The Barbarous Coast Page 9

  “So you send your troopers out to push citizens around. You want a testimonial from me?”

  “You’re not just any old ordinary citizen, Lew. You get around so fast and you make so many mistakes. You go bucketing up to Lance Leonard’s house and invade his privacy and throw your weight around. I was on the phone to Lance just now. It wasn’t smart what you did, and it wasn’t ethical, and nobody’s going to forget it.”

  “It wasn’t smart,” I admitted.

  “But it was brilliant compared with the rest of it. Merciful God, Lew, I thought you had some feeling for situations. When we get to the payoff—you trying to force your way into the house of a lady who shall be nameless—” He spread his arms wide and dropped them, unable to span the extent of my infamy.

  “What goes on in that house?” I said.

  He munched the inside corner of his mouth, watching my face. “If you were smart, as smart as I used to think, you wouldn’t ask that question. You’d let it lie. But you’re so interested in facts, I’ll tell you the one big fact. The less you know, the better for you. The more you know, the worse for you. You got a reputation for discretion. Use it.”

  “I thought I was.”

  “Uh-uh, you’re not that stupid, kiddo. Nobody is. Your neck’s out a mile, and you know it. You follow the thought, or do I have to spell it out in words of one syllable?”

  “Spell it out.”

  He got up from behind the desk. His sick yellow glance avoided mine as he moved around me. He leaned on the back of my chair. His allusive little whisper was scented with some spicy odor from his hair or mouth:

  “A nice fellow like you that percolates around where he isn’t wanted—he could stop percolating period.”

  I stood up facing him. “I was waiting for that one, Frost. I wondered when we were getting down to threats.”

  “Call me Leroy. Hell, I wouldn’t threaten you.” He repudiated the thought with movements of his shoulders and hands. “I’m not a man of violence, you know that. Mr. Graff doesn’t like violence, and I don’t like it. That is, when I can prevent it. The trouble with a high-powered operation like this one, sometimes it runs over people by accident when they keep getting in the way. It’s our business to make friends, see, and we got friends all over, Vegas, Chicago, all over. Some of them are kind of rough, and they might get an idea in their little pointed heads—you know how it is.”

  “No. I’m very slow on the uptake. Tell me more.”

  He smiled with his mouth; his eyes were dull yellow flint. “The point is, I like you, Lew. I get a kick out of knowing that you’re in town, in good health and all. I wouldn’t want your name to be bandied about on the long-distance telephone.”

  “It’s happened before. I’m still walking around, and feeling pretty good.”

  “Let’s keep it that way. I owe it to you to be frank, as one old friend to another. There’s a certain gun that would blast you in a minute if he knew what you been up to. For his own reasons he’d do it, in his own good time. And it could be he knows now. That’s a friendly warning.”

  “I’ve heard friendlier. Does he have a name?”

  “You’d know it, but we won’t go into that.” Frost leaned forward across the back of the chair, his fingers digging deep into the leather. “Get wise to yourself, Lew. You trying to get yourself killed and drag us down with you, or what?”

  “What’s all the melodrama about? I was looking for a woman. I found her.”

  “You found her? You mean you saw her—you talked to her?”

  “I didn’t get to talk to her. Your goon stopped me at the door.”

  “So you didn’t actually see her?”

  “No,” I lied.

  “You know who she is?”

  “I know her name. Hester Campbell.”

  “Who hired you to find her? Who’s behind this?”

  “I have a client.”

  “Come on now, don’t go fifth-amendment on me. Who hired you, Lew?”

  I didn’t answer.

  “Isobel Graff? Did she sick you onto the girl?”

  “You’re way off in left field.”

  “I used to play left field. Let me tell you something, just in case it’s her. She’s nothing but trouble—schizzy from way back. I could tell you things about Isobel you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Try me.”

  “Is she the one?”

  “I don’t know the lady.”

  “Scout’s honor?”

  “Eagle Scout’s honor.”

  “Then where’s the trouble coming from? I got to know, Lew. It’s my job to know. I got to protect the Man and the organization.”

  “What do you have to protect them against?” I said experimentally. “A murder rap?”

  The experiment got results. Fear crossed Leroy Frost’s face like a shadow chased by shadows. He said very mildly and reasonably: “Nobody said a word about murder, Lew. Why bring up imaginary trouble? We got enough real ones. The trouble I’m featuring just this minute is a Hollywood peeper name of Archer who is half smart and half stupid and who has been getting too big for his goddam breeches.” While he spoke, his fear was changing to malice. “You going to answer my question, Lew? I asked you who’s your principal and why.”

  “Sorry.”

  “You’ll be sorrier.”

  He came around the chair and looked me up and down and across like a tailor measuring me for a suit of clothes. Then he turned his back on me, and flipped the switch on his intercom.

  “Lashman! Come in here.”

  I looked at the door. Nothing happened. Frost spoke into the intercom again, on a rising note:

  “Lashman! Marfeld!”

  No answer. Frost looked at me, his yellow eyes dilating.

  “I wouldn’t slug a sick old man,” I said.

  He said something in a guttural voice which I didn’t catch. Outside the window, like his echo vastly amplified, men began to shout. I caught some words:

  “He’s comin’ your way.” And further off: “I see him.”

  A pink-haired man in a dark suit ran under the window, chasing his frenzied shadow across the naked ground. It was George Wall. He was running poorly, floundering from side to side and almost falling. Close behind him, like a second bulkier shadow struggling to make contact with his heels, Marfeld ran. He had a gun in his hand.

  Frost said: “What goes on?”

  He cranked open the casement window and shouted the same question. Neither man heard him. They ran on in the dust, up Western Street, through the fake tranquillity of Midwestern Town. George’s legs were pumping weakly, and Marfeld was closing up the distance between them. Ahead of George, in South Sea Village, Lashman jumped into sight around the corner of a palm-thatched hut.

  George saw him and tried to swerve. His legs gave under him. He got up, swaying in indecision as Lashman and Marfeld converged on him. Marfeld’s shoulder took him in the side, and he went down again. Lashman dragged him up to his feet, and Marfeld’s dark bulk blotted out his face.

  Frost was leaning on the window sill, watching the distant figures. Marfeld’s shoulder, leaning over George, moved in a jerky rhythm from side to side. I pushed Frost out of the way—he was light as straw—and went out through the window and across the lot.

  Marfeld and Lashman were fascinated and oblivious. Marfeld was pistol-whipping George while Lashman held him up. Blood streaked his blind face and spotted his charcoal-gray suit. I noticed the irrelevant fact that the suit belonged to me: I’d last seen it hanging in my bedroom closet. I moved on them in ice-cold anger, got one hand on Marfeld’s collar and the other on the slippery barrel of the gun. I heaved. The man and the gun came apart. The man went down backward. The gun stayed in my hand. It belonged to me, anyway. I reversed it and held it on Lashman:

  “Turn him loose. Let him down easy.”

  The little, cruel mouth in his big jaw opened and closed. The fever left his eyes. He laid George out on the white imported sand. The boy was out, with the whit
es of his eyes glaring.

  I took the revolver off Lashman’s hip, stepped back and included Marfeld in the double line of fire. “What are you cookies up to, or you just do this for fun?”

  Marfeld got to his feet, but he remained silent. Lashman answered the guns in my hands politely:

  “The guy’s a crackpot. He bust into Mr. Graff’s office, threatened to kill him.”

  “Why would he do that?”

  “It was something about his wife.”

  “Button it down,” Marfeld growled. “You talk too much, Lashman.”

  There were muffled footsteps in the dust behind me. I circled Marfeld and Lashman, and backed against the bamboo wall of a hut. Frost and the guard from the vestibule were crossing the lot toward us. This guard had a carbine on his arm. He stopped, and raised it into firing position.

  “Drop it,” I said. “Tell him to drop it, Frost.”

  “Drop it,” he said to the guard.

  The carbine thudded on the ground and sent up a little dust cloud. The situation was mine. I didn’t want it.

  “What goes on?” Frost said in a querulous tone. “Who is he?”

  “Hester Campbell’s husband. Kick him around some more if you really want bad publicity.”

  “Jesus Christ!”

  “You better get him a doctor.”

  Nobody moved. Frost slid his hand up under his waistcoat and fingered his rib-cage to see if his heart had stopped. He said faintly:

  “You brought him here?”

  “You know better than that.”

  “The guy tried to kill Mr. Graff,” Lashman said virtuously. “He was chasing Mr. Graff around the office.”

  “Is Graff all right?”

  “Yeah, sure. I heard the guy yelling and run him out of there before he did any damage.”

  Frost turned to the guard who had dropped the carbine: “How did he get in?”

  The man looked confused, then sullen. He broke his lips apart with difficulty:

  “He had a press card. Said he had an appointment with Mr. Graff.”

  “You didn’t clear it with me.”

  “You were busy, you said not to disturb—”

  “Don’t tell me what I said. Get out of here. You’re finished here. Who hired you?”

  “You did, Mr. Frost.”

  “I ought to be shot for that. Now get out of my sight.” His voice was very mild. “Tell anybody about this, anybody at all, and you might as well leave town, it’ll save you hospital bills.”

  The man’s face had turned a grainy white, the color of rice pudding. He opened and closed his mouth several times without speaking, turned on his heel, and trudged toward the gate.

  Frost looked down at the bloody man in the sand. He whined with pity, all of it for himself:

  “What am I going to do with him?”

  “Move your butt and get him an ambulance.”

  Frost turned his measuring look on me. Over it, he tried on a Santa Claus smile that didn’t fit. A fluttering tic in one eyelid gave him the air of having a secret understanding with me:

  “I talked a little rough back there in the office. Forget it, Lew. I like you. As a matter of fact, I like you very much.”

  “Get him an ambulance,” I said, “or you’ll be needing one for yourself.”

  “Sure, in a minute.” He rolled his eyes toward the sky like a producer having an inspiration. “I been thinking for some time, long before this came up, we can use you in the organization, Lew. How would you like to go to Italy, all expenses paid? No real work, you’ll have men under you. It’ll be a free vacation.”

  I looked at his sick, intelligent face and the cruel, stupid faces of the two men beside him. They went with the unreal buildings which stood around like the cruel, sick pretense of a city.

  “I wouldn’t let you pay my way to Pismo Beach. Now turn around and walk, Frost. You too, Marfeld, Lashman. Stay close together. We’re going to a telephone and call the Receiving Hospital. We’ve wasted enough time.”

  I had very little hope of getting out of there and taking George out with me. I merely had to try. What hope I had died a sudden death. Two men appeared ahead of us in Midwestern Town, running stooped over behind a clean white picket fence. One was the guard Frost had fired. Both of them had Thompson guns at the ready.

  They saw me and ducked behind a deep front porch with an old-fashioned glider on it. Frost and his goons stopped walking. I said to Frost’s back:

  “You’re going to have to handle this with care. You’ll be the first one drilled. Tell them to come out into the middle of the street and put their tommyguns down.”

  Frost turned to face me, shaking his head. Out of the tail of my left eye, I saw a third man running and crouching toward me, hugging the walls of the South Sea huts. He had a riot gun. I felt like a major strike which was being broken. Frost made a mock-lugubrious face which fitted all his wrinkles.

  “You’d never get out alive.” He raised his voice. “Drop ’em, Lew. I’ll count to three.”

  The man in the tail of my left eye was on his elbows and knees, crawling. He lay still and aimed as Frost began to count. I dropped the guns on the count of two. Marfeld and Lashman turned at the sound.

  Frost nodded. “Now you’re being smart.”

  Marfeld scooped up the guns. Lashman took a step forward. He had a black leather sap in his right hand. The man with the riot gun was on his feet now, trotting. The commandos behind the front porch came out from behind it, cautiously at first and then more quickly. The one Frost had fired had a silly, sickly grin on his face. He was ashamed of what he was doing, but couldn’t stop doing it.

  Away off on the other side of the lot, Simon Graff stood in a doorway and watched Lashman swing his sap.

  chapter 13

  TIME began to tick again, in fits and starts. Pain glowed in my mind like lightning in a cloud, expanding and contracting with my heartbeat. I lay on my back on a hard surface. Somewhere above me, Lance Leonard said through flutter and wow:

  “This is a neat layout Carlie’s got himself here. I been out here plenty of times. He gives me the run of the place. I get the use of it any time he’s away. It’s swell for dames.”

  “Be quiet.” It was Frost.

  “I was just explaining.” Leonard’s voice was aggrieved. “I know this place like I know the back of my hand. Anything you want, any kind of booze or wine, I can get it for you.”

  “I don’t drink.”

  “Neither do I. You on drugs?”

  “Yah, I’m on drugs,” Frost said bitterly. “Now shut it off. I’m trying to think.”

  Leonard subsided. I lay in the unblessed silence for a while. Sunlight was hot on my skin and red through my eyelids. When I raised my eyelids slightly, scalpels of light probed the inside of my head.

  “His eyelids just fluttered,” Leonard said.

  “Better take a look at him.”

  Boots scraped concrete. I felt a toe in my side. Leonard squatted and pulled open one of my eyelids. I had turned up my eyes.

  “He’s still out.”

  “Throw some water on him. There’s a hose on the other side of the pool.”

  I waited, and felt its stream gush into my face, hot from the sun, then lukewarm. I let a little of the water run into my dry mouth.

  “Still out,” Leonard said glumly. “What if he don’t wake up? What do we do then?”

  “That’s your friend Stern’s problem. He will, though. He’s a hardhead, bone all the way through. I almost wish he wouldn’t.”

  “Carlie ought to been here long ago. You think his plane crashed?”

  “Yah, I think his plane crashed. Which makes you a goddam orphan.” There was a rattlesnake buzz in Frost’s voice.

  “You’re stringing me, ain’t you? Aren’t you?” Leonard was dismayed.

  Frost failed to answer him. There was another silence. I kept my eyes shut, and sent a couple of messages down the red-lit avenues behind them. The first one took a long time get
ting there, but when it arrived it flexed the fingers of my right hand. I willed my toes to wiggle, and they wiggled. It was very encouraging.

  A telephone rang behind a wall.

  “I bet that’s Carlie now,” Leonard said brightly.

  “Don’t answer it. We’ll sit here and guess who it is.”

  “You don’t have to get sarcastic. Flake can answer it. He’s in there watching television.”

  The telephone hadn’t rung again. A sliding wall hissed in its grooves and bumped. Twistyface’s voice said:

  “It’s Stern. He’s in Victorville, wants to be picked up.”

  “Is he still on the line?” Leonard asked.

  “Yeah, he wants to talk to you.”

  “Go and talk to him,” Frost said. “Put him out of his misery.”

  Footsteps receded. I opened my eyes, looked up into glaring blue sky in which the declining sun hung like an inverted hot-plate. I raised my pulsating head, a little at a time. A winking oval pool was surrounded on three sides by a blue Fiberglas fence, on the fourth side by the glass wall of an adobe-colored desert house. Between me and the pool, Frost sat lax in a long aluminum chair under a blue patio umbrella. He was half-turned away from me, listening to a murmur of words from the house. An automatic hung from his limp right hand.

  I sat up slowly, leaning my weight on my arms. My vision had a tendency to blur. I focused on Frost’s neck. It looked like a scrawny plucked rooster’s, easy to wring. I gathered my legs under me. They were hard to control, and one shoe scraped the concrete.

  Frost heard the little sound it made. His eyes swiveled toward me. His gun came up. I crawled toward him anyway, dripping reddish water. He scrambled out of the long chair and backed toward the house.