The Ivory Grin

Chapter 27

It was late afternoon when I drove through Arroyo Beach to the ocean boulevard. The palm-lined sand was strewn with bodies like a desert battlefield. At the horizon sea and sky merged in a blue haze from which the indigo hills of the channel islands rose. Beyond them the sun’s fire raged on the slopes of space.

I turned south into traffic moving bumper to bumper, fender to fender, like an army in retreat. The arthritic trees cast long baroque shadows down the cemetery hill. The shadow of Durano’s house reached halfway across its wilderness of lawn towards the iron fence. I pulled out of the traffic into the entrance to the drive.

The gate was still chained and padlocked. There was a button set in the gatepost under a small weathered sign: RING FOR GARDENER PLEASE. I rang three times, without audible effect, and went back to my car to wait. After a while a small figure came out of the house. It was Una. She moved impatiently down the drive, chunky and squat between the slender coconut palms.

Her gold lamé coat gleamed like mail through the bars of the gate. “What do you want, you?”

I got out of the car and approached her. She looked at me, and at the house, as if invisible wires were jerking at her alternately from each direction. Then she right-about-faced and started away.

“I want to talk about Leo,” I said above the traffic noises.

Her brother’s name pulled her back to the gate: “I don’t understand you.”

“Leo Durano is your brother?”

“What if he is? I thought I fired you yesterday. How many times do I have to fire you before you stay fired?”

“Was that the trouble with Max Heiss, that he wouldn’t stay fired?”

“What about Max Heiss?”

“He was killed this morning, murdered. Your labor turnover is rapid, and all of your ex-employees are ending the same way.”

Her expression didn’t change, but her diamonded right hand reached for one of the bars and gripped it. “Heiss had a lot of drunky ideas. If somebody cut him down, it’s no affair of mine. Or my brother’s.”

“It’s funny,” I said, “when I saw Heiss in the morgue I thought of you and Leo. Leo has quite a record in that line.”

Her hand left the bar and jumped like a brilliant crustacean to her throat. “You’ve seen Bess Wionowski.”

“We had a little chat.”

“Where is she?” Una spoke as if her throat was hurting her.

“Blown again,” I said. “You might as well open the gate. We can’t talk here.”

“I might as well.”

She groped in the wide square pocket of her gold coat. I had my finger hooked in the trigger guard of my gun. All she brought out was a key, with which she opened the padlock. I unchained the gate and pushed it open.

Her hand closed on my arm: “What happened to Max Heiss? Did he get sliced, like Lucy?”

“He was put to the torch like Joan of Arc.”

“When?”

“Early this morning. We found him in the mountains, in a wrecked car. The car belonged to Charles Singleton, and Heiss was wearing Singleton’s clothes.”

“Whose clothes?”

Her fingers were biting into me. Contact with her was unpleasant and strange, like being grabbed by the branch of a small spiny tree. I shook her hand off.

“You know him, Una, the golden boy Bess was running with. Somebody blowtorched Heiss and dressed him in Singleton’s clothes to make it look as if Singleton died this morning. But we know better, don’t we?”

“If you think Leo did it, you’re crazy.”

“I’m surprised you still use that word in your family.”

Her gaze, which had been steady on my face, swerved away. She said with her head down: “Leo was home in bed this morning. I can prove it by his nurse. Leo is a very sick man.”

“Paranoia?” I said distinctly. “G.P.I.?”

Her rigid calm tore like a photograph. “Those lying sawbones at the clinic! They promised me they kept professional secrets. I’ll professional-secret them when they send me their next bill.”

“Don’t blame the clinic. I’ve seen enough commitment trials to recognize paranoid symptoms.”

“You’ve never seen my brother.”

I didn’t answer the unasked question.

“I’m going to see him now, with you.”

“I’ve taken good care of Leo,” she cried suddenly, “with trained nurses all the time, the best of care! The doctor comes every day to see him. I work and slave for that man, making him things he likes to eat, spumoni, minestrone. When I have to, I feed him with my own hands.” She choked back the running words and turned away from me, ashamed of the solicitous old woman jostling her other selves.

I put one hand on her stiff elbow and propelled her towards the house. Its red-tiled upper edge cut off the sun. I looked up at the barred window behind which Leo Durano had been receiving the best of care, and heard a silent word repeated like an echo from the wall many times.

Inside the front door, an iron stairway curved in a spiral to the second floor. Una climbed it and preceded me along a dust-littered hallway. Near its end, the large young man in the white smock sat in an armchair beside a closed door.

My presence startled him. “Doctor?” he said to Una.

“Just a visitor.”

He shook his cheeks at her. “I wouldn’t do it, Miss Durano. He’s been hard to handle this afternoon. I had to restrain him.”

“Open the door, Donald,” Una said.

He produced a key from his tentlike smock. The room contained a bare iron cot and a disemboweled platform-rocker bolted to the floor. A few shreds remained of the drapes that had hung at the barred window. Beside the window, the plaster wall showed handprints, and indentations that could have been made by fists. The inner side of the oak door had been splintered, and repaired with bare oak boards.

Durano was sitting on the floor against the wall in the far corner by the window. His arms, folded in his lap, were sheathed in a brown leather restrainer on which toothmarks were visible. He looked up at us through soiled black hair that straggled over his forehead. His bleeding mouth opened and closed, trying to trap a word.

The word sounded like: “Forgive.”

Una ran across the room to him and went down clumsily on her trousered knees. “We don’t treat you good, Leo. Forgive me.” She drew his head against her metal torso.

“Forgive,” he answered brokenly. “I forgive me. Released without charge. I told the ragpickers you can’t vag an honest man or the son of an honest man, told them I was doing my father’s business.”

Clasping the mumbling head in both arms, Una looked up at me scornfully. “This is the poor little fellow who committed a murder this morning, eh? Tell him, Donald, where was Leo this morning?”

Donald swallowed painfully. “Police?”

“Close enough,” I said.

“He was right in this room. All night and all morning. Every night and morning. Durano don’t get around much any more.”

“Shut up, you.” Una left her brother and advanced on Donald. “No smart cracks, fat boy. He’s a better man right now than you’ll ever be. You’d still be emptying bedpans for sixty a month if it wasn’t for Leo Durano. Mister to you.”

He backed away from her, flushed and cowering like a browbeaten German wife. “You ask me a question, Miss Durano.”

“Shut up.” She passed him like a small cold wind, and hustled off down the corridor.

I said: “Donald. What about Saturday night two weeks ago? Was Durano in his room?”

“I wasn’t here. We usually get Saturday nights off.”

“We?”

“Me and Lucy before she left. Miss Durano paid me extra to stay last night. He was bad last night.”

“You coming?” Una called from the head of the stairs.

She took me to the room with the picture window at the rear of the house. The sun’s fires had blazed out of control across the whole western sky and were eating at the sea’s edges. Along the shore where the beach curved, a few late swimmers were tossed like matchsticks in a bloody froth of surf. I sat down in a chair against the side wall where I could watch the whole room and its doors and windows.

Seen from inside by daylight, the room was spacious and handsome in an old-fashioned way. Kept up, it might have been beautiful. But the carpets and the surfaces of the furniture were gray with dust, strewn with the leavings of weeks: torn magazines and crumpled newspapers, cigarette butts, unwashed dishes. A bowl of rotting fruit was alive with insects. The wall plants had drooped and died. Cobwebs hung in shaggy strands from the ceiling. It was a Roman villa liberated by Vandals.

Una sat down at the card-table by the big window. The cards with which she and Donald had been playing the night before lay scattered across the table, mixed with a confetti of potato chips. A pair of clouded glasses sat on its edge. Una’s hand crept out onto the table and began to gather the cards.

“How long has Leo been insane?” I said.

“What does it matter? You know he didn’t kill Heiss.”

“Heiss isn’t the only one.”

“Lucy Champion, then. He wouldn’t hurt Lucy. They got along swell till she left. She was a damn good nurse, I’ll give her that.”

“That isn’t why you were so anxious to get her back.”

“Isn’t it?” She smiled a keen half-smile, as bitter as wormwood.

“How long has he been insane, Una?”

“Since the first of the year. He blew his top for keeps at a New Year’s party in the Dial, that’s a night-spot in Detroit. He was trying to make the orchestra play the same piece over and over, some piece from an opera. They played it three times and quit. Leo said they were insulting a great Italian composer. He was going to shoot the orchestra leader. I stopped him.

“It was New Year’s Eve and everybody thought he was loaded. I knew different. I’d been watching him since summer. He had bad headaches all last year, and along in the fall he was flying off the handle every day. It was Bess set him off, he never should have taken her back. They fought like wildcats all the time. Then he started to lose his memory. He got so he didn’t even know his collectors’ names.”

“Collectors?”

Her hand became still among the half-gathered cards. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “He runs a collection agency.”

“With a gun?”

“Leo always carried large sums. The gun was for protection. I didn’t realize he was dangerous until he tried to use it on that musician. The doctor in Detroit said he was in a hopeless state, he wouldn’t live long. I saw I had to get him out of Michigan. I wasn’t going to have my brother committed.”

“Again.”

“Again, God damn you, if you know so much.”

“So you hired a couple of nurses and moved to California. No doubt reasoning that Californians were expendable, in case he tried to shoot somebody else.”

She turned from the card-table to look at my face, try to assess my meaning. “California was her idea. Anyway, I don’t see why you go on about killing. I keep him under close guard. The idea that Leo did these murders is ridiculous.”

“You didn’t take it so lightly when I brought it up. You’ve worked like a dog since I got here to build up his alibi. On top of that you’ve outlined his defense on a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, complete with medical witnesses.”

“I’ve been showing you that Leo can’t be tried for murder, let alone convicted.”

“Why go to all that trouble if the idea is ridiculous?”

She bent forward stiffly in her chair, planting her feet on the floor: “You wouldn’t want to harass a poor sick guy. What happens if you tip the cops in? They’ll pin a bum rap on him, with his record, or if that doesn’t work they’ll send him away.”

“There are worse places than a state hospital.” I was sitting in one.

“I can’t face it,” she said. “He was in before and I saw how they treated him. He’s got a right to spend his last days with somebody that loves him.”

Though she said them with great intensity, the words fell flat. I studied her head, slanting square and hard out of the gold coat. On the window side the sun cast her face in rosy relief. Its other side was in shadow so deep by contrast that she looked like half a woman. Or a woman composed half of flesh and half of darkness.

“How long do the doctors give him?”

“Not more than a year. You can ask them at the clinic. Two years at the outside.”

“Anywhere from one hundred to three hundred grand.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“My information is that Leo draws two to three grand a week from a numbers ring in Michigan. That adds up to a possible total of three hundred grand in two years, before taxes if you pay taxes.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Money,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re not handling Leo’s money. I wouldn’t believe it.”

An irrepressible faint smile appeared on her mouth, as if I had flattered her subtly. “I have big expenses, very big expenses.”

“Sure you have. Mink, diamonds, an ocean-front estate. They all cost money.”

“Medical expenses,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe.”

“Sure. You’ve got to keep him alive. The income lasts as long as he does. As long as you keep him under wraps, he’s a boss racketeer on Sabbatical leave drawing his weekly take. But when he dies, or the cops lock him up, or news of his condition gets back to Michigan, it’s finished for you. You’re a pretty hard type but I don’t see you going back to Michigan and fighting a war of succession with his mob. If you could do that, you wouldn’t have to come to me in the first place.”

She sat in silence, shivering a little inside the metal coat. Then she took up the gathered half of the deck and flung it down at random on the table. Brushed by her sleeve, a glass fell to the floor and broke.

“You didn’t figure this out for yourself,” she said in cold still anger. “It was Bess Wionowski put you onto it.”

“She may have helped.”

“That’s Wionowski’s gratitude.” A hard pulse kicked like a tiny animal tangled in the veins of her left temple. “She was on her uppers, last year when Leo took her back. We ransomed her out of a cell in Detroit city jail and treated her like a queen. When we came out here to Cal, we even let her choose the town to live in. I might of known she had a reason for picking this place.”

“Singleton,” I said.

The name acted on Una like an electric shock. She jumped to her feet, kicking out at the shards of glass on the floor as if she hated everything actual. “The filthy disloyal filly. Where is she now? Where is she? If you got her hid out waiting for her cut, you can go back and tell her I don’t pay off to squealers.”

She stood above me in a spiteful rage, less than half a woman now, a mean little mannish doll raving ventriloquially.

“Come down to earth,” I said. “You’ll give yourself a migraine. Neither of us wants your dirty money.”

“If my money’s so dirty, what are you sucking around for?”

“Just the truth, sweetheart. You know what happened to Singleton, if anybody does. You’re going to tell me.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You tell the cops. I’ll have them here before dark.”

She sat on the edge of her chair and looked out at the setting sun. Half down on the horizon, its red hemisphere was like a bird’s giant eye on which the inflamed blue underlid was shutting slowly.

“How did it happen?” I said.

“Give me a chance to think–”

“You’ve had two weeks. Now talk.”

“Where were you?”

“Downtown. When I got back Leo was waiting for me with a gun. He’d taken the springs off his bed and broken the door down and found the gun in my room. He made me drive him up to Singleton’s studio, forced me at gunpoint to do it. Singleton came out of the door, and Leo shot him in the guts. I grabbed Leo from behind as soon as he turned that gun away from me. It took all four of us to tie him.”

“All four?”

“Me and Bess and Lucy. Lucy was there. And Singleton.”

“Singleton was shot, you said.”

“He could still navigate, the last I saw of him. I left right away when we got Leo under control. I had to get Leo home.”

“So you don’t know what happened to Singleton?”

“No. They all three dropped out of sight. I hired Max Heiss to find out if Singleton was alive or dead. He watched the Singleton house all last week. On Thursday Lucy turned up there, sniffing around for the reward I guess. Heiss rode the bus back to Bella City with her and found out more than he ever turned in to me. Friday night he reported to me and claimed he lost Lucy in Bella City. I knew he was crossing me because he dropped a hint about the shooting. He was going to let me buy him off and then collect the Singleton reward besides.”

“So you killed him for being greedy.”

“Think again.”

“You were the one with everything to lose. Lucy and Heiss were the ones to lose it for you.”

“I still have everything to lose. Would I hand you all this on a silver platter if I wasn’t clear?”

“Who else had a reason to kill them?”

“Bess,” she said harshly. “Lucy was in touch with Bess in Bella City, I could tell by talking to Lucy. Max Heiss was on her track. How do I know what Bess did with Singleton? Maybe he died on her hands and that made her accessory. Bess couldn’t stand a police investigation. Bess has a record going back ten years.”

I stood up and moved towards her and stood over her: “Did you remind Bess of her record, up at Singleton’s cabin, after your brother shot him? Is that why she dropped out of sight and took Singleton into hiding?”

“Figure it out for yourself.”

“You scared her into hushing it up, didn’t you? Purely out of sisterly devotion, of course, to protect your brother, and his income.”

She shifted restlessly in the chair, doubling her legs under her to tighten her defenses. “What other reason would I have?”

“I’ve been casting around for one,” I said. “I thought of something that happened in Los Angeles about fifteen years ago, to a man and his wife and their son. The son was a Mongoloid idiot, and the man hated his wife for giving him that son. When the boy was ten or twelve years old, his father bought a shotgun and took him out on the desert and taught him to shoot. The boy had brains enough to pull the trigger of a shotgun. One night the father handed him the gun and told him to shoot his mother. She was asleep in bed. The boy blew her head off, being eager to please. He wasn’t prosecuted. But his father was, though he hadn’t physically committed the murder. He was convicted on a first-degree charge and put away with cyanide.”

“Too bad for him.”

“Too bad for anybody who tries to do murder by proxy. If you incite an insane person to commit a crime you’re legally guilty of it. Did you know that was the law when you drove your brother up the mountain to Singleton’s cabin and handed him a gun?”

She looked up at me with loathing, the muscles weaving and dimpling around her mouth. On the left side of her head where the knotted veins jerked, her face had swelled lopsided, as if moral strain had pushed or melted it out of shape. The light from the window fell on her like visible heat from an open furnace-door.

“You’ll never bum-rap me,” she said. “You haven’t even got a body. You don’t know where golden boy is any more than I do.”

Her statement turned at the end into a question. I left the question turning like a knife in her brain.