Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

Brake slung a look from the door which tightened on me like a rope. We left Benning in the hallway, leaning like a flimsy buttress against the rotting wall. He was pressing the marriage certificate to his thin chest as if it was a love token or a poultice or a banknote, or a combination of all three.

The interior of my car was furnace-hot. Brake pulled off his coat and folded it on his knees. His shirt was blotched with sweat.

“You went too far, Archer.”

“I think I didn’t go far enough.”

“That’s because you don’t have my responsibility.”

I admitted that that was true.

“I can’t take chances,” he went on. “I can’t act without evidence. I got nothing to justify a warrant for Mrs. Benning.”

“You’ve got just as much on her as you have on Alex Norris. He’s still in jail.”

Brake answered doggedly: “He’s being held without charge for twenty-four hours. It’s legal. But you can’t do that with people like Mrs. Benning. She’s a doctor’s wife, remember. I stuck my neck out going to Benning at all. He’s lived all his life in this town. His father was the high-school principal for twenty years.” He added defensively: “Anyway, what have we got on her?”

“You noticed her maiden name in the marriage certificate? Elizabeth Wionowski. The same name as the one in the telegram. She was Durano’s woman.”

“That don’t prove anything about Singleton, even if it was evidence, which it isn’t. What I don’t see in your story is this idea of a woman changing partners back and forth like a bloody square dance. It don’t happen.”

“Depends on the woman. I’ve known women who kept six men on the string at the same time. Mrs. Benning has been alternating three. I have a witness who says she was Singleton’s mistress for seven years, off and on. She came back to Benning because she needed help–”

Brake brushed the words like mosquitoes away from his head. “Don’t tell me any more. I got to take this careful and slow or I’m up the crick without a paddle.”

“You or Norris.”

“And don’t needle me. I’m handling this case the way I have to. If you can bring in Mrs. Benning to make a statement, okay, I’ll listen. But I can’t go out and bring her in myself. I can’t do anything to the doctor just because his wife went on a trip. Nobody told her not to.”

The sweat was running down his slant low forehead, gathering in his eyebrows like dew in a thicket. His eyes were bleak.

“It’s your town, lieutenant.”

I dropped him at the rear of the City Hall. He didn’t ask me what I intended to do next.

It was late afternoon when I drove through Arroyo Beach to the ocean boulevard. The palm-lined sand was strewn with bodies like a desert battlefield. At the horizon sea and sky merged in a blue haze from which the indigo hills of the channel islands rose. Beyond them the sun’s fire raged on the slopes of space.

I turned south into traffic moving bumper to bumper, fender to fender, like an army in retreat. The arthritic trees cast long baroque shadows down the cemetery hill. The shadow of Durano’s house reached halfway across its wilderness of lawn towards the iron fence. I pulled out of the traffic into the entrance to the drive.

The gate was still chained and padlocked. There was a button set in the gatepost under a small weathered sign: RING FOR GARDENER PLEASE. I rang three times, without audible effect, and went back to my car to wait. After a while a small figure came out of the house. It was Una. She moved impatiently down the drive, chunky and squat between the slender coconut palms.

Her gold lamé coat gleamed like mail through the bars of the gate. “What do you want, you?”

I got out of the car and approached her. She looked at me, and at the house, as if invisible wires were jerking at her alternately from each direction. Then she right-about-faced and started away.

“I want to talk about Leo,” I said above the traffic noises.

Her brother’s name pulled her back to the gate: “I don’t understand you.”

“Leo Durano is your brother?”

“What if he is? I thought I fired you yesterday. How many times do I have to fire you before you stay fired?”

“Was that the trouble with Max Heiss, that he wouldn’t stay fired?”

“What about Max Heiss?”

“He was killed this morning, murdered. Your labor turnover is rapid, and all of your ex-employees are ending the same way.”

Her expression didn’t change, but her diamonded right hand reached for one of the bars and gripped it. “Heiss had a lot of drunky ideas. If somebody cut him down, it’s no affair of mine. Or my brother’s.”

“It’s funny,” I said, “when I saw Heiss in the morgue I thought of you and Leo. Leo has quite a record in that line.”

Her hand left the bar and jumped like a brilliant crustacean to her throat. “You’ve seen Bess Wionowski.”

“We had a little chat.”

“Where is she?” Una spoke as if her throat was hurting her.

“Blown again,” I said. “You might as well open the gate. We can’t talk here.”

“I might as well.”

She groped in the wide square pocket of her gold coat. I had my finger hooked in the trigger guard of my gun. All she brought out was a key, with which she opened the padlock. I unchained the gate and pushed it open.

Her hand closed on my arm: “What happened to Max Heiss? Did he get sliced, like Lucy?”

“He was put to the torch like Joan of Arc.”

“When?”

“Early this morning. We found him in the mountains, in a wrecked car. The car belonged to Charles Singleton, and Heiss was wearing Singleton’s clothes.”

“Whose clothes?”

Her fingers were biting into me. Contact with her was unpleasant and strange, like being grabbed by the branch of a small spiny tree. I shook her hand off.

“You know him, Una, the golden boy Bess was running with. Somebody blowtorched Heiss and dressed him in Singleton’s clothes to make it look as if Singleton died this morning. But we know better, don’t we?”

“If you think Leo did it, you’re crazy.”

“I’m surprised you still use that word in your family.”

Her gaze, which had been steady on my face, swerved away. She said with her head down: “Leo was home in bed this morning. I can prove it by his nurse. Leo is a very sick man.”

“Paranoia?” I said distinctly. “G.P.I.?”

Her rigid calm tore like a photograph. “Those lying sawbones at the clinic! They promised me they kept professional secrets. I’ll professional-secret them when they send me their next bill.”

“Don’t blame the clinic. I’ve seen enough commitment trials to recognize paranoid symptoms.”

“You’ve never seen my brother.”

I didn’t answer the unasked question.

“I’m going to see him now, with you.”

“I’ve taken good care of Leo,” she cried suddenly, “with trained nurses all the time, the best of care! The doctor comes every day to see him. I work and slave for that man, making him things he likes to eat, spumoni, minestrone. When I have to, I feed him with my own hands.” She choked back the running words and turned away from me, ashamed of the solicitous old woman jostling her other selves.

I put one hand on her stiff elbow and propelled her towards the house. Its red-tiled upper edge cut off the sun. I looked up at the barred window behind which Leo Durano had been receiving the best of care, and heard a silent word repeated like an echo from the wall many times.

Inside the front door, an iron stairway curved in a spiral to the second floor. Una climbed it and preceded me along a dust-littered hallway. Near its end, the large young man in the white smock sat in an armchair beside a closed door.