“Is he a friend of yours?”
“I think of him as a friend, yes. A friend of brief standing, shall we say. Mr. Archer is a detective, a private detective I hired for personal reasons.”
“What reasons?”
“A crackpot threatened me last night. I hired Mr. Archer to investigate the matter.”
“Instruct him, then, to leave my friends alone. Carl Stern is an associate of mine. I want him treated with respect.”
Bassett’s eyes gleamed wetly, but he stood up to Graff. “I am manager of this club. As long as I am, I’ll set the standards for the behavior of the guests. No matter whose friends they are.”
Isobel Graff laughed tinnily. She had sat down on her coat, and was plucking at the fur.
Graff clenched his fists at his sides and began to shake. “Get out of here, both of you.”
“Come along, Archer. We’ll give Mr. Graff a chance to recover his manners.”
Bassett was white and scared, but he carried it off. I didn’t know he had it in him.
Chapter 21
WE WENT along the gallery to his his office. His walk was a stiff-backed, high-shouldered march step. His movements seemed to be controled by a system of outside pressures that fitted him like a corset.
He brought glasses out of his portable bar and poured me a stiff slug of whisky, a stiffer one for himself. The bottle was a different bottle from the one I had seen in the morning, and it was nearly empty. Yet the long day’s drinking, like a passage of years, had improved Bassett in some ways. He’d lost his jaunty self-consciousness, and he wasn’t pretending to be younger than he was. The sharp skull pressed like a death mask behind the thin flesh of his face.
“That was quite a performance,” I said. “I thought you were a little afraid of Graff.”
“I am, when I’m totally sober. He’s on the board of trustees, and you might say he controls my job. But there are limits to what a man can put up with. It’s rather wonderful not to feel frightened, for a change.”
“I hope I didn’t get you into trouble.”
“Don’t worry about me. I’m old enough to look after myself.” He waved me into a chair and sat behind his desk with the half-glass of neat whisky in his hand. He drank from it and regarded me over the rim. “What brings you here, old man? Has something happened?”
“Plenty has happened. I saw Hester tonight.”
He looked at me as though I’d said that I had seen a ghost. “You saw her? Where?”
“In her house in Beverly Hills. We had some conversation, which got us nowhere–”
“Tonight?”
“Around midnight, yes.”
“Then she’s alive!”
“Unless she was wired for sound. Did you think she was dead?”
It took him a while to answer. His eyes were wet and glassy. Behind them, something obscure happened to him. I guessed he was immensely relieved. “I was mortally afraid that she was dead. I’ve been afraid all day that George Wall was going to kill her.”
“That’s nonsense. Wall has disappeared himself. He may be in a bad way. Graff’s people may have killed him.”
Bassett wasn’t interested in Wall. He came around the desk and laid a tense hand on my shoulder. “You’re not lying to me? You’re certain that Hester’s all right?”
“She was all right, physically, a couple of hours ago. I don’t know what to make of her. She looks and talks like a nice girl, but she’s involved with the crummiest crew in the Southwest. Carl Stern, for instance. What do you make of her, Bassett?”
“I don’t know what to make of her. I never have.”
He leaned on the desk, pressed his hand to his forehead, and stroked his long horse face. His eyelids lifted slowly. I could see the dull pain peering out from under them. “You’re fond of her, aren’t you?”
“Very fond of her. I wonder if you can understand my feeling for the girl. It’s what you might call an avuncular feeling. There’s nothing – nothing fleshly about it at all. I’ve known Hester since she was an infant, her and her sister, too. Her father was one of our members, one of my dearest friends.”
“You’ve been here a long time.”
“Twenty-five years as manager. I was a charter member of the Club. There were twenty-five of us originally. Each of us put up forty thousand dollars.”
“You put up forty thousand?”
“I did. Mother and I were fairly well fixed at one time, until the crash of ’29 wiped us out. When that happened, my friends in the Club offered me the post of manager. This is the first and only job I’ve ever had.”
“What happened to Campbell?”
“He drank himself to death. As I am doing, on a somewhat retarded schedule.” Grinning sardonically, he reached for his glass and drained it. “His wife was a silly woman, completely impractical. Lived up Topanga Canyon after Raymond’s death. I did what I could for the fatherless babes.”
“You didn’t tell me all this yesterday morning.”
“No. I was brought up not to boast of my philanthropies.”
His speech was very formal, and slightly blurred. The whisky was getting to him. He looked from me to the bottle, his eyes swiveling heavily. I shook my head. He poured another quadruple shot for himself, and sipped at it. If he drank enough of it down, there would be no more pain behind his eyelids. Or the pain would take strange forms. That was, the trouble with alcohol as a sedative. It floated you off reality for a while, but it brought you back by a route that meandered through the ash-dumps of hell.
I threw out a question, a random harpoon before he floated all the way down to Lethe: “Did Hester doublecross you?”
He looked startled, but he handled his alcohol-saturated words with care: “What in heaven’s name are you talking about?”
“It was suggested to me that Hester stole something from you when she left here.”
“Stole from me? Nonsense.”
“She didn’t rob your safe?”
“Good Lord, no. Hester wouldn’t do a thing like that. Not that I have anything worth stealing. We handle no cash at the club, you know, all our business is done by chit–”
“I’m not interested in that. All I want is your word that Hester didn’t rob your safe in September.”
“Of course she didn’t. I can’t imagine where you got such a notion. People have such poisonous tongues.” He leaned toward me, swaying slightly. “Who was it?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“I say it does matter. You should check your sources, old man. It’s character-assassination. What kind of a girl do you think Hester is?”
“It’s what I’m trying to find out. You knew her as well as anyone, and you say she isn’t capable of theft.”
“Certainly not from me.”
“From anyone?”
“I don’t know what she’s capable of.”
“Is she capable of blackmail?”
“You ask the weirdest questions – weirder and weirder.”
“Earlier in the day, you didn’t think blackmail was so farfetched. You might as well be frank with me. Is Simon Graff being blackmailed?”
He wagged his head solemnly. “What could Mr. Graff be blackmailed for?”
I glanced at the photograph of the three divers. “Gabrielle Torres. I’ve heard that there was a connection between her and Graff.”
“What kind of connection?”
“Don’t pretend to be stupid, Clarence. You’re not. You knew the girl – she worked for you. If there was a thing between her and Graff, you’d probably know it.”
“If there was,” he said stolidly, “it never came to my knowledge.” He meditated for a while, swaying on his feet. “Good Lord, man, you’re not suggesting he killed her?”
“He could have. But Mrs. Graff was the one I had in mind.”