“No, I mean I didn’t plan it that way. I had no idea of blackmail. I didn’t want to see her killed.”
“Who did you want to see killed?”
“Simon,” Isobel Graff said. “Simon was to be the one. But I spoiled everything, didn’t I, Clare? It was my fault it all went wrong.”
“Be quiet, Belle.” It was the first time that Bassett had spoken to her directly. “Don’t say anything more.”
“You intended to shoot your husband, Mrs. Graff?”
“Yes. Clare and I were going to be married.”
Graff let out a snort, half angry and half derisive. She turned on him: “Don’t you dare laugh at me. You locked me up and stole my property. You treated me like a chattel-beast.” Her voice rose. “I’m sorry I didn’t kill you.”
“So you and your moth-eaten fortune-hunter could live happily ever after?”
“We could have been happy,” she said. “Couldn’t we, Clare? You love me, don’t you, Clare? You’ve loved me all these years.”
“All these years,” he said. But his voice was empty of feeling, his eyes were dead. “Now if you love me, you’ll be quiet, Belle.” His tone, brusque and unfriendly, denied his words.
He had rebuffed her, and she had a deep, erratic intuition. Her mood swung violently. “I know you,” she said in a hoarse monotone. “You want to blame me for everything. You want them to put me in the forever room and throw the key away. But you’re to blame, too. You said I could never be convicted of any crime. You said if I killed Simon in fragrante – in flagrante – the most they could do was lock me up for a while. Didn’t you say that, Clare? Didn’t you?”
He wouldn’t answer her or look at her. Hatred blurred his features like a tight rubber mask. She turned to me: “So you see, it was Simon I meant to kill. His chippie was just an animal he used – a little fork-legged animal. I wouldn’t kill a pretty little animal.”
She paused, and said in queer surprise: “But I did kill her. I shot her and smashed the connections. It came to me in the dark behind the door. It came to me like a picture of sin that she was the source of the evil. And she was the one the dirty old man was making passes at. So I smashed the connections. Clare was angry with me. He didn’t see the wicked things she did.”
“Wasn’t he with you?”
“Afterwards he was. I was trying to wipe up the blood – she bled on my nice clean floor. I was trying to wipe up the blood when Clare came in. He must have been waiting outside, and seen the chippie crawling out the door. She crawled away like a little white dog and died. And Clare was angry with me. He bawled me out.”
“How many times did you shoot her, Isobel?”
“Just once.”
“In what part of the body?”
She hung her head in ghastly modesty. “I don’t like to say, in public. I told you before.”
“Gabrielle Torres was shot twice, first in the upper thigh, then in the back. The first wound wasn’t fatal, it wasn’t even serious. The second wound pierced her heart. It was the second shot that killed her.”
“I only shot her once.”
“Didn’t you follow her down to the beach and shoot her again in the back?”
“No.” She looked at Bassett. “Tell him, Clare. You know I couldn’t have done that.”
Bassett glared at her without speaking. His eyes bulged like tiny pale balloons inflated by a pressure inside his skull.
“How would he know, Mrs. Graff?”
“Because he took the gun. I dropped it on the cabaña floor. He picked it up and went out after her.”
The pressure forced words from Bassett’s mouth. “Don’t listen to her. She’s crazy – hallucinating. I wasn’t within ten miles–”
“You were so, Clare,” she said quietly.
At the same time, she leaned across the desk and struck him a savage blow on the mouth. He took it stoically. It was the woman who began to cry. She said through tears: “You had the gun when you went out after her. Then you came back and told me she was dead, that I had killed her. But you would keep my secret because you loved me.”
Bassett looked from her to me. A line of blood lengthened from one corner of his mouth like a red crack in his livid mask. The blind worm of his tongue came out and nuzzled at the blood.
“I could use a drink, old man. I’ll talk, if you’ll only let me have a drink first.”
“In a minute. Did you shoot her, Clarence?”
“I had to.” He had lowered his voice to a barely audible whisper, as though a recording angel had bugged the room.
Isobel Graff said: “Liar, pretending to be my friend! You let me live in hell.”
“I kept you out of worse hell, Belle. She was on her way to her father’s house. She would have blabbed out everything.”
“So you did it all for me, you filthy liar! Young Lochinvar did it for Honeydew Heliopoulos, the girl of the golden west!” Her feelings had caught up with her. She wasn’t crying now. Her voice was savage.
“For himself,” I said. “He missed the jackpot when you failed to kill your husband. He saw his chance for a consolation prize if he could convince your husband that you murdered Gabrielle. It was a perfect set-up for a frame, so perfect that he even convinced you.”
The convulsion of denial went through Bassett again, leaving his mouth wrenched to one side. “It wasn’t that way at all. I never thought of money.”
“What’s that we found in your safe?’
“It was the only money I got, or asked for. I needed it to go away, I planned to go to Mexico and live. I never thought of blackmail until Hester stole the gun and betrayed me to those criminals. They forced me to kill them, don’t you see, with their greed and their indiscretion. Sooner or later the case would be reopened and the whole truth would come out.”
I looked to Graff for confirmation, but he had left the room. The empty doorway opened on darkness. I said to Bassett: “Nobody forced you to kill Gabrielle. Why couldn’t you let her go?”
“I simply couldn’t,” he said. “She was crawling home along the beach. I’d started the whole affair, I had to finish it. I could never bear to see an animal hurt, not even a little insect or a spider.”
“So you’re a mercy killer?”
“No, I can’t seem to make you understand. There we were, just the two of us in the dark. The surf was pounding in, and she was moaning and dragging her body along in the sand. Naked and bleeding, a girl I’d known for years, when she was an innocent child. The situation was so dreadfully horrible. Don’t you see, I had to put an end to it somehow. I had to make her stop crawling.”
“And you had to kill Hester Campbell yesterday?”
“She was another one. She pretended to be innocent and wormed her way into my good graces. She called me Uncle Clarence, she pretended to like me, when all she wanted was the gun in my safe. I gave her money, I treated her like a daughter, and she betrayed me. It’s a tragic thing when the young girls grow up and become gross and deceitful and lascivious.”
“So you see that they don’t grow up, is that it?”
“They’re better dead.”.
I looked down into his face. It wasn’t an unusual face. It was quite ordinary, homely and aging, given a touch of caricature by the long teeth and bulging eyes. Not the kind of face that people think of as evil. Yet it was the face of evil, drawn by a vague and passionate yearning toward the deed of darkness it abhorred.
Bassett looked up at me as if I were a long way off, communicating with him by thought-transference. He looked down at his clasped hands. The hands pulled apart from each other, and stretched and curled on his narrow thighs. The hands seemed remote from him, too, cut off by some unreported disaster from his intentions and desires.