The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 21

WE WENT along the gallery to his his office. His walk was a stiff-backed, high-shouldered march step. His movements seemed to be controled by a system of outside pressures that fitted him like a corset.

He brought glasses out of his portable bar and poured me a stiff slug of whisky, a stiffer one for himself. The bottle was a different bottle from the one I had seen in the morning, and it was nearly empty. Yet the long day’s drinking, like a passage of years, had improved Bassett in some ways. He’d lost his jaunty self-consciousness, and he wasn’t pretending to be younger than he was. The sharp skull pressed like a death mask behind the thin flesh of his face.

“That was quite a performance,” I said. “I thought you were a little afraid of Graff.”

“I am, when I’m totally sober. He’s on the board of trustees, and you might say he controls my job. But there are limits to what a man can put up with. It’s rather wonderful not to feel frightened, for a change.”

“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m old enough to look after myself.” He waved me into a chair and sat behind his desk with the half-glass of neat whisky in his hand. He drank from it and regarded me over the rim. “What brings you here, old man? Has something happened?”

“Plenty has happened. I saw Hester tonight.”

He looked at me as though I’d said that I had seen a ghost. “You saw her? Where?”

“In her house in Beverly Hills. We had some conversation, which got us nowhere–”

“Tonight?”

“Around midnight, yes.”

“Then she’s alive!”

“Unless she was wired for sound. Did you think she was dead?”

It took him a while to answer. His eyes were wet and glassy. Behind them, something obscure happened to him. I guessed he was immensely relieved. “I was mortally afraid that she was dead. I’ve been afraid all day that George Wall was going to kill her.”

“That’s nonsense. Wall has disappeared himself. He may be in a bad way. Graff’s people may have killed him.”

Bassett wasn’t interested in Wall. He came around the desk and laid a tense hand on my shoulder. “You’re not lying to me? You’re certain that Hester’s all right?”

“She was all right, physically, a couple of hours ago. I don’t know what to make of her. She looks and talks like a nice girl, but she’s involved with the crummiest crew in the Southwest. Carl Stern, for instance. What do you make of her, Bassett?”

“I don’t know what to make of her. I never have.”

He leaned on the desk, pressed his hand to his forehead, and stroked his long horse face. His eyelids lifted slowly. I could see the dull pain peering out from under them. “You’re fond of her, aren’t you?”

“Very fond of her. I wonder if you can understand my feeling for the girl. It’s what you might call an avuncular feeling. There’s nothing – nothing fleshly about it at all. I’ve known Hester since she was an infant, her and her sister, too. Her father was one of our members, one of my dearest friends.”

“You’ve been here a long time.”

“Twenty-five years as manager. I was a charter member of the Club. There were twenty-five of us originally. Each of us put up forty thousand dollars.”

“You put up forty thousand?”

“I did. Mother and I were fairly well fixed at one time, until the crash of ’29 wiped us out. When that happened, my friends in the Club offered me the post of manager. This is the first and only job I’ve ever had.”

“What happened to Campbell?”

“He drank himself to death. As I am doing, on a somewhat retarded schedule.” Grinning sardonically, he reached for his glass and drained it. “His wife was a silly woman, completely impractical. Lived up Topanga Canyon after Raymond’s death. I did what I could for the fatherless babes.”

“You didn’t tell me all this yesterday morning.”

“No. I was brought up not to boast of my philanthropies.”

His speech was very formal, and slightly blurred. The whisky was getting to him. He looked from me to the bottle, his eyes swiveling heavily. I shook my head. He poured another quadruple shot for himself, and sipped at it. If he drank enough of it down, there would be no more pain behind his eyelids. Or the pain would take strange forms. That was, the trouble with alcohol as a sedative. It floated you off reality for a while, but it brought you back by a route that meandered through the ash-dumps of hell.

I threw out a question, a random harpoon before he floated all the way down to Lethe: “Did Hester doublecross you?”

He looked startled, but he handled his alcohol-saturated words with care: “What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

“It was suggested to me that Hester stole something from you when she left here.”

“Stole from me? Nonsense.”

“She didn’t rob your safe?”

“Good Lord, no. Hester wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not that I have anything worth stealing. We handle no cash at the club, you know, all our business is done by chit–”

“I’m not interested in that. All I want is your word that Hester didn’t rob your safe in September.”

“Of course she didn’t. I can’t imagine where you got such a notion. People have such poisonous tongues.” He leaned toward me, swaying slightly. “Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I say it does matter. You should check your sources, old man. It’s character-assassination. What kind of a girl do you think Hester is?”

“It’s what I’m trying to find out. You knew her as well as anyone, and you say she isn’t capable of theft.”

“Certainly not from me.”

“From anyone?”

“I don’t know what she’s capable of.”

“Is she capable of blackmail?”

“You ask the weirdest questions – weirder and weirder.”

“Earlier in the day, you didn’t think blackmail was so farfetched. You might as well be frank with me. Is Simon Graff being blackmailed?”

He wagged his head solemnly. “What could Mr. Graff be blackmailed for?”

I glanced at the photograph of the three divers. “Gabrielle Torres. I’ve heard that there was a connection between her and Graff.”

“What kind of connection?”

“Don’t pretend to be stupid, Clarence. You’re not. You knew the girl – she worked for you. If there was a thing between her and Graff, you’d probably know it.”

“If there was,” he said stolidly, “it never came to my knowledge.” He meditated for a while, swaying on his feet. “Good Lord, man, you’re not suggesting he killed her?”

“He could have. But Mrs. Graff was the one I had in mind.”

Bassett gave me a stunned and murky look. “What a perfectly dreadful notion.”

“That’s what you’d say if you were covering for them.”

“But thish ish utterly–” He grimaced and started over: “This is utterly absurd and ridiculous–”

“Why? Isobel is crazy enough to kill. She had a motive.”

“She isn’t crazy. She was – she did have serious emotional problems at one time.”

“Ever been committed?”

“Not committed, I don’t believe. She’s been in a private sanitorium from time to time. Dr. Frey’s in Santa Monica.”

“When was she in last?”

“Last year.”

“What part of last year?”

“All of it. So you shee–” He waved his hand in front of his face, as if a buzzing fly had invaded his mouth. “You see, it’s quite impossible. Isobel was incarcerated at the time the girl was shot. Absolutely imposhible.”

“Do you know this for a fact?”

“Shertainly I do. I visited her regularly.”

“Isobel is another old friend of yours?”

“Shertainly is. Very dear old friend.”

“Old enough and dear enough to lie for?”

“Don’t be silly. Ishobel wouldn’t harm a living creashur.”

His eyes were clouding up, as well as his voice, but the glass in his hand was steady. He raised it to his mouth and drained it, then sat down rather abruptly on the edge of his desk. He swayed gently from side to side, gripping the empty glass in both hands as though it was his only firm support.

“Very dear old friend,” he repeated sentimentally. “Poor Ishbel, hers is a tragic story. Her mother died young, her father gave her everything but love. She needed sympathy, someone to talk to. I tried to be that shomeone.”

“You did?”

He gave me a shrewd, sad look. The jolt of whisky had partly and temporarily sobered him, but he had reached the point of diminishing returns. His face was the color of boiled meat, and his thin hair hung lank at the temples. He detached one hand from its glass anchor and pushed his hair back.

“I know it sounds unlikely. Remember, this was twenty years ago. I wasn’t always an old man. At any rate, Isobel liked older men. She was devoted to her father, but he couldn’t give her the understanding she needed. She’d just flunked out of college, for the third or fourth time. She was terribly withdrawn. She used to spend her days here, alone on the beach. Gradually she discovered that she could talk to me. We talked all one summer and into the fall. She wouldn’t go back to school. She wouldn’t leave me. She was in love with me.”

“You’re kidding.”

I was deliberately needling him, and he reacted with alcoholic emotionalism. Angry color seeped into his capillaries, stippling his gray cheeks with red: “It’s true, she loved me. I’d had emotional problems of my own, and I was the only one who understood her. And she respected me! I am a Harvard man, did you know that? I spent three years in France in the first war. I was a stretcherbearer.”

That would make him about sixty, I thought. And twenty years ago he would have been forty to Isobel’s twenty, say.

“How did you feel about her?” I said. “Avuncular?”

“I loved her. She and my mother were only two women I ever loved. And I’d have married her, too, if her father hadn’t stood in the way. Peter Heliopoulos disapproved of me.”

“So he married her off to Simon Graff.”

“To Simon Graff, yah.” He shuddered with the passion of a weak and timid man who seldom lets his feelings show. “To a climber and a pusher and a whoremonger and a cheat. I knew Simon Graff when he was an immigrant nobody, a nothing in this town. Assistant director on quickie Westerns with one decent suit to his name. I liked him, he pretended to like me. I lent him money, I got him a guest membership in the Club, I introduced him to people. I introduced him to Heliopoulos, by heaven. Within two years he was producing for Helio, and married to Isobel. Everything he has, everything he’s done, has come out of that marriage. And he hasn’t the common decency to treat her decently!”

He stood up and made a wide swashbucking gesture which carried him sideways all the way to the wall. Dropping the glass, he spread the fingers of both hands against the wall to steady himself. The wall leaned toward him, anyway. His forehead struck the plaster. He jackknifed at the hips and sat down with a thud on the carpeted floor.

He looked up at me, chuckling foolishly. One of his boiled blue eyes was straight, and one had turned outward. It gave him the appearance of mild, ridiculous lunacy.

“There’s a seavy hea running,” he said. “We’ll hatten down the batches.”

I took him by the arms and set him on his feet and walked him to his chair. He collapsed in it, hands and jaw hanging down. His divided glance came together on the bottle. He reached for it. Five or six ounces of whisky swished around in the bottom. I was afraid that another drink might knock him out, or maybe even kill him. I lifted the bottle out of his hands, corked it, and put it away. The key of the portable bar was in the lock. I turned it and put it in my pocket.

“By what warrant do you sequester the grog?” Working his mouth elaborately around the words, Bassett looked like a camel chewing. “This is illegal – false seizure. I demand a writ of habeas corpus.”

He leaned forward and reached for my glass. I snatched it away. “You’ve had enough, Clarence.”

“Make those decisions myself. Man of decision. Man of distinction. Bottle-a-day man, by God. Drink you under table.”

“I don’t doubt it. Getting back to Simon Graff, you don’t like him much?”

“Hate him,” he said. “Lez be frank. He stole away only woman I ever loved. ’Cept Mother. Stole my maître dee, too. Best maître dee in Southland, Stefan. They offered him double shallery, spirited him away to Las Vegas.”

“Who did?”

“Graff and Stern. Wanted him for their slo-called club.”

“Speaking of Graff and Stern, why would Graff be fronting for a mobster?”

“Sixty-four-dollar question, I don’t know the ansher. Wouldn’t tell you if did know. You don’t like me.”

“Buck up, Clarence. I like you fine.”

“Liar. Cruel and inhuman.” Two tears detached themselves from the corners of his eyes and crawled down his grooved cheeks like little silver slugs. “Won’t give me a drink. Trying to make me talk, withholding my grog. ’Snot fair, ’snot humane.”

“Sorry. No more grog tonight. You don’t want to kill yourself.”

“Why not? All alone in the world. Nobody loves me.” He wept suddenly and copiously, so that his whole face was wet. Transparent liquid streamed from his nose and mouth. Great sobs shook him like waves breaking in his body.

It wasn’t a pretty sight. I started out.

“Don’t leave me,” he said between sobs. “Don’t leave me alone.”

He came around the desk, buckled at the knees as if he’d struck an invisible wire, and lay full-length on the carpet, blind and deaf and dumb. I turned his head sideways so that he wouldn’t smother and went outside.