Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

“A bottle of beer.” I disturbed the bar whisky. “Ask Gretchen what she’s drinking, and if she’ll have one with me.”

The drink and Gretchen arrived simultaneously. “Helen says no charge,” the waitress said. “Your drinks are on the house. Or anything.”

“Food?”

“Not this late. The kitchen’s closed.”

“What, then?”

The waitress set my beer down hard so that it foamed, and went away without answering.

Gretchen giggled, not unpleasantly, as she slid into the seat across from me. “Helen’s got rooms upstairs. She says there’s too many men in this burg, and somebody has to do something to take the pressure off.” She sipped her drink, rum coke, and winked grotesquely over the rim of the glass. Her eyes were naïve and clear, the color of cornflowers. Not even the lascivious red mouth constructed with lipstick over her own could spoil her freshness.

“I’m a very low-pressure type myself.”

She looked me over carefully, did everything but feel the texture of the material my coat was made of. “Maybe. You don’t have the upstairs look, I admit. You can move, though, brother.”

“Forget it.”

“I wish I could. I never get scared when something happens, it always come over me later. I wake up in the middle of the night and get the screaming meemies. God damn that babe to hell.”

“She’s there already.”

“Yeah, I know what you mean. These Spanish babes take things so hard, it’s getting so a girl can’t have fun any more.”

“You do all right,” I said. “If Pat can be believed.”

She blushed, and her eyes brightened. “You know Pat?”

“He was my buddy,” I said, almost gagging on the word. “In the Marines.”

“He really was in the Marines, then?” She seemed surprised and pleased, and was sharper than I thought.

“Sure. We were on Guadal together.” I felt just a little like a pander.

“Maybe you can tell me.” She bit her lower lip and got lipstick on her teeth. Even her front teeth were bad. “Is it true what he says, that he’s a secret agent or something?”

“In the war?”

“Now. He says him being a chauffeur is only a blind, that he’s some kind of an undercover man.”

“I wouldn’t know.”

“He tells so many stories, half the time I don’t know what to believe. Pat’s a swell joe, though,” she added defensively. “He’s got a good brain, and he’ll go far.”

I agreed, as heartily as I could. “Yeah, a good guy. I was hoping to see him tonight. There’s a business opportunity in our organization, and he could get in on the ground floor.”

“A business opportunity?” The words had a magical four-color advertisement quality, and she repeated them with respect. The cornflower eyes saw Gretchen in an apron freshly laundered in the new Bendix, cooking for Reavis in the tiled kitchen of a new one-bedroom G.I. house in the suburbs of what city? “In L.A.?”

“Yeah.”

“He might be at my place. He waits for me in the trailer sometimes.”

“Can you leave now?”

“Why not? I’m a freelance.” The patter went on like a record she’d forgotten to turn off, but her thoughts were far ahead, on Gretchen in a new phase: attractive young wife of rising young executive Reavis.

She stroked the fender of my car as if it was an animal she could win by affection. I wanted to say, forget him. He’ll never stay long with any woman or pay his debts to any man. I said: “We’re doing good business these days. We can use a boy like Pat.”

“If I could help to get him a real good job—” she said. The rest of it was silent but unmistakable: he’d marry me. Maybe.

A few blocks off the main street I turned, as she directed, down a road lined with large old houses. The eroded asphalt rattled the tools in the trunk of the car. It was one of those streets that had once been the best in town. The houses were Victorian mansions, their gables and carved cornices grotesque against the sky. Now they were light-housekeeping apartments and boarding houses, wearing remnants of sleazy grandeur.

We went up an alley between two of them, to a yard oppressed by the black shadows of oaks. There was a trailer under the trees, on the far side of the yard. In the light of the headlights I could see that its metal side was peeling and rustling like an abandoned billboard. The littered yard gave off an odor of garbage.

“That’s our trailer there.” The girl was trying to be brisk, but there was a strain of anxiety rising in her voice. “No lights, though,” she added, when I switched off the headlights and the engine.

“He wouldn’t be waiting in the dark?”

“He might have gone to sleep. Sometimes he goes to sleep here.” She was on the defensive again, describing the habits of a large and troublesome pet whom she happened to love.

“You said ‘our trailer,’ by the way. Yours and Pat’s?”

“No sir, he just visits me. I got a bunkmate name of Jane, but she’s never home nights. She works in an all-night hamburger up the line.”

Her face was a pale blur, swallowed completely then by the shadow of the oaks. Their sharp dry leaves crackled under our feet. The door of the trailer was unlocked. She went in and turned on a light in the ceiling.

“He isn’t here.” She sounded disappointed. “Do you want to come in?”

“Thanks.” I stepped up from the concrete block that served as a doorstep. The top of the door was so low I had to duck my head.

The little room contained a sink and butane stove at the end nearest the door, two narrow built-in bunks covered with identical cheap red cotton spreads, a built-in plywood dresser at the far end cluttered with cosmetics and bobbypins and true-romance comic-books, and above it a warped, dirty mirror reflecting a blurred distorted version of the girl’s room, the girl, and me.

The man in the mirror was big and flat-bodied, and lean-faced. One of his gray eyes was larger than the other, and it swelled and wavered like the eye of conscience: the other eye was little, hard and shrewd. I stood still for an instant, caught by my own distorted face, and the room reversed itself like a trick drawing in a psychological test. For an instant I was the man in the mirror, the shadow-figure without a life of his own who peered with one large eye and one small eye through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.

“It’s kind of cramped,” she said, trying to be cheerful, “but we call it home sweet home.”

She reached past me and closed the door. In the close air, the smell of spilled rancid grease from the stove and the sick-sweet odor of dime-store perfume from the dresser were carrying on an old feud. I wasn’t rooting for either. “Cozy,” I said.

“Sit down, sir,” she said with forced gaiety. “I’m out of rum and cokes, but I got some muscatel.”

“Thanks, not on top of beer.”

I sat on the edge of one of the red-covered bunks. The movements of the man in the mirror had the quickness and precision of youth, but none of youth’s enthusiasm. Now his forehead was bulbous like a cartooned intellectual’s, his mouth little and prim and cruel. To hell with him.

“We could have a little party if you want,” she said uncertainly. Standing in the full glare of the light, she looked like a painted rubber doll, made with real human hair, that wasn’t quite new any more.

“I don’t want.”

“Okay, only you don’t have to be insulting about it, do you?” She meant to say it in a kidding way, but it came out wrong. She was embarrassed, and worried.

She tried again: “I guess you’re pretty anxious to see Pat, eh? He might be down in his place in L.A., you know. He don’t usually go down in the middle of the week, but a couple of times he did.”