The Ivory Grin (21 page)

She made an erratic rush for the bed, and covered herself with a sheet. Her mouth fell open. I
could
see her pale lower gums. She brought it closed with an effort. “What do you want?”

“Not you, Florie. Don’t be scared.”

The air in the room was stale, spiked with cheap alcohol and perfume. A half-empty half-gallon jug of muscatel stood on the floor by her bed. Her clothes were scattered on the floor and chair and dresser. I guessed she had taken them off in a staggering fury before she passed out.

“Who are you? Did Julian send you?”

“I was hired by the hotel association to check on false registrations.” I didn’t mention that my work in that field had ended ten years ago.

She chattered over the taut edge of the sheet: “I didn’t register. He did. It was all his fault. Besides, we didn’t do nothing. He brought me up here last night and parked me with a jar of muscadoodle. Then he went away and I haven’t seen him since. I waited up for him half the night. He never did come back. So how do you have anything on me?”

“I’ll make a bargain with you. No charges if you co-operate.”

Suspicion darkened her face. “How do you mean, co-operate?” Her body wriggled uneasily under the sheet.

“Just answer my questions. Desmond’s the one I want. It looks as if he ran out on you.”

“What time is it?”

“One thirty.”

“Sunday afternoon?”

“Uh-huh.”

“He did run out! He promised to take me on a trip.” She sat up on the bed, holding the sheet across her excessive bosom.

“How did you meet him?”

“I didn’t meet him. He come to the office one night last week, Thursday night it was. I was just finishing up my
cleaning. The doctor was out already, over at the library or someplace, and I was all alone in the office.”

“Where was Mrs. Benning?”

“She was upstairs, I guess, Yeah, she was upstairs with that colored girl friend of hers.”

“Lucy Champion?”

“That’s the one. Some people have funny friends. This Lucy woman come to visit her and they went upstairs to talk. Julian Desmond said it was me he wanted to see. He fed me a line how he was recruiting nurse’s aides for Hawaii at four hundred dollars a month! I was a sucker, I guess. I let him pump me about who I worked for and he took me out that night and got me plastered and asked me a bunch of questions about Mrs. Benning and that Lucy. I told him I didn’t know Lucy from a hole in the ground, or Mrs. Benning either for that matter. He wanted to know when she came back to her husband and if her hair was dyed and if they were really married, stuff like that.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him how she came back over the weekend, two weeks ago it was. When I walked in on Monday morning there she was. Doctor says: ‘Meet my wife. She’s been in a sanitarium.’ She didn’t look like san stuff to me—” Florie broke off suddenly. Her mouth clamped shut. “That was all I said. I caught on what he was up to, and you don’t catch me playing blackmailers’ games.”

“I can see that. What else was there to tell?”

“Nothing else, not a thing. I don’t know nothing about Mrs. Benning. She’s a mystery woman to me.”

I changed the direction of my approach: “Why did she fire you last night?”

“She didn’t fire me.”

“Why did you leave?”

“I didn’t want to work for her any more.”

“You worked for her yesterday, though.”

“Yeah, sure, that was before she fired—I mean I left.”

“Were you in the house all Saturday afternoon?”

“I was until six. I get off at six unless there’s extra cleaning. I mean I did.”

“Was Mrs. Benning there all afternoon?”

“Most of it. She went out in the late afternoon, said she was going to shop for Sunday.”

“What time did she go out?”

“Around five, a little before five.”

“What time did she come back?”

“I left before she came back.”

“And the doctor?”

“He was there, far as I know.”

“He didn’t go out with her?”

“No, he said he was going to take a siesta.”

“When did you see her after that?”

“I didn’t.”

“You saw her in Tom’s Café around eight.”

“Yeah. Yeah, I forgot about that.” Florie was getting rattled.

“Did she give you money?”

She hesitated. “No.” But she had to turn and look at the red plastic purse on the dresser.

“Why did she give you money?”

“She didn’t.”

“How much money?”

“Just my back pay,” she stammered. “They owed me back pay.”

“How much back pay?”

“Three hundred dollars.”

“That’s a lot of back pay. Isn’t it?”

She lifted her heavy gaze to the ceiling and brought it down again to the red purse on the dresser. She watched the purse intently, as if it was alive and struggling to take flight. “It was a bonus.” She had found a word. “She gave me a bonus.”

“What for? She didn’t like you.”

“You
don’t like me anyway,” she said in a childish voice. “I didn’t do anything bad. I don’t see how you have to jump on me.”

“I like you fine,” I lied. “Only it happens I’m trying to solve some murders. You’re an important witness.”

“Me?”

“You. What did she pay you to keep quiet about?”

“If I’m a witness, do I have to give the money back? The bonus?”

“Not if you keep your mouth shut about it.”

“You won’t tell?”

“I couldn’t be bothered. What did she buy from you, Florie?”

I waited, listening to her breathing.

“It was the blood,” she said. “I found some dried drops of blood on the floor of the examination room. I cleaned it up.”

“When?”

“Monday two weeks ago, the first day I saw Mrs. Benning. I asked doctor about the blood and he said he had an emergency over the weekend—a tourist that cut his finger. I didn’t think of it again until Mrs. Benning brought it up last night.”

“Like the woman who urged her children not to put peas in their noses.”

“Who was she?” Florie asked almost brightly.

“It’s a story. The point is that the children put peas in
their noses as soon as she turned her back. I’ll bet a nickel you told Desmond about the blood the minute Mrs. Benning turned hers.”

“I did not,” she said, with that peculiar whining intonation which means guilty as charged but I can’t help it if people are always leading me astray.

She introduced a diversion:

“Anyway, his name isn’t Desmond. It’s Heist or something like that. I caught a glimpse of his driver’s license.”

“When?”

“Last night in the car.”

“The Buick?”

“Yeah. Personally I think he stole it. I had nothing to do with it. He already had it when he came to move me out of the apartment. He tried to tell me he
found
it, can you imagine. He said it was worth five thousand, probably more. I told him that was a lot of money for a secondhand Buick, but he just laughed.”

“Was it a green 1948 two-door sedan?”

“I don’t know the years. It was a two-door Buick, and that was the color. He stole it, didn’t he?”

“I think he found it all right. Did he say where?”

“No. It must have been in town, though. He had no car at suppertime and then at ten o’clock when he picked me up at the apartment, he was driving this Buick. Where would a guy find a Buick?”

“It’s a good question. Put on your clothes, Florie. I’ll look away.”

“You’re not going to arrest me? I didn’t do nothing wrong—anything wrong.”

“I want you to try to identify somebody, that’s all.”

“Who?”

“That’s another good question.”

I went to the window and tried to open it. I could hardly breathe the hot foul air sealed in the little room. The window rose four inches and stuck forever. It faced north towards the City Hall and the Mission Hotel. In the sun-stopped streets a few pedestrians trudged, a few cars crawled and snored. Behind me I heard the twang of a snagged comb, Florie’s quiet swearing, the pull and snap of a girdle, the slither of silk stockings, heels on the floor, water running in the sink.

At the rear of a bus depot below the window, a dusty blue bus was loading passengers: a pregnant Mexican woman herding half-naked brown children, a fieldworker in overalls who might have been the father of the children, an old man with a cane casting a tripod shadow on the asphalt, two young soldiers looking bored with any possible journey through any valley under any sky. The line moved forward slowly like a colored snake drunk with sun.

“Ready,” Florie said.

She had on a bright red jacket over the batiste blouse. Her hair was combed back from her face, which looked harder under a white and red cosmetic mask. She peered at me anxiously, clutching the red plastic purse.

“Where are we going?”

“To the hospital.”

“Is he in the hospital?”

“We’ll see.”

I carried her cardboard suitcase down to the lobby. Heiss had paid for the room in advance. The aged clerk didn’t ask me about the telegram. The contract players followed our progress across the lobby to the street with knowing looks.

In my car, Florie relaxed into hangover somnolence. I drove across town to the county hospital. Obscured by the
dust and insect splashes on the windshield, wavering in the heat, the streets and buildings were like an image of a city refracted through Florie’s mind. The asphalt was soft as flesh under the wheels.

It was cold enough in the morgue.

CHAPTER
25
:
    
She came out shivering, holding
the red purse against her breast like an external heart that wouldn’t hold still. I supported her elbow. At the ambulance door she pulled away from me and went out by herself to the car. She stumbled on high heels across the gravel, dazed by too much light.

When I got in behind the wheel she looked at me with horror as if my face had been scorched, and slid far over against the opposite door. Her eyes were like large marbles made of black glass.

I took the yellow Western Union envelope out of my inside pocket: Mr. Julian Desmond, c/o Great West Hotel, Bella City, California. As long as Heiss was alive, it was a crime to open it. Since he was dead, it was legitimate evidence.

It contained a night letter sent from Detroit by someone who signed himself “Van”:

“I should go some place and lie down,” Florie said in a small voice. “You didn’t tell me he was dead. You didn’t tell me they blowtorched him. A shock like that is enough to kill a girl.”

I put the telegram away. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know who it was until you identified him. What makes you so positive?”

“I worked for a dentist one time. I notice teeth. Julian had bad teeth. I could tell it was him by the fillings.” She covered her glassy black eyes with her hand. “Won’t you take me where I can lie down?”

“First the police.”

Brake was sitting at his desk with a deeply bitten sandwich in his hand. The bite he had taken was pouched in his
cheek, rolling rhythmically with his chewing. He said around it:

“The wife put up enough sandwiches to feed an army before I remembered to call off the picnic. I told her to bring some down here, save me lunch money. Lunch money mounts up.”

“Even with all this overtime?”

“I’m saving the overtime to buy a yacht.” Brake knew I knew that no cop ever was paid for overtime.

“Miss Gutierrez here has just made a positive identification on your torch victim.” I turned to her. “This is Lieutenant Brake.”

Florie, who had been hanging back in the doorway, took a timid step forward. “Pleased to meet you. Mr. Archer convinced me to do my duty.”

“Good for him.” Brake popped the remnant of his sandwich into his mouth. Whatever was about to happen or be said, he would have finished his sandwich. “Does she know Singleton?”

“No. It isn’t Singleton.”

“The hell it isn’t. The license was issued to Singleton, and the engine-number checks.” He tapped a yellow teletype flimsy on top of the pile in his “In” basket.

“It’s Singleton’s car but not his body in it. The body belongs to Maxfield Heiss. He was a Los Angeles detective. Florie knew him well.”

“I didn’t know him so well. He made advances to me, trying to pump me about my bosses.”

“Come inside, Miss Gutierrez, and shut the door behind you. Now tell me, who are your bosses?”

“Dr. and Mrs. Benning,” I said.

“Let her do her own talking. What was he trying to find out about them, Miss Gutierrez?”

“When Mrs. Benning came back and if she dyed her hair and all like that.”

“Anything about murder?”

“No, sir. Julian didn’t say nothing about a murder.”

“Julian who?”

“Heiss was using an alias,” I said. “We should get over to Benning’s.”

I turned to the door. There was a cork bulletin board beside it, with a number of frayed Wanted circulars thumbtacked to it. I wondered how Mrs. Benning would look in that crude black-and-white.

Brake said: “Can you swear to the identification, Miss Gutierrez?”