Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“Which has nothing to do with petty theft or costume jewelry. You could have thought of a better story. But please don’t try.”

“I’m not. This is straight. When Lucy was working in my house she naturally got to know my family affairs. Well, there was bad feeling when she left, not on my side, on hers. There are one or two things that could embarrass me if she decided to spread them. So I want to know who she’s seeing. From that I can draw my own conclusions.”

“If I knew a little more about these embarrassing facts–”

“I’m not going to tell you, that’s definite. My whole idea in coming to you is to keep them from getting out. Now what could be franker than that?”

I still didn’t like her story, but the second version was an improvement over the first. I sat down again. “What sort of work did she do for you?”

She hesitated briefly. “General housework. She’s a maid. Her full name is Lucy Champion.”

“And where did she work for you?”

“In my house, naturally. There’s no reason for you to know where it is.”

I swallowed my irritation. “Where is she now, or is that another secret?”

“I know I seem unreasonable and suspicious,” she said. “Believe me, I’ve been burned. I take it you’ll do this job for me?”

“I might as well.”

“She’s in Bella City, up the Valley. You’ll have to hurry to make it before noon. It’s a good two hours from here.”

“I know where it is.”

“Good. A friend of mine saw her there yesterday, in a restaurant on Main Street near the corner of Hidalgo. My friend talked to the waiter and found out that Lucy eats her lunch there every day between twelve and one. It’s a combination café and liquor store called Tom’s. You can’t miss it.”

“A picture of Lucy would help.”

“I’m sorry.” She spread her hands in an automatic gesture that placed her ancestry on the north shore of the Mediterranean. “The best I can do is a description. She’s a handsome girl, and so light she could pass for South American or California Spanish. She has nice big brown eyes, and not too much of a mouth, like some of them. A nice little figure, too, if she wasn’t so skinny.”

“How old?”

“Not old. Younger than me – than I.” I noticed the self-correction, as well as the self-flattery in the comparison. “In her early twenties, I’d say.”

“Hair?”

“Black, in a straight bob. She keeps it straight with oil.”

“Height?”

“A couple of inches taller than I. I’m five foot two.”

“Distinguishing characteristics?”

“Her legs are her best feature, as she well knows.” Una couldn’t pay another woman an unmixed compliment. “Her nose is sort of turned up – cute, if her nostrils didn’t sort of stare at you.”

“What was she wearing when your friend saw her?”

“A black-and-white checkered sharkskin suit. That’s how I know it was her. I gave her the suit a couple of months ago. She altered it for herself.”

“So you won’t want the suit back.”

That seemed to strike a nerve. She removed the butt that had gone out in her holder and crushed it violently in the ashtray beside her chair. “I’ve taken quite a bit from you, mister.”

“We’re about even now,” I said. “I’ve been keeping score. I just wouldn’t want you to think that you were buying very much for a hundred bucks. I have to watch that around here. You’re suspicious. I’m touchy.”

“You talk as if you were bitten by a bear. Do you have an unhappy home life, by any chance?”

“I was just going to ask you about yours.”

“Don’t start worrying about my home life. That’s one thing – I don’t want you talking to Lucy.” She had a quick change of mood, or affected one. “Oh hell, it’s my life and I live it. We’re wasting time. Are you willing to do what I say, no more no less?”

“No more anyway. She mightn’t turn up at the restaurant today. If she does, I tail her, keep a record of where she goes, who she sees. And report to you?”

“Yes. This afternoon if possible. I’ll be registered at the Mission Hotel in Bella City. Ask for Mrs. Larkin.” She glanced at the square gold watch on her right wrist. “You better get going. If she leaves town let me know immediately, and stay with her.”

She moved deliberately and quickly to the outer door. Her walk was the shortest distance between things she wanted. The back of her neck was heavy under the cropped hair, swollen with muscle as if she had often used it for butting and rooting. Turning at the door to lift a flashing hand in good-bye, she hitched the mink stole higher. I wondered if she used it to conceal that telltale grossness.

I went back to my desk and dialed the switchboard of my answering service. Standing by the window, I could see the sidewalk below through the slats of the Venetian blind. It swarmed with a bright young crowd of guys and girls buzzing and fluttering in pursuit of happiness and the dollar.

Una emerged among them, dark and foreshortened by the height from which I was watching her. She turned uphill, her head thrust forward on her heavy neck, like an irresistible force searching for an immovable object. The switchboard answered in a youthful female gurgle on the fifth ring. I told it I was going out of town for the weekend.

From the top of the grade I could see the mountains on the other side of the valley, leaning like granite slabs against the blue tile sky. Below me the road meandered among brown September hills spattered with the ink-blot shadows of oaks. Between these hills and the further mountains the valley floor was covered with orchards like vivid green chenille, brown corduroy ploughed fields, the thrifty patchwork of truck gardens. Bella City stood among them, a sprawling dusty town miniatured and tidied by clear space. I drove down into it.

The packing houses of the growers’ associations stood like airship hangars on the edge of the green fields. Parched nurseries and suburban ranchos offered tomato plants and eggs and lima beans for sale. There was a roadside traffic of filling stations, drive-ins, motels slumping dejectedly under optimistic names. In the road the big trucks went by in both directions, trailing oil smoke and a long loud raspberry for Bella City.

The highway was a rough social equator bisecting the community into lighter and darker hemispheres. Above it in the northern hemisphere lived the whites who owned and operated the banks and churches, clothing and grocery and liquor stores. In the smaller section below it, cramped and broken up by ice plants, warehouses, laundries, lived the darker ones, the Mexicans and Negroes who did most of the manual work in Bella City and its hinterland. I remembered that Hidalgo Street ran parallel to the highway and two blocks below it.

It was fairly hot and very dry. The dryness ached in my sinuses. Main Street was loud and shiny with noon traffic moving bumper to bumper. I turned left on East Hidalgo Street and found a parking space in the first block. Housewives black, brown, and sallow were hugging parcels and pushing shopping carts on the sidewalk. Above them a ramshackle house, with paired front windows like eyes demented by earthquake memories, advertised Rooms for Transients on one side, Palm Reading on the other. A couple of Mexican children, boy and girl, strolled by hand in hand in a timeless noon on their way to an early marriage.

Two privates appeared from nowhere, pale in their uniforms like young ghosts trapped by reality. I got out and followed them across Main and into a magazine shop near the corner. The unlit neon sign of Tom’s Café was almost directly across the street. Beer on Tap. Steam Beer. Try Our Spaghetti Special.