Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

“Fool.” She sat down beside him and ruffled his black wire hair.

“If Mavis Kilbourne was as beautiful as all that, she’d have got on in pictures, wouldn’t she? But no, she married Kilbourne.”

“Kilbourne or the ten million?”

“More than ten million, come to think of it. Fifty-one per cent of Pacific Refining Company, current quotation 26-7/8 figure it out for yourself.”

“Pacific Refining Company,” I said slowly and distinctly, thinking of the woman who was drowned. “I thought he was in the taxi business.”

“He has some over in Glendale. His finger’s in several pies, but Pareco’s his plum. They got in early on the Nopal Valley strike.” He yawned, and leaned his head against his wife’s plump shoulder. “This bores me, Lew.”

“Go on. You are cooking electronically. Where does he live?”

“In the Valley.” His eyes were closed, and Hilda stroked with maternal awe the forehead that enclosed the filing-cabinet brain. “Staffordshire Estate, one of those private communities you need a special visa to get in. I was out there for a Fourth of July party. They had a Senator for guest of honor.”

“U.S. or State?”

“U.S. Senator, what do you think? State Senators are a dime a dozen.”

“Democratic or Republican?”

“What’s the difference? Haven’t I earned my ten dollars, brain-picker? Sweat-shopper?”

“One more question, asphalt intellectual. Where did the money come from in the first place?”

“Am I the Bureau of Internal Revenue?” He started to shrug, but found it required too much effort. “I am not.”

“You know things they don’t know.”

“I know nothing. All I hear is rumors. You are inciting me to commit a libel.”

“Spill it,” I said.

“Storm-trooper.”

“Now that isn’t nice to call anybody,” Hilda said soothingly.

I reminded him of the question: “The money. Where did it come from?”

“It didn’t grow on trees,” he said, and smothered a yawn. “I heard that Kilbourne made a fine thing out of black-market cars in Detroit during the war. Then he rushed down here to invest his money legitimately before somebody took it away from him. Now he’s grand old California stock and politicians go to his parties. Don’t quote me, it’s only a rumor. He might have spread it himself to cover up something worse, now that I come to think of it.”

Morris looked around the room with a dreaming smile and went to sleep sitting up. Removing his glasses, Hilda laid the limp boyish body out on the bed. I handled her the ten and moved to the door.

She followed me. “Come round in the daytime, Lew, we got the new Strauss from Paris.”

“I will when I have some time. I’m on my way to Nevada at the moment.”

“Seriously?”

“It looks like it.”

“That’s where Sue’s living, isn’t she?” Her round fat face lit up. “You’re going to have a reconciliation!”

“Not a chance. This is business.”

“I know you’ll come back together. Wait and see.”

“The bottom dropped out. All the king’s horses couldn’t put it back in for us.”

“Oh, Lew.” She looked ready to cry. “You made such a nice couple together.”

I patted her arm. “You are lovely and good, Hilda.” Morris groaned in his sleep. I went.

From the highway the Staffordshire Estates were a discreet brass marker bolted to a stone arch, through which a new blacktop turned off the public road. A metal sign on one side of the arch informed me further that they were PROTECTED BY PRIVATE PATROL. The rustic redwood gates stood open, and I drove through them. Morning haze was drifting slowly up the canyon ahead, a translucent curtain between the outside world and the privately patrolled world I was entering. There were trees along the road, tall cypresses and elms, and small birds singing in them. Behind adobe walls and thick square-cut hedges, sprinklers were whirling lariats of spray. The houses, massive and low and bright among banks of flowers set in billiard-table lawns, were spaced out of sight of each other, so that no one but the owners could enjoy them. In this corner of the San Fernando Valley, property had become a fine art that was an end in itself. There were no people in sight, and I had a queer feeling that the beautiful squatting houses had taken over the canyon for their own purposes.

Valmy, Arbuthnot, Romanovsky, the mailboxes announced as I drove by them: Lewisohn, Tappingham, Wood, Farrington, Von Esch. WALTER J. KILBOURNE was neatly stenciled on the ninth mailbox and I turned up the drive beside it. The house was built of pink brick and glass, with a flat jutting redwood roof. The drive was lined with twenty shades of begonia. I parked in the gravelled loop that went past the front door, and pressed the button beside it. Chimes echoed through the house. The place was as noisy as a funeral parlor at midnight, and I liked it almost as well.

The door was opened silently by a small Japanese whose footsteps made no sound. “You wish something, sir?” His lips were very careful with the sibilants. Over his white linen shoulder I could see an entrance loggia containing a white grand piano and a white-upholstered Hepplewhite sofa. A pool beyond the white-columned windows threw rippling sapphire shadows on the white walls.

“Mr. Kilbourne,” I said. “He told me he’d be home.”

“But he is not. I am sorry, sir.”

“It has to do with an oil lease. I need his signature.”

“He is not at home, sir. Do you wish to leave a message?”

There was no way to tell if he was lying. His black eyes were unblinking and opaque. “If you can tell me where he is—?”

“I do not know, sir. He has gone for a cruise. Perhaps if you were to try his office, sir. They have direct telephone communication with the yacht.”

“Thanks. May I call the office from here?”

“I am sorry, sir. Mr. Kilbourne has not authorized me to admit unknown persons to his home.” He ducked his bootbrush hair at me in a token bow, and shut the door in my face.

I climbed into my car, closing the door very gently so as not to start an avalanche of money. The loop in the drive took me past the garages. They contained an Austin, a jeep, and a white roadster, but no black limousine.

The limousine met me halfway back to the highway. I held the middle of the road and showed three fingers of my left hand. The black car braked to a stop a few feet short of my bumpers, and the chauffeur got out. His scarred eyes blinked in the brightening sun.

“What’s the trouble, mac? You give me the sign.”

I hitched the gun from my shoulder-holster as I stepped out of the car, and showed it to him. He raised his hands to shoulder level and smiled. “You’re screwy to try it, punk. I got nothing worth taking. I’m an old con myself but I got wise. Get wise like me and put away the iron.” The smile sat strangely, like a crooked Santa Claus mask, on his battered face.

“Save it for Wednesday night meeting.” I moved up to him, not too close. He was old, but strong and fast, and I didn’t want to shoot him.

He recognized me then. His face was expressive, like a concrete block. “I thought you was in the refrigerator.” The large hands closed and opened.

“Keep them up. What did you do with Reavis? Refrigerate him, too?”

“Reavis?” he said with laborious foxiness. “Who’s Reavis? I don’t know any Reavis.”

“You will, when they take you down to the morgue to look at him.” I improvised: “The Highway Patrol found him by the road outside of Quinto this morning. His throat was cut.”

“Uh?” The air issued from his mouth and nostrils as if I’d body-punched him.

“Let me see your knife,” I said, to keep his fifty points of I.Q. occupied.