The Ivory Grin (13 page)

“I went to school once, strangely enough. That was before I came down with a bad case of art. What did you say the name was?”

“Archer.”

“I know
that
. The woman’s name, who told you about the stolen jewelry.”

“Mrs. Larkin. It’s probably an alias. Her first name is Una.”

“Small and dark? Fiftyish? Mannish type?”

“That’s Una. Was she your customer?”

Denise frowned into her beer, sipped meditatively, came up with a light foam mustache. “I shouldn’t be talking out loud like this. But if she’s using an alias, there must be something fishy.” Her dubious expression hardened into self-concern: “You wouldn’t quote me, to her or anybody else? My business is on the edge of nothing, I have a boy to educate, I can’t afford any sort of trouble.”

“Neither can Una, or whatever her name is.”

“It’s Una Durano,
Miss
Una Durano. At least that’s what she goes by here. How did
you
happen to know her?”

“I worked for her at one time, briefly.” The afternoon seemed very long ago.

“Where does she come from?”

“I wouldn’t know. I’m much more interested in where she is now.”

“I might as well tell all,” Denise said wryly. “She lives on the Peppermill estate, leased it early last spring. I heard she paid a fantastic sum: a thousand dollars a month.”

“The diamonds are real, then?”

“Oh yes, the diamonds are real.”

“And just where is the Peppermill estate?”

“I’ll tell you. But you won’t go and see her tonight?” She pressed my arm with strong fingers. “If you do, she’ll realize I told tales out of school.”

“This is real life, Denise.”

“I know it. It’s my personal real life. The hundred dollars
she paid me for that hat took care of the rent that month.”

“What month was it?”

“March, I think. It was the first one she bought in my shop. She’s been back a couple of times since.”

“It must have looked good on her, if anything could.”

“Nothing could. She has no feminine quality. Anyway, she didn’t buy the turban to wear herself. She paid for it, with a hundred-dollar bill. But it was the other woman with her who tried it on and wore it out of the shop.” Her hand was still on my arm, like a bird that had settled on a comfortable roost for the night. She felt my muscles tense. “What’s the matter?”

“The other woman. Describe her.”

“She was a lovely girl, much younger than Miss Durano. A statuesque blonde, with the most wonderful blue eyes. She looked like a princess in my hat.”

“Did she live with Miss Durano?”

“I can’t say, though I saw them together several times. The blonde woman only came into my shop that once.”

“Did you catch her name?”

“I’m afraid not. Is it important?” Her fingers were sculpturing the muscle patterns in my forearm.

“I don’t know what’s important and what isn’t. You have been helpful, though.” I stood up out of her grasp.

“Aren’t you going to finish your beer? You can’t go out there tonight. It’s after midnight.”

“I think I’ll have a look at the place. Where is it?”

“I wish you wouldn’t. Promise me anyway you won’t go in and talk to her, not tonight.”

“You shouldn’t have phoned her,” I said. “But I’ll make you a better promise. If I find Charlie Singleton, I’ll buy the most expensive hat in your store.”

“For your wife?”

“I’m not married.”

“Oh.” She swallowed. “Well. To get to the Peppermill house, you turn left at the ocean boulevard and drive out to the end of town, past the cemetery. It’s the first big estate beyond the cemetery. You’ll know it by the greenhouses. And it has its own landing field.”

She rose heavily and crossed the room to the door. The cat had torn the Kleenex hat into shreds that littered the carpet like dirty snowflakes.

CHAPTER
15
:
    
I drove back to the ocean boulevard
and turned south. A fresh breeze struck the windwing and was deflected into my face, carrying moisture and sea-smells. Behind the whizzing palm trees on the margin of my headlights, the sea itself streamed silver under the moon.

The boulevard curved left away from the beach. It climbed a grade past wind-tormented evergreens huddled arthritically on the hillside. A stone wall sprang up beside the road, amplifying the hum of the tires and the mutter of the engine. Beyond the wall, stone angels pointed at the sky; saints spread their arms in iron benediction.

The cemetery wall ended abruptly, and its place was taken by a spear-pointed iron fence. I caught glimpses through it of a great lawn returning to wilderness, beyond it a flat field with a corrugated-iron hangar at one end, a wind-sock blowing from its roof. I slowed down.

A heavy wrought-iron gate hung between obelisk-shaped gateposts, one of which had a large
FOR SALE
sign bolted
to it. I got out and tried the gate. It was chained and padlocked. Through its bars I could see a long straight drive lined with coconut palms, at its end a massive house surrounded with outbuildings. The sloping glass roof of a conservatory glinted at the end of one wing.

The gate was climbable. Iron leaves between the bars provided foot- and hand-holds. I switched off my headlights and went over it. Circling wide on the lawn away from the drive, I struggled through the waist-high grass and weeds. The traveling moon accompanied me to the house.

The building was Spanish Renaissance with a strong Inquisition hangover. Narrow windows barred with ornamental ironwork were set deep in its wide flat concrete face. A lighted window on the second floor formed a tall yellow rectangle striped with vertical bars. I could see part of the ceiling of the room, vague shadows dancing on it. After a while the shadows approached the window, grouping and solidifying into human form. I lay down flat on my back and pulled my jacket together over my shirt-front.

A man’s head and shoulders appeared at the bottom of the tall yellow rectangle. I made out dark eyes in a moony blur of face under a tangle of hair. The eyes were raised to the sky. I looked straight up into its dark blue well, moon-washed and dripping with stars, and wondered what the man at the window was seeing there, or looking for.

He moved. Two pale hands sprang out from his dark silhouette and gripped the bars framing his face. He swayed from side to side, and I saw the white blaze on one side of his tangled head. His shoulders writhed. He seemed to be trying to wrench the bars out of their concrete sockets. Each time he tried and failed, he said one word in a low growling guttural.

“Hell,” he said. “Hell. Hell.”

The word fell heavily from his mouth forty or fifty times while his body tugged and heaved, flinging itself violently from side to side. He left the window then, as suddenly as he had appeared in it. I watched his slow shadow retreat across the ceiling and dissolve out of human shape.

Moving closer to the wall, I worked along it to the ground-floor window in which a faint light showed. This opened into a long hallway with a rounded ceiling. The light came from an open door at its far end. Listening closely, I heard some kind of music, a thin jazz scrabbling and tapping on the lid of silence.

I circled the house to the left, past a row of closed garage-doors, a clay tennis-court patchily furred with twitch grass, a sunken garden overgrown with succulents. From its end a
barranca
widened down to a bluff that overhung the sea. Below the bluff, the sea slanted up like a corrugated-metal roof to the horizon.

I turned back to the house. Between it and the sunken garden there was a flagged patio walled with flowerboxes. Its tables and chairs were sand-blown and rusting, old iron relics of dead summers. Light fell among them from a picture window in the wall overhead. The jazz was louder behind the wall, like music at a dance to which I hadn’t been invited.

The window was uncurtained but set too high to give me a view of the room. The black-beamed ceiling was visible, and the upper part of the far wall. Its oak panels were crowded with paintings of pigeon-breasted women in lace caps and mutton-chop-whiskered men, narrow-shouldered in black Victorian coats. Somebody’s ancestors, not Una’s. She had been stamped out by a machine.

Standing on my toes, I could see the top of Una’s head covered with short black curls like caracul. She was sitting
perfectly still beside the window. A young man was sitting opposite her, his profile visible from the neck up. It was a heavy and amorphous profile, whatever strength it had concealed by pads of flesh under the chin, around the mouth and eyes. He had light brown hair bristling in an unkempt crew-cut. The focus of his attention was somewhere between him and Una, below the level of the windowsill. I guessed from the movement of his eye that they were playing cards.

The music behind the wall stopped and started again. It was the same old record,
Sentimental Lady
, being played over and over. Sentimental Una, I said to myself, just as the howling began. Distant and muted by intervening walls, the howling rose and fell like a coyote baying the moon. Or a man. The hair on the back of my neck prickled.

Una said, loudly enough to be heard through the plate-glass window: “For Christ’s sake shut him up.”

The man with the crew-cut rose into half-length view. He wore the white-drill smock of a nurse or orderly, but he had none of their air of efficiency. “What do I do, bring him down here?” He clenched his hands together in a womanish gesture.

“It looks as if you’ll have to.”

The howling rose again. The orderly’s head turned towards it and then his body followed. He walked away from the window, out of my sight. Una got up and marched in the same direction. Her shoulders were trim in a tailored black pajama-jacket. She turned the music louder. It poured through the house like a dark intangible surf, and like a drowning person’s, the man’s cry rose above it. His howling was stilled suddenly. The music went on, washing over the human echo.

Then there were voices in the room, Una’s voice weaving jerkily through the music: “Headache … get some peace … sedation”; and the growling guttural I had heard before, starting below the music and rising above it:

“I can’t. It is terrible. Terrible things going on. I got to stop them.”

“Old man Stopper himself. You’re the one to stop them all right.” It was the younger man’s mezzo, with a titter running through it.

“Leave him alone!” Una cried savagely. “Let him have his say. You want him to yell all night?”

There was silence again, except for the swirling music. I stepped across a flowerbox into the patio and leaned my weight on one of the rusted tables. It held firm. Using a chair as a step, I got up onto the tabletop. The table teetered on its base, and I had a bad moment before it leveled back. When I straightened up, my head was almost even with the windowsill ten feet away.

On the far side of the room, Una was standing over a radio-phonograph. She turned it low and walked directly towards the window. I ducked instinctively, but she wasn’t looking at me. With an expression in which outrage and tolerance were combined, she was watching the man who stood in the center of the room. The man with the blaze of white like a lightning scar on the side of his head.

His small body was wrapped in a robe of red brocaded silk which hung in folds as if he had borrowed it from a larger man. Even his face seemed to have shrunk inside its skin. Instead of jowls he had pale loose wattles that flapped with the movement of his mouth.

“Terrible things.” His broken growl was loud in the silence. “Going on all the time. I caught the dogs at my
mamma. They crucified my daddy. I climbed up out of the culvert up on the hill and saw the nails in his hands and he said kill them all. Kill them all. Those were his last streetcar I went down into the tunnel under the river and the dead boys lying the ragpickers strutting around with the rods in their pants.” He trailed off into an obscene medley of Anglo-Saxon and Italian.

The white-smocked orderly was sitting on the arm of a leather chair. The light from a standing lamp beside him gave him the unreality of a pink elephant. He called out like a rooter from the sidelines:

“You tell ’em, Durano. You got a beautiful engram, old boy.”

Una darted towards him, angry face thrust forward:
“Mister
to you, you lump of dough. Call him
mister!”

“Mister
Durano, then. Sorry.”

The man who bore the name raised his face to the light. The black eyes were flat and shiny, deep-sunk, like bits of coal pressed into soft snow brows.
“Mister
District Attorney,” he cried earnestly. “He said there was rats in the river, rats in the Rouge Plant. He said kill them off. Rats in the drinking-water, swimming in my blood-veins, Mr. Doctor Attorney. I promised to clean them out.”

“Give him the gun, for Christ’s sake,” Una said. “Get it over with.”

“For Christ’s sweet sake,” Durano echoed her. “I seen him on the hill when I come up out of the culvert. Horseshoe nails in his hands, and the dogs at my mother. He give me the gun, said keep it in your pants boy, you get rats in the bloodstreams. I said I would clean them out.” His thin hand dove like a weasel for the pocket of his bathrobe. It came out empty. “They took my gun. How can I clean
them out when they took my rod away?” He raised his doubled fists in an agony of rage and beat his forehead with them. “Give me my gun!”

Una went to the record-player, almost running, as if a wind were hurrying her along. She turned it loud and came back to Durano, struggling step by step against the psychic wind that was blowing in the room. The fat orderly hitched up his smock and took a black automatic from under his belt. Durano pounced on him feebly. The orderly offered no resistance. Durano wrenched the automatic from his hands and backed away a few feet.

“Now!” he said with authority. He uttered a string of obscenities as if his mouth was full of them and he was spitting them out to be rid of them. “Now, you two, hands on the heads.”

The orderly did as he was told. Una lined up beside him with her hands in the air, rings flashing. Her face was expressionless.