Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

“I got no knife. I had nothing to do with it. I dropped him over the Nevada line. He couldn’t come back that fast.”

“You came back that fast.”

His face worked with the terrible effort of thought. “You’re feeding me a sucker’s line,” he said. “He never went back to Quinto, they never found him.”

“Where is he now, then?”

“I ain’t talking,” the concrete block announced. “You might as well put your iron away and lam.”

We were in a dark-green valley walled with close-set laurel on both sides. The only sound was the hum of our idling cars. “You have a deceptive face,” I said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was alive. You want it gun-whipped.”

“Try it on,” he said stolidly. “See where it gets you.”

I wanted to hurt him, but the memory of the night was ugly in my mind. There had to be a difference between me and the opposition, or I’d have to take the mirror out of my bathroom. It was the only mirror in the house, and I needed it for shaving.

“Run along, quiz kid.” I slanted the gun at the road. He went back to his car.

“Punk,” he shouted in his thick, expressionless voice as he swerved in the ditch to pass me. His wrap-around bumper nicked the left rear fender of my car, and he blasted my ears with him horn to show it was deliberate. The roar of his accelerating motor rose like a sound of triumph.

I put mine in gear. All the way across the desert I scanned the side of the road for blind cripples and old ladies that I could help across and minister to with potions of camomile tea.

It was late afternoon when I crossed the great level pass. The shadow of my car was running ahead in fleet silence, and slowly increasing its lead. The sun was yellow on the arid slopes, the air so clear that the mountains lacked perspective. They looked like surrealist symbols painted on the shallow desert sky. The heat, which had touched 110 at one, was slackening off, but my hood was still hot enough to fry the insects that splattered it.

The Rush Apartments occupied a two-story frame building on the east side of Las Vegas. Jaundiced with yellow paint, it stood tiredly between a parking lot and a chain grocery store. An outside wooden staircase with a single sagging rail led up to a narrow veranda on which the second-floor apartments opened. An old man was sitting in a kitchen chair tipped back against the wall under the stairs. He had a faded bandana handkerchief around his scrawny neck, and was sucking on a corncob pipe. A week’s beard grew on his folded cheeks like the dusty gray plush in old-fashioned railway coaches.

I asked him where Mrs. Schneider lived.

“She lives right here,” he mumbled.

“Is she in now?”

He removed his empty pipe from his mouth and spat on the cement floor. “How do you expect me to know? I don’t keep track of women’s comings and goings.”

I laid a fifty-cent piece on the bony knee. “Buy yourself a bag of tobacco.”

He picked it up sulkily, and slipped it into a pocket of his food-crusted vest. “I s’pose her husband sent you? At least she says he’s her husband, looks more like her bully to me. Anyway, you’re out of luck now, slicker. She went out a while ago.”

“You wouldn’t know where?”

“To the den of iniquity, what do you think? Where she spends all her time.” He tipped his chair forward and pointed far down the street. “You see that green sign? You can’t make it out from here, but it says ‘Green Dragon’ on it. That’s the den of iniquity. And you want me to tell you the name of this town? Sodom and Gonorrhea.” He laughed an old man’s laugh, high-pitched and unamused.

“Is that Elaine Schneider?”

“I dont know any other Mrs. Schneiders.”

“What does she look like?” I said. “I never saw her.”

“She looks like Jezebel.” His watery eyes glittered like melting ice. “She looks like what she is, the whore of Babylon rolling her eyes and shaking her privates at Christian young men. Are you a Christian, son?”

I backed away thanking him and crossed the street, leaving my car at the curb. I walked the two blocks to the Green Dragon and worked some of the stiffness out of my legs. It was another seedy-looking bar. Signs in the dirty half-curtained windows advertised LIQUOR, BEER, HOT and COLD SANDWICHES and SHORT ORDERS. I pulled the screen door open and went in. A semi-circular bar with slot machines. Kitchen smells, the smell of stale spilled beer, the sick-sour smell of small-time gamblers’ sweat, were slowly mixed by a four-bladed fan suspended from the fly-specked ceiling.

There was only one customer at the bar, a thin boy with uncombed red hair hunched desolately over a short beer. The bartender sat on a stool in a corner, as far away from the desolate youth as possible. His greased black head leaned against a table radio. “Three nothing,” he announced to anyone who cared. “Top of the seventh.” No sign of Jezebel.

I took a seat beside the redheaded boy, ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle of beer. The bartender went out reluctantly through the swinging door to the kitchen.

“Look at me, eh,” the man beside me said. The words twisted his mouth as if they hurt. “How do you like me?”

His thin unshaven face looked dirty. His eyes had blue hollows under them and red rims around them. One of his ears was caked with dry blood.

“I like you very much,” I said. “You have that beaten look that everybody admires.”

It took the raw edge off his mood of self-pity. He even managed a smile which made him look five years younger, hardly more than a kid. “Well, I asked for it.”

“Any time,” I said, “any time.”

“I asked for it in more ways than one, I guess. I should know better than to go on a bat in Las Vegas, but I guess I’ll never learn.”

“You have a few more years before you die. What happened to your ear?”

He looked sheepish. “I don’t even know. I met a guy in a bar last night and he roped me into a game in a poker-parlor on the other side of town. All I remember, I lost my money and my car. I had three aces when I lost my car, and somebody started an argument: I guess it was me. I woke up in a parking lot.”

“Hungry?”

“Naw. Thanks, though. I had a little change. The hell of it is I got to get back to L.A., and I got no car.”

The bartender brought my food and drink. “Stick around,” I told the young Dostoevsky. “I’ll give you a lift if I can.”

While I was eating, a woman came through a door at the end of the bar. She was tall and big-boned, with more than flesh enough to cover her bones. The skirt of her cheap black suit was wrinkled where her hips and thighs bulged out. Her feet and ankles spilled over the tops of very tight black pumps. Her north end was decorated with a single gray fox, a double strand of imitation pearls approximately the same color, and enough paint to preserve a battleship. Her chest was like a battleship’s prow, massive and sharp and uninviting. She gave me a long hard searchlight look, her heavy mouth held loose, all ready to smile. I took a bite of my sandwich and munched at her. The searchlights clicked off, almost audibly.

She turned to the bar and snapped open a shiny black plastic bag. The yellow hair which she wore in a braided coronet was dark at the roots, obviously dyed. Turn it back to brown, take off a few years and a few more pounds, chip the paint off her face, and she could be Reavis’s twin. They had the same eyes, the same thick handsome features.

The bartender clinched it: “Something for you: Elaine?”

She tossed a bill on the pitted woodstone surface. “Twenty quarters,” she growled in a whisky voice that wasn’t unpleasant. “For a change.”