The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I got back into the waiting room, surveyed Vance, and called for Shelly. About a minute later John Cawelti, who had gotten off at the second floor and walked up, stepped into the room.

  He saw me drinking a cup of solid Shelly coffee and saying, “So I bought the coat … Sergeant Cawelti, I didn’t know you were one of Shelly’s patients. You couldn’t have come to a better dentist.”

  “Just have a seat in the waiting room,” Shelly called over his shoulder. “I’ll be finished with Mr. Kerensky in about twenty minutes.”

  “I didn’t come here to see the fat dentist,” Cawelti said, adjusting his tie. “A gun, your gun, was dropped off at the station about an hour ago, with a note saying you had shot someone and the body was here now.”

  I pretended to savor the coffee and shrugged. “No body here, at least not till Shelly gets finished with Mr. Kerensky. You see a body here, Shel?”

  “No,” Shelly said.

  “Mr. Kerensky?” he asked.

  Shelly hovered over the corpse of Vance, who was covered in a white cloth, and answered, “He can’t talk. He’s got cotton in his mouth.”

  Shelly reached over for his drill, flipped the switch, and started enough noise to give me an excuse to lead Cawelti into my office. The drill was buzzing away when we closed the door and sat down, me behind the desk, Cawelti in front of it. He was smiling as if he had a great secret he didn’t plan to let me in on. He made a house of his fingers and bounced them together.

  “Now,” I said, casually opening a letter from a detective school in Van Nuys, “what’s this about my gun? Remember, I reported it missing. When can I get it back?”

  “When we find the body and match the hole in it with your thirty-eight is when,” Cawelti said, bouncing his fingers.

  “I’m still on the John Wayne case,” I said, glancing down at the letter promising to turn me into a sleuth in three weeks for $40.

  “And I’m still on your case,” Cawelti said. “I think your John Wayne story was turkey fart.”

  I decided not to go to detective school as we sat looking at each other for a few seconds and listening to Shelly drill away at Vance’s corpse.

  “I can’t help you, Big John,” I said with a heavy sigh. “I’ve got no body for you and not much time either. If I shoot anyone, I’ll let you know, but at the moment I don’t have a gun. Someone gave you a story, John, and you came running here hoping I had a—”

  He stood up and pointed his chimney finger at me. “I’m going to check every office on this floor and I’m going to check your car.”

  “Car’s at No-Neck Arnie’s on—”

  “I know where it is,” he said, still pointing.

  “Who is this guy I’m supposed to have dusted?”

  “Shit. Lewis Vance. Lewis Guy Vance. Small-time grifter,” Cawelti said. “Three minor convictions and one major-league job for assault. Played in a few double cheap movies over at RKO, even had a walk-through in Chaplin’s The Great Dictator. You never heard of him, right?”

  “Never heard of him,” I said with a smile, picking up my coffee cup. “Why am I supposed to have shot him?”

  “Fight, extortion, something like that,” Cawelti said, moving to the door. “I don’t know. Don’t care much. I find the body with your bullet and I’ll think of a motive.”

  And out went Sergeant John Cawelti. He left the door open and I heard him go out and slam the doors over Shelly’s drill. I gave it a count of twenty and then went into Shelly’s office.

  “Okay, Shel,” I said. “He’s gone.” Shelly went right on working. I walked over to him and tapped his shoulder. “Shel, he’s gone.”

  Shelly shrugged me off. “I’ve almost got this cavity cleared,” he grunted.

  I looked at Vance, who was definitely pale and dead, the dot in his forehead caked with blood.

  “Sheldon, the man is dead. He doesn’t need his teeth fixed. He needs to be buried.”

  “A second, give me a second, can’t you,” he bleated.

  Cawelti could have come back. We might even have run into him in the hall, but I’d learned to give Shelly Minck his ground when dental surgery was involved, as long as I wasn’t the one in the chair. He had managed to get me in that chair only once.

  Shelly finished, inserted a silver filling, patted it down, and said, “Finished,” as he proudly turned to face me.

  Shelly’s suggestions for getting Vance’s corpse out of the office with Cawelti around were not helpful. He thought we might simply throw the body out the window into the alley, hoping it didn’t land on some dozing derelict. I vetoed this idea, and we compromised by lowering Vance out the window with forty feet of rope purloined from Jeremy’s janitor’s closet. The body might have surprised a few people on the way down but no one opened awindow. The dubious tenants of the Farraday had their own problems and a healthy lack of curiosity. The body and the rope ended up in the alley behind a worn-out sofa.

  I left Shelly panting from the exertion and headed down the stairs. No Cawelti. Nobody. When I picked up my Ford, Arnie said that a cop who looked like a bartender had made him open the doors and the trunk and then left after sprinkling a few threats here and there.

  Five minutes later I had Vance’s dentally correct body in the trunk of my Ford. I had some vague ideas of what to do with him, but they had to wait while the two guys who had brought the body to the Farraday tried to kill me.

  6

  My ’38 Ford coupe had its problems, most of them a result of frequent encounters with overly large people with bad tempers and a willful disregard for other people’s property. That “willful disregard” expression came from my lawyer, slick Marty Leib, who tried to get a lunatic political party to repair my right front door after one of their members kicked it in. They didn’t pay and I wound up fifty bucks in the hole for Marty’s fees. The least he owed me was a good legal phrase I could toss around to impress clients. Another problem: the gas gauge didn’t work, never had worked since I bought the car from No-Neck Arnie the mechanic. I could live with that, and the hot sauce stains on the upholstery, and the radio that wouldn’t get one of my favorite stations, KHJ.

  I didn’t think about all this as I turned up a side street off Alvardo past St. Vincent’s Hospital. What I thought about was the uncertain lock on my trunk and the body of Lewis Vance bouncing at each stop. Traffic was light on the street of small factories and I was vaguely aware that I had turned on the radio and that Belle was warning Lorenzo Jones to keep out of the whole situation till Mary had time to talk to Biff and his brother. It sounded like good advice to me.

  The car that hit me was a ’42 Chrysler New Yorker, a four-door sedan, a solid car, maybe the last of its ilk till the war ended. With new cars off limits to the public for the duration of the war, the guys who hit me had to be rich, determined, or drunk. The first whack sent my Ford’s rear end shimmying to the side. I tried to keep the front of the car steady as an announcer on my now sputtering radio suggested that I pick up a can of Swift’s Prem for only thirty-one cents. My right rear skipped over the sidewalk, bounced off a brick wall, and made an old guy wearing a beret do a hell of a ballet leap to keep from getting killed. I heard a hubcap clatter down the street and felt my stomach being kissed and mugged by the steering wheel. The Chrysler was in front of me now. There were two figures, big ones, in the front seat. One, the passenger, looked back at me to see if I was hurt. I wasn’t, at least not enough to suit him.

  As I bounced forward trying to control my Ford, the Chrysler stopped and began to back up toward me, the passenger guiding the driver.

  The Basque ballet dancer I had almost hit was charging at me. I could see him in my now cracked rearview mirror. He was shouting and twirling a bony fist. I hit the gas, hoping my hopping tires would grasp the street and send me out of the path of the oncoming Chrysler, but the Ford had had enough. The radio went on about Prem. The Basque cursed and hit what was left of my right fender and the Chrysler plowed into me, crushing the passenger side
of the car.

  My left shoulder and head hit the door, which popped open. The Ford spat me out into the street like a bitter peach pit. I rolled over two or three times and lay on my back, looking up at the sun. It was too bright. I closed my eyes and heard what must have been the dancing Basque shout, “Craziness. Craziness. Crazies all over the streets.”

  Something was grinding inside my head or near it. I opened my eyes and saw what was left of my car moving sideways toward me, the door open like a mouth ready to scoop me up and digest me. The damned radio was still playing and Lorenzo was sighing as he and my Ford, urged on by the Chrysler beyond, skidded toward me.

  I rolled, tried to get up, crawled a few feet, wondering where the hell the people of Los Angeles were when I needed them, and fell on my face. I kissed the curb and prayed to Pearl Buck, sure I had ingested my last taco. Then the grinding stopped.

  A car door opened and I turned my head to see a square head looking over the top of my wreck. It was the Chrysler passenger. He came around one side of my former Ford while his partner came around the other.

  They were slightly-off bookends, barrel-chested, wearing identical yellow Hawaiian shirts with pineapples on them. The driver was humming something. I couldn’t tell what it was till he came around the car. It was a passable version of “Love in Bloom.” The passenger, slightly bigger, wasn’t humming at all. He did grunt a little when he pushed aside the Basque, who tried to stop him.

  “There’s an injustice here,” the old man shouted. “What, do you think you own the streets, you cossacks?”

  I managed to make it to a sitting position on the curb, though I knew my stomach would have preferred I stay in the gutter. I didn’t know what the two fugitives from a demolition derby had in mind.

  My .38 was indently in the glove compartment of the piece of modern sculpture that had recently been my car. I didn’t know where the .38 was now. I’ve never had particularly good luck with the gun. Sunday’s soiree had been one in a long series of firearms fiascos over the past few years. Just the same, I would have felt better having it to wave at the oncoming pineapples.

  A car came down the street, saw the mess, swerved just in time to miss the party, and sent the Basque leaping again. This time the old guy finally got the point, decided to leave the battle zone, and hurried down the street shouting about the madness of civilization.

  “Peters?” the bigger pineapple said.

  “No,” I said. “You’ve got the wrong guy. My name is Ross, Barney Ross.”

  “Barney Ross is a fighter,” said the second pineapple.

  “It’s Peters,” the big pineapple confirmed. He reached into his pocket and I tried to get to my feet for a gallant lunge before he could shoot me. My legs had been through this kind of thing too many times. They just wouldn’t cooperate. I sank back and thought, “The hell with it.”

  Banana fingers came out of the big one’s pocket and the walking fruit salad threw something in my lap. “This is a warning,” he said. “Consider it a warning.”

  “A warning,” the driver repeated, in case I had periodic sieges of deafness.

  “Stay away from the Alhambra,” the top banana said. “Forget about Longretti.”

  “Larchmont,” I said. “Two and two makes Larchmont. The Larchmonts sent you. Correct me if I’m wrong.”

  Another car came around the corner and paused while the big pineapple corrected me with an open-palmed slap to my forehead. I rolled back. The car took over, made it around the mess by going up on the sidewalk, and rolled away. The two pineapples were in no hurry.

  “See a doctor,” the bigger one said. “You hit your head when you fell out of the car.”

  “I didn’t fall,” I reminded him. “You shot me out the door. You have a goddamn short memory. Think back. There I was, driving peacefully down the street, when you two decided to turn me into scrap metal.”

  They looked at each other again. Rapid thought was not, their greatest strength.

  “You are trying to be funny?” the smaller one asked.

  I looked around for a more appreciative audience, maybe a cop, but none was around. Irony is useless when you have no audience.

  “This is very serious business here, Peters,” the big one said, leaning down to talk to me.

  “Very serious,” agreed the other one.

  Theirs was not a class act.

  “Don’t I look serious enough for you?” I tried.

  “You should be frightened.”

  “I’m frightened,” I conceded, though I wasn’t, at least not anymore. They probably weren’t going to kill me, though they might kick me once or twice for good luck. Kick a private eye and make a wish.

  They had exhausted their repertoire, at least the verbal one, and were deciding what to do next when a police siren called from not too far away.

  After exchanging looks the big one said, “No Alhambra.”

  They walked slowly around my car to the tune of the siren, got in their slightly battered Chrysler, and drove away. My right hand touched the wad the big guy had thrown in my lap. It felt like money. My eyes tried to focus on the paper. It looked like money. I had just finished counting the $400 in $50 bills when the siren, attached to a black-and-white police car, screamed into my ear. I looked over at my former Ford. The trunk had held and Vance was safely tucked inside. Two uniformed cops I didn’t recognize came out and walked over to me even more slowly than the pineapples. Both cops were in their middle forties and in need of a rigid diet. I didn’t think now was the time to advise them on the diet.

  I pocketed the money and tried to grin.

  “What the hell is going on here?” cop one said.

  These two didn’t promise to be any more alert than the pair who had just left. I had the dim hope, however, that the ones in the blue uniforms might be on my side, or at least not against me. I was proved wrong.

  “Hit-and-run,” I explained. “Two guys dressed in pineapple shirts driving a Chrysler plowed into me and then came back and did it again. I’m lucky to be alive.”

  “We’re all lucky to be alive,” said the second cop, who wore glasses. I looked up, shading my eyes from the sun with my hand. This one had the makings of a street-corner philosopher.

  “I don’t buy it,” the other one said, looking down at me with suspicion. “Why would two guys plow into you? What’s the motive?”

  “Lust,” I tried. “Or greed. How the hell do I know? Maybe they’re German spies disrupting normal life by random acts of terror against innocent citizens.”

  “Citizen,” the first cop said. “I think you’ve been doing some afternoon drinking and plowed your vehicle into the wall is what I think you did.”

  I gave him a long withering look and then tried to stand up. The cop with the glasses pushed me back down.

  “Stay there till the ambulance comes,” he said.

  “You called an ambulance?” the first cop asked.

  “No.”

  They stood for a few beats listening to the distant sound of music, waiting to see who would go back to the car and call for an ambulance.

  “I don’t need an ambulance,” I said finally, getting up. “Ambulances take you to hospitals and send you bills. Nothing’s broken.” I felt my body. Nothing seemed to be broken.

  “Suit yourself,” the first cop said with a shrug. “You’re going to have to get your car off the street and I’m going to have to give you a ticket.”

  “A ticket?”

  “Reckless driving, suspicion of driving under the influence of alcohol, disruption of a public thoroughfare,” he ticked off, as I staggered to my lump of a car. The radio was playing and Dinah Shore was singing and the sun was shining.

  “Thanks,” I said as I lurched forward.

  “We won’t arrest you this time,” cop one said.

  “I appreciate that,” I said appreciatively.

  The cop with glasses caught up with me and handed me the ticket, saying, “You better get this wreck off the street
in half an hour. We’ll be back to check.”

  “God bless you, Officer,” I said.

  I didn’t watch them get in the car and drive off. I tucked the ticket into the same pocket as the $50 bills, shook my head, which failed to make things any clearer, and looked around for a telephone. There was none. I had to walk four blocks to something approaching civilization and found a phone in a Thrifty drugstore and called No-Neck Arnie, who grunted in response to my sad tale and said he’d be right there.

  Twenty minutes later he drove up in his truck and found me sitting listening to the music slowly fade out as my car battery died. No-Neck climbed out of the truck, spat in the street, wiped his hammy hands on his greasy overalls and walked over to where I leaned against what had once been my hood.

  “It’s a total wreck,” he said, hands on hips.

  “You’re kidding,” I said.

  “Just look at it,” he said, pointing to the wreck to prove his point. “I ask you.”

  “A total wreck,” I agreed.

  A car or two negotiated past us as we negotiated, but I was feeling hot and still a little dizzy. My seersucker suit was dirty, which was no great problem. It had been dirty before the encounter with the Chrysler.

  “I’ll tell you what I’ll do, Peters,” No-Neck said, looking for a cigar stub in his pocket and finding none. “I’ll take this in trade, give you thirty bucks for it, and charge you only fifteen to tow it away.”

  “You’ll give me fifteen dollars,” I said, employing my lightning-fast mathematical brain.

  “And,” he said, still circling the car, “I’ll let you apply the insurance to a payment on one of the cars I’ve got back at the garage.”

  “I’m not insured,” I said.

  “Tough.”

  “I’ve got four hundred dollars,” I added, showing him the wad of fifties and the ticket.