“She was beaten to death with a poker yesterday afternoon.”
“And you have reason to believe that Mrs. Graff killed her?”
“Isobel Graff is involved, I don’t know how deeply. She was at the scene of the crime, apparently. Her husband seems to accept her guilt. But that’s not conclusive. Isobel may have been framed. Another possibility is this, that she has been used as a cat’s-paw in these killings. I mean that she committed them, physically, but was incited to do it by somebody else. Would she be open to that kind of suggestion?”
“The more I know of the human mind, the less I know.” He tried to smile, and failed miserably. “I predicted that you would be asking hypothetical questions.”
“I keep trying not to, doctor. You seem to attract them. And you haven’t answered my question about Bassett’s visits here.”
“Why, there was nothing unusual in them. He visited Mrs. Graff every week, I believe, sometimes more frequently when she asked for him. They were very close – indeed, they’d been engaged to be married at one time, many years ago, before her present marriage. I sometimes think she should have married Clarence instead of the man she did marry. He has an almost feminine quality of understanding, which she was badly in need of. Neither of them is adequate to stand alone. Together, if marriage had been possible for them, they might have made a functioning unit.” His tone was elegiac.
“What do you mean when you say that neither of them is adequate?”
“It should be obvious in the case of Mrs. Graff. She has been subject to schizophrenic episodes since her middle teens. She has remained, in a sense, a teen-aged girl inside of a middle-aged body – unable to cope with the demands of adult life.” He added with a trace of bitterness: “She has received little help from Simon Graff.”
“Do you know what caused her illness?”
“The etiology of this disease is still mysterious, but I think I know something of this particular case. She lost her mother young, and Peter Heliopoulos was not a wise father. He pushed her towards maturity, at the same time deprived her of true human contact. She became in a social sense his second wife before she even reached puberty. Great demands were made on her as his little hostess, as the spearhead of his social ambition. The very vulnerable spearhead. These demands were too great for one who was perhaps predisposed from birth to schizophrenia.”
“What about Clarence Bassett? Is he mentally ill?”
“I have no reason to think so. He is the manager of my club, not my patient.”
“You said he was inadequate.”
“I meant in the social and sexual sense. Clarence is the perennial bachelor, the giver of other people’s parties, the man who is content to dwell on the sidelines of life. His interest in women is limited to young girls, and to flawed women like Isobel who have failed to outlive their childhood. All this is typical, and part of his adjustment.”
“His adjustment to what?”
“To his own nature. His weakness requires him to avoid the storm centers of life. Unfortunately, his adjustment was badly shaken, several years ago, by his mother’s death. Since then he has been drinking heavily. I would hazard the guess that his alcoholism is essentially a suicidal gesture. He is literally drowning his sorrows. I suspect he would be glad to join his beloved mother in the grave.”
“You don’t regard him as potentially dangerous?”
The doctor answered after a thinking pause: “Perhaps he could be. The death-wish is powerfully ambivalent. It can be turned against the self or against others. Inadequate men have been known to try to complete themselves in violence. A Jack the Ripper, for instance, is probably a man with a strong female component who is trying to annul it in himself by destroying actual females.”
The abstract words fluttered and swerved like bats in the twilit room. “Are you suggesting that Clarence Bassett could be a mass murderer?”
“By no means. I have been speaking most generally.”
“Why go to all the trouble?”
He gave me a complex look. There was sympathy in it, and tragic knowledge, and weariness. He had worn himself out in the Augean stables, and despaired of human action.
“I am an old man,” he said. “I lie awake in the night watches and speculate on human possibility. Are you familiar with the newer interpersonal theories of psychiatry? With the concept of folie à deux?”
I said I wasn’t.
“Madness for two, it might be translated. A madness, a violence, may arise out of a relationship even though the parties to the relationship may be individually harmless. My nocturnal speculations have included Clarence Bassett and Isobel. Twenty years ago their relationship might have made a marriage. Such a relationship may also sour and deteriorate and make something infinitely worse. I am not saying that this is so. But it is a possibility worth considering, a possibility which arises when two persons have the same unconscious and forbidden desire. The same death-wish.”
“Did Bassett visit Mrs. Graff before her escape in March last year?”
“I believe he did. I would have to check the records.”
“Don’t bother, I’ll ask him personally. Tell me this, Dr. Frey: do you have anything more to go on than speculation?”
“Perhaps I have. If I had, I would not and could not tell you,” He raised his hand before his face in a faltering gesture of defense. “You deluge me with questions, sir, and there is no end to them. I am an old man, as I said. This is, or was, my dinner hour.”
He opened the door a second time. I thanked him and went out. He slammed the heavy front door behind me. The people on the twilit terraces turned pale, startled, purgatorial faces toward the source of the noise.
Chapter 31
IT WAS FULL NIGHT when I got to Malibu. A single car stood in the Channel Club parking-lot, a beat-up prewar Dodge with Tony’s name on the steering-post. Inside the club, around the pool, there was nobody in sight. I knocked on the door of Clarence Bassett’s office and got no answer.
I walked along the gallery and down the steps to the pool-side. The water shivered under a slow, cold offshore wind. The place seemed very desolate. I was the last man at the party for sure.
I took advantage of this circumstance by breaking into Simon Graff’s cabaña. The door had a Yale-type lock which was easy to jimmy. I stepped in and turned on the light, half expecting to find someone in the room. But it was empty, its furnishings undisturbed, its pictures bright and still on the walls, caught out of time.
Time was running through me, harsh on my nerve-ends, hot in my arteries, impalpable as breath in my mouth. I had the sleepless feeling you sometimes get in the final hours of a bad case, that you can see around corners, if you want to, and down into the darkness in human beings.
I opened the twin doors of the dressing-rooms. Each had a back door opening into a corridor which led to the showers. The one on the right contained a gray steel locker and an assortment of men’s beach clothes: robes and swimming trunks, Bermuda shorts and sport shirts and tennis shoes.The one on the left, which must have been Mrs. Graff’s, was completely bare except for a wooden bench and an empty locker.
I switched on the light in the ceiling, uncertain what I was looking for. It was something vague yet specific: a sure sense of what had happened on that spring night when Isobel Graff had been running loose and the first young girl had died. For a second, Isobel had said, I was in there, watching us through the door, and listening to myself. Please pour me a drink.