Think Fast, Mr. Peters

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “You said that in some movie,” I said, cutting into the eggs Benedict.

  “I’ve said practically everything in some movie,” he said with a shrug. “Everything but obscenities and perhaps I’ll live long enough to do that also.”

  Eggs Benedict wasn’t bad at all. It wasn’t even cold.

  “Good stuff,” I said.

  “You have a plan?” he asked.

  “I have a plan,” I answered and I told him the plan. Part one of the plan, as I’d told him on the phone, called for him to get out of his house with his wife and stay somewhere for a few days, somewhere where he couldn’t be found. I’d watch the front door and he could go out the back. Part two called for him to return for a meeting I wanted to hold of Peter Lorre imitators. We could both warn them, which appealed to Lorre, and maybe find some reason for the murders. We might also lure the killer into the open.

  “And how do you propose to get these people together?” Lorre asked reasonably, sipping his coffee.

  “We spread the word that we’re auditioning people who can imitate you for a movie. I know just the movie.”

  “Excellent, but might this not also draw the killer to … ah, I see,” he said putting his finger to the side of his nose.

  “You got it,” I confirmed. “We can’t watch you and every mimic in Los Angeles, but if we get them all together and draw our killer, we can …”

  “… get someone killed,” Lorre finished.

  “Or save someone,” I said as the waitress roamed over with the check, looked at each of us and decided that the actor was a better choice to pay the tab.

  “Yes, I suppose so,” agreed Lorre as the waitress hovered over us.

  “Carol’s on break,” she said. “You can pay me.”

  Lorre put his cigarette in his mouth, reached back for his wallet, and came out with a five-dollar bill, which he handed to the woman. She examined the bill suspiciously and moved slowly off to get his change.

  “And when shall this scene take place?” he asked, placing his wallet on the table.

  “Tomorrow. It’ll take that long to get the word out, find a place to get everyone together, get backup people to cover the place.”

  “I see,” said Lorre, looking at his wallet. “And that will cost …?”

  “Give me a hundred and hope for change.”

  “Check?”

  “Perfect. You think of a place to stay for a few days?”

  “The old man has a little place in Santa Monica. I’ll move into it till tomorrow,” Lorre said, pulling out a checkbook and opening it to a blank page. “I’m between pictures at the moment.”

  “Your father’s here?”

  “My father? I see. No, Sidney Greenstreet’s the old man. He’s quite willing to help out. I’ve already called him.”

  Lorre gave me Greenstreet’s address and the telephone number in Santa Monica. We left after I checked the street, grinned at the waitress, and grabbed a mint from the cashier’s counter. An hour later Lorre was packed and out of his home with me checking the street and assuring myself that no one was on his tail or mine.

  Lorre drove himself to Santa Monica and I headed back downtown, going up Broadway, through Elysian Park, and down Gatewood Street. Half a block from the Los Angeles River on Gatewood I found the house I was looking for and parked in front of it. The front door of the house was open and Bing Crosby was singing “Mississippi Mud” from a radio or record player inside.

  8

  The house was a small white frame box with the paint peeling off. It sat between two almost identical frame houses whose paint was peeling even faster. All three houses looked as if they were floating on a small lake. A fire hydrant had broken and was lazily bubbling mud around the three dwellings and threatening to spread to a run-down adobe down the block.

  I was trying to figure out how to get to the house without ruining my only pair of shoes when she stepped out on the porch.

  “I just called the fire department,” she said. “They’ll come out and turn off the hydrant. Kids keep doing it.”

  She was wearing a white apron over a yellow dress and her hair was tied back with a yellow ribbon. She looked like the full-page ad for a Glo Coat floor in Collier’s.

  “I’m looking for Elisa Potter,” I said.

  “You found her, Peters,” she said in a voice I knew, attached to a face I didn’t. “But at home I’m Elisa Morales.”

  The face was almost free of makeup and as she stood there looking at me with her hands on her hips I had the eerie feeling that she was my wife and I was coming home from work to one of the problems homeowners dread and have to face a dozen times a year.

  “Why don’t you take off your shoes and socks, roll up your pants, and wade over?”

  I sat on my fender, removed my shoes and socks, tucked them under my arm, and took her advice. The muddy grass sucked at my feet and I felt my left pants leg start to fall so I leaped forward to the porch to save it from a cleaning bill as Bing crooned, “It’s a treat to beat your feet on the Mississippi mud.”

  Elisa was leaning on the porch rail and regarding me with amusement.

  “You looked like a crippled stork,” she said.

  “Thanks. I was doing my best to impress you. Glad it worked.”

  I put the shoes and socks on the porch and shook as much mud and moisture from my feet as I could.

  “You like tamale pie?” she asked, folding her arms and stepping toward me.

  I could smell something minty on her breath.

  “Love it,” I said, which was the truth.

  “Hungry?”

  “As usual,” I answered, following her toward the screen door.

  She turned, held out her hand, and said, “Wait. I’ll get you some water and a towel for your feet.”

  She went in and I waited. Bing stopped singing and the sound of a needle scratching in the final rut let me know it was a record and not the radio. A plop let me know that the next disk had dropped and the Andrews Sisters confirmed it by belting out “Hold Tight.” The screen door pushed open and a small wet towel sloshed toward me. I caught it, cleaned the mud off my feet, dried them on the straw welcome mat’ and put my shoes next to each other on the mat with my socks inside them before going inside. I followed the smell of chili powder and pepper through the neat but not expensively furnished living room and passed through a doorless arch into the kitchen.

  Elisa, pot holders in both hands, was placing a big iron pot on a smooth stone in the middle of the table.

  “Have a seat,” she said, nodding toward a wooden chair. I sat.

  She went to the cupboard, got a couple of bowls and forks, and came back to the table.

  “Smells great,” I said.

  “Tastes great,” she said, clearing a spot for herself with her hand by pushing away garlic husks and remnants of celery. “My mother was Mexican. From Juarez. Her people have been making tamale pie from before Cortez. Beer?”

  “Sure,” I said, and she went to the refrigerator, pulled out two bottles of Meister Brau beer, pulled off the caps with a bottle opener attached to the refrigerator, and returned to the table.

  “Serve yourself,” she said. “I was hoping someone would come by. Thought I’d have to give some to the Larkins next door. Rita’s all right, but Charlie can’t keep his hands in his pockets and off the hostess.”

  She served me a full bowl and a huge chunk of rough wheat bread.

  “Will you marry me?” I asked.

  “No thanks,” she said. “I tried it a couple of times. Didn’t like it.”

  We ate in silence, listening to Crosby, Patti, Maxine, and Laverne, and Dinah Shore records. Neither of us said a word till we’d finished and had a second beer.

  “Great,” I said. “Thank your mother for me when you see her.”

  “Mom’s dead,” she said, starting to clear the table.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “She was ninety-two,” said Elisa with a smile. “She had me when she
was almost sixty.”

  “Some woman,” I said.

  “I’ve got a younger brother,” she countered, stacking the final dishes in the sink and wiping her hands on the apron. I sat looking at the bottle of Meister Brau as she took off the apron, found her purse and a pack of Camels, and lit up after sitting across from me.

  “I didn’t kill him,” she said.

  “OK,” I said, taking in a gulp of beer.

  “I hardly knew Sidney,” she went on.

  “Fine,” I said.

  “I mean, I can be tough enough on the set. You have to be. And I can’t say I liked the twerp, but I didn’t shoot him. Why would I?”

  “I can’t think of a reason,” I said. “I’ll be happy to cross you off my list as soon as you answer a few questions. But you’ve got to admit that I wouldn’t be much of a detective if I crossed everyone off a suspect list just because they told me they didn’t do it and let me sit barefoot in their kitchen eating tamale pie.”

  “Why would I kill Sidney Kindem?” she asked again.

  “Because he looked like Peter Lorre?” I asked in return.

  “What?”

  I wasn’t getting very far with this, but I wasn’t really interested in going on. I had a pleasant attack of heartburn and a couple of beers in my stomach. I was going through the motions.

  “Someone’s been going after Peter Lorre imitators since Sidney took a bullet yesterday,” I explained. “Sidney was the first, or maybe not if there’s a body or two waiting to be found.”

  “Coffee?” she asked.

  “Sure,” I said and watched her get up, go to the pot, get the cups, and come back.

  “You’d make a great wife,” I said, smelling the coffee. “Hills Brothers?”

  “Yeah,” she laughed, pouring herself a cup. “You’d think so. But I lost the role. Got the wrong leading man twice. You know something, Peters?”

  “Toby,” I said.

  “Toby,” she repeated. I liked the way it sounded. “You know something, Toby? I’m not much of an actress. I can deliver a line if it doesn’t require too much feeling, and I’m fine in medium and long shots. I move all right …”

  “You move more than all right.”

  “I move all right but I don’t have whatever it is that comes across in a movie,” she said, not quite ignoring my comment. “So I do low-budget quickies and make a living. Sometimes I go down to Mexico and do a picture in Spanish for a few dollars. I’m saving to buy a restaurant, a good Mexican restaurant where I can sit in a hot kitchen, cook tamale pie, and get fat like the rest of my family. The hardest part of acting for me is staying thin. It’s unnatural.”

  “You look fine,” I said, leaning toward her.

  “You’re fun,” she said, leaning close enough to me so I could smell the mint on her breath again, the mint and chili.

  She smiled and cocked her head and then the smile left her. She looked over my left shoulder toward the doorway to the living room. I turned and found myself looking at a dark, handsome young man with muscles and yellow anger in his eyes.

  Elisa said something in Spanish to the young man.

  “The young man said something angrily to Elisa and advanced on her with closed fists. She got up to face him and kept talking in Spanish. I tried finishing my coffee but the young man hit my shoulder, spilling what was left on the table.

  Elisa screamed at the young man, who grabbed her right arm. She slapped at his hand and pulled away. It was time. I got up, took a step, and put myself between them. His perfectly white teeth were clenched in front of my face.

  “Excuse me,” I said. “If you’re going to speak Spanish, you’ll have to slow down a hell of a lot for me to understand you. And if you want to push the lady around, you’re going to have to go around me to do it and I’m not so easy to get around.”

  “Out of the way old man,” the kid snarled. “I don’t want to have to hurt you.”

  “That’s all right,” I said through my crooked grin, “I fight dirty.”

  His knee came up fast to let me know that kids could fight dirty too, but he telegraphed that it was coming by shifting his weight and biting his lower lip. He would have made a lousy boxer in spite of the perfect build and body. Everything showed on his face. I turned my hip into the knee, threw my right elbow into his stomach, and hit him with an open-handed short left to the jaw that shot him backward over the chair I’d been sitting in.

  Behind me Elisa shouted, “Stop!”

  The kid came rolling up from the floor and came off his knees with a knife he’d grabbed off the table.

  “Hold it,” I said. “Before someone really gets hurt.”

  The someone I was most concerned with was me, but I had taken on some responsibility for Elisa and I held in a mad urge to make a barefooted dash past the kid for the front door. He came at me, knife low, blood on his teeth.

  “Ernesto,” Elisa cried behind me.

  I took three quick steps toward the living room to Ernesto’s right and he lunged after me, but I stopped, leaned left and kicked up with my right foot. My toes hit his already pummeled stomach and Ernesto went down, the knife flying and in a one-in-a-million chance plunging into a photograph of a toothless old woman on the wall.

  Ernesto rolled in pain on the floor and I turned to Elisa to ask her if she was all right. The answer was the metal bowl of a soup ladle against my right cheek.

  “Mama,” Ernesto groaned from the floor.

  The groan saved me from a second crack of the ladle. Elisa looked at me in disgust, threw the ladle in the general direction of the sink, and got on her hands and knees.

  “Hijo,” she said soothingly, taking his head in her hands. “Ernesto.”

  My cheek ached as I walked toward the living room, leaving mother and son to comfort each other and blame the battered intruder for coming between them. My business with Elisa wasn’t quite over but I’ve been in enough domestic reconciliations to know that I didn’t like them and wouldn’t be welcome.

  Two firemen were working on the hydrant when I stepped out on the porch and picked up my shoes and socks. As I sloshed past them, one of the firemen looked up at me, shook his head, and said, “Kids.”

  “Kids,” I agreed and got into my Crosley wondering if I should stop for a bottle of aspirin.

  I wasn’t far from Burlington Street so I returned to the scene of the crime and parked in front of Eskian’s hardware store. Business wasn’t brisk at this hour. Paul Eskian was leaning over his counter, elbow on a bag of fertilizer, reading the morning paper. He scratched his head and looked up at me.

  “Looking in the paper for the, the, the murder,” he said. “Not here. I figure it might drum up a little, little, little business, bring in a few new customers.”

  “Might,” I said.

  “Police were here for hours,” he said with a shake of his head. “Hours. Talking to everyone. Even taking, taking pebbles off my roof. Can, can you believe that?”

  “I can believe it,” I said coming to the counter. “Can you make me an extra key for my Crosley?”

  “Sure,” he said, reaching out for the key. “Police said you’re a private detective.”

  “The police are right. That OK?”

  “Interesting is all,” he said.

  “When I was in here yesterday,” I said, “my car was parked right out there.”

  “I recall,” Eskian said, holding the key up to look at the fine edges.

  “You see anyone near my car, maybe in my car?”

  “Just you,” he said. “And the, the, the guy in the black coat. Noticed because it’s too warm for a, a, a coat.”

  “You tell the police about this guy in the coat?” I asked.

  “They didn’t ask,” said Eskian. “Excuse me.”

  Eskian turned his back on me and put my Crosley key into his machine.

  “Did you get a look at the guy?” I asked, rubbing my sore jaw and considering asking him for an aspirin. “The guy in the black coat?”r />
  “Nope,” said Eskian over the sound of the grinding machine. “Could have, have, have been a woman for all I could tell. You aching?”

  “Just got hit in the jaw with a ladle.”

  “Masterson ironware?” he asked.

  “I don’t know. On the roof,” I shouted over the noise, “did you see anything? I mean anybody moving. Anything?”

  Eskian turned off the machine, which ground to a screeching halt like fingernails on a blackboard. I shuddered.

  “Sorry about, about that,” he said blowing steel dust off the key. “Those new machines make, make, make keys but they torture your eardrums every time. That’ll be a dime.”

  I gave him a dine, which he shoved in his pocket rather than opening the cash register.

  “Anyone else around who was here yesterday? You mentioned your son.”

  “Nope,” said Eskian apologetically. “Robert was working. Always wanted him in the business with, with me but kids they have a mind of their own, you, you, you know?”

  “Right,” I said. “What about employees?”

  “Got a helper, Keith, but he, he, he wasn’t working yesterday,” said Eskian. “Anything else I can help you with? Tools, paint, lawn fertilizer?”

  “No lawn, nothing to fix,” I said. “But I’ll be back if I have something broken.”

  “If they put something in the paper,” he said, returning to the newspaper, “I think I’ll clip it out and put it in the window. What do you think? Bad, bad, bad taste?”

  “Bad taste,” I said pulling out my notebook and writing my number on a sheet. “Here’s my number. You think of anything about yesterday that might help, give me a call.”

  “Will do,” he said, jamming the sheet in the pocket with the dime and looking at the paper.

  I left.

  I’d been trying to reach Fat Sal Lurtzma for over four hours but the line was always busy. I finally got through just before two in the afternoon. I was in a Rexall drugstore on Hill Street. The phone was near the lunch counter facing a display for enema bags.

  “Keep Fit. Keep Clean. Keep Clear for Victory,” read a sign above the display. A smiling soldier looked down at the enema bags with something like gratitude.