Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

Una darted towards him, angry face thrust forward: “ Mister to you, you lump of dough. Call him mister! ”

“ Mister Durano, then. Sorry.”

The man who bore the name raised his face to the light. The black eyes were flat and shiny, deep-sunk, like bits of coal pressed into soft snow brows. “ Mister District Attorney,” he cried earnestly. “He said there was rats in the river, rats in the Rouge Plant. He said kill them off. Rats in the drinking-water, swimming in my blood-veins, Mr. Doctor Attorney. I promised to clean them out.”

“Give him the gun, for Christ’s sake,” Una said. “Get it over with.”

“For Christ’s sweet sake,” Durano echoed her. “I seen him on the hill when I come up out of the culvert. Horseshoe nails in his hands, and the dogs at my mother. He give me the gun, said keep it in your pants boy, you get rats in the bloodstreams. I said I would clean them out.” His thin hand dove like a weasel for the pocket of his bathrobe. It came out empty. “They took my gun. How can I clean them out when they took my rod away?” He raised his doubled fists in an agony of rage and beat his forehead with them. “Give me my gun!”

Una went to the record-player, almost running, as if a wind were hurrying her along. She turned it loud and came back to Durano, struggling step by step against the psychic wind that was blowing in the room. The fat orderly hitched up his smock and took a black automatic from under his belt. Durano pounced on him feebly. The orderly offered no resistance. Durano wrenched the automatic from his hands and backed away a few feet.

“Now!” he said with authority. He uttered a string of obscenities as if his mouth was full of them and he was spitting them out to be rid of them. “Now, you two, hands on the heads.”

The orderly did as he was told. Una lined up beside him with her hands in the air, rings flashing. Her face was expressionless.

“This is it,” Durano said thickly. There were red welts on his forehead where he had struck himself. His slack mouth continued moving but I couldn’t hear what he said under the music. He leaned forward, strained white fingers around the gun. It looked as if it were holding him up in the beating ocean of noise.

Una said something in a low voice. The orderly glanced down with a faint fat smile. Durano took a skipping little step and shot him three times point-blank. The orderly lay down on the floor and pillowed his head on an upflung arm, the faint smile still on his face.

Durano shot Una, three times. She doubled over, grimacing histrionically, and collapsed on a divan. Durano looked around the room for other possible victims. Finding none, he dropped the gun in the pocket of his bathrobe. I had noticed when he began to shoot with it that it was a toy cap-pistol.

Una rose from the divan and turned the music down. Durano watched her without surprise. The man in white hoisted himself to his feet and escorted Durano across the room. Durano looked back from the doorway with a dreaming smile. The self-inflicted bruises on his forehead were swelling and turning blue.

Una waved to him, exaggeratedly, like a mother to a child, before the orderly hustled him out. Then she sat down at the card table by the window and began to shuffle the deck. Sentimental Una.

I climbed down from my perch. Away down below on the beach I could hear the waves playing patty cake in the sand, sucking and gurgling rhythmically like idiot children.

I went around to the front of the house. The barred window on the second floor was still lit, and I could see the shadows on the ceiling. I moved in closer to the front door, which was made of carved black oak and about twelve feet high. It was the kind of door that demanded to be knocked on with the butt end of a gun. I stood in a weed-grown flowerbed, leaned my chin on the iron railing of the portico, fingered the butt of the gun in my jacket pocket. And decided to call it a day.

I lacked the evidence and the power to put Una under arrest. Until I had one or the other, it would be better to leave her where I could find her again, safe in the bosom of her family.

The signpost at the mountain crossroads was splintered by the bullets of trigger-happy hunters. Four painted white boards projected from it. One pointed back the way I had come: ARROYO BEACH 7 MIS. One pointed forward: BELLA CITY 34 MIS. The one to the right said: EAGLE LOOKOUT 5 MIS; the one to the left: SKY ROUTE. The fifth direction, unmarked, was straight up to where a hawk wheeled on banked blue curves of air. It was bright early morning.

I got back behind the wheel of my car and turned onto the Sky Route. It was a hairpinning gravel road that traced the contours of the mountainside. On my left the mountain fell away into a canyon in which occasional rooftops were visible. Beyond the canyon’s far edge the sea lay smoothed by distance like wine in a teacup, rimmed by the thin white curve of Arroyo Beach.

I passed a few rural mailboxes standing on posts at the entrances to steep lanes. The mailbox numbered 2712 also bore the legend HIGHHOLME, H. WILDING, ESQ., in bold red block-capitals. Wilding’s lane widened into a clearing near the bottom of the canyon. A small stone house sat between white oaks at the back of the clearing.

There were bantam chickens scratching in the yard. An old hound cocked a grizzled snoot at me and lifted one eyebrow, refusing to move out of the path of the car. I set the emergency brake and got out. He growled at me apathetically, still without moving. A gray gander ran at me hissing and flapping, veered at the last moment into the trees. Somewhere in the wooded canyon below, a gang of kids were talking back and forth in Indian war-whoops.

The man who came out of the stone house could have passed for an Indian. He was dressed in a pair of dirty canvas shorts, and the rest of him was burned almost black by the sun. His straight black hair, grayed in streaks, hung down over his ears.

“Hello,” he said, strumming a silent overture on his washboard ribs. “Isn’t it a fine clear day? I hope you noticed the quality of the light. It’s rather special. Whistler might have been able to snare it in paint, not I.”

“Mr. Wilding?”

“Of course.” He extended a paint-stained hand. “Delighted to see you. Delighted to see anybody and any thing. Did it ever occur to you that light creates landscape, so that the world itself is created daily, in a sense? In my sense.”

“It never has.”

“Well, think about it,” he said earnestly. “Light creates landscape out of old black chaos. We painters recreate it. I can’t step outside in the morning without feeling like God himself on the second day. Or was it the third? It doesn’t matter really. I’ve divested myself of time. I live in pure space.”

“My name is Archer,” I said, before I drowned in a mountain torrent of words. “Two weeks ago–”

“I’m sorry, I’ve been rude. I so seldom see people, I’m a veritable gramophone when I do. Archer, you say? Were you born under Sagittarius by any chance, the sign of the Archer? If you were,” he concluded rather lamely, “that would be fun.”

“Sagittarius is my first name, curiously enough. It’s more fun than you can imagine.”

Wilding uttered a high loud laugh like a mocking-bird’s imitation of human mirth. A hooting echo of his laughter came back from the children in the woods.

“Who are you anyway?” he said. “Come in and have a cup of tea. I’ve only just brewed some.”

“I’m a detective.”

“On the Singleton case?”

“Yes.”

“Oh.” He didn’t renew his invitation to tea. “There’s really nothing I can tell you that I haven’t told the others.”