The Barbarous Coast

by Ross Macdonald

  “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.

  chapter 30

  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?”

  “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.”

  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.

  chapter 31

  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 poolside. 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 sports 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 my 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 c
rescent, 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?”