The Dark and Deadly Pool (8 page)

“Look, I’m sorry I had to be gone, but it wasn’t my fault,” I began.

Art just slammed his chair upright and snapped, “I know where you were.”

“Do you know what happened?”

“Of course I know. Everybody in the hotel knows by this time.”

“Oh,” I said.

Art gave a wicked chuckle. “And they even got the security chief to sign for it! That’s terrific!”

“I don’t think it’s so funny,” I said. “Lamar is very embarrassed about it.”

For the first time Art’s eyes met mine. “He should be embarrassed. For all any of us know, he was in on it.”

“No! I don’t believe that!”

He slowly stood up and stretched, rippling all the way down. I wasn’t impressed. Mrs. Zellendorf’s cat can do the same thing. “Now that you’re here, you can take over,” he said. “I’m off and won’t be back until tomorrow
A.M.
”

“Okay.”

“Don’t forget to clean the tiles and pick up the towels,” he said.

I had to clamp my teeth together until they hurt to keep from reminding him that I hadn’t forgot yet, and he knew it.

He sauntered from the indoor pool area toward the hotel, stopping to smile and ripple at two good-looking women who were lounging near the Jacuzzi.

Mr. Kamara passed him on his way to the pool. They said something to each other, and I could practically see sparks. What was the matter with Art? He was always preaching to me about keeping the hotel guests happy. Mr. Kamara growled something and belly-flopped into
the water, swimming back and forth, back and forth, without stopping or paying any more attention to Art, who wheeled and stomped out of the club as though he were trying to make dents in the floor.

For the moment the club was fairly quiet. Pauly was stuffing his face at a table near the pool, but his grandmother and Mrs. Larabee were nowhere in sight. I checked and tidied the women’s dressing area and opened the door of the sauna.

There sat Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee, the steam swirling around them. Mrs. Larabee was wearing her black racer bathing suit, but Mrs. Bandini was wrapped in a towel with soggy blue tennis shoes on her feet.

She smiled at me from under a bouffant, plastic shower cap. “Come in, come in, and shut the door,” she said as though she were in her own kitchen. “Tell us what happened.”

I shut the door, but the steam made my eyes water. “Some thieves claiming to be from a cleaning company took the two big sofas in the lobby. Only they weren’t from a cleaning company. They stole them.”

“My stars!” Mrs. Bandini turned to Mrs. Larabee. “Those beautiful silver-and-cream sofas! Imagine that!”

“They’re not silver and cream. They’re goldish and pinkish,” Mrs. Larabee said.

“Silver and cream, but does it matter what color? We’re talking about the fact that they’re stolen!”

“If they’re stolen, they have to identify them. And how can they identify them if they don’t know what color they are?”

I mumbled something and hurried out of the sauna. Strands of my hair were already beginning to damply plaster themselves on my ears and cheeks.

I strolled back to the desk. With no immediate jobs to
take care of, I could go through the photo-ID cards again.

The cards were alphabetized when they were put into the file box. I made a little song in my head about the last names as I mentally recorded them with the photos I was looking at. Durstan, Effendale, Ender, Fallon, Fox, Fraiser, Garnett—

Fraiser? I went back to his card. Kurt Quentin Fraiser. A good-looking guy with brown hair. I thought Tina had said his card wasn’t in here.

I picked up the phone and rang the security office.

“Yo,” Lamar answered.

“This is Liz. Is Tina there?”

“What’s wrong?”

“Nothing. I just need to ask Tina about one of the photo-ID cards.”

“Something wrong with the card?”

“No.”

“You want to tell Tina about some good-looking dude. Well, do it when you’re both off duty.”

“But I also want to ask her about two guys who—”

Lamar had cut the connection, so I sighed and hung up, too, once again marveling at how much he knew. He was really a good chief of security, and it wasn’t fair that Mr. Parmegan was blaming him for the sofas being stolen.

I leaned my chin on my hands, and my elbows on the desk, gazing out the window between my desk and the pool and trying to think. Something was peculiar about those photo-ID cards, but what was it? I couldn’t zero in on the problem, because of Pauly Canelli.

The precrowd club seemed peaceful. Even the fake—uh, artificial—trees looked drowsy. Two women were snoozing next to the pool, their towels pulled over them
like blankets, and Mr. Kamara was chugging a wake back and forth across the pool, as regular as a windup boat.

But Pauly wasn’t peaceful. He had finished his gigantic snack and was obviously bored and looking for something interesting to do. I watched his eyes widen and his lips stretch into a wicked grin as he spotted the pair of sleeping women, and it wasn’t hard to tell what he had in mind. He slowly got up from his chair, peeled off the T-shirt he’d been wearing, and began an exaggerated tiptoe toward the women.

I slid out of my chair and zipped to the office doorway. By the time I reached it he was already crouching into the cannonball position.

“Pauly Canelli!” I yelled. “Don’t you dare!”

My shout startled Pauly. Instead of stepping back and behaving himself, without looking or caring, he flung his round, tight little cannonball body smack into the pool.

And smack on top of Mr. Kamara, who sank straight to the bottom.

I felt as though I were in a slow-motion movie. I ran to the edge of the pool, tugging off my shoes and flinging them aside, then dived. It seemed to take forever, because while I was doing this my eyes were on Mr. Kamara. He didn’t move. Obviously Pauly had knocked him out.

My momentum carried me across the pool in a matter of seconds. I grabbed Mr. Kamara’s chin with both hands and pushed hard against the bottom of the pool. We rose to the top and I flipped on my side. One of my arms was under his chin. I used the other in a side stroke to help propel us to shallow water.

Both of the women who had been Pauly’s targets were already in the water. They helped me pull Mr. Kamara
from the pool. Mr. Kamara helped too. By this time he was choking and sputtering and conscious again.

He sat on the edge of the pool and rubbed his head.

“I’ll call a doctor,” I said.

“No. A doctor not necessary,” he said.

“I didn’t mean to jump on you,” Pauly said, his voice quivering. He reminded me of the huge-eyed lemurs in the night-animal section of the zoo.

“That is what happened?” Mr. Kamara asked. He stared at Pauly and mumbled something in his native tongue. I didn’t ask for a translation. His tone of voice told me all I needed to know.

Pauly’s lower lip curled out. “It’s her fault,” he said, pointing at me. “She yelled at me and scared me. That’s why I didn’t see you.”

One of the women said, “What a rude little boy. I heard her tell you earlier not to splash water on people. That’s what you were planning to do to us, wasn’t it?”

The other woman pointed at me and said to Mr. Kamara, “She dived right in and pulled you out.”

“Thank you,” he said to me.

“Thank them too,” I answered, smiling at the women. “They helped me.”

Mr. Kamara struggled to his feet and staggered over to the chair on which his robe was neatly folded and hung. He pulled on his robe and stepped into his thongs.

“Are you sure you’re all right?” I asked him.

“Yes. All right.”

I turned to Pauly, brushing back the dripping hair from my eyes. “As for you—I am not going to allow you back in the pool for the rest of the day.”

“Not all his fault,” Mr. Kamara said. He put a hand on Pauly’s shoulder. “Too much to think about. I not pay attention.”

“Is something wrong, Mr. Kamara? Can I do anything to help?”

For a long moment he looked at me, and I saw something flicker in his eyes. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a light bulb had appeared over his head, like in the old cartoon shows. He gave a little bow and grinned, but oddly the grin seemed to be more for himself than for me. “Ah, yes. You can help.”

He tugged his robe more tightly around himself, turned sharply, and wobbled from the pool area to the door to the hotel.

I wished I could take back my words. I wished that I could call out, “Wait, Mr. Kamara! I didn’t mean it!” For just an instant, before he turned away, I had glimpsed an almost evil expression of triumph on his face. I didn’t know what plan Mr. Kamara had in mind, but I was sure I was going to regret being any part of it.

Mrs. Bandini apologized over and over again for Pauly’s actions. When he complained that I had ordered him out of the pool for the rest of the day, she said I was perfectly right, and by pure coincidence it was time they were getting home anyway. Pauly made a face at me as they left.

I changed to an extra pair of pink shorts and a club T-shirt, which fortunately I kept in my locker, wrote out a detailed report in the day’s log, and called Lamar to tell him what had happened.

“I’m a little worried about Mr. Kamara,” I said.

“I’ll check on him,” he told me. “You were right to inform me.”

Lamar seemed to be calm and controlled again. I was glad he wasn’t still so upset. For a “fun health club” in a “relaxing, restful hotel,” we were pretty far off base.

I had no sooner put down the desk telephone than Detective Jarvis called. “Mr. Parmegan told me your working hours,” he said. “Could you make it downtown to the police station tomorrow morning to look at mug shots?”

“Sure,” I said. “What time?”

“How about nine o’clock?”

“Just tell me how to get there.”

“Do you have a car?”

Old Junk Bucket. “I guess you could call it a car.”

He gave me directions to the HPD main station on Riesner, and I carefully wrote them down.

I wished I could talk to Tina. I wished I could talk to Fran. I wished I could switch the hotel’s piped-in music to station KLEF. I’d feel a lot better if I could conduct an orchestra through an entire symphony. A symphony is so beautifully orderly. No klutzy people or stupid mistakes or deep black swimming pools. The pools in a symphony are bright spots of sound that trill or call or beat or blast or soar, each of them different, each of them woven together by a conductor with a baton.

None of my wishes came true. Instead, more people than I’d ever seen in the health club began to straggle in. It was all I could do to unobtrusively check ID cards and hand out towels and smiles. They must have been with the big convention Art Mart had told me about. Meetings were over, and they were ready to relax.

Finally, for a few moments, the office was empty. I glanced through the window and surveyed the indoor section of the health club. The Jacuzzi was loaded. A ring of heads and shoulders encircled the bubbles, reminding me of one of those battery games in which a ring of fish keep opening and closing their mouths, and you have to try to catch them.

Just beyond the Jacuzzi Fran was delivering a tray of drinks to four hairy-chested, potbellied men. Fran! I had to catch him.

I tugged down the back of my pink shorts and sauntered from the office, smiling and surveying and trying to
look both official and efficient. As I passed Fran I murmured, “We need to get together.”

He straightened and beamed at me. “I knew you’d eventually be attracted to me.”

I felt myself blushing, knowing he’d been overheard.

One of the men, who’d been lazily scratching his chest, stopped and studied me.

“Be quiet, Fran,” I said. “That’s not what I meant. I just have to talk to you about—about—well, you know what.”

“But of course,” Fran answered, trying to look mysterious. “The usual time. The usual place.” He swung his empty tray to his shoulder, picked up the signed check, and walked briskly toward the door to the hotel.

“Excuse me,” I said to the row of assorted eyes at the table. Nervously, I stepped back and skidded in a puddle of water. I reached out, grabbing at anything to keep from falling, and found myself gripping the slender trunk of a fake ficus tree. The ficus and I spun clockwise, but I managed to stay on my feet.

I caught my balance, brushed myself off nonchalantly, as though I performed this trick every day, and stared hard at the tree. It had turned with me. I know it had. Yet the base of the tree, with its level layer of wooden chips, looked undisturbed. I tried to pick up one of the chips, but it was glued in place. Well, of course it would be. The whole thing was fake, wasn’t it?

Embarrassed by my clumsiness, and as red as those misguided lobsters sunning overlong around the outside section of the pool, I dutifully walked my beat around the pool, outside and in, then dashed into the office to catch the telephone.

“You’ve got a crowd this afternoon,” Tina said.

“Oh, Tina, I’m glad you called. What did you find out about those men who had been in the club?”

“Nothing,” she said. “I couldn’t find them.”

“They left in an awful hurry,” I said. “That should prove they didn’t belong here. That and the fact that their faces weren’t on any of the cards.”