The drowning pool

“Like Pareco,” I said.

He grunted: “Huh?”

“The Pacific Refining Company.”

“Oh. Yeah. Only the oil companies don’t go in for murder any more. Not for a little matter like an oil lease. I meant to ask you, you didn’t see any strangers around the place?”

This was the question I’d been waiting for, and wondering how to answer. Reavis was the logical suspect: on the spot, drunk, and with a grievance. The only trouble was that when I picked him up, he hadn’t looked or talked or acted like a man who had just committed a crime. And the timing was wrong. But if the police were looking for a quick and easy out, they could probably send him to the gas chamber on circumstantial evidence. I’d seen it happen before, in the L.A. jungle, and I had to be sure about the Nopal Valley police. I decided that Knudson could be trusted, but I kept one card face down. I didn’t tell him that when I picked Reavis up a mile or more from the house, it was exactly 8:23 by my dashboard clock and my wrist watch. It was Reavis who had called attention to the time, and that could mean that Reavis was trying to use me for a phony alibi. I hated to be used.

Knudson didn’t like the delay, but he kept his temper. “All right. So you gave this boy a lift from outside the gate sometime after eight. You realize we don’t know when she was killed, and probably never will know. Marvell’s evidence is inconclusive. In his first account he didn’t even mention the splash he heard, or thinks he heard. Did Reavis have murder on his mind?”

“Not unless he enjoys it. He was in a good mood.”

“What sort of a boy is he? I’ve seen him around, but never talked to him.”

“There’s nothing wrong with him a pre-frontal lobotomy wouldn’t fix. He’d steal his widowed mother’s rent-money to play the ponies, but I don’t see him pushing her into the water. Psychopath, maybe, but not extreme. He takes it out in talking.”

He leaned toward me, as wide as the tabletop. “You like the boy? Is that why you let him slip away from Franks?”

“I lose my well-oiled precision when a slug just misses my kidneys. I don’t like Reavis at all, but some people do.” I pitched him a curve, low, on the outside: “Cathy Slocum likes him pretty well.”

His face swelled up with blood, and he leaned closer. “You’re a liar. Cathy doesn’t mess with trash like that.”

“Take it easy, Knudson.” I stood up. “Ask her father about it, if you like.”

The life went out of his face and left it stupid. “What goes on here?” he said to himself. Then he remembered me, and the shorthand man.

He took the notebook out of the man’s hands, and ripped out the last page of pencilled shorthand. “All right, Eddie, take a rest.” And to me: “What are you going to do? Help us find Reavis?”

“I’ll talk to Mrs. Slocum.”

“Do that. She’s in the front sitting-room with her husband. It’s across the hall from the living-room.”

I said: “I’m not a liar.”

“What?” He stood up slowly. He was no taller than I was, but he was wide and powerful. His thick body dominated the room even though the mind behind his pale blue eyes was turned elsewhere.

“I’m not a liar,” I said.

The eyes focused on me, cold with hostility. “All right,” he said after a time. “You’re not a liar.” He sat down at the table again, with his shoulders slumped like a padded coat on an inadequate hanger.

Chapter 8

Passing the open door of the living-room, I caught a glimpse of the people waiting inside. Voices were subdued, faces white and strained. Nobody seemed to be drinking, and all the gay conversation had run out. The party was a group hangover, the dim old room the ancestral cave of death. A policeman in a blue shirt sat hunched in a chair by the door, studying the visored cap on his knee as if it were the face of a dear friend.

The door of the sitting-room across the hall was locked. I was about to knock on it, when a man on the other side uttered a four-letter word. It sounded incongruous in his high tenor. He was answered by a woman’s voice, rapid and low, too low to penetrate the heavy door and let me hear her words. The only sounds I could make out plainly were the sobbing gasps that punctuated the sentences.

I moved to the next door on that side and entered the dark room beyond it. The light from the hall made crouched shadows of the chairs along the wall and gleamed among the silver and dishes that cluttered the buffet. There was still a little light in the room when I closed the door behind me: a thin shining under the old-fashioned sliding doors that separated the dining-room from the sitting-room. I crossed the room quietly and lay down by the sliding doors. Maude Slocum’s voice slid under them:

“I’ve stopped trying. For years I did my best for you. It didn’t take. Now I’m giving up.”

“You never tried,” her husband answered, flatly and bitterly. “You’ve lived in my house, and eaten my bread, and never made the slightest attempt to help me. If I’m a personal failure, as you say, the failure is certainly yours as well as mine.”

“Your mother’s house,” she taunted him. “Your mother’s bread—a very unleavened loaf.”

“Leave my mother out of it!”

“How can I leave her out?” Now her voice was purring smoothly, in control of itself and of the situation. “She’s been the central figure in my married life. You had your chance to make a clean break with her when we were married, but you hadn’t the courage to take it.”

“I had no real chance, Maude.” The actorish voice wobbled under the burden of self-pity. “I was too young to get married. I was dependent on her—I hadn’t even finished school. There weren’t many jobs in those days, either, and you were in a hurry to be married—”

“I was in a hurry? You begged me with tears in your voice to marry you. You said your immortal soul depended on it.”

“I know, I thought it did.” The simple words held echoes of despair. “You wanted to marry me, too. You had your reasons.”

“You’re damned right I had my reasons, with a child in my belly and nobody else to turn to. I suppose I should have been the true-hearted little woman and swallowed my pride and gone away somewhere.” Her voice sank to an acid whisper: “That’s what your mother wanted, wasn’t it?”

“Your were never little, Maude.”

She laughed unpleasantly. “Neither was Mother, was she? Her lap was always big enough for you.”

“I know how you feel about me, Maude.”

“You can’t. I have no feeling at all. You’re a perfect blank as far as I’m concerned.”

“Very well.” He struggled to keep his voice steady. “But now that Mother’s dead, I think that you’d be a little kinder to—her memory. She was always good to Cathy. She had to go without things herself to send Cathy to school and dress her properly—”

“I admit that. What you don’t understand is the fact that I’m thinking about myself. I put Cathy first, of course. I love her, and I want the best of everything for her. But that doesn’t mean I’m ready for the shelf. I’m a woman as well as a mother. I’m only thirty-five.”

“That’s rather late to start all over again.”

“Right now I feel as if I haven’t started—that I’ve been saving myself for fifteen years. I won’t keep much longer. I’m going rotten inside.”

“Your version at the moment. This is the chance you’ve been waiting for. If Mother hadn’t died, you’d have been perfectly willing to go on as before.”

“I’m afraid you don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Approximately as before, then. I know that something’s been happening to you since you made that trip to Chicago.”

“What about that trip to Chicago?” A threat tightened her voice like an unused muscle.

“I haven’t asked you any question about it. I don’t intend to. I do know that you’d changed when you came back that spring. You had more life—”