The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 5

WE ENTERED a dead-end street between the highway and the beach. The tires shuddered on the pitted asphalt. The cottages that lined the street were run-down and disreputable-looking, but the cars that stood in front of them were nearly all late models. When I turned off my engine, the only sound I could hear was the rumble and gasp of the sea below the cottages. Above them a few gulls circled, tattletale gray.

The one that Hester had lived in was a board-and-batten box which had an unused look, like a discarded container. Its wall had been scoured bare and grained by blowing sands. The cottage beside it was larger and better kept, but it was losing its paint, too.

“This is practically a slum,” George said. “I thought that Malibu was a famous resort.”

“Part of it is. This is the other part.”

We climbed the steps to Mrs. Lamb’s back porch, and I knocked on the rusty screen door. A heavy-bodied old woman in a wrapper opened the inside door. She had a pleasantly ugly bulldog face and a hennaed head, brash orange in the sun. An anti-wrinkle patch between her eyebrows gave her an air of calm eccentricity.

“Mrs. Lamb?”

She nodded. She held a cup of coffee in her hand, and she was chewing.

“I understand you rent the cottage next door.”

She swallowed whatever was in her mouth. I watched its passage down her withered throat. “I may as well tell you right off, I don’t rent stag. Now if you’re married, that’s another matter.” She paused expectantly and took a second swallow, leaving a red half-moon on the rim of the cup.

“I’m not married.”

That was as far as I got.

“Too bad,” she said. Her nasal Kansas voice hummed on like a wire in a rushing wind: “I’m all for marriage myself, went out with four men in my lifetime and married two of them. The first one lasted thirty-three years, I guess I made him happy. He didn’t bother me with his Copenhagen snuff and his dirt around the house. It takes more than that to bother me. So when he died I married again, and that one wasn’t so bad. Could have been better, could have been worse. It was kind of a relief, though, when he died. He didn’t do a lick of work in seven years. Luckily I had the strength to support him.”

Her sharp eyes, ringed with concentric wrinkles, flicked from me to George Wall and back again. “You’re both nice-appearing young men, you ought to be able to find a girl willing to take a chance with you.” She smiled fiercely, swirled her remaining coffee around in the cup, and drank it down.

“I had a wife,” George Wall said heavily. “I’m looking for her now.”

“You don’t say. Why didn’t you say so?”

“I’ve been trying to.”

“Don’t get mad. I like a little sociability, don’t you? What’s her name?”

“Hester.”

Her eyes flattened. “Hester Campbell?”

“Hester Campbell Wall.”

“Well, I’ll be darned. I didn’t know she was married. What happened, did she run away?”

He nodded solemnly. “Last June.”

“What do you know? She’s got less sense than I thought she had, running away from a nice young fellow like you.” She inspected his face intently through the screen, clucking in decrescendo. “ ’Course I never did give her credit for too much sense. She was always full of razzmatazz, ever since she was a kid.”

“Have you known her long?” I said.

“You bet I have. Her and her sister and her mother both. She was a hoity-toity one, her mother, always putting on airs.”

“Do you know where her mother is now?”

“Haven’t seen her for years, or the sister either.”

I looked at George Wall. He shook his head. “I didn’t even know she had a mother. She never talked about her family. I thought she was an orphan.”

“She had one,” the old woman said. “Her and her sister, Rina, they were both well supplied with a mother. Mrs. Campbell was bound to make something out of those girls if it killed them. I don’t know how she afforded all those lessons she gave them – music lessons and dancing lessons and swimming lessons.”

“No husband?”

“Not when I knew her. She was clerking in the liquor store during the war, which is how we became acquainted, through my second. Mrs. Campbell was always bragging about her girls, but she didn’t really have their welfare at heart. She was what they call a movie-mother, I guess, trying to get her little girls to support her.”

“Does she still live here?”

“Not to my knowledge. She dropped out of sight years ago. Which didn’t break my heart.”

“And you don’t know where Hester is, either?’

“I haven’t laid eyes on the girl since September. She moved out, and that was that. We have some turnover in Malibu, I can tell you.”

“Where did she move to?” George said.

“That’s what I’d like to know.” Her gaze shifted to me: “Are you a relative, too?”

“No, I’m a private detective.”

She showed no surprise. “All right, I’ll talk to you, then. Come inside and have a cup of coffee. Your friend can wait outside.”

Wall didn’t argue; he merely looked disgruntled. Mrs. Lamb unhooked her screen door, and I followed her into the tiny white kitchen. The red plaid of the tablecloth was repeated in the curtains over the sink. Coffee was bubbling on an electric plate.

Mrs. Lamb poured some of it for me in a cup which didn’t match hers, and then some more for herself. She sat at the table, motioned to me to sit opposite.

“I couldn’t exist without coffee. I developed the habit when I ran the snack bar. Twenty-five cups a day, silly old woman.” But she sounded very tolerant of herself. “I do believe if I cut myself I’d bleed coffee. Mr. Finney – he’s my adviser at the Spiritualist Church – says I should switch to tea, but I say no. Mr. Finney, I told him, the day I have to give up my favorite vice, I’d just as soon lay down and fold my hands around a lily and pass on into another life.”

“Good for you,” I said. “You were going to tell me something about Hester.”

“Yes, I was. I hated to say it right out in front of the husband. I had to evict her.”

“What for?”

“Carrying on,” she said vaguely. “The girl’s a fool about men. Doesn’t he know that?”

“It seems to be at the back of his mind. Any particular men?”

“One particular man.”

“Not Clarence Bassett?”

“Mr. Bassett? Heavens, no. I’ve known Mr. Bassett going on ten years – I ran the snack bar at the club until my legs give out – and you can take my word for it, he ain’t the carrying-on type. Mr. Bassett was more like a father to her. I guess he did his best to keep her out of trouble, but his best wasn’t good enough. Mine, either.”

“What kind of trouble did she get into?”

“Man trouble, like I said. Nothing that you could put your finger on, maybe, but I could see she was heading for disaster. One of the men she brought here to her house was a regular gangster type. I told Hester if she was going to have bums like him visiting her, spending the night, she’d have to find another house to do it in. I felt I had a right to speak out, knowing her from childhood and all. But she took it the wrong way, said she would look after her affairs and I could look after mine. I told her what she did on my property was my affair. She said, all right, if that’s the way you feel about it she’d get out, said I was an interfering old bag. Which maybe I am, at that, but I don’t take talk like that from any flibberty-gibbet who plays around with gunmen.”

She paused for breath. An ancient refrigerator throbbed emotionally in the corner of the kitchen. I took a sip of my coffee and looked out the window which overlooked the street. George Wall was sitting in the front seat of my car with a rejected expression on his face. I turned back to Mrs. Lamb: “Who was he, do you know?”

“I never did learn his name. Hester wouldn’t tell me his name. When I took the matter up with her, she said he was her boyfriend’s manager.”

“Her boyfriend?”

“The Torres boy. Lance Torres, he calls himself. He was a fairly decent boy at one time, least he put up a nice front when he had his lifeguard job.”

“Was he a lifeguard at the club?”

“Used to be, for a couple of summers. His Uncle Tony got him the job. But lifeguard was too slow for Lance, he had to be a big shot. I heard he was a boxer for a while and then he got into some trouble, I think they put him in jail for it last year.”

“What kind of trouble?”

“I don’t know, there’s too many good people in the world to make it worth my while to keep track of bums. You could of knocked me over with a brick when Lance turned up here with his gunman friend, sucking around Hester. I thought he had more self-respect.”

“How do you know he was a gunman?”

“I saw him shooting, that’s how. I woke up one morning and heard this popping noise down on the beach. It sounded like gunfire. It was. This fellow was out there shooting at beer bottles with a nasty black gun he had. That was the day I said to myself, either she stops messing around with bums or good-by Hester.”

“Who was he?”

“I never did learn his name. That nasty snub-nosed gun and the way he handled it was all I needed to know about him. Hester said he was Lance’s manager.”

“What did he look like?”

“Looked like death to me. Those glassy brown eyes he had, and kind of a flattened-out face, fishbelly color. But I talked right up to him, told him he ought to be ashamed of himself shooting up bottles where people could cut themselves. He didn’t even look at me, just stuck another clip in his gun and went on shooting at the bottles. He’d probably just as soon been shooting at me, least that was how he acted.”

Remembered anger heightened her color. “I don’t like being brushed off like that – it ain’t human. And I’m touchy about shooting, specially since a friend of mine was shot last year. Right on this very beach, a few miles south of where you’re sitting.”

“You don’t mean Gabrielle Torres?”

“I should say I do. You heard about Gabrielle, eh?”

“A little. So she was a friend of yours.”

“Sure, she was. Some people would have a prejudice, her being part Mex, but I say if a person is good enough to work with you, a person is good enough to be your friend.” Her monolithic bosom rose and fell under the flowered-cotton wrapper.

“Nobody knows who shot her, I hear.”

“Somebody knows. The one that did it.”

“Do you have any ideas, Mrs. Lamb?”

Her face was as still as stone for a long moment. She shook her head finally.

“Her cousin Lance, maybe, or his manager?”

“I wouldn’t put it past them. But what reason could they have?”

“You’ve thought about it, then.”

“How could I help it, with them going in and out of the cottage next door, shooting off guns on the beach? I told Hester the day she left, she should learn a lesson from what happened to her friend.”

“But she went off with them anyway?’

“I guess she did. I didn’t see her leave. I don’t know where she went, or who with. That day I made a point of going to visit my married daughter in San Berdoo.”