Росс Макдональд - The Barbarous Coast

The abstract words fluttered and swerved like bats in the twilit room. “Are you suggesting that Clarence Bassett could be a mass murderer?”

“By no means. I have been speaking most generally.”

“Why go to all the trouble?”

He gave me a complex look. There was sympathy in it, and tragic knowledge, and weariness. He had worn himself out in the Augean stables, and despaired of human action.

“I am an old man,” he said. “I lie awake in the night watches and speculate on human possibility. Are you familiar with the newer interpersonal theories of psychiatry? With the concept of folie à deux ?”

I said I wasn’t.

“Madness for two, it might be translated. A madness, a violence, may arise out of a relationship even though the parties to the relationship may be individually harmless. My nocturnal speculations have included Clarence Bassett and Isobel. Twenty years ago their relationship might have made a marriage. Such a relationship may also sour and deteriorate and make something infinitely worse. I am not saying that this is so. But it is a possibility worth considering, a possibility which arises when two persons have the same unconscious and forbidden desire. The same death-wish.”

“Did Bassett visit Mrs. Graff before her escape in March last year?”

“I believe he did. I would have to check the records.”

“Don’t bother, I’ll ask him personally. Tell me this, Dr. Frey: do you have anything more to go on than speculation?”

“Perhaps I have. If I had, I would not and could not tell you,” He raised his hand before his face in a faltering gesture of defense. “You deluge me with questions, sir, and there is no end to them. I am an old man, as I said. This is, or was, my dinner hour.”

He opened the door a second time. I thanked him and went out. He slammed the heavy front door behind me. The people on the twilit terraces turned pale, startled, purgatorial faces toward the source of the noise.

IT WAS FULL NIGHT when I got to Malibu. A single car stood in the Channel Club parking-lot, a beat-up prewar Dodge with Tony’s name on the steering-post. Inside the club, around the pool, there was nobody in sight. I knocked on the door of Clarence Bassett’s office and got no answer.

I walked along the gallery and down the steps to the pool-side. The water shivered under a slow, cold offshore wind. The place seemed very desolate. I was the last man at the party for sure.

I took advantage of this circumstance by breaking into Simon Graff’s cabaña . The door had a Yale-type lock which was easy to jimmy. I stepped in and turned on the light, half expecting to find someone in the room. But it was empty, its furnishings undisturbed, its pictures bright and still on the walls, caught out of time.

Time was running through me, harsh on my nerve-ends, hot in my arteries, impalpable as breath in my mouth. I had the sleepless feeling you sometimes get in the final hours of a bad case, that you can see around corners, if you want to, and down into the darkness in human beings.

I opened the twin doors of the dressing-rooms. Each had a back door opening into a corridor which led to the showers. The one on the right contained a gray steel locker and an assortment of men’s beach clothes: robes and swimming trunks, Bermuda shorts and sport shirts and tennis shoes.The one on the left, which must have been Mrs. Graff’s, was completely bare except for a wooden bench and an empty locker.

I switched on the light in the ceiling, uncertain what I was looking for. It was something vague yet specific: a sure sense of what had happened on that spring night when Isobel Graff had been running loose and the first young girl had died. For a second , Isobel had said, I was in there, watching us through the door, and listening to myself. Please pour me a drink.

I closed the door of her dressing-room. The louvers were set high in it, fairly wide apart, and loose, so that the windowless cubicle could air itself. By getting up on my toes, I could look down between the crosspieces into the outer room. Isobel Graff would have had to stand on the bench.

I dragged the bench over to the door and stood on it. Six inches below by eye-level, in the edge of one of the louvers, there was a series of indentations which looked like tooth-marks, around them a faint red lipstick crescent, dark with age. I examined the underside of the soft wooden strip and found similar markings. Pain jerked through my mind like a knotted string, pulling an image after it. It was pain for the woman who had stood on this bench in the dark, watching the outer room through the cracks between the louvers and biting down on the wood in agony.

I turned out the light and crossed the outer room and stood in front of Matisse’s Blue Coast lithograph. I had a fierce nostalgia for that brilliant, orderly world which had never quite existed. A world where nobody lived or died, held in the eye of a never-sinking sun.

Behind me someone cleared his throat delicately. I turned and saw Tony in the doorway, squinting against the light. His hand was on his gun butt.

“Mr. Archer, you broke the door?”

“I broke it.”

He shook his head at me in a monitory way, and stooped to look at the damage I had done. A bright scratch crossed the setting of the lock, and the edge of the wood was slightly dented. Tony’s blunt brown forefinger traced the scratch and the dent.

“Mr. Graff won’t like this, he is crazy about his cabaña , he furnished it all himself, not like the others.”

“When did he do that?”

“Last year, before the start of the summer season. He brought in his own decorators and cleaned it out like a whistle and put in all new stuff.” His gaze was serious, black, unwavering. He removed his peaked cap and scratched his gray-flecked head. “You the one that bust the lock on the fence gate, too?”

“I’m the one. I seem to be in a destructive mood today. Is it important?”

“Cops thought so. Captain Spero was asking me back and forth who bust the gate. They found another dead one on the beach, you know that, Mr. Archer?”

“Carl Stern.”

“Yah, Carl Stern. He was my nephew’s manager, one time. Captain Spero said it was one of these gang killings, but I dunno. What do you think?”

“I doubt it.”

Tony squatted on his heels just inside the open door. It seemed to make him nervous to be inside the Graffs’ cabaña . He scratched his head again, and ran thumb and finger down the grooves that bracketed his mouth. “Mr. Archer. What happened to my nephew Manuel?”

“He was shot and killed last night.”

“I know that. Captain Spero told me he was dead, shot in the eye.” Tony touched the lid of his left eye with his right forefinger. His upturned face resembled a cracked clay death mask.

“What else did Spero say?”

“I dunno. Said it was maybe another gang killing, but I dunno. He asked me, did Manuel have enemies? I told him, yah, he had one big enemy, name of Manuel Torres. What did I know about his life, his friends? He bust up from me long ago and went on his own road, straight down to hell in a low-top car.” Through the stoic Indian mask, his eyes shown with black, living grief, “I dunno, I coulden tear that boy loose from my heart. He was like my own son to me, one time.”

His bowed shoulders moved with his breathing. He said: “I’m gonna get out of this place, it’s bad luck for me and my family. I still got friends in Fresno. I ought to stayed in Fresno, never left it. I made the same mistake that Manuel made, thought I could come and take what I wanted. They wooden let me take it. They leave me with nothing, no wife, no daughter, no Manuel.”