Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“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 buffing into a private house with a deadly weapon. You was way cut 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 rut 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.

LEROY FROST was not only the 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 longterm 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 waist-coat, 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 that 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 hangar-like 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.