The drowning pool

“I was. Not any more. I wouldn’t be here if I was frightened, would I?” But her voice was light and ti

“Give me the straight story, Mavis. We don’t have time to argue.”

“Yes. The straight story.” Her mouth closed over the words. Her face and body were tense, fighting off sleep. “I feel like a junkie, Archer. The morphine’s getting me.”

“Let’s walk.”

“No. We’ll stay here. I have to get back to the boat soon. They don’t know I’m gone.”

I remembered the light that had gone on and off, and wondered.

But she had begun to talk in a steady flow of words, like a pentothal subject:

“I’m partly to blame for what happened. I did a sluttish thing. I suppose, and anyway I wasn’t naïve when I married him. I’d been living on the fringes for too long, taking what I could get, waiting on tables, doing extra work and trying for a bit part. I met him at a party in Bel-Air last year. I was doing some modeling at the time, and I was paid to be at the party, but Kilbourne didn’t know that, at least I don’t think he did. Anyway, he took to me, and he was loaded with money, and I had lost my nerve, and I took to him. He wanted a hostess and a clothes-horse and a bed-companion and he bought me the way he’d buy a filly for his stable. We did the town for ten nights ru

“I found out later. In the meantime I had new toys to play with and no real kick coming. Then Patrick Ryan turned up last winter. He’d dated me during the war a couple of times, and I liked the guy. I met him at Ciro’s one night. We ditched Kilbourne and I went home with Ryan. His place was horribly crummy, but he was good. He reminded me that even sex could be good, and I guess I fell in love with him in an unguarded moment.” Her voice was breathless and dry. Her shoulder moved against me restlessly. “You asked for the straight story. It doesn’t make me look nice.”

“Nobody’s straight story ever does. Go on.”

“Yes.” She leaned against me lightly, and I held her across the shoulders. Her bones were small and sharp in the rounded flesh. “We needed a chauffeur at the time; our old one had been picked up for violating parole. Kilbourne has a weakness for ex-convicts: he says they make faithful servants. I talked him into hiring Pat Ryan so I could have him around. I needed someone, and Pat said he loved me. We were going to run away together and start a new life somewhere. I guess where men are concerned I’m a lousy picker. I haven’t told you about the pre-Kilbourne ones, and I don’t intend to. Anyway, Kilbourne found out about us. Pat may have told him himself, to curry a little favor. So Kilbourne got me drunk one day and left me alone with Pat and hired a man to take pictures of us together. They were very pretty pictures. He ran them for me the next night, with ru

“But the pictures are gone now?”

“Yes. I destroyed them last night.”

“He doesn’t need the film to get a divorce.”

“You don’t understand,” she said. “Divorce is not what he wants. I’ve begged him for a divorce every day for the last six months. He wanted to keep me under his fat thumb for the rest of his life, and that was his way of doing it. If I stepped out of line just once, he was going to let Rico sell the film for distribution. They’d be showing it for years at stag parties and conventions and after-hours nightclubs. My face is known. What could I do?”

“What you did. Does he know the film is gone?”

“I haven’t told him. I don’t know how he’ll react. He could do anything.”

“Then leave him. He can’t touch you any more, if you’re sure there was only one copy.”

“There was only one copy. I made up to Rico one night and got that much out of him. But I’m afraid of Kilbourne.” She didn’t notice the contradiction: her feeling was too real.

“It’s a bad habit you have.”

“You don’t know Kilbourne,” she flared. “There’s nothing he won’t do, and he has the money and men to do it. He killed Pat last night—”

“Not over you, Mavis, though that might have helped. Maybe Kilbourne couldn’t forget the pictures, either, but he had more reasons than that. Pat was working for Kilbourne, did you know that? Taking his money up to the day he died.”

“No!”

“You still cared for Pat?”

“Not after he ran out on me. But he didn’t deserve to die.”

“Neither do you. You married one wrong one, and went to bed with another. Why don’t you take yourself out of circulation for a while?”

“Stay with you?” She half-turned toward me and her right breast trembled against my arm.

“That’s not what I mean. You wouldn’t be safe with me. I have some friends in Mexico who are safe, and I’ll put you on a plane.”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what to do.” Her voice wandered in the scale. Her skin in the growing light was blanched by fatigue. Her eyes moved uncertainly, huge and heavy and dark, with morphine dragging down hard on the lids.

She couldn’t make a decision. I made it for her, hoisting her to her feet with my hands in her armpits. “You’re going to Mexico. I’ll stay at the airport with you till you can get a plane.”

“You’re nice, you’re good to me.” She lolled against me, clutching at my arms and sliding down my chest.

The first explosions of a choked motor barked and spluttered on the other side of the basin. The spluttering settled into a steady roar, and a speedboat rounded the stern of the yacht and headed for the pier. Its dark shape prow cut like shears through the metal water. A man in the cockpit was watching me through binoculars. They made him look like a large goggle-eyed toad.

Mavis hung limp across my arm. I jerked her upright and shook her. “Mavis! We have to run for it.” Her eyes came partly open, but showed only white.

I lifted her in both arms and took her up the gangway. A man in a striped linen suit and a washable linen hat was squatting on the pier near the top of the gangway. It was Melliotes. He straightened up, moved quickly to bar my way. He was built like a grand piano, low and wide, but his movements were light as a dancer’s. Black eyes peered brightly from the gargoyle face.

I said: “Get out of my way.”

“I don’t think so. You turn around and go back down.”

The girl in my arms sighed and stirred at the sound of his voice. I hated her as a man sometimes hates his wife, or a con his handcuffs. It was too late to run. The man in the linen suit had his right fist in his pocket, with something more than a fist pointed at me.

“Back down,” he said.

The motor of the speedboat died behind me. I looked down and saw it coasting in to the landing platform. A blank-faced sailor turned from the wheel and jumped ashore with the painter. Kilbourne sat in the cockpit, looking complacent. A pair of binoculars hung on a strap around his thick neck, and a double-barreled shotgun lay across his knees.

I carried Mavis Kilbourne down to her waiting husband.