“Can you hear me?” Melanks asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose. The backs of his fingers had fine gray hairs growing at the knuckles.
“A few members of the staff now believe that the constant reign of terror to your anatomy is causing a building up of resistance by your body. Not that you are immune to damage but that your body has somehow said, ‘What the hell, I can take anything.’ Your skull no longer deserves the anatomical right to be referred to as a skull. We are not quite sure what to call it.”
I tried to sit up and made it to one elbow. I was in a hospital gown.
“The closest thing I have seen to what we are laughingly calling your cranium belonged to a punch-drunk fighter named Ramirez who, when his career was finished, made an occasional fifty cents by battering down doors with his head. Mr. Ramirez was incapable of coherent speech by that time and seemed to think he was a robot. Are you following the allegorical level of my tale, Mr. Peters?”
“If I continue to get hit in the head, my brain will turn to Junket pudding,” I said.
“Your brain is almost certainly pudding by now,” said Dr. Melanks. “I simply want you to sign it over to me on your death. I am sixty-seven and suffering from arthritis, a weak heart, mild sclerosis, and a very poor hereditary profile, but I should outlive you by a comfortable margin.”
He put down the chart, stepped in front of me, lifted my eyelids, shined a little flashlight into them, breathing mint in my face, and stood back.
“I’m not even going to bother to warn you,” he said. “It won’t do any good. I can see that Parry and a number of others have told you of the consequences of your folly. If you can rise, do so. If you can walk, amaze me with the sight. You have two dozen stitches in your head, at the base of your scalp.”
“I can feel them,” I said, sitting up and touching the bandage.
“A good omen,” sighed Melanks. “The whole thing is free of charge, of course, on the condition that you come back here in three days to let me take the stitches out and engage in a bit of anatomical phrenology for the medical students, who should see everything at least once.”
I stood and looked around for my clothes.
“Would you like to go through that door headfirst?” he said wearily. “I could sew you up again. I’ve already missed my dinner and part of my sleep. It would be an education to me in my declining years.”
I had enough of Doc Melanks’s sarcasm. What I needed was some pants before the police dropped in for a chat.
Melanks shook his head one more time and exited with a flourish and a swish of his white coat. He was followed almost immediately by Phil and Steve Seidman.
Phil had shaved since yesterday, and Seidman looked even more pale in the hospital light. Seidman leaned against the door, which he closed behind him, and Phil found a chrome-legged chair to sit on. He looked around the room as if I weren’t there, admiring the table, medicine cabinet, and the poison chart on the wall. Nobody spoke. This went on for about three minutes, when I gave up.
“Ressner killed him,” I said.
This started no general discussion, so I plunged forward, going to the metal cabinet in the corner to search for my clothes. They weren’t there.
“Ressner’s doctor told me he might go after Talbott,” I said. “So I went to Talbott’s house. You can check with Brenda Stallings. You remember her. Flynn case in ’39. She told me Talbott was out with Ressner at the Manhattan. I went there and followed them into the back room. I just followed the trail of blood to the back door and Ressner laid me out.”
“You saw Ressner?” Seidman asked.
“No, but it’s the same setup as the Grayson killing, isn’t it?”
Phil scratched his head and looked at his fingernails.
“I didn’t kill him,” I repeated.
“We don’t think you did,” said Seidman. Phil remained mute. “But this is going to be big news in tomorrow’s paper and on the radio. You better hope the Japs make a run on Corregidor. You’re all we’ve got and Talbott is big news. We’ll throw you to the newspapers so they’ll stay off our tochis for a week or so.”
“Nailing me won’t get you Ressner,” I said. “And he’ll just go after Mae West or De Mille.”
“We’ll put some coverage on them,” said Seidman. “How much chance have you got of turning up Ressner?”
I looked at Phil, who sat in the chrome chair and listened as if he were at a private performance of a new play.
“I’ll have him in twenty-four hours,” I said, having no idea where Ressner might be. Hell, I didn’t even know where my pants were.
“Horseshit,” said Phil finally.
I gave a deep fake sigh and clutched my heart.
“Thank God,” I said. “I thought the newspapers had cut out your heart.”
“No,” said Phil standing and stretching. His belly sagged as he took a step toward me. “Just my tongue. I asked you for a favor. I asked you to protect someone and keep things quiet. That’s supposed to be what you do best. Shit, that’s the only thing you can do. And look at this. A big state land developer and a movie star are dead.”
“People are dying by the hundreds on both sides of the ocean,” I reminded him.
“But I’m not responsible for them,” said Phil, stepping in front of me. I pulled back and he went on. “I’m not going to belt you. What I’m going to do is give you twenty-four hours. Then I’m going to have to haul you in, and you’re going to have to warm your toes in County if you can’t make bond while we try to find Ressner, and Mae West gets dragged into this. You get my drift, brother?”
“Pulsating through my stitches,” I said. “Now if you can get me a pair of pants, I’ll be on my way.”
“You want to let us in on this and save us all some time and grief?” asked Seidman.
“I think I’ll do it my way,” I said, knowing that my way was to blunder forward with my head down like Ramirez till I hit the right door. Without another word they left the room.
“My pants,” I shouted after them and followed them into the hall. They kept marching right through the waiting room past the mottled crew of black, yellow, white, brown, and green people in various states of emergency. The ones who were able looked up at me. Some, no doubt, wondered why the police had taken my pants.
Back in the treatment room I went to the phone and called Mrs. Plaut’s.
“Hell ….” Mrs. Plaut started, but someone was wrestling her for the phone.
“Mr. Gunther,” I heard her squeal.
Then Gunther came on. “Yes?”
“It’s me, Toby,” I said.
“I hoped it would be.”
Behind him I heard Mrs. Plaut cry, “One more such incident, Mr. Gunther, and you shall have to pack up all your neat little clothes and get your rump out of here.”
I explained my predicament to Gunther, who had been worrying about me, and he told me that he had already had my milk-stained suit cleaned and pressed and the button sewed back on. It would take him no more than fifteen minutes or so to get to the hospital.
While I waited in the room wondering what I would do next, a pair of nurses stuck their heads in. The younger of the two said, “That’s him.” The older one looked at me in awe and held up an X ray, which I assumed was my skull. I considered slinging something at them the way the chimps did in the zoo, but decided to preserve whatever dignity I might have left, which amounted to less than that of Huntz Hall’s character in the Bowery Boys movies.
Gunther made it in sixteen minutes according to the wall clock and four minutes according to my old man’s watch. I was dressed a few seconds later and signing my release papers seconds after that, with Dr. Melanks hovering over me with a cup of coffee.
“I was only half joking about having you sign your body over to me,” he said. “I’d like to watch a good pathologist going at your skull.”
“Bye doc,” I grinned, fitting on the hat that Gunther had brought so that it rested just above the bandage at the back of my
head. “Watch your blood pressure.”
Gunther drove me to Fairfax, suggesting that I come home and get a good night’s rest before I retrieved my car. I told him that it probably wouldn’t be there if I waited till morning. The cops would have towed it away. He shrugged, stepped on his elongated gas pedal, and hurried into the night with his radio tuned to Gene Autry.
The Ford was still in front of the fireplug when we got there. It was decorated by four parking tickets. I shoved them into the glove compartment, started the engine, wondered how much gas I had used, and followed Gunther back to Hollywood. The bumper next to me bobbed up and down, scratching at the upholstery. I parked in front of Mrs. Plaut’s and hauled the bumper up to my room. I couldn’t sleep on my back because of the stitches. Sleeping on my stomach meant a sure headache in the morning. I propped myself on my side with pillows as a compromise and considered retirement and a new career.
Maybe Arnie could teach me the car business, or Shelly could give me a two-week course in dentistry, or Jeremy could make me the Farraday janitor, or Gunther could teach me how to speak Norwegian so I could translate the classics. Maybe. I slept surprisingly well.
CHAPTER 9
Mrs. Plaut stood over me when I opened my eyes. The Beech-Nut gum clock on the wall told me it was nine in the morning. Her teacher-folded hands and the no-nonsense tight lips above her lacy collar told me she had a problem.
“I am vexed,” she said.
I tried to roll back to get a good look at her vexation, but my head touched the pillow and reminded me of my stitches. I rolled gently to a sitting position, yawned, and fixed my bleary eyes on her.
“You are vexed,” I encouraged.
“First Mr. Gunther behaves with improper respect,” she said, wringing her hands. “Next you confound the pages of my chapter on Cousin Dora. Did you read the chapter?”
“Cousin Dora attacked the Indians,” I yawned. “The Indians fled and preserved their virtue.”
“But still I am vexed,” she went on. I wasn’t sure if she had heard my summary. “The newspaper informs me that you are involved again in bodies. A news reporter even called this morning to speak to you. I told him that I had seen Mr. Richard Talbott in Destiny’s Darling four or five times. That was when Mr. Richard Talbott was a young man and the movies, thank Jesus, didn’t talk. He had fine hair like my brother Bernard.”
“You are vexed,” I reminded her loudly, pushing up from the mattress on the floor.
“Please put something on,” she said. I looked down at my underwear, nodded, and reached for my pants. “I think it improper that you should have killed Mr. Talbott. That’s what I have to say.”
“I didn’t kill him,” I said, trying to force my belt one notch over.
“Good,” she said, still grinding her knuckles. “The newspaper said you had been questioned concerning the crime, but it didn’t say you had killed him.”
“What else did the paper say?” I yelled. I pulled a nearly empty bottle of milk from the refrigerator, started the coffee, and rummaged through my cereals, finally settling on All Bran. It might be one of those days. I knew I had some brown sugar someplace but was having trouble tracking it down.
“The paper also said that,” she went on obligingly, “the Japanese have stormed Corregidor, Laval has rejected President Roosevelt’s warning, Great Britain in fighting the Vichy French on Madagascar, and Joe DiMaggio’s triple in the tenth inning beat the Chicago White Sox.”
It wasn’t the subject I had in mind, but I appreciated the summary and looked out of the window. The damn sky was clear. Lord God, hallelujah.
I held up the box of All Bran for Mrs. Plaut to look at and offered to share it with her. She shook her head no.
“So, Mr. Peters, what are we going to do?”
About the Japanese, fight and pray. About DiMaggio, nothing. I wasn’t a Sox fan.
“I will be much more circumspect in the future,” I yelled.
This seemed to placate her. Outside I could hear footsteps.
“I am well into my chapter on the Beemer side of the family and their encounters in science,” she said. “Then we should be ready to seek a publisher.”
We? I nodded dumbly and poured my cereal just as the knock came at my door.
“Come in,” I shouted and Gunther came in, all suited in gray.
Mrs. Plaut failed to hear him enter and continued to glare at me while I sat and ate. Gunther moved past her and caught the corner of her eye.
“Mr. Gunther,” she said as he moved to the table. “You have, until yesterday, always been a perfect little gentleman. I do not know what possessed you.”
“I’m truly sorry, Mrs. Plaut,” Gunther said with a continental bow of his head.
“When you want to apologize,” she went on, “I’ll be downstairs. And Mr. Peelers, will you please remove that thing.” She pointed to the bumper. With that and the Dora chapter she raced from the room.
“How might your head be this morning, Toby?” Gunther said as he poured the coffee.
“Feels like someone removed a few inches of scalp and sewed the whole thing back on too tight. Not bad though.” The All Bran was just what I needed.
“You seem surprisingly good spirited,” he observed, pouring himself some coffee after he recleaned the cup he had selected.
“Can’t explain it,” I said, pouring some more All Bran into the remaining milk in my bowl and spooning out some brown sugar, which I had found in the refrigerator. I had to dig the spoon in like a shovel to get it out. “Lost Anne. Beaten. Suspect in two murders. Broke. Income tax people are after me. War going on. But”-I held up a finger-“I am on the job.”
“Toby, I am having a slight idiomatic problem again in a translation I am engaged in for radio.” Gunther was serious about his translations. “In this tale, a man says ‘That’s the way the ball bounces.’ My research indicates that this expression derives from the irregular trajectory of an American football when it strikes the ground. This is a result of the peculiar shape of the ball. Most balls bounce quite true and predictably. An English rugby ball is somewhat similar, but this translation is into French, and I am at a loss.”
“Just skip it, Gunther,” I advised.
“That is not professional. Do you just skip it when you are working for a client?”
“No, I guess not.”
“Ah, there, so see,” he said, dabbing the corner of his lips with a paper napkin. I resisted the urge to scratch my itching stomach.
“I’ll think about it. I’m taking a drive up near Fresno today. Probably stay over. Want to join me?”
“I’m afraid I cannot unless you are too incapacitated to drive. I have much work, much work.”
“I can make it,” I said, getting up and stacking the dishes in the sink. Gunther finished the last of his coffee, eased himself from the chair, and moved past me to wash the dishes. I didn’t protest.
I shaved in the communal bathroom down the hall, brushed my furry teeth, noted the increasing amount of gray in my hair, and tried to get a look at my bandage, which just peeked out from behind my neck. There were a few aspirin left in the medicine cabinet. I think they were Hill’s. I gulped them and went back to my room. Gunther was gone. I made my bed, a job that consisted of kicking at the blanket so that it covered a pillow.
A search of the room turned up enough change to make the phone calls I needed to make. The first was to Dr. Winning. He answered on the second ring.
“Mr. Peters,” he said evenly. “You have found Mr. Ressner?”
“Not quite,” I said. “I’m following his trail, though. He produced another corpse yesterday. Richard Talbott the actor.”
There was a silence on Winning’s end. Obviously, he didn’t read the L.A. papers, though I would have pegged Talbott’s death for national news. I waited.
“This is terrible,” he finally said, which was accurate but not very imaginative. “What are you going to do?”
“Find him,” I said. “I’m go
ing to call the ex-Mrs. Ressner, the widow Grayson, and her daughter to see what I can dig up. Then I thought I’d come up and see you, maybe check Ressner’s room, talk to some of the staff or patients who knew him.”
More silence and then, “I’m not sure that would be wise. Many of the patients do not know Mr. Ressner is gone. The balance in a mental hospital such as ours is very delicate, very delicate.”
“I’ll be my most charming, doctor. I just don’t have enough to go on to find Ressner and I have less than two days before the cops come down on my already sore back. Not to mention that he might go for Mae West or De Mille next.”
“All right,” Winning gave in. “I’ll prepare the staff for your arrival. When might you be coming?”
“I’ll leave this afternoon. Should get there by tonight unless I get groggy and have to stop someplace on the way. Ressner did a tune on my head. One more thing, doc. I’ll need another cash payment.”
“I’ll have what you need when you arrive,” he said.
He gave me directions on how to get to the Winning Institute. His voice had gone drier and drier and seemed about to crack when we hung up. We both had trouble, and its name was Ressner.
I pulled out some more change and dialed the Grayson number in Plaza Del Lago. It rang and rang and rang and I waited till the baritone cowboy answered, “Grayson residence.”
“Dis be Thor landscape, you know,” I said as deeply as I could. “I must talk Mrs. Grayson. Joshua tree needs vork now, today or it die like dis, bang, bang, puff.”
“I’m afraid she can’t talk, Mr. Thor-”
“Mr. Gundersen,” I corrected.
“Mr. Gundersen,” he sighed with obvious exasperation reserved only for those who spoke with an accent, as if they couldn’t detect sarcasm. “Mr. Grayson died just a few days ago and-”
“And the Joshua vill die, too,” I said insistently.
In the background I could hear stirring and voices, and then a woman came on, voice high and nervous like Billie Burke.
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