The Ivory Grin (8 page)

The desk-clerk beamed with pleasure at the sight of me. I was the fortunate traveler whose lady-friend in the expensive suite wore genuine leopardskin and probable diamonds.

“I’m looking after things for Mrs. Larkin,” I said. “May I see her room account?”

“Certainly, sir.” Plucking a large card from a filing drawer beside him, he leaned confidentially across the polished counter top. “I do hope Mrs. Larkin isn’t checking out. She tips quite beautifully. It’s good for general morale among the help.” His voice sank to a bashful murmur: “She isn’t a Hollywood personality, by any chance?”

“I’m surprised she told you.”

“Oh, she didn’t
tell
me. I deduced it. I recognize real class. Of course I did have a clue.”

His polished oval fingernail pointed to the top of the card. Una had given the Hollywood-Roosevelt Hotel as her home address. Below it, only three items were listed on the account: twelve dollars for the suite, which had been paid in advance; a telephone charge of $3.35; and $2.25 for room service.

“She’s been here less than one full day,” I said in a
penny-pinching way. “Three thirty-five seems like a lot of money for phone calls.”

His small mustache rose towards his nostrils as if it was about to be inhaled. “Oh no, it’s perfectly legitimate. It was all one call, long distance and person-to-person. I took care of it myself.”

“Isn’t that unusual?”

“I wish it were. The daytime operator goes off at five, and the night operator was a little late. I was at the switchboard myself when Mrs. Larkin called down.”

“At five?”

“Maybe one or two minutes after. I’d just sat down in front of the board that minute. Switchboards have always fascinated me.”

“You’re sure it was Mrs. Larkin?”

“Oh, absolutely. Her voice is quite unique. Is she an actress of some kind, a character actress?”

“You’re quite acute,” I said. “She is also a character in her own right. It’s hard to believe she’d spend that much money on a single phone call.”

“Just ask her!” He was cut to the quick, which was very near the surface. “Go and ask her.”

“Mrs. Larkin doesn’t like to be bothered with these trivial details. She employs me to protect her from them, in fact. Now, if it was a call to Detroit, I could understand it.”

“Ypsilanti,” he said eagerly. “It was to the Tecumseh Tavern in Ypsilanti. That’s right outside Detroit, isn’t it?”

I assumed a thoughtful expression. “Let’s see now, who does Mrs. Larkin know in Ypsilanti?”

“His name was Garbold. She asked for a man called Garbold, person-to-person.” But his eagerness was beginning to fade at the edges. He looked down at his vase of
cornflowers as if he suspected that noxious insects might be concealed among them.

“Of course. Garbold. Why didn’t you say so? There’s no trouble there. Mrs. Larkin will take care of it.” I scrawled my initials at the bottom of the card and left him quickly.

Una had been quicker. I knocked once on her door and got no answer. What I got was the feeling you get when you go to a great deal of trouble to hit yourself a sharp blow at the base of the skull with a rubber hammer.

The door wasn’t locked. The leopard coat was gone from the back of the chair. Bedroom and bathroom were as clean as a whistle. I left as Una had, by the fire escape.

In the alley behind the hotel, a woman in a shawl and a dragging black skirt was hunched over an open garbage-can. She looked up at me from an infinite network of wrinkles.

“Did a lady come down here? In a spotted coat?”

The ancient woman removed something from her mouth’s eroded crater. I saw it was a red steak-bone she had been gnawing. “Si,” she said.

“Which way did she go?”

She raised the bone without speaking, and pointed up the alley. I dropped the change from my pocket into her mummified hand.

“Muchas gracias, señor.”
Her black Indian gaze came from the other side of history, like light from a star a thousand years away.

The alley led to the hotel garage. Mrs. Larkin had taken her car out within the last five minutes. It was a new Plymouth station-wagon. No, they didn’t keep track of license numbers. Probably she’d left a forwarding address at the desk. Try there.

CHAPTER
9
:
    
I climbed the oil-stained concrete
ramp to the sidewalk and stood at its edge, undecided what to do. I had no client, no good leads, not much money. Regret for Una’s hundred-dollar bill was gnawing at me already, like a small hungry stomach ulcer. The crowd went by like a kaleidoscope continually stirred, in which I only just failed to discern a pattern.

It was an early Saturday-night crowd. Farmhands in jeans and plaid shirts, soldiers in uniforms, boys in high-school windbreakers, roved singly and in pairs and packs among women of all ages and all shades. Hard-faced women in hats towed men in business suits. Ranchers hobbling in high-heeled boots leaned on their sun-faded wives. Under the winking yellow lights at the intersection, long shiny cars competed for space and time with pickup trucks, hot-rods, migrant jalopies. My car was still in the court of the Mountview Motel. I stepped out into the crowd and let it push me south, towards the highway.

Above the highway corner there was a cigar store with a pay-telephone sign. Under the sign a quartet of Mexican boys were watching the world go by. They leaned in a row, one-legged like storks, their lifted heels supported by the windowsill of the shop, displaying mismatched fluorescent socks under rolled jeans. Keep Your Feet on the Sidewalk Please was lettered on the wall beside them in vain.

I detached myself from the crowd and went in through the shop to the telephone booth at the rear. Three taxi-drivers were shooting craps on the back counter. I looked up Dr. Samuel Benning’s number in the local directory, and
dialed it. At the other end of the line the phone rang twenty times. My nickel jangled in the coin return with the fanfare of a silver-dollar jackpot.

Before I reached the front door a young woman passed the window, walking south by herself. The four boys sprang into a burlesque routine. The one at the end pushed the one beside him, who almost caromed with the woman. He recovered his balance and rumpled the ducktail haircut of the third, who punched the fourth in the stomach. They staggered around in front of the entrance, breathless with simulated laughter.

I pushed out through them. The woman looked back in disdain. Though she had changed her striped gray uniform for a white batiste blouse and a white skirt, I recognized her face. She was the plump dark-eyed woman who had directed me into Dr. Benning’s waiting-room. The back of my neck began to itch where the bitch goddess coincidence had bitten me before.

The woman walked on, switching her red-ribboned horsetail of black hair above the soft round rotation of her hips. I followed her, with compunction. She reminded me of Lucy for some reason, though she was wide and low-slung where Lucy had been lean and high-stepping. She walked, with a similar air of knowing where she was going, into the section in which I had first seen Lucy. When she crossed the street and entered Tom’s Café, my compunction turned acute.

She paused inside the glass door to get her bearings. Then she set her course for one of the rear booths. A man was sitting in the booth with his back to the door. His panama hat showed above the low plyboard partition. He rose to greet her, buttoning his camel’s-hair jacket, and stood above her in an attitude of delight while she inserted
her hips between the seat and the table. As a final mark of devotion he removed his hat and smoothed his stubbly shock of brown hair with fat white fingers, before he sat down opposite her. Max Heiss was exerting charm.

I went to the bar, which covered the whole left wall of the café. The booths along the opposite wall were full, and the bar was packed with Saturday-night drinkers: soldiers and shrill dark girls who looked too young to be there, hard-faced middle-aged women with permanented hair, old men renewing their youth for the thousandth time, asphalt-eyed whores working for a living on drunken workingmen, a few fugitives from the upper half of town drowning one self to let another self be born. Behind the bar a hefty Greek in an apron dispensed fuel, aphrodisiac, opiate, with a constant melancholy smile.

I ordered a short rye and took it standing, keeping an eye on Heiss in the bar mirror. He was leaning far over the table towards the dark-eyed woman, and she was registering pleasant shock.

The booth behind him was vacated, and I crossed to it before the table was cleared. The room was surging with noise. A juke box bawled above the babel of tongues at the bar. An electric shuffleboard beside the liquor counter at the front gave out machine-gun bursts of sound at intervals. I propped myself in the corner of the seat with my ear pressed to the plyboard. A yard away, Heiss was saying:

“I been thinking about you all day, dreaming about those great big beautiful eyes. I been dreaming about those great big beautiful etcetera, too, sitting and dreaming about ’em. You know what an etcetera is, Flossie?”

“I can guess.” She laughed, like somebody gargling syrup. “You’re a great kidder. Incidently, my name isn’t Flossie.”

“Florie, then, what does it matter? If you were the only
girl in the world, which is what you pradically are as far as I’m concerned, what does it matter? You’re the girl for me. But I bet you’ve got plenty of boy friends.” I guessed that Max had been drinking all day, and had reached the point where anything he said sounded like poetry set to music.

“I bet I have, not. Anyways, it’s no business of yours, Mr. Desmond. I hardly know you.” But she knew the game.

“Come on over on this side and get to know me better, kid. Florie. Sweet name for a sweet kid. Did anybody ever tell you you got a mouth like a flower, Florie?”

“You certny got a line, Mr. Desmond.”

“Aw, call me Julian. And come on over. I warn you it isn’t safe. When I get close up to a great big beautiful etcetera, I want to take a bite out of it, I warn you.”

“You hungry or something?” I heard the rustle and creak of the girl’s movement into the near seat. “Incidently, Julian, I’m kind of hungry. I could eat something.”

“
I’m
going to eat
you.”
Max’s voice was muffled. “I guess I better fatten you up first, huh? You want a steak, and something to drink? After that, who knows?
Quien sabe
, isn’t that how you say it?”

“I only talk American,” she answered him severely. Having established that, she relaxed again: “A steak will be swell, Julian. You’re a real fun guy.”

Heiss hailed the waitress. She crossed the room, a lank henna-head mincing on tender feet. “What’ll it be?”

“A steak for the little lady. I’ve already dined myself.”

“Let’s see, you’re drinking sherry.”

“Very dry sherry,” said Desmond-Heiss.

“Sure, very dry.” She turned her head to one side and threw the line away: “Maybe you take it in powder form.”

“An Alexander for me,” the girl said.

“Sure, kiddie, have yourself a time.” But there was an undertone
in his voice, the no-expense-account blues. “Nothing’s too good for Florie.”

A woman came in from the street and walked quickly along the row of booths. Her wide-shouldered black coat swung out behind with the energy of her movement and showed the white uniform underneath. She didn’t see me but I saw her and straightened up in my seat. She stopped beside Heiss and Florie, her blue eyes glittering in her cold porcelain face.

“Hello, Mrs. Benning. You want to see me?” Florie’s voice was small and tinny.

“You didn’t finish your work. You can come and finish it now.”

“I did do my work, Mrs. Benning. Everything you said.”

“Are you contradicting me?”

“No, but it’s Saturday night. I got a right to my Saturday nights. When do I get a chance to have some fun?”

“Fun is one thing. What you’re doing is peddling my private affairs to a dirty snooper.”

“What’s that?” Heiss put in brightly. “I beg your pardon, lady?”

“Don’t ‘lady’ me. Are you coming, Florie?” The woman’s voice was low, but it hummed like an overloaded electric circuit.

“I hope there ain’t no trouble, ma’am,” the waitress said briskly behind her.

Mrs. Benning toned to look at her. I didn’t catch the look, because the back of her dark head was towards me. The waitress backed away, holding the menu card as if to shield her chest.

Heiss stood up, not quite so tall as she was. “I don’t know who you are, lady. I can tell you this, you got no call to molest my girl friend in public.” His face was groping for
an attitude. Then his liquid gaze met hers and drooled away.

She leaned towards him, talking in a low buzzing monotone: “I know who you are. I saw you watching the house. I heard you talking to Florie on the office extension. I’m warning you: stay away from her, and especially stay away from me.”

“Florie has a right to her friends.” Heiss had found a manner, that of man-of-the-world, but it went bad immediately. “As for you, Mrs. Benning, if that’s what you call yourself, I wouldn’t touch you. I wouldn’t buy you for cat’s-meat—”

She laughed in his face: “You’d never have the chance, little man. Now crawl back down your hole. If I ever see you again, I’ll knock you over with a stick the way I would a gopher. Come on, Florie.”

Florie sat head down with her arms on the table, frightened and stubborn. Mrs. Benning took her by the wrist and hauled her to her feet. Florie didn’t resist. With dragging feet, she followed Mrs. Benning to the door. There was a taxi waiting at the yellow curb outside. By the time I reached the street, it had pulled away and lost itself in the traffic.

I had a bad feeling that history was repeating itself, in spades. The bad feeling got worse when Heiss came up behind me and touched my arm. He touched people whenever he could, to reassure himself of his membership in the race.

“Go and take gopher poison,” I said.

The veined nose stood out on his pale face. “Yeah, I saw you in there. I thought you run out on me, boysie. I was consoling my bereavement with a nice fresh chunk of Mexican cactus candy.”