He let go of my shoulder and moved to the wooden chair at the ancient-looking desk and motioned toward an embroidered, rickety-legged armchair. I looked at the door behind me. Tools was leaning against it.
"I'm not gonna ask you why anyone would want to kill me," Gouda said, running an open palm over the surface of the desk. "Truth is, I confess, there are guys who are not well inclined toward me. Women too. A couple or so. Business rivals, DeGeorgio, Baumholtz, and such like. I've got various holdings and interests, right, Tools?"
"A wide variety of interests," Tools agreed.
"Diversification," Gouda said, watching me. "Sit down."
I sat.
"Now," Gouda said. "I'm saying what I'm gonna say because (a) it's true, and (b) I want you impressed. I used to be engaged in contract work for legitimate businesses, corporations, even a union here and there in Detroit, Cleveland, Akron. When they needed people to be reasonable, I used to talk to them, me and Tools and some part-time help. I would talk and they would be reasonable. But I'm more interested in art now, Gothic art. I mention that I have a passion for beauty?"
"Something like that," I said.
"I say it, Tools?"
"Absolutely," Tools agreed.!
"And do I have a certain sensitivity for character?"
"Absolutely," Tools agreed. "Very sensitive."
"Could you and me have made it so long through life if I couldn't read through a man or woman who came to me and said the moon is made of shit painted white?"
"Never," said Tools emphatically.
"You," said Gouda, pointing at me, "are telling me shit is white."
"Someone plans to kill you or a woman named Gilmore," I said.
"You said." Gouda sighed. "Who the hell are you?"
"Toby Peters," I said, moving my head to be sure Tools was still leaning against the door.
"You a crackpot?" asked Gouda.
"No," I said.
"You a crackpot?" Tools repeated.
"I'm a private investigator," I said.
"You know anybody named Markowitz, Gamble, With-erspoon," Gouda said, picking up a small porcelain doll.
"Lerner, Romano, Hansen, Arango," Tools went on.
"Any of them send you here with this load of crap?" asked Gouda. "Not that I expect an easy answer."
"Karl," I said with my best smile.
"Mr. Gouda," Tools corrected.
"Mr. Gouda," I amended. "I'm just…"
"And some have said I am unjust," he chimed hi with a satisfied smile aimed at me and Tools. I couldn't see Tools's reaction. If it wasn't an old favorite of Gouda's, I was sure it went a few miles over Tools.
"Fine," I said, standing up. "I come here maybe to save your life and you play Little Caesar. You're on your own."
Tools was still leaning against the door. I took a step toward him.
"I don't like a guy coming here and telling me someone wants me dead," Gouda said. "It offends me. It makes me think something is going on."
I kept moving toward the door.
"Question, Peters," Gouda said behind me. "How do you think Mr. Nathanson got his nickname?"
I didn't answer.
"Answer," said Gouda and Tools opened his baggy jacket to reveal a holster.
I stopped.
The holster had four pockets. I could see a claw hammer hi one pocket and something metal in the other three. Tools was well armed for minor house repairs but I didn't think he could stop me unless he came up with something that fired bulle'ts. He was older than me, a roly-poly barrel.
"Out of the way, Mr. Nathanson," I said.
"Tools sparred with Joe Louis," said Gouda. "When Louis was tuning up for Tony Galento. Tools was a better fighter than Galento. Nothing hurts Tools. That right, Tools?"
"Nothing hurts Tools," Tools agreed, removing an oversized pair of pliers from his holster. "But…"
He didn't have to finish.
"No one sent me," I said, turning back to Gouda.
"I'll believe it when Tools has chatted with you a while," he said. "I didn't get to be the most sensitive dealer in Tiffany lamps this side of St. Louis by being incautious."
A buzz. From under Gouda's desk.
"I get it?" asked Tools.
"I get it," said Gouda, rising from the desk and adjusting his tie. "You have a little talk with Mr. Peters and see if maybe he remembers Lerner, DeGeorgio, or Arango."
Gouda moved past me toward the door.
"Where you going?" I asked.
"Customer," he said.
Tools moved away from the door toward me.
"Don't go," I said. "It might be…"
Gouda waved his hand at me and went through the door, closing it behind him.
"Tools," I said. "Your boss…"
"Karl's not my boss," Tools said, clicking the pliers together like castanets. "We're partners. He's got a passion for lamps with scary stuff, and I got a passion for tools and confession. I was a Catholic when I was a kid."
I backed away toward the desk, looking for a tool of my own.
"What are you now?"
"Bored," he said. "I was happier back east."
There was no way out but through Tools Nathanson. He could see me thinking. Tools shook his head no. I didn't have a choice even if I did have a rotating ball in my stomach that told me the man in front of me was too confident to be bluffing.
I was saved by the gun.
Karl Albert Gouda wasn't.
The shots were close together. Two of them. Tools blinked and turned. He had the door open and was running into the shop before I had taken my first step after him. The fat little son of a gun could move like a welterweight.
By the time I got to the front of the store where Tools was leaning over Karl Gouda near the open front door, I knew I had another victim for the list. I jumped over Gouda and went out the door. A car was going by. Cars were at the curb. A few people were walking across the street. No one was running. I went back inside. Tools was touching Gouda's cheek.
"Karl?" Tools whispered. "You okay? You dead?"
Tools looked up at me. I looked down at Gouda. His chest was covered in blood.
"He's dead," I said. "I warned him. I warned you."
"Like so much shit I'm dead," Gouda said, opening his eyes. His voice was hollow and weak, but he wasn't dead.
Tools was smiling and crying. Gouda tried to sit up.
"Goddamn kid," Gouda said with a cough as Tools, holster clanging, helped him to a sitting position. "Walked in, took two shots. One, two."
And then panic came into his face. He looked around the shop frantically.
"Take it easy, Karl," Tools soothed.
"The lamps," Gouda said. "He get my lamps. I'll rip his heart out."
"I don't think he got any lamps," I said.
"Thank God," said Gouda with a grimace of pain as Tools helped him take off his bloody suspenders, tie, and shirt.
A metal plate gleamed against the fallen man's chest. Tools removed it carefully and Gouda bit his lower lip to keep from screaming.
"Two holes," said Tools. "One made it all the way through. Other looks like it just broke the skin, maybe a rib. What you think, Karl?"
"A rib, definitely a rib," Gouda agreed. Then he looked up at me. 'Tools made this. I told you. Some people don't appreciate the work we did in Detroit"
"… and Kansas City," said Tools. "You want I should get the bullet out, Karl? It's sticking out."
Gouda nodded, looking up at me.
Tools pulled his pliers from his holster and went for the bullet sticking out of Gouda's chest.
"He'll give you blood poisoning," I said.
"My tools are sterile," Tools said, turning on me angrily.
"Sorry," I said.
Tools moved quickly, clamped down on the protruding bullet, looked at Gouda who nodded, and then pulled. Gouda gasped and the bullet flew into the air, crashing into the green-glass lamp with the hanging tree. Gouda closed his eyes and Tools's mouth opened
in horror.
I moved to the lamp.
"A little crack," I said.
"I'll find him," said Gouda softly. "I'll find the little shit and…"
"What did he look like?" I asked, moving to help Tools get his partner to his feet.
"Like a dead shit," Gouda said. "Why'd you say he was tryin' to kill me?"
"Something to do with Gone With the Wind," I said, helping Gouda to a chair near the wall.
Someone came through the door. I turned my head, ready for bullets.
"You have table lamps?" a well-dressed woman said, looking at us curiously.
"I have a bullet in my chest," said Gouda.
The woman looked at me and then at Tools. I don't think she liked what she saw. She turned and left.
"I'll get something to fix you up, Karl," said Tools, touching his partner's shoulder.
"Yeah," said Gouda.
Tools clanked back toward the O'Hara office and I asked again, "What did he look like?"
"A man with no goddamn sensitivity," he said through gritting teeth. "Maybe thirty, not heavy. Losing his hair in front. Dark eyes. Jacket, wearing a jacket with something written on the pocket. I won't forget him."
"Can you take a suggestion?" I asked.
He looked up at me without answering.
"Stay dead for a while. Go on vacation. I'll find the guy. You come back."
"We don't work mat way, Peters," he said. "Word gets out Karl Gouda runs and I might as well put a 'shoot me' ad in the LA. Times."
Tools was clanking back like a belled cat. He was carrying a cardboard box. I walked over to the door and closed it. Tools opened the box, pulled out bandages and bottles, removed shears from his belt, and started ministering to his fallen partner.
"I'm going," I said.
"Go," said Gouda, holding up his arms so Tools could wrap the bandage around him. "But we know your name. We can find you."
"We can find you," Tools agreed.
I was about to answer when the plate-glass window shattered a few feet from my head. Lamps and shades exploded as bullets tore through the shop. I hit the floor and cut my chin on broken green glass. Gouda groaned. I lifted my head and saw Tools trying to protect his partner with his own body, but it was too late. There was a hole in Gouda's face.
"He looks more like Swiss than Gouda," came a voice from the sidewalk.
I rolled over, and through the smashed window my eyes met those of the man on the sidewalk. I had seen him about an hour earlier, sitting hi Shelly Minck's dental chair. He aimed his pistol at me and was about to pull the trigger when an animal yowled across the street and Tools, clanking and crushing glass underfoot, charged past me.
I got to my feet, cutting my palms on broken glass, as the young man hi the jacket took off down the street and Tools Nathanson took off after him. The man with the gun was at least twenty years younger and wasn't carrying fifteen or twenty pounds of tools.
When I got to the sidewalk, people were starting to move cautiously toward the shop. Not many of them yet. I looked down the street and saw Tools collapsed on his knees about a block away. The killer was nowhere in sight.
I looked back at Gouda. This time he was definitely dead.
Chapter 7
Traffic bustled on Wilshire beyond the open window of Captain Philip Pevsner's office. I sat in the chair opposite Phil's desk and watched him sharpen a pair of pencils, lay out a pad of paper, and rearrange the photographs of his wife, Ruth, my two nephews, Nate and Dave, and my niece, Lucy.
There are some who say my brother and I look alike. And there are others who have better vision or tell the truth. Phil is five years older than I am, a bear with short white hair, hair that had been white since Phil returned from the Great War twenty-five years earlier. We're the same height but bis eyes are pale gray and mine are dark brown. He looked like a filled-out version of our father, who had died a few years after Phil came back from France. I looked like the photographs of our mother, who had died when I was bom, a fact that Jeremy Butler thought accounted for the lifetime of love-hate, war-peace between us. Phil's tie was open. His eyes were blank and his lips pursed.
"Ruth is doing fine," he said, rolling one of his nice sharp pencils between his palms and looking at me.
I nodded. My sister-in-law, all ninety pounds of her, had come close to dying about a month earlier. The prospect of being alone with three kids all under the age of thirteen must have scared even Phil, and the prospect of being without Ruth, who seemed to understand him, was probably more than he could have handled.
Phil had lived the life of a cop on the verge of a breakdown for two decades. Phil hated criminals, personally. He had been promoted twice, demoted twice; each time, up or down, because he had lost his temper and a suspect had lost teeth or bones. I knew that temper. It was responsible for my flat nose and my looking like a retired and slightly overweight middleweight.
"Kids?" I asked.
"Boys are fine. Lucy's learning to swim."
"Great," I said. "Where's Steve?"
Steve was the thin ghost of a partner my brother haunted the streets of Los Angeles with.
"Vacation," Phil said.
"Where?"
"Seattle, with his sister and mother."
"Great," I said.
"What happened to you?" he asked.
"Happened?"
Phil pointed at my head and hands. There was a Band-aid on my forehead and another on my left palm. The one on my palm wouldn't stick,
"Cut myself on some broken window glass," I said.
Phil nodded, sat back, looked at the sharp point of the pencil in his hand, and took a deep breath.
"We through with crap and Shinola?" he asked.
I shrugged.
"I'm going to say this calmly, Tobias," he said. "I'm going to say this calmly for three reasons. You want to hear my three reasons?"
"Very much," I said, giving him my full attention.
"First, my blood pressure is up. Like dad's. Remember how he used to get so excited when he argued with Hal Graham? They could argue about whether cranberries were fruits or vegetables. Dad's veins used to pop out on his forehead. His cheeks went red. Sound like someone you know?"
It sounded like Phil Pevsner.
"It killed Dad," said Phil. "It would be a bad joke by the devil if I fell down dead when Ruth was recovering. You know how old Dad was when he died?"
"About…" I started, but Phil overlapped me.
"Just the age I am now."
I wasn't sure, but I nodded knowingly.
"Second, I lose perspective when I get excited. I get more interested hi smashing than listening. And, I'll admit, sometimes I miss important things."
I was attentive.
Third, I owe you. When Ruth was in the hospital and you got Bette Davis to see her, Ruth started to get better, to fight her way back. So, you've got my reasons. Now, answer some questions."
"Right," I said.
"Lane Price says you claimed Sheldon Minck hired you to collect an overdue bill from a guy who was murdered in Glendale last night. Lane, as we both know, is a lazy slob, a politician, but he's not deaf. He wants you."
"He was ready to rehire me and make me his right hand yesterday," I said.
"That was before you lied about Minck," said Phil. "Talk. Keep me calm, Tobias. I've got things on my mind. My wife, my family, my job. And I've been wondering where the hell President Roosevelt is. Hasn't been a word hi the papers or on the news about him in a week."
"I don't know, Phil," I said.
"But there are some questions you can answer. This is the easiest question I'm going to ask you. The-next few are really tough. See if you can answer the question without my asking it."
A hom squawked on Wilshire. Somebody laughed. A car went by playing a song I couldn't quite make out.
"I was protecting my client. He thought Ramone was hi danger. A guy named Charles Larkin was killed last week. My client thought the killer might go after Ramon
e."
"Why?" asked Phil, reasonably.
"They were both extras hi Gone With the Wind," I explained. "So was Gouda."
"The one in the lamp store," Phil said. "An extra?"
"The one in the lamp store. An extra. And there's another one, Lionel Varney, another extra. I gave you his name when I called and…"
"Someone plans to kill every extra in Gone With the Wind?" Phil asked.
"Not every extra," I said. "Just the ones who were around the campfire when a fellow thespian got killed."
"That's good. By the time he got done with every extra, the body count would be bigger than Bataan. And this Karen Gilmore you sent me running out to check on. She was in Gone With the Wind too?"
"Right," I said.
"But why did you pick her?"
"Initials," I explained. "K.G. The killer said he was going to get K.G. next."
The killer?"
"Spelling," I said. "The killer is spelling."
And then it hit me. It didn't hit Phil. The killer was Spelling.
"What?" Phil asked.
"What?" I said.
"You just had an idea," said Phil, putting down the pencil.
"No," I said. "Just remembered something I forgot to do. Did you find Varney?"
"There's a Lionel Varney registered at the Carolina Hotel on Sunset. An actor. Been in town for a few days. How would you describe my attitude, Tobias? Right now. Calm?"
"Remarkably calm," I agreed.
There was a knock at the door behind me. The door opened.
"Captain," came a voice.
Something sailed past my head and crashed into the door as it closed.
"I told you to leave me alone till I came out," Phil shouted. Then he turned to me.
"Phil," I said calmly.
"I'm fine," he said, pointing a pencil at me. "Stopped drinking coffee. I'm eating cucumber-and-tomato sandwiches for lunch. Who's your client?"
"Phil, how many times do we have to go over this? I can't tell you my client's name without his or her permission."
"Where does it say that in any law book, any city, county, or state statute?" Phil said, placing his hands fiat on his desk.
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