The Ivory Grin (12 page)

“Sure. You think she held a gun on him? They were stuck on each other. He couldn’t peel his eyes off of her.”

“How did they leave? By car?”

“So I understand. Ask Dewey in the parking lot. Only you better slip him a little change first. He doesn’t enjoy the sound of his own voice the way I do.” Recognizing a good cue-line, he moved out of my range.

I drank up, and went outside. The hotel faced the sea, across a palm-lined boulevard. The parking lot lay behind a row of small expensive shops on its landward side. Moving along the sidewalk, I passed a display of silver and rawhide pendants, two wax mannequins in peasant skirts, a window full of jade; and was hit between the eyes by the name Denise. It was printed in gold leaf on the plate-glass window of a hat shop. Behind the window a single hat hung on a stand by itself, like a masterpiece of sculpture in a museum. The shop was dark, and after a second’s hesitation, I went on.

Under an arc light at the corner of the parking lot there was a small green-painted shack like a sentry-box. A sign attached to its wall stated:
The sole income of attendants consists of tips
. I stood beside the sign and held a dollar in the light. From somewhere among the sardined ranks of cars, a little man appeared. He was thin and gray. Under his old Navy turtleneck the shoulder-bones projected like pieces of waterworn driftwood. He moved silently in canvas sneakers, leaning forward as if he were being dragged by the tip of his long sharp nose.

“Make and color? Where’s your ticket, mister?”

“My car’s parked around the corner. I wanted to ask you about another car. I guess you’re Dewey.”

“I guess I am.” He blinked his faded eyes, innocently contemplating his identity. The top of his uncombed gray head was on a level with my shoulder.

“You know a lot about cars, I bet.”

“I bet. People, too. You’re a cop, or I miss my guess. I bet you want to ask me about young Charlie Singleton.”

“A private cop,” I said. “How much do you bet?”

“One buck.”

“You win, Dewey.” I passed the money to him.

He folded it up small and tucked it in the watch pocket of the dirtiest gray flannels in the world. “It’s only fair,” he said earnestly. “You take up my valuable time. I was polishing windshields and I pick up plenty money polishing windshields on a Saturday night.”

“Let’s get it over with, then. You saw the woman he left with?”

“Absotively. She was a pipperoo. I seen her coming and going.”

“Say again.”

“Coming and going,” he repeated. “The blonde lady. She druv up about ten o’clock in a new blue Plymouth station-wagon. I seen her get out in front of the hotel. I was around in front picking up a car. I seen her get out of the station-wagon and go inside the hotel. She was a pipperino.” His gray-stubbled jaw hung slack and he closed his eyes to concentrate on the memory.

“What happened to the station-wagon?”

“The other one druv it away.”

“Other one?”

“The other one that was driving the station-wagon. The dark-complected one that dropped the blonde lady off. She druv it away.”

“Was she a colored woman?”

“The one that was driving the station wagon? Maybe she was. She was dark-complected. I didn’t get a good look at her. I was watching the blonde lady. Then I come back here, and Charlie Singleton druv in after a while. He went inside and come out with the blonde lady and then they druv away.”

“In his car?”

“Yessir. 1948 Buick sedan, two-tone green.”

“You’re very observant, Dewey.”

“Shucks, I often seen young Charlie riding around in his car. I know cars. Druv my first car back in 1911 in Minneapolis, Minnesota.”

“When they left here, which way did they go?”

“Sorry, chum, I can’t say. I didn’t see. That’s what I told the other lady when she asked me, and she got mad and didn’t give me no tip.”

“What other lady was that?”

His faded eyes surveyed me, blinking slow signals to the faded brain behind them. “I got to get back to those windshields. My time is valuable on a Saturday night.”

“I bet you can’t remember about the other lady.”

“How much you want to bet?”

“A dollar?”

“Double it?”

“Two dollars.”

“Taken. She come blowing in a few minutes after they left, driving that blue Plymouth station-wagon.”

“The dark-complected one?”

“Naw, this was another one, older. Wearing a leopardskin coat. I seen her around here before. She asked me about the blonde lady and young Charlie Singleton, which way they went. I said I didn’t see. She called me a iggoramus and left. She looked like she was hopping mad.”

“Was anybody with her?”

“Naw. I don’t remember.”

“The woman live around here?”

“I seen her before. I don’t know where she lives.”

I put two ones in his hand. “Thanks, Dewey. One more thing. When Charlie drove away with the blonde, did he seem to be happy about it?”

“I dunno. He tipped me a buck. Anybody would be happy, going off with that blonde lady.” A one-sided grin
pulled at his wrinkled mouth. “Me, f’r instance. I ain’t had nothing to do with female flesh since I left my old lady in the depression. Twenty years is a long time, chum.”

“It certainly is. Good night.”

Sniffing lonesomely, Dewey pointed his nose toward the rank of cars and followed it out of sight.

CHAPTER
14
:
    
I went back to the hotel and
found a public telephone. According to the directory, the Denise Hat Shop was run by a Mrs. Denise Grinker whose residence was at 124 Jacaranda Lane. I called her home number, got an answer, and hung up.

The street twisted like a cowpath between the highway and the shore. Jacaranda and cypress trees darkened the road and obscured the houses along it. I drove slowly, in second gear, turning my flashlight on the house-fronts. It was a middle-class neighborhood subsiding into bohemian defeat. Weeds were rampant in the yards. Signs in dingy window corners advertised Handmade Pottery, Antiques, Typing: We Specialize in Manuscripts. The numerals 124 were painted in a vertical row, by hand, on the doorpost of a graying redwood bungalow.

I parked, and walked in under a shaggy eugenia arch. There was a rusty bicycle leaning against the wall on the front porch. The porch light came on when I knocked, and the door opened. A large woman wrapped in a flannel bathrobe appeared in the opening, one hip out. Because her hair was caught up in metal curlers, her face looked
naked and very broad. In spite of that, it was a pleasant face. I could feel my frozen smile thaw into something more comfortable.

“Mrs. Grinker? My name is Archer.”

“Hello,” she said good-humoredly, looking me over with large brown eyes a little the worse for wear. “I didn’t leave the darn shop unlocked again, touch wood?”

“I hope not.”

“Aren’t you a policeman?”

“More or less. It shows when I’m tired.”

“Wait a minute.” She brought a leather case out of the pocket of her bathrobe and put on tortoise-shell spectacles. “I don’t know you, do I?”

“No. I’m investigating a murder that occurred in Bella City this afternoon.” I produced the rolled-up turban from my pocket and held it out to her. “This belonged to the victim. Did you make it?”

She peered at it. “It’s got my name inside. What if I did?”

“You should be able to identify the customer you sold it to, if it’s an original.”

She leaned closer under the light, her glance shifting from the hat to me. The dark-rimmed spectacles had gathered her face into a shrewd hard pattern. “Is it a question of identification? You said it belonged to the victim. So who was the victim?”

“Lucy Champion was her name. She was a colored woman in her early twenties.”

“And you want to know if I sold her this turban?”

“I didn’t say that exactly. The question is who you sold it to.”

“Do I have to answer that? Let me see your badge.”

“I’m a private detective,” I said, “working with the police.”

“Who are you working
for?”

“My client doesn’t want her name used.”

“Exactly!” She blew me a whiff of beer. “Professional ethics. That’s how it is with me. I can’t deny I sold that hat, and I won’t deny it was an original. But how can I say who bought it from me? I made it away back last spring some time. I do know one thing for certain, though, it wasn’t a colored girl bought it. There’s never been one in my shop, except for a few brownskins from India and Persia and places like that. They’re different.”

“Born in different places, anyway.”

“Okay, we won’t argue. I have nothing against colored people. But they don’t buy hats from me. This girl must have found the hat, or stolen it, or had it given to her, or bought it in a rummage sale. So even if I could remember who bought it from me, it wouldn’t be fair to drag my client’s name into a murder case, would it?” Her voice contained a hint of phoniness, an echo of the daytime palaver in her shop.

“If you worked at it, Mrs. Grinker, I think you could remember.”

“Maybe I could and maybe I couldn’t.” She was troubled, and her voice grew shallower. “What if I did? It would be violating a professional confidence.”

“Do milliners take an oath?”

“We have our standards,” she said hollowly. “Oh hell, I don’t want to lose customers if I can help it. The ones who can pay my prices are getting as scarce as eligible men.”

I tried hard to look like an eligible man. “I can’t give you my client’s name. I will say that she’s connected with the Singleton family.”

“The Charles Singletons?” She pronounced the syllables
slowly and distinctly, like a quotation from a poem she had always loved.

“Uh-huh.”

“How is Mrs. Singleton?”

“Not very well. She’s worried about her son—”

“Is this murder connected with him?”

“I’m trying to find that out, Mrs. Grinker. I never will find out unless I get some co-operation.”

“I’m sorry. Mrs. Singleton isn’t a customer of mine—I’m afraid she buys most of her hats in Paris—but of course I know
of
her. Come in.”

The front door opened directly into a redwood-paneled living-room. A gas heater burned low in a red-brick fireplace. The room was warm and shabby and smelled of cats.

She waved a hospitable hand towards a studio couch covered with an afghan. A glass of beer was bubbling its life away on a redwood coffee-table beside the couch. “I was just having a beer for a nightcap. Let me get you one.”

“I don’t mind if you do.”

She went into another room, closing the door behind her.

When I sat down on the studio couch, a fluffy gray cat came out from under it and jumped onto my knee. Its purring rose and fell like the sound of a distant plane. Somewhere in the house, I thought I heard a low voice talking. Denise was a long time coming back.

I set the cat on the floor, and moved across the room to the door she had closed. On the other side of it, she was saying, in clipped telephone accents: “He claims to be employed by Mrs. Charles Singleton.” A silence, lightly scratched by the sound of the telephone. Then: “I absolutely won’t, I promise you. Of course, I understand perfectly.
I
did
want to get your view of the matter.” Another scratchy silence. Denise intoned a saccharine good-night, and hung up.

I tiptoed back to my seat, with the gray cat weaving between my legs. It paraded back and forth in front of me, rubbing its sides on my trousers and looking up at my face with remote female disdain.

I said: “Scat.”

Denise re-entered the room with a foaming glass in each hand. She said to the cat: “Doesn’t the nasty mans like kitty-witties?”

The cat paid no attention.

I said: “There’s a story about Confucius, Mrs. Grinker. He was a pre-Communist Chinaman.”

“I know who Confucius is.”

“It seems a stable burned down in a neighboring village, call it Bella City. Confucius wanted to know if any men were hurt. He didn’t ask about the horses.”

It hit her. The foam slopped over the rims of the beer-glasses and down across her fingers. She set the glasses on the coffee-table. “You can like cats and people, too,” she said doubtfully. “I have a son in college, believe it or not. I even had a husband at one time. Whatever happened to him?”

“I’ll look for him when I finish the case I’m on.”

“Don’t bother. Aren’t you going to drink your beer?” She sat on the edge of the couch, wiping her wet fingers with a piece of Kleenex.

“The case I’m on,” I said, “involves one dead woman and one missing man. If your cat had been run over by a hit-run driver, and somebody knew his license number, you’d expect to be told it. Who were you telephoning just now?”

“Nobody. It was a wrong number.” Her fingers were twisting the damp Kleenex into a small cup-shaped object, roughly the shape of a woman’s hat.

“The telephone didn’t ring.”

She looked up at me with pain on her large face. “This woman is one of my customers. I can vouch for her.” The pain was partly economic and partly moral.

“How did Lucy Champion get the hat? Does your customer explain that?”

“Of course. That’s why it’s so utterly pointless to bring her name into it. Lucy Champion used to be her maid. She ran away some time ago, without giving notice. She stole the hat from her employer, and other things as well.”

“What other things? Jewelry?”

“How did you know that?”

“I got it from the horse’s mouth. Maybe horse isn’t the right word. Mrs. Larkin is more of the pony type.”

Denise didn’t react to the name. Her quick unconscious fingers had moulded the Kleenex hat into a miniature replica of the black-and-gold turban. She noticed what her fingers had been making, and tossed it in front of the cat. The cat pounced.

The woman wagged her head from side to side. The metal curlers clicked dully like disconnected thoughts. “All this is very confusing. Oh well, let’s drink up.” She raised her glass. “Here’s to confusion. And universal darkness covers all.”

I reached for my beer. The sagging springs of the studio couch threw us together, shoulder to shoulder. “Where did you pick that up?”