Think Fast, Mr. Peters

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I looked at Seidman, who had closed his notebook and was giving me a wet-eyed warning look.

  “Great,” I said and got up. “When do I get my gun back?”

  “Probably never. How’s your neck?” Phil asked without looking up.

  “I won’t be playing mixed doubles for a few days,” I said and got out of there in five steps and a slammed door.

  I was halfway down the worn wooden steps just past the squad room that always smelled like pastrami and things I didn’t like thinking about when Seidman caught up with me.

  “He’d have been better off retiring,” he said. “Blood pressure.”

  “Phil’d drop dead if he didn’t have heads to smash,” I said. “Don’t you know the only thing between us and the jungle is Phil Pevsner?”

  We moved over to let a uniformed cop drag a handcuffed, crying young man up the steps. The crying man needed two shaves and looked like a ragged nightmare.

  “I’ve got a friend in the chief of police’s office,” Seidman said.

  “Congratulations. I know a mechanic who can fix the automatic transmission on an Oldsmobile.”

  “Friend told a funny story a while ago,” Seidman said, looking at me like a Jesuit urging confession. “I called him a while ago after Phil got his call from the chief. My friend said something about presidential phone calls. People with long names.”

  “Say Steve, I’d like to hear all this but I’ve got a neighborhood full of rubber shirkers to shake down,” I said, resisting the urge to pat his arm.

  Someone shrieked in the squad room. Neither of us seemed to notice. I would have bet it was the raggedy guy in handcuffs, but I hadn’t seen the rest of the afternoon herd. I got out of there fast.

  It was late, and I was hungry again. I drove back downtown and found a space on Hoover not far from the Farraday. Before going up to the office I stopped at Manny’s Tacos on the corner. The dinner rush, all six of them, had departed. It was just me, Manny, and a woman with bleached hair, too much makeup and a too-ready laugh.

  “What’s the big fuss about Johnny Barrymore?” she asked as I sat at the counter and ordered two tacos and a Pepsi.

  No one answered her so she asked again,

  “The fuss, the big fuss. What is it anyway?”

  “I don’t know,” Manny said, and I was sure he didn’t.

  “He’s dead,” I said. “Barrymore.”

  The woman laughed, a deep, rolling, false laugh. “A joker. God. Johnny was a joker too. He joked in bed too.”

  Manny shoved a plate with two tacos and refried beans in front of me. He plunked a bottle of Pepsi next to it.

  “You want to know something about Johnny Barrymore?” the blond said, moving toward me.

  I resisted the urge to lift my arm to protect my tacos. I didn’t want to know anything more about John Barrymore. I wanted my .38 back. I wanted enough money to buy a new suit and stock my refrigerator and shelf. I wanted to eat my tacos in peace. I went for taco number one and took a bite so I wouldn’t be expected to answer the blond’s question. Manny had gone back to the end of the counter to lean against the wall with his arms folded while he smoked a Camel. He didn’t want to know either, but it didn’t stop the blond, who got closer and looked older.

  She leaned forward to whisper to me, “Afraid he was going to get buried alive. That’s a fact. Built it right into his will that they had to check it. Creepy, huh? Told me that right in bed one night, in the dark, when he was feeling vulnerable.”

  “That was in the paper,” Manny said, apparently not afraid of offending a customer.

  “I never,” she replied haughtily, “never told the paper about me and Johnny. Never.”

  I ate my taco and planned my tactic for getting a few bucks extra out of Shelly. The taco was fine, just greasy enough to remind me of trips to Mexico. And Pepsi never lets me down.

  “He means about Barrymore being afraid of getting buried alive,” I said between bites.

  She walloped me soundly on the back and laughed while I choked.

  “I don’t read the papers,” she said, glaring at Manny. “Right, my friend?”

  “Lady doesn’t read the papers, Manny,” I said, getting my breath back.

  “Forgive me for doubting you,” said Manny sourly.

  “Ha,” said the blond, returning to her stool to brood.

  I wolfed down my refried beans and washed down taco number two with a bravura finish of Pepsi. Then I dropped sixty cents on the counter and left with a wave to Manny who deigned to do something that might have been nodding his head.

  The Farraday lobby was empty, cool, familiar. It wasn’t dark outside yet but the low sun was casting hard reds on the tile. I liked the way my footsteps echoed as I made for the stairs. I liked the feel of the black iron railing in my hand as I made my way up the stairs, ignoring the elevator.

  There were still a few sounds in the Farraday, a machine rumbling, voices behind a door whispering, but there was nothing behind the door to the office of Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., and Toby Peters, Investigations. I used my key, though a hairpin would have done just as well. I groped for the light switch, hit it, and went for the door of the reception nook beyond which was Shelly’s office, beyond which was my closet.

  The bulb in the reception nook was a twenty-five-watter. Its light barely made it through the glass door with enough energy or interest to get me to the light switch inside. Shelly had pulled down the shades, probably to protect a burglar from the shock of seeing sanitary conditions the Red Cross wouldn’t have tolerated in a prisoner of war camp.

  “Don’t turn on the light,” a voice said after I’d walked across the room and reached up to the switch.

  “I’ve seen it before, Shel. I can take it.”

  I turned to look in the room toward where Shelly’s voice had come from. He was seated in the dental chair. Actually, he spent more time in the chair than all of his patients combined. It was his white swivel throne complete with a constant supply of running water.

  “You joke. At a time like this, you joke,” he said and I was sure he was shaking his head.

  “I found Mildred,” I said.

  “I know. You think I don’t know that? She came home.”

  “You owe me twenty bucks, closing fee,” I said, flicking on the lights. “And you clean this place.”

  He was sitting in the chair wearing his wrinkled and stained smock. His eyes blinked; he looked like a startled, overfed mouse. His glasses were on his forehead, his dead cigar in his mouth. He reached up and flipped down the glasses and continued to blink in my general direction.

  “She says it’s all my fault, Toby. All my fault. She threw me out. Came home and threw me out.”

  He was pointing at himself through all this to be sure I knew who she was taking about.

  “She ran away with a Peter Lorre imitator and it’s your fault?”

  I considered a cup of coffee to help suppress the tacos and refried beans that didn’t want to be forgotten, but one look at the coallike demiliquid substance in the coffee pot made me give up Chase and Sanborn for the millennium.

  “She says, Mildred says, I drove her to it. She says if I had been more attentive, she wouldn’t have had to turn toward more glamorous men. She says if I hadn’t sent you after her, Peter Lorre would be alive now.”

  “Shel, she didn’t run away with Peter Lorre. Peter Lorre isn’t dead. It was some fake.”

  Shelly blinked at me, removed the cigar, and put it back.

  “She said …” he began.

  “Mildred is distraught,” I said.

  “She says I had you go kill him,” said Shelly, “but if it wasn’t Peter Lorre …”

  I couldn’t see what difference it made in the long run who Mildred had run off with but I didn’t want to explore it with Dr. Minck.

  “Be that as it may,” I began in my professional tone, “you owe me …”

  “That’s why he called. He wasn’t dead,” Shelly mused, bouncing his hairy, p
udgy fingers together.

  “Who wasn’t dead, Sheldon?”

  “Peter Lorre. Only I thought it wasn’t Peter Lorre. You can understand. First he runs away with Mildred. Only you say he didn’t. Then you shoot him. Which you say you didn’t. Then he calls here and says he wants to talk to you.”

  “Which I will do,” I said.

  “He left a number somewhere,” Shelly said with a pained wave of his arm.

  “Where, Shel?”

  “Who knows at a time like this, Toby. My world …” And he looked around at his world: The sink full of dishes and instruments sharing a shallow pool of water tinctured by coffee grounds, blood, and things too fierce to mention; a rusting green-enameled dental X-ray machine with a cone that looked like something Ming the Merciless had ordered for the express purpose of sadistically torturing Dale Arden; a glass-fronted cabinet of instruments crammed on top of each other and looking as if they yearned for freedom; a tall wooden cabinet filled with ancient dental books and browning dental magazines. Shelly’s world was wondrous to behold.

  “Shel, if Lorre hires me, you’re off the hook for the twenty bucks.”

  “The number’s Long Beach three four one two,” he said without hesitation.

  “Thanks,” I said and went into my office. The shade on the only window in the room was up and there was enough sun to suit my need for light. Before I could get to the phone, I heard Shelly’s radio playing through my closed door. Some band was playing “Poor Butterfly” and Shelly began singing along balefully.

  I gave the operator the Long Beach number, sat through three rings, and got the same woman with an accent I had talked to earlier.

  “Mr. Lorre, please. Tell him it’s Toby Peters returning his call.”

  “Ah, yes,” she said and put the phone down.

  Somehow Shelly had gotten confused and was trying to sing the words to “Sleepytime Gal” to the tune of “Poor Butterfly.”

  “You’ll learn to cook and to sew,” he crooned. “What’s more you’ll love it I know …”

  “Shelly, shut up,” I shouted.

  The hurt silence came immediately but the radio played on as Peter Lorre answered the phone.

  “Mr. Peters?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “I seem to be in need of your services.”

  “What seems to be the problem?” I asked, considering a reasonable fee now that I knew he had a hefty Warner contract.

  “This afternoon I mentioned that I might need your assistance. That was in reference to a threatening phone call. I get far fewer of those than you might think. In fact, this is the first since I left Europe. It might have been amusing if it were not for the fact he called again tonight and said that I was already dead twice and would soon be killed again. I’m dealing with a madman or a very humorless practical joker.”

  I asked the obvious. You have to ask the obvious or later you’ll have to make up some lame excuse for why you didn’t come up with something the average Cub Scout would ask.

  “The police are …” I started.

  “The police are an ass,” he concluded. “I have informed them of this most distressing phone call and they have indicated the Los Angeles Police Department is unable to protect all the Peter Lorres in the city. I informed him that, to the best of my knowledge, I am the only Peter Lorre.”

  “And you want me to …?”

  “Serve as a … I don’t know, a kind of bodyguard perhaps for a given period.”

  Someone behind him said something and Lorre excused himself politely, covered the mouthpiece, and then returned to me to say, “My wife indicates that I should pay whatever is essential.”

  “Twenty-five a day plus expenses,” I said.

  “That seems reasonable,” he said.

  “But I could be watching your back and front for weeks with you paying twenty-five a day. I don’t object to earning twenty-five a day but there might be a better way.”

  “I’m all for improving our options,” Lorre said.

  “I put one of my men on you, watch you out of sight, and we find a safe place for you to stay for a few days while I go after whoever called you. If I find him, stop him, in, say, a seven-day week, I get a one-hundred-buck bonus.”

  “That sounds most reasonable,” said Lorre just as Shelly began to sing “Whispering” a cappella.

  “Good,” I said with a smile that most people took for pain. “You try to think of some place you can go for a few days. I’ll come over there first thing in the morning and we’ll talk about it. Just give me your address.” He gave it and I went on, “I’ll have one of my best men at your door before dawn. You won’t see him but he’ll be there. Man with plenty of experience, a good eye.”

  Lorre said it would be fine but asked if we could meet in my office instead of at his home. He didn’t want to disturb his wife. I countered with breakfast at Stan’s on Sunset. He said he preferred Levy’s. I suggested that it might be a good idea not to go to places he usually went to. He thought that might be a good idea. We said good-bye and I quickly added up my possible earnings. Two hundred and seventy-five bucks for a week’s work, with one catch. I had to find a lunatic killer.

  I had a few things going for me. Real crazies are not that hard to spot, especially around Hollywood, and they usually can’t keep their mouths shut. If someone was going around hating Peter Lorre, he probably wasn’t keeping it to himself. Probably. Unless he was keeping it to himself. On the other hand, I was on the roof when Sidney got shot with my gun and there were a limited number of suspects unless Phil was right and Kindem had only been one name on a checklist and the killer had shot him and run. But I had trouble buying that story, partly because of my gun and partly because I had a feeling that the dying man’s Steinholtz was one of the people on that roof. I had to match Peter Lorre with someone on the roof.

  Shelly was silent again as I pulled out my notebook and made a list of the suspects. The Steistel brothers, Eric the blind director and Gregor the dyspeptic cameraman; Bobby Parotti, the kid assistant; Michael Lebowitz, Mildred’s brother; Mildred herself; Paul Eskian, the stammering hardware store owner; and Elisa Potter or Morales. There wasn’t a good suspect in the bunch. Eric was probably eliminated, though I had seen stranger things than blind murderers. Back in ’34, when I was still a cop, a guy had trained his monkey to shoot a gun. Worked with him every day for four months. Idea was the monkey would shoot the guy’s wife and get away with it. The first time the guy gave the monkey a loaded gun, the very first time, the chimp or whatever it was shot the guy in the head. At least that’s the way the wife told it. I always thought she was the one who trained the chimp and nothing had gone wrong at all.

  OK. I had work to do. I went over the possibilities of people I could send to keep an eye on Lorre. Jack Ellis, the house detective at the Alhambra, used to back me up and give me an occasional fill-in night on weekends when the fleet was in, but Jack hadn’t been the same since a pair of kid sailors had thrown him down the Alhambra elevator shaft. Jack wasn’t all that enthusiastic about outside jobs any more. Paddy Whannel, a security guard at NBC, was getting a little gray for the work, but he was good, at least when he was sober, which wasn’t often. Shelly was useless. Jeremy Butler might do it, but a bald 300-pound poet tends to be a bit conspicuous.

  I picked up the phone and called Mrs. Plaut’s. She didn’t answer, proving that one’s worst fears are not always realized. Mr. Hill the postman picked up the phone and I asked if Gunther were there.

  “I’ll check,” he said and a few moments later Gunther’s voice, precise, high, more than slightly accented, came on.

  “That is you, Toby?”

  “It’s me, Gunther. I need a favor.”

  “Yes?”

  “I need someone to keep an eye on my client, Peter Lorre. Someone may be trying to kill him. I want to be sure no one is tailing him when he comes to meet me for breakfast. If you could just watch him till tomorrow morning at about …”

  “Where
does he reside?” Gunther asked.

  “I don’t want to pull you away from your work,” I said, even though that was pretty much what I wanted to do.

  “A respite at this point would be most welcome. The project I am working on is a book on Soviet agriculture. My Russian is not as strong as it should be and my knowledge of agriculture minimal.”

  “Sorry I can’t give you a hand,” I said.

  I gave Gunther the address. I didn’t have to describe the client. When we hung up, I tried not to think of what a three-foot-tall midget could do if Lorre were attacked, but Gunther had done pretty well in the past. I tried not to think of how conspicuous a three-foot-tall midget might be tailing a man, but decided that a little man would hide more easily than a giant or a fat, myopic dentist. Besides, he could stay in his car, and all he had to do was watch Lorre’s rear end.

  A knock at my door pulled me from sweet reason to Shelly’s face. The door opened before I could tell him to come in.

  “I’m busy, Shel,” I said.

  “I’ll wait,” Shelly said with a smile, a large bead of perspiration wending its way down his forehead.

  “I may be all night,” I said with a smile as large as his.

  “That’s what I wanted to talk to you about, Toby. How long have we been friends?”

  “I wouldn’t say we’re exactly friends, Sheldon,” I said, still smiling. “But, to give it the benefit, five, maybe six years.”

  “Five or six years,” he repeated, shaking his head. “Time really flies.”

  “Shel …”

  “I need a place to sleep tonight.”

  “Hotel,” I said, looking down at my list of suspects.

  “Mildred didn’t let me stop for the money in the Buddha. I’m broke. Just one night, Toby. I’ll sleep on the floor.”

  I think he was about to go down on one knee and beg. I’m not sure. But I didn’t give him the chance.

  “One night?” I asked. “And I’ll sleep on the floor. I always sleep on the floor.”

  “One night, and then I’ll get to the bank. I’ve got two hundred in the bank. First thing in the morning. Cross my heart,” he said, wiping his forehead with his dingy sleeve. “We roomed together in New York. I wasn’t so bad.”