The Drowning Pool

Chapter 3

I found a phone booth in a drugstore down the block. There was no James Slocum in the Nopal Valley section of the directory, but there was a Mrs. Olivia Slocum, presumably his mother. I made the ten-cent toll call and got a cracked dry voice which could have belonged to man or woman:

“The Slocum residence.”

“Mrs. James Slocum, please.”

There was a click on the line: “All right, Mrs. Strang. I’ll take it no my extension.”

Mrs. Strang grunted and went off the line.

“Archer speaking,” I said. “I’m in Quinto.”

“I hoped you would call. Yes?”

“Look here, Mrs. Slocum, I’m practically handcuffed. I can’t ask questions, or I’ll start talk where there isn’t any. I have no lead and no contacts. Isn’t there some way I can meet your family—your husband, at least?”

“But he has nothing to do with it. You’ll only rouse suspicion.”

“Not necessarily. If I float around without an explanation, I’ll rouse suspicion for sure. And I won’t find anything out if I can’t talk to anybody.”

“You sound discouraged,” she said.

“I was never encouraged, I told you that. Operating in a vacuum, I don’t stand much chance of helping you. Even a list of suspects—”

“But there are none. I can’t name a single person. Is the case really so hopeless?”

“Unless I get a lucky break, like somebody running up to me in the street and confessing. This is a very intimate business, there’s nothing overt in it like the ordinary divorce setup, and I need to get closer to your life.”

Very softly, she said: “Are you proposing to spy on me, Mr. Archer?”

“Hardly. I’m working for you. But I need a center to work from, and you and your family are it. I got a look at your husband and daughter just now, but a look is not enough.”

“I specifically instructed you not to approach my husband.”

Her moods were hard to follow and match. I changed mine: “If you don’t let me handle the thing my own way, I’ll have to drop it. I’ll mail you your money.”

In the silence that followed, I could hear her tapping with a pencil on the base of the telephone. “No,” she said finally. “I want you to do what you can. If you have any reasonable suggestion—”

“It’s not very reasonable, but it should do. Do you have any friends in Hollywood? Picture people?”

Another silence. “There’s Mildred Fleming, she’s a secretary in one of the studios. I had lunch with her today.”

“Which studio?”

“Warner’s, I think.”

“All right. You told her how good the play is. She has a boy-friend who works for an agent who deals in literary properties. Me.”

“I see,” she answered slowly. “Yes, that’s reasonable enough. Actually, it will fit in very well. A few of James’s friends are coming in for cocktails. If you could be here at five?”

“I’ll come early.”

“Very well, Mr. Archer.” She gave me directions, and hung up.

My shirt was dank from sitting in the steaming booth. I drove back to my motel, changed to shorts and went down to the beach for a swim. The blue-green swells were heaving slowly beyond the surf. Further out, a few white sails leaned across the horizon, curved sharp like wings in the wind, but motionless in the distance. I met a wave head-on as it broke and took the cold shock running. My feet kicked out behind me and I swam straight out for a quarter of a mile. There the kelp-beds stopped me, a tangled barrier of brown and yellow tubes and bulbs floating low in the water. I hated the touch of underwater life.

I turned on my back and floated, looking up at the sky, nothing around me but cool clear Pacific, nothing in my eyes but long blue space. It was as close as ever got to cleanliness and freedom, as far as I ever got from all the people. They had jerrybuilt the beaches from San Diego to the Golden Gate, bulldozed super-highways through the mountains, cut down a thousand years of redwood growth, and built an urban wilderness in the desert. They couldn’t touch the ocean. They poured their sewage into it, but it couldn’t be tainted.

There was nothing wrong with Southern California that a rise in the ocean level wouldn’t cure. Except that there were too many Ararats, and I was no Noah. The sky was flat and empty, and the water was chilling me. I swam to the kelp-bed and plunged down through it. It was cold and clammy like the bowels of fear. I came up gasping and sprinted to shore with a barracuda terror nipping at my heels.

A wave thrust me up on the beach, where a cold late afternoon wind took over, armed with small needles of sand. I wasn’t a noble savage after all.

I was still chilly a half-hour, crossing the pass to Nopal Valley. Even at its summit the highway was wide and new, rebuilt with somebody’s money. I could smell the source of the money when I slid down into the valley on the other side. It stank like rotten eggs.

The oil wells from which the sulphur gas rose crowded the slopes on both sides of the town. I could see them from the highway as I drove in: the latticed triangles of the derricks where trees had grown, the oil-pumps nodding and clanking where cattle had grazed. Since ’thirty-nine or ’forty, when I had seen it last, the town had grown enormously, like a tumor. It had thrust out shoots in all directions: blocks of match-box houses in raw new housing developments and the real estate shacks to go with them, a half-mile gauntlet of one-story buildings along the highway: veterinarians, chiropractors, beauty shops, marketerias, restaurants, bars, liquor stores. There was a new four-story hotel, a white frame gospel tabernacle, a bowling alley wide enough to house a B-36. The main street had been transformed by glass brick, plastic, neon. A quiet town in a sunny valley had hit the jackpot hard, and didn’t know what to do with itself at all.

More had changed than the face of the buildings, or the number and make of the cars. The people were different and there were too many of them. Crowds of men whose faces were marked by sun and work and boredom walked in the streets and in and out of the bars, looking for fun or trouble. Very few women showed on the main street. The blue-shirted cop on the main corner wore his holster on the front of his hip, with the flap unbuttoned and the gun-butt showing.

Trail Road turned off to the right on the far side of the town, and climbed through the oil fields to a gently sloping mesa which overlooked the valley. As it climbed it dwindled down to a narrow blacktop looping up the side of the sunbaked hill. The mountains rose sheer in front of the nose of my car, starkly shadowed by the declining light. A long, low house half-hidden by giant oaks sat in the middle of the mesa, as indigenous as a boulder. Before I reached it I had to stop and open a gate which barred the road. On either side of it a six-foot cyclone fence topped by strands of barbed wire stretched out of sight.

The road inside the gate was freshly gravelled, and sentineled by twin rows of young palms. There were a couple of cars parked in the circular drive that curved around in front of the house. One was the old Packard sedan I had seen in front of the Quinto Theatre. I left my car beside it and crossed the terraced lawn, dodging the rainbowed spray from a sprinkling system.

The house was built of adobe brick the color of the earth, pressed down to the earth by a heavy red tile roof, and massive as a fortress. A deep veranda ran along its front. I climbed the low concrete steps. A woman in a red sweater and slacks was curled like a scarlet snake in one corner of a green canvas porch swing. Her head was bent over a book, and red harlequin spectacles gave her shadowed face a look of queer concentration. The concentration was real; she gave no sign of hearing me or seeing me until I spoke:

“Excuse me. I’m looking for Mrs. Slocum.”

“Excuse me.” She looked up in real surprise, her eyes refocusing like a sleeper’s, and flicked the spectacles off. It was Cathy Slocum; I hadn’t recognized her until then. The glasses and the look they gave her had added ten years to her age, and the shape of her body was misleading. It was one of those female bodies that bloomed very young. Her eyes were large and deep like her mother’s, and she had better lines. I could understand the chauffeur’s passion for her. But she was very young.

“My name is Archer,” I said.

She gave me a long, cool look, but didn’t know me. “I’m Cathy Slocum. Is it mother or grandmother you want to see?”

“Mother. She asked me to the party.”

“It’s not her party,” she said under her breath to herself. A spoiled-little-girl look made two black vertical lines between her eyebrows. Then she remembered me, and smoothed them out, and asked me very sweetly: “Are you a friend of mother’s, Mr. Archer?”

“A friend of a friend’s. Would you like my Bertillon measurements?”

She was clever enough to get it, and young enough to blush. “I’m sorry, I didn’t mean to be rude—we see so few strangers.” Which might account for her interest in a rough-talking chauffeur named Reavis. “Mother’s just come up from the pool, and she’s dressing, and father hasn’t come home. Would you care to sit down?”

“Thank you.” I followed the tall fine body to the swing, amused by the fact that it contained an adolescent who had to be reminded of her manners. Not a usual adolescent, though. The book in her hand, when she laid it down on the cushion between us, turned out to be a book on psychoanalysis by Karen Horney.

She began to make conversation, swinging the spectacles back and forth by one end: “Father’s rehearsing a play in Quinto, that’s what the party’s about. He’s really a very fine actor, you know.” She said it a little defensively.

“I know. Much better than the play.”

“Have you seen the play?”

“I caught a scene of it this afternoon.”

“And what did you think of it? Isn’t it well written?”

“Well enough,” I said, without enthusiasm.

“But what do you really think of it?”

Her look was so candid and girlish that I told her. “They should jack up the title and build a new play under it and change the title. If what I saw was a fair sample.”

“But everyone who’s seen it thinks it’s a masterpiece. Are you interested in the theatre, Mr. Archer?”

“Do you mean do I know what I’m talking about? Probably not. I work for a man in Hollywood who deals in literary properties. He sent me up to look at it.”

“Oh,” she said. “Hollywood. Father says it’s much too literary for Hollywood, and it’s not written to a formula. Mr. Marvell plans to take it to Broadway. Their standards are much subtler, don’t you think?”

“Much. Who is Mr. Marvell? I know he’s author-director of the play…”

“He’s and English poet. He went to Oxford, and his uncle’s a lord. He’s a good friend of father’s, and father likes his poetry and I tried to read some of it but I couldn’t understand it. It’s awfully difficult and symbolic, like Dylan Thomas.”

The name rang no bell. “Is your father going along, when Marvell takes the play to New York?”

“Oh, no.” The swinging spectacles described a full circle and struck against her knee with an audible tap. She put them on again. They lengthened and aged her face, and gave it piquancy. “Father’s just helping Francis out. He’s putting it on to try and get some backing. Father has no histrionic ambitions, though he is a really fine actor, don’t you think?”

A mediocre amateur, I thought. I said: “No question about it.” When the girl mentioned her father, as she frequently did, her mouth went flower-soft and her hands were still.

But when he mounted the veranda a few minutes later, with Marvell skipping beside him up the steps, she looked at James Slocum as if she were afraid of him. Her fingers interlaced and strained against each other. I noticed that the nails were bitten stubby.

“Hello, father.” The words left her mouth ajar, and the tip of her tongue moved along her upper lip.

He walked toward us purposefully, a middle-sized, thin-chested man who should have had a Greek torso to support his startling head. “I’ve been wanting to talk to you, Cathy.” The sensitive mouth was stern. “I expected you to wait for me at the theatre.”

“Yes, father.” She turned to me. “Do you know my father, Mr. Archer?”

I stood up and said hello. He looked me over with his sad brown eyes, and gave me a limp hand as an afterthought. “Francis,” he said to the blond man at his shoulder: “See if you and Archer can find a drink for yourselves. I’d like to have a moment with Cathy here.”

“Right.” Marvell touched me in the small of the back, ushering me to the front door. Cathy watched us go. Her father stood looking down at her with one hand on his hip, the other at his chin, in an actorish pose.

We entered a living-room as dim and cool as a cave. The windows were few and small, masked by Venetian blinds which laid horizontal bars across the light. The barred light fell on a floor of black oak, partly covered with faded Persian rugs. The furniture was heavy and old: a rosewood concert grand at the end of the room, carved elaborately to nineteenth-century taste, stiff-backed chairs of mahogany, a tapestried divan in front of the deep fireplace. The beams that supported the time-stained plaster ceiling were black oak like the floor. A chandelier of yellowing crystal hung down from the central beam like a misshaped stalactite.

“Queer old place, what?” Marvell said to me. “Well, what shall it be, old boy? A Scotch and soda?”

“Fine.”

“I expect I’ll have to look you up some ice.”

“Don’t bother.”

“No bother at all. I know where everything is.” He trotted away, his light hair flying in the wind of his own motion. For the nephew of a lord, he was very obliging. I myself was the nephew of my late Uncle Jake, who once went fifteen rounds with Gunboat Smith, to no decision.

I tried to remember what my Uncle Jake looked like. I could remember the smell of him, compounded of bay rum, hair oil, strong clean masculine sweat and good tobacco, and the taste of the dark chocolate cigarettes he brought me the day my father took me to San Francisco for the first time; but I couldn’t remember his face. My mother never kept his pictures, because she was ashamed to have a professional fighter in the family.

The murmur of voices drew me to a window which open outward onto the veranda. I sat down in a straight chair against the wall, hidden from outside by the heavy drapes and the half-closed blind. Cathy and her father were talking on the swing.

“I didn’t see him afterwards,” she said tensely. “I walked out and got in the car and drove myself home. He wasn’t even in sight.”

“But I know he drove you home. I saw his cap on the front seat of the car just now.”

“He must have left it before. I swear I didn’t see him after.”

“How can I believe you, Cathy?” The man’s voice held genuine torment. “You’ve lied to me before, about him, too. You promised me you’d have nothing to do with him, or any other man, until you were older.”

“But I didn’t! I didn’t do anything wrong.”

“You let him kiss you.”

“He made me. I tried to get away.” A trace of hysteria came into her voice like a thin entering wedge.

“You must have encouraged him in some way. A man doesn’t act like that without a reason, surely. Think about it, Cathy, didn’t you do or say something which might have led him on?” He was trying to be cool and fair, the impersonal cross-examiner, but hurt and rage buzzed like blundering insects in his tone.

“Led him on, father. That’s a hideous thing to say.” The onset of sobbing rocked her words.

“Darling,” he said. “Poor darling.” The swing creaked as he leaned toward her, and the sobs were smothered. “I didn’t mean to hurt you, Cathy, you know that. It’s simply because I love you that I’m so concerned about this—this ugly thing.”

“I love you too, father.” The words were muffled, probably by his shoulder.

“I wish I could believe that,” he said gently.

“But I do, father, I do. I think you’re the best man in the world.”

There was something queer about the conversation, made stranger still by the girl’s extreme urgency. They could have been two lovers, of the same age.

“Oh, Cathy,” he said brokenly. “What am I going to do about you?”

A third voice entered the colloquy: “What are you trying to do to her, James?” It was Maude Slocum’s voice, and it was cold with anger.

“This is no affair of yours,” he answered.

“I should think it is. She is my daughter, you know.”

“I’m well aware of that, my dear. It doesn’t necessarily follow that she can’t have a good, decent life.”

“She won’t have if you go on like this, stirring her up and torturing her nerves.”

“For heaven’s sake, mother.” Cathy spoke as if the older woman were the child. “The way you talk about me, you’d think I was a bone for two dogs to fight over. Why can’t you treat me like a human being?”

“I try to, Cathy. You’ll never listen to me. I know something about these things—” She faltered.

“If you know so much, why don’t you put them into practice? There’ve been nothing but scenes in this family since I was old enough to talk, and I’m sick of it.”

The girl’s footsteps crossed the veranda, and the elder Slocums were silent. A full minute passed before the woman said, in a voice I barely recognized: “Leave her alone, James. I’m warning you.”

The throaty whisper made the short hairs prickle at the back of my neck.