The Ivory Grin

Chapter 21

Schwartz was alone in the corridor. I asked him where Brake was.

“In his car. He got a radio call.”

I started for the ambulance entrance, and met Brake coming in.

“Norris do any talking?”

“Plenty.”

“Confess?”

“Hardly. He’s ready to make a statement.”

“When I’m ready. I got more important things right now. I’m going on a barbecue picnic in the mountains.” He smiled grimly, and called along the corridor to Schwartz: “Take Norris back to his cell. Get Pearce in the D.A.’s office, if he wants to make a statement. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Barbecue picnic?” I said.

“Yeah.” He pushed out through the white metal-sheathed door and let it swing back in my face. I followed him out to his car and got in the right side as he got in the left.

“I thought you’d be interested, Archer.” The car leaped forward under us, its tires whistling in the gravel of the hospital parking lot. “It was a man that got himself barbecued. A man.”

“Who is it?”

“Not identified yet. His car went over the side of Rancheria Canyon early this morning, and caught fire. When they found it they didn’t even know there was a body in it at first. Couldn’t get into it until they brought up a pump-truck from the ranger station. By that time the guy inside was nothing more than a clinker.”

“Torch murder?”

“Hallman seems to think so. He’s the CHP Captain. They had it tabbed as an accident until they thought to take a look at the gas tank. It’s intact, and that means the gasoline for the fire came from somewhere else.”

“What kind of car?”

“1948 Buick sedan. Registration destroyed. They’re checking the license and engine number for ownership.”

The last few jerry-built bungalows of the suburbs dropped behind. The speedometer needle moved steadily clockwise past fifty, sixty, and seventy, and hesitated near eighty. Brake flipped the siren switch. The siren began to moan in a low register.

I said before it drowned me out: “The car isn’t two-tone green, is it? Singleton’s car was a 1948 Buick. Is this one two-tone green?”

Brake pulled his hat off, leaving a red crimped line across his forehead, and tossed it into the back seat. “You’ve got Singleton on the brain. They didn’t tell me the color. But where does he come in?”

“Norris said he was murdered,” I shouted above the siren.

Brake switched it off. “What does Norris know about it?”

“Lucy Champion told him Singleton was shot.”

“Only she don’t make a very good witness. Don’t let him string you, man. He’d tell you anything to wiggle his black neck out of the noose it’s in.”

The speedometer needle pushed on past eighty. At the top of a slight rise, the car lifted under us and almost took flight. I felt as if the speed had lifted us out of the world, pulled Brake loose from his roots in Bella City’s broken pavements.

“Don’t you think it’s about time you admitted you made a mistake?”

He looked at me narrow-eyed. The speeding car wavered slightly with his attention before he turned back to the road. “When I got the weapon, his own knife?”

“She borrowed it from him for self-protection. She had it in her purse.”

“Can he prove that?”

“He doesn’t have to. You’re the proof department.”

“Hell, you’re talking like a shyster lawyer. I hate those mealy-mouthed shysters that try to block the law.”

“That’s quite a mouthful.”

“Chew on it.”

The county blacktop we were on curved in to join a concrete highway running east and west across the valley. Brake went through a red sign and took the turn on squealing tires.

“What do I do when they go around cutting each other with knives, setting fire to each other? Pat them on the back and tell them to go to it? I say stop them, put them away.”

“Put the right one away, though. You can’t solve these killings separately, hang Lucy’s on Alex and this new one on somebody else.”

“I can if they’re not connected.”

“I think they are connected.”

“Show me proof.”

“I’m not going up for the fresh air.”

The road had begun to climb through dried clay cutbanks marked with yellow Slide Area warnings. Even with the gas-pedal floorboarded under Brake’s toe, the speedometer needle stuck at seventy like the hand of a stopped clock. The folded blue slopes of the eastern range were framed in steep perspective by the windshield. They looked near enough to touch. A minute later, a mile nearer, they looked just as far away. I began to feel the altitude in my ears. As we rose into new perspectives, a few small white clouds burst out like ripe cotton behind the peaks. Away behind and down, Bella City stood in its fields like carelessly grouped chesspieces on a dusty board.

Five miles farther on, a thousand feet higher, we came to a semicircular gravel turnout on the left side of the highway. Several cars, a tow-truck and a red pump-truck were parked in the turnout. A group of men stood at its outer edge, looking down. Brake pulled up behind a new Ford with Highway Patrol markings. An officer in olive-drab whipcord detached himself from the group and came towards us: “Hello, Brake. I told the boys to leave everything the way it was down there after they put out the fire. We even took the pictures for you.”

“You people are learning. I’d paste a gold star on your forehead if I had one. Like you to meet Lew Archer here, the thinker. Captain Hallman.”

The captain gave me a puzzled look and a hard hand. We moved to the low log fence that rimmed the edge of the turnout. Below it the canyon-side slanted down to a gravel creek-bed overgrown with live oaks. From our height the September creek looked like a winding pebble-path dotted with occasional mud-puddles. A toy automobile lying on its bank sent up tendrils of steam to vanish in the sun. It was a Buick, painted two shades of green.

A trail of broken bushes, some of them charred, showed where the Buick had left the road and rolled down into the gorge. Brake said to Hallman: “Find anything on the road?”

“The tireprints on the shoulder. It wasn’t rolling fast, and that’s what made me suspicious in the first place. No skid marks. Somebody set fire to it and just took off the emergency and let her roll.” Hallman added in dead earnest: “Whoever poured that gasoline and ignited it out here has got more than murder against him. It was just good luck it didn’t start a forest fire. No wind.”

“When did it happen?”

“Must have been before light this morning. The headlights were turned on. I didn’t get a report until after eight o’clock. Then when I figured it for murder, I left the guy for you the way we found him.”

“You still don’t know who he is?”

“Wait until you see him. Like looking for a brand on a cooked hamburger. We should get a fast answer on the engine number, though.”

“It’s Singleton’s car,” I said to Brake.

“You might be right at that.” He sighed. “Well, if I got to go down there, I got to go down.”

“Feeling your age?” Hallman said. “You’ve packed a buck out of deeper holes than this. I’d go with you, but I been down twice already. I left a couple of the boys on guard.”

I could see them sitting on a boulder behind the smashed car. In the telescopic air it was almost possible to read the conversation off their moving lips.

Brake stepped over the log barrier and started down. I followed him, using the zigzag trail he improvised and braking my descent by holding on to the branches of stunted trees. We were both breathing hard when we reached the bottom. The two highway patrolmen led us along the creekbed to the wreck.

It rested on its right side. The hood and top and radiator grille looked as if a sledgehammer crew had been working on them. All four tires had blown out. The left door was sprung.

“I’m afraid it isn’t salvageable,” one of the patrolmen said. “Even if there was any way of getting it out.”

Brake turned on him savagely: “That’s too bad. I was planning to take it for a spin.”

He climbed onto the upper side of the car and wrenched the sprung door open as wide as it would go. I looked past him into the fire-gutted, water-soaked interior. Against the right front door, which rested on the ground, a human shape lay curled with its face hidden.

Brake lowered himself through the opening. Supporting himself with one hand on the steering column, he reached for the black shape with his other hand. Most of the clothes had burned away, but there was still a belt around the middle. When Brake took hold of the belt and heaved, it snapped in his hand. He passed it up to me. The blackened silver buckle bore the initials C A S.