The Barbarous Coast Read online

  He winced, but not with surprise, as though I’d pressed on the scar of an old wound. He shook his head sadly. “I wouldn’t hurt a hair on her head, and you know it.”

  “All right. Let it pass.”

  “I won’t let it pass. You can take it back or get out of here.”

  “All right. I take it back.”

  “You shouldn’t have said it in the first place. She was my friend. I thought you were my friend.”

  “I’m sorry, Joseph. I have to ask these questions.”

  “Why do you have to? Who makes you? You should be careful what you say about who did what around here. Do you know what Tony Torres would do if he thought I killed his girl?”

  “Kill you.”

  “That’s right. He threatened to kill me when the police turned me loose. It was all I could do to talk him out of it. He gets these fixed ideas in his head, and they stick there like a bur. And he’s got a lot of violence in him yet.”

  “So do we all.”

  “I know it, Mr. Archer. I know it in myself. Tony’s got more than most. He killed a man with his fists once, when he was young.”

  “In the ring?”

  “Not in the ring, and it wasn’t an accident. It was over a woman, and he meant to do it. He asked me down to his room one night and got drunk on muscatel and told me all about it.”

  “When was this?”

  “A couple of months ago. I guess it was really eating him up. Gabrielle’s mother was the woman, you see. He killed the man that she was running with, and she left him. The other man had a knife, so the judge in Fresno called it self-defense, but Tony blamed himself. He connected it up with Gabrielle, said that what happened to her was God’s punishment on him. Tony’s very superstitious.”

  “You know his nephew Lance?”

  “I know him.” Joseph’s tone defined his attitude. It was negative. “He used to have the job I have a few years back, when I started in the snack bar. I hear he’s a big wheel now, it’s hard to believe. He was so bone lazy he couldn’t even hold a lifeguard job without his uncle filling in for him. Tony used to do his clean-up work while Lance practiced fancy diving.”

  “How does Tony feel about him now?”

  Joseph scratched his tight hair. “He finally caught on to him. I’d say he almost hates him.”

  “Enough to kill him?”

  “What’s all this talk about killing, Mr. Archer? Did somebody get killed?”

  “I’ll tell you, if you can keep a secret.”

  “I can keep a secret.”

  “See that you do. Your friend Lance was shot last night.”

  He didn’t lift his eyes from the counter. “He was no friend of mine. He was nothing in my life.”

  “He was in Tony’s.”

  He shook his head slowly from side to side. “I shouldn’t have told you what I did about Tony. He did something once when he was young and crazy. He wouldn’t do a thing like that again. He wouldn’t hurt a flea, unless it was biting him.”

  “You can’t have it both ways at once, Joseph. You said he hated Lance.”

  “I said almost,”

  “Why did he hate him?”

  “He had good reason.”

  “Tell me.”

  “Not if you’re going to turn it against Tony. That Lance isn’t fit to tie his shoelaces for him.”

  “You think yourself that Tony may have shot him.”

  “I’m not saying what I think, I don’t think anything.”

  “You said he had good reason. What was the reason?”

  “Gabrielle,” he said to the floor. “Lance was the first one she went with, back when she was just a kid in high school. She told me that. He started her drinking, he taught her all the ways of doing it. If Tony shot that pachuco, he did a good service to the world.”

  “Maybe, but not to himself. You say Gabrielle told you all these things?”

  He nodded, and his black, despondent shadow nodded with him.

  “Were you intimate with her?”

  “I never was, not if you mean what I think you mean. She treated me like I had no human feelings. She used to torture me with these things she told me—the things he taught her to do.” His voice was choked. “I guess she didn’t know she was torturing me. She just didn’t know I had feelings.”

  “You’ve got too many feelings.”

  “Yes, I have. They break me up inside sometimes. Like when she told me what he wanted her to do. He wanted her to go to L.A. with him and live in a hotel, and he would get her dates with men. I blew my top on that one, and went to Tony with it. That was when he broke off with Lance, got him fired from here and kicked him out of the house.”

  “Did Gabrielle go with him?”

  “No, she didn’t. I thought with him out of the way, maybe she’d straighten out. But it turned out to be too late for her. She was already gone.”

  “What happened to her after that?”

  “Listen, Mr. Archer,” he said in a tight voice. “You could get me in trouble. Spying on the members is no part of my job.”

  “What’s a job?”

  “It isn’t the job. I could get another job. I mean really bad trouble.”

  “Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I thought you wanted to be serviceable.”

  chapter 23

  HE looked up at the light. His face was smooth. No moral strain showed. But I could feel the cracking tension in him.

  “Gabrielle is dead,” he said to the unblinking light. “What service can I do her by talking about her?”

  “There are other girls, and it could happen to them.”

  His silence stretched out. Finally he said:

  “I’m not as much of a coward as you think. I tried to tell the policemen, when they were asking me questions about the earring. But they weren’t interested in hearing about it.”

  “Hearing about what?”

  “If I’ve got to say it, I’ll say it. Gabrielle used to go in one of the cabañas practically every day and stay there for an hour or more.”

  “All by herself?”

  “You know I don’t mean that.”

  “Who was with her, Joseph?”

  I was almost certain what his answer would be.

  “Mr. Graff used to be with her.”

  “You’re sure of that?”

  “I’m sure. You don’t understand about Gabrielle. She was young and silly, proud that a man like Mr. Graff would take an interest in her. Besides, she wanted me to cover for her by taking orders in the other cabañas when she was—otherwise occupied. She wasn’t ashamed for me to know,” he added bitterly. “She was just ashamed for Mrs. Lamb to know.”

  “Did they ever meet here at night?” I said. “Graff and Gabrielle?”

  “Maybe they did. I don’t know. I never worked at night in those days.”

  “She was in the Club the night she was killed,” I said. “We know that.”

  “How do we know that? Tony found her on the beach.”

  “The earring you found. Where was it you found it?”

  “On the gallery in front of the cabañas. But she could have dropped it there any time.”

  “Not if she was still wearing the other one. Do you know for a fact that she was, or is this just what they told you?”

  “I know it for a fact. I saw it myself. When they were asking me questions, they took me down to where she was. They opened up the drawer and made me look at her. I saw the little white earring on her ear.”

  Tears started in his eyes, the color of blue-black ink. Memory had given him a sudden stab. I said:

  “Then she must have been in the Club shortly before she was killed. When a girl loses one earring, she doesn’t go on wearing the other one. Which means that Gabrielle didn’t have time to notice the loss. It’s possible that she lost it at the precise time that she was being killed. I want you to show me where you found it, Joseph.”

  Outside, first light was washing the eastern slopes of the sky. The sparse stars
were melting in it like grains of snow on stone. Under the dawn wind, the pool was gray and restless like a coffined piece of the sea.

  Tobias led me along the gallery, about half the length of the pool. We passed the closed doors of half-a-dozen cabañas, including Graff’s. I noticed that the spring had gone out of his walk. His sneakered feet slapped the concrete disconsolately. He stopped and turned to me:

  “It was right about here, caught in this little grid.” A circular wire grating masking a drain was set into a shallow depression in the concrete. “Somebody’d hosed down the gallery and washed it into the drain. I just happened to see it shine.”

  “How do you know somebody hosed the gallery?”

  “It was still wet in patches.”

  “Who did it, do you know?”

  “Could have been anybody, anybody that worked around the pool. Or any of the members. You never can tell what the members are going to do.”

  “Who worked around the pool at that time?”

  “Me and Gabrielle, mostly, and Tony and the lifeguard.… No, there wasn’t any lifeguard just then—not until I took over in the summer. Miss Campbell was filling in as lifeguard.”

  “Was she there that morning?”

  “I guess she was. Yes, I remember she was. What are you trying to get at, Mr. Archer?”

  “Who killed Gabrielle, and why and where and how.”

  He leaned against the wall, his shoulders high. His eyes and mouth gleamed in his black basalt face. “For God’s sake, Mr. Archer, you’re not pointing the finger at me again?”

  “No. I’d like your opinion. I think that Gabrielle was killed in the Club, maybe right on this spot. The murderer dragged her down to the beach, or else she crawled there under her own power. She left a trail of blood, which had to be washed away. And she dropped an earring, which didn’t get washed away.”

  “A little earring isn’t much to go on.”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

  “You think Miss Campbell did all this?”

  “It’s what I want your opinion about. Did she have any reason, any motive?”

  “Could be she had.” He licked his lips. “She made a play for Mr. Graff herself, only he didn’t go for her.”

  “Gabrielle told you this?”

  “She told me Miss Campbell was jealous of her. She didn’t have to tell me. I can see things for myself.”

  “What did you see?”

  “The dirty looks between them, all that spring. They were still friends in a way, you know how girls can be, but they didn’t like each other the way they used to. Then, right after it happened, right after the inquest, Miss Campbell took off for parts unknown.”

  “But she came back.”

  “More than a year later she came back, after it all died down. She was still very interested in the case, though. She asked me a lot of questions this last summer. She gave me a story that her and her sister Rina were going to write it up for a magazine, but I don’t think that was their interest.”

  “What kind of questions did they ask?”

  “I don’t know,” he said wearily. “Some of the ones you asked me, I guess. You’ve asked me about a million of them now.”

  “Did you tell her about the earring?”

  “Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Does it matter?” He pushed himself away from the wall, shuffled across the gallery, and looked up at the whitening sky. “I got to go home and get some sleep, Mr. Archer. I go back on duty at nine o’clock.”

  “I thought you never got tired.”

  “I get depressed. You stirred up a lot of things I want to forget. In fact, you’ve been giving me kind of a hard time.”

  “I’m sorry. I’m tired, too. It’ll be worth it, though, if we can solve this murder.”

  “Will it? Say you do, then what will happen?” His face was grim in the gray light, and his voice drew on old reserves of bitterness. “The same thing will happen that happened before. The cops will take over your case and seal it off and nothing will happen, nobody get arrested.”

  “Is that what happened before?”

  “I’m telling you it did. When Marfeld saw he couldn’t railroad me, he suddenly lost interest in the case. Well, I lost interest, too.”

  “I can go higher than Marfeld if I have to.”

  “What if you do? It’s too late for Gabrielle, too late for me. It was always too late for me.”

  He turned on his heel and walked away. I said after him:

  “Can I drop you someplace?”

  “I have my own car.”

  chapter 24

  I SHOULD have handled it better. I walked to the end of the pool, the last man at the party, feeling that early-morning ebb of heart when the blood runs sluggish and cold. The fog had begun to blow out to sea. It foamed and poured in a slow cataract toward the obscure west. Black-marble patches of ocean showed through here and there.

  I must have seen it and known what it was before I was conscious of it. It was a piece of black driftwood with a twist of root at one end, floating low in the water near the shore. It rode in slowly and discontinuously, pushed by a series of breaking waves. Its branches were very flexible for a log. A wave lodged it on the wet brown sand. It was a man in a dark, belted raincoat, lying face-down.

  The gate in the fence was padlocked. I picked up a DO NOT RUN sign with a heavy concrete base and swung it at the padlock. The gate burst open. I went down the concrete steps and turned Carl Stern over onto his back. His forehead was deeply ridged where it had struck or been struck by a hard object. The wound in his throat gaped like a toothless mouth shouting silently.

  I went to my car, remembering from my bottom-scratching days that there was a southward current along this shore, about a mile an hour. Just under three miles north of the Channel Club, a paved view-point for sightseers blistered out from the highway to the fenced edge of a bluff which overhung the sea. Stern’s rented sedan was parked with its heavy chrome front against the cable fence. Blood spotted the windshield and dashboard and the front seat. Blood stained the blade of the knife which lay on the floor-mat. It looked like Stern’s own knife.

  I didn’t mess with any of it. I wanted no part of Stern’s death. I drove home on automatic pilot and went to bed. I dreamed about a man who lived by himself in a landscape of crumbling stones. He spent a great deal of his time, without much success, trying to reconstruct in his mind the monuments and the buildings of which the scattered stones were the only vestiges. He vaguely remembered some kind of oral tradition to the effect that a city had stood there once. And a still vaguer tradition: or perhaps it was a dream inside of the dream: that the people who had built the city, or their descendants, were coming back eventually to rebuild it. He wanted to be around when the work was done.

  chapter 25

  MY answering service woke me at seven thirty. “Rise and shine, Mr. Archer!”

  “Do I have to shine? I’m feeling kind of dim. I got to bed about an hour ago.”

  “I haven’t been to bed yet. And, after all, you could have canceled your standing order.”

  “I hereby cancel it, forever.” I was in one of those drained and chancy moods when everything seems either laughable or weepworthy, depending on the position you hold your head in. “Now hang the hell up and let me get back to sleep. This is cruel and unusual punishment.”

  “My, but we’re in splendid spirits this morning!” Her secretarial instinct took over: “Wait now, don’t hang up. Couple of long-distance calls for you, both from Las Vegas. First at one forty, young lady, seemed very anxious to talk to you, but wouldn’t leave her name. She said she’d call back, but she never did. Got that? Second at three fifteen, Dr. Anthony Reeves, intern at the Memorial Hospital, said he was calling on behalf of a patient named George Wall, picked up at the airport with head injuries.”

  “The Vegas airport?”

  “Yes. Does that mean anything to you?”

  It meant a surge of relief, followed by the realization that I
was going to have to drag myself out to International Airport and crawl aboard a plane. “Make me a reservation, will you, Vera?”

  “First plane to Vegas?”

  “Right.”

  “One other call, yesterday afternoon. Man named Mercero from the CHP, said the Jag was registered to Lance Leonard. Is that the actor that got himself shot last night?”

  “It’s in the morning papers, eh?”

  “Probably. I heard it on the radio.”

  “What else did you hear?”

  “That was all. It was just a flash bulletin.”

  “No,” I said. “It isn’t the same one. What did you say the name was again?”

  “I forget.” She was a jewel among women.

  Shortly before ten o’clock I was talking to Dr. Anthony Reeves in his room in the Southern Nevada Hospital. He’d had the night duty on Emergency, and had given George Wall a preliminary examination when George was brought in by the sheriff’s men. They had found him wandering around McCarran Airfield in a confused condition. He had a fractured cheekbone, probably a brain concussion, and perhaps a fractured skull. George had to have absolute quiet for at least a week, and would probably be laid up for a month. He couldn’t see anyone.

  It was no use arguing with young Dr. Reeves. Butter wouldn’t melt in his mouth. I went in search of a susceptible nurse, and eventually found a plump little redhead in an L.A. General cap who was impressed by an old Special Deputy badge I carried. On the strength of it, she led me to a semi-private room with a NO VISITORS sign on the door. George was the only occupant, and he was sleeping. I promised not to wake him.

  The window shades were tightly drawn, and there was no light on in the room. It was so dim that I could barely make out George’s white-bandaged head against the pillow. I sat in an armchair between his bed and the empty one, and listened to the susurrus of his breathing. It was slow and steady. After a while I almost went to sleep myself.

  I was startled out of it by a cry of pain. I thought at first it was George, but it was a man on the other side of the wall. He cried loudly again.

  George stirred and groaned and sat up, raising both hands to his half-mummified face. He swayed and threatened to fall out of bed. I held him by the shoulders.