The Barbarous Coast (13 page)

Call me trouble looking for a place to happen. I went around to the side of the house, through a creaking wooden gate into a walled patio. The flagstone paving was uneven under my feet. Crab grass grew rank in the spaces between the stones. I made my way among wrought-iron tables and disemboweled chaises to a pair of French doors set into the wall.

My flashlight beam fell through dirty glass into a lanai full of obscene shadows. They were cast by rubber plants and cacti growing in earthenware pots. I reversed the light and used its butt to punch out one of the panes, drew back a reluctant bolt, and forced the door open.

The house was mostly front, like the buildings on Graff’s sets. Its rear had been given over to ghosts and spiders. Spiders had rigged the lanai’s bamboo furniture and black oak rafters with loops and hammocks and wheels of dusty webbing. I felt like an archæologist breaking into a tomb.

The door at the end of the lanai was unlocked. I passed through a storeroom full of once-expensive junk: high, unsittable Spanish chairs, a grand piano with grinning yellow keys, brownish oil paintings framed in gilt: through another door, into the central hallway of the house. I crossed to the door of the living-room.

White walls and a half-beamed ceiling rose in front of me, supported by the upward beam from my light. I lowered it to the floor, which was covered with ivory carpeting. White and black sectional furniture, low-slung and cubistic, was grouped in angular patterns around the room. The fireplace was faced with black tile and flanked by a square white leather hassock. On the other side of the fireplace, a faint dark patch showed in the carpet.

I got down on my knees and examined it. It was a wet spot the size of a large dinner plate, of no particular color.
Through the odor of detergent, and under the other odors in the room, perfume and cigarette smoke and sweet mixed drinks, I could smell blood. The odor of blood was persistent, no matter how you scrubbed.

Still on my knees, I turned my attention to the raised fireplace. It was equipped with a set of brass fire tools in a rack: brush, shovel, a pair of leather bellows with brass handles. The set was new, and looked as if it had never been used or even touched. Except that the poker was missing.

Beyond the fireplace there was a doorless arch which probably opened into the dining-room. Most of the houses of this style and period had similar floor plans, and I had been in a lot of them. I moved to the arch, intending to go over the rest of the downstairs, then the upstairs.

A motor droned in the street. Light washed the draped front windows and swept past. I went to the end window and looked out through the narrow space between the drape and the window frame. The old black Lincoln was standing in the driveway. Marfeld was at the wheel, his face grotesquely shadowed by the reflection of the headlights. He switched them off and climbed out.

Leroy Frost got out on the far side. I knew him by his hurrying feeble walk. The two men passed within three or four feet of me, headed for the front door. Frost was carrying a glinting metal rod which he used as a walking-stick.

I went through the archway into the next room. In its center a polished table reflected the wan light filtered through lace-curtained double windows. A tall buffet stood against the wall inside the arch, a chair in the corner behind it. I sat down in the deep shadow, with my flashlight in one hand and my gun in the other.

I heard a key turn in the front door, then Leroy Frost’s voice, jerking with strain:

“I’ll take the key. What happened to the other key?”

“Lance give it to the pig.”

“That was a sloppy way to handle it.”

“It was your idea, chief. You told me not to talk to her myself.”

“All right, as long as she got it.” Frost mumbled something indistinguishable. I heard him shuffling in the entrance to the living-room. Suddenly he exploded: “Where is the goddam light? You been in and out of this house, you expect me to grope around in the dark all night?”

The lights went on in the living-room. Footsteps crossed it. Frost said:

“You didn’t do a very good job on the rug.”

“I did the best I could in the time. Nobody’s gonna go over it with a fine-tooth comb, anyway.”

“You hope. You better bring that hassock over here, cover it up until it dries. We don’t want her to see it.”

Marfeld grunted with effort. I heard the hassock being dragged across the carpet.

“Fine,” Frost said. “Now wipe my prints off the poker and put it where it belongs.”

There was the sound of metal coming in contact with metal.

“You sure you got it clean, chief?”

“Don’t be a birdbrain, it isn’t the same poker. I found a match for it in the prop warehouse.”

“I be damned, you think of everything.” Marfeld’s voice was moist with admiration. “Where did you ditch the other one?”

“Where nobody’s going to find it. Not even you.”

“Me? What would I want with it?”

“Skip it.”

“Hell, don’t you
trust
me, chief?”

“I trust nobody. I barely trust myself. Now let’s get out of here.”

“What about the pig? Don’t we wait for her?”

“No, she won’t be here for a while. And the less she sees of us, the better. Lance told her what she’s supposed to do, and we don’t want her asking us questions.”

“I guess you’re right.”

“I don’t need you to tell me I’m right. I know more about heading off blackmail than any other two men in this town. Bear it in mind in case you develop any ideas.”

“I don’t get it, chief. What kind of ideas you mean?” Marfeld’s voice was full of injured innocence.

“Ideas of retiring, maybe, with a nice fat pension.”

“No, sir. Not me, Mr. Frost.”

“I guess you know better, at that. You try to put the bite on me or any friend of mine—it’s the quickest way to get a hole in the head to go with the hole in the head you already got.”

“I know that, Mr. Frost. Christ amighty, I’m
loyal
. Didn’t I prove it to you?”

“Maybe. Are you sure you saw what you said you saw?”

“When was that, chief?”

“This afternoon. Here.”

“Christ, yes.” Marfeld’s plodding mind caught the implication and was stung by it. “Christ, Mr. Frost, I wouldn’t lie to you.”

“You would if you did it yourself. That would be quite a trick, to do a murder and con the organization into covering for you.”

“Aw now, chief, you wouldn’t accuse me. Why would I kill anybody?”

“For kicks. You’d do it for kicks, any time you thought you could get away with it. Or to make yourself into a hero, if you had a few more brains.”

Marfeld whined adenoidally: “Make myself into a hero?”

“Yah, Marfeld to the rescue, saving the company’s cookies for it again. It’s kind of a coincidence that you been in on both killings, Johnny-on-the-spot. Or don’t you think so?”

“That’s crazy, chief, honest to God.” Marfeld’s voice throbbed with sincerity. It ran down, and began on a new note: “I been loyal all my life, first to the sheriff and then to you. I never asked for anything for myself.”

“Except a cash bonus now and then, eh?” Frost laughed. Now that Marfeld was jittery, too, Frost was willing to forgive him. His laughter rustled like a Santa Ana searching among dry leaves. “Okay, you’ll get your bonus, if I can get it past the comptroller.”

“Thank you, chief. I mean it very sincerely.”

“Sure you do.”

The light went out. The front door closed behind them. I waited until the Lincoln was out of hearing, and went upstairs. The front bedroom was the only room in use. It had quilted pink walls and a silk-canopied bed, like something out of a girl’s adolescent dream. The contents of the dressing-table and closet told me that the girl had been spending a lot of money on clothes and cosmetics, and hadn’t taken any of it with her.

I
LEFT
the house the way I had entered, and drove up into the Canyon. A few sparse stars peered between the streamers of cloud drifting along the ridge. Houselights on the slopes islanded the darkness through which the road ran white under my headlight beam. Rounding a high curve, I could see the glow of the beach cities far below to my left, phosphorescence washed up on the shore.

Lance Leonard’s house was dark. I parked on the gravel shoulder a hundred yards short of the entrance to his driveway. Its steep grade was slippery with fog. The front door was locked, and nobody answered my knock.

I tried the garage door. It opened easily when I lifted the handle. The Jaguar had returned to the fold, and the motorcycle was standing in its place. I moved between them to the side entrance. This door wasn’t locked.

The concentric ovals of light from my flash slid ahead of me across the floor of the utility room, the checkerboard linoleum in the kitchen, the polished oak in the living-room, up along the glass walls on which the gray night pressed heavily, around and over the fieldstone-faced fireplace, where a smoking log was disintegrating into talc-like ash and dull-red flakes of fire. The mantel held a rack of pipes and a tobacco jar, an Atmos clock which showed that it was three minutes to eleven, a silver-framed glamour shot of Lance Leonard smiling with all his tomcat charm.

Lance himself was just inside the front door. He wore a plaid evening jacket and midnight-blue trousers and dull-blue dancing-pumps, but he wasn’t going anywhere. He lay on his back with his toes pointing at opposite corners of the ceiling. One asphalt eye looked into the light, unblinking. The other had been broken by a bullet.

I put on gloves and got down on my knees and saw the second bullet wound in the left temple. It was bloodless. The hair around it was singed, the skin peppered with powder marks. I covered the floor on my hands and knees. Pushing aside one of the stiff legs, I found a used copper shellcase, medium caliber. Apparently it had rebounded from the wall or from the murderer’s clothes and rolled across the floor where Leonard fell on it.

It took me a long time to find the second shell. I opened the front door, finally, and saw it glinting in the crack between the lintel and the concrete stoop. I squatted in the
doorway with my back to the dead man and tried to reconstruct his murder. It looked simple enough. Someone had knocked on the door, waited with a gun for Lance to open it, shot him in the eye, shot him again after he fell to make certain, and gone away, closing the door behind him. The door had a self-locking mechanism.

I left the shells where they were, and shook down the rest of the house. The living-room was almost as impersonal as a hotel room. Even the pipes on the mantel had been bought by the set, and only one of them had ever been smoked. The tobacco in the jar was bone dry. There was nothing but tobacco in the jar, nothing but wood in the woodbox. The portable bar in one corner was well stocked with bottles, most of which were unopened.

I went into the bedroom. The blond oak chests of drawers were stuffed with loot from the Miracle Mile haberdasheries: stacks of shirts custom-made out of English broadcloth and wool gabardine and Madras, hand-painted ties, Argyle socks, silk scarves, a rainbow of cashmere sweaters. A handkerchief drawer contained gold cufflinks and monogrammed tie-bars; a gold identification bracelet engraved with the name Lance Leonard; a tarnished medal awarded to Manuel Torres (it said on the back) for the Intermediate Track and Field Championships, Serena Junior High School, 1945; five expensive wristwatches and a stopwatch. The boy had been running against time.

I looked into the closet. A wooden shoe-rack held a dozen pairs of shoes to go with the dozen suits and jackets hanging above them. A double-barreled shotgun stood in a corner beside a two-foot pile of comic books and crime magazines. I leafed through some of the top ones: Fear, Lust, Horror, Murder, Passion.

On the shelves at the head of the bed there were some other books of a different kind. A morocco-bound catechism inscribed in a woman’s hand: “Manuel Purificación Torres,
1943” An old life of Jack Dempsey, read to pieces, whose flyleaf bore the legend: “Manny ‘Terrible’ Torres, 1734 West Nopal Street, Los Angeles, California, The United States, The Western Hemisfear, the World, The Universe.” A manual of spoken English whose first few pages were heavily underscored in pencil. The name on the flyleaf of this one was Lance Leonard.

The fourth and final book was a stamped-leather album of clippings. The newspaper picture on the first page showed a boyish Lance leaning wide-shouldered and waspwaisted into the camera. The caption stated that Manny Torres was being trained by his Uncle Tony, veteran club-fighter, and experts conceded him an excellent chance of capturing the lightweight division of the Golden Gloves. There was no follow-up to this. The second entry was a short account of Lance Torres’ professional debut; he had knocked out another welterweight in two minutes of the second round. And so on for twenty fights, through six-rounders up to twelve. None of the clippings mentioned his arrest and suspension.

I replaced the album on the shelf and went back to the dead man. His breast pocket contained an alligator billfold thick with money, a matching address book filled with girls’ names and telephone numbers scattered from National City to Ojai. Two of the names were Hester Campbell and Rina Campbell. I wrote down their Los Angeles telephone numbers.

There was a gold cigarette case full of reefers in the side pocket of his dinner jacket. In the same pocket, I found an engraved invitation in an envelope addressed to Lance Leonard, Esq., at the Coldwater Canyon address. Mr. and Mrs. Simon Graff requested his presence at a Roman Saturnalia to be held at the Channel Club tonight.

I put everything back and stood up to leave, turned at the door for a final look at the boy. He lay exhausted by his
incredible leap from nowhere into the sun. His face was old-ivory in the flashlight beam. I switched it off and let the darkness take him.

“Lance Manuel Purificación Torres Leonard,” I said out loud by way of epitaph.

Outside, a wisp of cloud dampened my face like cold and meager tears. I climbed on heavy legs to my car. Before I started the motor, I heard another motor whining up the grade from the direction of Ventura Boulevard. Headlights climbed the hanging cloud. I left my own lights off.