The Drowning Pool by Ross Macdonald

Author:Ross Macdonald [Macdonald, Ross]
Format: epub, mobi
Published: 2010-03-21T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 15

It was late afternoon when I crossed the great level pass. The shadow of my car was running ahead in fleet silence, and slowly increasing its lead. The sun was yellow on the arid slopes, the air so clear that the mountains lacked perspective. They looked like surrealist symbols painted on the shallow desert sky. The heat, which had touched 110 at one, was slackening off, but my hood was still hot enough to fry the insects that splattered it.

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.

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