Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

“Your luck is bound to change.” He smiled insincerely. “The one you been playing is loaded to pay anytime.”

“What the hell,” she said, deadpan. “Easy come, easy go.”

“Especially easy go,” the boy beside me said to the beer-foam in the bottom of his glass.

Mechanically, without excitement or any sign of interest, she fed the quarters one by one into a machine near the door. Somebody phoning long-distance to somebody else who had been dead for years. Some twos and fours, a single twelve, stretched her money out. They went back in as a matter of course. She played the machine as if it was a toneless instrument made to express despair. When the jackpot came in a jangling rush of metal, I thought the machine had simply broken down. Then the slugs and quarters overflowed the bowl and rolled on the floor.

“I told you,” the bartender said. “I said she was set to pay.”

Paying no attention to her winnings, she crossed to the bar and took the seat beside me. He gave her a double whisky in a shot-glass without being asked.

“ You pick it up, Simmie.” Her voice had a trace of weary coquetry. “I’m wearing a girdle.”

“Sure, but I don’t need to count them. I’ll give you the twenty-five.”

“I put thirty-five in.” The double shot went down like water down a drain.

“That’s the percentage, kid. You got to pay something for all the fun you get.”

“Yeah, fun.” She folded the twenty and the five he gave her, and tucked them away in her bag.

A newsboy came in with an armful of Evening Review-Journal’s and I bought one. The third page carried the story I was looking for, under the heading: EX-MARINE SOUGHT IN NOPAL VALLEY DEATH. It gave no information I didn’t have, except that the police were maintaining an open mind as to the cause of death. Accompanying the story was a picture of Reavis, smiling incongruously over the caption: WANTED FOR QUESTIONING.

I folded the paper open at the third page and laid it on the bar between me and the big synthetic blonde. She didn’t notice it for a minute or two; she was watching the bartender gather up her jackpot. Then her gaze strayed back to the bar and saw the picture, tool hold of it. The breath wheezed asthmatically in her nostrils, and stopped entirely for a period of seconds. She took a pair of spectacles from her bag. With them on her face, she looked oddly like a schoolteacher gone astray.

“You mind if I look at your paper?” she asked me huskily. There was more south in her voice than there had been before.

“Go ahead.”

The bartender looked up from sorting the slugs and quarters on the bar. “Say, I didn’t know you wore glasses, Elaine. Very becoming.”

She didn’t hear him. With the aid of a scarlet-tipped finger moving slowly from word to word, she was spelling out the newspaper story to herself. When the slow finger reached the final period, she was silent and still for an instant. Then she said aloud: “Well I’ll be—!”

She flung the paper down, its edges crumpled by the moist pressure of her hands, and went to the street door. Her hips rolled angrily, her high heels spiked the floor. The screen door slammed behind her.

I waited thirty seconds and went after her. Rotating on his stool, the desolate youth followed me with his eyes, like a stray dog I had befriended and betrayed.

“Stick around,” I told him over my shoulder.

The woman was already halfway up the block. Though they were hobbled by her skirt, her legs were moving like pistons. The gray foxtail hung down her back, fluttering nervously. I followed her more slowly when I saw where she was going. She went up the outside door, and went in, leaving it open. I crossed the street and slid behind the wheel of my car.

She came out immediately. Something metallic in her hand caught a ray of sunlight. She pushed it into her bag as she came down the stairs. The forgotten glasses on her face gave it a purposeful air. I hid my face behind a road map.

She crossed the parking lot to an old Chevrolet sedan. Its original blue paint had faded to brownish green. The fenders were crumpled and dirty like paper napkins on a restaurant table. The starter jammed, the exhaust came out in spasms of dark blue smoke. I followed the pillar of smoke to the main highway junction in the middle of town, where it turned south towards Boulder City. I let it get well ahead as we passed out of town onto the open highway.

Between Boulder City and the dam an asphalt road turned off to the left toward Lake Mead, skirting the public beaches along the shore. Children were playing on the gravel below the road, splashing in the shallow waveless water. Further out a fast red hydroplane was skittering back and forth like a waterbug, describing esses on the paper-flat, paper-gray surface.

The Chevrolet turned off the blacktop, to the left again, up a gravel road which wound through low scrub oak. The brush and the innumerable branching lanes made an accidental maze. I had to move up on the woman to keep her in sight. She was too busy holding her car on the road to notice me. Her smooth old tires skidded and ground among the loose stones as she came out of one curve only to enter another.

We passed a public camping-ground where families were eating in the open among parked cars, tents, tear-drop trailers. A few hundred yards further on, the Chevrolet left the gravel road, turning up a brush-crowded lane which was no more than two ruts in the earth. Seconds later, I heard its motor stop.

I left my car where it was and went up the lane on foot. The Chevrolet was parked in front of a small cabin faced with peeled saplings. The woman tried the screen door, found it locked, pounded it with her fist.

“What gives?” It was Reavis’s voice, coming from inside the cabin.

I crouched behind a scrub-oak, feeling as if I should be wearing a coonskin cap.

Reavis unhooked the door and stepped outside. His hounds-tooth suit was dusty, and creased in all the wrong places. His hair curled down in his eyes. He pushed it back with an irritable hand. “What’s the trouble, sis?”

“You tell me, you lying little crumb.” He overshadowed her by half a head, but her passionate energy made him look helpless. “You told me you were having woman trouble, so I said I’d hide you out. You didn’t tell me that the woman was dead.”

He stalled for time to think: “I don’t know what you’re talking about, Elaine. Who’s dead? This dame I was talking about isn’t dead. She’s perfectly okay only she says she’s missed two months in a row and I don’t want any part of it. She was cherry.”

“Yeah, a grandmother and cherry.” Her voice rasped with ugly irony. “This is one thing you can’t lie out of, sprout. You’re in too deep for me to try and help you. I wouldn’t help you even if I could. You can go to the gas chamber and I wouldn’t lift a finger to save your neck. Your neck ain’t worth the trouble to me or to anybody else.”

Reavis whined and whimpered: “What the hell are you talking about, Elaine. I didn’t do nothing wrong. Are the police after me?”

“You know damn well they are. This time you’re going to get it, sonny boy. And I want no part of it unnerstan’? I want no part of you from now on.”

“Come on now, Elaine, settle down. That’s no kind of talk to use on your little brother.” He forced his voice into an ingratiating rhythm and put one hand on her shoulder. She took it off and held her purse in both hands.

“You can save it. You’ve talked me into too much trouble in my life. Ever since you stole that dollar bill from maw’s purse and tried to shift it onto me, I knew you were heading for a bad end.”

“ You’ve done real good for yourself, Elaine. Selling it for two-bits in town on Saturday night before you was out of pigtails. You still charging for it, or do you pay them?”