Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

“Is the five grand ethical?”

“I promised you it was. I’ve been burned, I lost my license once–”

“No blackmail involved?”

“Absolutely not. If you want the honest truth, the thing’s so legal I’m afraid of it.”

“All right, here’s what I think. It isn’t Lucy she wants at all. Lucy’s a decoy duck for somebody else.”

“You catch on rapidly. Do you know who the somebody else is, though?”

“I haven’t identified her, no.”

“Uh-uh. Not her.” He smiled with superior knowledge. “ Him. I’ve got his name and description and everything else. And that black babe is going to lead us to him, watch.”

Heiss was emotionally carried away. His sherry-brown eyes slopped round in their sockets, and his hands congratulated each other. To me, his story sounded too good to be true. It was.

Lucy straightened suddenly and jumped up from the bench, heading for the back door of the waiting-room. I left Heiss standing. When I turned the rear corner of the station, Lucy was climbing into a green Ford coupé. Alex Norris was at the wheel. The Ford was rolling before the door slammed.

There was one taxi at the stand beside the station. Its driver was sprawled asleep in the front seat, his peaked cap over the upper part of his face, his mouth wide and snoring. Out of the tail of my eye, I saw the Ford turn north toward the highway.

I shook the driver awake. He was little and gray-haired, but he wanted to fight. “Take it easy, for Christ’s sake. What goes on?”

I showed him money. “Follow that Ford coupé.”

“All right, take it easy.”

Max Heiss tried to get in beside me. I shut the door in his face, and the taxi pulled away. We were in the street in time to see the Ford turn left at the highway intersection, towards Los Angeles. At the intersection a red light stopped us. It was a long time before it turned green again. We drove fast out of town, passing everything on the highway. No green Ford.

Five miles beyond the city limits, I told the driver to turn around.

“Sorry,” he said. “I couldn’t run that light with all the traffic going through. You have trouble with those people?”

“No trouble.”

When I got back to the station, Max Heiss had gone. That suited me just as well. I ordered breakfast, always a safe meal in the station lunchroom, and discovered when I started to eat it that I was hungry.

It was shortly after five o’clock when I back to the Mountview Motel.

Lucy’s key, with the numbered brass tag dangling from it, was in her door. I obeyed my impulse to knock. There was no answer. I looked around the court, which was sunk in the somnolence and heat of late afternoon. On its far side trailer children were chirping like crickets. I knocked again, listened to answering silence, turned the knob and stepped inside. Lucy was lying almost at my feet. I closed the door and looked at my watch. Five seventeen.

The roller blind was down over the window. Light slanted through the cracks in the blind, supporting a St. Vitus’s dance of dust motes. There was a wall switch beside the door, and I jogged it with my elbow. The yellow walls sprang up around me and the ceiling pressed down from overhead, ringed with concentric shadows. The light radiated from a wall bracket directly over Lucy. Its paper-shaded bulb shone down into her face, which was gray as a clay death-mask in a pool of black blood. Her cut throat gaped like the mouth of an unspeakable grief.

I leaned on the door and wished myself on the other side of it, away from Lucy. But death had tied me to her faster than any ceremony.

One of her arms was outflung. Beside the spread upturned hand something metal glinted. I stooped to look at it. It was a handmade knife with a curved six-inch blade and a black wooden handle ornamented with carved leaves. The blade was stained.

I stepped across Lucy towards the bed. It was identical with the bed in my room, its green rayon cover wrinkled where she had lain on it. At its foot her suitcases stood unopened. I opened one of them, using a clean handkerchief to mask my fingerprints. It was neatly packed with nurses’ uniforms, crisp and starched from the laundry. Like the private compartment of a divided life, the contents of the other suitcase were a jumbled mess. It had been packed in a hurry with a tangle of stockings, wadded dresses, soiled blouses and underwear, an Ebony and a sheaf of romance magazines, an Ellington album wrapped in red silk pajamas. I found an envelope tucked among the powders and creams in a side pocket.

It was addressed to Miss Lucy Champion, c/o Norris, 14 Mason, Bella City; and postmarked Detroit, Mich., Sept. 9. The letter inside lacked date or return address:

DEAR LUCY

Am very sorry you lost your job we all thot you got youself fixed up for Life but you never know what is going to come, sure we want you back honey can you raze the fair am afraid we cant. You father is out of work agin and am the soul sport of the family agin, hard to make ends meat. Can always give you a bed to sleep in honey something to eat, come home things will be better. Brother is still in school doing real good writting this for me (hi sis). Hope you can raze fair stay off the roads.

MOTHER

P.S. – How are you sis am fine, you know who.

I put the letter back where I had found it, and closed the suitcase. Its catch clicked loudly, like a final tick of time.

Lucy’s purse lay in a nest of dust in the corner behind her head. It contained lipstick and a handkerchief stained with it, a few ten- and five- and one-dollar bills and some change, a one-way ticket to Detroit, a social security card, and a newspaper clipping. The clipping was printed in old-fashioned type under a single-column head:

MOTHER OFFERS REWARD FOR MISSING MAN

Arroyo Beach, Sept. 8 (Special to the BELLA CITY PRESS.) Mrs. Charles A. Singleton, socialite resident of this resort town, today posted a reward of $5,000 for information concerning the whereabouts of her son. The son, Charles A. Singleton, Jr., disappeared from the public rooms of a local hotel one week ago, on the evening of September 1st. His friends and relatives have not heard from him since that date.

Singleton, a Harvard graduate and wartime Air Force Lieutenant, is of medium height and athletic build, with curly brown hair, hazel eyes and a ruddy complexion. When last seen he was wearing a grey worsted suit, white shirt, dark red tie, and black shoes, without hat or topcoat. The missing man, son of the late Major Charles A. Singleton, is heir to the Singleton agricultural enterprises. His maternal grandfather was Colonel Isaac Carlyle, who married Maria Valdes, daughter of the founder of the great Valdes land-grant estates.

Local police are inclined to reject suggestions of foul play, though Mrs. Singleton herself expresses fears for her son’s safety. County Sheriff Oscar Lanson states: “Kidnapping seems out of the question. There has been no ransom note, for one thing. As for foul play, the evidence indicates that Mr. Singleton left Arroyo Beach under his own power, for his own reasons. It is to be remembered that he is a young, unattached man, with a background of travel. We are, however, doing everything we can to locate him, and will welcome any information from the public.”

Anyone having information as to Singleton’s whereabouts was urged to contact Capt. Kennedy of the Arroyo Beach sheriff’s office.

I read the report twice, fixing the names, times, places, in my head, then replaced the clipping in the purse and the purse in the corner. In a way I knew less than before, as something written in a foreign language extends the range of your ignorance. I looked at my watch. Five twenty-four. Seven minutes since I had found Lucy.