The Drowning Pool

Chapter 25

The ride to Quinto, on and old bus sardined with weekenders, was long and slow and hot. A girl who exhaled beer fumes and mauve-scented perfume regaled me with stories of her bowling triumphs in the twenty-alley Waikiki Bowl on Figueroa Boulevard. At the Quinto junction I bade her a quick farewell and walked out to the pier.

My car was where I had left it. A parking-ticket was tucked under the windshield wiper. I tore it into eight pieces and tossed them into the ocean one by one. I didn’t intend to come back to Quinto if I could help it.

Over the pass again to Nopal Valley. The central street was choked with late afternoon traffic, and parked cars lined the curbs. One of them pulled out ahead of me and I backed into its place. I walked a block to Antonio’s and took a seat at the end of the crowded bar. Antonio saw me and nodded in recognition.

Without a word spoken he went to his safe and opened it. When he came to take my order, the clumsy newspaper package was in his hands. I thanked him. He said I was welcome. I asked for a double bourbon, which he brought. I paid him for it. He lit my cigarette. I drank the bourbon straight and walked out with the money in my pocket.

Gretchen Keck was standing in front of the butane stove just inside the door of her trailer. She was wearing a halter and slacks. Her yellow hair was pulled up into a top-knot, held in place by an elastic band. The egg that she was frying spluttered and popped like a tiny machine gun riddling my guts with hunger.

She didn’t notice me until I rapped on the open door. Then she saw who it was. She picked up the frying-pan and brandished it clublike. The egg fell onto the floor and lay there drooling yellow. “Get away from me.”

“In a minute.”

“You’re a dirty bull, ain’t you, one of the ones that bumped Pat? I got nothing to say.”

“I have.”

“Not to me you haven’t. I don’t know nothing. You can amscray.” With the frying-pan upraised, ready to throw, she should have looked ridiculous. There was nothing ridiculous about her.

I talked fast: “Pat gave me something for you before he died—”

“Before you killed him, you mean.”

“Shut up and listen to me, girl. I haven’t got all day.”

“All right, finish your pitch. I know you’re lying, copper. You’re trying to hook me in, only I don’t know nothing. How could I know he was going to murder somebody?”

“Put it down and listen to me. I’m coming in.”

“In a pig’s eye!”

I stepped across the threshold, wrenching the iron pan from her hand, pushed her down into the solitary chair: “Pat didn’t murder anybody, can you understand that?”

“It said he did in the paper. Now I know you’re lying.” But her voice had lost its passionate conviction. Her soft mouth drooped uncertainly.

“You don’t have to believe what you read in the papers. Mrs. Slocum died by accident.”

“Why did they kill Pat then if he didn’t murder her?”

“Because he claimed he did. Pat heard a policeman tell me she was dead. He went to the man he was working for and convinced him that he killed her.”

“Pat wasn’t that crazy.”

“No. He was crazy like a fox. The big boss gave him ten grand lamster’s money. Pat talked himself into getting paid for a murder he didn’t do.”

“Jesus!” Her eyes were wide with admiration. “I told you he had a brain on him.”

“He had a heart, too.” That lie left a bile taste on my tongue. “When he saw he wasn’t going to make it, he gave me the ten grand to give to you. He told me you were his heir.”

“No. He told you that?” The cornflower eyes spilled over. “What else did he say?”

My tongue wagged on: “He said he wanted you to have it on one condition: that you get out of Nopal Valley and go some place where you can live a decent life. He said it would all be worth it if you did that.”

“I will!” she cried. “Did you say ten grand? Ten thousand dollars?”

“Right.” I handed her the package. “Don’t spend it in California or they might try to trace it. Don’t tell anybody what I’ve told you. Go to another state and put it in a bank and buy a house or something. That’s what Pat wanted you to do with it.”

“Did he say that?” She had torn off the wrappings and crushed the bright bills to her breast.

“Yes. He said that.” And I told her what she wanted to hear because there was no reason not to: “He also said that he loved you.”

“Yes,” she whispered. “I loved him, too.”

“I have to go now, Gretchen.”

“Wait a minute.” She rose, her mouth working awkwardly, trying to frame a question. “Why did you—I mean I guess you really was his friend, like you said. I’m sorry. I thought you was a copper. And here you just came to bring me the money from Pat.”

“Put it away,” I said. “Get out of town tonight if you can.”

“Yeah. Sure. I’ll do just what Pat wanted me to. He really was a swell guy after all.”

I turned and went out the door, so that she wouldn’t see my face. “Goodbye, Gretchen.”

The money wouldn’t do her any permanent good. She’d buy a mink coat or a fast car, and find a man to steal one or wreck the other. Another Reavis, probably. Still, it would give her something to remember different from the memories that she had. She had no souvenirs and I had too many. I wanted no mementos of Reavis or Kilbourne.

Mrs. Strang ushered me into James Slocum’s bedroom. It was a very manly room, equipped with red leather chairs and solid dark furniture: Prints of old sailing vessels, like portholes opening on a motionless sea, adorned the paneled oak walls. Built-in bookcases, crammed with volumes, covered the length and height of one wall. The kind of room a hopeful mother might furnish for her son.

Olivia Slocum’s son was sitting up at the end of the great four-poster bed. His face was bloodless and thin. In the late gray light from the windows he looked like a silver image of a man. Francis Marvell was sitting on his own feet in a chair beside him. Both of them were intent on a chessboard set with black and white ivory pieces that rested on the edge of the bed between them.

Slocum’s hand emerged from his scarlet silk sleeve and moved a black knight. “There.”

“Jolly good,” Marvell said. “Oh, jolly good.”

Slocum withdrew his dreaming gaze from the board and turned it on me. “Yes?”

“You said you would see Mr. Archer?” the housekeeper faltered.

“Mr. Archer? Oh. Yes. Come in, Mr. Archer.” Slocum’s voice was weak and vaguely peevish.

Mrs. Slocum left the room. I stood where I was. Slocum and Marvell projected an atmosphere, a circle of intimacy, which I didn’t care to enter. Nor did they want me to enter it. Their heads were turned toward me at the same impatient angle, willing me to be gone. To leave them to the complex chess-play between them.

“I hope that you’re recovering, Mr. Slocum.” I had nothing better to say.

“I don’t know, I have had a perfectly dreadful series of shocks.” Self-pity squeaked behind the words like a rat behind the wall. “I have lost my mother, I have lost my wife, my own daughter has turned against me now.”

“I’m standing by, dear fellow,” Marvell said. “You can count on me, you know.” Slocum smiled weakly. His hand moved toward Marvell’s, which was resting slack by the chessboard, but paused short of it.

“If you’ve come about the play,” Marvell said to me, “I’m afraid I have to confess we’ve given it up. After all that’s happened, it may be months or years before I can regain the world of imagination. Poor dear James may never act again.”

“No great loss to the theatre,” Slocum said with quiet pathos. “But Mr. Archer isn’t interested in the play, Francis. I’d supposed you knew by now that he’s a detective. I imagine that he’s looking for his pay.”

“I have been paid.”

“That’s just as well. You’d never have a penny out of me. May I hazard a guess as to who paid you?”

“You needn’t. It was your wife.”

“Of course it was! And shall I tell you why?” He leaned forward, clutching the bedclothes. His eyes were bright with fever or passion. The silver face was peaked and hollowed like an old man’s. “Because you helped her to murder my mother, didn’t you? Didn’t you?”

Marvell uncoiled his legs and stood up, his face averted in embarrassment.

“No, Francis, please don’t go. I want you to hear this. I want you to know the sort of woman I’ve had to spend my life with.”

Marvell slumped back into the chair and began to bite his knuckles.

“Go on,” I said. “This is interesting.”

“It came to me the night before last. I lay here thinking the night through, and I saw the whole thing plainly. She’d always hated my mother, she wanted her money, she wanted to leave me. But she didn’t dare to murder her without assistance. You were to lend the professional touch, were you not?”

“And what was my particular contribution?”

His voice was soft and sly: “You provided the scapegoat, Mr. Archer. No doubt Maude drowned mother herself; she wouldn’t delegate that task, not she. You were there to make sure that Reavis took the blame. My suspicion was confirmed yesterday when Reavis’s cap was found in the grove by the pool. I knew that Reavis didn’t leave it there. He’d left it on the front seat of the car. I saw it in the car myself. I suggest that you saw it there too, and realized what could be done with it.”

“I’m not very suggestible, Mr. Slocum. But let’s assume that what you say is true. What are you going to do about it?”

“There is nothing I can do.” With his eyes turned up toward the ceiling, his hands now gripping each other, he looked like a mad saint. “In order to have you punished, I should have to trumpet my shame, my wife’s shame, to the world. You can rest easy, unless you have a conscience. Last night I did my duty to my dead mother. I told my wife what I have told you. She killed herself. It was fitting.”

Hard words rose in me. I held them back with clenched teeth. Slocum had retreated from reality. If I told him that he had driven his wife to suicide for no good reason, it would only drive him further into the unreal world.

Maude Slocum hadn’t killed herself because she murdered her mother-in-law. Her husband’s story of the cap had simply told her that Reavis hadn’t done it. Which meant that someone else had.

I said to Marvell: “If you care about this man, you’d better get him a damn good doctor.”

He batted his eyes at me, and stuttered something incoherent against his knuckles. Slocum’s face was still turned to the ceiling, wearing a sad holy smile. I went out. Form the hallway I heard him say: “It’s your move, Francis.”

I went through the house alone, thinking of Maude Slocum and looking for her daughter. The rooms and corridors were empty and still. The tide of violence running in the house had permanently ebbed and drawn the life out with it. The veranda and the loggia and the terraces were empty of life, except for the flowers burning in the fading light. I avoided the pool, which glimmered through the trees like a wicked blade. At the end of the funereal alley of cypresses I came to the old lady’s garden.

Cathy was sitting on a stone bench islanded among the lake of flowers. Her face was turned to the west, where a while before the sun had died in a glory. Her young look traveled up beyond the fieldstone wall of the garden to the mountains. She was watching their purple masses as if they formed the walls of a great prison where she had been sentenced to live alone forever.

I called to her over the gate: “Cathy. May I come in?”

She turned slowly, the mountains huge and ancient in her eyes. Her voice was flat: “Hello, Mr. Archer. Do come in.”

I released the redwood latch and stepped into the garden.

“Don’t close it,” she said. “You can leave it open.”

“What are you doing?”

“Just thinking.” She moved aside on the bench, to make room for me. The concrete surface still held the sun’s heat.

“What about?”

“Me. I used to think this was all so beautiful, and now it doesn’t mean a thing. Coleridge was right about nature, I guess. You see the beauty there if you have it in your heart. If your heart is desolate, the world is a wilderness. Did you ever read his ‘Ode to Dejection’?”

I said I never had.

“I understand it now. I’d kill myself if I had my mother’s courage. As it is, I suppose I’ll sit around and wait for something to happen to me. Something good or something bad, it doesn’t really matter.”

I didn’t know what to say. I settled for something meaningless and soothing: “All the bad things have happened, haven’t they?”

“Except the desolation in the heart.” If she hadn’t been completely earnest, the phrase would have sounded foolish.

I said: “Talk it out to me.”

“What do you mean?”

She met my gaze. For a long moment we looked at each other. Her body narrowed and shrunk, drawing away from me. “I don’t know what you mean.”

“You killed your grandmother,” I said. “You might as well tell me about it.”

She bowed her head and shoulders and sat there, dry-eyed and quiet. “Does everybody know?”

“Nobody knows, Cathy. Just me and Ralph Knudson.”

“Yes. He talked to me today. Mr. Knudson is my father. Why didn’t they tell me sooner? I’d never have sent that letter.”

“Why did you send it?” I said.

“I hated my mother. She was cheating on my father—Mr. Slocum. I saw her and Mr. Knudson together one day, and I wanted to make her suffer. And I thought if my father—if Mr. Slocum found out he’d make her leave and we could be together. Don’t you see, they were always quarreling or giving each other the silent treatment. I wanted them separated so there would be some peace. But the letter didn’t seem to make any difference at all.”

For a while she had seemed a woman; more than that, an ageless sybil speaking from ancient wisdom. She had become a child again, a harried child trying to explain the inexplicable: how one could do a murder with the best intentions in the world.

“So you did it the hard way,” I said. “You thought your grandmother’s money would blow them apart. Your mother would run off with her lover, and you could live happily ever after with your father.”

“Mr. Slocum,” she corrected me. “He isn’t my father. Yes, I thought that. I am a hideous creature.” And she wailed.

A mockingbird in the cypresses took it up. The sobbing howls of the girl and the bird demented the twilight. I laid one arm across Cathy’s shuddering back. She said: “I am hideous. I should die.”

“No, Cathy. Too many people have died.”

“What are you going to do with me? I deserve to die. I really hated Grandma, I wanted to kill her. She twisted my father from the time he was a little boy, she made him what he is. You know what an Oedipus complex is, don’t you?”

“Yes. I’ve also heard of an Electra complex.”

She missed that. It was just as well, because I shouldn’t have said it. She knew too much already, more than she could bear.

She had given over crying, but the bird still howled from the tree like a disembodied conscience.

I said: “Cathy. I’m not going to do anything to you. I haven’t the right.”

“Don’t be nice to me. I don’t deserve anything nice from anybody. From the moment I decided to do it, I’ve felt as if I was cut off from every human being. I know what they mean by the mark of Cain, I have it.” She covered her high fair brow with her hand, as if it might actually be branded.

“I understand how you feel. I was responsible, in a way, for Pat Reavis’s death. Once I killed another man with my hands. I did it to save my own life, but his blood is on my hands.”

“You are being too good to me, and so was Mr. Knudson. My father.” The word sounded remarkable from her lips, as if it stood for something great and mysterious and new. “He blamed himself for everything that happened. Now you’re blaming yourself. I’m the one that did it, though. I even intended Pat to take the blame for me. I did see him here that night. I lied to you when I told you that I didn’t. He wanted me to run away with him, and I tried to want to, but I couldn’t. He was drunk; I sent him away. Then I decided I could do it. It was terrible. Once I saw what I could do, I felt as if I had to do it. You know?”

“I think I know.”

“I felt as if I’d sold my soul to the devil, even before it happened—No, I mustn’t say it happened, because I made it happen. Still I thought if I could get away from here, it wouldn’t have to happen. I saw you coming out of the house, and I got into your car. But you wouldn’t take me away.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Don’t be sorry, you couldn’t help it. What could you have done with me? Anyway, you left me there. I knew Grandma was sitting here in the garden. I couldn’t go back into the house until it was done. I went down by the pool and hid Pat’s cap in the hedge, then I called her. I told her there was a dead bird in the pool. She came to look and I pushed her in. I went into the house and went to bed. I didn’t sleep all night, or last night either. Do you think I can sleep tonight, now that other people know?”

She turned her face to me. It was open and tormented, its flesh gray and almost translucent, like the last falling light in the garden.

“I hope so, Cathy.”

Her cold lips moved: “Do you think I’m insane? I’ve been afraid for years that I was going insane.”

“No,” I said, though I hadn’t any idea.

A man’s voice called her name from somewhere out of sight. The bird flew out of the tree and circled to another, where it took up a new cry.

Cathy’s head came up like a deer’s. “I’m here.” And she added in the same clear voice: “father.” The strange and ancient word.

Knudson appeared at the gate. He glowered when he saw me. “I told you to get out and stay out. Leave her alone.”

“No,” Cathy said. “He’s been nice to me, father.”

“Come here, Cathy.”

“Yes, father.” She went to him, her head bowed and watchful.

He spoke to her in a low voice, and she walked away in the direction of the house. She moved uncertainly, a traveler on new ground, and was lost in the cypress shadows.

I went to the gate and faced Knudson in the narrow opening between the fieldstone posts. “What are you going to do with her?”

“That’s my business.” He was taking off his coat. He was in civilian clothes, and his gunbelt was missing.

“I’ve made it my business, too.”

“You’ve made a mistake. Several mistakes. You’re going to suffer for them.” He swung a fist at me.

I stepped out of reach. “Don’t be childish, Knudson. Bloodletting won’t help either of us. Or Cathy.”

He said: “Take off your coat.” He draped his over the swinging gate.

I threw mine on top of it. “If you insist.”

He backed onto the grass, and I followed him. It was a long hard fight, and a useless one. Still it had to be fought through. He was bigger and heavier than I was, but I was faster. I hit him three times to his one. I knocked him down six times before he stayed, prone on his back with both hands over his face. Both of my thumbs were sprained and swelling tight. My right eye was almost closed by a mouse on the upper lid.

It was full dark when it ended. He sat up after a while and spoke between sobbing breaths. “I had to fight somebody. Slocum was no good to me. You fight well, Archer.”

“I was trained by pros. What are you going to do with Cathy?”

Slowly he got to his feet. His face was striped with black blood which dropped from the end of his chin and splattered his torn shirt. He staggered and almost fell. I steadied him with my hand.

“Officially, you mean?” He mumbled, through puffed lips. “I turned in my resignation this afternoon. I didn’t tell them why. You’re not going to tell them, either.”

“No,” I said. “She’s your baby.”

“She knows that she’s my baby. She’s coming with me, back to Chicago. I’ll put her in school there, and try to give her a home. Does that sound impossible to you? I’ve seen worse cases than Cathy straighten out and grow up into people. Not often, but it happens.”

“Cathy will make it if anybody will. What does Slocum say?”

“Slocum can’t stop me,” he said. “He isn’t going to try. Mrs. Strang is coming with me; she and Cathy are fond of each other.”

“Good luck, then.”

Around us and above us the darkness was immense. Our hands groped for each other and met. I left him there.