The Ivory Grin

Chapter 18

The dirty-white brick city hall was distinguished from the surrounding store and office-buildings by a flagless flagpole standing in its patch of scorched grass. At the rear a concrete ramp sloped down from a paved parking lot to the scuffed green door of the police department. Benning turned at the door, smiling a sour private smile.

“The descent into Avernus,” he said.

Inside, in a green-walled corridor, a few wire-netted ceiling-bulbs maintained a bilious twilight. Under the brisk odors of floor oil and metal polish, the smells of fear and germicide, poverty and old sweat, kept up a complicated human murmur. In the furthest, dimmest corner, opposite a door marked DESK SERGEANT, a monumental shape sat on a wooden bench against the wall.

It belonged to a large Negro woman in a black cloth coat. The hair that showed under the side of her black felt hat was the color and texture of steel wool. I recognized her when she turned to look at us.

Benning spoke first – “Mrs. Norris!–” and went to her with his hands out.

She took them, raising her heavy, dark face to his. “I’m glad to see you, doctor.” Cross-hatched by shadow, her nose and mouth and chin looked like black stone rounded by years of weather. Only her eyes gleamed sorrowfully with life. “They’ve arrested Alex. They’re accusing him of murder.”

“It must be a mistake,” he said in a low bedside voice. “I know he’s a good boy.”

“He is a good boy.” She looked questioningly at me.

“This is Mr. Archer, Mrs. Norris. He’s working on the case. Mr. Archer has just been telling me that he thinks Alex is innocent.”

“Thank you, Mr. Archer, and pleased to make your acquaintance.”

“When was he arrested?”

“Early this morning, in the desert. He was trying to get out of the state. The car broke down. He was a young fool to run away in the first place. It’s twice as bad for him, now that they’ve brought him back.”

“Did you get him a lawyer?” Benning said.

“Yes, I’m having Mr. Santana. He’s up in the Sierra for the weekend, but his housekeeper got in touch with him.”

“He’s a good man, Santana.” Patting her shoulder, he moved towards the desk sergeant’s door. “I’ll talk to Brake, and see what I can do for Alex.”

“I know Alex has a good friend in you, doctor.”

Her words were hopeful, but her back and shoulders sloped in resignation. When she saw my intention of sitting down, she gathered her coat and shifted her body to one side, an involuntary sigh escaping from its concertina folds. I sat on a scrambled alphabet of initials carved in the soft wood of the bench.

“Do you know my son, Mr. Archer?”

“I talked to him a little last night.”

“And you don’t believe he’s guilty?”

“No. He seemed very fond of Lucy.”

She pursed up her heavy lips suspiciously, and said in a smaller voice: “Why do you say that?”

“He said it himself. Also, it showed in his actions.”

That silenced her for a while. Her diffident black hand touched my arm very softly and retreated to her bosom. A thin gold wedding-band was sunk almost out of sight in the flesh of its third finger. “You are on our side, Mr. Archer?”

“The side of justice when I can find it. When I can’t find it, I’m for the underdog.”

“My son is no underdog,” she said with a flash of pride.

“I’m afraid he’ll be treated like one. There’s a chance that Alex may be railroaded for this murder. The only sure way to prevent that is to pin it on the murderer. And you may be able to help me do that.” I took a deep breath.

“I believe that you are a righteous man, Mr. Archer.”

I let her believe it.

“You’re welcoming to anything I can say, or do,” she continued. “It is true, what you said before. My boy was crazy for that woman. He wanted to marry her. I did my best to prevent it, every way I could. Alex is only nineteen, much too young to think about getting married. I planned an education for him. I tried to tell him that a dark-complected man is nothing in this country without an education to stand on. And Lucy wasn’t the wife for him. She was older than Alex, five or six years older, and she was fast in her habits. I sent her away from my house yesterday, and then she got herself killed. I confess I made a mistake. I rose up in anger against her. She had no safe place to go. If I’d known what was going to come to her, she could have stayed on with us.”

“You don’t have to blame yourself. I think what happened to her was bound to happen.”

“Do you think that?”

“She was carrying something too heavy for her.”

“I had the feeling. Yes. She was afraid.” Mrs. Norris leaned towards me with heavy confiding charm: “I had the feeling from the beginning that Lucy Champion was bad luck to me and my house. She was from Detroit, and I lived there myself when Alex was an infant. Last night when they came to me and said that she was killed, it was like all the things I’d dreaded for myself and Alex, when we were moving from city to city trying to find a living in the depression. Like those things had suddenly come true for us at last, here in this valley. After all those years I worked and planned, keeping my name respectable.”

Looking into her eyes, deep black springs tapping the deep black past. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I misstated myself,” she said with renewed energy. “It is not my name I care for. It’s my son. I believed if we could get out of those big cities in the North and live in a decent place of our own, I could bring him up straight as his father wished for him. Now he has been arrested.”

“Where is his father? It would be a good thing if he stood by.”

“Yes, it would be a good thing. Alex’s father died in the war. Mr. Norris was a chief petty officer in the United States Navy.” She blew her nose with the force and effect of an exclamation mark, and dabbed at her eyes.

I waited a while, and said: “When did Lucy Champion come to your house?”

“She drove up in a taxi on a Sunday morning before church. It must have been two weeks ago today. I never like to do business on the Sabbath, but then I had no right to turn her away just for my private indulgence. The decent hotels were closed to her in this city, and most of the houses where our people can rent are not fit for dogs to inhabit. She was well spoken and well dressed. She told me she was on a vacation from her work, and she wanted to stay in a private house. I had the side room empty since the spring, and with Alex commencing college I needed the money.

“She seemed a peaceable little soul, though she was nervous and shy. She scarcely ever went out at all except to get herself lunch. She made her own breakfast, and ate her dinners with us. We had a boarding arrangement.”

“Did she eat well?”

“Now that you mention it, she didn’t. Picked at her food like a bird. I asked her once or twice if my food was not agreeing with her, but she was vague in her answers.”

“Did she mention any illness to you?”

“She never did, Mr. Archer. Excuse me, now, she did. There was some trouble with her stomach. Nervous stomach.”

“And you sent her to Dr. Benning?”

“I didn’t send her. I said if she needed a doctor, he was a good man to go to. Whether she went to him or not, that I can’t say.”

“She went to him all right. But she never spoke of Dr. Benning to you?”

“Not that I recollect, except for that one time I recommended him.”

“Did she mention Mrs. Benning?”

“Mrs Benning? Dr. Benning has no wife that I know of.”

“I met her last night, in his house. At least I met a woman who calls herself Mrs. Benning.”

“You must refer to Florida Gutierrez. She works for the doctor. He wouldn’t marry her. Dr. Benning wouldn’t marry any woman, not after the bad trouble he had with his first wife.”

“Was he a widower?”

“Divorced,” she said flatly, unable to conceal her disapproval. She added quickly: “Not that I blame the doctor, except for his foolishness marrying a woman so much younger than him – than he. She was a Jezebel to him, a blonde Jezebel mistreating him without shame. It ended as I expected, with her running off and divorcing him. At least that was the story I heard.” She pulled herself up sharp. “I ought to wash out my mouth, repeating gossip and scandal on the Lord’s Day.”

“What was her name, Mrs. Norris?”

“Elizabeth Benning. Doctor called her Bess. I don’t know her maiden name. He married her in the war, when he was a medical officer in the United States Navy. That was before we moved here from the North.”

“And how long ago did she leave him?”

“Nearly two years, it was. He was better off without her, though I never dared tell him so.”

“She seems to have come back.”

“Now? In his house?”

I nodded.

Her mouth pursed up tight again. Her whole face closed against me. Distrust of white men lay deep and solid in her like stone strata deposited through generations of time. “You won’t repeat that which I have been saying? I have an evil tongue and I’ve still not learned to curb it.”

“I’m trying to get you out of trouble, not deeper in.”

She answered slowly, after a time: “I do believe you. And it’s true, she returned to him?”

“She’s there in the house. Didn’t Lucy mention her at all? She went to the doctor three times, and Mrs. Benning had been working as his receptionist.”

She answered positively: “Lucy never did.”

“The doctor told me you’ve had nursing experience. Did Lucy show any signs of illness, physical or mental?”

“She seemed a well woman to me, apart from her eating habits. Of course when they drink, often they don’t eat.”

“She drank?”

“I learned to my sorrow and shame she was a drinker. And now that you ask me about her health Mr. Archer, there is this thing has been puzzling me.”

She opened the clasp of her black purse and groped for something inside. It turned out to be a clinical thermometer in a black leatherette carrying case, which she handed to me.

“I found this after she left, in the medicine cabinet over the sink in her room. Don’t shake it down now. I want you to look at the temperature.”

I opened the case and turned the narrow glass stem until I could see the column of mercury. It registered 107° F.

“Are you sure this was Lucy’s?”

She pointed to the initials, L.C. inked on the case. “Certainly it belonged to her. She was a nurse.”

“She couldn’t have had a temperature like that, could she? I thought 107 was fatal.”

“It is, for adults. I don’t understand it myself. Do you think I should show it to the police?”

“I will, if you like. In the meantime, can you tell me anything more about her habits? You say she was quiet and shy?”

“Very much so, at first, keeping herself to herself. Most of her evenings she just plain sat in her room with a little portable gramophone she brought along with her. I thought it was a peculiar way for a young woman to spend her vacation, and I said so. She laughed at that, but not in a humorous way. She became hysterical, and that was when I realized the strain that she was under, I began to feel the strain in the atmosphere when she was in the house. She was in the house twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, it seemed like.”

“Did she have any visitors?”

She hesitated. “No, she had never a one. She sat in her room and kept that jazzy music playing on the radio. Then I discovered her drinking. I was cleaning her room one day when she was out to buy her lunch downtown. I opened up a drawer to put fresh paper in the bottom, and it had whisky bottles in it, three or four empty pint bottles.” Her voice was hushed with outrage.

“Maybe it helped her nerves.”

She looked at me shrewdly: “Alex said just those words to me when I mentioned it to him. He defended her, which set me to thinking about the two of them living together in the same house. That was the end of last week. Then the middle of this week, late Wednesday night it was, I heard her tromping around in her room. I knocked on her door, and she responded in silk pajamas and there was Alex with her in her room. He said she was teaching him to dance. To all appearances, she was teaching my son the wicked ways of the world, in red silk pajamas, and I told her that to her face.”

Her bosom heaved with remembered anger, like the aftershock of an earthquake: “I told her she was degenerating my God-fearing household into a dancehall, she must let my son alone. She said it was Alex’s choice and he backed her up, he said he loved her. Then I was harsh with her. The red silk pajamas over her insolent flesh, they blinded my eyes to charity. My evil anger rose up and I said she must let Alex alone or leave my house in her nightclothes as she was. I said that I was planning better things for my son than she could give him. Alex spoke up then, saying if Lucy Champion went he would go along with her.”

Now in a sense, he had. His mother’s gaze seemed to be following his image into the shadows where Lucy had preceded him.

“You let her stay, though,” I said.

“Yes. My son’s wish is powerful with me. Lucy herself went away next morning, but she left her things behind. I don’t know where she spent the day. I know she took a bus somewhere because she complained about the service that night when she came back. She was very excited in her manner.”

“Thursday night?”

“Yes, it was Thursday night. All day Friday she was quiet and meek, though worried under the surface. I guessed she was planning something, and I was fearful she intended to run away with Alex. That night there was more trouble. I saw there was going to be trouble on top of trouble if she stayed.”

“What was the Friday night trouble?”

“I’m ashamed to speak of it.”

“It may be important.” Casting back over the quarrel I had eavesdropped on, I guessed what Mrs. Norris was holding back: “She did have a visitor, didn’t she?”

“Perhaps it is best for me to tell you, if it will help Alex.” She hesitated. “Yes, Lucy had a visitor Friday night. I heard him go in by her side entrance and I watched for him and saw him when he left. She entertained a man in her room, a white man. I didn’t speak of it that night, mistrusting my anger so. I promised myself to sleep and pray on it, but I slept very little. Lucy slept late and then she went out for lunch when I was at the store. When she came back, she tempted my son. She kissed him in full sight on the public street. It was wanton and shameless. I said she had to go, and she went. My boy wanted to leave me and go with her. I had to tell him then about the man in her room.”

“You shouldn’t have.”

“I know it. I confess it. It was rash and scornful of me. And it failed to turn him from her. The same afternoon she telephoned for him and he went to her call. I asked him where he was going. He wouldn’t say. He took the car without asking for my permission. I knew then he was lost to me, whatever happened. He never before refused to do my bidding.”

She bowed suddenly, sobbing into her hands, a black Rachel lamenting the wrecked hopes of all mothers for their sons, black and white and tan. The desk sergeant appeared in his doorway and watched her in silence for a while before he spoke: “Is she all right?”

“She’s worried about her son.”

“She has a right to be,” he said indifferently. “You Archer?”

I said I was.

“Lieutenant Brake will see you in his office now, if you’re waiting.”

I thanked him, and he retreated quickly.

Mrs. Norris’s fit of grief had subsided as suddenly as it rose. She said: “I’m truly sorry.”

“It’s all right. You’ve got to remember that Alex can still be decent, even if he did disobey you. He’s old enough to make decisions.”

“I can accept that,” she said. “But that he should leave me for a light, common woman, it was cruel and it was wrong. Shed led him straight into jail.”

“You shouldn’t have worked on his jealousy,” I said.

“Have you lost your faith in him because of that?”

“No, but it gives him a motive. Jealousy is dangerous stuff to fiddle with, especially when you’re not sure of your facts.”

“There was no doubt what she was, with a white man with her late at night in her room.”

“She had only one room.”

“That’s true.”

“Where else could she have a visitor?”

“In my good front parlor,” she said. “I gave her free use of the parlor.”

“Maybe she wanted privacy.”

“Why, I’d like to know.” The question implied its own answer.

“There are plenty of reasons for a man to visit a woman. What did this man look like?”

“I saw him only a second, under the street light at the corner. He was an ordinary-looking man, middle size, middle age. At least he seemed slow in his movements. I didn’t lay eyes on his face, not to see it.”

“Did you notice his clothes?”

“I did. He wore a panama straw hat, and a light-colored jacket. His trousers were darker in color. He did not appear respectable to me.”

“He probably isn’t respectable, Mrs. Norris. But I can assure you he visited her for business purposes.”

“Do you know him?”

“His name is Max Heiss; he’s a private detective.”

“Like you?”

“Not exactly.” I rose to go.

She laid a detaining hand on my arm: “I said too much, Mr. Archer. You do still believe that Alex is innocent?”

I said: “Of course.” But I was bothered by the motive she had provided.

Mrs. Norris sensed my doubt, and thanked me sadly, withdrawing her hand.