Murder on a Yellow Brick Road tp-2

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “God says I get $50 a day, expenses, and a lot of cooperation.”

  “You’ll get it,” said Hoff.

  We walked back to Hoff’s office. On the way, we passed Walter Pidgeon talking to a short, chunky woman in big glasses. Pidgeon was laughing heartily and saying, “That’s priceless.”

  “Mr. Mayer is very persuasive,” said Hoff without any sarcasm.

  “He convinced me it was my patriotic duty to help M.G.M.. If I don’t work for M.G.M., we’ll be at war with Germany within a year.”

  I wasn’t sure what had convinced me to take the job. The money was good. I did want to provide some fatherly protection for Judy Garland, and by taking the job I stood a good chance of seeing Cassie James again. The only problem was that I didn’t think I could come near to doing what I was to be paid for. I pointed out to Hoff that I had one day’s pay coming already. He paid me out of his wallet as we walked.

  The small, dark girl with the Mexican accent and May Company glasses looked up as Hoff and I entered his office. Hoff looked terrible. He had sweated through another suit and run out of Spuds. The girl looked concerned, but we swept past her and into Hoff’s office.

  While I phoned the L.A. police, Hoff poured himself a small drink of something from a bar hidden in a cabinet. He didn’t offer me anything.

  I got past the switchboard operator and made my way to an Officer Derry. He wondered why I wanted to talk to Lieutenant Pevsner. No one who knew Phil Pevsner could understand why anyone would willingly seek his company. I used my full real name, Tobias Leo Pevsner, to cut through the blue tape and indicate I was the man’s brother. It got me to Sergeant Seidman, my brother’s partner.

  “Toby,” said Seidman coming on the phone, “he doesn’t want to talk to you, and if you’re smart, you won’t want to talk to him. We’ve had a tough week.”

  “Sergeant, I’m reporting a murder. Someone’s murdered a Munchkin at M.G.M.”

  There was silence at the other end, except for the background sounds of typewriters and cops talking.

  “You want me to tell your brother that?” he said calmly.

  “It’s true. Why don’t the two of you come…”

  There was a crackling sound at the other end and the clunk of the phone, then my brother’s rumbling voice:

  “Toby, you fuck-up. If this is one of your stupid jokes, you’ll do hospital time.”

  He meant it and I knew it, but I couldn’t resist. Maybe it was a death wish or something.

  “How are Ruth and the kids?” I asked. For some reason, maybe the fact that I never visited him and his family, this always drove Phil up the wall, and the walls of the L.A. police department are no fun running up. Besides, with the gut he was developing, a run up the wall was out of the question. He hung up.

  “Will he come?” Hoff asked finishing his drink.

  “He’ll come,” I said, leaning back and putting my feet up on the desk. I picked up his newspaper and began to read, trying to look as confident as I was not.

  It took fifteen minutes for Phil and Seidman to get to M.G.M. In that time I discovered through my reading that the Greeks had hurled back an Italian invasion, that the Japanese were charging that Americans were assembling arms at Manila, that the A amp;P was celebrating its 81st anniversary, that I could get a suit from Brooks on South Broadway for $25 and take three payments, and that a bottle of FF California port could be had for 37 cents.

  The call came to Hoff’s office from cowboy Buck McCarthy at the gate. Hoff told Buck to take the police to the Munchkin City set, and then he hurried to the door. I slowed him down and told him it would be a good idea to let the police get to the scene first. I folded the newspaper neatly, placed it on Hoff’s desk and got up. I was in no hurry to see Phil Pevsner. The only one who had ever successfully stood between us in battle was my dad, a Glendale grocer, who had died a long time ago. There were a couple of times even when he was alive that Phil almost lost control and went for me right over our father. Dad would have been flattened like a beer can in the Rose Bowl parade if Phil hadn’t gotten himself under control. It had been something I had said, but I couldn’t remember what it was.

  When Hoff and I got to the Oz set, we walked in slowly, like a camera dollying in to the center of a Busby Berkeley musical number. Three people stood looking down at the dead Munchkin, who had not moved nor been moved. Two of them, Seidman and my brother, wore badly rumpled suits. The third guy was a big, bald, uniformed cop I recognized as Rashkow. Rashkow was only in his twenties, but heredity and my brother had robbed him of most of his hair. Seidman turned to me and Hoff with a sour look I recognized. Seidman was thin and white-faced. He hated the sunlight. Phil just looked at the corpse with anger, as if the little man had purposely conspired to ruin his day. For Phil, Los Angeles was strewn with corposes whose sole job was to complicate his life and make it miserable. He hated corpses. He’d even kicked one in anger once, according to Seidman. He hated murderers even more. The only thing he hated more than corpses and murderers was me.

  Phil was a little taller than me, broader, older with close-cut steely hair and a hard cop’s gut. His tie always dangled loosely around his neck, and his face frequently turned red with contained rage, especially when I was present. M.G.M. had certainly picked the right guy to calm him down. By the time Hoff and I were within five feet, Phil’s lower lip was out, and his head was gently shaking up and down like a bull building up for a charge.

  Seidman pulled out a notebook. I nodded to him and to Rashkow, who was afraid to smile.

  “Toby,” Phil began plunging his hands into his pants pockets to keep them calm,” “I’m going to ask you questions, and you are going to answer without jokes. Then you are going to get your ass out of here. You understand?”

  I understood and said so. I was determined to keep from irritating him.

  “Who found the body?”

  “I did,” I said. Hoff twitched next to me.

  “Who’s he?” Phil asked, nodding at Hoff, “and what’s up his ass?”

  “His name is Hoff,” I said. “He’s an assistant vice president for publicity. I was supposed to meet him here about working as a bodyguard for a premiere when I stumbled on the body.”

  “I see,” said Phil, starting to walk in a small circle on the yellow brick road. “You were meeting on this set instead of in his office because it’s more comfortable and convenient here.”

  “He wanted to keep our meeting secret,” I said slowly, “because the star I was assigned to doesn’t like protection.”

  “That right, Hoff?” Phil said, moving no more than two inches from Hoff. Sweat popped out of Hoff’s pores.

  “That’s right,” Hoff said softly.

  “It’s bullshit!” Phil shouted in Hoff’s face. The shout had enough impact to send Hoff staggering back a few feet with numbed ear drums. “What’s going on here? Who killed the little turd?”

  “Phil, we don’t know,” I said with my hands coming open and palms up. “I just stumbled on the body.”

  “Who is he, the dead midget?”

  “They like to be called ‘little people,’ ” I corrected.

  “He doesn’t give a shit what we call him!” Phil shouted. “Who is he?”

  Everyone looked at Hoff.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “There were a few hundred little people on the picture. He might not even be one of them.”

  “Well,” sighed Phil, putting his hand on Hoff’s shoulder, “do you think you could get someone in here to identify him? And then can you round up anyone who has been in this building in the last twenty-four hours and will admit it?”

  Hoff said he could, and Phil told Rashkow to call for someone from the Coroner’s office. I thought of the Coroner from Munchkin City who had certified the death of the first Wicked Witch. He had stood right about where Phil was standing.

  “What was the dead midget doing in here?” Phil asked Hoff. “And why is he wearing that costume?”

  “We do
n’t know what he was doing in here and why he was wearing his costume,” answered Hoff. Phil looked at Hoff as if he were useless, and Hoff reached for a Spud. Seidman got Hoff’s office number and sent him on his way to get possible witnesses. Seidman and Rashkow began to look around the set, and Phil turned his back on me and walked over to the waterless Munchkin City fountain where he sat looking dyspeptically at the corpse and the set. He took a white tablet out of his pocket and popped it into his mouth. He chewed it furiously. Little pieces of it spat out when I approached him and sat down.

  “You’re a goddamn liar,” he said, chewing away.

  I shrugged.

  “Phil, can you think about keeping this quiet for a while?”

  He stopped chewing and looked at me blankly. I waited for the blank look to turn to rage and expected his thick hand to catch me before I could move away, but the look turned to a smile, and then a laugh. Both Seidman and Rashkow stopped to see what had happened. Phil almost choked with maniacal laughter. In the midst of his laughter, he grabbed my collar and stood up. Our noses were almost touching when he spoke.

  “Toby, I’ve messed you before and I’ll do it again. You’re covering and you’re trying to use me. You didn’t have to call me for this. Don’t use me, brother. I don’t like it, and don’t play me for a fool. Don’t mistake a bad temper for stupidity. You’ve done that a few times in the past and what did it get you?”

  “This nose,” I said. He liked the answer and let me go.

  “You covering for somebody?” he said, sitting again.

  “No,” I said, trying to unwrinkle my shirt. “But bad publicity on this thing could ruin the image of the picture, cause the studio trouble. No one’s asking you not to investigate, not to do everything. But you let this out and the newspapers will be driving you crazy, too. They’ll be on your back. You want that?”

  “You’re concerned about me,” he said. “I’m touched.”

  I hadn’t expected my argument to do any good. My next move was going to be to suggest he talk to Mayer. Maybe Mayer’s double-talk, power, and sincerity would get to Phil, though I doubted it.

  “I’ll think about it,” he said.

  I almost fell in the dry fountain in surprise. He looked away from me.

  “You know you’ve got two nephews, Toby,” he whispered angrily, “and one of them, Davey, the older boy…”

  “I know Davey’s your older boy,” I said. He gave me a look of contempt, and I suddenly had the image of Davey and Nate, his kids, pounding on each other the way Phil and I had.

  “Davey just got out of the hospital,” Phil went on. “It was close.”

  I knew that, too, and he knew I knew, but I kept my mouth shut. Phil’s wife, Ruth, had told me once that Phil was a good father. I wasn’t sure what that meant. He certainly wasn’t like my father.

  “In their room,” said Phil, “the kids have a poster from the movie. They saw it five times. I don’t want to be the one who tears down that poster.”

  “Thanks Phil. I…”

  He turned, boiling slowly.

  “I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” he explained. “I said I don’t want to, and you have nothing to thank me for. I never wanted your thanks or asked for it.”

  That was true. I shut up. It surprised me how closely Phil’s and Mayer’s philosophy were to each other. Phil said I could go after I gave a statement to Seidman, which I did. Seidman also gave me a statement. Phil owed a lot of money to the hospital. Ruth was blaming him for not being around enough. It was what cop’s wives did. It was their duty to complain. Eventually, it was their duty to stop complaining or walk out. My wife walked out. I didn’t think Ruth would, but you never know.

  Hoff wasn’t in his office when I got there, but I left a message with his secretary that it looked as if I could keep the lid on for a few days. I gave her my office number and listened to her worry about Hoff for a few minutes before I escaped.

  I eased my Buick into gear, coaxing the pistons with sweet thoughts, and made my way past the Japanese gardener and around an elephant being led by a girl with very little on besides a few spangles. At the gate I waved good-bye to Buck McCarthy, who had his thumbs in his pockets, cowboy style. It was my turn to drive off into the sunset, but it was only a little after noon.

  I stopped at a Mexican place for three tacos and a Pepsi and headed back to my office.

  3

  Within two hours I had met a dead Munchkin, consoled Judy Garland, argued with Louis B. Mayer, and got a job with M.G.M. It was the kind of news you ran home with to your wife, your mother and father, or your dog. I didn’t have any of them, but I did have Shelly Minck.

  Shelly and I shared space in the Farraday Building on Hoover near Ninth. The Farraday had the eternal smell of Lysol to cover up the essence of derelict in the cracked tile hall. Sometimes the neighborhood bums slept it off under the stairs until the landlord, a gentle gorilla of a man named Jeremy Butler, plucked them up and deposited them in back of the building. Butler had been a professional wrestler. Since he retired after investing in real estate, he had devoted himself to plucking bums from his lobbies and writing poetry. Some of Butler’s poems had actually been published in little magazines with names like Illiad Now and Big Bay Review.

  Butler was in the lobby plucking a bum when I arrived. He nodded to me and headed to the rear of the building. His footsteps echoed away, and I felt at home as I went up the stairs. There was an elevator, but a crippled spinster on relief could beat it to the fourth floor without even trying.

  I hiked up the stairway past three floors of offices belonging to disbarred lawyers, bookies, second-rate doctors, pornographic book publishers, and baby photographers. Far behind, I could hear Gorilla Butler dumping the bum and closing the fire door.

  Chipped letters on the pebbled glass door to my office read:

  SHELDON MINCK, D.D.S., S.D.

  DENTIST

  TOBY PETERS

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

  I opened the door and carefully avoided the pile of outdated magazines on the table in the alcove we called a waiting room. The waiting room had two chairs that had come with the place before Shelly moved in. One of the chairs had once been covered with leather. Someone had knocked over the room’s lone ash tray. The alcove wall was decorated with an ancient drawing from a dental supply company showing what various gum diseases look like.

  I pushed open the inner door and entered the office of Dr. Minck. Clients for me had to pass through his office where he was often working on a neighborhood bum or a raggedy kid. I had rented the office space from Shelly after I did a small job for him. We got along, and he let me pay what I could afford, almost nothing.

  Shelly had a stubbly-faced bum in the chair. The bum looked like a startled old bird. No, he looked like Walter Brennan imitating a startled bird.

  Shelly-short, fat, in his fifties, and desperately myopic-was humming and puffing on his ever present cigar while he tried to read the label of a small bottle over the rim of his thick glasses. When he heard me, Shelly turned and nodded a greeting with his cigar. He was, as always, wearing a once white smock which had stains of both blood and jelly on it. Shelly didn’t introduce me to his patient. Walter Brennan just popped his eyes open and darted them between me and his dentist. I couldn’t see a tooth in the guy’s head.

  “Any calls?” I said.

  “No calls, some mail,” replied Shelly, satisfied with the label on the bottle. He turned to his patient and patted his head reassuringly with the same hand in which he held his cigar.

  “Mr. Strange here and I are engaged in a mission of mercy,” Shelly said, plunging a hypodermic into the bottle in his hand. Reddish liquid burbled into the syringe. Shelly pointed to the old man’s mouth with the needle. “Mr. Strange has a toothache. We know exactly which tooth it is because Mr. Strange has only one tooth. That right, Mr. Strange?”

  Mr. Strange gave a birdlike nod of agreement. He was petrified with fear, but Shelly didn’t seem to n
otice.

  “We are going to save that tooth, aren’t we, Mr. Strange? We are going to perform something called a root canal. We are going to do it because one tooth is better than no teeth, and because I have not performed a root canal in some time, and I need the practice. Now open up, Mr. Strange.”

  Shelly shifted the cigar in his mouth and forced the old man’s mouth open with his strong, sweaty fingers. The hypo plunged in and the old man gurgled.

  “That’ll kill the pain,” whispered Shelly. “Now we’ll just let that go to work for a little while.”

  While we were waiting for the shot to work on Walter Brennan, I told Shelly about my morning at Metro. He listened while he groped around for an instrument he wanted. He found it underneath some coffee cups in a corner. Then he went to work on the old man. Above the sound of the drill he said, “I worked on a midget once. Little tiny teeth, but the roots on ’em. That little cocker had roots like steel. Two extractions on that midget were harder than a mouthful of root canals. Try to hold still, Mr. Strange. This will only take twenty or thirty minutes.”

  Having failed to impress what passed for my only friend, I went into my office. I’d save the story of encounters with the great and near great for my date next week with Carmen.

  My office had once been a dental room. It was just big enough for my battered desk and a couple of chairs. The walls were bare, except for a framed copy of my private investigator’s certificate, and a photograph of my father, my brother Phil, and our beagle dog Kaiser Wilhelm. The ten-year-old kid in the picture didn’t look like me. His nose was straight. He was smiling and holding onto the dog’s collar. The fourteen-year-old looked like Phil, with the dark scowl, the tension. The tall, heavy man in the picture had one hand on each kid’s shoulder.

  There wasn’t much mail on the desk. Someone in Leavenworth, Kansas wanted to send me a catalogue of tricks and novelties for a dollar. A client named Merle Levine who had lost her cat wanted me to return the ten dollar advance she had given me. The case was two years old. I hadn’t found the cat. I hadn’t really looked. Two brothers named Santini on Sepulveda wanted to paint my home or office for a ridiculously low price.