The Ivory Grin (26 page)

“A character in a boiled shirt saw me watching the third rail and picked me up. He turned out to be an unemployed ballroom-dancer from Montreal. Paul Theuriet. I supported him the rest of that year while we tried to work up an act together. Ever hear of Lagauchetière Street in Montreal?”

“I never did.”

“It’s rugged, and so was the act. Paul said I could make a dancer out of myself. God knows I tried. I was too clumsy or something.
He
was old and gouty in the joints. We did get ourselves booked into a few third-string clubs in Niagara Falls, Buffalo, Toledo. Then we were stranded in Detroit. I was waiting table in a beer joint, trying to raise enough money for limber-legs to open a dance studio, getting nowhere. We tried the old badger a couple of times. Paul fumbled it and ran out to Canada, left me holding the bag. That was where Leo came into my life again.”

“It’s about time.”

“You asked for all of it,” she said with a wry stubborn smile. This was her saga, all she had to show for her life, and she was going to tell it her own way:

“Leo heard that I was in the Detroit clink for extortion. He was going good again, a medium big gun in Michigan numbers. He had pull with the cops, and he hadn’t forgotten me. He sprung me out of that rap. After all those years, I moved back in with Leo and his sister. No class, but the chips. I was in the chips.”

“So you lived happily ever after, and that’s why you’re not here.”

“It isn’t funny,” she said. “Leo started to have the fantods, worse than ever. It got so bad I sent some money to Sam, for an insurance policy. I thought if it got too bad I
could come out here and retire on Sam. They didn’t know about Sam.”

“They?”

“Leo and his sister. She handled the money for Leo after his memory faded. Leo blew his top the end of last year. He tried to gun an orchestra leader for no good reason at all. We took him to a doctor and the doctor said he’d been sick for twenty years and was in the final stage of paresis. We couldn’t keep him in Michigan after that. He had enemies in the organization. The money boys and the underdogs with the irons were both turning against him. Leo never laid anything on the line for his share of those banks. All he ever put up was his hard-nose reputation and his connections. If they knew he lost his mind they’d cut him out, or cut him down. So it was California here we came. I sold Una on Arroyo Beach.

“Ever since Boston, when Charlie Singleton kicked me out of his life, I had this certain idea busting my brain. He thought I was from hunger, and I thought if I went back to Arroyo Beach with money on my back I’d make him squirm. Pass him on the street and pretend I didn’t know him. Anyway, that was my idea. When I did see him again, I did a quick reverse and there I was back at the old stand, Saturday nights in his studio. I didn’t care about anything he did to me in the past. He was the only man I liked to be with. It went along like old times until a couple of weeks ago the lid blew off. When Leo found out about Charlie and me.” She paused, her eyes like fogged blue steel.

“Did he find out from Lucy?”

“Not a chance. Lucy was my one real friend in that house. Besides, she was a nurse. She had psychic—psychiatric training. She wouldn’t pull a raw deal like that on one of
her patients. She was the one who warned us Leo was on the warpath. She came up the mountain in a cab one jump ahead of him.”

“Who sent Leo on the warpath?”

“Una did, at least that’s what we figured afterwards. Lucy drove me over to the hotel to keep my date with Charlie. When Lucy got back to the house, Una cross-questioned her about where I was and who I was with. Lucy wouldn’t talk, and Una fired her. I guess Una knew all about it already. She turned Leo loose and sicked him on us.

“Maybe the fantods ran in the family. Anyway, she must have been far gone with whatever it was she had, to give Leo a loaded gun and a green light. I didn’t understand it at the time. I was in the studio with Lucy when it happened. I looked out the window and saw Leo in the station-wagon with Una, and Charlie walking out to him, not realizing the danger. Charlie went right up to the station-wagon, and Leo shot him. Charlie fell down and got up again. Una took Leo’s gun away from him. We all stepped in and got him under control. Then Una put on an act about how Leo forced her to bring him there. I believed her, then. I was scared not to believe her. I’ve always been scared of Una.

“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 boyfriend 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.

CHAPTER
30
:
    
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.”

“Bess didn’t destroy him.”

“I’m afraid you’re mistaken. Now that Bess is dead, I’m free to tell you the truth. She confessed to me that she shot him.”

“She was lying to you.”

He stood wide-legged and stubborn under the light, shaking his long head from side to side. “She couldn’t have been lying. No one would lie about such a thing.”

“Bess did. It was the only way she could persuade you to
take care of him. The crime was actually committed by Una Durano. Bess was a witness, as I said.”

He slumped into the chair. “Do you know that, for a fact?”

“I couldn’t prove it in court. I don’t have to. Una is dead, along with the competent witnesses, Singleton and Lucy and Bess.”

“Did this woman murder them all? What kind of a woman was she?”

“As hard and nasty as they come. But she didn’t kill them all. Bess was the only one she killed. She thought Bess had turned informer against her.”

“You said she murdered Singleton.”

“Not exactly.”

“You said she committed the crime,” he insisted.

“The crime was attempted murder, done by proxy, but you finished Singleton off. I think he’d still be alive if you hadn’t got your knife into him.”

Benning’s body jerked backwards. His large grimy hands moved towards each other across his denim-covered abdomen. The thumb and forefinger of one hand plucked at the coverall zipper as if it were a sutured incision in his flesh.

He found his voice: “This is utter nonsense. You can’t prove either the fact or the intent. Singleton’s death was pure accident. I couldn’t stop the internal hemorrhage.”

“You destroyed the body. That carries a lot of weight.”

“If you could prove it. But there is no body. You have nothing.” It was an echo of what he had said about himself.

“Singleton’s bones will do.”

“Bones?”

“The skeleton you rigged to hold Bess in line. It’s turned into a booby trap.”

“You’ve left me far behind.”

I moved the gun in my hand, drawing his attention to it. “Open the closet in the examination room.”