The Barbarous Coast (28 page)

“I heard my wife. Where is she?”

I swung the flash-beam along the beach. Its cone of brilliance filled with swirling fog. Isobel Graff ran away from it. Black and huge on the gray air, her shadow ran
ahead of her. She seemed to be driving off a fury which dwarfed her and tormented her and mimicked all her movements.

Graff called her name again and ran after her. I followed along behind and saw her fall and get up and fall again. Graff helped her to her feet. They walked back toward me, slowly and clumsily. She dragged her feet and hung her head, turning her face away from the light. Graff’s arm around her waist propelled her forward.

I took the target pistol out of my belt and showed it to her. “Is this the gun you used to shoot Gabrielle Torres?”

She glanced at it and nodded mutely.

“No,” Graff said. “Admit nothing, Isobel.”

“She’s already confessed,” I said.

“My wife is mentally incompetent. Her confession is not valid evidence.”

“The gun is. The sheriff’s ballistics department will have the matching slugs. The gun and the slugs together will be unshakable evidence. Where did you get the gun, Graff?”

“Carl Walther made it for me, in Germany, many years ago.”

“I’m talking about the last twenty-four hours. Where did you get it this time?”

He answered carefully: “I have had it in my possession continuously for over twenty years.”

“The hell you have. Stern had it last night before he was killed. Did you kill him for it?”

“That is ridiculous.”

“Did you have him killed?”

“I did not.”

“Somebody knocked off Stern to get hold of this gun. You must know who it was, and you might as well tell me. Everything’s going to come out now. Not even your kind of money can stop it.”

“Is money what you want from me? You can have
money.” His voice dragged with contempt—for me, and perhaps for himself.

“I’m not for sale like Marfeld,” I said. “Your boss thug tried to buy me. He’s in the Vegas clink with a body to explain.”

“I know that,” Graff said. “But I am talking about a very great deal of money. A hundred thousand dollars in cash. Now. Tonight.”

“Where would you get that much in cash tonight?”

“From Clarence Bassett. He has it in his office safe. I paid it to him this evening. It was the price he set on the pistol. Take it away from him, and you can have it.”

T
HERE
was light in Bassett’s office. I knocked so hard that I bruised my knuckles. He came to the door in shirt sleeves. His face was putty-colored, with blue hollows under the eyes. His eyes had a Lazarus look, and hardly seemed to recognize me.

“Archer? What’s the trouble, man?”

“You’re the trouble, Clarence.”

“Oh, I
hope
not.” He noticed the couple behind me, and did a big take. “You’ve found her, Mr. Graff. I’m so glad.”

“Are you?” Graff said glumly. “Isobel has confessed everything to this man. I want my money back.”

Bassett’s face underwent a process of change. The end product of the process was a bright, nervous grin which resembled the rictus of a dead horse.

“Am I to understand this? I return the money, and we
drop the whole matter? Nothing more will be said?”

“Plenty more will be said. Give him his money, Clarence.”

He stood tense in the doorway, blocking my way. Visions of possible action flitted behind his pale-blue eyes and died. “It’s not here.”

“Open the safe and we’ll see for ourselves.”

“You have no warrant.”

“I don’t need one. You’re willing to co-operate. Aren’t you?”

He reached up and plucked at his neck above the open collar of his button-down shirt, stretching the loose skin and letting it pull itself back into place. “This has been a bit of a shock. As a matter of fact, I am willing to co-operate. I have nothing to hide.”

He turned abruptly, crossed the room, and took down the photograph of the three divers. A cylindrical safe was set in the wall behind it. I covered him with the target pistol as he spun the bright chrome dials. The gun he had used on Leonard was probably at the bottom of the sea, but there could be another gun in the safe. All the safe contained was money, though—bundles of money done up in brown bank paper.

“Take it,” Graff said. “It is yours.”

“It would only make a bum out of me. Besides, I couldn’t afford to pay the tax on it.”

“You are joking. You must want money. You work for money, don’t you?”

“I want it very badly,” I said. “But I can’t take this money. It wouldn’t belong to me, I would belong to it. It would expect me to do things, and I would have to do them. Sit on the lid of this mess of yours, the way Marfeld did, until dry rot set in.”

“It would be easy to cover up,” Graff said.

He turned a basilisk eye on Clarence Bassett. Bassett flattened himself against the wall. The fear of death invaded
his face and galvanized his body. He swatted the gun out of my hand, went down on his hands and knees, and got a grip on the butt. I snaked it away from him before he could consolidate his grip, lifted him by the collar, and set him in the chair at the end of his desk.

Isobel Graff had collapsed in the chair behind the desk. Her head was thrown back, and her undone hair poured like black oil over the back of the chair. Bassett avoided looking at her. He sat hunched far over to one side away from her, trembling and breathing hard.

“I’ve done nothing that I’m ashamed of. I shielded an old friend from the consequences of her actions. Her husband saw fit to reward me.”

“That’s the gentlest description of blackmail I ever heard. Not that blackmail covers what you’ve done. Are you going to tell me you knocked off Leonard and Stern to protect Isobel Graff?”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”

“When you tried to frame Isobel for the murder of Hester Campbell, was that part of your protection service?”

“I did nothing of the sort.”

The woman echoed him: “Clare did nothing of the sort.”

I turned to her. “You went to her house in Beverly Hills yesterday afternoon?”

She nodded.

“Why did you go there?”

“Clare told me she was Simon’s latest chippie. He’s the only one who tells me things, the only one who cares what happens to me. Clare said if I caught them together, I could force Simon to give me a divorce. Only she was already dead. I walked into the house, and she was already dead.” She spoke resentfully, as though Hester Campbell had deliberately stood her up.

“How did you know where she lived?”

“Clare told me.” She smiled at him in bright acknowledgement. “Yesterday morning when Simon was having his dip.”

“All this is utter nonsense,” Bassett said. “Mrs. Graff is imagining it. I didn’t even
know
where she lived, you can bear witness to that.”

“You wanted me to believe you didn’t, but you knew, all right. You’d had her traced, and you’d been threatening her. You couldn’t afford to let George Wall get to her while she was still alive. But you wanted him to get to her eventually. Which is where I came in. You needed someone to lead him to her and help pin the frame on him. Just in case it didn’t take, you sent Mrs. Graff to the house to give you double insurance. The second frame was the one that worked—at least, it worked for Graff and his brilliant cohorts. They gave you a lot of free assistance in covering up that killing.”

“I had nothing to do with it,” Graff said behind me. “I’m not responsible for Frost’s and Marfeld’s stupidity. They acted without consulting me.” He was standing by himself, just inside the door, as if to avoid any part in the proceedings.

“They were your agents,” I told him, “and you’re responsible for what they did. They’re accessory after the fact of murder. You should be handcuffed to them.”

Bassett was encouraged by our split. “You’re simply fishing,” he said. “I was fond of Hester Campbell, as you know. I had nothing against the girl. I had no reason to harm her.”

“I don’t doubt you were fond of her, in some peculiar way of your own. You were probably in love with her. She wasn’t in love with you, though. She was out to take you if she could. She ran out on you in September, and took along your most valuable possession.”

“I’m a poor man. I have no valuable possessions.”

“I mean this gun.” I held the Walther pistol out of his
reach. “I don’t know exactly how you got it the first time. I think I know how you got it the second time. It’s been passed around quite a bit in the last four months, since Hester Campbell stole it from your safe. She turned it over to her friend Lance Leonard. He wasn’t up to handling the shakedown himself, so he co-opted Stern, who had experience in these matters. Stern also had connections which put him beyond the reach of Graff’s strong-arm boys. But not beyond your reach.

“I’ll give you credit for one thing, Clarence. It took guts to tackle Stern, even if I did soften him up for you. More guts than Graff and his private army had.”

“I didn’t kill him,” Bassett said. “You know I didn’t kill him. You saw him leave.”

“You followed him out, though, didn’t you? And you didn’t come back for a while. You had time to slug him in the parking-lot, bundle him into his car, and drive it up the bluff where you could slit his throat and push him into the sea. That was quite an effort for a man your age. You must have wanted this gun back very badly. Were you so hungry for a hundred grand?”

Bassett looked up past me at the open safe. “Money had nothing to do with it.” It was his first real admission. “I didn’t know he had that gun in his car until he tried to pull it on me. I hit him with a tire-iron and knocked him out. It was kill or be killed. I killed him in self-defense.”

“You didn’t cut his throat in self-defense.”

“He was an evil man, a criminal, meddling in matters he didn’t understand. I destroyed him as you would destroy a dangerous animal.” He was proud of killing Stern. The pride shone in his face. It made him foolish. “A gangster and drug-peddler—is he more important than I? I’m a civilized man, I come from a good family.”

“So you cut Stern’s throat. You shot Lance Leonard’s eye
out. You beat in Hester Campbell’s skull with a poker. There are better ways to prove you’re civilized.”

“They deserved it.”

“You admit you killed them?”

“I admit nothing. You have no right to bullyrag me. You can’t prove a thing against me.”

“The police will be able to. They’ll trace your movements, turn up witnesses to pin you down, find the gun you used on Leonard.”

“Will they really?” He had enough style left to be sardonic.

“Sure they will. You’ll show them where you ditched it. You’ve started to tattle on yourself already. You’re no hard-faced pro, Clarence, and you shouldn’t try to act like one. Last night when it was over and the three of them were dead, you had to knock yourself out with a bottle. You couldn’t face the thought of what you had done. How long do you think you can hold out sitting in a cell without a bottle?”

“You hate me,” Bassett said. “You hate me and despise me, don’t you?”

“I don’t think I’ll answer that question. Answer one of mine. You’re the only one who can. What sort of man would use a sick woman as his cat’s-paw? What sort of man would cut a young girl like Gabrielle off from the light so he could collect a bounty on her death?”

Bassett made an abrupt squirming gesture of denial. The movement involved the entire upper half of his body, and resembled a convulsion. He said through rigid jaws:

“You’ve got it all wrong.”

“Then straighten me out.”

“What’s the use? You would never understand.”

“I understand more than you think. I understand that you spied on Graff when his wife was in the sanitarium.
You saw him using his
cabaña
for meetings with Gabrielle. You undoubtedly knew about the gun in his locker. Everything you knew or learned, you passed on to Isobel Graff. Probably you helped her to run away from the sanitarium, and provided her with the necessary pass-keys. It all adds up to remote-control murder. That much I understand. I don’t understand what you had against Gabrielle. Did you try for her yourself and lose her to Graff? Or was it just that she was young and you were getting old, and you couldn’t stand to see her living in the world?”

He stammered: “I had nothing to do with her death.” But he turned in his chair as if a powerful hand had him by the nape of the neck. He looked at Isobel Graff for the first time, quickly and guiltily.

She was sitting upright now, as still as a statue. A statue of a blind and schizophrenic Justice, stonily returning Bassett’s look:

“You did so, Clarence.”

“No, I mean I didn’t plan it that way. I had no idea of blackmail. I didn’t want to see her killed.”

“Who did you want to see killed?”

“Simon,” Isobel Graff said. “Simon was to be the one. But I spoiled everything, didn’t I, Clare? It was my fault it all went wrong.”

“Be quiet, Belle.” It was the first time that Bassett had spoken to her directly. “Don’t say anything more.”

“You intended to shoot your husband, Mrs. Graff?”

“Yes. Clare and I were going to be married.”

Graff let out a snort, half angry and half derisive. She turned on him:

“Don’t you dare laugh at me. You locked me up and stole my property. You treated me like a chattel-beast.” Her voice rose. “I’m
sorry
I didn’t kill you.”

“So you and your moth-eaten fortune-hunter could live happily ever after?”

“We could have been happy,” she said. “Couldn’t we, Clare? You love me, don’t you, Clare? You’ve loved me all these years.”

“All these years,” he said. But his voice was empty of feeling, his eyes were dead. “Now if you love me, you’ll be quiet, Belle.” His tone, brusque and unfriendly, denied his words.

He had rebuffed her, and she had a deep, erratic intuition. Her mood swung violently. “I know you,” she said in a hoarse monotone. “You want to blame me for everything. You want them to put me in the forever room and throw the key away. But you’re to blame, too. You said I could never be convicted of any crime. You said if I killed Simon
in fragrante—in flagrante
—the most they could do was lock me up for a while. Didn’t you say that, Clare? Didn’t you?”