Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

“Did she tell you where she’d been?”

“No, she didn’t say a thing. Actually, she didn’t speak for days. Dr. Frey was worried for a while that she might be going into catatonia. Even when she did come out of it and started to talk again, she never mentioned that night – at least, not in words. I saw her in the crafts room, though, later in the spring. I saw some of the objects she made out of clay. I shouldn’t have been shocked after what I’ve seen in mental wards, but I was shocked by some of those objects.” She closed her eyes as if to shut out the sight of them, and went on in a hushed voice: “She used to make these girl dolls and pinch their heads off and destroy them part by part, like some sort of jungle witch. And horrible little men dolls with huge – organs. Animals with human faces, coupling. Guns and – parts of the human body, all mixed up.”

“Not nice,” I said, “but it wouldn’t necessarily mean anything, would it? Did she ever discuss these things with you?”

“Not with me, no. Dr. Frey doesn’t encourage the nurses to practice psychiatry.”

She turned in the seat and her knee nudged mine, withdrawing quickly. Her dark-blue gaze came up to my face. It was strange that a girl who had seen so much should have such innocent eyes.

“Will you be seeing Dr. Frey?” she said.

“Probably I will.”

“Please don’t tell him about me, will you?”

“There’s no reason why I should.”

“It’s a terrible breach of ethics, you know, for a nurse to talk about her patients. I’ve worried myself sick these last few months since I spilled out everything to Hester. I was such a fool. I believed that she was sincere for once in her life, that all she wanted was the truth about Gabrielle’s death. I should never have trusted her with dangerous information. It’s obvious what she wanted it for. She wanted to use it to blackmail Mrs. Graff.”

“How long have you known that, Rina?”

Her voice, or her candor, failed her for a time. I waited for her to go on. Her eyes were almost black with thought. She said: “It’s hard to say. You can know a thing and not know it. When you love a person, it takes so long to face the facts about them. I’ve really suspected the whole thing practically from the beginning. Ever since Hester left the Club and started living without any visible income. It came to a head on that horrible double date I told you about. Carl Stern got tight and started to boast about his new place in Vegas, and how he had Simon Graff under his thumb. And Hester sat there drinking it in, with stars in her eyes. I got a queer idea that she wanted me there to see how well she was doing. What a success she’d made of her life, after all. That was when I blew my top.”

“What was their reaction?”

“I didn’t wait for any reaction. I walked out of the place – we were in the Bar of Dixie – and went home in a taxi by myself. I never saw Hester again. I didn’t see any of them again, until yesterday when Lance called me.”

“To ask you to fly to Vegas under her name?”

She nodded.

“Why did you agree to do it?”

“You know why. I was supposed to be giving her an alibi.”

“It doesn’t explain why you wanted to.”

“Do I have to explain? I simply wanted to.” She added after a time: “I felt I owed it to Hester. In a way I’m as guilty as she is. This awful business would never have started if it hadn’t been for me. I’d got her into it, I felt it was up to me to get her out. But Hester was dead already, wasn’t she?”

A fit of shivering took hold of her, shaking her so that her teeth knocked together. I put my arm around her until the spasm passed. “Don’t blame yourself too much.”

“I have to. Don’t you see, if Isobel Graff killed Hester, I’m to blame?”

“I don’t see it. People are responsible for what they do themselves. Anyway, there’s some doubt in my mind that Isobel killed your sister. I’m not even certain that she shot Gabrielle Torres. I won’t be until I get hold of firm evidence; a confession, or an eyewitness, or the gun she used.”

“You’re just saying that.”

“No, I’m not just saying it. I jumped to certain conclusions too early in this case.”

She didn’t ask me what I meant, and that was just as well. I still had no final answers.

“Listen to me, Rina. You’re a girl with a lot of conscience, and you’ve taken some hard blows. You have a tendency to blame yourself for things. You were probably brought up to blame yourself for everything.”

She sat stiff in the circle of my arm. “It’s true. Hester was young and always getting into trouble, and Mother blamed me. Only, how did you know that? You have a great deal of insight.”

“Too bad it mostly takes the form of hindsight. Anyway, there’s one thing I’m sure of. You’re not responsible for what happened to Hester, and you didn’t do anything very wrong.”

“Do you really believe that?” She sounded astonished.

“Naturally I believe it.”

She was a good girl, as Mrs. Busch had said. She was also a very tired girl, and a sad and nervous girl. We sat in uneasy silence for a while. The hum of the engines had changed. The plane had passed the zenith of its flight and begun the long descent toward Los Angeles and the red sun. Before the plane touched earth, Rina had cried a little on my shoulder. Then she slept a little.

MY CAR was in the parking-lot at International Airport. Rina asked me to drop her off at her mother’s house in Santa Monica. I did so, without going in myself, and drove up Wilshire and out San Vicente to Dr. Frey’s sanitarium. It occupied walled grounds which had once belonged to a large private estate in the open country between Sawtelle and Brentwood. A male attendant in a business suit opened the automatic gate and told me that Dr. Frey was probably at dinner.

The central building was a white Edwardian mansion, with more recent additions, which stood on a terraced hillside. Dr. Frey lived in a guesthouse to one side of it. People who looked like anybody else were promenading on the terraces. Like anybody else, except that there was a wall around their lives. From Dr. Frey’s veranda, I could see over the wall, as far as the ocean. Fog and darkness were gathering on its convex surface. Below the horizon the lost sun smoldered like a great plane that had crashed and burned.

I talked to a costumed maid, to a gray-haired housekeeper, finally to Dr. Frey himself. He was a stoop-shouldered old man in dinner clothes, with a highball glass in his hand. Intelligence and doubt had deeply lined his face. The lines deepened when I told him that I suspected Isobel Graff of murder. He set his glass on the mantelpiece and stood in front of it, rather belligerently, as though I had threatened the center of his house.

“Am I to understand that you are a policeman?”

“A private detective. Later I’ll be taking this to the police. I came to you first.”

“I hardly feel favored,” he said. “You can’t seriously expect me to discuss such a matter, such an accusation, with a stranger. I know nothing about you.”

“You know quite a bit about Isobel Graff.”

He spread his long gray hands. “I know that I am a doctor and that she is my patient. What do you expect me to say?”

“You could tell me there’s nothing in it.”

“Very well, I do so. There is nothing in it. Now if you’ll excuse me, I have guests for dinner.”

“Is Mrs. Graff here now?”

He countered with a question of his own: “May I ask, what is your purpose in making these inquiries?”

“Four people have been killed, three of them in the last two days.”

He showed no surprise. “These people were friends of yours?”