The Ivory Grin

Chapter 30

The starred sky arched like a crystal roof over the town. The valley floor was like the floor of a cave, the mountains blunt stalagmites against its glimmering walls. Once I got off the highway, the streets of Bella City were deserted. Its midnight buildings, leached of color by the alkali moonlight, stood like gray shadows on their own black shadows.

Parking at Benning’s curb, I rang the bell and heard its complaint inside the house. A door creaked open at the rear of the hallway. Benning passed through its widening shaft of light and shut the door behind him. His face appeared above the cardboard patch in the corner of the window. It was crumpled and streaked like a discarded charcoal-sketch of itself.

He opened the front door. “What is it? Why have you come here?”

“Let me see your hands, doctor.” I showed him the gun in mine.

He stepped out onto the porch, bulky in a zippered blue coverall, and held out his empty hands.

“They’re dirty,” he said. “I’ve been doing some cleaning in the house.”

“Your wife is dead.”

“Yes. I know. They phoned me from Los Angeles. I’m getting ready to go.” He glanced down at my gun as if it were an obscenity that shouldn’t be mentioned. “Perhaps they sent you to fetch me?”

“I came on my own.”

“To spy on my grief, Mr. Archer?” he asked with broken irony. “You’ll be disappointed. I can’t feel grief, not for her. I’ve suffered too much for her.” He turned up his dirty palms and looked down into them. “I have nothing.” His fists closed slowly on moonlight. “Who is this woman who murdered her?”

“Una Durano. She’s dead, too. I shot her.”

“I’m grateful to you for that.” His words were as insubstantial as his double fistful of moonlight. “Why did she do it to Bess?”

“She had various reasons. Your wife was a witness to the Singleton shooting, for one.”

“Bess? A witness?”

“She was there when Singleton was shot.”

“Who on earth was Singleton?”

“You know as well as I do, doctor. He was your wife’s lover almost as long as you were married to her.”

Benning looked up and down the empty street. “Come inside,” he said nervously. “I only have a few minutes, but we can talk there.”

He stood aside to let me enter first, maintaining a formal politeness like a wire-walker afraid to look down. I waved him in with my gun and followed him through the waiting-room into the consultation room. The inside of the house was suffocating after the chilly night air.

I pulled his swivel chair into the middle of the room. “Sit down, away from the desk.”

“You’re very hospitable,” he said with his down-dragging smile. “Bess was, too, in her way. I won’t deny that I knew of her affair with Singleton. Or that I was glad she shot him. It seemed fitting that she should be the one to destroy that arrogant young man.”

“Bess didn’t destroy him.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Now that Bess is dead, I’m free to tell you the truth. She confessed to me that she shot him.”

“She was lying to you.”

He stood wide-legged and stubborn under the light, shaking his long head from side to side. “She couldn’t have been lying. No one would lie about such a thing.”

“Bess did. It was the only way she could persuade you to take care of him. The crime was actually committed by Una Durano. Bess was a witness, as I said.”

He slumped into the chair. “Do you know that, for a fact?”

“I couldn’t prove it in court. I don’t have to. Una is dead, along with the competent witnesses, Singleton and Lucy and Bess.”

“Did this woman murder them all? What kind of a woman was she?”

“As hard and nasty as they come. But she didn’t kill them all. Bess was the only one she killed. She thought Bess had turned informer against her.”

“You said she murdered Singleton.”

“Not exactly.”

“You said she committed the crime,” he insisted.

“The crime was attempted murder, done by proxy, but you finished Singleton off. I think he’d still be alive if you hadn’t got your knife into him.”

Benning’s body jerked backwards. His large grimy hands moved towards each other across his denim-covered abdomen. The thumb and forefinger of one hand plucked at the coverall zipper as if it were a sutured incision in his flesh.

He found his voice: “This is utter nonsense. You can’t prove either the fact or the intent. Singleton’s death was pure accident. I couldn’t stop the internal hemorrhage.”

“You destroyed the body. That carries a lot of weight.”

“If you could prove it. But there is no body. You have nothing.” It was an echo of what he had said about himself.

“Singleton’s bones will do.”

“Bones?”

“The skeleton you rigged to hold Bess in line. It’s turned into a booby trap.”

“You’ve left me far behind.”

I moved the gun in my hand, drawing his attention to it. “Open the closet in the examination room.”

He rose, still holding his middle where my accusation had hit him. I thought he was too willing. The closet was empty. He shut the door and leaned against it. His long-toothed melancholy grin mimicked the grin of the absent skull.

“Where is it, doctor?”

“I suppose Bess took it with her. That would be fitting, too.”

There was an iron grate set in the baseboard beside the closet door. Benning’s glance rested on it involuntarily, a second too long. The grate was the closed outlet of an old-fashioned hot-air system. Holding my gun on Benning, I stooped to touch it. It was warm, and under it I could sense the minute vibrations of fire.

“Show me the furnace.”

Benning stood flat against the door, his eyes gleaming palely, as though they belonged to a tormented animal crouched inside of him. He drooped suddenly, but I distrusted his docility. It was taut and dangerous. I held my gun close to his back as we went through the house and down the basement stairs.

The light was still on in the basement. A naked bulb suspended on a wire cast a dingy yellow glare on shelves of empty jars, broken furniture, newspapers and magazines, generations of cobwebs. A rusty three-burner gas plate squatted on a bench beside the stairs, and a copper boiler, dented and green with age, hung on the wall above it. Benning avoided that corner of the basement.

In the far corner, behind a rough board partition, an old cast-iron furnace was breathing like a bull. I used my toe to open the fire door, and saw what lay in the heart of the fire: a skull licked by flames in a phoenix nest of bones.

Beside me, Benning was lost in contemplation. The orange light of the fire played feebly on the lower part of his face. He seemed for an instant to be young and smiling.

“Put it out.”

He came to himself with a start. “I can’t. I don’t know how.”

“Find a way, and be quick about it. Those bones are worth money to me.”

He attached a garden hose to a tap in the hot water tank, and turned its stream on the fire. Steam sizzled and gushed from the furnace door. He emerged from it coughing, and sat down on a pile of kindling against the board partition. I looked into the blackened firebox at five thousand dollars’ worth of charred bones, all that remained of the golden boy. It was a hell of a way to make money, selling dead men’s bones. I kicked the iron door shut.

With his eyes closed, his head lolling back against the boards, Benning looked like another dead man.

“Are you ready to give me a full confession?”

“Never,” he said. “They can’t convict me.”

“They have three tries, remember.”

“Three?”

“If it was only Singleton, there’d be some room for doubt, even for sympathy. He took Bess away from you. You had some justification for letting the scalpel slip in his bowels.”

He said in a deeper voice: “My enemy was delivered into my hands.” Then he opened his eyes in bewilderment, as if he had talked in his sleep and waked himself from nightmare.

“That doesn’t apply to Lucy. She tried to help you.”

Benning laughed. With a great effort, he throttled the laugh and imposed silence on himself.

“Before Bess was killed tonight, she told me Lucy assisted at the operation. Lucy was in a position to know who and what killed Singleton. When things closed in on her – landlady trouble, no job, detectives tailing her – she thought of selling her knowledge to Singleton’s family. But she made the mistake of coming to you yesterday and giving you a chance before she did anything final.

“If she could get money from you, she wouldn’t have to sell you out or involve herself in a murder case. You gave her the money you had on hand, enough to buy a train ticket and get out of town. You also hedged against the chance that she wouldn’t take that train, by filching her motel-key out of her purse. Lucy missed the train, in every sense. When she went back to the motel, you were waiting in her room. She tried to defend herself with a knife. You were too strong for her.”

“You can’t prove it,” Benning said. Bowed far forward, he was staring down at the wet concrete floor.

“A witness will turn up. Somebody must have seen you go out, even if Florie didn’t. You must have passed somebody who knows you between here and the Mount view Motel, going or coming. If I have to, I’m going to canvass the whole population of the town.”

His head came up as if I had tightened a knot under his jaw. He knew he had been seen. “Why do you want to do this? Why do you hate me?” He wasn’t asking me alone. He was asking all the people who had known him and not loved him in his life.

“Lucy was young,” I said. “She had a boy friend who wanted to marry her. They honeymooned in the morgue, and Alex is still in jail, sweating out your rap for you. Do you think you’re worth the trouble you’ve caused?”

He didn’t answer me.

“It’s not just the people you’ve killed. It’s the human idea you’ve been butchering and boiling down and trying to burn away. You can’t stand the human idea. You and Una Durano don’t stack up against it, and you know it. You know it makes you look lousy. Even a dollar-chaser like Max Heiss makes you look lousy. So you have to burn his face off with a blowtorch. Isn’t that what you did?”

“It’s not true. He demanded money. I had no money to give him.”

“You could have taken your medicine,” I said. “That never occurred to you. It hasn’t yet. When Max found the Buick in your barn, that made him your enemy. Naturally he had to die. And when he came back for his money, you were ready for him, with Singleton’s clothes and a blowtorch and a can of gasoline. It must have seemed like a wonderful plan, to get rid of Heiss and in the same motion establish Singleton’s death by accident. But all it accomplished was to tip Bess off on what you’d done. As soon as I told her about the car he was found in, she realized you killed Max. And she left you.”

“She left me, yes. After all I’d done for her.”

“Not for her. For you. You’ve killed two men and a woman because they threatened your security. You’d have killed Bess if she hadn’t got out fast. She didn’t tell me that, but I think she knew it. She was the one you wanted to kill from the start, if you hadn’t been afraid.”

He shuddered, covering his eyes with his spread fingers. “Why are you torturing me?”

“I want a confession.”

It took him several minutes to bring himself under control. When he lowered his hands, his face had smoothed and thinned. His eyes seemed smaller and darker. No animal was using them.

He got up awkwardly from the pile of wood and took a halting step towards me: “I’ll give you a confession, Mr. Archer. If you’ll let me have access to my drug cabinet, for just a moment?”

“No.”

“It will save time and trouble, for all of us.”

“It’s too easy. I’ve promised myself one satisfaction out of this case. To see you go in and Alex Norris come out.”

“You’re a hard man.”

“I hope so. It’s the soft ones, the self-pity boys like you, that give me bad dreams.” I had had enough of that basement, cluttered with broken objects, wet and hot and squalid with broken desires. “Let’s go, Benning.”

Outside, the flawed white moon was higher among the stars. Benning looked up at them as if the night had really become a cave of shadows, the moon a clouded port and the stars peepholes into a terrible brightness: “I do feel grief for her. I loved her. There was nothing I wouldn’t do.”

He started down the veranda steps, his short black shadow dragging and jerking at his heels.