The Ivory Grin Page 7

  “I’m going to eat you.” Max’s voice was muffled. “I guess I better fatten you up first, huh? You want a steak, and something to drink? After that, who knows? Quien sabe, isn’t that how you say it?”

  “I only talk American,” she answered him severely. Having established that, she relaxed again: “A steak will be swell, Julian. You’re a real fun guy.”

  Heiss hailed the waitress. She crossed the room, a lank henna-head mincing on tender feet. “What’ll it be?”

  “A steak for the little lady. I’ve already dined myself.”

  “Let’s see, you’re drinking sherry.”

  “Very dry sherry,” said Desmond-Heiss.

  “Sure, very dry.” She turned her head to one side and threw the line away: “Maybe you take it in powder form.”

  “An Alexander for me,” the girl said.

  “Sure, kiddie, have yourself a time.” But there was an undertone in his voice, the no-expense-account blues. “Nothing’s too good for Florie.”

  A woman came in from the street and walked quickly along the row of booths. Her wide-shouldered black coat swung out behind with the energy of her movement and showed the white uniform underneath. She didn’t see me but I saw her and straightened up in my seat. She stopped beside Heiss and Florie, her blue eyes glittering in her cold porcelain face.

  “Hello, Mrs. Benning. You want to see me?” Florie’s voice was small and tinny.

  “You didn’t finish your work. You can come and finish it now.”

  “I did do my work, Mrs. Benning. Everything you said.”

  “Are you contradicting me?”

  “No, but it’s Saturday night. I got a right to my Saturday nights. When do I get a chance to have some fun?”

  “Fun is one thing. What you’re doing is peddling my private affairs to a dirty snooper.”

  “What’s that?” Heiss put in brightly. “I beg your pardon, lady?”

  “Don’t ‘lady’ me. Are you coming, Florie?” The woman’s voice was low, but it hummed like an overloaded electric circuit.

  “I hope there ain’t no trouble, ma’am,” the waitress said briskly behind her.

  Mrs. Benning toned to look at her. I didn’t catch the look, because the back of her dark head was towards me. The waitress backed away, holding the menu card as if to shield her chest.

  Heiss stood up, not quite so tall as she was. “I don’t know who you are, lady. I can tell you this, you got no call to molest my girl friend in public.” His face was groping for an attitude. Then his liquid gaze met hers and drooled away.

  She leaned towards him, talking in a low buzzing monotone: “I know who you are. I saw you watching the house. I heard you talking to Florie on the office extension. I’m warning you: stay away from her, and especially stay away from me.”

  “Florie has a right to her friends.” Heiss had found a manner, that of man-of-the-world, but it went bad immediately. “As for you, Mrs. Benning, if that’s what you call yourself, I wouldn’t touch you. I wouldn’t buy you for cat’s-meat—”

  She laughed in his face: “You’d never have the chance, little man. Now crawl back down your hole. If I ever see you again, I’ll knock you over with a stick the way I would a gopher. Come on, Florie.”

  Florie sat head down with her arms on the table, frightened and stubborn. Mrs. Benning took her by the wrist and hauled her to her feet. Florie didn’t resist. With dragging feet, she followed Mrs. Benning to the door. There was a taxi waiting at the yellow curb outside. By the time I reached the street, it had pulled away and lost itself in the traffic.

  I had a bad feeling that history was repeating itself, in spades. The bad feeling got worse when Heiss came up behind me and touched my arm. He touched people whenever he could, to reassure himself of his membership in the race.

  “Go and take gopher poison,” I said.

  The veined nose stood out on his pale face. “Yeah, I saw you in there. I thought you run out on me, boysie. I was consoling my bereavement with a nice fresh chunk of Mexican cactus candy.”

  “Pumping her, you mean.”

  “You unnerestimate me. I pumped Florie dry long since! They can’t resist me, boysie. What is it I got that they can’t resist me, I wonder.” His mobile mouth was working overtime, talking him back into his own good opinion.

  “What’s the pitch, Max?”

  “No dice, Archer. You got your chance to cut in, this aft. You couldn’t be bothered with me. Now I can’t be bothered.”

  “You want to be coaxed.”

  “Not me. Lay a small pinkie on me and I scream my head off.” He cast a smug eye on the crowds streaming past us, as if he was depending on them for protection.

  “You don’t know me well,” I said. “Those aren’t my methods.”

  “I know you as well as I want to,” he said. “You gave me the quick old brush this aft.”

  “Forget it. What’s the tieup with this missing man in Arroyo Beach?”

  “Come again, boysie.” He leaned against the corner post of the storefront. “I should give you something for nothing. Nobody ever gave me something for nothing. I got to roust and hustle for what I get.” With a lipstick-stained handkerchief, he wiped his face.

  “I’m not trying to take something from you, Max.”

  “That’s jakeroo, then. Good night. Don’t think it ain’t been charming.” He turned away.

  I said: “Lucy’s dead.”

  That stopped him. “What did you say?”

  “Lucy had her throat cut this afternoon.”

  “You’re stringing me.”

  “Go out to the morgue and take a look for yourself. And if you won’t tell me what you know, tell it to the cops.”

  “Maybe I will at that.” His eyes shone like brown agates lit from behind. “Well, bon soir again.”

  He moved away, with one or two furtive back-glances, and joined the northward stream of pedestrians. I wanted to go after him and shake the truth out of him. But I had just said those weren’t my methods, and the words stood.

  CHAPTER 10: I picked up my car at the Mountview Motel and drove to Dr. Benning’s house. There were no lights behind its white painted windows. From the overgrown yard it looked like a house no one had lived in for a long time. Its tall gray front stood flimsily against the dark red sky like a stage set propped by scantlings from behind.

  When I rang the door bell, the house resumed its dimensions. Far in its interior, behind walls, the buzzer sounded like a trapped insect. I waited and rang again and no one answered. There were old-fashioned glass panels, ground in geometric patterns, set in both of the double doors. I pressed my face to one of them and looked in and saw nothing. Except that the glass was cracked in one corner, and gave slightly under pressure.

  I slipped on a driving-glove and punched out the cracked corner. It smashed on the floor inside. I waited and looked up and down the street and rang the bell a third time. When nobody answered and nobody passed on the sidewalk I eased my arm through the triangular hole and snapped the Yale lock.

  I closed and relocked the door with my gloved hand. Broken glass crunched under my heel. Feeling along the wall, I found the door of the waiting-room. A little light fell through the windows from the street, lending the room a vague beauty like an old woman with good features, heavily veiled.

  I located the filing cabinet behind the desk in the corner. Using my pocket flash and shielding its light with my body, I went through the Active Patient drawer of the file. Camberwell, Carson, Cooley. There was no card for Lucy Champion.

  Dousing the light, I moved along the wall to the inner door, which was a few inches ajar. I pushed it open wider, slid through and closed it behind me. I switched on the flash again and probed the walls and furniture with its white finger of light. The room contained a flat-topped oak-veneer desk, a swivel chair and a couple of other chairs, an old three-tiered sectional bookcase not quite full of medical texts and journals. Above the bookcase on the calcimined wall, there was a framed diploma i
ssued in June 1933 by a medical school I had never heard of.

  I went through an open door into a room with figured oilcloth walls and a linoleum floor. Brownish stains on the far wall outlined the place where a gas range had once stood. An adjustable examination-table of brown-painted steel padded with black leatherette had taken its place. There were a battered white enameled instrument cabinet and a sterilizer against the wall beside it. On the other side of the room, under the blinded window, a faucet dripped steadily into a sink. I went to the closed door in the wall beyond it, and turned the knob. It was locked.

  The second pass-key I tried opened the door. My light flashed on the ivory grin of death.

  Six inches above the level of my eyes, a skeleton’s shadowed sockets looked down hollowly. I thought in the instant of shock that it was a giant’s bones, then saw that the long toe-bones dangled nearly a foot above the floor. The whole thing hung in the closet by wires attached to an overhead crossbar. Its joints had been carefully articulated with wire, and the movement of the door had set it swaying slightly. Its barred shadow wavered on the closet wall behind it.

  It looked like a man’s bones to me. I had an old brotherly feeling that I should take him by the unfleshed hand. He was lonely and desolate. I was afraid to touch him.

  Somewhere in the house, no louder than a rodent squeak, a door or a floorboard creaked. It caused a croupy tightening in my breathing. I listened and heard the faint wheeze in my throat, and the dripping of the tap. Working with jumping fingers, I relocked the closet door and dropped the key in my pocket.

  With the flash unlit in my hand, I retraced my steps by blind touch to the door of the consultation room. I had one foot across its metal-strip threshold when the light came on in my face. Dr. Benning’s wife stood against the opposite wall with one hand on the light switch. She was so still that she might have been a figure in a frieze, part of the wall itself.

  “What goes on in here?”

  I squeezed out a husky answer: “The doctor wasn’t here. I came in to wait.”

  “You a crib-smasher? Junkie? We’ve got no dope in this office.”

  “I came to ask a question. I thought the office might answer it for me.”

  “What question?” The small automatic steady in her hand was gun-metal blue, and her eyes had taken its color.

  “Put the gun away, Mrs. Benning. I can’t talk with iron in my face.”

  “You’ll talk.” She pulled herself away from the wall and moved towards me. Even in motion her body seemed still and frigid. But I could feel its power, like a land mine under a snowbank. “You’re another lousy snooper, aren’t you?”

  “A fair-to-middling one. What happened to Florie?”

  She stopped in the center of the room, her legs braced apart. The pupils of her gun-colored eyes were dark and empty like the muzzle of the gun at the center of her body.

  I said: “If that gun went off and hurt me you’d be in a real jam. Put it away, it isn’t needed.”

  She didn’t seem to hear me. “I thought I saw you before. You were in the café. What happened to Florie is nobody’s business but hers and mine. I paid her off and fired her. I don’t approve of my servants stooling to scavengers. Does that take care of the question you had?”

  “One of them.”

  “Fine. Now get out, or I’ll have you arrested for burglary.” The gun moved very little, but I felt it like a fingernail on my skin.

  “I don’t think you will.”

  “You want to stick around and find out?” She glanced at the telephone on the desk.

  “I intend to. You’re vulnerable, or you’d have called the cops right away. You don’t talk like a doctor’s wife, incidentally.”

  “Maybe you want to see my marriage license.” She smiled a little, showing the tip of her tongue between white teeth. “I mean perchance you desire to peruse my connubial document. I can talk different ways, depending on who I’m talking to. To scavengers, I can also talk with a gun.”

  “I don’t like the word scavenger.”

  “He doesn’t like it,” she said to nobody in particular.

  “What do you think I want from you?”

  “Money. Or are you one of the ones that gets paid off in the hay?”

  “It’s an idea. Ill take a rain check on it. Right now, I’d like to know what Lucy Champion was doing in this office. And if you won’t put the gun away, set the safety.”

  She was still braced and tense, holding on to the gun the way a surfboarder clutches his stick. Muscular tension alone might squeeze the trigger and shoot me.

  “The man’s afraid.” Her mouth was sullen and scornful, but she clicked the safety on with her thumb. “What about Lucy Champion? I don’t know any Lucy Champion.”

  “The young colored woman who came here this afternoon.”

  “Oh. Her. The doctor has all kinds of patients.”

  “Do many of them get themselves killed?”

  “That’s a funny question. I’m not laughing, though, notice?”

  “Neither is Lucy. She had her throat cut this afternoon.”

  She tried to swallow that without a tremor, but she was shaken. Her braced body was more than ever like a surf-boarder’s moving fast on troubled water.

  “You mean she’s dead,” she said dully.

  “Yes.”

  Her eyes closed, and she swayed without falling. I took one long step and lifted the gun from her hand and ejected the clip. There was no shell in the chamber.

  “Did you know her, Mrs. Benning?”

  The question brought her out of her standing trance. Her eyes opened, tile blue again and impermeable. “She was one of my husband’s patients. Naturally he’ll be shocked. That automatic belongs to him, by the way.” She had assumed a mask of respectability and the voice that went with it.

  I tossed the gun on the desk and kept the clip. “Is that his skeleton in the closet, too?”

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

  “Have it your way. You knew what I was talking about when I said that Lucy Champion was dead.”

  Her hand went to her forehead, white under dead-black hair. “I can’t stand death, especially somebody’s I know.”

  “How well did you know her?”

  “She was a patient, I said. I’ve seen her a couple of times.”

  “Why isn’t there a card for her?”

  “A card?”

  “In the active file.”

  “I don’t know. Are you going to keep me standing here all night? I warn you, my husband will be back at any moment.”

  “How long have you been married, Mrs. Benning?”

  “It’s none of your damn business. Now get out of here or I will call the police.”

  She said it without conviction. Since I had told her Lucy was dead, there had been no force in her. She looked like a sleepwalker struggling to come awake.

  “Go ahead and call them.”

  She looked at me with blank loathing. “Augh.” It was a shallow retching sound. “Do your damnedest. Do your dirtiest. Only get out of my sight.”

  The upper faces of her breasts gleamed through the fabric of her uniform like cold trembling moons. I walked around her and let myself out.

  CHAPTER 11: The state blacktop unwound like a used typewriter-ribbon under my headlights. It threaded the wilderness of stone that cut off Bella Valley from the ocean, clinging to the walls of precipitous canyons, looping across the shoulders of peaks that towered into darkness. After forty long mountain miles it dropped me down into the lap of the coastal range. A late moon was rising heavily on the sea.

  Five minutes north of the junction with U.S. 101 Alternate, the lights of Arroyo Beach began to clutter the roadside. Motels, service stations, real-estate booths, chicken-steak pavilions were outlined in neon on the face of the darkness. I pulled up beside the pumps of a service station; while my car was being gassed I asked the attendant if he had a pay phone. He was a hammered-down elderly man in a uniform of g
ray coveralls and black leather bowtie, who looked and smelled as if he washed in crankcase oil. He jerked an oil-grained thumb towards the one-room office he had emerged from.

  The local telephone directory was a thin pamphlet attached to the wall telephone by a chain. Mrs. Charles Singleton was well represented in it. She lived at 1411 Alameda Topanga, and her telephone number was 1411. A second number was listed for the gatehouse, a third for the chauffeur’s apartment, a fourth for the gardener’s cottage, a fifth for the butler’s pantry.

  When the attendant brought me my change, I asked him where Alameda Topanga was.

  “Who you looking for, brother?”

  “Nobody in particular. I’m sightseeing.”

  “This is a funny time of the night to be sightseeing.” He looked me over. “They got a private patrol, nights, on the Alameda, and you don’t look like no member of no garden club.”

  “I’m interested in real estate. It’s a good section, I heard.”

  “Good ain’t the word for it, brother. Since they built the big hotel and the moneybags moved up here from Malibu, that property is worth its weight in gold. I only wisht I had a piece of it. I could of had. Before the war, if the old lady would of let me take a little money out of the sock, I could of had five acres at a steal. I could of been sitting pretty now, but she says save your money. The place is dead, she says, the rich set is pulling out for keeps.” His laugh was bitter and compulsive, like an old cough.

  “Too bad,” I said. “Where is the Alameda?”

  He gave me directions, pointing at the dark foothills as if they rose on the edge of the promised land. I turned towards them at the next intersection, and drove to the outskirts. Empty fields strewn with rubbish lay like a no-man’s land between the suburban cottages and the country estates. I entered an avenue hemmed in on both sides by the gray trunks and overarched by the branches of eucalyptus trees. It went by a hedged polo field and across a golf course. Cars were massed around a lighted clubhouse in the distance, and gusts of music were blown my way by the wind.

  The road ascended hills terraced like the steps of an easy manmade purgatory. I caught glimpses of glass-and-aluminum living-machines gleaming like surgical equipment in the clinical moonlight; Venetian palaces, Côte d’Azur villas, castles in Spain; Gothic and Greek and Versailles and Chinese gardens. There was a great deal of vegetable life, but no people. Perhaps the atmosphere of this higher region was too rare and expensive for the human breathing system. It was the earthly paradise where money begot plants upon property. People were irrelevant, unless they happened to have money or property.