The Ivory Grin

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 gray 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 man-made 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.

The stone gateposts bearing the number 1411 were backed up by a Tudor cottage with dark leaded windows. The gates stood open. A sweeping drive conducted me through a line of yews like honorary pallbearers to a villa that faced the moon in white Palladian splendor.

I parked under the columned porte-cochère and rang the old-fashioned bell at the side entrance. Soft, doubtful footsteps approached the deep-paneled door from the other side. A key ground in the lock, and a young woman looked out, soft chestnut hair shadowing her face.

“What is it, sir?” Her voice was soft and doubtful.

“Is it too late to see Mrs. Singleton?”

I handed her my business card. She turned her profile to the light: soft chin, soft bee-stung mouth, straight and honest nose. Her eyes were still shadowed, but I saw how young she was.

“Investigator,” she said. “Does this mean you’re from the agency? It’s late for Mrs. Singleton. She isn’t terribly well.”

“I run my own agency.”

“I see. But it is about Charlie – Mr. Singleton?”

“He’s still on the missing list, then.”

“Yes. He is.”

“I may have a lead for you.”

“Really? You think you know where he is?”

“I haven’t got that far. It’s only today I stumbled across – this matter. I don’t even know the circumstances of his disappearance. Or if the reward still stands.”

“It does,” she said with a faint, dubious smile. “If you’ll tell me just what it is you stumbled across.”

Late or not, I wanted to see Mrs. Singleton. I tossed the girl the heaviest answer I could think of: “A dead body.”

Her hand went to her breast like a frightened bird. “Charlie’s? Not Charlie’s?”

“It was a young colored woman named Lucy Champion. She had her throat cut. Know her?”

Her answer was slow in coming. I guessed that it was going to be a lie, and that the lie came hard. “No. I don’t know her. What possible connection–?” Her voice died.

“She was carrying a newspaper clipping about Singleton’s disappearance and the reward. I thought she might have come here about it. The police will probably have the same idea, when they get around to it.”

“Was she killed here, in Arroyo Beach?”

“In Bella City.” She didn’t recognize the name, and I added: “It’s an inland town, in the valley, about thirty miles from here as the crow flies.”

“Come in.” She consulted my card again: “Mr. Archer. I’ll ask Mrs. Singleton if she will see you.”

She left me standing in the entrance hall and walked along it to a lighted doorway. She was clothed with expensive bad taste in a knitted rust-colored suit that made her look slightly overblown, at least from the rear. Her movements had an awkward innocence, as if the sudden development of her body had embarrassed her with riches.

I put in several minutes looking at a sequence of Chinese paintings on the wall. A Chinese gentleman with giant earlugs denoting wisdom journeyed on foot through valleys and across rivers and mountains to a snow-line shrine. There were seven paintings, one for each stage of his journey.

The girl appeared in the doorway, her brown hair aureoled by the light behind her. “Mr. Archer. She’ll see you.”

The room had a lofty white ceiling supported by a Doric cornice. The walls were lined with cases of books uniformly bound in white calf. The cases were interspersed with paintings; one of them, of a laughing girl in a low-cut bodice, might have been a Watteau or a Fragonard. On a white sofa with a curved back, a heavy gray-haired woman sat.

She had the kind of face, square-jawed and heavy-eyebrowed, that unlucky women sometimes inherit from their fathers. It might have been handsome in a horsy way before age and ego had stiffened the bony framework and thrust it forward under the skin like concealed artillery. The slack body was encased in a black silk dress that would have served for mourning. In the monolithic black lap, the pale yellow hands were conspicuous. They had a constant tremor.

She cleared her throat: “Sit down, Mr. Archer, in this armchair here.” And after I had done so: “Now tell me just who you are.”

“I’m a licensed private detective. Most of my work is in Los Angeles, and I have my office there. Before the war I was a detective-sergeant on the Long Beach force. I gave the young lady my card.”

“Sylvia showed it to me. She told me further that you had some rather shocking information, about a colored young woman?”

“Her name is Lucy Champion. I found her with her throat cut in a Bella City motel. There was a clipping in her purse from the Bella City paper, concerning your son’s disappearance and the reward you offered. It occurred to me as a possibility that she was killed because she intended to claim the reward. She showed up in Bella City about the same time your son left here, two weeks ago. And I thought she might have approached you.”

“Isn’t that rather jumping to conclusions, on the very flimsiest grounds?” Mrs. Singleton’s voice was low and cultivated. Her hands twitched and plucked at each other like nervous scorpions. “You’re surely not implying that we had anything whatever to do with the girl’s death? Or with her life.”

“I didn’t make myself clear.” Though I thought I had. “Assume that your son met with foul play. Assume that Lucy Champion knew what had happened and who was responsible for it. If she was intending to go to you or the authorities with that sort of information, it would explain what was done to her.”

Mrs. Singleton gave no sign of having heard me. She looked down at her angry hands as if she’d have liked to disown them. “Light me a cigarette, Sylvia.”

“Of course.” Sylvia rose from her seat at the end of the sofa, took a cigarette from an ivory box, placed one end between the clamped blue lips, applied the flame of a table-lighter to the other.

Mrs. Singleton inhaled deeply, and exhaled from mouth and nostrils. The smoke crawled like fog in the crannies of her head. Even her eyes looked smoky. “You’re not implying, I trust, that my son ran off to Bella City with a colored girl.”

“Oh no, Mrs. Singleton!” the girl cried out. “He doesn’t mean that.” Then she remembered her place, which was to be seen and not heard. She sat down in her corner, looking as if she had given herself a fright.

Mrs. Singleton persisted: “What possible connection could there be between such a person and my son?”

“I’d like to know myself. In fact I’m interested enough to be willing to work on this case on a contingent basis.”

“You mean, no doubt, that if you were to qualify for the reward, it would be paid to you. That can be taken for granted.”

“Something more definite. Reward money has a way of slipping into policemen’s pockets. It has a homing instinct for authority. And I’d like to be sure of my fifty a day and expenses.”

“Naturally you would.” She exhaled smoke, purring behind it like a cat in a curtain. “What I fail to see is any particular reason why I should underwrite your activities.”

“I can’t afford to work for fun. It would also be useful to be able to name you as a client.”

“That I can understand.” Her iron-gray head struck an imperious pose, a little like a late Roman emperor’s. Her low voice rose in volume and pitch as if it were preparing to dominate a tea party or repel a barbarian assault. “I do not understand why you must interest yourself at all in my affairs. I am employing a detective agency now. They’ve already cost me more than I can easily afford, and in value received they’ve given me absolutely nothing. I’m not a wealthy woman.” Which probably meant, in her circle, that she could count her millions on the fingers of one hand. She added breathlessly in the ebb of her self-pity: “I’m not unwilling to pay for helpful information, but if a large agency has failed to restore my son to me, as it has, I see no reason to suppose that one man alone might succeed, do you?”

The cigarette in the corner of her mouth was burning short. Sylvia removed it without being asked, and crushed it out in an ashtray.

I said: “Let me kick it around and see what I can do. I intend to find out why Lucy Champion was killed. If and when I do, it may lead to your son. That’s my hunch, at least.”

“Your hunch,” she said contemptuously. “If Charles were being held under duress, for ransom, your visit to me tonight under these circumstances could be interpreted as an overture, from whoever was holding him. Did you know this Negress, the one you claim was murdered?”

“She was murdered. Did you know her?”

Her face radiated a dull white glow of anger. “I warn you not to be insolent, young man. I know how to deal with insolence.”

I glanced at Sylvia, who smiled bleakly and almost imperceptibly shook her head: “You must be very tired, Mrs. Singleton. It’s very late.”

The older woman paid no attention to her. She leaned towards me, her black silk lap wrinkling stiffly like iron under pressure: “Only this morning, under circumstances similar to these, a man came here representing himself as a private detective, like you. He claimed that he could find Charles for me, if I would pay him part of the reward in advance. I naturally refused. Then he wasted a full hour of my time, asking me questions. When I tried to ask him a question or two in my turn, he had nothing to say, not a constructive word. What was his name, Sylvia?”

“Heiss.”

“Heiss,” the older woman repeated vehemently, as if she had invented the name on the spur of the moment. She rolled her eyes towards me. They had been pickled in tears, glassed in grief, but they were still shrewd. “Do you know him?”

“I don’t think so.”

“A most repugnant creature. Eventually he dared to suggest that I sign a contract to pay him five thousand dollars if he should produce my son, alive or dead. He boasted of his connections among the criminal element. I arrived at the conclusion that he was either conspiring to defraud me, or representing a criminal organization of some sort. I ordered him out of my house.”

“And you’ve cast me in the same role?”

“Oh no,” the girl said softly from her corner.

Mrs. Singleton subsided backward, her energy spent. Her head rolled on the curved back of the sofa, exposing a slack throat to an invisible knife. Rising words palpitated feebly in her throat: “I don’t know what to think. I’m sick, old, exhausted, bereft. In a word of liars. No one will tell me anything.”

Sylvia rose, her soft and anxious look shepherding me to the door. Mrs. Singleton called out with sudden eagerness: “Mr. Archer. Did Charles send you to me? Is that it? Does he need money?” The change in her voice was startling. She sounded like a frightened girl. I turned to look at her face, and saw the same false girlishness touch it with beauty for an instant. The beauty passed like the beam of a searchlight moving across time. It left her mouth curled in a cynical parody of mother-love.

The situation was too complicated for me to understand or try to deal with. I didn’t know whether the umbilical cord between Mrs. Singleton and her son had stretched and broken and snapped back in her face and knocked her silly. Or whether she knew he was dead and was talking against despair. Whichever it was, she was ready to believe almost anything and suspicious of nearly everybody. Reality had betrayed her.

“I’ve never met Charles,” I said. “Good night. Good luck.”

She didn’t answer.