Free The Dark and Deadly Pool by Joan Lowery Nixon

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 tolook 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