Isobel Graff had collapsed in the chair behind the desk. Her head was thrown back, and her undone hair poured like black oil over the back of the chair. Bassett avoided looking at her. He sat hunched far over to one side away from her, trembling and breathing hard.
“I’ve done nothing that I’m ashamed of. I shielded an old friend from the consequences of her actions. Her husband saw fit to reward me.”
“That’s the gentlest description of blackmail I ever heard. Not that blackmail covers what you’ve done. Are you going to tell me you knocked off Leonard and Stern to protect Isobel Graff?”
“I have no idea what you’re talking about.”
“When you tried to frame Isobel for the murder of Hester Campbell, was that part of your protection service?”
“I did nothing of the sort.”
The woman echoed him: “Clare did nothing of the sort.”
I turned to her. “You went to her house in Beverly Hills yesterday afternoon?”
She nodded.
“Why did you go there?”
“Clare told me she was Simon’s latest chippie. He’s the only one who tells me things, the only one who cares what happens to me. Clare said if I caught them together, I could force Simon to give me a divorce. Only she was already dead. I walked into the house, and she was already dead.” She spoke resentfully, as though Hester Campbell had deliberately stood her up.
“How did you know where she lived?”
“Clare told me.” She smiled at him in bright acknowledgment. “Yesterday morning when Simon was having his dip.”
“All this is utter nonsense,” Bassett said. “Mrs. Graff is imagining it. I didn’t even know where she lived, you can bear witness to that.”
“You wanted me to believe you didn’t but you knew, all right. You’d had her traced, and you’d been threatening her. You couldn’t afford to let George Wall get to her while she was still alive. But you wanted him to get to her eventually. Which is where I came in. You needed someone to lead him to her and help pin the frame on him. Just in case it didn’t take, you sent Mrs. Graff to the house to give you double insurance. The second frame was the one that worked – at least, it worked for Graff and his brilliant cohorts. They gave you a lot of free assistance in covering up that killing.”
“I had nothing to do with it,” Graff said behind me. “I’m not responsible for Frost’s and Marfeld’s stupidity. They acted without consulting me.” He was standing by himself, just inside the door, as if to avoid any part in the proceedings.
“They were your agents,” I told him, “and you’re responsible for what they did. They’re accessory after the fact of murder. You should be handcuffed to them.”
Bassett was encouraged by our split. “You’re simply fishing,” he said. “I was fond of Hester Campbell, as you know, I had nothing against the girl. I had no reason to harm her.”
“I don’t doubt you were fond of her, in some peculiar way of your own. You were probably in love with her. She wasn’t in love with you, though. She was out to take you if she could. She ran out on you in September, and took along your most valuable possession.”
“I’m a poor man. I have no valuable possessions.”
“I mean this gun.” I held the Walther pistol out of his reach. “I don’t know exactly how you got it the first time. I think I know how you got it the second time. It’s been passed around quite a bit in the last four months, since Hester Campbell stole it from your safe. She turned it over to her friend Lance Leonard. He wasn’t up to handling the shakedown himself, so he co-opted Stern, who had experience in these matters. Stern also had connections which put him beyond the reach of Graff’s strong-arm boys. But not beyond your reach.
“I’ll give you credit for one thing, Clarence. It took guts to tackle Stern, even if I did soften him up for you. More guts than Graff and his private army had.”
“I didn’t kill him,” Bassett said. “You know I didn’t kill him. You saw him leave.”
“You followed him out, though, didn’t you? And you didn’t come back for a while. You had time to slug him in the parking-lot, bundle him into his car; and drive it up the bluff where you could slit his throat and push him into the sea. That was quite an effort for a man your age. You must have wanted this gun back very badly. Were you so hungry for a hundred grand?”
Bassett looked up past me at the open safe. “Money had nothing to do with it.” It was his first real admission. “I didn’t know he had that gun in his car until he tried to pull it on me. I hit him with a tire-iron and knocked him out. It was kill or be killed. I killed him in self-defense.”
“You didn’t cut his throat in self-defense.”
“He was an evil man, a criminal, meddling in matters he didn’t understand. I destroyed him as you would destroy a dangerous animal.” He was proud of killing Stern. The pride shone in his face. It made him foolish. “A gangster and drugpeddler – is he more important than I? I’m a civilized man, I come from a good family.”
“So you cut Stern’s throat. You shot Lance Leonard’s eye out. You beat in Hester Campbell’s skull with a poker. There are better ways to prove you’re civililized.”
“They deserved it.”
“You admit you killed them?”
“I admit nothing. You have no right to bullyrag me. You can’t prove a thing against me.”
“The police will be able to. They’ll trace your movements, turn up witnesses to pin you down, find the gun you used on Leonard.”
“Will they really?” He had enough style left to be sardonic.
“Sure they will. You’ll show them where you ditched it. You’ve started to tattle on yourself already. You’re no hard-faced pro, Clarence, and you shouldn’t try to act like one. Last night when it was over and the three of them were dead, you had to knock yourself out with a bottle. You couldn’t face the thought of what you had done. How long do you think you can hold out sitting in a cell without a bottle?”
“You hate me,” Bassett said. “You hate me and despise me, don’t you?”
“I don’t think I’ll answer that question. Answer one of mine. You’re the only one who can. What sort of man would use a sick woman as his cat’s-paw? What sort of man would cut a young girl like Gabrielle off from the light so he could collect a bounty on her death?”
Bassett made an abrupt squirming gesture of denial. The movement involved the entire upper half of his body, and resembled a convulsion. He said through rigid jaws: “You’ve got it all wrong.”
“Then straighten me out.”
“What’s the use? You would never understand.”
“I understand more than you think. I understand that you spied on Graff when his wife was in the sanitarium. You saw him using his cabaña for meetings with Gabrielle. You undoubtedly knew about the gun in his locker. Everything you knew or learned, you passed on to Isobel Graff. Probably you helped her to run away from the sanitarium, and provided her with the necessary pass-keys. It all adds up to remote-control murder. That much I understand. I don’t understand what you had against Gabrielle. Did you try for her yourself and lose her to Graff? Or was it just that she was young and you were getting old, and you couldn’t stand to see her living in the world?”
He stammered: “I had nothing to do with her death.” But he turned in his chair as if a powerful hand had him by the nape of the neck. He looked at Isobel Graff for the first time, quickly and guiltily.
She was sitting upright now, as still as a statue. A statue of a blind and schizophrenic Justice, stonily returning Bassett’s look: “You did so, Clarence.”