The drowning pool

The man beside me was breathing like a bull. “You won’t get far with this, Archer. Better get back to your hunting-grounds before it happens to you.”

I told him I liked it where I was. My right hand found the wallet in his left hip-pocket, flipped it open under the dashlights. His driver’s license bore the name Oscar Ferdinand Schmidt.

I said: “Oscar Ferdinand Schmidt is a very euphonious name. It will go well in a murder indictment.”

He advised me to commit sodomy. I held my impulse to hurt him. Next to the driver’s license, and envelope of transparent celluloid held a small blue card which identified Oscar F. Schmidt as a Special Officer of the Company Police of the Pacific Refining Company. There were bills in the folding-money compartment, but nothing bigger than a twenty. I tucked the bills in his pocket, and the wallet in mine.

“I want my wallet back,” he said, “or I slap a charge on you.”

“You’re going to be busy fighting one of your own. The sheriff is going to find your wallet in the brush by the Notch Trail.”

He was silent for a minute, except that the horsehide jacket creaked like a bellows with his breathing. “The sheriff will give it back to me, without no questions asked. How do you think the sheriff gets elected?”

“I know now, Oscar. But it happens the FBI is interested in lynchings. Do you have an in with the Justice Department, too?”

His husky voice had changed when he answered. It had sick and frightened overtones. “You’re crazy if you try to buck us, Archer.”

I prodded him hard with the gun, so that he grunted. “You’ll sit in the cyanide room before I reserve a bed at Camarillo. Meanwhile I want you to talk. How much did you give Franks for the information, and who gave you the money?”

His brain worked cumbrously. I could almost hear it turn over and stall, turn over slowly again. “You let me go if I tell you?”

“For the present. I couldn’t be bothered with you.”

“And give me back the wallet?”

“I keep the wallet, and the gun.”

“I never fired the gun.”

“You never will.”

His brain turned over again. He was sweating, and starting to smell. I wanted him out of the car.

“Kilbourne gave me the money,” he said finally. “Five C’s, I think it was. You’re crazy if you buck him.”

I said: “Get out of my car.”

Where Ta

It was after closing-time, and the main street was almost deserted. A few late drunks were cruising the sidewalks, unwilling to end the night and face the morning. Some had female companions to assure them that fun was still to be had, that there were still doors in the dark walls that would open on romance for a nominal payment. The women were the kind that seldom appear in daylight and look dead when they do. Two plain-clothes men were trying doors on opposite sides of the street.

Passing Antonio’s place, I saw a small light behind the bar, half eclipsed by a man’s head. I braked the car and nosed in to the curb. I had ten thousand dollars in my breast pocket, which would be hard to explain if I was shaken down by the cops, harder to survive if anyone else found it on my. I wrapped the torn brown package in a piece of newspaper and tied it with friction tape. I’d talked to Antonio once, and didn’t know his last name, but he was the man I trusted in Nopal Valley.

He came to the blinded door when I rapped on the plate glass, opened it four inches on a chain. “Who is it, please?” His face was in the shadow.

I showed him mine.

“I am very sorry, I ca

“I don’t want a drink, I want you to do me a favor.”

“What kind of a favor?”

“Keep this in your safe until tomorrow.” I pushed one end of the package through the narrow opening.

He looked at it without touching it. “What is in the parcel?”

“Money. A lot of money.”

“Who is the owner of the money?”

“I’m trying to find out. Will you keep it?”

“You should take it to the police.”

“I don’t trust the police.”

“Yet you trust me?”

“Apparently.”

He took the package from my hands and said: “I will keep it for you. Also, I must apologize for what happened in my bar last night.”

I told him to forget it.

Chapter 19

The house on the mesa was dark and silent. Nothing stirred, inside or out, but the shrill sighing of the cicadas rising and falling in the empty fields. I knocked on the front door and waited, shivering in my clothes. There was no wind, but the night was cold. The insect cry sounded like wind in autumn trees.

I tried the door. It was locked. I knocked on it again. After a long time a light appeared in the hall, footsteps dragged themselves toward the door. The porch light over my head was switched on, and the door opened, inch by inch. It was Mrs. Strang, the housekeeper, her time-bleached hair in double braids, her eyes puffed and reddened from sleep.

The old eyes peered at me: “Is it Mr. Archer?”

“Yes. I have to see Mrs. Slocum.”

Her hands plucked at the collar of her blue rayon wrapper. A pink-flowered fla

“Not Maude Slocum. I saw her less than two hours ago.”

“Oh, you mean young Mrs. Slocum. She’s in bed, I guess. Which is where you should be. This is no hour of the night—”

“I know. I have to see her. Will you wake her for me?”

“I don’t know whether I ought to. She’ll be displeased.”

“I’ll wake her myself if you don’t.”

“Gracious, no.” She moved as if to bar the door against me, then changed her mind: “Is it as important as all that?”

“A matter of life and death.” I didn’t know whose life, or whose death.

“Very well, come in. I’ll ask her to come down.”

She left me in the sitting-room and shuffled out. The twin braids down her back looked stiff and dry, like flowers pressed in an old forgotten book.

When she returned her face and body were sagging with anxiety. “Her door is locked. She doesn’t answer.”

I moved toward her, hurried her with me into the hall and along it to the stairs. “Do you have a key?”

“There is no key for that door.” She was panting. “It’s bolted on the inside.”

“Show me.”

She toiled up the stairs ahead of me and led me down the upstairs hall to the last door. It was made of heavy oak panels. I set my shoulder against it and failed to move it.

The housekeeper took my place at the door and cried out, “Mrs. Slocum!” on a cracked note of despair.

“You’re sure she’s in there,” I said.

“She must be in there. The door is bolted.”

“I’ll have to break it down. Do you have a crowbar or a pinchbar? Anything.”

“I’ll go and see. There are tools in the back kitchen.”

I switched off the light in the hall and saw that there was light behind the door. I leaned against it again and listened. No snore, no sound of drunken breathing, no sound of any kind. Maude Slocum was sleeping very soundly.

Mrs. Strang came back, her body moving like a lumpy bundle of terror and compunction. Her veined hands held a short steel bar with one flat end, the kind that is used to open packing cases. I took it from her and inserted the flat end between the door and the frame. Something cracked and gave when I pulled on it. I shifted the bar and pulled hard once again. Wood tore, and the door sprang open.