The Barbarous Coast (9 page)

“I have her address someplace.”

“Doesn’t she have a phone?”

“No, she uses a neighbor’s phone. Teeny Campbell’s had hard sledding these last few years.” She paused, and gave me a liquid look. “I’m not going to give you her address if it means trouble for her. Why are you looking for Hester?”

“One of her Canadian relatives wants to get in touch with her.”

“One of her husband’s relatives?”

“Yes.”

“Cross your heart and hope to die.”

“Cross my heart,” I said. It felt like the kind of lie that would bring me bad luck. It was. “And hope to die.”

Mrs. Campbell lived on a poor street of stucco and frame cottages half hidden by large, ancient oak trees. In their sun-flecked shadows, pre-school children played their killing games: Bang bang, you’re dead; I’m not dead; you are so dead. A garbage truck on its rounds started a chorus of dogs barking in resentment at the theft of their masters’ garbage.

Mrs. Campbell’s cottage stood behind a flaked stucco wall in which a rusty gate stood permanently open. There was a new cardboard
FOR SALE
sign wired to the gate. In the courtyard, red geraniums had thrust up through a couple of stunted lime trees and converted them into red-flowering bushes which seemed to be burning in the sun. The thorned and brighter fire of a bougainvillæa vine surged up the front porch and the roof.

I stepped in under its cool shade and knocked on the screen door, which was tufted with cotton to ward off flies.
A tiny barred window was set in the inner door. Its shutter snapped open, and an eye looked out at me. It was a blue eye, a little faded, surrounded with curled lashes and equipped with a voice like the sparrows’ in the oak trees:

“Good morning, are you from Mr. Gregory?”

I mumbled something indistinguishable which might have been, yes, I was.

“Goodie, I’ve been expecting you.” She unlocked the door and opened it wide. “Come in, Mr.—?”

“Archer,” I said.

“I’m absotively delighted to see you, Mr. Archer.”

She was a small, straight-bodied woman in a blue cotton dress too short and frilly for her age. This would be about fifty, though everything about her conspired to deny it. For an instant in the dim little box of a hallway, her bird voice and quick graces created the illusion that she was an adolescent blonde.

In the sunlit living-room, the illusion died. The dry cracks of experience showed around her eyes and mouth, and she couldn’t smile them away. Her ash-blond boyish bob was fading into gray, and her neck was withering. I kind of liked her, though. She saw that. She wasn’t stupid.

She ankled around the small living-room, lifting clean ashtrays and setting them down again. “Do have a chair, or would you prefer to stand up and look around? How nice of you to be interested in my little nest. Please notice the sea view, which is one of the little luxuries I have. Isn’t it lovely?”

She posed her trim, small body, extended her arm toward the window and held it stiff and still, slightly bent up at the elbow, fingers apart. There was a view of the sea: a meager blue ribbon, tangled among the oak-tree branches.

“Very nice.” But I was wondering what ghostly audience or dead daddy she was playing to. And how long she would go on taking me for a prospective buyer.

The room was crammed with dark old furniture made for a larger room, and for larger people: a carved refectory table flanked by high-backed Spanish chairs, an overstuffed red plush divan, thick red drapes on either side of the window. These made a cheerless contrast with the plaster walls and ceiling, which were dark green and mottled with stains from old leaks in the roof.

She caught me looking at the waterstains. “It won’t happen again, I can guarantee you that. I had the roof repaired last fall, and, as a matter of fact, I’ve been saving up to redecorate this room. When all of a sudden my big move came up. I’ve had the most wondrous good luck, you know, or I should say my daughter has.” She paused in a dramatic listening attitude, as if she were receiving a brief message in code on her back fillings. “But let me tell you over coffee. Poor man, you look quite peaked. I know what house-hunting is.”

Her generosity disturbed me. I hated to accept anything from her under false pretenses. But before I could frame an answer she’d danced away through a swinging door to the kitchen. She came back with a breakfast tray on which a silver coffee set shone proudly, laid it on the table, and hovered over it. It was a pleasure to watch her pour. I complimented the coffeepot.

“Thank you very mooch, kind sir. It was one of my wedding presents, I’ve kept it all these years. I’ve held on to a lot of things, and now I’m glad I did, now that I’m moving back into the big house.” She touched her lips with her fingertips and chuckled musically. “But of course you can’t know what I’m talking about, unless Mr. Gregory told you.”

“Mr. Gregory?”

“Mr. Gregory the realtor.” She perched on the divan beside me, confidentially. “It’s why I’m willing to sell without a cent of profit, as long as I get my equity out of this place.
I’m moving out the first of the week, to go and live with my daughter. You see, my daughter is flying to Italy for a month or so, and she wants me to be in the big house, to look after it while she’s gone. Which I’ll be very happy to do, I can tell you.”

“You’re moving into a larger house?”

“Yes indeedy I am. I’m moving back into my own house, the one my girls were born in. You might not think it to look around you, unless you have an eye for good furniture, but I used to live in a grand big house in Beverly Hills.” She nodded her head vigorously, as though I’d contradicted her. “I lost it—we lost it way back before the war when my husband left us. But now that clever daughter of mine has bought it back! And she’s asked me to live with her!” She hugged her thin chest. “How she must love her little mother! Eh? Eh?”

“She certainly must,” I said. “It sounds as if she’s come into some money.”

“Yes.” She plucked at my sleeve. “I
told
her it would happen, if she kept faith and worked hard and made herself agreeable to people. I told the girls the very day we moved out that someday we’d move back. And, sure enough, it’s happened, Hester’s come in to all this uranium money.”

“She found uranium?”

“Mr. Wallingford did. He was a Canadian mining tycoon. Hester married an older man, just as I did in my time. Unfortunately the poor man died before they’d been married a year. I never met him.”

“What was his name?”

“George Wallingford,” she said. “Hester draws a substantial monthly income from the estate. And then she’s got her movie money, too. Everything seems to have broken for her at once.”

I watched her closely, but could see no sign that she was lying consciously.

“What does she do in the movies?”

“Many things,” she said with a wavy flip of her hand. “She dances and swims and dives—she was a professional diver—and of course she acts. Her
father
was an actor, back in the good old days. You’ve heard of Raymond Campbell?”

I nodded. The name belonged to a swashbuckling silent-movie star who had tried to make the transition to the talkies and been tripped by advancing years and a tenor voice. I could remember a time in the early twenties when Campbell’s serials filled the Long Beach movie houses on Saturday afternoons. Me they had filled with inspiration: his Inspector Fate of Limehouse series had helped to make me a cop, for good or ill. And when the cops went sour, the memory of Inspector Fate had helped to pull me out of the Long Beach force.

She said: “You do remember Raymond, don’t you? Did you know him personally?”

“Just on the screen. It’s been a long time. What ever happened to him?”

“He died,” she said, “he died of a broken heart, way back in the depression. He hadn’t had a picture for years, his friends turned against him, he was terribly in debt. And so he died.” Her eyes became glazed with tears, but she smiled bravely through them like one of Raymond Campbell’s leading ladies. “I carried on the faith, however. I was an actress myself, before I subordinated my life to Raymond’s, and I brought up my girls to follow in his footsteps, just as he would have wished. One of them, at least, has made the most of it.”

“What does your other daughter do?”

“Rina? She’s a psychiatric nurse, can you imagine? It’s always been a wonder to me that two girls so close in age and looks could differ so in temperament. Rina actually doesn’t
have
any temperament. With all the artistic training I gave her, she grew up just as cold and hard and practical
as they come. Why, I’d drop dead with shock if Rina ever offered me a home. No!” she cried melodramatically. “Rina would rather spend her time with crazy people. Why would a pretty girl do a thing like that?”

“Maybe she wants to help them.”

Mrs. Campbell looked blank. “She could have found a more feminine way. Hester brings real joy to others without demeaning herself.”

A funny look must have crossed my face. She regarded me shrewdly, then snapped her eyelids wide and turned on her brights. “But I mustn’t bore you with my family affairs. You came to look at the house. It’s got just the three rooms, but it’s
most
convenient, especially the kitchen.”

“Don’t bother with that, Mrs. Campbell. I’ve been imposing on your hospitality.”

“Why, no you haven’t. Not at all.”

“I have, though. I’m a detective.”

“A detective?” Her tiny fingers clawed at my arm and took hold. She said in a new voice, a full octave lower than her bird tones: “Has something happened to Hester?”

“Not that I know of. I’m simply looking for her.”

“Is she in trouble?”

“She may be.”

“I knew it. I’ve been so afraid that something would go wrong. Things never work out for us. Something goes wrong, always.” She touched her face with her fingertips: it was like crumpled paper. “I’m in a damned hole,” she said hoarsely. “I gave up my job on the strength of this, and I owe half the people in town. If Hester falls down on me now, I don’t know what I’ll do.” She dropped her hands, and raised her chin. “Well, let’s have the bad news. Is it all a bunch of lies?”

“Is what a bunch of lies?”

“What I’ve been telling you, what she told me. About the movie contract and the trip to Italy and the rich husband
who died. I had my doubts about it, you know—I’m not that much of a fool.”

“Part of it may be true. Part of it isn’t. Her husband isn’t dead. He isn’t old, and he isn’t rich, and he wants her back. Which is where I come in.”

“Is that all there is to it? No.” Her eyes regarded me with hard suspicion. The shock had precipitated a second personality in her, and I wondered how much of the hardness belonged to her, and how much to hysteria. “You’re holding out on me. You admitted she’s in trouble.”

“I said she may be. What makes you so sure?”

“You’re a hard man to get information out of.” She stood up in front of me, planting her fists on her insignificant hips and leaning forward like a bantam fighter. “Now don’t try to give me the runaround, though God knows I’m used to it after thirty years in this town. Is she or isn’t she in trouble?”

“I can’t answer that, Mrs. Campbell. So far as I know, there’s nothing against her. All I want to do is talk to her.”

“On what subject?”

“The subject of going back to her husband.”

“Why doesn’t he talk to her himself?”

“He intends to. At the moment he’s a little under the weather. And we’ve had a lot of trouble locating her.”

“Who is he?”

“A young newspaperman from Toronto. Name’s George Wall.”

“George Wall,” she said. “George Wallingford.”

“Yes,” I said, “it figures.”

“What sort of a man is this George Wall?”

“I think he’s a good one, or he will be when he grows up.”

“Is he in love with her?”

“Very much. Maybe too much.”

“And what you want from me is her address?”

“If you know it.”

“I ought to know it. I lived there for nearly ten years. 14 Manor Crest Drive, Beverly Hills. But if that’s all you wanted, why didn’t you say so? You let me beat my gums and make a fool of myself. Why do that to me?”

“I’m sorry. It wasn’t very nice. But this may be more than a runaway-wife case. You suggested yourself that Hester’s in trouble.”

“Trouble is what the word detective means to me.”

“Has she been in trouble before?”

“We won’t go into that.”

“Have you been seeing much of her this winter?”

“Very little. I spent one weekend with her—the weekend before last.”

“In the Beverly Hills house?”

“Yes. She’d just moved in, and she wanted my advice about redecorating some of the rooms. The people who had it before Hester didn’t keep it up—not like the days when we had our Japanese couple.” Her blue gaze strained across the decades, and returned to the present. “Anyway, we
had
a good time together, Hester and I. A wonderful weekend all by our lonesomes, chatting and tending to her clothes and pretending it was old times. And it ended up with Hester inviting me to move in the first of the year.”

“That was nice of her.”

“Wasn’t it? I was so surprised and pleased. We hadn’t been close at all for several years. I’d hardly seen her, as a matter of fact. And then, out of the blue, she asked me to come and live with her.”

“Why do you think she did?”

The question seemed to appeal to her realistic side. She sat on the edge of her chair, in thinking position, her fingertips to her temple. “It’s hard to say. Certainly not on account of my beautiful blue eyes. Of course, she’s going to be away and she needs someone to stay in the house and look after it. I think she’s been lonely, too.”

“And frightened?”

“She didn’t act frightened. Maybe she was. She wouldn’t tell me if she was. My girls don’t tell me anything.” She inserted the knuckle of her right thumb between her teeth, and wrinkled her face like a baby monkey. “Will I still be able to move the first of the year? Do you think I will?”

“I wouldn’t count on it.”

“But the house must belong to her. She wouldn’t spend all that money on redecorating. Mr. Archer—is that your name? Archer?—where is all the money coming from?”