The Ivory Grin

Chapter 16

The signpost at the mountain crossroads was splintered by the bullets of trigger-happy hunters. Four painted white boards projected from it. One pointed back the way I had come: ARROYO BEACH 7 MIS. One pointed forward: BELLA CITY 34 MIS. The one to the right said: EAGLE LOOKOUT 5 MIS; the one to the left: SKY ROUTE. The fifth direction, unmarked, was straight up to where a hawk wheeled on banked blue curves of air. It was bright early morning.

I got back behind the wheel of my car and turned onto the Sky Route. It was a hairpinning gravel road that traced the contours of the mountainside. On my left the mountain fell away into a canyon in which occasional rooftops were visible. Beyond the canyon’s far edge the sea lay smoothed by distance like wine in a teacup, rimmed by the thin white curve of Arroyo Beach.

I passed a few rural mailboxes standing on posts at the entrances to steep lanes. The mailbox numbered 2712 also bore the legend HIGHHOLME, H. WILDING, ESQ., in bold red block-capitals. Wilding’s lane widened into a clearing near the bottom of the canyon. A small stone house sat between white oaks at the back of the clearing.

There were bantam chickens scratching in the yard. An old hound cocked a grizzled snoot at me and lifted one eyebrow, refusing to move out of the path of the car. I set the emergency brake and got out. He growled at me apathetically, still without moving. A gray gander ran at me hissing and flapping, veered at the last moment into the trees. Somewhere in the wooded canyon below, a gang of kids were talking back and forth in Indian war-whoops.

The man who came out of the stone house could have passed for an Indian. He was dressed in a pair of dirty canvas shorts, and the rest of him was burned almost black by the sun. His straight black hair, grayed in streaks, hung down over his ears.

“Hello,” he said, strumming a silent overture on his washboard ribs. “Isn’t it a fine clear day? I hope you noticed the quality of the light. It’s rather special. Whistler might have been able to snare it in paint, not I.”

“Mr. Wilding?”

“Of course.” He extended a paint-stained hand. “Delighted to see you. Delighted to see anybody and any thing. Did it ever occur to you that light creates landscape, so that the world itself is created daily, in a sense? In my sense.”

“It never has.”

“Well, think about it,” he said earnestly. “Light creates landscape out of old black chaos. We painters recreate it. I can’t step outside in the morning without feeling like God himself on the second day. Or was it the third? It doesn’t matter really. I’ve divested myself of time. I live in pure space.”

“My name is Archer,” I said, before I drowned in a mountain torrent of words. “Two weeks ago–”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been rude. I so seldom see people, I’m a veritable gramophone when I do. Archer, you say? Were you born under Sagittarius by any chance, the sign of the Archer? If you were,” he concluded rather lamely, “that would be fun.”

“Sagittarius is my first name, curiously enough. It’s more fun than you can imagine.”

Wilding uttered a high loud laugh like a mocking-bird’s imitation of human mirth. A hooting echo of his laughter came back from the children in the woods.

“Who are you anyway?” he said. “Come in and have a cup of tea. I’ve only just brewed some.”

“I’m a detective.”

“On the Singleton case?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He didn’t renew his invitation to tea. “There’s really nothing I can tell you that I haven’t told the others.”

“I’m working alone. I haven’t talked to the others, and I don’t know what they know or what they think. My own feeling is that he’s dead.”

“Charles dead?” Surprise or some other emotion pulled like a drawstring through his cordovan face and left it wrinkled. “That would be a waste. He was only twenty-nine. Why do you feel that he is dead, Mr. Archer?”

“Analogy. A woman was killed yesterday, apparently because she knew what happened to him.”

“The blonde woman, was she killed?”

“A colored woman.” I told him about Lucy.

He squatted Indian-fashion, resting one elbow on his folded bare knees, and drew a design in the dust with his forefinger. It was a long-faced mask in the shape of a coffin, which looked a little like his own face. A bantam rooster came and pecked at his hand.

Wilding stood up, and struck himself lightly over the eyes with the hand that had drawn the coffin. “There’s your symbol-making faculty at work in its crudest form. I wonder sometimes if my sainted mother didn’t deceive my father with a Navajo.” He obliterated the dust-drawing with his sandaled feet, talking on without a pause: “The painter makes objects out of events, the poet makes words out of events. What does the man of action do, Mr. Archer? Suffer them?”

“Your friend Singleton did, I think. I take it he was your friend, or is.”

“Certainly he was. I’ve known Charles since he was a schoolboy. I taught at Arroyo Prep School for a while, before my pictures sold. And he’s been coming up here in the summers for nearly ten years. You can see his place from here.”

He pointed north along the canyon. Near its head, a half mile or more away, a squat structure of brown oiled logs gleamed dully among the live oaks. “I helped him to build it myself, in the summer of 1941. It’s only a one-room affair, but Charles always called it his studio. He came back from his freshman year at Harvard with ideas of becoming a poet. His mother’s house on the Hill made him feel cramped and stuffy. Both she and her house – I don’t know whether you know them – are crusty with tradition, not the kind of tradition that a budding poet could use. Charles came up here to escape from it. He called this canyon his private vale of soul-making.”

“I’d like to have a look at his cabin.”

“I’ll go over with you.”

Wilding moved impulsively towards my car, and I followed him. I drove up the lane in low gear and turned left on the gravel road cut into the canyon wall. The second mailbox we came to was stenciled with the name of Singleton. I turned left again into a lane that slanted down the side of the canyon. About halfway to the bottom, the log house stood on a natural shelf between the canyon’s converging walls. When I parked in front of it and got out, I saw that the front door was sealed with official paper.

I turned to Wilding: “You didn’t tell me the place was sealed. Does the sheriff suspect violence?”

“He doesn’t confide in me,” Wilding said wryly. “When I told him about the shot I heard, he didn’t seem to take it too seriously.”

“The shot?”

“Sorry, I imagined that you knew. I heard a shot from this direction, late that Saturday night. I didn’t think twice about it at the time, for the simple reason that I hear a great many shots, in and out of hunting season. When they questioned me the following week, I mentioned it of course. I believe they went over the premises quite thoroughly after that. They didn’t find a bullet or anything of the sort.”

“They wouldn’t, if the slug went into Singleton.”

“Mercy upon us,” he said. “Do you really suppose that Charles was shot up here in his own cabin?”

“They must think something happened here, or they wouldn’t have sealed it up. What else did you hear that Saturday night?”

“Nothing, absolutely nothing. A single shot around eleven o’clock, and that was all. A few cars went by, but there’s always late night traffic on the road.”

Wilding went to the large window that balanced the door in the front wall of the cabin. Standing on tiptoe, he peered in past the brown monk’s-cloth drapes partly drawn across it. I looked over his shoulder into a square beamed room furnished in primitive luxury with polished wood, homespun fabrics, copper. Everything seemed to be in order and place. Above the copper-vented fireplace opposite the window, a handsome boy in oils looked out of a bleached wooden frame, over our heads, down five miles of sunlit canyon.

“That’s Charles,” Wilding said in a whisper, as if the boy in the frame might overhear him. “I painted it myself, and gave it to him. He looked like a young Shelley when he was twenty. I’m afraid he doesn’t any more. Charles lost his ethereal quality during the war, when he took up with that woman. Or it may have been the war itself that did it. I suppose I have a prejudice against women. I’m a confirmed bachelor myself.”

“Is she the blonde you mentioned?”

“Did I mention her? I didn’t mean to.” He turned and laid a brown hand on my shoulder. “Look here, old chap, are you one of the old lady’s investigators? If you are, I don’t want to say any more. Naturally I told the whole thing to the sheriff.”

“Anything you tell me is between us.”

His bright black eyes explored my face like foraging beetles. “What is your interest in Charles, just while we’re on the subject?”

“Mrs. Singleton’s paid companion hired me.”

“Sylvia Treen? She’s a lovely child, very much in love with Charles, I think. But I had no idea–”

“She knows about the blonde.”

“Yes. I told her. I thought it might be for the best, in the long run. Whatever happened, Charles would never marry Sylvia. He’s not the marrying sort. I didn’t let Sylvia know how long the affair had lasted.”

“She said it was just this summer.”

“I let her imagine that. Actually, it’s been going on for seven or eight years. Charles introduced me to her the year he entered the Air Force. Her name was Bess, I don’t recall her surname. She was very young and quite exciting, marvelously colored. Perfect in every way, until she opened her mouth – but I mustn’t tattle.” He continued to tattle: “Charles always did have a proletarian penchant, you know. In spite of that or because of it, it was clearly a case of true love. The children were mad about each other. I shouldn’t say children. She wasn’t a child. She was already married, I understand. Which doubtless suited Charles.” He added reflectively: “Perhaps he should have married her.”

“You think she shot him?”

“I have no reason to think so. Certainly it’s possible. Seven years is a long time for a young lady to wait for a young man to make up his mind.”

“Was she here the night he disappeared?”

“I have no way of knowing. I did see a light in the cabin. Actually I haven’t seen her for weeks. I do have the impression that they came up here together quite often during the summer, practically every Saturday night.”

“And before that?”

He leaned against the sealed door and thought for a while, his thin brown arms folded on his chest. “Their visits haven’t been continuous, I know that. Bess first appeared in the summer of 1943, and that was when I met her. I wanted to paint her. Charles was excessively possessive, and he never again asked me back when she was here. After that summer, I didn’t set eyes on her again until 1945, when Charles left the Air Force. For the next two or three years I saw her at a distance quite often. Then Charles went back to Harvard in the fall of 1948 to study law, and I didn’t see them again until this spring. It’s possible that she followed him to Cambridge. I’ve never asked him about her.”

“Why?”

“He’s jealous, as I said, and secretive about his private affairs. It’s partly his mother’s doing. Mrs Singleton’s attitude towards the human libido is austere, to say the least.”

“So you don’t know where she came from, where she went, what she was doing in Arroyo Beach, who she was married to?”

“To all of those questions, I have to answer no.”

“You can describe her?”

“If I can find the words. She was a young Aphrodite, a Velasquez Venus with a Nordic head.”

“Try me again, Mr. Wilding, in simple language.”

“A Nordic Aphrodite rising from the Baltic.” He smiled reminiscently. “She was perfect until she opened her mouth. Then it was painfully clear that she had learned to speak English, if English is the word, in shall we say a rather barbarous milieu.”

“I take it she was a blue-eyed blonde, and no lady.”

“Baltic blue eyes,” he insisted. “Hair like pale young cornsilk. Almost too dramatic to paint seriously, though I dearly should have loved to do a nude.” His eyes were burning a figure into the air. “Charles wouldn’t hear of it.”

“Can you draw her from memory?” I said.

“I could if I wished.” He kicked at the dirt like a rebellious boy. “I haven’t really bothered with human material for years. My present concern is pure space, lit by the intelligible radiance of nature, if you follow me.”

“I don’t.”

“In any case, I never use my art, or allow it to be used.”

“Uh-huh. Very high-minded. You’ve divested yourself of time. It happens a friend of yours has done it the hard way, probably. Most people would climb down off their high horse and do what they can to help.”

He gave me a bitter, wrinkled look. I thought he was going to cry. Instead he let out another of his high inhuman laughs, which echoed like the cry of a lost gull down the canyon. “I do believe you’re right, Mr. Sagittarius. If you’ll take me home, I’ll see what I can do.”

He came out of his house a half hour later, waving a piece of drawing paper: “Here you are, as representational as I can make her. It’s pastel chalk sprayed with fixative, so don’t try to fold it.”

I took the drawing from his hand. It was a colored sketch of a young woman. Her pale blonde braids were coroneted on her head. Her eyes had the dull gleaming suavity of tile. Wilding had caught her beauty, but she was older in time than in the picture.

He seemed to sense what I was thinking: “I had to sketch her as I first saw her. That was my image of her. She’ll be seven or eight years older.”

“She’s changed the color of her hair, too.”

“You know her, then.”

“Not well. I’ll get to know her better.”