The Ivory Grin

by Ross Macdonald

  He backed away from her, flushed and cowering like a browbeaten German wife. “You ask me a question, Miss Durano.”

  “Shut up.” She passed him like a small cold wind, and hustled off down the corridor.

  I said: “Donald. What about Saturday night two weeks ago? Was Durano in his room?”

  “I wasn’t here. We usually get Saturday nights off.”

  “We?”

  “Me and Lucy before she left. Miss Durano paid me extra to stay last night. He was bad last night.”

  “You coming?” Una called from the head of the stairs.

  She took me to the room with the picture window at the rear of the house. The sun’s fires had blazed out of control across the whole western sky and were eating at the sea’s edges. Along the shore where the beach curved, a few late swimmers were tossed like matchsticks in a bloody froth of surf. I sat down in a chair against the side wall where I could watch the whole room and its doors and windows.

  Seen from inside by daylight, the room was spacious and handsome in an old-fashioned way. Kept up, it might have been beautiful. But the carpets and the surfaces of the furniture were gray with dust, strewn with the leavings of weeks: torn magazines and crumpled newspapers, cigarette butts, unwashed dishes. A bowl of rotting fruit was alive with insects. The wall plants had drooped and died. Cobwebs hung in shaggy strands from the ceiling. It was a Roman villa liberated by Vandals.

  Una sat down at the card-table by the big window. The cards with which she and Donald had been playing the night before lay scattered across the table, mixed with a confetti of potato chips. A pair of clouded glasses sat on its edge. Una’s hand crept out onto the table and began to gather the cards.

  “How long has Leo been insane?” I said.

  “What does it matter? You know he didn’t kill Heiss.”

  “Heiss isn’t the only one.”

  “Lucy Champion, then. He wouldn’t hurt Lucy. They got along swell till she left. She was a damn good nurse, I’ll give her that.”

  “That isn’t why you were so anxious to get her back.”

  “Isn’t it?” She smiled a keen half-smile, as bitter as wormwood.

  “How long has he been insane, Una?”

  “Since the first of the year. He blew his top for keeps at a New Year’s party in the Dial, that’s a night-spot in Detroit. He was trying to make the orchestra play the same piece over and over, some piece from an opera. They played it three times and quit. Leo said they were insulting a great Italian composer. He was going to shoot the orchestra leader. I stopped him.

  “It was New Year’s Eve and everybody thought he was loaded. I knew different. I’d been watching him since summer. He had bad headaches all last year, and along in the fall he was flying off the handle every day. It was Bess set him off, he never should have taken her back. They fought like wildcats all the time. Then he started to lose his memory. He got so he didn’t even know his collectors’ names.”

  “Collectors?”

  Her hand became still among the half-gathered cards. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “He runs a collection agency.”

  “With a gun?”

  “Leo always carried large sums. The gun was for protection. I didn’t realize he was dangerous until he tried to use it on that musician. The doctor in Detroit said he was in a hopeless state, he wouldn’t live long. I saw I had to get him out of Michigan. I wasn’t going to have my brother committed.”

  “Again.”

  “Again, God damn you, if you know so much.”

  “So you hired a couple of nurses and moved to California. No doubt reasoning that Californians were expendable, in case he tried to shoot somebody else.”

  She turned from the card-table to look at my face, try to assess my meaning. “California was her idea. Anyway, I don’t see why you go on about killing. I keep him under close guard. The idea that Leo did these murders is ridiculous.”

  “You didn’t take it so lightly when I brought it up. You’ve worked like a dog since I got here to build up his alibi. On top of that you’ve outlined his defense on a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, complete with medical witnesses.”

  “I’ve been showing you that Leo can’t be tried for murder, let alone convicted.”

  “Why go to all that trouble if the idea is ridiculous?”

  She bent forward stiffly in her chair, planting her feet on the floor: “You wouldn’t want to harass a poor sick guy. What happens if you tip the cops in? They’ll pin a bum rap on him, with his record, or if that doesn’t work they’ll send him away.”

  “There are worse places than a state hospital.” I was sitting in one.

  “I can’t face it,” she said. “He was in before and I saw how they treated him. He’s got a right to spend his last days with somebody that loves him.”

  Though she said them with great intensity, the words fell flat. I studied her head, slanting square and hard out of the gold coat. On the window side the sun cast her face in rosy relief. Its other side was in shadow so deep by contrast that she looked like half a woman. Or a woman composed half of flesh and half of darkness.

  “How long do the doctors give him?”

  “Not more than a year. You can ask them at the clinic. Two years at the outside.”

  “Anywhere from one hundred to three hundred grand.”

  “What the hell do you mean by that?”

  “My information is that Leo draws two to three grand a week from a numbers ring in Michigan. That adds up to a possible total of three hundred grand in two years, before taxes if you pay taxes.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Money,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re not handling Leo’s money. I wouldn’t believe it.”

  An irrepressible faint smile appeared on her mouth, as if I had flattered her subtly. “I have big expenses, very big expenses.”

  “Sure you have. Mink, diamonds, an ocean-front estate. They all cost money.”

  “Medical expenses,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe.”

  “Sure. You’ve got to keep him alive. The income lasts as long as he does. As long as you keep him under wraps, he’s a boss racketeer on Sabbatical leave drawing his weekly take. But when he dies, or the cops lock him up, or news of his condition gets back to Michigan, it’s finished for you. You’re a pretty hard type but I don’t see you going back to Michigan and fighting a war of succession with his mob. If you could do that, you wouldn’t have come to me in the first place.”

  She sat in silence, shivering a little inside the metal coat. Then she took up the gathered half of the deck and flung it down at random on the table. Brushed by her sleeve, a glass fell to the floor and broke.

  “You didn’t figure this out for yourself,” she said in cold still anger. “It was Bess Wionowski put you onto it.”

  “She may have helped.”

  “That’s Wionowski’s gratitude.” A hard pulse kicked like a tiny animal tangled in the veins of her left temple. “She was on her uppers, last year when Leo took her back. We ransomed her out of a cell in Detroit city jail and treated her like a queen. When we came out here to Cal, we even let her choose the town to live in. I might of known she had a reason for picking this place.”

  “Singleton,” I said.

  The name acted on Una like an electric shock. She jumped to her feet, kicking out at the shards of glass on the floor as if she hated everything actual. “The filthy disloyal filly. Where is she now? Where is she? If you got her hid out waiting for her cut, you can go back and tell her I don’t pay off to squealers.”

  She stood above me in a spiteful rage, less than half a woman now, a mean little mannish doll raving ventriloquially.

  “Come down to earth,” I said. “You’ll give yourself a migraine. Neither of us wants your dirty money.”

  “If my money’s so dirty, what are you sucking around for?”

  “Just the truth, sweetheart. You know what happened to Singleton, if anybody doe
s. You’re going to tell me.”

  “And if I don’t?”

  “You tell the cops. I’ll have them here before dark.”

  She sat on the edge of her chair and looked out at the setting sun. Half down on the horizon, its red hemisphere was like a bird’s giant eye on which the inflamed blue underlid was shutting slowly.

  “How did it happen?” I said.

  “Give me a chance to think—”

  “You’ve had two weeks. Now talk.”

  “It was all Bess Wionowski’s fault. The big estate and the high living weren’t good enough for that Chicago chippie. Way last spring she started dating this guy from the Hill, this Singleton scion. I figured she knew him from when she lived here during the war. Before long she was spending nights with him. I tried to keep it from Leo but he found out about it some way. He has his lucid times, anyway he had until two weeks ago. It was a Saturday night, and Bess was up the mountain with her highfalutin boy friend, set to make beautiful music. Leo found out where she was, from Lucy Champion, I guess. Lucy was supposed to be looking after him that night. When he blew off, she couldn’t handle him. Lucy called a taxi and went up the hill to warn the—lovers.” The word had an obscene sound in Una’s mouth.

  “Where were you?”

  “Downtown. When I got back Leo was waiting for me with a gun. He’d taken the springs off his bed and broken the door down and found the gun in my room. He made me drive him up to Singleton’s studio, forced me at gunpoint to do it. Singleton came out of the door, and Leo shot him in the guts. I grabbed Leo from behind as soon as he turned that gun away from me. It took all four of us to tie him.”

  “All four?”

  “Me and Bess and Lucy. Lucy was there. And Singleton.”

  “Singleton was shot, you said.”

  “He could still navigate, the last I saw of him. I left right away when we got Leo under control. I had to get Leo home.”

  “So you don’t know what happened to Singleton?”

  “No. They all three dropped out of sight. I hired Max Heiss to find out if Singleton was alive or dead. He watched the Singleton house all last week. On Thursday Lucy turned up there, sniffing around for the reward I guess. Heiss rode the bus back to Bella City with her and found out more than he ever turned in to me. Friday night he reported to me and claimed he lost Lucy in Bella City. I knew he was crossing me because he dropped a hint about the shooting. He was going to let me buy him off and then collect the Singleton reward besides.”

  “So you killed him for being greedy.”

  “Think again.”

  “You were the one with everything to lose. Lucy and Heiss were the ones to lose it for you.”

  “I still have everything to lose. Would I hand you all this on a silver platter if I wasn’t clear?”

  “Who else had a reason to kill them?”

  “Bess,” she said harshly. “Lucy was in touch with Bess in Bella City, I could tell by talking to Lucy. Max Heiss was on her track. How do I know what Bess did with Singleton? Maybe he died on her hands and that made her accessory. Bess couldn’t stand a police investigation. Bess has a record going back ten years.”

  I stood up and moved towards her and stood over her: “Did you remind Bess of her record, up at Singleton’s cabin, after your brother shot him? Is that why she dropped out of sight and took Singleton into hiding?”

  “Figure it out for youself.”

  “You scared her into hushing it up, didn’t you? Purely out of sisterly devotion, of course, to protect your brother, and his income.”

  She shifted restlessly in the chair, doubling her legs under her to tighten her defenses. “What other reason would I have?”

  “I’ve been casting around for one,” I said. “I thought of something that happened in Los Angeles about fifteen years ago, to a man and his wife and their son. The son was a Mongolian idiot, and the man hated his wife for giving him that son. When the boy was ten or twelve years old, his father bought a shotgun and took him out on the desert and taught him to shoot. The boy had brains enough to pull the trigger of a shotgun. One night the father handed him the gun and told him to shoot his mother. She was asleep in bed. The boy blew her head off, being eager to please. He wasn’t prosecuted. But his father was, though he hadn’t physically committed the murder. He was convicted on a first-degree charge and put away with cyanide.”

  “Too bad for him.”

  “Too bad for anybody who tries to do murder by proxy. If you incite an insane person to commit a crime you’re legally guilty of it. Did you know that was the law when you drove your brother up the mountain to Singleton’s cabin and handed him a gun?”

  She looked up at me with loathing, the muscles weaving and dimpling around her mouth. On the left side of her head where the knotted veins jerked, her face had swelled lopsided, as if moral strain had pushed or melted it out of shape. The light from the window fell on her like visible heat from an open furnace-door.

  “You’ll never bum-rap me,” she said. “You haven’t even got a body. You don’t know where golden boy is any more than I do.”

  Her statement turned at the end into a question. I left the question turning like a knife in her brain.

  CHAPTER 28: Lights shone like wit in a dowager behind the windows of the Palladian villa. The green spectrum of its lawns and trees was deepening around it into solid green darkness. I parked under the porte-cochere and yanked at the old fashioned bell-pull that hung by the side entrance.

  A stout woman in an apron opened the door. Her hand left a deposit of white flour on the doorknob. “What is it?”

  “Is Miss Treen in?”

  “I think she’s busy. Who shall I say is calling?”

  “Mr. Archer.”

  She permitted me to enter the hallway. I started to sit down on an elegant bowlegged chair, caught her backward look of disapproval, and remained standing. The Chinese gentleman with the wise earlobes was pursuing his timeless journey along the wall, from the lowlands across a river valley into the highlands and up the snowcapped mountain to his shrine. There were seven of him, one for each stage of the journey. There was only one of me, and my earlobes felt inadequate.

  Sylvia appeared at the end of the hall, pale and absent-looking in a black suit like a uniform. “I’m so relieved you’ve come.”

  “How’s Mrs. Singleton?”

  “Not well, I’m afraid. This afternoon was too much for her. The police phoned from Bella City to say that Charles’s car had been found with his body in it. They wanted her to make a formal identification. Before she was ready to leave, they called again. The body had been identified as someone else, some detective. I’m so glad it wasn’t you.”

  “So am I. It was Max Heiss.”

  “Yes. I found that out. Why was he killed, do you know? Why was he dressed in Charles’s clothes?”

  “Somebody wanted to have it appear that Charles died in an accident this morning. The body was burned to make it hard to identify.”

  Her mouth was pulled thin across her teeth in horror. “There are such dreadful things in the world. Why?”

  “There are dreadful things in people’s heads. This one is easier to explain than some. If Charles died in an accident this morning, he couldn’t have died in a shooting two weeks ago.”

  “You mean that he did die two weeks ago? You can’t mean that,” she softly prompted the irreversible facts.

  “Charles is probably dead, Sylvia. I know he was shot. I think he died of it.”

  “Who would shoot Charles?”

  “He was mixed up with a woman named Bess. She had other lovers. One of them caught Charles with her in his studio, and shot him. Bess had a police record, and she was forced to cover up the shooting. She took Charles to her husband, who is a doctor in Bella City. Charles died, apparently. No one has seen him since.”

  “She has,” Sylvia whispered.

  “Who?”

  “The woman, Bess. She phoned here a little while ago. I’m certain it was the
same woman.”

  “You spoke to her?”

  “Yes. She insisted on talking to Mrs. Singleton, but Mrs. Singleton was in no condition. The woman didn’t identify herself. She didn’t have to. I knew from what she said that she was—Charles’s mistress.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That she could give us information.”

  “Five thousand dollars’ worth?”

  “Yes. She claimed to know where Charles is.”

  “Did you arrange to meet her?”

  “I invited her to come here, but she wouldn’t. She said she’d phone again at seven to fix a meeting-place. We must have the money ready for her in cash, in unmarked bills. Fortunately Mrs. Singleton has the cash on hand. She’s been holding it in readiness ever since she posted the reward.”

  “Mrs. Singleton is going through with this, then.”

  “Yes, I advised her to. I may be quite wrong. I’ve had no one to turn to. The woman particularly warned me not to call in the police or Mrs. Singleton’s detective agency or her lawyers. She said that if we did, the deal was off.”

  “She didn’t mention me, though.”

  “If only you would stand by, Mr. Archer. I’m not equipped to handle this kind of—transaction. I wouldn’t even know what to ask for in the way of proof.”

  “What sort of proof did she offer?”

  “Proof that she knows where Charles is. She didn’t describe its nature and I hadn’t the presence of mind to question her about it. The whole thing took me by surprise. I lacked the wit, even, to ask her if Charles was dead.” She hesitated, then said in a rush of feeling: “Of course I meant to ask her. I was afraid to, I suppose. I put it off. Then the operator asked her to deposit more money, and she hung up.”

  “It was a long distance call?”

  “I had the impression it was from Los Angeles.”

  “How much did the operator ask for?”

  “Forty cents.”

  “Probably Los Angeles. Bess didn’t give her name?”