The drowning pool

“This will do.”

I stole a look at the woman, to confirm my first impression. Her atmosphere was like pure oxygen; if you breathed it deep it could make you dizzy and gay, or poison you. Her eyes were melancholy under heavy lashes, her cheeks faintly hollowed as if she had been feeding on her own beauty. Her flesh had that quality of excess drawn fine, which men would turn and follow in the street.

Her hands fumbled with the diamond clasp of a gold lamé bag, and groped inside. “God damn and blast it,” she said. Her voice was level and low.

“Trouble?” I said it not too hopefully.

She didn’t turn, or even move her eyes. I thought it was a brush-off, and didn’t especially mind, since I’d asked for it. But she answered after a while, in the same flat level tone: “Night after night after night, the run-around. If I had taxi fare I’d walk out on him.”

“Be glad to help.”

She turned and looked at me—the kind of look that made me wish I was younger and handsomer and worth a million, and assured me that I wasn’t. “Who are you?”

“Unknown admirer. For the last five minutes, that is.”

“Thank you, Unknown Admirer.” She smiled and raised her eyebrows. Her smile was like an arrow. “Are you sure it isn’t father of five?”

“Vox populi,” I said, “vox dei. I also have a fleet of taxis at my disposal.”

“It’s fu

“I have a taxi waiting. You can have it.”

“Such sweetness, and self-denial to boot. So many unknown admirers want to be known.”

“Kidding aside.”

“Forget it, I was talking. I haven’t the guts to do anything else but talk.”

She glanced at her table, and the large head jerked peremptorily, beckoning her. Downing her drink, she left the bar and went back to the table. The large head called for its check in a rich, carrying voice.

The bartender spread his arms and addressed the people at the bar: “Sorry now, good people, it’s time to close now, you know.”

“Who’s the Palomino?” I asked him quietly.

“Mrs. Kilbourne, you mean?

“Yeah, who’s she?”

“Mrs. Walter Kilbourne,” he stated with finality. “That’s Walter Kilbourne with her.” The name had co

I was waiting in the taxi across the street when they appeared on the sidewalk. Simultaneously, the limousine drew up to the curb. Kilbourne’s legs were small for his giant torso. As they crossed the sidewalk, his great head moved level with his wife’s. This time Reavis sat up front with the chauffeur.

My driver said: “You want to play tag some more?”

“Might as well, it’s barely two o’clock.”

“Some guys,” he grumbled, “got a very peculiar sense of humor.”

He made a U-turn at the corner and came back fast. The traffic had thi

My driver had double-parked a hundred yards short of The Flamenco. He slammed the gear-shift savagely into low and wrestled with the steering wheel. “How long does this go on?”

“We’ll have to wait and see.”

“I usually get myself a bite and java round about two o’clock.”

“Yeah, it’s sure as hell. Murder certainly breaks up a man’s schedule.”

The speedometer needle jumped ten miles, as if it was attached directly to his heartbeat. “Did you say murder?”

“Right.”

“Somebody get it, or somebody going to get it?”

“Somebody got it.”

“I don’t like messing with killings.”

“Nobody does. Just keep that car in sight, and vary your distance.”

The black car stopped with a blaze of brake-lights at the Cahuenga stoplight, and my driver made a mistake. Before it turned left, he pulled up close to it. Reavis looked back, his eyes wide and black in our headlights, and spoke to the chauffeur. I cursed under my breath, and hoped that he was discussing the beauty of the night.

He wasn’t. Once the limousine got onto the Freeway, it began to move at the speed it was built for. Our speedometer needle moved up to eighty and stayed there like the hand of a stopped clock. The tail-lights disappeared around a curve and were gone when we rounded the next curve on whining tires.

“Sorry,” the driver said, his head and body rigid over the wheel. “That Caddie can hold a hundred from here to San Francisco. Anyway, it probably turned off on Lankershim.”

Chapter 11

Graham Court had changed in the hour or so since I had seen it last. The place had the same abandoned ugliness, the same foul-breathed atmosphere of people living desperately on their uppers, but these things had lost a part of their reality. By stepping out of it into a limousine which took him into the company of Mrs. Kilbourne, Reavis had given the place a new dimension: the possibility that there was more behind the thin warped walls than drinking and poverty, copulation and despair. For Reavis, at least, Graham Court was a place where anything could happen: the low-life set where actors played at being poor for a thousand dollars a day; the slum where the handsome prince lived incognito.

In the first cottage, a woman sighed mournfully in her sleep, and a man’s blurred growl instructed her to shut her big loud yap. A radio chirped like a frenzied cricket in the shack at the front of the row, where someone was listening to an all-night disc-jockey or had forgotten to turn it off. Reavis’s was the third from the street on the left. The door opened at the first try with an ordinary passkey. I closed it behind me and found the light-switch beside it.

The room precipitated out of darkness and enclosed me in a dingy wallboard cube. The light was a paper-shaded bulb in a hanging double socket, drawn sideways by a cord which ran to a nail in the wall and down the wall to a two-burner electric plate. There were dark crumbs on the oilcloth-covered table beside the burner, and some of them were moving. A chest of drawers sagged against the opposite wall, its veneer flaked like crackleware. Its top, indented with charred cigarette burns, held a bottle of barbershop hair-oil and a pair of military brushes in a pigskin case initialed P.M.R.

I went through the drawers and found two laundered shirts, two pairs of cotton socks in brilliant patterns, a change of underclothes, a cardboard box bearing a Sheik label and a colored picture of the Sheik himself, a blue silk ribbon signifying second place in Junior Field and Track at Camp Mackenzie, wherever that was, in 1931; and a carton of cardboard matchfolders. The carton was nearly full, and each of the folders bore the legend, printed in gold on black: Compliments of Patrick “Pat” Reavis. The bottom drawer contained dirty clothes, including the Hawaiian shirt.

An iron bed in the left-hand corner of the room opposite the door took up about a quarter of the floor space. It was covered with a U.S. Navy blanket. The pictures on the wall above the bed seemed to go with the blanket. They were photographs of nude women, both glossy prints and cutouts, perhaps a dozen of each. Gretchen Keck was among them, the face above the soft young body set in a smiling tetany of embarrassment. The picture in the drawer of the table by the bed were more unusual. They included a set of the Herculaneum murals, which did not mean that Reavis was an amateur archaeologist. There was nobody there that I knew. Opposite the bed a faded green curtain, hung from a curved iron pipe, enclosed a sink and toilet and a portable shower stall sheathed with rusting metal. A pool of dirty water spread across the rotting linoleum and darkened the hem of the curtain.