The Drowning Pool

Chapter 24

The studio guard was a big ex-cop wrapped in crisp cellophane refinement. He leaned toward the hole in his plate-glass window. “Who was that you wanted to see?”

“Mildred Fleming. She’s secretary to one of the producers or directors.”

“Oh yes. Miss Fleming. One moment if you please.” He talked into the phone at his elbow, looked up with question-mark eyebrows: “Miss Fleming wants to know who it is.”

“Lewis Archer. Tell her Maude Slocum sent me.”

“Who sent you?”

“Maude Slocum.” The name had unexpected reverberations in my interior.

He talked into the telephone again and came up smiling. “Miss Fleming will be with you shortly. Have a seat, Mr. Armature.”

I took a chromium chair in a far corner of the big, airy lobby. I was the only living person on the secular side of the plate glass, but the walls were populated by giant photographs. The studio’s stars and featured players looked down on me from a lofty unreal world where everyone was young and hugely gay. One of the bright-haired fillies reminded me of Mavis; one of the dark young stallions could have been Pat Ryan thoroughly groomed and equipped with porcelain teeth. But Pat was huddled somewhere on a slab. Mavis was at the Hall of Justice talking to her lawyers about bail bond. The happy endings and the biggest oranges were the ones that California saved for export.

A short woman in a flame-colored blouse came through a plate-glass door that shut and locked itself behind her. Her short bobbed hair was blue-black and fitted her small head like a coat of Chinese lacquer. Her eyes, dark brown and experienced, carried a little luggage underneath.

I stood up and met her as she came toward me, her girdle-sheathed body moving with quick nervous energy. “Miss Fleming? I’m Archer.”

“Hello.” She gave me a firm cold hand. “I thought Al said your name was Armature.”

“He did.”

“I’m glad it isn’t. We had an assistant director called Mr. Organic once, but nobody could take him seriously. He changed his name to Goldfarb and did right well for himself.” Her rate of speech was a hundred words a minute, timed to the typewriter in her head. “Al also said Maude sent you, or is that another of his famous blunders?”

“He said that, but it isn’t exactly true.”

The smiling crinkle left her eyes, and they raked me up and down in a hard once-over. I was glad I’d changed to a fresh suit on the way from the Hall of Justice. In five or ten years she’d still remember the pattern of my tie, be able to pick my picture from a rogues’ gallery.

“Well,” she said with hostility, “you tell me what you’re selling and I’ll tell you how much I don’t want whatever it is. I’m busy, brother, you shouldn’t do these things.”

“I sell my services.”

“Oh, no, not that!” She was a natural clown.

“I’m a private detective. I worked for Mrs. Slocum until last night.”

“Doing what?”

“Investigating. A certain matter.”

“It’s funny she didn’t tell me.” She was interested again. “I saw her at lunch the day before yesterday. What happened last night, she fire you?”

“No. She resigned.”

“I don’t get you.” But she understood the finality of my tone. Emotion flowed into her eyes as dark as ink.

“She committed suicide last night,” I said.

Mildred Fleming sat down suddenly, perched stiffly on the edge of a green plastic settee. “You’re kidding.”

“She’d dead all right.”

“Why in God’s name?” Some tears spilled out of her eyes and coursed down her cheeks, eroding the heavy makeup. She wiped them with a ball of crumpled Kleenex. “Excuse me. I happened to be pretty fond of the girl. Ever since high school.”

“I liked her too. It’s why I want to talk to you.”

She moved like a hummingbird, toward the outside door. “Come on across the street. I’ll buy you a coffee.”

The drugstore on the opposite corner contained everything a drugstore should except a pharmacy. Newspapers and magazines, motion picture projectors and pogo sticks, sunglasses and cosmetics and bathing suits, and twenty assorted specimens of human flotsam watching the door for a familiar face. There was a lunch bar at the rear, with booths along the wall, most of them empty in the afternoon lull.

Mildred Fleming slipped into one of the booths and held up two fingers to the waitress behind the counter. The waitress came running with two heavy mugs, and fussed over my companion.

“Silly girl,” she said when the waitress had bounced away. “She thinks I’ve got a pull. Nobody’s got a pull any more.” She leaned across the scarred table, sipping at her coffee. “Now tell me about poor Maude. Without coffee, I couldn’t take it.”

I had come to her for information, but first I told her what I thought was fit for her to know. What water had done to Olivia Slocum, what fire had done to Ryan, what strychnine had done to Maude. I left out Kilbourne and Mavis, and what they had done to each other.

She took it calmly, except that toward the end she needed her makeup more. She didn’t say a word, till I mentioned Knudson and the fact that he had run me out of town.

“You shouldn’t pay too much attention to what he said. I can imagine how he feels. I don’t know whether I should tell you this—”

“You don’t have to tell me. Knudson loved her, it was pretty obvious.”

I was probing for a gap in her defenses. Most good secretaries had an occupational weakness: they gathered inside information and after they had gathered it they had to tell it to somebody.

She was piqued. “If you know the whole story already, why come to me?”

“I know damn little. I don’t know who drowned Olivia Slocum or why Maude Slocum took strychnine. I came to you because you’re her closest friend. I figured you had a right to know what happened and that you’d want to help me get to the bottom of it.”

She was gratified. “I do want to help you. I’ve always been in Maude’s confidence, and I can tell you she’s had a tragic life.” She called for more coffee, and turned back to me: “As far as her mother-in-law is concerned, didn’t you say that this man Pat Ryan killed her?”

“That’s Knudson’s theory, and most of the evidence supports it. I’ve taken an option on it, but I haven’t bought it yet.”

“You don’t think Maude—?” Her eyes shone blackly in the dim booth.

“I do not.”

“I’m glad you don’t. Anyone that knew her would tell you she couldn’t hurt anyone. She was a gentle creature, in spite of everything.”

“Everything?”

“Her whole damned messy life. Everything that made her want to suicide.”

“You know why she did then?”

“I guess I do, at that. She was crucified for fifteen years. She’s the one woman I’ve ever known that wanted to do the right thing and couldn’t make it. Everything about Maude was right except her life. She made a couple of mistakes that she couldn’t wipe out. I’ll tell you on one condition. Do you have a word of honor?”

“I have a word. I was an officer in the war, but the gentleman part didn’t take.”

The stern sharp glance raked me again. “I think I’d trust you as far as I would myself, no further. Give me your word that Cathy will never hear this, and that it won’t affect Cathy in any way.”

I guessed what she was going to tell me. “I can’t do that if other people know it.”

“Nobody but me,” she said. “And Knudson, of course, and maybe Knudson’s wife.”

“So Knudson has a wife.”

“He hasn’t lived with her for fifteen or sixteen years, but they’re still married, for keeps. She’ll never divorce him, no matter what he does. She hates him. I guess she hates everyone in the world. She’s going to be glad to hear that Maude killed herself.”

“You know the woman, do you?”

“Do I know her! I lived in her house for nearly a year, and I know her better than I want to. Eleanor Knudson is one of these hard righteous women who wouldn’t donate two pennies to close a dead man’s eyes. Maude lived there too, we were room-mates: that’s how the whole thing started. We were in our sophomore year at Berkeley.”

“Mrs. Knudson ran a boarding house in Berkeley?”

“A rooming house for girls. Her husband was a sergeant with the Oakland police. She was older than he was; I never figured out how she managed to hook him. Probably the usual landlady-roomer business: propinquity and maternal care and more propinquity. She had brains and she wasn’t bad-looking if you like the cold-steel type. Anyway, she and Ralph Knudson had been married for several years when we moved in.”

“You and Maude, you mean?”

“Yes. We’d taken our freshman year in the Teachers’ College in Santa Barbara, but we couldn’t stay there. We both had to work our way through school, and there wasn’t enough work in Santa Barbara. Maude’s father was a rancher in Ventura—that’s where we went to high school, in Ventura—but the depression had wiped him out. My father was dead and my mother couldn’t help me. She was having a hard enough time supporting herself in ’thirty-two. So Maudie and I moved on to the big city. We both knew typing and shorthand and we made a go of it, doing public stenography and typing dissertations. Living was cheap in those days. We paid Mrs. Knudson ten dollars a month for our room, and did our own cooking. We even managed to get to some of our classes.”

“I was around in those days,” I said.

She supped the dregs of her coffee and lit a cigarette, regarding me somberly through the smoke. “They were wonderful sad days. There were lines a mile long at the mission soup-kitchens in San Francisco and Oakland, but we were going to be career girls and set the Bay on fire. I’ve realized since then that it was all my idea. Maudie just went along because I needed her. She had more brains than me, and more goodness. The pure female type, you know? All she really wanted was a husband and a home and a chance to raise some decent kids like herself. So she got herself tangled up with a man who could never marry her as long as he lived. As long as Eleanor Knudson lived, anyway. I watched it happen and couldn’t do a thing to stop it. They were made for each other, Maudie and Ralph, like in the love stories. He was all man and she was all woman and his wife was a frigid bitch. They couldn’t live in the same house without falling in love with each other.”

“And making music together?”

“Damn your eyes!” she spat out suddenly. “You’ve got a lousy attitude. It was the real thing, see. She was twenty and proud, she’d never gone with a man. He was the man for her and she was the woman for him. They were like Adam and Eve; it wasn’t Maudie’s fault he was married already. She went into it blind as a baby, and so did he. It just happened. And it was real,” she insisted. “Look how it lasted.”

“I have been looking.”

She stirred uncomfortably, shredding her cigarette butt in her small hard fingers. “I don’t know why I’m telling you these things. What do they mean to you? Is somebody paying you?”

“Maude gave me two hundred dollars; that’s all gone by now. But once I’m in a case I sort of like to stay through to the end. It’s more than curiosity. She must have died for a reason. I owe it to her or myself to find out the reason, to see the whole thing clear.”

“Ralph Knudson knows the reasons. Eleanor Knudson knows: hell, it was her idea in a way. Maude had to spend her good years with a man she didn’t love, and I guess she simply got sick of it.”

“What do you mean, she had to marry Slocum?”

“You haven’t given me your word,” she said. “About Cathy.”

“You don’t have to worry about Cathy. I feel sorry for the girl. I wouldn’t touch her.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot after all. James Slocum must have known she wasn’t his child. They said she was a seven-months’ baby, but Slocum must have known.”

“Knudson is Cathy’s father then.”

“Who else? When he found out Maude was pregnant he begged his wife for a divorce. He offered her everything he had. No soap. So Knudson left his wife and his job and cleared out. He was crazy to take Maudie with him, but she wouldn’t go. She was scared, and she was thinking about the baby she was carrying. James Slocum wanted to marry her, and she let him.”

“How did he come into the picture?”

“Maude had been typing for him all winter. He was doing graduate work in drama, and he seemed to be well-heeled. That wasn’t really why she married him, though, at least not the only reason. He had a faggot tendency, you know? He claimed he needed her, that she could save him. I don’t know whether she did or not. Chances are she didn’t.”

“She was still trying,” I said. “You should be doing my work, Miss Fleming.”

“You mean I notice things? Yes, I do. But where Maudie was concerned I didn’t have to: we were like sisters. We talked the whole thing out before she gave Slocum her answer. I advised her to marry him. I made a mistake. I often make mistakes.” A bitter smile squeezed her mouth and eyes. “I’m not really a Miss, incidentally. My name is Mrs. Mildred Fleming Kraus Peterson Daniels Woodbury. I’ve been married four times.”

“Congratulations four times.”

“Yeah,” she answered dryly. “As I was saying, I make mistakes. For most of them I take the rap myself. Maude took the rap for this one. She and Slocum left school before the end of the spring semester and went to live with his mother in Nopal Valley. She was determined to be a good wife to him, and a good mother to the kid, and for twelve years she stuck it out. Twelve years.

“In 1946 she came across a picture of Knudson in the Los Angeles Times. He was a police lieutenant in Chicago, and he’d run down some ex-con or other. It suddenly hit Maude that she still loved him, and that she was losing her life. She came down here and told me about it and I told her to beat her way to Chicago if she had to hitchhike. She had some money saved, and she went. Knudson was still living by himself. He hasn’t been since.

“That fall the Chief of Police in Nopal Valley was fired for bribery. Knudson applied for the job and got it. He wanted to be near Maude, and he wanted to see his daughter. So they finally got together, in a way.” She sighed. “I guess Maude couldn’t stand the strain of having a lover. She wasn’t built for intrigue.”

“No. It didn’t work out well.”

“Maude had enough maturity to see what had to be done, if she could do it. She’d have gone away with Knudson this time. But it was too late. She had Cathy to think about. The hell of it was that Cathy didn’t like Knudson. And she was crazy about Slocum.”

“Too crazy,” I said.

“I know what you mean.” The dark sharp eyes veiled themselves, and unveiled. “Of course, she believes Slocum is her father. I think she’d better go on believing that, don’t you?”

“It’s not my problem.”

“Nor mine. I’m glad it isn’t. whatever happens to Cathy, I’m sorry for her. It’s a shame, she’s a wonderful kid. I think I’ll go up and see her over the weekend.—I almost forgot, the funeral. When is the funeral?”

“I wouldn’t know. You better call her house.”

She stood up quickly, and offered me her hand. “I must be going now—some work to finish up. What time is it?”

I looked at my watch. “Four o’clock.”

“Goodbye, Mr. Archer. Thanks for listening to me.”

“I shouldn’t be thanking you.”

“No. I had to talk to somebody about it. I felt guilty. I still do.”

“Guilty of what?”

“Being alive, I guess.” She flashed me a difficult smile, and darted away.

I sat over a third cup of coffee and thought about Maude Slocum. Hers was one of those stories without villains or heroes. There was no one to admire, no one to blame. Everyone had done wrong for himself and others. Everyone had failed. Everyone had suffered.

Perhaps Cathy Slocum had suffered most of all. My sympathies were shifting from the dead woman to the living girl. Cathy had been born into it innocent. She had been weaned on hatred and schooled in a quiet hell where nothing was real but her love for her father. Who wasn’t really her father.