Ross Macdonald - The drowning pool

“You don’t have to tell me. Knudson loved her, it was pretty obvious.”

I was probing for a gap in her defenses. Most good secretaries had an occupational weakness: they gathered inside information and after they had gathered it they had to tell it to somebody.

She was piqued. “If you know the whole story already, why come to me?”

“I know damn little. I don’t know who drowned Olivia Slocum or why Maude Slocum took strychnine. I came to you because you’re her closest friend. I figured you had a right to know what happened and that you’d want to help me get to the bottom of it.”

She was gratified. “I do want to help you. I’ve always been in Maude’s confidence, and I can tell you she’s had a tragic life.” She called for more coffee, and turned back to me: “As far as her mother-in-law is concerned, didn’t you say that this man Pat Ryan killed her?”

“That’s Knudson’s theory, and most of the evidence supports it. I’ve taken an option on it, but I haven’t bought it yet.”

“You don’t think Maude—?” Her eyes shone blackly in the dim booth.

“I do not.”

“I’m glad you don’t. Anyone that knew her would tell you she couldn’t hurt anyone. She was a gentle creature, in spite of everything.”

“Everything?”

“Her whole damned messy life. Everything that made her want to suicide.”

“You know why she did then?”

“I guess I do, at that. She was crucified for fifteen years. She’s the one woman I’ve ever known that wanted to do the right thing and couldn’t make it. Everything about Maude was right except her life. She made a couple of mistakes that she couldn’t wipe out. I’ll tell you on one condition. Do you have a word of honor?”

“I have a word. I was an officer in the war, but the gentleman part didn’t take.”

The stern sharp glance raked me again. “I think I’d trust you as far as I would myself, no further. Give me your word that Cathy will never hear this, and that it won’t affect Cathy in any way.”

I guessed what she was going to tell me. “I can’t do that if other people know it.”

“Nobody but me,” she said. “And Knudson, of course, and maybe Knudson’s wife.”

“So Knudson has a wife.”

“He hasn’t lived with her for fifteen or sixteen years, but they’re still married, for keeps. She’ll never divorce him, no matter what he does. She hates him. I guess she hates everyone in the world. She’s going to be glad to hear that Maude killed herself.”

“You know the woman, do you?”

“Do I know her! I lived in her house for nearly a year, and I know her better than I want to. Eleanor Knudson is one of these hard righteous women who wouldn’t donate two pennies to close a dead man’s eyes. Maude lived there too, we were room-mates: that’s how the whole thing started. We were in our sophomore year at Berkeley.”

“Mrs. Knudson ran a boarding house in Berkeley?”

“A rooming house for girls. Her husband was a sergeant with the Oakland police. She was older than he was; I never figured out how she managed to hook him. Probably the usual landlady-roomer business: propinquity and maternal care and more propinquity. She had brains and she wasn’t bad-looking if you like the cold-steel type. Anyway, she and Ralph Knudson had been married for several years when we moved in.”

“You and Maude, you mean?”

“Yes. We’d taken our freshman year in the Teachers’ College in Santa Barbara, but we couldn’t stay there. We both had to work our way through school, and there wasn’t enough work in Santa Barbara. Maude’s father was a rancher in Ventura—that’s where we went to high school, in Ventura—but the depression had wiped him out. My father was dead and my mother couldn’t help me. She was having a hard enough time supporting herself in ’thirty-two. So Maudie and I moved on to the big city. We both knew typing and shorthand and we made a go of it, doing public stenography and typing dissertations. Living was cheap in those days. We paid Mrs. Knudson ten dollars a month for our room, and did our own cooking. We even managed to get to some of our classes.”

“I was around in those days,” I said.

She supped the dregs of her coffee and lit a cigarette, regarding me somberly through the smoke. “They were wonderful sad days. There were lines a mile long at the mission soup-kitchens in San Francisco and Oakland, but we were going to be career girls and set the Bay on fire. I’ve realized since then that it was all my idea. Maudie just went along because I needed her. She had more brains than me, and more goodness. The pure female type, you know? All she really wanted was a husband and a home and a chance to raise some decent kids like herself. So she got herself tangled up with a man who could never marry her as long as he lived. As long as Eleanor Knudson lived, anyway. I watched it happen and couldn’t do a thing to stop it. They were made for each other, Maudie and Ralph, like in the love stories. He was all man and she was all woman and his wife was a frigid bitch. They couldn’t live in the same house without falling in love with each other.”

“And making music together?”

“Damn your eyes!” she spat out suddenly. “You’ve got a lousy attitude. It was the real thing, see. She was twenty and proud, she’d never gone with a man. He was the man for her and she was the woman for him. They were like Adam and Eve; it wasn’t Maudie’s fault he was married already. She went into it blind as a baby, and so did he. It just happened. And it was real,” she insisted. “Look how it lasted.”

“I have been looking.”

She stirred uncomfortably, shredding her cigarette butt in her small hard fingers. “I don’t know why I’m telling you these things. What do they mean to you? Is somebody paying you?”

“Maude gave me two hundred dollars; that’s all gone by now. But once I’m in a case I sort of like to stay through to the end. It’s more than curiosity. She must have died for a reason. I owe it to her or myself to find out the reason, to see the whole thing clear.”

“Ralph Knudson knows the reasons. Eleanor Knudson knows: hell, it was her idea in a way. Maude had to spend her good years with a man she didn’t love, and I guess she simply got sick of it.”

“What do you mean, she had to marry Slocum?”

“You haven’t given me your word,” she said. “About Cathy.”

“You don’t have to worry about Cathy. I feel sorry for the girl. I wouldn’t touch her.”

“I suppose it doesn’t matter a hell of a lot after all. James Slocum must have known she wasn’t his child. They said she was a seven-months’ baby, but Slocum must have known.”

“Knudson is Cathy’s father then.”

“Who else? When he found out Maude was pregnant he begged his wife for a divorce. He offered her everything he had. No soap. So Knudson left his wife and his job and cleared out. He was crazy to take Maudie with him, but she wouldn’t go. She was scared, and she was thinking about the baby she was carrying. James Slocum wanted to marry her, and she let him.”

“How did he come into the picture?”

“Maude had been typing for him all winter. He was doing graduate work in drama, and he seemed to be well-heeled. That wasn’t really why she married him, though, at least not the only reason. He had a faggot tendency, you know? He claimed he needed her, that she could save him. I don’t know whether she did or not. Chances are she didn’t.”

“She was still trying,” I said. “You should be doing my work, Miss Fleming.”

“You mean I notice things? Yes, I do. But where Maudie was concerned I didn’t have to: we were like sisters. We talked the whole thing out before she gave Slocum her answer. I advised her to marry him. I made a mistake. I often make mistakes.” A bitter smile squeezed her mouth and eyes. “I’m not really a Miss, incidentally. My name is Mrs. Mildred Fleming Kraus Peterson Daniels Woodbury. I’ve been married four times.”