“No,” the caller whined. “Warnings, just warnings. For God’s sake this isn’t easy on us …”
“Hey, I’m sorry,” I said looking back into the restaurant. The band was gone, faded into the paneling, under the tables, into the Greek town painted on the wall, or wherever they lurked, waiting for their victims.
“Stop investigating,” came the voice. “Or we’ll kill the dentist. We will. We saw you go to Miracle Pictures. We’ll kill him.”
“I went for coffee and some Harry James,” I said. “Look, if you have something to say, say it. I’ve got work to do.”
“Minck,” he screamed.
“What makes you think I give a damn what you do with him?” I said, trying to sound as indifferent as Ned Sparks. “I’ve got a real problem here. You ever have a headache? I mean a real headache that tears off the side of your skull?”
“No,” came the voice. “Once when I was …”
“Forget it,” I said. “This is my headache. I don’t want to hear your sad stories.”
“Be reasonable,” the voice cried.
“OK,” I said. “I’ll be reasonable. You kill him and I keep up the investigation till it leads me to you and I kill you. You let him go and I continue the investigation till it leads to you and I don’t kill you. I just turn you over for murder.”
“That’s not a very good choice,” came the Mickey voice.
“It’s not supposed to be,” I said, biting my lower lip to hold back the pain in my head. “You killed two people, hurt another one. Kidnaped a dentist, which may or may not be a crime in California, and you took a shot at me, not to mention murdering a pigeon and ruining my day.”
“Mistakes happen,” the voice said. “They can happen to anyone. It wasn’t supposed to go like this.”
“I’m hanging up,” I said.
“Wait …”
“Wait for what?” I asked.
The caller put the phone down on something hard. I listened, heard nothing, and watched the old waiter weave his way toward me between tables with a fresh glass of water in one hand and something in the open palm of the other.
“Toby?” Shelly’s voice bellowed on the phone.
“Yes, Shel,” I said.
“I’ve been kidnaped,” he said.
“I figured that out, Shel. They even left a note.”
“These are not kind people, Toby. Not kind at all,” Shelly bleated.
The old waiter held out his left hand, on which there rested seven round, green capsules. I took all seven and he gestured for me to put them in my mouth.
“Hold on, Shel,” I said. “I’m taking some pills for my headache.”
“Headache,” he cried. “Headache. I’m being threatened with … with …” and then, to whoever it was on the other side, “What are you threatening me with, cutting off my hands, torture, murder?”
“Shelly,” I said through the pills rattling in my mouth. “They don’t need your suggestions.”
I took the water, washed down the pills and handed the glass back to the waiter.
“Where are you, Sheldon?” I asked.
“Where am … a basement, something. How do I know? They took my glasses. Toby, do what they tell you to do for my sake. For Mildred’s sake. She’s too young to be a widow.”
I figured her for just about the right age but I asked Shelly, “How many of them are there.?”
“Two,” he said. “They jumped me in the office. I was just going to clean up the place when they came in. I swear as God is my witness, I was going to clean up.”
“Who are they, Shel?” I asked.
“I don’t know,” he cried. “You think I know kidnapers and murderers? I’m a dentist. I’ve never seen these people before. Without my glasses I can’t see them now. Will you just do what they want? Will you do that for me?”
“Describe them, Shel,” I said. “Do it fast.”
“Well …” he began, “the older one …” and someone pulled the phone away from Shelly and screamed like Mickey Mouse.
“That’s not fair, Peters. That is not fair here. We’ve been square with you. I owe you that, but you’ve got to take this seriously.”
“I don’t think I’ve got anything else to talk to you about. Remember, you hurt the dentist, I find and hurt you.”
“It wasn’t supposed to go like this,” the caller cried.
I hung up.
“Well?” asked the waiter, clasping his hands together as if I were going to report on the birth of twins.
My headache wasn’t gone but it was going.
“Old Greek remedy?” I asked.
“Chinese,” he said. “Yin Chao. Get it from Chau Ling’s in Chinatown. Great stuff. Don’t know what’s in it.”
“Thanks,” I said.
“My pleasure,” the waiter said, touching his mustache.
I walked out into the street. The sun didn’t hurt nearly as much now, thanks to Yin Chao and the knowledge that I was getting someplace.
10
The day wasn’t exactly young, but it wasn’t old either, and I had work to do and some leads to follow. I went back to my office. It wasn’t close but it beat going back to Mrs. Plaut’s. It was after five when I got there, so there were parking spaces on the street. I looked around for whoever was tailing me but I didn’t see him, which meant that he was either very good or I wasn’t being watched at the moment.
It was clear that the guy with the Mickey Mouse voice hadn’t been following me. He had been somewhere with Shelly and a telephone. Whoever was following me had called Mickey Mouse, told him the name of the Greek restaurant, and told him to call. If Mickey Mouse were the brains of the outfit, I was riding high in the saddle, an expression I picked up from a Buck Jones movie. I’ve only been on a horse once in my life and I didn’t like it. The horse had liked it even less.
The Farraday lobby was empty, but that didn’t surprise me. There were no sounds echoing through the well-scrubbed hallways, which didn’t surprise me either. The usual sounds of the Farraday were muffled, faintly musical, and came from the offices that lined the hallways on each floor. I trudged up the stairway, listening to the early evening calm, and pausing to be sure no footsteps were behind me.
When I hit the fourth floor, my legs were feeling a little weak. I credited my recent headache, my bout with Elisa’s son Ernesto, Shelly’s kidnaping and an all-around hell of a day. I didn’t want to think about my legs being half a century old, but I couldn’t help it. I tried to think of nothing. My Farraday landlord, the wrestling poet Jeremy Butler, had once tried to teach me to meditate, to think of nothing. It seemed easy when he suggested it, and then I tried. I had just about come to the conclusion that it isn’t possible to think of nothing when my mind went blank one afternoon while I was sitting at my desk looking at a crack in the wall and waiting for a miracle. That blankness was clean, simple, and lasted about half an hour that felt like a few seconds. When a thought came back, I tried to find that blankness again, but I couldn’t. I never did find it again.
When I opened the door to Shelly’s and my office, I wasn’t thinking about meditating. I was thinking about why the door wasn’t locked. I was sure I’d locked it. Something moved inside the dark dental office beyond the tiny waiting room I was standing in. My gun was somewhere in the evidence room of the Wilshire police station. Whoever was in there had heard me coming in. There was no covering that. I pulled the chain on the light in the waiting room, started to hum “Ramona” as casually as I could, and leaned down to remove the wooden leg of one of the two chairs in the waiting area. It had been more than a year since I’d told Shelly to fix the chair, warned him that some day a patient would sit on it and break a limb or two, but Shelly had cast his thoughts beyond waiting room chairs. I held the chair leg tightly in my right hand and eased the dismantled chair against the little table covered with old magazines. Then I got up, opened the door to Shelly’s office, and stepped in ready to swing, jump, or run. There was no one there.
Maybe there was no one there. Maybe I was imagining things. Maybe I had left the door open and maybe I had even left the Arvin radio on the shelf near the sink on, but I didn’t think so. Armed and ready, I moved to the sink and reached up to turn off the radio—and got a better idea. I turned the volume up. Gabriel Heatter’s voice came on with some good news and some bad. The United States, Great Britain, and Russia had pledged to open a new front in Europe, with the United States hitting the mainland. The Germans were being hit hard on the Russian front. According to the Russians, the Germans had lost 15,000 soldiers, fifty tanks and eighty planes in the Crimea in just three days. The bad news was that there were reports that the Japanese had landed or were about to land in the Aleutian Islands.
I didn’t have time for more news. I moved to my office door, reached down quietly with my Neanderthal club at the ready, and threw open the door.
Elisa stifled a scream. She was standing at the window smoking. She dropped the cigarette and looked at the club-wielding shadow figure who had burst into the room.
“Don’t,” she cried.
“I’m not,” I said lowering the chair leg. “What are you doing here? How did you get in?”
She leaned against my desk with one hand on her chest, between her breasts, trying to catch her breath.
“I got in because I told an Amazon woman who said she was the landlord’s wife that I was a client, and I had to wait for you. She said she didn’t want me waiting in the halls, that it wasn’t safe to wander the halls of the Farraday after dark. I wouldn’t doubt it.”
“That was Alice Pallis Butler,” I said. “She’s a romantic. Her husband’s a poet.”
“I wouldn’t want to be her husband and get into a fight with her over who was doing the dishes,” Elisa said.
“He’s even bigger than she is,” I said, closing the door and putting the chair leg on the end of my desk. “And they don’t fight. They’re in love.”
“That’s nice,” Elisa said, her breath neatly caught.
Her hair was dark, fluffy, and long and her face made up, not movie made up but made up. She wore a gray dress that showed a lot of shapely frontage. Her shoulders were padded and she looked like she’d just stepped into the detective’s office in a Mike Shayne movie.
“You need help?” I asked, standing across the desk from her.
“I brought you something,” she said, and pointed a scarlet fingernailed finger at a package about the size of a cigar box on the desk.
“Thanks,” I said reaching for the package. It was neatly wrapped and tied. I moved around the desk past her, smelled her spicy scent, and fished in my mess of a desk drawer for a knife. I found my Boy Scout knife with the broken handle and cut the strings on the package. The paper fell open like a tulip and a sweet almond smell came out.
“Careful,” she said. “Flan.”
I carefully opened the rest of the package and found myself looking at a dish of brownish jelly. She had even included a spoon. I took the spoon and tasted the flan. It was sweet.
“You just making the rounds of detective offices, barber shops, churches and boys’ clubs spreading good cheer and flan, or am I a special project?” I asked, sitting down to work on the flan.
She moved around to stand over me looking down while I ate.
“It’s an apology,” she said. “For Ernesto. For me. Ernesto’s been hanging around with some zoot-suit Mexican kids downtown. White soldiers and sailors have been giving them a hard time. This morning he had a run-in with a couple of soldiers before he came home. He came through the door, saw you, and lost his temper.”
“And you clobbered me with a soup ladle,” I reminded her, touching my slightly swollen jaw.
She leaned over, breathed on my cheek, and touched my sore jaw with warm fingers and just the slightest touch of fingernails.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “He’s my son, and I was afraid you would hurt him.”
I took another bite of the flan.
“Can I taste some of that?” she asked. “I had no time before I came here. I just had time after Ernesto left for work to get dressed and come here.”
I spooned up some quivering flan and held it up for her. Her mouth engulfed the spoon and her tongue licked the small sugary spot she had missed. I almost dropped the spoon.
“I’m really sorry about this morning,” she whispered, taking the spoon from my hand and putting it on the table.
“Say, listen,” I said looking up at her. “I can understand.”
“I’d like to make it up to you,” she said, touching my hair and my cheek.
I could have told her that the flan and the apology were enough, but I’m no fool, or at least I’m not that big a fool. She leaned over with her mouth open and kissed me, with one hand holding tightly but not pulling my hair. We kissed for a long time, a long drowsy time, before she pulled away slowly.
“Here?” she said.
“No room,” I said.
“We’ll make room.”
She reached over and pushed everything on my desk onto the floor. Old bills, flyers, the last of the flan, a stapler that had been given to me by my ex-wife, a copy of the collected poems of William Blake that Jeremy had given me, and various pencils and paperweights made by my nephews in first and second grade went flying and clattering.
“Enough room?” she said, turning to me with a smile.
“It’ll do,” I said.
I don’t know if you could call what we did making love, but it was definitely engaging in lust. She took the lead, did the undressing, indicated where she wanted me and how, and took over with an experience I didn’t want to think about. I came close to that half hour of no-thought I had been seeking. Was sex meditation? I’d have to ask Jeremy about it some time.
“Relax,” she whispered.
“If I relax, we’ll never get anywhere,” I whispered back.
“It takes care of itself,” she said leaning over me on the desk. “You don’t have to work at it, just enjoy it.”
I did.
When we were finished, or at least when I was finished, she got off the table, went to her purse, and pulled out a cigarette which she lit with no sign of getting dressed. I got up like the somnambulist in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari, tested my back for pain, found none, and rolled off the desk to retrieve my clothes.
Elisa stood at the window naked, smoking, and said,
“There are two men down there fighting.”
“They do that a lot,” I said. “They just show their teeth. I think they’re friends.”
“I see,” she said.
“You want to get dressed?” I asked, buttoning my shirt.
She turned from the window, grinned, and gave me a moist open-mouthed kiss that got me going again. This time I took off my pants and I didn’t get lost in meditation.
When we were finished again, I lay exhausted on the table looking up at the crack in the ceiling that reminded me of the Mississippi River. Elisa got dressed and gathered her things, including the spoon and the now empty bowl, and I sat up without worrying about my back.
“I really enjoyed that,” she said, reaching over to touch my cheek.
“I didn’t find it agonizing,” I answered groggily.
“I didn’t kill Lowry,” she said.
“But you did know him.”
“I …” she started.
“I mean you were the one who brought him to the Steistel Brothers,” I said, putting on my underwear.
“I met him on another picture,” she said. “I knew Miracle was looking for a Peter Lorre. I suggested Lowry. I’m sorry I did.”
“Why?”
Lowry mistook professional kindness for sexual interest,” she said, looking in a mirror and adjusting her makeup. “That became particularly awkward when he brought that Minck woman around.”
“What do you know about Lowry?” I asked, considering my shirt and deciding not to put it on.
She kept looking in her mirror, checked her
lipstick, shrugged, and said, “German, just came over a year ago. Had a few parts and made a near living selling men’s clothing at I. Magnin’s on Wilshire. I did not kill him.”
“You’re not a suspect,” I lied.
“Thanks. I believe you,” she lied.
We could have gone on lying to each other for a while but the door opened and Jeremy Butler stepped in. Jeremy filled the doorway like a massive walking bomb, the kind that is painted on the fuselages of bombers. His bald head almost reached to top of the door and his nearly 300 pounds almost touched both sides of the doorway.
Elisa stepped back, her heels grinding something she had swept onto the floor.
“Toby,” Jeremy said, looking at me nearly undressed on the chair. “Are you all right? Alice told me she let a woman in here.”
“Elisa Potter,” I said, nodding at Elisa.
“Very pleased to meet you,” Jeremy said politely, ignoring the mess and my state of undress.
“Jeremy owns this building,” I said. “He’s a former wrestler.”
Elisa looked at Jeremy with a slightly furrowed brow and then a light of recognition.
“Did you write a book of poetry, Doves of a Winter Night?” she asked.
“Yes,” Jeremy said.
“God,” Elisa said. “I love that book. I got it from a friend.”
“Thank you,” said Jeremy. The sun was almost gone, but I thought I detected something I never expected to see, Jeremy blushing.
“Oh God, wait till I tell Harold,” she said. Before I could wonder who Harold might be, she started to recite:
Curling over the hills, cloud fingers
pause to linger
lovingly against the tips of trees,
sigh and break free
like ghosts to roll gently down
around
the houses that silent lie
with windows like open eyes.
The fog blankets, comforts, hides,
and then slowly moves back like the tide
to wait moist-fingered for another evening.
“You have a remarkable memory,” said Jeremy, his voice betraying an emotion I’d never heard before.
Think Fast, Mr. Peters Page 14