The drowning pool

She was silent for a time. “No. It isn’t that. I have some regard for truth myself. I suppose it’s a woman’s regard: I want the truth if it doesn’t hurt too much. And I suppose I’m a little afraid of a man who cares strongly about something. You really care, don’t you, whether Reavis is i

“Doesn’t Knudson and his decent conscience?”

“He did, but I don’t know if he still does. There are a lot of things going on that I don’t understand.” That made two of us. “My esteemed husband, for instance, has retired to his room and refuses to emerge. He claims that he’ll spend the rest of his life in his room, like Marcel Proust.” Hatred flashed in the ocean-colored eyes and disappeared, like a shark-fin.

I crushed out my cigarette, which tasted acrid on an empty stomach. “This Marcel something-or-other, is he a friend of yours?”

“So now you’re going to play dumb again?”

“I might as well. It seems to be all the rage in this ménage. You’re perfectly willing to talk about abstractions like truth and justice. But you haven’t told me a single damned fact that might help to find the person that wrote the letter, or the person that killed your mother-in-law.”

“Ah, the letter. We’re back at the letter again.”

“Mrs. Slocum,” I said, “the letter wasn’t written about me. It was written about you. You hired me to find out who wrote it, remember?”

“So much has happened since, hasn’t it? It seems unimportant now.”

“Now that she’s dead?”

“Yes,” she answered calmly. “Now that she’s dead.”

“Has it occurred to you that the letter-writer and the murderer may be the same person?”

“It hadn’t. I can’t see any co

“Neither can I. With co-operation, I might; if you’d tell me what you know about the relations between the people in this house.”

She raised her shoulders and let them fall in a gesture of weary resignation. “I can’t claim immunity to questioning on the grounds of extreme youth, like Cathy. I am most frightfully tired. What do you want to know?”

“How long you’ve known Knudson, and how well.”

She gave me a second slow and probing look. “Just the last year or so, not at all intimately.”

“Yesterday you mentioned a friend of yours, by the name of Mildred Fleming. She might be able to tell me a different story. Or don’t you confide in your friends, either?”

She answered coldly: “I think you’re being insolent, Mr. Archer.”

“Very good, ma’am. We’ll play the game according to the formal rules. Unless you want to call it on account of insolence.”

“I haven’t decided about that. I’ll tell you one thing, though, I do know Walter Kilbourne. In fact, I saw him tonight.”

Knudson’s heavy feet came down the hall, his sloping shoulders filled the doorway. “I finally routed sheriff out of bed. He’ll meet us at the Notch.”

“You,” I said, “not me. Mrs. Slocum has just been kind enough to offer me another drink, and I need it. I’ll give the sheriff a statement in the morning. Take the kid along. His name is Musselman and he’s in my car, probably sleeping by now.—You should get some good tread-marks where the truck pulled onto the shoulder to turn around.”

“Thank you very much for the masterly suggestion.” His tone was ironic, but he seemed to be relieved that I wasn’t going along. He and the sheriff could putter around the scene of the crime, gather up the remains and drive them back to town. Nothing was going to be done.

“See that the kid has a decent place to sleep, will you? And give him this for me, I owe it to him.” I handed him a ten-dollar bill.

“Whatever you say. Goodnight, Mrs. Slocum. I appreciate your co-operation.”

“It was a pleasure.”

Old lovers, I thought again, playing with double entendres. Knudson went out. My initial liking for him had changed to something quite different. Still, he was a man, and a policeman. He wouldn’t push his way to what he wanted over an old lady’s dead body. He’d choose a harder way.

Maude Slocum rose and took my empty glass. “Do you really want a drink?”

“A short one, please, with water.”

“I think I’ll join you.”

She poured me two fingers of whisky from the decanter, four fingers for herself. She took it at a gulp.

I sipped at mine. “What I really want is the dope on Kilbourne. I’ll take that straight.”

“God-damned truthoholic,” she said surprisingly. The idea of the whisky had hit her before it had time to work. She sat down beside me heavily and loosely. “I don’t know anything about Walter Kilbourne, nothing against him I mean.”

“That makes you unique, I guess. Where did you see him tonight?”

“At the Boardwalk restaurant in Quinto. I thought Cathy deserved a change after the dreary day she’d had with the police and—her father. Anyway, I drove her over to Quinto to have di

“His wife. Did you have any conversation with him?”

“No. He didn’t recognize me, and I’d never particularly liked him. I did ask the headwaiter what he was doing here. Apparently his yacht is in the harbor.”

It was what I needed. Tiredness had drained my body of energy and begun to attack my will. I’d been chi

But there were more questions to ask. “How did you happen to know him in the first place?”

“He was here a couple of years ago. He made a business arrangement with my mother-in-law, to test for oil on her ranch. This was when they’d made a big strike on the other side of the valley, before they’d touched this side. A crew of men came out with Kilbourne and spent several weeks on our property, drilling holes and setting off explosive charges—I forget the technical name for it.”

“Seismographing?”

“Seismographing. They found the oil all right, but nothing came of it. Mother”—her lips moved round the word as if it tasted strange—“Mother decided that oil derricks would obstruct her precious view, and broke off relations with Kilbourne. There was more to it that that, of course: she didn’t like the man, and I don’t think she trusted him. So we’ve continued to live in genteel poverty.”

“Weren’t other companies interested? Oil’s getting pretty scarce in this part of the world.”

“She didn’t really want to lease to anyone. Besides, there was something in the original contract for the exploration; it gave Kilbourne’s company first refusal.”

“Naturally, it would.”

Her erratic hand reached blindly for a cigarette. I took one out of the box, put it between her fingers, lit it for her. She sucked on it uncontrolledly like a child. The whisky had combined with her fatigue and given her nervous system a hard one-two. Her face, her muscles, her voice, were rapidly going to pieces.

So I asked her the question that would hurt, and carefully watched her face for its effect: “You won’t be living in genteel poverty much longer, will you? I suppose that you and your husband will be getting in touch with Kilbourne. Or is that why he’s up here tonight?”

“It hadn’t occurred to me,” she said. “I imagine, though, that that’s just what we’ll do. I must talk to James about it.”

She closed her eyes. From the places where it was pi

I said goodnight and left her.