“Lucy is my meat. I won her in a raffle by dint of sheer personal derring-do. Signed her up for a seven-year contract and just when I’m thinking of converting the deal into cash, lo and behold I stumble into you. In my alcoholic way.”
“That was quite a speech, Max. How much truth is there in it?”
“Nothing-but-the-truth-so-help-me-God.” He raised his palm in mock solemnity. “Not the whole truth, naturally. I don’t know the whole truth and neither do you. We need an exchange of views.”
Lucy came out of the telephone booth. Whenever she left an enclosed space her body huddled protectively into itself. She sat down on a bench and crossed her legs, leaning forward as if she had stomach cramps.
Heiss nudged me softly. His moist eyes shone. He might have been confiding the name of his beloved. “I do know there’s a great deal of money in it.”
“How much?”
“Five grand. I’d be willing to go fifty-fifty with you.”
“Why?”
“Simple panic, chum.” Unlike most natural liars, he could use the truth effectively. “Hit me and I black out. Shoot me and I bleed. Frighten me and I lose my controls. I’m not the courageous type. I need a partner who is, one that won’t tear me off.”
“Or a fall guy?”
“Perish the thought. This is strictly legal, believe me. You don’t often pick up twenty-five hundred legally.”
“Go on.”
“In a minute. Exchange of views is what I said. You haven’t told me a thing. What tale did the lady tell you, for example?”
“Lady?”
“Woman, dame, whatever she is. The one with the boyish bob and the diamonds. Didn’t she hire you?”
“You know everything, Max. How can I tell you something you don’t know?”
“You can try. What was her story to you?”
“Something about missing jewels. It wasn’t very convincing even at the time.”
“Better than the guff she handed me. Do you know what she gave me? That the girl was her late husband’s servant, and when he died he left a legacy to her, and she was the executrix of the estate. And oh mercy me I owe it to my poor dead husband to find Lucy and pay off.” With a nasty wit, he mimicked Una’s accents of false sentiment. “She must have thought she was dealing with an imbecile or something.”
“When was this?”
“A week ago. I spent a good solid week picking that black girl up.” He shot a vicious glance through the window at Lucy’s impervious back. “So I found her, and what happened? I phoned up the good executrix and asked her for further instructions, and she fired me.”
“What’s she trying to cover up, Max?”
“Are we in business?”
“That depends.”
“The hell. I offer you a half interest in a big deal, and you say that depends. That depends. I bare my bosom to you, and all you do is play clam. It isn’t ethical.”
“Is the five grand ethical?”
“I promised you it was. I’ve been burned, I lost my license once—”
“No blackmail involved?”
“Absolutely not. If you want the honest truth, the thing’s so legal I’m afraid of it.”
“All right, here’s what I think. It isn’t Lucy she wants at all. Lucy’s a decoy duck for somebody else.”
“You catch on rapidly. Do you know who the somebody else is, though?”
“I haven’t identified her, no.”
“Uh-uh. Not her.” He smiled with superior knowledge. “Him. I’ve got his name and description and everything else. And that black babe is going to lead us to him, watch.”
Heiss was emotionally carried away. His sherry-brown eyes slopped round in their sockets, and his hands congratulated each other. To me, his story sounded too good to be true. It was.
Lucy straightened suddenly and jumped up from the bench, heading for the back door of the waiting-room. I left Heiss standing. When I turned the rear corner of the station, Lucy was climbing into a green Ford coupé. Alex Norris was at the wheel. The Ford was rolling before the door slammed.
There was one taxi at the stand beside the station. Its driver was sprawled asleep in the front seat, his peaked cap over the upper part of his face, his mouth wide and snoring. Out of the tail of my eye, I saw the Ford turn north toward the highway.
I shook the driver awake. He was little and gray-haired, but he wanted to fight. “Take it easy, for Christ’s sake. What goes on?”
I showed him money. “Follow that Ford coupé.”
“All right, take it easy.”
Max Heiss tried to get in beside me. I shut the door in his face, and the taxi pulled away. We were in the street in time to see the Ford turn left at the highway intersection, towards Los Angeles. At the intersection a red light stopped us. It was a long time before it turned green again. We drove fast out of town, passing everything on the highway. No green Ford.
Five miles beyond the city limits, I told the driver to turn around.
“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t run that light with all the traffic going through. You have trouble with those people?”
“No trouble.”
When I got back to the station, Max Heiss had gone. That suited me just as well. I ordered breakfast, always a safe meal, in the station lunchroom, and discovered when I started to eat it that I was hungry.
It was shortly after five o’clock when I finished my bacon and eggs. I walked back to the Mountview Motel.
CHAPTER 6: Lucy’s key, with the numbered brass tag dangling from it, was in her door. I obeyed my impulse to knock. There was no answer. I looked around the court, which was sunk in the somnolence and heat of late afternoon. On its far side trailer children were chirping like crickets. I knocked again, listened to answering silence, turned the knob and stepped inside. Lucy was lying almost at my feet. I closed the door and looked at my watch. Five seventeen.
The roller blind was down over the window. Light slanted through the cracks in the blind, supporting a St. Vitus’s dance of dust motes. There was a wall switch beside the door, and I jogged it with my elbow. The yellow walls sprang up around me and the ceiling pressed down from overhead, ringed with concentric shadows. The light radiated from a wall bracket directly over Lucy. Its paper-shaded bulb shone down into her face, which was gray as a clay death-mask in a pool of black blood. Her cut throat gaped like the mouth of an unspeakable grief.
I leaned on the door and wished myself on the other side of it, away from Lucy. But death had tied me to her faster than any ceremony.
One of her arms was outflung. Beside the spread upturned hand something metal glinted. I stooped to look at it. It was a handmade knife with a curved six-inch blade and a black wooden handle ornamented with carved leaves. The blade was stained.
I stepped across Lucy towards the bed. It was identical with the bed in my room, its green rayon cover wrinkled where she had lain on it. At its foot her suitcases stood unopened. I opened one of them, using a clean handkerchief to mask my fingerprints. It was neatly packed with nurses’ uniforms, crisp and starched from the laundry. Like the private compartment of a divided life, the contents of the other suitcase were a jumbled mess. It had been packed in a hurry with a tangle of stockings, wadded dresses, soiled blouses and underwear, an Ebony and a sheaf of romance magazines, an Ellington album wrapped in red silk pajamas. I found an envelope tucked among the powders and creams in a side pocket.
It was addressed to Miss Lucy Champion, c/o Norris, 14 Mason, Bella City; and postmarked Detroit, Mich., Sept. 9. The letter inside lacked date or return address:
DEAR LUCY
Am very sorry you lost your job we all thot you got youself fixed up for Life but you never know what is going to come, sure we want you back honey can you raze the fair am afraid we cant. You father is out of work agin and am the soul sport of the family again, hard to make ends meat. Can always give you a bed to sleep in honey something to eat, come home things will be better. Brother is still in school doing re
al good writting this for me (hi sis). Hope you can raze fair stay off the roads.
MOTHER.
P.S.—How are you sis am fine, you know who.
I put the letter back where I had found it, and closed the suitcase. Its catch clicked loudly, like a final tick of time.
Lucy’s purse lay in a nest of dust in the corner behind her head. It contained lipstick and a handkerchief stained with it, a few ten- and five- and one-dollar bills and some change, a one-way ticket to Detroit, a social security card, and a newspaper clipping. The clipping was printed in old-fashioned type under a single-column head:
MOTHER OFFERS REWARD FOR MISSING MAN
Arroyo Beach, Sept. 8 (Special to the BELLA CITY PRESS.) Mrs. Charles A. Singleton, socialite resident of this resort town, today posted a reward of $5,000 for information concerning the whereabouts of her son. The son, Charles A. Singleton, Jr., disappeared from the public rooms of a local hotel one week ago, on the evening of September 1st. His friends and relatives have not heard from him since that date.
Singleton, a Harvard graduate and wartime Air Force Lieutenant, is of medium height and athletic build, with curly brown hair, hazel eyes and a ruddy complexion. When last seen he was wearing a grey worsted suit, white shirt, dark red tie, and black shoes, without hat or topcoat. The missing man, son of the late Major Charles A. Singleton, is heir to the Singleton agricultural enterprises. His maternal grandfather was Colonel Isaac Carlyle, who married Maria Valdes, daughter of the founder of the great Valdes land-grant estates.
Local police are inclined to reject suggestions of foul play, though Mrs. Singleton herself expresses fears for her son’s safety. County Sheriff Oscar Lanson states: “Kidnapping seems out of the question. There has been no ransom note, for one thing. As for foul play, the evidence indicates that Mr. Singleton left Arroyo Beach under his own power, for his own reasons. It is to be remembered that he is a young, unattached man, with a background of travel. We are, however, doing everything we can to locate him, and will welcome any information from the public.”
Anyone having information as to Singleton’s whereabouts was urged to contact Capt. Kennedy of the Arroyo Beach sheriff’s office.
I read the report twice, fixing the names, times, places, in my head, then replaced the clipping in the purse and the purse in the corner. In a way I knew less than before, as something written in a foreign language extends the range of your ignorance. I looked at my watch. Five twenty-four. Seven minutes since I had found Lucy.
In order to reach the door I had to step over her again. I looked down into the gray face before I switched off the light. Alienated and deeply sunk beyond time already, the face told me nothing. Then it was swallowed by shadows.
In the court, the yellow sunlight looked thin and faded, as if it had been late afternoon for an insupportable time. An old car turned in from the highway and rolled across the gravel to the trailers, leaving a feeble flurry of dust on the stagnant air. I waited for the dust to settle before I started across the court to the office. Before I reached it I saw that Alex Norris was watching me from the gate.
Moving with awkward speed in a pressed blue suit too small for him, he ran at me. I went to meet him and crouched for the onset. He was heavy and strong, and he knew how to use his weight. His shoulder took my midriff and laid me on the gravel on my back. I got up. He didn’t know how to use his fists. I stepped inside a wild swing and bent him with a body-blow. It brought his head forward for an uppercut. Instead, to save my knuckles and his face, I locked his right arm and used it as a lever to turn him away.
“Let me go,” he said. “Fight fair. I’ll show you.”
“You showed me. I’m too old to fight. Me and Joe.”
“He could beat your brains out,” the boy cried defiantly. “Turn me loose, I’ll do it myself. What were you doing in Lucy’s room?”
“Something’s happened to her.”
Bowed and immobilized by my hold, he had to crane his neck sideways to look at me. His black forehead was sprinkled with droplets of sweat, and his eyes were large and bright with expectations of disaster. “You’re a liar. Let me go.”
“Will you stand and talk to me, like a sensible man?”
“No.” But the word lacked force. The brightness of his eyes was glazing, would turn to tears in a minute. He was a boy in a man’s frame. I released him.
He straightened slowly, rubbing his cramped arm. Beyond him, on the other side of the court, a ragged line of spectators was moving slowly towards the lure of violence.
“Come into the office, Alex.”
He stiffened. “Who’s going to make me?”
“Nobody’s going to make you. Come on, anyway.”
“I don’t have to.”
“How old are you, Alex?”
“Nineteen, going on twenty.”
“Ever been in trouble?”
“I never have. Ask my mother.”
“Lucy your girl friend?”
“She’s not my girl friend. We’re going to get married.” He added, with pathetic irrelevance: “I can support a wife.”
“Sure you can.”
His bright gaze was painful on my face. “Is something the matter? Why did you go in there?”
I groped back for the impulse that had made me knock on Lucy’s door and go in. “To talk to her. To warn her to leave town.”
“We are leaving, tonight. That’s what I’m waiting for. She came to get her things.” As if it were being turned by a long-handled wrench against his will, his head turned on his shoulders to look at the closed door of number seven. “Why doesn’t she come out? Is she sick?”
I said: “She’s not coming out.”
The gallery of onlookers from the trailers was straggling across the court, uttering small sounds of menace and excitement. I pulled the office door open and held it for Alex. He went in past me, moving nothing but his legs.
The man who loved Ethel and nobody else was sitting on the studio bed with his back to the door, a half-empty Coke bottle in his fist. He rose and padded to the counter, casting a backward glance at the studio bed. From the cover of a magazine spread open on its pillow, a bare-bosomed woman screamed soundlessly for assistance.
Disregarding her pleas, the pink-haired man said: “What can I do for you?” Then his slow nerves reacted to the black boy: “What does he want?”
“The telephone,” I said.
“Local call?”
“The police. Do you know the number?”
He knew it. “Trouble?”
“In number seven. Go and take a look. I wouldn’t go in, though. Don’t let the others, either.”
He leaned on the counter, his belly oozing over its edge like cottage cheese in a bag. “What happened?”
“Look for yourself. Give me the telephone first.”
He handed me the telephone, hustled to the door and out. Alex tried to follow him. I kept my right hand on the boy’s arm and dialed with my left. When he heard what I had to say to the desk sergeant he fell forward across the counter, catching his weight on his forearms. The upper half of his body was shaken by an inaudible sobbing. The desk sergeant said that he would send a car right out.
I shifted my hand to the boy’s back. He shied away from it as if I were trying to stab him.
“What were you doing out there, Alex?”
“Minding my own business.”
“Waiting for Lucy?”
“If you know, you don’t have to ask me.”
“How long were you waiting?”
“Nearly half an hour. I drove around the block a couple of times and came back.”
I looked at my watch: five thirty-one. “She went in about five o’clock?”
“It was just about five.”
“Did she go in alone?”
“Yes. Alone.”
“Did anybody else go in afterwards?”
“Not that I saw.”
“Did anybody come out?”
“You did. I saw you come out
.”
“Besides me. Before me.”
“I didn’t see. I drove around the block.”
“Did you go in?”
“No, sir. I didn’t go in.”
“Why not?”
“She said she’d only be five minutes. Her bags, they were still packed.”
“You could have gone in.”
“I didn’t want to. She didn’t want me to.”
“Lucy was passing, wasn’t she?”
“What if she was? There is no law against passing in this state.”
“You’re well informed,” I said. “Going to school?”
“I just started junior college. But I’m quitting.”
“To get married?”
“I’ll never get married. I’ll never marry anybody now. I’ll run away and lose myself.” With his head dejected below his shoulders, he was speaking to the scarred top of the counter.
“You’re going to have to stick around and answer a lot of questions. Pull yourself together.”
I shook him roughly by the shoulder. He wouldn’t turn or move until the siren whooped on the highway. Then his head came up like an animal’s at bay.
CHAPTER 7: A black patrol-car ground to a stop on the gravel outside the office. A plainclothesman got out, mounted the stoop, and filled the doorway. In spite of his gray fedora and baggy gray clothes, he looked as if he had always been a policeman—had teethed on handcuffs, studied his lessons in the criminal code, pounded out his career on broken pavements, in nocturnal alleys. Scarred and seamed by fifty years of sun and other weather, his face was a relief map of life in the valley.
“I’m Brake, lieutenant of detectives. You the one that phoned?”
I said I was. “She’s in room seven, at the end of the court.”
“Dead?”
“Very.”
Alex let out a choked noise. Brake took a step towards him and looked him over closely. “What are you doing here?”
“Waiting for Lucy.”
“She the one that’s dead?”
“Yes, sir.”
“You’re going to have a long wait. Did you cut her?”
The Ivory Grin Page 4