Summary
Told to wait for Mr. Mulwray, Jake walks into the backyard, where there is a pond. A gardener with a Japanese accent mutters about the pond being “bad for glass,” a phrase Jake repeats as if he understands what the man is saying. Jake spots something shiny in the water, but before he can retrieve the object, Hollis’s wife, Evelyn, comes from another area of the property and invites Jake to have an iced tea with her. Evelyn informs him that Hollis is at work; Jake says Hollis isn’t, and he has cleared out of the apartment where the photos were taken. She says that isn’t Hollis’s apartment. Jake tells Evelyn that somebody has gone to a lot of trouble setting him up, which is why he wants to talk to Hollis. Evelyn agrees to drop the lawsuit and asks to drop the whole subject. Jake wants to get to the bottom of what’s going on, explaining that the “phony broad” wasn’t out to get him but her husband. She tells Jake that Hollis might be at one of two reservoirs, where he tends to walk around during lunch.
At the Oak Pass reservoir, Jake gets past the police guarding the area by showing the business card of the man from the office adjacent to Mulwray’s. Once through, Jake encounters Lou Escobar, a police lieutenant he used to know from when they worked in Chinatown. The lieutenant is pleased to inform Jake that Hollis is right there. He points to Hollis’s dead body being hauled up a reservoir shoot by a rope tied to his ankle. The scene cuts to the lieutenant interviewing Evelyn at the police station, asking her about Hollis’s affair and the woman he was photographed with. Evelyn and Jake go along with a story that she hired Jake to investigate her husband.
Jake goes to the morgue, where he is friendly with Morty, the coroner in charge. At the morgue there is another body of an apparent drowning in the LA River, which prompts Jake to investigate the scene, knowing the drought means the water level is so low that the supposed cause of death is unlikely to be the real one. At the site, Jake asks questions of the Latino boy on the horse and learns that Hollis asked him earlier about when and where “the water comes.” At dusk, Jake returns to the Oak Pass reservoir and climbs the fence. Suddenly he hears what sounds like two bullets firing and ducks down into a channel. A moment later the channel floods with water and pushes him toward a fence he climbs. When trying to leave, Jake encounters Mulvihill and another man. The other man cuts Jake’s nostril with a switchblade and says that next time he’ll take the whole nose off.
In his office with a bandaged nose, Jake receives a call from the woman who posed as Mrs. Mulwray. She says she had no idea anything so terrible would happen to Hollis. Instead of telling him who her employer was, she tells him to check the obituaries in the paper. Jake next meets with Evelyn at a fine-dining restaurant. Jake thanks her for the check she sent, but says she “short-changed” him on the story. He says he thinks she is hiding something and that the check could look like she’s paying him off to hide evidence. Evelyn reveals she knew about the affair and rather than being upset, she was grateful to learn about it. Jake deduces that she was having affairs too. She says she never sees anyone for long and that affairs are difficult for her. Jake asks what the C initial in her name is and learns it’s Cross, her maiden name.
Outside the restaurant, Jake asks her to come with him. She says there is nothing more to say. Jake tells Evelyn in an aggressive manner that her husband was murdered because “somebody’s been dumping thousands of tons of water from the city’s reservoirs and we’re supposed to be in the middle of a drought. He found out about it and he was killed.” He tells her he still thinks she is hiding something and then drives off quickly.
Jake returns to the Water Department office and asks to speak with Mr. Yelburton, the man whose business cards he took when looking for Hollis. Jake sees a photo of Noah Cross on the wall, linking the name to Evelyn’s maiden name. While made to wait, Jake learns from the receptionist that Noah Cross used to own the entire Water Department. He and Mr. Mulwray were partners in the business, and Mulwray believed the public should own the water.
Analysis
Unable to find Hollis at his office, Jake visits the Mulwrays’ mansion, hoping to speak with him about which of his enemies might have set them both up. While waiting, Jake has an awkward conversation with the Japanese gardener, who, to Jake, seems to be talking nonsense about the pond being “bad for glass.” Jake also sees something shiny in the water, but he can’t quite make out what it is. With this seemingly unimportant scene fragment, Polanski sets up a crucial revelation Jake will have toward the end of the film.
During his second meeting with Evelyn Mulwray, Jake is perplexed by—and skeptical of—how quickly she offers to drop the lawsuit against him. She is also seemingly not upset about learning of Hollis’s affair, and not interested in discovering who is out to get her husband. With Evelyn’s evasive behavior, Polanski builds on the theme of deceit, suggesting through her reserved attitude that there is more to the story than she is letting on.
The plot thickens when Jake arrives at Oak Pass Reservoir—getting through guards by pretending he works for the Water Department—only to discover Hollis has been found dead there. Not believing Hollis’s death was the suicide it is being branded as, Jake speaks to the coroner and learns another man turned up dead, apparently drowned in the same river Jake recently saw Hollis visiting. Jake returns to the dried-up riverbed to confirm that there is no way the man could have drowned himself, meaning he was murdered and it was staged to look like a drowning. Jake also learns from a boy on a horse that Hollis had asked him about water being released there at irregular intervals.
Driven to investigate further and uncover what is beginning to look like a murder conspiracy centered on the city’s water supply, Jake sneaks into the Oak Pass Reservoir that night. He is washed away by another unexplained dump of water—a peculiar occurrence given that the city is supposedly undergoing a drought. Polanski introduces the theme of intimidation when Jake encounters the former corrupt sheriff Claude Mulvihill and an associate as he tries to leave Oak Pass. Ostensibly working for the Water Department to investigate security threats, Mulvihill reprimands Jake for trespassing. The encounter quickly becomes heated as Mulvihill and his henchman act more like gangsters than city employees. Jake leaves the scene with a slice through his nostril—a symbolic warning to keep his nose out of where it doesn’t belong.
Jake’s hunch that he has stumbled across a conspiracy is strengthened when he receives a call from the woman who pretended to be Evelyn Mulwray. Worried for her safety, she refuses to name who hired her to deceive Jake, but gives him a cryptic hint. In his next encounter with Evelyn, Jake continues to be frustrated with her evasiveness and seeming reluctance to help him uncover the truth, even after he shares his theory that Hollis was killed because he knew about a conspiracy to dump tons of water in the midst of a drought. However, he does learn an important piece of information: her maiden name is Cross. In the next scene, back at the Water Department, Jake puts it together that Evelyn is the daughter of Noah Cross, Hollis’s business partner from before the city’s water supply was a publicly owned utility.
