The Ivory Grin

Chapter 5

The street was one block west of Main and parallel to it. Its pitted asphalt was lined with Main Street’s leavings: radio and shoe repair shops, reupholsterers, insect exterminators, flytrap lunchrooms. A few old houses survived among them as flats and boarding-houses.

Lucy paused in front of a house in the third block and looked up and down the street. A hundred yards behind her, I was waiting at a bus stop on the corner. In a sudden flurry of movement, she ran across the shallow yard of the house and up the veranda steps. I walked on.

The house she had entered leaned with an absent and archaic air between a mattress-cleaning plant and a one-chair barbershop. Three-storied and weirdly gabled, it had been built before the invention of California architecture. Wavy brown watermarks streaked its gray frame sides. The lower panes of the ground-floor windows, painted white, faced the sun like a blind man’s frosted glasses. Beside the double front-door there was a name on a board, printed in large black letters: SAMUEL BENNING, M.D. A card above the bell-push said, in English and Spanish, Ring and Enter. I did.

The air in the hallway was a thin hospital-soup compounded of cooking odors, antiseptic, dimness. A face swam at me through it. It was a big man’s face, too sharp and aggressive. I shifted my feet instinctively, then saw that it was my own face reflected in murky glass, framed in the tarnished curlicues of a wall mirror.

A door let light in at the end of the hall. A dark-haired woman came through it. She wore the gray striped uniform of a nurse’s aide, and she was handsome in a plump and violent way. Her black eyes looked at me as if they knew it. “You wish to see the doctor, sir?”

“If he’s in.”

“Just go into the waiting-room, sir. He will take care of you presently. The door on your left.”

She rolled away on smoothly revolving hips.

The waiting-room was unoccupied. Large and many-windowed, it had evidently been the front parlor of the house. Its present quality was a struggling lack of respectability, from the shredding carpet to the high discolored ceiling. Against the walls there were some wicker chairs that someone had recently brightened up with chintz. And the walls and floor were clean. In spite of this, it was a room in which the crime of poverty had left clues.

I sat down in one of the chairs with my back to the light and picked up a magazine from a rickety table. The magazine was two years old, but it served to mask my face. Across the room from me, in the inner wall, there was a closed door. After a while a tall black-haired woman wearing an ill-fitting white uniform opened the door. I heard a voice that sounded like Lucy’s say something unintelligible and emotional, several rooms away. The women who had opened the door closed it sharply behind her and came towards me: “Do you wish to see the doctor?”

Her eyes were the color of baked blue enamel. Her beauty canceled the room.

I was wondering how the room had happened to deserve her when she interrupted me: “Did you wish to see the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“He’s busy now.”

“Busy for how long? I’m in a hurry.”

“I couldn’t say how long.”

“I’ll wait for a while.”

“Very well, sir.”

She stood with perfect calm under the pressure of my stare, as if it were her natural element. Her beauty wasn’t the kind that depended on movement or feeling. It was plastic and external like a statue’s; even the blue eyes were flat and depthless. Her whole face looked as if it had been frozen with novocaine.

“Are you one of Dr. Benning’s patients?”

“Not yet.”

“Can I have your name, please?”

“Larkin,” I said at random. “Horace Larkin.”

The frozen face remained frozen. She went to the desk and wrote something on a card. Her tight, lumpy uniform made me restless. Everything about her bothered me.

A bald man in a doctor’s smock jerked the inner door open. I raised the magazine in front of me and examined him over its edge. Large-eared and almost hairless, his head seemed naked, as if it had been plucked. His long face was dimly lit by pale worried eyes. Deep lines of sorrow dragged down from the wings of his large vulnerable nose.

“Come here,” he said to the receptionist. “You talk to her, for heaven’s sake. I can’t make head or tail of it.” His voice was high-pitched and rapid, furious with anger or anxiety.

The woman surveyed him coldly, glanced at me, and said nothing.

“Come on,” he said placatingly, raising a bony red hand towards her. “I can’t handle her.”

She shrugged her shoulders and passed him in the doorway. His stringy body cringed away from hers, as if she radiated scorching heat. I left the house.

Lucy came out ten minutes later. I was sitting in the barber shop beside Dr. Benning’s house. There were two men ahead of me, one in the chair having his neck shaved, the other reading a newspaper by the window. The newspaper-reader was an unstylish stout in a tan camel’s-hair jacket. There were purple veins in his cheeks and nose. When Lucy passed the window heading south, he got up hurriedly, put on a soiled panama, and left the shop.

I waited, and followed him out.

“But you are next, sir,” the barber cried after me. I looked back from the other side of the street, and he was still at the window, making siren gestures with a razor.

The man with the veined nose and the panama hat was halfway to the next corner, almost abreast of Lucy. She led us back to the railway station. When she reached it, a passenger train was pulling out towards the north. She stood stock-still on the platform until its smoke was a dissolving haze on the foothills. The man in the camel’s-hair coat was watching her, slouched like a barely animate lump of boredom behind a pile of express crates under the baggage-room arch.

Lucy turned on her heel and entered the station. A narrow window under the arch gave me a partial view of the waiting-room. I moved to another window, ignoring the man behind the express crates but trying to place him in my memory. Lucy was at the ticket window with green money in her hand.

The man edged towards me, his stout body wriggling along the wall as if the shade-latticed air offered solid resistance to its movement. He laid two soft white fingers on my arm.

“Lew Archer, n’est-ce pas?” The French was deliberate clowning, accompanied by a smirk.

“Must be two other people.” I shook the fingers loose.

“You wouldn’t brush me, boysie. I remember you but vividly. You testified for the prosecution in the Saddler trial, and you did a nice job too. I combed the jury panel for the defense. Max Heiss?”

He took off his panama hat, and a shock of red-brown hair pushed out over his forehead. Under it, clever dirty eyes shone liquidly like dollops of brown sherry. His little smile had a shamefaced charm, acknowledging that he had taken a running jump at manhood and still, at forty or forty-five, had never quite got his hands on it. – If it existed, the smile went on to wonder.

“Heiss?” he said coaxingly, “Maxfield Heiss?”

I remembered him and the Saddler trial. I also remembered that he had lost his license for tampering with prospective jurors in another murder trial.

“I know you, Max. So what if I do?”

“So we toddle across the street and I’ll buy you a drink and we can talk over old times and such.” His words were soft and insinuating, breaking gently like bubbles between his pink lips. His breath was strong enough to lean on.

I glanced at Lucy. She was in a telephone booth at the other end of the waiting-room. Her lips were close to the mouthpiece and moving.

“Thanks, not this time. I have a train to catch.”

“You’re kidding me again. There isn’t another train in either direction for over two hours. Which means you don’t have to be anxious the girl will get away, n’est-ce pas? She can’t possibly use that ticket she just bought for over two hours.” His face lit up with a practical joker’s delight, as if he had just palmed off an explosive cigar on me.

I felt as if he had. “Somebody’s kidding. I’m not in the mood for it.”

“Now don’t be like that. You don’t have to take offense.”

“Beat it, Max.”

“How can we do business if you won’t even bat the breeze?”

“Go away. You’re standing in my light.”

He waltzed in a small circle and presented his smirk to me again: “Avee atquee valee, boysie, that means goodbye and hello. I’m on public property and you can’t push me off. And you got no monopoly on this case. If the true facts were known, I bet you don’t even know what case you’re on. I got a priority on you there.”

I couldn’t help being interested, and he knew it. His fingers returned like a troupe of trained slugs to my arm: “Lucy is my meat. I won her in a raffle by dint of sheer personal derring-do. Signed her up for a seven-year contract and just when I’m thinking of converting the deal into cash, lo and behold I stumble into you. In my alcoholic way.”

“That was quite a speech, Max. How much truth is there in it?”

“Nothing – but – the – truth – so – help – me – God.” He raised his palm in mock solemnity. “Not the whole truth, naturally. I don’t know the whole truth and neither do you. We need an exchange of views.”

Lucy came out of the telephone booth. Whenever she left an enclosed space her body huddled protectively into itself. She sat down on a bench and crossed her legs, leaning forward as if she had stomach cramps.

Heiss nudged me softly. His moist eyes shone. He might have been confiding the name of his beloved. “I do know there’s a great deal of money in it.”

“How much?”

“Five grand. I’d be willing to go fifty-fifty with you.”

“Why?”

“Simple panic, chum.” Unlike most natural liars, he could use the truth effectively. “Hit me and I black out. Shoot me and I bleed. Frighten me and I lose my controls. I’m not the courageous type. I need a partner who is, one that won’t tear me off.”

“Or a fall guy?”

“Perish the thought. This is strictly legal, believe me. You don’t often pick up twenty-five hundred legally.”

“Go on.”

“In a minute. Exchange of views is what I said. You haven’t told me a thing. What tale did the lady tell you, for example?”

“Lady?”

“Woman, dame, whatever she is. The one with the boyish bob and the diamonds. Didn’t she hire you?”

“You know everything, Max. How can I tell you something you don’t know?”

“You can try. What was her story to you?”

“Something about missing jewels. It wasn’t very convincing even at the time.”

“Better than the guff she handed me. Do you know what she gave me? That the girl was her late husband’s servant, and when he died he left a legacy to her, and she was the executrix of the estate. And oh mercy me I owe it to my poor dead husband to find Lucy and pay off.” With a nasty wit, he mimicked Una’s accents of false sentiment. “She must have thought she was dealing with an imbecile or something.”

“When was this?”

“A week ago. I spent a good solid week picking that black girl up.” He shot a vicious glance through the window at Lucy’s impervious back. “So I found her, and what happened? I phoned up the good executrix and asked her for further instructions, and she fired me.”

“What’s she trying to cover up, Max?”

“Are we in business?”

“That depends.”

“The hell. I offer you a half interest in a big deal, and you say that depends. That depends. I bare my bosom to you, and all you do is play clam. It isn’t ethical.”

“Is the five grand ethical?”

“I promised you it was. I’ve been burned, I lost my license once–”

“No blackmail involved?”

“Absolutely not. If you want the honest truth, the thing’s so legal I’m afraid of it.”

“All right, here’s what I think. It isn’t Lucy she wants at all. Lucy’s a decoy duck for somebody else.”

“You catch on rapidly. Do you know who the somebody else is, though?”

“I haven’t identified her, no.”

“Uh-uh. Not her.” He smiled with superior knowledge. “Him. I’ve got his name and description and everything else. And that black babe is going to lead us to him, watch.”

Heiss was emotionally carried away. His sherry-brown eyes slopped round in their sockets, and his hands congratulated each other. To me, his story sounded too good to be true. It was.

Lucy straightened suddenly and jumped up from the bench, heading for the back door of the waiting-room. I left Heiss standing. When I turned the rear corner of the station, Lucy was climbing into a green Ford coupé. Alex Norris was at the wheel. The Ford was rolling before the door slammed.

There was one taxi at the stand beside the station. Its driver was sprawled asleep in the front seat, his peaked cap over the upper part of his face, his mouth wide and snoring. Out of the tail of my eye, I saw the Ford turn north toward the highway.

I shook the driver awake. He was little and gray-haired, but he wanted to fight. “Take it easy, for Christ’s sake. What goes on?”

I showed him money. “Follow that Ford coupé.”

“All right, take it easy.”

Max Heiss tried to get in beside me. I shut the door in his face, and the taxi pulled away. We were in the street in time to see the Ford turn left at the highway intersection, towards Los Angeles. At the intersection a red light stopped us. It was a long time before it turned green again. We drove fast out of town, passing everything on the highway. No green Ford.

Five miles beyond the city limits, I told the driver to turn around.

“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t run that light with all the traffic going through. You have trouble with those people?”

“No trouble.”

When I got back to the station, Max Heiss had gone. That suited me just as well. I ordered breakfast, always a safe meal in the station lunchroom, and discovered when I started to eat it that I was hungry.

It was shortly after five o’clock when I back to the Mountview Motel.