“Maybe. Why don’t we just wait and see? I’ll leave you three here to talk it over.” I made a move to the door, but Winning’s voice stopped me.
“Wait. Peters, I think I have something that will show you how wrong you are, that will convince you.”
I turned to look at him, at all of them, and waited. He moved quickly into the back of the house, fumbled in one of the rooms, and came in holding a.38 automatic.
“Just stand still, Peters, while we consider our next step.”
Mrs. Grayson was weeping now, and Delores moved to her side.
“The next step is obvious. You kill him, and we bury him in the desert,” she said.
“All right,” sighed Winning.
“Two questions for a dying man?” I asked.
“Very fast ones, Peters, this is upsetting Mrs. Grayson,” he said.
“Sorry. How good was my story?”
“So-so,” he admitted. “A few details were off, but very close. Your second question?”
“Is that my gun?”
“It is,” he said. “Now Delores, I suggest you take your mother to her room for a while.” Delores and Jeanette obeyed and left Winning and me alone.
“That gun makes a big noise when it goes off,” I said, taking a step toward him.
“There’s no one around to hear it for half a mile, and there’s nothing at all unusual about shooting at prairie dogs at night,” he said.
I took another step toward him and he raised the gun to fire. With my next step he did fire but nothing happened. The step after that I was in front of him and threw a punch that came from the floor. He pulled the trigger again as he fell. The bullet took off through the window and into the night. I kicked the gun out of his hand and he rolled over moaning and holding his chin.
“I think it’s broken,” he moaned.
“We can only hope,” I said, going through his pockets and finding my wallet. “No bullet in the first chamber,” I explained. “Never is. That’s the trouble with being an amateur.”
I made a long-distance call to Phil and invited the family back into the living room to wait for the state police. They came in about twenty minutes and led us all out after I turned the gun over to them. Phil had called, and I was sure I’d be spending a night in the lockup at the worst. I didn’t know what would happen to Winning and the Grayson girls. I didn’t care.
CHAPTER 17
The stitches came out of my head three days later, the morning Phil told me that Winning and the Graysons were being booked for murder. The case was pretty good if not perfect. If Mrs. Grayson didn’t take back her confession, they’d all do a lot of hard time.
The story had made the first pages of papers all across the country, primarily because Richard Talbott was one of the victims. The double murder shared space with the Japanese taking of Corregidor and the Russian counteroffensive.
There was no thank-you note from Anne for the hat, but I hadn’t expected one. There was no thank-you note from Arnie either when I collected on four overdue bills, one of them going back to 1939. Barely veiled threats and, in the case of the 1939 bill, the casual showing of my shoulder holster had done the trick. The guy was a close-to-the-ground mutt who owned a hot dog stand in Tarzana. If he had given me trouble, he would have discovered an empty holster. I had hocked my.38 at Wiley’s Pawn shop on Vine when the police returned it to me. With the five bucks I got for it and the eighteen left in my wallet when I got it back from Winning in Plaza Del Lago, I had enough to pay back Rosie and eat, especially with a free meal with my brother’s family.
I had dinner with them in North Hollywood on Saturday. Ruth was a better cook than Mrs. Plaut’s Aunt Jessica, but I had to spend part of the time looking out for my niece, Lucy, whose favorite game was to sneak up behind family members, yell “Surprise,” and whollop them with whatever was at hand, a doll, an old lock, a toy gun. She had started the game as a baby and was having trouble breaking the habit at the age of almost three.
“President’s eating fresh fruit and cutting back on desserts with sugar,” Ruth said, apologizing for not having made my favorite chocolate pudding pie. I peeled a navel orange and ate it, watching for Lucy and keeping a hand ready to defend my not-completely-healed head.
Phil said nothing. Well, almost nothing. At one point he asked to have the stew passed to him.
After dinner the boys and I left. I thought Phil wanted to say something, but he didn’t. Ruth said they had to be home by eleven, and out we went.
I couldn’t find much to see, and I wanted to play it safe, so we saw My Gal Sal with Rita Hayworth and Victor Mature.
“I wish I could do that,” Nat said when we got out of the show.
“What?” asked his brother, shoveling in the last greasy drops of popcorn.
“Make my whole scalp go up and down like Victor Mature when he’s thinking. Can you do that, Uncle Toby?”
I tried and failed and then asked the boys casually how their father had been in the last week or so.
“Like always,” said Nat. “Busy. We were supposed to go to the park last week for a picnic, but he was chasing crazy killers again. He keeps catching them but there’s always more.”
Dave dropped the empty popcorn box in a wastebasket, and we all climbed in the front seat of the car.
“Are you going to be cops?” I asked.
“I think I’ll be a private cop so I can shoot rat-faced hoods like you do,” Nat said seriously.
“The problem is they usually shoot me first,” I said.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “Dave will probably be a comedian in dives around the city and Lucy will be a has-been.”
“You’ve got it all worked out,” I said.
“It pays to plan ahead,” Nat said, punching his brother in the shoulder for no reason I could see.
On the morning the stitches came out, I got a check in the mail from my last client, Emmett Kelly the circus clown. He invited me to drop in on him if I came East. I read the letter over a taco at Manny’s and figured out that I now had enough money to pay my fifteen bucks rent to Mrs. Plaut and ten to Jeremy for the office. I gave Arnie twenty more bucks toward the now-repaired Ford and still had enough to eat for another week or two if I drove very little and made no further moves in my so-far-unsuccessful assault on Carmen the cashier at Levy’s Grill.
So, on the morning the stitches came out I went over to the Hope Street YMCA after setting up a handball game with Doc Hodgdon, the sixty-six-year-old orthopedic surgeon, who as usual barely worked up a sweat in disposing of me 21-4, 21-9. I slumped to the locker room with Hodgdon looking for someone else to take on before he went back to manipulating the spines of the wretched.
I went back to my boardinghouse and called the Winning Institute, where I was informed that the institute was undergoing a name change. Henceforth, the place would be called the Fresno Institute for Mental Research. Dr. Vadergreff was now in charge, though Dr. Winning was eventually expected to return.
In ninety-nine years to life, I thought, and asked for special permission to speak to Sklodovich.
“I’m sorry,” the woman on the other end said, “there is no one in the institute with that name.”
“Cortland,” I said.
“We do have such a patient,” the woman said, “but I’m afraid you cannot speak to him. There are strict orders-”
“Let me talk to Dr. Vadergreff,” I jumped in. “Tell him it’s Toby Peters. I don’t care where he is or what he is doing.”
The line clicked off. For a second or two I thought she had cut me off, but the line clicked back on, and I recognized Dr. Vadergreff’s voice through his first cough.
“Yes, Mr.Peters,” he said in his best doctor manner.
“I want to talk to Cortland,” I said. “If I don’t, I’ll initiate a lawsuit against your little castle for kidnapping me. It might not hold up, but with the publicity you’ve already had, you’ll have to pack up the place stone by stone and move it to Canada.�
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“I see,” he said. “I’m not sure it would be good for Mr. Cortland.”
“I have great respect for your opinion,” I said, “but at the moment I think you should shove it in a tin can and get Cortland on the horn.”
The phone went down hard, and I looked down the stairs to watch Mrs. Plaut slowly rising toward me, her glasses firmly planted, her eyes narrow, a pile of papers under her arm. I turned toward the phone as she moved behind me and pretended not to see her. I kept saying “uh huh, huh uh” to a dead phone until Cortland came on.
“Haven’t talked on a phone for four or five years,” he said.
“How’s it feel?”
“Tense,” he said, “Already feel that there’s time and space to be filled, and if I stop talking we’ll be wasting telephone air or something.”
“I know how you feel. I’m sending you a dozen oranges this afternoon. Anything else you want? Sure you don’t want me to work on getting you out of there?”
“Hell no,” he said emphatically. “People are getting killed out there. They tried to keep it from us, but Dealer found out about Dr. Winning. They say Ressner is coming back here. Is he?”
“If he wants to,” I told him. “It looks like there may be plenty of money to pay his way when the Grayson estate is settled. Of course that might take a few centuries, but the court will probably agree to use Grayson’s money rather than the state’s.”
“Good,” said Cortland. “I like Ressner. Quite an actor.”
“Quite an actor,” I agreed. “You want me to get the stethoscope, the raincoat, and the white uniform back to you?”
“No need,” he said. “No need. There are plenty more here.”
“How about a visit when I get enough cash together for gas?”
Now there was a pause on the other end while Sklodovich/Cortland thought about it.
“I don’t think so. I think I’d feel a little awkward now that I know you’re really not one of us. No offense. Sorry.”
“Hey, don’t apologize for everything. Remember?”
“Right,” he agreed. “Thanks for the oranges.”
Then the line did go dead, and I turned to Mrs. Plaut, who dumped the pile of papers in my arms.
“Very rough,” she said. “Revision of the chapter on Uncle Will Parmarshall’s kidnapping.”
“Who kidnapped him?” I asked, taking a step toward my room, where I planned to drop the manuscript.
“No one,” she said, following me and poking me with a steely elbow to get the common sense moving in my battered body. “He kidnapped Olivet Marsh back in the rush at Summter’s Mill when Olivet and his gang of murderous thugs tried to take Uncle Parmarshall’s barber chair.”
“I’m looking forward to reading it,” I said.
“Take care of it this time, Mr. Peelers, and remember, no more bodies in your room.” She actually wagged her finger at me, and I nodded and pushed my door open.
Gunther was off somewhere seeing a publisher about a job, and I didn’t feel like reading about Uncle Parmarshall, especially in rough form. I had some Pepsi and a Wonder Bread sandwich of tuna salad remnants and a slice of Kraft yellow.
The next step was clear, but I didn’t want to take it. I’d make some calls to the not too affluent but not yet decayed hotels around Los Angeles, where I knew the house detectives to see if any of them needed some part-time help or someone to fill in while they went on vacation or had a nervous breakdown. If they had the breakdown, I could steer them away from Fresno Mental. If that didn’t pan out, I could call a guy named Buddy who did skip-tracing in Sacramento and take on some of his dirty jobs for a percentage. Before I did that, however, I’d spend another day in my office waiting for the mail or the phone to ring.
Everything was fine on the drive down to Hoover. The car was running; my watch wasn’t. The radio was playing, but just two stations, the gas gauge was jumping all over the place, and my bumper was back on along with both headlights.
I parked behind the Farraday, locked the car, looked around for marauding bums, and went in. I saw Jeremy talking to Alice Palice on the second-floor landing. He held a bottle of Lysol in one massive mitt and a rag in the other. Alice was speaking with passion, and Jeremy was nodding. I couldn’t make out the words, but they made an impressive couple, minimum of 450 pounds of muscle between them.
In the lobby of the offices I shared with Shelly Minck I stopped to examine the dusty picture of a decaying tooth. I wondered what would happen if my teeth went bad. Would I turn to Shelly for help or kill myself? I went through the reception-room door, pushing one ratty waiting chair back where it belonged and saw Shelly talking to a woman in the chair, who seemed to want to leave. She was a little, dark woman with brown frightened eyes, clutching a colorful beaded handbag to her chest.
“See,” Shelly beamed, removing the cigar from his mouth to face me. “That ad has been great. People from all over. I think this woman came all the way from Juarez to see me.”
“No,” said the woman. “No. No quiero que usted trabaja sur mis dientes.”
“See,” cackled the dentist, holding her back with a fat paw.
“She says she’s not here for you to work on her teeth,” I explained.
“Sure she is,” he said, touching her head to calm her and getting his ring caught in her hair. “She’s just frightened. Those teeth need work. Tell her I take pesos but I make my own exchange rate.”
“Que quiere, senorita?” I said.
At that point the woman told me in panicked Spanish that she had seen Shelly’s ad and had recognized him as the dentist who had ruined her husband’s bridgework ten years earlier in Yuma. She had come to demand her money back.
I explained to Shelly, who put his right hand to his chest as if he were going to pledge allegiance to the flag or have a heart attack. He did it with all the sincerity of a kid caught with his hand in the fudge.
“I’ve never seen this woman or her husband in my life,” he gasped. “Tell her to get out immediately. Vamoose.”
“How do you know you’ve never seen her husband?” I asked reasonably as Shelly tried to pry the woman out of the chair. Now she didn’t want to go.
“I have, as you know, an excellent memory,” he grunted, pulling at her and pausing only to marvel at her determination.
“Mi esposo se llama Martin Gutierez,” she said to me.
The name shot through Shelly like a double dose of Ex-Lax.
“Oh, no,” he said. “Out.”
“Recuerda,” she insisted. “Mi esposo es un hombre muy grande.”
“She says,” I told Shelly enjoying the scene, “that her husband is a big man.”
“Muy grande,” she said, wrestling with Shelly for her purse.
“Very big,” I translated.
He let go of the purse, wiped his sweating brow with the corner of his dirty smock, and gasped, “How much? How much does she want?”
“Cuanto?” I asked with my most pleasant smile.
She told me but I didn’t need to interpret.
“Fifty dollars?” he groaned. “Never.”
“Suit yourself, Shel, but I think she’ll come back some time with her husband, and it’ll cost you a lot more than fifty to move to another office. Besides, your home address is in the phone book.”
“Sneaky Mexicans,” he snorted, going to the drawers in which he kept his tools, old X rays, and a small box with cash. He grumbled with his back turned, found what he was looking for, closed the drawer, and returned with some bills. He handed them to Mrs. Gutierez, who counted them and shoved them into her beaded purse with a smile.
“See those teeth?” Shelly said with the trace of a grin. “They’ll be dropping like Nazi’s in Russia in weeks, and I won’t lift a finger to help her.”
Mrs. Gutierez thanked me and went out the door as fast as she could move.
“Damned ad,” growled Shelly, ambling over to pour himself coffee. “I’m going to pull it.”
“How ma
ny Gutierezes are there out there, Shel?”
“None. He’s the only one. A slight error in judgment. A slip. Everyone is entitled to one slip in an illustrious career. Even Joe Louis lost to Schmeling.”
Shelly grabbed his glasses just as they were about to slip from his nose and slopped coffee on his smock in the process. It joined a collage of other stains.
The outer door to our office opened and someone knocked at the second door.
“Yeah,” yelled Shelly and then to me, “it’s probably the South Pasadena Fire Department coming for my ears.”
“You treated the South Pasadena Fire Department and-”
“It was just a routine checkup,” he said. “How was I to know …“Toby, I’ll give you te-five bucks to protect me from sore losers for the next week till the ad dies.”
“Cash in advance,” I beamed. He went into his pocket, fished out a five, handed it to me, and looked at the door, which was opening.
A reasonably well-dressed couple in their early sixties stepped in. The woman was in front. The man behind was holding his swollen jaw.
“Dr. Minch?” she said, looking at me and Shelly, who was hiding behind me grasping his coffee cup in two hands.
“Minck,” I corrected. “That’s him.”
“We read your ad in the paper. Joseph has a terrible toothache.”
Shelly handed me the coffee cup as he pushed past me and hurried forward to lead Joseph to the dental chair.
“You are fortunate indeed,” he said. “I’ve just had a cancellation.”
I poured the coffee into the sink, deposited the cup, and went into my office and called Levy’s to see if Carmen had checked in yet. She hadn’t. I said I’d call back. I had five bucks. Maybe I could talk Carmen into a couple of late-night tacos and a swing-shift movie. Laurence Olivier was playing in The Invaders.
That reminded me. I had planned to take my nephews to another show when I had the cash, if my sister-in-law Ruth would let me.
I called, looking out the window to see if my car was safe. It was. Ruth answered on the second ring. I could hear two-year-old Lucy in the background saying, “Why? Why? Why? Why?”
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