The Howard Hughes Affair: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Four)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  The smiler, I decided, was Bugsy Siegel. He was a well-built man with a prominent nose which had taken a break and veered to the left. His dark hair was parted evenly on the left and was receding slightly. His suit was dark and his tie blue. He had a neat handkerchief in his pocket. I suddenly recognized his face.

  “You Peters?” said Siegel, getting up and letting the smile drop slightly. The touch of Brooklyn was still in his voice.

  “Yeah,” I said.

  “I know you from somewhere,” he said suspiciously.

  “The YMCA,” I said.

  He snapped his fingers and looked at the ape next to him. The ape was sweating and didn’t respond.

  “Right,” Siegel said easing up, “you work out there too. We never really met.”

  “Right,” I said with a smile at my fellow Y member. I had seen him working out occasionally at the Y for the last few years. We never talked and I hadn’t known who he was—the two guys who watched him while he worked out didn’t promote friendliness. The guy I recognized as Siegel did a lot of running and swimming, and I had seen him boxing a few times.

  “You’re not here to challenge me to four or five rounds, are you?” he said amiably, looking at the ape to appeciate his joke. The ape did so with a small smile. I appreciated his joke too.

  “No challenge of any kind,” I said. “I need some help. I told you on the phone I’m working for Howard Hughes. On the night of the party you went to at his house in Mirador, someone tried to steal Hughes’ plans for some important military weapons.”

  Siegel got up quickly from behind his desk. Ape didn’t move. Siegel’s smile was gone.

  “Wait,” I said quickly. “I came here for your help. I’m not accusing you of anything.”

  Siegel nodded cautiously for me to continue.

  “At first I wasn’t sure if someone had actually tried to steal anything that night,” I said, looking at him and trying not to blink and look nervous. “But last night a guy named Frye tried to kill me to stop the investigation and got himself strangled. And this afternoon Major Barton, who was at the party, caught two bullets in his heart before he could tell me anything.”

  “I didn’t like Barton,” said Siegel. “You know why I didn’t like him?” I said I didn’t know and Siegel went on, “Because he knew who I was and said something that didn’t please me. He had a few too many belts, of booze in him and said things people shouldn’t say.”

  “That won’t do you any good if the cops start putting things together and find out you knew him,” I said, to keep Siegel talking. “They’ve got reasons for trying to nail you, and you’ve got one indictment on your head now.”

  “You know a lot about my business,” Siegel said suspiciously, coming around the desk and stepping toward me. The ape didn’t move a muscle, just stood there, sweating.

  “Not enough to get me in trouble,” I said quickly. “My only interest is in finding out who tried to get those plans and, maybe, who put away two people in the last eighteen hours. They’re probably the same person and they’re probably up to something that won’t be good for this country.”

  I hoped patriotism would move Siegel or at least back him away from suspicion toward me. It did.

  This country has given me some rough times,” he said. “But it’s given me a lot too.”

  You mean you’ve taken a lot, I thought to myself, resisting the almost overwhelming urge to say it aloud. I was proud of my restraint.

  “You know what that Hitler bastard is doing to Jews?” he said.

  I said I had some idea, and he said I didn’t.

  “If there’s a war,” he said earnestly, “I’m going to do what I can to help beat Hitler. I was going to tell Hughes that, but his party broke up early and I never got the chance. You can tell him for me.”

  “I will,” I said. “Now about Major Barton.…”

  “If the cops try to hang that on me, they’ll be wasting their time. I didn’t do it. In my business, we only kill each other.”

  Siegel calmed himself by taking a deep breath and looking at his well-scrubbed hands. Then he answered the phone that was ringing on his desk. He listened for a few seconds. “Carbo? All right,” he turned to me. “I’ve got to go downstairs for a few minutes. Talk to Jerry and make yourself a drink if you want.” Siegel went out the same door I had come through. I looked at the ape named Jerry and he looked at me. I moved to a chair in the corner and sat down.

  “Worked for Mr. Siegel long?” I tried.

  “A month,” Jerry said in a surprisingly high voice. “And I don’t work for him the way you think. I’m a teacher, ballroom dancing.”

  I started to smile at Jerry’s joke and held back the smile because he wasn’t smiling back. I also realized that the reason the furniture was in a corner and Jerry was sweating might give some support to his crazy tale.

  “No kidding?” I said.

  “I like dancing,” Jerry said defiantly, taking a step toward me.

  “So do I,” I said, hoping he wasn’t going to ask me to dance.

  “I know what you’re thinking,” Jerry said. “You’re thinking a guy that spends most of his time fox trotting, waltzing, rhumbaing must be some kind of a fairy, right?”

  “No, never entered my mind.”

  Jerry’s move toward me wasn’t exactly ungraceful.

  “I can clean and jerk two fifty,” he said. “I’m in a baseball league that plays two nights a week, year around.”

  I wondered what position he played but didn’t have time to ask.

  “You think you can do that?” he said. “You think a fairy can lift two fifty and play baseball?”

  I couldn’t see any reason why not, but I said I saw his point.

  “People think a dance teacher walks around on his tiptoes and has a limp wrist,” he went on. “Nobody thinks Fred Astaire is a fairy.”

  I didn’t know and didn’t care, but I told him he was right. At that point Siegel returned with Miss Show Business behind him. Her coat was gone, and she spangled and glittered like a dime store.

  “Peters, this is Verna,” Siegel said. “She’s in the lounge show. I’m taking a few dance lessons, advanced stuff from Jerry, and Verna’s helping out.”

  “Pleased to meet you, Verna,” I said, wondering what I had wandered into.

  “Listen,” Siegel said, coming over to me, “I’ve got big friends in this town. I know a Countess, a real one, society people, show business, you know. If I can help, let me know. Anything I can do. I didn’t see anything at Hughes’ that night. I don’t know anything. If you want me to, I’ll ask some questions, but I don’t think this is exactly the kind of thing my people would know about. Know what I mean?”

  I said I knew, and he put a hand on my shoulder to guide me out. He stopped at the office door, looked back at Verna and Jerry at the other side of the room. Jerry was demonstrating a step to Verna, who was having trouble understanding.

  “You look like an honest guy, Peters,” Siegel whispered. “Tell me. You think I’m losing my hair?”

  I looked at his hair, and he looked like he was losing it. I said no he wasn’t losing it and I wished I had as fine a crop as he. Siegel patted my shoulder, smiled and opened the door. I walked out and shared the small hallway with the guy who had gone over me for the gun.

  “Remember,” said Siegel. “You need help—you know where to come.”

  “Right,” I said. “Thanks.”

  The door closed, and I eased my way past the muscle and went down the stairs, feeling his eyes on me.

  My father’s watch told me it was two-forty-five. My body told me time was running out, and the doorman of the Hollywood Lounge told me it was almost 7:30. I decided to believe the doorman. I had four and a half hours till my meeting with Hughes, and I decided to spend a few of those hours at the Y, urging my body toward a few more years of abuse. The sky rumbled a rain warning.

  I drove to the Y on Hope Street, showed my card to the night man, and went down the sta
irs to the locker room.

  The locker door bounced, banged and vibrated, adding a familiar sound to the equally familiar smell of sweat, chlorine and urine and the sight of peeling walls, narrow wooden benches and bare 40-watt bulbs. It was a comforting jazz of light and sound for a confused Toby Peters. I absorbed it with all of my still intact senses as I hung my jacket on the hook and began to take off my shirt.

  The sound of running shower water off in the shower room echoed with indistinguishable voices as I slowly undressed and changed into shorts, T-shirt, jock, socks and shoes. A dozen lockers down, a tall kid with sloping shoulders sat in a wringing wet T-shirt and panted heavily. The kid pushed his moist hair back but seemed too tired to reach up and open his locker. I adjusted my soiled supporter, frayed from overwashing in the sink. My shorts were slightly torn at the crotch, my T-shirt was crumpled, sweat-dry and a little stiff, and my gym shoes were worn tennis-flat and giving away at the seams. I savored my socks. They were new, soft and absorbant.

  I took a last look at the tall kid and moved down the row of lockers toward the stairs leading to the gym. I was aware of moving, shuffling bodies even before I got to the gym floor. When I came up from the stairway darkness, I faced a volleyball game with five people on each side, all men. The server was a stocky young guy with a white shirt. I turned away from them and headed far the light bag in the corner. I banged away on it for about ten minutes with my handball gloves, softening the gloves and working up a slight sweat. Leaving the plop of the volleyball behind me, I went up the stairs and did a mile on the track.

  I was feeling good and not thinking. I made my way to the handball courts and struck it lucky. Dana Hodgdon, a proctologist who was about sixty, was alone on a court. He was a thin guy with white hair which he kept out of his eyes by wearing a sweat band on his forehead.

  He was already dripping with sweat when I knocked at the door and asked if he wanted a game. He said sure and after I got a few whacks at the ball, he served. My palms started to swell as they always did. I was feeling great and only lost the first game 21–14. My legs felt good, and my hands were in control of the ball. Some days everything felt right, and I could put the ball where I wanted it. Other days, I could strain and concentrate, relax and forget, change my style and still blow easy shots. In four years of playing, I had only beaten Doc Hodgdon twice. Both games were on the same day and I just barely won. Then he disappeared for a month. When he came back he explained that he had played that day with double pneumonia and a temperature of 102.

  Hodgdon played the angles and never moved more than he had to. He played it smart. I played it frenzied and ran myself into exhaustion. I sometimes wondered what was in it for him to play against me, since I was the only one who got a lot of exercise and had anything to gain from a victory.

  With my mind pleasantly blank, I went for a low shot and hit the wall head on. It had happened before, but that didn’t make it any better.

  Flat on my back on the cool wooden floor, my eyes looked up at the open space high on the rear wall of the court, where people could watch the game or wait their turn. The face of a skeleton looked down at me, attached to a lean, powerful, dark-suited body. I tried to sit up but fell back, dazed.

  “How you feeling?” Doc Hodgdon asked, helping me up. I had trouble standing, and Doc helped me off the court and down to the locker room, where I surveyed the damage to my forehead in a shower room mirror. It was slightly swollen, matching the lump on the back of my head. My eyes looked bewildered. Reflected in the mirror, I could see Doc Hodgdon bouncing his handball.

  “It feels all right,” I said, running cold water into my cupped hands. I brought my face down to the hands.

  “Sure you’re O.K.?” asked Doc.

  “Fine. All right. Go on back, I think I’ll call it a night, Doc. Thanks for the game,”

  Doc turned, and as I examined myself in the mirror again, I saw him pull off his sweat-stained shirt and watched the crescent-shaped scar low on his back disappear as he left the shower room. The rushing sound of water soothed my eyes, and the smell of sweat satisfied my senses—the compensations of a wounded athlete.

  I took my T-shirt off carefully to avoid the sudden dizziness that might drop me to the floor, and was about to move to the showers when I decided to take a last look at my head. The mirror had clouded with steam, and as I wiped it clean I saw the image of the cadaverous man who had been in the gallery over the handball court. His arms were folded and he stared at me with a slight smile.

  I tried to ignore him, but a shudder ran through me as if an ice cream cone had touched my bare flesh. I hurried to the shower, where I stood slump-shouldered, letting warm soothing water hit my many scars. More alert, but still heavy-legged, I picked up my shoes, jock, socks and shoes and returned to my locker, where I pulled out my towel and began to dry myself. I dressed slowly, and as I finished I sensed someone behind me. Before I turned, I knew it was the cadaverous man with the deep, dark eyes. He was about five feet away, and I glanced at him. He was wearing a dark suit with no tie. He was over six feet tall. He was nearly bald, and the cadaverous impression of his face was partly a result of this and partly his sunken eyes and a nose smashed almost as. flat as my own. The man leaned against a locker, his arms folded, and spoke in a whisper. I didn’t like the German accent.

  “Please come with me quietly.”

  It was more than a request and I tried to figure the man. Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with the Hughes case and the two bodies. Maybe he was a determined homosexual, a strong-arm thief, or simply a lunatic who liked scaring people. The neighborhood around the Y was a grab bag of slums and wealth, sanity and insanity. My eyes took in the locker room. It was empty. I turned to stand face to face with the man. A bench stood between us.

  “What’s up?” I said, stalling until I could think of something to do.

  “Nothing,” said the man. “We simply want to talk to you quietly about the events of the last day or so.” I looked around for the rest of the “we” and saw no one till the man in black allowed his jacket to open enough to show an equally black holster with a large gun.

  I devised a brilliant plan on the spot and threw my gym clothes in the guy’s face. Shoes, shorts, handball gloves, a lock and a roll of tape hit him, and I turned and ran along the edge of the lockers down two rows. I stopped, looking and listening for possible help. My heart was doing a rhumba that Jerry the dancer would have been proud of.

  I could hear the cadaverous man coming down the other aisle. One of the tall lockers near me was partly open. It was narrow, but by ducking slightly and pulling my shoulders together, I squeezed in and pulled the door closed. The metal locker floor gave slightly under my weight.

  My pursuer stopped and listened. Footsteps raced around the row of lockers, and I knew the man had heard the locker close. I held my breath as I listened to him make his way down, opening lockers one at a time. Through the slit in the locker door, I watched the man work his way toward me. I had no more than a few seconds before the skeleton with the gun would open the door.

  I waited till he was outside my locker and then pushed on the door as hard as I could. Both the door and my body hit the man, sending him backwards over the wooden bench. I was definitely not working myself into his good graces.

  I scrambled up and ran through a fire exit in the corner. No one was outside as I headed for the mesh fence that surrounded the tennis courts behind the gym. A drizzle had started. The courts were empty and still wet from yesterday’s rain. I leaped for the fence, clinging as my feet missed the links and dropped to the asphalt court surface just as the man arrived behind me. Instead of following over the fence, he raced for the entrance to the courts about thirty yards away. It was the only way out, and I was too tired to beat him to it. I thought of going back over the fence and turned to give it a hell of a try, but going over the first time on top of my workout had taken too much out of me. Ten years earlier, I would have made it. I was almost to the top on pure
stubbornness when I felt the pull at my leg. I looked around in the drizzle for someone to call, but there was no one in sight.

  I tumbled back into the court and fell into a shallow puddle. The man hovered over me looking casually toward the Y and the street, as if he were enjoying an outing on a clear day. He was smiling a friendly smile as he helped me up and brushed water from my clothes. He kept one hand on his gun under his jacket and I was convinced he could get it out quickly. I didn’t like his smile.

  “Very quietly,” he whispered. “Move very slowly and ask no questions.”

  There was no point in fighting. The man put an arm around my shoulder and led me slowly back toward and around to the front of the Y. We passed a girl with a book over her head to keep off the rain, but I didn’t say anything. There was nothing she could do to help.

  He led me to the big black Caddy that had chased me earlier. The front grill was bent from where it had hit the cab. He opened the back door and motioned me in. I went and he slid next to me. A thick-necked gorilla in the front seat drove off.

  I thought I might catch my breath, regain some strength and go out the door at the first traffic light if there were enough people around. We turned down Pico and came to a red light in about three minutes. I tried to pull the lock button up, but it didn’t move. The man with the skeleton face didn’t even turn his head.

  For a few seconds, I considered that I might be dreaming, that I had suffered a concussion and passed out on the gym floor or in the locker room. Young Doctor Parry had warned me about further blows to the head, and I was already two above the limit. Maybe I was back in Cincinnati and these were friends of Koko the Clown.

  A solid gun in my side convinced me that I wasn’t dreaming and the skeleton man said softly, “Don’t try anything more. And be very quiet.”

  We drove out of the drizzle and through Topanga Canyon. In about fifteen minutes we were in Ventura County, and after another twenty minutes we turned into a driveway in Calabasas. I didn’t like it, especially the fact that I hadn’t been blindfolded. These gentlemen weren’t worried about my seeing where I was being taken, which led me to the conclusion that I might not be coming back from this trip.