Bullet for a Star: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book One)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  We stepped into a combination dressing room and den and were greeted by the lone occupant, who advanced on us. He was a tall man, easily six foot two, wearing a Union cavalry uniform and carrying a drink of clear liquid in his left hand.

  “Sidney,” he said with genuine affection, “always good to see you.”

  Sid glumly shook the extended hand of the man towering over him. The man turned to me with a warm smile, a touch of curiosity and familiar, even, white teeth. He shook my hand firmly and appeared every bit as confident and likable as he did in his movies.

  “This is Toby Peters,” said Sid, collapsing into a chair. “He’s going to make that transaction for us. Toby, Errol Flynn.”

  “Mr. Peters,” Flynn began, guiding me to a soft brown sofa, “may I call you Toby?”

  “Sure,” I said, taking a seat. He sat next to me.

  “A rather minor character in my first picture at this studio …” Flynn began.

  “The Case of the Curious Bride,” Adelman’s voice rose wearily from the chair in which he was slumped but couldn’t be seen, “and you were a rather minor character in it.”

  “True,” continued Flynn with a grin. “This minor character, at a crucial moment in the plot, shouted, ‘this is a frame up.’ Please imagine, Toby, that I am shouting those words. Mind you, I am not above the sort of thing implied in the photograph. As a matter of fact, I strongly advocate it, but it is illegal.”

  “And very bad publicity,” came the voice of Adelman. I looked at Flynn, who sighed, took a drink of the clear liquid and added, “quite right.”

  “I am not a citizen,” he continued, “and it would be a rather simple matter to ask me to leave the country, which would displease me, the studio and, I modestly hope, a great many moviegoers. Can I get you a drink? Vodka?” He held up his glass. I said no, and he went on.

  “My past is not entirely sans blemish or incident. When I was a boy in Australia, I ran with a gang of razor robbers, cutthroats. When they murdered a friend, I headed for New Guinea to seek my fortune. Instead I spent some time in jail for assaulting an unsavory Chinese and, a short time later, was within inches of losing my life, when I was put on trial for killing a headhunter who had attacked me.”

  It was fascinating, but I wondered why he was telling me all this.

  “I’m telling you all this,” he answered, reading my mind, “because I want you to know that if I did spend some time with the young lady …”

  “Very young lady,” came Adelman’s voice.

  “All right,” Flynn smiled, lifting his hands in mock defeat, “very young lady, I would gallantly admit it. I have known very young ladies both in and out of the jungle, and I do not forget any of them. I have never seen the young lady in that photograph I saw this afternoon. However, Sidney has convinced me that, under the circumstances, we should pay.”

  There was a shuffle in Sidney’s chair, and he rose to his full five feet and a few inches as he faced us sourly.

  “And the circumstances,” he said, “include the fact that you are in the middle of some very delicate divorce proceedings.”

  Flynn rose, put his drink down and looked at his face in a mirror on the wall. Then he looked at my reflection over his shoulder looking at him.

  “You know,” he said turning to me, “a few weeks ago I was a pirate. Today I’m in the middle of a Western. This business can be very confusing.” He walked over to me, and I stood up. He put an arm around my shoulder.

  “Toby,” he said softly, “I am thirty years old and getting very wealthy. I am a product, a voice, a face, a body. I make three or four pictures a year to get as much out of that product as possible before it wears out. What I would dearly like to do is take your place for that assignation and break the blackmailer’s goddamn neck, but I’m too big an investment.”

  He guided me toward the door, and Sid walked after us shaking his head.

  “Why don’t I forget the money and issue a challenge to the guy to meet you in Griffith Park with swords at dawn,” I grunted.

  It wasn’t much of a joke, but Flynn leaned back in his blue uniform, teeth showing, hands on hips, just like in The Adventures of Robin Hood, and laughed loudly. It got me. For a second I was a ten year old at a matinee instead of a shabby, part-time bodyguard in his forties with a mashed nose.

  “I like you, Toby,” said Flynn shaking my hand again, “and I trust you.”

  “I’ll do what has to be done, Mr. Flynn,” I said, and I meant it.

  “Call me Errol or Princey.”

  Sid and I went into the hall.

  “Princey?” I asked looking at Sid.

  Adelman shrugged. “He picked it up from The Prince and the Pauper. He likes it, and he wasn’t even the fucking prince.”

  “I’ll be in my office all night. You call me as soon as you have the negative and the picture and bring them here immediately.”

  “Right,” I said looking at a well-built redhead who hurried by, in bizarre costume, reading a script.

  Adelman went back to his office, and I retrieved my Buick from Anatole Litvak’s parking space. The piston sounded worse as I backed out. My mind was racing ahead, and I almost hit the redhead. Big feathers drapped over her behind bounced as she jumped out of the way and screamed at me.

  “Jerk, you almost killed me,” she shouted. I turned to apologize, but she had already turned away.

  I drove through the gate, waving at Hatch.

  “Good to see you again, Toby,” he called, lifting his ham hand and flashing oversize teeth.

  “My best to Jack Warner,” I shouted back.

  I drove past the golf course across from Warners, where Jack Warner, Sid Adelman and half of the talent at the studio weren’t permitted because they were Jewish.

  It was four in the afternoon. I dropped my car off in a garage near my apartment on Eleventh Street, gave Arnie, the no-necked mechanic eight bucks in advance and told him I’d be back in two hours. He smiled around a stubby cigar, and I went home and changed clothes.

  Twenty minutes later I was at the Y on Hope Street where I paid the last three bucks on my year’s membership and spent fifteen minutes on the track and ten on the small punching bag. Then I got up a handball game with a lean banker named Dana Hodgdon. He was 62 and beat hell out of me every time we played.

  By eight I had my car and ate my first steak in months at Levy’s Grill, downtown on Sprina. Carmen the cashier, a dark and recent widow, gave me a smile when I paid. Everyone was smiling at me. I felt great and invited her to a late movie. Her wide mouth over her ample everything asked for a raincheck, and I said O.K.

  I went back to my apartment, turned on the fan, listened to Gracie Allen tell George Burns about her brother for half an hour, and set the alarm. I stretched out on my unmade bed and dreamed I was Robin Hood. I swung on a chandelier, waving a sword, and speared a photograph out of Basil Rathbone’s hand. I turned my back and was about to get clubbed by a combination of Claude Rains and Sid Adelman when Alan Hale saved my life. I looked down at the photograph and saw that it was me in a compromising position with Carmen the cashier. She was wearing a child’s dress. I woke up. The alarm was ringing.

  I put on my pants, shirt and holster, complete with 38 automatic. In the ten years I had owned the gun, I had never fired it at anyone or wanted to. I seldom loaded it. Some clients expected a private investigator to have a gun and felt disappointed if they didn’t spot one under his jacket. This time I loaded the gun. I didn’t expect trouble. The only thing I had that the blackmailers wanted was an envelope of money, and I fully intended to give it to them. But you never knew what a nervous or stupid criminal might do. Sid Adelman was paying me $400 to be less nervous and a little smarter than the blackmailer.

  The streets were almost deserted. They usually are in Los Angeles. Thousands of people move to the city every week, but it has a lot of space to fill. I went down University and headed toward Figueroa. I pulled up in front of the address Sid had given me. It was one of
a series of spread out, not very big one-story bungalows with small front yards. It was two minutes to two. I checked my flashlight and envelope and let the inside of my arm touch the firmness of my holster through my jacket. It was reassuring.

  There was a “For Sale” sign on the lawn, just barely visible by the street light. The house was dark and silent. All the houses on both sides of the street were dark and silent. I knocked gently. Nothing. I knocked again and this time heard someone move quickly across the room behind the door. The door opened suddenly and a beam of light hit me in the face. I flashed my light back on a dark hood with two round eyes.

  The hooded being, dressed entirely in black, held a gun in one hand and an envelope in the other.

  “Nice night,” I said, reaching slowly in my pocket for the envelope of money. I wanted to hear his voice. He was about my height, maybe a little taller, and not as broad in the shoulders. He said nothing. I shrugged, pulling out the envelope. “Just trying to ease the tension.”

  He carefully took my thick envelope and handed me his thin one. I opened his, put the flashlight under my arm and looked at the photograph and negative. It was Flynn’s face. The girl was on her stomach. He was behind and on top of her. They were both baby naked, and she was looking directly at the camera with a dreamy, distant smile. She looked even younger than I expected, and I could see why Sid was nervous.

  The black hood shuffled. He looked up at me with sudden fear in his eyes and began to raise his gun toward me.

  “Now wait a minute,” I said, taking a step backward. With that step I realized the fear wasn’t directed at me, but the person whose foot I stepped on. Before I could turn, I was pushed forward into the hooded man. We fell in darkness and something hit the back of my head. I tried to hang on to consciousness and the photograph, but both were going fast.

  There was a distant tug at the picture in my hand. I pulled back, but something hit me again, and I started to go out. From far away I thought I heard a shot. Alan Hale, I thought, where are you now that I need you?

  I opened my eyes to almost total darkness. I didn’t know if I were lying or sitting and didn’t much care. The hell with it. Existing was getting damn difficult. I tried to move and felt as if someone had punished me for the effort by driving a rusty spike between my eyes. I could taste the spike. My hand shot up to my head and came back wet with my own blood. My only decent suit and shirt were a mess.

  I figured out that the floor was under my chest. I pushed, but fell over, a balloon swelling in my head. Sitting up was the hardest thing I had done since I told my old man I was quitting college. I tried to think, but someone was groaning so loud and breathing so heavily that I couldn’t. I knew the groaning breather was me.

  My eyes slowly focused for the dim light from the street, and I crawled in the direction where I thought my flashlight had flown. It took me about three weeks to find the flashlight with every effort expanding the balloon in my head. I started to groan again but realized there was no one to feel sorry for me. The flashlight was still working. The beam had no trouble finding the hooded corpse in the middle of the room.

  I reached for my gun. It was gone. My watch said 2:05. A lot had happened in five minutes. My best bet would be to get the hell out of there, but my legs told me it would be slow going. I crawled to the body. He was in a fetal position. I was sure he was dead even before I turned him over and saw that someone had dotted his right eye with a bullet. I pulled the hood off. His eyes were open, and he looked frightened and surprised.

  So was I. The man was Cunningham, Sid Adelman’s assistant, minus his Harold Lloyd glasses and his life. I was a lousy judge of character. He would never make it in the Warner organization.

  Somewhere inside my painful head I knew that the little hole in Cunningham’s head was made by my 38. His gun was still in his hand. I smelled it. It hadn’t been fired. The shot had made noise, and there was a better than even bet that the L.A. police would be coming through the door any second.

  I wiped blood from my eyes and searched the body and around it. No identification. No money. No negative. No photograph. I looked down at my red hand and realized that my fist was closed and I was holding something.

  Toby, I told myself, be a good guy and open your hand. Let’s see what you’ve got.

  It took a few seconds for the request to make it from my brain to the hand, but it opened, and I looked down at the face and vacant eyes of the girl in the picture. I had held on to it when I was hit, and the corner with her face had come off in my hand. I stuffed the fragment of photograph in my pocket and tried to stand. The door was kicked open. If the killer had come back to finish me, he was going to have no trouble.

  Light hit me in the face, and I winced with pain.

  “Don’t move mister,” said a young voice.

  “I can’t move,” I tried to say, but it must have come out sounding like a ten-month old eating cereal.

  Another beam of light searched the room, and I tilted my light up. There were two young Los Angeles cops with flashlights and guns. Their dark ties were neat, and their shields gleamed over their left pockets.

  “I think this one’s dead,” said the young-voiced cop.

  “And I think this one’s drunk,” said the other one helping me up. He was big and had no trouble lifting me with one arm. “He’s hurt too.”

  His hand touched my holster. He reached under my jacket to check.

  “You’ve got troubles mister,” he whispered almost sympathetically.

  You don’t know half of it, I thought.

  One hour later, after a quick trip to Los Angeles County General Hospital where a nervous medical student sewed up my head, I was feeling again. Not really better, but feeling and starting to think. I was sitting with the big cop in a police station, a wide, dirty room. The smell of stale tobacco and human sweat hung over the few desks. An ancient NRA eagle poster peeled off of one dirty wall. The cop looked at me with curiosity and took off his hat to rub his head. For a young man, he had very little hair.

  I said I was sorry for getting blood on his uniform, and he said it was all right.

  A coffee cup was hot in my hand. I sipped, but each sip hurt. Everything hurt.

  “The sergeant says you can make one call before he talks to you, but we’ve got to listen to what you say.”

  “Shouldn’t you be out in your car or on your beat?” I asked.

  “We’re short-handed, vacations. You kill that guy?”

  “No. You believe me?”

  He shrugged.

  Adelman was waiting for my call and a negative, but I had promised to cover for him, the studio and Flynn. I’d screwed everything else up. At least I could do that.

  “No call,” I said. “Just get in touch with Lieutenant Pevsner in Homicide. Tell him I’m here and what happened.”

  “You want Pevsner?” said the young man, unable to believe the request.

  “Yes, please.”

  “Your funeral,” he shrugged again, “but I’m not calling him. The sergeant will have to do it.”

  A few minutes after four I was feeling almost alive again. The big cop had moved with me to Pevsner’s small office. There was barely enough room for the battered desk, a steel file cabinet, two chairs, him and me.

  Pevsner came in, looked at me and then at the big cop, who put his hat back on and started to turn on his friendly smile but thought better of it and left. He did the right thing. Pevsner slammed the door and moved behind the desk glaring at me, a manila folder in his hand.

  He was a little taller than me, a little broader, a little older and developing a slight cop’s gut He had close-cut steely hair and the look of a lunatic who required superhuman effort to hold in his rage. The last time I had seen that look was when I went with him to the Louis-Roper fight in Wrigley Field a year earlier. Joe Louis had kayoed Jack Roper in the first. Phil Pevsner had felt cheated and angry. His tie was dangling loosely around his neck.

  “You look like a pile of crap,”
Pevsner said.

  “How are Ruth and the kids?”

  “You have a phone in that tin office of yours,” he said. “You know my number. This is no goddamn time to ask me about my family. Did you shoot that guy?”

  “No.”

  “Where’s your gun?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “What were you doing in that house, and how did you get your head bashed?” He looked up from the report in front of him.

  “I got a call early in the evening,” I said trying to sound sincere. “Some guy said he had a job for me, guard for some truckers’ union official who was getting threats. The guy said the union man was hiding at the house, and I should come there at two in the morning.”

  “Why two in the morning?”

  “I don’t know,” I said wearily. “Maybe someone was following him.”

  “So?”

  “So, I went to the house at two. Someone opened the door and used my head for batting practice.”

  “You see anyone?”

  “Too dark.”

  “You know the guy who was killed?”

  “No.”

  “Toby,” Pevsner sighed and pursed his lips, “You are one shitty liar. Who are you covering for?”

  “Errol Flynn,” I said.

  Pevsner stood up in a rage, his hands going red and then white as they clasped the edge of the desk.

  “Cut that wise-ass crap, Toby, or you’re going to catch a phone book in the face.”

  I put my two hands up, palms toward him. I knew from experience that he meant it.

  “Phil, I’ve had enough for one night. I know you can give me more. I didn’t kill that guy.”

  “Shit,” Pevsner answered, throwing the folder on the desk.

  “Did you find my gun?”

  No answer.

  “Come on, Phil. What did I do, shoot that guy, bury my gun, beat myself over the back of the head and sit around waiting for the cops?”

  “Toby, I know when you’re lying. Your story is full of holes, and the holes are plugged with horse shit.”

  “Are you going to book me, Phil?”

  “Not yet. Get the hell out of here. When I find out who that dead man is, we’re going to have another talk.”