The Ivory Grin

Chapter 20

The door was numbered 01. The room behind the door was windowless, low-ceilinged, concrete-walled. When the door sucked shut behind us, we might have been in a sepulcher far down under the earth. Brake’s heel struck dully on the composition floor. His shadow spread across me as he approached the only light in the room.

It was a cone-shaded bulb that hung low on an adjustable pulley over a rubber-wheeled stretcher. Lucy’s sheeted body lay on the stretcher under its white glare. Her head was uncovered and turned towards Alex Norris. He was sitting in a chair on the far side of the stretcher, looking steadfastly into the dead woman’s face. His right wrist was linked to hers by twin rings of blue steel. The pumps of a cooling system hummed and throbbed like time running down in the concrete walls. Behind the paired glass doors of the refrigerator, the other sheeted bodies might have been waiting for judgment, dreaming a preview of hell. It was as cold as hell.

The uniformed policeman who had been sitting opposite Alex got to his feet, raising his hand in a slovenly salute. “Morning, lieutenant.”

“What’s good about it? You running a wake in here, Schwartz?”

“You told me not to mark him. Like you said, I been letting nature take its course.”

“Well? Did nature take its course?” Brake stood over Alex, wide and impermeable against the light. “You want to make a statement now?”

Moving to one side, I saw Alex look up slowly. His face had thinned. The passage of the night had pared flesh from his temples and cheekbones. His wide carved lips drew back from his teeth and closed again without making any sound.

“Or you want to sit all day and hold hands?”

“You heard what the man said,” Schwartz growled. “He ain’t fooling. You sit here until you talk. In an hour or so the deputy coroner’s gonna cut her up, finish the job you done. Maybe you want a ringside seat?”

Alex paid no attention to Brake or his subordinate. His gaze, incredulous and devoted, returned to the dead woman’s head. Under the pitiless glare her hair shone like coiled steel shavings.

“What’s the matter with you, Norris? You got no human feelings?” Brake sounded almost querulous in the subterranean stillness, almost feeble, as if the boy by accepting everything had turned the tables on him.

I said “Brake.” The word had more force behind it than I intended.

“What’s eating you?” He turned with a bewildered frown. The dead cigar in the corner of his mouth was like a black finger pulling one side of his face crooked. I retreated to the door, and he followed his own diminishing shadow towards me: “You want that crying towel?”

I said in a low voice, but not too low for Alex to overhear: “You’re handling him wrong. He’s a sensitive kid. You can’t treat him like a punchy thug.”

“Him sensitive?” Brake removed his cigar and spat on the floor. “He’s got a hide like a rhinoceros.”

“I don’t think so. Give me a chance at him anyway. Uncouple him and let me talk to him alone.”

“My wife and me were going up in the mountains today,” Brake said irrelevantly. “We promised the kids a picnic.”

He sneered at the dead cigar in his hand, dropped it suddenly, and ground it under his heel. “Schwartz! Turn him loose. Bring him over here.”

The click of the handcuffs opening was tiny but very important, like the sound of a moral weight shifting on its fulcrum.

Schwartz pulled Alex to his feet. They crossed the room together, Alex round-shouldered and hanging back, Schwartz roughly urging him. “Taking him back to the cell, lieutenant?”

“Not yet.” Brake addressed the boy: “Mr. Archer here is a friend of yours, Norris. He wants a little chinfest with you. Personally I think he’s wasting all our time, but it’s up to you. Will you talk to Mr. Archer?”

Alex looked from Brake to me. His smooth young face had the same expression I had seen on the ancient Indian face of the woman in the alley, beyond the reach of anything white men could do or say. He nodded wordlessly, and looked back at Lucy.

Brake and Schwartz went out. The door pulled shut. Alex started back across the room. He walked uncertainly with his legs spraddled like an old man’s. The concrete floor sloped gently to a covered drain in the center of the room. He staggered down the barely perceptible slope and labored up the other side to the stretcher.

Standing over Lucy with his head bowed, he asked her: “Why did they do it?” in a dry hard voice.

I reached past him and pulled the sheet up over her head. I took him by the shoulders, turned him to face me. Part of his weight hung on me for a moment, until his muscles tightened. “Straighten up,” I said.

He was as tall as I was, but his head was drooping on his undeveloped neck. I pushed my closed right hand under his chin. “Straighten up, Alex. Look at me.”

He flinched away. I held him with my other hand on his shoulder. Suddenly he tensed and knocked my hand away from his chin.

“Steady, boy.”

“I’m not a horse,” he cried. “Don’t you talk to me like I was a horse. Keep your hands off of me.”

“You’re worse than a horse. You’re a stubborn mule. Your girl is lying dead, and you won’t open your mouth to tell me who did it to her.”

“They think I did it.”

“It’s your own fault if they do. You shouldn’t have run out. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”

“Lucky.” The word was as blank as a hiccup.

“Lucky not to be dead. That’s the one situation nobody can reverse. You think you’ve got it tough now, and you have, but that’s no reason for turning into a dummy. One of these days you’re going to snap out of it and really care what happened to Lucy. Only it’ll be too late for you to do anything about it. You’ve got to help now.”

I let go of him. He stood shakily, pulling at his fleshy lower lip with a bitten forefinger. Then he said: “I tried to tell them things at first, this morning when they brought me in. But him and the deputy D.A., they only had the one thing on their minds, to make me say I did it. Why would I kill my own fiancée?” The question rose up hard from his working chest. His face was blind with the effort of speaking, the more terrible effort of speaking as a man. He couldn’t sustain it: “I wish I was dead like Lucy.”

“If you were, you couldn’t help us.”

“Nobody asked for any help from me. Who wants any help from me?”

“I do.”

“You don’t believe I killed her?”

“No.”

He looked at me for maybe half a minute, his gaze shifting in heartbeat rhythm from one of my eyes to the other. “She didn’t do it to herself, did she? Mister? You don’t think Lucy – cut her own throat?” He whispered the question so as not to embarrass the dead woman behind him.

“It isn’t likely. The suggestion has been made. What made you think of it?”

“No reason, except she was scared. She was awful scared yesterday. That’s why I loaned her the knife, when she left our house. She asked me for something to protect herself with. I had no gun or anything to give her.” His voice dropped apologetically. “I gave her the knife.”

“The one she was killed with?”

“Yes. They showed it to me this morning. It was a little bolo knife that my father sent me from the South Pacific.”

“She was carrying the knife?”

“Yessir, in her purse. She had a big purse. She put it in her purse when I gave it to her, before she went away from the house. If they caught her, she said she would leave her mark on them.” A frown of grief knitted his eyebrows.

“Who was she afraid of?”

“Men following her. It started Thursday, when she came back on the bus from Arroyo Beach. She said this man got off the bus and trailed her home. I thought at first she was spinning me a tale, trying to be mysterious. Then the next day I saw him myself when she came home from lunch. He was lurking around our street, and that night he came and visited her right in our house. I asked her about him yesterday, and she said that he was a crooked detective. That he was trying to make her do something against her will, but she wouldn’t do it.”

“Did she mention his name?”

“She said his name was Desmond, Julian Desmond. The next day another man was after her. I didn’t see him. Lucy saw him, though. And there was the trouble at our house, and she moved out.”

I swallowed the bitter taste of guilt in my mouth. “Was she planning to leave town?”

“She couldn’t make up her mind before she left. She said she’d phone me. Then when she did phone, she was at the station. There was no train out for a couple of hours, and men there were spying on her. She said I should come with the car. I picked her up at the station and we got away from them, on the old airport road. We parked behind the airport fence, and we talked. She was shivering scared. Right there and then we decided to get married. I thought if we stayed together, I could defend her.” His voice sank deep into his chest, almost out of hearing. “I didn’t do so good.”

“None of us did.”

“She wanted to leave town right away. First we had to go back to the Mount view Motel to get her bags.”

“Did she have her motel-key?”

“She said she lost it.”

“Didn’t give it to you?”

“Why would she give it to me? I couldn’t go in there with her. Even if I was light enough to pass, like her, I wouldn’t do it. She went in there by herself. She never came out again. Somebody was waiting in there for her, and took the knife away from her and used it on her.”

“Who was waiting?”

“Julian Desmond maybe. She wouldn’t do what he wanted. Or the other one that was after her.”

I was ashamed to tell him that I was the other one. His shoulders were slumped, and the flesh around his mouth hung almost stupidly. His moral strength was running out again. I placed Schwartz’s chair for him and eased him into it: “Sit down, Alex. You’ve covered the big points against you. There are a few little points left. Money is one of them. What were you intending to marry on?”

“I have some money of my own.”

“How much?”

“Forty-five dollars. I made it picking tomatoes.”

“Not much to get married on.”

“I aimed to get a job. My back is strong.” There was a sullen pride in his voice, but he wasn’t meeting my eyes. “Lucy could work too. She worked as a nurse before.”

“Where?”

“She didn’t tell me where.”

“She must have told you something.”

“No sir. I never asked her.”

“Did she have some money?”

“I didn’t ask her. I wouldn’t take money from a woman anyway.”

“If you earned it, though,” I said. “Didn’t she say she’d cut you in if you got her safe out of town?”

“Cut me in?”

“On the reward,” I said. “The Singleton reward.”

His black gaze climbed slowly to the level of my eyes, and quickly dropped. He said to the floor: “Lucy didn’t have to pay me money to marry her.”

“Where were you going to get married? Where were you going to drive to yesterday?”

“Las Vegas or someplace. It didn’t matter. Anyplace.”

“Arroyo Beach?”

He didn’t answer. I had pushed him too fast and too far. Looking down at the locked round impenetrable skull, I understood Brake’s routine and desperate anger after thirty years of trying to fit human truth into the square-cut legal patterns handed down for his use by legislators and judges. And thinking of Brake’s anger, I lost my own.

“Listen, Alex. We’re going back to the beginning again. Lucy was murdered. We both want to find the murderer and see him punished. You have more reason than I have to want that. You claim you were in love with her.”

“I was!” The drill had struck the nerve.

“That’s one reason, then. You have another reason: Unless we find the real killer, you’ll be spending years of your life in jail.”

“I don’t care what happens to me now.”

“Think about Lucy. When you were waiting for her at the motel, somebody took that knife and cut her throat with it. Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“What did Julian Desmond want her to do?”

“Be a witness for him,” he answered slowly.

“A witness to what?”

“I don’t know what.”

“A murder,” I said. “Was it a murder?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“It was a murder, wasn’t it? He wanted her to help him collect the reward. But she thought she could go it alone, and get the reward money for herself. Isn’t that the reason she was killed?”

“I didn’t think it out, mister.”

“But you knew about the reward money? You knew she hoped to collect it.”

“I never hoped to share in it,” he said doggedly.

“She went to Arroyo Beach on Thursday to see his mother, and lost her nerve at the last minute. Isn’t that the truth?”

“Yes, sir. I gathered that.”

“She was going to try again yesterday.”

“Maybe she was. I had nothing to do with any murder. Lucy didn’t either.”

“But she knew what happened to Singleton.”

“She knew something.”

“And you know something, too.”

“She let on about it to me. I didn’t ask her. I didn’t want to have any part of it. She told it to me anyway.”

“What did she tell you, Alex?”

“A man shot him. A crazy man shot him and he died. She told me that.”