Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“Whatever you think. Won’t you take the call?”

“She knows my voice. You talk to her. Tell her you have the money. You’ll buy her information, provided it’s backed up by proof. If she’s in Los Angeles or within driving distance, make an appointment for ten tonight, later if she insists. She’s to go to West Hollywood and park in front of 8411 1/2 Sunset Boulevard. You’ll contact her there.”

“I?”

“We both will.” I printed the address in my notebook, and tore the leaf out for her. “No matter how she gripes, don’t let her choose the meeting-place.”

“Why not?”

“You’re going to be with me. Bess may or may not be dangerous herself, but she has dangerous friends.”

She read the address I had printed. “What place is this?”

“My office. It’s a good safe place to talk to her, and I have built-in mikes. I don’t suppose you take shorthand?”

“ Pas trop. I can take some sort of notes.”

“How’s your memory? Repeat the instructions I gave you.”

She did, without an error, and said with the air of a child remembering her manners: “Come into the library, Mr. Archer. Let me make you some tea while we’re waiting. Or a drink?”

I said that tea would be fine. The telephone rang before I got a taste of it. It was Bess calling from Los Angeles.

At half past nine we were in my West Hollywood office. I called my answering service and was informed that a Mr. Elias McBratney of Beverly Hills had phoned twice on Saturday and would phone again on Monday. James Spinoza, Jr., of Spinoza Beach Garb, wished me to call him back as soon as possible about those shortages. A lady who declined to give her name had tried to reach me four times between eight ten and nine twenty. I thanked the operator and said I would take my own calls until further notice.

I turned out the desk lamp. The inner office was dimly lit by the rectangular white beam that fell from the outer room through the one-way panel in the glass door. A changing light thrown up from the Boulevard silhouetted the girl against the window.

“Look at the lights all up the sides of the hills,” she said. “I’ve never seen this city at night. It’s so new and aspiring.”

“New anyway.”

I stood behind her watching the cars run by in the road. I felt very close to Sylvia in the half-dark, and very conscious of time. The headlights flashed and disappeared like a bright succession of instants plunging out of darkness into darkness.

“Some day we’ll have to jack it up and put a foundation under it.”

“I like it the way it is,” she said. “New England is all foundation and nothing else. Who cares about foundations?”

“You do, for one.”

She turned, and her shoulder brushed me like a friendly movement of the darkness itself. “Yes, I do. You have foundations, Archer, don’t you?”

“Not exactly. I have a gyroscope arrangement. I’m afraid to let it stop spinning.”

“That’s better than foundations. And I don’t believe you’re afraid of anything at all.”

“Am I not.” I emitted a cynical-uncle chuckle which turned into a real laugh. Sylvia didn’t join in.

The telephone on the desk rang sharply. I reached for it and spoke into the mouthpiece: “Hello.”

No answer. Only a faint electric murmur, the sound of thin wire in thin space. A click at the other end. Dead line.

I dropped the telephone into its cradle. “Nobody there.”

“Perhaps it was the woman. Bess.” Sylvia’s face in the upward light from the window was white and enormous-eyed.

“I doubt it. She has no way of knowing this is my address.”

“Will she come, do you think?”

“Yes. She needs the money for a getaway.” I patted my fat breast-pocketful of bills.

“Getaway,” Sylvia said, like a tourist picking up a foreign word. “What a wretched life she must have led, and still be leading. Oh, I hope she comes.”

“Is it so important?”

“I have to know about Charles, one way or the other.” She added under her breath: “And I want to see her.”

“You’ll be able to.” I showed her the one-way panel in the door, and the earphones wired to the mike in the outer room. “You stay in here and take your notes. I’ll keep her in the other room. I don’t expect any trouble.”

“I’m not afraid. I was afraid of everything for so very long. I’ve suddenly got over it.”

At eight minutes to ten, a blue Chevrolet sedan passed slowly on the far side of the road, in the direction of Los Angeles. The face of the woman behind the wheel was caught in a photoflash of approaching headlights.

“That was Bess. You stay in here now and be still. Away from the window.”

“Yes.”

Closing doors behind me, I ran downstairs to the street. At two minutes to ten the Chevrolet came back and pulled up to the curb directly opposite the doorway where I was waiting, I crossed the sidewalk in three steps, opened the car door, pushed my gun into the woman’s side. She released the emergency brake and raced the engine. I plucked the key out of the ignition switch. She tried to scratch my face. I locked her fingers.

“Calm down, Bess. You’re caught.”

“When haven’t I been.” She drew a long sighing breath. “I could stand it better before I started bumping into you. Well, little man, what now?”

“The same as before, except that you’re going to do your talking to me.”

“Who says I am?”

“Five grand says it.”

“You mean you’ve got the money for me?”

“When you earn it.”

“And I can go free?”

“If you’re reasonably clean, and I don’t mean vice-squad stuff.”

She leaned close to study my eyes as if her future lay behind them. I leaned away.

“Let me see the money.”

“Upstairs in my office.”

“What are we waiting for then?”

She came out of the car, her body full and startling in a yellow jersey dress with a row of gold buttons down the front. I frisked her on the stairs and found no gun and burned my hands a little. But in the lighted room I saw that she was losing what she had had. Her past was coming out on her face like latent handwriting. Her powder and lipstick, alkali and orange in the fluorescent light, were cracking and peeling off. Grime showed in the pores of her nose and at the sides of her neck. Dissolution was working in her rapidly like a fatal disease she had caught from her husband that day.

She felt my look cold against her, and reached up automatically to straighten her hair. It was streaked greenish yellow and black. I guessed she had been working on it with peroxide half the afternoon, trying to reconstruct her image in a cheap hotel mirror. And I wondered what the girl behind the one-way panel was thinking.

“Don’t look at me,” Bess said. “I’ve had a bad day.”

She sat in a chair by the outer door, as far from the light as possible, and crossed her legs. Nothing could happen to legs.

“You’ve had a bad day coming,” I said. “Now talk.”

“Don’t I get a peek at the money?”

I sat down facing her and placed the five brown-paper-wrapped packages on the table between us. There was a microphone built into the table lamp, and I switched it on.

“Five grand, you said?”

“You’re dealing with honest people. You can take my word for it.”

“How much do I have to give you?”

“The whole thing. All you know.”

“That would take years.”

“I wonder. We’ll start with something simple. Who killed Singleton?”

“Leo Durano blasted him.” Her clouded blue gaze had returned to the packages of money. “Now I guess you want to know who Leo Durano is.”