Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“The answer is no and no.”

“I killed my father, too. I broke his heart. Shall I tell you my other crimes? It’s quite a decalogue. Envy and malice and pride and lust and rage. I’d sit at home and plan his death, by hanging, burning, shooting, drowning, poison. I’d sit at home and imagine him with them, all the young girls with their bodies and waving white legs. I sat at home and tried to have men friends. It never seemed to work out. They were exhausted by the heat and cold or else I frightened them. One of them told me I frightened him, the lousy little nance. They’d drink up my liquor and never come back.” She sipped from her glass. “Go ahead,” she said. “Drink up your liquor.”

“Drink up yours, Isobel. I’ll take you home. Where do you live?”

“Quite near here, on the beach. But I’m not going home. You won’t make me go home, will you? I haven’t been to a party for so long. Why don’t we go and dance? I am very ugly to look at, but I am a good dancer,”

“You are very beautiful, but I am a lousy dancer.”

“I’m ugly,” she said. “You mustn’t mock me. I know how ugly I am. I was born ugly through and through, and nobody ever loved me.”

The door opened behind her, swinging wide. Simon Graff appeared in the opening. His face was stony.

“Isobel! What kind of Walpurgisnacht is this? What are you doing here?”

Her reaction was slow, almost measured. She turned and rose from the stool. Her body was tense and insolent. The drink was shaking in her hand.

“What am I doing? I’m telling my secrets. I’m telling all my dirty little secrets to my dear friend.”

“You fool. Come home with me.”

He took several steps toward her. She threw her glass at his head. It missed him and dented the wall beside the door. Some of the liquid spattered his face.

“Crazy woman,” he said. “You come home now with me. I will call Dr. Frey.”

“I don’t have to go with you. You’re not my father.” She turned to me, the look of lopsided cunning still on her face. “Do I have to go with him?”

“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.

WE WENT along the gallery to his his office. His walk was a stiff-backed, high-shouldered march step. His movements seemed to be controled 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?”