The Ivory Grin Page 10

  “No. I’m investigating a murder that occurred in Bella City this afternoon.” I produced the rolled-up turban from my pocket and held it out to her. “This belonged to the victim. Did you make it?”

  She peered at it. “It’s got my name inside. What if I did?”

  “You should be able to identify the customer you sold it to, if it’s an original.”

  She leaned closer under the light, her glance shifting from the hat to me. The dark-rimmed spectacles had gathered her face into a shrewd hard pattern. “Is it a question of identification? You said it belonged to the victim. So who was the victim?”

  “Lucy Champion was her name. She was a colored woman in her early twenties.”

  “And you want to know if I sold her this turban?”

  “I didn’t say that exactly. The question is who you sold it to.”

  “Do I have to answer that? Let me see your badge.”

  “I’m a private detective,” I said, “working with the police.”

  “Who are you working for?”

  “My client doesn’t want her name used.”

  “Exactly!” She blew me a whiff of beer. “Professional ethics. That’s how it is with me. I can’t deny I sold that hat, and I won’t deny it was an original. But how can I say who bought it from me? I made it away back last spring some time. I do know one thing for certain, though, it wasn’t a colored girl bought it. There’s never been one in my shop, except for a few brownskins from India and Persia and places like that. They’re different.”

  “Born in different places, anyway.”

  “Okay, we won’t argue. I have nothing against colored people. But they don’t buy hats from me. This girl must have found the hat, or stolen it, or had it given to her, or bought it in a rummage sale. So even if I could remember who bought it from me, it wouldn’t be fair to drag my client’s name into a murder case, would it?” Her voice contained a hint of phoniness, an echo of the daytime palaver in her shop.

  “If you worked at it, Mrs. Grinker, I think you could remember.”

  “Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t.” She was troubled, and her voice grew shallower. “What if I did? It would be violating a professional confidence.”

  “Do milliners take an oath?”

  “We have our standards,” she said hollowly. “Oh hell, I don’t want to lose customers if I can help it. The ones who can pay my prices are getting as scarce as eligible men.”

  I tried hard to look like an eligible man. “I can’t give you my client’s name. I will say that she’s connected with the Singleton family.”

  “The Charles Singletons?” She pronounced the syllables slowly and distinctly, like a quotation from a poem she had always loved.

  “Uh-huh.”

  “How is Mrs. Singleton?”

  “Not very well. She’s worried about her son—”

  “Is this murder connected with him?”

  “I’m trying to find that out, Mrs. Grinker. I never will find out unless I get some co-operation.”

  “I’m sorry. Mrs. Singleton isn’t a customer of mine—I’m afraid she buys most of her hats in Paris—but of course I know of her. Come in.”

  The front door opened directly into a redwood-paneled living-room. A gas heater burned low in a red-brick fireplace. The room was warm and shabby and smelled of cats.

  She waved a hospitable hand towards a studio couch covered with an afghan. A glass of beer was bubbling its life away on a redwood coffee-table beside the couch. “I was just having a beer for a nightcap. Let me get you one.”

  “I don’t mind if you do.”

  She went into another room, closing the door behind her.

  When I sat down on the studio couch, a fluffy gray cat came out from under it and jumped onto my knee. Its purring rose and fell like the sound of a distant plane. Somewhere in the house, I thought I heard a low voice talking. Denise was a long time coming back.

  I set the cat on the floor, and moved across the room to the door she had closed. On the other side of it, she was saying, in clipped telephone accents: “He claims to be employed by Mrs. Charles Singleton.” A silence, lightly scratched by the sound of the telephone. Then: “I absolutely won’t, I promise you. Of course, I understand perfectly. I did want to get your view of the matter.” Another scratchy silence. Denise intoned a saccharine good-night, and hung up.

  I tiptoed back to my seat, with the gray cat weaving between my legs. It paraded back and forth in front of me, rubbing its sides on my trousers and looking up at my face with remote female disdain.

  I said: “Scat.”

  Denise re-entered the room with a foaming glass in each hand. She said to the cat: “Doesn’t the nasty mans like kitty-witties?”

  The cat paid no attention.

  I said: “There’s a story about Confucius, Mrs. Grinker. He was a pre-Communist Chinaman.”

  “I know who Confucius is.”

  “It seems a stable burned down in a neighboring village, call it Bella City. Confucius wanted to know if any men were hurt. He didn’t ask about the horses.”

  It hit her. The foam slopped over the rims of the beer-glasses and down across her fingers. She set the glasses on the coffee-table. “You can like cats and people, too,” she said doubtfully. “I have a son in college, believe it or not. I even had a husband at one time. Whatever happened to him?”

  “I’ll look for him when I finish the case I’m on.”

  “Don’t bother. Aren’t you going to drink your beer?” She sat on the edge of the couch, wiping her wet fingers with a piece of Kleenex.

  “The case I’m on,” I said, “involves one dead woman and one missing man. If your cat had been run over by a hit-run driver, and somebody knew his license number, you’d expect to be told it. Who were you telephoning just now?”

  “Nobody. It was a wrong number.” Her fingers were twisting the damp Kleenex into a small cup-shaped object, roughly the shape of a woman’s hat.

  “The telephone didn’t ring.”

  She looked up at me with pain on her large face. “This woman is one of my customers. I can vouch for her.” The pain was partly economic and partly moral.

  “How did Lucy Champion get the hat? Does your customer explain that?”

  “Of course. That’s why it’s so utterly pointless to bring her name into it. Lucy Champion used to be her maid. She ran away some time ago, without giving notice. She stole the hat from her employer, and other things as well.”

  “What other things? Jewelry?”

  “How did you know that?”

  “I got it from the horse’s mouth. Maybe horse isn’t the right word. Mrs. Larkin is more of the pony type.”

  Denise didn’t react to the name. Her quick unconscious fingers had moulded the Kleenex hat into a miniature replica of the black-and-gold turban. She noticed what her fingers had been making, and tossed it in front of the cat. The cat pounced.

  The woman wagged her head from side to side. The metal curlers clicked dully like disconnected thoughts. “All this is very confusing. Oh well, let’s drink up.” She raised her glass. “Here’s to confusion. And universal darkness covers all.”

  I reached for my beer. The sagging springs of the studio couch threw us together, shoulder to shoulder. “Where did you pick that up?”

  “I went to school once, strangely enough. That was before I came down with a bad case of art. What did you say the name was?”

  “Archer.”

  “I know that. The woman’s name, who told you about the stolen jewelry.”

  “Mrs. Larkin. It’s probably an alias. Her first name is Una.”

  “Small and dark? Fiftyish? Mannish type?”

  “That’s Una. Was she your customer?”

  Denise frowned into her beer, sipped meditatively, came up with a light foam mustache. “I shouldn’t be talking out loud like this. But if she’s using an alias, there must be something fishy.” Her dubious expression hardened into self-concern: “You wouldn’t quote me, to
her or anybody else? My business is on the edge of nothing, I have a boy to educate, I can’t afford any sort of trouble.”

  “Neither can Una, or whatever her name is.”

  “It’s Una Durano, Miss Una Durano. At least that’s what she goes by here. How did you happen to know her?”

  “I worked for her at one time, briefly.” The afternoon seemed very long ago.

  “Where does she come from?”

  “I wouldn’t know. I’m much more interested in where she is now.”

  “I might as well tell all,” Denise said wryly. “She lives on the Peppermill estate, leased it early last spring. I heard she paid a fantastic sum: a thousand dollars a month.”

  “The diamonds are real, then?”

  “Oh yes, the diamonds are real.”

  “And just where is the Peppermill estate?”

  “I’ll tell you. But you won’t go and see her tonight?” She pressed my arm with strong fingers. “If you do, she’ll realize I told tales out of school.”

  “This is real life, Denise.”

  “I know it. It’s my personal real life. The hundred dollars she paid me for that hat took care of the rent that month.”

  “What month was it?”

  “March, I think. It was the first one she bought in my shop. She’s been back a couple of times since.”

  “It must have looked good on her, if anything could.”

  “Nothing could. She has no feminine quality. Anyway, she didn’t buy the turban to wear herself. She paid for it, with a hundred-dollar bill. But it was the other woman with her who tried it on and wore it out of the shop.” Her hand was still on my arm, like a bird that had settled on a comfortable roost for the night. She felt my muscles tense. “What’s the matter?”

  “The other woman. Describe her.”

  “She was a lovely girl, much younger than Miss Durano. A statuesque blonde, with the most wonderful blue eyes. She looked like a princess in my hat.”

  “Did she live with Miss Durano?”

  “I can’t say, though I saw them together several times. The blonde woman only came into my shop that once.”

  “Did you catch her name?”

  “I’m afraid not. Is it important?” Her fingers were sculpturing the muscle patterns in my forearm.

  “I don’t know what’s important and what isn’t. You have been helpful, though.” I stood up out of her grasp.

  “Aren’t you going to finish your beer? You can’t go out there tonight. It’s after midnight.”

  “I think I’ll have a look at the place. Where is it?”

  “I wish you wouldn’t. Promise me anyway you won’t go in and talk to her, not tonight.”

  “You shouldn’t have phoned her,” I said. “But I’ll make you a better promise. If I find Charlie Singleton, I’ll buy the most expensive hat in your store.”

  “For your wife?”

  “I’m not married.”

  “Oh.” She swallowed. “Well. To get to the Peppermill house, you turn left at the ocean boulevard and drive out to the end of town, past the cemetery. It’s the first big estate beyond the cemetery. You’ll know it by the greenhouses. And it has its own landing field.”

  She rose heavily and crossed the room to the door. The cat had torn the Kleenex hat into shreds that littered the carpet like dirty snowflakes.

  CHAPTER 15: I drove back to the ocean boulevard and turned south. A fresh breeze struck the windwing and was deflected into my face, carrying moisture and sea-smells. Behind the whizzing palm trees on the margin of my headlights, the sea itself streamed silver under the moon.

  The boulevard curved left away from the beach. It climbed a grade past wind-tormented evergreens huddled arthritically on the hillside. A stone wall sprang up beside the road, amplifying the hum of the tires and the mutter of the engine. Beyond the wall, stone angels pointed at the sky; saints spread their arms in iron benediction.

  The cemetery wall ended abruptly, and its place was taken by a spear-pointed iron fence. I caught glimpses through it of a great lawn returning to wilderness, beyond it a flat field with a corrugated-iron hangar at one end, a wind-sock blowing from its roof. I slowed down.

  A heavy wrought-iron gate hung between obelisk-shaped gateposts, one of which had a large FOR SALE sign bolted to it. I got out and tried the gate. It was chained and padlocked. Through its bars I could see a long straight drive lined with coconut palms, at its end a massive house surrounded with outbuildings. The sloping glass roof of a conservatory glinted at the end of one wing.

  The gate was climbable. Iron leaves between the bars provided foot- and hand-holds. I switched off my headlights and went over it. Circling wide on the lawn away from the drive, I struggled through the waist-high grass and weeds. The traveling moon accompanied me to the house.

  The building was Spanish Renaissance with a strong Inquisition hangover. Narrow windows barred with ornamental ironwork were set deep in its wide flat concrete face. A lighted window on the second floor formed a tall yellow rectangle striped with vertical bars. I could see part of the ceiling of the room, vague shadows dancing on it. After a while the shadows approached the window, grouping and solidifying into human form. I lay down flat on my back and pulled my jacket together over my shirt-front.

  A man’s head and shoulders appeared at the bottom of the tall yellow rectangle. I made out dark eyes in a moony blur of face under a tangle of hair. The eyes were raised to the sky. I looked straight up into its dark blue well, moon-washed and dripping with stars, and wondered what the man at the window was seeing there, or looking for.

  He moved. Two pale hands sprang out from his dark silhouette and gripped the bars framing his face. He swayed from side to side, and I saw the white blaze on one side of his tangled head. His shoulders writhed. He seemed to be trying to wrench the bars out of their concrete sockets. Each time he tried and failed, he said one word in a low growling guttural.

  “Hell,” he said. “Hell. Hell.”

  The word fell heavily from his mouth forty or fifty times while his body tugged and heaved, flinging itself violently from side to side. He left the window then, as suddenly as he had appeared in it. I watched his slow shadow retreat across the ceiling and dissolve out of human shape.

  Moving closer to the wall, I worked along it to the ground-floor window in which a faint light showed. This opened into a long hallway with a rounded ceiling. The light came from an open door at its far end. Listening closely, I heard some kind of music, a thin jazz scrabbling and tapping on the lid of silence.

  I circled the house to the left, past a row of closed garage-doors, a clay tennis-court patchily furred with twitch grass, a sunken garden overgrown with succulents. From its end a barranca widened down to a bluff that overhung the sea. Below the bluff, the sea slanted up like a corrugated-metal roof to the horizon.

  I turned back to the house. Between it and the sunken garden there was a flagged patio walled with flowerboxes. Its tables and chairs were sand-blown and rusting, old iron relics of dead summers. Light fell among them from a picture window in the wall overhead. The jazz was louder behind the wall, like music at a dance to which I hadn’t been invited.

  The window was uncurtained but set too high to give me a view of the room. The black-beamed ceiling was visible, and the upper part of the far wall. Its oak panels were crowded with paintings of pigeon-breasted women in lace caps and mutton-chop-whiskered men, narrow-shouldered in black Victorian coats. Somebody’s ancestors, not Una’s. She had been stamped out by a machine.

  Standing on my toes, I could see the top of Una’s head covered with short black curls like caracul. She was sitting perfectly still beside the window. A young man was sitting opposite her, his profile visible from the neck up. It was a heavy and amorphous profile, whatever strength it had concealed by pads of flesh under the chin, around the mouth and eyes. He had light brown hair bristling in an unkempt crew-cut. The focus of his attention was somewhere between him and Una, below the level of the windowsil
l. I guessed from the movement of his eye that they were playing cards.

  The music behind the wall stopped and started again. It was the same old record, Sentimental Lady, being played over and over. Sentimental Una, I said to myself, just as the howling began. Distant and muted by intervening walls, the howling rose and fell like a coyote baying the moon. Or a man. The hair on the back of my neck prickled.

  Una said, loudly enough to be heard through the plate-glass window: “For Christ’s sake shut him up.”

  The man with the crew-cut rose into half-length view. He wore the white-drill smock of a nurse or orderly, but he had none of their air of efficiency. “What do I do, bring him down here?” He clenched his hands together in a womanish gesture.

  “It looks as if you’ll have to.”

  The howling rose again. The orderly’s head turned towards it and then his body followed. He walked away from the window, out of my sight. Una got up and marched in the same direction. Her shoulders were trim in a tailored black pajama-jacket. She turned the music louder. It poured through the house like a dark intangible surf, and like a drowning person’s, the man’s cry rose above it. His howling was stilled suddenly. The music went on, washing over the human echo.

  Then there were voices in the room, Una’s voice weaving jerkily through the music: “Headache … get some peace … sedation”; and the growling guttural I had heard before, starting below the music and rising above it:

  “I can’t. It is terrible. Terrible things going on. I got to stop them.”

  “Old man Stopper himself. You’re the one to stop them all right.” It was the younger man’s mezzo, with a titter running through it.

  “Leave him alone!” Una cried savagely. “Let him have his say. You want him to yell all night?”

  There was silence again, except for the swirling music. I stepped across a flowerbox into the patio and leaned my weight on one of the rusted tables. It held firm. Using a chair as a step, I got up onto the tabletop. The table teetered on its base, and I had a bad moment before it leveled back. When I straightened up, my head was almost even with the windowsill ten feet away.