Bassett gave me a stunned and murky look. “What a perfectly dreadful notion.”
“That’s what you’d say if you were covering for them.”
“But thish ish utterly–” He grimaced and started over: “This is utterly absurd and ridiculous–”
“Why? Isobel is crazy enough to kill. She had a motive.”
“She isn’t crazy. She was – she did have serious emotional problems at one time.”
“Ever been committed?”
“Not committed, I don’t believe. She’s been in a private sanitorium from time to time. Dr. Frey’s in Santa Monica.”
“When was she in last?”
“Last year.”
“What part of last year?”
“All of it. So you shee–” He waved his hand in front of his face, as if a buzzing fly had invaded his mouth. “You see, it’s quite impossible. Isobel was incarcerated at the time the girl was shot. Absolutely imposhible.”
“Do you know this for a fact?”
“Shertainly I do. I visited her regularly.”
“Isobel is another old friend of yours?”
“Shertainly is. Very dear old friend.”
“Old enough and dear enough to lie for?”
“Don’t be silly. Ishobel wouldn’t harm a living creashur.”
His eyes were clouding up, as well as his voice, but the glass in his hand was steady. He raised it to his mouth and drained it, then sat down rather abruptly on the edge of his desk. He swayed gently from side to side, gripping the empty glass in both hands as though it was his only firm support.
“Very dear old friend,” he repeated sentimentally. “Poor Ishbel, hers is a tragic story. Her mother died young, her father gave her everything but love. She needed sympathy, someone to talk to. I tried to be that shomeone.”
“You did?”
He gave me a shrewd, sad look. The jolt of whisky had partly and temporarily sobered him, but he had reached the point of diminishing returns. His face was the color of boiled meat, and his thin hair hung lank at the temples. He detached one hand from its glass anchor and pushed his hair back.
“I know it sounds unlikely. Remember, this was twenty years ago. I wasn’t always an old man. At any rate, Isobel liked older men. She was devoted to her father, but he couldn’t give her the understanding she needed. She’d just flunked out of college, for the third or fourth time. She was terribly withdrawn. She used to spend her days here, alone on the beach. Gradually she discovered that she could talk to me. We talked all one summer and into the fall. She wouldn’t go back to school. She wouldn’t leave me. She was in love with me.”
“You’re kidding.”
I was deliberately needling him, and he reacted with alcoholic emotionalism. Angry color seeped into his capillaries, stippling his gray cheeks with red: “It’s true, she loved me. I’d had emotional problems of my own, and I was the only one who understood her. And she respected me! I am a Harvard man, did you know that? I spent three years in France in the first war. I was a stretcherbearer.”
That would make him about sixty, I thought. And twenty years ago he would have been forty to Isobel’s twenty, say.
“How did you feel about her?” I said. “Avuncular?”
“I loved her. She and my mother were only two women I ever loved. And I’d have married her, too, if her father hadn’t stood in the way. Peter Heliopoulos disapproved of me.”
“So he married her off to Simon Graff.”
“To Simon Graff, yah.” He shuddered with the passion of a weak and timid man who seldom lets his feelings show. “To a climber and a pusher and a whoremonger and a cheat. I knew Simon Graff when he was an immigrant nobody, a nothing in this town. Assistant director on quickie Westerns with one decent suit to his name. I liked him, he pretended to like me. I lent him money, I got him a guest membership in the Club, I introduced him to people. I introduced him to Heliopoulos, by heaven. Within two years he was producing for Helio, and married to Isobel. Everything he has, everything he’s done, has come out of that marriage. And he hasn’t the common decency to treat her decently!”
He stood up and made a wide swashbucking gesture which carried him sideways all the way to the wall. Dropping the glass, he spread the fingers of both hands against the wall to steady himself. The wall leaned toward him, anyway. His forehead struck the plaster. He jackknifed at the hips and sat down with a thud on the carpeted floor.
He looked up at me, chuckling foolishly. One of his boiled blue eyes was straight, and one had turned outward. It gave him the appearance of mild, ridiculous lunacy.
“There’s a seavy hea running,” he said. “We’ll hatten down the batches.”
I took him by the arms and set him on his feet and walked him to his chair. He collapsed in it, hands and jaw hanging down. His divided glance came together on the bottle. He reached for it. Five or six ounces of whisky swished around in the bottom. I was afraid that another drink might knock him out, or maybe even kill him. I lifted the bottle out of his hands, corked it, and put it away. The key of the portable bar was in the lock. I turned it and put it in my pocket.
“By what warrant do you sequester the grog?” Working his mouth elaborately around the words, Bassett looked like a camel chewing. “This is illegal – false seizure. I demand a writ of habeas corpus.”
He leaned forward and reached for my glass. I snatched it away. “You’ve had enough, Clarence.”
“Make those decisions myself. Man of decision. Man of distinction. Bottle-a-day man, by God. Drink you under table.”
“I don’t doubt it. Getting back to Simon Graff, you don’t like him much?”
“Hate him,” he said. “Lez be frank. He stole away only woman I ever loved. ’Cept Mother. Stole my maître dee, too. Best maître dee in Southland, Stefan. They offered him double shallery, spirited him away to Las Vegas.”
“Who did?”
“Graff and Stern. Wanted him for their slo-called club.”
“Speaking of Graff and Stern, why would Graff be fronting for a mobster?”
“Sixty-four-dollar question, I don’t know the ansher. Wouldn’t tell you if did know. You don’t like me.”
“Buck up, Clarence. I like you fine.”
“Liar. Cruel and inhuman.” Two tears detached themselves from the corners of his eyes and crawled down his grooved cheeks like little silver slugs. “Won’t give me a drink. Trying to make me talk, withholding my grog. ’Snot fair, ’snot humane.”
“Sorry. No more grog tonight. You don’t want to kill yourself.”
“Why not? All alone in the world. Nobody loves me.” He wept suddenly and copiously, so that his whole face was wet. Transparent liquid streamed from his nose and mouth. Great sobs shook him like waves breaking in his body.
It wasn’t a pretty sight. I started out.
“Don’t leave me,” he said between sobs. “Don’t leave me alone.”
He came around the desk, buckled at the knees as if he’d struck an invisible wire, and lay full-length on the carpet, blind and deaf and dumb. I turned his head sideways so that he wouldn’t smother and went outside.
Chapter 22
THE AIR was turning chilly. Laughter and other party sounds still overflowed the bar, but the music in the court ceased. A car toiled up the drive to the highway, and then another. The party was breaking up.
There was light in the lifeguard’s room at the end of the row of cabañas. I looked in. The young Negro was sitting inside, reading a book. He closed it when he saw me, and stood up. The name of the book was Elements of Sociology.
“You’re a late reader.”
“Better late than never.”
“What do you do with Bassett when he passes out?”