Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

My presence startled him. “Doctor?” he said to Una.

“Just a visitor.”

He shook his cheeks at her. “I wouldn’t do it, Miss Durano. He’s been hard to handle this afternoon. I had to restrain him.”

“Open the door, Donald,” Una said.

He produced a key from his tentlike smock. The room contained a bare iron cot and a disemboweled platform-rocker bolted to the floor. A few shreds remained of the drapes that had hung at the barred window. Beside the window, the plaster wall showed handprints, and indentations that could have been made by fists. The inner side of the oak door had been splintered, and repaired with bare oak boards.

Durano was sitting on the floor against the wall in the far corner by the window. His arms, folded in his lap, were sheathed in a brown leather restrainer on which toothmarks were visible. He looked up at us through soiled black hair that straggled over his forehead. His bleeding mouth opened and closed, trying to trap a word.

The word sounded like: “Forgive.”

Una ran across the room to him and went down clumsily on her trousered knees. “We don’t treat you good, Leo. Forgive me.” She drew his head against her metal torso.

“Forgive,” he answered brokenly. “I forgive me. Released without charge. I told the ragpickers you can’t vag an honest man or the son of an honest man, told them I was doing my father’s business.”

Clasping the mumbling head in both arms, Una looked up at me scornfully. “This is the poor little fellow who committed a murder this morning, eh? Tell him, Donald, where was Leo this morning?”

Donald swallowed painfully. “Police?”

“Close enough,” I said.

“He was right in this room. All night and all morning. Every night and morning. Durano don’t get around much any more.”

“Shut up, you.” Una left her brother and advanced on Donald. “No smart cracks, fat boy. He’s a better man right now than you’ll ever be. You’d still be emptying bedpans for sixty a month if it wasn’t for Leo Durano. Mister to you.”

He backed away from her, flushed and cowering like a browbeaten German wife. “You ask me a question, Miss Durano.”

“Shut up.” She passed him like a small cold wind, and hustled off down the corridor.

I said: “Donald. What about Saturday night two weeks ago? Was Durano in his room?”

“I wasn’t here. We usually get Saturday nights off.”

“We?”

“Me and Lucy before she left. Miss Durano paid me extra to stay last night. He was bad last night.”

“You coming?” Una called from the head of the stairs.

She took me to the room with the picture window at the rear of the house. The sun’s fires had blazed out of control across the whole western sky and were eating at the sea’s edges. Along the shore where the beach curved, a few late swimmers were tossed like matchsticks in a bloody froth of surf. I sat down in a chair against the side wall where I could watch the whole room and its doors and windows.

Seen from inside by daylight, the room was spacious and handsome in an old-fashioned way. Kept up, it might have been beautiful. But the carpets and the surfaces of the furniture were gray with dust, strewn with the leavings of weeks: torn magazines and crumpled newspapers, cigarette butts, unwashed dishes. A bowl of rotting fruit was alive with insects. The wall plants had drooped and died. Cobwebs hung in shaggy strands from the ceiling. It was a Roman villa liberated by Vandals.

Una sat down at the card-table by the big window. The cards with which she and Donald had been playing the night before lay scattered across the table, mixed with a confetti of potato chips. A pair of clouded glasses sat on its edge. Una’s hand crept out onto the table and began to gather the cards.

“How long has Leo been insane?” I said.

“What does it matter? You know he didn’t kill Heiss.”

“Heiss isn’t the only one.”

“Lucy Champion, then. He wouldn’t hurt Lucy. They got along swell till she left. She was a damn good nurse, I’ll give her that.”

“That isn’t why you were so anxious to get her back.”

“Isn’t it?” She smiled a keen half-smile, as bitter as wormwood.

“How long has he been insane, Una?”

“Since the first of the year. He blew his top for keeps at a New Year’s party in the Dial, that’s a night-spot in Detroit. He was trying to make the orchestra play the same piece over and over, some piece from an opera. They played it three times and quit. Leo said they were insulting a great Italian composer. He was going to shoot the orchestra leader. I stopped him.

“It was New Year’s Eve and everybody thought he was loaded. I knew different. I’d been watching him since summer. He had bad headaches all last year, and along in the fall he was flying off the handle every day. It was Bess set him off, he never should have taken her back. They fought like wildcats all the time. Then he started to lose his memory. He got so he didn’t even know his collectors’ names.”

“Collectors?”

Her hand became still among the half-gathered cards. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “He runs a collection agency.”

“With a gun?”

“Leo always carried large sums. The gun was for protection. I didn’t realize he was dangerous until he tried to use it on that musician. The doctor in Detroit said he was in a hopeless state, he wouldn’t live long. I saw I had to get him out of Michigan. I wasn’t going to have my brother committed.”

“Again.”

“ Again, God damn you, if you know so much.”

“So you hired a couple of nurses and moved to California. No doubt reasoning that Californians were expendable, in case he tried to shoot somebody else.”

She turned from the card-table to look at my face, try to assess my meaning. “California was her idea. Anyway, I don’t see why you go on about killing. I keep him under close guard. The idea that Leo did these murders is ridiculous.”

“You didn’t take it so lightly when I brought it up. You’ve worked like a dog since I got here to build up his alibi. On top of that you’ve outlined his defense on a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity, complete with medical witnesses.”

“I’ve been showing you that Leo can’t be tried for murder, let alone convicted.”

“Why go to all that trouble if the idea is ridiculous?”

She bent forward stiffly in her chair, planting her feet on the floor: “You wouldn’t want to harass a poor sick guy. What happens if you tip the cops in? They’ll pin a bum rap on him, with his record, or if that doesn’t work they’ll send him away.”

“There are worse places than a state hospital.” I was sitting in one.

“I can’t face it,” she said. “He was in before and I saw how they treated him. He’s got a right to spend his last days with somebody that loves him.”

Though she said them with great intensity, the words fell flat. I studied her head, slanting square and hard out of the gold coat. On the window side the sun cast her face in rosy relief. Its other side was in shadow so deep by contrast that she looked like half a woman. Or a woman composed half of flesh and half of darkness.

“How long do the doctors give him?”

“Not more than a year. You can ask them at the clinic. Two years at the outside.”

“Anywhere from one hundred to three hundred grand.”

“What the hell do you mean by that?”

“My information is that Leo draws two to three grand a week from a numbers ring in Michigan. That adds up to a possible total of three hundred grand in two years, before taxes if you pay taxes.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Money,” I said. “Don’t tell me you’re not handling Leo’s money. I wouldn’t believe it.”