The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 32

THERE WAS LIGHT in Bassett’s office. I knocked so hard that I bruised my knuckles. He came to the door in shirt sleeves. His face was putty-colored, with blue hollows under the eyes. His eyes had a Lazarus look, and hardly seemed to recognize me.

“Archer? What’s the trouble, man?”

“You’re the trouble, Clarence.”

“Oh, I hope not.” He noticed the couple behind me, and did a big take. “You’ve found her, Mr. Graff. I’m so glad.”

“Are you?” Graff said glumly. “Isobel has confessed everything to this man. I want my money back.”

Bassett’s face underwent a process of change. The end product of the process was a bright, nervous grin which resembled the rictus of a dead horse.

“Am I to understand this? I return the money, and we drop the whole matter? Nothing more will be said?”

“Plenty more will be said. Give him his money, Clarence.”

He stood tense in the doorway, blocking my way. Visions of possible action flitted behind his pale-blue eyes and died. “It’s not here.”

“Open the safe and we’ll see for ourselves.”

“You have no warrant.”

“I don’t need one. You’re willing to co-operate. Aren’t you?”

He reached up and plucked at his neck above the open collar of his button-down shirt, stretching the loose skin and letting it pull itself back into place. “This has been a bit of a shock. As a matter of fact, I am willing to co-operate. I have nothing to hide.”

He turned abruptly, crossed the room, and took down the photograph of the three divers. A cylindrical safe was set in the wall behind it. I covered him with the target pistol as he spun the bright chrome dials. The gun he had used on Leonard was probably at the bottom of the sea, but there could be another gun in the safe. All the safe contained was money, though – bundles of money done up in brown bank paper.

“Take it,” Graff said. “It is yours.”

“It would only make a bum out of me. Besides, I couldn’t afford to pay the tax on it.”

“You are joking. You must want money. You work for money, don’t you?”

“I want it very badly,” I said. “But I can’t take this money. It wouldn’t belong to me, I would belong to it. It would expect me to do things, and I would have to do them. Sit on the lid of this mess of yours, the way Marfeld did, until dry rot set in.”

“It would be easy to cover up,” Graff said.

He turned a basilisk eye on Clarence Bassett. Bassett flattened himself against the wall. The fear of death invaded his face and galvanized his body. He swatted the gun out of my hand, went down on his hands and knees, and got a grip on the butt. I snaked it away from him before he could consolidate his grip, lifted him by the collar, and set him in the chair at the end of his desk.

Isobel Graff had collapsed in the chair behind the desk. Her head was thrown back, and her undone hair poured like black oil over the back of the chair. Bassett avoided looking at her. He sat hunched far over to one side away from her, trembling and breathing hard.

“I’ve done nothing that I’m ashamed of. I shielded an old friend from the consequences of her actions. Her husband saw fit to reward me.”

“That’s the gentlest description of blackmail I ever heard. Not that blackmail covers what you’ve done. Are you going to tell me you knocked off Leonard and Stern to protect Isobel Graff?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“When you tried to frame Isobel for the murder of Hester Campbell, was that part of your protection service?”

“I did nothing of the sort.”

The woman echoed him: “Clare did nothing of the sort.”

I turned to her. “You went to her house in Beverly Hills yesterday afternoon?”

She nodded.

“Why did you go there?”

“Clare told me she was Simon’s latest chippie. He’s the only one who tells me things, the only one who cares what happens to me. Clare said if I caught them together, I could force Simon to give me a divorce. Only she was already dead. I walked into the house, and she was already dead.” She spoke resentfully, as though Hester Campbell had deliberately stood her up.

“How did you know where she lived?”

“Clare told me.” She smiled at him in bright acknowledgment. “Yesterday morning when Simon was having his dip.”

“All this is utter nonsense,” Bassett said. “Mrs. Graff is imagining it. I didn’t even know where she lived, you can bear witness to that.”

“You wanted me to believe you didn’t but you knew, all right. You’d had her traced, and you’d been threatening her. You couldn’t afford to let George Wall get to her while she was still alive. But you wanted him to get to her eventually. Which is where I came in. You needed someone to lead him to her and help pin the frame on him. Just in case it didn’t take, you sent Mrs. Graff to the house to give you double insurance. The second frame was the one that worked – at least, it worked for Graff and his brilliant cohorts. They gave you a lot of free assistance in covering up that killing.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Graff said behind me. “I’m not responsible for Frost’s and Marfeld’s stupidity. They acted without consulting me.” He was standing by himself, just inside the door, as if to avoid any part in the proceedings.

“They were your agents,” I told him, “and you’re responsible for what they did. They’re accessory after the fact of murder. You should be handcuffed to them.”

Bassett was encouraged by our split. “You’re simply fishing,” he said. “I was fond of Hester Campbell, as you know, I had nothing against the girl. I had no reason to harm her.”

“I don’t doubt you were fond of her, in some peculiar way of your own. You were probably in love with her. She wasn’t in love with you, though. She was out to take you if she could. She ran out on you in September, and took along your most valuable possession.”

“I’m a poor man. I have no valuable possessions.”

“I mean this gun.” I held the Walther pistol out of his reach. “I don’t know exactly how you got it the first time. I think I know how you got it the second time. It’s been passed around quite a bit in the last four months, since Hester Campbell stole it from your safe. She turned it over to her friend Lance Leonard. He wasn’t up to handling the shakedown himself, so he co-opted Stern, who had experience in these matters. Stern also had connections which put him beyond the reach of Graff’s strong-arm boys. But not beyond your reach.

“I’ll give you credit for one thing, Clarence. It took guts to tackle Stern, even if I did soften him up for you. More guts than Graff and his private army had.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Bassett said. “You know I didn’t kill him. You saw him leave.”

“You followed him out, though, didn’t you? And you didn’t come back for a while. You had time to slug him in the parking-lot, bundle him into his car; and drive it up the bluff where you could slit his throat and push him into the sea. That was quite an effort for a man your age. You must have wanted this gun back very badly. Were you so hungry for a hundred grand?”

Bassett looked up past me at the open safe. “Money had nothing to do with it.” It was his first real admission. “I didn’t know he had that gun in his car until he tried to pull it on me. I hit him with a tire-iron and knocked him out. It was kill or be killed. I killed him in self-defense.”

“You didn’t cut his throat in self-defense.”

“He was an evil man, a criminal, meddling in matters he didn’t understand. I destroyed him as you would destroy a dangerous animal.” He was proud of killing Stern. The pride shone in his face. It made him foolish. “A gangster and drugpeddler – is he more important than I? I’m a civilized man, I come from a good family.”

“So you cut Stern’s throat. You shot Lance Leonard’s eye out. You beat in Hester Campbell’s skull with a poker. There are better ways to prove you’re civililized.”

“They deserved it.”

“You admit you killed them?”

“I admit nothing. You have no right to bullyrag me. You can’t prove a thing against me.”

“The police will be able to. They’ll trace your movements, turn up witnesses to pin you down, find the gun you used on Leonard.”

“Will they really?” He had enough style left to be sardonic.

“Sure they will. You’ll show them where you ditched it. You’ve started to tattle on yourself already. You’re no hard-faced pro, Clarence, and you shouldn’t try to act like one. Last night when it was over and the three of them were dead, you had to knock yourself out with a bottle. You couldn’t face the thought of what you had done. How long do you think you can hold out sitting in a cell without a bottle?”

“You hate me,” Bassett said. “You hate me and despise me, don’t you?”

“I don’t think I’ll answer that question. Answer one of mine. You’re the only one who can. What sort of man would use a sick woman as his cat’s-paw? What sort of man would cut a young girl like Gabrielle off from the light so he could collect a bounty on her death?”

Bassett made an abrupt squirming gesture of denial. The movement involved the entire upper half of his body, and resembled a convulsion. He said through rigid jaws: “You’ve got it all wrong.”

“Then straighten me out.”

“What’s the use? You would never understand.”

“I understand more than you think. I understand that you spied on Graff when his wife was in the sanitarium. You saw him using his cabaña for meetings with Gabrielle. You undoubtedly knew about the gun in his locker. Everything you knew or learned, you passed on to Isobel Graff. Probably you helped her to run away from the sanitarium, and provided her with the necessary pass-keys. It all adds up to remote-control murder. That much I understand. I don’t understand what you had against Gabrielle. Did you try for her yourself and lose her to Graff? Or was it just that she was young and you were getting old, and you couldn’t stand to see her living in the world?”

He stammered: “I had nothing to do with her death.” But he turned in his chair as if a powerful hand had him by the nape of the neck. He looked at Isobel Graff for the first time, quickly and guiltily.

She was sitting upright now, as still as a statue. A statue of a blind and schizophrenic Justice, stonily returning Bassett’s look: “You did so, Clarence.”

“No, I mean I didn’t plan it that way. I had no idea of blackmail. I didn’t want to see her killed.”

“Who did you want to see killed?”

“Simon,” Isobel Graff said. “Simon was to be the one. But I spoiled everything, didn’t I, Clare? It was my fault it all went wrong.”

“Be quiet, Belle.” It was the first time that Bassett had spoken to her directly. “Don’t say anything more.”

“You intended to shoot your husband, Mrs. Graff?”

“Yes. Clare and I were going to be married.”

Graff let out a snort, half angry and half derisive. She turned on him: “Don’t you dare laugh at me. You locked me up and stole my property. You treated me like a chattel-beast.” Her voice rose. “I’m sorry I didn’t kill you.”

“So you and your moth-eaten fortune-hunter could live happily ever after?”

“We could have been happy,” she said. “Couldn’t we, Clare? You love me, don’t you, Clare? You’ve loved me all these years.”

“All these years,” he said. But his voice was empty of feeling, his eyes were dead. “Now if you love me, you’ll be quiet, Belle.” His tone, brusque and unfriendly, denied his words.

He had rebuffed her, and she had a deep, erratic intuition. Her mood swung violently. “I know you,” she said in a hoarse monotone. “You want to blame me for everything. You want them to put me in the forever room and throw the key away. But you’re to blame, too. You said I could never be convicted of any crime. You said if I killed Simon in fragrante – in flagrante – the most they could do was lock me up for a while. Didn’t you say that, Clare? Didn’t you?”

He wouldn’t answer her or look at her. Hatred blurred his features like a tight rubber mask. She turned to me: “So you see, it was Simon I meant to kill. His chippie was just an animal he used – a little fork-legged animal. I wouldn’t kill a pretty little animal.”

She paused, and said in queer surprise: “But I did kill her. I shot her and smashed the connections. It came to me in the dark behind the door. It came to me like a picture of sin that she was the source of the evil. And she was the one the dirty old man was making passes at. So I smashed the connections. Clare was angry with me. He didn’t see the wicked things she did.”

“Wasn’t he with you?”

“Afterwards he was. I was trying to wipe up the blood – she bled on my nice clean floor. I was trying to wipe up the blood when Clare came in. He must have been waiting outside, and seen the chippie crawling out the door. She crawled away like a little white dog and died. And Clare was angry with me. He bawled me out.”

“How many times did you shoot her, Isobel?”

“Just once.”

“In what part of the body?”

She hung her head in ghastly modesty. “I don’t like to say, in public. I told you before.”

“Gabrielle Torres was shot twice, first in the upper thigh, then in the back. The first wound wasn’t fatal, it wasn’t even serious. The second wound pierced her heart. It was the second shot that killed her.”

“I only shot her once.”

“Didn’t you follow her down to the beach and shoot her again in the back?”

“No.” She looked at Bassett. “Tell him, Clare. You know I couldn’t have done that.”

Bassett glared at her without speaking. His eyes bulged like tiny pale balloons inflated by a pressure inside his skull.

“How would he know, Mrs. Graff?”

“Because he took the gun. I dropped it on the cabaña floor. He picked it up and went out after her.”

The pressure forced words from Bassett’s mouth. “Don’t listen to her. She’s crazy – hallucinating. I wasn’t within ten miles–”

“You were so, Clare,” she said quietly.

At the same time, she leaned across the desk and struck him a savage blow on the mouth. He took it stoically. It was the woman who began to cry. She said through tears: “You had the gun when you went out after her. Then you came back and told me she was dead, that I had killed her. But you would keep my secret because you loved me.”

Bassett looked from her to me. A line of blood lengthened from one corner of his mouth like a red crack in his livid mask. The blind worm of his tongue came out and nuzzled at the blood.

“I could use a drink, old man. I’ll talk, if you’ll only let me have a drink first.”

“In a minute. Did you shoot her, Clarence?”

“I had to.” He had lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper, as though a recording angel had bugged the room.

Isobel Graff said: “Liar, pretending to be my friend! You let me live in hell.”

“I kept you out of worse hell, Belle. She was on her way to her father’s house. She would have blabbed out everything.”

“So you did it all for me, you filthy liar! Young Lochinvar did it for Honeydew Heliopoulos, the girl of the golden west!” Her feelings had caught up with her. She wasn’t crying now. Her voice was savage.

“For himself,” I said. “He missed the jackpot when you failed to kill your husband. He saw his chance for a consolation prize if he could convince your husband that you murdered Gabrielle. It was a perfect set-up for a frame, so perfect that he even convinced you.”

The convulsion of denial went through Bassett again, leaving his mouth wrenched to one side. “It wasn’t that way at all. I never thought of money.”

“What’s that we found in your safe?’

“It was the only money I got, or asked for. I needed it to go away, I planned to go to Mexico and live. I never thought of blackmail until Hester stole the gun and betrayed me to those criminals. They forced me to kill them, don’t you see, with their greed and their indiscretion. Sooner or later the case would be reopened and the whole truth would come out.”

I looked to Graff for confirmation, but he had left the room. The empty doorway opened on darkness. I said to Bassett: “Nobody forced you to kill Gabrielle. Why couldn’t you let her go?”

“I simply couldn’t,” he said. “She was crawling home along the beach. I’d started the whole affair, I had to finish it. I could never bear to see an animal hurt, not even a little insect or a spider.”

“So you’re a mercy killer?”

“No, I can’t seem to make you understand. There we were, just the two of us in the dark. The surf was pounding in, and she was moaning and dragging her body along in the sand. Naked and bleeding, a girl I’d known for years, when she was an innocent child. The situation was so dreadfully horrible. Don’t you see, I had to put an end to it somehow. I had to make her stop crawling.”

“And you had to kill Hester Campbell yesterday?”

“She was another one. She pretended to be innocent and wormed her way into my good graces. She called me Uncle Clarence, she pretended to like me, when all she wanted was the gun in my safe. I gave her money, I treated her like a daughter, and she betrayed me. It’s a tragic thing when the young girls grow up and become gross and deceitful and lascivious.”

“So you see that they don’t grow up, is that it?”

“They’re better dead.”.

I looked down into his face. It wasn’t an unusual face. It was quite ordinary, homely and aging, given a touch of caricature by the long teeth and bulging eyes. Not the kind of face that people think of as evil. Yet it was the face of evil, drawn by a vague and passionate yearning toward the deed of darkness it abhorred.

Bassett looked up at me as if I were a long way off, communicating with him by thought-transference. He looked down at his clasped hands. The hands pulled apart from each other, and stretched and curled on his narrow thighs. The hands seemed remote from him, too, cut off by some unreported disaster from his intentions and desires.

I picked up the telephone on the desk and called the county police. They had routines for handling this sort of thing. I wanted it out of my hands.

Bassett leaned forward as I laid the receiver down. “Look here, old fellow,” he said civilly, “you promised me a drink. I could use a drink in the worst way.”

I went to the portable bar at the other end of the desk and got a bottle out. But Bassett received a more powerful sedative. Tony Torres came in through the open door. He slouched and shuffled forward, carrying his heavy Colt revolver. His eyes were dusty black. The flame from his gun was pale and brief, but its roar was very loud. Bassett’s head was jerked to one side. It remained in that position, resting on his shoulder.

Isobel Graff looked at him in dull surprise. She rose and hooked her fingers in the neck of her denim blouse. Tore the blouse apart and offered her breast to the gun. “Kill me. Kill me, too.”

Tony shook his head solemnly. “Mr. Graff said Mr. Bassett was the one.”

He thrust the revolver into its holster. Graff entered behind him, diffidently. Stepping softly like an undertaker, Graff crossed the room to the desk where Bassett sat. His hand reached out and touched the dead man’s shoulder. The body toppled, letting out a sound as it struck the floor. It was a mewling sound, like the faint and distant cry of a child for its mother.

Graff jumped back in alarm, as if his electric touch had knocked the life out of Bassett. In a sense, it had.

“Why drag Tony into this?” I said.

“It seemed the best way. The results are the same in the long run. I was doing Bassett a favor.”

“You weren’t doing Tony one.”

“Don’t worry about me,” Tony said. “Two years now, two years in March, this is all I been living for, to get the guy that done it to her. I don’t care if I never get back to Fresno or not.” He wiped his wet forehead with the back of his hand, and shook the sweat off his hand. He said politely: “Is it okay with you gentlemen I step outside? It’s hot in here. I’ll stick around.”

“It’s all right with me,” I told him.

Graff watched him go out, and turned to me with renewed assurance: “I noticed that you didn’t try to stop him. You had a gun, you could have prevented that shooting.”

“Could I?”

“At least we can keep the worst of it out of the papers now.”

“You mean the fact that you seduced a teen-aged girl and ran out on her in the clutch?”

He shushed me and looked around nervously, but Tony was out of hearing.

“I’m not thinking of myself only.”

He glanced significantly toward his wife. She was sitting on the floor in the darkest corner of the room. Her knees were drawn up to her chin. Her eyes were shut, and she was as still and silent as Bassett was.

“It’s a little late to be thinking about Isobel.”

“No, you are wrong. She has great recuperative powers. I have seen her in worse condition than this. But you could not force her to face a public courtroom, you are not so inhuman.”

“She won’t have to. Psychiatric Court can be held in a private hospital room. You’re the one who has to face the public rap.”

“Why? Why should I have to suffer more? I have been victimized by an Iago. You don’t know what I have endured in this marriage. I am a creative personality, I needed a little sweetness and gentleness in my life. I made love to a young woman, that is my only crime.”

“You lit the match that set the whole thing off. Lighting a match can be a crime if it sets fire to a building.”

“But I did nothing wrong, nothing out of the ordinary. A few tumbles in the hay, what do they amount to? You wouldn’t ruin me for such a little thing? Is it fair to make me a public scapegoat, wreck my career? Is it just?”

His earnest eloquence lacked conviction. Graff had lived too long among actors. He was a citizen of the unreal city, a false front leaning on scantlings.

“Don’t tack to me about justice, Graff. You’ve been covering up murder for nearly two years.”

“I have suffered terribly for those two years. I have suffered enough, and paid enough. It has cost me tremendous sums.”

“I wonder. You used your name to pay off Stern. You used your corporation to pay off Leonard and the Campbell girl. It’s a nice trick if you can work it, letting Internal Revenue help you pay your blackmail.”

My guess must have been accurate. Graff wouldn’t try to argue with it. He looked down at the valuable gun in my hand. It was the single piece of physical evidence that would force his name into the case. He said urgently: “Give me my gun.”

“So you can put me down with it?’

Somewhere on the highway, above the rooftop, a siren whooped.

“Hurry up,” he said.”The police are coming. Remove the shells and give me the gun. Take the money in the safe.”

“Sorry, Graff, I have a use for the gun. It’s Tony’s justifiable-homicide plea.”

He looked at me as if I was a fool. I don’t know how I looked at Graff, but it made him drop his eyes and turn away. I closed the safe and spun the dials and rehung the photograph of the three young divers. Caught in unchanging flight, the two girls and the boy soared between the sea and the sky’s bright desolation.

The siren’s whoop was nearer and louder, like an animal on the roof. Before the sheriff’s men walked in, I laid the Walther pistol on the floor near Bassett’s outflung hand. Their ballistics experts would do the rest.

The End