Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“We’ve met. I know his record.”

She was beyond surprise. “You don’t know Leo like I know Leo. I wish I never set eyes on him.”

“He was picked up for contributing about ten years ago. Were you the minor?”

“Uh-huh. He was the connection I told you about, the one with the hat-check concessions in the clubs. We both got sneezed the same night, and they found out we lived in the same hotel room. He got off easy. The court doctor said he was batty, I could of told them that. They stuck him away in the booby-hatch for a spell, until Una talked him out of there. She’s been talking him out of jams since he was a kid.”

“Not this one,” I said. “Now what about Singleton?”

“Me and Charlie?”

“You and Charlie.”

“He was the one big love of my life,” her cracked lips said. Her bleached hands moved down her smooth jersey body from breasts to thighs, wiping out a memory, or reviving it. “I met him too late, after I married Sam. Sam and I were living together in Arroyo Beach, and Sam was all work and no play, and that was never for me. Charlie picked me up in a bar. He had everything, looks and class and an Air Force officer’s uniform. Real class. Class was the one thing I really wanted. I went with him the first night and it worked like magic. I didn’t know what it was before Charlie showed me. Leo and Sam and the others never even scratched my surface.

“Charlie had to go back to Hamilton Field but he’d fly down weekends. I waited for those weekends. Then Sam went to sea and I couldn’t even remember what he looked like. I can’t remember now. It was different when Charlie went. He went all the way to Guam. He couldn’t fly back from there. The waiting stretched out, and he didn’t write.

“Sam wrote though, and Sam was the first to come back. I made the best of a bad job. After all I was married to the guy. We settled down in Bella City and I cooked his chops for him and said hello how are you to the cheesy patients he had. I never mentioned Charlie to him but I guess he figured it out from the things I didn’t say. It wasn’t any good at all after Sam came back. I stuck it for one year, keeping track of Charlie in the Arroyo newspaper and marking off the days on the calendar. I crossed off every day for a year. I got up early in the morning to cross them off and then I went back to bed.

“One Saturday morning I didn’t go back to bed. I got on a bus and rode to Arroyo Beach and phoned Charlie and we started over again, nearly every weekend. That was the summer of forty-six, I guess. It didn’t last. He said goodbye in September and went back to Boston to take a course at Harvard Law School. I stayed with Sam that winter. It was a long winter. Summer was good when it came but it didn’t last. It never lasted. Next year when the rains came in the valley and I saw that green stuff on the hills I couldn’t stick it. I couldn’t even hear what Sam was saying any more; it went through my head like wind.

“I got on a train for New York and from there to Boston, Massachusetts. Charlie was living in his own apartment in Belmont, but he wasn’t glad to see me. He said I was part of his California vacations, I didn’t fit into his Boston life. Scat. I told him what he was, and I walked out of there with nothing on but a dress. It was March, and it was snowing. I was going to walk into the river because the name of it was the Charles River and that would drive him crazy. I hoped.

“I looked at the river for a while with the snowflakes falling into it. Then I walked to the end of the subway and rode downtown. I didn’t even rate a cold out of it. For a long time then I lived on Scollay Square, getting back at Charlie. I phoned him once to tell him what I was doing. He hung up on me. That night it was the third rail in the subway I looked at. I stood and looked at it for over an hour, and I couldn’t move forward or back.

“A character in a boiled shirt saw me watching the third rail and picked me up. He turned out to be an unemployed ballroom-dancer from Montreal. Paul Theuriet. I supported him the rest of that year while we tried to work up an act together. Ever hear of Lagauchetière Street in Montreal?”

“I never did.”

“It’s rugged, and so was the act. Paul said I could make a dancer out of myself. God knows I tried. I was too clumsy or something. He was old and gouty in the joints. We did get ourselves booked into a few third-string clubs in Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Toledo. Then we were stranded in Detroit. I was waiting table in a beer joint, trying to raise enough money for limber-legs to open a dance studio, getting nowhere. We tried the old badger a couple of times. Paul fumbled it and ran out to Canada, left me holding the bag. That was where Leo came into my life again.”

“It’s about time.”

“You asked for all of it,” she said with a wry stubborn smile. This was her saga, all she had to show for her life, and she was going to tell it her own way: “Leo heard that I was in the Detroit clink for extortion. He was going good again, a medium big gun in Michigan numbers. He had pull with the cops, and he hadn’t forgotten me. He sprung me out of that rap. After all those years, I moved back in with Leo and his sister. No class, but the chips. I was in the chips.”

“So you lived happily ever after, and that’s why you’re not here.”

“It isn’t funny,” she said. “Leo started to have the fantods, worse than ever. It got so bad I sent some money to Sam, for an insurance policy. I thought if it got too bad I could come out here and retire on Sam. They didn’t know about Sam.”

“They?”

“Leo and his sister. She handled the money for Leo after his memory faded. Leo blew his top the end of last year. He tried to gun an orchestra leader for no good reason at all. We took him to a doctor and the doctor said he’d been sick for twenty years and was in the final stage of paresis. We couldn’t keep him in Michigan after that. He had enemies in the organization. The money boys and the underdogs with the irons were both turning against him. Leo never laid anything on the line for his share of those banks. All he ever put up was his hard-nose reputation and his connections. If they knew he lost his mind they’d cut him out, or cut him down. So it was California here we came. I sold Una on Arroyo Beach.

“Ever since Boston, when Charlie Singleton kicked me out of his life, I had this certain idea busting my brain. He thought I was from hunger, and I thought if I went back to Arroyo Beach with money on my back I’d make him squirm. Pass him on the street and pretend I didn’t know him. Anyway, that was my idea. When I did see him again, I did a quick reverse and there I was back at the old stand, Saturday nights in his studio. I didn’t care about anything he did to me in the past. He was the only man I liked to be with. It went along like old times until a couple of weeks ago the lid blew off. When Leo found out about Charlie and me.” She paused, her eyes like fogged blue steel.

“Did he find out from Lucy?”

“Not a chance. Lucy was my one real friend in that house. Besides, she was a nurse. She had psychic – psychiatric training. She wouldn’t pull a raw deal like that on one of her patients. She was the one who warned us Leo was on the warpath. She came up the mountain in a cab one jump ahead of him.”

“Who sent Leo on the warpath?”

“Una did, at least that’s what we figured afterwards. Lucy drove me over to the hotel to keep my date with Charlie. When Lucy got back to the house, Una cross-questioned her about where I was and who I was with. Lucy wouldn’t talk, and Una fired her. I guess Una knew all about it already. She turned Leo loose and sicked him on us.

“Maybe the fantods ran in the family. Anyway, she must have been far gone with whatever it was she had, to give Leo a loaded gun and a green light. I didn’t understand it at the time. I was in the studio with Lucy when it happened. I looked out the window and saw Leo in the station-wagon with Una, and Charlie walking out to him, not realizing the danger. Charlie went right up to the station-wagon, and Leo shot him. Charlie fell down and got up again. Una took Leo’s gun away from him. We all stepped in and got him under control. Then Una put on an act about how Leo forced her to bring him there. I believed her, then. I was scared not to believe her. I’ve always been scared of Una.