And Kill Once More. Al Fray
questions—” I grinned—“and I’ll answer them both. As you can probably guess the hours are a little irregular. Some of the boys go fishing, some sleep; I pile up beach time. And a detective that looked like a detective couldn’t earn enough money to file an income tax report. The good ones look like bookkeepers or salesmen or carpenters.”
She touched a tongue to her lips again and a twinkle came into her eye. “I know one that looks like something you see down on Muscle Beach most any Sunday morning.”
“You pursue your hobby and I’ll keep mine,” I said. “This being a working day for me, though, it might be best if we slipped back to things a little closer to the business at hand. I was going to ask some more questions about the guests and our man George Engle. Feel like talking a while?”
As the big Caddy rolled over the highway I listened and tried to slide things into place. The George and Sandy marriage was definitely a going affair. He was older than she—a hell of a lot older—but Kate was sure they were quite the happy couple. Married three years ago, lived in the city for a while, then the sudden shift to the hills and sand. No explanations, just building a desert home in the bleak foothills edging the Mojave. A permanent setup, complete with pool and a dozen guest rooms.
Visits by many friends, both sexes, but of the old gang only Kate was invited. George ran the rest of the guest list. And his wife held down the fort with a vigilance hardly to be expected of a wife so young. Two years and not off of the grounds. Now Kate was worried.
A worried blonde with plenty of scratch in her handbag. Enough to roll her expensive hack down to the best agency in Hollywood and part with one of Boreland Gregory’s king-size retainers just to see what was keeping her little friend on the nest.
A few more miles and Kate called a turn. We wheeled left off of the highway and onto a narrow tarred road. We began to gain a little altitude. Tar pavement gave way to gravel but it was carefully graded and fairly wide. It wound into the opening of a canyon and started up at an even steeper angle. Hairpin turns and switchbacks. Then we saw it.
Almost on the ridge but not quite—low enough to let the hill break the wind. Rambling in the Southern California mode, and even from below you could see that it was something special in the way of desert mansions. It came in and out of sight as we rounded tight turns and changed direction, and when I pulled the Cad hard to the left and circled an embankment we rolled onto the concrete parking strip in front of a six-car garage. The cream and brown Pontiac belonging to Pilcher stood at one end of the apron and a black Lincoln was beside it. I eased the Cad to a stop, went around to the other side and held the door for Kate. For once I wasn’t looking at her.
“Nice layout, isn’t it?” She smiled.
I didn’t answer. Hers was the understatement of the morning and I couldn’t improve on it. Bright new concrete block had been painted a soft desert blue and while the area outlying from the block fence was brown and parched, inside everything was green and rich with life. A park. An estate which, had it not been so obviously new, might have been a holdover from the years when fabulously wealthy movie stars, in those lush years before heavy income tax, built great showplaces above Beverly Hills.
I blew a slow breath and reached for the bags, but a Philippino was hurrying toward us. I straightened again and had one more look at the Engle resort.
For a man who worked only a couple of mornings a week George Engle was doing right well.
Three
BY MID-AFTERNOON I was beginning to adjust to life as the other half lives it. I stroked slowly toward the shallow end of twenty thousand dollars worth of swimming pool and reflected on the tidy little estate that Engle had managed to afford on a two-day working week. The main building was a huge U-shaped, inn-like structure which provided a fine windbreak for one side and both ends of the plunge. Beyond the center segment the hill rose sharply for a short distance and atop the crest an enormous storage tank gathered water pumped in from a dozen distant hot springs. A wide expanse of grass separated the house from the pool on those sides but to the south a thick growth of Italian cypress ran close to the concrete fringe of the plunge and blocked desert winds which would blow with considerable vigor at certain seasons. Leading through the cypress, a flagstone walk wound through heavy shrubbry and down the slope toward the service building that housed the valve for the pool.
Everything inside the fence was green and carefully tended, a marked relief from the parched, brown desert surrounding us, and standing on the lower edge of the estate you could look past the barren land and into a green valley to which irrigation had brought a new value. But the center of interest which completely dominated the estate was George Engle’s swimming pool. Oval, roughly thirty by fifty and a full fifteen feet at the deep end, she was a far cry from the pint capacity leaf-catchers scattered around L.A. Like I said, I’ve dreamed of operating one on a commercial basis and as a prospective customer I’ve shopped around a little as to cost and upkeep of these things and there is a hell of a lot more to it than digging a hole, cementing the sides, and filling it from the garden hose.
True, you have to dig a hole. It costs money—important money if you have any amount of rock formation running under your land, and it’s also true that you cement the walls and bottom of the thing. But a bit of pencil work coupled with a few facts you picked up in high school physics will tell you that there’s a lot of weight on the floor of that pool. To be exact there’s just over sixty-two pounds per square foot for every foot of depth—over nine hundred pounds pushing downward on each square foot at the deep end of Engle’s pool. That means steel reinforcement and plenty of it, along with several inches of concrete. Money—money—money.
Then there is a drainage system. The common way is to fill the pool once and use that water continuously, adding only enough to take care of evaporation loss. This requires an expensive filter system, pumps, and man hours, but even so it beats changing water. Then there is heat. Let’s not kid about it—water standing around gets cold, even in Southern California, in the winter. Or every night, for that matter, and while some of us might like it cool enough to be invigorating the guests you invite won’t go for it and that means heat. An added expense, but there it is. You’ll have to do something about keeping down the algae and every so often you’ll have to apply a coating to the entire surface. Time and materials and more cash down the drain.
Now add the cleaning, and it’s a major headache. Dust blowing across the street keeps right on going and eventually whisks off the far side but when those tiny particles hit the water in your pool, they stay. The dirt settles to the bottom in a thin brown film and about every other day you have to peel off and get in for some wet work or push with the long pole from the edge. The gadget that cleans your pool isn’t too different from the vacuum sweeper in principle—it sucks up water and dirt from the bottom, runs it through the filter and returns it to the plunge—but you’ll get a lot of exercise on the handle of it just the same.
That’s the usual private plunge setup and like I say it’s expensive, but basking in the warmth of George Engle’s pool I watched lazy vapors drift upward from the storage tank on the hill and thought about how different this one was. Not that the idea is original. It isn’t; there are several like it scattered around wherever you find natural hot springs. For this kind of layout you capture half a dozen warm springs, pump the water up to a big reservoir, buy enough flat land down below to engage in extensive irrigation operations, and establish the cycle. Fill the swimming pool early, paddle around in the warm water all day, and at night you drain the now cool water into a lower tank for the crops below, hose down the sides and bottom, and fill the clean pool with fresh warm water from the storage above. Each day sees newly pumped warm water in the pool and by the time it cools you are through with it and can refill again.
And all you need is a few hundred thousand dollars to find the hot springs and buy the land and lay the pipe and provide pumps, tanks, plunge, and a ranch in the valley. Just a little pin money you scrape together a couple of days a week.
I was still trying to nail these scattered facts into some sort of pattern when I heard a splash at the deep end. Kate Weston bobbed up near the center and swam toward me with strong smooth strokes.