The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 14

THE FOURTH CAR I thumbed stopped for me. It was a cut-down jalopy with a pair of skis strapped to the top, driven by a college boy on his way back to Westwood. I told him I’d turned my car over on a back road. He was young enough to accept my story without any questions, and decent enough to let me go to sleep in the back seat.

He took me to the ambulance entrance of St. John’s Hospital. A resident surgeon put some stitches in my scalp, gave me quiet hell, and told me to go to bed for a couple of days. I took a taxi home. Traffic was sparse and rapid on the boulevard. I sat back in the seat and watched the lights go by, flashing like thrown knives. There were nights when I hated the city.

My house looked shabby and small. I turned on all the lights. George Wall’s dark suit lay like a crumpled man on the bedroom floor. To hell with him, I thought, and repeated the thought aloud. I took a bath and turned off all the lights and went to bed.

It didn’t do any good. A nightmare world sprang up around the room, a world of changing faces which wouldn’t hold still. Hester’s face was there, refracted through George Wall’s mind. It changed and died and came alive and died again smiling, staring with loveless eyes out of the red darkness. I thrashed around for a while and gave up. Got up and dressed and went out to my garage.

It hit me then, and not until then, that I was minus a car. If the Beverly Hills cops hadn’t hauled it away, my car was parked on Manor Crest Drive, across the street from Hester’s house. I called another taxi and asked to be let off on a corner half a block from the house. My car was where I had left it, with a parking ticket under the windshield-wiper.

I crossed the street for a closer look at the house. There was no car in the drive, no light behind the windows. I climbed the front steps and leaned on the bellpush. Inside, the electric bell chirred like a cricket on an abandoned hearth. The nobody-home sound, the empty-house girl-gone one-note blues.

I tried the door. It was locked. I glanced up and down the street. Lights shone at the intersections and from the quiet houses. The people were all inside. They had given up night walks back in the cold war.

Call me trouble looking for a place to happen. I went around to the side of the house, through a creaking wooden gate into a walled patio. The flagstone paving was uneven under my feet. Crab grass grew rank in the spaces between the stones. I made my way among wrought-iron tables and disemboweled chaises to a pair of French doors set into the wall.

My flashlight beam fell through dirty glass into a lanai full of obscene shadows. They were cast by rubber plants and cacti growing in earthenware pots. I reversed the light and used its butt to punch out one of the panes, drew back a reluctant bolt, and forced the door open.

The house was mostly front, like the buildings on Graff’s sets. Its rear had been given over to ghosts and spiders. Spiders had rigged the lanai’s bamboo furniture and black oak rafters with loops and hammocks and wheels of dusty webbing. I felt like an archaeologist breaking into a tomb.

The door at the end of the lanai was unlocked. I passed through a storeroom full of once-expensive junk: high, unsittable Spanish chairs, a grand piano with grinning yellow keys, brownish oil paintings framed in gilt: through another door, into the central hallway of the house. I crossed to the door of the living-room.

White walls and a half-beamed ceiling rose in front of me, supported by the upward beam from my light. I lowered it to the floor, which was covered with ivory carpeting. White and black sectional furniture, low-slung and cubistic, was grouped in angular patterns around the room. The fireplace was faced with black tile and flanked by a square white leather hassock. On the other side of the fireplace, a faint dark patch showed in the carpet.

I got down on my knees and examined it. It was a wet spot the size of a large dinner plate, of no particular color. Through the odor of detergent, and under the other odors in the room, perfume and cigarette smoke and sweet mixed drinks, I could smell blood. The odor of blood was persistent, no matter how you scrubbed.

Still on my knees, I turned my attention to the raised fireplace. It was equipped with a set of brass fire tools in a rack: brush, shovel, a pair of leather bellows with brass handles. The set was new, and looked as if it had never been used or even touched. Except that the poker was missing.

Beyond the fireplace there was a doorless arch which probably opened into the dining-room. Most of the houses of this style and period had similar floor plans, and I had been in a lot of them. I moved to the arch, intending to go over the rest of the downstairs, then the upstairs.

A motor droned in the street. Light washed the draped front windows and swept past. I went to the end window and looked out through the narrow space between the drape and the window frame. The old black Lincoln was standing in the driveway. Marfeld was at the wheel, his face grotesquely shadowed by the reflection of the headlights. He switched them off and climbed out.

Leroy Frost got out on the far side. I knew him by his hurrying feeble walk. The two men passed, within three or four feet of me, headed for the front door. Frost was carrying a glinting metal rod which he used as a walking-stick.

I went through the archway into the next room. In its center a polished table reflected the wan light filtered through lace-curtained double windows. A tall buffet stood against the wall inside the arch, a chair in the corner behind it. I sat down in the deep shadow, with my flashlight in one hand and my gun in the other.

I heard a key turn in the front door, then Leroy Frost’s voice, jerking with strain: “I’ll take the key. What happened to the other key?”

“Lance give it to the pig.”

“That was a sloppy way to handle it.”

“It was your idea, chief. You told me not to talk to her myself.”

“All right, as long as she got it.” Frost mumbled something indistinguishable. I heard him shuffling in the entrance to the living-room. Suddenly he exploded: “Where is the goddam light? You been in and out of this house, you expect me to grope around in the dark all night?”

The lights went on in the living-room. Footsteps crossed it. Frost said: “You didn’t do a very good job on the rug.”

“I did the best I could in the time. Nobody’s gonna go over it with a fine-tooth comb, anyway.”

“You hope. You better bring that hassock over here, cover it up until it dries. We don’t want her to see it.”

Marfeld grunted with effort. I heard the hassock being dragged across the carpet.

“Fine,” Frost said. “Now wipe my prints off the poker and put it where it belongs.”

There was the sound of metal coming in contact with metal.

“You sure you got it clean, chief?”

“Don’t be a birdbrain, it isn’t the same poker. I found a match for it in the prop warehouse.”

“I be damned, you think of everything.” Marfeld’s voice was moist with admiration. “Where did you ditch the other one?”

“Where nobody’s going to find it. Not even you.”

“Me? What would I want with it?”

“Skip it.”

“Hell, don’t you trust me, chief?”

“I trust nobody. I barely trust myself. Now let’s get out of here.”

“What about the pig? Don’t we wait for her?”

“No, she won’t be here for a while. And the less she sees of us, the better. Lance told her what she’s supposed to do, and we don’t want her asking us questions.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“I don’t need you to tell me I’m right. I know more about heading off blackmail than any other two men in this town. Bear it in mind in case you develop any ideas.”

“I don’t get it, chief. What kind of ideas you mean?” Marfeld’s voice was full of injured innocence.

“Ideas of retiring, maybe, with a nice fat pension.”

“No, sir. Not me, Mr. Frost.”

“I guess you know better, at that. You try to put the bite on me or any friend of mine – it’s the quickest way to get a hole in the head to go with the hole in the head you already got.”

“I know that, Mr. Frost. Christ amighty, I’m loyal. Didn’t I prove it to you?”

“Maybe. Are you sure you saw what you said you saw?”

“When was that, chief?”

“This afternoon. Here.”

“Christ, yes.” Marfeld’s plodding mind caught the implication and was stung by it. “Christ, Mr. Frost, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“You would if you did it yourself. That would be quite a trick, to do a murder and con the organization into covering for you.”

“Aw now, chief, you wouldn’t accuse me. Why would I kill anybody?”

“For kicks. You’d do it for kicks, any time you thought you could get away with it. Or to make yourself into a hero, if you had a few more brains.”

Marfeld whined adenoidally: “Make myself into a hero?”

“Yah, Marfeld to the rescue, saving the company’s cookies for it again. It’s kind of a coincidence that you been in on both killings, Johnny-on-the-spot. Or don’t you think so?”

“That’s crazy, chief, honest to God.” Marfeld’s voice throbbed with sincerity. It ran down, and began on a new note: “I been loyal all my life, first to the sheriff and then to you. I never asked for anything for myself.”

“Except a cash bonus now and then, eh?” Frost laughed. Now that Marfeld was jittery, too, Frost was willing to forgive him. His laughter rustled like a Santa Ana searching among dry leaves. “Okay, you’ll get your bonus, if I can get it past the comptroller.”

“Thank you, chief. I mean it very sincerely.”

“Sure you do.”

The light went out. The front door closed behind them. I waited until the Lincoln was out of hearing, and went upstairs. The front bedroom was the only room in use. It had quilted pink walls and a silk-canopied bed, like something out of a girl’s adolescent dream. The contents of the dressing-table and closet told me that the girl had been spending a lot of money on clothes and cosmetics, and hadn’t taken any of it with her.