“Enough to kill him?”
“What’s all this talk about killing, Mr. Archer? Did somebody get killed?”
“I’ll tell you, if you can keep a secret.”
“I can keep a secret.”
“See that you do. Your friend Lance was shot last night.”
He didn’t lift his eyes from the counter. “He was no friend of mine. He was nothing in my life.”
“He was in Tony’s.”
He shook his head slowly from side to side. “I shouldn’t have told you what I did about Tony. He did something once when he was young and crazy. He wouldn’t do a thing like that again. He wouldn’t hurt a flea, unless it was biting him.”
“You can’t have it both ways at once, Joseph. You said he hated Lance.”
“I said almost.”
“Why did he hate him?”
“He had good reason.”
“Tell me.”
“Not if you’re going to turn it against Tony. That Lance isn’t fit to tie his shoelaces for him.”
“You think yourself that Tony may have shot him.”
“I’m not saying what I think, I don’t think anything.”
“You said he had good reason. What was the reason?”
“Gabrielle,” he said to the floor. “Lance was the first one she went with, back when she was just a kid in high school. She told me that. He started her drinking, he taught her all the ways of doing it. If Tony shot that pachuco, he did a good service to the world.”
“Maybe, but not to himself. You say Gabrielle told you all these things?”
He nodded, and his black, despondent shadow nodded with him.
“Were you intimate with her?”
“I never was, not if you mean what I think you mean. She treated me like I had no human feelings. She used to torture me with these things she told me – the things he taught her to do.” His voice was choked. “I guess she didn’t know she was torturing me. She just didn’t know I had feelings.”
“You’ve got too many feelings.”
“Yes, I have. They break me up inside sometimes. Like when she told me what he wanted her to do. He wanted her to go to L.A. with him and live in a hotel, and he would get her dates with men. I blew my top on that one, and went to Tony with it. That was when he broke off with Lance, got him fired from here and kicked him out of the house.”
“Did Gabrielle go with him?”
“No, she didn’t. I thought with him out of the way, maybe she’d straighten out. But it turned out to be too late for her. She was already gone.”
“What happened to her after that?”
“Listen, Mr. Archer,” he said in a tight voice. “You could get me in trouble. Spying on the members is no part of my job.”
“What’s a job?”
“It isn’t the job. I could get another job. I mean really bad trouble.”
“Sorry. I didn’t mean to frighten you. I thought you wanted to be serviceable.”
Chapter 23
HE LOOKED up at the light. His face was smooth. No moral strain showed. But I could feel the cracking tension in him.
“Gabrielle is dead,” he said to the unblinking light. “What service can I do her by talking about her?”
“There are other girls, and it could happen to them.”
His silence stretched out. Finally he said: “I’m not as much of a coward as you think. I tried to tell the policemen, when they were asking me questions about the earring. But they weren’t interested in hearing about it.”
“Hearing about what?”
“If I’ve got to say it, I’ll say it. Gabrielle used to go in one of the cabañas practically every day and stay there for an hour or more.”
“All by herself?”
“You know I don’t mean that.”
“Who was with her, Joseph?”
I was almost certain what his answer would be. “Mr. Graff used to be with her.”
“You’re sure of that?”
“I’m sure. You don’t understand about Gabrielle. She was young and silly, proud that a man like Mr. Graff would take an interest in her. Besides, she wanted me to cover for her by taking orders in the other cabañas when she was – otherwise occupied. She wasn’t ashamed for me to know,” he added bitterly. “She was just ashamed for Mrs. Lamb to know.”
“Did they ever meet here at night?” I said. “Graff and Gabrielle?”
“Maybe they did. I don’t know. I never worked at night in those days.”
“She was in the Club the night she was killed,” I said. “We know that.”
“How do we know that? Tony found her on the beach.”
“The earring you found. Where was it you found it?”
“On the gallery in front of the cabañas. But she could have dropped it there any time.”
“Not if she was still wearing the other one. Do you know for a fact that she was, or is this just what they told you?”
“I know it for a fact. I saw it myself. When they were asking me questions, they took me down to where she was. They opened up the drawer and made me look at her. I saw the little white earring on her ear.”
Tears started in his eyes, the color of blue-black ink. Memory had given him a sudden stab. I said: “Then she must have been in the Club shortly before she was killed. When a girl loses one earring, she doesn’t go on wearing the other one. Which means that Gabrielle didn’t have time to notice the loss. It’s possible that she lost it at the precise time that she was being killed. I want you to show me where you found it, Joseph.”
Outside, first light was washing the eastern slopes of the sky. The sparse stars were melting in it like grains of snow on stone. Under the dawn wind, the pool was gray and restless like a coffined piece of the sea.
Tobias led me along the gallery, about half the length of the pool. We passed the closed doors of half-a-dozen cabañas, including Graff’s. I noticed that the spring had gone out of his walk. His sneakered feet slapped the concrete disconsolately. He stopped and turned to me: “It was right about here, caught in this little grid.” A circular wire grating masking a drain was set into a shallow depression in the concrete. “Somebody’d hosed down the gallery and washed it into the drain. I just happened to see it shine.”
“How do you know somebody hosed the gallery?”
“It was still wet in patches.”
“Who did it, do you know?”
“Could have been anybody, anybody that worked around the pool. Or any of the members. You never can tell what the members are going to do.”
“Who worked around the pool at that time?”
“Me and Gabrielle, mostly, and Tony and the lifeguard. No, there wasn’t any lifeguard just then – not until I took over in the summer. Miss Campbell was filling in as lifeguard.”
“Was she there that morning?”
“I guess she was. Yes, I remember she was. What are you trying to get at, Mr. Archer?”
“Who killed Gabrielle, and why and where and how,”
He leaned against the wall, his shoulders high. His eyes and mouth gleamed in his black basalt face. “For God’s sake, Mr. Archer, you’re not pointing the finger at me again?”
“No, I’d like your opinion. I think that Gabrielle was killed in the Club, maybe right on this spot. The murderer dragged her down to the beach, or else she crawled there under her own power. She left a trail of blood, which had to be washed away. And she dropped an earring, which didn’t get washed away.”
“A little earring isn’t much to go on.”
“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”
“You think Miss Campbell did all this?”
“It’s what I want your opinion about. Did she have any reason, any motive?”
“Could be she had.” He licked his lips. “She made a play for Mr. Graff herself, only he didn’t go for her.”