I had a curious sensation that Barclay didn’t exist, that he never had existed; that everything had been a figment of my imagination. But the throbbing lump on top of my noggin contradicted any such nonsense.
Barclay had been real enough. Figments of the imagination don’t slug you to dreamland, and they don’t croak poor old deaf guys like Duffy. And I had glimpsed the maimed ham with my own optics. I had lamped him in his wheelchair, definitely legless under the lap blanket, definitely one-armed, with a shirt sleeve pinned up emptily.
“Ransom!”
The shout came hoarsely from above, and then I heard a series of scuffling sounds, the violent rustling of underbrush. I leaped for the steps, took them three at a time, catapulted across lawn and patio toward those continuing noises.
Hard by the tiled area bordering the swimming pool there was a row of clumped hydrangea bushes. I couldn’t see them stirring, but I heard them.
Flying blind, I plunged forward – and overshot the mark.
Something reached out, tripped me. As I stumbled, a heavy and panting burden landed on my back with an impact that drove me down on all fours like a bear. I didn’t lose my roscoe, but for all the good it did me I might as well have pitched it into the pool. The hand that held it was pressed knuckle-deep in loam and I couldn’t raise it, couldn’t even move it.
Weight crushed me, flattened me, and then fingers clamped around my throat from behind. They were hot, inexorable fingers as relentless as steel springs.
They throttled me, pressing against my jugular and carotid artery, collapsing my gullet and robbing my bellows of air. I bucked and arched my spine and sunfished like a rodeo bronc, but all I threw was snake-eyes. I didn’t throw my rider.
Then I didn’t throw anything. I got thrown. I was propelled headlong into the swimming pool and I sank like an anchor.
They say a drowning gee sees his whole life pass by him in a series of flashback montage memories. Not me. I just saw the scenes of the past few hours. Plummeting downward in cold water, I reviewed everything that had happened.
My head stopped throbbing and my mind sharpened like a razor on a hone. I saw the cat eating a bird on the steps of the Chaple Arms. I saw Ronald Barclay’s hotel suite, the trick mirror in the closet door, the little padlocked alcove workshop where he had dabbled in prosthetics. I saw the defunct Duffy lying with his temple crushed in, a button fastened in one ear and wires running down to a switched-off hearing gadget he would never need again.
I saw a legless figure in a rolling wheelchair, a one-armed form with a vague blur of face and a gat in his lap, and the voice of a guy I’d once considered my friend. I had the memory of a kraut director named Heinrich who had climbed to the top of the cinema heap, slowly but implacably, until he was chief poobah of a major studio.
And I saw a voluptuous and uninhibited quail, feather-brained, black of hair and gorgeously white of skin, lolling in a darkened solarium taking a star bath, letting her lovely contours soak up cosmic rays while she expressed a fervent wish that her hubby would drop dead.
I hit bottom. And, as I hit, I found all the answers. A fine time to be finding answers, when you’re drowning at the bottom of a swimming pool.
On the other hand, when you’re a murderer and you’ve strangled a guy and dumped him in the deep six, you’ll likely stand by to see if he floats to the surface again. That’s so you can shoot him, bludgeon him or shove him under to make certain he dies – if he’s not already dead. Naturally, if he’s dead he’ll stay beneath the water and you needn’t worry about him any more.
I stayed under water.
I wasn’t deceased. I wasn’t even unconscious. But I knew if I came up for air I would be a goner. The instant my conk popped out it would be a bull’s-eye, either for a bullet or a fractured skull if I happened to be within reaching distance of the pool’s edge. I realized this even while my lungs were bursting and every muscle struggled to impel me off the bottom.
I fought it. I reverted to my stunting days when I could stay immersed as long as the scenario demanded. I held my breath, got my feet planted solidly on the slippery tile floor of the immense pool and slowly started walking. Very slowly, so I couldn’t create surface ripples. And keeping my mental fingers crossed, hoping I was headed in the right direction.
My soles detected a slant – downward.
I reversed myself. My ears were pounding now, and my chest was full of molten metal that seared and burned like a blast furnace. But I had learned which way the pool’s bottom tilted, and I was heading for the shallow end. All I needed was another minute.
Too bad Emil Heinrich was such a big shot at Paragon Pix. Too bad he had so much dough. If he had been less wealthy his swimming pool would be smaller. I could reach the shallow part sooner. But no, Heinrich had to be in the top chips. Try that on your philosophy. A guy earned too much geet, and because of it people died.
I couldn’t hold my breath any longer.
I let some of it out and it streamed up over my head like an immense balloon. Like a drifting blister. Like bubble gum. It popped and broke on the surface. I could hear it.
Okay, killer. You happy now? You know what that air-bubble spells. You’ve murdered me. That was the last of my air. Now you can go away. I’m on the bottom and I’m croaked.
Oh, yeah? That’s what you think.
The pool’s floor slanted more abruptly. I kept walking. I got my cigarette holder out of my inside coat pocket. It was a plastic cigarette holder with silver filigree. A client had given it to me one time, by way of showing gratitude. I never use it, except when I’m trying to impress other clients. Cigarette holders are an affectation. I like to inhale my poison straight.
Nice cigarette holder. Not as long as a symphony conductor’s baton, but long enough. A hollow tube, slightly flared at one end; a mouthpiece on the other.
Shallow water now. Still deep enough to cover me, but shallow. Careful now. Keep at least six inches of water over your head, Ransom, old boy. Don’t break the surface.
I stuck the holder in my mouth and poked its opposite end out of the pool. I blew through it, cleared it.
Then I breathed through it. I breathed air. Wonderful element, air. Puts oxygen in your blood and hair on your chest. I breathed air through the plastic tube, and nobody knew it. Nobody could see me. To all intents and purposes I was a cadaver at the bottom of the water. For a cadaver I was feeling pretty spry.
I kept breathing, not moving. No telling how long it would be before I dared take a chance and scramble out onto dry land. I couldn’t tell who was watching, any more than the watcher could tell I was alive. I breathed, and waited. I waited and breathed.
Nobody lives forever. I walked and broke water and found the hand rails of a ladder and got my feet on the rungs, hauled myself to the bordering tiles. No gunshots. No swat on the steeple. Nothing but darkness and the squishing of my shoes and the splashy drip-drip-drip from my ruined tweeds.
That, and distant bitter dialogue, and a motor idling lazily on the driveway down below.
The motor had a rich hollow chuckle from its exhaust, like an Indian tomtom in a rain barrel. It sounded healthy and powerful and expensive. It sounded like five miles to the gallon, provided the driver did a lot of coasting.
The masculine voices sounded sore.
I skittered to the steep concrete escarpment the Heinrich menage used for an outdoor stairway and probed my way down through a night that was just as dark as it had ever been. On the parking area this side of the driveway there was something that could have been a Cadillac, a Packard, a Lincoln or a streamlined Diesel locomotive.