The Ivory Grin

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 issued 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. I’ll 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 surfboarder’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.