The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 19

I WENT upstairs and along the gallery to Bassett’s office. He still wasn’t in it. I went in search of a drink. Under the half-retracted roof of a great inner court, dancers were sliding around on the wax tiles to the music of a decimated orchestra. JEREMY CRANE AND HIS JOY so was the legend on the drum. Their sad musicians’ eyes look down their noses at the merrymaking squares. They we playing lilting melancholy Gershwin: “Someone to Watch Over Me.”

My diving friend whose hips didn’t bounce was dancing with the perennial-bachelor type who loved taking pictures. Her diamonds glittered on his willowy right shoulder. He didn’t like it when I cut in, but he departed gracefully.

She had on a tiger-striped gown with a slashed neckline and a flaring skirt which didn’t become her. Her dancing was rather tigerish. She plunged around as if she was used to leading. Our dance was politely intense, like an amateur wrestling match, with no breath wasted on words. I said when it ended: “Lew Archer is my name. May I talk to you?”

“Why not?”

We sat at one of several marble-topped tables separated by a glass windscreen from the pool. I said: “Let me get you a drink.”

“Thank you, I don’t drink. You’re not a member, and you’re not one of Sime Graff’s regulars. Let me guess.” She fingered her pointed chin, and her diamonds flashed. “Reporter?”

“Guess again.”

“Policeman?”

“You’re very acute, or am I very obvious?”

She studied me from between narrowed eyelids, and smiled narrowly. “No, I wouldn’t say you’re obvious. It’s just you asked me something about Hester Campbell before. And it kind of made me wonder if you were a policeman.”

“I don’t follow your line of reasoning.”

“Don’t you? Then how does it happen that you’re interested in her?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. My lips are sealed.”

“Mine aren’t,” she said. “Tell me, what is she wanted for? Theft?”

“I didn’t say she was wanted.”

“Then she ought to be. She’s a thief, you know.” Her smile had a biting edge. “She stole from me. I left my wallet in the dressing-room in my cabaña one day last summer. It was early in the morning, no one was around except the staff, so I didn’t bother locking up the place. I did a few dives and showered, and when I went to dress, my wallet was gone.”

“How do you know she took it?”

“There’s no doubt whatever that she did. I saw her slinking down the shower-room corridor just before I found it missing. She had something wrapped in a towel in her hand, and a guilty smirk on her face. She didn’t fool me for a minute. I went to her afterwards and asked her point-blank if she had it. Of course she denied it, but I could see the deceitful look in her eyes.”

“A deceitful look is hardly evidence.”

“Oh, it wasn’t only that. Other members have suffered losses, too, and they always coincided with Miss Campbell’s being around. I know I sound prejudiced, but I’m not, really. I’d done my best to help the girl, you see. I considered her almost a protégée at one time. So it rather hurt when I caught her stealing from me. There was over a hundred dollars in the wallet, and my driver’s license and keys, which had to be replaced.”

“You say you caught her.”

“Morally speaking, I did. Of course she wouldn’t admit a thing. She’d cached the wallet somewhere in the meantime.”

“Did you report the theft?” My voice was sharper than I intended.

She drummed on the tabletop with blunt fingertips. “I must say, I hardly expected to be cross-questioned like this. I’m voluntarily giving you information, and I’m doing so completely without malice. You don’t understand, I liked Hester. She had bad breaks when she was a kid, and I felt sorry for her.”

“So you didn’t report it.”

“No, I didn’t, not to the authorities. I did take it up with Mr. Bassett, which did no good at all. She had him thoroughly hoodwinked. He simply couldn’t believe that she’d wrong – until it happened to him.”

“What happened to him?”

“Hester stole from him, too,” she said with a certain complacency. “That is, I can’t swear that she did, but I’m morally certain of it. Miss Hamblin, his secretary, is a friend of mine, and I hear things. Mr. Bassett was dreadfully upset the day she left.” She leaned toward me across the table: I could see the barred rib-cage between her breasts. “And Miss Hamblin said he changed the combination of his safe that very day.”

“All this is pretty tenuous. Did he report a theft?”

“Of course he didn’t. He never said a word to anybody. He was too ashamed of being taken in by her.”

“And you’ve never said a word to anybody, either?”

“Until now.”

“Why bring it all out now?”

She was silent, except for her drumming fingers. The lower part of her face set in a dull, thick expression. She had turned her head away from the source of light, and I couldn’t see her eyes. “You asked me.”

“I didn’t ask you anything specific.”

“You talk as if you were a friend of hers. Are you?”

“Are you?”

She covered her mouth with her hand, so that her whole face was hidden, and mumbled behind it: “I thought she was my friend. I could have forgiven her the wallet, even. But I saw her last week in Myrin’s. I walked right up to her, prepared to let bygones be bygones, and she snubbed me. She pretended not to know me.” Her voice became deep and harsh, and the hand in front of her mouth became a fist. “So I thought, if she’s suddenly loaded, able to buy clothes at Myrin’s, the least she can do is repay me my hundred dollars.”

“You need the money, do you?”

Her fist repelled the suggestion, fiercely, as if I’d accused her of having a moral weakness or a physical disease. “Of course I don’t need the money. It’s the principle of the thing.” After a thinking pause she said: “You don’t like me the least little bit, do you?”

I hadn’t expected the question, and I didn’t have an answer ready. She had the peculiar combination of force and meanness you often find in rich, unmarried women. “You’re loaded,” I said, “and I’m not, and I keep remembering the difference. Does it matter?”

“Yes, it matters. You don’t understand.” Her eyes emerged from shadow, and her meager breast leaned hard against the table edge. “It isn’t the money, so much. Only I thought Hester liked me. I thought she was a true friend. I used to coach her diving, I let her use Father’s pool. I even gave a party for her once – a birthday party.”

“How old was she?”

“It was her eighteenth birthday. She was the prettiest girl in the world then, and the nicest. I can’t understand – what happened to all her niceness?”

“It’s happening to a lot of people.”

“Is that a crack at me?”

“At me,” I said. “At all of us. Maybe it’s atomic fallout or something.”

Needing a drink more than ever, I thanked her and excused myself and found my way to the drinking-room. A curved mahogany bar took up one end of it. The other walls were decorated with Hollywood-Fauvist murals. The large room contained several dozen assorted couples hurling late-night insults at each other and orders at the Filipino bartenders. There were actresses with that numb and varnished and would-be actresses with that waiting look; junior-executive types hacking diligently at each other with their profiles; their wives watching each other through smiles; and others.

I sat at the bar between strangers, wheedled a whisky-and-water out of one of the white-coated Filipinos, and listened to the people. These were movie people, but a great deal of their talk was about television. They talked about communications media and the black list and the hook and payment for second showings and who had money for pilot films and what their agents said. Under their noise, they gave out a feeling of suspense. Some of them seemed to be listening hard for the rustle of a dropping option. Some of their eyes were knowing previews of that gray, shaking hangover dawn when all the mortgage payments came due at once and the options fell like snow.

The man on my immediate right looked like an old actor and sounded like a director. Maybe he was an actor turned director. He was explaining something to a frog-voiced whisky blonde: “It means it’s happening to you, you see. You’re the one in love with the girl, or the boy, as the case may be. It’s not the girl on the screen he’s making a play for, it’s you.”

“Empathy-schwempathy,” she croaked pleasantly. “Why not just call it sex?”

“It isn’t sex. It includes sex.”

“Then I’m for it. Anything that includes sex, I’m for it. That’s my personal philosophy of life.”

“And a fine philosophy it is,” another man said. “Sex and television are the opium of the people.”

“I thought marijuana was the opium of the people.”

“Marijuana is the marijuana of the people.”

There was a girl on my left. I caught a glimpse of her profile, young and pretty and smooth as glass. She was talking earnestly to the man beside her, an aging clown I’d seen in twenty movies.

“You said you’d catch me if I fell,” she said.

“I was feeling stronger then.”

“You said you’d marry me if it ever happened.”

“You got more sense than to take me seriously. I’m two years behind on alimony now.”

“You’re very romantic, aren’t you?”

“That’s putting it mildly, sweetheart. I got some sense of responsibility, though. I’ll do what I can for you, give you a telephone number. And you can tell him to send the bill to me.”

“I don’t want your dirty telephone number. I don’t want your dirty money.”

“Be reasonable. Think of it like it was a tumor or something – that is, if it really exists. Another drink?”

“Make mine prussic acid,” she said dully.

“On the rocks?”

I left half my drink standing. It was air I needed. At one of the marble-topped tables in the court, under the saw-toothed shadow of a banana tree, Simon Graff was sitting with his wife. His gray hair was still dark and slick from the shower. He wore a dinner jacket with a pink shirt and a red cummerbund. She wore a blue mink coat over a black gown figured with gold which was out of style. His face was brown and pointed, talking at her. I couldn’t see her face. She was looking out through the windscreen at the pool.

I had a contact mike in my car, and I went out to the parking-lot to get it. There were fewer cars than there had been, and one additional one: Carl Stern’s sedan. It had Drive-Yourself registration. I didn’t take time to go over it.

Graff was still talking when I got back to the poolside. The pool was abandoned now, but wavelets still washed the sides, shining in the underwater light. Hidden from Graff by the banana tree, I moved a rope chair up against the windscreen and pressed the mike to the plate glass. The trick had worked before, and it worked again. He was saying: “Oh, yes, certainly, everything is my fault, I am your personal bête noire, and I apologize deeply.”

“Please, Simon.”

“Simon who? There is no Simon here. I am Mephisto Bête Noire, the famous hell husband. No!” His voice rose sharply on the word. “Think a minute, Isobel, if you have any mind left to think with. Think of what I have done for you, what I have endured and continue to endure. Think where you would be if it weren’t for my support.”

“This is support?”

“We won’t argue. I know what you want. I know your purpose in attacking me.” His voice was smooth as butter salted with tears. “You have suffered, and you want me to suffer. I refuse to suffer. You cannot make me suffer.”

“God damn you,” she said in a rustling whisper.

“God damn me, eh? How many drinks have you had?”

“Five or ten or twelve. Does it signify?”

“You know you cannot drink, that alcohol is death for you. Must I call Dr. Frey and have you locked up again?”

“No!” She was frightened. “I’m not drunk.”

“Of course not. You are sobriety personified. You are the girl ideal of the Women’s Christian Temperance Union, mens sana in corpore sano. But let me tell you one thing, Mrs. Sobriety. You are not going to ruin my party, no matter what. If you cannot or will not act as hostess, you will take yourself off, Toko will drive you.”

“Get her to be your hostess, why don’t you?”

“Who? Who are you talking about?”

“Hester Campbell,” she said. “Don’t tell me you’re not seeing her.”

“For business purposes. I have seen her for business purposes. If you have hired detectives, you will regret it”

“I don’t need detectives, I have my sources. Did you give her the house for business purposes? Did you buy her those clothes for business purposes?”

“What do you know about that house? Have you been in that house?”

“It’s none of your business.”

“Yes.” The word hissed like steam escaping from an overloaded pressure system. “I make it my business. Were you in that house today?”

“Maybe.”

“Answer me, crazy woman.”

“You can’t talk to me like that.” She began to call him names in a low, husky voice. It sounded like something tearing inside of her, permitting the birth of a more violent personality.

She rose suddenly, and I saw her walking across the patio in a straight line, moving among the dancers as though they were phantoms, figments of her mind. Her hip bumped the door frame as she went into the bar.

She came right out again, by another door. I caught a glimpse of her face in the light from the pool. It was white and frightened-looking. Perhaps the people frightened her. She skirted the shallow end of the pool, clicking along on high heels, and entered a cabaña on the far side.

I strolled toward the other end of the pool. The diving tower rose gleaming against a bank of fog that hid the sea. The ocean end was surrounded by a heavy wire fence. From a locked gate in the fence, a flight of concrete steps led down to the beach. High tides had gnawed and crumbled the lower steps.

I leaned on the gatepost and lit a cigarette. I had to cup the match against the stream of cold air which flowed upward from the water. This and the heavy sky overhead created the illusion that I was on the bow of a slow ship, and the ship was headed into foggy darkness.