Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“One of them.”

“Fine. Now get out, or I’ll have you arrested for burglary.” The gun moved very little, but I felt it like a fingernail on my skin.

“I don’t think you will.”

“You want to stick around and find out?” She glanced at the telephone on the desk.

“I intend to. You’re vulnerable, or you’d have called the cops right away. You don’t talk like a doctor’s wife, incidentally.”

“Maybe you want to see my marriage license.” She smiled a little, showing the tip of her tongue between white teeth. “I mean perchance you desire to peruse my connubial document. I can talk different ways, depending on who I’m talking to. To scavengers, I can also talk with a gun.”

“I don’t like the word scavenger.”

“He doesn’t like it,” she said to nobody in particular.

“What do you think I want from you?”

“Money. Or are you one of the ones that gets paid off in the hay?”

“It’s an idea. I’ll take a rain check on it. Right now, I’d like to know what Lucy Champion was doing in this office. And if you won’t put the gun away, set the safety.”

She was still braced and tense, holding on to the gun the way a surfboarder clutches his stick. Muscular tension alone might squeeze the trigger and shoot me.

“The man’s afraid.” Her mouth was sullen and scornful, but she clicked the safety on with her thumb. “What about Lucy Champion? I don’t know any Lucy Champion.”

“The young colored woman who came here this afternoon.”

“Oh. Her. The doctor has all kinds of patients.”

“Do many of them get themselves killed?”

“That’s a funny question. I’m not laughing, though, notice?”

“Neither is Lucy. She had her throat cut this afternoon.”

She tried to swallow that without a tremor, but she was shaken. Her braced body was more than ever like a surfboarder’s moving fast on troubled water.

“You mean she’s dead,” she said dully.

“Yes.”

Her eyes closed, and she swayed without falling. I took one long step and lifted the gun from her hand and ejected the clip. There was no shell in the chamber.

“Did you know her, Mrs. Benning?”

The question brought her out of her standing trance. Her eyes opened, tile blue again and impermeable. “She was one of my husband’s patients. Naturally he’ll be shocked. That automatic belongs to him, by the way.” She had assumed a mask of respectability and the voice that went with it.

I tossed the gun on the desk and kept the clip. “Is that his skeleton in the closet, too?”

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

“Have it your way. You knew what I was talking about when I said that Lucy Champion was dead.”

Her hand went to her forehead, white under dead-black hair. “I can’t stand death, especially somebody’s I know.”

“How well did you know her?”

“She was a patient, I said. I’ve seen her a couple of times.”

“Why isn’t there a card for her?”

“A card?”

“In the active file.”

“I don’t know. Are you going to keep me standing here all night? I warn you, my husband will be back at any moment.”

“How long have you been married, Mrs. Benning?”

“It’s none of your damn business. Now get out of here or I will call the police.”

She said it without conviction. Since I had told her Lucy was dead, there had been no force in her. She looked like a sleepwalker struggling to come awake.

“Go ahead and call them.”

She looked at me with blank loathing. “Augh.” It was a shallow retching sound. “Do your damnedest. Do your dirtiest. Only get out of my sight.”

The upper faces of her breasts gleamed through the fabric of her uniform like cold trembling moons. I walked around her and let myself out.

The state blacktop unwound like a used typewriter-ribbon under my headlights. It threaded the wilderness of stone that cut off Bella Valley from the ocean, clinging to the walls of precipitous canyons, looping across the shoulders of peaks that towered into darkness. After forty long mountain miles it dropped me down into the lap of the coastal range. A late moon was rising heavily on the sea.

Five minutes north of the junction with U.S. 101 Alternate, the lights of Arroyo Beach began to clutter the roadside. Motels, service stations, real-estate booths, chicken-steak pavilions were outlined in neon on the face of the darkness. I pulled up beside the pumps of a service station; while my car was being gassed I asked the attendant if he had a pay phone. He was a hammered-down elderly man in a uniform of gray coveralls and black leather bowtie, who looked and smelled as if he washed in crankcase oil. He jerked an oil-grained thumb towards the one-room office he had emerged from.

The local telephone directory was a thin pamphlet attached to the wall telephone by a chain. Mrs. Charles Singleton was well represented in it. She lived at 1411 Alameda Topanga, and her telephone number was 1411. A second number was listed for the gatehouse, a third for the chauffeur’s apartment, a fourth for the gardener’s cottage, a fifth for the butler’s pantry.

When the attendant brought me my change, I asked him where Alameda Topanga was.

“Who you looking for, brother?”

“Nobody in particular. I’m sightseeing.”

“This is a funny time of the night to be sightseeing.” He looked me over. “They got a private patrol, nights, on the Alameda, and you don’t look like no member of no garden club.”

“I’m interested in real estate. It’s a good section, I heard.”

“Good ain’t the word for it, brother. Since they built the big hotel and the moneybags moved up here from Malibu, that property is worth its weight in gold. I only wisht I had a piece of it. I could of had. Before the war, if the old lady would of let me take a little money out of the sock, I could of had five acres at a steal. I could of been sitting pretty now, but she says save your money. The place is dead, she says, the rich set is pulling out for keeps.” His laugh was bitter and compulsive, like an old cough.

“Too bad,” I said. “Where is the Alameda?”

He gave me directions, pointing at the dark foothills as if they rose on the edge of the promised land. I turned towards them at the next intersection, and drove to the outskirts. Empty fields strewn with rubbish lay like a no-man’s land between the suburban cottages and the country estates. I entered an avenue hemmed in on both sides by the gray trunks and overarched by the branches of eucalyptus trees. It went by a hedged polo field and across a golf course. Cars were massed around a lighted clubhouse in the distance, and gusts of music were blown my way by the wind.

The road ascended hills terraced like the steps of an easy man-made purgatory. I caught glimpses of glass-and-aluminum living-machines gleaming like surgical equipment in the clinical moonlight; Venetian palaces, Côte d’Azur villas, castles in Spain; Gothic and Greek and Versailles and Chinese gardens. There was a great deal of vegetable life, but no people. Perhaps the atmosphere of this higher region was too rare and expensive for the human breathing system. It was the earthly paradise where money begot plants upon property. People were irrelevant, unless they happened to have money or property.

The stone gateposts bearing the number 1411 were backed up by a Tudor cottage with dark leaded windows. The gates stood open. A sweeping drive conducted me through a line of yews like honorary pallbearers to a villa that faced the moon in white Palladian splendor.

I parked under the columned porte-cochère and rang the old-fashioned bell at the side entrance. Soft, doubtful footsteps approached the deep-paneled door from the other side. A key ground in the lock, and a young woman looked out, soft chestnut hair shadowing her face.