The Ivory Grin

Chapter 29

At half past nine we were in my West Hollywood office. I called my answering service and was informed that a Mr. Elias McBratney of Beverly Hills had phoned twice on Saturday and would phone again on Monday. James Spinoza, Jr., of Spinoza Beach Garb, wished me to call him back as soon as possible about those shortages. A lady who declined to give her name had tried to reach me four times between eight ten and nine twenty. I thanked the operator and said I would take my own calls until further notice.

I turned out the desk lamp. The inner office was dimly lit by the rectangular white beam that fell from the outer room through the one-way panel in the glass door. A changing light thrown up from the Boulevard silhouetted the girl against the window.

“Look at the lights all up the sides of the hills,” she said. “I’ve never seen this city at night. It’s so new and aspiring.”

“New anyway.”

I stood behind her watching the cars run by in the road. I felt very close to Sylvia in the half-dark, and very conscious of time. The headlights flashed and disappeared like a bright succession of instants plunging out of darkness into darkness.

“Some day we’ll have to jack it up and put a foundation under it.”

“I like it the way it is,” she said. “New England is all foundation and nothing else. Who cares about foundations?”

“You do, for one.”

She turned, and her shoulder brushed me like a friendly movement of the darkness itself. “Yes, I do. You have foundations, Archer, don’t you?”

“Not exactly. I have a gyroscope arrangement. I’m afraid to let it stop spinning.”

“That’s better than foundations. And I don’t believe you’re afraid of anything at all.”

“Am I not.” I emitted a cynical-uncle chuckle which turned into a real laugh. Sylvia didn’t join in.

The telephone on the desk rang sharply. I reached for it and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Hello.”

No answer. Only a faint electric murmur, the sound of thin wire in thin space. A click at the other end. Dead line.

I dropped the telephone into its cradle. “Nobody there.”

“Perhaps it was the woman. Bess.” Sylvia’s face in the upward light from the window was white and enormous-eyed.

“I doubt it. She has no way of knowing this is my address.”

“Will she come, do you think?”

“Yes. She needs the money for a getaway.” I patted my fat breast-pocketful of bills.

“Getaway,” Sylvia said, like a tourist picking up a foreign word. “What a wretched life she must have led, and still be leading. Oh, I hope she comes.”

“Is it so important?”

“I have to know about Charles, one way or the other.” She added under her breath: “And I want to see her.”

“You’ll be able to.” I showed her the one-way panel in the door, and the earphones wired to the mike in the outer room. “You stay in here and take your notes. I’ll keep her in the other room. I don’t expect any trouble.”

“I’m not afraid. I was afraid of everything for so very long. I’ve suddenly got over it.”

At eight minutes to ten, a blue Chevrolet sedan passed slowly on the far side of the road, in the direction of Los Angeles. The face of the woman behind the wheel was caught in a photoflash of approaching headlights.

“That was Bess. You stay in here now and be still. Away from the window.”

“Yes.”

Closing doors behind me, I ran downstairs to the street. At two minutes to ten the Chevrolet came back and pulled up to the curb directly opposite the doorway where I was waiting, I crossed the sidewalk in three steps, opened the car door, pushed my gun into the woman’s side. She released the emergency brake and raced the engine. I plucked the key out of the ignition switch. She tried to scratch my face. I locked her fingers.

“Calm down, Bess. You’re caught.”

“When haven’t I been.” She drew a long sighing breath. “I could stand it better before I started bumping into you. Well, little man, what now?”

“The same as before, except that you’re going to do your talking to me.”

“Who says I am?”

“Five grand says it.”

“You mean you’ve got the money for me?”

“When you earn it.”

“And I can go free?”

“If you’re reasonably clean, and I don’t mean vice-squad stuff.”

She leaned close to study my eyes as if her future lay behind them. I leaned away.

“Let me see the money.”

“Upstairs in my office.”

“What are we waiting for then?”

She came out of the car, her body full and startling in a yellow jersey dress with a row of gold buttons down the front. I frisked her on the stairs and found no gun and burned my hands a little. But in the lighted room I saw that she was losing what she had had. Her past was coming out on her face like latent handwriting. Her powder and lipstick, alkali and orange in the fluorescent light, were cracking and peeling off. Grime showed in the pores of her nose and at the sides of her neck. Dissolution was working in her rapidly like a fatal disease she had caught from her husband that day.

She felt my look cold against her, and reached up automatically to straighten her hair. It was streaked greenish yellow and black. I guessed she had been working on it with peroxide half the afternoon, trying to reconstruct her image in a cheap hotel mirror. And I wondered what the girl behind the one-way panel was thinking.

“Don’t look at me,” Bess said. “I’ve had a bad day.”

She sat in a chair by the outer door, as far from the light as possible, and crossed her legs. Nothing could happen to legs.

“You’ve had a bad day coming,” I said. “Now talk.”

“Don’t I get a peek at the money?”

I sat down facing her and placed the five brown-paper-wrapped packages on the table between us. There was a microphone built into the table lamp, and I switched it on.

“Five grand, you said?”

“You’re dealing with honest people. You can take my word for it.”

“How much do I have to give you?”

“The whole thing. All you know.”

“That would take years.”

“I wonder. We’ll start with something simple. Who killed Singleton?”

“Leo Durano blasted him.” Her clouded blue gaze had returned to the packages of money. “Now I guess you want to know who Leo Durano is.”

“We’ve met. I know his record.”

She was beyond surprise. “You don’t know Leo like I know Leo. I wish I never set eyes on him.”

“He was picked up for contributing about ten years ago. Were you the minor?”

“Uh-huh. He was the connection I told you about, the one with the hat-check concessions in the clubs. We both got sneezed the same night, and they found out we lived in the same hotel room. He got off easy. The court doctor said he was batty, I could of told them that. They stuck him away in the booby-hatch for a spell, until Una talked him out of there. She’s been talking him out of jams since he was a kid.”

“Not this one,” I said. “Now what about Singleton?”

“Me and Charlie?”

“You and Charlie.”

“He was the one big love of my life,” her cracked lips said. Her bleached hands moved down her smooth jersey body from breasts to thighs, wiping out a memory, or reviving it. “I met him too late, after I married Sam. Sam and I were living together in Arroyo Beach, and Sam was all work and no play, and that was never for me. Charlie picked me up in a bar. He had everything, looks and class and an Air Force officer’s uniform. Real class. Class was the one thing I really wanted. I went with him the first night and it worked like magic. I didn’t know what it was before Charlie showed me. Leo and Sam and the others never even scratched my surface.

“Charlie had to go back to Hamilton Field but he’d fly down weekends. I waited for those weekends. Then Sam went to sea and I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. I can’t remember now. It was different when Charlie went. He went all the way to Guam. He couldn’t fly back from there. The waiting stretched out, and he didn’t write.

“Sam wrote though, and Sam was the first to come back. I made the best of a bad job. After all I was married to the guy. We settled down in Bella City and I cooked his chops for him and said hello how are you to the cheesy patients he had. I never mentioned Charlie to him but I guess he figured it out from the things I didn’t say. It wasn’t any good at all after Sam came back. I stuck it for one year, keeping track of Charlie in the Arroyo newspaper and marking off the days on the calendar. I crossed off every day for a year. I got up early in the morning to cross them off and then I went back to bed.

“One Saturday morning I didn’t go back to bed. I got on a bus and rode to Arroyo Beach and phoned Charlie and we started over again, nearly every weekend. That was the summer of forty-six, I guess. It didn’t last. He said goodbye in September and went back to Boston to take a course at Harvard Law School. I stayed with Sam that winter. It was a long winter. Summer was good when it came but it didn’t last. It never lasted. Next year when the rains came in the valley and I saw that green stuff on the hills I couldn’t stick it. I couldn’t even hear what Sam was saying any more; it went through my head like wind.

“I got on a train for New York and from there to Boston, Massachusetts. Charlie was living in his own apartment in Belmont, but he wasn’t glad to see me. He said I was part of his California vacations, I didn’t fit into his Boston life. Scat. I told him what he was, and I walked out of there with nothing on but a dress. It was March, and it was snowing. I was going to walk into the river because the name of it was the Charles River and that would drive him crazy. I hoped.

“I looked at the river for a while with the snowflakes falling into it. Then I walked to the end of the subway and rode downtown. I didn’t even rate a cold out of it. For a long time then I lived on Scollay Square, getting back at Charlie. I phoned him once to tell him what I was doing. He hung up on me. That night it was the third rail in the subway I looked at. I stood and looked at it for over an hour, and I couldn’t move forward or back.

“A character in a boiled shirt saw me watching the third rail and picked me up. He turned out to be an unemployed ballroom-dancer from Montreal. Paul Theuriet. I supported him the rest of that year while we tried to work up an act together. Ever hear of Lagauchetière Street in Montreal?”

“I never did.”

“It’s rugged, and so was the act. Paul said I could make a dancer out of myself. God knows I tried. I was too clumsy or something. He was old and gouty in the joints. We did get ourselves booked into a few third-string clubs in Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Toledo. Then we were stranded in Detroit. I was waiting table in a beer joint, trying to raise enough money for limber-legs to open a dance studio, getting nowhere. We tried the old badger a couple of times. Paul fumbled it and ran out to Canada, left me holding the bag. That was where Leo came into my life again.”

“It’s about time.”

“You asked for all of it,” she said with a wry stubborn smile. This was her saga, all she had to show for her life, and she was going to tell it her own way: “Leo heard that I was in the Detroit clink for extortion. He was going good again, a medium big gun in Michigan numbers. He had pull with the cops, and he hadn’t forgotten me. He sprung me out of that rap. After all those years, I moved back in with Leo and his sister. No class, but the chips. I was in the chips.”

“So you lived happily ever after, and that’s why you’re not here.”

“It isn’t funny,” she said. “Leo started to have the fantods, worse than ever. It got so bad I sent some money to Sam, for an insurance policy. I thought if it got too bad I could come out here and retire on Sam. They didn’t know about Sam.”

“They?”

“Leo and his sister. She handled the money for Leo after his memory faded. Leo blew his top the end of last year. He tried to gun an orchestra leader for no good reason at all. We took him to a doctor and the doctor said he’d been sick for twenty years and was in the final stage of paresis. We couldn’t keep him in Michigan after that. He had enemies in the organization. The money boys and the underdogs with the irons were both turning against him. Leo never laid anything on the line for his share of those banks. All he ever put up was his hard-nose reputation and his connections. If they knew he lost his mind they’d cut him out, or cut him down. So it was California here we came. I sold Una on Arroyo Beach.

“Ever since Boston, when Charlie Singleton kicked me out of his life, I had this certain idea busting my brain. He thought I was from hunger, and I thought if I went back to Arroyo Beach with money on my back I’d make him squirm. Pass him on the street and pretend I didn’t know him. Anyway, that was my idea. When I did see him again, I did a quick reverse and there I was back at the old stand, Saturday nights in his studio. I didn’t care about anything he did to me in the past. He was the only man I liked to be with. It went along like old times until a couple of weeks ago the lid blew off. When Leo found out about Charlie and me.” She paused, her eyes like fogged blue steel.

“Did he find out from Lucy?”

“Not a chance. Lucy was my one real friend in that house. Besides, she was a nurse. She had psychic – psychiatric training. She wouldn’t pull a raw deal like that on one of her patients. She was the one who warned us Leo was on the warpath. She came up the mountain in a cab one jump ahead of him.”

“Who sent Leo on the warpath?”

“Una did, at least that’s what we figured afterwards. Lucy drove me over to the hotel to keep my date with Charlie. When Lucy got back to the house, Una cross-questioned her about where I was and who I was with. Lucy wouldn’t talk, and Una fired her. I guess Una knew all about it already. She turned Leo loose and sicked him on us.

“Maybe the fantods ran in the family. Anyway, she must have been far gone with whatever it was she had, to give Leo a loaded gun and a green light. I didn’t understand it at the time. I was in the studio with Lucy when it happened. I looked out the window and saw Leo in the station-wagon with Una, and Charlie walking out to him, not realizing the danger. Charlie went right up to the station-wagon, and Leo shot him. Charlie fell down and got up again. Una took Leo’s gun away from him. We all stepped in and got him under control. Then Una put on an act about how Leo forced her to bring him there. I believed her, then. I was scared not to believe her. I’ve always been scared of Una.

“She said the shooting had to be hushed up, or else. It had to be as if nothing happened. No hospital for Charlie, and him doubled up in his car. I was afraid to argue with Una. I took what clothes I had in the studio and drove Charlie and Lucy over the pass to Bella City.

“I’d been to see Sam Benning a couple of times in the spring and summer, in case I ever needed him. He thought I was working in L.A., modeling clothes. We were on pretty good terms, but I couldn’t tell Sam the truth: that one boy-friend shot the other and Sam was to make it all come right in the end. I played it as strong as I could with Sam. I told him Charlie had made a rough pass and I shot him myself. Lucy backed me up. Charlie was past talking by then.

“Sam believed me. He made me promise if he fixed Charlie up I had to stick with him in Bella City from then on and be a wife to him. I promised. He had me over a barrel.

“Maybe the wound was worse than it looked at first, or Sam isn’t much of a surgeon. He blamed Lucy for what happened, said she fouled up the operation trying to assist him. Sam was always a man to shift blame onto other people’s shoulders. Anyway Charlie died that night, right on the table in the examination room, before he came out of the ether.”

“Who gave him the anesthetic?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t stand to see him bleeding.”

“You’re a strange woman, Bess.”

“I don’t think so. How could I watch Sam cutting into him? Charlie was my boy. I loved him.”

“I’ll tell you what’s really strange,” she added after an interval: “The people you love are never the ones that love you. The people that love you, the way Sam loved me, they’re the ones you can’t love. Sam was a good man when I first knew him. But he was too crazy about me. I couldn’t love him, ever, and he was too smart to fool. It ruined him.

“He did a wild thing that Sunday morning. There was Charlie dead in his house, and Sam thinking I had shot him. I couldn’t change my story at that late date. Sam was afraid he was going to lose me again, and it pushed him over the edge. He butchered Charlie, cut him up into pieces like a butcher. He locked the cellar door on me, wouldn’t let me down there. I could tell from the noises what he was doing. There was a laundry tub and an old gas stove down there that his mother left behind her when she died. When he was through, there was nothing but bones left. He spent the next three nights working on them, putting them together with wire. Sam always was good with his hands. When it was all wired together and varnished and dried, he riveted on a tag from a medical-supply house and hung the thing in a closet. He said that was the skeleton in my closet and if I ever left him–” She drew a fingernail across her throat.

There was a muffled cry from the inner room.

“And that’s your proof?” I said loudly.

“You’ll find it in the closet off his examination room. Unless you already did?”

“What did he do with Charlie’s car?”

“Hid it in the barn, under some old boards and tarpaulins. I helped him.”

“Did you help him burn Max Heiss, when Max found the car?”

Bess didn’t hear me. An intermittent sobbing and gasping rose and fell in the inner room. Bess was listening to it, the flesh haggard on the bones of her face like wet clay drooping on an armature.

“You crossed me, you,” she said.

Something fell softly and heavily against the inside of the glass-paneled door. I went to it. The door was hard to open because Sylvia had fainted against it. I reached around its edge and turned her onto her back. The metal earphones pincered her closed white face. Her eyes came open: “I’m sorry. I’m such a fool.”

I started for the water cooler. Bess was at the outer door, fumbling with the Yale lock. The packages of bills were gone from the table.

“Sit down,” I said to her straining yellow back. “I haven’t finished with you.”

She didn’t answer. All her remaining energy was focused on escape. The lock snapped back. The door opened inwards with Una pushing behind it from the hallway.

Una’s mouth was wet. Her eyes were blind with the same darkness I had seen on her brother’s face. The gun in her hand was real.

“I thought you’d be here with him. This is the payoff, Wionowski, to squealers and false friends.”

“Don’t do it.” Bess was leaning off balance against the opening door, still bent on escape.

I moved sideways to the wall, bringing my gun out fast, not fast enough. Bess staggered backwards under the blow of the first shot from Una’s gun and went down under the second. The twin explosions smashed like bones in my head.

I shot to kill. Una died on her feet, of a smudged hole in the temple, and thumped the floor. I held Sylvia’s hand until the police arrived. Her hand was ice cold at first. After a while it was a little warmer, and I could feel her blood beating.