The Dark and Deadly Pool (6 page)

“What I’m saying is that my last job is to put the club in order. I put away used towels, throw out the used soap in the showers, toss away paper cups and napkins and rubbish people leave around, and do a last-minute inspection around the pool. Usually there aren’t many people at the pool during the last hour, and the puddles on the tiles drain and dry fast. By the time I leave, those tiles don’t even have wet footprints on them. And I could swear there were no puddles on the tiles when I locked up tonight. But when we went back there with Lamar I noticed water on the tiles near where we were standing.”

“Can we go back and look again?”

I nodded. “Let’s hurry.”

We unlocked the door to the pool area. Once inside the room we kept our backs to the door, breathing in the smell of warm chlorine and jungle dampness until our eyes became accustomed to the darkness.

“No one’s here now,” Fran whispered. “That is, I can’t see anyone except us.”

As fast as possible I scurried to the office door, fumbled the keys, and finally got it open. I stepped inside and turned on the lights.

Fran was standing outside the office door staring at a spot on the tiles around the pool. “Right over there,” he said, and pointed.

“Yes. Someone used the pool to sneak in here.” I looked at the puddle of water that dripped across the tiles. Automatically Fran and I moved forward, following it.

It stopped abruptly in front of one of the large potted ficus trees.

“What happened to him?” Fran murmured. “He couldn’t just dissolve. He had to go somewhere.”

I held my breath as I slowly looked upward into the slender branches over our heads.

No one was there.

If someone had been looking back at me, I think I would have fainted or screamed or maybe fallen in the pool and drowned, I was that frightened.

Fran wasn’t any braver. As he felt around the top of the big brass planter, I could see his fingers tremble. “Funny,” he said. His voice cracked and he started over, speaking a little more slowly and a little deeper. “It’s funny, but it’s damp right here and around the trunk of the tree in this one spot.”

I put my hand where he showed me. “It’s like someone took hold of the trunk of the tree.”

Fran let out a long sigh. “Maybe we’ve come across some kind of a relay tag race that involves diving into the pool, climbing out, touching the tree, diving in again, and—oh, well. It’s an idea.”

“Not a very good one.”

“Have you got a better one?”

The telephone in the office rang, and I jumped straight up in the air.

I ran to answer, and it was Tina. “Your mother called
from Dallas, and because the club is officially closed the switchboard referred the call to me. She was all excited because you hadn’t got home yet. Anyhow, I saw you on camera with Lamar, so I told her you were helping the chief of security on a special project and would be home in half an hour. What are you doing in the health club?”

“Fran and I were investigating a puddle.”

“There are better things to do with your spare time. You’d better get on home right away and call your mother.”

“I thought you were off duty,” I said.

“I will be as soon as Harvey gets here for his shift. He forgot to get his car inspected and had to take a bus.”

“Thanks for covering for me, Tina,” I said. “See you tomorrow.”

I turned off the lights and locked the office door. Fran and I left the club and the hotel and the parking lot, the latter only after I convinced Fran I didn’t want to go somewhere for a Coca-Cola.

“Have you ever heard of the theory of relativity?” Fran asked.

“Of course. Einstein. But I don’t understand it.”

“Very few people do,” Fran said. “Sometime I’ll explain it to you. It has to do with height.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

“Yes, it does. You said you didn’t understand it, and you were right. Basically, when you get past all the equations, it boils down to the fact that if two people like each other, relative heights between them are meaningless.”

“Good night, Fran,” I said. “I’ll see you tomorrow.” I couldn’t imagine why, but I was looking forward to it.

With gusto and flair I conducted the most dramatic part of Wagner’s
Ride of the Valkyries
as I drove home.

As soon as I got inside the house I called Mom at their hotel in Dallas. She was still wide awake.

“I’m fine,” I said.

“I just wanted to make sure,” Mom said.

“You don’t need to worry about me.”

“Oh, darling, I wouldn’t! Not for a minute!” Mom answered, then began a list of questions, beginning with “Are you eating a nourishing breakfast?” and ending with “Are you sure you’re fine? I just had this strange, shivery feeling that everything might not be quite all right.”

“Relax, Mom. Things are okay,” I said. I didn’t tell Mom that I was carrying around a strange, shivery feeling too.

I arrived at the Ridley the next afternoon at the same time as four men dressed in white duck jumpsuits. A fifth man had backed a large van up to the double doors next to the employee entrance. The men followed me into the hotel. I planned to hold out my plastic handbag to be examined, but I dropped it, and as I suddenly stopped to pick it up, one of the men fell over me.

“I’m very sorry,” I said, trying to help him up, pick myself up, and get a grip on my handbag at the same time.

“No problem,” he grumbled, and glared at me.

He was young and tall and kind of cute. I smiled and started to say something casually friendly. But it’s hard to be casually friendly to someone who’s rubbing his elbow because it hurts, and it’s all your fault, so I let the whole thing drop and held my handbag out to the guard at the desk.

But the man who was carrying a clipboard leaned over
the desk and said to the security guard, “Somebody gotta sign this order form.”

“The manager’s always out for lunch at this time, so I’ll get Mr. Boudry for you,” the guard said, and he pressed a couple of buttons.

“Will you please look at my handbag?” I asked the guard.

He took it, and the man with the clipboard looked at it too. “What’s so special about it?” he asked me. “I’ve seen better-looking handbags than that.”

“It’s a security regulation,” I told him.

He shrugged. “You got tight security here?”

“Absolutely,” I said.

“The best,” the guard said. He handed back my handbag just as Lamar strode in. Lamar ignored me, eagle-eying the men in white uniforms. As I left I heard one of them telling Lamar, “We got orders to pick up two ten-foot sofas to be cleaned. Have you got enough authority to sign this?”

I walked on to the health club through the side lobby, glancing into the main lobby as I passed. There were only two ten-foot sofas in the hotel, and they were gorgeous and probably terribly expensive, with hand-carved mahogany framing coral-and-silver brocade. They didn’t look as though they needed cleaning to me, but hotel managers must know what they’re doing.

Mr. Jones and Mr. Kamara were seated as far from the pool area as they could get, behind a large potted palm tree. Their plastic lounge chairs sagged under their weight as the men leaned close to each other. Mr. Kamara was wearing bathing trunks, but Mr. Jones was dressed in a wrinkled gray suit. He was probably hot, because his face was red, and he kept rubbing at his forehead with a handkerchief. With his other hand he
kept batting away a palm tree frond that dipped low enough to tickle his head. All that mopping and batting made him look like a wiggling gray spider.

But Mr. Kamara wasn’t the fly. Instead, he looked as though he could eat Mr. Jones, with or without ketchup. I couldn’t tell what the two men were saying, because the gurgling, bubbling Jacuzzi drowned out their words, but each time Mr. Kamara hit his fist on the arm of the lounge chair, Mr. Jones winced and shuddered.

“Liz!”

I jumped as Art Mart yelled at me from the open office doorway. “You’re five minutes late!”

“Sorry!” It took only seconds to reach the office.

“A large convention of insurance salesmen will be here for the next three days, and they’ve already started coming into the club. So get with it, will you?”

I’d never seen him this grouchy, but I didn’t let his rudeness bother me. What can you expect from someone like Art? Not much. “I’m with it,” I told him. “On duty. Bright and cheerful.”

He actually growled at me, snatched his car keys out of the desk, and said, “I’m off. Got stuff to do.”

“Are you going to be back?”

“Maybe yes, maybe no.”

“But you said the club would be really busy.”

“So what? I hired you because I thought you could do the job. How smart do you have to be to pick up dirty towels? If you don’t think you can handle it, just say so.”

It would have given me a great deal of pleasure to tell him what I was thinking about him, but I wanted to hang on to my job. So I quietly said, “I can handle it.”

Without another word he strode out of the office.

I completed my check of the women’s dressing room and sauna, but there were guests in the men’s section.
Art was right. The club was getting busy in a hurry. I toured the pool area, stopping to say hello to Mrs. Bandini and Mrs. Larabee, and passed Mr. Jones, who was leaving the club. “Good-bye,” I said cheerfully, but he didn’t seem to hear me. He pushed through the door, head down, muttering to himself.

Just as I sat at the desk Tina popped into the office. “Hi,” she said. “Ready?”

“For what?”

“Card file.” She handed me a stack of cards an inch thick. “Here are the new ones, and while you’re busy filing them, let’s see if we can’t find that good-looking guy’s card.”

“What’s his name?”

“I don’t know, but he’s out there right now, sunning himself. He’s already got a great tan.”

I pulled the file from the side drawer and handed it to her. “Here. While I study the new ones, you can look through the file and find his name.”

While Tina was busy with the file, I checked in four guests, mentally matched their faces to their cards, handed them towels, and smilingly said that I hoped they enjoyed their stay in the Ridley health club.

As I went back to the desk, Tina snapped shut the lid of the file and looked puzzled. “So where is he?”

“Who?”

“The guy with the brown hair. His card isn’t in here.”

“Maybe he checked out.”

“No. I told you. He’s out there sunning himself.”

“Maybe the card was misfiled.”

“I went through the whole thing.”

“Do you suppose he’s not really a guest here? We could ask security to check.”

Tina stood up and smiled. “I’m security. Remember?
And what a good excuse to start a conversation. See you later.”

She zipped out the doorway, heading for the outside pool—just as a small body dashed past her and cannonballed into the pool, sending up a sheet of water.

Tina jumped back, glaring and muttering, and snatched up a towel. As she blotted the spots on her uniform she said, “This is your department. Yell at him. Kick him out. Have him arrested for impersonating a human being.”

I had seen who it was. Pauly Canelli. “I’ll be stern,” I said, and marched to the side of the pool. Pauly had surfaced and was grinning at me.

“I told you not to do that,” I said.

“I forgot.”

“No, you didn’t.”

“What are you gonna do about it?”

I put my fists on my hips and tried to look tough and mean. “Out of the pool!”

“I’ll tell my grandma.”

“Out!”

He swam to the shallow end, near to the chair in which his grandmother was enthroned. I walked around the edge of the pool to meet him. I noticed two men in business suits standing by the door to the hotel. Perhaps they were new guests. I should find out, but I had to take care of Pauly first.

Mrs. Bandini was all smiles as Pauly ran to her. She enfolded him in a large beach towel and beamed at me. “Isn’t he a lovely boy? Both of my grandchildren are such a joy to me.”

“She made me get out of the pool,” Pauly whined.

Mrs. Bandini’s eyes grew wide. “Why?”

“He was cannonballing people,” I said. “I told him not to.”

Mrs. Bandini chuckled. “I thought it was something important. Well, Pauly won’t do it anymore, will you, Pauly, my love?” Without waiting for his answer she said to him, “Why don’t you ring up room service and get something good to eat, like a hamburger and milk shake? And later you can go back in the pool if Liz says you can, and I’m sure she will.”

“It’s okay,” I mumbled, wishing I had handled things better.

As Pauly ran to the house phone, Mrs. Bandini confided, “He’s so much like his big brother Eric was at that age. So full of life and fun and mischief.”

I just smiled back. What could I say?

“I can’t wait until you and Eric meet each other,” Mrs. Bandini added.

As far as I was concerned, I hoped that day would never come. I glanced at the door and saw that the two men in business suits were still there. They were both about my height and stocky. They were old enough to have jowls, and the dark-haired one could have used a shampoo. “Excuse me,” I said to Mrs. Bandini, and walked toward the guests.