The Barbarous Coast Read online

  “You’ll get it, sucker-puncher,” I said between difficult breaths.

  “Not from you, old man.”

  The door opened behind him, and featherhead looked out. She wore dark harlequin glasses whose sequined rims matched the comb. Oil glistened on her face. A terrycloth towel held under her armpits clung to the bulbs and narrows of her body.

  “What’s the trouble, hon?”

  “No trouble. Get inside.”

  “Who is this character? Did you hit him?”

  “What do you think?”

  “I think you’re crazy, taking the chances you take.”

  “Me take chances? Who shot off her mouth on the telephone? You brought the bastard here.”

  “All right, so I wanted out. So I changed my mind.”

  “Shut it off.” He threatened her with a movement of his shoulders. “I said inside.”

  Running footsteps clattered on the driveway. George Wall called out: “Hester! I’m here!”

  What I could see of her face didn’t change expression. Leonard spread a hand on her terrycloth breast and pushed her in and shut the door on her. He turned as George charged in on him, met him with a stiff left to the face. George stopped dead. Leonard waited, his face smooth and intent like a man’s listening to music.

  I got my legs under me and stood up and watched them fight. George had been wanting a fight: he had the advantage of height and weight and reach: I didn’t interfere. It was like watching a man get caught in a machine. Leonard stepped inside of a looping swing, rested his chin on the big man’s chest, and hammered his stomach. His elbows worked like pistons in oiled grooves close to his body. When he stepped back, George doubled over. He went to his knees and got up again, very pale.

  The instant his hands left the flagstone, Leonard brought up his right hand into George’s face, his back uncoiling behind it. George walked backward onto the tender new lawn. He looked at the sky in a disappointed way, as if it had dropped something on him. Then he shook his head and started back toward Leonard. He tripped on a garden hose and almost fell.

  I stepped between them, facing Leonard. “He’s had it. Knock it off, eh?”

  George shouldered me aside. I grabbed his arms.

  “Let me at the little runt,” he said through bloody lips.

  “You don’t want to get hurt, boy.”

  “Worry about him.”

  He was stronger than I was. He broke loose and spun me away. Threw another wild one which split the back of his suit coat and accomplished nothing else. Leonard inclined his head two or three inches from the vertical and watched the fist go by. George staggered off balance. Leonard hit him between the eyes with his right hand, hit him again with his left as he went down. George’s head made a dull noise on the flagstone. He lay still.

  Leonard polished the knuckles of his right fist with his left hand, as though it were a bronze object of art.

  “You shouldn’t use it on amateurs.”

  He answered reasonably: “I don’t unless I have to. Only sometimes I get damn browned off, big slobs thinkin’ they can push me around. I been pushed around plenty, I don’t have to take it no more.” He balanced himself on one foot and touched George’s outflung arm with the tip of his big toe. “Maybe you better take him to a doctor.”

  “Maybe I better.”

  “I hit him pretty hard.”

  He showed me the knuckles of his right hand. They were swelling and turning blue. Otherwise, the fight had done him good. He was cheerful and relaxed, and he pranced a little when he moved, like a stallion. Featherhead was watching him from the window. She had on a linen dress now. She saw me looking at her, and moved back out of sight.

  Leonard turned on the hose and ran cold water over George’s head. George opened his eyes and tried to sit up. Leonard turned off the hose.

  “He’ll be all right. They don’t come out of it that fast when they’re bad hurt. Anyway, I hit him in self-defense, you’re a witness to that. If there’s any beef about it, you can take it up with Leroy Frost at Helio.”

  “Leroy Frost is your fixer, eh?”

  He gave me a faintly anxious smile. “You know Leroy?”

  “A little.”

  “Maybe we won’t bother him about it, eh? Leroy, he’s got a lot of troubles. How much you make in a day?”

  “Fifty when I’m working.”

  “Okay, how’s about I slip you fifty and you take care of the carcass?” He turned on all his neon charm. “Incidently, I should apologize. I kind of lost my head there for a minute, I shouldn’t ought to of took the sucker punch on you. You can pay me back some time.”

  “Maybe I will, at that.”

  “Sure you will, and I’ll let you. How’s the breadbasket, cap?”

  “Feels like a broken tennis racquet.”

  “But no hard feelings, eh?”

  “No hard feelings.”

  “Swell, swell.”

  He offered me his hand. I set myself on my heels and hit him in the jaw. It wasn’t the smartest thing in the world to do. My legs were middle-aging, and still wobbly. If I missed the nerve, he could run circles around me and cut me to ribbons with his left alone. But the connection was good.

  I left him lying. The front door was unlocked, and I went in. The girl wasn’t in the living-room or on the terrace. Her terrycloth towel was crumpled on the bedroom floor. A sun-hat woven of plaited straw lay on the floor beside it. The leather band inside the hat was stamped with the legend: “Handmade in Mexico for the Taos Shop.”

  A motor coughed and roared behind the wall. I found the side door which opened from the utility room into the garage. She was at the wheel of the Jaguar, looking at me with her mouth wide open. She locked the door on her side before I got hold of the handle. Then it was torn from my fist.

  The Jaguar screeched in the turnaround, laying down black spoor, and leaped up the driveway to the road. I let it go. I couldn’t leave George with Leonard.

  They were sitting up in front of the house, exchanging dim looks of hatred across the flagstone walk. George was bleeding from the mouth. The flesh around one of his eyes was changing color. Leonard was unmarked, but I saw when he got to his feet that there was a change in him.

  He had a hangdog air, a little furtive, as if I’d jarred him back into his past. He kept running his fingers over his nose and mouth.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “you’re still gorgeous.”

  “Funny boy. You think it’s funny? I kill you, it wasn’t for this.” He displayed his swollen right hand.

  “You offered me a sucker punch, remember. Now we’re even. Where did she go?”

  “You can go to hell.”

  “What’s her address?”

  “Go to hell.”

  “You might as well give me her address. I got her license number. I can trace her.”

  “Go right ahead.” He gave me a superior look, which probably meant that the Jaguar was his.

  “What did she change her mind about? Why did she want out?”

  “I can’t read minds. I dunno nothin’ about her. I service plenty of women, see? They ask me for it, I give ’em a bang sometimes. Does that mean I’m responsible?”

  I reached for him. He backed away, his face sallow and pinched. “Keep your hands off of me. And drag your butt off of my property. I’m warning you, I got a loaded shotgun in the house.”

  He went as far as the door, and turned to watch us. George was on his hands and knees now. I got one of his arms draped over my shoulders and heaved him up to his feet. He walked like a man trying to balance himself on a spring mattress.

  When I turned for a last look at the house, Leonard was on the doorstep, combing his hair.

  chapter 9

  I DROVE down the long grade to Beverly 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:

  Dear Mr. Archer, Arrived nine left twelve noon, I need the money for today will drive by and pick it up this aft, please leave $3.75 in mailbox if your out. Yours truly, Beatrice M. Jackson.

  P.S.—There is mouse dirt in the cooler, you buy a trap Ill set it out, mouse dirt is not sanitary.

  Yours truly, Beatrice M. Jackson.

  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:

  True friendship is a happy thing

  Which makes both men and angels sing.

  As the year begins, and another ends,

  Resolved: that we shall still be friends.

  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-tut’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 Helio-Graff?”