The Barbarous Coast (26 page)

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 younger 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.

M
Y
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?”

“Hardly. Members of the human race, though.”

He said with the bitter irony of age: “So you are an altruist, are you? A Hollywood culture-hero in a sports coat? You propose to cleanse the Augean stables single-handed?”

“I’m not that ambitious. And I’m not your problem, doctor. Isobel Graff is. If she killed four people, or one, she ought to be put away where she can’t kill any more. Don’t you agree?”

He didn’t answer me for a minute. Then he said: “I signed voluntary commitment papers for her this morning.”

“Does that mean she’s on her way to the state hospital?”

“It should, but I’m afraid it doesn’t.” It was the third time in three minutes that he’d been afraid. “Before the papers could be—ah—implemented, Mrs. Graff escaped. She was very determined, much more so than we bargained for. I confess error. I should have had her placed in maximum security. As it was, she broke a reinforced window with a chair and made good her escape in the back of a laundry truck.”

“When was this?”

“This morning, shortly before the lunch hour. She hasn’t been found as yet.”

“How hard is she being looked for?”

“You’ll have to ask her husband. His private police are searching. He forbade—” Dr. Frey compressed his lips and reached for his drink. When he had sipped it: “I’m afraid I can’t submit to further interrogation. If you were an official—” He shrugged, and the ice tinkled in his glass.

“You want me to call the police in?”

“If you have evidence.”

“I’m asking you for evidence. Did Mrs. Graff kill Gabrielle Torres?”

“I have no way of knowing.”

“What about the others?”

“I can’t say.”

“You’ve seen her and talked to her?”

“Of course. Many times. Most recently this morning.”

“Was her mental condition consistent with homicide?”

He smiled wearily. “This is not a courtroom, sir. Next you’ll be framing a hypothetical question. Which I would refuse to answer.”

“The question isn’t hypothetical. Did she shoot Gabrielle Torres on the night of March 21 last year?”

“It may not be hypothetical, but the question is certainly academic. Mrs. Graff is mentally ill now, and she was ill on March 21 of last year. She couldn’t possibly be convicted of murder, or any other crime. So you are wasting both our times, don’t you think?”

“It’s only time, and I seem to be getting somewhere. You’ve practically admitted that she did that shooting.”

“Have I? I don’t think so. You are a very pertinacious young man, and you are making a nuisance of yourself.”

“I’m used to that.”

“I am not.” He moved to the door and opened it. Male laughter came from the other side of the house. “Now if you will transport your rather shopworn charm to another location, it will save me the trouble of having you thrown out.”

“One more question, doctor. Why did she pick that day in March to run away? Did she have a visitor that day, or the day before?”

“Visitor?” I had succeeded in surprising him. “I know nothing of any visitors.”

“I understand Clarence Bassett visited her regularly here.”

He looked at me, eyes veiled like an old bird’s. “Do you have a paid spy among my employees?”

“It’s simpler than that. I’ve talked to Bassett. As a matter of fact, he brought me into this case.”

“Why didn’t you say so? I know Bassett very well.” He closed the door and took a step toward me. “He hired you to investigate these deaths?”

“It started out as a missing-girl case and turned into a murder case before I found her. The girl’s name was Hester Campbell.”

“Why, I know Hester Campbell. I’ve known her for years at the Club. I gave her sister a job.” He paused, and the slight excitement ran through him and drained away. The only trace it left was a tremor in the hand that held his glass. He sipped from the glass to conceal its clinking. “Is Hester Campbell one of the victims?”

“She was beaten to death with a poker yesterday afternoon.”

“And you have reason to believe that Mrs. Graff killed her?”

“Isobel Graff is involved, I don’t know how deeply. She was at the scene of the crime, apparently. Her husband seems to accept her guilt. But that’s not conclusive. Isobel may have been framed. Another possibility is this, that she has been used as a cat’s-paw in these killings. I mean that she committed them, physically, but was incited to do it by somebody else. Would she be open to that kind of suggestion?”

“The more I know of the human mind, the less I know.” He tried to smile, and failed miserably. “I predicted that you would be asking hypothetical questions.”

“I keep trying not to, doctor. You seem to attract them. And you haven’t answered my question about Bassett’s visits here.”

“Why, there was nothing unusual in them. He visited Mrs.
Graff every week, I believe, sometimes more frequently when she asked for him. They were very close—indeed, they’d been engaged to be married at one time, many years ago, before her present marriage. I sometimes think she should have married Clarence instead of the man she did marry. He has an almost feminine quality of understanding, which she was badly in need of. Neither of them is adequate to stand alone. Together, if marriage had been possible for them, they might have made a functioning unit.” His tone was elegiac.

“What do you mean when you say that neither of them is adequate?”

“It should be obvious in the case of Mrs. Graff. She has been subject to schizophrenic episodes since her middle teens. She has remained, in a sense, a teen-aged girl inside of a middle-aged body—unable to cope with the demands of adult life.” He added with a trace of bitterness: “She has received little help from Simon Graff.”

“Do you know what caused her illness?”

“The etiology of this disease is still mysterious, but I think I know something of this particular case. She lost her mother young, and Peter Heliopoulos was not a wise father. He pushed her towards maturity, at the same time deprived her of true human contact. She became in a social sense his second wife before she even reached puberty. Great demands were made on her as his little hostess, as the spearhead of his social ambition. The very vulnerable spearhead. These demands were too great for one who was perhaps predisposed from birth to schizophrenia.”

“What about Clarence Bassett? Is he mentally ill?”

“I have no reason to think so. He is the manager of my club, not my patient.”

“You said he was inadequate.”

“I meant in the social and sexual sense. Clarence is the perennial bachelor, the giver of other people’s parties, the
man who is content to dwell on the sidelines of life. His interest in women is limited to young girls, and to flawed women like Isobel who have failed to outlive their childhood. All this is typical, and part of his adjustment.”

“His adjustment to what?”

“To his own nature. His weakness requires him to avoid the storm centers of life. Unfortunately, his adjustment was badly shaken, several years ago, by his mother’s death. Since then he has been drinking heavily. I would hazard the guess that his alcoholism is essentially a suicidal gesture. He is literally drowning his sorrows. I suspect he would be glad to join his beloved mother in the grave.”

“You don’t regard him as potentially dangerous?”

The doctor answered after a thinking pause: “Perhaps he could be. The death-wish is powerfully ambivalent. It can be turned against the self or against others. Inadequate men have been known to try to complete themselves in violence. A Jack the Ripper, for instance, is probably a man with a strong female component who is trying to annul it in himself by destroying actual females.”