Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

“It wouldn’t do Mrs. Kilbourne a lot of good.”

“Worry about yourself, Rico. This film is solid evidence of blackmail. Mrs. Kilbourne would never have to take the stand.”

“Blackmail, crap! I never took no money from Mrs. Kilbourne.” He rolled his eyes, seeking the woman’s glance, but she was fixedly watching the film in my hand. I put it back in my pocket.

“No judge or jury would ever believe it,” I said. “You’re in a box. You want me to nail down the lid?”

He lay still for fifteen or twenty seconds, his lean brown forehead corrugated by thought. “A box is right,” he admitted finally. “What do you want me to do?”

“Nothing. Nothing at all. Just keep your nose clean and stay away from my client. A young boy like you deserves a second chance, after all.”

He showed vari-colored teeth in a shamed grin: so far gone that he was smiling at my jokes. I unwound the wire from his wrists and let him stand up. All his joints were stiff.

“You’re letting him off easy,” the woman said.

“What do you want to do to him?”

She turned her eyes on him, gray and lethal under the heavy curtains of her lashes. Instinctively he moved away from her, keeping his back to the wall. He looked willing to be put back into the closet.

“Nothing,” she said at last. It was one of her favorite words. But on the way to the door she stepped on the black hairpiece and ground it under her gold heel. The last I saw of Rico, he had his right hand flat on top of his scalp, utter humiliation on his face.

We walked in silence to the nearest boulevard and caught a cruising cab. She told the driver to take her to The Flamenco.

“Why there?” I said, when the cab was under way. “It’s close by now.”

“Not for me. I have to go back there anyway. I borrowed taxi-fare from the powder-room girl, and left her my bag for security.”

“That’s quite a situation you have there. A diamond-studded bag, and nothing in it.”

“Tell it to my husband.”

“I’d be glad to.”

“Oh no!” She moved against me. “You wouldn’t really?”

“He’s got you frightened out of your wits. Why?”

“You won’t ask me any questions, will you? I’m so tired. This business has taken more out of me than you think.”

Her head touched my shoulder tentatively, and rested there. I leaned sideways, looking down into her face. Her gray eyes were crepuscular. The lashes came down over them like sudden night. Her mouth was dark and glistening. I kissed her, felt her toe press on my instep, her hand move on my body. I drew back from the whirling vortex that had opened, the drowning pool. She wriggled and sighed, and went to sleep in my arms.

I dropped her half a block from The Flamenco, and asked the driver to take me to Graham Court. He needed directions. It was all I could do to give them to him. My brain and body had gone into a champagne hangover. Through the long ride back, the wearing business of retrieving my car, driving it home, opening and shutting the garage, unlocking the door of house and locking it behind me. I stayed awake with difficulty. I told my brain to tell my body to do what had to be done, and watched my body do it.

It was twenty after four by the electric alarm on the table beside my bed. Taking off my jacket, I felt for the can of film in the pocket. It was gone. I sat on the edge of the bed and shivered for two minutes by the clock. That made it four-twenty-two.

I said: “Goodnight to you, Mavis.” Rolled over in my clothes, and went to sleep.

The alarm made a noise which reminded me of dentists, which reminded me of optometrists, which reminded me of thick-lensed spectacles, which reminded me of Morris Cramm: the man I had been trying to think about when I woke up.

Hilda met me on the third-floor landing with her finger to her lips. “Be quiet now, Morris is sleeping, and he had a hard night.” She was blonde and fat and doe-eyed, radiating through her housecoat the warmth and gentleness of Jewish women who are happily married.

“Wake him up for me, will you? Just a minute?”

“No, I couldn’t do that.” She looked at me more closely. The only light came from a burlap-curtained French door that opened on a fire escape at the end of the hall. “What happened to you, Lew? You look God-awful.”

“You look swell. It’s wonderful to see nice people again.”

“Where have you been?”

“To hell and back. Glendale, that is. But I’ll never leave you again.” I kissed her on the cheek, which smelt of Palmolive soap.

She gave me a friendly little push that almost sent me backwards over the rail. “Don’t do that. Morris might hear you, and he’s awful jealous. Anyway, I’m not nice people. I’m a sloppy housekeeper, and I haven’t done my nails for two whole weeks. Why? Because I’m lazy.”

“I’m crazy about your nails. They never scratch.”

“They will if you don’t quiet down. And don’t think you’re going to flatter me into waking him up. Morris needs his sleep.”

Morris Cramm was night legman for a columnist and worked the graveyard shift. He knew everybody worth knowing in the metropolitan area, and enough about them to set up a blackmailing syndicate bigger than Sears Roebuck. To Morris, that idea would never have occurred.

“Look at it this way, Hilda. I am searching for the long-lost son of a wealthy English nobleman. The bereaved father is offering a fantastic reward for the prodigal’s Los Angeles address. With Morris, I go halves. If he can give me the address, it will entitle him to this valuable gift certificate, bearing an engraved portrait of Alexander Hamilton and personally autographed by the Secretary of the Treasury.” I took a ten-dollar bill out of my wallet.

“You sound like a radio program. A couple of radio programs, all mixed up.”

“For five minutes of his personal sleeping time, I offer ten dollars in cash. Two dollars a minute, a hundred and twenty dollars an hour. Show me the movie star that gets nine hundred and sixty dollars for eight-hour day.”

“Well,” she said dubiously, “if there’s money involved. They’re selling Beethoven quartets fifty per cent off down at the record shop— Only what if Morris doesn’t know the answer?”

“He knows all the answers, doesn’t he?”

She turned with her hand on the doorknob and said quite seriously: “Sometimes I think he does. He knows so much it saps the energy right out of him.”

Hilda adjusted the blind and let a little light into the bedroom-sittingroom. The floor was covered with newspapers, the walls with shelves of books and record albums. A large Capehart dominated the room and the lives of the two people who lived in it. Morris was sleeping on an uncovered studio bed opposite the window, a small dark man in candy-striped pyjamas. He rolled over and sat up blinking. His eyes looked huge and emotional without his glasses.

He stared at me blindly: “What time is it? Who is it?”

“Nearly nine o’clock, dear. Lew came to ask you a question.” She handed him his glasses from a shelf above the bed.

“My God, so early?” He refused to look at me. He put his hands on opposite shoulders and rocked himself and groaned.

“I’m sorry, Morris. It will only take a minute. Can you give me Walter Kilbourne’s address? He isn’t in the phone book. I have his car license, but this is a personal matter.”

“Never heard of him.”

“For ten dollars, darling,” Hilda said very gently.

“If you don’t know where Kilbourne lives, admit it. He looks like money to me, and he’s married to the most beautiful woman in town.”

“Ten million dollars, more or less,” he said resentfully. “As for Mrs. Kilbourne, I don’t go for ash blondes myself. My aesthetic taste demands a ruddier coloration.” He smiled with frank admiration at his wife.