Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

A bald man in a doctor’s smock jerked the inner door open. I raised the magazine in front of me and examined him over its edge. Large-eared and almost hairless, his head seemed naked, as if it had been plucked. His long face was dimly lit by pale worried eyes. Deep lines of sorrow dragged down from the wings of his large vulnerable nose.

“Come here,” he said to the receptionist. “You talk to her, for heaven’s sake. I can’t make head or tail of it.” His voice was high-pitched and rapid, furious with anger or anxiety.

The woman surveyed him coldly, glanced at me, and said nothing.

“Come on,” he said placatingly, raising a bony red hand towards her. “I can’t handle her.”

She shrugged her shoulders and passed him in the doorway. His stringy body cringed away from hers, as if she radiated scorching heat. I left the house.

Lucy came out ten minutes later. I was sitting in the barber shop beside Dr. Benning’s house. There were two men ahead of me, one in the chair having his neck shaved, the other reading a newspaper by the window. The newspaper-reader was an unstylish stout in a tan camel’s-hair jacket. There were purple veins in his cheeks and nose. When Lucy passed the window heading south, he got up hurriedly, put on a soiled panama, and left the shop.

I waited, and followed him out.

“But you are next, sir,” the barber cried after me. I looked back from the other side of the street, and he was still at the window, making siren gestures with a razor.

The man with the veined nose and the panama hat was halfway to the next corner, almost abreast of Lucy. She led us back to the railway station. When she reached it, a passenger train was pulling out towards the north. She stood stock-still on the platform until its smoke was a dissolving haze on the foothills. The man in the camel’s-hair coat was watching her, slouched like a barely animate lump of boredom behind a pile of express crates under the baggage-room arch.

Lucy turned on her heel and entered the station. A narrow window under the arch gave me a partial view of the waiting-room. I moved to another window, ignoring the man behind the express crates but trying to place him in my memory. Lucy was at the ticket window with green money in her hand.

The man edged towards me, his stout body wriggling along the wall as if the shade-latticed air offered solid resistance to its movement. He laid two soft white fingers on my arm.

“Lew Archer, n’est-ce pas?” The French was deliberate clowning, accompanied by a smirk.

“Must be two other people.” I shook the fingers loose.

“You wouldn’t brush me, boysie. I remember you but vividly. You testified for the prosecution in the Saddler trial, and you did a nice job too. I combed the jury panel for the defense. Max Heiss?”

He took off his panama hat, and a shock of red-brown hair pushed out over his forehead. Under it, clever dirty eyes shone liquidly like dollops of brown sherry. His little smile had a shamefaced charm, acknowledging that he had taken a running jump at manhood and still, at forty or forty-five, had never quite got his hands on it. – If it existed, the smile went on to wonder.

“Heiss?” he said coaxingly, “Maxfield Heiss?”

I remembered him and the Saddler trial. I also remembered that he had lost his license for tampering with prospective jurors in another murder trial.

“I know you, Max. So what if I do?”

“So we toddle across the street and I’ll buy you a drink and we can talk over old times and such.” His words were soft and insinuating, breaking gently like bubbles between his pink lips. His breath was strong enough to lean on.

I glanced at Lucy. She was in a telephone booth at the other end of the waiting-room. Her lips were close to the mouthpiece and moving.

“Thanks, not this time. I have a train to catch.”

“You’re kidding me again. There isn’t another train in either direction for over two hours. Which means you don’t have to be anxious the girl will get away, n’est-ce pas? She can’t possibly use that ticket she just bought for over two hours.” His face lit up with a practical joker’s delight, as if he had just palmed off an explosive cigar on me.

I felt as if he had. “Somebody’s kidding. I’m not in the mood for it.”

“Now don’t be like that. You don’t have to take offense.”

“Beat it, Max.”

“How can we do business if you won’t even bat the breeze?”

“Go away. You’re standing in my light.”

He waltzed in a small circle and presented his smirk to me again: “ Avee atquee valee, boysie, that means goodbye and hello. I’m on public property and you can’t push me off. And you got no monopoly on this case. If the true facts were known, I bet you don’t even know what case you’re on. I got a priority on you there.”

I couldn’t help being interested, and he knew it. His fingers returned like a troupe of trained slugs to my arm: “Lucy is my meat. I won her in a raffle by dint of sheer personal derring-do. Signed her up for a seven-year contract and just when I’m thinking of converting the deal into cash, lo and behold I stumble into you. In my alcoholic way.”

“That was quite a speech, Max. How much truth is there in it?”

“Nothing – but – the – truth – so – help – me – God.” He raised his palm in mock solemnity. “Not the whole truth, naturally. I don’t know the whole truth and neither do you. We need an exchange of views.”

Lucy came out of the telephone booth. Whenever she left an enclosed space her body huddled protectively into itself. She sat down on a bench and crossed her legs, leaning forward as if she had stomach cramps.

Heiss nudged me softly. His moist eyes shone. He might have been confiding the name of his beloved. “I do know there’s a great deal of money in it.”

“How much?”

“Five grand. I’d be willing to go fifty-fifty with you.”

“Why?”

“Simple panic, chum.” Unlike most natural liars, he could use the truth effectively. “Hit me and I black out. Shoot me and I bleed. Frighten me and I lose my controls. I’m not the courageous type. I need a partner who is, one that won’t tear me off.”

“Or a fall guy?”

“Perish the thought. This is strictly legal, believe me. You don’t often pick up twenty-five hundred legally.”

“Go on.”

“In a minute. Exchange of views is what I said. You haven’t told me a thing. What tale did the lady tell you, for example?”

“Lady?”

“Woman, dame, whatever she is. The one with the boyish bob and the diamonds. Didn’t she hire you?”

“You know everything, Max. How can I tell you something you don’t know?”

“You can try. What was her story to you?”

“Something about missing jewels. It wasn’t very convincing even at the time.”

“Better than the guff she handed me. Do you know what she gave me? That the girl was her late husband’s servant, and when he died he left a legacy to her, and she was the executrix of the estate. And oh mercy me I owe it to my poor dead husband to find Lucy and pay off.” With a nasty wit, he mimicked Una’s accents of false sentiment. “She must have thought she was dealing with an imbecile or something.”

“When was this?”

“A week ago. I spent a good solid week picking that black girl up.” He shot a vicious glance through the window at Lucy’s impervious back. “So I found her, and what happened? I phoned up the good executrix and asked her for further instructions, and she fired me.”

“What’s she trying to cover up, Max?”

“Are we in business?”

“That depends.”

“The hell. I offer you a half interest in a big deal, and you say that depends. That depends. I bare my bosom to you, and all you do is play clam. It isn’t ethical.”