The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  The radio in the Crosley was pretty good. I listened to the news and found out that coffee and tea would probably be rationed soon, which meant that millions of people who didn’t even like tea would soon be running out to stock up on it. Basements would fill with boxes of tea, more tea than a hoarder could drink in a lifetime, even if he or she loved tea.

  Traffic was heavy heading back to the Farraday, so I stopped for a hot dog, some fries, and a chocolate shake at a stand on Gower.

  Inside, the guy next to me asked for the mustard. I told him I had just had a couple of Pepsis with Charlie Chaplin. The guy with the mustard looked like a leather bulldog.

  “What’d Chaplin drink?” he said humoring me.

  “Alka-Seltzer,” I said. “Nervous stomach.”

  “Too bad,” the bulldog man said, and walked off dripping mustard.

  8

  It was after five when I got back to the Farraday. At that hour I found a space on the street half a block down. The workers, shoppers, and sightseers of the daylight hours were on their way out of town and the shadowy night crowds hadn’t yet made their way in.

  The people on the streets now were mostly young men in soldier and sailor uniforms. They had nowhere to go but shared hotel rooms and afternoon bars till the prostitutes, feeling the shade of night, knew it was time to get up and go to work.

  Madame Carpentier was coming out of the Farraday as I walked up. I would have avoided her if I could, but it was too late. Her “study” was in the office on the second floor. Her specialty was the past and the future. Mine was the present. You’d have thought we had nothing in common, but she kept seeing me in tea leaves and Tarot cards. I didn’t want to be seen in tea leaves or Tarot cards or even in my mirror.

  Madame Carpentier, also known as Vera Krachnovitz, was about fifty or eighty, carried a knitting bag that weighed her down, and wore loose-fitting black dresses with colorful beads. Her too-black hair was always tied in a tight bun.

  “Tobias Leo,” she said when I tried to ease past her. “You’ve been trying to avoid me.”

  “I’ve been busy,” I said.

  “Too busy to learn the future?”

  “Takes the fun out of now,” I said. “I’d rather not know.”

  She shifted the knitting bag into her left hand and stared at me.

  “How’s business?” I asked politely.

  “Murder,” she whispered. A pair of kid sailors heard the word as they passed by and grinned at us.

  “That’s too bad,” I said.

  “No,” she corrected, holding up her free hand. “I’m not talking about my business. Business is good. These children stream in with their dollars to discover if they will live and prosper,” she said. “I put on a show. I give them their money’s worth. Incense, sometimes even raising the table. They eat it up. No, I mean you and murder.” She shifted the knitting bag back to her right hand again. “Damn thing weighs a ton, but I can’t leave my stuff in the office. Thieves.”

  “Murder,” I said.

  “Tobias Leo,” she said, remembering the subject. “There will be two murders.”

  “Just one,” I corrected her, feeling like a kid who needed a toilet but couldn’t get away from the teacher in the hall.

  “Listen to me,” she said. “Pay attention, don’t fidget. Three will die, two of them murdered. This is free information. You could pay some attention here. I’ve had a long hard day. You want me to buy you a drink?”

  The first sign of night appeared on the street like a robin in spring. A prostitute named Boom-Boom stepped out of the Anchor Bar across the street, blinked at the setting sun, saw her shadow, and went back inside.

  “No thanks, Madame C.,” I said. “I’ve got to work …”

  “Suit yourself,” she said with a shrug, finally putting down her load to exercise her fingers. “I wasn’t going to make a sexual attack on your scarred body. Watch yourself.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking a step toward the Farraday before she could say more, but I wasn’t fast enough.

  “Damn, I almost forgot,” she said, lifting her burden again. “Two men in yellow are looking for you.”

  “Madame C., you are one amazing woman,” I sighed.

  “They were here about ten minutes ago. I heard them asking Jeremy about you,” she said. “Stay away from them.”

  “Is that from the cards?”

  “Hell no,” she said, looking down the street and gauging the journey. “It’s from someone who’s seen too many things on these streets.”

  The outer lobby of the Farraday was tiled, clean, and dark. Jeremy had been at his task of scrubbing. The inner lobby echoed my footsteps as I headed for the fake marble staircase. Then a voice came out of the shadows.

  “Toby.”

  I stopped and Jeremy Butler came out, a pail in one hand, a wet rag in the other. He was wearing dark slacks and a gray T-shirt. His shaved head caught a small glint of dusty light from a small, high lobby window.

  “Some men were looking for you,” he said with concern.

  “I know. I ran into Madame Carpentier in the street. How are the wedding plans?”

  Jeremy looked up into the heights of the Farraday in the general direction of Alice Pallice’s office.

  “Perfect,” he said. “Remember. You are coming.”

  “I wouldn’t miss it,” I said.

  “What else is new?” I asked politely.

  “The war,” he said. “The echoes of war on life and art difficult for people to grasp. The War Production Board plans to order the halting of manufacture of almost all musical instruments except violins, cellos, and some guitars. This, they say, will result in striking savings of strategic material.”

  “A tough war,” I agreed.

  “It’s the metal,” Jeremy explained. “The musical industry used about fifteen thousand tons of war related metals last year including ten thousand tons of iron, three thousand tons of steel, fifteen hundred tons of brass, three hundred and seventy-five tons of copper, and twenty-five tons of aluminum.”

  “That’s a lot of music,” I said.

  “According to the War Production Board, that iron could have been used to make the casings for eleven thousand five hundred six-ton army tanks; the steel, eighty-three medium tanks; the brass, fifty million rounds of thirty-caliber cartridges; the copper, five hundred hundred-and-fifty-five-milli-meter field pieces; and the aluminum, forty thousand aircraft flares.”

  “Jeremy, how do you remember all this?”

  “It’s a curse,” he said. “The bathos of human existence brands itself on my soul. I’m working on an ironic poem on the curse, which I will read at the wedding ceremony. Alice thinks it appropriate in this day and age.”

  “Sounds fine to me.”

  Somewhere above us a door closed, a man coughed.

  “The instruments of the orchestra are the first cousins to the weapons of destruction,” he said. “An ordinary piano contains enough steel, copper wire and brass to make a dozen bayonets, a corps radio, and sixty-six thirty-caliber cartridges. A bass drum contains the steel for two bayonets and a trumpet enough brass for about sixty thirty-caliber cartridge cases. If this war continues for three or four years, the orchestra will die, chamber music will be the norm. The irony Toby, the irony. As the war continues, music will be more gentle, thoughtful. I haven’t worked it all out …”

  “It’s a job for a poet,” I said.

  “Till they take away our pens and scrolls,” he said sadly, looking into his bucket of soapy water for the muse.

  “Jeremy, cheer up. You’re getting married,” I said, starting up the stairs.

  The thought of the gargantuan Alice brought a small smile to the massive, scarred face of the former wrestler, onetime Terror of Tarzana.

  “I’ve got to get back to work.” Jeremy sighed. “It never stops. As Sisyphus discovered, if you don’t keep pushing the rock upward, it will roll back and crush you. Civilization is the realization that the rock will never be
pushed to the top. Our meaning lies in the style in which we push and our attitude toward the other pushers.”

  “Check,” I said, as Jeremy strode back into the darkened depths of the Farraday Building to push against endless dirt.

  Having encountered a mystic and poet within five minutes, Shelly would have been an interesting contrast, but Shelly was already gone, the outer door locked. I had to use my key and was pleased to find that no more of the bodies Madame Car-pentier had promised were waiting in the waiting room.

  Shelly’s office was dark, but since the sun wasn’t quite down, there was enough light coming through his window for me to walk toward my office without fumbling for the light switch. I touched the coffee pot. It was warm. I knew there’d be some coffee at the bottom. Shelly never cleaned the pot. I rinsed a mug that had Venga a Tijuana enameled on it in red. The coffee was awful but it was coffee.

  I stepped inside my office and almost tripped over one of the Hawaiian pineapples. The coffee spilled, some of it, on the floor, but I straightened up and reached over and put the cup on my desk before all of it was lost.

  The bigger pineapple on one side of the door closed it behind me. The smaller pineapple moved to block my possible exit. I knew the office better than they did. There was only one way out now, the window through which Shelly and I had lowered Vance a few hours earlier.

  I inched past the lesser of the two evils and got behind my desk to face them. My desk was tiny, the room small, my options limited, and my senses alert, partly from the awful coffee.

  “We gave you four hundred dollars,” said the big one, sitting in the chair opposite me. The smaller one stood, his back to the door.

  “You destroyed my car,” I said, sipping slowly and considering my options. “That was a family heirloom. The four hundred dollars bought me new transportation, not my loyalty. You almost killed me.”

  The setting sun over my shoulder was hitting him in the face. His face, less than comely in the best of light, was beet red. Even Josef von Sternberg couldn’t have given the gentleman a look of normalcy.

  “If we wanted to kill you, you’d be dead,” he said. “Am I right, Sutker?”

  “You are right, Lyle,” the smaller pineapple said.

  “We told you to stay out of this,” Lyle said. He seemed to have memorized his lines. I wondered who was writing his material.

  “I’m working for Charlie Chaplin,” I said, trying to remember if there was anything in my desk I could use to claw my way out of here. “The Larchmonts owe him ten grand.”

  “They don’t owe Chaplin anything,” the big pineapple said. “What did you do with the body?”

  “Vance’s body was in the trunk of the Ford when you hit me,” I said. “Now I’ve got him on ice.”

  “We never killed anyone, did we, Sutker?” Lyle said.

  “We never,” Sutker agreed.

  “See?” said Lyle to me, having offered the evidence of Sutker’s unshakable testimony.

  “I didn’t think you killed Vance,” I said, wondering if I could fool them with the broken stapler in the bottom drawer. The light was behind me and it might look like a gun in the shadow. “But you did plant his body here. You or the Larchmonts did find the gun in the Alhambra and gave it to the police. The Larchmonts want me out of this, fine. I’ll get out when I find Teddy and Alex. I’ve got a client to protect. Now get out.”

  I reached down for the drawer, opened it, fumbled for the stapler, and aimed it at the big yellow lump. He looked surprised.

  “That’s a stapler,” he said. I put the stapler down. “We’ll get Teddy. We’ll get the money back. You stay out. You know what we do now, Sutker?”

  “We demobilize Sam Spade,” said Sutker.

  Lyle looked pleased with his protégé’s answer. The phone rang and I grabbed it before they could stop me.

  “Hello,” I said.

  Lyle stood up and gave me a red-faced warning. The pineapples and bananas were wrinkled.

  “Hello, Mr. Peelers?” came Mrs. Plaut’s high voice.

  “It’s me, Captain,” I said. “Come right up. I’ve got visitors.”

  Lyle looked at me warily and then at Sutker for help. Sutker had no help to give. Lyle was the what little brains the outfit had.

  “Mr. Peelers,” Mrs. Plaut went on, “I’ve been trying to reach hold of you for many hours with rationing and all.”

  “I understand,” I said, looking smugly at Lyle.

  “Good,” she went on. “We must discuss the photographs. Aunt Donna’s glass plate photographs seem to have gotten mixed with the Easton side of the family and it is difficult to tell whether the woman with the long hair and feather is Cousin Eunice Marie Ann or a Sioux who worked in my Great-Uncle Caution’s General Merchandise Store in Hanley, Missouri.”

  “We’ll straighten that out as soon as you get up here,” I said seriously.

  “I cannot come up there, Mr. Peelers,” Mrs Plaut said with a wary sigh. “I do not know where ‘there’ might be and since the photographs are here and heavy and you reside here, my ‘here’ is here.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said.

  “There are details of identity to be worked out—” she said.

  “Captain,” I cut in. “We can save that for later. I’ve got a life-and-death situation up here. If you don’t hurry, there could be bullets, falling bodies, and death.”

  Mrs. Plaut did not answer for a few seconds and then she said, “Mr. Peelers, do you have a radio on there?”

  “No, that was me. I said—”

  But before I could repeat it, Lyle pulled the phone from my hand and held it to his ear. I could see from his face that Mrs. Plaut was speaking. Puzzlement bespangled his brow. He reached over and slammed down the phone.

  “Captain Irene Plaut,” I said. “She’s downstairs with two men from homicide and —”

  Lyle was shaking his bulky head no. “Sutker, we must alter Mr. Peters and rearrange his office and face,” said Lyle, moving around the right side of my desk. Sutker began to move slowly to my left. And then the door opened and the last of the sunlight struck Jeremy Butler, who held an envelope in his hand.

  “Toby, this letter just arrived by special—” he began and then stopped as his eyes took in my two visitors.

  “Go out and close the door behind you,” Lyle said.

  “Go out and play D and D, Deaf and Dumb,” agreed Sutker.

  “What is this, Toby?” Jeremy asked, ignoring Lyle and Sutker, who had paused to menace him.

  “I think they plan to rearrange me, Jeremy,” I said.

  “Back out and close the door, blimp, before we—” Lyle began, but we failed to discover the extent of his violent inventiveness. Jeremy stepped forward and threw both of his arms out. He hit both Lyle and Sutker solidly, Lyle in the throat, Sutker in the face. The fight was over.

  Lyle sagged against the wall, clutching his throat with both hands, his face strawberry red, his tongue out, mouth open. Sutker’s hands covered his broken nose and his moaning mouth. See no evil and speak no evil were in pain.

  “What shall we do with them?” Jeremy asked. “The police?”

  “No,” I said. “I think they’re getting the Farraday dirty and should probably be escorted out with a warning.”

  “As you think best,” Jeremy said, reaching over to grab Lyle by the neck. Lyle slouched back as Jeremy’s massive hand approached, but he was caught. He was breathing a bit now but no intelligible sounds were coming through the damaged throat. Sutker saw Jeremy’s hand coming through his bloody fingers but had nowhere to hide in my closet-sized office. Jeremy picked them up by the neck and went out the door calling, “I’ll be back when I’ve deposited them in the alley.”

  “Thanks, Jeremy,” I called as he dragged his burden into the twilight of Shelly’s office.

  I finished my coffee and reached for the envelope that Jeremy had brought and dropped on my desk. I had to lean back to catch the departing light to read the note that went with th
e two hundred dollars in cash. It read:

  Peters. This should cover expenses for a while. If

  you need more, get back to me. My business

  manager says this is more than generous. One more

  problem. My secretary says someone named Alex,

  didn’t give his last name, called, mentioned you, and

  said he’d be seeing me. Might be your Alex. Keep in

  touch and take care of yourself.

  It was signed John Wayne. I pocketed the cash and called County Hospital. Straight-Ahead had been released, according to the ward nurse. She tracked down Dr. Parry for me and he got on the phone.

  “What do you want, Peters?” he said.

  “Beason. I thought he was—”

  “This isn’t a prison,” Parry said. “He signed himself out He said he was fine and had to get back to work.”

  “And you didn’t try to stop him?”

  “Peters,” he said slowly, carefully, “I’ve seen men who I knew were dying get off of operating tables and insist on going back to combat. I’ve seen men with scratches whimper to be sent home, pretend they were blind, deaf, insane. I didn’t stop any of them, I’m not God.”

  He was shouting now. I wondered how many nurses and patients were listening.

  “Doc …”

  “I’m just a one-legged doctor,” he went on. “People are responsible for their own lives. I do … forget it. I’m sorry.”

  “Listen, Doc, I just came into some money. How about dinner, on me?”

  His voice went from shouting rage to a low whisper I could hardly hear.

  “Not tonight,” he said. “Not tonight.”

  “Saturday,” I said. “I’ll pick you up at the hospital at seven.”

  “Saturday,” he said, and hung up.

  During Parry’s absence, I had taken my pains and breaks to Doc Hodgdon. Doc Hodgdon was a wiry man, about seventy, whom I played handball with down at the Y on Hope Street. I had never beaten Doc Hodgdon, who played the angles of the court like a three-rail billiard pro. Doc Hodgdon had made me a few meals and shared a few Pabst Blue Ribbons in his kitchen behind his office. Doc’s wife was long dead and his two kids lived back East. My plan was to get Hodgdon and Parry and me together over one of Hodgdon’s lamb roasts. I might sucker them into a poker game and get them to swapping army stories of the two big wars they had met the world in.