Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“I’m working alone. I haven’t talked to the others, and I don’t know what they know or what they think. My own feeling is that he’s dead.”

“Charles dead?” Surprise or some other emotion pulled like a drawstring through his cordovan face and left it wrinkled. “That would be a waste. He was only twenty-nine. Why do you feel that he is dead, Mr. Archer?”

“Analogy. A woman was killed yesterday, apparently because she knew what happened to him.”

“The blonde woman, was she killed?”

“A colored woman.” I told him about Lucy.

He squatted Indian-fashion, resting one elbow on his folded bare knees, and drew a design in the dust with his forefinger. It was a long-faced mask in the shape of a coffin, which looked a little like his own face. A bantam rooster came and pecked at his hand.

Wilding stood up, and struck himself lightly over the eyes with the hand that had drawn the coffin. “There’s your symbol-making faculty at work in its crudest form. I wonder sometimes if my sainted mother didn’t deceive my father with a Navajo.” He obliterated the dust-drawing with his sandaled feet, talking on without a pause: “The painter makes objects out of events, the poet makes words out of events. What does the man of action do, Mr. Archer? Suffer them?”

“Your friend Singleton did, I think. I take it he was your friend, or is.”

“Certainly he was. I’ve known Charles since he was a schoolboy. I taught at Arroyo Prep School for a while, before my pictures sold. And he’s been coming up here in the summers for nearly ten years. You can see his place from here.”

He pointed north along the canyon. Near its head, a half mile or more away, a squat structure of brown oiled logs gleamed dully among the live oaks. “I helped him to build it myself, in the summer of 1941. It’s only a one-room affair, but Charles always called it his studio. He came back from his freshman year at Harvard with ideas of becoming a poet. His mother’s house on the Hill made him feel cramped and stuffy. Both she and her house – I don’t know whether you know them – are crusty with tradition, not the kind of tradition that a budding poet could use. Charles came up here to escape from it. He called this canyon his private vale of soul-making.”

“I’d like to have a look at his cabin.”

“I’ll go over with you.”

Wilding moved impulsively towards my car, and I followed him. I drove up the lane in low gear and turned left on the gravel road cut into the canyon wall. The second mailbox we came to was stenciled with the name of Singleton. I turned left again into a lane that slanted down the side of the canyon. About halfway to the bottom, the log house stood on a natural shelf between the canyon’s converging walls. When I parked in front of it and got out, I saw that the front door was sealed with official paper.

I turned to Wilding: “You didn’t tell me the place was sealed. Does the sheriff suspect violence?”

“He doesn’t confide in me,” Wilding said wryly. “When I told him about the shot I heard, he didn’t seem to take it too seriously.”

“The shot?”

“Sorry, I imagined that you knew. I heard a shot from this direction, late that Saturday night. I didn’t think twice about it at the time, for the simple reason that I hear a great many shots, in and out of hunting season. When they questioned me the following week, I mentioned it of course. I believe they went over the premises quite thoroughly after that. They didn’t find a bullet or anything of the sort.”

“They wouldn’t, if the slug went into Singleton.”

“Mercy upon us,” he said. “Do you really suppose that Charles was shot up here in his own cabin?”

“They must think something happened here, or they wouldn’t have sealed it up. What else did you hear that Saturday night?”

“Nothing, absolutely nothing. A single shot around eleven o’clock, and that was all. A few cars went by, but there’s always late night traffic on the road.”

Wilding went to the large window that balanced the door in the front wall of the cabin. Standing on tiptoe, he peered in past the brown monk’s-cloth drapes partly drawn across it. I looked over his shoulder into a square beamed room furnished in primitive luxury with polished wood, homespun fabrics, copper. Everything seemed to be in order and place. Above the copper-vented fireplace opposite the window, a handsome boy in oils looked out of a bleached wooden frame, over our heads, down five miles of sunlit canyon.

“That’s Charles,” Wilding said in a whisper, as if the boy in the frame might overhear him. “I painted it myself, and gave it to him. He looked like a young Shelley when he was twenty. I’m afraid he doesn’t any more. Charles lost his ethereal quality during the war, when he took up with that woman. Or it may have been the war itself that did it. I suppose I have a prejudice against women. I’m a confirmed bachelor myself.”

“Is she the blonde you mentioned?”

“Did I mention her? I didn’t mean to.” He turned and laid a brown hand on my shoulder. “Look here, old chap, are you one of the old lady’s investigators? If you are, I don’t want to say any more. Naturally I told the whole thing to the sheriff.”

“Anything you tell me is between us.”

His bright black eyes explored my face like foraging beetles. “What is your interest in Charles, just while we’re on the subject?”

“Mrs. Singleton’s paid companion hired me.”

“Sylvia Treen? She’s a lovely child, very much in love with Charles, I think. But I had no idea–”

“She knows about the blonde.”

“Yes. I told her. I thought it might be for the best, in the long run. Whatever happened, Charles would never marry Sylvia. He’s not the marrying sort. I didn’t let Sylvia know how long the affair had lasted.”

“She said it was just this summer.”

“I let her imagine that. Actually, it’s been going on for seven or eight years. Charles introduced me to her the year he entered the Air Force. Her name was Bess, I don’t recall her surname. She was very young and quite exciting, marvelously colored. Perfect in every way, until she opened her mouth – but I mustn’t tattle.” He continued to tattle: “Charles always did have a proletarian penchant, you know. In spite of that or because of it, it was clearly a case of true love. The children were mad about each other. I shouldn’t say children. She wasn’t a child. She was already married, I understand. Which doubtless suited Charles.” He added reflectively: “Perhaps he should have married her.”

“You think she shot him?”

“I have no reason to think so. Certainly it’s possible. Seven years is a long time for a young lady to wait for a young man to make up his mind.”

“Was she here the night he disappeared?”

“I have no way of knowing. I did see a light in the cabin. Actually I haven’t seen her for weeks. I do have the impression that they came up here together quite often during the summer, practically every Saturday night.”

“And before that?”

He leaned against the sealed door and thought for a while, his thin brown arms folded on his chest. “Their visits haven’t been continuous, I know that. Bess first appeared in the summer of 1943, and that was when I met her. I wanted to paint her. Charles was excessively possessive, and he never again asked me back when she was here. After that summer, I didn’t set eyes on her again until 1945, when Charles left the Air Force. For the next two or three years I saw her at a distance quite often. Then Charles went back to Harvard in the fall of 1948 to study law, and I didn’t see them again until this spring. It’s possible that she followed him to Cambridge. I’ve never asked him about her.”