“Phil, if I—”
“We’ve got four bodies, Toby. They’re laying all over the county,” he said too calmly. I could imagine Seidman in front of him, indicating that he should stay calm. “And Steve got the feeling talking to some of Lipparini’s people that they’d like to have a little talk with you.”
“Phil,” I said earnestly. “Lipparini has a bodyguard. I don’t know his name. Looks a little like a blown-up Moe Howard.”
“Genette, Jerry Genette.” He sighed. “He doesn’t look anything like Moe Howard for chrissake. We questioned him. We’re questioning everybody, even George Raft. This case is going to be all over the papers in the morning. Lipparini was rat shit, but he had a name. And by the way, Louis’s lady friend says she never heard of him. I’m pulling him in, too. Get in here.”
“Parkman,” I tried.
“We’re still looking,” Phil answered. “Toby, get your ass in here. Meara wants you for this one. Lipparini’s friends want you. And I want you. You take your choice.”
“I try to find who killed everyone,” I said. “That’s my choice. And don’t pull Louis in yet. I think Louis’s lady friend might have an encounter with the Lord and decide to tell the truth.”
“Get in—” he began and I hung up.
“Got to go,” I said to Anne. “Meara is probably going to be here soon. A lot of people might be here soon. Tell them all whatever they want to hear, that I was here, that I was dressed like the Easter Bunny, the truth.”
“Take care, Tobias Leo Pevsner,” she said. She put down a dish and held her hand out to me. I took it, let it go reluctantly, said “Adiós” to Anjelica just like the Cisco Kid, and got the hell out of there as fast as I could go.
The morning was sunny, warm, and without a breeze. I got into my car and drove down the highway. A black sedan looked as if it might be tailing me, so I pulled into a circular driveway in front of a big beach house. I waved at the guy in shorts and sunglasses who came out to greet me and then pulled back onto the highway. The black sedan was far ahead and moving. Then I drove the last few hundred yards to the house I was looking for.
The house was about half a mile from Anne’s and a little closer to the beach. It was a two-story wooden spider of a beach house built against the jagged hillside and supported by beams sunk into the sand and resting on rock below. A lot of these had been going up lately as Santa Monica became a place where the rich could spend a quiet weekend. The problem with the housing boom was the war. These unsteady sentinels would be the first to go in an invasion, but there were movie stars and people getting rich on selling guns and butter who didn’t seem to worry about it or the possibility of the Pacific rolling over in anger to take the house and part of the hill some night when the water banshees were howling.
I stepped onto the wooden porch and looked down between the boards at the rocky beach twenty feet below. It made me nervous, but I kept going and knocked at the door.
The last two times Brenda Stallings had opened a door for me, I had wound up being seduced and shot by her and getting both of her husbands killed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross this threshold again.
“I’m not married, Peters,” she said. “There’s no one here you can get killed.”
She looked the same—cool, blonde, every hair perfect, her lips red and recently painted, her white dress a towelly material belted with a sash at her thin waist. She didn’t look a minute over twenty-five and couldn’t have been a year under thirty-eight. Brenda had been a wealthy society deb about seventeen years earlier. She had doubled for Harlow and then, after a short, successful film career, she had married a blackmailing actor named Harry Beaumont, who now resided in Roseland Cemetery. Her second husband, Richard Talbott, the star of Captain Daring and others of its ilk, had been knifed over a year ago by a nut I was trailing.
“Before you ask,” she said, “Lynn is in New York and has in fact just married a producer several years older than I am and very interested in having a family in addition to the two he already has by his previous wives.”
“Which means?” I asked, still standing on the porch.
“I may soon be a grandmother,” she said. “Do I look like a grandmother?”
“Do I look like Robert Taylor?” I answered.
“There may be hope for you, Peters,” she said with a twisted smile that didn’t make her look less beautiful. “Come in.”
“No guns,” I said, stepping past her.
“No guns,” she said, showing her hands.
White was her color. Her last two houses had been white on white on white, and this one was no exception. The carpet was white and the walls and furniture in the living room were white with tasteful blond wooden tables. Both of Brenda’s previous husbands were honored by portraits on the wall. They seemed to be looking at each other and wondering what the hell they had done to deserve this.
There was a giant glass door facing the ocean. Beyond the sliding door was a porch and wooden steps leading down to the sand. The door was open, and the sound of rolling sea mixed with beach voices.
“Nice place,” I said.
She shrugged, found a cigarette, lit it with an Oscar that had been turned into a lighter.
“Sand gets into the carpet, sand and salt air,” she said, looking at the floor and then at me. “It looks as if you’ve had your share of sand and salt water in the last year or two.”
“I don’t weather very well,” I said.
She looked at me with curiosity, folded her arms, showing scarlet fingernails, played with her cigarette.
“You want to know why I’m here?” I said with a smile.
“I assumed it wasn’t just to talk about the good old days,” she said, taking a white marble ashtray and wandering to the glass door. The light hit her from behind as she knew it would. It was perfect.
“Joe Louis,” I said.
She laughed and said, “Of course. Are you going to get him maimed? Please try to bear in mind that I’m not married to him.”
“You told the police you didn’t know him,” I reminded her.
“Peters, what would you tell the police in my place? My friends, or the only people I know on an extended basis, would think nothing of my friendship with Joe Louis. However, I don’t want newspapers, magazines, and radio reporters camped on my door, and I don’t want certain people with whom I plan to enter into business to have second thoughts about my viability as a partner.”
She had begun pacing the room and smoking fiercely as she talked, which gave me some hope. I hadn’t been thrown out, and she hadn’t sat or stood calmly lying to me. Something was working at her, and I went for it.
“He’s a decent guy,” I said.
“He rides horses better than either of my two husbands, and he plays better golf than they did,” she said. “And he excels in other areas, too. And you are right. He’s a decent guy.”
“The cops are trying to nail him for a murder down the beach,” I said. I had been leaning against the wall, watching her stalk the room like a Persian cat. She walked nicely, glided across the carpet. “All you have to say is that he was staying with you and had a reason for being here.”
She stopped and stared at me, putting out her cigarette and placing the ashtray on one of the wooden tables.
“Is that all I have to do?” she said, pursing her lips. “That and face the consequences?”
“The police will keep it out of the papers,” I assured her, but she and I knew there was no guarantee of that.
“Shit,” she said and stamped her foot and bit her lower lip. “Shit, shit, shit.”
“And more shit,” I agreed.
“I don’t want to be a grandmother,” she said.
“I don’t want to be an ice fisherman in Alaska,” I said, “but what choice do I have?”
Her shoulders sagged slightly. Everything she did was a pose. I wondered if she practiced in front of a mirror.
“I suppose in a sick kind of way I owe you something, Pete
rs,” she said, turning to me with her hands on her hips. It was the same pose, the same tone, and maybe even close to the same words she had shot at Warren William in It Takes a Lady.
“It Takes a Lady, 1936,” I said.
“God no. It was Vagabond From Genesis, 1934,” she said. “Can’t help it. Too many rehearsals, too many directors. The only place I can be original is in bed. Do you remember?”
“It was a pool house and a deck chair, and you were stalling to keep me from finding your daughter,” I said. “Yes, you were original, but now …”
“I’m stalling,” she said. “Brenda Stallings. All right. Tell your policeman friends I’ll verify that the Brown Bomber, the Detroit Dynamite, the Sepia Socker, the Champ was here because I invited him and all the rest. Do you think I might succeed in bribing the police to keep it quiet?”
“No,” I said. “It would take care of a few of them but not enough to guarantee anything.”
The phone rang, a white phone on the table near the white sofa.
“Then our visit is over?” she said, a trace of weariness touching the corners of her mouth.
“Over,” I agreed between rings.
“You can let yourself out,” she said, stepping toward the phone. “Does your back ever …” she said, pausing with her hand over the phone and looking at me.
“No, just a scar, a nice conversation piece when I show my body off for girls on the beach,” I said.
“As I recall, you had plenty of scars on your body,” she said seductively, falling into her best-known character, Lucinda in Belle of Forever. Then, looking back at the insistent phone, she sighed. “A grandmother.”
I left the room and headed for the door. Behind me I could hear her on the phone,
“Yes,” she said, very businesslike. “I’ve just decided to do it, produce it myself, but as we agreed, only on condition that you direct and I star as both the mother and daughter.”
I wanted to stay around and find out more about the project, but I had my own closets to open. I found a phone inside Schell’s Grill on Wilshire in Santa Monica and called Phil to assure him that Brenda Stallings would be cooperative. He threatened me with vivid but not colorful images of what might happen to my body if I didn’t turn myself in fast. I hung up on him for the second time that morning. My next call was to Jeremy. He didn’t answer. I waited five minutes and called him again. This time he came on.
“I need a place to stay for a few days, Jeremy,” I said. I explained the situation quickly while a woman with a crying little boy hovered behind me, wanting to use the phone.
Jeremy took about five seconds to think and came up with: “I just purchased a court complex. Six one-room apartments in Burbank just off Olive I’m renovating now. No tenants. The units are furnished, though the furniture will have to be changed. It needs work.”
“I’m not fussy,” I said. “Just desperate.”
The woman waiting for the phone picked up her kid to show me how much of a burden he was and to get his weeping closer to my ear. Jeremy gave me the address and concluded by saying, “Apartment number six has a window that won’t lock. You can go through it. I’ll come by to see you before dark with some supplies and books.”
“Thanks, Jeremy,” I said and hung up.
The woman almost hit me with the wailing kid, but I sidestepped like a ranking bantamweight and went for the door.
Twenty minutes later I pulled into the parking space for the Ocean Breeze Apartments in Burbank. It was about a mile or two from Warners and just off Olive. It looked to me as if it were the shame of the neighborhood and needed a lot more than renovation if it was to hold its own with the nearby single-family homes big enough to have brick walls or iron fences.
I climbed over the broken wire mesh put up to keep kids out. Actually it wouldn’t keep any self-respecting nine-year-old out, though it would let them know they weren’t supposed to try. The Ocean Breeze was far enough away from traffic so that it wasn’t likely any bums might find the place and camp in it while Jeremy hammered, cleaned, and attempted to save the crumbling wreck.
The apartments were in a horseshoe around a pond. The pond wasn’t exactly empty. There were a few beer bottles and a mat of decaying grass in it, and a lemon tree gone wild stood on its bank. The lemons were ripe, and a bluebird was chirping on a branch.
Apartment number six was exactly in the middle of the curve of the horseshoe. There were only two windows facing the courtyard. I found the one with the broken lock, climbed in, and opened the front door to let a little light in and a little bad air out. Then I pulled up the shades. The room wasn’t as bad as I had feared. Then again, it wasn’t as good as I had hoped. I had enough cash to change my mind and go to a hotel, but with both the police and the Lipparini mob looking for me even a false name might not be enough.
The furniture in number six wasn’t too dusty but it was old. It looked like it had all been junked from my parents’ living room back in 1927. There was a tiny, dark alcove with a refrigerator. I checked it. It was warm and smelled like mildew. Then I checked the second room. There was a bed, just a spring and mattress, both too soft. There was also a small shower stall in the corner covered by an olive drab canvas curtain. I tried the light switch. No electricity. I tried the shower. The water sputtered and spat out in a brown stream. I let it run until it turned tan and then slightly clear. Having explored the place, I sat on the bed and tried to think about what the hell I was going to do next. The only thing I came up with was a plan to have lunch in a few hours.
I found a dirty glass pitcher in a cupboard next to the refrigerator, rinsed it out, picked five lemons from the tree, and tried to make lemonade. I dragged a wooden chair out into the courtyard and sat drinking warm sugarless lemonade at the dry pond while I pondered who was killing who and why. The only names I could come up with were Jerry Genette, who I still thought fondly of as Moe Howard; Al Parkman; and Anne. I couldn’t think of any reason, at least not a good one, why Genette or Parkman would kill Ralph, Mush, Silvio, and Lipparini, but that didn’t mean they didn’t have reasons. I just didn’t know them. Anne had the best reason, money, but I knew she hadn’t done it. And, of course, it could have been any one of several hundred thousand people. Hell, none of the murders were related, and maybe we were dealing with three different killers. Maybe it was infectious murder, a record-book coincidence.
I don’t know what time Jeremy showed up. I had taken off Ralph’s shirt and jacket and dozed off in the chair in the shade of the lemon tree. When I saw him climbing over the wire mesh, I automatically checked my old man’s watch, which told me it was nine, which it surely was not. Jeremy was wearing a brown windbreaker and carrying a large paper bag.
“You see the possibilities here, Toby,” he said, his well-polished bald pate gleaming in the late afternoon sun. “Some paint, new furnishings, fresh water in the pond and some fish, a few new trees and a new name. What do you think would be a good name? I’ve been considering Fidelia’s Garden:
“As withered weed through cruel winterstine,
That feels the warmth of sunny beam’s reflection
Lifts up his head, that did before decline
And gins to spread his leaf before the fair sunshine.”
“Did you write that or Byron?” I asked, knowing Jeremy’s two favorite poets.
“Edmund Spenser,” he said. “Generally I find him too elusive and pastoral, but he inspires me when I’m faced with a cleanup job like this. Byron is not to be read when one has work to do, but Spenser is fine. I brought you a book.”
He reached into the paper bag and handed me a hardcover copy of As William James Said: A Treasury of His Work.
“Thanks, Jeremy,” I said. “I’d probably be up all night reading it if there were electricity.”
Jeremy’s hand went back into the bag and came out with a metal Army lamp. “I have extra batteries,” he said, patting the bag. “I’ve also brought you a towel, a bit of food, and a newspaper.”
&
nbsp; I got out of my chair, thanked him, and led him into number six.
“How’s the book give-away coming?” I asked politely, putting the paper bag and lamp down on the counter in the alcove.
“Doves of a Winter Night is off to a good start,” Jeremy said. “Alice and I have a meeting with a member of the Whittier school board tomorrow. I’m hoping we can be persuasive.”
If the Whittier school board member was less than seven feet tall and weighed under three hundred, Alice and Jeremy would surely be persuasive.
“Sounds good,” I said.
We talked for about half an hour before Jeremy said he had to leave. He was meeting Alice for a strategy session on how to present their book to the board member.
“One final thing,” he said, walking to the door. “I would like your advice. Max Edelstein, the wrestling promoter, has asked me to come out of retirement for an exhibition to raise money for Armed Forces Relief. He wants me to read a few poems and then go two minutes each with volunteer servicemen. I’m well aware that it is a gimmick. The wrestling doesn’t bother me, but I don’t want my poetry demeaned.”
“Don’t read your own poetry,” I said. “Read some of your favorites.”
“I like that,” he said. “No one would have the temerity to laugh at Lord Byron.”
“Not with you around,” I agreed. “Thanks for the package, Jeremy.”
“Try not to do anything foolish, Toby,” he said. “Each year, each moment we become a little more frail of body and, if we’re fortunate, a little more strong of spirit.”
“I’ll be careful, Jeremy,” I said.
When he was gone, I tested the lamp. It worked. I didn’t plan to sit around reading William James. I had a feeling William was not Frank and Jesse’s brother, but the lamp would be nice to have. I also found soap, a towel, a loaf of bread, a pound of sliced salami, some mustard, and a knife, along with a quart of milk in a paper carton. I didn’t like cartons. The wax kept coming off in the milk. I made a sandwich, washed it down with milk, and switched on the lamp. The sun was going down. I’d wasted the whole damn day with no plan.
Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) Page 13