The Ivory Grin

by Ross Macdonald

  “Yeah, sure, that was before she fired—I mean I left.”

  “Were you in the house all Saturday afternoon?”

  “I was until six. I get off at six unless there’s extra cleaning. I mean I did.”

  “Was Mrs. Benning there all afternoon?”

  “Most of it. She went out in the late afternoon, said she was going to shop for Sunday.”

  “What time did she go out?”

  “Around five, a little before five.”

  “What time did she come back?”

  “I left before she came back.”

  “And the doctor?”

  “He was there, far as I know.”

  “He didn’t go out with her?”

  “No, he said he was going to take a siesta.”

  “When did you see her after that?”

  “I didn’t.”

  “You saw her in Tom’s Café around eight.”

  “Yeah. Yeah, I forgot about that.” Florie was getting rattled.

  “Did she give you money?”

  She hesitated. “No.” But she had to turn and look at the red plastic purse on the dresser.

  “Why did she give you money?”

  “She didn’t.”

  “How much money?”

  “Just my back pay,” she stammered. “They owed me back pay.”

  “How much back pay?”

  “Three hundred dollars.”

  “That’s a lot of back pay. Isn’t it?”

  She lifted her heavy gaze to the ceiling and brought it down again to the red purse on the dresser. She watched the purse intently, as if it was alive and struggling to take flight. “It was a bonus.” She had found a word. “She gave me a bonus.”

  “What for? She didn’t like you.”

  “You don’t like me anyway,” she said in a childish voice. “I didn’t do anything bad. I don’t see how you have to jump on me.”

  “I like you fine,” I lied. “Only it happens I’m trying to solve some murders. You’re an important witness.”

  “Me?”

  “You. What did she pay you to keep quiet about?”

  “If I’m a witness, do I have to give the money back? The bonus?”

  “Not if you keep your mouth shut about it.”

  “You won’t tell?”

  “I couldn’t be bothered. What did she buy from you, Florie?”

  I waited, listening to her breathing.

  “It was the blood,” she said. “I found some dried drops of blood on the floor of the examination room. I cleaned it up.”

  “When?”

  “Monday two weeks ago, the first day I saw Mrs. Benning. I asked doctor about the blood and he said he had an emergency over the weekend—a tourist that cut his finger. I didn’t think of it again until Mrs. Benning brought it up last night.”

  “Like the woman who urged her children not to put peas in their noses.”

  “Who was she?” Florie asked almost brightly.

  “It’s a story. The point is that the children put peas in their noses as soon as she turned her back. I’ll bet a nickel you told Desmond about the blood the minute Mrs. Benning turned hers.”

  “I did not,” she said, with that peculiar whining intonation which means guilty as charged but I can’t help it if people are always leading me astray.

  She introduced a diversion:

  “Anyway, his name isn’t Desmond. It’s Heist or something like that. I caught a glimpse of his driver’s license.”

  “When?”

  “Last night in the car.”

  “The Buick?”

  “Yeah. Personally I think he stole it. I had nothing to do with it. He already had it when he came to move me out of the apartment. He tried to tell me he found it, can you imagine. He said it was worth five thousand, probably more. I told him that was a lot of money for a secondhand Buick, but he just laughed.”

  “Was it a green 1948 two-door sedan?”

  “I don’t know the years. It was a two-door Buick, and that was the color. He stole it, didn’t he?”

  “I think he found it all right. Did he say where?”

  “No. It must have been in town, though. He had no car at suppertime and then at ten o’clock when he picked me up at the apartment, he was driving this Buick. Where would a guy find a Buick?”

  “It’s a good question. Put on your clothes, Florie. I’ll look away.”

  “You’re not going to arrest me? I didn’t do nothing wrong—anything wrong.”

  “I want you to try to identify somebody, that’s all.”

  “Who?”

  “That’s another good question.”

  I went to the window and tried to open it. I could hardly breathe the hot foul air sealed in the little room. The window rose four inches and stuck forever. It faced north towards the City Hall and the Mission Hotel. In the sun-stopped streets a few pedestrians trudged, a few cars crawled and snored. Behind me I heard the twang of a snagged comb, Florie’s quiet swearing, the pull and snap of a girdle, the slither of silk stockings, heels on the floor, water running in the sink.

  At the rear of a bus depot below the window, a dusty blue bus was loading passengers: a pregnant Mexican woman herding half-naked brown children, a fieldworker in overalls who might have been the father of the children, an old man with a cane casting a tripod shadow on the asphalt, two young soldiers looking bored with any possible journey through any valley under any sky. The line moved forward slowly like a colored snake drunk with sun.

  “Ready,” Florie said.

  She had on a bright red jacket over the batiste blouse. Her hair was combed back from her face, which looked harder under a white and red cosmetic mask. She peered at me anxiously, clutching the red plastic purse.

  “Where are we going?”

  “To the hospital.”

  “Is he in the hospital?”

  “We’ll see.”

  I carried her cardboard suitcase down to the lobby. Heiss had paid for the room in advance. The aged clerk didn’t ask me about the telegram. The contract players followed our progress across the lobby to the street with knowing looks.

  In my car, Florie relaxed into hangover somnolence. I drove across town to the county hospital. Obscured by the dust and insect splashes on the windshield, wavering in the heat, the streets and buildings were like an image of a city refracted through Florie’s mind. The asphalt was soft as flesh under the wheels.

  It was cold enough in the morgue.

  CHAPTER 25: She came out shivering, holding the red purse against her breast like an external heart that wouldn’t hold still. I supported her elbow. At the ambulance door she pulled away from me and went out by herself to the car. She stumbled on high heels across the gravel, dazed by too much light.

  When I got in behind the wheel she looked at me with horror as if my face had been scorched, and slid far over against the opposite door. Her eyes were like large marbles made of black glass.

  I took the yellow Western Union envelope out of my inside pocket: Mr. Julian Desmond, c/o Great West Hotel, Bella City, California. As long as Heiss was alive, it was a crime to open it. Since he was dead, it was legitimate evidence.

  It contained a night letter sent from Detroit by someone who signed himself “Van”:

  ONCEOVER LIGHTLY DURANOS AIRMAIL REPORT FOLLOWS. LEO ARRESTED FELONIOUS ASSAULT 1925 AGE TWENTY SERVED SIX ARRESTED 1927 KIDNAPPING NO CASE ALLEGED MEMBER OR PROTECTEE PURPLE GANG ARRESTED 1930 SUSPICION MURDER NOLLE PROSSED NO WITNESSES 1932 MURDER AIRTIGHT ALIBI ACQUITTED. BREAKUP PURPLE GANG LEO TO CHICAGO RAN GOON SQUAD THREE-FOUR YEARS THEN SYNDICATE TIEUP LEGIT FRONT HATCHECK CONCESSIONS. ARRESTED CONTRIBUTING DELINQUENCY MINOR EARLY 1942 COMMITTED STATE HOSPITAL DIAGNOSIS UNKNOWN RELEASED OCTOBER 1942 GUARDIANSHIP SISTER UNA PUBLIC STENOGRAPHER AND BOOKKEEPER. ENFORCER FOR NUMBERS RING ATTEMPTING TAKE OVER ROUGE AND WILLOW RUN PLANTS BROKEN UP 1943. 1944 LEO AND UNA ORGANIZED DETROIT-BASED NUMBERS RING STILL GOING GOOD PROTECTION ESTIMATED WEEKLY NET TWO TO THREE GEES. LEO AND UNA NOT SEEN M
ICHIGAN SINCE JANUARY YPSILANTI HOUSE CLOSED BANKS BEING RUN BY WILLIAM GARIBALDI ALIAS GARBOLD OLDTTME PURPLE ALUMNUS. NO RECORD ELIZABETH BENNING LEO LIVING WITH BESS WIONOWSKI PRIOR DEPARTURE MICHIGAN. DO I DIG DEEPER.

  “I should go some place and lie down,” Florie said in a small voice. “You didn’t tell me he was dead. You didn’t tell me they blowtorched him. A shock like that is enough to kill a girl.”

  I put the telegram away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was until you identified him. What makes you so positive?”

  “I worked for a dentist one time. I notice teeth. Julian had bad teeth. I could tell it was him by the fillings.” She covered her glassy black eyes with her hand. “Won’t you take me where I can lie down?”

  “First the police.”

  Brake was sitting at his desk with a deeply bitten sandwich in his hand. The bite he had taken was pouched in his cheek, rolling rhythmically with his chewing. He said around it:

  “The wife put up enough sandwiches to feed an army before I remembered to call off the picnic. I told her to bring some down here, save me lunch money. Lunch money mounts up.”

  “Even with all this overtime?”

  “I’m saving the overtime to buy a yacht.” Brake knew I knew that no cop ever was paid for overtime.

  “Miss Gutierrez here has just made a positive identification on your torch victim.” I turned to her. “This is Lieutenant Brake.”

  Florie, who had been hanging back in the doorway, took a timid step forward. “Pleased to meet you. Mr. Archer convinced me to do my duty.”

  “Good for him.” Brake popped the remnant of his sandwich into his mouth. Whatever was about to happen or be said, he would have finished his sandwich. “Does she know Singleton?”

  “No. It isn’t Singleton.”

  “The hell it isn’t. The license was issued to Singleton, and the engine-number checks.” He tapped a yellow teletype flimsy on top of the pile in his “In” basket.

  “It’s Singleton’s car but not his body in it. The body belongs to Maxfield Heiss. He was a Los Angeles detective. Florie knew him well.”

  “I didn’t know him so well. He made advances to me, trying to pump me about my bosses.”

  “Come inside, Miss Gutierrez, and shut the door behind you. Now tell me, who are your bosses?”

  “Dr. and Mrs. Benning,” I said.

  “Let her do her own talking. What was he trying to find out about them, Miss Gutierrez?”

  “When Mrs. Benning came back and if she dyed her hair and all like that.”

  “Anything about murder?”

  “No, sir. Julian didn’t say nothing about a murder.”

  “Julian who?”

  “Heiss was using an alias,” I said. “We should get over to Benning’s.”

  I turned to the door. There was a cork bulletin board beside it, with a number of frayed Wanted circulars thumbtacked to it. I wondered how Mrs. Benning would look in that crude black-and-white.

  Brake said: “Can you swear to the identification, Miss Gutierrez?”

  “I guess, if you insist.”

  “What do you mean, you guess?”

  “I never like to swear, it ain’t ladylike.”

  Brake snorted and stood up and left me standing in the room with Florie. He returned with a uniformed policewoman, white-haired and granite-eyed:

  “Mrs. Simpson will stay here with you, Miss Gutierrez, until I get back. You’re not in custody, understand.”

  Brake and I climbed the ramp to the parking lot.

  “We’ll take my car. There’s something I want you to read.” I handed him the night letter from Detroit.

  “I hope it makes more sense than that little dame. She’s a moron.”

  “She can see and remember.”

  He grunted as he climbed into the car. “What did she see?”

  “Blood. Dried blood on the floor of Benning’s examination room. It was her job to clean it.”

  “When? Yesterday?”

  “Two weeks ago. The Monday after the weekend that Singleton was shot.”

  “You definitely think he was shot?”

  “Read the telegram. See what it means to you.” I started the car, and turned on a crosstown street in the direction of Benning’s house.

  Brake looked up from the yellow paper. “It don’t mean a great deal to me. It’s mostly a rap sheet on a mobster I never heard of. Who is this Durano?”

  “A Michigan numbers racketeer. He’s in California now. His sister Una is the one who hired me in the first place.”

  “Why?”

  “I think her brother shot Singleton. Lucy was a witness, and Una Durano was trying to find her and silence her.”

  “Where is he now?”

  “I wouldn’t know.” But the blasted man with the toy gun was vivid behind my eyes.

  “Funny you didn’t pass on this stuff to me.”

  I said, a little disingenuously: “I couldn’t tell you what I didn’t know. I just got hold of the telegram, at the hotel where Heiss was staying.”

  “You’re building a pretty big story out of a little bit of a telegram. And it ain’t even evidence, unless you have your mitts on the guy that sent it. Who’s this Van?”

  “Sounds like an undercover man for a Detroit agency.”

  “Agency work costs money. Was Heiss a bigtimer?”

  “Hardly, but he kept hoping. He thought he saw big money in this case, starting with the Singleton reward.”

  “What was he doing with Singleton’s car?”

  “He told Florie he found it. It was evidence, to help him collect the reward. Before that he tried to get Lucy to be a witness for him. But the Singleton reward was only a beginning for him. He had bigger money on his mind.”

  “Blackmail? From Durano?”

  “It’s possible.”

  “So you think those mobsters torched him.”

  “That’s possible, too.”

  We had reached Benning’s block. I parked in front of the barber shop beside his house. Brake made no move to get out of the car. “Do you know any of these things that you say are possible?”

  “I don’t know anything for sure. It’s a peculiarity of this case. We’ve got damn little physical evidence and damn few honest witnesses. There’s no single detail strong enough to hang your hat on. But I have got a Gestalt on the whole picture.”

  “A what?”

  “Call it a hunch, about how the case hangs together. There are a lot of people in it, so it can’t be simple. Even with two people, actions are never simple.”

  “Cut the philosophy. Come down to cases again. If these are gang killings, what are we doing here? Mrs. Benning doesn’t come into it at all.”

  “Mrs. Benning is the central figure in the picture,” I said. “She had three men on the string: Durano, Singleton, Benning. Durano shot Singleton over her. She couldn’t face an investigation so she skipped out and came back to Benning for help.”

  “What did she do with Singleton?”

  “We better ask her.”

  CHAPTER 26: Blinded and gray-sided, Benning’s house seemed to exhale its own shabby twilight. The doctor was pale and blinking like a twilight creature when he came to the door: “Good afternoon, lieutenant.”

  He looked at me without speaking. Brake flashed his buzzer to indicate this wasn’t a social call. Benning backed up abruptly, reaching for his hat on the hall rack and setting it on his head.

  “You going somewhere, doctor?”

  “Why no, I wasn’t. I often wear a hat in the house.” He gave Brake a sheepish smile.

  The hallway was dim and chilly. An odor of rotting wood, which I hadn’t noticed before, underlay the other odors. Men with a sense of failure like Benning had a knack of choosing the right environment for failure, or creating it around them. I listened for the sound of the woman in the house. There was no sound except the drip of a tap somewhere like a slow internal hemorrhage.

  Brake said in formal tones: “I want to see the l
ady known as Mrs. Benning.”

  “Do you mean my wife?”

  “I do.”

  “Then why not say so?” Benning spoke with acerbity. He was pulling himself together under the hat.

  “Is she here?”

  “Not at the moment, no.” Biting at the inside of his long upper lip, the doctor resembled a worried camel chewing a bitter cud. “Before I answer any questions, no matter how charmingly phrased, I’d like to know if you’re here in an official capacity. Or do you simply derive a puerile pleasure from displaying your badge?”

  Brake turned dull red. “There’s no pleasure in it, doctor. I got two murders on the book, another one floating.”

  Benning swallowed several times, his adam’s-apple bobbing like a distorted yo-yo in his throat. “You’re not seriously suggesting that there’s any connection.” The words fell into a silence that seemed to disturb him. He filled it by adding: “Between my wife and these murders?”

  “I’m asking for your co-operation, doctor. You gave it to me this morning. I can’t keep down crime without the co-operation of the citizenry.”

  The two men faced each other in silence for a minute. Brake’s silence was heavy, persistent, thick, like a tree-stump’s. Benning’s was tense and alert. He might have been listening to a sound too high for our ears to catch.

  He cleared his throat. The distorted yo-yo bobbed. “Mrs. Benning has gone to San Francisco for a few days. It’s been hard for her to readjust to Bella City and—marriage. After the unpleasantness of the last two days—well, we both thought she needed a rest. She left about an hour ago.”

  I said: “Where is she going to stay in San Francisco?”

  “I’m sorry, I don’t know the address. Bess makes a point of enjoying the utmost personal freedom, and I make a point of allowing it.” His pale eyes were watching me, daring me to mention our last meeting.

  “When is she coming back?”

  “I assume in a week or so. It will depend partly on the friends she’s staying with.”

  “What friends?”

  “I can’t help you there, either. I don’t really know my wife’s friends. We’ve been living apart for the past two years.”

  He was choosing his words very carefully, as if the slightest mishandling might jar out of them a blast of meaning that would destroy him and his house. It struck me that Bess had left him and wasn’t coming back. This was the fact he was concealing from me and Brake, and possibly from himself.