The Ivory Grin

Chapter 25

She came out shivering, holding the red purse against her breast like an external heart that wouldn’t hold still. I supported her elbow. At the ambulance door she pulled away from me and went out by herself to the car. She stumbled on high heels across the gravel, dazed by too much light.

When I got in behind the wheel she looked at me with horror as if my face had been scorched, and slid far over against the opposite door. Her eyes were like large marbles made of black glass.

I took the yellow Western Union envelope out of my inside pocket: Mr. Julian Desmond, c/o Great West Hotel, Bella City, California. As long as Heiss was alive, it was a crime to open it. Since he was dead, it was legitimate evidence.

It contained a night letter sent from Detroit by someone who signed himself “Van”:

ONCEOVER LIGHTLY DURANOS AIRMAIL REPORT FOLLOWS. LEO ARRESTED FELONIOUS ASSAULT 1925 AGE TWENTY SERVED SIX ARRESTED 1927 KIDNAPPING NO CASE ALLEGED MEMBER OR PROTECTEE PURPLE GANG ARRESTED 1930 SUSPICION MURDER NOLLE PROSSED NO WITNESSES 1932 MURDER AIRTIGHT ALIBI ACQUITTED. BREAKUP PURPLE GANG LEO TO CHICAGO RAN GOON SQUAD THREE-FOUR YEARS THEN SYNDICATE TIEUP LEGIT FRONT HATCHECK CONCESSIONS. ARRESTED CONTRIBUTING DELINQUENCY MINOR EARLY 1942 COMMITTED STATE HOSPITAL DIAGNOSIS UNKNOWN RELEASED OCTOBER 1942 GUARDIANSHIP SISTER UNA PUBLIC STENOGRAPHER AND BOOKKEEPER. ENFORCER FOR NUMBERS RING ATTEMPTING TAKE OVER ROUGE AND WILLOW RUN PLANTS BROKEN UP 1943. 1944 LEO AND UNA ORGANIZED DETROIT-BASED NUMBERS RING STILL GOING GOOD PROTECTION ESTIMATED WEEKLY NET TWO TO THREE GEES. LEO AND UNA NOT SEEN MICHIGAN SINCE JANUARY YPSILANTI HOUSE CLOSED BANKS BEING RUN BY WILLIAM GARIBALDI ALIAS GARBOLD OLDTIME PURPLE ALUMNUS. NO RECORD ELIZABETH BENNING LEO LIVING WITH BESS WIONOWSKI PRIOR DEPARTURE MICHIGAN. DO I DIG DEEPER.

“I should go some place and lie down,” Florie said in a small voice. “You didn’t tell me he was dead. You didn’t tell me they blowtorched him. A shock like that is enough to kill a girl.”

I put the telegram away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was until you identified him. What makes you so positive?”

“I worked for a dentist one time. I notice teeth. Julian had bad teeth. I could tell it was him by the fillings.” She covered her glassy black eyes with her hand. “Won’t you take me where I can lie down?”

“First the police.”

Brake was sitting at his desk with a deeply bitten sandwich in his hand. The bite he had taken was pouched in his cheek, rolling rhythmically with his chewing. He said around it: “The wife put up enough sandwiches to feed an army before I remembered to call off the picnic. I told her to bring some down here, save me lunch money. Lunch money mounts up.”

“Even with all this overtime?”

“I’m saving the overtime to buy a yacht.” Brake knew I knew that no cop ever was paid for overtime.

“Miss Gutierrez here has just made a positive identification on your torch victim.” I turned to her. “This is Lieutenant Brake.”

Florie, who had been hanging back in the doorway, took a timid step forward. “Pleased to meet you. Mr. Archer convinced me to do my duty.”

“Good for him.” Brake popped the remnant of his sandwich into his mouth. Whatever was about to happen or be said, he would have finished his sandwich. “Does she know Singleton?”

“No. It isn’t Singleton.”

“The hell it isn’t. The license was issued to Singleton, and the engine-number checks.” He tapped a yellow teletype flimsy on top of the pile in his “In” basket.

“It’s Singleton’s car but not his body in it. The body belongs to Maxfield Heiss. He was a Los Angeles detective. Florie knew him well.”

“I didn’t know him so well. He made advances to me, trying to pump me about my bosses.”

“Come inside, Miss Gutierrez, and shut the door behind you. Now tell me, who are your bosses?”

“Dr. and Mrs. Benning,” I said.

“Let her do her own talking. What was he trying to find out about them, Miss Gutierrez?”

“When Mrs. Benning came back and if she dyed her hair and all like that.”

“Anything about murder?”

“No, sir. Julian didn’t say nothing about a murder.”

“Julian who?”

“Heiss was using an alias,” I said. “We should get over to Benning’s.”

I turned to the door. There was a cork bulletin board beside it, with a number of frayed Wanted circulars thumb tacked to it. I wondered how Mrs. Benning would look in that crude black-and-white.

Brake said: “Can you swear to the identification, Miss Gutierrez?”

“I guess, if you insist.”

“What do you mean, you guess?”

“I never like to swear, it ain’t ladylike.”

Brake snorted and stood up and left me standing in the room with Florie. He returned with a uniformed policewoman, white-haired and granite-eyed: “Mrs. Simpson will stay here with you, Miss Gutierrez, until I get back. You’re not in custody, understand.”

Brake and I climbed the ramp to the parking lot.

“We’ll take my car. There’s something I want you to read.” I handed him the night letter from Detroit.

“I hope it makes more sense than that little dame. She’s a moron.”

“She can see and remember.”

He grunted as he climbed into the car. “What did she see?”

“Blood. Dried blood on the floor of Benning’s examination room. It was her job to clean it.”

“When? Yesterday?”

“Two weeks ago. The Monday after the weekend that Singleton was shot.”

“You definitely think he was shot?”

“Read the telegram. See what it means to you.” I started the car, and turned on a crosstown street in the direction of Benning’s house.

Brake looked up from the yellow paper. “It don’t mean a great deal to me. It’s mostly a rap sheet on a mobster I never heard of. Who is this Durano?”

“A Michigan numbers racketeer. He’s in California now. His sister Una is the one who hired me in the first place.”

“Why?”

“I think her brother shot Singleton. Lucy was a witness, and Una Durano was trying to find her and silence her.”

“Where is he now?”

“I wouldn’t know.” But the blasted man with the toy gun was vivid behind my eyes.

“Funny you didn’t pass on this stuff to me.”

I said, a little disingenuously: “I couldn’t tell you what I didn’t know. I just got hold of the telegram, at the hotel where Heiss was staying.”

“You’re building a pretty big story out of a little bit of a telegram. And it ain’t even evidence, unless you have your mitts on the guy that sent it. Who’s this Van?”

“Sounds like an undercover man for a Detroit agency.”

“Agency work costs money. Was Heiss a bigtimer?”

“Hardly, but he kept hoping. He thought he saw big money in this case, starting with the Singleton reward.”

“What was he doing with Singleton’s car?”

“He told Florie he found it. It was evidence, to help him collect the reward. Before that he tried to get Lucy to be a witness for him. But the Singleton reward was only a beginning for him. He had bigger money on his mind.”

“Blackmail? From Durano?”

“It’s possible.”

“So you think those mobsters torched him.”

“That’s possible, too.”

We had reached Benning’s block. I parked in front of the barber shop beside his house. Brake made no move to get out of the car. “Do you know any of these things that you say are possible?”

“I don’t know anything for sure. It’s a peculiarity of this case. We’ve got damn little physical evidence and damn few honest witnesses. There’s no single detail strong enough to hang your hat on. But I have got a Gestalt on the whole picture.”

“A what?”

“Call it a hunch, about how the case hangs together. There are a lot of people in it, so it can’t be simple. Even with two people, actions are never simple.”

“Cut the philosophy. Come down to cases again. If these are gang killings, what are we doing here? Mrs. Benning doesn’t come into it at all.”

“Mrs. Benning is the central figure in the picture,” I said. “She had three men on the string: Durano, Singleton, Benning. Durano shot Singleton over her. She couldn’t face an investigation so she skipped out and came back to Benning for help.”

“What did she do with Singleton?”

“We better ask her.”