Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“And the license?”

“5T1381.”

Brake made a note of it. “What route is she taking?”

“I have no idea. Surely you’re not proposing to have Mrs. Benning picked up on the highway?”

“First I want to make sure she isn’t here.”

“You think I’ve been lying to you?”

“Not a bit. I’m just doing my job. May I have your permission to look through the house?”

“Do you have a search warrant?”

“I do not. I took it for granted you had nothing to hide.”

Benning managed to smile. “Of course. I was merely curious.” He swung his arm in a quarter circle that ended with his knuckles thumping the wall. “Make free with my demesne, gentlemen.”

Brake started up the stairs that rose at the end of the hallway. I went though the outer rooms with Benning, and paused in the examination room. He spoke quietly from the doorway: “I know my enemies, Mr. Archer, and my wife’s enemies. I understand your type, the appetitive man. What you can’t have you seek to destroy.” His voice was rising like an ill wind, carrying echoes of our previous meeting.

“Why did your wife come back to you?” I said.

“She loved me.”

“Then why did she leave you again today?”

“She was afraid.”

“Afraid of the Duranos? The police?”

“She was afraid,” he repeated.

I looked around the shabby oilcloth walls and the scrubbed linoleum floor. The faucet was still leaking drop by drop into the sink.

“Is this the room where Florie found the blood, doctor?”

“Blood?” he said. “Blood?”

“The day after your wife came back there were spots of blood on the floor. According to Florie.”

“Oh, yes. I had an emergency patient that Sunday. Cut finger.”

“I suggest that your emergency patient came here late Saturday night. Mrs. Benning brought him to you for treatment. He had a slug in his body instead of a cut finger. His name was Singleton. What happened to him, doctor, did he die on your hands?”

“I had no such patient.”

“I suggest that you performed an unreported operation on a dying man, and couldn’t save him.”

“Have you made that suggestion to Brake?”

“No. I’m not your enemy. I’m not interested in breaches of medical ethics. I’m after a murderer. But I haven’t even been able to prove that Singleton was murdered. Was he?”

Our glances met and locked, until Benning disengaged his. “It’s not myself I’m concerned about,” he said falteringly.

“Your wife? Did she do the shooting?”

He failed to meet my eyes again. Both of us were listening to Brake’s unaccompanied footsteps coming down the stairs and through the house.

Brake saw the tension between us as soon as he entered the room: “What goes on?”

“Very little,” I said.

Benning looked at me with gratitude, and drew himself up visibly. “Did you look under all the beds, lieutenant?”

“I did. No women’s clothes in the closets, either. You sure your wife isn’t planning to stay away?”

“She hasn’t many clothes.”

Brake crossed the room to the locked closet which I had broken into the night before. He shook the knob with the violence of frustration. “You check this room in here, Archer?”

“It’s only a closet,” Benning said. “There’s nothing inside but my skeleton.”

“Your what?”

“It’s an anatomical specimen.”

“Open up.”

Benning went to the closet door with a key-ring jingling in his hand. As he unlocked it, he gave us a bright bitter smile over his shoulder. “You don’t seriously think I’ve locked my wife in here?”

He swung the door open. The sparse head grinned steadfastly, superciliously, from its refuge beyond time. Benning stood back, watching us for signs of shock or surprise. He seemed disappointed when we showed none.

“Mr. Macabre,” I said. “Where did he come from?”

“I got him from a medical-supply house.” He pointed out a rectangular brass tag attached to one of the ribs: Sunset Hospital Equipment Co., Ltd. I had missed it the night before.

“Not many doctors have these any more, do they?”

“I keep him for a special reason. I worked my way through medical school, and I never received an adequate grounding in anatomy. I’ve been studying it on my own, with the help of this old boy.” He poked the varnished cage of ribs with his finger, and set the whole thing swaying. “Poor old boy. I’ve often wondered who or what he was. A convicted felon, or a pauper who died in a charity ward? Memento mori. ”

Brake had been fidgeting. “Let’s go,” he said suddenly. “I’ve got work to do.”

“There are a couple of other points I want to take up with Dr. Benning.”

“Make it fast, then.” Brake seemed to have broken through the thin ice, and contracted a case of cold feet. He moved out through the waiting-room as if to detach his authority from me.

The doctor followed Brake, emphasizing the realignment that was taking place. It had been two against him. Now it was two against me.

“I don’t really mind, lieutenant. I’d like to satisfy Mr. Archer completely and have it over with. If Mr. Archer can be satisfied.” Benning turned to face me in the waiting-room like an actor who has been groping for his part and finally begun to live it.

“There’s a conflict of testimony,” I said. “Florie Gutierrez says that your wife and Lucy Champion were friends. You claim they weren’t. Florie says your wife was out of the house when Lucy was killed yesterday afternoon. You claim she was here with you.”

“I can’t pretend to be objective in this matter, with my wife’s reputation at stake. I’ll tell you my own experience of Florida Gutierrez. She’s an unmitigated liar. And when my wife discharged her last night–”

“Why did your wife discharge her?”

“Incompetence. Dishonesty and incompetence. The Gutierrez woman threatened to get even, as she put it. I knew she’d go to almost any lengths to damage us. But the lengths she’s gone to have surprised even me. There seems to be no limit to human malice.”

“Was your wife in the house between five and six yesterday?”

“She was.”

“How do you know? You were taking a siesta.”

He was silent for nearly half a minute. Brake was watching from the doorway with the air of a disinterested spectator.

“I didn’t sleep,” Benning said. “I was conscious of her presence in the house.”

“But you couldn’t see her? It might have been Florie? You can’t swear it was your wife?”

Benning took off his hat and inspected its interior as if for a missing idea. He said slowly and painfully: “I don’t have to answer that question, or any other question. Even if I were in court – you can’t force a man to testify against his wife.”

“You volunteered an alibi for her. Incidentally, you haven’t proved she is your wife.”

“Nothing could be easier.” He strode into his consultation room and came back with a folded document that he handed to Brake.

Brake glanced at it, and passed it to me. It was a marriage certificate issued in the State of Indiana on May 14, 1943. It stated that Samuel Benning, aged 38, had been married on that date to Elizabeth Wionowski, aged 18.

Benning took it out of my hands. “And now, gentlemen, it’s about time I insisted that my private life, and my wife’s, is no affair of yours. Since she isn’t here to defend herself, I’ll remind you that there are libel laws, and false arrest is actionable in the courts.”

“You don’t have to remind me .” Brake stressed the personal pronoun. “There’s been no arrest, no accusation. Thank you for your co-operation, doctor.”