Buried Caesars

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “It will serve you well,” she agreed.

  “Good night,” I said.

  “Good night,” she said, and moved her nose inside the small black box of screws, tubes and wires.

  Since there was no lock on my door, or any of the doors in Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house, and since my .38 was probably in the pocket of Conrad or Wylie, I went into Gunther’s room next to mine. Gunther was in San Francisco and I was sure he wouldn’t mind as long as I kept the place clean. If Pintacki and his men came looking for me, I’d hear them and have time to go out Gunther’s window and down the fire ladder against the wall.

  I knew Gunther would have some delicacies in his small refrigerator, like gnu liver pâté and pickled quail eggs, but I stuck with what was in the brown bag I placed on a polished table. I vowed to keep away from Gunther’s desk and books, and protect whatever I touched. I gave the cat a bowl of milk, which was probably not good for him, and a can of tuna, which looked good to me.

  I ate my Wheaties and a Spam sandwich with Miracle Whip, and tried to figure out what my next move might be. It was simple. Pintacki had the MacArthur papers. Pintacki wanted me. I’d make it easy for him to find me and then I’d get him to give me MacArthur’s campaign papers. I’d leave the details for later. When I finished dinner, the cat made noises like he wanted to go out. I could have opened the window. I knew he could jump from Mrs. Plaut’s second floor, but I didn’t know how he could get back in. The hell with it. I opened the window. He went for it, bounded up to the sill, wagged his abbreviated tail, looked out into the night and leaped.

  I left the window open, propped one of Gunther’s chairs under the doorknob, took off my shoes and lay down on Gunther’s sofa—a cousin of the one in my furnished room, except the little doilies on the arms of his were clean and white. I needed a shave, a bath, clean teeth and a new outlook on life. None of them were on the way that night. I closed my eyes and let the automatic part of my brain worry about the return of the cat or Pintacki and his boys.

  I slept great. No dreams I can remember, though I had the feeling I had been dreaming when the sound of a door opening woke me. Gunther’s chair was firmly in place under the doorknob. The sound was coming from my room. I almost checked my watch but I stopped myself and looked around. Gunther had a desk clock. I rolled off the couch and squinted at it. It was a little after five. Mrs. Plaut wouldn’t be in my room for at least another two hours.

  I could hear movement in my room, and the sound but not the words of two male voices. I grabbed my shoes and my Windbreaker and went for the open window. As I put one bare foot over the sill and searched for the top rung of the fire ladder, I could hear someone trying Gunther’s door. When I’d gone down five or six rungs I could hear someone pushing at the door. When I hit the damp morning ground, I could hear, above me, Gunther’s door being forced open and the chair clattering into the room. I ran for the corner of the house and almost made it.

  “There he is,” I could hear Pintacki say from Gunther’s window. This was followed by a bullet cracking through the crisp morning. The bullet hit Mrs. Plaut’s cement path behind me.

  I got around the corner of the house and heard Pintacki’s voice: “Wylie, you have no goddam skill with that weapon whatsoever. Get out in front.”

  I ran. My back, stiff from sleeping on Gunther’s soft sofa, told me to slow down, but my back didn’t know what I knew. I kept running, my feet slapping against the asphalt. Birds were chirping and the air felt California moist, green and new. Nothing was on the street but a milk truck that rolled lazily to a stop in front of a house in the middle of the block.

  My Crosley was where I’d left it, but the two front tires were flat. Pintacki had covered my retreat. I glanced over at the door of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house in time to see Conrad and Wylie step out on the porch, each of them carrying a pistol.

  Pintacki’s DeSoto was double-parked in front of Mrs. Plaut’s, which gave me an idea. I couldn’t outrun them even if my back were perfect. I had no gun. I had no car. I was barefoot. Hiding on Heliotrope wasn’t likely. Conrad and Wylie started down the white wooden steps toward me and paused because, instead of running away from them, I was headed down the middle of the street toward Mrs. Plaut’s, knowing surprise was my only chance. Once they figured out what I was doing, and I knew from my limited experience with them that it would take some major mental effort on their part, they would cut me off and cut me down before I got the their car.

  But before they figured out what was happening, Mrs. Plaut, wearing a blue bathrobe, came running out of the house—clutching over her head in both hands the dying shell of the radio she had been working on the night before.

  “Mountebanks,” she shouted, bringing the radio down on Conrad’s head before he could fully turn and face her. Conrad’s knees buckled and he slipped down the steps to the sidewalk. Wylie turned to his partner’s aid and aimed his pistol at Mrs. Plaut’s head. I was only a few feet from the DeSoto but I stopped, barefoot and panting, wondering if I could get to Mrs. Plaut in time to help her without getting myself killed.

  Mrs. Plaut answered my question by bringing her trusty radio shell down on Wylie’s arm. A wild shot from Wylie’s pistol tore through the screen door into the house. A beat later, Pintacki staggered out, clutching his left shoulder and making a pained face like Our Gang’s Alfalfa.

  Doors were starting to open up and down Heliotrope. I clutched at the door of the DeSoto. It was open. Not only was it open, they had left the key in the ignition and the motor running for a quick getaway after my murder.

  I opened the car door, threw my shoes and Windbreaker onto the front seat, followed them, slammed the door, hit the lock and threw the car into first. The wounded trio headed toward me, Wylie holding his arm, Pintacki holding his shoulder and Conrad staggering in a daze. I gave them a wave and took off down the street. In the side-view mirror I saw Pintacki step into the street. I was hoping he’d be yelling, cursing, raging, but he just stood there bleeding and looking cold and calm as I hit the corner and turned. Mrs. Plaut was on her way down the front steps after the defeated trio.

  If there was another battle, I missed it.

  10

  The DeSoto had a damned good radio. I wondered how much Zanzibar Al would get for it as I turned the corner at Ninth and pulled into the alleyway behind the Farraday. I didn’t worry about where I was parking, just pulled over to the side and got out of the car, leaving the door open.

  Zanzibar Al emerged from the dark side of nowhere—behind a cardboard box that had once housed a refrigerator—and coughed his way over to me. He had his blue shirt on today and seemed to have found a new rope to hold up his pants.

  “Nice vehicle,” he said shakily.

  “It’s yours,” I said, throwing him the keys. He put out his bony hands to catch them but they had jangled onto the cracked concrete before he fully grasped that they were coming.

  “I’m not a driver,” he said, bending down to pick up the keys. “No license of any kind for anything. And nowhere to go.”

  “Why should you be different?” I said. “It’s yours anyway. Push it over in the shade and live in it.”

  Zanzibar Al looked at the keys, the car, and me. He said softly, “Too much responsibility. I don’t want responsibility. I gave it up twenty years back.”

  “Then sell the tires, the radio, the seats, whatever you find in the trunk,” I said, heading for the rear door of the Farraday. I went in without looking back.

  Jeremy hadn’t turned the night lights off. The place glowed like West Hollywood at night before the war. Since it was a good hour before Jeremy would begin his daily dousing of Lysol, the smell of stale yesterday jittered in the air.

  I took the stairs as fast as I could. I hadn’t been to the YMCA on High Street for a couple of weeks and it showed. By the time I hit the sixth floor I was winded and looking back over my shoulder. Even someone as dense as Pintacki and the boys would find me before lunchtime. All they would have to d
o is open the L.A. directory under Investigators, Private, and there I’d be between Parkinson and Pinkerton.

  I knew there was someone in the office as soon as I put my key in the outer door; the lock was open. There was no way the Pintacki crew could have gotten here that fast. They had wheels to find and wounds to bind. I should have at least an hour on them, maybe more.

  When I opened the inner door past the waiting alcove, I found Shelly stacking his dental magazines in a somewhat neat pile on his instrument case in the corner. He was singing “Sand in My Shoes,” and dum-dumming most of the words as he scuttled around, glasses at the tip of his nose, cigar in the corner of his mouth. He heard the door and turned around.

  “Good morning, Toby,” he said genially. “You look like hell.”

  “Shelly, it must be seven in the morning,” I said.

  “More like six-thirty,” he said happily. “How you like the clean-up campaign?”

  “Long way to go, but impressive. What’s going on?”

  “Sam, the patient who was in the chair the other day. You remember him?”

  “I remember him, Shel,” I said, angling toward my office door.

  “Listen,” Shelly said, taking the cigar out of his mouth and leaning toward me to whisper. “I forgive you for getting him drunk or whatever the hell you did. He’ll be back this morning and that’s all that really counts.”

  “Very generous of you, Shel,” I said.

  “I think he’s got money. I quoted him a price to perform magic in his mouth and he didn’t flinch,” said Shelly, examining a stained bag of cotton swabs and reluctantly dropping them in the garbage. “He’s coming back this morning.”

  “He called?” I asked Shelly, the foe of filth, whose eyes found the sink filled with rusting instruments, sludge-bottomed coffee cups, nightmares of strawberry Danish rolls.

  “No, but he has his second appointment this morning,” Shelly said. “I got a feeling things are going my way. And, you know what?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Mildred called,” he said with a grin, returning the cigar to his mouth and reaching for the back of his dental chair, where his stained, once-white smock lay. “I’ll call her back later. Give her time to think.”

  “Good strategy,” I said.

  “Probably wants me back,” he said, putting his head and pudgy arms through the smock. “I plan to think about it. Make her sweat in her own juice. Did I tell you about Louise-Marie?”

  “You mentioned something about hiring a dental assistant,” I said.

  “Louise-Marie Fursthomer,” he said, pausing to tap a drill bit against his palm and imagine Louise-Marie. “A very professional woman. She’ll be coming in later today for an interview. That ought to get Mildred thinking.”

  “Good plan, Shel. So you’re cleaning up for your new patient and a dental assistant. You have my blessing. Now, I’ve got work to do,” I said. “Three guys are looking for me, want to kill me. I stole their car and got one of them shot.”

  “That can wait,” Shelly said, his head popping out of the smock he was putting on. “I’m talking about something important here, Toby. I’m talking about saving a marriage, Mildred’s and mine. The world is in a terrible state of chaos. Here, look.”

  He grabbed a crumpled morning Los Angeles Times from his dental chair and held it up.

  “There’s going to be a national thirty-five-mile speed limit,” he said: “The Nazis look like they’re going to take Stalingrad. But am I crying? Am I down?”

  “Not yet,” I said, reaching over to take the newspaper. There was an article on the front page with a bulletin from General MacArthur’s headquarters in Australia, saying that the Japanese drive in New Guinea had been halted, but the General himself had been too busy to make himself available for comment.

  “Are you crying?” Shelly asked brightly. “Crying from the pathos of the world?”

  “Not yet,” I said, hanging the paper back to him.

  “Then what the hell,” he said, with a yellow-toothed grin ill-becoming a doctor of dental surgery. “I read the chapter you gave me, Mrs. Plaut’s book.” He hurried over to the file cabinet, fished around and came back with a thick envelope. “That woman can write. Got to give her credit. I always thought she was just a batty old fart.”

  “I’m sure she’ll be happy to hear that,” I said, taking the envelope.

  “I’ve made some comments, suggestions,” he said. “The business about her great-aunt’s marrying three Indians from different Sioux tribes is hot stuff.”

  I tucked the envelope under my arm.

  “Shel, those guys I told you about might be here any minute to kill me. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Okay, okay,” he said, throwing up his hands. “I try to cheer you up, share a little good news and hope, and all you can think about is your problems. I’ve got work to do here anyway.”

  I hurried into my office, closed the door. I didn’t have to turn on the light. The morning sun was bright and dancing off the building next door. I opened the envelope and placed Mrs. Plaut’s pages on the desk, threw open the window and heard the echoing voice of Zanzibar Al arguing with someone out of sight below me. I made a few phone calls and decided to pull out twenty bucks of MacArthur’s money I had hidden in a copy of The Collected Tales of Ambrose Bierce in my bottom drawer.

  The twenty was there, but Major Oren Castle wasn’t at the number he had given me. Someone answered and said they’d give him the message as soon as they could find him. The message was simple—help. I was willing to sit in my office and draw the bears but I needed someone standing behind them when they stepped into it. Castle, I knew from firsthand experience, was handy with a gun.

  In the other room, Shelly turned on the radio and listened to “The Romance of Helen Trent.” Helen was leaving desperate phone messages for someone named Hanson. I had my own problems. I made another call, a just-in-case call, to a twenty-four-hour-a-day number I had written along with half a dozen others on the center drawer of my desk—just under my inadvertent collection of lint, paper clips and shoelaces.

  “Is Wolfy there?” I asked.

  “Talk,” barked Wolfy.

  “It’s Toby Peters. I need a weapon.”

  “Handgun?”

  “Right.”

  “Legal?”

  “Right.”

  “When?”

  “Now.”

  “Twenty-five for a nice little Luger, very German,” said Wolfy.

  “Twenty,” I countered.

  “Join the German army. They’ll give you one free and lots of live targets.”

  “Twenty is all I’ve got with me,” I said.

  “People think I’m Santy Claus.”

  “You’re a saint. Saint Wolfy the first,” I said.

  “I got no religion, Peters. Where are you?”

  “My office in the Farraday.”

  “My man will have it there, loaded, in ten minutes. You give him the twenty and he hands it to you.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Hey, it’s business,” replied Wolfy and hung up.

  I could have used a bowl of Wheaties or a Danish and coffee. I couldn’t go for them so I settled on a shave. I kept an extra Gillette razor in the drawer, along with a packet of Blue Blades. I fished it out, had a fleeting thought of the cat, and went back into Shelly’s office. He was plugging away at the sink, filling the garbage can rather than cleaning the cups and instruments. The garbage can was overflowing on the floor—bloody cotton, coffee grounds, a broken rusty probe.

  “I’ll get new stuff,” he said, holding up a white bowl which neither of us recognized despite its flower pattern and the residue of brown something at the bottom. Shelly tossed it on top of the garbage pile, where it teetered and then came to rest.

  I grunted and reached over his shoulder for our bar of soap, which was down to a nub the size of my thumb.

  Behind us Helen Trent reached Hanson and gushed that she was so relieved to find h
im. I turned on the hot water and shaved without a mirror, marveling at the unfamiliar sight of the bottom of the sink which winked at me from between the last dozen or so items congealed there.

  “He’s late,” Shelly said, looking at his watch as he picked up the paper and sat in the dental chair, keeping an eye on the door. “Hell, so he’s late. He’ll be here, right?”

  “Any good news in the paper?” I asked, continuing to shave, nicking my cheek on a rough patch where the cat had scratched me on our first meeting.

  “British have a new drive on Madagascar,” he muttered. “I don’t even know what Madagascar is.”

  I left Shelly to his radio soaps and went back into my office, figuring about five minutes had passed. Should be plenty of time, I thought. I thought it, but I was wrong for the first time in my life. Well, maybe not the first time.

  My first thought when I heard Shelly’s outer door open was that Hammett had ignored my advice and prepared to lay himself once again on the altar of the Hatchet Man of Hoover Street, but it wasn’t Hammett. I heard a familiar man’s voice through the door. I sat back in my chair, put my feet up on the desk and my hands behind my head, and put on a smile that claimed to know something very special and secret. And then the door flew open.

  Conrad and Wylie stepped into the already crowded office. Now that I was close to it, I could see that the gun in Wylie’s left hand was my .38. I didn’t know who owned the gun in Conrad’s hand. Wylie’s right arm was in a sling. Conrad’s head bore a bandage, a neat cross of a bandage that appeared to be covering a wound in his head. Mrs. Plaut had done her duty but it hadn’t slowed down these troops. Between Conrad and Wylie stood Shelly, Conrad’s thick fingers around his neck holding him out like a ventriloquist’s dummy; only this dummy was turning red in the face and about to lose his glasses.

  “Cops are outside,” I said.

  “Like so much shit,” spat Wylie.

  “Shit,” echoed Conrad.

  “How about an old lady with a radio,” I tried. “She’s on the way up.”