The Howard Hughes Affair: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Four)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “He had always been no more than a step or two ahead of the Nazis,” said Wherthman.

  “He’s Jewish?” I asked.

  “No, family was Protestant-Catholic. But as he told you, he is a Marxist.”

  I finished my tea, scratched my stomach and turned to the pictures on the wall.

  “Now,” I said, “if I can only figure out why Schell wrote ‘unkind’ on the table in his blood while he was being strangled, I may have most of this sorted out.”

  Gunther finished his tea and got down from the chair to move to my side. Since his head came just above my belt, he had to look almost straight up to see the photograph.

  “That doesn’t say ‘unkind’,” he said to me.

  I looked down at him.

  “It says ‘ein kind’—a child—in German. It isn’t English.”

  Of course, Wolfgang Schell was German. He wouldn’t write in English when he was dying. But the new possibility that followed didn’t give me a lot of cheer. Had Schell been trying to leave a message that he had been strangled by a child?

  CHAPTER TEN

  I decided to be unreachable for a few days, just in case Phil put things together faster than I thought he would. Using a semisturdy suitcase given as a fee by a pawnbroker named Hy O’Brien, I packed in a record four minutes, asked Gunther to keep an eye on the room for me and headed into the morning. I made it to my car just in time to have Jimmy Fiddler tell me that Milton Berle had married Joyce Matthews and Ronald Reagan was right behind Erroll Flynn in fan mail at Warner Brothers with Jimmy Cagney a close third. It sounded unlikely to me, and I was about to tell Fiddler so when I felt something cold and hard on my neck.

  My guess was that my injuries had caught up with me and the first sign of paralysis had struck. When a short, thick head and little eyes appeared in my rear-view mirror, I breathed a weary sigh. Life seemed to be a never-ending series of attacks punctuated by periods of confusion. This was an attack, and the wheezer had a gun to my neck. His nose was held together by a strip of tape, and his face showed a variety of scars from the lumps I had smashed in his face. Overall, I would have called my work a triumph of cosmetic surgery, but I had the feeling that Wheezer thought otherwise.

  “Aross miten zu en leben,” he said, or something to that effect. His face looked more confused than angry, and I had a fair idea why. He couldn’t speak English.

  Since I couldn’t speak German, any attempt at conversation seemed pointless without an interpreter. I didn’t think Wheezer would want me to head back and get Gunther, but I didn’t want conversation to die, or I might follow the example.

  “Voss vills du?” I said, heading for Broadway and as much traffic as I could find.

  “Give tsu mier du parperen du cameram,” he said.

  He was sweating, and the Luger in his hand bumped on my neck.

  “Certainly,” I said, “whatever you say. Wass you … oh shit.”

  “Paperen, cameren,” he said again, impatiently looking out of the window to see if anyone was watching. Not being familiar with L.A. and the neighborhood, he didn’t know that he probably could have had a horizontal guillotine around my neck, and the chance of anyone paying attention would have been nonexistent, unless a tourist from Delaware happened to have lost his way.

  “Pictures, pictures,” he said, the sweat dripping from his furrowed brow, and loosening the tape on his nose he blurted out “Paperen, cameren.”

  We were making progress, though we were a long way from Wendell Wilke’s One World. Wheezer thought I had some papers, plans, or photographs, probably the stolen Hughes plans, though why he should think I had them was a new mystery.

  “Schell,” he said.

  I thought he was saying the German word for fast, so I pointed to the thick traffic ahead.

  “Nicht Schnell” he bellowed, hitting me on the lump already on my head and almost knocking me out. “Schell. Martin Schell.”

  The car veered while I tried to make one image out of the vibrating three or four I was seeing. I managed to get them down to a double image. The truck driver I had almost hit leaped out of his cab, tilted his cap back and started for me. Wheezer pointed his Luger at the driver, who promptly returned to his truck and toilets or whatever was in it.

  “Take it easy, Hans,” I said slowly, hoping to either calm him or get through to him. I did neither. He hit me again. I was more ready for it this time and held the car steadier, but the blood trickling down my neck brought nausea.

  “Look,” I said, getting angry and desperate, “if you keep gaspolotzing me en kopf, you’ll get dreck. Farshteh?”

  His face was a confused mask of sweat. He peeled the moist tape from his sweating nose, revealing a cut that must have hit bone and was barely clotting. It should have had a few stitches.

  My guess was that Wheezer knew Martin Schell was gone. He thought I had strangled Wolfgang Schell, and he probably figured I had gotten to Martin too, who had been out gunning for me. Apparently Martin had the plans, and Wheezer thought I had done him in and taken them. At least that was the best I could do. His face told me reasoning with him was impossible. I either gave him some plans or he blew my head off. I had the feeling that even if I gave him the plans I didn’t have, he would blow my head off. He had already paved the way by chipping a hole in my scalp.

  “Yah, will Ich do,” I said in resignation, heading for a parking lot. It was an old empty lot where an enterprising owner had put up a small shack to collect a few parking dollars till he could find a sucker who would put up a liquor store and make his fortune. Right now it was just a ten-cent-an-hour lot for about fifty cars, and it was half full. The attendant was a Negro about twenty-five. He wore a clean blue shirt with “Larry” stitched on it in white.

  “Twenty-cent minimum,” he said, leaning down with his hand out.

  Wheezer showed him the gun, and the young man straightened up and said softly, “I ain’t about to die over twenty cents. You want to park that bad, go on.”

  “Humor him,” I told the young man.

  “Hey,” said the young man, “I just work here. I’m not about to die here. Consider him humored.”

  “Shah,” Wheezer said, looking around desperately. I decided the sweat wasn’t just from fear. He had a fever. His wounds had probably become infected, and he needed medical treatment.

  “Paperen, paperen,” he shouted at me.

  “Paperen him, mister,” Larry the attendant suggested, “or he’s liable to paper both of us.”

  A Plymouth pulled in behind us and hit his horn for us to hurry up and park. This didn’t help Wheezer’s control of the situation, so he prodded my open wound.

  “O.K.,” I said, reaching into my jacket carefully to pull out the package of photographs of the people at Hughes’party. “Here.”

  I handed the packet over my shoulder and watched Wheezer in the rear view mirror. The Plymouth was laying on the horn. Wheezer needed both hands to check the packet. When he tilted the gun hand up to hold the envelope, I slid down in the seat and threw my right elbow at his face. I made contact with his already infected nose and he pulled the trigger as he screamed. The bullet went out the open window and cracked the glass on the little shack a few feet from attendant Larry, who hit the dirt. The Plymouth backed out of the lot fast, and I rolled out of the driver’s seat door.

  Wheezer came out of the car moaning and holding his bleeding nose with one hand while he tried to level the gun at me. I got to my knees and hit him in the stomach with everything I had. A small crowd gathered across the street and watched us, but a wild shot from Wheezer hit the building above them and sent them running. I went around my Buick with Wheezer in pursuit, got to the street and just missed a bread truck making a turn from Fifth Street. Wheezer was right behind me and not quite as agile. The bread truck hit him and came to a halt at the curb.

  I couldn’t tell if Wheezer was dead or breathing. He wasn’t moving. I staggered back to Larry, who was on his feet now in a not-so-clean blue shir
t. Behind us the bread truck driver had run to kneel over Wheezer. Traffic was stopping. I pulled my wallet out and peeled off a five, gave it to Larry, who pulled his eyes from the prone body of the man who had almost killed him.

  “Describe me,” I said, seeing two of him.

  “What?” he said, thinking he had another looney on his hands. Then he understood.

  “You’re about sixty with white hair,” he said. I gave him a ten. “And you’re Chinese.”

  “Right,” I said, giving him another five. “And my car?”

  “A new blue Caddy,” he said.

  “You got it,” I said and got back in my Buick.

  “You better take care of that head,” he said, leaning toward me.

  “Too late,” I said. I could hear a police siren coming up fast. A good size crowd had gathered around Wheezer. I pulled around a row of parked cars and into an alley, traveling in the opposite direction of the lot and the sound of the siren. If Wheezer were alive, I doubted if the police would get anything sensible from him for a long time.

  I saw four alley exits in front of me and had to stop till they became one. Then I drove slowly and very carefully to County Hospital.

  My Emergency Room credentials were perfect, a bleeding head.

  “Take a seat,” three fat nurses said. “We’ll be with you in a minute.”

  “Any more than that and I’ll need a transfusion,” I said. They smiled and I told them it was no joke. They walked away, merging into a single body.

  It was a slow Thursday afternoon, and the crowd was down to two: me and a woman holding her stomach and moaning. The woman was about fifty and wearing a white uniform. She was either a nurse, which didn’t seem likely, or a Good Humor Man in disguise. I found a washroom and took some paper towels, which I pressed to my throbbing head. When I got back to the waiting room the Good Humor Woman was gone, and the three nurses were there.

  “It’ll be a few minutes,” one said.

  “You know I see three of you,” I said.

  “A few minutes,” they insisted.

  “That’s all right,” I said, groaning. “If you see Doctor Parry, you might tell him his uncle is in the Emergency Room waiting.”

  A few minutes later the hospital loudspeaker lady called for Doctor Parry to go to the Emergency Room, and three minutes later twin Doctor Parrys were in front of me.

  They were both in their late twenties with thin yellow hair and glasses. They looked tired.

  “Well, Mister Peters,” Parry said wearily, “what’s going on this time?”

  “My head this time,” I said, pointing at my head.

  “I’m not your personal physician, Mister Peters,” he said.

  “Call me Toby. I thought we were friends.”

  He blew out air and motioned for me to follow him into a small examining room. I bled my way after him and sat down. He looked into my eyes.

  “What do you see?” I said.

  “The back of your skull,” he said. “Your head is completely empty.”

  He examined the back of my head none-too-gently. Outside I could hear an ambulance siren come to a snarling stop.

  “Normal people your age don’t lie on the sidewalk and hit their heads until they crack,” he said, prodding away while I made faces. “Nurse said you made a joke about seeing double.”

  “Sometimes triple or quadruple,” I groaned. “Right now you look like the Dionne quintuplets.”

  I could hear a rush of people in the hall outside the room.

  He sewed my scalp and said nothing.

  “Aren’t you going to warn me?” I tried to coax him into conversation.

  “About what?” he said. “You have a natural immunity to warning. In all the time I’ve been a doctor …” he began.

  “Which isn’t too long,” I added.

  “Which isn’t too long,” he agreed, finishing the fifteenth or sixteenth stitch. “I have never seen as marred and as bruised a specimen as you are. If you survive till next week, I’d consider it a privilege to show your traumatized body at grand rounds. I might even write a paper on you or start a betting pool among the house staff about how long you’ll survive. I suppose there’s no sense hospitalizing you. You’ll just run out and drive some poor nursing station superintendent insane. Sit there a while.”

  I watched the wallpaper curl and felt the stitches tighten. He was back in five minutes with a small bottle of pills.

  “Take two every few hours and come back to see me on Monday or earlier if it gets worse. I’ve got to check these stitches.”

  “Thanks, Doc,” I said, getting up and heading for the sink, where I gulped a couple of pills and dropped the bottle in my pocket.

  “Don’t thank me, Wyatt,” he said sarcastically. “You’re a medical curiosity.”

  He left, and I moved slowly to the door. The room was reasonably steady. When I opened the door, my knees almost dropped me. Sergeant Seidman was standing in the waiting room, talking to the fat nurses, who were now one nurse. Two well-dressed young men were with him, asking questions. I caught part of a question.

  “When will we be able to talk to him?”

  “Maybe never,” she said, which threw a scare in me. I closed the door gently and went through a second door that led to a treatment room, where a nurse and a doctor were working frantically on someone lying on a table. Someone was the Wheezer.

  If my brain had been operating at even half mast, I would have realized that Wheezer would have been brought to County.

  “Get the hell out of here,” a doctor who couldn’t have been more than twelve shouted at me.

  I eased past him and out the door about ten feet away from Seidman and the guys who I decided must be the FBI. I walked slowly with my back to the bustle of the main part of the hospital. In about five minutes, I had worked my way back to the Emergency Room parking lot and into my car. My knees were shaking. I gobbled four more pills for good luck and worked them down dry.

  I drove a few blocks away, parked and took off my jacket and shirt, changing them for the clean but crumpled shirt and zippered Gabardine jacket in my suitcase.

  On Main I found a hotel that had seen better days and parked my car in an enclosed garage, where it wouldn’t be spotted easily if my brother started looking.

  Complete with suitcase I made it through a jungle of potted palms in the lobby, registered as Melvin Ott, bought a package of Wilbur Buds and a Pepsi and went to my room. I didn’t know what time it was. The going over or the pills or both got to me, and I sang myself to sleep with a medley of Russ Columbo songs. I got through “The Devil and the Deep Blue Sea” and was well into “Just One More Chance” on the line which went “I’d want no others if you’d grant me just one more chance,” when Koko applauded and pulled me into the inkwell.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  I woke up and found myself looking down at a newly dead man in the bed. His face was white, his head swollen and his nose smashed. It was me. The sensation passed, and I was back in my body with a mouth full of sandy lettuce. There was no phone, and my watch told me it was six, which meant nothing. I found my tooth powder in Hy O’Brien’s suitcase. I brushed with my fingers and rinsed, cupping my hand. I was wary of the dirty glass on the sink. I gulped a few more of Dr. Parry’s magic pills and shaved with a once-used blade. It wasn’t too bad.

  The shower didn’t work when I turned it on. It just screamed, but that was enough to scare the roach in the tub, who scurried for safety down the drain. I turned on the tub tap and gave the bug a free ride to the ocean and me a bath. The soap said “Elysian Hotel” on it, which was fine except that I was staying at the Hotel Miraflores. I toweled off with a chic towel with a see-through hole, as they might say in a Movietone Newsreel fashion feature.

  I hoped I had not slept through to Saturday. It was light out, but my beard with definite grey stubble had told me more than a few hours had pranced by.

  When I went down to the lobby, the guy at the desk, who looked something like N
at Pendleton, confirmed that I had slept through Friday and owed him another day’s toll. I paid him and found out it was almost noon on Saturday. Making my way through the maze of potted palms in the Miraflores lobby with my suitcase in hand, I found the street, cursed the bright sun and headed for a hot dog stand half way up the block.

  “How’s the news?” I asked the rail-thin dark waitress behind the counter.

  “Roosevelt says he doesn’t like the Japs’ answer,” she coughed, putting down her cigarette. “What’ll it be?”

  “A transfusion,” I said. “If you don’t have one, I’ll settle for two dogs with grilled onions and the works and a large Pepsi.”

  She disappeared. The other patrons and I ignored each other, and I brought my expense book for Hughes up to date. I considered listing the payoff to Larry the parking lot attendant as a parking expense, but decided to call it “essential supplementary secrecy,” which might appeal to Hughes.

  The dogs weren’t bad. They weren’t good either. I burped politely, got my car out of hock and headed for Mirador.

  If you discount the times the back of my stitched head hit the top of the seat, making me groan, the trip was uneventful. My chewed cheek was healing, and I had some hope that the case would soon be ended. I didn’t listen to the radio, and I didn’t admire the scenery. Instead, I just drove, trying to think and having no luck.

  The main street of Mirador was teeming with life. The cat who had sat on the door was walking down the sidewalk. A small boy and girl were drawing in chalk on the street. An old man was sitting on a wooden chair in front of the bait store, and Sheriff Nelson and his deputy Alex were leaning against the yellow police car with their arms folded, chewing on toothpicks and watching me.

  I pulled up next to them.

  “You’re expected up at the Hughes house,” Nelson said, anxious to have me gone.