The Barbarous Coast Read online

  “What happened to your wife, Tony?”

  “My wife?” The question surprised him. He had to think for a minute. “She run out on me, many years now. Run away with a man, last I heard she’s in Seattle, she’s always crazy for men. My Gabrielle took after her, I think. I went to Catholic Welfare, ask them what I should do, my girl is running out of control like a loco mare in heat—I didden say that to the Father, not them words.

  “The Father says, put her in a convent school, but it was too much money. Too much money to save my daughter’s life. All right, I saved the money, I got the money in the bank, nobody to spend it for.” He turned and said to the Virgin: “I am a dirty old fool.”

  “You can’t live their life for them, Tony.”

  “No. What I could do, I coulda kept her locked up with good people looking after her. I coulda kept Manuel out of my house.”

  “Did he have something to do with her death?”

  “Manuel is in jail when it happens. But he was the one started her running wild. I didden catch on for a long time, he taught her to lie to me. It was high-school basketball, or swimming team, or spend-the-night-with-a-friend. Alla time she was riding around on the back of motycycles from Oxnard, learning to be a dirty—” His mouth clamped down on an unspoken word.

  After a pause, he went on more calmly: “That girl I seen with Manuel on the Venice Speedway in the low-top car. Hester Campbell. She’s the one Gabrielle’s supposed to spend the night with, the night that she got killed. Then you come here this morning asking about Manuel. It started me thinking, about who done it to her. Manuel and the blondie girl, why do they get together, can you tell me?”

  “Later on I may be able to. Tell me, Tony, is thinking all you’ve been doing?”

  “Huh?”

  “Did you leave the Club today or tonight? Did you see your nephew Manuel?”

  “No. No to both questions.”

  “How many guns do you have?”

  “Just the one.”

  “What caliber?”

  “Forty-five Colt revolver.” His mind was one-track and too preoccupied to catch the inference. “Here.”

  He reached behind the mashed pillow and handed me his revolver. Its chambers were full, and it showed no signs of having been fired recently. In any case, the shells I had found beside his nephew’s body were medium-caliber, probably thirty-two’s.

  I hefted the Colt. “Nice gun.”

  “Yeah. It belongs to the Club. I got a permit to carry it.”

  I gave it back to him. He pointed it at the floor, sighting along the barrel. He spoke in a very old voice, dry, sexless, dreadful:

  “If I ever know who killed her, this is what he gets. I don’t wait for crooked cops to do my business.” He leaned forward and tapped my arm with the barrel, very lightly: “You’re a detective, mister, find me who killed my girl, you can have all I got. Money in the bank, over a thousand dollars, I save my money these days. Piece of rented property onna beach, mortgage all paid off.”

  “Keep it that way. And put the gun away, Tony.”

  “I was a gunner’s mate in the World War Number One. I know how to handle guns.”

  “Prove it. Too many people would get a boot out of it if I got myself drilled in a shooting accident.”

  He slipped the revolver under the pillow and stood up. “It’s too late, huh? Nearly two years, a long time. You are not interested in wild-duck cases, you got other business.”

  “I’m very much interested. In fact, this is why I wanted to talk to you.”

  “It’s what you call a coincidence, eh?” He was proud of the word.

  “I don’t believe much in coincidences. If you trace them back far enough, they usually have a meaning. I’m pretty sure this one has.”

  “You mean,” he said slowly, “Gabrielle and Manuel and Manuel’s blondie?”

  “And you, and other things. They all fit in together.”

  “Other things?”

  “We won’t go into them now. What did the cops tell you last March?”

  “No evidence, they said. They poked around here a few days and closed down the case. They said some robber, but I dunno. What robber shoots a girl for seventy-five cents?”

  “Was she raped?”

  Something like dust gathered on the surface of his anthracite eyes. The muscles stood out in his face like walnuts of various sizes in a leather bag, altering its shape. I caught a glimpse of the gamecock passion that had held him up for six rounds against Armstrong in the old age of his legs.

  “No rape,” he said with difficulty. “Doctor at the autopsy says a man was with her some time in the night. I don’t wanna talk about it. Here.”

  He stooped and dragged the suitcase out from under the bed, flung it open, rummaged under a tangle of shirts. Stood up breathing audibly with a dog-eared magazine in his hand.

  “Here,” he said violently. “Read it.”

  It was a lurid-covered true-crime book which fell open to an article near the middle entitled “The Murder of the Violated Virgin.” This was an account of the murder of Gabrielle Torres, illustrated with photographs of her and her father, one of which was a smudgy reproduction of the photograph on the wall. Tony was shown in conversation with a sheriff’s plainclothesman identified in the caption as Deputy Theodore Marfeld. Marfeld had aged since March of the previous year. The account began:

  It was a balmy Spring night at Malibu Beach, gay playground of the movie capital. But the warm tropical wind that whipped the waves shoreward seemed somehow threatening to Tony Torres, onetime lightweight boxer and now watchman at the exclusive Channel Club. He was not easily upset after many years in the squared circle, but tonight Tony was desperately worried about his gay young teen-aged daughter, Gabrielle.

  What could be keeping her? Tony asked himself again and again. She had promised to be in by midnight at the latest. Now it was three o’clock in the morning, now it was four o’clock, and still no Gabrielle. Tony’s inexpensive alarm clock ticked remorselessly on. The waves that thundered on the beach below his modest seaside cottage seemed to echo in his ears like the very voice of doom itself.…”

  I lost patience with the clichés and the excess verbiage, which indicated that the writer had nothing much to say. He hadn’t. The rest of the story, which I scanned in a hurry, leered a great deal under a veil of pseudo-poetic prose, on the strength of a few facts:

  Gabrielle had a bad reputation. There had been men in her life, unnamed. Her body had been found to contain male seed and two bullets. The first bullet had inflicted a superficial wound in her thigh. This had bled considerably. The implication was that several minutes at least had elapsed between the firing of the first bullet and the firing of the second. The second had entered her back, found its way through the ribs, and stopped her heart.

  Both slugs were twenty-two long, and had been fired from the same long-barreled revolver, location unknown. That is what the police ballistics experts said. Theodore Marfeld said—the quotation ended the article: “Our daughters must be protected. I am going to solve this hideous crime if it takes me the rest of my life. At the moment I have no definite clues.”

  I looked up at Tony. “Nice fellow, Marfeld.”

  “Yah.” He heard the irony. “You know him, huh?”

  “I know him.”

  I stood up. Tony took the magazine from my hand, tossed it into the suitcase, kicked the suitcase under the bed. He reached for the string that controlled the light, and jerked the grief-stricken room downward into darkness.

  chapter 19

  I WENT upstairs and along the gallery to Bassett’s office. He still wasn’t in it. I went in search of a drink. Under the half-retracted roof of a great inner court, dancers were sliding around on the waxed tiles to the music of a decimated orchestra, JEREMY CRANE AND HIS JOY BOYS was the legend on the drum. Their sad musicians’ eyes looked down their noses at the merrymaking squares. They were playing lilting melancholy Gershwin: “Someone to Watch Over Me.” />
  My diving friend whose hips didn’t bounce was dancing with the perennial-bachelor type who loved taking pictures. Her diamonds glittered on his willowy right shoulder. He didn’t like it when I cut in, but he departed gracefully.

  She had on a tiger-striped gown with a slashed neckline and a flaring skirt which didn’t become her. Her dancing was rather tigerish. She plunged around as if she was used to leading. Our dance was politely intense, like an amateur wrestling match, with no breath wasted on words. I said when it ended:

  “Lew Archer is my name. May I talk to you?”

  “Why not?”

  We sat at one of several marble-topped tables separated by a glass windscreen from the pool. I said:

  “Let me get you a drink.”

  “Thank you, I don’t drink. You’re not a member, and you’re not one of Sime Graff’s regulars. Let me guess.” She fingered her pointed chin, and her diamonds flashed. “Reporter?”

  “Guess again.”

  “Policeman?”

  “You’re very acute, or am I very obvious?”

  She studied me from between narrowed eyelids, and smiled narrowly. “No, I wouldn’t say you’re obvious. It’s just you asked me something about Hester Campbell before. And it kind of made me wonder if you were a policeman.”

  “I don’t follow your line of reasoning.”

  “Don’t you? Then how does it happen that you’re interested in her?”

  “I’m afraid I can’t tell you that. My lips are sealed.”

  “Mine aren’t,” she said. “Tell me, what is she wanted for? Theft?”

  “I didn’t say she was wanted.”

  “Then she ought to be. She’s a thief, you know.” Her smile had a biting edge. “She stole from me. I left my wallet in the dressing-room in my cabaña one day last summer. It was early in the morning, no one was around except the staff, so I didn’t bother locking up the place. I did a few dives and showered, and when I went to dress, my wallet was gone.”

  “How do you know she took it?”

  “There’s no doubt whatever that she did. I saw her slinking down the shower-room corridor just before I found it missing. She had something wrapped in a towel in her hand, and a guilty smirk on her face. She didn’t fool me for a minute. I went to her afterwards and asked her point-blank if she had it. Of course she denied it, but I could see the deceitful look in her eyes.”

  “A deceitful look is hardly evidence.”

  “Oh, it wasn’t only that. Other members have suffered losses, too, and they always coincided with Miss Campbell’s being around. I know I sound prejudiced, but I’m not, really. I’d done my best to help the girl, you see. I considered her almost a protégée at one time. So it rather hurt when I caught her stealing from me. There was over a hundred dollars in the wallet, and my driver’s license and keys, which had to be replaced.”

  “You say you caught her.”

  “Morally speaking, I did. Of course she wouldn’t admit a thing. She’d cached the wallet somewhere in the meantime.”

  “Did you report the theft?” My voice was sharper than I intended.

  She drummed on the tabletop with blunt fingertips. “I must say, I hardly expected to be cross-questioned like this. I’m voluntarily giving you information, and I’m doing so completely without malice. You don’t understand, I liked Hester. She had bad breaks when she was a kid, and I felt sorry for her.”

  “So you didn’t report it.”

  “No, I didn’t, not to the authorities. I did take it up with Mr. Bassett, which did no good at all. She had him thoroughly hoodwinked. He simply couldn’t believe that she’d do wrong—until it happened to him.”

  “What happened to him?”

  “Hester stole from him, too,” she said with a certain complacency. “That is, I can’t swear that she did, but I’m morally certain of it. Miss Hamblin, his secretary, is a friend of mine, and I hear things. Mr. Bassett was dreadfully upset the day she left.” She leaned toward me across the table: I could see the barred rib-cage between her breasts. “And Miss Hamblin said he changed the combination of his safe that very day.”

  “All this is pretty tenuous. Did he report a theft?”

  “Of course he didn’t. He never said a word to anybody. He was too ashamed of being taken in by her.”

  “And you’ve never said a word to anybody, either?”

  “Until now.”

  “Why bring it all out now?”

  She was silent, except for her drumming fingers. The lower part of her face set in a dull, thick expression. She had turned her head away from the source of light, and I couldn’t see her eyes. “You asked me.”

  “I didn’t ask you anything specific.”

  “You talk as if you were a friend of hers. Are you?”

  “Are you?”

  She covered her mouth with her hand, so that her whole face was hidden, and mumbled behind it: “I thought she was my friend. I could have forgiven her the wallet, even. But I saw her last week in Myrin’s. I walked right up to her, prepared to let bygones be bygones, and she snubbed me. She pretended not to know me.” Her voice became deep and harsh, and the hand in front of her mouth became a fist. “So I thought, if she’s suddenly loaded, able to buy clothes at Myrin’s, the least she can do is repay me my hundred dollars.”

  “You need the money, do you?”

  Her fist repelled the suggestion, fiercely, as if I’d accused her of having a moral weakness or a physical disease. “Of course I don’t need the money. It’s the principle of the thing.” After a thinking pause she said: “You don’t like me the least little bit, do you?”

  I hadn’t expected the question, and I didn’t have an answer ready. She had the peculiar combination of force and meanness you often find in rich, unmarried women. “You’re loaded,” I said, “and I’m not, and I keep remembering the difference. Does it matter?”

  “Yes, it matters. You don’t understand.” Her eyes emerged from shadow, and her meager breast leaned hard against the table edge. “It isn’t the money, so much. Only I thought Hester liked me. I thought she was a true friend. I used to coach her diving, I let her use Father’s pool. I even gave a party for her once—a birthday party.”

  “How old was she?”

  “It was her eighteenth birthday. She was the prettiest girl in the world then, and the nicest. I can’t understand—what happened to all her niceness?”

  “It’s happening to a lot of people.”

  “Is that a crack at me?”

  “At me,” I said. “At all of us. Maybe it’s atomic fallout or something.”

  Needing a drink more than ever, I thanked her and excused myself and found my way to the drinking-room. A curved mahogany bar took up one end of it. The other walls were decorated with Hollywood-Fauvist murals. The large room contained several dozen assorted couples hurling late-night insults at each other and orders at the Filipino bartenders. There were actresses with that numb and varnished look, and would-be actresses with that waiting look; junior-executive types hacking diligently at each other with their profiles; their wives watching each other through smiles; and others.

  I sat at the bar between strangers, wheedled a whisky-and-water out of one of the white-coated Filipinos, and listened to the people. These were movie people, but a great deal of their talk was about television. They talked about communications media and the black list and the hook and payment for second showings and who had money for pilot films and what their agents said. Under their noise, they gave out a feeling of suspense. Some of them seemed to be listening hard for the rustle of a dropping option. Some of their eyes were knowing previews of that gray, shaking hangover dawn when all the mortgage payments came due at once and the options fell like snow.

  The man on my immediate right looked like an old actor and sounded like a director. Maybe he was an actor turned director. He was explaining something to a frog-voiced whisky blonde: “It means it’s happening to you, you see. You’re the one in love with the girl, or th
e boy, as the case may be. It’s not the girl on the screen he’s making a play for, it’s you.”

  “Empathy-schwempathy,” she croaked pleasantly. “Why not just call it sex?”

  “It isn’t sex. It includes sex.”

  “Then I’m for it. Anything that includes sex, I’m for it. That’s my personal philosophy of life.”

  “And a fine philosophy it is,” another man said. “Sex and television are the opium of the people.”

  “I thought marijuana was the opium of the people.”

  “Marijuana is the marijuana of the people.”

  There was a girl on my left. I caught a glimpse of her profile, young and pretty and smooth as glass. She was talking earnestly to the man beside her, an aging clown I’d seen in twenty movies.

  “You said you’d catch me if I fell,” she said.

  “I was feeling stronger then.”

  “You said you’d marry me if it ever happened.”

  “You got more sense than to take me seriously. I’m two years behind on alimony now.”

  “You’re very romantic, aren’t you?”

  “That’s putting it mildly, sweetheart. I got some sense of responsibility, though. I’ll do what I can for you, give you a telephone number. And you can tell him to send the bill to me.”

  “I don’t want your dirty telephone number. I don’t want your dirty money.”

  “Be reasonable. Think of it like it was a tumor or something—that is, if it really exists. Another drink?”

  “Make mine prussic acid,” she said dully.

  “On the rocks?”

  I left half my drink standing. It was air I needed. At one of the marble-topped tables in the court, under the saw-toothed shadow of a banana tree, Simon Graff was sitting with his wife. His gray hair was still dark and slick from the shower. He wore a dinner jacket with a pink shirt and a red cummerbund. She wore a blue mink coat over a black gown figured with gold which was out of style. His face was brown and pointed, talking at her. I couldn’t see her face. She was looking out through the windscreen at the pool.