Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

A long black car nosed out of the stream and into the red curb where Reavis was sitting. He stood up and flipped his cigarette away. A man in a dark gray livery got out of the chauffeur’s seat and opened the back door for him. I was halfway across the street, in the thin aisle of safety between the moving lanes, when the limousine got under way again. I opened the door of the first cab in the line and told the driver to follow it.

“Double fare?” he said above the starting roar of his motor.

“Sure thing. And an extra buck for the license number.”

The cab left the curb in a jet-propelled takeoff that threw me back in the seat, and went up to fifty in second. Cutting in and out of traffic, it gained on the black limousine.

“Don’t pull up on him too fast. Drop back when you get the number.”

He slowed a bit, but gradually narrowed the space between the two cars. “The number is 23P708,” he said after a while. “You tailing the guy or what?”

“This is a game I play.”

“Okay, I was only asking a natural question.”

“I don’t know the answer.” That ended our conversation. I wrote the number inside a match-folder and slipped it into my watch-pocket.

The black car drew into the curb unexpectedly, dropped Reavis, and pulled away again. He swaggered across the sidewalk under a sign which spelled out Hunt Club. The leather-padded door swung to behind him.

“Let me out here,” I said to the driver. “Park as near as you can and wait for me.”

He raised his right hand and brushed the ball of his thumb back and forth across the first two fingers. “Show me a little green first, eh?”

I handed him a five.

He looked at the bill and turned to look at me over the back of the seat. His face was Sicilian, black-eyed, sharp-nosed. “This wouldn’t be a heist or nothing like that?”

I told him: “I’m a private cop. There won’t be any trouble.” I hoped there wouldn’t.

Dennis’s Hunt Club was dim and chilly and crowded. Indirect lights shone with discretion on polished brass and wood, on polished pates and highly polished faces. The photographs that lined the panelled walls were signed by all the big names and the names that had once been big. Dennis himself was near the door, a gray-haired man wearing undertaker’s clothes, clown’s nose, financier’s mouth. He was talking with an air of elegant condescension to one of the names that had once been big. The fading name glanced at me from under his fine plucked eyebrows. No competition. He registered relief and condescension.

The place was built on two levels, so that the bar commanded a view of the dining-room. It was nearly two o’clock. The bar was doing a rush-hour business before the curfew knelled. I found an empty stool, ordered a Guinness stout for energy, and looked around me.

The hounds-tooth suit was raising its visual din in the middle of the dining-room. Reavis, his back to me, was at a table with a woman and a man. The man leaned across his four-inch steak in Reavis’s direction, a blue dinner-jacket constricting his heavy shoulders. The wide neck that grew through his soft white collar supported an enormous head, covered with skin as pink and smooth as a baby’s. Pinkish hair lay in thin ringlets on the massive scalp. The eyes were half-closed, listening: bright slits of intelligence in the great soft, chewing face.

The third at the table was a young ash blonde, wearing a gown of white pleated chiffon and the beauty to outshine it. When she inclined her head, her short bright hair swung forward, framing her features chastely like a wimple. Her features were fine.

She was trying to hear what the men were talking about. The big face looked at her and opened its eyes a little wider and didn’t like what it saw. A babyish petulance drove a wedge between the invisible eyebrows and plucked at the munching mouth, which spoke to her. The woman rose and moved in the direction of the bar. People noticed her. She slid onto the empty stool beside me, and was served before I was. The bartender called her by name, “Mrs. Kilbourne,” and would have tugged at his forelock if he’d had one. Her drink was straight bourbon.

Finally the bartender brought me my stout, foaming in a chilled copper mug. “Last call, sir.”

“This will do.”

I stole a look at the woman, to confirm my first impression. Her atmosphere was like pure oxygen; if you breathed it deep it could make you dizzy and gay, or poison you. Her eyes were melancholy under heavy lashes, her cheeks faintly hollowed as if she had been feeding on her own beauty. Her flesh had that quality of excess drawn fine, which men would turn and follow in the street.

Her hands fumbled with the diamond clasp of a gold lamé bag, and groped inside. “God damn and blast it,” she said. Her voice was level and low.

“Trouble?” I said it not too hopefully.

She didn’t turn, or even move her eyes. I thought it was a brush-off, and didn’t especially mind, since I’d asked for it. But she answered after a while, in the same flat level tone: “Night after night after night, the run-around. If I had taxi fare I’d walk out on him.”

“Be glad to help.”

She turned and looked at me—the kind of look that made me wish I was younger and handsomer and worth a million, and assured me that I wasn’t. “Who are you?”

“Unknown admirer. For the last five minutes, that is.”

“Thank you, Unknown Admirer.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows. Her smile was like an arrow. “Are you sure it isn’t father of five?”

“Vox populi,” I said, “vox dei. I also have a fleet of taxis at my disposal.”

“It’s funny, but I really have. My husband has, anyway. And I don’t have taxi fare.”

“I have a taxi waiting. You can have it.”

“Such sweetness, and self-denial to boot. So many unknown admirers want to be known.”

“Kidding aside.”

“Forget it, I was talking. I haven’t the guts to do anything else but talk.”

She glanced at her table, and the large head jerked peremptorily, beckoning her. Downing her drink, she left the bar and went back to the table. The large head called for its check in a rich, carrying voice.

The bartender spread his arms and addressed the people at the bar: “Sorry now, good people, it’s time to close now, you know.”

“Who’s the Palomino?” I asked him quietly.

“Mrs. Kilbourne, you mean?

“Yeah, who’s she?”

“Mrs. Walter Kilbourne,” he stated with finality. “That’s Walter Kilbourne with her.” The name had connotations of money for me, but I couldn’t place it definitely.

I was waiting in the taxi across the street when they appeared on the sidewalk. Simultaneously, the limousine drew up to the curb. Kilbourne’s legs were small for his giant torso. As they crossed the sidewalk, his great head moved level with his wife’s. This time Reavis sat up front with the chauffeur.

My driver said: “You want to play tag some more?”

“Might as well, it’s barely two o’clock.”

“Some guys,” he grumbled, “got a very peculiar sense of humor.”

He made a U-turn at the corner and came back fast. The traffic had thinned, and it was easy to keep the widely spaced red tail-lights in sight. In the center of the Strip, the black car pulled into the curb again. The blonde woman and her husband got out and entered The Flamenco. Reavis stayed where he was, beside the chauffeur. The black car U-turned suddenly, and passed us going in the opposite direction.

My driver had double-parked a hundred yards short of The Flamenco. He slammed the gear-shift savagely into low and wrestled with the steering wheel. “How long does this go on?”

“We’ll have to wait and see.”