The Ivory Grin

Chapter 24

It was an old railroad hotel on Main Street between the tracks and the highway. Its narrow-windowed brick face was lugubrious, as if the big trucks going by for years had broken its steam-age spirit. There were battered brass spittoons on the floor of the lobby, old Union Pacific photogravures on the walls. Four men were playing contract at a card table near the front window. They had the still faces and satisfied hands of veteran railroaders growing old on schedule.

The clerk was a skinny old man in a green eyeshade and a black alpaca coat. Yes, Mr. and Mrs. Desmond were registered: 310, on the third floor. No phone, I could just go up. The bell-hop was off on Sundays, he added whiningly.

I started for the elevator. The clerk called me back: “Wait a minute, young fellow, since you’re going up anyways. This wire came in for Mr. Desmond this morning. I didn’t like to disturb him.” The eyeshade suffused his face with a green cadaverous flush.

I took the sealed yellow envelope. “I’ll give it to Mr. Desmond.”

“The elevator isn’t working,” he whined. “You’ll have to use the stairs.”

The second floor was hotter than the first. The third floor was stifling. At the end of a windowless corridor lit by twenty-watt bulbs I found the door I was looking for. A cardboard DO NOT DISTURB sign dangled from the knob.

I knocked. Bedsprings groaned. A woman called out drowsily: “Who is it? Julian?”

I said: “Florie?”

Unsteady footsteps approached the door. She fumbled at the lock. “Just a minute. I’m blind this morning.”

I slipped the telegram into the breast pocket of my jacket. The door opened inward and I went in with it. Florie looked at me dumbly for five or six long seconds. Her black hair was matted and frizzled. Her eyes hung heavy and dark under heavy lids. In the frightened attitude her body had assumed, her hips and breasts seemed strangely irrelevant. The rouge-stained mouth in her sallow face was like a wilted red rose stuck in plasticine.

She made an erratic rush for the bed, and covered herself with a sheet. Her mouth fell open. I could see her pale lower gums. She brought it closed with an effort. “What do you want?”

“Not you, Florie. Don’t be scared.”

The air in the room was stale, spiked with cheap alcohol and perfume. A half-empty half-gallon jug of muscatel stood on the floor by her bed. Her clothes were scattered on the floor and chair and dresser. I guessed she had taken them off in a staggering fury before she passed out.

“Who are you? Did Julian send you?”

“I was hired by the hotel association to check on false registrations.” I didn’t mention that my work in that field had ended ten years ago.

She chattered over the taut edge of the sheet: “I didn’t register. He did. It was all his fault. Besides, we didn’t do nothing. He brought me up here last night and parked me with a jar of muscadoodle. Then he went away and I haven’t seen him since. I waited up for him half the night. He never did come back. So how do you have anything on me?”

“I’ll make a bargain with you. No charges if you co-operate.”

Suspicion darkened her face. “How do you mean, co-operate?” Her body wriggled uneasily under the sheet.

“Just answer my questions. Desmond’s the one I want. It looks as if he ran out on you.”

“What time is it?”

“One thirty.”

“Sunday afternoon?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He did run out! He promised to take me on a trip.” She sat up on the bed, holding the sheet across her excessive bosom.

“How did you meet him?”

“I didn’t meet him. He come to the office one night last week, Thursday night it was. I was just finishing up my cleaning. The doctor was out already, over at the library or someplace, and I was all alone in the office.”

“Where was Mrs. Benning?”

“She was upstairs, I guess. Yeah, she was upstairs with that colored girl friend of hers.”

“Lucy Champion?”

“That’s the one. Some people have funny friends. This Lucy woman come to visit her and they went upstairs to talk. Julian Desmond said it was me he wanted to see. He fed me a line how he was recruiting nurse’s aides for Hawaii at four hundred dollars a month! I was a sucker, I guess. I let him pump me about who I worked for and he took me out that night and got me plastered and asked me a bunch of questions about Mrs. Benning and that Lucy. I told him I didn’t know Lucy from a hole in the ground, or Mrs. Benning either for that matter. He wanted to know when she came back to her husband, and if her hair was dyed and if they were really married, stuff like that.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him how she came back over the weekend, two weeks ago it was. When I walked in on Monday morning there she was. Doctor says: ‘Meet my wife. She’s been in a sanitarium.’ She didn’t look like san stuff to me–” Florie broke off suddenly. Her mouth clamped shut. “That was all I said. I caught on what he was up to, and you don’t catch me playing blackmailers’ games.”

“I can see that. What else was there to tell?”

“Nothing else, not a thing. I don’t know nothing about Mrs. Benning. She’s a mystery woman to me.”

I changed the direction of my approach: “Why did she fire you last night?”

“She didn’t fire me.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t want to work for her any more.”

“You worked for her yesterday, though.”

“Yeah, sure, that was before she fired – I mean I left.”

“Were you in the house all Saturday afternoon?”

“I was until six. I get off at six unless there’s extra cleaning. I mean I did.”

“Was Mrs. Benning there all afternoon?”

“Most of it. She went out in the late afternoon, said she was going to shop for Sunday.”

“What time did she go out?”

“Around five, a little before five.”

“What time did she come back?”

“I left before she came back.”

“And the doctor?”

“He was there, far as I know.”

“He didn’t go out with her?”

“No, he said he was going to take a siesta.”

“When did you see her after that?”

“I didn’t.”

“You saw her in Tom’s Café around eight.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I forgot about that.” Florie was getting rattled.

“Did she give you money?”

She hesitated. “No.” But she had to turn and look at the red plastic purse on the dresser.

“Why did she give you money?”

“She didn’t.”

“How much money?”

“Just my back pay,” she stammered. “They owed me back pay.”

“How much back pay?”

“Three hundred dollars.”

“That’s a lot of back pay. Isn’t it?”

She lifted her heavy gaze to the ceiling and brought it down again to the red purse on the dresser. She watched the purse intently, as if it was alive and struggling to take flight. “It was a bonus.” She had found a word. “She gave me a bonus.”

“What for? She didn’t like you.”

“You don’t like me anyway,” she said in a childish voice. “I didn’t do anything bad. I don’t see how you have to jump on me.”

“I like you fine,” I lied. “Only it happens I’m trying to solve some murders. You’re an important witness.”

“Me?”

“You. What did she pay you to keep quiet about?”

“If I’m a witness, do I have to give the money back? The bonus?”

“Not if you keep your mouth shut about it.”

“You won’t tell?”

“I couldn’t be bothered. What did she buy from you, Florie?”

I waited, listening to her breathing.

“It was the blood,” she said. “I found some dried drops of blood on the floor of the examination room. I cleaned it up.”

“When?”

“Monday two weeks ago, the first day I saw Mrs. Benning. I asked doctor about the blood and he said he had an emergency over the weekend – a tourist that cut his finger. I didn’t think of it again until Mrs. Benning brought it up last night.”

“Like the woman who urged her children not to put peas in their noses.”

“Who was she?” Florie asked almost brightly.

“It’s a story. The point is that the children put peas in their noses as soon as she turned her back. I’ll bet a nickel you told Desmond about the blood the minute Mrs. Benning turned hers.”

“I did not,” she said, with that peculiar whining intonation which means guilty as charged but I can’t help it if people are always leading me astray.

She introduced a diversion: “Anyway, his name isn’t Desmond. It’s Heist or something like that. I caught a glimpse of his driver’s license.”

“When?”

“Last night in the car.”

“The Buick?”

“Yeah. Personally I think he stole it. I had nothing to do with it. He already had it when he came to move me out of the apartment. He tried to tell me he found it, can you imagine. He said it was worth five thousand, probably more. I told him that was a lot of money for a secondhand Buick, but he just laughed.”

“Was it a green 1948 two-door sedan?”

“I don’t know the years. It was a two-door Buick, and that was the color. He stole it, didn’t he?”

“I think he found it all right. Did he say where?”

“No. It must have been in town, though. He had no car at suppertime and then at ten o’clock when he picked me up at the apartment, he was driving this Buick. Where would a guy find a Buick?”

“It’s a good question. Put on your clothes, Florie. I’ll look away.”

“You’re not going to arrest me? I didn’t do nothing wrong – anything wrong.”

“I want you to try to identify somebody, that’s all.”

“Who?”

“That’s another good question.”

I went to the window and tried to open it. I could hardly breathe the hot foul air sealed in the little room. The window rose four inches and stuck forever. It faced north towards the City Hall and the Mission Hotel. In the sun-stopped streets a few pedestrians trudged, a few cars crawled and snored. Behind me I heard the twang of a snagged comb, Florie’s quiet swearing, the pull and snap of a girdle, the slither of silk stockings, heels on the floor, water running in the sink.

At the rear of a bus depot below the window, a dusty blue bus was loading passengers: a pregnant Mexican woman herding half-naked brown children, a fieldworker in overalls who might have been the father of the children, an old man with a cane casting a tripod shadow on the asphalt, two young soldiers looking bored with any possible journey through any valley under any sky. The line moved forward slowly like a colored snake drunk with sun.

“Ready,” Florie said.

She had on a bright red jacket over the batiste blouse. Her hair was combed back from her face, which looked harder under a white and red cosmetic mask. She peered at me anxiously, clutching the red plastic purse.

“Where are we going?”

“To the hospital.”

“Is he in the hospital?”

“We’ll see.”

I carried her cardboard suitcase down to the lobby. Heiss had paid for the room in advance. The aged clerk didn’t ask me about the telegram. The contract players followed our progress across the lobby to the street with knowing looks.

In my car, Florie relaxed into hangover somnolence. I drove across town to the county hospital. Obscured by the dust and insect splashes on the windshield, wavering in the heat, the streets and buildings were like an image of a city refracted through Florie’s mind. The asphalt was soft as flesh under the wheels.

It was cold enough in the morgue.