He Done Her Wrong tp-8

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Gunther Wherthman,” I shouted, loud enough to wake Thomas, who had dozed off on the cot where I had been lying.

  “Mr. Wherthman,” she gasped. “Why are you calling? I just saw you into your room.”

  “Oh shit,” I sighed softly.

  “You needn’t blaspheme,” retorted Mrs. Plaut. “Even in your native tongue.”

  Dot looked at me without curiosity, puffed on his pipe, and dreamed of Sergeant York.

  “Peters, Peters, Toby PETERS,” I shouted. The veins on my forehead ached.

  “Mr. Peelers?” she said after a pause.

  “Yes,” I gasped.

  “He is not here and the police are looking for him again,” she explained.

  “The police …”

  “I’ll let you talk to Mr. Wherthman,” she said, and I heard the phone clink against the wall in the hall.

  “Used to work in the estuary down near San Luis,” Dot told no one in particular as he took his pipe out and looked into the bowl before returning it to the corner of his mouth.

  There is no end to the eccentricity of this world, I observed silently waiting for Gunther, who finally came on after a scraping of the chair in the hall on which he always stood to cope with the phone.

  “This is Gunther Wherthman here,” he said with his usual accent and dignity.

  “This is Toby, Gunther. I’ve had a slight accident.”

  “Toby, are you all right?”

  “I’m O.K. Can you come and get me? I’ll tell you where I am. What did Mrs. Plaut mean about the cops looking for me?”

  “You are, it seems wanted for interrogation concerning the murder of a Mr. Grayson. I heard through the door. As you know I am not fond of the Los Angeles police.” He paused politely and waited for my next question.

  “Was my brother one of the cops who came?”

  “That is correct,” he said.

  I gave him directions and spent the next hour and ten minutes playing poker with Dot, who took me for four bucks and informed me that he would use the money to go into town and see Veronica Lake in This Gun for Hire.

  “She gets kissed by Robert Preston,” he said, his eyes glazing over with the look he reserved for Sergeant York and Veronica Lake.

  “I’ll have to catch it,” I said.

  When Gunther arrived, I picked up my package, thanked Dot, petted Thomas, and got into the car next to Gunther. Gunther’s Olds was equipped with built-up pedals so he could reach them.

  “Little fella,” said Dot, pointing at Gunther with his pipe.

  “I hadn’t noticed,” I said, and we pulled into the night heading back to L.A.

  CHAPTER 5

  The next morning I got up early, had some coffee and the Wheaties, and put on my last suit, a brown wool that looked reasonably good if you didn’t get too close. Since it was Sunday, I couldn’t get my milk-smelling suit cleaned and the button sewed on, and I couldn’t contact Arnie to try to make a deal on the ’38 Ford before the price went up again. Dot had remembered to take the license plates off the old Buick and drop them in the box with the other goodies.

  A call to the Wilshire District Police Station told me that Phil was in and working. Crime doesn’t stop on Sunday. In fact, Saturday night is usually enough to make Sunday a cop’s daymare.

  No backache. No major bruises. I decided to walk the three miles and take in the California sea air, but by the time f hit Fairfax, the rain had started. I ducked into a doorway and looked for a cab. The streets were not quite empty, but Sunday mornings are not carnival time in Los Angeles. Everybody always seems to be someplace else. Too much land too spread out to absorb us all, but the war was helping make up for it by sending thousands in every day. Common sense would have had it the other way. The coast was the most vulnerable part of the States to Japanese attack. The Japanese were warning us every few days that they were coming. Maybe the bombing of Tokyo last week would give them something else to think about, maybe it wouldn’t.

  What brought people were the jobs. Soldiers, sailors, and marines shipped out from the coast. The fleet was always coming to San Diego. The big money was in the armed forces, and the jobs were where the big money was.

  California was having a love affair with men in uniform. They could drink, shout, maim, and abuse, usually one another, and they’d be forgiven like cute three-year-olds. Civilian guilt paved the way until their time ran out and they had to get on those ships and sail to hell island.

  The men in uniform who weren’t having a great time in L.A. were the cops. By the time I caught a cab and got to the station, the rain was slowing down. A quartet of uniformed cops stood at the top of the stone steps trying to decide if they should go out into the streets, dampen their uniforms and spirits, and look for the bad guys, who were too damned easy to find.

  I went in and nodded at the desk sergeant, an old-timer named Coronet, who nodded back. A sailor was sleeping on the wooden bench against the wall.

  “Got rolled,” said Coronet, nodding at the kid. “Swears it was two guys and Jean Harlow. I told him Harlow’s dead. And if she weren’t, why would she roll a sailor?”

  “Could have been someone who looked like Harlow?” I said.

  Coronet shook his shaggy white head wisely and offered me a stick of Dentyne. I stuck it in my jacket pocket. He unwrapped his and began to chew.

  “Naw,” he said. “That makeup, the whole ambience is out of touch.”

  “Ambience?” I repeated.

  “Heard it on ‘Believe It or Not’ last night,” Coronet nodded. “Very educational show. You should catch it.”

  “I will,” I said and went up the twenty creaking brown stairs through the often-kicked wooden door at the top and into the squad room. As it always did, the room smelled of food, humanity, and stale smoke.

  Business was booming. Fat Sergeant Veldu sat at his desk with one salami hand in the ample hair of a Mexican kid. Veldu was holding the kid’s face inches from his own and whispering. The kid looked scared. I couldn’t hear what Veldu whispered because there was too much going on.

  Two women dressed for a big night out were sitting on a bench in the corner, smoking and talking as if they were waiting for the maitre d’ to lead them to a seat at the Cafe La Male. One of the women, a blond, had a black and purple eye. The other woman had a thick bandage over her ear.

  The blond laughed and said over the noise, “You should have bit it off.”

  Next to them a ragbag wino in a long coat was looking through Veldu’s wastebasket. Veldu reached back without taking his hand from the Mexican kid or moving his eyes and coshed the ragbag with his free hand. The ragbag sat up.

  My least favorite detective in the solar system, John Cawelti, was sipping coffee and playing with a pencil while he listened to someone on the phone, who didn’t give him a chance to speak. Cawelti’s checked jacket was off, and his shoulder holster rested comfortably over his heart. As always, except for one time when Jeremy Butler had shaken him up, Cawelti’s black hair was plastered down and parted in the middle as if he were about to try out for tenor in a barbershop quartet. He looked up and saw me. I smiled at him. It was love at first sight. Then he made the little gesture that cemented our relationship, and I mouthed “Same to you” and winked. He glared for a few seconds more, jabbed his pencil into his desk, and turned away.

  Two uniformed cops were standing over a seated guy built like a Norwegian tanker. He tried to stand but they pushed him back. He paused, blank-faced, tried to stand again, and the cops pushed him down again. Neither side seemed to be enjoying the game. I could see why the cops didn’t want him to get to his feet. He was a dead ringer for heavyweight contender Tami Mauriello.

  I spotted Seidman in the corner sitting on his desk going through some papers and made my way to him over bums, through bruisers, ladies of last night, cops, and piles of paper.

  He didn’t bother to look up. He had cops’ eyes and knew when I’d stepped into the squad room.

  “Usually we have to
go out and find you,” he said in his dead, even voice, which matched his complexion. “We changing the rules?”

  “I’m getting older and mellower, Steve,” I said, sitting next to him on the desk and trying to read with him. He put the papers down, folded his arms over his thin chest, and looked at me.

  “So am I, Toby,” he said. “And I’ve been up all night. So has Phil. Now if you go into his office and get him riled up and I have to come in and make peace, I may move a little slower than usual. You may not be lucky. Give it a rest. There’s a war on.”

  “Blessed are the peacemakers,” I said.

  “For they shall inherit the pieces,” he replied. “Go on in. Wait. This is a dumb question but I’ll ask it for the record. Did you kill that Grayson in Plaza Del Lago?”

  “No,” I said, plunging my hands in my pockets and dancing out of the way of Veldu and the Mexican kid, who was waltzing toward the private interrogation room in the far corner.

  Seidman went back to reading his file, and I knocked on Phil’s office door.

  “Come in,” he said. In I went.

  Phil was seated at his desk. His back was turned, and he was scratching his steely-haired head as he had done for the past thirty years. I closed the door and eased into one of the two chairs on the other side of the desk. His office was no bigger than mine back at the Farraday. His window had an even worse view. He admired the brick wall across the way for a few more seconds, scratched his head once more, and turned to me, folding his hands in front of him on the desk. His eyes were red, and gray stubble covered his face. He’d look better in a beard, but cops couldn’t have beards.

  “O.K., what have you got for me?” he said.

  I reached into my pocket, pulled out the bronze Alcatraz, and placed it on the desk in front of him. He looked down at it without unfolding his hands. I looked at it too.

  “This is-” he started.

  “Alcatraz,” I finished. “A present, a paperweight. I used to have it in my office. Got it from an ex-con named Maloney who did time on the Rock. Thought it would look better in here. Maybe you could refer to it when you wanted to sweat a grumpy killer.”

  Phil’s right eye closed slightly trying to assess the joke. He was capable of heaving the thing at me or picking it up, leaping over the desk, and beating me with it.

  “Thanks,” he said.

  It wasn’t going to be easy to get a rise out of my brother this day.

  “How are Ruth and the kids?” I tried. That usually bothered him.

  “Fine. We were supposed to have a picnic today.” He looked out the window. Thunder crackled up the coast. “Sunday. What the hell. Did you kill Grayson?”

  “No.”

  Phil scratched his head again and opened the file in front of him. It was my thick file, already fingerprint-stained and frayed at the corners. The basics were there. I’d been in and out of trouble for a dozen years, though no more than other private eyes.

  Phil looked up from the file and glanced at our father’s watch on my wrist. It said four o’clock. It was getting better all the time, no more than seven hours off.

  “O.K.,” Phil sighed. “Woman named Delores Grayson says you drove out to Plaza Del Lago yesterday looking for her father. She tried to keep you from seeing him, but you got away from her in her kitchen and went looking for him. She was scared but followed up a few seconds later. She found you in the old man’s bedroom. The guy was dead and you were ready to clobber her with a radio. You forced her into the living room, made her sit, and you ran for the door and beat it. How does that sound to you?”

  “Like Hansel and Gretel,” I said. “Her name isn’t Grayson. It’s Ressner. I was looking for her father, her real father, Jeffrey Ressner, the guy I think tried to put the hand on our friend Mae West. He was in the house. She tried to keep me from seeing him. When I got to the bedroom, Grayson was already skewered. I told Delores to call the cops, and I went for Ressner, who pulled out in a Packard, California 1942 license plate thirty-four fifty-seven. I went after him till my car died. Hell, it committed suicide. Delores Ressner is trying to protect her nut father.”

  “You didn’t see Ressner kill Grayson?” Phil said, reaching up to his neck to loosen his tie, but it was already loose and hanging around his shoulders.

  “I didn’t even see Ressner clearly when he took off in the Packard,” I said.

  “The Packard belongs to the Graysons,” he said. “It’s missing. I’ll get the state police to talk to Delores. This isn’t my case, Toby. It’s the state police. I’ll put them off a day or two if they can’t break Delores, but then you’ll have to talk to them. You think he’ll go for Mae?”

  “He’s a wacko, Phil. I don’t know what he’ll do, but I’ll get on it. Can you put anyone on her to be sure?”

  “Out of my district if she stays at the ranch. And I just don’t have the reasons.”

  “Maybe I can get Jeremy to be a houseguest at the ranch till I track Ressner down,” I said.

  Phil looked down and nodded.

  “Hell, Phil, this is damned depressing. It’s like Thanksgiving when we were kids and you and I would declare a truce long enough to go for the turkey wishbone. I’d wish for a Tris Speaker glove or a million bucks.”

  “And I’d wish to be a cop,” he said.

  We sat silently in the room for about two minutes listening to the chicken yard outside the thin wooden partition. I was trying to think of an insult to get Phil going again when Seidman pushed open the door without knocking.

  “Veldu’s prisoner just had an accident,” he said evenly. “Fell down in the interrogation room. He’s out. Doesn’t look so good.”

  “Coming,” said Phil, pushing back from the desk. “Call the hospital. Have them send an ambulance just in case.”

  “Already did,” Seidman said, closing the door.

  Phil eased his cop’s gut around the desk and took one lumbering step to the door. I got up behind him.

  “Phil,” I whispered. “Face it. You’re getting too old for this stuff.”

  His elbow shot back and caught me in the stomach, taking my wind with a gasp. He grabbed me by the neck before I sunk to the floor and pulled our faces even closer together than Veldu and the kid had been.

  “Listen, brother of mine,” he hissed. I could smell the morning coffee on his breath, see life coming to his eyes. “There’s a line you don’t go over. Never. You just put your foot on it. Now back away.” He shook me a little and stood me up. “You’ve got two days. That’s all I can hold the state cops for. Then they get your hind end.”

  He let me go and I took one step backward, pulling in air and holding the wall to keep from falling. Seidman stepped back in and looked at me.

  “You all right?” he said.

  “Couldn’t be better,” I gasped.

  “You woke him up,” Seidman said, nodding his head toward where my brother had departed.

  “It’s surprising what you can accomplish with a little brotherly love and battery acid on your tongue,” I sputtered, holding my stomach.

  Seidman hurried off, and I staggered to the door and out. The walk through the squad room was long. I didn’t want to hold my stomach, and I didn’t feel like getting into a conversation about sugar rationing.

  I put one hand on a desk to steady myself before making the last half-dozen steps to the door. It turned out to be Cawelti’s always neat and polished desk, and his thin voice whispered in my ear, “Get your fingers off my desk or you’re going to be a one-handed typist.”

  I got my fingers off, looked at him, crossed my eyes, and gave him a Harpo Marx gookie face. Cawelti’s face turned bright red, the red in a ripe sugar beet or a Walt Disney cartoon. His holster bounced with the rapid beating of his heart as he stood up.

  The two women, one with the black eye and the other with the ear bandage, paused with the wino to look at us. I turned my back and walked to the door, expecting a bullet, another dent in my skull, or teeth in my neck.

  “It
’s coming to you soon, Peters,” Cawelti said.

  “I understand your draft notice is in the mail, John,” I said, opening the door. “We’ll all miss you.” And out I went.

  It had, so far, been one beautiful morning and the day had just begun. When I got down to the desk, Coronet was talking to the sailor, who was now awake.

  “I ought to know Jean Harlow when I see her,” the kid said. “I seen all her pictures.”

  “Dead is dead,” said Coronet reasonably between chews of his gum. “I tell you the whole ambience is out of touch, son.”

  I handed the kid the stick of Dentyne that Coronet had given me earlier. He looked at me suspiciously, took the gum, and said thanks.

  The rain had stopped but it was coming back soon. I found a nearby drugstore open, sat at the counter, and had spaghetti Milanese and a Spur cola for twenty cents. It was early for lunch, but my stomach needed settling and my mind needed stimulation.

  The waitress, who was listening to Walter Winchell on the radio, paused long enough to give me change for some phone calls and I went to work.

  The first call was to Mae West.

  Dizzy or Daffy answered the phone and got Mae West on a few seconds later. She breathed deeply two or three times before panting “Hel-lo Peters. What can I do for you or vice versa?”

  “You can stay home for a few days and let that friend of mine, Jeremy, keep you company till we track down this Ressner. He’s getting a bit unruly.”

  “Jeremy that big, big fella?” she asked.

  “The same.”

  “I’d love to spend a day or two discussing the finer things in life with him. Send him down with a change of pajamas and a bad book. I’m going through a bit of divorce and can use the company of an intellec-tual.”

  “I’ll tell him.”

  “Be careful.”

  “I try to be,” I said, fidgeting for coins for my next call.

  “I doubt it,” she said and hung up.

  I reached Jeremy in his apartment, the only apartment in the Farraday Building. He didn’t like to leave the place even on Sunday. He had been working on some poems for his forthcoming anthology, an anthology that he decided to publish himself using Alice Palice’s portable printing press, for which Alice would receive a month’s free rent. He quickly agreed to spend a few days guarding Mae West, however.