The Ivory Grin Page 5

Alex looked at the detective as if he were a tree too thick to climb. “No, sir.”

  “You’re Annie Norris’s boy, aren’t you?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “How’s your mother going to like this?” Before Alex could answer, Brake turned to me: “Did he cut her?”

  “I doubt it. He stayed around after it happened. They were on their way to get married, he says.”

  “He says.”

  “I didn’t cut her,” Alex said. “I wouldn’t hurt a hair of Lucy’s head.” He was leaning slackly against the counter on his elbows, as if he no longer had a use for his body.

  The fat key-clerk came in, letting the door close softly on his heel. He moved sideways along the wall and around the end of the counter to his world of paper bosoms, dirty sheets, silent screams for assistance. The sight of death had reminded him of the buried guilts in the graveyard of his mind, and he jumped when Brake said to his back:

  “Are you the key-clerk?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “I want a key to number seven, all the keys in fact.”

  “They’re both out, Mr. Brake.” He came forward placatingly, offering his quivering body as a sacrifice. “I give her one when she rented the room, and then when she came back she asked me for the duplicate. She said she lost the other. I said she’d have to pay—”

  I cut in: “The key’s in the door, lieutenant.”

  “Why didn’t you say so?”

  Brake stepped outside and summoned his driver to keep an eye on Alex. A second police-car drew up behind the first. The ring of spectators broke and re-formed around it. A uniformed sergeant pushed through them to join Brake. He had a folded tripod and camera under one arm and a fingerprint kit in the other hand. “Where’s the stiff, lieutenant?”

  “Over yonder. Call the deputy coroner?”

  “He’s on his way.”

  “She’ll spoil before we get to her, at this rate. Now take it easy, folks. Gangway.”

  The crowd made way for them and surged in their wake.

  Inside the office, Alex and his guard sat in glum intimacy on the settee. The guard was a large young cop in a blue traffic-officer’s uniform. Beside his thick-chested frame Alex looked smaller and thinner. His gaze was turned inward. He seemed to be seeing himself for the first time as he was: a black boy tangled in white law, so vulnerable he hardly dared move a muscle.

  Behind the counter, the key-clerk was comforting himself with the remnant of his Coke. I sat on the studio bed beside him:

  “I’d like to get that straight about the keys.”

  “Questions!” He belched pathetically. Brown liquid trickled from the corner of his mouth into a red rash on his chin. “You prob’ly won’t believe me, I look like a healthy constitution, only I got delicate nerves. I’m still on partial disability from the Army, and that’s the proof of it. I can’t take all this cross-questioning and stuff. The way the lieutenant looked at me, you’d think I done her in.” He pouted like a bloated dilapidated imbecile little boy.

  “When did you see her last?”

  “Must of been around five o’clock, I didn’t look at the time.”

  “She needed another key?”

  “That’s correct. I asked her what happened to the one I give her when she checked in. She said she must of lost it. I said that would be fifty cents extra and she paid me the money right then. She said she was checking out. Little did I know she had a rendezvoose with murder.”

  “Did she seem disturbed?”

  “I don’t know. I didn’t specially notice. I was the one that should of been disturbed. Why’d she want to come here to get herself chopped? They’d do it for her down on Hidalgo any day of the week.”

  “It certainly was tough on you,” I said, “and inconsiderate of her.”

  “You’re bloody right.” Self-pity gurgled in his throat like a hemorrhage beyond the reach of irony or cautery. “How did I know she was passing herself for white? That she was going to bleed all over my floor? I got to clean it up.”

  On the other side of the counter Alex sat with his guard. All I could see of him was the top of his head, but I could hear him breathing.

  “After the girl went into her room,” I said, “did anybody else go in?”

  “Not that I saw. I don’t pay no attention half the time. They go and come.” The phrase pleased him, and he repeated: “Go and come.”

  “You didn’t see anybody?”

  “Naw. I was sitting down in here passing the time. They come and go.” A flash of anger galvanized him feebly: “I wisht I seen him. Just lemme get my hands on the guy that done it and mussed that floor—”

  “You think it was a man?”

  “Who said so?”

  “You said ‘guy.’ ”

  “Only a manner of speaking. Anyway, why would a woman cut a woman?” Leaning towards me, he said in a loud stage whisper: “You want my honest opinion, I think that young buck done it. They’re always cutting their wenches, you know that.”

  There was a scuffle of feet. Alex Norris came over the counter head first and lighted on all fours in front of us. Scrambling to his feet, he landed one back-handed blow on the side of the clerk’s head. The clerk screamed gently and swooned across my legs.

  Alex dived for the open window. Unable to get to my feet, I yelled: “Stop it, Alex! Come back!”

  He kicked out the screen and hoisted one leg over the sill. The coat of his blue suit was split down the back.

  His guard strode round the end of the counter, lifting the right side of his uniform blouse. His black police-holster snapped open and a revolver popped up in his hand like a lethal jack-in-the-box. Its safety clicked off. Alex was still in the window, struggling to force his other leg through the narrow opening. He was a sitting duck, and the range was almost point-blank.

  I rolled the key-clerk off my knees to the floor and stepped across the line of fire. The trigger-happy guard cursed me and said: “Get out of the way.”

  Alex was out of the window. I went out after him. He was pounding across a field of tall dry grass towards the fence that ran along the highway. It was a seven-foot wire fence. He ran up it and vaulted over in a single fluid motion. His Ford coupé was parked on the shoulder of the highway.

  I got over the fence and fell on the other side. A gun went off behind me. Alex was in his car, kicking the starter. A bullet struck the hood of the Ford with the plop of a heavy raindrop, leaving a hole. As if stung, the Ford jumped forward, its rear wheels churning the gravel. I ran for it and got one arm hooked through the open right window.

  Alex didn’t turn his head over the wheel, but he braked suddenly, swerved, and accelerated. I lost my precarious grip on the door. When I hit the ground, I rolled. The colored world spun into gray monochrome and blacked out for a second. The young traffic-cop with the gun hauled me to my feet. The Ford was out of sight.

  “Listen, you.” He cursed me unimaginatively a few times. “I could of pinked him, if you hadn’t been in the way. What you trying to pull?” The revolver in his right hand seemed to be threatening me. His left hand was automatically brushing gravel off the back of my jacket.

  “You wanted him alive. If you shot him you’d be in the soup. He wasn’t under arrest.”

  His face went white under the tan, as if I had turned a valve on its blood supply. Almost furtively, he put the revolver away.

  Brake came out through the gate of the court, running swiftly and cumbrously like a bear on its hind legs. He had grasped the situation before he reached us:

  “You’re wasting time, Trencher. Take after him. Use the other car. I’ll get on the radio. What’s his number?”

  “I didn’t get it, lieutenant.”

  “You’re doing great work, Trencher.” Brake waved him away.

  I gave him the license number. Moving with alert impatience, Brake went back to the patrol-car and shut himself in to radio his headquarters. I waited for him beside it:

  “What’s the story, lieutenant?
”

  “General alarm. Roadblocks.” He started for Lucy’s room.

  The crowd of trailer people, men and women and children, blocked his path. One of the men spoke up: “The boy get away from you, captain?”

  “We’ll get him back. Incidentally, I want all you people to stay home tonight. We’ll talk to you later.”

  “Is it murder?” The question fell into a hush, which was broken by a sparrowlike twittering from women and children.

  “I’ll guarantee this:” Brake said, “she didn’t cut herself shaving. Now break it up. You people go back to your houses.”

  The crowd drew back muttering. Advised by his glance to come along, I followed Brake to the door of number seven. Inside, the identification officer was taking measurements and photographs. Lucy lay under his ministrations with the bored expression of a hostess whose guests’ antics were getting out of hand.

  “Come in,” Brake said. “Shut the door.”

  One of the suitcases was open on the bed, and he returned to his examination of it. I stayed by the door, watching his large practiced hands go through the white uniforms.

  “Trained nurse, apparently.” He added very casually: “How did you happen to find her?”

  “I knocked on the door and she didn’t answer. The door wasn’t locked. I looked in.”

  “Why do that?”

  “I’m in the room next door.”

  His narrow gray gaze came up to my face. “You know her?”

  “Never met her.”

  “Hear any noise? See anybody?”

  “No.” I made a quick decision: “I’m a private detective from Los Angeles. I’ve been tailing her since noon.”

  “Well.” The gray eyes clouded. “That makes it interesting. Why were you doing that?”

  The identification man, who was dusting the second suitcase for fingerprints, turned his head to give me a sharp-faced look.

  “I was hired to.”

  Brake straightened up and faced me. “I didn’t think you were doing it for fun. Let’s see your identification.”

  I showed him my photostat.

  “Who hired you?”

  “I don’t have to answer that.”

  “You weren’t hired to kill her, by any chance?”

  “You’ll have to do better than that, if you want any co-operation from me.”

  “Who said I wanted any co-operation from you? Who hired you?”

  “You get tough very quickly, lieutenant. I could have blown when I found her, instead of sticking around to give you the benefit of my experience.”

  “Can the spiel.” He didn’t needle easily. “Who hired you? And for God’s sake don’t give me the one about you got your client’s interests to protect. I got a whole city to protect.”

  We faced each other across the drying moat of blood. He was a rough small-city cop, neither suave nor persuasive, with an ego encysted in scar-tissue. I was tempted to needle him again, to demonstrate to these country cousins how a boy from the big city could be hard in a polished way. But my heart wasn’t in the work. I felt less loyalty to my client than to the dead girl on the floor, and I compromised:

  “A woman who gave her name as Una Larkin came to my office this morning. She hired me to tail this girl, and told me where to find her at lunchtime. Tom’s Café on Main Street. I picked her up there and followed her home to Alex Norris’s house, where she was a roomer—”

  “Save the details for your statement,” Brake said. “What was that about the client’s name? You think it was a phony?”

  “Yes. Am I going to make a statement?”

  “Well go downtown soon’s we finish up here. Right now I want to know what she hired you for.”

  “She said Lucy worked for her, and left a couple of weeks ago with some of her jewelry—ruby earrings and a gold necklace.”

  Brake glanced at the identification man, who wagged his head negatively. He said to me: “You’ll have to take it up with the County Administrator. Or is that story phony, too?”

  “I think so.”

  “The woman live in town here?”

  “I doubt it. She was very cagy about who she was and where she came from.”

  “You giving it straight, or suppressing information?”

  “Straight.” Una had bought that much with the hundred that was lonely in my wallet.

  “It better be. Did you call us as soon as you found her?”

  “There was a few minutes’ time-lag. On my way across the court to the office, young Norris attacked me.”

  “Was he going or coming?”

  “Neither. He was waiting.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I held him and questioned him a little. He said he’d been waiting for Lucy to get her things since five o’clock. They were going away to be married. He didn’t know she was dead until I told him.”

  “You read minds, huh?” Brake’s face slanted, chin out, towards me, cracked and red like Bella Valley earth above the irrigation level. “What else do you do, Mister Experience?”

  “When I make a statement, I try to keep the record straight. The physical facts are against Norris. It looks like consciousness of guilt, running out like that—”

  “You don’t tell me,” Brake said heavily, and his assistant snickered. “I never would have thought of that by myself.”

  “He ran because he was scared. He thought he was going to be railroaded, and maybe he was right. I’ve seen it happen to black boys, also to white boys.”

  “Oh sure, you’ve been around. You’ve had a lot of experience. Only I don’t want the goddam benefit of your goddam experience. I want your facts.”

  “You’re getting them. Maybe I’m going too fast for your powers of assimilation.”

  Brake’s small eyes crossed slightly. His large face became congested with dark blood. The developing situation was interrupted by someone opening the door behind me, and singing out: “Break it up, boys. I have a date with a lady. Where’s the lady?”

  It was the deputy coroner, a plump young medical man bubbling with the excessive cheerfulness of those who handled death as a regular chore. He was accompanied by a white-coated ambulance driver and a black-coated undertaker who strove to outdo him in gaiety. Brake lost interest in me and my selection of facts.

  Samples of blood were taken from the floor. The stained bolo knife and Lucy’s smaller belongings were packed in evidence cases. Its position having been outlined with chalk, the body was lifted onto a stretcher and covered with canvas. The undertaker and the ambulance driver carried it out. Brake sealed the door.

  It was twilight, and the courtyard was almost empty. Around a pole in its center, a group of women stood in the spill of light from a single arc-lamp. They were talking in loud self-righteous tones about murders they had seen or read or heard about or imagined. Their voices sank to an uneasy protesting murmur as Lucy’s cortege went by them. Their eyes, bright-dark in faces splashed with white by the lamp on the pole, followed the covered stretcher to the back door of the waiting hearse. The sky was a dingy yellow ceiling.

  CHAPTER 8: The Mission Hotel was the most impressive building on Main Street. It was a concrete cube pierced with four rows of windows and surmounted by a broadcasting mast that thrust a winking red light towards the stars. Its flat white façade was stained red by a vertical neon sign over the entrance.

  The lobby was deep and gloomy, furnished with dark wrinkled-leather chairs. Those near the half-curtained windows at the front were occupied by old men sitting in stiff impromptu positions, as if a flood had lodged them there years ago and then receded forever. On the wall above their heads, an obscure mural depicted U.S. cavalrymen riding strange horses with human knees in pursuit of still stranger Indians.

  The desk-clerk was a mouse-colored little man who was striving against heavy odds to confer distinction on himself and his surroundings. With hair and eyebrow-moustache scrupulously brushed, a cornflower in his buttonhole matching the delicate pin-stripe in his
flannels, and at his languid elbow a vase of cornflowers to underline his point, he might have inspired a tone poem by Debussy. He answered my question in tones of careful elegance, implying that he hadn’t always manned an outpost in the wilderness:

  “I believe Mrs. Larkin is in her suite. I haven’t seen her go out, sir. Whom shall I say is calling?”

  “Archer. Don’t bother announcing me. What’s her room number?”

  “One hundred and two, Mr. Archer. I think she’s expecting you.”

  It was opposite the elevator on the second floor. At the end of the corridor a pair of curtained French doors had a red-lit sign above them: FIRE ESCAPE. I knocked on the door of 102. The elevator creaked and thumped behind me like an old heart running down.

  A wan voice called through the door: “Who is it, anyway?”

  “Archer.”

  “Come in.”

  The door was locked, and I said so.

  “All right, all right, I’m coming.” The door swung inward.

  Una looked sick. The olive-drab patches under her eyes had darkened and spread. In red Japanese pajamas she looked less like a woman than a sexless imp who had grown old in hell.

  She stood back to let me enter the room and closed the door softly behind me. It was the sitting-room of the bridal or gubernatorial suite, if honeymooners or politicians ever came there. The two tall windows that overlooked the street had drapes of dark-red plush. They were lit from outside by a red neon glow that competed with the light of a parchment-shaded floor lamp made of twisted black iron. The tall carved Spanish chairs looked unsat in and unsittable. The only trace of Una’s occupancy was a leopard coat hanging over the back of a chair.

  “What’s the trouble?” I said to her back.

  She seemed to be supporting herself on the doorknob. “No trouble. It’s this foul heat, and the waiting and the uncertainty.” She saw where that was leading her, into candor, and switched off the little-girl whine. “I have a migraine, God bless it. They hit me regularly.”

  “Too bad.” I added, with deliberate tactlessness: “I have a headache myself.”

  She turned on me with a hypochondriac’s fierce competitive smile. “Not migraine, I bet. If you haven’t had migraine you don’t know what it is. I wish I could have my head amputated. Wouldn’t that be stylish, though, a headless torso strutting around?” She was making an effort to master her self-pity and carry it off as a joke. “Men wouldn’t know the difference.”