“Number six if it’s empty.”
“It ain’t.”
“How about number eight?”
“You can have eight.” He rummaged in the desk for a registration blank, which he pushed across the counter. “You on the road?”
“Uh-huh.” I signed my name illegibly, omitting my license number and home address. “Hot today.”
“You ain’t seen nothing.” His defensive tone was accentuated by an asthmatic wheeze. “It’s barely a hundred. You should of been here around the first of the month. It was darn near a hundred and ten. That’s what keeps the tourists away in droves. The room is two and a half single.”
I gave him the money and asked to use the phone.
“Long distance?” he wheezed suspiciously.
“A local call. Private, if you don’t mind.”
He produced a telephone from under the counter and ambled out, slamming the screen door behind him. I dialed the number of the Mission Hotel. Una’s voice answered immediately when the switchboard called her room:
“Who is it?”
“Archer speaking, from the Mountview Motel. Lucy Champion checked in here a few minutes ago. She was evicted by her landlady, a colored woman named Norris on Mason Street.”
“Where is this motel?”
“On the highway two blocks west of Main. She’s in room seven.”
“All right, fine,” on a rising note. “Keep a close watch on her. I’m going to pay her a visit. I want to know where she goes after I talk to her.”
She hung up. I moved into room eight by placing my overnight bag in the middle of the worn rag rug and hanging my jacket on the one wire hanger in the cardboard wardrobe. The bed was covered with a sleazy green spread that failed to conceal the economic depression in its middle. I didn’t trust the bed. I sat on a straight chair that I placed beside the front window and lit a cigarette.
The window gave me a view of Lucy’s door and window across the inner corner of the ell. The door was closed, the green roller-blind drawn down over the window. The smoke from my cigarette rose straight up through the stagnant air to the yellow plaster ceiling. A woman groaned behind the wallboard partition in the next room, number nine.
A man’s voice said: “Anything the matter?”
“Don’t talk.”
“I thought something was the matter.”
“Shut up. There’s nothing the matter.”
“I thought I hurt you.”
“Shut up. Shut up. Shut up.”
My cigarette tasted like burning grass. I butted it in the lid of a coffee can which had been left in the room as an ashtray and thought of the people who had lain alone or in pairs on the iron bed and looked at the yellow ceiling. Traces of their dirt remained in the corners, their odors clung to the walls. They had come from all over the country to look at the yellow ceiling, stir in the iron bed, finger the walls and leave their indelible marks.
I moved across the floor to the partition between my room and Lucy’s. She was sobbing. After a while she said something to herself that sounded like: “I won’t.” And after another while: “I don’t know what to do.”
People were always sobbing to themselves and saying that they didn’t know what to do. Still, it was hard to listen to. I went back to my chair by the window and watched the door, trying to imagine I didn’t know what was going on behind it.
Una appeared in front of it suddenly like a figure in a dream. A marijuana dream. She had on leopard-spotted slacks and a yellow silk shirt. Leaning towards the door like an eager fighter, she struck it two backhanded blows with her right fist.
Lucy opened the door. Her curled brown hands came up to her mouth and hooked on her lower lip. Una pushed in like a small garish battering-ram, and Lucy fell back out of my line of vision. I heard her staggering heels strike the floor. I moved to the partition.
“Sit down,” Una said briskly. “No, you sit on the bed. I’ll take the chair. Well, Lucy. What have you been doing with yourself?”
“I don’t want to talk to you.” Lucy’s voice might have been soft and pleasant if fear hadn’t been playing tricks with it.
“You don’t have to get excited.”
“I’m not getting excited. What I do is my own business. It’s no business of yours.”
“I wonder about that. Just what does your business cover?”
“I’ve been looking for a job, a decent job. When I save a little money, I’m going back home. It’s not your business, but I’m telling you anyway.”
“That’s a good thing, Lucy. Because you’re not going back to Detroit, now or ever.”
“You can’t stop me!”
There was an interval of silence. “No, I can’t stop you. I will tell you this. When you step off that train, there’ll be a reception waiting for you. I phone Detroit long distance every afternoon.”
Another, longer pause.
“So you see, Lucy, Detroit is out for you. You know what I think you should do, Lucy? I think you made a mistake leaving us. I think you should come back with us.”
Lucy sighed very deeply. “No, I can’t.”
“Yes. You come back. It’ll be safer for you and safer for us, safer for everybody.” The bright clatter of Una’s tone took on an illusive softness: “I’ll tell you what the situation is, dearie. We can’t just have you running around loose the way you have been. You’ll get into trouble, or you’ll have a teensy bit too much to drink in the wrong company, and then you’ll blab. I know you people, you see. Blabbermouths every one of you.”
“Not me,” the girl protested. “I’d never blab, I promise you faithfully. Please leave me go on the way I been, minding my own business, please.”
“I’ve got my duty to my brother. I’d like to leave you alone, Lucy. If you’d co-operate.”
“I always co-operated before, before it happened.”
“Sure you did. Tell me where she is, Lucy. Then I’ll leave you alone, or you can come back to us on double the salary. We trust you. It’s her we don’t trust, you know that. Is she here in town?”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said.
“You know she’s here in town. Now tell me where she is. I’ll give you a thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead if you’ll tell me. Come on now, Lucy. Tell me.”
“I don’t know,” Lucy said.
“A thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead,” Una repeated. “I have it right here.”
“I won’t take your money,” Lucy said. “I don’t know where she is.”
“Is she in Bella City?”
“I don’t know, mum. She brought me here and left. How do I know where she went? She never told me nothing.”
“That’s funny, I thought you were her regular little confidante.” Harshly, with a sudden change of pace: “Was he hurt bad?”
“Yes. I mean, I don’t know.”
“Where is he? In Bella City?”
“I don’t know, mum.” Lucy’s voice had sunk to a stolid monotone.
“Is he dead?”
“I don’t know who you talking about, mum.”
“Rotten little liar!” Una said.
I heard a blow. A chair scraped. Someone hiccuped once, loudly.
“You leave me be, Miss Una.” The pressure of the situation had thrown Lucy back into sullen nonresistance, and slurred her speech. “I don’t have to take nothing from you. I’ll call the pollice.”
“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to hit you. You know my bad temper, Lucy.” Una’s voice was husky with false solicitude. “Did I hurt you?”
“You didn’t hurt me. You couldn’t hurt me. Just stay away from me. Go away and leave me be.”
“Why should I?”
“Because you won’t get nothing out of me.”
“How much are you holding out for, honey?”
“And don’t you call me honey. I’m no honey of yours.”
“Five thousand dollars?”
“I wouldn’t touch your money.”
“You’r
e getting pretty uppity for a nigger gal that couldn’t get a job until I gave her one.”
“Don’t you call me that. And you know what you can do with your job. I wouldn’t go back to it if I was starving to death.”
“Maybe you will,” Una said cheerfully. “I hope you do starve to death.”
Her footsteps marched to the door, and the door slammed. In the hollow silence that ensued in the room, a series of slow dragging movements ended in the creak of bed-springs and another yawning sigh. I went back to my window. The sky blazed blue in my eyes. At the entrance Una was climbing into a taxi. It went away.
Two cigarettes later, Lucy came out and locked her door with a brass-tagged key. She wavered on the concrete stoop for a moment, gathering herself like an inexperienced diver for a plunge into cruel space. Thick powder clung like icing sugar to her face, imperfectly masking its darkness and its despair. Though she was wearing the same clothes, her body looked softer and more feminine.
She left the court and turned right along the shoulder of the highway. I followed her on foot. Her steps were quick and uncertain, and I was half afraid she might fall in front of a car. Gradually her stride took on the rhythm of some purpose. At the first traffic-lights, she crossed the highway.
I went ahead of her and ducked into the first store I came to, which happened to be an open-front fruit-and-vegetable market. Bent over a bin of oranges with my back to the street, I heard her heels on the pavement and felt her shadow brush me, like a cold feather.
CHAPTER 5: The street was one block west of Main and parallel to it. Its pitted asphalt was lined with Main Street’s leavings: radio and shoe repair shops, reupholsterers, insect exterminators, flytrap lunchrooms. A few old houses survived among them as flats and boarding-houses.
Lucy paused in front of a house in the third block and looked up and down the street. A hundred yards behind her, I was waiting at a bus stop on the corner. In a sudden flurry of movement, she ran across the shallow yard of the house and up the veranda steps. I walked on.
The house she had entered leaned with an absent and archaic air between a mattress-cleaning plant and a one-chair barbershop. Three-storied and weirdly gabled, it had been built before the invention of California architecture. Wavy brown watermarks streaked its gray frame sides. The lower panes of the ground-floor windows, painted white, faced the sun like a blind man’s frosted glasses. Beside the double front-door there was a name on a board, printed in large black letters: SAMUEL BENNING, M.D. A card above the bell-push said, in English and Spanish, Ring and Enter. I did.
The air in the hallway was a thin hospital-soup compounded of cooking odors, antiseptic, dimness. A face swam at me through it. It was a big man’s face, too sharp and aggressive. I shifted my feet instinctively, then saw that it was my own face reflected in murky glass, framed in the tarnished curlicues of a wall mirror.
A door let light in at the end of the hall. A dark-haired woman came through it. She wore the gray striped uniform of a nurse’s aide, and she was handsome in a plump and violent way. Her black eyes looked at me as if they knew it. “You wish to see the doctor, sir?”
“If he’s in.”
“Just go into the waiting-room, sir. He will take care of you presently. The door on your left.”
She rolled away on smoothly revolving hips.
The waiting-room was unoccupied. Large and many-windowed, it had evidently been the front parlor of the house. Its present quality was a struggling lack of respectability, from the shredding carpet to the high discolored ceiling. Against the walls there were some wicker chairs that someone had recently brightened up with chintz. And the walls and floor were clean. In spite of this, it was a room in which the crime of poverty had left clues.
I sat down in one of the chairs with my back to the light and picked up a magazine from a rickety table. The magazine was two years old, but it served to mask my face. Across the room from me, in the inner wall, there was a closed door. After a while a tall black-haired woman wearing an ill-fitting white uniform opened the door. I heard a voice that sounded like Lucy’s say something unintelligible and emotional, several rooms away. The woman who had opened the door closed it sharply behind her and came towards me:
“Do you wish to see the doctor?”
Her eyes were the color of baked blue enamel. Her beauty canceled the room.
I was wondering how the room had happened to deserve her when she interrupted me: “Did you wish to see the doctor?”
“Yes.”
“He’s busy now.”
“Busy for how long? I’m in a hurry.”
“I couldn’t say how long.”
“I’ll wait for a while.”
“Very well, sir.”
She stood with perfect calm under the pressure of my stare, as if it were her natural element. Her beauty wasn’t the kind that depended on movement or feeling. It was plastic and external like a statue’s; even the blue eyes were flat and depthless. Her whole face looked as if it had been frozen with novocaine.
“Are you one of Dr. Benning’s patients?”
“Not yet.”
“Can I have your name, please?”
“Larkin,” I said at random. “Horace Larkin.”
The frozen face remained frozen. She went to the desk and wrote something on a card. Her tight, lumpy uniform made me restless. Everything about her bothered me.
A bald man in a doctor’s smock jerked the inner door open. I raised the magazine in front of me and examined him over its edge. Large-eared and almost hairless, his head seemed naked, as if it had been plucked. His long face was dimly lit by pale worried eyes. Deep lines of sorrow dragged down from the wings of his large vulnerable nose.
“Come here,” he said to the receptionist. “You talk to her, for heaven’s sake. I can’t make head or tail of it.” His voice was high-pitched and rapid, furious with anger or anxiety.
The woman surveyed him coldly, glanced at me, and said nothing.
“Come on,” he said placatingly, raising a bony red hand towards her. “I can’t handle her.”
She shrugged her shoulders and passed him in the doorway. His stringy body cringed away from hers, as if she radiated scorching heat. I left the house.
Lucy came out ten minutes later. I was sitting in the barber shop beside Dr. Benning’s house. There were two men ahead of me, one in the chair having his neck shaved, the other reading a newspaper by the window. The newspaper-reader was an unstylish stout in a tan camel’s-hair jacket. There were purple veins in his cheeks and nose. When Lucy passed the window heading south, he got up hurriedly, put on a soiled panama, and left the shop.
I waited, and followed him out.
“But you are next, sir,” the barber cried after me. I looked back from the other side of the street, and he was still at the window, making siren gestures with a razor.
The man with the veined nose and the panama hat was halfway to the next corner, almost abreast of Lucy. She led us back to the railway station. When she reached it, a passenger train was pulling out towards the north. She stood stock-still on the platform until its smoke was a dissolving haze on the foothills. The man in the camel’s-hair coat was watching her, slouched like a barely animate lump of boredom behind a pile of express crates under the baggage-room arch.
Lucy turned on her heel and entered the station. A narrow window under the arch gave me a partial view of the waiting-room. I moved to another window, ignoring the man behind the express crates but trying to place him in my memory. Lucy was at the ticket window with green money in her hand.
The man edged towards me, his stout body wriggling along the wall as if the shade-latticed air offered solid resistance to its movement. He laid two soft white fingers on my arm:
“Lew Archer, n’est-ce pas?” The French was deliberate clowning, accompanied by a smirk.
“Must be two other people.” I shook the fingers loose.
“You wouldn’t brush me, boysie. I remember you but vividly. You testified f
or the prosecution in the Saddler trial, and you did a nice job too. I combed the jury panel for the defense. Max Heiss?”
He took off his panama hat, and a shock of red-brown hair pushed out over his forehead. Under it, clever dirty eyes shone liquidly like dollops of brown sherry. His little smile had a shamefaced charm, acknowledging that he had taken a running jump at manhood and still, at forty or forty-five, had never quite got his hands on it.—If it existed, the smile went on to wonder.
“Heiss?” he said coaxingly. “Maxfield Heiss?”
I remembered him and the Saddler trial. I also remembered that he had lost his license for tampering with prospective jurors in another murder trial.
“I know you, Max. So what if I do?”
“So we toddle across the street and I’ll buy you a drink and we can talk over old times and such.” His words were soft and insinuating, breaking gently like bubbles between his pink lips. His breath was strong enough to lean on.
I glanced at Lucy. She was in a telephone booth at the other end of the waiting-room. Her lips were close to the mouthpiece and moving.
“Thanks, not this time. I have a train to catch.”
“You’re kidding me again. There isn’t another train in either direction for over two hours. Which means you don’t have to be anxious the girl will get away, n’est-ce pas? She can’t possibly use that ticket she just bought for over two hours.” His face lit up with a practical joker’s delight, as if he had just palmed off an explosive cigar on me.
I felt as if he had. “Somebody’s kidding. I’m not in the mood for it.”
“Now don’t be like that. You don’t have to take offense.”
“Beat it, Max.”
“How can we do business if you won’t even bat the breeze?”
“Go away. You’re standing in my light.”
He waltzed in a small circle and presented his smirk to me again: “Avee atquee valee, boysie, that means good-bye and hello. I’m on public property and you can’t push me off. And you got no monopoly on this case. If the true facts were known, I bet you don’t even know what case you’re on. I got a priority on you there.”
I couldn’t help being interested, and he knew it. His fingers returned like a troupe of trained slugs to my arm:
The Ivory Grin Page 3