Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

His silence stretched out. Finally he said: “I’m not as much of a coward as you think. I tried to tell the policemen, when they were asking me questions about the earring. But they weren’t interested in hearing about it.”

“Hearing about what?”

“If I’ve got to say it, I’ll say it. Gabrielle used to go in one of the cabañas practically every day and stay there for an hour or more.”

“All by herself?”

“You know I don’t mean that.”

“Who was with her, Joseph?”

I was almost certain what his answer would be. “Mr. Graff used to be with her.”

“You’re sure of that?”

“I’m sure. You don’t understand about Gabrielle. She was young and silly, proud that a man like Mr. Graff would take an interest in her. Besides, she wanted me to cover for her by taking orders in the other cabañas when she was – otherwise occupied. She wasn’t ashamed for me to know,” he added bitterly. “She was just ashamed for Mrs. Lamb to know.”

“Did they ever meet here at night?” I said. “Graff and Gabrielle?”

“Maybe they did. I don’t know. I never worked at night in those days.”

“She was in the Club the night she was killed,” I said. “We know that.”

“How do we know that? Tony found her on the beach.”

“The earring you found. Where was it you found it?”

“On the gallery in front of the cabañas . But she could have dropped it there any time.”

“Not if she was still wearing the other one. Do you know for a fact that she was, or is this just what they told you?”

“I know it for a fact. I saw it myself. When they were asking me questions, they took me down to where she was. They opened up the drawer and made me look at her. I saw the little white earring on her ear.”

Tears started in his eyes, the color of blue-black ink. Memory had given him a sudden stab. I said: “Then she must have been in the Club shortly before she was killed. When a girl loses one earring, she doesn’t go on wearing the other one. Which means that Gabrielle didn’t have time to notice the loss. It’s possible that she lost it at the precise time that she was being killed. I want you to show me where you found it, Joseph.”

Outside, first light was washing the eastern slopes of the sky. The sparse stars were melting in it like grains of snow on stone. Under the dawn wind, the pool was gray and restless like a coffined piece of the sea.

Tobias led me along the gallery, about half the length of the pool. We passed the closed doors of half-a-dozen cabañas , including Graff’s. I noticed that the spring had gone out of his walk. His sneakered feet slapped the concrete disconsolately. He stopped and turned to me: “It was right about here, caught in this little grid.” A circular wire grating masking a drain was set into a shallow depression in the concrete. “Somebody’d hosed down the gallery and washed it into the drain. I just happened to see it shine.”

“How do you know somebody hosed the gallery?”

“It was still wet in patches.”

“Who did it, do you know?”

“Could have been anybody, anybody that worked around the pool. Or any of the members. You never can tell what the members are going to do.”

“Who worked around the pool at that time?”

“Me and Gabrielle, mostly, and Tony and the lifeguard. No, there wasn’t any lifeguard just then – not until I took over in the summer. Miss Campbell was filling in as lifeguard.”

“Was she there that morning?”

“I guess she was. Yes, I remember she was. What are you trying to get at, Mr. Archer?”

“Who killed Gabrielle, and why and where and how,”

He leaned against the wall, his shoulders high. His eyes and mouth gleamed in his black basalt face. “For God’s sake, Mr. Archer, you’re not pointing the finger at me again?”

“No, I’d like your opinion. I think that Gabrielle was killed in the Club, maybe right on this spot. The murderer dragged her down to the beach, or else she crawled there under her own power. She left a trail of blood, which had to be washed away. And she dropped an earring, which didn’t get washed away.”

“A little earring isn’t much to go on.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

“You think Miss Campbell did all this?”

“It’s what I want your opinion about. Did she have any reason, any motive?”

“Could be she had.” He licked his lips. “She made a play for Mr. Graff herself, only he didn’t go for her.”

“Gabrielle told you this?”

“She told me Miss Campbell was jealous of her. She didn’t have to tell me. I can see things for myself.”

“What did you see?”

“The dirty looks between them, all that spring. They were still friends in a way, you know how girls can be, but they didn’t like each other the way they used to. Then, right after it happened, right after the inquest, Miss Campbell took off for parts unknown.”

“But she came back.”

“More than a year later she came back, after it all died down. She was still very interested in the case, though. She asked me a lot of questions this last summer. She gave me a story that her and her sister Rina were going to write it up for a magazine, but I don’t think that was their interest.”

“What kind of questions did they ask?”

“I don’t know,” he said wearily. “Some of the ones you asked me, I guess. You’ve asked me about a million of them now.”

“Did you tell her about the earring?”

“Maybe I did. I don’t remember. Does it matter?” He pushed himself away from the wall, shuffled across the gallery, and looked up at the whitening sky. “I got to go home and get some sleep, Mr. Archer. I go back on duty at nine o’clock.”

“I thought you never got tired.”

“I get depressed. You stirred up a lot of things I want to forget. In fact, you’ve been giving me kind of a hard time.”

“I’m sorry. I’m tired, too. It’ll be worth it, though, if we can solve this murder.”

“Will it? Say you do, then what will happen?” His face was grim in the gray light, and his voice drew on old reserves of bitterness. “The same thing will happen that happened before. The cops will take over your case and seal it off and nothing will happen, nobody get arrested.”

“Is that what happened before?”

“I’m telling you it did. When Marfeld saw he couldn’t railroad me, he suddenly lost interest in the case. Well, I lost interest, too.”

“I can go higher than Marfeld if I have to.”

“What if you do? It’s too late for Gabrielle, too late for me. It was always too late for me.”

He turned on his heel and walked away. I said after him: “Can I drop you someplace?”

“I have my own car.”

I SHOULD have handled it better. I walked to the end of the pool, the last man at the party, feeling that early-morning ebb of heart when the blood runs sluggish and cold. The fog had begun to blow out to sea. It foamed and poured in a slow cataract toward the obscure west. Black-marble patches of ocean showed through here and there.

I must have seen it and known what it was before I was conscious of it. It was a piece of black driftwood with a twist of root at one end, floating low in the water near the shore. It rode in slowly and discontinuously, pushed by a series of breaking waves. Its branches were very flexible for a log. A wave lodged it on the wet brown sand. It was a man in a dark, belted overcoat, lying face-down.

The gate in the fence was padlocked. I picked up a DO NOT RUN sign with a heavy concrete base and swung it at the padlock. The gate burst open. I went down the concrete steps and turned Carl Stern over onto his back. His forehead was deeply ridged where it had struck or been struck by a hard object. The wound in his throat gaped like a toothless mouth shouting silently.