The drowning pool

The Quinto pier was a continuation of the street, carrying the blacktop road two hundred yards beyond the concrete sea well. Below the pier the long white surges mumbled the sand, lapped at the ancient pilings that supported it, in a work of slow sure destruction. My brights lit up the white railings along the sides. They were bare from end to end, and the road was naked between them. Toward the outer end a group of small buildings huddled against the night: a bait-and-tackle booth, a hot-dog stand, a seashell-souvenir store, a ship’s carpenter shop, all closed and lightless. I parked on their landward side, by a ten-cent public telescope, and walked on. The polished wooden butt of my automatic was wet-cold in my palm.

The smell of the sea, of kelp and fish and bitter moving water, rose stronger in my nostrils. It flooded my consciousness like an ancestral memory. The swells rose sluggishly and fell away, casting up dismal gleams between the boards of the pier. And the whole pier rose and fell in stiff and creaking mimicry, dancing its long slow dance of dissolution. I reached the end and saw no one, heard nothing but my footsteps and the creak of the beams, the slap of waves on the pilings. It was a fifteen-foot drop to the dim water. The nearest land ahead of me was Hawaii.

I turned my back on Hawaii and started for shore. Mavis had changed her mind and stood me up. A final goodbye to Mavis, my cold brain chattered; she was unaccountable no-account not-to-be-counted-on. Or had her mind been changed for her. My feet dragged on the planking. Too late, too old, too tired, the deep surge at the back of my mind was sighing.

False dawn was spreading like spilt milk in the sky above the mountains. At their foot the streets of Quinto lay like an unseen cobweb beaded with lights. The highballing trucks from San Francisco and Portland and Seattle went south on 101 like shooting stars. To my right the long arc of the breakwater curved toward the pier. A light on a tower at its end flashed on and off, stroking the narrow cha

Another light went on as I watched, bringing a triple window into sharp yellow contrast with a low dark cabin. The long hull below it had lines of movement even though it was anchored and dead in the water. It was painted so white that it seemed to shine with its own luminescence. From a quarter mile away it looked like a small neat cruiser. But comparing it with the other boats I guessed it was seventy feet long: except for the purse-seiners, the biggest boat in the harbor. Kilbourne would choose that kind of coracle to ride in.

The light went out, as if by telepathy. I strained my eyes, trying to guess what went on behind the three oblong windows that I could no longer see. A hand from nowhere plucked at my trousers leg. I stepped out of reach, jerked my gun out, snapped a cartridge into the chamber. The wind whistled in my throat.

A head appeared above the planking at the edge of the pier. Light hair frothed out from under a beret. A light voice whispered: “It’s me.”

“Don’t play hiding-games.” I snarled, because she’d u

She stood up and showed herself, a dark slim shape in sweater and slacks against the dark gray water. With racing lines for a long fast voyage by night, and a sweet full spi

“You’ll get by,” I said, and lied in my teeth: “You fascinate me as a source of income solely.”

“Very well, sir. We’d better go below. We’ll be seen up here.” She held out her hand for mine. It was as cold as a fish.

She was standing on a railed gangway which slanted down to the water below the pier. We descended to a floating platform at the edge of the forest of pilings. A little plywood boat was tied to a rusty iron ring at the edge of the platform. Boat and platform rose and fell together with the waves.

“Whose boat?”

“It’s a tender from the yacht. I came ashore in it.”

“Why?”

“The water-taxis make so much commotion, and besides they’d know where I went.”

“I see. Now I know everything.”

“Please don’t be nasty, Archer. What’s your first name, anyway?”

“Lew. You can call me Archer.”

“I’m sorry if I frightened you, Lew,” in that small, contrite, aphrodisiac voice. “I didn’t really mean to. I had to be sure it was you.”

“Who else were you expecting?”

“Well. It might have been Melliotes.”

“Who in hell,” I said, “is Melliotes? Or did you invent the name?”

“If you think the Melliotes is a figment, come out to the boat and meet him.”

“Is that the family boat?” I pointed to the long white hull on the other side of the basin.

“It is.” She thumbed her nose at it. “Some family. Take my husband’s dear good friend Melliotes, for example. Last night my dear good husband held me down in my bunk while dear good Dr. Melliotes gave me a shot of morphine to put me to sleep.”

I offered her a cigarette, which she took automatically. Lighting if for her, I looked into her eyes. The dark gray pupils were as tiny as a bird’s.

“You see,” she said, “I’m no liar. Feel my heart.” Her hand pressed mine against her ribs below the left breast. There was a pounding in the tips of my fingers, but it was my own heart I felt. “You see?”

“Why aren’t you still asleep?”

“I didn’t go to sleep. Morphine just stimulates me, I’m like a cat. I feel the hangover now, though. I think I’d better sit down.” Still with her hand on my wrist, she sat on the foot of the gangway and drew me down beside her. “I could show you the mark of the needle but that wouldn’t be ladylike, would it?”

“Always the lady,” I said. “Who are you, Mavis?”

She yawned and stretched herself. I didn’t look at her, and she subsided. “A working girl. Used to be, anyway. I wish I still was. Only I was going to tell you about Dr. Melliotes. He was driving the car when Rico brought you home.”

I remembered the man I had fought with in Reavis’s shack. “He didn’t look like a medical man to me.”

“He calls himself a doctor, but Folsom’s his alma mater if he has one. He’s some kind of hydrotherapist, and he runs a sanitarium in Venice. Walter has a spastic colon and he’s been going to Melliotes for years. He even brings him along on cruisers, which is very convenient when he wants me put to sleep. I fooled them tonight, though. I didn’t go to sleep, and I heard what went on.”

“I heard my husband conspiring to murder a man. Pat Ryan, the man you asked me about. Walter gave orders to a man called Schmidt to have Pat Ryan killed. A couple of hours later Schmidt came aboard again and said that it was done.” She peered into my face. “Doesn’t that mean anything to you at all?”

“Plenty. Did anybody say why Reavis had to be shot?”

“Nobody said why, but I know why.” She tilted her head toward me, her soft lower lip protruding. “You haven’t promised me you’d go to work for me.”

“You haven’t told me what you want done. I’m not a hired gun like Schmidt.”

“I only want justice done. I want you to pin Pat’s murder on Schmidt, and on my husband.”

“You’ll have to tell me why.”

“I’ll tell you everything if it will help. I want my husband dead or put away, and I haven’t nerve enough to do it myself.”

“I’m afraid he’s too big for me to take alone, but we might get at him through Schmidt. One thing I don’t understand, how Kilbourne got you buffaloed. You’re frightened to death of him.”