The Ivory Grin

Chapter 19

Brake’s office was a bare cubicle walled with the same green plaster as the corridor. Close up under the ceiling, heating-pipes like sections of iron viscera hung from metal supports. A single small window, high in the wall, fly specked a square of sky.

Dr. Benning was sitting uncomfortably with his hat on his knees, in a straight chair against the wall. Brake, with his usual air of alert stolidity, was talking into the telephone on his desk: “I’m busy or haven’t you heard. Let the HP handle it. I haven’t been a traffic cop for twenty years.”

He hung up, and ran a hand like a harrow through his dust-colored hair. Then he pretended to be noticing my presence in the doorway for the first time: “Oh. It’s you. You decided to favor us with a visit. Come in and sit down. The doc here tells me you’re taking a pretty active interest in this case.”

I sat beside Benning, who smiled deprecatingly and opened his mouth to speak. Before he had a chance to, Brake went on: “Since that’s the situation, let’s get a couple of things straight. I’m no one-man team. I like help, from private cops or citizens or anybody. I’m glad you sent the doc in to fill me in on the stiff, for instance.”

“What do you think about suicide?”

Brake pawed my question away. “I’ll come to that, I got a point to make first. If you’re going to be in on this case, talking to my witnesses and messing around in general, I got to know where you stand and where your client stands.”

“My original client ran out on me.”

“So what’s your interest? The doc here tells me you think we’re trying to frame the Norris boy.”

“I didn’t put it so strongly,” Benning said. “I also happen to agree with Mr. Archer, that the lad is probably innocent.”

“Is that your opinion, Archer?”

“It is. I’d like to talk to Alex–”

“Sure you would. Did his mother hire you, by any chance? To cross me up, by any chance?”

“Having delusions of persecution, lieutenant?”

Hostility darkened his face for a slow instant, like a cloud-shadow crossing a hillside. “You admit it’s your opinion that Norris ain’t guilty. Before we do any talking, I want to know if you’re looking for evidence to hang an opinion on, like a bloody lawyer. Or looking for evidence period.”

“Evidence period. I was hired last night by a Miss Sylvia Treen. She’s Mrs. Charles Singleton’s companion.”

Benning leaned forward at the sound of the second name: “Isn’t she the woman whose son is missing?”

“That’s right,” Brake said. “We got a routine circular on him last week. Then we find this clipping about him in Champion’s things. I been trying to figure how a missing high-lifer like Singleton fits in with a dinge cutting in the valley here. You got any ideas on the subject, doc?”

“I haven’t really thought about it.” He thought about it. “At first glance it does appear that the connections may be accidental. I know some of my patients carry all sorts of unconnected things around with them, clippings and whatnot. Women who are emotionally disturbed often identify themselves with people in the newspapers.”

Brake turned to me impatiently: “What about you, Archer? You got any opinions?”

I glanced at Benning’s long conscientious face, wondering how much he knew about his wife. It wasn’t my job to fill him in on her background.

“None that you couldn’t shoot full of holes with a pea-shooter.”

“I favor a .45 myself,” Brake said. “What about your client? Miss Treen, is that her name?”

“Miss Treen gave me some of the details of Singleton’s disappearance.” I passed them on to Brake, or at least enough of them to hold his co-operation in Bella City without being embarrassed by it in Arroyo Beach. I left the blonde woman out of it entirely.

Bored with my expurgated version, Brake snapped his metal armbands and fiddled with the papers in his “In” basket. Benning listened with close and nervous attention.

When I finished, the doctor rose abruptly, turning his hat in his hand: “If you’ll excuse me, men, I should look in at the hospital before church.”

“Appreciate you coming in,” Brake said. “Give the stiff a once-over if you like, but I don’t think you’ll find any hesitation marks. I never seen a suicide with a cut throat that didn’t have hesitation marks. Or one that was cut so deep.”

“Is she in the hospital morgue?”

“Yeah, waiting for autopsy. Just go right in and tell the guard I sent you.”

“I’m on the staff of the hospital,” Benning said with his sour private smile. He jammed his hat on his head and moved sideways to the door, his long legs scissoring awkwardly.

“Just a minute, doctor.” I stood up and handed him the thermometer Mrs. Norris had given me. “This belonged to Lucy Champion. I’d like to see what you make of it.”

He took the thermometer out of its case and held it to the light. “A hundred and seven, that’s quite a temperature.”

“Did Lucy have a fever yesterday?”

“Not to my knowledge.”

“Isn’t it standard practice to take a patient’s temperature?”

He answered after a pause: “Yes, I remember now, I took Miss Champion’s. It was in the normal range. She wouldn’t have lasted long with a temperature of 107.”

“She didn’t last long.”

Brake came around his desk and took the thermometer from Benning’s hand. “Where did you get this, Archer?”

“From Mrs. Norris. She found it in Lucy’s room.”

“She could of hotted it up with a lighted match. Eh, doc?”

Benning looked puzzled. “That wouldn’t make much sense.”

“It does to me. She might of been trying to prove that Champion was delirious, killed herself when she was out of her head.”

“I don’t think so,” I said.

“Wait a minute. Hold it.” Brake banged his desk with a gavel-heavy palm. “Didn’t Champion come here around the first of the month?”

“Two weeks ago today.”

“That’s what I thought. You know what the heat was here in the valley weekend before last? A hundred and seven. It wasn’t Champion who had the fever, it was this bloody town.”

“Is that right, doctor?” I said. “Does a mercury thermometer hold a reading like that?”

“If it’s not disturbed. It happens to mine all the time, I should have remembered.”

“There goes your clue,” Brake said.

“And here go I,” Benning added with lame whimsy.

When the door had closed behind him, Brake leaned back in his chair and lit a cigar. “You think there’s anything in the doc’s idea that Champion had a phobia?”

“He seems to know his psychology.”

“Sure he does. He told me he wanted to specialize in it at one time, only he couldn’t afford another five years of training. If he tells me the girl was psycho, I’m willing to take his word for it. He knows what he’s talking about. The trouble is I don’t.” He blew a smoke ring and speared it with an obscene middle finger. “I’m all for physical evidence myself.”

“Have you got much in that line?”

“Enough. You keep it under your hat and not go running to the defense?”

I caught him up on the word. “Aren’t you jumping ahead of yourself a little?”

“I learned in this job to look a long way ahead.”

He lifted a black-steel evidence case from the bottom drawer of his desk, and raised the lid. It contained the bolo knife with the carved black wooden handle. The bloodstains on the curved blade had dried dark brown.

“I’ve seen that.”

“You don’t know who it belongs to, though.”

“Do you?”

“I showed this bolo to Mrs. Norris last night, before she knew how Champion got killed. She identified it right off. Her husband sent it to Alex from the Philippines, about seven years ago. It’s been in the kid’s possession ever since. He had it mounted on his bedroom wall, and she saw it every morning when she went in to make his bed, right up to yesterday morning.”

“Did she say that?”

“She did. So maybe Champion had hot psychological flashes like the doc said. Maybe there’s a tie-up with the Singleton case that we don’t know about. I’m not going to lose any sleep over it. I got enough right here to arraign and convict.” He shut the lid of the evidence box, relocked it and replaced it in the drawer.

I had been trying to decide all morning whether to give Brake everything I knew. I decided not to. The frayed ends of several lives, Singleton’s and his blonde’s, Lucy’s, and Una’s, were braided into the case. The pattern I was picking out strand by strand was too complicated to be explained in the language of physical evidence. Brake’s understanding was an evidence box holding the kinds of facts that could be hammered through the skulls of a back-country jury. It wasn’t a back-country case.

I said: “Have you got the boy’s side of it yet? He isn’t stupid. He must have known the bolo could be traced to him. Would he use it to do a murder and leave it lying there?”

“He didn’t leave it lying. He started back for it. You saw him coming back. He even jumped you.”

“That’s not important. He thought I was messing with Lucy, and he got mad. The boy was under a strain.”

“Sure he was. That’s part of my case. He’s the emotional type. I’m not claiming premeditation, see. I say it’s a crime of passion, second degree. He got hot pants and busted in on her. Or maybe he lifted the key from her purse when they were out riding. Anyway she wasn’t having any. He ran wild and cut her and took off. Then he remembered the knife and came back for it.”

“Your story fits the external facts. It doesn’t fit your suspect.” But I was thinking that if and when Brake discovered the jealousy motive, he would have a steamroller case.

“You don’t know these people the way I do. I deal with them every day.” He unbuttoned his left shirt-cuff and bared a heavy freckled forearm. A white scar ran jaggedly from the wristbone to the elbow. “The buck that gave me this was trying for my throat.”

“So that makes Norris a slasher.”

“There’s more to it than that.” Brake was on the defensive in spite of his honorable scar. The violent world he fought for and against didn’t suit him or anybody else, and he knew it.

“I think there is more to it. Too many people were interested in Lucy. I wouldn’t settle for the first suspect we stumble across. It isn’t that easy.”

“You took me up wrong,” he said. “What I mean, the boy acts guilty. I been looking at their faces for thirty years, listening to them talk.” He didn’t have to tell me. The thirty years were marked clearly on him, like fir-traces on an old tree. “All right, I’m still in the minor leagues. All right. This is my league. Champion is a minor league killing.”

“Consciousness of guilt is pretty tricky stuff. It’s psychological, for one thing.”

“Psychological hell. It’s a plain fact. We try to hold him for questioning, he runs out. We catch him and bring him back and he won’t talk. I tried to talk to him. He’s sullen. Tell him the world was flat, he wouldn’t answer yes or no or maybe.”

“How have you been treating him?”

“Never laid a finger on him, neither did anybody else.” Brake pulled down his shirt-sleeve and rebuttoned the cuff. “We got our own brand of psychology.”

“Where is he?”

“Out at the morgue.”

“Isn’t that a little unusual?”

“Not by me. I get a killing a month in this town, sometimes two. And I solve them, see? Most of them. The atmosphere at the morgue will loosen a killer up faster than anything I know.”

“Psychology.”

“That’s what I said. Now, you playing on my team or you want a crying towel to cry into? If you’re on my team, we’ll go on out there and see if he’s ready to talk.”