Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“She was carrying something too heavy for her.”

“I had the feeling. Yes. She was afraid.” Mrs. Norris leaned towards me with heavy confiding charm: “I had the feeling from the beginning that Lucy Champion was bad luck to me and my house. She was from Detroit, and I lived there myself when Alex was an infant. Last night when they came to me and said that she was killed, it was like all the things I’d dreaded for myself and Alex, when we were moving from city to city trying to find a living in the depression. Like those things had suddenly come true for us at last, here in this valley. After all those years I worked and planned, keeping my name respectable.”

Looking into her eyes, deep black springs tapping the deep black past. I couldn’t think of anything to say.

“I misstated myself,” she said with renewed energy. “It is not my name I care for. It’s my son. I believed if we could get out of those big cities in the North and live in a decent place of our own, I could bring him up straight as his father wished for him. Now he has been arrested.”

“Where is his father? It would be a good thing if he stood by.”

“Yes, it would be a good thing. Alex’s father died in the war. Mr. Norris was a chief petty officer in the United States Navy.” She blew her nose with the force and effect of an exclamation mark, and dabbed at her eyes.

I waited a while, and said: “When did Lucy Champion come to your house?”

“She drove up in a taxi on a Sunday morning before church. It must have been two weeks ago today. I never like to do business on the Sabbath, but then I had no right to turn her away just for my private indulgence. The decent hotels were closed to her in this city, and most of the houses where our people can rent are not fit for dogs to inhabit. She was well spoken and well dressed. She told me she was on a vacation from her work, and she wanted to stay in a private house. I had the side room empty since the spring, and with Alex commencing college I needed the money.

“She seemed a peaceable little soul, though she was nervous and shy. She scarcely ever went out at all except to get herself lunch. She made her own breakfast, and ate her dinners with us. We had a boarding arrangement.”

“Did she eat well?”

“Now that you mention it, she didn’t. Picked at her food like a bird. I asked her once or twice if my food was not agreeing with her, but she was vague in her answers.”

“Did she mention any illness to you?”

“She never did, Mr. Archer. Excuse me, now, she did. There was some trouble with her stomach. Nervous stomach.”

“And you sent her to Dr. Benning?”

“I didn’t send her. I said if she needed a doctor, he was a good man to go to. Whether she went to him or not, that I can’t say.”

“She went to him all right. But she never spoke of Dr. Benning to you?”

“Not that I recollect, except for that one time I recommended him.”

“Did she mention Mrs. Benning?”

“Mrs Benning? Dr. Benning has no wife that I know of.”

“I met her last night, in his house. At least I met a woman who calls herself Mrs. Benning.”

“You must refer to Florida Gutierrez. She works for the doctor. He wouldn’t marry her. Dr. Benning wouldn’t marry any woman, not after the bad trouble he had with his first wife.”

“Was he a widower?”

“Divorced,” she said flatly, unable to conceal her disapproval. She added quickly: “Not that I blame the doctor, except for his foolishness marrying a woman so much younger than him – than he. She was a Jezebel to him, a blonde Jezebel mistreating him without shame. It ended as I expected, with her running off and divorcing him. At least that was the story I heard.” She pulled herself up sharp. “I ought to wash out my mouth, repeating gossip and scandal on the Lord’s Day.”

“What was her name, Mrs. Norris?”

“Elizabeth Benning. Doctor called her Bess. I don’t know her maiden name. He married her in the war, when he was a medical officer in the United States Navy. That was before we moved here from the North.”

“And how long ago did she leave him?”

“Nearly two years, it was. He was better off without her, though I never dared tell him so.”

“She seems to have come back.”

“Now? In his house?”

I nodded.

Her mouth pursed up tight again. Her whole face closed against me. Distrust of white men lay deep and solid in her like stone strata deposited through generations of time. “You won’t repeat that which I have been saying? I have an evil tongue and I’ve still not learned to curb it.”

“I’m trying to get you out of trouble, not deeper in.”

She answered slowly, after a time: “I do believe you. And it’s true, she returned to him?”

“She’s there in the house. Didn’t Lucy mention her at all? She went to the doctor three times, and Mrs. Benning had been working as his receptionist.”

She answered positively: “Lucy never did.”

“The doctor told me you’ve had nursing experience. Did Lucy show any signs of illness, physical or mental?”

“She seemed a well woman to me, apart from her eating habits. Of course when they drink, often they don’t eat.”

“She drank?”

“I learned to my sorrow and shame she was a drinker. And now that you ask me about her health Mr. Archer, there is this thing has been puzzling me.”

She opened the clasp of her black purse and groped for something inside. It turned out to be a clinical thermometer in a black leatherette carrying case, which she handed to me.

“I found this after she left, in the medicine cabinet over the sink in her room. Don’t shake it down now. I want you to look at the temperature.”

I opened the case and turned the narrow glass stem until I could see the column of mercury. It registered 107° F.

“Are you sure this was Lucy’s?”

She pointed to the initials, L.C. inked on the case. “Certainly it belonged to her. She was a nurse.”

“She couldn’t have had a temperature like that, could she? I thought 107 was fatal.”

“It is, for adults. I don’t understand it myself. Do you think I should show it to the police?”

“I will, if you like. In the meantime, can you tell me anything more about her habits? You say she was quiet and shy?”

“Very much so, at first, keeping herself to herself. Most of her evenings she just plain sat in her room with a little portable gramophone she brought along with her. I thought it was a peculiar way for a young woman to spend her vacation, and I said so. She laughed at that, but not in a humorous way. She became hysterical, and that was when I realized the strain that she was under, I began to feel the strain in the atmosphere when she was in the house. She was in the house twenty-three hours out of the twenty-four, it seemed like.”

“Did she have any visitors?”

She hesitated. “No, she had never a one. She sat in her room and kept that jazzy music playing on the radio. Then I discovered her drinking. I was cleaning her room one day when she was out to buy her lunch downtown. I opened up a drawer to put fresh paper in the bottom, and it had whisky bottles in it, three or four empty pint bottles.” Her voice was hushed with outrage.

“Maybe it helped her nerves.”

She looked at me shrewdly: “Alex said just those words to me when I mentioned it to him. He defended her, which set me to thinking about the two of them living together in the same house. That was the end of last week. Then the middle of this week, late Wednesday night it was, I heard her tromping around in her room. I knocked on her door, and she responded in silk pajamas and there was Alex with her in her room. He said she was teaching him to dance. To all appearances, she was teaching my son the wicked ways of the world, in red silk pajamas, and I told her that to her face.”