The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 31

IT WAS FULL NIGHT when I got to Malibu. A single car stood in the Channel Club parking-lot, a beat-up prewar Dodge with Tony’s name on the steering-post. Inside the club, around the pool, there was nobody in sight. I knocked on the door of Clarence Bassett’s office and got no answer.

I walked along the gallery and down the steps to the pool-side. The water shivered under a slow, cold offshore wind. The place seemed very desolate. I was the last man at the party for sure.

I took advantage of this circumstance by breaking into Simon Graff’s cabaña. The door had a Yale-type lock which was easy to jimmy. I stepped in and turned on the light, half expecting to find someone in the room. But it was empty, its furnishings undisturbed, its pictures bright and still on the walls, caught out of time.

Time was running through me, harsh on my nerve-ends, hot in my arteries, impalpable as breath in my mouth. I had the sleepless feeling you sometimes get in the final hours of a bad case, that you can see around corners, if you want to, and down into the darkness in human beings.

I opened the twin doors of the dressing-rooms. Each had a back door opening into a corridor which led to the showers. The one on the right contained a gray steel locker and an assortment of men’s beach clothes: robes and swimming trunks, Bermuda shorts and sport shirts and tennis shoes.The one on the left, which must have been Mrs. Graff’s, was completely bare except for a wooden bench and an empty locker.

I switched on the light in the ceiling, uncertain what I was looking for. It was something vague yet specific: a sure sense of what had happened on that spring night when Isobel Graff had been running loose and the first young girl had died. For a second, Isobel had said, I was in there, watching us through the door, and listening to myself. Please pour me a drink.

I closed the door of her dressing-room. The louvers were set high in it, fairly wide apart, and loose, so that the windowless cubicle could air itself. By getting up on my toes, I could look down between the crosspieces into the outer room. Isobel Graff would have had to stand on the bench.

I dragged the bench over to the door and stood on it. Six inches below by eye-level, in the edge of one of the louvers, there was a series of indentations which looked like tooth-marks, around them a faint red lipstick crescent, dark with age. I examined the underside of the soft wooden strip and found similar markings. Pain jerked through my mind like a knotted string, pulling an image after it. It was pain for the woman who had stood on this bench in the dark, watching the outer room through the cracks between the louvers and biting down on the wood in agony.

I turned out the light and crossed the outer room and stood in front of Matisse’s Blue Coast lithograph. I had a fierce nostalgia for that brilliant, orderly world which had never quite existed. A world where nobody lived or died, held in the eye of a never-sinking sun.

Behind me someone cleared his throat delicately. I turned and saw Tony in the doorway, squinting against the light. His hand was on his gun butt.

“Mr. Archer, you broke the door?”

“I broke it.”

He shook his head at me in a monitory way, and stooped to look at the damage I had done. A bright scratch crossed the setting of the lock, and the edge of the wood was slightly dented. Tony’s blunt brown forefinger traced the scratch and the dent.

“Mr. Graff won’t like this, he is crazy about his cabaña, he furnished it all himself, not like the others.”

“When did he do that?”

“Last year, before the start of the summer season. He brought in his own decorators and cleaned it out like a whistle and put in all new stuff.” His gaze was serious, black, unwavering. He removed his peaked cap and scratched his gray-flecked head. “You the one that bust the lock on the fence gate, too?”

“I’m the one. I seem to be in a destructive mood today. Is it important?”

“Cops thought so. Captain Spero was asking me back and forth who bust the gate. They found another dead one on the beach, you know that, Mr. Archer?”

“Carl Stern.”

“Yah, Carl Stern. He was my nephew’s manager, one time. Captain Spero said it was one of these gang killings, but I dunno. What do you think?”

“I doubt it.”

Tony squatted on his heels just inside the open door. It seemed to make him nervous to be inside the Graffs’ cabaña. He scratched his head again, and ran thumb and finger down the grooves that bracketed his mouth. “Mr. Archer. What happened to my nephew Manuel?”

“He was shot and killed last night.”

“I know that. Captain Spero told me he was dead, shot in the eye.” Tony touched the lid of his left eye with his right forefinger. His upturned face resembled a cracked clay death mask.

“What else did Spero say?”

“I dunno. Said it was maybe another gang killing, but I dunno. He asked me, did Manuel have enemies? I told him, yah, he had one big enemy, name of Manuel Torres. What did I know about his life, his friends? He bust up from me long ago and went on his own road, straight down to hell in a low-top car.” Through the stoic Indian mask, his eyes shown with black, living grief, “I dunno, I coulden tear that boy loose from my heart. He was like my own son to me, one time.”

His bowed shoulders moved with his breathing. He said: “I’m gonna get out of this place, it’s bad luck for me and my family. I still got friends in Fresno. I ought to stayed in Fresno, never left it. I made the same mistake that Manuel made, thought I could come and take what I wanted. They wooden let me take it. They leave me with nothing, no wife, no daughter, no Manuel.”

He balled his fist and struck himself on the cheekbone and looked around the room in confused awe, as though it was the lair of gods which he had offended. The room reminded him of his duty to it: “What you doing in here, Mr. Archer? You got no right in here?”

“I’m looking for Mrs. Graff.”

“Why didden you say so? You didden have to break the door down. Mrs. Graff was here a few minutes ago. She wanted Mr. Bassett, only he ain’t here.”

“Where is Mrs. Graff now?’

“She went down on the beach. I tried to stop her, she ain’t in very good shape. She wooden come with me, though. You think I ought to telephone Mr. Graff?”

“If you can get in touch with him. Where’s Bassett?”

“I dunno, he was packing his stuff before. He’s going away on his vacation, maybe. He always goes to Mexico for a month in the off-season. Used to show me colored pictures–”

I left him talking to the empty room and went to the end of the pool. The gate in the fence was open. Twenty feet below it, the beach sloped away to the water, delimited by the wavering line of white foam. The sight of the ocean gave me a queasy feeling: it reminded me of Carl Stern doing the dead man’s float.

Waves rose like apparitions at the surf-line and fell like masonry. Beyond them a padded wall of fog was sliding shoreward. I went down the concrete steps, met by a snatch of sound which blew up to me between the thumpings of the surf. It was Isobel Graff talking to the ocean in a voice like a gull’s screek. She dared it to come and get her. She sat hunched over her knees, just beyond its reach, and shook her fist at the muttering water.

“Dirty old cesspool, I’m not afraid of you.”

Her profile was thrust forward, gleaming white with a gleaming dark eye in it. She heard me moving toward her and cowered away, one arm thrown over her face.

“Leave me alone. I won’t go back. I’ll die first.”

“Where have you been all day?”

Her wet black eyes peered up from under her arm. “It’s none of your business. Go away.”

“I think I’ll stay with you.”

I sat beside her on the impacted sand, so close that our shoulders touched. She drew away from the contact, but made no other move. Her dark and unkempt bird’s-head twisted toward me suddenly. She said in her own voice: “Hello.”

“Hello, Isobel. Where have you been all day?”

“On the beach, mostly. I felt like a nice long walk. A little girl gave me an ice-cream cone, she cried when I took it away from her, I am an old horror. But it was all I had to eat all day. I promised to send her a check, only I’m afraid to go home. That dirty old man might be there.”

“What dirty old man?”

“The one that made a pass at me when I took the sleeping-pills. I saw him when I passed out. He had a rotten breath like Father’s when he died. And he had worms that were his eyes.” Her voice was singsong.

“Who had?”

“Old Father Deathmas with the long white dirty beard.” Her mood was ugly and ambiguous. She wasn’t too far gone to know what she was saying, just far enough gone to say it. “He made a pass at me, only I was too tired, and there I was in the morning back at the old stand with the same hot and cold running people. What am I going to do? I’m afraid of the water. I can’t stand the thought of the violent ways, and sleeping-pills don’t work. They simply pump you out and walk you up and down and feed you coffee and there you are back at the old stand.”

“When did you try sleeping-pills?”

“Oh, a long time ago, when Father made me marry Simon. I was in love with another man.”

“Clarence?”

“He was the only one I ever. Clare was so sweet to me.”

The wall of fog had crossed the foam-line and was almost on top of us. The surf pounded behind it like a despondent visitor. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I looked down at her face, which slanted up close to mine: a pale ghost of a face with two dark eye-holes and a mouth-hole in it. She was tainted by disease and far from young, but in the foggy night she looked more like a child than a woman. A disordered child who had lost her way and met death on the detour.

Her head leaned on my shoulder. “I’m caught,” she said. “I’ve been trying all day to get up the nerve to walk into the water. What am I going to do? I can’t endure forever in a room.”

“In the church you were brought up in, suicide is a sin.”

“I’ve committed worse.”

I waited. The fog was all around us now, an element composed of air and water and a fishy chill. It made a kind of limbo, out of this world, where anything could be said. Isobel Graff said: “I committed the worst sin of all. They were together in the light and I was alone in the darkness. Then the light was like broken glass in my eyes, but I could see to shoot. I shot her in the groin and she died.”

“This happened in your cabaña?”

She nodded faintly. I felt the movement rather than saw it. “I caught her there with Simon. She crawled out here and died on the beach. The waves came up and took her. I wish that they would take me.”

“What happened to Simon that night?”

“Nothing. He ran away. To do it again another day and do it and do it and do it. He was terrified when I came out of the back room with the gun in my hand. He was the one I really intended to kill but he scuttled out the door.”

“Where did you get the gun?”

“It was Simon’s target pistol. He kept it in his locker. He taught me to fire it himself, on this very beach.” She stirred in the crook of my arm. “What do you think of me now?”

I didn’t have to answer her. There was a moving voice in the fog above our heads. It was calling her name, Isobel.

“Who is it? Don’t let them take me.” She turned on her knees and clutched my hand. Hers was fish-cold.

Footsteps and light were descending the concrete steps. I got up and went to meet them. The beam of light wavered toward me. Graff’s dim and nimbused figure was behind it. The long, thin nose of a target pistol protruded from his other hand. My gun was already in mine.

“You’re covered, Graff. Drop it directly in front of you.”

His pistol thudded softly in the sand. I stooped and picked it up. It was an early-model German Walther, .22 caliber, with a custom-made walnut grip too small to fit my hand. The gun was loaded. Distrusting its hair-trigger action, I set the safety and shoved it down under my belt.

“I’ll take the light, too.”

He handed me his flashlight. I turned its beam upward on his face and saw it naked for an instant. His mouth was soft and twisted, his eyes were frightened.

“I heard my wife. Where is she?”

I swung the flash-beam along the beach. Its cone of brilliance filled with swirling fog. Isobel Graff ran away from it. Black and huge on the gray air, her shadow ran ahead of her. She seemed to be driving off a fury which dwarfed her and tormented her and mimicked all her movements.

Graff called her name again and ran after her. I followed along behind and saw her fall and get up and fall again. Graff helped her to her feet. They walked back toward me, slowly and clumsily. She dragged her feet and hung her head, turning her face away from the light. Graff’s arm around her waist propelled her forward.

I took the target pistol out of my belt and showed it to her. “Is this the gun you used to shoot Gabrielle Torres?”

She glanced at it and nodded mutely.

“No,” Graff said. “Admit nothing, Isobel.”

“She’s already confessed,” I said.

“My wife is mentally incompetent. Her confession is not valid evidence.”

“The gun is. The sheriff’s ballistics department will have the matching slugs. The gun and the slugs together will be unshakable evidence. Where did you get the gun, Graff?”

“Carl Walther made it for me, in Germany, many years ago.”

“I’m talking about the last twenty-four hours. Where did you get it this time?”

He answered carefully: “I have had it in my possession continuously for over twenty years.”

“The hell you have. Stern had it last night before he was killed. Did you kill him for it?”

“That is ridiculous.”

“Did you have him killed?”

“I did not.”

“Somebody knocked off Stern to get hold of this gun. You must know who it was, and you might as well tell me. Everything’s going to come out now. Not even your kind of money can stop it.”

“Is money what you want from me? You can have money.” His voice dragged with contempt – for me, and perhaps for himself.

“I’m not for sale like Marfeld,” I said. “Your boss thug tried to buy me. He’s in the Vegas clink with a body to explain.”

“I know that,” Graff said. “But I am talking about a very great deal of money. A hundred thousand dollars in cash. Now. Tonight.”

“Where would you get that much in cash tonight?’

“From Clarence Bassett. He has it in his office safe. I paid it to him this evening. It was the price he set on the pistol. Take it away from him, and you can have it.”