Think Fast, Mr. Peters

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “One night,” I agreed with a sigh. “I’ll be ready in about ten minutes.”

  “Toby …”

  “If you say ‘God bless you,’ the offer is off.”

  He put his fingers to his lips and slipped out the door, closing it behind him. He sang no more while I put my notes together and settled on a plan for the morning. When I stepped into his office, Shelly stood holding a dental case in his right hand.

  “Got some homework to do, Sheldon?” I asked.

  Shelly looked down at his bag and held it up in front of him as if I could see through it.

  “Change of underwear,” he explained. “Managed to grab it when Mildred turned her head.”

  “I’m grateful,” I said. “Let’s go.”

  And we did. But we didn’t get far. Outside the door of our offices, on the floor of the hallway of the Farraday Building, lay a dead pigeon with a little capsule tied to his leg.

  “How did a bird get in here?” Shelly asked, holding his case under his arm and moving to kick it out of the way.

  “Hold it, Shel,” I said, and leaned down to pop off the top of the capsule and pull out a rolled up note.

  “What’s it say?” Shelly asked, pushing his slipping glasses back on his nose. “Who’s it for?”

  7

  Around midnight Shelly called my name. I opened my eyes and looked up from my mattress on the floor at a cool finger of moonlight touching my small kitchen table. I pretended not to hear him as I rolled over on my side, closing my eyes.

  “Toby,” he repeated, “I don’t get it. Who would kill a pigeon? Who did a pigeon hurt? I’m not going to be able to sleep.”

  I considered a convincing snore, rejected a grunt that he might take for attention, and discarded the idea of telling him I wanted to get some sleep. I am not without sympathy for murdered pigeons but Shelly seemed to have missed the point. Inside the capsule attached to the pigeon’s leg was a simple message to me: PETERS FORGET THE LOWRY MURDER OR YOU ARE A DEAD PIGEON.

  “Toby, you awake or what? I can’t sleep. Let’s play gin or talk or something.”

  I didn’t want to hear about Mildred. I didn’t want to hear about a new scheme for wiring teeth so you could pick up radio stations in your mouth. I wanted to sleep. I had a big day ahead of me and I wanted to dream about Puffed Rice covered with five spoons of sugar and milk to the top of the bowl.

  Shelly gave up after a few more whines and whimpers and I slept. If I had been alone, I would have gotten up for the cereal, but it wasn’t worth the price I’d have to pay in conversation with Sheldon Minck.

  I dreamt. Jeremy tells me that we all dream every night but we don’t remember our dreams. The trick to remembering is to wake up during a dream. Poets, he said, are particularly good at waking up during or immediately after a dream. Something lets them know some good stuff that they might be able to use has been going on. Jeremy’s current favorite poet was Byron. I read a few Byron poems. The guy had nightmares. I preferred the book of William Blake poems Jeremy had given me, though I didn’t understand most of them. I just liked the way they sounded and it was the only poetry book I’d ever seen with drawings in it.

  I dreamt. It was a dream I thought I was rid of. Cincinnati again, I thought as I dreamt. I wandered the streets, went down to the water. There was a dead pigeon floating in the river. I didn’t take a good look at his face. I kept walking. The damned city was empty, as empty as it always was. This time it wasn’t winter. It was summer and the only sound was a flag on a pole high above me flapping in the wind. I went wandering, knowing I wouldn’t find anyone. I never did. There were different places in Cincinnati where I usually wound up. One place was on the shore of the river looking out at an island. Another place was a row of old townhouses. I didn’t want to go there but that was where I found myself. I went up the stairs of one of the identical townhouses, closed the door behind me, listened for nothing, and heard a knock at the door. I turned in fear and started to reach for the door handle and then I stopped just as I always stopped. I didn’t want to see who or what was out there. I had wandered around Cincinnati, where I’ve never been, looking for life, for something, and now that it was right outside the door, the possibility of facing it panicked me.

  I woke up suddenly, choking back a shout. Morning light came through the window. I was sweating. Shelly was snoring gently in the bed. I remembered the dream but I didn’t play with it. I wanted it to go away. I got up carefully, paying tribute in caution to my back. Nothing hurt. I took off my T-shirt, threw it on the sofa, and looked at Shelly, who resembled a beached seal on its back.

  Sitting at the table, I ate my Puffed Rice with slices of my last banana after eating the cream from the top of the new bottle of milk with a reasonably clean spoon. I felt better.

  “Mildred?” Shelly called out, sitting up and looking in my general direction with a nearly closed-eye squint. His chubby body quivered in something that might have been hope.

  “No, Shel,” I said. “It’s me.”

  He reached over to the table near the bed, groped for his glasses, found them, pushed them on his face, and found me.

  “Toby,” he said. “I thought …”

  “Want some cereal?”

  He waddled over in his drooping shorts and we ate in near silence, except for the sounds of a despondent dentist playing with his breakfast. His cereal got soggy. I got up and put together enough clothing to make myself almost presentable if someone didn’t look too closely at the shirt, which was missing a single button right in the middle. I covered that missing button by wearing my poplin jacket zipped closed. No one could see the holes in socks, shorts, or ego.

  “How do I look, Shel?”

  He shrugged and popped a grain of Puffed Rice on the table with the back of his spoon. I checked the small mirror on my dresser near the Beech-Nut clock, which told me it was 8:30.

  “I need a shave,” I said.

  Shelly said nothing.

  “I’m going to shave, Shel. You might make the bed, get dressed, and make your way to the bank so you can stay somewhere else tonight.”

  “Whatever,” Shelly said, reaching into the cereal box to find another cereal morsel to crush.

  I grabbed my razor and went into the hall humming the Gillette Blue Blade song.

  “How are you fixed for blades?” I crooned.

  And a voice inside answered, “There are no blades in Cincinnati.”

  It scared the hell out of me, made me consider religion or something stronger than the couple of beers a week I usually put away. I knew no one was there but me, but I didn’t like what I was doing to myself.

  “Comes from being alone so much,” Mrs. Plaut’s voice said from the stairwell.

  “What does?” I asked.

  “That look, talking-to-yourself look. I see it in the mirror once or twice a day,” she said, taking the last few steps up the stairs to the landing and pointing her broom at me. She was wearing her hearing aid this morning. “Doesn’t scare me anymore, though.”

  “Doesn’t?” I said.

  She shook her head.

  “You get used,” she said.

  “Used?”

  “Used to it,” she said. “You never like it, but you get used.”

  “You’ve made me feel much better, Mrs. Plaut,” I said with a tip of my razor in her direction as she approached the door to my room. “Maybe I’ll just go in there and cut my throat.”

  “Won’t,” she said with a hand on my doorknob. “You’re not a croppler.”

  I wanted to warn her about Shelly sitting in my room in his shorts. He was probably croppling, whatever that was. I went in the bathroom and shaved.

  A few minutes later I finished shaving and stuck my head in my room, where Mrs. Plaut sat at the table across from Shelly saying, “… and when I let my mister come back he was as well-behaved as Teddy Roosevelt’s dog.”

  I reached over, put my razor on the dresser, closed the door quietly, and tiptoed down the stai
rs. It could have been a good day. The sun was out, the sky blue and clear. Halfway down the block some kids I couldn’t see were laughing on their way to school. My back was feeling fine and I had a few dollars in my battered but still serviceable wallet.

  It could have been a good morning or, at worst, a passable one if someone hadn’t chosen that moment to take a shot at me. I recognized the sound, the whistle of a miniature super-speed train buzzing past, and the crack of glass behind me. It was the crack that convinced me I wasn’t hit, or probably wasn’t hit. The shot could have gone through me. But I’ve been shot twice and it wasn’t like this.

  I dropped and kissed Mrs. Plaut’s white-painted porch and waited for the second shot. None came. A car screeched away, wasting precious tire rubber that could have been used by FDR for the boys overseas.

  People didn’t come running out of their houses. The kids on their way to school kept laughing and the sun kept shining. I wondered how long I would writhe there if the bullet had pinched its way through me.

  Sitting up carefully, I double-checked to be sure there were no holes in me. I turned my head and saw that there was a distinct hole in the photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt that Mrs. Plaut proudly displayed in the belief that it was Marie Dressler. Eleanor wore the bullet hole like a pendant as she stared in the general direction of the departed gunman or -woman through cracked picture glass.

  I could have yelled, moaned, looked around for sympathy, called the cops, but I knew that no matter how much the incident had meant to me it wouldn’t register on other people as more than an annoyance, a call for attention and sympathy. I brushed myself off and walked down the steps, watching both ways for returning assassins. I didn’t let myself get truly scared till I squeezed into my Crosley. My body was scared, but my mind didn’t seem to be. My hands shook and I felt cold, but I felt myself waiting for my body to get over it so I could get on with business. After all, my mind told my body, maybe it was a mistake. Maybe the would-be killer was a Republican and was going around shooting framed photos of the Roosevelts on his way to work. Or perhaps he was after someone else, a neighbor, or even Mrs. Plaut, who had made many inadvertent enemies at the War Ration Board. I drove and tried to calm my body with other possibilities, but my body just kept shaking and insisting that it knew it had been the target. The most likely gunman was the one who had left the message with the pigeon, but hell, he wasn’t playing fair. He hadn’t even given me a chance to get out of the case before he came shooting. Then again, this could simply have been a second warning.

  I turned on the radio and it helped. The Blue Network news was reporting that German vengeance squads had wiped out Lidice, a Czech village of about 1,200 people, killing all the men and deporting the women and children on the grounds that the people of the town were harboring the two assassins of Reinhard Heydrich, the hangman, the late German ruler of Bohemia-Moravia. A guy taking a shot at a middle-aged detective on a Hollywood street didn’t seem very important, even if I was the target. Instead of wondering about my shootist, I wondered where Lidice was. I realized that I wasn’t even sure where Czechoslovakia was. I was pretty sure the Czechs hadn’t invited Heydrich to be the ruler of Bohemia-Moravia.

  The radio went on to say something about the exiled king of Greece visiting the White House but my heart wasn’t in it. My heart was somewhere near my frayed black belt.

  The restaurant was just off San Vincente. It had a lot to recommend it. There were always parking spaces nearby and very few people died of food poisoning as a result of eating at Stan’s. I knew Lorre was already inside because I spotted Gunther’s car halfway down the block with Gunther’s eyes peering just over the steering wheel in the direction of the restaurant. I parked and walked over to Gunther, who rolled down the window.

  “He’s inside,” I said.

  “He is inside,” Gunther confirmed. “He came directly here from his home. No one followed.”

  Gunther had been up all night watching Lorre’s house but you wouldn’t know it to look at him. Twenty out of twenty passing strangers asked to judge which of us had been up all night would have chosen me without hesitating. Gunther’s face was clean shaven, his hair neatly combed. As always he wore a three-piece suit that didn’t display a wrinkle. I couldn’t see his shoes but I was sure I’d be able to see my reflection in them if he got out.

  “I’ll take over now, Gunther, thanks.”

  “It would be no great inconvenience for me to continue the vigil,” he said. I thought I heard a background strain of tiredness.

  “No, I’ll call you later if I need relief. I’ll find a place to keep him safe till I can figure out what’s what and who’s who.”

  “What’s what and who’s who? An idiom?”

  “You got it, Gunther,” I said, looking over at the restaurant and down the street in case I had been followed by my sniper. I had not ignored the possibility that the guy who had taken a shot at me had also killed two Lorre impersonators, one with my gun.

  “Then I shall depart, Toby. Please exercise caution.”

  “At all times,” I said with a grin.

  Gunther didn’t believe it, but he turned on the ignition, put his feet on the built-up gas and clutch pedals, and eased out into the street.

  Lorre was sitting at a window table near the front of the restaurant with his back to the door. The place wasn’t crowded but there were a few late breakfasters and four old guys arguing at a table in the back. I walked over to Lorre and said, “Good morning. Let’s change tables.”

  “But,” he said, looking up from a plate of something with eggs, “the day is …”

  “You don’t sit near windows and you don’t turn your back on doors,” I explained. “Not till this is over.”

  “I see,” he said through hooded eyes. “Then you think …?”

  “When I can,” I said. “But mostly I know from having done it wrong too many times.”

  Lorre got up, took his napkin and silverware in one hand and his plate in the other, and followed me to a semidark windowless booth away from the front of the restaurant.

  “Where you goin’?” asked a waitress behind us.

  “Booth,” I explained, turning to her.

  “I’ve been on my feet since five,” she said.

  She was a good forty pounds overweight. I felt sorry for her feet. I said so and watched Lorre sit down in the booth and arrange his breakfast. Then I sat across from him where I could watch the door.

  “Now I’ve got to walk another ten, fifteen feet,” she said, standing over me with her pad. “You count coming and going, you add on a half mile a day for every table past station six.”

  “Would you like eggs Benedict?” Lorre asked, nodding at the stuff in front of him. “I must confess I am partial to dishes that seem even a bit more exotic than the usual fare. It comes from sleeping on park benches in Vienna when I was a young man, when I was locked out of the house by my stepmother for not getting home before nine. I stayed away from home for weeks. I sold my books, my clothes for food, and when I had no more books or clothes I lived on coffee and conversation and watched others eat.”

  “I’ll try the eggs Benedict,” I said, and Lorre nodded at the waitress.

  “Coffee?” she asked, shaking her head, unable to get over the death march we had imposed on her.

  “If we don’t sit back here,” I explained, “somebody may come in and shoot us before we can see them.”

  “Coffee?” she repeated.

  “Coffee,” I said, and she limped away.

  “Someone shot at me this morning,” I said, reaching for a piece of cold toast.

  Lorre had a piece of running egg near his mouth, but stopped before he could get it in. He couldn’t decide whether to eat it or put it back. He ate it. I liked that.

  “And you believe …”

  “… in being careful,” I said. “I don’t know what’s going on. We can go through a list of possible enemies or I can put pressure on everyone who was present when the
first guy got shot on the roof.”

  “Which would you prefer?” he asked.

  “They used my gun on the roof,” I said, crunching the end of the toast and cursing myself for not seeing the small jar of red jam in the shadows of the napkin holder.

  “I see. That offends you?”

  “No, it makes me think someone knew which car was mine. I had the gun in my glove compartment. It makes me wonder why they picked my gun, why they were following me. It makes me think one of the people on that roof pulled the trigger. Maybe there’s a club of Peter Lorre haters in Los Angeles. Maybe the shooting on the roof had nothing to do with the other killing and the phone threat to you. It could all be coincidence, a sudden epidemic of Lorre hatred.”

  “It is unlikely,” Lorre said, calmly downing the last forkful of food on his plate. “But it could have something to do with hatred of Germans. I’ve played Nazis even though I fled from them. Who else is playing Nazis but Jews like me who ran from Europe with whatever we could carry. My grandfather was a rabbi. My real name, which I can hardly remember, is Ladislav Lowenstein. Yet I’ve had hate mail asking why a Nazi like me was getting rich making American movies. Perhaps …”

  “I don’t think it’s a Nazi hater. No one’s taking shots at Conrad Veidt or trying to run down Otto Preminger or Fritz Lang—at least I don’t think they are,” I said as the waitress plopped the plate and cup of coffee in front of me.

  “But they are not as visible as I am,” Lorre countered.

  “Might be a little cold,” the waitress said, sponging up some spilled coffee with a paper napkin. “Had to carry it further.”

  “I’m sure it will be lovely,” I said, showing a false smile and lots of teeth. She turned and moved away.

  “I think that woman is indifferent to the possibility of obtaining a tip,” Lorre said, lighting a cigarette.

  “Maybe,” I said, “but I like her.”

  Lorre laughed and said, “You are most amusing, Mr. Peters, most amusing.”