The Ivory Grin (27 page)

He rose, still holding his middle where my accusation had hit him. I thought he was too willing. The closet was empty. He shut the door and leaned against it. His long-toothed melancholy grin mimicked the grin of the absent skull.

“Where is it, doctor?”

“I suppose Bess took it with her. That would be fitting, too.”

There was an iron grate set in the baseboard beside the closet door. Benning’s glance rested on it involuntarily, a second too long. The grate was the closed outlet of an old-fashioned hot-air system. Holding my gun on Benning, I stooped to touch it. It was warm, and under it I could sense the minute vibrations of fire.

“Show me the furnace.”

Benning stood flat against the door, his eyes gleaming palely, as though they belonged to a tormented animal crouched inside of him. He drooped suddenly, but I distrusted his docility. It was taut and dangerous. I held my gun close to his back as we went through the house and down the basement stairs.

The light was still on in the basement. A naked bulb suspended on a wire cast a dingy yellow glare on shelves of empty jars, broken furniture, newspapers and magazines, generations of cobwebs. A rusty three-burner gas plate squatted on a bench beside the stairs, and a copper boiler, dented and green with age, hung on the wall above it. Benning avoided that corner of the basement.

In the far corner, behind a rough board partition, an old cast-iron furnace was breathing like a bull. I used my toe to open the fire door, and saw what lay in the heart of the fire: a skull licked by flames in a phoenix nest of bones.

Beside me, Benning was lost in contemplation. The orange light of the fire played feebly on the lower part of his face. He seemed for an instant to be young and smiling.

“Put it out.”

He came to himself with a start. “I can’t. I don’t know how.”

“Find a way, and be quick about it. Those bones are worth money to me.”

He attached a garden hose to a tap in the hot water tank, and turned its stream on the fire. Steam sizzled and gushed from the furnace door. He emerged from it coughing, and sat down on a pile of kindling against the board partition. I looked into the blackened firebox at five thousand dollars’ worth of charred bones, all that remained of the golden boy. It was a hell of a way to make money, selling dead men’s bones. I kicked the iron door shut.

With his eyes closed, his head lolling back against the boards, Benning looked like another dead man.

“Are you ready to give me a full confession?”

“Never,” he said. “They can’t convict me.”

“They have three tries, remember.”

“Three?”

“If it was only Singleton, there’d be some room for doubt, even for sympathy. He took Bess away from you. You had some justification for letting the scalpel slip in his bowels.”

He said in a deeper voice: “My enemy was delivered into my hands.” Then opened his eyes in bewilderment, as if he had talked in his sleep and waked himself from nightmare.

“That doesn’t apply to Lucy. She tried to help you.”

Benning laughed. With a great effort, he throttled the laugh and imposed silence on himself.

“Before Bess was killed tonight, she told me Lucy assisted at the operation. Lucy was in a position to know who and what killed Singleton. When things closed in on her—landlady trouble, no job, detectives tailing her—she thought of selling her knowledge to Singleton’s family. But she made the mistake of coming to you yesterday and giving you a chance before she did anything final.

“If she could get money from you, she wouldn’t have to sell you out or involve herself in a murder case. You gave her the money you had on hand, enough to buy a train ticket and get out of town. You also hedged against the chance that she wouldn’t take that train, by filching her motel-key out of her purse. Lucy missed the train, in every sense. When she went back to the motel, you were waiting in her room. She tried to defend herself with a knife. You were too strong for her.”

“You can’t prove it,” Benning said. Bowed far forward, he was staring down at the wet concrete floor.

“A witness will turn up. Somebody must have seen you go out, even if Florie didn’t. You must have passed somebody who knows you between here and the Mountview Motel, going or coming. If I have to, I’m going to canvass the whole population of the town.”

His head came up as if I had tightened a knot under his jaw. He knew he had been seen. “Why do you want to do this? Why do you hate me?” He wasn’t asking me alone. He was asking all the people who had known him and not loved him in his life.

“Lucy was young,” I said. “She had a boy friend who wanted to marry her. They honeymooned in the morgue, and Alex is still in jail, sweating out your rap for you. Do you think you’re worth the trouble you’ve caused?”

He didn’t answer me.

“It’s not just the people you’ve killed. It’s the human idea you’ve been butchering and boiling down and trying to burn away. You can’t stand the human idea. You and Una Durano don’t stack up against it, and you know it. You know it makes you look lousy. Even a dollar-chaser like Max Heiss makes you look lousy. So you have to burn his face off with a blowtorch. Isn’t that what you did?”

“It’s not true. He demanded money. I had no money to give him.”

“You could have taken your medicine,” I said. “That never occurred to you. It hasn’t yet. When Max found the Buick in your barn, that made him your enemy. Naturally he had to die. And when he came back for his money, you were ready for him, with Singleton’s clothes and a blowtorch and a can of gasoline. It must have seemed like a wonderful plan, to get rid of Heiss and in the same motion establish Singleton’s death by accident. But all it accomplished was to tip Bess off on what you’d done. As soon as I told her about the car he was found in, she realized you killed Max. And she left you.”

“She left me, yes. After all I’d done for her.”

“Not for her. For you. You’ve killed two men and a woman because they threatened your security. You’d have killed Bess if she hadn’t got out fast. She didn’t tell me that, but I think she knew it. She was the one you wanted to kill from the start, if you hadn’t been afraid.”

He shuddered, covering his eyes with his spread fingers. “Why are you torturing me?”

“I want a confession.”

It took him several minutes to bring himself under control. When he lowered his hands, his face had smoothed and thinned. His eyes seemed smaller and darker. No animal was using them.

He got up awkwardly from the pile of wood and took a halting step towards me:

“I’ll give you a confession, Mr. Archer. If you’ll let me have access to my drug cabinet, for just a moment?”

“No.”

“It will save time and trouble, for all of us.”

“It’s too easy. I’ve promised myself one satisfaction out of this case. To see you go in and Alex Norris come out.”

“You’re a hard man.”

“I hope so. It’s the soft ones, the self-pity boys like you, that give me bad dreams.” I had had enough of that basement, cluttered with broken objects, wet and hot and squalid with broken desires. “Let’s go, Benning.”

Outside, the flawed white moon was higher among the stars. Benning looked up at them as if the night had really become a cave of shadows, the moon a clouded port and the stars peepholes into a terrible brightness:

“I do feel grief for her. I loved her. There was nothing I wouldn’t do.”

He started down the veranda steps, his short black shadow dragging and jerking at his heels.

BLACK MONEY

When Lew Archer is hired to get the goods on the suspiciously suave Frenchman who’s run off with his client’s girlfriend, it looks like a simple case of alienated affections. Things look different when the mysterious foreigner turns out to be connected to a seven-year-old suicide and a mountain of gambling debts.
Black Money
is Ross Macdonald at his finest, baring the skull beneath the suntanned skin of Southern California’s high society.

Crime Fiction/978-0-679-76810-4

THE GOODBYE LOOK

In
The Goodbye Look
, Lew Archer is hired to investigate a burglary at the mission-style mansion of Irene and Larry Chalmers. The prime suspect, their son Nick, has a talent for disappearing, and the Chalmerses are a family with money and memories to burn. As Archer zeros in on Nick, he discovers a troubled blonde, a stash of wartime letters, and a mysterious hobo.
In The Goodbye Look
, Ross Macdonald delves into the world of the rich and the troubled and reveals that the past has a deadly way of catching up to the present.

Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70865-7

FIND A VICTIM

Las Cruces wasn’t a place most travelers would think to stop. But after Lew Archer plays the good samaritan and picks up a bloodied hitchhiker, he finds himself in town for a few days awaiting a murder inquest. A hijacked truck full of liquor and an evidence box full of marijuana, $20,000 from a big time bank heist by a small time crook, corruption, adultery, incest, prodigal daughters, and abused wives all make the little town seem a lot more interesting than any guide book ever could. And as the murder rate rises, Archer finds himself caught up in a mystery where everyone is a suspect and everyone’s a victim.

Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70867-1

“Ross Macdonald remains the grandmaster, taking the crime novel to new heights by imbuing it with psychological respondence, complexity of story, and richness of style that remain inspiring.”

—Jonathan Kellerman

THE MOVING TARGET

Like many Southern California millionaires, Ralph Sampson keeps odd company. There’s the sun-worshipping holy man whom Sampson once gave his very own mountain; the fading actress with sidelines in astrology and S&M. Now one of Sampson’s friends may have arranged his kidnapping. As Lew Archer follows the clues from the canyon sanctuaries of the mega-rich to jazz joints where you get beaten up between sets,
The Moving Target
blends sex, greed, and family hatred into an explosively readable crime novel.

Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70146-7

SLEEPING BEAUTY

In
Sleeping Beauty
, Lew Archer finds himself the confidant of a wealthy, violent family with a load of trouble on their hands—including an oil spill, a missing girl, a lethal dose of Nembutal, a six-figure ransom, and a stranger afloat, face down, off a private beach. Here is Ross Macdonald’s masterful tale of buried memories, the consequences of arrogance, and the anguished relations between parents and their children. Riveting, gritty, tautly written,
Sleeping Beauty
is crime fiction at its best

Crime Fiction/978-0-375-70866-4

THE GALTON CASE

Almost twenty years have passed since Anthony Galton disappeared, along with a suspiciously streetwise bride and several thousand dollars of his family’s fortune. Now Anthony’s mother wants him back and has hired Lew Archer to find him. What turns up is a headless skeleton, a boy who claims to be Galton’s son, and a con game whose stakes are so high that someone is still willing to kill for them. Devious and poetic, The
Galton Case
displays Macdonald at the pinnacle of his form.

Crime Fiction/978-0-679-76864-7

“Lew Archer … is a crime-fighter of the old school; painstakingly searching out the twisting thread of suspense that leads him from the hint of one complicated drama to another.”

—Christian Science Monitor

THE CHILL

In
The Chill
a distraught young man hires Archer to track down his runaway bride. But no sooner has he found Dolly Kincaid than Archer finds himself entangled in two murders, one twenty years old, the other so recent that the blood is still wet. What ensues is a detective novel of nerve-racking suspense, desperately believable characters, and one of the most intricate plots ever spun by an American crime writer.

Crime Fiction/978-0-679-76807-4

THE FAR SIDE OF THE DOLLAR

Has Tom Hillman run away from his exclusive reform school, or has he been kidnapped? Are his wealthy parents protecting him or their own guilty secrets? And why does every clue lead Lew Archer to an abandoned Hollywood hotel, where starlets and sailors once rubbed shoulders with two-bit grifters—and where the present clientele includes a brand-new corpse? The result is Macdonald at his most exciting, delivering 1,000-volt shocks to the nervous system while uncovering the venality and depravity at the heart of the case.

Crime Fiction/978-0-679-76865-4

ALSO AVAILABLE:

The Underground Man
, 978-0-679-76808-1
The Way Some People Die
, 978-0-307-27898-2
Wycherly Woman
, 978-0-375-70144-3
The Zebra-Striped Hearse
, 978-0-375-70145-0

VINTAGE CRIME/BLACK LIZARD
Available at your local bookstore, or visit
www.randomhouse.com
.