The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I could see no good reason why he wouldn’t shoot all four of us, but I hoped the prospect of mowing down innocent citizens would not appeal to the shaking desk clerk, whose experience in mayhem, as far as I knew, had been limited to one unfortunate scrape and a lucky shot a few hours earlier with an apparently unpleasant third-rate bully. “Think of the publicity.”

  Teddy’s mouth went dry. He reached over and took a sip of the flat Pepsi to moisten it. I didn’t stop him. No one moved. We just watched him and hoped he’d down the whole thing.

  “Five bodies in one room, one a famous actor,” Straight-Ahead chimed in. “The Alhambra might have a hell of a time surviving that.”

  “I can shoot you all and get away,” Teddy reasoned. He took another sip.

  “You’ll never get away with it,” I said. People always said that in situations like this. My experience was that they very often did get away with it, but you don’t tell things like that to killers holding guns. You just hoped they saw the same movies and listened to the same radio shows you did. The room suddenly went quiet. The rain had stopped.

  Teddy blinked his eyes and looked at us. I couldn’t tell whether he was considering who to shoot first or was realizing that he couldn’t pull the trigger. I never got a chance to ask him.

  “I’ve had just about enough,” Wayne said, and took a step, the final step, forward. Teddy, already a little drowsy from the drink, moved his gun-holding hand and fired. It missed Wayne, breezed past me, and shattered the window, letting in a rush of rain-scented air. Wayne’s punch slammed Teddy against the wall. The gun fell, hit the floor, bounced a few times, and rested.

  Olivia screamed and Straight-Ahead walked slowly straight ahead toward the slumped figure. Wayne, fists still clenched, stepped back to let the house detective take over. It was a show and a half to see Merit get to his knee, lift the now silent desk clerk up, and deposit him on the chair near the desk.

  “Let’s go,” I said, exchanging a look of understanding with Merit when he turned around.

  “Go?” asked Wayne, his dark hair over his forehead. “What are you talking about? This man killed that man and we—”

  “Can go,” I said.

  Olivia didn’t need persuading. She grabbed her red bag and headed for the door.

  “You’ve never been in this room,” Straight-Ahead said to her.

  “I’ve never been in this hotel,” she answered. “Nice to meet you, John.” And out she went.

  “Merit will work a deal with Teddy,” I explained to the bewildered Wayne. “Teddy says he shot Vance in self-defense and no one else was around. Merit backs him up. Story’s over. Teddy doesn’t want it that way, Merit calls him a liar trying to save his skin, but that won’t happen. Teddy will back it up and you’re out of it.”

  “With some embellishments, that’s the way it really was,” Merit said, looking at Teddy.

  “It’s—” John Wayne began.

  “Not like the movies,” I finished. “Not this time anyway. The rain’s stopped. You want to stop for a beer?”

  “I guess,” said Wayne, shaking his head. “It’s too late for DeMille’s party.” He took a last look at the corpse on the bed and the scrawny killer in the chair. The Ringo Kid wouldn’t have handled it like this, but what the hell. He looked at Straight-Ahead, who said, “Go on. It’s my job.”

  Wayne nodded and moved into the hall after I said, “I’ll be right there.”

  Teddy was showing no signs of waking up.

  “My gun,” I said.

  “Your gun,” Merit repeated, giving up on reviving Teddy Spaghetti in the near future. “We say you left it here for Teddy for a price. Protection. He was threatened by all kinds. That sort of thing. It’ll hold up.”

  “It’ll shake a lot,” I said, “but it’ll probably hold. Take care.”

  A breeze from the broken window swirled around the room as Straight-Ahead waved his arm at me and sat slowly in the understuffed chair to wait for Teddy to wake up. I closed the door quietly and joined John Wayne in the hall.

  “Things like this happen to you a lot?” he said as we got onto the elevator.

  “When things are going well,” I said. “Only when things are going well.”

  My head began to ache again and I longed for a plate of tacos from Manny’s, a few blocks away. I wondered if I could talk Wayne into a visit.

  2

  Talking Wayne into a taco at Manny’s wasn’t too hard. He had already missed his DeMille party and had no place to go. If Manny recognized the Duke when we walked in, he didn’t let on, and since there was only one other customer in the place, a fat guy in the corner who needed a shave and demonstrated that he could snore with his mouth open, no one bothered us.

  We talked about the bad old days in Glendale. We had both listened to station KIEV on the radio out of the old Glendale Hotel. We had both gone to Glendale High, had both downed beers in Dave Burton’s bar, and watched Doug Fairbanks movies at the Alexander Theatre. Wayne didn’t seem to be in any big hurry to go home or anywhere else. In an hour he had lined up seven empty bottles of Drerys Beer with the mountie on the label and I had lined up three.

  Manny smoothed his bandit mustache and turned on the radio to pick up the news and drown out the snorer in the corner. Two Jap carriers had been sunk at Midway, and the Tokyo Armada was running from Admiral Nimitz. The British were moving in Libya, and Rommel was in Tobruk to rally the Afrika Korps.

  “Tried to enlist,” the Duke said, scratching at the label of his beer bottle with his thumbnail. “Too old, too many kids, bad shoulder. I’m gonna try again.”

  I held up my fourth taco to him in a salute to his patriotism. I knew I was too old to enlist, not that I would have, but who knows. My brother, Phil, had lied about his age and made it into the end of the last war. It had almost got him killed.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I said, reaching into my pocket for a couple of bucks. “Tacos and beer are on me. You can leave a tip for Manny.”

  A guy on the radio was excited and told us that first thing in the morning we should run down to the L.A. Furniture Company on South Broadway to buy a rebuilt Royal Eureka vacuum cleaner. Manny didn’t look excited. The idea that a floor might need cleaning was alien to him. He turned off the radio, and the sudden silence almost woke the sleeper, who snorted in fear.

  “Colorful place,” Wayne said.

  “Few people know of it and those of us who do try to keep it to ourselves,” I said. “But you’re welcome to join the elite.”

  “Hasta luego,” Wayne called to Manny as we left. Manny nodded back without answering as he started to clear away taco plates and empty beer bottles.

  “Manny is Greek,” I said as Wayne walked to the door.

  Wayne looked back at Manny, the sleeper, and the red leather-covered stools.

  “He looks Mexican,” Wayne said.

  “Part of his exotic image. Adds to his mystique for the clientele,” I explained.

  Outside, the rain had stopped and the night was getting damp and muggy-feeling.

  Wayne looked at the sky and zipped up his windbreaker. The seven beers hadn’t seem to have affected him. I got the impression that he was used to stronger stuff.

  “Helluva thing,” he said.

  “Helluva thing,” I agreed, though I didn’t know what we were talking about—the Vance murder, the Battle of Midway, Rommel, or Wayne’s inability to get into the war. I was wrong on all four.

  “You know where I’d like to go now?” he asked.

  “Back into Manny’s for another round and a chorus of ‘Wang Wang Blues’ with the guy sleeping it off in the corner,” I tried.

  Wayne looked at me, gave me a lopsided grin, and shook his head. “You got one funny sense of humor,” he said.

  “My brother tells me that sometimes.”

  “I’d like to go home is where I’d like to go,” he explained, putting an arm around me and leaning down to whisper. “But I can’t. The wife and I don’t see ey
e-to-eye, so I camp out in hotels.”

  “I’ve heard something about it,” I said.

  “You have?” he asked suspiciously. Maybe now I did catch the first small signs of slurred speech. I knew the three beers I had put away were having a slight effect on my midnight patter. My normal gargle for tacos was a couple of Pepsis.

  “I’m a detective,” I reminded him. “We keep our ears open and wear flowers in our buttonholes when we can afford them.”

  There was nothing else to say. The Duke thanked me for getting him out of the Alhambra and popping for the tacos, and we parted, going in opposite directions. I watched him lope down Broadway past a lone couple, who recognized him and turned to watch his familiar walk, then I turned south and went for my own car, which was still where I had left it. I managed to climb in and get it started before the staggering panhandler got to me. He had been advancing slowly, his too warm topcoat flapping in the muggy breeze, his hands already out like Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Mummy.

  I made it to Heliotrope in Hollywood and parked in front of home, Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house. For the past month or so I had been considering the purchase of a rope ladder, one I could drop from my room window so I could enter and exit without encountering Mrs. Plaut, who, I was now convinced, never slept. But I knew I’d never buy the ladder, would never take time off to buy it and install it and use it. Hell, if I could follow through on an idea like that, I wouldn’t be filling in as a night watchman at an old people’s home or a substitute house dick in second-rate hotels. There was no moving from Mrs. Plaut’s. Rooms were hard to get in the middle of a war. Besides, my best friend lived at the Plaut Palace and I didn’t want to insult or hurt Gunther Wherthman’s feelings.

  I trudged up the walk and the three white wooden steps, not trying to be particularly quiet. Being particularly quiet, even taking off my shoes, had never saved me from Mrs. Plaut. Since she was as close to deaf as one could be without benefit of a precise sign on her chest, I had often wondered by what uncanny sense she detected even the slightest presence in or near her domicile. Gunther was of the opinion that she felt vibrations through the wooden floor. Joe Hill, the postman who lived in the loft, thought she was a witch, but whatever it was, the minute and quite ancient and feisty Mrs. Plaut was better than radar.

  I sensed her before I saw her in the shadows on the front porch. She sat on the white wooden porch swing rocking, her feet not quite touching the wooden planks of the porch.

  “Photographs, Mr. Peelers,” she said.

  “It’s after midnight, Mrs. Plaut. What are you still doing up?” I knew she wouldn’t hear me, but after nearly fifty years of almost normal conversation with people, habits die hard.

  “What do you think of photographs?” she went on. The porch swing stopped, ending the rusty creaking. The question, stated in her insistent and too loud voice, penetrated, I was sure, every sleeping house on the block. Now the neighborhood awaited my opinion on the art of photography at midnight.

  “I think photographs are great,” I said. “I’ve got one of my old dog, my brother, and my dad on my office wall where I can see them and—”

  “Family photographs are the best,” she answered relevantly. And then I realized that it was not relevance but coincidence that had created apparent reason. She went on, “I believe we should incorporate photographs in the book.”

  Now I understood. For more than two years Mrs. Plaut had been submitting to me neatly written pages of her family history. At some juncture and confused moment in our early encounters, Mrs. Plaut had decided that I was both an exterminator and an editor. No amount of explanation had destroyed this illusion, and to preserve what little sanity and the room I possessed, I had found it easier simply to give in and read her manuscript, not knowing that it would continue to grow. It now was more than fifteen hundred pages long. The prospect of including family photographs filled me with delight.

  Something, I could see, was in her hands, a rather large wicker sewing box. She held it out to me and I advanced to take it. It was surprisingly heavy.

  “Photographs,” I said.

  “Photographs,” she replied. “Going back to 1800.”

  “That’s before photography was invented,” I informed her.

  She looked at me from the shadows as if my ignorance had no bounds.

  “You look through the photographs and counsel me on which would be most illustrative of what you have already edited,” she explained. “We can discuss it tomorrow. Each, you will find, is clearly marked on the reverse. Some are copies Harold made from glass plates, tintypes, and the like.”

  I almost asked who Harold was but even three beers did not drive me to such foolishness. Actually, I considered the price of looking at the photographs a cheap one to pay for escaping from a nocturnal confrontation with Mrs. Plaut.

  “I’ll do that,” I said, turning to enter the house.

  “I’m thinking of purchasing a device to aid the hearing,” she said behind me, and I was alive with new hope.

  “Terrific idea,” I said, turning to her and speaking as loudly and distinctly as I could.

  “I’d like to be able to hear my canary Sweet Alice,” she explained. “And Mr. Peelers, though you may not have noticed it, there has been a slight inclination on my part not to hear everything with perfect clarity. After all, I am—”

  And I waited for the disclosure of Mrs. Plaut’s age, a fact that had remained secret to all boarders in the Heliotrope house for perhaps a century, according to legend.

  “—in my middle years and must recognize that all bodily functions deteriorate, not unlike in a Ford automobile,” she concluded.

  “I would like the doctor with whom you work to make some recommendation about the proper inconspicuous device to assist my hearing,” she went on, “if it should at some point need assistance.”

  I shifted the wicker basket of photographs in my arms and said loudly, “I share office space with a dentist. Shelly is a dentist, Mrs. Plaut, and I don’t think—”

  “Doctors get discounts,” she explained. “I am interested in an Aurex, which the ads say is like glasses.”

  I would puzzle out later how a hearing aid was like glasses but now I simply wanted to get my burden to my room and sleep off a long day of work, a murder, and too many beers with the Ringo Kid.

  “I’ll do it,” I agreed, and was relieved to see a smile of satisfaction on her face. I turned and entered the house as the squeak of the porch swing resumed. Somehow I was going to have to go through the box of photographs and come up with a price on the hearing aid for Mrs. Plaut, I climbed the stairs, considered knocking on Gunther Wherthman’s door, decided it was too late, and went as quietly into my room as I could.

  I took off my rumpled seersucker suit, hung it in the closet, changed my underwear, brushed my teeth in the washroom down the hall, and returned to my room and small table to eat a bowl of Wheaties and milk while I looked at a few treasures from the Plaut photo collection. My room isn’t much but I like it that way. Not much to have. Not much to lose. I liked the idea of knowing that if I didn’t have to return some night I wouldn’t miss anything except Gunther and the Beech-Nut clock on the wall, which told me it was now a little after one in the morning. I had a small refrigerator, a hot plate, a wooden table with two wooden chairs, and a sofa with doilies on the arms that I was forbidden to remove under pain of torture by Mrs. Plaut. I had a bed but I had moved my mattress to the floor because of my bad back. Mrs. Plaut had learned to tolerate this eccentricity, though I’m not sure why. The only other item of interest in the room was a painted portrait, which may have been Abraham Lincoln, a relative of Mrs. Plaut’s, or a random leftover from a previous tenant. He was a stern, bearded character in a black jacket and string tie, a no-nonsense dark-haired old guy who needed only a cartoon balloon saying “Shape up or ship out.” I had recently taken to calling him Bosco and talking to him, a sure sign of early senility or too close an association with the fringe members of normal soc
iety.

  The wicker sewing basket contained more than photographs, but I ignored a receipt for fifty-nine cents for a bottle of Pinaud cologne and plowed on through about twenty photographs and had a second bowl of Wheaties before I gave up. Names were scrawled on the back of the photographs with comments—almost legible—in Mrs. Plaut’s unmistakable hand. I was sure she had taken penmanship lessons from Cotton Mather and used a goose quill.

  I discovered over the next twenty minutes that:

  Uncle Dan Seltz was a distinguished traitor, though in what war and under what circumstances was not clear. It was, however, clear that Uncle Dan Seltz was an expert in disguising himself as a woman. Either that or Mrs. Plaut had been incorrectly labeling the photographs, a prospect that filled me with more dread than the thought of the mummy coming for me.

  Cousin Agnes: her house in Buiose (state unspecified) had burned down, making room for the home of Mrs. Amelia Garpol in the photograph. I assumed the woman in front of the house was either Cousin Agnes, Mrs. Garpol, or that master of disguise, Uncle Dan Seltz.

  Enough. I left the bowl and the photographs on the table, put the bottle of milk back in the refrigerator, set my watch against the Beech-Nut clock, and turned out the light. My watch would now be correct for a few seconds. It had been the one item of my father’s that I had held on to. It didn’t work and couldn’t be fixed, but I couldn’t let it go. It had its own crazy code of time, a code I always thought I might someday break. There was no moonlight from outside, but I knew where the mattress was on the floor and stumbled to it.

  I lay back against the pillow I used behind my head and clutched the second pillow I used to keep me from rolling over on my stomach during the night. An accidental night on my stomach would put my back out of commission for at least four days. This had been a simple truth in the glamorous life of the world’s foremost detective ever since that day a half-dozen years earlier when I had been unlovingly squeezed by a massive Negro gentleman who wanted to talk to Mickey Rooney at a premiere. Unfortunately, it had been my responsibility to keep anyone but Louis B. Mayer away from the Mick.