The Dark and Deadly Pool (19 page)

On Saturday there wasn’t such a rush near dinnertime. In fact, most people had plans for the evening and cleared out early. I hoped Fran would drop by, but he didn’t. As it got closer and closer to eleven o’clock, I became more edgy.

Where was Lamar?

Two people stayed in the pool, and I was so glad to see them that I grinned and waved each time they glanced at the office window. I rushed through the inspection of the women’s dressing-room area, nearly colliding with the woman swimmer as she came in to change.

“Leaving so early?” I asked.

She looked at me oddly. “I thought you’d have kicked us out by this time. It’s already two minutes after eleven.”

“Well, so it is.” I chuckled and went back to the office to wait for them.

They came through the office almost together and said a quick good-night. I heard the door to the hotel corridor shut behind them.

I raced into the men’s locker area, mumbling under my breath that I had to pick up more towels than there had been swimmers, and dashed back to the office. I removed my purse from the desk and tossed the desk keys into the top middle drawer. Taking a deep breath I turned off all the lights in the club and tried to lock the office door.

My fingers shook as I kept trying to put the key in upside down. I closed my eyes, leaning my head against the door, and made myself relax. Then calmly I inserted the key, turned it, and heard the familiar click of the lock sliding into place.

That wasn’t all that I heard.

Slowly I turned around.

Summer moonlight drenched the outer pool, brightening a wake of ripples that followed the dark shape that sped toward me under the glass wall.

I turned too quickly, stumbled, lost my balance, and fell to my knees. I clawed and scrambled my way up, trying to run toward the door to the hotel.

There was a loud splash behind me, and I could hear a body shove up onto the tiles. I couldn’t make it.

“What’s the matter, Liz? Are you still afraid of the dark?”

I whirled to face Art Mart, then leaned against the wall in relief. “It’s only you,” I said. “You scared me to death.
I didn’t even know you were here. Why didn’t you tell me you were in the pool before I turned out the lights?”

“I didn’t want to bother you,” he said. He moved closer to me, bent over, and shook the water from his hair.

“Don’t you want a towel?” I asked. I stepped toward the office door, unlocked it, and turned on the office light. He came into the office with me, took the towel on top of the stack by the door, and rubbed his face, hair, and shoulders.

“Have you looked inside your locket?” he asked. “The one Mr. Kamara gave you?”

I tried to take a step away from him, but the office was too small and Art Mart was between me and the door.

“What are you talking about?” I managed to ask.

“A list,” he said. “I know it’s got to be in there. Give me the locket and I’ll show you.”

“I can’t. It’s—it’s at home.”

“No, it isn’t. Just the empty jewelry box on the table.” He moved a step closer to me. “Give me the locket, Liz, and save yourself a lot of trouble.”

He snatched my purse from my hand. It didn’t take him long to see that the locket wasn’t in my wallet.

“I gave the list to Lamar,” I told him.

“That’s not what I heard,” he said.

“Tina told you?”

“Uh-uh. I overheard you talking to her.” He chuckled. “You weren’t very bright to do that.”

I tried to distract him, hoping I could edge toward the open door. “What kind of a list is it?”

He snickered at a joke he thought only he could understand. “You might say it’s a kind of membership list—yeah—for a club.”

“You mean for a syndicate.”

His eyes widened. “You know more than I suspected you did.”

“Why do you want the list?”

“The bottom line is always money, isn’t it?”

“Who’s going to pay you for it?”

“The same guys who killed Jones because he took it.”

Art shifted his weight to the balls of his feet, as though he was ready to move toward me, and I desperately asked another question. Maybe his ego would help me. “Mr. Jones didn’t know whose wallet he was taking, did he?”

One eyebrow lifted. “You know that too?”

“So do the police.” If I thought I’d frighten him, I was wrong, so I added, “Those syndicate men will kill you too!”

“Naw,” he said. “I did them a favor. They thought they’d get the list when they killed Jones. They didn’t know he had passed it on to Kamara.”

“They killed Mr. Kamara!”

He didn’t answer, but his eyes told me how wrong I was. I gasped. “You?”

“Kamara made his first mistake in telling me he had the list. His second was in refusing to give it to me.”

I blurted out, “You conducted the orchestra, didn’t you?”

“What orchestra? What are you talking about?”

“I figured out that Floyd told Mr. Kamara who the people with money were, and he passed the word to Mr. Jones. Now I know who gave them the photo-ID cards. You did.”

He was still listening, so I began to move a half inch at a time toward the doorway, talking rapidly. “And Floyd—maybe other people in the hotel—used the club’s towel cart to hide valuables in. You were the only one who brought the cart to the club in the mornings, before
the club opened. You stashed the stolen things in the brass planter under that ficus tree. Then, after the club was closed and dark, someone—” I stopped, remembering. “It was you I saw in the pool, wasn’t it? You came into the club through the gap in the wall and the pool and took away the things that had been stolen.”

I pointed at the tree, and as he automatically turned to look, I sidled another inch toward the doorway.

“There are still things I don’t know,” I said. “I don’t know who fenced the things for you. Maybe it was Mr. Kamara. And I don’t know who stole the sofas, but the police will find them before they get reupholstered.”

He gave a start. “How’d you work that one out?”

I moved one more inch. He hadn’t seemed to notice. By this time I was practically babbling. “And I don’t know why Lamar told you about setting a trap for Marco Soledat, but—”

Art grinned. “He didn’t. You did.”

“No, I didn’t.”

“You should be more careful what you say when you’re sleepy.”

I tried to dodge, but he took a long step toward me and grabbed me tightly. I wiggled and struggled until I heard Art exclaim, “So there it is!”

In one motion he ripped away the hip pocket of my shorts, grabbed the locket, and slammed me against the wall. He kept his sharp elbow pressed against my ribs as he opened the locket, tearing out the picture and unfolding the list.

He looked so pleased with himself that for an instant I had the wild hope that he’d let me go, but he gripped my shoulders, turning me and pushing me so that I stumbled ahead of him. He turned off the office light and
shoved me to the edge of the swimming pool. At my feet lapped the deep black water.

“Let’s go swimming, Liz,” Art said.

“Let’s not,” a strong, deep voice called from the darkness.

Art whirled, dragging me against him, and hooked his right arm across my throat and chin.

Shapes rose and flung themselves toward us.

“Stay away!” Art yelled as he kept moving back along the edge of the pool.

With a rush all the lights in the club zapped away the dark, and I blinked, trying to adjust to the sudden brightness.

Lamar stood there and Detective Jarvis, who held a gun in his hand. Tina was behind them, eyes as wide as though she were at a horror movie.

“Stay away!” Art repeated.

“It’s too late for you to make such a dramatic move, Mr. Martin,” Detective Jarvis said.

“You’re not going to get the list!” Art yelled at them. He tossed the crumpled paper into the pool. I could imagine the ink running and fading as the paper soaked in the chlorinated water.

Art’s voice rose. I squirmed, and his arm was rough under my nose. I could smell the damp sourness of his fear. Or maybe it was my own fear. “If you get near me I’ll break her neck,” he said.

“No,” I mumbled, and wanted to spit out the hair on his arm that brushed my tongue. Feeling more like a trapped animal than a human being, I instinctively opened my mouth as wide as I could and bit down on his arm with all of my strength.

I don’t know what happened next. I was knocked aside so violently that I went flying into the pool. So did Art
Mart, they told me later, except my right foot clipped him under the chin, and he slammed into the tile edge, knocking himself cold.

I panicked and swam with all my strength to the other side of the pool. It was something like being in the water with a killer shark. All I wanted was out.

I struggled up the steps, and there was Tina, who hugged me even though I dripped cold water all over her. “Liz, you were wonderful! You were brave! How did you do that with your foot?”

“Do what?”

She hugged me again. “There you go,” she said, “Already your subconscious is repressing the terrifying memory and forcing it from your conscious mind.”

“I kicked him, didn’t I?”

“That’s right.”

Over Tina’s shoulder I could see the door open. Two very familiar people came into the club. “My mother’s here,” I said. “And my father.”

“Oh, dear,” Tina said. “I wish I had my degree and training. I don’t know how to handle this one.”

“Mary Elizabeth!” my mother shouted from behind Tina. “What is going on here?”

I ran to hold them tightly. “I’ll tell you all about it,” I said.

And, after we were finally home and I was wrapped snugly in my father’s big terry-cloth robe and my mother’s fuzzy sheepskin slippers, I did.

Having a day off didn’t mean a thing. I had to go downtown to give all sorts of information to Detective Jarvis and someone from the district attorney’s office and all sorts of other people. They were awfully glad I had copied the list. From what I overheard, those names were going to help them make a big drug bust sometime very soon. I suspected that the woman who said she was Mr. Kamara’s sister might very well be included.

Art Mart wasn’t so cocky now. He was spilling names of accomplices in the hotel thefts so fast it was as if someone had tapped into a leak in his brain.

I was glad it was all over, and glad that Fran was there with me.

They left us alone for a few minutes, and I leaned back in my chair. “How I Spent My Summer Vacation,” I said.

Fran smiled. “Then you’re supposed to write what you learned from it, like ‘crime doesn’t pay.’ ”

I thought about my week plus at the health club. “That’s not all I learned, Fran. I’ve been discovering something kind of crazy. Most people want to be somebody else. Mrs. Bandini wants to look like the women
who lead exercise classes on TV. Lamar wants to be Clint Eastwood. Tina wants to be an instantly rich psychologist. And you want to be ta—” I stopped too late. It didn’t come out right, and I didn’t get a chance to try to make it better.

Fran said, “Everyone except you, Liz.”

“Everyone except me what?”

“You mentioned all the people who wish they were someone else, but you’re different. You wish other people would change to be the way
you
want them to be. You’ve got some fantasy in your head, and it’s all you can see, so that you can’t accept other people for who and what they are.”

Fran got up and walked out of the room. I didn’t call him back. I felt as though he had punched me. His words were more painful than Art Mart’s big ugly arm. Fran didn’t understand. I was trying to follow my father’s advice. I didn’t really want other people to change to suit me.

Yes, I did.

A sick pain poked around my stomach. Fran had really hurt me. I didn’t want to think about it any longer. I felt horrible.

I knew what would comfort me. I closed my eyes, sat up straight in my chair, and tried to imagine myself on the podium at Jones Hall with the Houston Symphony Orchestra before me, instruments tuned and ready, each musician waiting for my command. The musicians were like pieces in a puzzle, neatly in place, ready for me to take charge and tell them what to do.

Is that why I wanted to be conductor of a symphony orchestra? So I could make things happen the way I wanted them to happen? To make people be the way I
wanted them to be? Fran was a terrific person, and I liked him, but I hadn’t been able to accept him the way he was.

Fran was right.

I groaned, and the musicians, the instruments, and Jones Hall dissolved with a
poof.

Detective Jarvis came back into the room and said, “Mary Elizabeth, we’re going to take you and Francis back to the health club. The attorney from the DA’s office wants to view the scene and have you point out a couple of things.”

Fran and I didn’t talk much in the car. Every time I thought about what he had said, I wanted to cry.

And when we arrived at the health club there was no time to talk, even if we had wanted to. Mrs. Bandini practically flew out of her chair and rushed to meet us. Mrs. Larabee was on her heels.

“We heard! We heard!” Mrs. Bandini shouted.

“Although we’ll be glad to hear it again straight from you,” Mrs. Larabee said.