High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Mr. Peelers, Mr. Peelers,” she cried, hurrying to me with short little steps and her hands up. “You had a call. Carole Lombard called and said to tell you to remember to tell Cary Grant to be reasonable.”

  “Thank you, Mrs. Plaut,” I said.

  “I will,” she said with a smile, turning back into her parlor.

  My decoding of the message was that Lombardi had called or had someone call to remind me to be sure Cooper agreed to make the picture. He was certainly determined.

  It was almost eleven when I parked in front of the Big Bear Bar in Burbank. The street was quiet. A few lights were on in the nearby houses, and the lawns were creaking with crickets. Three cars were parked in front of or near the bar, and I thought I recognized one of them. When I got to the door, I could hear Lola Farmer belting “Rosie the Riveter.” She should have stuck to ballads. I waited till she was finished before stepping in.

  There was a bartender with the face of an orangutan serving a customer with the body of a chimp. At one of the tables a couple sat arguing in low voices. At another table sat someone I wasn’t looking for, the squat man with the high voice who had laid me out in front of Mrs. Plaut’s. At the table next to him sat the person I wanted, Shelly Minck. His back was to me, but I couldn’t mistake that shape, that bald head and the cigar smoke. Lola was clinking the keys to think up another song. She looked about the same as she had in the afternoon, which was fine with me.

  “Requests?” she asked.

  “The Man I Love,” I said, and she looked up and gave me a smile of agony.

  Shelly turned as quickly as he could at hearing my voice. He started to rise, but I got to him before he could get up and put my hand on his shoulder.

  “It’s not polite to leave when the lady starts a song,” I whispered.

  “I can explain,” he said.

  I winked at the squat man, who drank his beer and pretended not to see me.

  “After the song,” I told Shelly.

  Lola did a reasonable job, considering the state of the piano and the limits of her voice. There was something so damned sad about her singing that I was beginning to like it.

  I applauded and so did Shelly and the chimp at the bar. The arguing couple was too busy and the squat muscleman was still pretending not to be there. I waved to him to catch his attention, which caused him to rise, pay his bill and leave. His place was taken by the two men who had come through the door, Costello and Marco, both looking as if they could use the sleep I had taken.

  “Talk, Shelly,” I said, before Lola could start another song.

  “It’s like this …” he began, but I had had enough.

  “No, on second thought don’t talk. Just pay for your drink and get out, and stay out of this case.”

  “But …”

  “Out,” I shouted. Everyone looked at us, and I raised my hand to show it was just a friendly discussion between friends.

  “I could help you, Toby,” whined Shelly, pushing his glasses back from a nose that looked as if it had been immersed in mineral oil. I reached for his jacket, and he held up his right hand.

  “All right, all right. I know when I’m not wanted.”

  “No you don’t, Shel. That’s the problem.”

  He got up, paid his bill and went out the door. Marco and Costello had a discussion, probably considering if one of them should follow Shelly to see who he was and what I had to do with him. Marco got up and ambled out.

  Lola played, sang and drank for about fifteen more minutes till the couple in battle got up and paid their bill. Then she took a break and came over to my table.

  “Nice,” I said.

  “A few centuries ago I remember promising you a drink,” she said, looking at me. “Jimmy,” she called, and then to me, “What’ll you have?”

  I drank a beer when it came and looked at her with sympathy and more.

  “The drink is all I promised,” she said hoarsely.

  “The drink is all you promised,” I agreed, looking over at Costello, who was nursing a second beer.

  “I’m going to be lucky to make it back to my place and into bed alone. It’s been a tough day.” She finished her drink and looked into the bottom of the glass.

  “I understand,” I said. “You need a ride?”

  “Just a ride,” she said, looking at me. From a distance she had looked all right, but close up I could see that dancing of the eyeballs that shows someone who might have trouble navigating the length of a napkin.

  “Gotta get back to work,” she said, standing, steadying herself and making it back to the piano. She ran a handful of fingers through her hair, coughed and began to sing. The monkey at the bar left in about ten minutes. That left just Costello, me and the barkeep. Lola wrapped up a medley of Cole Porter without losing too many words, and I clapped. I gave Costello a dirty look, and he joined in clapping. Jimmy the bartender was already cleaning up for the night.

  “You need anything?” I asked Lola at the piano.

  “A steady arm and a new head,” she said and smiled, reaching under the piano for a small purse.

  She said good night to the bartender, and I put my arm around her to give her support to the door. I nodded to Costello that it was time to go. He caught me at the door and grabbed my arm.

  “I gotta wait for Marco. He took the car.”

  “I’m not staying to keep you company.” I told him and went out into the Burbank night with Lola. Somewhere a dog barked. The street was dark and quiet, and so was Lola.

  She almost fell asleep on the way to the Glendale address she gave me. I knew the way. I grew up in Glendale. At least I got older in Glendale.

  Her furnished apartment was in a new war boom building on the commercial strip. Some people were sitting outside swapping songs, lies and stories, waiting for the factory shifts to change or unwinding after a long day. I got Lola through the hall with writing on the walls. There was no carpeting and no attempt to cover the cement blocks which the building was made of. Our footsteps bounced around, and the few words I said were lost in echoes.

  At her door she found her key and turned to me.

  “I wouldn’t be much good,” she said with a sad smile.

  “Some other time,” I said wittily.

  She touched my cheek and kissed me, her mouth soft and tired and tasting of sweet bourbon and lost dreams. I lost myself in the kiss, and then she pulled away.

  “Like a teenage date,” she said, and then she disappeared through the door, closing it behind her.

  I felt sorry for myself. Someone was trying to kill me, but that wasn’t what was making me sad. Ann was getting married. Carmen worked late and fought me off and Lola Farmer was too drunk and sad.

  Heliotrope was quiet. Lights were out on the street, and Mrs. Plaut had long since tucked away her manuscript. I parked behind a Packard right in front of the house. It looked like Marco and Costello’s Packard. I checked the license plate and it sounded right. Marco wasn’t in the car.

  No one stirred as I went into the house and up the stairs to my room. I went in quietly and turned on my lights. Costello was sitting at my table, looking up at me with his eyes wide and his mouth open.

  “Okay,” I started to say wearily and then stopped. Something red trickled from Costello’s mouth.

  When I reached him, I could see the glassy look of pain and surprise in his eyes. One reason for it was the knife in his back. It was a long knife. Now you might wonder how I would know it was a long knife if it was imbedded in the back of my uninvited guest. It was my knife, one of the two kitchen knives that had come with the room.

  “Who did it?” I asked, kneeling next to Costello, who grasped my arm with the grip of death.

  “He …” gasped Costello.

  “Who?”

  “Yes … He … No … Yes,” he whispered.

  “Yes, no, yes?” I repeated.

  “He … No … Yes,” agreed Costello.

  With that enlightening exchange, my guest fell ov
er on his face, just missing a spot of milk I had failed to clean up from breakfast. He was dead. I knew what I had to do. Costello was short, but too heavy to haul away, and I didn’t want to be caught trying. I could just let him sit there till morning and then call the police, but I didn’t think I’d get much sleep, and besides it would just be putting off the inevitable.

  I went to the hall phone and called the Wilshire Police District Office. It wasn’t quite in this area, but that’s where my brother Phil was in charge of homicide.

  Phil wasn’t at the station: The sergeant on the desk said he’d give me Officer Cawelti. I said no thanks. Cawelti and I were not sleep-over friends.

  I called Phil at home. His wife Ruth answered sleepily.

  “Ruth, this is Toby. Did I wake you?”

  “No, what time is it? The baby’s up with something. What’s wrong, Toby?”

  Before I could say more I could hear a grunt and the bouncing of springs. Behind that was the cry of my niece Lucy.

  “Toby,” came Phil’s voice, wavering between concern and anger, “what do you want?”

  “I’ve got something for the boys,” I said softly. “I picked up autographs of Babe Ruth, Bill Dickey, Mark Koenig and Bob Meusel this morning.”

  “You’re drunk,” hissed Phil.

  “I’ve also got something for you—your favorite—a corpse.”

  “Where?” he said soberly.

  “Here, in my room.”

  “You did it?” asked Phil seriously.

  “No, someone left him as a present.”

  “I’ll be there in half an hour.”

  While I waited for Phil I went carefully through Costello’s pockets. They didn’t tell me much except that his last name was Santucci, that he was from Chicago and that he was married. He had forty bucks and a holster with a gun which hadn’t been fired. I thought over his nonsense comments and tried to make sense of them. I woke Gunther, who came in wearing a tiny gray bathrobe with a sash. Gunther avoided examining the corpse and told me that he had heard some noises in my room about an hour earlier, but that since I hadn’t answered when he knocked, he had assumed I was all right.

  I told Gunther about my conversation a few minutes ago with the now-dead Costello, and Gunther listened seriously, touched his tiny chin and hurried to his room for a pencil and paper.

  “I think I understand,” he said animatedly. “You asked him who killed him and he said …”

  “He. No. Yes,” I finished, looking at Costello’s head.

  “Okay,” I went on, wanting to make a Spam sandwich but thinking it might look bad if my brother came while I was munching over the corpse. “He was killed by He. Yes. No Yes.”

  “Is there a street perhaps or a place in Los Angeles called Yesno or Yezno or Yeznoyes or …”

  “That’s it, Gunther,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “No Yes. Noyes. There is a street called Noyes in Burbank, and that’s where I was tonight. Costello didn’t know how to pronounce it. Maybe he was telling us where he was killed, not who killed him. So what do we have?”

  You have,” explained Gunther, “a man who was murdered on Noyes Street.”

  “I don’t see what difference where he was killed makes. But that’s my knife in his back. Either the killer came here earlier and took it, or he got Costello here somehow and killed him. Either way he was dumped here to get me in trouble and out of a case I’m on.”

  There was a loud knock at the door downstairs.

  “Phil,” I said, and Gunther put his hands in his robe and hurried back to his room. He had no affection for Phil, and Phil in a bad mood would think nothing of drop-kicking Gunther through the window.

  There was no chance that Mrs. Plaut would hear the door no matter how hard Phil pounded. I ran down and opened it.

  Phil Pevsner, brother of Tobias Leo Pevsner who at an early age became Toby Peters, was a little taller than me, a little broader, a few years older and much heavier. His hair was close-cut, curly and the color of steel. His thick, strong fingers scratched constantly from habit; dandruff or perplexity, I’ve never been sure. He started doing it in 1918 when he came back from the war. Phil hadn’t even bothered with the tie he usually kept unmade around his neck. Behind him stood Sergeant Steve Seidman, a cadaverous man who had little to say and was my brother’s partner. Seidman was a strange creature, a man who actually liked my brother.

  “Where is it?” Phil said through his teeth.

  I handed him the crumpled sheet with the Yankee autographs. He crushed it in his fist and was about to fling it in my face.

  “They’re real,” I said, holding up my hands. “For Dave and Nate.”

  He shoved the paper into his pocket and pushed me out of the way. Seidman followed behind, giving me a shake of his head to show me he disapproved of my not growing up.

  In my room, we stood looking down at Costello solemnly for a few seconds before Phil sighed and Seidman began to examine the body.

  “Now,” said Phil, grabbing my shirt and looking into my eyes, “start talking—fast, clear and straight.”

  Phil hated crime just a little more than he hated me. His impulse was to smash a hole through criminals and brothers and make straight for whatever sunlight and peace might be on the other side. Sometimes I thought Phil might have a few screws rattling around in his head. For more than twenty-five years he had been trying to clean up Los Angeles. The more he cleaned up and the more criminals he found, the more corpses came. At one point he had even charged a two-bit gunman with picking wildflowers, a crime punishable in Los Angeles by a $200 fine and up to six months in jail. There was no end to being a cop, and that frustrated him. Since he could never really win, he hated each new murderer and victim, who reminded him that things were getting worse instead of better, that Phil Pevsner would not make it a better world for his three kids. Since I seemed to be in the business of bringing him more business, I was not one of his favorite Californians.

  “I don’t know his name,” I said. “He’s from Chicago, a minor hood. A case I’m on has something to do with a guy named Lombardi, who just came here from the East to start a sausage factory.”

  “A case?” said Phil evenly. “Tell me more about it.”

  “Client,” I said and smiled. “I have to check with the client.”

  “How many times did I tell you there is no such thing for private detectives? You’re not a priest or a lawyer. Sam Spade was full of shit.” Phil shook me around a little to see if sense would find an accidental resting place in my head. It wouldn’t.

  “I’m not talking about the law,” I said. “I’m talking about ethics.”

  Phil laughed. I didn’t like the laugh. I think he was getting ready to go for the long-distance Toby-throwing record. So I talked fast.

  “This guy and another Chicago hood named Marco were tailing me. They picked me up yesterday and they’ve been on my tail since.”

  “So you got upset and skewered one of them when he came to lean on you,” Phil explained.

  “No,” I said. “I was out for the night at a bar in Burbank. You can check at the bar. It wasn’t crowded.”

  “That’s not proof of anything, and you know it,” shouted Phil. “You recognize the knife?”

  “Which knife?” I said innocently.

  “The one in the guy’s back, you smartass piece of …” If I had enough nose left for him to break, he would have done it. Seidman put a hand on his shoulder and stepped between us. Phil backed off, his face red, his teeth grinding.

  “Back off, Toby,” Seidman whispered. He had seen this game of bait-the-brother between me and Phil before. He had tried to figure it out and had tried to reason with both of us, me to stop needling Phil and Phil to stop taking the hook. The Pevsner brothers are a proud and foolish lot. We have no interest in listening to reason.

  “You think you can keep from driving him to kill you while I call the evidence boys and the coroner?” Seidman said, looking over at Phil, who was glaring angrily at the co
rpse.

  “Okay,” I said, and Seidman went out to use the hall phone.

  With his back to me, Phil said, “Did he say anything before he died?”

  “Only Mother of Mercy, is this the end of Costello,” I said.

  Phil didn’t turn. I think he was trying to count to ten.

  “On the head of my wife and kids,” he said with a calmness that scared even me, “if you give me one more wise-ass answer tonight, I’ll maim you.”

  He had done it before. It was time for me to cut the comments and stick to lies and near-facts. I wasn’t sure if it was in me. My brain is trickier than I am and makes me say things that aren’t always healthy for either of us.

  “Maybe your client did this?” Phil tried.

  “Nope,” I said, moving to the sofa to sit and being careful not to touch Mrs. Plaut’s doilies. I noticed for the first time that if you looked at the doily long enough, you could see the face of Harold Ickes in the pattern. “In a crazy way, old Costello here and my client were after the same thing. There is a guy whose name I don’t know who looks like a file cabinet. He—”

  “No name …?” said Phil, adding, “You got a clean glass?”

  I found him a glass, and he filled it with water and took a white pill from a bottle in his coat. I knew better than to ask what it was.

  “What was that?” I asked, even though I knew better.

  “Anti-Toby pills,” he said, rubbing his fingers over his gray stubble of morning beard. Seidman came back. His face showed nothing. It never did, but his eyes went to both of us to be sure that we had survived a minute or two alone together.

  “They’ll be here in fifteen, twenty minutes.”

  There was a knock on the door and Seidman opened it to Mrs. Plaut, who came in clutching her robe around her with one hand and holding a lug wrench in the other.

  “Are you in need of assistance, Mister Peelers?” she said, looking with suspicion at Phil and Seidman.

  “No, thank you, Mrs. Plaut,” I said. “These are policemen. There’s been an accident.”