The Barbarous Coast (19 page)

“I don’t know. Is he your legal guardian?”

Graff answered: “Yes, I am. You will keep out of this.” He said to her: “There is nothing but grief for you, for all of us, if you try to break loose from me. You would be really lost.” There was a new quality in his voice, a largeness and a darkness and an emptiness.

“I’m lost now. How lost can a woman get?”

“You will find out, Isobel. Unless you come with me and do as I say.”

“Svengali,” I said. “Very old-hat.”

“Keep out of this, I warn you.” I felt his glance like an icicle parting my hair. “This woman is my wife.”

“Lucky her.”

“Who are you?” I told him.

“What are you doing in this club, at this party?”

“Watching the animals.”

“I expect a specific answer.”

“Try using a different tone, and you might get one.” I came around the end of the bar and stood beside Isobel Graff. “You’ve been spoiled by all those yes-men in your life. I happen to be a no-man.”

He looked at me in genuine shock. Maybe he hadn’t been contradicted for years. Then he remembered to be angry, and turned on his wife:

“Did he come here with you?”

“No.” She sounded intimidated. “I thought he was one of your guests.”

“What is he doing in this
cabaña?”

“I offered him a drink. He helped me. A man hit me.” Her voice was monotonous, threaded by a whine of complaint.

“What man hit you?”

“Your friend Carl Stern,” I said. “He slapped her around and pushed her down. Bassett and I threw him out.”

“You threw him out?” Graff’s alarm turned to anger, which he directed against his wife again: “You permitted this, Isobel?”

She hung her head and assumed an awkward, ugly posture, standing on one leg like a schoolgirl.

“Didn’t you hear me, Graff? Or don’t you object to thugs pushing your wife around?”

“I will look after my wife in my own way. She is mentally disturbed, sometimes she requires to be firmly handled. You are not needed. Get out.”

“I’ll finish my drink first, thank you.” I added conversationally: “What did you do with George Wall?”

“George Wall? I know no George Wall.”

“Your strong-arm boys do—Frost and Marfeld and Lashman.”

The names piqued his interest. “Who is this George Wall?”

“Hester’s husband.”

“I am not acquainted with any Hester.”

His wife gave him a swift, dark look, but said nothing. I fixed him with my steeliest glance and tried to stare him down. It didn’t work. His eyes were like holes in a wall; you looked through them into a great, dim, empty place.

“You’re a liar, Graff.”

His face turned purple and white. He went to the door and called Bassett in a loud, trembling voice. When Bassett appeared, Graff said: “I want this man thrown out. I don’t permit party-crashers—”

“Mr. Archer is not exactly a party-crasher,” Bassett said coolly.

“Is he a friend of yours?”

“I think of him as a friend, yes. A friend of brief standing, shall we say. Mr. Archer is a detective, a private detective I hired for personal reasons.”

“What reasons?”

“A crackpot threatened me last night. I hired Mr. Archer to investigate the matter.”

“Instruct him, then, to leave my friends alone. Carl Stern is an associate of mine. I want him treated with respect.”

Bassett’s eyes gleamed wetly, but he stood up to Graff. “I am manager of this club. As long as I am, I’ll set the standards for the behavior of the guests. No matter whose friends they are.”

Isobel Graff laughed tinnily. She had sat down on her coat, and was plucking at the fur.

Graff clenched his fists at his sides and began to shake. “Get out of here, both of you.”

“Come along, Archer. We’ll give Mr. Graff a chance to recover his manners.”

Bassett was white and scared, but he carried it off. I didn’t know he had it in him.

W
E
went along the gallery to his office. His walk was a stiff-backed, high-shouldered march step. His movements seemed to be controlled by a system of outside pressures that fitted him like a corset.

He brought glasses out of his portable bar and poured me a stiff slug of whisky, a stiffer one for himself. The bottle was a different bottle from the one I had seen in the morning, and it was nearly empty. Yet the long day’s drinking, like a passage of years, had improved Bassett in some ways. He’d lost his jaunty self-consciousness, and he wasn’t pretending
to be younger than he was. The sharp skull pressed like a death mask behind the thin flesh of his face.

“That was quite a performance,” I said. “I thought you were a little afraid of Graff.”

“I am, when I’m totally sober. He’s on the board of trustees, and you might say he controls my job. But there are limits to what a man can put up with. It’s rather wonderful not to feel frightened, for a change.”

“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble.”

“Don’t worry about me. I’m old enough to look after myself.” He waved me into a chair and sat behind his desk with the half-glass of neat whisky in his hand. He drank from it and regarded me over the rim. “What brings you here, old man? Has something happened?”

“Plenty has happened. I saw Hester tonight.”

He looked at me as though I’d said that I had seen a ghost.

“You saw her? Where?”

“In her house in Beverly Hills. We had some conversation, which got us nowhere—”

“Tonight?”

“Around midnight, yes.”

“Then she’s alive!”

“Unless she was wired for sound. Did you think she was dead?”

It took him a while to answer. His eyes were wet and glassy. Behind them, something obscure happened to him. I guessed he was immensely relieved. “I was mortally afraid that she was dead. I’ve been afraid all day that George Wall was going to kill her.”

“That’s nonsense. Wall has disappeared himself. He may be in a bad way. Graff’s people may have killed him.”

Bassett wasn’t interested in Wall. He came around the desk and laid a tense hand on my shoulder. “You’re not lying to me? You’re certain that Hester’s all right?”

“She was all right, physically, a couple of hours ago. I
don’t know what to make of her. She looks and talks like a nice girl, but she’s involved with the crummiest crew in the Southwest. Carl Stern, for instance. What do you make of her, Bassett?”

“I don’t know what to make of her. I never have.”

He leaned on the desk, pressed his hand to his forehead, and stroked his long horse face. His eyelids lifted slowly. I could see the dull pain peering out from under them.

“You’re fond of her, aren’t you?”

“Very fond of her. I wonder if you can understand my feeling for the girl. It’s what you might call an avuncular feeling. There’s nothing—nothing fleshly about it at all. I’ve known Hester since she was an infant, her and her sister, too. Her father was one of our members, one of my dearest friends.”

“You’ve been here a long time.”

“Twenty-five years as manager. I was a charter member of the Club. There were twenty-five of us originally. Each of us put up forty thousand dollars.”

“You put up forty thousand?”

“I did. Mother and I were fairly well fixed at one time, until the crash of ’29 wiped us out. When that happened, my friends in the Club offered me the post of manager. This is the first and only job I’ve ever had.”

“What happened to Campbell?”

“He drank himself to death. As I am doing, on a somewhat retarded schedule.” Grinning sardonically, he reached for his glass and drained it. “His wife was a silly woman, completely impractical. Lived up Topanga Canyon after Raymond’s death. I did what I could for the fatherless babes.”

“You didn’t tell me all this yesterday morning.”

“No. I was brought up not to boast of my philanthropies.”

His speech was very formal, and slightly blurred. The whisky was getting to him. He looked from me to the bottle, his eyes swiveling heavily. I shook my head. He poured another
quadruple shot for himself, and sipped at it. If he drank enough of it down, there would be no more pain behind his eyelids. Or the pain would take strange forms. That was the trouble with alcohol as a sedative. It floated you off reality for a while, but it brought you back by a route that meandered through the ash-dumps of hell.

I threw out a question, a random harpoon before he floated all the way down to Lethe: “Did Hester doublecross you?”

He looked startled, but he handled his alcohol-saturated words with care: “What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”

“It was suggested to me that Hester stole something from you when she left here.”

“Stole from me? Nonsense.”

“She didn’t rob your safe?”

“Good Lord, no. Hester wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not that I have anything worth stealing. We handle no cash at the club, you know, all our business is done by chit—”

“I’m not interested in that. All I want is your word that Hester didn’t rob your safe in September.”

“Of course she didn’t. I can’t imagine where you got such a notion. People have such poisonous tongues.” He leaned toward me, swaying slightly. “Who was it?”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“I say it does matter. You should check your sources, old man. It’s character-assassination. What kind of a girl do you think Hester is?”

“It’s what I’m trying to find out. You knew her as well as anyone, and you say she isn’t capable of theft.”

“Certainly not from me.”

“From anyone?”

“I don’t know what she’s capable of.”

“Is she capable of blackmail?”

“You ask the weirdest questions—weirder and weirder.”

“Earlier in the day, you didn’t think blackmail was so farfetched.
You might as well be frank with me. Is Simon Graff being blackmailed?”

He wagged his head solemnly. “What could Mr. Graff be blackmailed for?”

I glanced at the photograph of the three divers. “Gabrielle Torres. I’ve heard that there was a connection between her and Graff.”

“What kind of connection?”

“Don’t pretend to be stupid, Clarence. You’re not. You knew the girl—she worked for you. If there was a thing between her and Graff, you’d probably know it.”

“If there was,” he said stolidly, “it never came to my knowledge.” He meditated for a while, swaying on his feet. “Good Lord, man, you’re not suggesting he
killed
her?”

“He could have. But Mrs. Graff was the one I had in mind.”

Bassett gave me a stunned and murky look. “What a perfectly dreadful notion.”

“That’s what you’d say if you were covering for them.”

“But thish ish utterly—” He grimaced and started over: This is utterly absurd and ridiculous—”

“Why? Isobel is crazy enough to kill. She had a motive.”

“She isn’t crazy. She was—she did have serious emotional problems at one time.”

“Ever been committed?”

“Not committed, I don’t believe. She’s been in a private sanitorium from time to time. Dr. Frey’s in Santa Monica.”

“When was she in last?”

“Last year.”

“What part of last year?”

“All of it. So you shee—” He waved his hand in front of his face, as if a buzzing fly had invaded his mouth. “You see, it’s quite impossible. Isobel was incarcerated at the time the girl was shot. Absolutely imposhible.”

“Do you know this for a fact?”

“Shertainly I do. I visited her regularly.”

“Isobel is another old friend of yours?”

“Shertainly is. Very dear old friend.”

“Old enough and dear enough to lie for?”

“Don’t be silly. Ishobel wouldn’t harm a living creashur.”

His eyes were clouding up, as well as his voice, but the glass in his hand was steady. He raised it to his mouth and drained it, then sat down rather abruptly on the edge of his desk. He swayed gently from side to side, gripping the empty glass in both hands as though it was his only firm support.

“Very dear old friend,” he repeated sentimentally. “Poor Ishbel, hers is a tragic story. Her mother died young, her father gave her everything but love. She needed sympathy, someone to talk to. I tried to be that shomeone.”

“You did?”

He gave me a shrewd, sad look. The jolt of whisky had partly and temporarily sobered him, but he had reached the point of diminishing returns. His face was the color of boiled meat, and his thin hair hung lank at the temples. He detached one hand from its glass anchor and pushed his hair back.

“I know it sounds unlikely. Remember, this was twenty years ago. I wasn’t always an old man. At any rate, Isobel liked older men. She was devoted to her father, but he couldn’t give her the understanding she needed. She’d just flunked out of college, for the third or fourth time. She was terribly withdrawn. She used to spend her days here, alone on the beach. Gradually she discovered that she could talk to me. We talked all one summer and into the fall. She wouldn’t go back to school. She wouldn’t leave me. She was in love with me.”

“You’re kidding.”

I was deliberately needling him, and he reacted with alcoholic emotionalism. Angry color seeped into his capillaries, stippling his gray cheeks with red:

“It’s true, she loved me. I’d had emotional problems of my own, and I was the only one who understood her. And she respected me! I am a Harvard man, did you know that? I spent three years in France in the first war. I was a stretcher-bearer.”

That would make him about sixty, I thought. And twenty years ago he would have been forty to Isobel’s twenty, say.

“How did you feel about her?” I said. “Avuncular?”

“I loved her. She and my mother were the only two women I ever loved. And I’d have married her, too, if her father hadn’t stood in the way. Peter Heliopoulos disapproved of me.”

“So he married her off to Simon Graff.”

“To Simon Graff, yah.” He shuddered with the passion of a weak and timid man who seldom lets his feelings show. “To a climber and a pusher and a whoremonger and a cheat. I knew Simon Graff when he was an immigrant nobody, a nothing in this town. Assistant director on quickie Westerns with one decent suit to his name. I liked him, he pretended to like me. I lent him money, I got him a guest membership in the Club, I introduced him to people. I introduced him to Heliopoulos, by heaven. Within two years he was producing for Helio, and married to Isobel. Everything he has, everything he’s done, has come out of that marriage. And he hasn’t the common decency to treat her decently!”