The Barbarous Coast (24 page)

“I guess so. That was the idea.” She looked up again. “Please don’t stand over me. I’m willing to tell you what I know, but please don’t cross-question me. I’ve had a terrible night.”

Her fingers dabbed at her forehead and came away wet. There was a box of Kleenex on the bedside table. I handed her a leaf of it, which she used to wipe her forehead and blow her nose. She said surprisingly, in a voice as thin as a flute:

“Are you a good man?”

“I like to think so,” but her candor stopped me. “No,” I said, “I’m not. I keep trying, when I remember to, but it keeps getting tougher every year. Like trying to chin yourself with one hand. You can practice off and on all your life, and never make it.”

She tried to smile. The gentle corners of her mouth wouldn’t lift. “You talk like a decent man. Why did you come to my sister’s house last night? How did you get in?”

“I broke in.”

“Why? Have you got something against her?”

“Nothing personal. Her husband asked me to find her. I’ve been trying to.”

“She has no husband. I mean, Hester’s husband is dead.”

“She told you he was dead, eh?”

“Isn’t it true?”

“She doesn’t tell the truth when a lie will do.”

“I know.” She added in an unsentimental tone: “But Hester is my sister and I love her. I’ve always done what I could for her, I always will.”

“And that’s why you’re here.”

“That’s why I’m here. Lance and Carl Stern told me that I could save Hester a lot of grief, maybe a penitentiary term. All I had to do was fly here under her name, and register in a hotel, then disappear. I was supposed to take a taxi out to the edge of the desert, past the airport, and Carl Stern was supposed to pick me up. I didn’t meet him, though. I came back here instead. I lost my nerve.”

“Is that why you tried to phone me?”

“Yes. I got to thinking, when I saw the piece about Lance in the paper. You’d told me the truth about that, perhaps you’d told me the truth about everything. And I remembered something you said last night—the very first thing you said when you saw me in Hester’s room. You said—” her voice was careful, like a child’s repeating a lesson by rote—”you thought I was Hester, and you said you thought I was dead—that
she
was dead.”

“I said that, yes.”

“Is it true?”

I hesitated. She got to her feet, swaying a little. Her hand pressed hard on my arm:

“Is Hester dead? Don’t be afraid to tell me if she is. I can take it.”

“Sorry, I don’t know the answer.”

“What do you think?”

“I think she is. I think she was killed in the Beverly Hills house yesterday afternoon. And the alibi they’re trying to set up isn’t for Hester. It’s for whoever killed her.”

“I’m sorry. I don’t follow.”

“Say she was killed yesterday. You assumed her identity, flew here, registered, disappeared. They wouldn’t be asking questions about her in L.A.”

“I would.”

“If you got back alive.”

It took her a second to grasp the idea, another to apply it to her present situation. She blinked, and the shock wave hit her. Her eyes were like cracked blue Easter eggs.

“What do you think I should do?”

“Fade. Disappear, until I get this thing settled. But first I want your story. You haven’t explained why you let them use you for a patsy. Or how much you knew about your sister’s activities. Did she tell you what she was doing?”

“She didn’t intend to, but I guessed. I’m willing to talk, Mr. Archer. In a way, I’m as guilty as Hester. I feel responsible for the whole thing.”

She paused, and looked around the yellow plaster walls. She seemed to be dismayed by the ugliness of the room. Her gaze stopped at the door behind me, and hardened. The door sprang open as I turned. Harsh sunlight slapped me across the eyes, and glinted on three guns. Frost held one of them. Lashman and Marfeld flanked him. Behind them Mrs. Busch crawled in the gravel. In the street Charles Meyer’s shabby yellow taxi rolled away toward town. He didn’t look back.

I saw all this while I reached for my left armpit. I didn’t complete the motion. The day and the night and the day again had dulled me, and I wasn’t reacting well, but I knew that a gun in my hand was all they needed. I stood with my right hand frozen on my chest.

Frost smiled like a death’s-head against the aching blue sky. He had on a multicolored shot-silk shirt, a Panama hat with a matching colored band, and the kind of white flannels worn by tennis pro’s. The gun in his hand was a German machine pistol. He pressed its muzzle into my solar plexus and took my gun.

“Hands on your head. This is a real lovely surprise.”

I put my hands on my head. “I like it, too.”

“Now turn around.”

Mrs. Busch had got to her feet. She cried out: “Dirty bullying bastards!” and flung herself on the back of the nearest gunman. This happened to be Marfeld. He pivoted and slapped her face with the barrel of his gun. She fell turning and lay still on her face, her hair splashing out like fire. I said:

“I’m going to kill you, Marfeld.”

He turned to me, his eyes joyous, if Marfeld could feel joy. “You and who else, boysie? You won’t be doing any pitching. You’re the catcher, see?”

He slapped the side of my head with the gun. The sky swayed like a blue balloon on a string.

Frost spoke sharply to Marfeld. “Lay off. And, for God’s sakes, lay off the woman.” He spoke to me more gently: “Keep your hands on your head and turn around.”

I did these things, tickled by worms of blood crawling through my hair and down the side of my face. Rina was sitting on the bed against the wall. Her legs were drawn up under her, and she was shivering.

“You disappoint me, doll,” Frost said. “You do too, Lew.”

“I disappoint myself.”

“Yeah, after all the trouble I went to, giving you good advice, and our years of friendly relationship.”

“You move me deeply. I haven’t been so deeply moved since I heard a hyena howl.”

Frost pushed the gun muzzle hard into my right kidney. Marfeld moved around me, swinging his shoulders busily. “That’s no way to talk to Mr. Frost.”

He swung the edge of his hand toward my throat. I pulled in my chin to protect my larynx and caught the blow on the mouth. I made a noise that sounded like
gar
and reached for him. Lashman locked my right arm and hung his weight on it. Marfeld’s right shoulder dropped. At the end of his hooked right arm, his fist swung into my
belly. It doubled me over. I straightened, gulping down bitter regurgitated coffee.

“That’s enough of that,” Frost said. “Hold a gun on him, Lash.”

Frost moved past me to the bed. He walked slackly with his shoulders drooping. His voice was dry and tired:

“You ready to go now, baby?”

“Where is my sister?”

“You know she had to leave the country. You want to do what’s right for her, don’t you?” He leaned toward her in a parody of wheedling charm.

She hissed at him, grinning with all her teeth: “I wouldn’t cross the street with you. You smell! I want my sister.”

“You’re coming if you have to be carried. So, on your horse.”

“No. Let me out of here. You killed my sister.”

She scrambled off the bed and ran for the door. Marfeld caught her around the waist and wrestled with her, grinning, his belly pressed to her hip. She slashed his cheek with her nails. He caught her by the hand and bent her fingers backward, struck savagely at her head with the flat of his hand. She stood submissive against the ghastly wall.

The gun at my back had lost contact, leaving a cold vacuum. I whirled. Lashman had been watching the girl being hurt with a voyeur’s hot, dreamy eyes. I forced his gun down before he fired. I got the gun away from him and swung it at the left front corner of his skull. He crumpled in the doorway.

Marfeld was on my back. He was heavy and strong, with an innate sense of leverage. His arm looped around my neck and tightened. I swung him against the door frame. He almost pulled my head off, but he fell on top of Lashman, his face upturned. With the butt of the gun, I struck him between the eyes.

I turned toward Frost in the instant that he fired, and flung myself sideways. His slugs whanged into the wall wide of my head. I shot him in the right arm. His gun clanked on the floor. I got my free hand on it and stood up and backed to the wall and surveyed the room.

The air-conditioner thumped and whirred like a wounded bird in the wall behind my head. The girl leaned white-faced and still on the opposite wall. Frost sat on the floor between us, holding his right arm with his left hand. Blood laced his fingers. He looked from them to me. The fear of death which never left his eyes had taken over the rest of his face. In the doorway, Marfeld lay with his head on Lashman’s chest. His veined eyeballs were turned up and in toward the deep blue dent in his forehead. Except for his hoarse breathing and the noise of the air-conditioner, the room was very tranquil.

Mrs. Busch appeared in the doorway, weaving slightly. One of her eyes was swollen and black, and her smiling mouth was bloody. She held a .45 automatic in both hands. Frost looked into its roving eye and tried to crawl under the bed. It was too low to receive him. He lay beside it, whimpering:

“Please. I’m a sick man. Don’t shoot.”

The redheaded woman laughed. “Look at him crawl. Listen to him whine.”

“Don’t kill him,” I said. “Strange as it may seem, I have a use for him.”

R
INA
drove Frost’s Cadillac. I rode in the back seat with Frost. She had made a pressure bandage and a sling for his arm out of several Dewdrop Inn bath towels. He sat and nursed his arm, refusing to talk, except to give directions.

Beyond the airport, we turned right toward mountains which lay naked and wrinkled under the sun. The road climbed toward the sun, and as it climbed it dwindled, changing to gravel. We came over the first low hump and overlooked a white-floored valley where nothing grew.

Near the crest of the inner slope, a concrete building with a rounded roof was set into the side of the hill. Squat and windowless, it resembled a military strongpoint. It was actually a disused ammunition dump.

Frost said: “She’s in there.”

Rina looked over her shoulder. Her nervous foot on the power brakes jolted the car to a stop. We slipped out under the brilliant sky. A jet track crossed it like a long white scar. I told Rina to stay in the car.

“You can put your gun away,” Frost said. “There’s nobody in there but her.”

I made him climb ahead of me, up the slope to the single door of the building. Sheathed with rusting steel, the door swung half open. A broken padlock hung from its hasp. I pulled the door wide, holding my gun on Frost. A puff of warm air came from the interior. It smelled like an oven where meat had been scorched.

Frost hung back. I forced him to enter ahead of me. We stood on a narrow platform, peering down into dimness.
The concrete floor of the dump was about six feet below the level of the entrance. Framed in light, our shadows fell across it. I pushed Frost out of the rectangle of light, and saw what lay on the floor: a wizened thing like a mummy, blackened and consumed by fire instead of by time.

“You did this to her?”

Frost said without conviction: “Hell, no, it was her husband. You should be talking to him. He followed her here from L.A., did you know that? Knocked her off and set fire to the body.”

“You’ll have to do better than that, Frost. I’ve been talking to the husband. You flew him here in Stern’s plane to frame him for the killing. You probably brought the body on the same flight. The frame didn’t take, though, and it’s not going to. None of your dirty little plans is working out.”

He was silent for a period of time which was divided into shorter periods by the tic twitching at his eyelid. “It wasn’t my idea, it was Stern’s. And the gasoline was his idea. He said to put her to the torch, so that when they found the body they couldn’t establish when she died. The girl was dead already, see, all we did was cremate her.”

He looked down at the body. It was the image of the thing he feared, and it imposed silence on him. He reached out suddenly with his good arm, clawed at my shoulder and caught hold. “Can’t we get out of here, Lew? I’m a sick man, I can’t stand it in here.”

I shook him off. “When you’ve told me who killed the girl.”

There was another breathing silence. “Isobel Graff killed her,” he said finally.

“How do you know?”

“Marfeld saw her. Marfeld saw her come tearing out of the house with the fantods. He went in, and there was Hester in the living-room. She had her head beaten in with a poker. The poker was lying across her. We couldn’t leave
her there. The cops would trace the Graff connection in no time—”

“What was Hester’s connection with Graff?”

“Isobel thought they were shacked up, let’s leave it at that. Anyway, it was up to me to do something with the body. I wanted to chuck it in the ocean, but Graff said no—he has a house on the ocean at Malibu. Then Lance Leonard got this other idea.”

“How did Leonard get into the act?”

“He was a friend of Hester’s. She borrowed his car, he came by to pick it up. Leonard had a key to her house, and he walked in on Marfeld and the body. He had his own reasons for wanting to cover it up, so he suggested getting her sister to help. The two sisters are look-alikes, almost like twins, and Leonard knew both of them. He talked the sister into flying here.”

“What was going to happen to her?”

“That was Carl Stern’s problem. But it looks as though Stern ran out on the whole deal. I don’t see how he can afford to do that.”

“You’re kind of out of touch,” I said. “You used to be an operator. When did you start letting goons and gunsills do your thinking for you?”

Frost grimaced and hung his head. “I’m not myself. I been full of demerol for the last three months.”

“You’re on a demerol kick?”

“I’m a dying man, Lew. My insides are being eaten away. I’m in terrible pain right at this moment. I shouldn’t be walking around.”

“You won’t be walking around. You’ll be sitting in a cell.”