The Barbarous Coast Page 8

  “Has she been in trouble before?”

  “We won’t go into that.”

  “Have you been seeing much of her this winter?”

  “Very little. I spent one weekend with her—the weekend before last.”

  “In the Beverly Hills house?”

  “Yes. She’d just moved in, and she wanted my advice about redecorating some of the rooms. The people who had it before Hester didn’t keep it up—not like the days when we had our Japanese couple.” Her blue gaze strained across the decades, and returned to the present. “Anyway, we had a good time together, Hester and I. A wonderful weekend all by our lonesomes, chatting and tending to her clothes and pretending it was old times. And it ended up with Hester inviting me to move in the first of the year.”

  “That was nice of her.”

  “Wasn’t it? I was so surprised and pleased. We hadn’t been close at all for several years. I’d hardly seen her, as a matter of fact. And then, out of the blue, she asked me to come and live with her.”

  “Why do you think she did?”

  The question seemed to appeal to her realistic side. She sat on the edge of her chair, in thinking position, her fingertips to her temple. “It’s hard to say. Certainly not on account of my beautiful blue eyes. Of course, she’s going to be away and she needs someone to stay in the house and look after it. I think she’s been lonely, too.”

  “And frightened?”

  “She didn’t act frightened. Maybe she was. She wouldn’t tell me if she was. My girls don’t tell me anything.” She inserted the knuckle of her right thumb between her teeth, and wrinkled her face like a baby monkey. “Will I still be able to move the first of the year? Do you think I will?”

  “I wouldn’t count on it.”

  “But the house must belong to her. She wouldn’t spend all that money on redecorating. Mr. Archer—is that your name? Archer?—where is all the money coming from?”

  “I have no idea,” I said, though I had several.

  chapter 11

  MANOR CREST DRIVE was one of those quiet palm-lined avenues which had been laid out just before the twenties went into their final convulsions. The houses weren’t huge and fantastic like some of the rococo palaces in the surrounding hills, but they had pretensions. Some were baronial pseudo-Tudor with faked half-timbered façades. Others were imitation Mizener Spanish, thick-walled and narrow-windowed like stucco fortresses built to resist imaginary Moors. The street was good, but a little disappointed-looking, as though maybe the Moors had already been and gone.

  Number 14 was one of the two-story Spanish fortresses. It sat well back from the street behind a Monterey cypress hedge. Water from a sprinkling system danced in the air above the hedge, rainbowed for an instant as I passed. A dusty gray Jaguar was parked in the driveway.

  I left my car in front of one of the neighboring houses, walked back, and strolled down the driveway to the Jaguar. According to the white slip on the steering-post, it was registered to Lance Leonard.

  I turned and surveyed the front of the house. Tiny gusts from the sprinkler wet my face. It was the only sign of life around. The black oak door was closed, the windows heavily draped. The pink tile roof pressed down on the house like a lid.

  I mounted the stoop and pressed the bellpush and heard the electric buzzer sound deep inside the building. I thought I heard footsteps approaching the ironbound door. Then I thought I heard breathing. I knocked on the door and waited. The breathing on the other side of the door, if it was breathing, went away or ceased.

  I knocked a few more times and waited some more, in vain. Walking back toward the driveway, I caught a movement from the corner of my eye. The drape in the end window twitched at the edge. When I looked directly at it, it had fallen back in place. I reached across a spiky pyracantha and tapped on the window, just for kicks. Kicks were all I got.

  I returned to my car, U-turned at the next intersection, drove back past the pink-roofed house, and parked where I could watch its front in my rear-view mirror. The street was very quiet. Along both sides of it, the fronds of the palms hung in the air like static green explosions caught by a camera. In the middle distance, the tower of the Beverly Hills City Hall stood flat white against the flat blue sky. Nothing happened to mark the passage of time, except that the hands of my wristwatch bracketed two o’clock and moved on past.

  About two ten, a car rolled into sight from the direction of the City Hall. It was an old black Lincoln, long and heavy as a hearse, with gray curtains over the rear windows completing the resemblance. A man in a black felt hat was at the wheel. He was doing about fifty in a twenty-five-mile zone. As he entered the block I was in, he started to slow down.

  I reached for a yesterday’s newspaper in the back seat and propped it up on the wheel to hide my face. Its headlines read like ancient history. The Lincoln seemed to take a long time to pass me. Then it did. Small-eyed, saddle-nosed, rubber-mouthed, its driver’s face was unforgettable. Unforgettably ugly.

  He turned into the driveway of Number 14, entering my rear-view mirror, and parked beside the Jaguar and got out. He moved quickly and softly, without swinging his arms. In a long charcoal-gray raglan topcoat, his slope-shouldered body looked like a torpedo sliding on its base.

  The door opened before he knocked. I couldn’t see who opened it. The door closed for a while, two or three long minutes, and then opened again.

  Lance Leonard came out of the house. In a queer little hustling run, like a puppet jerked by wires, he descended the steps and crossed the lawn to the Jaguar, not noticing the sprinkler, though it wet his white silk open-necked shirt and spotted his light-beige slacks.

  The Jaguar backed roaring into the street. As it raced past on squealing tires I caught a glimpse of Lance Leonard’s face. His face was a blank, dead yellow. The nose and chin were drawn sharp. The eyes blazed black. They didn’t see me.

  The Jaguar plunged away into silence. I got out the .38 Special which I kept in the dash compartment and crossed the street. The Lincoln was registered to a Theodore Marfeld who lived at a Coast Highway address in South Malibu. Its black leather interior was shabby and smelled of cat. The back seat and floor were covered with sheets of heavy wrapping paper. The dashboard clock had stopped at eleven twenty.

  I went to the door of the house and lifted my fist to knock and saw that the door was standing slightly ajar. I pushed it wider, stepped into a dim hall with a round Moorish ceiling. Ahead to my left a flight of red tile steps rose cumbrously through the ceiling. To the right, an inner door threw a bent fan of brightness across the floor and up the blank plaster side of the staircase.

  A hatted shadow moved into the brightness and blotted most of it out. The head and shoulder of Saddlenose leaned from the doorway.

  “Mr. Marfeld?” I said.

  “Yeah. Who the hell are you? You got no right barging into a private residence. Get the hell out.”

  “I’d like to speak to Miss Campbell.”

  “What about? Who sent you?” he said mouthily.

  “Her mother sent me, as a matter of fact. I’m a friend of the family. Are you a friend of the family?”

  “Yeah. A friend of the family.”

  Marfeld raised his right hand to his face. His left hand was out of sight behind the door frame. I was holding the gun in my pocket with my finger on the trigger. Marfeld seemed puzzled. He took hold of the entire lower part of his face and pulled it sideways. There was a red smear on the ball of his thumb. It left a red thumbprint on the side of his indented nose.

  “Cut yourself?”

  He turned his hand around and looked at his thumb and closed his fist over it. “Yeah, I cut myself.”

  “I’m an expert at First Aid. If you’re in pain, I have some monoacetic acid ester of salicylic acid in the car. I also have some five-per-cent tincture of iodine to offset the risk of blood-poisoning or other serious infection.”

  His right hand pushed the words away from his face. Neurosis cheeped surprisingly in his v
oice. “Shut up, God damn you, I can’t stand doubletalk.” He got himself under control and returned to his lower-register personality. “You heard me tell you to get out of here. What are you waiting for?”

  “That’s no way for a friend of the family to talk to another friend of the family.”

  He leaned round-shouldered out of the doorway, a metal rod glittering in his left hand. It was a brass poker. He shifted it to his right hand and lunged toward me, so close I could smell his breath. His breath was sour with trouble. “God-damn doublemouth.”

  I could have shot him through my pocket. Maybe I should have. The trouble was, I didn’t know him well enough to shoot him. And I trusted the speed of my reflexes, forgetting Leonard’s knockdown punch and the residue of languor in my legs.

  Marfeld raised the poker. A dark drop flew from its hooked point and spattered the plaster wall like a splash of wet red paint. My eye stayed on it a millisecond too long. The poker seared and chilled the side of my head. It was a glancing blow, or I would have gone all the way out. As it was, the floor upended and rapped my knees and elbows and my forehead. The gun went skittering through a hole in the broken light.

  I crawled up the steep floor toward it. Marfeld stamped at my fingers. I got my hands on one of his feet, my shoulder against his knee, and threw him over backward. He went down hard and lay whooping for breath.

  I groped for the gun among jagged shards of light. The bright room beyond the doorway flashed on my angled vision with a hallucination’s vividness. It was white and black and red. The blonde girl in the linen dress lay on a white rug in front of a raised black fireplace. Her face was turned away. An inkblot of red darkness spread around it.

  Then there were footsteps behind me, and as I turned, the front end of the Sunset Limited hit the side of my head and knocked me off the rails into deep red darkness.

  I came to, conscious of motion and a rumbling noise in my stomach which gradually detached itself from me and became the sound of a car engine. I was sitting propped up in the middle of the front seat. Shoulders were jammed against me on both sides. I opened my eyes and recognized the dashboard clock which had stopped at eleven twenty.

  “People are dying to get in there,” Marfeld said across me from the right.

  My eyeballs moved grittily in their sockets. Marfeld had my gun on his knee. The driver, on my left, said:

  “Brother, you kill me. You pull the same old gag out of the file every time you pass the place.”

  We were passing Forest Lawn. Its Elysian fields were distorted by moving curves, heat waves in the air or behind my eyes. I felt a craving nostalgia for peace. I thought how nice it would be to lie down in the beautiful cemetery and listen to organ music. Then I noticed the driver’s hands on the wheel. They were large, dirty hands, with large, dirty fingernails, and they made me mad.

  I reached for the gun on Marfeld’s knee. Marfeld pulled it away like somebody taking candy from a baby. My reactions were so feeble and dull it scared me. He rapped my knuckles with the gun muzzle.

  “How about that? The sleeper awakes.”

  My wooden tongue clacked around in my desiccated mouth and produced some words: “You jokers know the penalty for kidnapping?”

  “Kidnapping?” The driver had a twisted little face which sprouted queerly out of a massive body. He gave me a corkscrew look. “I didn’t hear of any kidnapping lately. You must of been dreaming.”

  “Yeah,” Marfeld said. “Don’t try to kid me, peeper. I was on the county cops for fifteen years. I know the law and what you can do and what you can’t do. You can’t go bulling into a private house with a deadly weapon. You was way out of line and I had a right to stop you. Christ, I could of killed you, they wouldn’t even booked me.”

  “Count your blessings,” the driver said. “You peepers, some of you, act like you think you can get away with murder.”

  “Somebody does.”

  Marfeld turned violently in the seat and pushed the gun muzzle into the side of my stomach. “What’s that? Say that again. I didn’t catch it.”

  My wits were still widely scattered around Los Angeles County. I had just enough of them with me to entertain a couple of ideas. They couldn’t be sure, unless I told them, that I had seen the girl in the bright room. If she was dead and they knew I knew, I’d be well along on my way to a closed-coffin funeral.

  “What was that about murder?”

  Marfeld leaned hard on the gun. I tensed my stomach muscles against its pressure. The taste of the little seeds they put in rye bread rose in my throat. I concentrated on holding it down.

  Marfeld got tired of prodding me after a while, and sat back with the gun on his knee. “Okay. You can do your talking to Mr. Frost.”

  He made it sound as if nothing worse could ever happen to me.

  chapter 12

  LEROY FROST was not only head of Helio-Graff’s private police force. He had other duties, both important and obscure. In certain areas, he could fix a drunk-driving or narcotics rap. He knew how to bring pressure to settle a divorce suit or a statutory-rape charge out of court. Barbiturate suicides changed, in his supple hands, to accidental overdoses. Having served for a time as deputy security chief of a Washington agency, he advised the editorial department on the purchase of scripts and the casting department on hiring and firing. I knew him slightly, about as well as I wanted to.

  The studio occupied a country block surrounded by a high white concrete wall on the far side of San Fernando. Twistyface parked the Lincoln in the semicircular drive. The white-columned colonial façade of the administration building grinned emptily into the sun. Marfeld got out and put my gun in his coat pocket and pointed the pocket at me.

  “March.”

  I marched. Inside in the vestibule a blue-uniformed guard sat in a glass cage. A second uniformed guard came out of the white oak woodwork. He led us up a curved ramp, along a windowless corridor with a cork floor and a glass roof, past rows of bigger-than-life-size photographs: the heads that Graff and, before him, Heliopoulos had blown up huge on the movie screens of the world.

  The guard unlocked a door with a polished brass sign: SECURITY. The room beyond was large and barely furnished with filing cabinets and typewriter desks, one of which was occupied by a man in earphones typing away like mad. We passed into an anteroom, with a single desk, unoccupied, and Marfeld disappeared through a further door which had Leroy Frost’s name on it.

  The guard stayed with me, his right hand near the gun on his hip. His face was heavy and blank and content to be heavy and blank. Its lower half stuck out like the butt end of a ham, in which his mouth was a small, meaningless slit. He stood with his chest pushed out and his stomach held in, wearing his unofficial uniform as though it was very important to him.

  I sat on a straight chair against the wall and didn’t try to make conversation. The dingy little room had the atmosphere of an unsuccessful dentist’s waiting-room. Marfeld came out of Frost’s office looking as if the dentist had told him he’d have to have all his teeth pulled. The uniform that walked like a man waved me in.

  I’d never seen Leroy Frost’s office. It was impressively large, at least the size of a non-producing director’s on long-term contract. The furniture was heavy but heterogeneous, probably inherited from various other rooms at various times: leather chairs and a camel-backed English settee and a bulging rosewood Empire desk which was big enough for table tennis.

  Frost sat behind the desk, holding a telephone receiver to his head. “Right now,” he said into it. “I want you to contact her right now.”

  He laid the receiver in its cradle and looked up, but not at me. I had to be made to realize how unimportant I was. He leaned back in his swivel chair, unbuttoned his waistcoat, buttoned it up again. It had mother-of-pearl buttons. There were crossed cavalry sabers on the wall behind him, and the signed photographs of several politicians.

  In spite of all this backing, and the word on the outer door, Frost looked insecure. The authority th
at thick brown eyebrows lent his face was false. Under them, his eyes were glum and yellowish. He had lost weight, and the skin below his eyes and jaw was loose and quilted like a half-sloughed snakeskin. His youthful crewcut only emphasized the fact that he was sick and prematurely aging.

  “All right, Lashman,” he said to the guard. “You can wait outside. Lew Archer and me, we’re buddy-buddy from way back.”

  His tone was ironic, but he also meant that I had eaten lunch at Musso’s with him once and made the mistake of letting him pick up the tab because he had been on an expense account and I hadn’t. He didn’t invite me to sit down. I sat down anyway, on the arm of one of the leather chairs.

  “I don’t like this, Frost.”

  “You don’t like it. How do you think I feel? Here I thought we were buddy-buddy like I said, I thought there was a basis of mutual live-and-let-live there. My God, Lew, people got to be able to have faith and confidence in each other, or the whole fabric comes to pieces.”

  “You mean the dirty linen you’re washing in public?”

  “Now what kind of talk is that? I want you to take me seriously, Lew, it offends my sense of fitness when you don’t. Not that I matter personally. I’m just another joe working my way through life—a little cog in a big machine.” He lowered his eyes in humility. “A very big machine. Do you know what our investment is, in plant and contracts and unreleased film and all?”

  He paused rhetorically. Through the window to my right, I could see hangarlike sound stages and a series of open sets: Brownstone Front, Midwestern Town, South Sea Village, and the Western Street where dozens of celluloid heroes had taken the death walk. The studio seemed to be shut down, and the sets were deserted, dream scenes abandoned by the minds that had dreamed them.

  “Close to fifteen million,” Frost said in the tone of a priest revealing a mystery. “A huge investment. And you know what its safety depends on?”

  “Sun spots?”

  “It isn’t sun spots,” he said gently. “The subject isn’t funny, fifteen million dollars isn’t funny. I’ll tell you what it depends on. You know it, but I’ll tell you anyway.” His fingers formed a Gothic arch a few inches in front of his nose. “Number one is glamour, and number two is goodwill. The two things are interdependent and interrelated. Some people think the public will swallow anything since the war—any stinking crud—but I know different. I’m a student of the problem. They swallow just so much, and then we lose them. Especially these days, when the industry’s under attack from all sides. We got to keep our glamour dry for the public. We got to hold on to our strategic goodwill. It’s psychological warfare, Lew, and I’m on the firing line.”