The Ivory Grin

Chapter 15

I drove back to the ocean boulevard and turned south. A fresh breeze struck the windwing and was deflected into my face, carrying moisture and smells. Behind the whizzing palm trees on the margin of my headlights, the sea itself streamed silver under the moon.

The boulevard curved left away from the beach. It climbed a grade past wind-tormented evergreens huddled arthritically on the hillside. A stone wall sprang up beside the road, amplifying the hum of the tires and the mutter of the engine. Beyond the wall, stone angels pointed at the sky; saints spread their arms in iron benediction.

The cemetery wall ended abruptly, and its place was taken by a spear-pointed iron fence. I caught glimpses through it of a great lawn returning to wilderness, beyond it a flat field with a corrugated-iron hangar at one end, a wind-sock blowing from its roof. I slowed down.

A heavy wrought-iron gate hung between obelisk-shaped gateposts, one of which had a large FOR SALE sign bolted to it. I got out and tried the gate. It was chained and padlocked. Through its bars I could see a long straight drive lined with coconut palms, at its end a massive house surrounded with outbuildings. The sloping glass roof of a conservatory glinted at the end of one wing.

The gate was climbable. Iron leaves between the bars provided foot- and hand-holds. I switched off my headlights and went over it. Circling wide on the lawn away from the drive, I struggled through the waist-high grass and weeds. The traveling moon accompanied me to the house.

The building was Spanish Renaissance with a strong Inquisition hangover. Narrow windows barred with ornamental ironwork were set deep in its wide flat concrete face. A lighted window on the second floor formed a tall yellow rectangle striped with vertical bars. I could see part of the ceiling of the room, vague shadows dancing on it. After a while the shadows approached the window, grouping and solidifying into human form. I lay down flat on my back and pulled my jacket together over my shirt-front.

A man’s head and shoulders appeared at the bottom of the tall yellow rectangle. I made out dark eyes in a moony blur of face under a tangle of hair. The eyes were raised to the sky. I looked straight up into its dark blue well, moon washed and dripping with stars, and wondered what the man at the window was seeing there, or looking for.

He moved. Two pale hands sprang out from his dark silhouette and gripped the bars framing his face. He swayed from side to side, and I saw the white blaze on one side of his tangled head. His shoulders writhed. He seemed to be trying to wrench the bars out of their concrete sockets. Each time he tried and failed, he said one word in a low growling guttural.

“Hell,” he said. “Hell. Hell.”

The word fell heavily from his mouth forty or fifty times while his body tugged and heaved, flinging itself violently from side to side. He left the window then, as suddenly as he had appeared in it. I watched his slow shadow retreat across the ceiling and dissolve out of human shape.

Moving closer to the wall, I worked along it to the ground-floor window in which a faint light showed. This opened into a long hallway with a rounded ceiling. The light came from an open door at its far end. Listening closely, I heard some kind of music, a thin jazz scrabbling and tapping on the lid of silence.

I circled the house to the left, past a row of closed garage-doors, a clay tennis-court patchily furred with twitch grass, a sunken garden overgrown with succulents. From its end a barranca widened down to a bluff that overhung the sea. Below the bluff, the sea slanted up like a corrugated-metal roof to the horizon.

I turned back to the house. Between it and the sunken garden there was a flagged patio walled with flowerboxes. Its tables and chairs were sand-blown and rusting, old iron relics of dead summers. Light fell among them from a picture window in the wall overhead. The jazz was louder behind the wall, like music at a dance to which I hadn’t been invited.

The window was uncurtained but set too high to give me a view of the room. The black-beamed ceiling was visible, and the upper part of the far wall. Its oak panels were crowded with paintings of pigeon-breasted women in lace caps and mutton-chop-whiskered men, narrow-shouldered in black Victorian coats. Somebody’s ancestors, not Una’s. She had been stamped out by a machine.

Standing on my toes, I could see the top of Una’s head covered with short black curls like caracul. She was sitting perfectly still beside the window. A young man was sitting opposite her, his profile visible from the neck up. It was a heavy and amorphous profile, whatever strength it had concealed by pads of flesh under the chin, around the mouth and eyes. He had light brown hair bristling in an unkempt crew-cut. The focus of his attention was somewhere between him and Una, below the level of the windowsill. I guessed from the movement of his eye that they were playing cards.

The music behind the wall stopped and started again. It was the same old record, Sentimental Lady, being played over and over. Sentimental Una, I said to myself, just as the howling began. Distant and muted by intervening walls, the howling rose and fell like a coyote baying the moon. Or a man. The hair on the back of my neck prickled.

Una said, loudly enough to be heard through the plate-glass window: “For Christ’s sake shut him up.”

The man with the crew-cut rose into half-length view. He wore the white-drill smock of a nurse or orderly, but he had none of their air of efficiency. “What do I do, bring him down here?” He clenched his hands together in a womanish gesture.

“It looks as if you’ll have to.”

The howling rose again. The orderly’s head turned towards it and then his body followed. He walked away from the window, out of my sight. Una got up and marched in the same direction. Her shoulders were trim in a tailored black pajama-jacket. She turned the music louder. It poured through the house like a dark intangible surf, and like a drowning person’s, the man’s cry rose above it. His howling was stilled suddenly. The music went on, washing over the human echo.

Then there were voices in the room, Una’s voice weaving jerkily through the music: “Headache...get some peace...sedation”; and the growling guttural I had heard before, starting below the music and rising above it: “I can’t. It is terrible. Terrible things going on. I got to stop them.”

“Old man Stopper himself. You’re the one to stop them all right.” It was the younger man’s mezzo, with a titter running though it.

“Leave him alone!” Una cried savagely. “Let him have his say. You want him to yell all night?”

There was silence again, except for the swirling music. I stepped across a flowerbox into the patio and leaned my weight on one of the rusted tables. It held firm. Using a chair as a step, I got up onto the tabletop. The table teetered on its base, and I had a bad moment before it levelled back. When I straightened up, my head was almost even with the windowsill ten feet away.

On the far side of the room, Una was standing over a radio-phonograph. She turned it low and walked directly towards the window. I ducked instinctively, but she wasn’t looking at me. With an expression in which outrage and tolerance were combined, she was watching the man who stood in the center of the room. The man with the blaze of white like a lightning scar on the side of his head.

His small body was wrapped in a robe of red brocaded silk which hung in folds as if he had borrowed it from a larger man. Even his face seemed to have shrunk inside its skin. Instead of jowls he had pale loose wattles that flapped with the movement of his mouth.

“Terrible things.” His broken growl was loud in the silence. “Going on all the time. I caught the dogs at my mamma. They crucified my daddy. I climbed up out of the culvert up on the hill and saw the nails in his hands and he said kill them all. Kill them all. Those were his last streetcar I went down into the tunnel under the river and the dead boys lying the ragpickers strutting around with rods in their pants.” He trailed off into an obscene medley of Anglo-Saxon and Italian.

The white-smocked orderly was sitting on the arm of a leather chair. The light from a standing lamp beside him gave him the unreality of a pink elephant. He called out like a rooter from the sidelines: “You tell ’em, Durano. You got a beautiful engram, old boy.”

Una darted towards him, angry face thrust forward: “Mister to you, you lump of dough. Call him mister!”

“Mister Durano, then. Sorry.”

The man who bore the name raised his face to the light. The black eyes were flat and shiny, deep-sunk, like bits of coal pressed into soft snow brows. “Mister District Attorney,” he cried earnestly. “He said there was rats in the river, rats in the Rouge Plant. He said kill them off. Rats in the drinking-water, swimming in my blood-veins, Mr. Doctor Attorney. I promised to clean them out.”

“Give him the gun, for Christ’s sake,” Una said. “Get it over with.”

“For Christ’s sweet sake,” Durano echoed her. “I seen him on the hill when I come up out of the culvert. Horseshoe nails in his hands, and the dogs at my mother. He give me the gun, said keep it in your pants boy, you get rats in the bloodstreams. I said I would clean them out.” His thin hand dove like a weasel for the pocket of his bathrobe. It came out empty. “They took my gun. How can I clean them out when they took my rod away?” He raised his doubled fists in an agony of rage and beat his forehead with them. “Give me my gun!”

Una went to the record-player, almost running, as if a wind were hurrying her along. She turned it loud and came back to Durano, struggling step by step against the psychic wind that was blowing in the room. The fat orderly hitched up his smock and took a black automatic from under his belt. Durano pounced on him feebly. The orderly offered no resistance. Durano wrenched the automatic from his hands and backed away a few feet.

“Now!” he said with authority. He uttered a string of obscenities as if his mouth was full of them and he was spitting them out to be rid of them. “Now, you two, hands on the heads.”

The orderly did as he was told. Una lined up beside him with her hands in the air, rings flashing. Her face was expressionless.

“This is it,” Durano said thickly. There were red welts on his forehead where he had struck himself. His slack mouth continued moving but I couldn’t hear what he said under the music. He leaned forward, strained white fingers around the gun. It looked as if it were holding him up in the beating ocean of noise.

Una said something in a low voice. The orderly glanced down with a faint fat smile. Durano took a skipping little step and shot him three times point-blank. The orderly lay down on the floor and pillowed his head on an upflung arm, the faint smile still on his face.

Durano shot Una, three times. She doubled over, grimacing histrionically, and collapsed on a divan. Durano looked around the room for other possible victims. Finding none, he dropped the gun in the pocket of his bathrobe. I had noticed when he began to shoot with it that it was a toy cap-pistol.

Una rose from the divan and turned the music down. Durano watched her without surprise. The man in white hoisted himself to his feet and escorted Durano across the room. Durano looked back from the doorway with a dreaming smile. The self-inflicted bruises on his forehead were swelling and turning blue.

Una waved to him, exaggeratedly, like a mother to a child, before the orderly hustled him out. Then she sat down at the card table by the window and began to shuffle the deck. Sentimental Una.

I climbed down from my perch. Away down below on the beach I could hear the waves playing patty cake in the sand, sucking and gurgling rhythmically like idiot children.

I went around to the front of the house. The barred window on the second floor was still lit, and I could see the shadows on the ceiling. I moved in closer to the front door, which was made of carved black oak and about twelve feet high. It was the kind of door that demanded to be knocked on with the butt end of a gun. I stood in a weed-grown flowerbed, leaned my chin on the iron railing of the portico, fingered the butt of the gun in my jacket pocket. And decided to call it a day.

I lacked the evidence and the power to put Una under arrest. Until I had one or the other, it would be better to leave her where I could find her again, safe in the bosom of her family.