The Barbarous Coast Page 10

  “Flake! Come out here.”

  Twistyface appeared in the opening of the wall. I wasn’t thinking well, and my movements were sluggish. I got up, made a staggering lunge for Frost, and fell short, onto my knees. He aimed a kick at my head, which I was too slow to avoid. The sky broke up in lights. Something else hit me, and the sky turned black.

  I swung in black space, supported by some kind of sky hook above the bright scene. I could look down and see everything very clearly. Frost and Leonard and Twistyface stood over a prostrate man, palavering in doubletalk. At least, it sounded like doubletalk to me. I was occupied with deep thoughts of my own. They flashed on my mind like brilliant lantern slides: Hollywood started as a meaningless dream, invented for money. But its colors ran, out through the holes in people’s heads, spread across the landscape and solidified. North and south along the coast, east across the desert, across the continent. Now we were stuck with the dream without a meaning. It had become the nightmare that we lived in. Deep thoughts.

  I realized with some embarrassment that the body on the deck belonged to me. I climbed air down to it and crawled back in, a rat who lived in a scarecrow. It was familiar, even cozy, except for the leaks. But something had happened to me. I was hallucinating a little bit, and self-pity opened up in front of me like a blue, inviting pool where a man could drown. I dove in. I swam to the other side, though. There were barracuda in the pool, hungry for my manhood. I climbed out.

  Came to my senses and saw I hadn’t moved. Frost and Leonard had gone away. Twistyface sat in the aluminum chair and watched me sit up. He was naked to the waist. Black fur made tufted patterns on his torso. He had breasts like a female gorilla. The inevitable gun was in his paw.

  “That’s better,” he said. “I don’t know about you, but ole Flake feels like going in and watching some TV. It’s hotter than the hinges out here.”

  It was like walking on stilts, but I made it inside, across a large, low room, into a smaller room. This was paneled in dark wood and dominated by the great blind eye of a television set. Flake pointed with his gun at the leather armchair beside it.

  “You sit there. Get me a Western movie.”

  “What if I can’t?”

  “There’s always a Western movie at this time of day.”

  He was right. I sat for what seemed a long time and listened to the clop-clop and bang-bang. Flake sat close up in front of the screen, fascinated by simple virtue conquering simple evil with fists and guns and rustic philosophy. The old plot repeated itself like a moron’s recurrent wish-fulfillment dream. The pitchman in the intervals worked hard to build up new little mechanical wishes. Colonel Risko says buy Bloaties, they’re yum-yum delicious, yum-yum nutritious. Get your super-secret badge of membership. You’ll ell-oh-vee-ee Bloaties.

  I flexed my arms and legs from time to time and tried to generate willpower. There was a brass lamp on top of the television set. It had a thick base, and looked heavy enough to be used as a weapon. If I could find the will to use it, and if Flake would forget his gun for two consecutive seconds.

  The movie ended in a chaste embrace which brought tears to Flake’s eyes. Or else his eyes were watering from eyestrain. The gun sagged between his spread knees. I rose and got hold of the lamp. It wasn’t as heavy as it looked. I hit him on the head with it anyway.

  Flake merely looked surprised. He fired in reflex. The pitchman on the television screen exploded in the middle of a deathless sentence. In a hail of glass I kicked at the gun in Flake’s hand. It hopped through the air, struck the wall, and went off again. Flake lowered his little dented head and charged me.

  I sidestepped. His wild fist cracked a panel in the wall. Before he recovered his balance, I got a half-nelson on him and then a full nelson.

  He was a hard man to bend. I bent him, and rapped his head on the edge of the television box. He lunged sideways, dragging me across the room. I retained my hold, clenched hands at the back of his neck. I rapped his head on the steel corner of an air-conditioning unit set in the window. He went soft, and I dropped him.

  I got down on my knees and found the gun and had a hard time getting up again. I was weak and trembling. Flake was worse off, snoring through a broken nose.

  I found my way to the kitchen and had a drink of water and went outside. It was already evening. There were no cars in the carport, just a flat-tired English bicycle and a motor scooter that wouldn’t start. Not for me it wouldn’t. I thought of waiting there for Frost and Leonard and Stern, but all I could think of to do with them was shoot them. I was sick and tired of violence. One more piece of violence and they could reserve my room at Camarillo, in one of the back wards. Or such was my opinion at the time.

  I started down the dusty private road. It descended a low rise toward the bed of a dry stream in the middle of a wide, flat valley. There were mountain ranges on two sides of the valley, high in the south and medium high in the west. On the slopes of the southern range, drifts of snow gleamed impossibly white between the deep-blue forests. The western range was jagged black against a sky where the last light was breaking up into all its colors.

  I walked toward the western range. Pasadena was on the other side of it. On my side of it, in the middle of the valley, tiny cars raced along a straight road. One of them turned toward me, its headlights swinging up and down on the bumps. I lay down in the sage beside the road.

  It was Leonard’s Jaguar, and he was driving it. I caught a glimpse of the face in the seat beside him: a pale, flat oval like a dish on which flat eyes were painted, a pointed chin resting on a spotted bow tie. I’d seen that old-young face before, in the papers after Siegel died, on television during the Kefauver hearings, once or twice at nightclub tables flanked by bodyguards. Carl Stern.

  I stayed off the road, cutting at an angle across the high desert toward the highway. The air was turning chilly. In the darkness rising from the earth and spreading across the sky, the evening star hung alone. I was a bit lightheaded, and from time to time I thought that the star was something I had lost, a woman or an ideal or a dream.

  Self-pity stalked me, snuffing at my spoor. He was invisible, but I could smell him, a catty smell. Once or twice he fawned on the backs of my legs, and once I kicked at him. The joshua trees waved their arms at me and tittered.

  chapter 14

  THE fourth car I thumbed stopped for me. It was a cut-down jalopy with a pair of skis strapped to the top, driven by a college boy on his way back to West-wood. I told him I’d turned my car over on a back road. He was young enough to accept my story without too many questions, and decent enough to let me go to sleep in the back seat.

  He took me to the ambulance entrance of St. John’s Hospital. A resident surgeon put some stitches in my scalp, gave me quiet hell, and told me to go to bed for a couple of days. I took a taxi home. Traffic was sparse and rapid on the boulevard. I sat back in the seat and watched the lights go by, flashing like thrown knives. There were nights when I hated the city.

  My house looked shabby and small. I turned on all the lights. George Wall’s dark suit lay like a crumpled man on the bedroom floor. To hell with him, I thought, and repeated the thought aloud. I took a bath and turned off all the lights and went to bed.

  It didn’t do any good. A nightmare world sprang up around the room, a world of changing faces which wouldn’t hold still. Hester’s face was there, refracted through George Wall’s mind. It changed and died and came alive and died again smiling, staring with loveless eyes out of the red darkness. I thrashed around for a while and gave up. Got up and dressed and went out to my garage.

  It hit me then, and not until then, that I was minus a car. If the Beverly Hills cops hadn’t hauled it away, my car was parked on Manor Crest Drive, across the street from Hester’s house. I called another taxi and asked to be let off on a corner half a block from the house. My car was where I had left it, with a parking ticket under the windshield-wiper.

  I crossed the street for a closer look at the house. There w
as no car in the drive, no light behind the windows. I climbed the front steps and leaned on the bellpush. Inside, the electric bell chirred like a cricket on an abandoned hearth. The nobody-home sound, the empty-house girl-gone one-note blues.

  I tried the door. It was locked. I glanced up and down the street. Lights shone at the intersections and from the quiet houses. The people were all inside. They had given up night walks back in the cold war.

  Call me trouble looking for a place to happen. I went around to the side of the house, through a creaking wooden gate into a walled patio. The flagstone paving was uneven under my feet. Crab grass grew rank in the spaces between the stones. I made my way among wrought-iron tables and disemboweled chaises to a pair of French doors set into the wall.

  My flashlight beam fell through dirty glass into a lanai full of obscene shadows. They were cast by rubber plants and cacti growing in earthenware pots. I reversed the light and used its butt to punch out one of the panes, drew back a reluctant bolt, and forced the door open.

  The house was mostly front, like the buildings on Graff’s sets. Its rear had been given over to ghosts and spiders. Spiders had rigged the lanai’s bamboo furniture and black oak rafters with loops and hammocks and wheels of dusty webbing. I felt like an archæologist breaking into a tomb.

  The door at the end of the lanai was unlocked. I passed through a storeroom full of once-expensive junk: high, unsittable Spanish chairs, a grand piano with grinning yellow keys, brownish oil paintings framed in gilt: through another door, into the central hallway of the house. I crossed to the door of the living-room.

  White walls and a half-beamed ceiling rose in front of me, supported by the upward beam from my light. I lowered it to the floor, which was covered with ivory carpeting. White and black sectional furniture, low-slung and cubistic, was grouped in angular patterns around the room. The fireplace was faced with black tile and flanked by a square white leather hassock. On the other side of the fireplace, a faint dark patch showed in the carpet.

  I got down on my knees and examined it. It was a wet spot the size of a large dinner plate, of no particular color. Through the odor of detergent, and under the other odors in the room, perfume and cigarette smoke and sweet mixed drinks, I could smell blood. The odor of blood was persistent, no matter how you scrubbed.

  Still on my knees, I turned my attention to the raised fireplace. It was equipped with a set of brass fire tools in a rack: brush, shovel, a pair of leather bellows with brass handles. The set was new, and looked as if it had never been used or even touched. Except that the poker was missing.

  Beyond the fireplace there was a doorless arch which probably opened into the dining-room. Most of the houses of this style and period had similar floor plans, and I had been in a lot of them. I moved to the arch, intending to go over the rest of the downstairs, then the upstairs.

  A motor droned in the street. Light washed the draped front windows and swept past. I went to the end window and looked out through the narrow space between the drape and the window frame. The old black Lincoln was standing in the driveway. Marfeld was at the wheel, his face grotesquely shadowed by the reflection of the headlights. He switched them off and climbed out.

  Leroy Frost got out on the far side. I knew him by his hurrying feeble walk. The two men passed within three or four feet of me, headed for the front door. Frost was carrying a glinting metal rod which he used as a walking-stick.

  I went through the archway into the next room. In its center a polished table reflected the wan light filtered through lace-curtained double windows. A tall buffet stood against the wall inside the arch, a chair in the corner behind it. I sat down in the deep shadow, with my flashlight in one hand and my gun in the other.

  I heard a key turn in the front door, then Leroy Frost’s voice, jerking with strain:

  “I’ll take the key. What happened to the other key?”

  “Lance give it to the pig.”

  “That was a sloppy way to handle it.”

  “It was your idea, chief. You told me not to talk to her myself.”

  “All right, as long as she got it.” Frost mumbled something indistinguishable. I heard him shuffling in the entrance to the living-room. Suddenly he exploded: “Where is the goddam light? You been in and out of this house, you expect me to grope around in the dark all night?”

  The lights went on in the living-room. Footsteps crossed it. Frost said:

  “You didn’t do a very good job on the rug.”

  “I did the best I could in the time. Nobody’s gonna go over it with a fine-tooth comb, anyway.”

  “You hope. You better bring that hassock over here, cover it up until it dries. We don’t want her to see it.”

  Marfeld grunted with effort. I heard the hassock being dragged across the carpet.

  “Fine,” Frost said. “Now wipe my prints off the poker and put it where it belongs.”

  There was the sound of metal coming in contact with metal.

  “You sure you got it clean, chief?”

  “Don’t be a birdbrain, it isn’t the same poker. I found a match for it in the prop warehouse.”

  “I be damned, you think of everything.” Marfeld’s voice was moist with admiration. “Where did you ditch the other one?”

  “Where nobody’s going to find it. Not even you.”

  “Me? What would I want with it?”

  “Skip it.”

  “Hell, don’t you trust me, chief?”

  “I trust nobody. I barely trust myself. Now let’s get out of here.”

  “What about the pig? Don’t we wait for her?”

  “No, she won’t be here for a while. And the less she sees of us, the better. Lance told her what she’s supposed to do, and we don’t want her asking us questions.”

  “I guess you’re right.”

  “I don’t need you to tell me I’m right. I know more about heading off blackmail than any other two men in this town. Bear it in mind in case you develop any ideas.”

  “I don’t get it, chief. What kind of ideas you mean?” Marfeld’s voice was full of injured innocence.

  “Ideas of retiring, maybe, with a nice fat pension.”

  “No, sir. Not me, Mr. Frost.”

  “I guess you know better, at that. You try to put the bite on me or any friend of mine—it’s the quickest way to get a hole in the head to go with the hole in the head you already got.”

  “I know that, Mr. Frost. Christ amighty, I’m loyal. Didn’t I prove it to you?”

  “Maybe. Are you sure you saw what you said you saw?”

  “When was that, chief?”

  “This afternoon. Here.”

  “Christ, yes.” Marfeld’s plodding mind caught the implication and was stung by it. “Christ, Mr. Frost, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

  “You would if you did it yourself. That would be quite a trick, to do a murder and con the organization into covering for you.”

  “Aw now, chief, you wouldn’t accuse me. Why would I kill anybody?”

  “For kicks. You’d do it for kicks, any time you thought you could get away with it. Or to make yourself into a hero, if you had a few more brains.”

  Marfeld whined adenoidally: “Make myself into a hero?”

  “Yah, Marfeld to the rescue, saving the company’s cookies for it again. It’s kind of a coincidence that you been in on both killings, Johnny-on-the-spot. Or don’t you think so?”

  “That’s crazy, chief, honest to God.” Marfeld’s voice throbbed with sincerity. It ran down, and began on a new note: “I been loyal all my life, first to the sheriff and then to you. I never asked for anything for myself.”

  “Except a cash bonus now and then, eh?” Frost laughed. Now that Marfeld was jittery, too, Frost was willing to forgive him. His laughter rustled like a Santa Ana searching among dry leaves. “Okay, you’ll get your bonus, if I can get it past the comptroller.”

  “Thank you, chief. I mean it very sincerely.”

  “Sure you do.”


  The light went out. The front door closed behind them. I waited until the Lincoln was out of hearing, and went upstairs. The front bedroom was the only room in use. It had quilted pink walls and a silk-canopied bed, like something out of a girl’s adolescent dream. The contents of the dressing-table and closet told me that the girl had been spending a lot of money on clothes and cosmetics, and hadn’t taken any of it with her.

  chapter 15

  I LEFT the house the way I had entered, and drove up into the Canyon. A few sparse stars peered between the streamers of cloud drifting along the ridge. Houselights on the slopes islanded the darkness through which the road ran white under my headlight beam. Rounding a high curve, I could see the glow of the beach cities far below to my left, phosphorescence washed up on the shore.

  Lance Leonard’s house was dark. I parked on the gravel shoulder a hundred yards short of the entrance to his driveway. Its steep grade was slippery with fog. The front door was locked, and nobody answered my knock.

  I tried the garage door. It opened easily when I lifted the handle. The Jaguar had returned to the fold, and the motorcycle was standing in its place. I moved between them to the side entrance. This door wasn’t locked.

  The concentric ovals of light from my flash slid ahead of me across the floor of the utility room, the checkerboard linoleum in the kitchen, the polished oak in the living-room, up along the glass walls on which the gray night pressed heavily, around and over the fieldstone-faced fireplace, where a smoking log was disintegrating into talc-like ash and dull-red flakes of fire. The mantel held a rack of pipes and a tobacco jar, an Atmos clock which showed that it was three minutes to eleven, a silver-framed glamour shot of Lance Leonard smiling with all his tomcat charm.

  Lance himself was just inside the front door. He wore a plaid evening jacket and midnight-blue trousers and dull-blue dancing-pumps, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He lay on his back with his toes pointing at opposite corners of the ceiling. One asphalt eye looked into the light, unblinking. The other had been broken by a bullet.