High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I went to the bathroom in four soft steps and closed the door most of the way so I could watch my room and the stairway. A burly cop I recognized trudged up the stairs, with his gun drawn, as quietly as he could. Gunther stepped back into my room. The cop didn’t see him, but he moved cautiously to my door and stepped in. I got out of the bathroom and tiptoed to my room when I heard Gunther’s voice.

  “I simply have not seen him,” said Gunther, spotting me over the shoulder of the cop as I waved and sidled past the open door.

  “Are you some kind of German?” asked the policeman suspiciously.

  “I am Swiss,” said Gunther with real indignation.

  Cawelti wasn’t in sight when I got to the bottom of the stairs. He was probably waiting at the kitchen door to block my exit. I went through the front door and ran the half-block to my Buick. I was just pulling down the street when Cawelti came rushing around Mrs. Plaut’s with gun in hand to see me. I made a quick turn over someone’s lawn and sped down the street till I hit Fountain Avenue. I turned left, slowed down and then made a left on Western and drove to Melrose, where I made a left again and headed for downtown and my office.

  I parked in back of a cleaning store on Ninth. The spot was reserved for the owner, but I knew the owner didn’t have a car to drive. His name was Schoenberg, and I brought him what little cleaning I had. He had complained about being unable to get tires for his car and how he had to take the bus to work.

  The rear fire door of the Farraday had no outside handle, but I knew Jeremy Butler kept it open when he worked, and since he worked almost every day, I assumed it would be open. Saturday was no day of rest for either the neighborhood bums or Jeremy Butler. I was right. On the way up the stairs, I spotted Jeremy on his knees, scrubbing away.

  “I think it’s tar or gum or some substance from hell,” he said, sitting and looking at me. He hesitated, put his brush down and looked at me from his scar-lidded eyes. “I lost that man Fargo Thursday. I’m sorry, Toby.”

  “It’s all right, Jeremy,” I said. “I found him. Any police around here?”

  “That Cawelti, the one with the temper, was here,” Jeremy said, looking at the spot on the stairs. “We didn’t exchange conversation.”

  Jeremy and Cawelti had had a run-in a few months earlier when Cawelti had confronted me in the lobby of the Farraday. It was my considered opinion that Cawelti’s life was a series of run-ins punctuated by violence.

  “I’m going up to the office for a minute,” I said. “If Cawelti shows up, try to let me know. If not, let’s take a walk when I come down. I think I need more of your help.”

  Jeremy nodded and went back to the stair, his massive right arm bearing down with soap and suds.

  My visit to the office was practical. I needed more bullets for my .38, and I had some in my desk drawer. I had used the gunful I had in my duel with Fargo and Gelhorn.

  Shelly was working on a patient when I went through the door. He glanced over his shoulder at me, frowned and went back to the woman in the chair.

  “I haven’t been here, Shel,” I said, stepping quickly to my office.

  Shelly grunted, and the woman in the chair tapped her foot on the footrest in impatience or pain. I voted for pain.

  “Mildred’s angry,” he said, and then he mumbled something like, “Where is that damned frubble-squeezer?”

  “Sorry,” I said, stepping back to the doorway.

  “Mildred found out I drove Carmen home from the fights,” he said, attacking the mouth of the woman in the chair with the frubble-squeezer. “She’s jealous.”

  “I’ll call her as soon as I’ve got things settled on the Cooper business,” I said, reassuringly.

  “She won’t believe you,” said Sheldon Minck, angrily attacking his patient s mouth. The wretched woman whimpered.

  “I know how to handle Mildred,” I said, loading the gun. The patient in the chair was watching me through her suffering, and I couldn’t tell if the fear in her eyes was resulting from seeing me load a gun or pain from Shelly’s attack.

  “You can’t handle Mildred,” he said. “She doesn’t like you, doesn’t believe a thing you say. She says you’re a bad influence on me.”

  “She wants you to play with the other kids,” I sympathized. “The ones from the right side of Figueroa.”

  “Something like that,” Shelly said, going at the woman again, who groaned.

  “What are you doing to her?” I asked with mild interest.

  “Cleaning her teeth,” said Shelly, pausing to wipe his sweating forehead and relight his dead cigar.

  “How dirty are they?” I said.

  “So-so,” he countered, tossing the frubble-squeezer in the general direction of the sink and missing. The frubble-squeezer bounced onto the floor, and Shelly ignored it.

  “We’ll talk about it later, Shel,” I said.

  “Sure,” said Shelly sullenly. I left and went down the stairs two or three at a time. Alice Palice of Artistic Books, Inc., was in the hall on the third floor, arguing with a couple of men in the shadows. They seemed angry. I hoped for their sakes they didn’t get too angry.

  Jeremy stood when I got to the step he was working on.

  “These are good steps,” he said, “but no creation of man can withstand man’s own determination to destroy the artifacts of his culture. In Europe people still live in adequate houses built five hundred years ago. Here we marvel if a building stands seventy years. We are a wasteful society.”

  He gathered his pail and brush and walked with me down the stairs. We deposited the cleaning things in a janitor’s closet and started out the front door. The street was crowded with Saturday-morning shoppers. Pulling into a space half a block away was a police car. Cawelti jumped out. Jeremy and I backed into the Farraday lobby before he could spot us. I nodded toward the rear and Jeremy followed me, moving more quickly and quietly than I did, though he outweighed me by almost a hundred pounds.

  We went out the back door and through the alley. At the corner we turned right on Wilshire while I told Jeremy my plan and asked him to stay near his office phone. I might need some reliable help with little notice. He agreed, and I told him what I knew as we walked through Westlake Park. We sat for a few minutes under the eight-foot nude black-cement Prometheus, who held out his torch and globe.

  “That was erected by Nina Saemundsson for the Federal Art Project in 1935,” Jeremy said, looking up at the statue with admiration. “An underappreciated work. There is also a magnificent mural of Prometheus by José Orozco in Fray Hall at Pomona College in Claremont. It shows a huge Prometheus holding up the sky with small, gaunt people encouraging him.”

  I looked at the statue, pretending to share his admiration for Prometheus. My mind was on real bodies, not myths.

  “The cost of bringing truth to men is often pain and eternal suffering,” said Jeremy the poet, looking toward the playground in the distance. “I have a poem that might help you,” he said, turning to me and putting a hand on my shoulder. “You want to hear it?”

  I said sure. What else do you tell a 270-pound former wrestler with hairy arms thicker than radiators? He recited quietly:

  There is no end but death.

  We look for start, middles and end

  to give our lives a diameter

  controllable limits that send

  us a feeling of security,

  suggest an order

  that is not there.

  If there is a border,

  we create it; and sense

  is just a matter

  of whose story sings

  and whose song

  you remember the melody of.

  “Nice,” I said, having, as always, understood none of it.

  “It will be published in the Gregory Press 1943 edition of new poets,” he said proudly.

  “I’ll look forward to it.” I shook his hand and remembered when I did that in spite of his strength, his shake was firm and gentle. When you have the touch and are really
confident of it, you don’t have to prove it. I would have liked Hemingway to shake Jeremy’s hand.

  I stayed away from Hoover to be sure I didn’t accidentally run into Cawelti on the prowl. Schoenberg let me use his phone to call Carmen at Levy’s.

  “Levy’s,” she answered.

  “Carmen,” I said weakly, “is that you, Carmen?”

  “Toby,” she said with anger touched with concern. “What’s wrong?”

  “Police after me,” I panted. Schoenberg, who was a sagging man in his sixties with a sagging tailor’s lip, stared at me over the pair of pants he was sewing. “Thursday at the fight I was kidnapped by Fascist spies. I’m working on a secret case. If I had gone back in the stadium for you, it might have involved you, and I couldn’t do that.”

  “I thought you …” she began.

  “No, never,” I said. “I’ll explain when I get this case wrapped up. Trust me. Got to hang up now. I hear them coming.” I hung up.

  “Take off that coat,” said Schoenberg, “and I’ll sew it good like new.”

  “No time,” I said.

  “It offends me esthetically as a tailor,” he said with a heavy Yiddish accent. “I’ll do it for free.”

  Five minutes later I was back in my Buick and headed for Santa Monica. The day was warmer, and the radio told me my time was running out. I’d promised Seidman that I’d turn myself in, killer or no killer, sometime today. Officially, today ran till midnight. I took Santa Monica Boulevard, Route 66, and tried to think out my dialogue with Lombardi.

  Ann, the former Mrs. Toby Peters, had once said that my greatest drawback was my inability to plan ahead, even when not doing so might be dangerous to life and limb. While I had to agree with Ann that it was a shortcoming, I couldn’t rank it at the top. To give her credit, she was constantly changing the item to top the list of the major drawbacks of life with Toby Peters. Just before she walked out for the first, last and only time, we agreed that the list of my faults, if published, would rival the Greater Los Angeles telephone directory in volume.

  So I headed for a confrontation with Lombardi in the hope that the right words would come when the time came. It was my style, and I accepted it. It was a simple plan which had seen me through life but done my body no great good. Step one, plunge yourself in and make your opponent angry. Step two, provoke him or her a little more. Step three, hope they respond to prove you were right. (Parenthetical remark to step three: hope you survive the attack.) Step four, set up a trap so you nail them. I knew there were smarter ways to work, but a man gets into habits and learns to live with them and even savor them. This was the patented Toby Peters method. I could open a school and teach it: a half-day course in being a private detective.

  I remembered a line from Jeremy’s poem and asked myself, “Whose song do you remember the melody of?” The music to “Over There” popped into my head. It was my father’s favorite song, along with “The Bird in the Gilded Cage.” I sang them both on the way to Lombardi’s and finished when I pulled into the now-familiar parking lot.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  An overnight rain had turned the parking lot into Mudville. I walked carefully around piles of bricks and puddles. There were no construction workers hammering or mortaring merrily away. It was Saturday. It was also possible that my number-one suspect, Lombardi, might not be at the factory, but I had no place else to try, and time was running out.

  The rear door was open, and I stepped into darkness.

  “Hey,” I called, not wanting to get an accidental blast in the stomach from a jumpy watchman. “Anybody here?”

  My eyes got used to the darkness, and I sidestepped machinery and boxes and found my way forward by the scent of garlic.

  “Anybody here?” I tried again, running my hand along the wall I had found and going for the door I remembered. I found it and opened it to find myself facing the two sausage workers in white. The kosher one, Steve, was pointing a gun at my chest.

  “You are trespassing,” he said evenly. The other guy kept his hands in his pockets. “I wonder what Mr. Lombardi will want us to do with this trespasser?”

  “Mr. Lombardi will want to talk to this trespasser,” I said. “I’ve got information for him that he wants. He’s expecting me. Just tell him it’s what I was going to give him on Thursday.”

  Steve looked at his co-worker, chewed on the inside of his right cheek pensively and nodded toward a door in the far corner of the storefront. This was a room bright with light from the windows. Outside, a passerby looked through the window, curious about the new store in the neighborhood.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “We’ll be waiting right here,” Steve said. “We’ll see what Mr. Lombardi decides to do with you.”

  The threat of my own kosher future hovered in the air with the smell of garlic and spices as I walked to the door and reached for the handle.

  “Hold it,” shouted Steve, running up to my side. I held it.

  Steve patted me down and found the .38. He pulled it out and gave me a dirty look.

  “You almost let me get by with that,” I said with a shake of my head, to indicate that he might be losing his touch. “I won’t mention it to Mr. Lombardi.”

  “You’ll get it back on the way out,” he said. “If you go out.”

  I knocked on the door as Steve stood back to stand guard and wait for the roar of Lombardi that would end my brief passage on earth in human form. Lombardi said nothing, so I stepped in, closed the door behind me and counted on whatever gods there might be to provide me with the right words.

  Lombardi had his back turned, and I started to talk.

  “Before you do something you and I will regret,” I said, “let me talk. I’ve told someone I’m coming here. If anything happens to me, he’ll tell the police. I’m supposed to give him a call every fifteen minutes. I don’t want any trouble. I just want to straighten things between me and the police.”

  Lombardi said nothing and didn’t turn around. There was something in the atmosphere of the room, something I recognized from experience. It was the silence of death, and since I was still alive and Lombardi wasn’t moving, I placed my bet on him. I went around the desk and found out I was right.

  This time the knife was in his chest. Lombardi looked surprised, skewered in his own sausage factory, his plan of corned-beef conquest ended before it really began.

  With the departure of Lombardi’s soul, if there were such a thing, went the last clear suspect on my list. I was back at the start—well, almost at the start. Lombardi was now off my list of suspects. Most victims have that as doubtful consolation.

  “Everything all right, Mr. Lombardi?” asked Steve outside the door. I could see his shadow on the glass.

  “It’s okay,” I said, holding my hand over my mouth. I tried to put some anger in the words, but I didn’t want to use enough words to make him doubt the voice.

  “I’ll be right out here,” said Steve.

  I grunted and went on, talking in my own voice.

  “Okay, so we understand each other. You’ve got my word that I’ll never bother you again, and you agree to let me step out of this with my own skin instead of the one you put on the hot dogs. I appreciate your understanding, and you can count on me.”

  My choices were few. I could call Steve in and show him Lombardi’s corpse. There was an outside chance he would believe I hadn’t just walked in and played Zorro. But even if he believed me, there was a chance he might not let me go. I had no gun and could find none on Lombardi’s corpse or in his desk.

  Lombardi’s white smock was stained with red now, and he looked like a butcher who had been turned against by one of the steers ready for slaughter. There was no blood on me as I went to the door, saying “Thanks” to the corpse as I backed out and shut the door.

  Steve faced me and looked at the office door.

  “Mr. Lombardi says he doesn’t want to be disturbed,” I said, putting out my hand for the gun.

  Steve hesitated,
looked over at his co-worker and handed me my .38.

  “Mr. Lombardi is a very understanding man,” I said, going to the front door and turning the handle. The door was locked. I tried not to show panic as I walked past Steve and headed for the door leading to the dark room beyond and the parking lot and the relative safety of my car beyond that.

  I was almost touching the door when it opened and Marco stepped in.

  “What’s going on?” he demanded, looking at me. “I go out five minutes and this mug is on the premises. You can’t see Mr. Lombardi. He don’t want to see you.”

  “I just saw him,” I said. “We’ve got everything straightened out.”

  Marco cocked his big bald head and looked at Lombardi’s door.

  “I want to hear him say that,” he said.

  “It’s true,” said Steve, backing me up with what he thought he had heard. “Mr. Lombardi doesn’t want to be bothered now.”

  Marco looked back at me suspiciously as I walked slowly through the door. Once in the dark, panic came, and I rushed toward the spot of light on the far wall that marked the exit. I cracked my knee on something short and hard and hobbled forward without making a noise. The Buick was at least six hundred yards away in the parking lot. Well, maybe it was twenty yards away. I was carrying the ball through mud, knowing the tacklers were not far behind.

  The car stalled in the mud and the wheels spun. I took a deep breath, counted to five, took my .38 out and put it at my side, watching the door while I tried again slowly. This time the car moved backward, and I let it have its own head till I felt the wheels touch something solid. Then I tore forward over rubble, leaving the lot and the factory behind.

  As I drove, I mused over whether by nightfall there would be any organized group in the Greater Los Angeles area that would not be trying to find me. I wasn’t sure who I’d prefer to take my chances with, Cawelti or Marco and company. The only one I could think of who might frighten both of them was Luís Felípe Castelli, but he had his Fascists, assumed and real, to deal with. My battle was on a less global scale but no less important to me.