Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“What do you mean, you guess?”

“I never like to swear, it ain’t ladylike.”

Brake snorted and stood up and left me standing in the room with Florie. He returned with a uniformed policewoman, white-haired and granite-eyed: “Mrs. Simpson will stay here with you, Miss Gutierrez, until I get back. You’re not in custody, understand.”

Brake and I climbed the ramp to the parking lot.

“We’ll take my car. There’s something I want you to read.” I handed him the night letter from Detroit.

“I hope it makes more sense than that little dame. She’s a moron.”

“She can see and remember.”

He grunted as he climbed into the car. “What did she see?”

“Blood. Dried blood on the floor of Benning’s examination room. It was her job to clean it.”

“When? Yesterday?”

“Two weeks ago. The Monday after the weekend that Singleton was shot.”

“You definitely think he was shot?”

“Read the telegram. See what it means to you.” I started the car, and turned on a crosstown street in the direction of Benning’s house.

Brake looked up from the yellow paper. “It don’t mean a great deal to me. It’s mostly a rap sheet on a mobster I never heard of. Who is this Durano?”

“A Michigan numbers racketeer. He’s in California now. His sister Una is the one who hired me in the first place.”

“Why?”

“I think her brother shot Singleton. Lucy was a witness, and Una Durano was trying to find her and silence her.”

“Where is he now?”

“I wouldn’t know.” But the blasted man with the toy gun was vivid behind my eyes.

“Funny you didn’t pass on this stuff to me.”

I said, a little disingenuously: “I couldn’t tell you what I didn’t know. I just got hold of the telegram, at the hotel where Heiss was staying.”

“You’re building a pretty big story out of a little bit of a telegram. And it ain’t even evidence, unless you have your mitts on the guy that sent it. Who’s this Van?”

“Sounds like an undercover man for a Detroit agency.”

“Agency work costs money. Was Heiss a bigtimer?”

“Hardly, but he kept hoping. He thought he saw big money in this case, starting with the Singleton reward.”

“What was he doing with Singleton’s car?”

“He told Florie he found it. It was evidence, to help him collect the reward. Before that he tried to get Lucy to be a witness for him. But the Singleton reward was only a beginning for him. He had bigger money on his mind.”

“Blackmail? From Durano?”

“It’s possible.”

“So you think those mobsters torched him.”

“That’s possible, too.”

We had reached Benning’s block. I parked in front of the barber shop beside his house. Brake made no move to get out of the car. “Do you know any of these things that you say are possible?”

“I don’t know anything for sure. It’s a peculiarity of this case. We’ve got damn little physical evidence and damn few honest witnesses. There’s no single detail strong enough to hang your hat on. But I have got a Gestalt on the whole picture.”

“A what?”

“Call it a hunch, about how the case hangs together. There are a lot of people in it, so it can’t be simple. Even with two people, actions are never simple.”

“Cut the philosophy. Come down to cases again. If these are gang killings, what are we doing here? Mrs. Benning doesn’t come into it at all.”

“Mrs. Benning is the central figure in the picture,” I said. “She had three men on the string: Durano, Singleton, Benning. Durano shot Singleton over her. She couldn’t face an investigation so she skipped out and came back to Benning for help.”

“What did she do with Singleton?”

“We better ask her.”

Blinded and gray-sided, Benning’s house seemed to exhale its own shabby twilight. The doctor was pale and blinking like a twilight creature when he came to the door: “Good afternoon, lieutenant.”

He looked at me without speaking. Brake flashed his buzzer to indicate this wasn’t a social call. Benning backed up abruptly, reaching for his hat on the hall rack and setting it on his head.

“You going somewhere, doctor?”

“Why no, I wasn’t. I often wear a hat in the house.” He gave Brake a sheepish smile.

The hallway was dim and chilly. An odor of rotting wood, which I hadn’t noticed before, underlay the other odors. Men with a sense of failure like Benning had a knack of choosing the right environment for failure, or creating it around them. I listened for the sound of the woman in the house. There was no sound except the drip of a tap somewhere like a slow internal hemorrhage.

Brake said in formal tones: “I want to see the lady known as Mrs. Benning.”

“Do you mean my wife?”

“I do.”

“Then why not say so?” Benning spoke with acerbity. He was pulling himself together under the hat.

“Is she here?”

“Not at the moment, no.” Biting at the inside of his long upper lip, the doctor resembled a worried camel chewing a bitter cud. “Before I answer any questions, no matter how charmingly phrased, I’d like to know if you’re here in an official capacity. Or do you simply derive a puerile pleasure from displaying your badge?”

Brake turned dull red. “There’s no pleasure in it, doctor. I got two murders on the book, another one floating.”

Benning swallowed several times, his adam’s-apple bobbing like a distorted yo-yo in his throat. “You’re not seriously suggesting that there’s any connection.” The words fell into a silence that seemed to disturb him. He filled it by adding: “Between my wife and these murders?”

“I’m asking for your co-operation, doctor. You gave it to me this morning. I can’t keep down crime without the cooperation of the citizenry.”

The two men faced each other in silence for a minute. Brake’s silence was heavy, persistent, thick, like a tree-stump’s. Benning’s was tense and alert. He might have been listening to a sound too high for our ears to catch.

He cleared his throat. The distorted yo-yo bobbed. “Mrs. Benning has gone to San Francisco for a few days. It’s been hard for her to readjust to Bella City and – marriage. After the unpleasantness of the last two days – well, we both thought she needed a rest. She left about an hour ago.”

I said: “Where is she going to stay in San Francisco?”

“I’m sorry, I don’t know the address. Bess makes a point of enjoying the utmost personal freedom, and I make a point of allowing it.” His pale eyes were watching me, daring me to mention our last meeting.

“When is she coming back?”

“I assume in a week or so. It will depend partly on the friends she’s staying with.”

“What friends?”

“I can’t help you there, either. I don’t really know my wife’s friends. We’ve been living apart for the past two years.”

He was choosing his words very carefully, as if the slightest mishandling might jar out of them a blast of meaning that would destroy him and his house. It struck me that Bess had left him and wasn’t coming back. This was the fact he was concealing from me and Brake, and possibly from himself.

“Why did she come back after those two years?”

“I believe she realized that she had made a mistake in leaving me. Not that you have any license to ask me.”

“The doctor’s right,” Brake said. “Absolutely right. How’s she traveling, by the way?”

“By car. She took my car.” He added stiffly: “She had my permission to take it.”

“Let’s see, that’s a Chevvie sedan, isn’t it, doctor?”

“A 1946 blue Chevrolet sedan.”