Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I thanked him and suggested that he track down Parkman, follow him, keep an eye on him, and let me know if the Three Stooges showed up. Gunther agreed with enthusiasm. I knew he would be on it by dawn, that he would stay in his car with the special built-up pedals a discreet distance behind Parkman at all times. I advised him not to go into Reed’s, just to watch the door. A midget in a gym might be too easy to spot. There was no sixty-five-pound category.

  When Gunther left my room around midnight, I wound my watch and wondered if it was too late to call Carmen the cashier at Levy’s restaurant on Spring. She would be getting off in twenty minutes. My blood was up and I didn’t feel like sleeping. I actually started toward the door to the hall with nickel in my hand. Then I stopped. Something made me feel that a call to Carmen would betray Anne. It was stupid. Anne had promised me nothing, given me no opening, no real hope. She needed a friend. That was all. I should do what I could for her and get back to my own life. She would. Anne always bounced back. I put the nickel back in. my pocket, took off my suit, and sat at my table for another hour working on Mrs. Plant’s manuscript. I read to the end of the chapter and found that:

  Uncle Machen urged the crazy man known as Kyle to accompany him to the mine, but Kyle, who was crazy but not stupid, declined and said that he would rather return to Walter’s Lump and live out his days as a bachelor, to which Uncle Machen said, “Bunk.”

  It was then that Uncle Machen ventured into the mine once again in search of God-knows-what, gold and his brother Albert, who may himself have disappeared in the mine the year before.

  The ways of the Lord and the Doyle family are various and, I am sorry to say, sometimes wicked. Uncle Albert turned up in Juarez some months later, living with a Mexican family engaged in manufacturing cigars of an inferior nature. In the meanwhile, Uncle Machen bad entered the mine never to be seen again. I say never to be seen because it was claimed that he was frequently heard, him or his ghost, singing “Lead Kindly Light” or a bawdy ballad learned in his days as a cleanup boy in the Red Water saloon of New Orleans.

  Such are the travails of the Doyle family.

  Such are the travails, I agreed, putting the manuscript aside and heading for my mattress. Sleeping proved to be a dilemma. I had to stay on my left side to keep my bruised face from touching the pillow. I think it took me all of ten minutes to fall asleep.

  5

  After placing Mrs. Plaut’s chapter gently and quietly in front of her door in the morning, I hurried to my car and drove downtown. I told Arnie the no-neck mechanic to fix the gas gauge and hurried to the office.

  The lobby was empty, the building was echoing and humming, and my cheek was puffy and tender, but I felt good. Even with the twenty bucks Arnie would gouge from me for fixing the gauge I was still well over six hundred bucks. I considered going to the bank and opening an account. It would be the first one I’d had since Anne and I had been married. There had never been much in that account, at least not much that I supplied.

  Shelly had taken the word DISCREET off of the door, but he hadn’t bothered to center the remaining INVESTIGATIONS, so the word sat off to the right under my name, looking as if it were about to fall off the window. Shelly was at work on a patient when I came in. I couldn’t see who he was, but Shelly was strangely silent. With a victim in the chair, Sheldon Minck normally babbled, sang, or hummed away.

  “Any messages, Shel?” I asked.

  He grunted something that sounded negative and stood back from his patient. In the chair sat Lt. Steve Seidman, his mouth open, a white towel around his neck, and a pistol in his lap.

  Shelly looked at me, pleading, his scalp covered with sweat.

  “Hi, Steve,” I said. Seidman nodded, his face more pale than usual.

  Shelly was mouthing something to me, trying to conceal his mime from his patient.

  “What are you trying to say, Shel?” I asked.

  “He’s going to shoot me,” Shelly whispered, his voice dry. He grabbed at his glasses just as they were about to clatter to the floor. “He’s going to shoot me if I don’t fix his teeth right.”

  “Sounds reasonable to me,” I said.

  “That’s not funny, Toby,” Shelly said, moving toward me, a thin, pointed instrument in his hand. “You’ve got to help me. Reason with him for God’s sake.”

  “Okay, Shel,” I said, backing away before he could put a sweaty hand on my no longer new suit. I had brushed it off, but it had picked up dirt from Reed’s gym and the roof outside Parkman’s window and several trips, spills, and plunges in the night. I needed a change of clothes and resolved to put out a few dollars of Joe Louis’s money. “Steve, are you planning to shoot Sheldon if he messes up your teeth again?”

  Seidman nodded affirmatively.

  “He wouldn’t do that,” Shelly said, looking back at Seidman. “He’s a policeman. He wouldn’t shoot someone, a fellow professional, for an honest human error.”

  “I don’t know, Shel,” I said, moving to my door. “He might. And I don’t think performing oral surgery without a certificate falls under the heading of honest human mistakes.”

  Shelly held his hands up to the sky. “What would my father say if he could see this, see what his son is surrounded by?”

  “I don’t know, Shel,” I said sympathetically. “Why don’t we call him and ask him. But didn’t you tell me once he wouldn’t talk to you after you cleaned his teeth in ’sixteen?”

  “I was just starting out then,” Shelly said. “Aren’t you going to help me anymore? Is that all you have to say?”

  “No, I think you’d better get back to work on Lieutentant Seidman and be very, very careful.”

  Seidman was tapping the barrel of his gun against the arm of the chair to attract Shelly’s attention. Shelly turned with resignation back to his patient, and I went into my office, pausing to rinse a white cup that had Welcome to Juarez written on it and pour coffee from the pot near the sink.

  There was no mail on my desk. I placed my Juarez coffee cup down, watched the steam curl from it for a second or two, and pulled out the list of names I had copied from Ralph’s notebook. I also took out my wallet, removed five hundred dollars, and put it in my lower desk drawer, in the pages of a hardcover copy of The Collected Poetry of William Blake. Jeremy had given me the book for my birthday a year ago. I’d never read it, and I couldn’t imagine anyone who might come into my office reading it, at least not the people who might come into my office and go through the drawers.

  Lipparini’s name wasn’t on Ralph’s list, but there was an M. L. Automobile Sales in North Hollywood. I hadn’t thought about it when I had first looked at it; it just seemed like a place where Howard might have picked up a Lincoln or a big Packard. Now the name made sense. I dug out the nickel I had planned on using the night before to call Carmen, dropped it into my pay phone, and dialed the number.

  “M. L. Auto,” a woman’s voice chirped.

  “I’d like to talk to M. L.,” I said.

  “I’m sorry,” she said, sounding as if it was the saddest duty she might have in a lifetime, “but there is no M. L. Would you like to speak to our sales or service manager?”

  “No,” I said, “I want the finance manager, the boss, Mr. Lipparini.”

  “Whom shall I say is calling?” she asked after a pause.

  “Toby Peters,” I said.

  “I don’t think he is in right now, Mr. Peters,” she said.

  “Tell him it’s the guy who danced with his stooges last night.”

  I played with the tip of a pencil, trying to scratch it into a point I could use while I waited. I didn’t have to wait long.

  “Peters?” The voice was deep, the name said languidly.

  “Right,” I said.

  “You’re dead,” he said.

  “You want to hear a corpse talk?” I answered.

  There was no sound on the other side, but the line stayed open. He didn’t hang up. So, I continued.

  “I’ve been through Ralph
Howard’s papers,” I lied magnificently, “and I have evidence that you and he were involved in a deal to fix some fights, that you owned a piece of the fighters Howard supposedly owned on his own. I’m putting things together and I find the possibility that Howard made you unhappy, maybe he couldn’t fix the contracts, or set up an exhibition with Joe Louis, or pay back some money he owed you fast enough, or … It can go on. But suddenly the day before yesterday Howard meets two guys who look suspiciously like a pair of the walking radios you had at Reed’s last night. And Howard is now dead. It wouldn’t look good for you if people I know at the L.A. Times got this.”

  “You can’t …” he began.

  “Collect from a dead man,” we finished in unison, and I went on alone to say, “I know the line. Something happens to me and the envelope of Ralph Howard’s letters and business dealings with you gets mailed to the district attorney by a friend of mine.”

  “No one’s going to hurt you,” he said, taking forever to say it. “You upset Jerry a little last night. He’ll get over it.”

  “And?” I said, pleased that I was no longer a dead man.

  “And,” he went on, “I didn’t have Howard killed. He owed me, yes, he owed me. Maybe I juiced him a little, had someone chase him around in a car on a Saturday night, a nice new Pontiac maybe, but I didn’t have him killed. You know my motto.”

  “Engraved on my cheek,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

  “We’re talking,” he said. “But you talk about me paying you for those Howard papers and we stop talking. I don’t go in anybody’s pocket.”

  “No money,” I said, turning my chair around with a rusty squeal to look out the window. “Information. You think it’s possible a pair of your boys might have gotten overly enthusiastic about their job, accidentally did Ralph Howard in, and then decided not to take the responsibility?”

  “No,” he said simply, and then after a long pause: “They do what I say, no more, no less, or they have a long swim in the ocean.”

  “I’d like to talk to that trio from last night,” I said. “You name the place and I’ll be there.”

  I thought he had gone out for a hot dog. There was nothing on the line for a minute or two and then he said, “Here, half an hour. Come alone. I’ll give you ten minutes, and then I don’t want to hear from you or see you again ever.”

  “Half an hour,” I said and hung up.

  I was five minutes late. No-Neck Arnie had just been putting the finishing touches on my new gas gauge and I had to wait.

  “Putting one of those things in ain’t easy,” he said, wiping his hand and holding it out for payment.

  “It ain’t cheap either,” I answered, shelling out two tens and two singles.

  The gauge worked fine. Arnie had thrown in a full tank of gas and a warning about rationing, which led me to believe that the cost of running my car would be going up.

  M. L. Auto was on Sherman Way just off of Laurel Canyon Drive. It was big and bright with lots of windows and three rows of used cars in the outside lot. The lot and the showroom didn’t seem to be overrun with customers. Two guys who looked like salesmen looked at me when I came through the front door. Then they glanced at each other to see who would get me. Neither seemed eager for the possible sale. Finally, the shorter of the two put his left hand in the pocket of his nicely pressed trousers, touched his bow tie, and ambled toward me past a shiny ’38 Oldsmobile. He wasn’t young and he wasn’t full of car salesman energy. His black hair was brushed back and he had nice heavy bags under his eyes.

  “Hi,” he said, holding his hand out.

  “Hi,” I returned, shaking his hand.

  “My name is Jerry,” he went on. “We’ve got nothing new. Won’t be anything new till the war ends, but we have some good-as-new pre-war models, fully reconditioned, real rubber tires.”

  “I’m here to see Mr. Lipparini,” I said. “I’ve got an appointment and I’m late.”

  Jerry hadn’t been smiling, and he not-smiled even more and took his hand out of his pocket with a bit of respect. “Up the stairs, first door,” he said, pointing to a carpeted flight of wooden stairs against the wall. He returned to his fellow salesman in the corner.

  I found the door at the top of the stairs, knocked, and a woman’s voice told me to come in. The office was carpeted, with wood-paneled walls, pictures of cars, cozy. The blonde behind the desk looked cozy and warm, too. She was about twenty, had on a businesslike green dress and a nice smile, showing white teeth. Leaning against the wall behind her was my old friend Moe. He had changed suits but not dispositions. His arms were folded, but his eyes were aimed at me, which wasn’t too bad. It was the little smile I didn’t like.

  “Mr. Peters?” the blonde said.

  “He’s Peters,” Moe confirmed. She looked at Moe and then back at me, still smiling.

  “Mr. Lipparini has been expecting you,” she went on. “Just knock and go right in.”

  I knocked and went right in.

  Lipparini was seated behind a big black desk. No trouble recognizing him. I knew him from his pictures in the papers. The happy grin under a small nose. The thinning hair combed sideways to make it look like more, but instead making him look like a man who was trying to fool himself. He was about sixty and in reasonably good shape. His gray eyes looked like they belonged in a different face, or else the real Monty Lipparini was wearing a mask and only his real eyes were visible. I didn’t want that mask to come off. I had the feeling that people who saw the real face turned to stone or worse.

  “Peters,” he said, shaking his head. “Hell of a world. Hell of a world.”

  “Hell of a world, Mr. Lipparini,” I agreed, though it didn’t look like such a bad world for him. I tried to ignore Curly and Larry standing to the right of the desk. Larry’s scar looked fleshy and his face puffy, like a little kid who’s just been caught going through the pockets in the coat room.

  “I just heard on the radio the Japs bombed some place called Dutch Harbor in Alaska. Nineteen planes. That’s the first raid on the United States.” He looked genuinely concerned, at least his face did. His eyes were watching me.

  “Pearl Harbor,” I said.

  “Right,” he agreed, standing up and plunging his hands in his pockets. He was wearing a shirt and tie but no jacket. His sleeves were rolled up and ready for work. His arms were dark and hairy. “I mean the first attack on the coast, the continent, America, not some island a million miles away. They hit Alaska and then they hit Seattle or Frisco or Los Angeles. You know what would happen? You remember what happened in February?”

  He looked at me and I nodded. The air-raid sirens had gone off about two o’clock in the morning. I had rolled out of bed to check the windows, and when I saw searchlights aiming into the sky, I’d gone downstairs to join the other tenants of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house. We stood and watched without knowing what was going on. Far away someone was pumping ack-ack rounds at the moon, and an air-raid warden came running down Heliotrope holding his metal pot on his head with one hand and telling us to go in and turn out the lights. It went on like that for two hours, till the sun came up. The next morning the L.A. Times told us foreign bombers had raided Southern California. There was even a report that a plane had been shot down near 185th and Vermont. It turned out that no planes had flown over California or been shot down, though there were casualties. Three people were killed in car crashes when they tried to get out of the city to avoid the oncoming Japanese. Two others had heart attacks. Air-raid wardens went down non-fatally all over the place after running into walls or civilians. The ack-ack had destroyed roofs, lawns, cars, and a Chinese restaurant.

  “Christ.” Lipparini went on pacing behind his desk. “If the Japs really came … You want coffee or something?”

  “No thanks,” I said. Curly and Larry didn’t say anything.

  “I’m trying to be a little friendly here,” Lipparini said. “You called me pushing and I’m trying to make it a little friendly.”

  �
��Coffee would be great,” I said.

  “Okay, that’s better.” He picked up one of the two phones on his desk, pushed a button, and said, “Mr. Peters would like a coffee.… I don’t know. Give him cream and sugar.” He hung up, still standing, gave the two standing men a disgruntled look, and turned his attention back to me.

  “I didn’t have Howard killed,” he said. “I didn’t even have him worked on. I was thinking about it, but I didn’t. And my boys didn’t do it on their own.”

  He looked at Curly and Larry, who didn’t look back.

  “If I found out they did, they’d be swimming for Japan.”

  “I thought you didn’t get rid of people,” I said.

  “I said,” he corrected, “I don’t get rid of people who owe me. If my people spin on me, they owe their skins, and the only way I can collect it is if I take it from their bodies.”

  It was a pleasant image but I didn’t want to dwell on it. I might owe my skin to Monty Lipparini some day. I considered not going on, saying good-bye, and searching for a new suspect. The light might not be as good on the street, but it would be a lot safer. There was a knock at the door and the bouncy blonde came in, smiling at all concerned, and handed me a cup of coffee. I took it, said thanks, and she left. Lipparini watched me. Curly and Larry watched me. I drank some coffee and smiled appreciatively. It was too sweet.

  “How you like it?” Lipparini asked, cocking his head as if my answer was very, very important.

  “Good coffee,” I said, taking another sip. The answer was right. It widened Lipparini’s grin and he pointed to the empty chair in front of his desk. I sat down.

  “I’m going into the coffee business,” he said. “Cars are too damn much trouble during a war. I’ll keep this place going but what the hell, you can’t get parts, tires, gas, cars. But coffee, that I can get. I’ve got a source in Cuba. What you’re drinking there is M. L. coffee. I got a couple of guys working on an ad for the radio. We’re going to be on the Milton Berle Show. M. L. coffee, one sip will make the war seem far away. How do you like it?”