He Done Her Wrong tp-8

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Campbell rapped his cane on the table and stood.

  “I suggest that when next we meet, we have a Sherlockian quiz prepared by our current president and that the winner of that quiz have his dinner paid for.”

  “Or her dinner,” came a powerful rasp.

  “As the case may be,” conceded Campbell, sitting with a smirk that indicated clearly who he expected to win the quiz.

  “Sounds like a fine idea,” agreed Lachtman, looking around for support. Margaritte turned her head away. Meanwhile, Aardvark’s head was sinking dangerously close to the pool of melted sherbet. I nudged him, and he roused himself into something that resembled being awake.

  “Settled,” said Lachtman. “I’ll prepare the quiz. And that’s it for tonight. I’m glad you could all-”

  Campbell was already up and had turned his back to address a group at another table before Lachtman could finish his goodbye.

  With the possible exception of Campbell, who didn’t seem to be a particularly good suspect, no one in the room really resembled the one who had tried to kill me two days earlier at Mae West’s party, but then again it was hard to know. The person might well be a woman, though there were some reasons to think it wasn’t.

  With the opportunity for the deerstalker gone till the next meeting, Lachtman turned to me.

  “Thank you for coming to speak to us tonight, Mr. Pastor. We’ve all learned a great deal about how a detective works.”

  His words and the response of the group had made it clear that they really didn’t care how a real detective worked and that I had, as many times before in my battered life, disappointed people who expected more from me.

  Margaritte Lachtman moved to her husband’s side as the crowd aimed for the door.

  “It was fun,” I lied. “Was this the entire group or were there some members who couldn’t make it?”

  “Everyone was here,” Lachtman said, looking at his wife for confirmation. She didn’t confirm.

  “Ressner,” she corrected. “Jeffrey Ressner.”

  “Yes, oh yes, Mr. Ressner,” Lachtman remembered, with a look on his face that reminded me of the time my brother had slipped me a worm at a Saturday matinee when I had asked for the popcorn.

  “What about Mr. Reesner?” I said with a small smile.

  “He hasn’t come in several years, though he called yesterday and said he was back,” said Lachtman, looking at the door. “He knows the Canon well and many other things, but-”

  “He is a bit difficult, or was in the past,” completed Margaritte, handing Lachtman his shopping bag.

  “Maybe it’s just too far for him to come,” I tried.

  “He doesn’t live that far, no farther than some members, somewhere in the valley with his daughter,” he said.

  That was as far as I could push. I should be able to find a Jeffrey Ressner in the valley phone books. Of course he might be living with a daughter under her name, and she might have a married name, and Lachtman would surely have an address for him, and I might have to come back and get it, but for now I had a lead.

  “It was good to meet you, Mr. Peters,” said Margaritte Lachtman, extending her hand. Maybe it was one Pepsi too many and an overload of caloric energy, but her hand felt like Anne’s and I didn’t want to let it go. She pulled away and moved toward Alvin Aardvark, who had passed out at the main table. Busboys and waiters were clearing up around him as I moved to leave.

  In the next room the salesmen masquerading as politicians were laughing, probably at the jokes of their boss. I didn’t laugh when Campbell swooped in front of me as I took a step into the hall.

  “You were asking about Jeffrey Ressner,” he said.

  I shrugged. “Not particularly.”

  “You were asking,” he insisted, pointing his cane at me. I considered taking it from him and playing a few Krupa tunes on his head. “I suggest you stay away from him. He is more dangerous than Lethal and Lightning.”

  “Lethal and Lightning?”

  “Yesterday at San Quentin,” he said softly between the peals of next-door laughter, “Robert S. James was hanged. He was a barber convicted of killing pregnant Mary Bush James, his wife, for twenty-one thousand dollars insurance. He drowned her after failing to kill her by forcing her to put her feet into a box that contained two rented rattlesnakes named Lethal and Lightning. A tale worthy of the master himself.”

  “I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

  With that Campbell made a move intended, I think, to give the impression that he had disappeared into the shadows behind a potted palm. Instead, he tripped over the scurrying, chunky little beagle of a waiter and fell with his cane clattering and his hand grabbing for fronds.

  “Drunken fart,” mumbled the waiter, hurrying on.

  I tried to pretend that I hadn’t seen Campbell’s failed exit and headed for the door and home.

  CHAPTER 3

  Dinah Shore sang “One Dozen Roses” to me as I drove to my office in the Farraday Building the next morning. I took Melrose to Vermont and cut across at Ninth. The news tried to come on and tell me about the Russian front and to remind me that they were going to draft 1Bs, but I wouldn’t listen. I turned the radio off as I pulled into the alley off Hoover, where I usually parked between garbage cans and piles of soggy newspapers. The newspapers were gone. Kids had grabbed them up on red wagons and carted them off to school paper drives.

  There were no downtown bums sleeping it off at the back door, and the world inside the dark coolness of the Farraday Building was (as I always remembered it) filled with the smell of Lysol, faint echoes, and the distant clicking of machines including typewriters, the mildly porno press on the third floor, and an out-of-tune piano.

  My back, which would have qualified me as 4F even if I weren’t too old and didn’t have too many dents in my cranium and the red kiss of two bullet wounds in my gut, was giving me warnings. Soaking in rain and a cold pool had done me no good. So I moved slowly and quietly. Somewhere in the depths of cracked marble and pebble glass office windows Jeremy Butler lurked, cleaning and rhyming. If he spotted me moving slowly, he’d insist on working on my back. His manipulations always gave me relief, but the immediate pain of his knee in my back and his hairy arms around my chest was sought only in the most extreme emergencies. I had no emergency.

  My plan, as I walked the wide fake marble stairs upward toward the fourth floor, was to track down Ressner or whoever the extortionist was and turn him over to the cops before he went for Mae West again or made a move at me for messing up his scam. I hadn’t liked the cracked voice behind all that makeup and I didn’t look forward to opening my front door one day and finding Ressner disguised at Rita Hayworth with a gun in his hand.

  On the second floor I paused to give my back a rest and heard the echo of footsteps below and the opening of the elevator door. It was a newcomer to the Farraday Building. Only newcomers or the terminally ill rode the elevator, an ornate brass cage that gave the illusion it wasn’t moving at all, that the building was slowly sinking around it. Usually it stalled by the second floor, and the rider had to force the metal door open and walk the rest of the way. Bad back and all, I was sure I’d beat the elevator to four, for it was going that far, with enough time to spare for a cup of Shelly Minck’s caramel thick coffee.

  Somewhere in the deck of offices on two, a groan rattled the glass of an unseen door. My guess was that it came from the offices of the Bookends of Jesus, a recent Farraday tenant run by twin grinners with white hair and Iowa accents. Jeremy had said that they had nothing in their office but heavy cartons and a telephone, which made them among the more stable occupants of the Farraday.

  My favorite tenant, however, was Alice Palice, who in the farthest corner of the third floor ran Artistic Books, an economical operation consisting of one small porno printing press weighing 250 pounds, considerably less than Alice, who frequently had to hoist the machine on her shoulder and run like hell when a complaint came. I think Alice had designs on Jeremy, th
e only creature in greater Los Angeles who could lift both Alice and her nonportable press.

  When I hit four, the elevator was far below and making a familiar weary metal sound.

  Bookies, alcoholic doctors, baby photographers with thick glasses, and con artists on the way down paced and called behind their glass cages as I went up one more flight in the Farraday. In the building across the street the same thing was happening. I imagined a world of multiplied Farraday Buildings teeming with mildew and the last gasp of false energy. I wondered how many of the people in these buildings were 1Bs. Maybe the Bookends of Jesus were both 1Bs and could be stuffed flatfooted and nearsighted into uniforms and shipped off to General MacArthur to plug a leak in the Pacific.

  In front of my office door I paused and read the familiar sign in black letters on the pebbled glass:

  SHELDON P. MINCK, D.D.S., S.D.

  DENTIST

  If you looked, you could see through the swatch of white paint that the words Oral Surgeon had been covered over. Shelly had reluctantly blotted them out after a visit from a not-very-friendly representative of the dental association.

  In much smaller letters below this was:

  TOBY PETERS

  PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

  I went in. The small reception room was as it always had been: three wooden chairs, small table with an overflowing ashtray, copies of magazines going back to the Jazz Age, and a dusty pharmaceutical house drawing of a tooth. I went through the room to Shelly’s dental office, where he was singing “Bye Bye Blackbird” as he worked on a kid in uniform. The kid was sitting at attention.

  “Be with you in a min-oot,” bellowed Shelly, waving a bloody swab in my general direction.

  “It’s me,” I said, stepping up to look at the kid, whose eyes were glistening with tears of pain he just barely controlled. He was, I guessed, about ten years old. Almost all soldiers, sailors, and marines looked as if they were ten years old, but with 1Bs being called up, maybe that would change. The armed forces would look like a convention of pops and sons, hand in hand, skipping up on the Nazis and Japs.

  “Toby,” Shelly said, turning to me to squint through his ever-sagging thick glasses. He removed his cigar from his mouth, which let me think he had something serious to say, wiped the bloody swab on his once-white smock, and went on. “Been waiting for you.”

  “Thanks,” I said, heading for the coffeepot. There was enough in it for one last cup. I poured it into an almost-clean brown cup and waited. Log Cabin syrup in the little metal cabin poured faster.

  “Working on this boy for practically nothing,” Shelly said proudly, rubbing his sweaty bald head with his sleeve. “Mean breaks on the bicuspids.” Shelly reached for the kid’s mouth, and the kid shrank back, but there was no place to go. “Got in a fight. You know? Big night in the big city.”

  “I thought the army had its own dentists,” I said, trying to remove my sugar spoon from the coffee.

  “They do, they do,” Shelly agreed, putting a plump and not-too-clean hand on the boy’s shoulder, “But Private Bayer here didn’t want to get into any trouble.” Shelly shot us both a wink of dark conspiracy. “And I’m only too happy to help our boys in blue.”

  “He’s a soldier, not a sailor,” I said, chewing on a mouthful of coffee. I put the cup down in the sink, which was already filled with used dental tools and a plate smeared with something red, probably Shelly’s strawberry breakfast roll.

  The kid tried to swallow and smile back at Shelly, who looked down at him benevolently.

  “If that’s his pleasure,” I said, looking at the kid.

  “Sure it is,” grinned Shelly, searching for something in the stack of instruments on the little table. The kid’s eyes opened wide and carried the prayer that whatever Shelly came up with it wouldn’t be sharp and more than six inches long. Shelly didn’t find what he wanted, so he moved next to me and looked in the sink. Below a stainless-steel pan with egg stains on it he found what he was searching for. It was sharp, or had been once, and maybe less than six inches long. The kid groaned. Shelly washed the instrument under the cold water and leaned toward me, smelling of stale cigar and mint Life Savers.

  “Client,” he whispered.

  “You mean someone called?” I whispered back.

  The kid in the chair leaned forward, straining to hear us. Maybe we were consulting on his case, life, and future.

  “No,” whispered Shelly coming even closer. “In your office, now. Clean suit. Been waiting almost an hour. Guy was here when I opened up.”

  I took off my hat, clenched my fist at the kid to encourage him, and took the three steps to my office as Shelly went to work with the weapon in hand.

  Clients almost never came to my office. I discouraged it. When someone called, I usually went to him or her or arranged to meet at the drugstore at the corner or Manny’s taco stand on Flower Street, depending on how high-class the potential client was. This guy was a little hard to place. He looked up at me from the papers on his lap as I closed the door.

  “Peters,” I said.

  He put the papers into his briefcase, stood, and held out his hand. I took it. His shake was firm and his eyes on mine.

  “Winning, Dr. Robert Winning,” he said. Winning was about five ten, average build, and well but conservatively dressed in a dark suit, white shirt, and dark blue tie with thin angular stripes of a slightly lighter blue. The lighter blue matched his eyes. I guessed he was somewhere in his fifties. His hair was dark brown without a touch of gray, and his skin had that smooth clearness that comes with heredity or illness. He sat straight and watched as I moved behind my desk, unbuttoned my own blue jacket carefully to keep the button that was on its last thread from falling off, and looked at him.

  “I’m looking for a man and I want you to help me find him,” Winning said. His voice was calm like a radio announcer’s. “His name is Jeffrey Ressner.”

  There are coincidences in the world and there is magic. I believe in both, but only after all other explanations have been exhausted. My eyes must have showed something because Winning smiled.

  “I know,” he said. “I’ve been trying to find Ressner for a week. I checked some of his old known contacts and talked this morning to Howard Lachtman, of the Engineer’s Thumbs. He told me that you had asked about Ressner, and he gave me your address. I decided that it would be best if I could discover why you are seeking Ressner and to enlist your aid in that effort.”

  I glanced down at my mail. There were three items. One was a postcard from a clothing store in Van Nuys announcing spring wardrobe suggestions. The second was an official-looking letter with a government return address. It looked like one of the notices to register for ration cards. I threw it in the trash can under my desk. The other mail was a square envelope. I recognized the writing and wanted to open it, but I had business. Instead I picked it up and played with it as I talked.

  “Why do you want Ressner?” I asked.

  Winning pulled some papers from his briefcase, glanced at them, and looked at me.

  “I’m a psychiatrist,” he said softly. “Head of the Winning Institute near Clovis, just beyond Fresno. Mr. Ressner, until April fifteenth of this year, was a patient in our institute and had been for more than four years. He escaped dressed rather ingeniously as a nurse.”

  “What was he in for?” I asked trying not to look at the envelope, which had definitely been addressed by my ex-wife, Anne.

  Winning blew out a little puff of air and shook his head. He could either make this long or short, and I had the feeling that he had given the long version before.

  “Simply put,” he began, “Jeffrey Ressner is obsessed with famous people. He believes that fame was denied him as a young man when he had a promising acting career. In fact, he seems to have been a reasonably competent and perhaps even gifted actor, but as you know, talent is not always enough. He began to harass movie producers, actors, directors, and others for jobs, and the police were called in several times. It grew i
ncreasingly worse to the point where his wife and daughter left him. Subsequently, both the wife and daughter showed some understanding and agreed to have him taken in for treatment. Fortunately, Ressner’s wife had since remarried someone with considerable financial resources.”

  “How bad was he?”

  “Nothing terrible, really,” sighed Winning. “A few situations in which he had to be removed by the police from Cecil B. De Mille’s house. One confrontation with Joe Louis.”

  “Joe Louis? What did he have-”

  “That was never quite clear to us,” Winning said, showing a trace of puzzlement. “Ressner said something about Joe Louis as a performer of … but it wasn’t clear.”

  “Mae West,” I said.

  “What?” he gasped.

  “Has Ressner ever had any contact with Mae West?” I said.

  “You surprised me with that,” he said. “Miss West appeared at the institute last year. She is very interested in the problems of the mentally ill, among other things. Ressner met her and tried to talk to her. We had to pull him away. He grew more and more animated, insisting that she could help his career. How did you know …?”

  “I think he contacted her,” I explained, starting to tear the corner off the envelope. “Bad scene at her place night before last, Dr. Winning. I think your Mr. Ressner is dangerous. I think you should call in the cops.”

  Winning’s already pale face grew even more pale.

  “No, no. Not if it can be helped. He’s never done anything really violent and the embarrassment to the institute, his family, our … I’d rather avoid it if at all possible.”

  “He tried to turn me into diced ham,” I said, inserting my finger under the letter flap.

  “Mr. Peters,” Winning stood, leaning both hands on my desk. It put him above me, looking down, which might have worked on difficult patients or their relatives, but only resulted in my turning a near smirk in his direction. “Our institute does some fine work. One of our new patients, for example, should the family so decide, will be Kermit Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt’s son. It can do us no good to have the police brought in followed by the newspapers talking about escaped lunatics and … you can see my point.”