Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

He wagged his studded head good-humoredly. “Forget Franks, eh? I can’t help it if he’s a ward-heeler in the Mayor’s party, and the Mayor is ex officio on the Police Commission. Can I?”

“You could put him on a desk, or issue him blanks.”

“Yeah. You’re a fast talker, Archer, but you needn’t get your back up. Maude Slocum told me about you.”

“How much?”

“Enough. The less said about that the better. Right?” His mind was quick and cold, out of place in his big, full-blooded body. I could almost see it turning a leaf and writing a new heading at the top of a clean page. “So far as she knew, you were the last one to talk to the old lady before she died. Exactly when did you see her?”

“Just before sunset. That would be a few minutes after seven.”

“A couple of minutes before. It’s earlier here on account of the mountains. You talked to her in the garden, I believe? If you’ll tell me now exactly what was said—” He went to the door and called his shorthand writer, who took his position at the kitchen table. I told him what was said.

“Nothing much there, eh?” He sounded disappointed. “No sign of suicidal impulse? Or illness? She had a pretty bad heart, the doctor says.”

“Nothing that I could put my finger on. She seemed a little screwy to me, but nearly everyone does. What’s the physical evidence?”

“Everything external points to drowning. That’s the presumption, anyway, when you find a corpse in water—though how the hell she got there I can’t say. About the body, we’ll know more tomorrow. The Coroner’s ordering an autopsy and an inquest.”

“What’s the assumption in the meantime? Fell, or got pushed?”

“Fell, but I’m handling it as homicide until I know for sure. Old ladies do fall into swimming-pools, I guess.”

“She wasn’t old.”

“I know. And there’s no good reason why she should go near the pool, let alone into it. She never used it. It was built for her husband’s arthritis years ago. She was forbidden the water, on account of her heart, and she was afraid of it, anyway.”

“Not without reason.”

“No.” His thick, square-nailed fingers drummed on the hard tabletop. “I tried a reconstruction from the condition of the lawn around the pool. The trouble was, when Marvell yelled for help, everybody came running. They trampled out any traces there might have been.”

“One thing, if it’s murder, you’ll have most of your suspects accounted for. The people at the party.”

“It’s not that simple.” To the man with the notebook he said: “Don’t bother with this,” and turned back to me: “They had a buffet lunch in the dining-room, and at the time it happened the guests were moving in and out. Even Marvell could have pushed her in, then fished her out himself.”

“Why pick on Marvell?”

“Figure it out. He wants money to take his play east. He’s very close to Slocum. Now Slocum has money.”

“You’re skipping Slocum, aren’t you?”

His face twisted sourly. “James is a mother’s boy. He wouldn’t touch a hair of his mother’s head.”

“And Maude Slocum?”

“I’m skipping her, too.” His mind flicked another page, and started a new heading: “Assuming she was murdered, there’s a possibility it was an outside job. A woman like that makes a lot of enemies.”

“Like Pareco,” I said.

He grunted: “Huh?”

“The Pacific Refining Company.”

“Oh. Yeah. Only the oil companies don’t go in for murder any more. Not for a little matter like an oil lease. I meant to ask you, you didn’t see any strangers around the place?”

This was the question I’d been waiting for, and wondering how to answer. Reavis was the logical suspect: on the spot, drunk, and with a grievance. The only trouble was that when I picked him up, he hadn’t looked or talked or acted like a man who had just committed a crime. And the timing was wrong. But if the police were looking for a quick and easy out, they could probably send him to the gas chamber on circumstantial evidence. I’d seen it happen before, in the L.A. jungle, and I had to be sure about the Nopal Valley police. I decided that Knudson could be trusted, but I kept one card face down. I didn’t tell him that when I picked Reavis up a mile or more from the house, it was exactly 8:23 by my dashboard clock and my wrist watch. It was Reavis who had called attention to the time, and that could mean that Reavis was trying to use me for a phony alibi. I hated to be used.

Knudson didn’t like the delay, but he kept his temper. “All right. So you gave this boy a lift from outside the gate sometime after eight. You realize we don’t know when she was killed, and probably never will know. Marvell’s evidence is inconclusive. In his first account he didn’t even mention the splash he heard, or thinks he heard. Did Reavis have murder on his mind?”

“Not unless he enjoys it. He was in a good mood.”

“What sort of a boy is he? I’ve seen him around, but never talked to him.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him a pre-frontal lobotomy wouldn’t fix. He’d steal his widowed mother’s rent-money to play the ponies, but I don’t see him pushing her into the water. Psychopath, maybe, but not extreme. He takes it out in talking.”

He leaned toward me, as wide as the tabletop. “You like the boy? Is that why you let him slip away from Franks?”

“I lose my well-oiled precision when a slug just misses my kidneys. I don’t like Reavis at all, but some people do.” I pitched him a curve, low, on the outside: “Cathy Slocum likes him pretty well.”

His face swelled up with blood, and he leaned closer. “You’re a liar. Cathy doesn’t mess with trash like that.”

“Take it easy, Knudson.” I stood up. “Ask her father about it, if you like.”

The life went out of his face and left it stupid. “What goes on here?” he said to himself. Then he remembered me, and the shorthand man.

He took the notebook out of the man’s hands, and ripped out the last page of pencilled shorthand. “All right, Eddie, take a rest.” And to me: “What are you going to do? Help us find Reavis?”

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Slocum.”

“Do that. She’s in the front sitting-room with her husband. It’s across the hall from the living-room.”

I said: “I’m not a liar.”

“What?” He stood up slowly. He was no taller than I was, but he was wide and powerful. His thick body dominated the room even though the mind behind his pale blue eyes was turned elsewhere.

“I’m not a liar,” I said.

The eyes focused on me, cold with hostility. “All right,” he said after a time. “You’re not a liar.” He sat down at the table again, with his shoulders slumped like a padded coat on an inadequate hanger.

Passing the open door of the living-room, I caught a glimpse of the people waiting inside. Voices were subdued, faces white and strained. Nobody seemed to be drinking, and all the gay conversation had run out. The party was a group hangover, the dim old room the ancestral cave of death. A policeman in a blue shirt sat hunched in a chair by the door, studying the visored cap on his knee as if it were the face of a dear friend.

The door of the sitting-room across the hall was locked. I was about to knock on it, when a man on the other side uttered a four-letter word. It sounded incongruous in his high tenor. He was answered by a woman’s voice, rapid and low, too low to penetrate the heavy door and let me hear her words. The only sounds I could make out plainly were the sobbing gasps that punctuated the sentences.

I moved to the next door on that side and entered the dark room beyond it. The light from the hall made crouched shadows of the chairs along the wall and gleamed among the silver and dishes that cluttered the buffet. There was still a little light in the room when I closed the door behind me: a thin shining under the old-fashioned sliding doors that separated the dining-room from the sitting-room. I crossed the room quietly and lay down by the sliding doors. Maude Slocum’s voice slid under them: