Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“Not that it would have done me any good,” she added wryly. “He was no more interested in me than I was in him. He spent the evening in various nightclubs playing footsie with Lance under the table. Hester didn’t notice, or maybe she didn’t care. She could be very dense about certain things. I cared, though, for her sake. Finally I told them off and walked out on the three of them.”

“What did you say to them?”

“Just the plain unvarnished truth. That Carl Stern was a pederast and probably much worse, and Hester was crazy to fool around with him and his pretty-boy.”

“Did you mention blackmail?”

“Yes. I told them I suspected it.”

“That was a dangerous thing to do. It gave Stern a reason to want you dead. I’m pretty sure he meant to kill you last night. Lucky for you he died first.”

“Really? I can’t believe–” But she believed it. Her dry throat refused to function. She sat swallowing. “Just because I – because I suspected something?”

“Suspected him of blackmail, and called him a fag. Killing always came easy to Stern. I went over his rap sheet this afternoon – the Nevada authorities have a full file on him. No wonder he couldn’t get a gambling license in his own name. Back in the thirties he was one of Anastasia’s boys, suspected of implication in over thirty killings.”

“Why wasn’t he arrested?”

“He was, but they couldn’t convict him. Don’t ask me why. Ask the politicians that ran the cops in New York and Jersey and Cleveland and the other places. Ask the people that voted for the politicians. Stern ended up in Vegas, but he belonged to the whole country. He worked for Lepke, for Game Boy Miller in Cleveland, for Lefty Clark in Detroit, for the Trans America gang in L.A. He finished his apprenticeship under Siegel, and after Siegel got it he went into business for himself.”

“What sort of business?”

“Wire service for bookies, narcotics, prostitution, anything with a fast and dirty buck in it. He was a millionaire, all right, several times over. He sank a million in the Casbah alone.”

“I don’t understand why he would go in for blackmail. He didn’t need the money.”

“He was Syndicate-trained, and blackmail’s been one of their main sources of power ever since Maffia days. No, it wasn’t money he needed. It was status. Simon Graff’s name gave him his chance to go legit, to really build himself into the countryside.”

“And I helped him.” The bones had come out in her face so that it was almost ugly. “I made it possible. I could bite my tongue out.”

“Before you do, I wish you’d explain what you mean.”

She drew in her breath sharply. “Well, in the first place, I’m a psychiatric nurse.”

She fell silent. It was hard for her to get started.

“So your mother told me,” I said.

She gave me a sidelong glance. “When did you run into Mother?”

“Yesterday.”

“What did you think of her?”

“I liked her.”

“Really?”

“I like women in general, and I’m not hypercritical.”

“I am,” Rina said. “I’ve always been suspicious of Mother and her little airs and graces and her big ideas. And it was mutual. Hester was her favorite, her little pal. Or she was Hester’s little pal. She spoiled my sister rotten, at the same time made terrible demands on her: all she wanted was for Hester to be great.

“I sat on the side lines for fifteen years and watched the two girls play emotional ping-pong. Or pong-ping. I was the not-so-innocent bystander, the third one that made the crowd, the one that wasn’t simpatico .” It sounded like a speech she’d rehearsed to herself many times. There was bitterness in her voice, tempered with resignation. “I broke it up as soon as Mother would let me, as soon as I finished high school. I went into nurse’s training in Santa Barbara, and took my P.G. work at Camarillo.”

Talking about her profession, or talking out her feelings about her family, had given her back some of her self-assurance. She held her shoulders straighter, and her breasts were bold.

“Mother thought I was crazy. We had a knockdowndragout quarrel the first year, and I haven’t seen much of Mother since. It just happens I like doing things for sick people, especially working with disturbed people. Need to be needed, I guess. My main interest now is occupational therapy. It’s mainly what I’m doing with Dr. Frey.”

“This is the Dr. Frey who runs the sanitarium in Santa Monica?”

She nodded. “I’ve worked there for over two years.”

“So you know Isobel Graff.”

“Do I ever. She was admitted to the san not long after I started there. She’d been in before, more than once. The doctor said she was worse than usual. She’s schizophrenic, you know, has been for twenty years, and when it’s acute she develops paranoid delusions. The doctor said they used to be directed against her father when he was alive. This time they were directed against Mr. Graff. She believed that he was plotting against her, and she was going to get him first.

“Dr. Frey thought Mr. Graff should have her locked up for his own protection. Every now and then a paranoid delusion erupts into action. I’ve seen it happen. Dr. Frey gave her a series of metrazol treatments, and she gradually came out of the acute phase and quieted down. But she was still quite remote when this thing happened. I still wouldn’t turn my back on her. But Dr. Frey said she wasn’t dangerous, and he knew her better than I did and, after all, he was the doctor.

“In the middle of March, he gave her the run of the grounds. I shouldn’t second guess a doctor, but that’s where he made his mistake. She wasn’t ready for freedom. The first little thing that happened set her off.”

“What did happen?”

“I don’t know exactly. Perhaps someone made a thoughtless remark, or simply looked at her in the wrong tone of voice. Paranoid people are like that, almost like radio receivers. They pick a tiny signal out of the air and build it up with their own power until they can’t hear anything else. Whatever happened, Isobel took off, and she was gone all night.

“When she came back, she was really in a bad way. With that terrible glazed look on her face, like a fish with a hook in its mouth. She was right back where she started in January – worse.”

“What night was she gone?”

“March 21, the first day of spring. I’m not likely to forget the date. A girl I used to know in Malibu, a girl named Gabrielle Torres, was killed that same night. I didn’t connect the two events at the time.”

“But you do now?”

She inclined her head somberly. “Hester made the connection for me. You see, she knew something I hadn’t known, that Simon Graff and Gabrielle were – lovers.”

“When did this come out?”

“One day last summer when we had lunch together. Hester was practically on her uppers then, I used to buy her lunch whenever I could. We were gossiping about this and that, and she brought up the case. It seemed to be on her mind: she was back at the Channel Club at the time, giving diving lessons. She told me about the love affair; apparently Gabrielle had confided in her. Without thinking what I was doing, I told her Isobel Graff had escaped that night. Hester reacted like a Geiger counter, and started asking me questions. I thought her only interest was in tracking down the person who killed her friend. I let down my back hair and told her all I knew, about Isobel and her runout and her mental condition when she came back.

“I had the early-morning duty that day, and I was the one who looked after her until Dr. Frey got there. Isobel dragged herself in some time around dawn. She was in bad shape, and not just mentally. She was physically exhausted. I think now she must have walked and run and crawled along the shore all the way from Malibu. The surf must have caught her, too, because her clothes were wet and matted with sand. I gave her a hot bath first thing.”