Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“A private one.”

“Yeah, private. That’s for me. These county cops, who can trust ’em? They run around in their fancy automobiles and arrest people for no-taillight or throw-a-beer-can-in-the-highway-ditch. Something real bad happens, they ain’t there.”

“They’re usually there, Tony.”

“Maybe. I seen some funny things in my time. Like what happened last year, right in my own family.” His head turned slowly to the left, under intangible but irresistible pressure, until he was looking at the girl in the white dress. “I guess you heard about Gabrielle, my daughter.”

“Yes. I heard.”

“Shot on the beach, I found her. March twenty-first, last year. She was gone all night supposed to be with a girl friend. I found her in the morning, eighteen years old, my only daughter.”

“I’m sorry.”

His black glance probed my face, gauging the depth of my sympathy. His wide mouth was wrenched by the pain of truth-telling: “I ain’t no bleeding heart. It was my fault, I seen it coming. How could I bring her up myself? A girl without a mother? A pretty young girl?” His gaze rotated in a quarter-circle again, and returned to me. “What could I tell her what to do?”

“What happened to your wife, Tony?”

“My wife?” The question surprised him. He had to think for a minute. “She run out on me, many years now. Run away with a man, last I heard she’s in Seattle, she’s always crazy for men. My Gabrielle took after her, I think. I went to Catholic Welfare, ask them what I should do, my girl is running out of control like a loco mare in heat – I didden say that to the Father, not them words.

“The Father says, put her in a convent school, but it was too much money. Too much money to save my daughter’s life. All right, I saved the money, I got the money in the bank, nobody to spend it for.” He turned and said to the Virgin: “I am a dirty old fool.”

“You can’t live their life for them, Tony.”

“No. What I could do, I coulda kept her locked up with good people looking after her. I coulda kept Manuel out of my house.”

“Did he have something to do with her death?”

“Manuel is in jail when it happens. But he was the one started her running wild. I didden catch on for a long time, he taught her to lie to me. It was high-school basketball, or swimming team, or spend-the-night-with-a-friend. Alla time she was riding around on the back of motorcycles from Oxnard, learning to be a dirty–” His mouth clamped down on an unspoken word.

After a pause, he went on more calmly: “That girl I seen with Manuel on the Venice Speedway in the low-top car. Hester Campbell. She’s the one Gabrielle’s supposed to spend the night with, the night that she got killed. Then you come here this morning asking about Manuel. It started me thinking, about who done it to her. Manuel and the blondie girl, why do they get together, can you tell me?”

“Later on I may be able to. Tell me, Tony, is thinking all you’ve been doing?”

“Huh?”

“Did you leave the Club today or tonight? Did you see your nephew Manuel?”

“No. No to both questions.”

“How many guns do you have?”

“Just the one.”

“What caliber?”

“Forty-five Colt revolver.” His mind was one-track and too preoccupied to catch the inference. “Here.”

He reached behind the mashed pillow and handed me his revolver. Its chambers were full, and it showed no signs of having been fired recently. In any case, the shells I had found beside his nephew’s body were medium-caliber, probably thirty-two’s.

I hefted the Colt. “Nice gun.”

“Yeah. It belongs to the Club. I got a permit to carry it.”

I gave it back to him. He pointed it at the floor, sighting along the barrel. He spoke in a very old voice, dry, sexless, dreadful: “If I ever know who killed her, this is what he gets. I don’t wait for crooked cops to do my business.” He leaned forward and tapped my arm with the barrel, very lightly: “You’re a detective, mister, find me who killed my girl, you can have all I got. Money in the bank, over a thousand dollars, I save my money these days. Piece of rented property onna beach, mortgage all paid off.”

“Keep it that way. And put the gun away, Tony.”

“I was a gunner’s mate in the World War Number One. I know how to handle guns.”

“Prove it. Too many people would get a boot out of it if I got myself drilled in a shooting accident.”

He slipped the revolver under the pillow and stood up. “It’s too late, huh? Nearly two years, a long time. You are not interested in wild-duck cases, you got other business.”

“I’m very much interested. In fact, this is why I wanted to talk to you.”

“It’s what you call a coincidence, eh?” He was proud of the word.

“I don’t believe much in coincidences. If you trace them back far enough, they usually have a meaning. I’m pretty sure this one has.”

“You mean,” he said slowly, “Gabrielle and Manuel and Manuel’s blondie?”

“And you, and other things. They all fit together.”

“Other things?”

“We won’t go into them now. What did the cops tell you last March?”

“No evidence, they said. They poked around here a few days and closed down the case. They said some robber, but I dunno. What robber shoots a girl for seventy-five cents?”

“Was she raped?”

Something like dust gathered on the surface of his anthracite eyes. The muscles stood out in his face like walnuts of various sizes in a leather bag, altering its shape. I caught a glimpse of the gamecock passion that had held him up for six rounds against Armstrong in the old age of his legs.

“No rape,” he said with difficulty. “Doctor at the autopsy says a man was with her some time in the night. I don’t wanna talk about it. Here.”

He stooped and dragged the suitcase out from under the bed, flung it open, rummaged under a tangle of shirts. Stood up breathing audibly with a dog-eared magazine in his hand.

“Here,” he said violently. “Read it.”

It was a lurid-covered true-crime book which fell open to an article near the middle entitled “The Murder of the Violated Virgin.” This was an account of the murder of Gabrielle Torres, illustrated with photographs of her and her father, one of which was a smudgy reproduction of the photograph on the wall. Tony was shown in conversation with a sheriff’s plainclothesman identified in the caption as Deputy Theodore Marfeld. Marfeld had aged since March of the previous year. The account began:

It was a balmy Spring night at Malibu Beach, gay playground of the movie capital. But the warm tropical wind that whipped the waves shoreward seemed somehow threatening to Tony Torres, onetime lightweight boxer and now watchman at the exclusive Channel Club. He was not easily upset after many years in the squared circle, but tonight Tony was desperately worried about his gay young teen-aged daughter, Gabrielle.

What could be keeping her? Tony asked himself again and again. She had promised to be in by midnight at the latest. Now it was three o’clock in the morning, now it was four o’clock, and still no Gabrielle. Tony’s inexpensive alarm clock ticked remorselessly on. The waves that thundered on the beach below his modest seaside cottage seemed to echo in his ears like the very voice of doom itself. . . .

I lost patience with the clichés and the excess verbiage, which indicated that the writer had nothing much to say. He hadn’t. The rest of the story, which I scanned in a hurry, leered a great deal under a veil of pseudo-poetic prose, on the strength of a few facts: Gabrielle had a bad reputation. There had been men in her life, unnamed. Her body had been found to contain male seed and two bullets. The first bullet had inflicted a superficial wound in her thigh. This had bled considerably. The implication was that several minutes at least had elapsed between the firing of the first bullet and the firing of the second. The second had entered her back, found its way through the ribs, and stopped her heart.