The Ivory Grin (23 page)

“You volunteered an alibi for her. Incidentally, you haven’t proved she is your wife.”

“Nothing could be easier.” He strode into his consultation
room and came back with a folded document that he handed to Brake.

Brake glanced at it, and passed it to me. It was a marriage certificate issued in the State of Indiana on May 14, 1943. It stated that Samuel Benning, aged 38, had been married on that date to Elizabeth Wionowski, aged 18.

Benning took it out of my hands. “And now, gentlemen, it’s about time I insisted that my private life, and my wife’s, is no affair of yours. Since she isn’t here to defend herself, I’ll remind you that there are libel laws, and false arrest is actionable in the courts.”

“You don’t have to remind me.” Brake stressed the personal pronoun. “There’s been no arrest, no accusation. Thank you for your co-operation, doctor.”

Brake slung a look from the door which tightened on me like a rope. We left Benning in the hallway, leaning like a flimsy buttress against the rotting wall. He was pressing the marriage certificate to his thin chest as if it was a love token or a poultice or a banknote, or a combination of all three.

The interior of my car was furnace-hot. Brake pulled off his coat and folded it on his knees. His shirt was blotched with sweat.

“You went too far, Archer.”

“I think I didn’t go far enough.”

“That’s because you don’t have my responsibility.”

I admitted that that was true.

“I can’t take chances,” he went on. “I can’t act without evidence. I got nothing to justify a warrant for Mrs. Benning.”

“You’ve got just as much on her as you have on Alex Norris. He’s still in jail.”

Brake answered doggedly: “He’s being held without
charge for twenty-four hours. It’s legal. But you can’t do that with people like Mrs. Benning. She’s a doctor’s wife, remember. I stuck my neck out going to Benning at all. He’s lived all his life in this town. His father was the high-school principal for twenty years.” He added defensively: “Anyway, what have we got on her?”

“You noticed her maiden name in the marriage certificate? Elizabeth Wionowski. The same name as the one in the telegram. She was Durano’s woman.”

“That don’t prove anything about Singleton, even if it was evidence, which it isn’t. What I don’t see in your story is this idea of a woman changing partners back and forth like a bloody square dance. It don’t happen.”

“Depends on the woman. I’ve known women who kept six men on the string at the same time. Mrs. Benning has been alternating three. I have a witness who says she was Singleton’s mistress for seven years, off and on. She came back to Benning because she needed help—”

Brake brushed the words like mosquitoes away from his head. “Don’t tell me any more. I got to take this careful and slow or I’m up the crick without a paddle.”

“You or Norris.”

“And don’t needle me. I’m handling this case the way I have to. If you can bring in Mrs. Benning to make a statement, okay, I’ll listen. But I can’t go out and bring her in myself. I can’t do anything to the doctor just because his wife went on a trip. Nobody told her not to.”

The sweat was running down his slant low forehead, gathering in his eyebrows like dew in a thicket. His eyes were bleak.

“It’s your town, lieutenant.”

I dropped him at the rear of the City Hall. He didn’t ask me what I intended to do next.

CHAPTER
27
:
    
It was late afternoon when I
drove through Arroyo Beach to the ocean boulevard. The palm-lined sand was strewn with bodies like a desert battlefield. At the horizon sea and sky merged in a blue haze from which the indigo hills of the channel islands rose. Beyond them the sun’s fire raged on the slopes of space.

I turned south into traffic moving bumper to bumper, fender to fender, like an army in retreat. The arthritic trees cast long baroque shadows down the cemetery hill. The shadow of Durano’s house reached halfway across its wilderness of lawn towards the iron fence. I pulled out of the traffic into the entrance to the drive.

The gate was still chained and padlocked. There was a button set in the gatepost under a small weathered sign:
RING FOR GARDENER PLEASE
. I rang three times, without audible effect, and went back to my car to wait. After a while a small figure came out of the house. It was Una. She moved impatiently down the drive, chunky and squat between the slender coconut palms.

Her gold lamé coat gleamed like mail through the bars of the gate. “What do you want, you?”

I got out of the car and approached her. She looked at me, and at the house, as if invisible wires were jerking at her alternately from each direction. Then she right-about-faced and started away.

“I want to talk about Leo,” I said above the traffic noises.

Her brother’s name pulled her back to the gate: “I don’t understand you.”

“Leo Durano is your brother?”

“What if he is? I thought I fired you yesterday. How many times do I have to fire you before you stay fired?”

“Was that the trouble with Max Heiss, that he wouldn’t stay fired?”

“What about Max Heiss?”

“He was killed this morning, murdered. Your labor turnover is rapid, and all of your ex-employees are ending the same way.”

Her expression didn’t change, but her diamonded right hand reached for one of the bars and gripped it. “Heiss had a lot of drunky ideas. If somebody cut him down, it’s no affair of mine.
Or
my brother’s.”

“It’s funny,” I said, “when I saw Heiss in the morgue I thought of you and Leo. Leo has quite a record in that line.”

Her hand left the bar and jumped like a brilliant crustacean to her throat. “You’ve seen Bess Wionowski.”

“We had a little chat.”

“Where is she?” Una spoke as if her throat was hurting her.

“Blown again,” I said. “You might as well open the gate. We can’t talk here.”

“I might as well.”

She groped in the wide square pocket of her gold coat. I had my finger hooked in the trigger guard of my gun. All she brought out was a key, with which she opened the padlock. I unchained the gate and pushed it open.

Her hand closed on my arm: “What happened to Max Heiss? Did he get sliced, like Lucy?”

“He was put to the torch like Joan of Arc.”

“When?”

“Early this morning. We found him in the mountains, in
a wrecked car. The car belonged to Charles Singleton, and Heiss was wearing Singleton’s clothes.”

“Whose clothes?”

Her fingers were biting into me. Contact with her was unpleasant and strange, like being grabbed by the branch of a small spiny tree. I shook her hand off.

“You know him, Una, the golden boy Bess was running with. Somebody blowtorched Heiss and dressed him in Singleton’s clothes to make it look as if Singleton died this morning. But we know better, don’t we?”

“If you think Leo did it, you’re crazy.”

“I’m surprised you still use that word in your family.”

Her gaze, which had been steady on my face, swerved away. She said with her head down: “Leo was home in bed this morning. I can prove it by his nurse. Leo is a very sick man.”

“Paranoia?” I said distinctly. “G.P.I.?”

Her rigid calm tore like a photograph. “Those lying sawbones at the clinic! They promised me they kept professional secrets. I’ll professional-secret them when they send me their next bill.”

“Don’t blame the clinic. I’ve seen enough commitment trials to recognize paranoid symptoms.”

“You’ve never seen my brother.”

I didn’t answer the unasked question. “I’m going to see him now, with you.”

“I’ve taken good care of Leo,” she cried suddenly, “with trained nurses all the time, the best of care! The doctor comes every day to see him. I work and slave for that man, making him things he likes to eat, spumoni, minestrone. When I have to, I feed him with my own hands.” She choked back the running words and turned away from me,
ashamed of the solicitous old woman jostling her other selves.

I put one hand on her stiff elbow and propelled her towards the house. Its red-tiled upper edge cut off the sun. I looked up at the barred window behind which Leo Durano had been receiving the best of care, and heard a silent word repeated like an echo from the wall many times.

Inside the front door, an iron stairway curved in a spiral to the second floor. Una climbed it and preceded me along a dust-littered hallway. Near its end, the large young man in the white smock sat in an armchair beside a closed door.

My presence startled him. “Doctor?” he said to Una.

“Just a visitor.”

He shook his cheeks at her. “I wouldn’t do it, Miss Durano. He’s been hard to handle this afternoon. I had to restrain him.”

“Open the door, Donald,” Una said.

He produced a key from his tentlike smock. The room contained a bare iron cot and a disemboweled platform-rocker bolted to the floor. A few shreds remained of the drapes that had hung at the barred window. Beside the window, the plaster wall showed handprints, and indentations that could have been made by fists. The inner side of the oak door had been splintered, and repaired with bare oak boards.

Durano was sitting on the floor against the wall in the far corner by the window. His arms, folded in his lap, were sheathed in a brown leather restrainer on which tooth-marks were visible. He looked up at us through soiled black hair that straggled over his forehead. His bleeding mouth opened and closed, trying to trap a word.

The word sounded like: “Forgive.”

Una ran across the room to him and went down clumsily on her trousered knees. “We don’t treat you good, Leo. Forgive me.” She drew his head against her metal torso.

“Forgive,” he answered brokenly. “I forgive me. Released without charge. I told the ragpickers you can’t vag an honest man or the son of an honest man, told them I was doing my father’s business.”

Clasping the mumbling head in both arms, Una looked up at me scornfully. “This is the poor little fellow who committed a murder this morning, eh? Tell him, Donald, where was Leo this morning?”

Donald swallowed painfully. “Police?”

“Close enough,” I said.

“He was right in this room. All night and all morning. Every night and morning. Durano don’t get around much any more.”

“Shut up, you.” Una left her brother and advanced on Donald. “No smart cracks, fat boy. He’s a better man right now than you’ll ever be. You’d still be emptying bedpans for sixty a month if it wasn’t for Leo Durano. Mister to you.”

He backed away from her, flushed and cowering like a browbeaten German wife. “You ask me a question, Miss Durano.”

“Shut up.” She passed him like a small cold wind, and hustled off down the corridor.

I said: “Donald. What about Saturday night two weeks ago? Was Durano in his room?”

“I wasn’t here. We usually get Saturday nights off.”

“We?”

“Me and Lucy before she left. Miss Durano paid me extra to stay last night. He was bad last night.”

“You coming?” Una called from the head of the stairs.

She took me to the room with the picture window at the rear of the house. The sun’s fires had blazed out of control across the whole western sky and were eating at the sea’s edges. Along the shore where the beach curved, a few late swimmers were tossed like matchsticks in a bloody froth of surf. I sat down in a chair against the side wall where I could watch the whole room and its doors and windows.

Seen from inside by daylight, the room was spacious and handsome in an old-fashioned way. Kept up, it might have been beautiful. But the carpets and the surfaces of the furniture were gray with dust, strewn with the leavings of weeks: torn magazines and crumpled newspapers, cigarette butts, unwashed dishes. A bowl of rotting fruit was alive with insects. The wall plants had drooped and died. Cobwebs hung in shaggy strands from the ceiling. It was a Roman villa liberated by Vandals.

Una sat down at the card-table by the big window. The cards with which she and Donald had been playing the night before lay scattered across the table, mixed with a confetti of potato chips. A pair of clouded glasses sat on its edge. Una’s hand crept out onto the table and began to gather the cards.

“How long has Leo been insane?” I said.

“What does it matter? You know he didn’t kill Heiss.”

“Heiss isn’t the only one.”

“Lucy Champion, then. He wouldn’t hurt Lucy. They got along swell till she left. She was a damn good nurse, I’ll give her that.”

“That isn’t why you were so anxious to get her back.”

“Isn’t it?” She smiled a keen half-smile, as bitter as wormwood.

“How long has he been insane, Una?”

“Since the first of the year. He blew his top for keeps at a
New Year’s party in the Dial, that’s a night-spot in Detroit. He was trying to make the orchestra play the same piece over and over, some piece from an opera. They played it three times and quit. Leo said they were insulting a great Italian composer. He was going to shoot the orchestra leader. I stopped him.

“It was New Year’s Eve and everybody thought he was loaded. I knew different. I’d been watching him since summer. He had bad headaches all last year, and along in the fall he was flying off the handle every day. It was Bess set him off, he never should have taken her back. They fought like wildcats all the time. Then he started to lose his memory. He got so he didn’t even know his collectors’ names.”

“Collectors?”

Her hand became still among the half-gathered cards. She uncrossed and recrossed her legs. “He runs a collection agency.”

“With a gun?”

“Leo always carried large sums. The gun was for protection. I didn’t realize he was dangerous until he tried to use it on that musician. The doctor in Detroit said he was in a hopeless state, he wouldn’t live long. I saw I had to get him out of Michigan. I wasn’t going to have my brother committed.”

“Again.”

“
Again
, God damn you, if you know so much.”

“So you hired a couple of nurses and moved to California. No doubt reasoning that Californians were expendable, in case he tried to shoot somebody else.”