The Ivory Grin (18 page)

“Not yet.” Brake addressed the boy: “Mr. Archer here is a friend of yours, Norris. He wants a little chinfest with you. Personally I think he’s wasting all our time, but it’s up to you. Will you talk to Mr. Archer?”

Alex looked from Brake to me. His smooth young face had the same expression I had seen on the ancient Indian face of the woman in the alley, beyond the reach of anything white men could do or say. He nodded wordlessly, and looked back at Lucy.

Brake and Schwartz went out. The door pulled shut. Alex
started back across the room. He walked uncertainly with his legs spraddled like an old man’s. The concrete floor sloped gently to a covered drain in the center of the room. He staggered down the barely perceptible slope and labored up the other side to the stretcher.

Standing over Lucy with his head bowed, he asked her: “Why did they do it?” in a dry hard voice.

I reached past him and pulled the sheet up over her head. I took him by the shoulders, turned him to face me. Part of his weight hung on me for a moment, until his muscles tightened. “Straighten up,” I said.

He was as tall as I was, but his head was drooping on his undeveloped neck. I pushed my closed right hand under his chin. “Straighten up, Alex. Look at me.”

He flinched away. I held him with my other hand on his shoulder. Suddenly he tensed and knocked my hand away from his chin.

“Steady, boy.”

“I’m not a horse,” he cried. “Don’t you talk to me like I was a horse. Keep your hands off of me.”

“You’re worse than a horse. You’re a stubborn mule. Your girl is lying dead, and you won’t open your mouth to tell me who did it to her.”

“They think I did it.”

“It’s your own fault if they do. You shouldn’t have run out. You’re lucky you didn’t get shot.”

“Lucky.” The word was as blank as a hiccup.

“Lucky not to be dead. That’s the one situation nobody can reverse. You think you’ve got it tough now, and you have, but that’s no reason for turning into a dummy. One of these days you’re going to snap out of it and really care what happened to Lucy. Only it’ll be too late for you to do anything about it. You’ve got to help now.”

I let go of him. He stood shakily, pulling at his fleshy lower lip with a bitten forefinger. Then he said: “I tried to tell them things at first, this morning when they brought me in. But him and the deputy D.A., they only had the one thing on their minds, to make me say I did it. Why would I kill my own fiancée?” The question rose up hard from his working chest. His face was blind with the effort of speaking, the more terrible effort of speaking as a man. He couldn’t sustain it: “I wish I was dead like Lucy.”

“If you were, you couldn’t help us.”

“Nobody asked for any help from me. Who wants any help from me?”

“I do.”

“You don’t believe I killed her?”

“No.”

He looked at me for maybe half a minute, his gaze shifting in heartbeat rhythm from one of my eyes to the other. “She didn’t do it to herself, did she? Mister? You don’t think Lucy—cut her own throat?” He whispered the question so as not to embarrass the dead woman behind him.

“It isn’t likely. The suggestion has been made. What made you think of it?”

“No reason, except she was scared. She was awful scared yesterday. That’s why I loaned her the knife, when she left our house. She asked me for something to protect herself with. I had no gun or anything to give her.” His voice dropped apologetically. “I gave her the knife.”

“The one she was killed with?”

“Yes. They showed it to me this morning. It was a little bolo knife that my father sent me from the South Pacific.”

“She was carrying the knife?”

“Yessir, in her purse. She had a big purse. She put it in
her purse when I gave it to her, before she went away from our house. If they caught her, she said she would leave her mark on them.” A frown of grief knitted his eyebrows.

“Who was she afraid of?”

“Men following her. It started Thursday, when she came back on the bus from Arroyo Beach. She said this man got off the bus and trailed her home. I thought at first she was spinning me a tale, trying to be mysterious. Then the next day I saw him myself when she came home from lunch. He was lurking around our street, and that night he came and visited her right in our house. I asked her about him yesterday, and she said that he was a crooked detective. That he was trying to make her do something against her will, but she wouldn’t do it.”

“Did she mention his name?”

“She said his name was Desmond, Julian Desmond. The next day another man was after her. I didn’t see him. Lucy saw him, though. And there was the trouble at our house, and she moved out.”

I swallowed the bitter taste of guilt in my mouth. “Was she planning to leave town?”

“She couldn’t make up her mind before she left. She said she’d phone me. Then when she did phone, she was at the station. There was no train out for a couple of hours, and men there were spying on her. She said I should come with the car. I picked her up at the station and we got away from them, on the old airport road. We parked behind the airport fence, and we talked. She was shivering scared. Right there and then we decided to get married. I thought if we stayed together, I could defend her.” His voice sank deep into his chest, almost out of hearing. “I didn’t do so good.”

“None of us did.”

“She wanted to leave town right away. First we had to go back to the Mountview Motel to get her bags.”

“Did she have her motel-key?”

“She said she lost it.”

“Didn’t give it to you?”

“Why would she give it to me? I couldn’t go in there with her. Even if I was light enough to pass, like her, I wouldn’t do it. She went in there by herself. She never came out again. Somebody was waiting in there for her, and took the knife away from her and used it on her.”

“Who was waiting?”

“Julian Desmond maybe. She wouldn’t do what he wanted. Or the other one that was after her.”

I was ashamed to tell him that I was the other one. His shoulders were slumped, and the flesh around his mouth hung almost stupidly. His moral strength was running out again. I placed Schwartz’s chair for him and eased him into it:

“Sit down, Alex. You’ve covered the big points against you. There are a few little points left. Money is one of them. What were you intending to marry on?”

“I have some money of my own.”

“How much?”

“Forty-five dollars. I made it picking tomatoes.”

“Not much to get married on.”

“I aimed to get a job. My back is strong.” There was a sullen pride in his voice, but he wasn’t meeting my eyes. “Lucy could work too. She worked as a nurse before.”

“Where?”

“She didn’t tell me where.”

“She must have told you something.”

“No sir. I never asked her.”

“Did she have some money?”

“I didn’t ask her. I wouldn’t take money from a woman anyway.”

“If you earned it, though,” I said. “Didn’t she say she’d cut you in if you got her safe out of town?”

“Cut me in?”

“On the reward,” I said. “The Singleton reward.”

His black gaze climbed slowly to the level of my eyes, and quickly dropped. He said to the floor: “Lucy didn’t have to pay me money to marry her.”

“Where were you going to get married? Where were you going to drive to yesterday?”

“Las Vegas or someplace. It didn’t matter. Anyplace.”

“Arroyo Beach?”

He didn’t answer. I had pushed him too fast and too far. Looking down at the locked round impenetrable skull, I understood Brake’s routine and desperate anger after thirty years of trying to fit human truth into the square-cut legal patterns handed down for his use by legislators and judges. And thinking of Brake’s anger, I lost my own.

“Listen, Alex. We’re going back to the beginning again. Lucy was murdered. We both want to find the murderer and see him punished. You have more reason than I have to want that. You claim you were in love with her.”

“I was!” The drill had struck the nerve.

“That’s one reason, then. You have another reason: Unless we find the real killer, you’ll be spending years of your life in jail.”

“I don’t care what happens to me now.”

“Think about Lucy. When you were waiting for her at the motel, somebody took that knife and cut her throat with it. Why?”

“I don’t know why.”

“What did Julian Desmond want her to do?”

“Be a witness for him,” he answered slowly.

“A witness to what?”

“I don’t know what.”

“A murder,” I said. “Was it a murder?”

“Maybe. I don’t know.”

“It was a murder, wasn’t it? He wanted her to help him collect the reward. But she thought she could go it alone, and get the reward money for herself. Isn’t that the reason she was killed?”

“I didn’t think it out, mister.”

“But you knew about the reward money? You knew she hoped to collect it.”

“I never hoped to share in it,” he said doggedly.

“She went to Arroyo Beach on Thursday to see his mother, and lost her nerve at the last minute. Isn’t that the truth?”

“Yes, sir. I gathered that.”

“She was going to try again yesterday.”

“Maybe she was. I had nothing to do with any murder. Lucy didn’t either.”

“But she knew what happened to Singleton.”

“She knew something.”

“And you know something, too.”

“She let on about it to me. I didn’t ask her. I didn’t want to have any part of it. She told it to me anyway.”

“What did she tell you, Alex?”

“A man shot him. A crazy man shot him and he died. She told me that.”

CHAPTER
21
:
    
Schwartz was alone in the corridor
. I asked him where Brake was. “In his car. He got a radio call.”

I started for the ambulance entrance, and met Brake coming in.

“Norris do any talking?”

“Plenty.”

“Confess?”

“Hardly. He’s ready to make a statement.”

“When I’m ready. I got more important things right now. I’m going on a barbecue picnic in the mountains.” He smiled grimly, and called along the corridor to Schwartz: “Take Norris back to his cell. Get Pearce in the D.A.’s office, if he wants to make a statement. I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

“Barbecue picnic?” I said.

“Yeah.” He pushed out through the white metal-sheathed door and let it swing back in my face. I followed him out to his car and got in the right side as he got in the left.

“I thought you’d be interested, Archer.” The car leaped forward under us, its tires whistling in the gravel of the hospital parking lot. “It was a man that got himself barbecued. A man.”

“Who is it?”

“Not identified yet. His car went over the side of Rancheria Canyon early this morning, and caught fire. When they found it they didn’t even know there was a body in it
at first. Couldn’t get into it until they brought up a pump-truck from the ranger station. By that time the guy inside was nothing more than a clinker.”

“Torch murder?”

“Hallman seems to think so. He’s the CHP Captain. They had it tabbed as an accident until they thought to take a look at the gas tank. It’s intact, and that means the gasoline for the fire came from somewhere else.”

“What kind of car?”

“1948 Buick sedan. Registration destroyed. They’re checking the license and engine number for ownership.”

The last few jerry-built bungalows of the suburbs dropped behind. The speedometer needle moved steadily clockwise past fifty, sixty, and seventy, and hesitated near eighty. Brake flipped the siren switch. The siren began to moan in a low register.

I said before it drowned me out: “The car isn’t two-tone green, is it? Singleton’s car was a 1948 Buick. Is this one two-tone green?”

Brake pulled his hat off, leaving a red crimped line across his forehead, and tossed it into the back seat. “You’ve got Singleton on the brain. They didn’t tell me the color. But where does he come in?”

“Norris said he was murdered,” I shouted above the siren.

Brake switched it off. “What does Norris know about it?”

“Lucy Champion told him Singleton was shot.”

“Only she don’t make a very good witness. Don’t let him string you, man. He’d tell you anything to wiggle his black neck out of the noose it’s in.”

The speedometer needle pushed on past eighty. At the top of a slight rise, the car lifted under us and almost took flight. I felt as if the speed had lifted us out of the world,
pulled Brake loose from his roots in Bella City’s broken pavements.

“Don’t you think it’s about time you admitted you made a mistake?”

He looked at me narrow-eyed. The speeding car wavered slightly with his attention before he turned back to the road. “When I got the weapon, his own knife?”

“She borrowed it from him for self-protection. She had it in her purse.”

“Can he prove that?”

“He doesn’t have to. You’re the proof department.”

“Hell, you’re talking like a shyster lawyer. I hate those mealy-mouthed shysters that try to block the law.”

“That’s quite a mouthful.”

“Chew on it.”

The county blacktop we were on curved in to join a concrete highway running east and west across the valley. Brake went through a red sign and took the turn on squealing tires.

“What do I do when they go around cutting each other with knives, setting fire to each other? Pat them on the back and tell them to go to it? I say stop them, put them away.”

“Put the right one away, though. You can’t solve these killings separately, hang Lucy’s on Alex and this new one on somebody else.”

“I can if they’re not connected.”

“I think they are connected.”

“Show me proof.”

“I’m not going up for the fresh air.”

The road had begun to climb through dried clay cut-banks marked with yellow Slide Area warnings. Even with the gas-pedal floorboarded under Brake’s toe, the speedometer needle stuck at seventy like the hand of a stopped
clock. The folded blue slopes of the eastern range were framed in steep perspective by the windshield. They looked near enough to touch. A minute later, a mile nearer, they looked just as far away. I began to feel the altitude in my ears. As we rose into new perspectives, a few small white clouds burst out like ripe cotton behind the peaks. Away behind and down, Bella City stood in its fields like carelessly grouped chesspieces on a dusty board.