The Ivory Grin

Chapter 9

I climbed the oil-stained concrete ramp to the sidewalk and stood at its edge, undecided what to do. I had no client, no good leads, not much money. Regret for Una’s hundred-dollar bill was gnawing at me already, like a small hungry stomach ulcer. The crowd went by like a kaleidoscope continually stirred, in which I only just failed to discern a pattern.

It was an early Saturday-night crowd. Farmhands in jeans and plaid shirts, soldiers in uniforms, boys in high-school windbreakers, roved singly and in pairs and packs among women of all ages and all shades. Hard-faced women in hats towed men in business suits. Ranchers hobbling in high-heeled boots leaned on their sun-faded wives. Under the winking yellow lights at the intersection, long shiny cars competed for space and time with pickup trucks, hot-rods, migrant jalopies. My car was still in the court of the Mountview Motel. I stepped out into the crowd and let it push me south, towards the highway.

Above the highway corner there was a cigar store with a pay-telephone sign. Under the sign a quartet of Mexican boys were watching the world go by. They leaned in a row, one-legged like storks, their lifted heels supported by the windowsill of the shop, displaying mismatched fluorescent socks under rolled jeans. Keep Your Feet on the Sidewalk Please was lettered on the wall beside them in vain.

I detached myself from the crowd and went in through the shop to the telephone booth at the rear. Three taxi-drivers were shooting craps on the back counter. I looked up Dr. Samuel Benning’s number in the local directory, and dialed it. At the other end of the line the phone rang twenty times. My nickel jangled in the coin return with the fanfare of a silver-dollar jackpot.

Before I reached the front door a young woman passed the window, walking south by herself. The four boys sprang into a burlesque routine. The one at the end pushed the one beside him, who almost caromed with the woman. He recovered his balance and rumpled the ducktail haircut of the third, who punched the fourth in the stomach. They staggered around in front of the entrance, breathless with simulated laughter.

I pushed out through them. The woman looked back in disdain. Though she had changed her striped gray uniform for a white batiste blouse and a white skirt, I recognized her face. She was the plump dark-eyed woman who had directed me into Dr. Benning’s waiting-room. The back of my neck began to itch where the bitch goddess coincidence had bitten me before.

The woman walked on, switching her red-ribboned horsetail of black hair above the soft round rotation of her hips. I followed her, with compunction. She reminded me of Lucy for some reason, though she was wide and low-slung where Lucy had been lean and high-stepping. She walked, with a similar air of knowing where she was going, into the section in which I had first seen Lucy. When she crossed the street and entered Tom’s Café, my compunction turned acute.

She paused inside the glass door to get her bearings. Then she set her course for one of the rear booths. A man was sitting in the booth with his back to the door. His panama hat showed above the low ply board partition. He rose to greet her, buttoning his camel’s-hair jacket, and stood above her in an attitude of delight while she inserted her hips between the seat and the table. As a final mark of devotion he removed his hat and smoothed his stubbly shock of brown hair with fat white fingers, before he sat down opposite her. Max Heiss was exerting charm.

I went to the bar, which covered the whole left wall of the café. The booths along the opposite wall were full, and the bar was packed with Saturday-night drinkers: soldiers and shrill dark girls who looked too young to be there, hard-faced middle-aged women with permanented hair, old men renewing their youth for the thousandth time, asphalt-eyed whores working for a living on drunken workingmen, a few fugitives from the upper half of town drowning one self to let another self be born. Behind the bar a hefty Greek in an apron dispensed fuel, aphrodisiac, opiate, with a constant melancholy smile.

I ordered a short rye and took it standing, keeping an eye on Heiss in the bar mirror. He was leaning far over the table towards the dark-eyed woman, and she was registering pleasant shock.

The booth behind him was vacated, and I crossed to it before the table was cleared. The room was surging with noise. A juke box bawled above the babel of tongues at the bar. An electric shuffleboard beside the liquor counter at the front gave out machine-gun bursts of sound at intervals. I propped myself in the corner of the seat with my ear pressed to the plyboard. A yard away, Heiss was saying: “I been thinking about you all day, dreaming about those great big beautiful eyes. I been dreaming about those great big beautiful etcetera, too, sitting and dreaming about ’em. You know what an etcetera is, Flossie?”

“I can guess.” She laughed, like somebody gargling syrup. “You’re a great kidder. Incidently, my name isn’t Flossie.”

“Florie, then, what does it matter? If you were the girl in the world, which is what you pradically are as far as I’m concerned, what does it matter? You’re the girl for me. But I bet you’ve got plenty of boy friends.” I guessed that Max had been drinking all day, and had reached the point where anything he said sounded like poetry set to music.

“I bet I have, not. Anyways, it’s no business of yours, Mr. Desmond. I hardly know you.” But she knew the game.

“Come on over on this side and get to know me better, kid, Florie. Sweet name for a sweet kid. Did anybody ever tell you you got a mouth like a flower, Florie?”

“You certny got a line, Mr. Desmond.”

“Aw, call me Julian. And come on over. I warn you it isn’t safe. When I get close up to a great big beautiful etcetera, I want to take a bite out of it, I warn you.”

“You hungry or something?” I heard the rustle and creak of the girl’s movement into the near seat. “Incidently, Julian, I’m kind of hungry. I could eat something.”

“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 turned 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 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.