The Ivory Grin

Chapter 23

A high-pitched voice flicked at my back: “Take your hands off my wife.”

Dr. Benning was standing just inside the kitchen door, with one hand on the knob. A black leather Bible was under his arm and his hat was on his head. I moved between him and his wife. “I was waiting to see you, doctor.”

“Filth,” he cried. “Ordure. I come home from the House of God–” The trembling of his mouth ruined the sentence.

“Nothing happened,” the woman said behind me.

Benning had the eyes of a pole-axed steer. His hand on the doorknob and his shoulder against the jamb were supporting his weight. His body vibrated grossly like a tuning fork: “You’re lying to me, both of you. You had your hands on her. Carnal knowledge–” The words knotted in his throat and almost choked him. “Like dogs. Like two dogs in the kitchen of my home.”

“That’s enough.” The woman stepped around me. “I’ve heard enough from you, after I told you nothing happened. What would you do if it had?”

He answered disconnectedly: “I gave you a helping hand. I lifted you out of the gutter. You owe everything to me.” The shock had sprung a booby-trap of clichés in his head.

“Good gray doctor Good-Samaritan! What would you do if anything had happened?”

He choked out: “A man can take so much from a woman. I have a gun in my desk–”

“So you’ll shoot me down like the dog I am, eh?” She planted herself firmly on braced legs. Leaning towards him in a fishwife attitude, her body seemed to be reveling in its power, drawing terrific energy from his weakness.

“I’ll kill myself,” he cried on a high note.

A few tears squeezed from his eyes and ran down into the failure marks that dragged from the wings of his nose. He was the suicidal man who never quite nerved himself to suicide. I realized suddenly why his description of Lucy’s fears had sounded so convincing. They were his own.

His wife said: “Go ahead. Don’t let me stop you. Maybe that isn’t such a bad idea.” She moved in on him with her hands on her hips, flailing him with words.

He cringed away from her with one hand stretched towards her, asking for mercy. His hat caught on the end of a towelrack and fell to the floor. He looked as if he were disintegrating.

“Don’t, Bess,” he said so rapidly that I could barely catch the words. “I didn’t mean it. I love you. You’re all I’ve got.”

“Since when have you got me?”

He turned to the wall, stood with his face against the rough plaster, his shoulders heaving. His Bible dropped to the floor.

I took her by the elbows from behind: “Leave him alone.”

“Why should I?”

“I hate to see any man broken down by any woman.”

“You can leave.”

“You’re the one that’s leaving.”

“Who do you think you’re talking to?” She was still showing fire, but it was warmed-over fire.

“Singleton’s girl friend,” I said into her ear. “Now get out of here. I want to ask your husband a couple of questions.”

I pushed her through the doorway and closed it after her. She didn’t try to come back into the kitchen, but I could feel her presence behind the door.

“Dr. Benning.”

He was quieting down. After a while he turned to face me. In spite of his baldness, his middle age, his beaten air, he looked like a heartbroken adolescent in disguise.

“She’s all I’ve got,” he said. “Don’t take her away from me.” He was slipping rung by rung into a hell of self-abasement.

I lost patience: “I wouldn’t take her as a gift. Now if you can concentrate for a minute, where was your wife between five and six yesterday afternoon?”

“Right here, with me,” A grief-stricken hiccup made a caesura between the phrases.

“Where was she between twelve last night and eight this morning?”

“In bed, of course.”

“Will you swear to it, on the Bible?”

“Yes, I will.” He picked up the Bible and held it with his right hand flat on the cover: “I swear that my wife Elizabeth Benning was in this house with me yesterday afternoon between five and six and all last night from midnight until morning. Does that satisfy you?”

“Yes. Thank you.” I wasn’t satisfied, but this was the best I could hope for until I found more evidence.

“Is that all?” He sounded disappointed. I wondered if he was afraid to be left alone in the house with her.

“Not quite. You had a servant until yesterday. Florie?”

“Florida Gutierrez, yes. My wife discharged her for incompetence.”

“Do you know her address?”

“Of course. She’d been in my employ for nearly a year. 437 East Hidalgo Street, Apartment F.”

Mrs. Benning was standing outside the door. She flattened herself against the wall to let me go by. Neither of us spoke.

The long one-storied frame building stood at right angles to Hidalgo Street, facing a littered alley. Across the alley, a high wire fence surrounded a yard of piled lumber. I could smell cut white pine when I got out of my car.

At the head of the roofed gallery that ran along the building, a very fat Mexican was propped in a chair against the wall. He had on a bright-green rayon shirt that showed every fold of his stomach and chest.

I said: “Good morning.”

“Good afternoon, I think.”

He removed a brown cigarette from his mouth and shifted his weight, bringing his slippered feet onto the floor. There was a grease-spot on the wall where his iron-gray head had rested. The open door beside him was lettered amateurishly with a large red A.

“Good afternoon then. Where is Apartment F?”

“Second last door.” He gestured with his cigarette towards the rear, where a few dark men and women in their Sunday clothes were sitting in the shadow of the gallery, watching the lumberyard. “Florida ain’t here, if it’s her you’re looking for.”

“Florida Gutierrez?”

“Gutierrez.” He repronounced the name for me, with the accent on the second syllable. “She went away.”

“Where to?”

“How do I know where to? She told me she was going to live with her sister in Salinas.” His brown eyes were gently cynical.

“When did she go?”

“Last night, about ten o’clock. She was five weeks behind in her rent. She came in with a handful of bills and said: ‘How much do I owe? I am moving out, to live with my sister in Salinas.’ I saw the man waiting outside in the big automobile and I said: ‘Florida, your sister has changed in appearance.’ She said: ‘He is my brother-in-law.’ And I said: ‘You’re a lucky young woman, Florida. Ready to join the starvation army this morning, and tonight driving off with your brother-in-law in a Buick automobile.’ ” He set the cigarette between his smiling white teeth and blew a plume of smoke.

“Did you say Buick?”

“A fine big Buick,” he said, “with holes in the side. And a foolish girl riding away in it, with holes in her head. What could I do?” He spread his hands in cheerful resignation. “She is not a member of the Martinez family. Gracias á Dios,” he added under his breath.

“Did you notice the color of the car?”

“I couldn’t tell for sure. It was dark night. Blue or green, I would say.”

“And the man?”

He studied me with noncommittal eyes. “Florida is in trouble? You are from the police?”

I showed him my photostat and listened to him spell it out. “I thought it was trouble,” he said quietly.

“Was the man young and good-looking?”

“He was a man of middle age. He didn’t leave the automobile, even when Florida carried out her bags. No manners! I didn’t like his looks.”

“Can you describe him?”

“I didn’t see him too well.”

“I have a man in mind,” I said. “Short brown hair, fattish, shifty-looking, wino eyes, panama hat, light tan jacket. Calls himself Julian Desmond.”

He snapped his fingers. “That is the man. Florida called him Julian. Is he truly her brother-in-law?”

“No. You were right about him. I guess you know this town pretty well, Mr. Martinez.”

The suggestion seemed to exhilarate him. “For sixty-three years! My father was born here.”

“Here’s a question you should be able to answer. If you were Julian, and you wanted to take Florida to a hotel for the night, which one would you go to?”

“Any of them in the lower town, I guess.”

“Name the most likely ones, will you?” I took out my notebook.

He regarded it unhappily, disturbed by the notion of having anything he said committed to writing. “This trouble, is it serious?”

“Not for her. She’s needed as a witness.”

“A witness? Is that all? What kind of a witness?”

“The Buick she left in was involved in an accident this morning. I’m trying to identify the driver.”

The old man sighed with relief. “I will be glad to help.”

When I left him, I had the addresses of several hotels: the Rancheria, the Bella, the Oklahoma, the California, the Great West, the Pacific, and the Riviera. I was lucky on my third try, which happened to be the Great West.