Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“She said the shooting had to be hushed up, or else. It had to be as if nothing happened. No hospital for Charlie, and him doubled up in his car. I was afraid to argue with Una. I took what clothes I had in the studio and drove Charlie and Lucy over the pass to Bella City.

“I’d been to see Sam Benning a couple of times in the spring and summer, in case I ever needed him. He thought I was working in L.A., modeling clothes. We were on pretty good terms, but I couldn’t tell Sam the truth: that one boy-friend shot the other and Sam was to make it all come right in the end. I played it as strong as I could with Sam. I told him Charlie had made a rough pass and I shot him myself. Lucy backed me up. Charlie was past talking by then.

“Sam believed me. He made me promise if he fixed Charlie up I had to stick with him in Bella City from then on and be a wife to him. I promised. He had me over a barrel.

“Maybe the wound was worse than it looked at first, or Sam isn’t much of a surgeon. He blamed Lucy for what happened, said she fouled up the operation trying to assist him. Sam was always a man to shift blame onto other people’s shoulders. Anyway Charlie died that night, right on the table in the examination room, before he came out of the ether.”

“Who gave him the anesthetic?”

“I don’t know, I wasn’t there. I couldn’t stand to see him bleeding.”

“You’re a strange woman, Bess.”

“I don’t think so. How could I watch Sam cutting into him? Charlie was my boy. I loved him.”

“I’ll tell you what’s really strange,” she added after an interval: “The people you love are never the ones that love you. The people that love you, the way Sam loved me, they’re the ones you can’t love. Sam was a good man when I first knew him. But he was too crazy about me. I couldn’t love him, ever, and he was too smart to fool. It ruined him.

“He did a wild thing that Sunday morning. There was Charlie dead in his house, and Sam thinking I had shot him. I couldn’t change my story at that late date. Sam was afraid he was going to lose me again, and it pushed him over the edge. He butchered Charlie, cut him up into pieces like a butcher. He locked the cellar door on me, wouldn’t let me down there. I could tell from the noises what he was doing. There was a laundry tub and an old gas stove down there that his mother left behind her when she died. When he was through, there was nothing but bones left. He spent the next three nights working on them, putting them together with wire. Sam always was good with his hands. When it was all wired together and varnished and dried, he riveted on a tag from a medical-supply house and hung the thing in a closet. He said that was the skeleton in my closet and if I ever left him–” She drew a fingernail across her throat.

There was a muffled cry from the inner room.

“And that’s your proof?” I said loudly.

“You’ll find it in the closet off his examination room. Unless you already did?”

“What did he do with Charlie’s car?”

“Hid it in the barn, under some old boards and tarpaulins. I helped him.”

“Did you help him burn Max Heiss, when Max found the car?”

Bess didn’t hear me. An intermittent sobbing and gasping rose and fell in the inner room. Bess was listening to it, the flesh haggard on the bones of her face like wet clay drooping on an armature.

“You crossed me, you,” she said.

Something fell softly and heavily against the inside of the glass-paneled door. I went to it. The door was hard to open because Sylvia had fainted against it. I reached around its edge and turned her onto her back. The metal earphones pincered her closed white face. Her eyes came open: “I’m sorry. I’m such a fool.”

I started for the water cooler. Bess was at the outer door, fumbling with the Yale lock. The packages of bills were gone from the table.

“Sit down,” I said to her straining yellow back. “I haven’t finished with you.”

She didn’t answer. All her remaining energy was focused on escape. The lock snapped back. The door opened inwards with Una pushing behind it from the hallway.

Una’s mouth was wet. Her eyes were blind with the same darkness I had seen on her brother’s face. The gun in her hand was real.

“I thought you’d be here with him. This is the payoff, Wionowski, to squealers and false friends.”

“Don’t do it.” Bess was leaning off balance against the opening door, still bent on escape.

I moved sideways to the wall, bringing my gun out fast, not fast enough. Bess staggered backwards under the blow of the first shot from Una’s gun and went down under the second. The twin explosions smashed like bones in my head.

I shot to kill. Una died on her feet, of a smudged hole in the temple, and thumped the floor. I held Sylvia’s hand until the police arrived. Her hand was ice cold at first. After a while it was a little warmer, and I could feel her blood beating.

The starred sky arched like a crystal roof over the town. The valley floor was like the floor of a cave, the mountains blunt stalagmites against its glimmering walls. Once I got off the highway, the streets of Bella City were deserted. Its midnight buildings, leached of color by the alkali moonlight, stood like gray shadows on their own black shadows.

Parking at Benning’s curb, I rang the bell and heard its complaint inside the house. A door creaked open at the rear of the hallway. Benning passed through its widening shaft of light and shut the door behind him. His face appeared above the cardboard patch in the corner of the window. It was crumpled and streaked like a discarded charcoal-sketch of itself.

He opened the front door. “What is it? Why have you come here?”

“Let me see your hands, doctor.” I showed him the gun in mine.

He stepped out onto the porch, bulky in a zippered blue coverall, and held out his empty hands.

“They’re dirty,” he said. “I’ve been doing some cleaning in the house.”

“Your wife is dead.”

“Yes. I know. They phoned me from Los Angeles. I’m getting ready to go.” He glanced down at my gun as if it were an obscenity that shouldn’t be mentioned. “Perhaps they sent you to fetch me?”

“I came on my own.”

“To spy on my grief, Mr. Archer?” he asked with broken irony. “You’ll be disappointed. I can’t feel grief, not for her. I’ve suffered too much for her.” He turned up his dirty palms and looked down into them. “I have nothing.” His fists closed slowly on moonlight. “Who is this woman who murdered her?”

“Una Durano. She’s dead, too. I shot her.”

“I’m grateful to you for that.” His words were as insubstantial as his double fistful of moonlight. “Why did she do it to Bess?”

“She had various reasons. Your wife was a witness to the Singleton shooting, for one.”

“Bess? A witness?”

“She was there when Singleton was shot.”

“Who on earth was Singleton?”

“You know as well as I do, doctor. He was your wife’s lover almost as long as you were married to her.”

Benning looked up and down the empty street. “Come inside,” he said nervously. “I only have a few minutes, but we can talk there.”

He stood aside to let me enter first, maintaining a formal politeness like a wire-walker afraid to look down. I waved him in with my gun and followed him through the waiting-room into the consultation room. The inside of the house was suffocating after the chilly night air.

I pulled his swivel chair into the middle of the room. “Sit down, away from the desk.”

“You’re very hospitable,” he said with his down-dragging smile. “Bess was, too, in her way. I won’t deny that I knew of her affair with Singleton. Or that I was glad she shot him. It seemed fitting that she should be the one to destroy that arrogant young man.”