She laughed in his face: “You’d never have the chance, little man. Now crawl back down your hole. If I ever see you again, I’ll knock you over with a stick the way I would a gopher. Come on, Florie.”
Florie sat head down with her arms on the table, frightened and stubborn. Mrs. Benning took her by the wrist and hauled her to her feet. Florie didn’t resist. With dragging feet, she followed Mrs. Benning to the door. There was a taxi waiting at the yellow curb outside. By the time I reached the street, it had pulled away and lost itself in the traffic.
I had a bad feeling that history was repeating itself, in spades. The bad feeling got worse when Heiss came up behind me and touched my arm. He touched people whenever he could, to reassure himself of his membership in the race.
“Go and take gopher poison,” I said.
The veined nose stood out on his pale face. “Yeah, I saw you in there. I thought you run out on me, boysie. I was consoling my bereavement with a nice fresh chunk of Mexican cactus candy.”
“Pumping her, you mean.”
“You unnerestimate me. I pumped Florie dry long since! They can’t resist me, boysie. What is it I got that they can’t resist me, I wonder.” His mobile mouth was working overtime, talking him back into his own good opinion.
“What’s the pitch, Max?”
“No dice, Archer. You got your chance to cut in, this aft. You couldn’t be bothered with me. Now I can’t be bothered.”
“You want to be coaxed.”
“Not me. Lay a small pinkie on me and I scream my head off.” He cast a smug eye on the crowds streaming past us, as if he was depending on them for protection.
“You don’t know me well,” I said. “Those aren’t my methods.”
“I know you as well as I want to,” he said. “You gave me the quick old brush this aft.”
“Forget it. What’s the tieup with this missing man in Arroyo Beach?”
“Come again, boysie.” He leaned against the corner post of the storefront. “I should give you something for nothing. Nobody ever gave me something for nothing. I got to roust and hustle for what I get.” With a lipstick-stained handkerchief, he wiped his face.
“I’m not trying to take something from you, Max.”
“That jakeroo, then. Good night. Don’t think it ain’t been charming.” He turned away.
I said: “Lucy’s dead.”
That stopped him. “What did you say?”
“Lucy had her throat cut this afternoon.”
“You’re stringing me.”
“Go out to the morgue and take a look for yourself. And if you won’t tell me what you know, tell it to the cops.”
“Maybe I will at that.” His eyes shone like brown agates lit from behind. “Well, bon soir again.”
He moved away, with one or two furtive back-glances, and joined the northward stream of pedestrians. I wanted to go after him and shake the truth out of him. But I had just said those weren’t my methods, and the words stood.
Chapter 10
I picked up my car at the Mountview Motel and drove to Dr. Benning’s house. There were no lights behind its white painted windows. From the overgrown yard it looked like a house no one had lived in for a long time. Its tall gray front stood flimsily against the dark red sky like a stage set propped by scantlings from behind.
When I rang the door bell, the house resumed its dimensions. Far in its interior, behind walls, the buzzer sounded like a trapped insect. I waited and rang again and no one answered. There were old-fashioned glass panels, ground in geometric patterns, set in both of the double doors. I pressed my face to one of them and looked in and saw nothing. Except that the glass was cracked in one corner, and gave slightly under pressure.
I slipped on a driving-glove and punched out the cracked corner. It smashed on the floor inside. I waited and looked up and down the street and rang the bell a third time. When nobody answered and nobody passed on the sidewalk I eased my arm through the triangular hole and snapped the Yale lock.
I closed and relocked the door with my gloved hand. Broken glass crunched under my heel. Feeling along the wall, I found the door of the waiting-room. A little light fell through the windows from the street, lending the room a vague beauty like an old woman with good features, heavily veiled.
I located the filing cabinet behind the desk in the corner. Using my pocket flash and shielding its light with my body, I went through the Active Patient drawer of the file. Camberwell, Carson, Cooley. There was no card for Lucy Champion.
Dousing the light, I moved along the wall to the inner door, which was a few inches ajar. I pushed it open wider, slid through and closed it behind me. I switched on the flash again and probed the walls and furniture with its white finger of light. The room contained a flat-topped oak-veneer desk, a swivel chair and a couple of other chairs, an old three-tiered sectional bookcase not quite full of medical texts and journals. Above the bookcase on the calcimined wall, there was a framed diploma issued in June 1933 by a medical school I had never heard of.
I went through an open door into a room with figured oilcloth walls and a linoleum floor. Brownish stains on the far wall outlined the place where a gas range had once stood. An adjustable examination-table of brown-painted steel padded with black leatherette had taken its place. There were a battered white enameled instrument cabinet and a sterilizer against the wall beside it. On the other side of the room, under the blinded window, a faucet dripped steadily into a sink. I went to the closed door in the wall beyond it, and turned the knob. It was locked.
The second pass-key I tried opened the door. My light flashed on the ivory grin of death.
Six inches above the level of my eyes, a skeleton’s shadowed sockets looked down hollowly. I thought in the instant of shock that it was a giant’s bones, then saw that the long toe-bones dangled nearly a foot above the floor. The whole thing hung in the closet by wires attached to an overhead crossbar. Its joints had been carefully articulated with wire, and the movement of the door had set it swaying slightly. Its barred shadow wavered on the closet wall behind it.
It looked like a man’s bones to me. I had an old brotherly feeling that I should take him by the unfleshed hand. He was lonely and desolate. I was afraid to touch him.
Somewhere in the house, no louder than a rodent squeak, a door or a floorboard creaked. It caused a croupy tightening in my breathing. I listened and heard the faint wheeze in my throat, and the dripping of the tap. Working with jumping fingers, I relocked the closet door and dropped the key in my pocket.
With the flash unlit in my hand, I retraced my steps by blind touch to the door of the consultation room. I had one foot across its metal-strip threshold when the light came on in my face. Dr. Benning’s wife stood against the opposite wall with one hand on the light switch. She was so still that she might have been a figure in a frieze, part of the wall itself.
“What goes on in here?”
I squeezed out a husky answer: “The doctor wasn’t here. I came in to wait.”
“You a crib-smasher? Junkie? We’ve got no dope in this office.”
“I came to ask a question. I thought the office might answer it for me.”
“What question?” The small automatic steady in her hand was gun-metal blue, and her eyes had taken its color.
“Put the gun away, Mrs. Benning. I can’t talk with iron in my face.”
“You’ll talk.” She pulled herself away from the wall and moved towards me. Even in motion her body seemed still and frigid. But I could feel its power, like a land mine under a snowbank. – “You’re another lousy snooper, aren’t you?”