The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 29

MUCH LATER, on the sunset plane, we were able to talk about it. Leroy Frost, denying and protesting and calling for lawyers and doctors, had been deposited with Marfeld and Lashman in the security ward of the hospital. The remains of Hester Campbell were in the basement of the same building, awaiting autopsy. I told the sheriff and the district attorney enough to have Frost and his men held for possible extradition on suspicion of murder. I didn’t expect it to stick. The final moves in the case would have to be made in California.

The DC-6 left the runway and climbed the blue ramp of air. There were only a dozen other passengers, and Rina and I had the front end of the plane to ourselves. When the NO SMOKING sign went out, she crossed her legs and lit a cigarette. Without looking at me directly, she said in a brittle voice: “I suppose I owe you my life, as they say in books. I don’t know what I can do to repay you. No doubt I should offer to go to bed with you. Would you like that?”

“Don’t,” I said. “You’ve had a rough time and made a mistake, and I’ve been involved in it. But you don’t have to take it out on me.”

“I didn’t mean to be snide,” she said, a little snidely. “I was making a serious offer of my body. Having nothing better to offer.”

“Rina, come off it.”

“I’m not attractive enough, is that what you mean?”

“You’re talking nonsense. I don’t blame you. You’ve had a bad scare.”

She sulked for a while, looking down at the Chinese Wall of mountains we were crossing. Finally she said in a chastened tone: “You’re perfectly right. I was scared, really scared, for the first time in my life. It does funny things to a girl. It made me feel – well, almost like a whore – as though I wasn’t worth anything to myself.”

“That’s the way the jerks want you to feel. If everybody felt like a zombie, we’d all be on the same level. And the jerks could get away with the things jerks want to get away with. They’re not, though. Jerkiness isn’t as respectable as it used to be, not even in L.A. Which is why they had to build Vegas.”

She didn’t smile. “Is it such a terrible place?”

“It depends on who you pick for your playmates. You picked the worst ones you could find.”

“I didn’t pick them, and they’re not my playmates. They never were. I despise them. I warned Hester years ago that Lance was poison for her. And I told Carl Stern what I thought of him to his face.”

“When was this? Last night?”

“Several weeks ago. I went out on a double date with Lance and Hester. Perhaps it was a foolish thing to do, but I wanted to find out what was going on. Hester brought Carl Stern for me, can you imagine? He’s supposed to be a millionaire, and Hester always believed that money was the important thing. She couldn’t see, even at that late date, why I wouldn’t play up to Stern.

“Not that it would have done me any good,” she added wryly. “He was no more interested in me than I was in him. He spent the evening in various nightclubs playing footsie with Lance under the table. Hester didn’t notice, or maybe she didn’t care. She could be very dense about certain things. I cared, though, for her sake. Finally I told them off and walked out on the three of them.”

“What did you say to them?”

“Just the plain unvarnished truth. That Carl Stern was a pederast and probably much worse, and Hester was crazy to fool around with him and his pretty-boy.”

“Did you mention blackmail?”

“Yes. I told them I suspected it.”

“That was a dangerous thing to do. It gave Stern a reason to want you dead. I’m pretty sure he meant to kill you last night. Lucky for you he died first.”

“Really? I can’t believe–” But she believed it. Her dry throat refused to function. She sat swallowing. “Just because I – because I suspected something?”

“Suspected him of blackmail, and called him a fag. Killing always came easy to Stern. I went over his rap sheet this afternoon – the Nevada authorities have a full file on him. No wonder he couldn’t get a gambling license in his own name. Back in the thirties he was one of Anastasia’s boys, suspected of implication in over thirty killings.”

“Why wasn’t he arrested?”

“He was, but they couldn’t convict him. Don’t ask me why. Ask the politicians that ran the cops in New York and Jersey and Cleveland and the other places. Ask the people that voted for the politicians. Stern ended up in Vegas, but he belonged to the whole country. He worked for Lepke, for Game Boy Miller in Cleveland, for Lefty Clark in Detroit, for the Trans America gang in L.A. He finished his apprenticeship under Siegel, and after Siegel got it he went into business for himself.”

“What sort of business?”

“Wire service for bookies, narcotics, prostitution, anything with a fast and dirty buck in it. He was a millionaire, all right, several times over. He sank a million in the Casbah alone.”

“I don’t understand why he would go in for blackmail. He didn’t need the money.”

“He was Syndicate-trained, and blackmail’s been one of their main sources of power ever since Maffia days. No, it wasn’t money he needed. It was status. Simon Graff’s name gave him his chance to go legit, to really build himself into the countryside.”

“And I helped him.” The bones had come out in her face so that it was almost ugly. “I made it possible. I could bite my tongue out.”

“Before you do, I wish you’d explain what you mean.”

She drew in her breath sharply. “Well, in the first place, I’m a psychiatric nurse.”

She fell silent. It was hard for her to get started.

“So your mother told me,” I said.

She gave me a sidelong glance. “When did you run into Mother?”

“Yesterday.”

“What did you think of her?”

“I liked her.”

“Really?”

“I like women in general, and I’m not hypercritical.”

“I am,” Rina said. “I’ve always been suspicious of Mother and her little airs and graces and her big ideas. And it was mutual. Hester was her favorite, her little pal. Or she was Hester’s little pal. She spoiled my sister rotten, at the same time made terrible demands on her: all she wanted was for Hester to be great.

“I sat on the side lines for fifteen years and watched the two girls play emotional ping-pong. Or pong-ping. I was the not-so-innocent bystander, the third one that made the crowd, the one that wasn’t simpatico.” It sounded like a speech she’d rehearsed to herself many times. There was bitterness in her voice, tempered with resignation. “I broke it up as soon as Mother would let me, as soon as I finished high school. I went into nurse’s training in Santa Barbara, and took my P.G. work at Camarillo.”

Talking about her profession, or talking out her feelings about her family, had given her back some of her self-assurance. She held her shoulders straighter, and her breasts were bold.

“Mother thought I was crazy. We had a knockdowndragout quarrel the first year, and I haven’t seen much of Mother since. It just happens I like doing things for sick people, especially working with disturbed people. Need to be needed, I guess. My main interest now is occupational therapy. It’s mainly what I’m doing with Dr. Frey.”

“This is the Dr. Frey who runs the sanitarium in Santa Monica?”

She nodded. “I’ve worked there for over two years.”

“So you know Isobel Graff.”

“Do I ever. She was admitted to the san not long after I started there. She’d been in before, more than once. The doctor said she was worse than usual. She’s schizophrenic, you know, has been for twenty years, and when it’s acute she develops paranoid delusions. The doctor said they used to be directed against her father when he was alive. This time they were directed against Mr. Graff. She believed that he was plotting against her, and she was going to get him first.

“Dr. Frey thought Mr. Graff should have her locked up for his own protection. Every now and then a paranoid delusion erupts into action. I’ve seen it happen. Dr. Frey gave her a series of metrazol treatments, and she gradually came out of the acute phase and quieted down. But she was still quite remote when this thing happened. I still wouldn’t turn my back on her. But Dr. Frey said she wasn’t dangerous, and he knew her better than I did and, after all, he was the doctor.

“In the middle of March, he gave her the run of the grounds. I shouldn’t second guess a doctor, but that’s where he made his mistake. She wasn’t ready for freedom. The first little thing that happened set her off.”

“What did happen?”

“I don’t know exactly. Perhaps someone made a thoughtless remark, or simply looked at her in the wrong tone of voice. Paranoid people are like that, almost like radio receivers. They pick a tiny signal out of the air and build it up with their own power until they can’t hear anything else. Whatever happened, Isobel took off, and she was gone all night.

“When she came back, she was really in a bad way. With that terrible glazed look on her face, like a fish with a hook in its mouth. She was right back where she started in January – worse.”

“What night was she gone?”

“March 21, the first day of spring. I’m not likely to forget the date. A girl I used to know in Malibu, a girl named Gabrielle Torres, was killed that same night. I didn’t connect the two events at the time.”

“But you do now?”

She inclined her head somberly. “Hester made the connection for me. You see, she knew something I hadn’t known, that Simon Graff and Gabrielle were – lovers.”

“When did this come out?”

“One day last summer when we had lunch together. Hester was practically on her uppers then, I used to buy her lunch whenever I could. We were gossiping about this and that, and she brought up the case. It seemed to be on her mind: she was back at the Channel Club at the time, giving diving lessons. She told me about the love affair; apparently Gabrielle had confided in her. Without thinking what I was doing, I told her Isobel Graff had escaped that night. Hester reacted like a Geiger counter, and started asking me questions. I thought her only interest was in tracking down the person who killed her friend. I let down my back hair and told her all I knew, about Isobel and her runout and her mental condition when she came back.

“I had the early-morning duty that day, and I was the one who looked after her until Dr. Frey got there. Isobel dragged herself in some time around dawn. She was in bad shape, and not just mentally. She was physically exhausted. I think now she must have walked and run and crawled along the shore all the way from Malibu. The surf must have caught her, too, because her clothes were wet and matted with sand. I gave her a hot bath first thing.”

“Did she tell you where she’d been?”

“No, she didn’t say a thing. Actually, she didn’t speak for days. Dr. Frey was worried for a while that she might be going into catatonia. Even when she did come out of it and started to talk again, she never mentioned that night – at least, not in words. I saw her in the crafts room, though, later in the spring. I saw some of the objects she made out of clay. I shouldn’t have been shocked after what I’ve seen in mental wards, but I was shocked by some of those objects.” She closed her eyes as if to shut out the sight of them, and went on in a hushed voice: “She used to make these girl dolls and pinch their heads off and destroy them part by part, like some sort of jungle witch. And horrible little men dolls with huge – organs. Animals with human faces, coupling. Guns and – parts of the human body, all mixed up.”

“Not nice,” I said, “but it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything, would it? Did she ever discuss these things with you?”

“Not with me, no. Dr. Frey doesn’t encourage the nurses to practice psychiatry.”

She turned in the seat and her knee nudged mine, withdrawing quickly. Her dark-blue gaze came up to my face. It was strange that a girl who had seen so much should have such innocent eyes.

“Will you be seeing Dr. Frey?” she said.

“Probably I will.”

“Please don’t tell him about me, will you?”

“There’s no reason why I should.”

“It’s a terrible breach of ethics, you know, for a nurse to talk about her patients. I’ve worried myself sick these last few months since I spilled out everything to Hester. I was such a fool. I believed that she was sincere for once in her life, that all she wanted was the truth about Gabrielle’s death. I should never have trusted her with dangerous information. It’s obvious what she wanted it for. She wanted to use it to blackmail Mrs. Graff.”

“How long have you known that, Rina?”

Her voice, or her candor, failed her for a time. I waited for her to go on. Her eyes were almost black with thought. She said: “It’s hard to say. You can know a thing and not know it. When you love a person, it takes so long to face the facts about them. I’ve really suspected the whole thing practically from the beginning. Ever since Hester left the Club and started living without any visible income. It came to a head on that horrible double date I told you about. Carl Stern got tight and started to boast about his new place in Vegas, and how he had Simon Graff under his thumb. And Hester sat there drinking it in, with stars in her eyes. I got a queer idea that she wanted me there to see how well she was doing. What a success she’d made of her life, after all. That was when I blew my top.”

“What was their reaction?”

“I didn’t wait for any reaction. I walked out of the place – we were in the Bar of Dixie – and went home in a taxi by myself. I never saw Hester again. I didn’t see any of them again, until yesterday when Lance called me.”

“To ask you to fly to Vegas under her name?”

She nodded.

“Why did you agree to do it?”

“You know why. I was supposed to be giving her an alibi.”

“It doesn’t explain why you wanted to.”

“Do I have to explain? I simply wanted to.” She added after a time: “I felt I owed it to Hester. In a way I’m as guilty as she is. This awful business would never have started if it hadn’t been for me. I’d got her into it, I felt it was up to me to get her out. But Hester was dead already, wasn’t she?”

A fit of shivering took hold of her, shaking her so that her teeth knocked together. I put my arm around her until the spasm passed. “Don’t blame yourself too much.”

“I have to. Don’t you see, if Isobel Graff killed Hester, I’m to blame?”

“I don’t see it. People are responsible for what they do themselves. Anyway, there’s some doubt in my mind that Isobel killed your sister. I’m not even certain that she shot Gabrielle Torres. I won’t be until I get hold of firm evidence; a confession, or an eyewitness, or the gun she used.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not just saying it. I jumped to certain conclusions too early in this case.”

She didn’t ask me what I meant, and that was just as well. I still had no final answers.

“Listen to me, Rina. You’re a girl with a lot of conscience, and you’ve taken some hard blows. You have a tendency to blame yourself for things. You were probably brought up to blame yourself for everything.”

She sat stiff in the circle of my arm. “It’s true. Hester was young and always getting into trouble, and Mother blamed me. Only, how did you know that? You have a great deal of insight.”

“Too bad it mostly takes the form of hindsight. Anyway, there’s one thing I’m sure of. You’re not responsible for what happened to Hester, and you didn’t do anything very wrong.”

“Do you really believe that?” She sounded astonished.

“Naturally I believe it.”

She was a good girl, as Mrs. Busch had said. She was also a very tired girl, and a sad and nervous girl. We sat in uneasy silence for a while. The hum of the engines had changed. The plane had passed the zenith of its flight and begun the long descent toward Los Angeles and the red sun. Before the plane touched earth, Rina had cried a little on my shoulder. Then she slept a little.