t think so. You turn around and go back down.”

The girl in my arms sighed and stirred at the sound of his voice. I hated her as a man sometimes hates his wife, or a con his handcuffs. It was too late to run. The man in the linen suit had his right fist in his pocket, with something more than a fist pointed at me.

“Back down,” he said.

The motor of the speedboat died behind me. I looked down and saw it coasting in to the landing platform. A blank-faced sailor turned from the wheel and jumped ashore with the painter. Kilbourne sat in the cockpit, looking complacent. A pair of binoculars hung on a strap around his thick neck, and a double-barreled shotgun lay across his knees.

I carried Mavis Kilbourne down to her waiting husband.