The Ivory Grin

Chapter 14

I went back to the hotel and found a public telephone. According to the directory, the Denise Hat Shop was run by a Mrs. Denise Grinker whose residence was at 124 Jacaranda Lane. I called her home number, got an answer, and hung up.

The street twisted like a cowpath between the highway and the shore. Jacaranda and cypress trees darkened the road and obscured the houses along it. I drove slowly, in second gear, turning my flashlight on the house-fronts. It was a middle-class neighborhood subsiding into bohemian defeat. Weeds were rampant in the yards. Signs in dingy window corners advertised Handmade Pottery, Antiques, Typing: We Specialize in Manuscripts. The numerals 124 were painted in a vertical row, by hand, on the doorpost of a graying redwood bungalow.

I parked, and walked in under a shaggy eugenia arch. There was a rusty bicycle leaning against the wall on the front porch. The porch light came on when I knocked, and the door opened. A large woman wrapped in a flannel bathrobe appeared in the opening, one hip out. Because her hair was caught up in metal curlers, her face looked naked and very broad. In spite of that, it was a pleasant face. I could feel my frozen smile thaw into something more comfortable.

“Mrs. Grinker? My name is Archer.”

“Hello,” she said good-humoredly, looking me over with large brown eyes a little the worse for wear. “I didn’t leave the darn shop unlocked again, touch wood?”

“I hope not.”

“Aren’t you a policeman?”

“More or less. It shows when I’m tired.”

“Wait a minute.” She brought a leather case out of the pocket of her bathrobe and put on tortoise-shell spectacles. “I don’t know you, do I?”

“No. I’m investigating a murder that occurred in Bella City this afternoon.” I produced the rolled-up turban from my pocket and held it out to her. “This belonged to the victim. Did you make it?”

She peered at it. “It’s got my name inside. What if I did?”

“You should be able to identify the customer you sold it to, if it’s an original.”

She leaned closer under the light, her glance shifting from the hat to me. The dark-rimmed spectacles had gathered her face into a shrewd hard pattern. “Is it a question of identification? You said it belonged to the victim. So who was the victim?”

“Lucy Champion was her name. She was a colored woman in her early twenties.”

“And you want to know if I sold her this turban?”

“I didn’t say that exactly. The question is who you sold it to.”

“Do I have to answer that? Let me see your badge.”

“I’m a private detective,” I said, “working with the police.”

“Who are you working for?”

“My client doesn’t want her name used.”

“Exactly!” She blew me a whiff of beer. “Professional ethics. That’s how it is with me. I can’t deny I sold that hat, and I won’t deny it was an original. But how can I say who bought it from me? I made it away back last spring some time. I do know one thing for certain, though, it wasn’t a colored girl bought it. There’s never been one in my shop, except for a few brownskins from India and Persia and places like that. They’re different.”

“Born in different places, anyway.”

“Okay, we won’t argue. I have nothing against colored people. But they don’t buy hats from me. This girl must have found the hat, or stolen it, or had it given to her, or bought it in a rummage sale. So even if I could remember who bought it from me, it wouldn’t be fair to drag my client’s name into a murder case, would it?” Her voice contained a hint of phoniness, an echo of the daytime palaver in her shop.

“If you worked at it, Mrs. Grinker, I think you could remember.”

“Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t.” She was troubled, and her voice grew shallower. “What if I did? It would be violating a professional confidence.”

“Do milliners take an oath?”

“We have our standards,” she said hollowly. “Oh hell, I don’t want to lose customers if I can help it. The ones who can pay my prices are getting as scarce as eligible men.”

I tried hard to look like an eligible man. “I can’t give you my client’s name. I will say that she’s connected with the Singleton family.”

“The Charles Singletons?” She pronounced the syllables slowly and distinctly, like a quotation from a poem she had always loved.

“Uh-huh.”

“How is Mrs. Singleton?”

“Not very well. She’s worried about her son–”

“Is this murder connected with him?”

“I’m trying to find that out, Mrs. Grinker. I never will find out unless I get some co-operation.”

“I’m sorry. Mrs. Singleton isn’t a customer of mine – I’m afraid she buys most of her hats in Paris – but of course I know of her. Come in.”

The front door opened directly into a redwood-paneled living-room. A gas heater burned low in a red-brick fireplace. The room was warm and shabby and smelled of cats.

She waved a hospitable hand towards a studio couch covered with an afghan. A glass of beer was bubbling its life away on a redwood coffee-table beside the couch. “I was just having a beer for a nightcap. Let me get you one.”

“I don’t mind if you do.”

She went into another room, closing the door behind her.

When I sat down on the studio couch, a fluffy gray cat came out from under it and jumped onto my knee. Its purring rose and fell like the sound of a distant plane. Somewhere in the house, I thought I heard a low voice talking. Denise was a long time coming back.

I set the cat on the floor, and moved across the room to the door she had closed. On the other side of it, she was saying, in clipped telephone accents: “He claims to be employed by Mrs. Charles Singleton.” A silence, lightly scratched by the sound of the telephone. Then: “I absolutely won’t, I promise you. Of course, I understand perfectly. I did want to get your view of the matter.” Another scratchy silence. Denise intoned a saccharine good-night and hung up.

I tiptoed back to my seat, with the gray cat weaving between my legs. It paraded back and forth in front of me, rubbing its sides on my trousers and looking up at my face with remote female disdain.

I said: “Scat.”

Denise re-entered the room with a foaming glass in each hand. She said to the cat: “Doesn’t the nasty mans like kitty-witties?”

The cat paid no attention.

I said: “There’s a story about Confucius, Mrs. Grinker. He was a pre-Communist Chinaman.”

“I know who Confucius is.”

“It seems a stable burned down in a neighboring village, call it Bella City. Confucius wanted to know if any men were hurt. He didn’t ask about the horses.”

It hit her. The foam slopped over the rims of the beer-glasses and down across her fingers. She set the glasses on the coffee-table. “You can like cats and people, too,” she said doubtfully. “I have a son in college, believe it or not. I even had a husband at one time. Whatever happened to him?”

“I’ll look for him when I finish the case I’m on.”

“Don’t bother. Aren’t you going to drink your beer?” She sat on the edge of the couch, wiping her wet fingers with a piece of Kleenex.

“The case I’m on,” I said, “involves one dead woman and one missing man. If your cat had been run over by a hit-run driver, and somebody knew his license number, you’d expect to be told it. Who were you telephoning just now?”

“Nobody. It was a wrong number.” Her fingers were twisting the damp Kleenex into a small cup-shaped object, roughly the shape of a woman’s hat.

“The telephone didn’t ring.”

She looked up at me with pain on her large face. “This woman is one of my customers. I can vouch for her.” The pain was partly economic and partly moral.

“How did Lucy Champion get the hat? Does your customer explain that?”

“Of course. That’s why it’s so utterly pointless to bring her name into it. Lucy Champion used to be her maid. She ran away some time ago, without giving notice. She stole the hat from her employer, and other things as well.”

“What other things? Jewelry?”

“How did you know that?”

“I got it from the horse’s mouth. Maybe horse isn’t the right word. Mrs. Larkin is more of the pony type.”

Denise didn’t react to the name. Her quick unconscious fingers had moulded the Kleenex hat into a miniature replica of the black-and-gold turban. She noticed what her fingers had been making, and tossed it in front of the cat. The cat pounced.

The woman wagged her head from side to side. The metal curlers clicked dully like disconnected thoughts. “All this is very confusing. Oh well, let’s drink up.” She raised her glass. “Here’s to confusion. And universal darkness covers all.”

I reached for my beer. The sagging springs of the studio couch threw us together, shoulder to shoulder. “Where did you pick that up?”

“I went to school once, strangely enough. That was before I came down with a bad case of art. What did you say the name was?”

“Archer.”

“I know that. The woman’s name, who told you about the stolen jewelry.”

“Mrs. Larkin. It’s probably an alias. Her first name is Una.”

“Small and dark? Fiftyish? Mannish type?”

“That’s Una. Was she your customer?”

Denise frowned into her beer, sipped meditatively, came up with a light foam mustache. “I shouldn’t be talking out loud like this. But if she’s using an alias, there must be something fishy.” Her dubious expression hardened into self-concern: “You wouldn’t quote me, to her or anybody else? My business is on the edge of nothing, I have a boy to educate, I can’t afford any sort of trouble.”

“Neither can Una, or whatever her name is.”

“It’s Una Durano, Miss Una Durano. At least that’s what she goes by here. How did you happen to know her?”

“I worked for her at one time, briefly.” The afternoon seemed very long ago.

“Where does she come from?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m much more interested in where she is now.”

“I might as well tell all,” Denise said wryly. “She lives on the Peppermill estate, leased it early last spring. I heard she paid a fantastic sum: a thousand dollars a month.”

“The diamonds are real, then?”

“Oh yes, the diamonds are real.”

“And just where is the Peppermill estate?”

“I’ll tell you. But you won’t go and see her tonight?” She pressed my arm with strong fingers. “If you do, she’ll realize I told tales out of school.”

“This is real life, Denise.”

“I know it. It’s my personal real life. The hundred dollars she paid me for that hat took care of the rent that month.”

“What month was it?”

“March, I think. It was the first one she bought in my shop. She’s been back a couple of times since.”

“It must have looked good on her, if anything could.”

“Nothing could. She has no feminine quality. Anyway, she didn’t buy the turban to wear herself. She paid for it, with a hundred-dollar bill. But it was the other woman with her tried it on and wore it out of the shop.” Her hand was still on my arm, like a bird that had settled on a comfortable roost for the night. She felt my muscles tense. “What’s the matter?”

“The other woman. Describe her.”

“She was a lovely girl, much younger than Miss Durano. A statuesque blonde, with the most wonderful blue eyes. She looked like a princess in my hat.”

“Did she live with Miss Durano?”

“I can’t say, though I saw them together several times. The blonde woman only came into my shop that once.”

“Did you catch her name?”

“I’m afraid not. Is it important?” Her fingers were sculpturing the muscle patterns in my forearm.

“I don’t know what’s important and what isn’t. You have been helpful though.” I stood up out of her grasp.

“Aren’t you going to finish your beer? You can’t go out there tonight. It’s after midnight.”

“I think I’ll have a look at the place. Where is it?”

“I wish you wouldn’t. Promise me anyway you won’t go in anyway and talk to her, not tonight.”

“You shouldn’t have phoned her,” I said. “But I’ll make you a better promise. If I find Charlie Singleton, I’ll buy the most expensive hat in your store.”

“For your wife?”

“I’m not married.”

“Oh.” She swallowed. “Well. To get to the Peppermill house, you turn left at the ocean boulevard and drive out to the end of town, past the cemetery. It’s the first big estate beyond the cemetery. You’ll know it by the greenhouses. And it has its own landing field.”

She rose heavily and crossed the room to the door. The cat had torn the Kleenex hat into shreds that littered the carpet like dirty snowflakes.