The Drowning Pool

by Ross Macdonald

  A heavy middle-aged man in a fake policeman’s uniform appeared from nowhere. He picked up the knife, broke it across his knee, and dropped the blade and handle in the pocket of his blue coat. He came to my booth, stepping lightly as if he was walking on eggs. His shoes were slit and mis-shapen across the base of the toes.

  “Nice work, son,” he said. “They flare up so fast sometimes I can’t keep track of ’em.”

  “Knife-play disturbs my drinking.”

  His red-rimmed eyes peered from a face that was gullied by time. “New in these parts, ain’t you?”

  “Yeah,” I answered, though I felt as if I’d been in Nopal Valley for days. “Speaking of my drinking, I haven’t been doing any.”

  He signalled to a waitress. “We’ll fix that.” She set down a trayful of empty glasses grained with the leavings of foam. “What’ll it be?”

  “A bottle of beer.” I distrusted the bar whisky. “Ask Gretchen what she’s drinking, and if she’ll have one with me.”

  The drink and Gretchen arrived simultaneously. “Helen says no charge,” the waitress said. “Your drinks are on the house. Or anything.”

  “Food?”

  “Not this late. The kitchen’s closed.”

  “What, then?”

  The waitress set my beer down hard so that it foamed, and went away without answering.

  Gretchen giggled, not unpleasantly, as she slid into the seat across from me. “Helen’s got rooms upstairs. She says there’s too many men in this burg, and somebody has to do something to take the pressure off.” She sipped her drink, rum coke, and winked grotesquely over the rim of the glass. Her eyes were naïve and clear, the color of cornflowers. Not even the lascivious red mouth constructed with lipstick over her own could spoil her freshness.

  “I’m a very low-pressure type myself.”

  She looked me over carefully, did everything but feel the texture of the material my coat was made of. “Maybe. You don’t have the upstairs look, I admit. You can move, though, brother.”

  “Forget it.”

  “I wish I could. I never get scared when something happens, it always comes over me later. I wake up in the middle of the night and get the screaming meemies. God damn that babe to hell.”

  “She’s there already.”

  “Yeah, I know what you mean. These Spanish babes take things so hard, it’s getting so a girl can’t have any fun any more.”

  “You do all right,” I said. “If Pat can be believed.”

  She blushed, and her eyes brightened. “You know Pat?”

  “He was my buddy,” I said, almost gagging on the word. “In the Marines.”

  “He really was in the Marines, then?” She seemed surprised and pleased, and was sharper than I thought.

  “Sure. We were on Guadai together.” I felt just a little like a pander.

  “Maybe you can tell me.” She bit her lower lip and got lipstick on her teeth. Even her front teeth were bad. “Is it true what he says, that he’s a secret agent or something?”

  “In the war?”

  “Now. He says him being a chauffeur is only a blind, that he’s some kind of an undercover man.”

  “I wouldn’t know.”

  “He tells so many stories, half the time I don’t know what to believe. Pat’s a swell joe, though,” she added defensively. “He’s got a good brain, and he’ll go far.”

  I agreed, as heartily as I could. “Yeah, a good guy. I was hoping to see him tonight. There’s a business opportunity in our organization, and he could get in on the ground floor.”

  “A business opportunity?” The words had a magical four-color advertisement quality, and she repeated them with respect. The cornflower eyes saw Gretchen in an apron freshly laundered in the new Bendix, cooking for Reavis in the tiled kitchen of a new one-bedroom G.I. house in the suburbs of what city? “In L.A.?”

  “Yeah.”

  “He might be at my place. He waits for me in the trailer sometimes.”

  “Can you leave now?”

  “Why not? I’m a freelance.” The patter went on like a record she’d forgotten to turn off, but her thoughts were far ahead, on Gretchen in a new phase: attractive young wife of rising young executive Reavis.

  She stroked the fender of my car as if it was an animal she could win by affection. I wanted to say, forget him. He’ll never stay long with any woman or pay his debts to any man. I said: “We’re doing good business these days. We can use a boy like Pat.”

  “If I could help to get him a real good job—” she said. The rest of it was silent but unmistakable: he’d marry me. Maybe.

  A few blocks off the main street I turned, as she directed, down a road lined with large old houses. The eroded asphalt rattled the tools in the trunk of the car. It was one of those streets that had once been the best in town. The houses were Victorian mansions, their gables and carved cornices grotesque against the sky. Now they were light-housekeeping apartments and boarding houses, wearing remnants of sleazy grandeur.

  We went up an alley between two of them, to a yard oppressed by the black shadows of oaks. There was a trailer under the trees, on the far side of the yard. In the light of the headlights I could see that its metal side was peeling and rusting like an abandoned billboard. The littered yard gave off an odor of garbage.

  “That’s our trailer there.” The girl was trying to be brisk, but there was a strain of anxiety rising in her voice. “No lights, though,” she added, when I switched off the headlights and the engine.

  “He wouldn’t be waiting in the dark?”

  “He might have gone to sleep. Sometimes he goes to sleep here.” She was on the defensive again, describing the habits of a large and troublesome pet whom she happened to love.

  “You said ‘our trailer,’ by the way. Yours and Pat’s?”

  “No sir, he just visits me. I got a bunkmate name of Jane, but she’s never home nights. She works in an all-night hamburger up the line.”

  Her face was a pale blur, swallowed completely then by the shadow of the oaks. Their sharp dry leaves crackled under our feet. The door of the trailer was unlocked. She went in and turned on a light in the ceiling.

  “He isn’t here.” She sounded disappointed. “Do you want to come in?”

  “Thanks.” I stepped up from the concrete block that served as a doorstep. The top of the door was so low I had to duck my head.

  The little room contained a sink and a butane stove at the end nearest the door, two narrow built-in bunks covered with identical cheap red cotton spreads, a built-in plywood dresser at the far end cluttered with cosmetics and bobby-pins and true-romance comic-books, and above it a warped, dirty mirror reflecting a blurred distorted version of the girl’s room, the girl, and me.

  The man in the mirror was big and flat-bodied, and lean-faced. One of his gray eyes was larger than the other, and it swelled and wavered like the eye of conscience: the other eye was little, hard and shrewd. I stood still for an instant, caught by my own distorted face, and the room reversed itself like a trick drawing in a psychological test. For an instant I was the man in the mirror, the shadow-figure without a life of his own who peered with one large eye and one small eye through dirty glass at the dirty lives of people in a very dirty world.

  “It’s kind of cramped,” she said, trying to be cheerful, “but we call it home sweet home.”

  She reached past me and closed the door. In the close air, the smell of spilled rancid grease from the stove and the sick-sweet odor of dime-store perfume from the dresser were carrying on an old feud. I wasn’t rooting for either. “Cozy,” I said.

  “Sit down, sir,” she said with forced gaiety. “I’m out of rum and cokes, but I got some muscatel.”

  “Thanks, not on top of beer.”

  I sat on the edge of one of the red-covered bunks. The movements of the man in the mirror had the quickness and precision of youth, but none of youth’s enthusiasm. Now his forehead was bulbous like a cartooned intellectual’s, his mouth littl
e and prim and cruel. To hell with him.

  “We could have a little party if you want,” she said uncertainly. Standing in the full glare of the light, she looked like a painted rubber doll, made with real human hair, that wasn’t quite new any more.

  “I don’t want.”

  “Okay, only you don’t have to be insulting about it, do you?” She meant to say it in a kidding way, but it came out wrong. She was embarrassed, and worried.

  She tried again: “I guess you’re pretty anxious to see Pat, eh? He might be down in his place in L.A., you know. He don’t usually go down in the middle of the week, but a couple of times he did.”

  “I didn’t know he had a place in L.A.”

  “A little place, a one-room apartment. He took me down one week end to see it. Gee, wouldn’t that be funny if you came all the way up here to find him and he was down in L.A. all the time.”

  “That would be a scream. You know where it is, so I can look him up tomorrow?”

  “He won’t be there tomorrow. He’s got to be back on the job, at Slocum’s.”

  I let her think that. “Too bad. I have to get back to L.A. tonight. Maybe you can give me his address.”

  “I don’t have the number, but I could find it again.” Her eyes flickered dully, as if she hoped to promote something. She sat down on the bunk opposite me, so close that our knees touched. A pair of nylons hanging from a towel-rack above the bed tickled the back of my neck. “I’d do anything I could to help,” she said.

  “Yeah, I appreciate that. Does the place have a name?”

  “Graham Court, something like that. It’s on one of the little side streets off North Madison, between Hollywood and L.A.”

  “And no phone?”

  “Not that I know of.”

  “Thanks again.” I stood up. She rose like my shadow, and we were jammed in the narrow aisle between the beds. I tried to move past her to the door, and felt the touch of her round thighs.

  “I kind of like you, Mister. If there was anything I could do?”

  Her breasts were pointed like a dilemma. I pushed on past. The man in the mirror was watching me with one eye as cold as death. “How old are you, Gretchen?” I asked her from the doorway.

  She didn’t follow me to the door. “None of your business. A hundred years, about. By the calendar, seventeen.”

  Seventeen, a year or two older than Cathy. And they had Reavis in common. “Why don’t you go home to your mother?”

  She laughed: paper tearing in an echo chamber. “Back to Hamtramck? She left me at Stanislaus Welfare when she got her first divorce. I been on my own since 1946.”

  “How are you doing, Gretchen?”

  “Like you said, I’m doing all right.”

  “Do you want a lift back to Helen’s?”

  “No thank you, sir. I got enough money to live on for a week. Now that you know where I live, come and see me sometime.”

  The old words started an echo that lasted fifty miles. The night was murmurous with the voices of girls who threw their youth away and got the screaming meemies at three or four a.m.

  chapter 10

  I stopped at a lunch-bar east of the cemetery on Santa Monica Boulevard, for a sandwich and coffee and a look at the telephone book. It hung by a chain from the pay telephone on the wall beside the front window. A Graham Court on Laredo Lane was listed. I dialed the number and watched the sidewalk roamers. The young hepcats high on music or weed, the middle-aged men on the town, the tourists waiting for something to fulfill their fantasies, the hopeful floozies and the despairing ones, the quick, light, ageless grifters walked the long Hollywood beat on the other side of the plate glass. The sign above the window was red on one side, green on the other, so that they passed from ruddy youth to sickly age as they crossed my segment of sidewalk, from green youth to apoplexy.

  A dim voice answered on the twelfth ring. Pat Reavis didn’t live at Graham Court, he never had, goodnight.

  The counterman slid a thin white sandwich and a cup of thick brown coffee across the black lucite bar. He had pink butterfly ears. The rest of him was still in the larval stage.

  “I couldn’t help hearing,” he said moistly. “You’re looking for a contact, I know a good number to call.”

  “Write it in blood on a piece of rag-content paper and eat it with your breakfast.”

  “Huh?” he said. “Blood?”

  “What makes you think that sex is the important thing in life?”

  He laughed through his nose. “Name another.”

  “Money.”

  “Sure, but what does a guy want money for, answer me that.”

  “So he can retire to a lamasery in Tibet.” I showed him a Special Deputy badge which I’d saved from a wartime case on the Pedro docks. “Pimping will get you a couple of years up north.”

  “Jesus.” His face underwent a sudden and shocking change. Old age ran crooked fingers over it, and held it crooked. “I was only kidding, I didn’t mean nothing, I don’t know any number. Honest to God.”

  His whine followed me onto the sidewalk. The closing door shut it off. I was in an unpleasant mood.

  Laredo Lane was one of the little lost stucco-and-frame streets between the two big boulevards. Its street lights, one to a block, spaced long patches of gloom. There were occasional houselights where after-midnight parties were going on. I caught fragments of music and laughter, glimpses of dancing couples in the windows as I drove past. Some of the dancers were black, some white; some had brown Indian faces. Most of the small marginal houses were dark behind closed blinds. One entire block was empty, its broken row of concrete foundations bared by an old fire.

  I felt like a lonely cat, an aging tom ridden by obscure rage, looking for torn-ear trouble. I clipped that pitch off short and threw it away. Night streets were my territory, and would be till I rolled in the last gutter.

  The letters GRAHAM COURT were cut in the front of a rectangular metal box lit from inside by an electric bulb. Nailed to the post which supported the sign was a piece of white-painted board on which an unsteady hand had lettered VACANCY. The NO was hidden by a weathered cardboard flap. I parked two hundred feet past the sign and left my engine running. The exhaust made little blue puffs like pipe-smoke in the chilling air.

  The Court was a row of decaying shacks bent around a strip of withering grass. A worn gravel drive brought the world to their broken-down doorsteps, if the world was interested. A few of the shacks leaked light through chinks in their warped frame sides. The building marked Office, which was nearest the street, was closed and dark. It looked abandoned, as if the proprietor had given up for good. Over my head a red-flowering eucalyptus moved in a wind as soft as night-time breathing, and dropped its thin small petals to the ground. I picked one off the sidewalk for no good reason and ground it to red powder between my fingers.

  I was deciding between the direct approach and a long dull wait in the car, when the door of one of the cottages opened, halfway down the row. It dropped a yellow plank of light across the grass. A man’s shadow moved in it, and then the light went out. I walked on up the street, away from my car. After an interval, quick footsteps followed me.

  I turned up the walk of an unlighted house, casually and with a sort of reluctance, to give the impression that I belonged there. My long vague shadow merged with the shadows of bushes, and I knew that no more than my outline would be visible to the man behind me. A car was parked in the driveway beside the house, and I moved out of sight behind it. The footsteps on the sidewalk went by without a pause.

  At the corner, the man crossed under the streetlight. It was Reavis, walking with an eager swagger, chin up and shoulders held back consciously as if he was pied-piping a bevy of girls at broad noon. When he had turned the corner, I ran back to my car and drove it around the block in time to shut off the lights and see the one-man parade cross the next intersection.

  I took no chances. Because he knew my car, I locked it and left it parked where it was. I let him s
tay nearly a block ahead and used whatever cover was convenient: trees, hedges, parked cars. He never looked back; he moved like a man whose conscience was clear, or lacking. When he got to Sunset, he turned left. I crossed the boulevard and closed the distance between us. He had on a hounds-tooth suit in clashing black and tan. I could practically hear the suit across the wide traffic-humming thoroughfare.

  Reavis headed for a taxi stand, where several cabs stood in line along the curb. I expected him to take one, and was set to follow him in another. Instead, he sat down on the bench at the bus-stop, crossed his legs, and lit a cigarette. I went a few yards up the cross-street and watched him from the shadow of the building on the corner. Off to my left, the tall apartment hotels stood against a sky whose moving reddish color was like the inside of closed eyelids. The late night traffic flowed between me and Reavis at a steady thirty-five to forty.

  A long black car nosed out of the stream and into the red curb where Reavis was sitting. He stood up and flipped his cigarette away. A man in a dark gray livery got out of the chauffeur’s seat and opened the back door for him. I was halfway across the street, in the thin aisle of safety between the moving lanes, when the limousine got under way again. I opened the door of the first cab in the line and told the driver to follow it

  “Double fare?” he said above the starting roar of his motor.

  “Sure thing. And an extra buck for the license number.”

  The cab left the curb in a jet-propelled takeoff that threw me back in the seat, and went up to fifty in second. Cutting in and out of traffic, it gained on the black limousine.

  “Don’t pull up on him too fast. Drop back when you get the number.”

  He slowed a bit, but gradually narrowed the space between the two cars. “The number is 23P708,” he said after a while. “You tailing the guy or what?”

  “This is a game I play.”