He Done Her Wrong tp-8

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “My fee, Dr. Winning, is thirty bucks a day plus expenses, plus three percent over expenses to cover paperwork. I’ll take the case for four days. If I don’t have him by then, we take it to the cops. Agreed?”

  Winning sat again.

  “Perhaps we can discuss it if you haven’t found him in four days?”

  We were bargaining for pennies.

  “Sure,” I agreed. “I’ll call you at the institute if I haven’t got a line on him by Monday, but it’ll just be to let you know that it’s time to go to the cops. Deal?”

  Winning touched his chin with his right hand, shrugged, and said, “It is a deal.”

  “I’ll need fifty dollars up front,” I said. He pulled out his wallet and fished for the fifty in tens and ones while I glanced at the invitation to my wife’s wedding in two days.

  I took the bills from Winning, stuffed them in my wallet, and pulled a pad of paper out of my top drawer. The top sheet had my doodle of cubes attached to cubes. I ripped it off, wrote a receipt, handed the sheet to him, and he fished out and handed me a business card, white, clean, embossed in silver, in hard-to-read script.

  “Call me at any time of the day or night,” he said, rising and snapping his briefcase closed. “If my secretary or I do not answer, please keep trying. The institute is a rather busy place, and I spend little actual time in my office.”

  I looked down at my invitation to a wedding and then at the psychiatrist.

  “You married, doc?”

  “I was,” he said, looking at me as if I might be a suitable case for treatment. “My duties proved to take more time and attention than my wife could accept.”

  “I know how it is,” I said. “My wife’s getting remarried in two days.”

  “Would you like to give me the fifty dollars back and talk about it for a few hours,” he said with a smile.

  “No, I think I’ll hold on to the cash and try to work it out myself. Is that what you guys get? Twenty-five bucks an hour?”

  “You can get less expensive help,” he said, “but it’s not always as good.”

  “Forget it. You have any information on Ressner I might be able to use? A photo?” I said, unable to look up from the invitation.

  “Right on your desk, in that folder, but no photo,” Winning said softly.

  I hadn’t noticed him putting the folder there.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said with a nod and a look toward Winning, who had walked to the door and had his hand on the knob. He was looking beyond my eyes for something deeper, but I had dropped the shades. Winning gave up, opened the door, and let in the sound of Shelly scraping away and singing, “Where nobody cares for me, sugar’s sweet, so is she.” Then he was gone, and I was alone with my invitation and last week’s Life.

  I read the thin file Winning had dropped on my desk. Winning had been a sweet break. I was going for Ressner anyway, for myself, for Mae West, and for Phil. Getting paid for it would be nice.

  There was no likely Ressner in the L.A. directory. Same was true of the valley towns. Nothing in the files helped much except for a reference to Ressner’s former wife. Her name was now Grayson. Which reminded me-Anne Mitzenmacher Peters would soon be Anne Howard.

  I couldn’t find a Jeanette Grayson in any of the directories, but that didn’t surprise me much. The phone, if it was listed, would be in her husband’s name, and there were too damn many Graysons to start that. The file had no address or phone number for her. So, I looked up at my favorite crack in the white wall of my office, followed it to the corner, and picked up the phone.

  Phil wasn’t in, but his partner, Sergeant Steve Seidman, a silent cadaver of a man, asked if he could help. I said no and told him to have Phil call back. Then I waited.

  At first I searched for letters to write. There weren’t any. I doodled cubes and tried to find a position on the chair that didn’t make my back worse. Then I looked out the window at the alley and watched a pair of rummies heading toward the Farraday. I lost sight of them below. I would have forgotten them if I didn’t hear something like metal against concrete. I pried open the window and leaned out to see the two bums prying off my hubcaps.

  My.38 was in the glove compartment. Even if I had it, I wouldn’t have fired even a warning shot. I don’t shoot well enough. I’d probably kill one of them, put another hole in my car, or fill an innocent passerby with dread and lead. I grabbed a bronze paperweight shaped like Alcatraz and shouted down.

  “Drop those caps and run like hell,” I yelled. “Or I’ll bomb you clear to Burbank.”

  “Drop them,” I shouted, “or …”

  I heaved Alcatraz out the window and watched it turn over three or four times before hitting the roof of my car, bouncing and crashing through the rear window. The bums, thinking that they were being bombed by God, dropped the caps and ran. One cap spun like a top. The other rolled back toward the car and leaned against it.

  That’s when the phone rang.

  “You think you’ve got troubles,” I said to whoever was on the other end.

  “Can the crap, Tobias,” came Phil’s weary voice. “What do you want?”

  “Help,” I said.

  He didn’t answer.

  “With the job we talked about,” I went on.

  “What do you need?” he said quietly.

  “I’ve got to find a woman in the Los Angeles area named Grayson, first name Jeanette. I think she’s married to someone with money. Her ex-husband is probably the looney who went after Mae West.”

  “You at your office?” he said.

  “Yeah, I’m at my office. Anne’s getting married Sunday.”

  He didn’t say anything, just breathed heavy.

  “Sunday,” I repeated.

  “What do you want me to say?” he finally sighed. “She knows what she’s doing. It’s your own fault. You’ve heard it all. Get off the phone and let me see if I can get this for you.”

  He hung up. I needed someone to feel sorry for me, so I wandered into Shelly’s office where he was humming “The Carioca” and patting the mouth of the soldier with a gray towel as if he were a baby who had dribbled a mouthful of banana mush.

  “Don’t bite on that for a week or two,” Shelly paused in his humming to say.

  The kid nodded and looked at the door.

  “That filling and stuff will hold all right,” Shelly went on as he chomped on his cigar, “but it’s not made to be abused. You’re going to have to be careful chewing on that side from now on. Your new life motto is ‘Eat Carefully and Chew on the Right.’”

  The kid nodded again, got up, dug out a wallet, and counted out bills, which he handed to Shelly, who removed his cigar. Shelly always removed his cigar to count money. Satisfied, he beamed at the kid, who beat it into the dangerous halls of the Farraday Building.

  “Shel,” I said softly. “Anne’s getting married Sunday.”

  Shelly looked at me and blinked behind his bottle-bottom glasses.

  “Too bad,” he said shaking his head. “Say, did you have any money down with Arnie on the Sugar Ray Robinson fight? Knocked out Banner in the second. I made twenty bucks.”

  “Anne’s getting married,” I repeated as he stuffed the money into his wallet.

  “Anne?”

  “My former wife,” I explained.

  “That airlines guy you were talking about? Ralph?” he said, pushing his glasses back and reaching for a dental journal.

  “That’s the one,” I admitted.

  Shelly sat in his own chair, magazine in his lap, and looked at me with sympathy.

  “Mildred and I want to visit her brother in Cleveland,” he said. “You think Anne could get this guy to give us a break on tickets?”

  “I’ll ask him, Shel. Thanks for listening.”

  “What are friends for,” he said with a knowing smile and settled down with his journal.

  The phone call came an hour later. I had spent the hour trying to think about something else. A client once tried to teach me
meditation as payment for finding his runaway sister. I got the idea down all right, but I couldn’t put it into practice. My thoughts, my back, the damn city, and my dreams kicked me in my flat nose every time I tried. The guy had assured me that if I just kept at it I’d make a breakthrough one day. I had almost given up on that ever happening, but I gave it a try every so often. The problem was that I had chosen the bronze Alcatraz paperweight as the focus of my attention during meditation and it was resting somewhere inside my Buick.

  “Forty-six Buena Suerte in Plaza Del Lago,” came Phil’s voice over the phone.

  “Got it,” I said.

  “You going to the wedding?”

  “Sure,” I said. “Wouldn’t miss it for a dozen tacos and all the Pepsi in Ventura.”

  CHAPTER 4

  The Graysons had a phone, but there was no answer. It took me five minutes to find Plaza Del Lago on the Mobil Oil map I kept in my bottom drawer. After two more minutes I decided that the map was just too old, that Plaza Del Lago was one of the hundreds of new towns that had sprung up in the last decade, a period my map didn’t cover.

  I found it at about the point where I was going to give up, climb in my Buick, and make what would probably be my final fruitless attempt to pull a teardrop of affection from Anne. Plaza Del Lago wasn’t on the coast where I had been looking. It was inland, beyond Palmdale, almost touching the Mojave Desert, maybe sixty miles from Hollywood off of State Highway 138.

  Shelly was absorbed in his dental journal when I walked out. I don’t think he heard me say that I’d be gone till Monday. It didn’t matter; I wasn’t expecting any calls.

  The damage to the Buick wasn’t too bad: a dent in the roof that cut through four or five layers of paint and a broken window. I fished out fragments of glass, placed Alcatraz gently on the front seat, and drove to No-Neck Arnie’s. He was working on a recent Caddy.

  “Arn, this is an emergency,” I said, getting out.

  He sighed, the sigh of the put-upon mechanic, a sigh that Alexander the Great probably got from his blacksmith when he came in with a battle-battered chariot.

  “I see,” he said, touching the dent. “Bombed by an eagle with kidney stones.”

  “No,” I answered. “Alcatraz fell from the sky.”

  Arnie didn’t care whether I was joking or not. He fixed cars, took a few bets on the side, and went through life without a sense of humor, which is probably located somewhere in the neck.

  “Forget about the dent,” he said. “Live with it. There’s a war on. This car ain’t going to make it through it. I’ll fix the window or give it a patch, some clear, thick see-through stuff. If I fix the window, it stays here two, three days. I can put the patch on in five minutes for five bucks. You want my advice?”

  “No,” I said. Five bucks was a hell of a lot for some tape and see-through stuff.

  He decided to give me the advice anyway, but he looked around to be sure no one was listening. To do this, Arnie had to turn his entire tub of a body.

  “Let me junk the parts on this carroodi and you can subtract it from the cost of that ’38 Ford we were talking about the other day. It would only run you two hundred and twenty bucks.”

  “The other day you said I could have the Ford for two hundred with no junk parts. No questions.” I reminded him.

  “There have been other bidders,” he confided, looking down at his grease-black hands and rubbing the tips of his fingers together.

  “I’ll keep the carroodi for a few days and think about it,” I said. “Meanwhile, try to keep the price on that Ford from hitting three hundred.”

  “I’ll try,” he said laying a hand on my shoulder and doing something with his mouth that resembled a smile.

  I had never considered Arnie a friend, and he wasn’t bringing us any closer together, and I could give lopsided smiles with the best of them. We could have stood there grinning like baboons in Griffith Park for an hour or so, but I had no time for such jollity.

  “Put the stuff on the back window, and here’s five before the price goes up.”

  Ten minutes later I was on my way to Plaza Del Lago after Arnie told me that I still had time to put a few bucks on the Kentucky Derby, which was scheduled to start in an hour.

  “Put two bucks on Shutout,” he confided, leaning into my window.

  “Next year,” I said, glancing back through the blue thickness of my double-layered rear window.

  I drove for an hour, listening to the radio. A big battle was going on at the gates of Mandalay. I tried not singing “The Road to Mandalay,” but it came out anyway. The sports news came on around one and I was told that Willard Marshall was expected to be a big gun for Mel Ott’s Giants. I remembered seeing Ott a couple of times in exhibition games, that bottle of a bat and that foot up in the air when he moved into the ball. Next weekend I’d get my nephews Dave and Nat and take them to a ball game somewhere, if my sister-in-law Ruth would let me. She didn’t really trust me with them since the last time I had taken the boys out, promising to take them to see Dumbo, and dropping them instead at a triple horror show that gave Davie nightmares for a week. When the announcer told me that Shutout had won the Derby, I turned the radio off.

  The land went flat about two minutes past Dot’s Dixie Gas Station, just inside Antelope Valley, where I had stopped to fill the tank and buy a candy bar.

  Antelope Valley was named for the herds that roamed there a few hundred years earlier at the edge of the Mojave. Low hills, the Lovejoy Buttes, separate the valley from the desert. The twenty-five-hundred-square-mile valley is supplied with water from a giant natural reservoir underground and runoff from the mountains.

  In April and May tourists from town come out to see the desert flowers, particularly the California poppies that sometimes stretch like a red blanket for twenty miles. I had gone slowly behind tourists for much of the way.

  Dot was a skinny guy with a bad leg and no interest in conversation. A mongrel dog, which was stuffed, dead, or in deep meditation, lay next to the pump where Dot filled me up after looking at the dent in my roof and the rear window.

  The flat land turned to desert brush and stretched on dry and far past Palmdale. I was somewhere near Plaza Del Lago or what once had been Plaza Del Lago, but it wasn’t there. Then the narrow road took a sudden dip, and I saw the town sitting in a basin. It was bigger than I expected and sprawled out. A narrow part of town lay in front of me on both sides of the two-lane highway with wooden storefronts and old houses. Beyond the street on both sides stood larger, more substantial houses with grounds and an occasional pool. Face-to-face off the highway, about a block in to the left, were two big sprawling buildings both with large pools.

  Five minutes later I was on Plaza Del Lago’s main street and pulling into a parking space in front of Cal’s General Store and Gifts. I went in, plunked down a quarter and got a box of Wheaties and a quart of milk and two cents in change from a woman I supposed was Mrs. Cal, a thin-haired knot of a woman dressed in overalls. I’d worry about a bowl and spoon later.

  “Could you tell me where the Grayson place is?” I said, hoisting my bag of groceries.

  “Could,” said Mrs. Cal and turned back to stacking Gold Dust Cleanser.

  “Will you?” I went on.

  She looked at me in a way that would have put Arnie’s sigh to shame.

  “You got business?” she said. Her voice had a desert dry rattle, resulting I imagined from eating nothing but crackers from the cracker barrel and conserving her voice for the opera.

  “I got business,” I said, getting into the swing of things.

  “They’re new, practically everyone is here,” she said, looking at me in a way that made it clear that I would not be a welcome addition to Plaza Del Lago.

  “Why’d they all come?”

  “The springs,” she said, pointing at a display across the aisle behind me. The store wasn’t big, and the two aisles were narrow and filled from floor to ceiling. The display she pointed to was bottles of so
mething called Poodle Springs water. The labels were yellow with a white cartoon poodle on them, standing on its hind legs, with its tongue out. The water inside the bottle was a little murky.

  “Spring under the town,” Mrs. Cal explained, growing talkative. “Been there since God created it.”

  “That a fact?” I encouraged.

  “Stuff tastes like turkey piss,” she said, shaking her head.

  Never having tasted turkey piss I said, “No kidding.”

  “I don’t kid,” she said, leaning on the counter.

  “How’d it all start?”

  “Fella named Grayson, the one you’re looking for, come down here maybe ten years back, bought up most of the land. People were happy to sell it to him. Thought he was a idiot.”

  “He wasn’t?” I asked.

  “Look around if you got eyes,” she said, turning her head in every direction. All I could see was piles of groceries, but I assumed she meant the buildings beyond. “He got all kinds of fools from places like San Francisco, Los Angeles, and Reno to put up money and build houses and those two hotels. Sunk money into ads in the papers. Told people this turkey piss could cure anything. Pretty soon old people were down here buying, swimming in the stuff, drinking it. Some people will buy a goat’s ass and stick it on their head if a smart talker gets his jaw going at them.”

  “Some people,” I agreed.

  “We make out all right with it,” she added. “I ain’t complaining.”

  Since it had sounded to me like complaining, I considered debating the point with her, but remembered my job.

  “Grayson’s?”

  “Keep going two roads east, turn left and drive till you can’t drive no more. Big ’dobe house with an old mission bell on top and a Joshua tree in the yard.”

  “Thanks,” I said, taking my package and turning.

  Mrs. Cal went back to her stacking and piling without another word.

  The directions were fine. Plaza Del Lago wasn’t that big. I passed the two face-to-face hotels with porches covered with old people wearing floppy hats and drinking murky turkey piss. None of them had a goat’s ass on their head, unless it was under the floppy hats.