Росс Макдональд - The Ivory Grin

In order to reach the door I had to step over her again. I looked down into the gray face before I switched off the light. Alienated and deeply sunk beyond time already, the face told me nothing. Then it was swallowed by shadows.

In the court, the yellow sunlight looked thin and faded, as if it had been late afternoon for an insupportable time. An old car turned in from the highway and rolled across the gravel to the trailers, leaving a feeble flurry of dust on the stagnant air. I waited for the dust to settle before I started across the court to the office. Before I reached it I saw that Alex Norris was watching me from the gate.

Moving with awkward speed in a pressed blue suit too small for him, he ran at me. I went to meet him and crouched for the onset. He was heavy and strong, and he knew how to use his weight. His shoulder took my midriff and laid me on the gravel on my back. I got up. He didn’t know how to use his fists. I stepped inside a wild swing and bent him with a body-blow. It brought his head forward for an uppercut. Instead, to save my knuckles and his face, I locked his right arm and used it as a lever to turn him away.

“Let me go,” he said. “Fight fair. I’ll show you.”

“You showed me. I’m too old to fight. Me and Joe.”

“He could beat your brains out,” the boy cried defiantly. “Turn me loose, I’ll do it myself. What were you doing in Lucy’s room?”

“Something’s happened to her.”

Bowed and immobilized by my hold, he had to crane his neck sideways to look at me. His black forehead was sprinkled with droplets of sweat, and his eyes were large and bright with expectations of disaster. “You’re a liar. Let me go.”

“Will you stand and talk to me, like a sensible man?”

“No.” But the word lacked force. The brightness of his eyes was glazing, would turn to tears in a minute. He was a boy in a man’s frame. I released him.

He straightened slowly, rubbing his cramped arm. Beyond him, on the other side of the court, a ragged line of spectators was moving slowly towards the lure of violence.

“Come into the office, Alex.”

He stiffened. “Who’s going to make me?”

“Nobody’s going to make you. Come on, anyway.”

“I don’t have to.”

“How old are you, Alex?”

“Nineteen, going on twenty.”

“Ever been in trouble?”

“I never have. Ask my mother.”

“Lucy your girl friend?”

“She’s not my girl friend. We’re going to get married.” He added, with pathetic irrelevance: “I can support a wife.”

“Sure you can.”

His bright gaze was painful on my face. “Is something the matter? Why did you go in there?”

I groped back for the impulse that had made me knock on Lucky’s door and go in. “To talk to her. To warn her to leave town.”

“We are leaving, tonight. That’s what I’m waiting for. She came to get her things.” As if it were being turned by a long-handled wrench against his will, his head turned on his shoulders to look at the closed door of number seven. “Why doesn’t she come out? Is she sick?”

I said: “She’s not coming out.”

The gallery of onlookers from the trailers was straggling across the court, uttering small sounds of menace and excitement. I pulled the office door open and held it for Alex. He went in past me, moving nothing but his legs.

The man who loved Ethel and nobody else was sitting on the studio bed with his back to the door, a half-empty Coke bottle in his fist. He rose and padded to the counter, casting a backward glance at the studio bed. From the cover of a magazine spread open on its pillow, a bare-bosomed woman screamed soundlessly for assistance.

Disregarding her pleas, the pink-haired man said: “What can I do for you?” Then his slow nerves reacted to the black boy: “What does he want?”

“The telephone,” I said.

“Local call?”

“The police. Do you know the number?”

He knew it. “Trouble?”

“In number seven. Go and take a look. I wouldn’t go in, though. Don’t let the others, either.”

He leaned on the counter, his belly oozing over its edge like cottage cheese in a bag. “What happened?”

“Look for yourself. Give me the telephone first.”

He handed me the telephone, hustled to the door and out. Alex tried to follow him. I kept my right hand on the boy’s arm and dialed with my left. When he heard what I had to say to the desk sergeant he fell forward across the counter, catching his weight on his forearms. The upper half of his body was shaken by an inaudible sobbing. The desk sergeant said that he would send a car right out.

I shifted my hand to the boy’s back. He shied away from it as if I were trying to stab him.

“What were you doing out there, Alex?”

“Minding my own business.”

“Waiting for Lucy?”

“If you know, you don’t have to ask me.”

“How long were you waiting?”

“Nearly half an hour. I drove around the block a couple of times and came back.”

I looked at my watch: five thirty-one. “She went in about five o’clock?”

“It was just about five.”

“Did she go in alone?”

“Yes. Alone.”

“Did anybody else go in afterwards?”

“Not that I saw.”

“Did anybody come out?”

“You did. I saw you come out.”

“Besides me. Before me.”

“I didn’t see. I drove around the block.”

“Did you go in?”

“No, sir. I didn’t go in.”

“Why not?”

“She said she’d only be five minutes. Her bags, they were still packed.”

“You could have gone in.”

“I didn’t want to. She didn’t want me to.”

“Lucy was passing, wasn’t she?”

“What if she was? There is no law against passing in this state.”

“You’re well informed,” I said. “Going to school?”

“I just started junior college. But I’m quitting.”

“To get married?”

“I’ll never get married. I’ll never marry anybody now. I’ll run away and lose myself.” With his head dejected below his shoulders, he was speaking to the scarred top of the counter.

“You’re going to have to stick around and answer a lot of questions. Pull yourself together.”

I shook him roughly by the shoulder. He wouldn’t turn or move until the siren whooped on the highway. Then his head came up like an animal’s at bay.

A black patrol-car ground to a stop on the gravel outside the office. A plainclothesman got out, mounted the stoop, and filled the doorway. In spite of his gray fedora and baggy gray clothes, he looked as if he had always been a policeman – had teethed on handcuffs, studied his lessons in the criminal code, pounded out his career on broken pavements, in nocturnal alleys. Scarred and seamed by fifty years of sun and other weather, his face was a relief map of life in the valley.

“I’m Brake, lieutenant of detectives. You the one that phoned?”

I said I was. “She’s in room seven, at the end of the court.”

“Dead?”

“Very.”

Alex let out a choked noise. Brake took a step towards him and looked him over closely. “What are you doing here?”

“Waiting for Lucy.”

“She the one that’s dead?”

“Yes, sir.”

“You’re going to have a long wait. Did you cut her?”

Alex looked at the detective as if he were a tree too thick to climb. “No, sir.”

“You’re Annie Norris’s boy, aren’t you?”

“Yes, sir.”

“How’s your mother going to like this?” Before Alex could answer Brake turned to me: “Did he cut her?”

“I doubt it. He stayed around after it happened. They were on their way to get married, he says.”