The drowning pool

“Mr. Kilbourne,” I said. “He told me he’d be home.”

“But he is not. I am sorry, sir.”

“It has to do with an oil lease. I need his signature.”

“He is not at home, sir. Do you wish to leave a message?”

There was no way to tell if he was lying. His black eyes were unblinking and opaque. “If you can tell me where he is—?”

“I do not know, sir. He has gone for a cruise. Perhaps if you were to try his office, sir. They have direct telephone communication with the yacht.”

“Thanks. May I call the office from here?”

“I am sorry, sir. Mr. Kilbourne has not authorized me to admit unknown persons to his home.” He ducked his bootbrush hair at me in a token bow, and shut the door in my face.

I climbed into my car, closing the door very gently so as not to start an avalanche of money. The loop in the drive took me past the garages. They contained an Austin, a jeep, and a white roadster, but no black limousine.

The limousine met me halfway back to the highway. I held the middle of the road and showed three fingers of my left hand. The black car braked to a stop a few feet short of my bumpers, and the chauffeur got out. His scarred eyes blinked in the brightening sun.

“What’s the trouble, mac? You give me the sign.”

I hitched the gun from my shoulder-holster as I stepped out of the car, and showed it to him. He raised his hands to shoulder level and smiled. “You’re screwy to try it, punk. I got nothing worth taking. I’m an old con myself but I got wise. Get wise like me and put away the iron.” The smile sat strangely, like a crooked Santa Claus mask, on his battered face.

“Save it for Wednesday night meeting.” I moved up to him, not too close. He was old, but strong and fast, and I didn’t want to shoot him.

He recognized me then. His face was expressive, like a concrete block. “I thought you was in the refrigerator.” The large hands closed and opened.

“Keep them up. What did you do with Reavis? Refrigerate him, too?”

“Reavis?” he said with laborious foxiness. “Who’s Reavis? I don’t know any Reavis.”

“You will, when they take you down to the morgue to look at him.” I improvised: “The Highway Patrol found him by the road outside of Quinto this morning. His throat was cut.”

“Uh?” The air issued from his mouth and nostrils as if I’d body-punched him.

“Let me see your knife,” I said, to keep his fifty points of I.Q. occupied.

“I got no knife. I had nothing to do with it. I dropped him over the Nevada line. He couldn’t come back that fast.”

“You came back that fast.”

His face worked with the terrible effort of thought. “You’re feeding me a sucker’s line,” he said. “He never went back to Quinto, they never found him.”

“Where is he now, then?”

“I ain’t talking,” the concrete block a

We were in a dark-green valley walled with close-set laurel on both sides. The only sound was the hum of our idling cars. “You have a deceptive face,” I said. “If I didn’t know better, I’d think it was alive. You want it gun-whipped.”

“Try it on,” he said stolidly. “See where it gets you.”

I wanted to hurt him, but the memory of the night was ugly in my mind. There had to be a difference between me and the opposition, or I’d have to take the mirror out of my bathroom. It was the only mirror in the house, and I needed it for shaving.

“Run along, quiz kid.” I slanted the gun at the road. He went back to his car.

“Punk,” he shouted in his thick, expressionless voice as he swerved in the ditch to pass me. His wrap-around bumper nicked the left rear fender of my car, and he blasted my ears with him horn to show it was deliberate. The roar of his accelerating motor rose like a sound of triumph.

I put mine in gear. All the way across the desert I sca

Chapter 15

It was late afternoon when I crossed the great level pass. The shadow of my car was ru

The Rush Apartments occupied a two-story frame building on the east side of Las Vegas. Jaundiced with yellow paint, it stood tiredly between a parking lot and a chain grocery store. An outside wooden staircase with a single sagging rail led up to a narrow veranda on which the second-floor apartments opened. An old man was sitting in a kitchen chair tipped back against the wall under the stairs. He had a faded bandana handkerchief around his scrawny neck, and was sucking on a corncob pipe. A week’s beard grew on his folded cheeks like the dusty gray plush in old-fashioned railway coaches.

I asked him where Mrs. Schneider lived.

“She lives right here,” he mumbled.

“Is she in now?”

He removed his empty pipe from his mouth and spat on the cement floor. “How do you expect me to know? I don’t keep track of women’s comings and goings.”

I laid a fifty-cent piece on the bony knee. “Buy yourself a bag of tobacco.”

He picked it up sulkily, and slipped it into a pocket of his food-crusted vest. “I s’pose her husband sent you? At least she says he’s her husband, looks more like her bully to me. Anyway, you’re out of luck now, slicker. She went out a while ago.”

“You wouldn’t know where?”

“To the den of iniquity, what do you think? Where she spends all her time.” He tipped his chair forward and pointed far down the street. “You see that green sign? You can’t make it out from here, but it says ‘Green Dragon’ on it. That’s the den of iniquity. And you want me to tell you the name of this town? Sodom and Gonorrhea.” He laughed an old man’s laugh, high-pitched and unamused.

“Is that Elaine Schneider?”

“I dont know any other Mrs. Schneiders.”

“What does she look like?” I said. “I never saw her.”

“She looks like Jezebel.” His watery eyes glittered like melting ice. “She looks like what she is, the whore of Babylon rolling her eyes and shaking her privates at Christian young men. Are you a Christian, son?”

I backed away thanking him and crossed the street, leaving my car at the curb. I walked the two blocks to the Green Dragon and worked some of the stiffness out of my legs. It was another seedy-looking bar. Signs in the dirty half-curtained windows advertised LIQUOR, BEER, HOT and COLD SANDWICHES and SHORT ORDERS. I pulled the screen door open and went in. A semi-circular bar with slot machines. Kitchen smells, the smell of stale spilled beer, the sick-sour smell of small-time gamblers’ sweat, were slowly mixed by a four-bladed fan suspended from the fly-specked ceiling.

There was only one customer at the bar, a thin boy with uncombed red hair hunched desolately over a short beer. The bartender sat on a stool in a corner, as far away from the desolate youth as possible. His greased black head leaned against a table radio. “Three nothing,” he a

I took a seat beside the redheaded boy, ordered a ham and cheese sandwich and a bottle of beer. The bartender went out reluctantly through the swinging door to the kitchen.

“Look at me, eh,” the man beside me said. The words twisted his mouth as if they hurt. “How do you like me?”

His thin unshaven face looked dirty. His eyes had blue hollows under them and red rims around them. One of his ears was caked with dry blood.

“I like you very much,” I said. “You have that beaten look that everybody admires.”