The Barbarous Coast

Chapter 9

I DROVE down the long grade to Beverley Hills slowly, because I was feeling accident-prone. There were days when you could put your finger on the point of stress and everything fell into rational patterns around you. And there were the other days. George bothered me. He sat hunched over with his head in his hands, groaning from time to time. He had a fine instinct, even better than mine, for pushing his face in at the wrong door and getting it bloodied. He needed a keeper: I seemed to be elected.

I took him to my own doctor, a G.P. named Wolfson who had his office on Santa Monica Boulevard. Wolfson laid him out on a padded metal table in a cubicle, went over his face and skull with thick, deft fingers, flashed a small light in his eyes, and performed other rituals.

“How did it happen?”

“He fell down and hit his head on a flagstone walk.”

“Who pushed him? You?”

“A mutual friend. We won’t go into that. Is he all right?”

“Might be a slight concussion. You ever hurt your head before?”

“Playing football, I have,” George said.

“Hurt it bad?”

“I suppose so. I’ve blacked out a couple of times.”

“I don’t like it,” Wolfson said to me. “You ought to take him to the hospital. He should spend a couple of days in bed, at least.”

“No!” George sat up, forcing the doctor backward. His eyes rolled heavily in their swollen sockets. “A couple of days is all I’ve got. I have to see her.”

Wolfson raised his eyebrows. “See who?”

“His wife. She left him.”

“So what? It happens every day. It happened to you. He’s still got to go to bed.”

George swung his legs off the table and stood up shakily. His face was the color of newly poured cement. “I refuse to go to the hospital.”

“You’re making a serious decision,” Wolfson said coldly. He was a fat doctor who loved only medicine and music.

“I can put him to bed at my house. Will that do?”

Wolfson looked at me dubiously. “Could you keep him down?”

“I think so.”

“Very well,” George stated solemnly, “I accept the compromise.”

Wolfson shrugged. “If that’s the best we can do. I’ll give him a shot to relax him, and I’ll want to see him later.”

“You know where I live,” I said.

In a two-bedroom stucco cottage on a fifty-foot lot off Olympic. For a while the second bedroom hadn’t been used. Then for a while it had been. When it was vacated finally, I sold the bed to a secondhand-furniture dealer and converted the room into a study. Which for some reason I hated to use.

I put George in my bed. My cleaning woman had been there that morning, and the sheets were fresh. Hanging his torn clothes on a chair, I asked myself what I thought I was doing and why. I looked across the hall at the door of the bedless bedroom where nobody slept any more. An onion taste of grief rose at the back of my throat. It seemed very important to me that George should get together with his wife and take her away from Los Angeles. And live happily ever after.

His head rolled on the pillow. He was part way out by now, under the influence of paraldehyde and Leonard’s sedative fists: “Listen to me, Archer. You’re a good friend to me.”

“Am I?”

“The only friend I have within two thousand miles. You’ve got to find her for me.”

“I did find her. What good did it do?”

“I know, I shouldn’t have come tearing down to the house like that. I frightened her. I always do the wrong thing. Christ, I wouldn’t hurt a hair of her head. You’ve got to tell her that for me. Promise you will.”

“All right. Now go to sleep.”

But there was something else he had to say: “At least she’s alive, isn’t she?”

“If she’s a corpse, she’s a lively one.”

“Who are these people she’s mixed up with? Who was the little twerp in the pajamas?”

“Boy named Torres. He used to be a boxer, if that’s any comfort to you.”

“Is he the one who threatened her?”

“Apparently.”

George raised himself on his elbows. “I’ve heard that name Torres. Hester used to have a friend named Gabrielle Torres.”

“She told you about Gabrielle, did she?”

“Yes. She told me that night she confessed her sins to me.” His gaze moved dully around the room and settled in a corner, fixed on something invisible. His dry lips moved, trying to name the thing he saw: “Her friend was shot and killed, in the spring of last year. Hester left California right after.”

“Why would she do that?”

“I don’t know. She seemed to blame herself for the other girl’s death. And she was afraid of being called as a witness, if the case ever came to trial.”

“It never did.”

He was silent, his eyes on the thing in the empty corner. “What else did she tell you, George?”

“About the men she’d slept with, from the time that she was hardly in her teens.”

“That Hester had slept with?”

“Yes. It bothered me more than the other, even. I don’t know what that makes me.”

Human, I thought.

George closed his eyes. I turned the venetian blinds down and went into the other room to telephone. The call was to CHP headquarters, where a friend of mine named Mercero worked as a dispatcher. Fortunately he was on the daytime shift. No, he wasn’t busy but he could be any minute, accidents always came in pairs and triples to foul him up. He’d try to give me a quick report on the Jaguar’s license number.

I sat beside the telephone and lit a cigarette and tried to have a brilliant intuition, like all the detectives in books and some in real life. The only one that occurred to me was that the Jaguar belonged to Lance Leonard and would simply lead me around in a circle.

Cigarette smoke rumbling in my stomach reminded me that I was hungry. I went out to the kitchen and made myself a ham-and-cheese sandwich on rye and opened a bottle of beer. My cleaning woman had left a note on the kitchen table:

I sealed four dollars in an envelope, wrote her name across the face, and took it out to the front porch. A pair of house wrens chitchatting under the eaves made several snide references to me. The mailbox was full of mail: four early bills, two requests for money from charitable organizations, a multigraphed letter from my Congressman which stated that he was alert to the threat, a brochure describing a book on the Secrets of Connubial Bliss marked down to $2.98 and sold only to doctors, clergymen, social-service workers, and other interested parties; and a New Year’s card from a girl who had passed out on me at a pre-Christmas party. This was signed “Mona” and carried a lyric message:

I sat down at the hall table with my beer and tried to draft an answer. It was hard. Mona passed out at parties because she had lost a husband in Korea and a small son at Children’s Hospital. I began to remember that I had no son, either. A man got lonely in the stucco wilderness, pushing forty with no chick, no child. Mona was pretty enough, and bright enough, and all she wanted was another child. What was I waiting for? A well-heeled virgin with her name in the Blue Book?

I decided to call Mona. The telephone rang under my hand. “Mercero?” I said,

But it was Bassett’s voice, breathy in my ear: “I tried to get you earlier.”

“I’ve been here for the last half-hour.”

“Does that mean you’ve found her, or given up?’

“Found her and lost her again.” I explained how, to the accompaniment of oh’s and ah’s and tut-tot’s from the other end of the line. “This hasn’t been one of my days so far. My biggest mistake was taking Wall along.”

“I hope he’s not badly hurt?” There was a vein of malice in Bassett’s solicitude.

“He’s a hardhead, he’ll survive.”

“Why do you suppose she ran away from him this time?”

“Simple panic, maybe. Maybe not. There seems to be more to this than a lost-wife case. Gabrielle Torres keeps cropping up.”

“It’s odd you should mention her. I’ve been thinking about her off and on all morning – ever since you commented on her picture.”

“So have I. There are three of them in the picture: Gabrielle and Hester and Lance. Gabrielle was murdered, the murderer hasn’t been caught. The other two were very close to her. Lance was her cousin. Hester was her best friend.”

“You’re not suggesting that Lance, or Hester–?” His voice was hushed, but buzzing with implications.

“I’m only speculating. I don’t think Hester killed her friend. I do think she knows something about the murder that nobody else knows,”

“Did she say so?”

“Not to me. To her husband. It’s all pretty vague. Except that nearly two years later she turns up in Coldwater Canyon. She’s suddenly prosperous, and so is her little friend with the big fists.”

“It does give one to think, doesn’t it?” He tittered nervously. “What do you have in mind?”

“Blackmail is most obvious, and I never rule out the obvious. Lance spread the word that he’s under contract at Helio-Graff, and it seems to be legit. The question is, how did he latch on to a contract with a big independent? He’s a good-looking boy, but it takes more than that these days. You knew him when he was a lifeguard at the Club?”

“Naturally. Frankly, I wouldn’t have hired him if his uncle hadn’t been extremely persistent. We generally use college boys in the summer.”

“Did he have acting ambitions?”

“Not to my knowledge. He was training to be a pugilist.” Bassett’s voice was contemptuous.

“He’s an actor now. It could be he’s an untutored genius – stranger things have happened – but I doubt it. On top of that, Hester claims to have a contract, too.”

“With Hello-Graff?”

“I don’t know. I intend to find out.”

“You’ll probably find it’s with Hello-Graff.” His voice had become sharper and more definite. “I’ve hesitated to tell you this, though it’s what I called you about. In my position, one acquires the habit of silence. However, I was talking to a certain person this morning, and Hester’s name came up. So did the name of Simon Graff. They were seen together in rather compromising circumstances.”

“Where?”

“In a hotel in Santa Monica – the Windsor, I believe.”

“It fits. She used to live there. When was this?”

“A few weeks ago. My informant saw them coming out of a room on one of the upper floors. At least, Mr. Graff came out. Hester only came as far as the door.”

“Who is your informant?”

“I couldn’t possibly tell you that, old man. It was one of our members.”

“So is Simon Graff.”

“Don’t think I’m not aware of it. Mr. Graff is the most powerful single member of the Club.”

“Aren’t you sticking your neck out, telling me this?”

“Yes. I am. I hope my confidence in you – in your discretion – hasn’t been misplaced.”

“Relax. I’m a clam. But what about your switchboard?”

“I’m on the switchboard myself,” he said.

“Is Graff still out there?”

“No. He left hours ago.”

“Where can I find him?”

“I have no idea. He’s having a party here tonight, but you mustn’t approach him. You’re not on any account to approach him.”

“All right.” But I made a mental reservation. “This secret informant of yours – it wouldn’t be Mrs. Graff?”

“Of course not.” His voice was fading. Either he was lying, or the decision to tell me about the Windsor Hotel episode had drained his energy. “You mustn’t even consider such a thought.”

“All right,” I said, considering it.

I called the Highway Patrol number and got Mercero: “Sorry, Lew, no can do. Three accidents since you called, and I’ve been hopping.” He hung up on me.

It didn’t matter. A pattern was forming in the case, like a motif in discordant, angry music. I had the slimmest of leads, a sunhat from a shop in Santa Monica. I also had the queer tumescent feeling you get when something is going to break.

I looked in on George before I left the house. He was snoring. I shouldn’t have left him.