Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

An irrepressible faint smile appeared on her mouth, as if I had flattered her subtly. “I have big expenses, very big expenses.”

“Sure you have. Mink, diamonds, an ocean-front estate. They all cost money.”

“Medical expenses,” she said, “you wouldn’t believe.”

“Sure. You’ve got to keep him alive. The income lasts as long as he does. As long as you keep him under wraps, he’s a boss racketeer on Sabbatical leave drawing his weekly take. But when he dies, or the cops lock him up, or news of his condition gets back to Michigan, it’s finished for you. You’re a pretty hard type but I don’t see you going back to Michigan and fighting a war of succession with his mob. If you could do that, you wouldn’t have to come to me in the first place.”

She sat in silence, shivering a little inside the metal coat. Then she took up the gathered half of the deck and flung it down at random on the table. Brushed by her sleeve, a glass fell to the floor and broke.

“You didn’t figure this out for yourself,” she said in cold still anger. “It was Bess Wionowski put you onto it.”

“She may have helped.”

“That’s Wionowski’s gratitude.” A hard pulse kicked like a tiny animal tangled in the veins of her left temple. “She was on her uppers, last year when Leo took her back. We ransomed her out of a cell in Detroit city jail and treated her like a queen. When we came out here to Cal, we even let her choose the town to live in. I might of known she had a reason for picking this place.”

“Singleton,” I said.

The name acted on Una like an electric shock. She jumped to her feet, kicking out at the shards of glass on the floor as if she hated everything actual. “The filthy disloyal filly. Where is she now? Where is she? If you got her hid out waiting for her cut, you can go back and tell her I don’t pay off to squealers.”

She stood above me in a spiteful rage, less than half a woman now, a mean little mannish doll raving ventriloquially.

“Come down to earth,” I said. “You’ll give yourself a migraine. Neither of us wants your dirty money.”

“If my money’s so dirty, what are you sucking around for?”

“Just the truth, sweetheart. You know what happened to Singleton, if anybody does. You’re going to tell me.”

“And if I don’t?”

“You tell the cops. I’ll have them here before dark.”

She sat on the edge of her chair and looked out at the setting sun. Half down on the horizon, its red hemisphere was like a bird’s giant eye on which the inflamed blue underlid was shutting slowly.

“How did it happen?” I said.

“Give me a chance to think–”

“You’ve had two weeks. Now talk.”

“It was all Bess Wionowski’s fault. The big estate and the high living weren’t good enough for that Chicago chippie. Way last spring she started dating this guy from the Hill, this Singleton scion. I figured she knew him from when she lived here during the war. Before long she was spending nights with him. I tried to keep it from Leo but he found out about it some way. He has his lucid times, anyway he had until two weeks ago. It was a Saturday night, and Bess was up the mountain with her highfalutin boy friend, set to make beautiful music. Leo found out where she was, from Lucy Champion, I guess. Lucy was supposed to be looking after him that night. When he blew off, she couldn’t handle him. Lucy called a taxi and went up the hill to warn the – lovers .” The word had an obscene sound in Una’s mouth.

“Where were you?”

“Downtown. When I got back Leo was waiting for me with a gun. He’d taken the springs off his bed and broken the door down and found the gun in my room. He made me drive him up to Singleton’s studio, forced me at gunpoint to do it. Singleton came out of the door, and Leo shot him in the guts. I grabbed Leo from behind as soon as he turned that gun away from me. It took all four of us to tie him.”

“All four?”

“Me and Bess and Lucy. Lucy was there. And Singleton.”

“Singleton was shot, you said.”

“He could still navigate, the last I saw of him. I left right away when we got Leo under control. I had to get Leo home.”

“So you don’t know what happened to Singleton?”

“No. They all three dropped out of sight. I hired Max Heiss to find out if Singleton was alive or dead. He watched the Singleton house all last week. On Thursday Lucy turned up there, sniffing around for the reward I guess. Heiss rode the bus back to Bella City with her and found out more than he ever turned in to me. Friday night he reported to me and claimed he lost Lucy in Bella City. I knew he was crossing me because he dropped a hint about the shooting. He was going to let me buy him off and then collect the Singleton reward besides.”

“So you killed him for being greedy.”

“Think again.”

“You were the one with everything to lose. Lucy and Heiss were the ones to lose it for you.”

“I still have everything to lose. Would I hand you all this on a silver platter if I wasn’t clear?”

“Who else had a reason to kill them?”

“Bess,” she said harshly. “Lucy was in touch with Bess in Bella City, I could tell by talking to Lucy. Max Heiss was on her track. How do I know what Bess did with Singleton? Maybe he died on her hands and that made her accessory. Bess couldn’t stand a police investigation. Bess has a record going back ten years.”

I stood up and moved towards her and stood over her: “Did you remind Bess of her record, up at Singleton’s cabin, after your brother shot him? Is that why she dropped out of sight and took Singleton into hiding?”

“Figure it out for yourself.”

“You scared her into hushing it up, didn’t you? Purely out of sisterly devotion, of course, to protect your brother, and his income.”

She shifted restlessly in the chair, doubling her legs under her to tighten her defenses. “What other reason would I have?”

“I’ve been casting around for one,” I said. “I thought of something that happened in Los Angeles about fifteen years ago, to a man and his wife and their son. The son was a Mongoloid idiot, and the man hated his wife for giving him that son. When the boy was ten or twelve years old, his father bought a shotgun and took him out on the desert and taught him to shoot. The boy had brains enough to pull the trigger of a shotgun. One night the father handed him the gun and told him to shoot his mother. She was asleep in bed. The boy blew her head off, being eager to please. He wasn’t prosecuted. But his father was, though he hadn’t physically committed the murder. He was convicted on a first-degree charge and put away with cyanide.”

“Too bad for him.”

“Too bad for anybody who tries to do murder by proxy. If you incite an insane person to commit a crime you’re legally guilty of it. Did you know that was the law when you drove your brother up the mountain to Singleton’s cabin and handed him a gun?”

She looked up at me with loathing, the muscles weaving and dimpling around her mouth. On the left side of her head where the knotted veins jerked, her face had swelled lopsided, as if moral strain had pushed or melted it out of shape. The light from the window fell on her like visible heat from an open furnace-door.

“You’ll never bum-rap me,” she said. “You haven’t even got a body. You don’t know where golden boy is any more than I do.”

Her statement turned at the end into a question. I left the question turning like a knife in her brain.

Lights shone like wit in a dowager behind the windows of the Palladian villa. The green spectrum of its lawns and trees was deepening around it into solid green darkness. I parked under the porte-cochère and yanked at the old-fashioned bell-pull that hung by the side entrance.