“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?”
He wouldn’t answer her or look at her. Hatred blurred his features like a tight rubber mask. She turned to me:
“So you see, it was Simon I meant to kill. His chippie was just an animal he used—a little fork-legged animal. I wouldn’t kill a pretty little animal.”
She paused, and said in queer surprise: “But I did kill her. I shot her and smashed the connections. It came to me in the dark behind the door. It came to me like a picture of sin that she was the source of the evil. And she was the one the dirty old man was making the passes at. So I smashed the connections. Clare was angry with me. He didn’t see the wicked things she did.”
“Wasn’t he with you?”
“Afterwards he was. I was trying to wipe up the blood—she bled on my nice clean floor. I was trying to wipe up the blood when Clare came in. He must have been waiting outside, and seen the chippie crawling out the door. She crawled away like a little white dog and died. And Clare was angry with me. He bawled me out.”
“How many times did you shoot her, Isobel?”
“Just once.”
“In what part of the body?”
She hung her head in ghastly modesty. “I don’t like to say, in public. I told you before.”
“Gabrielle Torres was shot twice, first in the upper thigh, then in the back. The first wound wasn’t fatal, it wasn’t even serious. The second wound pierced her heart. It was the second shot that killed her.”
“I only shot her once.”
“Didn’t you follow her down to the beach and shoot her again in the back?”
“No.” She looked at Bassett. “Tell him, Clare. You know I couldn’t have done that.”
Bassett glared at her without speaking. His eyes bulged like tiny pale balloons inflated by a pressure inside his skull.
“How would he know, Mrs. Graff?”
“Because he took the gun. I dropped it on the cabaña floor. He picked it up and went out after her.”
The pressure forced words from Bassett’s mouth. “Don’t listen to her. She’s crazy—hallucinating. I wasn’t within ten miles—”
“You were so, Clare,” she said quietly.
At the same time, she leaned across the desk and struck him a savage blow on the mouth. He took it stoically. It was the woman who began to cry. She said through tears:
“You had the gun when you went out after her. Then you came back and told me she was dead, that I had killed her. But you would keep my secret because you loved me.”
Bassett looked from her to me. A line of blood lengthened from one corner of his mouth like a red crack in his livid mask. The blind worm of his tongue came out and nuzzled at the blood.
“I could use a drink, old man. I’ll talk, if you’ll only let me have a drink first.”
“In a minute. Did you shoot her, Clarence?”
“I had to.” He had lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper, as though a recording angel had bugged the room.
Isobel Graff said: “Liar, pretending to be my friend! You let me live in hell.”
“I kept you out of worse hell, Belle. She was on her way to her father’s house. She would have blabbed out everything.”
“So you did it all for me, you filthy liar! Young Lochinvar did it for Honeydew Heliopoulos, the girl of the golden west!” Her feelings had caught up with her. She wasn’t crying now. Her voice was savage.
“For himself,” I said. “He missed the jackpot when you failed to kill your husband. He saw his chance for a consolation prize if he could convince your husband that you murdered Gabrielle. It was a perfect set-up for a frame, so perfect that he even convinced you.”
The convulsion of denial went through Bassett again, leaving his mouth
wrenched to one side. “It wasn’t that way at all. I never thought of money.”
“What’s that we found in your safe?”
“It was the only money I got, or asked for. I needed it to go away, I planned to go to Mexico and live. I never thought of blackmail until Hester stole the gun and betrayed me to those criminals. They forced me to kill them, don’t you see, with their greed and their indiscretion. Sooner or later the case would be reopened and the whole truth would come out.”
I looked to Graff for confirmation, but he had left the room. The empty doorway opened on darkness. I said to Bassett:
“Nobody forced you to kill Gabrielle. Why couldn’t you let her go?”
“I simply couldn’t,” he said. “She was crawling home along the beach. I’d started the whole affair, I had to finish it. I could never bear to see an animal hurt, not even a little insect or a spider.”
“So you’re a mercy killer?”
“No, I can’t seem to make you understand. There we were, just the two of us in the dark. The surf was pounding in, and she was moaning and dragging her body along in the sand. Naked and bleeding, a girl I’d known for years, when she was an innocent child. The situation was so dreadfully horrible. Don’t you see, I had to put an end to it somehow. I had to make her stop crawling.”
“And you had to kill Hester Campbell yesterday?”
“She was another one. She pretended to be innocent and wormed her way into my good graces. She called me Uncle Clarence, she pretended to like me, when all she wanted was the gun in my safe. I gave her money, I treated her like a daughter, and she betrayed me. It’s a tragic thing when the young girls grow up and become gross and deceitful and lascivious.”
“So you see that they don’t grow up, is that it?”
“They’re better dead.”
I looked down into his face. It wasn’t an unusual face. It was quite ordinary, homely and aging, given a touch of caricature by the long teeth and bulging eyes. Not the kind of face that people think of as evil. Yet it was the face of evil, drawn by a vague and passionate yearning toward the deed of darkness it abhorred.
Bassett looked up at me as if I were a long way off, communicating with him by thought-transference. He looked down at his clasped hands. The hands pulled a part from each other, and stretched and curled on his narrow thighs. The hands seemed remote from him, too, cut off by some unreported disaster from his intentions and desires.
I picked up the telephone on the desk and called the county police. They had routines for handling this sort of thing. I wanted it out of my hands.
Bassett leaned forward as I laid the receiver down. “Look here, old fellow,” he said civilly, “you promised me a drink. I could use a drink in the worst way.”
I went to the portable bar at the other end of the desk and got a bottle out. But Bassett received a more powerful sedative. Tony Torres came in through the open door. He slouched and shuffled forward, carrying his heavy Colt revolver. His eyes were dusty black. The flame from his gun was pale and brief, but its roar was very loud. Bassett’s head was jerked to one side. It remained in that position, resting on his shoulder.
Isobel Graff looked at him in dull surprise. She rose and hooked her fingers in the neck of her denim blouse. Tore the blouse apart and offered her breast to the gun. “Kill me. Kill me, too.”
Tony shook his head solemnly. “Mr. Graff said Mr. Bassett was the one.”
He thrust the revolver into its holster. Graff entered behind him, diffidently. Stepping softly like an undertaker, Graff crossed the room to the desk where Bassett sat. His hand reached out and touched the dead man’s shoulder. The body toppled, letting out a sound as it struck the floor. It was a mewling sound, like the faint and distant cry of a child for its mother.
Graff jumped back in alarm, as if his electric touch had knocked the life out of Bassett. In a sense, it had.
“Why drag Tony into this?” I said.
“It seemed the best way. The results are the same in the long run. I was doing Bassett a favor.”
“You weren’t doing Tony one.”
“Don’t worry about me,” Tony said. “Two years now, two years in March, this is all I been living for, to get the guy that done it to her. I don’t care if I never get back to Fresno or not.” He wiped his wet forehead with the back of his hand, and shook the sweat off his hand. He said politely: “Is it okay with you gentlemen I step outside? It’s hot in here. I’ll stick around.”
“It’s all right with me,” I told him.
Graff watched him go out, and turned to me with renewed assurance: “I noticed that you didn’t try to stop him. You had a gun, you could have prevented that shooting.”
“Could I?”
“At least we can keep the worst of it out of the papers now.”
“You mean the fact that you seduced a teen-aged girl and ran out on her in the clutch?”
He shushed me and looked around nervously, but Tony was out of hearing.
“I’m not thinking of myself only.”
He glanced significantly toward his wife. She was sitting on the floor in the darkest corner of the room. Her knees were drawn up to her chin. Her eyes were shut, and she was as still and silent as Bassett was.
“It’s a little late to be thinking about Isobel.”
“No, you are wrong. She has great recuperative powers. I have seen her in worse condition than this. But you could not force her to face a public courtroom, you are not so inhuman.”
“She won’t have to. Psychiatric Court can be held in a private hospital room. You’re the one who has to face the public rap.”
“Why? Why should I have to suffer more? I have been victimized by an Iago. You don’t know what I have endured in this marriage. I am a creative personality, I needed a little sweetness and gentleness in my life. I made love to a young woman, that is my only crime.”
“You lit the match that set the whole thing off. Lighting a match can be a crime if it sets fire to a building.”
“But I did nothing wrong, nothing out of the ordinary. A few tumbles in the hay, what do they amount to? You wouldn’t ruin me for such a little thing? Is it fair to make me a public scapegoat, wreck my career? Is it just?”
His earnest eloquence lacked conviction. Graff had lived too long among actors. He was a citizen of the unreal city, a false front leaning on scantlings.
“Don’t talk to me about justice, Graff. You’ve been covering up murder for nearly two years.”
“I have suffered terribly for those two years. I have suffered enough, and paid enough. It has cost me tremendous sums.”
“I wonder. You used your name to pay off Stern. You used your corporation to pay off Leonard and the Campbell girl. It’s a nice trick if you can work it, letting Internal Revenue help you pay your blackmail.”
My guess must have been accurate. Graff didn’t try to argue with it. He looked down at the valuable gun in my hand. It was the single piece of physical evidence that would force his name into the case. He said urgently:
“Give me my gun.”
“So you can put me down with it?”
Somewhere on the highway, above the rooftop, a siren whooped.
“Hurry up,” he said. “The police are coming. Remove the shells and give me the gun. Take the money in the safe.”
“Sorry, Graff, I have a use for the gun. It’s Tony’s justifiable-homicide plea.”
He looked at me as if I was a fool. I don’t know how I looked at Graff, but it made him drop his eyes and turn away. I closed the safe and spun the dials and rehung the photograph of the three young divers. Caught in unchanging flight, the two girls and the boy soared between the sea and the sky’s bright desolation.
The siren’s whoop was nearer and louder, like an animal on the roof. Before the sheriff’s men walked in, I laid the Walther pistol on the floor near Bassett’s outflung hand. Their ballistics experts would do the rest.
ALSO BY Ross MACDONALD
BLACK MONEY
> When Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who’s run off with his client’s girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts. Black Money is Ross Macdonald at his finest, baring the skull beneath the suntanned skin of Southern California’s high society.
Crime Fiction/978-0-679-76810-4
THE GOODBYE LOOK
In The Goodbye Look, Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, and a mysterious hobo. In The Goodbye Look, Ross Macdonald delves into the world of the rich and the troubled and reveals that the past has a deadly way of catching up to the present.
Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70865-7
FIND A VICTIM
Las Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But after Lew Archer plays the good Samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big time bank heist by a small time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters, and abused wives all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in a mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone’s a victim.
Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70867-1
THE CHILL
In The Chill a distraught young man hires Archer to track down his runaway bride. But no sooner has he found Dolly Kincaid than Archer finds himself entangled in two murders, one twenty years old, the other so recent that the blood is still wet. What ensues is a detective novel of nerve-racking suspense, desperately believable characters, and one of the most intricate plots ever spun by an American crime writer.
The Barbarous Coast Page 23