The Ivory Grin (4 page)

“I wonder about that. Just what does your business cover?”

“I’ve been looking for a job, a
decent
job. When I save a little money, I’m going back home. It’s not your business, but I’m telling you anyway.”

“That’s a good thing, Lucy. Because you’re not going back to Detroit, now or ever.”

“You can’t stop me!”

There was an interval of silence. “No, I can’t stop you. I will tell you this. When you step off that train, there’ll be a reception waiting for you. I phone Detroit long distance every afternoon.”

Another, longer pause.

“So you see, Lucy, Detroit is out for you. You know what I think you should do, Lucy? I think you made a mistake leaving us. I think you should come back with us.”

Lucy sighed very deeply. “No, I can’t.”

“Yes. You come back. It’ll be safer for you and safer for us, safer for everybody.” The bright clatter of Una’s tone took on an illusive softness: “I’ll tell you what the situation is, dearie. We can’t just have you running around loose the way you have been. You’ll get into trouble, or you’ll have a teensy bit too much to drink in the wrong company, and
then you’ll blab. I know you people, you see. Blabbermouths every one of you.”

“Not me,” the girl protested. “I’d never blab, I promise you faithfully. Please leave me go on the way I been, minding my own business,
please.”

“I’ve got my duty to my brother. I’d like to leave you alone, Lucy. If you’d co-operate.”

“I always co-operated before, before it happened.”

“Sure you did. Tell me where she is, Lucy. Then I’ll leave you alone, or you can come back to us on double the salary. We trust you. It’s her we don’t trust, you know that. Is she here in town?”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said.

“You know she’s here in town. Now tell me where she is. I’ll give you a thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead if you’ll tell me. Come on now, Lucy. Tell me.”

“I don’t know,” Lucy said.

“A thousand dollars cash on the barrelhead,” Una repeated. “I have it right here.”

“I won’t take your money,” Lucy said. “I don’t know where she is.”

“Is she in Bella City?”

“I don’t know, mum. She brought me here and left. How do I know where she went? She never told me nothing.”

“That’s funny, I thought you were her regular little confidante.” Harshly, with a sudden change of pace: “Was he hurt bad?”

“Yes. I mean, I don’t know.”

“Where is he? In Bella City?”

“I don’t know, mum.” Lucy’s voice had sunk to a stolid monotone.

“Is he dead?”

“I don’t know who you talking about, mum.”

“Rotten little liar!” Una said.

I heard a blow. A chair scraped. Someone hiccuped once, loudly.

“You leave me be, Miss Una.” The pressure of the situation had thrown Lucy back into sullen nonresistance, and slurred her speech. “I don’t have to take nothing from you. I’ll call the
pol
lice.”

“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t mean to hit you. You know my bad temper, Lucy.” Una’s voice was husky with false solicitude. “Did I hurt you?”

“You didn’t hurt me. You couldn’t hurt me. Just stay away from me. Go away and leave me be.”

“Why should I?”

“Because you won’t get nothing out of me.”

“How much are you holding out for, honey?”

“And don’t you call me honey. I’m no honey of yours.”

“Five thousand dollars?”

“I wouldn’t touch your money.”

“You’re getting pretty uppity for a nigger gal that couldn’t get a job until I gave her one.”

“Don’t you call me that. And you know what you can do with your job. I wouldn’t go back to it if I was starving to death.”

“Maybe you will,” Una said cheerfully. “I hope you do starve to death.”

Her footsteps marched to the door, and the door slammed. In the hollow silence that ensued in the room, a series of slow dragging movements ended in the creak of bed-springs and another yawning sigh. I went back to my window. The sky blazed blue in my eyes. At the entrance Una was climbing into a taxi. It went away.

Two cigarettes later, Lucy came out and locked her door
with a brass-tagged key. She wavered on the concrete stoop for a moment, gathering herself like an inexperienced diver for a plunge into cruel space. Thick powder clung like icing sugar to her face, imperfectly masking its darkness and its despair. Though she was wearing the same clothes, her body looked softer and more feminine.

She left the court and turned right along the shoulder of the highway. I followed her on foot. Her steps were quick and uncertain, and I was half afraid she might fall in front of a car. Gradually her stride took on the rhythm of some purpose. At the first traffic-lights, she crossed the highway.

I went ahead of her and ducked into the first store I came to, which happened to be an open-front fruit-and-vegetable market. Bent over a bin of oranges with my back to the street, I heard her heels on the pavement and felt her shadow brush me, like a cold feather.

CHAPTER
5
:
    
The street was one block west of
Main and parallel to it. Its pitted asphalt was lined with Main Street’s leavings: radio and shoe repair shops, reupholsterers, insect exterminators, flytrap lunchrooms. A few old houses survived among them as flats and boarding-houses.

Lucy paused in front of a house in the third block and looked up and down the street. A hundred yards behind her, I was waiting at a bus stop on the corner. In a sudden flurry of movement, she ran across the shallow yard of the house and up the veranda steps. I walked on.

The house she had entered leaned with an absent and
archaic air between a mattress-cleaning plant and a one-chair barbershop. Three-storied and weirdly gabled, it had been built before the invention of California architecture. Wavy brown watermarks streaked its gray frame sides. The lower panes of the ground-floor windows, painted white, faced the sun like a blind man’s frosted glasses. Beside the double front-door there was a name on a board, printed in large black letters: S
AMUEL BENNING, M.D
. A card above the bell-push said, in English and Spanish, Ring and Enter. I did.

The air in the hallway was a thin hospital-soup compounded of cooking odors, antiseptic, dimness. A face swam at me through it. It was a big man’s face, too sharp and aggressive. I shifted my feet instinctively, then saw that it was my own face reflected in murky glass, framed in the tarnished curlicues of a wall mirror.

A door let light in at the end of the hall. A dark-haired woman came through it. She wore the gray striped uniform of a nurse’s aide, and she was handsome in a plump and violent way. Her black eyes looked at me as if they knew it. “You wish to see the doctor, sir?”

“If he’s in.”

“Just go into the waiting-room, sir. He will take care of you presently. The door on your left.”

She rolled away on smoothly revolving hips.

The waiting-room was unoccupied. Large and many-windowed, it had evidently been the front parlor of the house. Its present quality was a struggling lack of respectability, from the shredding carpet to the high discolored ceiling. Against the walls there were some wicker chairs that someone had recently brightened up with chintz. And the walls and floor were clean. In spite of this, it was a room in which the crime of poverty had left clues.

I sat down in one of the chairs with my back to the light and picked up a magazine from a rickety table. The magazine was two years old, but it served to mask my face. Across the room from me, in the inner wall, there was a closed door. After a while a tall black-haired woman wearing an ill-fitting white uniform opened the door. I heard a voice that sounded like Lucy’s say something unintelligible and emotional, several rooms away. The woman who had opened the door closed it sharply behind her and came towards me:

“Do you wish to see the doctor?”

Her eyes were the color of baked blue enamel. Her beauty canceled the room.

I was wondering how the room had happened to deserve her when she interrupted me: “Did you wish to see the doctor?”

“Yes.”

“He’s busy now.”

“Busy for how long? I’m in a hurry.”

“I couldn’t say how long.”

“I’ll wait for a while.”

“Very well, sir.”

She stood with perfect calm under the pressure of my stare, as if it were her natural element. Her beauty wasn’t the kind that depended on movement or feeling. It was plastic and external like a statue’s; even the blue eyes were flat and depthless. Her whole face looked as if it had been frozen with novocaine.

“Are you one of Dr. Benning’s patients?”

“Not yet.”

“Can I have your name, please?”

“Larkin,” I said at random. “Horace Larkin.”

The frozen face remained frozen. She went to the desk
and wrote something on a card. Her tight, lumpy uniform made me restless. Everything about her bothered me.

A bald man in a doctor’s smock jerked the inner door open. I raised the magazine in front of me and examined him over its edge. Large-eared and almost hairless, his head seemed naked, as if it had been plucked. His long face was dimly lit by pale worried eyes. Deep lines of sorrow dragged down from the wings of his large vulnerable nose.

“Come here,” he said to the receptionist. “You talk to her, for heaven’s sake. I can’t make head or tail of it.” His voice was high-pitched and rapid, furious with anger or anxiety.

The woman surveyed him coldly, glanced at me, and said nothing.

“Come on,” he said placatingly, raising a bony red hand towards her. “I can’t handle her.”

She shrugged her shoulders and passed him in the doorway. His stringy body cringed away from hers, as if she radiated scorching heat. I left the house.

Lucy came out ten minutes later. I was sitting in the barber shop beside Dr. Benning’s house. There were two men ahead of me, one in the chair having his neck shaved, the other reading a newspaper by the window. The newspaper-reader was an unstylish stout in a tan camel’s-hair jacket. There were purple veins in his cheeks and nose. When Lucy passed the window heading south, he got up hurriedly, put on a soiled panama, and left the shop.

I waited, and followed him out.

“But you are next, sir,” the barber cried after me. I looked back from the other side of the street, and he was still at the window, making siren gestures with a razor.

The man with the veined nose and the panama hat was halfway to the next corner, almost abreast of Lucy. She led
us back to the railway station. When she reached it, a passenger train was pulling out towards the north. She stood stock-still on the platform until its smoke was a dissolving haze on the foothills. The man in the camel’s-hair coat was watching her, slouched like a barely animate lump of boredom behind a pile of express crates under the baggage-room arch.

Lucy turned on her heel and entered the station. A narrow window under the arch gave me a partial view of the waiting-room. I moved to another window, ignoring the man behind the express crates but trying to place him in my memory. Lucy was at the ticket window with green money in her hand.

The man edged towards me, his stout body wriggling along the wall as if the shade-latticed air offered solid resistance to its movement. He laid two soft white fingers on my arm:

“Lew Archer,
n’est-ce pas?”
The French was deliberate clowning, accompanied by a smirk.

“Must be two other people.” I shook the fingers loose.

“You wouldn’t brush me, boysie. I remember you but vividly. You testified for the prosecution in the Saddler trial, and you did a nice job too. I combed the jury panel for the defense. Max Heiss?”

He took off his panama hat, and a shock of red-brown hair pushed out over his forehead. Under it, clever dirty eyes shone liquidly like dollops of brown sherry. His little smile had a shamefaced charm, acknowledging that he had taken a running jump at manhood and still, at forty or forty-five, had never quite got his hands on it.—If it existed, the smile went on to wonder.

“Heiss?” he said coaxingly. “Maxfield Heiss?”

I remembered him and the Saddler trial. I also remembered that he had lost his license for tampering with prospective jurors in another murder trial.

“I know you, Max. So what if I do?”

“So we toddle across the street and I’ll buy you a drink and we can talk over old times and such.” His words were soft and insinuating, breaking gently like bubbles between his pink lips. His breath was strong enough to lean on.

I glanced at Lucy. She was in a telephone booth at the other end of the waiting-room. Her lips were close to the mouthpiece and moving.

“Thanks, not this time. I have a train to catch.”

“You’re kidding me again. There isn’t another train in either direction for over two hours. Which means you don’t have to be anxious the girl will get away,
n’est-ce pas?
She can’t possibly use that ticket she just bought for over two hours.” His face lit up with a practical joker’s delight, as if he had just palmed off an explosive cigar on me.

I felt as if he had. “Somebody’s kidding. I’m not in the mood for it.”

“Now don’t be like that. You don’t have to take offense.”

“Beat it, Max.”

“How can we do business if you won’t even bat the breeze?”

“Go away. You’re standing in my light.”

He waltzed in a small circle and presented his smirk to me again:
“Avee atquee valee
, boysie, that means good-bye and hello. I’m on public property and you can’t push me off. And you got no monopoly on this case. If the true facts were known, I bet you don’t even know what case you’re on. I got a priority on you there.”

I couldn’t help being interested, and he knew it. His fingers returned like a troupe of trained slugs to my arm:

“Lucy is my meat. I won her in a raffle by dint of sheer personal derring-do. Signed her up for a seven-year contract and just when I’m thinking of converting the deal into cash, lo and behold I stumble into you. In my alcoholic way.”

“That was quite a speech, Max. How much truth is there in it?”

“Nothing-but-the-truth-so-help-me-God.” He raised his palm in mock solemnity. “Not the whole truth, naturally. I don’t know the whole truth and neither do you. We need an exchange of views.”