I closed the door of her dressing-room. The louvers were set high in it, fairly wide apart, and loose, so that the windowless cubicle could air itself. By getting up on my toes, I could look down between the crosspieces into the outer room. Isobel Graff would have had to stand on the bench.
I dragged the bench over to the door and stood on it. Six inches below by eye-level, in the edge of one of the louvers, there was a series of indentations which looked like tooth-marks, around them a faint red lipstick crescent, dark with age. I examined the underside of the soft wooden strip and found similar markings. Pain jerked through my mind like a knotted string, pulling an image after it. It was pain for the woman who had stood on this bench in the dark, watching the outer room through the cracks between the louvers and biting down on the wood in agony.
I turned out the light and crossed the outer room and stood in front of Matisse’s Blue Coast lithograph. I had a fierce nostalgia for that brilliant, orderly world which had never quite existed. A world where nobody lived or died, held in the eye of a never-sinking sun.
Behind me someone cleared his throat delicately. I turned and saw Tony in the doorway, squinting against the light. His hand was on his gun butt.
“Mr. Archer, you broke the door?”
“I broke it.”
He shook his head at me in a monitory way, and stooped to look at the damage I had done. A bright scratch crossed the setting of the lock, and the edge of the wood was slightly dented. Tony’s blunt brown forefinger traced the scratch and the dent.
“Mr. Graff won’t like this, he is crazy about his cabaña, he furnished it all himself, not like the others.”
“When did he do that?”
“Last year, before the start of the summer season. He brought in his own decorators and cleaned it out like a whistle and put in all new stuff.” His gaze was serious, black, unwavering. He removed his peaked cap and scratched his gray-flecked head. “You the one that bust the lock on the fence gate, too?”
“I’m the one. I seem to be in a destructive mood today. Is it important?”
“Cops thought so. Captain Spero was asking me back and forth who bust the gate. They found another dead one on the beach, you know that, Mr. Archer?”
“Carl Stern.”
“Yah, Carl Stern. He was my nephew’s manager, one time. Captain Spero said it was one of these gang killings, but I dunno. What do you think?”
“I doubt it.”
Tony squatted on his heels just inside the open door. It seemed to make him nervous to be inside the Graffs’ cabaña. He scratched his head again, and ran thumb and finger down the grooves that bracketed his mouth. “Mr. Archer. What happened to my nephew Manuel?”
“He was shot and killed last night.”
“I know that. Captain Spero told me he was dead, shot in the eye.” Tony touched the lid of his left eye with his right forefinger. His upturned face resembled a cracked clay death mask.
“What else did Spero say?”
“I dunno. Said it was maybe another gang killing, but I dunno. He asked me, did Manuel have enemies? I told him, yah, he had one big enemy, name of Manuel Torres. What did I know about his life, his friends? He bust up from me long ago and went on his own road, straight down to hell in a low-top car.” Through the stoic Indian mask, his eyes shown with black, living grief, “I dunno, I coulden tear that boy loose from my heart. He was like my own son to me, one time.”
His bowed shoulders moved with his breathing. He said: “I’m gonna get out of this place, it’s bad luck for me and my family. I still got friends in Fresno. I ought to stayed in Fresno, never left it. I made the same mistake that Manuel made, thought I could come and take what I wanted. They wooden let me take it. They leave me with nothing, no wife, no daughter, no Manuel.”
He balled his fist and struck himself on the cheekbone and looked around the room in confused awe, as though it was the lair of gods which he had offended. The room reminded him of his duty to it: “What you doing in here, Mr. Archer? You got no right in here?”
“I’m looking for Mrs. Graff.”
“Why didden you say so? You didden have to break the door down. Mrs. Graff was here a few minutes ago. She wanted Mr. Bassett, only he ain’t here.”
“Where is Mrs. Graff now?’
“She went down on the beach. I tried to stop her, she ain’t in very good shape. She wooden come with me, though. You think I ought to telephone Mr. Graff?”
“If you can get in touch with him. Where’s Bassett?”
“I dunno, he was packing his stuff before. He’s going away on his vacation, maybe. He always goes to Mexico for a month in the off-season. Used to show me colored pictures–”
I left him talking to the empty room and went to the end of the pool. The gate in the fence was open. Twenty feet below it, the beach sloped away to the water, delimited by the wavering line of white foam. The sight of the ocean gave me a queasy feeling: it reminded me of Carl Stern doing the dead man’s float.
Waves rose like apparitions at the surf-line and fell like masonry. Beyond them a padded wall of fog was sliding shoreward. I went down the concrete steps, met by a snatch of sound which blew up to me between the thumpings of the surf. It was Isobel Graff talking to the ocean in a voice like a gull’s screek. She dared it to come and get her. She sat hunched over her knees, just beyond its reach, and shook her fist at the muttering water.
“Dirty old cesspool, I’m not afraid of you.”
Her profile was thrust forward, gleaming white with a gleaming dark eye in it. She heard me moving toward her and cowered away, one arm thrown over her face.
“Leave me alone. I won’t go back. I’ll die first.”
“Where have you been all day?”
Her wet black eyes peered up from under her arm. “It’s none of your business. Go away.”
“I think I’ll stay with you.”
I sat beside her on the impacted sand, so close that our shoulders touched. She drew away from the contact, but made no other move. Her dark and unkempt bird’s-head twisted toward me suddenly. She said in her own voice: “Hello.”
“Hello, Isobel. Where have you been all day?”
“On the beach, mostly. I felt like a nice long walk. A little girl gave me an ice-cream cone, she cried when I took it away from her, I am an old horror. But it was all I had to eat all day. I promised to send her a check, only I’m afraid to go home. That dirty old man might be there.”
“What dirty old man?”
“The one that made a pass at me when I took the sleeping-pills. I saw him when I passed out. He had a rotten breath like Father’s when he died. And he had worms that were his eyes.” Her voice was singsong.
“Who had?”
“Old Father Deathmas with the long white dirty beard.” Her mood was ugly and ambiguous. She wasn’t too far gone to know what she was saying, just far enough gone to say it. “He made a pass at me, only I was too tired, and there I was in the morning back at the old stand with the same hot and cold running people. What am I going to do? I’m afraid of the water. I can’t stand the thought of the violent ways, and sleeping-pills don’t work. They simply pump you out and walk you up and down and feed you coffee and there you are back at the old stand.”
“When did you try sleeping-pills?”
“Oh, a long time ago, when Father made me marry Simon. I was in love with another man.”
“Clarence?”
“He was the only one I ever. Clare was so sweet to me.”
The wall of fog had crossed the foam-line and was almost on top of us. The surf pounded behind it like a despondent visitor. I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry. I looked down at her face, which slanted up close to mine: a pale ghost of a face with two dark eye-holes and a mouth-hole in it. She was tainted by disease and far from young, but in the foggy night she looked more like a child than a woman. A disordered child who had lost her way and met death on the detour.