Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“I think there is more to it. Too many people were interested in Lucy. I wouldn’t settle for the first suspect we stumble across. It isn’t that easy.”

“You took me up wrong,” he said. “What I mean, the boy acts guilty. I been looking at their faces for thirty years, listening to them talk.” He didn’t have to tell me. The thirty years were marked clearly on him, like fir-traces on an old tree. “All right, I’m still in the minor leagues. All right. This is my league. Champion is a minor league killing.”

“Consciousness of guilt is pretty tricky stuff. It’s psychological, for one thing.”

“Psychological hell. It’s a plain fact. We try to hold him for questioning, he runs out. We catch him and bring him back and he won’t talk. I tried to talk to him. He’s sullen. Tell him the world was flat, he wouldn’t answer yes or no or maybe.”

“How have you been treating him?”

“Never laid a finger on him, neither did anybody else.” Brake pulled down his shirt-sleeve and rebuttoned the cuff. “We got our own brand of psychology.”

“Where is he?”

“Out at the morgue.”

“Isn’t that a little unusual?”

“Not by me. I get a killing a month in this town, sometimes two. And I solve them, see? Most of them. The atmosphere at the morgue will loosen a killer up faster than anything I know.”

“Psychology.”

“That’s what I said. Now, you playing on my team or you want a crying towel to cry into? If you’re on my team, we’ll go on out there and see if he’s ready to talk.”

The door was numbered 01. The room behind the door was windowless, low-ceilinged, concrete-walled. When the door sucked shut behind us, we might have been in a sepulcher far down under the earth. Brake’s heel struck dully on the composition floor. His shadow spread across me as he approached the only light in the room.

It was a cone-shaded bulb that hung low on an adjustable pulley over a rubber-wheeled stretcher. Lucy’s sheeted body lay on the stretcher under its white glare. Her head was uncovered and turned towards Alex Norris. He was sitting in a chair on the far side of the stretcher, looking steadfastly into the dead woman’s face. His right wrist was linked to hers by twin rings of blue steel. The pumps of a cooling system hummed and throbbed like time running down in the concrete walls. Behind the paired glass doors of the refrigerator, the other sheeted bodies might have been waiting for judgment, dreaming a preview of hell. It was as cold as hell.

The uniformed policeman who had been sitting opposite Alex got to his feet, raising his hand in a slovenly salute. “Morning, lieutenant.”

“What’s good about it? You running a wake in here, Schwartz?”

“You told me not to mark him. Like you said, I been letting nature take its course.”

“Well? Did nature take its course?” Brake stood over Alex, wide and impermeable against the light. “You want to make a statement now?”

Moving to one side, I saw Alex look up slowly. His face had thinned. The passage of the night had pared flesh from his temples and cheekbones. His wide carved lips drew back from his teeth and closed again without making any sound.

“Or you want to sit all day and hold hands?”

“You heard what the man said,” Schwartz growled. “He ain’t fooling. You sit here until you talk. In an hour or so the deputy coroner’s gonna cut her up, finish the job you done. Maybe you want a ringside seat?”

Alex paid no attention to Brake or his subordinate. His gaze, incredulous and devoted, returned to the dead woman’s head. Under the pitiless glare her hair shone like coiled steel shavings.

“What’s the matter with you, Norris? You got no human feelings?” Brake sounded almost querulous in the subterranean stillness, almost feeble, as if the boy by accepting everything had turned the tables on him.

I said “Brake.” The word had more force behind it than I intended.

“What’s eating you?” He turned with a bewildered frown. The dead cigar in the corner of his mouth was like a black finger pulling one side of his face crooked. I retreated to the door, and he followed his own diminishing shadow towards me: “You want that crying towel?”

I said in a low voice, but not too low for Alex to overhear: “You’re handling him wrong. He’s a sensitive kid. You can’t treat him like a punchy thug.”

“Him sensitive?” Brake removed his cigar and spat on the floor. “He’s got a hide like a rhinoceros.”

“I don’t think so. Give me a chance at him anyway. Uncouple him and let me talk to him alone.”

“My wife and me were going up in the mountains today,” Brake said irrelevantly. “We promised the kids a picnic.”

He sneered at the dead cigar in his hand, dropped it suddenly, and ground it under his heel. “Schwartz! Turn him loose. Bring him over here.”

The click of the handcuffs opening was tiny but very important, like the sound of a moral weight shifting on its fulcrum.

Schwartz pulled Alex to his feet. They crossed the room together, Alex round-shouldered and hanging back, Schwartz roughly urging him. “Taking him back to the cell, lieutenant?”

“Not yet.” Brake addressed the boy: “Mr. Archer here is a friend of yours, Norris. He wants a little chinfest with you. Personally I think he’s wasting all our time, but it’s up to you. Will you talk to Mr. Archer?”

Alex looked from Brake to me. His smooth young face had the same expression I had seen on the ancient Indian face of the woman in the alley, beyond the reach of anything white men could do or say. He nodded wordlessly, and looked back at Lucy.

Brake and Schwartz went out. The door pulled shut. Alex started back across the room. He walked uncertainly with his legs spraddled like an old man’s. The concrete floor sloped gently to a covered drain in the center of the room. He staggered down the barely perceptible slope and labored up the other side to the stretcher.

Standing over Lucy with his head bowed, he asked her: “Why did they do it?” in a dry hard voice.

I reached past him and pulled the sheet up over her head. I took him by the shoulders, turned him to face me. Part of his weight hung on me for a moment, until his muscles tightened. “Straighten up,” I said.

He was as tall as I was, but his head was drooping on his undeveloped neck. I pushed my closed right hand under his chin. “Straighten up, Alex. Look at me.”

He flinched away. I held him with my other hand on his shoulder. Suddenly he tensed and knocked my hand away from his chin.

“Steady, boy.”

“I’m not a horse,” he cried. “Don’t you talk to me like I was a horse. Keep your hands off of me.”

“You’re worse than a horse. You’re a stubborn mule. Your girl is lying dead, and you won’t open your mouth to tell me who did it to her.”

“They think I did it.”

“It’s your own fault if they do. You shouldn’t have run out. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”

“Lucky.” The word was as blank as a hiccup.

“Lucky not to be dead. That’s the one situation nobody can reverse. You think you’ve got it tough now, and you have, but that’s no reason for turning into a dummy. One of these days you’re going to snap out of it and really care what happened to Lucy. Only it’ll be too late for you to do anything about it. You’ve got to help now.”

I let go of him. He stood shakily, pulling at his fleshy lower lip with a bitten forefinger. Then he said: “I tried to tell them things at first, this morning when they brought me in. But him and the deputy D.A., they only had the one thing on their minds, to make me say I did it. Why would I kill my own fiancée?” The question rose up hard from his working chest. His face was blind with the effort of speaking, the more terrible effort of speaking as a man. He couldn’t sustain it: “I wish I was dead like Lucy.”