The Ivory Grin

Chapter 26

Blinded and gray-sided, Benning’s house seemed to exhale its own shabby twilight. The doctor was pale and blinking like a twilight creature when he came to the door: “Good afternoon, lieutenant.”

He looked at me without speaking. Brake flashed his buzzer to indicate this wasn’t a social call. Benning backed up abruptly, reaching for his hat on the hall rack and setting it on his head.

“You going somewhere, doctor?”

“Why no, I wasn’t. I often wear a hat in the house.” He gave Brake a sheepish smile.

The hallway was dim and chilly. An odor of rotting wood, which I hadn’t noticed before, underlay the other odors. Men with a sense of failure like Benning had a knack of choosing the right environment for failure, or creating it around them. I listened for the sound of the woman in the house. There was no sound except the drip of a tap somewhere like a slow internal hemorrhage.

Brake said in formal tones: “I want to see the lady known as Mrs. Benning.”

“Do you mean my wife?”

“I do.”

“Then why not say so?” Benning spoke with acerbity. He was pulling himself together under the hat.

“Is she here?”

“Not at the moment, no.” Biting at the inside of his long upper lip, the doctor resembled a worried camel chewing a bitter cud. “Before I answer any questions, no matter how charmingly phrased, I’d like to know if you’re here in an official capacity. Or do you simply derive a puerile pleasure from displaying your badge?”

Brake turned dull red. “There’s no pleasure in it, doctor. I got two murders on the book, another one floating.”

Benning swallowed several times, his adam’s-apple bobbing like a distorted yo-yo in his throat. “You’re not seriously suggesting that there’s any connection.” The words fell into a silence that seemed to disturb him. He filled it by adding: “Between my wife and these murders?”

“I’m asking for your co-operation, doctor. You gave it to me this morning. I can’t keep down crime without the cooperation of the citizenry.”

The two men faced each other in silence for a minute. Brake’s silence was heavy, persistent, thick, like a tree-stump’s. Benning’s was tense and alert. He might have been listening to a sound too high for our ears to catch.

He cleared his throat. The distorted yo-yo bobbed. “Mrs. Benning has gone to San Francisco for a few days. It’s been hard for her to readjust to Bella City and – marriage. After the unpleasantness of the last two days – well, we both thought she needed a rest. She left about an hour ago.”

I said: “Where is she going to stay in San Francisco?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know the address. Bess makes a point of enjoying the utmost personal freedom, and I make a point of allowing it.” His pale eyes were watching me, daring me to mention our last meeting.

“When is she coming back?”

“I assume in a week or so. It will depend partly on the friends she’s staying with.”

“What friends?”

“I can’t help you there, either. I don’t really know my wife’s friends. We’ve been living apart for the past two years.”

He was choosing his words very carefully, as if the slightest mishandling might jar out of them a blast of meaning that would destroy him and his house. It struck me that Bess had left him and wasn’t coming back. This was the fact he was concealing from me and Brake, and possibly from himself.

“Why did she come back after those two years?”

“I believe she realized that she had made a mistake in leaving me. Not that you have any license to ask me.”

“The doctor’s right,” Brake said. “Absolutely right. How’s she traveling, by the way?”

“By car. She took my car.” He added stiffly: “She had my permission to take it.”

“Let’s see, that’s a Chevvie sedan, isn’t it, doctor?”

“A 1946 blue Chevrolet sedan.”

“And the license?”

“5T1381.”

Brake made a note of it. “What route is she taking?”

“I have no idea. Surely you’re not proposing to have Mrs. Benning picked up on the highway?”

“First I want to make sure she isn’t here.”

“You think I’ve been lying to you?”

“Not a bit. I’m just doing my job. May I have your permission to look through the house?”

“Do you have a search warrant?”

“I do not. I took it for granted you had nothing to hide.”

Benning managed to smile. “Of course. I was merely curious.” He swung his arm in a quarter circle that ended with his knuckles thumping the wall. “Make free with my demesne, gentlemen.”

Brake started up the stairs that rose at the end of the hallway. I went though the outer rooms with Benning, and paused in the examination room. He spoke quietly from the doorway: “I know my enemies, Mr. Archer, and my wife’s enemies. I understand your type, the appetitive man. What you can’t have you seek to destroy.” His voice was rising like an ill wind, carrying echoes of our previous meeting.

“Why did your wife come back to you?” I said.

“She loved me.”

“Then why did she leave you again today?”

“She was afraid.”

“Afraid of the Duranos? The police?”

“She was afraid,” he repeated.

I looked around the shabby oilcloth walls and the scrubbed linoleum floor. The faucet was still leaking drop by drop into the sink.

“Is this the room where Florie found the blood, doctor?”

“Blood?” he said. “Blood?”

“The day after your wife came back there were spots of blood on the floor. According to Florie.”

“Oh, yes. I had an emergency patient that Sunday. Cut finger.”

“I suggest that your emergency patient came here late Saturday night. Mrs. Benning brought him to you for treatment. He had a slug in his body instead of a cut finger. His name was Singleton. What happened to him, doctor, did he die on your hands?”

“I had no such patient.”

“I suggest that you performed an unreported operation on a dying man, and couldn’t save him.”

“Have you made that suggestion to Brake?”

“No. I’m not your enemy. I’m not interested in breaches of medical ethics. I’m after a murderer. But I haven’t even been able to prove that Singleton was murdered. Was he?”

Our glances met and locked, until Benning disengaged his. “It’s not myself I’m concerned about,” he said falteringly.

“Your wife? Did she do the shooting?”

He failed to meet my eyes again. Both of us were listening to Brake’s unaccompanied footsteps coming down the stairs and through the house.

Brake saw the tension between us as soon as he entered the room: “What goes on?”

“Very little,” I said.

Benning looked at me with gratitude, and drew himself up visibly. “Did you look under all the beds, lieutenant?”

“I did. No women’s clothes in the closets, either. You sure your wife isn’t planning to stay away?”

“She hasn’t many clothes.”

Brake crossed the room to the locked closet which I had broken into the night before. He shook the knob with the violence of frustration. “You check this room in here, Archer?”

“It’s only a closet,” Benning said. “There’s nothing inside but my skeleton.”

“Your what?”

“It’s an anatomical specimen.”

“Open up.”

Benning went to the closet door with a key-ring jingling in his hand. As he unlocked it, he gave us a bright bitter smile over his shoulder. “You don’t seriously think I’ve locked my wife in here?”

He swung the door open. The sparse head grinned steadfastly, superciliously, from its refuge beyond time. Benning stood back, watching us for signs of shock or surprise. He seemed disappointed when we showed none.

“Mr. Macabre,” I said. “Where did he come from?”

“I got him from a medical-supply house.” He pointed out a rectangular brass tag attached to one of the ribs: Sunset Hospital Equipment Co., Ltd. I had missed it the night before.

“Not many doctors have these any more, do they?”

“I keep him for a special reason. I worked my way through medical school, and I never received an adequate grounding in anatomy. I’ve been studying it on my own, with the help of this old boy.” He poked the varnished cage of ribs with his finger, and set the whole thing swaying. “Poor old boy. I’ve often wondered who or what he was. A convicted felon, or a pauper who died in a charity ward? Memento mori.”

Brake had been fidgeting. “Let’s go,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got work to do.”

“There are a couple of other points I want to take up with Dr. Benning.”

“Make it fast, then.” Brake seemed to have broken through the thin ice, and contracted a case of cold feet. He moved out through the waiting-room as if to detach his authority from me.

The doctor followed Brake, emphasizing the realignment that was taking place. It had been two against him. Now it was two against me.

“I don’t really mind, lieutenant. I’d like to satisfy Mr. Archer completely and have it over with. If Mr. Archer can be satisfied.” Benning turned to face me in the waiting-room like an actor who has been groping for his part and finally begun to live it.

“There’s a conflict of testimony,” I said. “Florie Gutierrez says that your wife and Lucy Champion were friends. You claim they weren’t. Florie says your wife was out of the house when Lucy was killed yesterday afternoon. You claim she was here with you.”

“I can’t pretend to be objective in this matter, with my wife’s reputation at stake. I’ll tell you my own experience of Florida Gutierrez. She’s an unmitigated liar. And when my wife discharged her last night–”

“Why did your wife discharge her?”

“Incompetence. Dishonesty and incompetence. The Gutierrez woman threatened to get even, as she put it. I knew she’d go to almost any lengths to damage us. But the lengths she’s gone to have surprised even me. There seems to be no limit to human malice.”

“Was your wife in the house between five and six yesterday?”

“She was.”

“How do you know? You were taking a siesta.”

He was silent for nearly half a minute. Brake was watching from the doorway with the air of a disinterested spectator.

“I didn’t sleep,” Benning said. “I was conscious of her presence in the house.”

“But you couldn’t see her? It might have been Florie? You can’t swear it was your wife?”

Benning took off his hat and inspected its interior as if for a missing idea. He said slowly and painfully: “I don’t have to answer that question, or any other question. Even if I were in court – you can’t force a man to testify against his wife.”

“You volunteered an alibi for her. Incidentally, you haven’t proved she is your wife.”

“Nothing could be easier.” He strode into his consultation room and came back with a folded document that he handed to Brake.

Brake glanced at it, and passed it to me. It was a marriage certificate issued in the State of Indiana on May 14, 1943. It stated that Samuel Benning, aged 38, had been married on that date to Elizabeth Wionowski, aged 18.

Benning took it out of my hands. “And now, gentlemen, it’s about time I insisted that my private life, and my wife’s, is no affair of yours. Since she isn’t here to defend herself, I’ll remind you that there are libel laws, and false arrest is actionable in the courts.”

“You don’t have to remind me.” Brake stressed the personal pronoun. “There’s been no arrest, no accusation. Thank you for your co-operation, doctor.”

Brake slung a look from the door which tightened on me like a rope. We left Benning in the hallway, leaning like a flimsy buttress against the rotting wall. He was pressing the marriage certificate to his thin chest as if it was a love token or a poultice or a banknote, or a combination of all three.

The interior of my car was furnace-hot. Brake pulled off his coat and folded it on his knees. His shirt was blotched with sweat.

“You went too far, Archer.”

“I think I didn’t go far enough.”

“That’s because you don’t have my responsibility.”

I admitted that that was true.

“I can’t take chances,” he went on. “I can’t act without evidence. I got nothing to justify a warrant for Mrs. Benning.”

“You’ve got just as much on her as you have on Alex Norris. He’s still in jail.”

Brake answered doggedly: “He’s being held without charge for twenty-four hours. It’s legal. But you can’t do that with people like Mrs. Benning. She’s a doctor’s wife, remember. I stuck my neck out going to Benning at all. He’s lived all his life in this town. His father was the high-school principal for twenty years.” He added defensively: “Anyway, what have we got on her?”

“You noticed her maiden name in the marriage certificate? Elizabeth Wionowski. The same name as the one in the telegram. She was Durano’s woman.”

“That don’t prove anything about Singleton, even if it was evidence, which it isn’t. What I don’t see in your story is this idea of a woman changing partners back and forth like a bloody square dance. It don’t happen.”

“Depends on the woman. I’ve known women who kept six men on the string at the same time. Mrs. Benning has been alternating three. I have a witness who says she was Singleton’s mistress for seven years, off and on. She came back to Benning because she needed help–”

Brake brushed the words like mosquitoes away from his head. “Don’t tell me any more. I got to take this careful and slow or I’m up the crick without a paddle.”

“You or Norris.”

“And don’t needle me. I’m handling this case the way I have to. If you can bring in Mrs. Benning to make a statement, okay, I’ll listen. But I can’t go out and bring her in myself. I can’t do anything to the doctor just because his wife went on a trip. Nobody told her not to.”

The sweat was running down his slant low forehead, gathering in his eyebrows like dew in a thicket. His eyes were bleak.

“It’s your town, lieutenant.”

I dropped him at the rear of the City Hall. He didn’t ask me what I intended to do next.