“Get out of here,” the squat man said, turning his back and starting to walk away.
“I’m telling the truth,” I shouted, rattling the door again.
“Shut up,” the squat man said, turning to me again. “You’ll call attention. This is a business. What’s the matter with you?”
“Let me in,” I said.
The squat man held up a hand and said, “Wait. One second. Okay?”
I waited while he disappeared in the depths of the lamp shop. I watched the cars coming past till he returned and opened the door.
“Come on,” he said wearily.
He closed the door behind me when I was inside and then hurried back into the depths of the shop without waiting to see if I could keep up with him. He made a strange clanging sound like the Tin Woodsman as he led the way to a door, opened it, and stepped back so I could enter in front of him.
The room was a warehouse, big, with crates and cardboard boxes piled to the ceiling.
“Wait here,” the squat man said and left.
I was standing next to an old floor lamp with a green-glass shade. I pulled the chain and the light went on, illuminating the shade. Dark trees, leafless trees with branches like claws, were painted on the underside of the green glass. From a branch of one of the trees a man was dangling, a noose around his neck.
“You like it?” a voice came, waking me from a dream of Universal Studio monsters.
“Fascinating,” I said, looking up at a husky man with a satisfied smile on his face.
The man was somewhere in his forties, good teeth, recently barbered straight brown hair. He wore a pair of brown slacks with dark suspenders over a white shirt and brown bow tie.
“Real art,” he said. “Gal over in Burbank makes them. She’s maybe eighty years old. Can you believe it? All her own inspiration. She did eighteen years hard time some place back east. Manslaughter. I think it was her brother. Something. Kansas. Ohio. Who knows? One of those places.”
“Fascinating,” I said.
“You said that already.”
“Sorry.”
His hands were folded in front of him just below his belly and he was rocking gently on his heels. Behind him the squat man with the white hair and bad complexion stood watching me.
“I don’t make a dime on her stuff,” the man in suspenders said. “Do I make a dime, Tools?”
“Not one dime, Karl,” Tools said flatly.
“Do I care, Tools?”
“Not so’s I ever noticed,” said Tools.
Karl Gouda took a step toward me and whispered, “I got a passion for art, you see. It’s been said my taste runs a little to the morbid. But, I say, who gives a shit? You take it where it goes. You Mormon or something?”
“I’m something, but not a Mormon,” I said, looking at the duo facing me.
“If you were, I’d apologize for saying ‘shit,’ but since you’re not, I don’t see any need to apologize. You see a need to apologize?”
“No,” I said.
“So, what’s this shit about someone wanting to kill me?” Gouda said, a look of distaste on his face.
“Charles Larkin, Al Ramone, both extras in Gone With the Wind, were murdered in the last three days,” I said. “The killer sent a note saying that the next victim would be K.G. and then Lionel Varney. K.G. Your initials.”
“And half the county of Los Angeles,” Gouda said impatiently.
“But only a few people who worked on Gone With the Wind.”
I pulled the photograph of Ramone and the soldiers saying hi to Vivien Leigh from my pocket and handed it to him. Gouda looked at the picture.
“Ramone’s the one circled in red,” I said. “You’re all on this nut’s list.”
“That’s me,” Gouda said with a sigh, pointing to the photograph.
“And Varney?”
“Don’t remember any names,” he said. “We were together maybe eight, ten hours. I remember the guy who fell on the sword. This one.”
He handed the photograph to me, tapping one of the stubble-covered faces.
“I think we should talk,” I said.
“Come with me,” Gouda said, reaching over to put a heavy hand on my shoulder.
I moved forward and he guided me toward the back of the store. Tools trailed us, shuffling past rows of lamps. Occasionally, for no reason and with no pattern I could see, Gouda paused to turn a lamp on or off. He talked softly as we walked.
“As you can see, Tiffany is my obsession,” he said. “Real Tiffany or really creative stained glass, any period. Delicate, soulful.”
He paused to touch the purple-glass shade of a nearby lamp and I staggered to a halt.
“Touch it,” he said.
I reached out and touched it.
“Texture,” he said intimately. “That’s the secret of fine glass, texture.”
“Gone With the Wind,” I reminded him.
“Not if they’re properly cared for,” he said.
We were moving again, toward the shadows and a partially open door.
“You’re an actor,” I said.
“I’m what you call an entrepreneur,” he countered. “Right, Tools?”
“Hundred percent,” came Tools’s voice.
We went through the open door. We were in a familiar room, an old room.
“You recognize it?” Gouda asked as Tools closed the door behind us. “Furniture, drapes?”
“I don’t …”
“Study,” he said. “Old O’Hara’s study in Gone With the Wind. Tara. Not copies. The real stuff. The McCoy. Saturday there’s going to be a reunion of some of the cast and crew of the movie. Right on the Selznick lot, in front of the Tara exterior. I understand there are still some pieces left, furniture, paintings. We get first crack at buying it. You working for DeGeorgio or Baumholtz, trying to scare me off of being there to pick up what’s left, tell them I’ll see them on Saturday. You know what I’m saying here?”
He let go of my shoulder and moved to the wooden chair at the ancient-looking desk and motioned toward an embroidered, rickety-legged armchair. I looked at the door behind me. Tools was leaning against it.
“I’m not gonna ask you why anyone would want to kill me,” Gouda said, running an open palm over the surface of the desk. “Truth is, I confess, there are guys who are not well inclined toward me. Women too. A couple or so. Business rivals, DeGeorgio, Baumholtz, and such like. I’ve got various holdings and interests, right, Tools?”
“A wide variety of interests,” Tools agreed.
“Diversification,” Gouda said, watching me. “Sit down.”
I sat.
“Now,” Gouda said. “I’m saying what I’m gonna say because (a) it’s true, and (b) I want you impressed. I used to be engaged in contract work for legitimate businesses, corporations, even a union here and there in Detroit, Cleveland, Akron. When they needed people to be reasonable, I used to talk to them, me and Tools and some part-time help. I would talk and they would be reasonable. But I’m more interested in art now, Gothic art. I mention that I have a passion for beauty?”
“Something like that,” I said.
“I say it, Tools?”
“Absolutely,” Tools agreed.
“And do I have a certain sensitivity for character?”
“Absolutely,” Tools agreed. “Very sensitive.”
“Could you and me have made it so long through life if I couldn’t read through a man or woman who came to me and said the moon is made of shit painted white?”
“Never,” said Tools emphatically.
“You,” said Gouda, pointing at me, “are telling me shit is white.”
“Someone plans to kill you or a woman named Gilmore,” I said.
“You said.” Gouda sighed. “Who the hell are you?”
“Toby Peters,” I said, moving my head to be sure Tools was still leaning against the door.
“You a crackpot?” asked Gouda.
“No,” I said.
“You a
crackpot?” Tools repeated.
“I’m a private investigator,” I said.
“You know anybody named Markowitz, Gamble, Witherspoon,” Gouda said, picking up a small porcelain doll.
“Lerner, Romano, Hansen, Arango,” Tools went on.
“Any of them send you here with this load of crap?” asked Gouda. “Not that I expect an easy answer.”
“Karl,” I said with my best smile.
“Mr. Gouda,” Tools corrected.
“Mr. Gouda,” I amended. “I’m just …”
“And some have said I am unjust,” he chimed in with a satisfied smile aimed at me and Tools. I couldn’t see Tools’s reaction. If it wasn’t an old favorite of Gouda’s, I was sure it went a few miles over Tools.
“Fine,” I said, standing up. “I come here maybe to save your life and you play Little Caesar. You’re on your own.”
Tools was still leaning against the door. I took a step toward him.
“I don’t like a guy coming here and telling me someone wants me dead,” Gouda said. “It offends me. It makes me think something is going on.”
I kept moving toward the door.
“Question, Peters,” Gouda said behind me. “How do you think Mr. Nathanson got his nickname?”
I didn’t answer.
“Answer,” said Gouda and Tools opened his baggy jacket to reveal a holster.
I stopped.
The holster had four pockets. I could see a claw hammer in one pocket and something metal in the other three. Tools was well armed for minor house repairs but I didn’t think he could stop me unless he came up with something that fired bullets. He was older than me, a roly-poly barrel.
“Out of the way, Mr. Nathanson,” I said.
“Tools sparred with Joe Louis,” said Gouda. “When Louis was tuning up for Tony Galento. Tools was a better fighter than Galento. Nothing hurts Tools. That right, Tools?”
“Nothing hurts Tools,” Tools agreed, removing an oversized pair of pliers from his holster. “But …”
He didn’t have to finish.
“No one sent me,” I said, turning back to Gouda.
“I’ll believe it when Tools has chatted with you a while,” he said. “I didn’t get to be the most sensitive dealer in Tiffany lamps this side of St. Louis by being incautious.”
A buzz. From under Gouda’s desk.
“I get it?” asked Tools.
“I get it,” said Gouda, rising from the desk and adjusting his tie. “You have a little talk with Mr. Peters and see if maybe he remembers Lerner, DeGeorgio, or Arango.”
Gouda moved past me toward the door.
“Where you going?” I asked.
“Customer,” he said.
Tools moved away from the door toward me.
“Don’t go,” I said. “It might be …”
Gouda waved his hand at me and went through the door, closing it behind him.
“Tools,” I said. “Your boss …”
“Karl’s not my boss,” Tools said, clicking the pliers together like castanets. “We’re partners. He’s got a passion for lamps with scary stuff, and I got a passion for tools and confession. I was a Catholic when I was a kid.”
I backed away toward the desk, looking for a tool of my own.
“What are you now?”
“Bored,” he said. “I was happier back east.”
There was no way out but through Tools Nathanson. He could see me thinking. Tools shook his head no. I didn’t have a choice even if I did have a rotating ball in my stomach that told me the man in front of me was too confident to be bluffing.
I was saved by the gun.
Karl Albert Gouda wasn’t.
The shots were close together. Two of them. Tools blinked and turned. He had the door open and was running into the shop before I had taken my first step after him. The fat little son of a gun could move like a welterweight.
By the time I got to the front of the store where Tools was leaning over Karl Gouda near the open front door, I knew I had another victim for the list. I jumped over Gouda and went out the door. A car was going by. Cars were at the curb. A few people were walking across the street. No one was running. I went back inside. Tools was touching Gouda’s cheek.
“Karl?” Tools whispered. “You okay? You dead?”
Tools looked up at me. I looked down at Gouda. His chest was covered in blood.
“He’s dead,” I said. “I warned him. I warned you.”
“Like so much shit I’m dead,” Gouda said, opening his eyes. His voice was hollow and weak, but he wasn’t dead.
Tools was smiling and crying. Gouda tried to sit up.
“Goddamn kid,” Gouda said with a cough as Tools, holster clanging, helped him to a sitting position. “Walked in, took two shots. One, two.”
And then panic came into his face. He looked around the shop frantically.
“Take it easy, Karl,” Tools soothed.
“The lamps,” Gouda said. “He get my lamps. I’ll rip his heart out.”
“I don’t think he got any lamps,” I said.
“Thank God,” said Gouda with a grimace of pain as Tools helped him take off his bloody suspenders, tie, and shirt.
A metal plate gleamed against the fallen man’s chest. Tools removed it carefully and Gouda bit his lower lip to keep from screaming.
“Two holes,” said Tools. “One made it all the way through. Other looks like it just broke the skin, maybe a rib. What you think, Karl?”
“A rib, definitely a rib,” Gouda agreed. Then he looked up at me. “Tools made this. I told you. Some people don’t appreciate the work we did in Detroit.”
“… and Kansas City,” said Tools. “You want I should get the bullet out, Karl? It’s sticking out.”
Gouda nodded, looking up at me.
Tools pulled his pliers from his holster and went for the bullet sticking out of Gouda’s chest.
“He’ll give you blood poisoning,” I said.
“My tools are sterile,” Tools said, turning on me angrily.
“Sorry,” I said.
Tools moved quickly, clamped down on the protruding bullet, looked at Gouda who nodded, and then pulled. Gouda gasped and the bullet flew into the air, crashing into the green-glass lamp with the hanging tree. Gouda closed his eyes and Tools’s mouth opened in horror.
I moved to the lamp.
“A little crack,” I said.
“I’ll find him,” said Gouda softly. “I’ll find the little shit and …”
“What did he look like?” I asked, moving to help Tools get his partner to his feet.
“Like a dead shit,” Gouda said. “Why’d you say he was tryin’ to kill me?”
“Something to do with Gone With the Wind,” I said, helping Gouda to a chair near the wall.
Someone came through the door. I turned my head, ready for bullets.
“You have table lamps?” a well-dressed woman said, looking at us curiously.
“I have a bullet in my chest,” said Gouda.
The woman looked at me and then at Tools. I don’t think she liked what she saw. She turned and left.
“I’ll get something to fix you up, Karl,” said Tools, touching his partner’s shoulder.
“Yeah,” said Gouda.
Tools clanked back toward the O’Hara office and I asked again, “What did he look like?”
“A man with no goddamn sensitivity,” he said through gritting teeth. “Maybe thirty, not heavy. Losing his hair in front. Dark eyes. Jacket, wearing a jacket with something written on the pocket. I won’t forget him.”
“Can you take a suggestion?” I asked.
He looked up at me without answering.
“Stay dead for a while. Go on vacation. I’ll find the guy. You come back.”
“We don’t work that way, Peters,” he said. “Word gets out Karl Gouda runs and I might as well put a ‘shoot me’ ad in the L.A. Times.”
Tools was clanking back like a belled cat. He was carrying a cardboa
rd box. I walked over to the door and closed it. Tools opened the box, pulled out bandages and bottles, removed shears from his belt, and started ministering to his fallen partner.
“I’m going,” I said.
“Go,” said Gouda, holding up his arms so Tools could wrap the bandage around him. “But we know your name. We can find you.”
“We can find you,” Tools agreed.
I was about to answer when the plate-glass window shattered a few feet from my head. Lamps and shades exploded as bullets tore through the shop. I hit the floor and cut my chin on broken green glass. Gouda groaned. I lifted my head and saw Tools trying to protect his partner with his own body, but it was too late. There was a hole in Gouda’s face.
“He looks more like Swiss than Gouda,” came a voice from the sidewalk.
I rolled over, and through the smashed window my eyes met those of the man on the sidewalk. I had seen him about an hour earlier, sitting in Shelly Minck’s dental chair. He aimed his pistol at me and was about to pull the trigger when an animal yowled across the street and Tools, clanking and crushing glass underfoot, charged past me.
I got to my feet, cutting my palms on broken glass, as the young man in the jacket took off down the street and Tools Nathanson took off after him. The man with the gun was at least twenty years younger and wasn’t carrying fifteen or twenty pounds of tools.
When I got to the sidewalk, people were starting to move cautiously toward the shop. Not many of them yet. I looked down the street and saw Tools collapsed on his knees about a block away. The killer was nowhere in sight.
I looked back at Gouda. This time he was definitely dead.
Chapter 6
Traffic bustled on Wilshire beyond the open window of Captain Philip Pevsner’s office. I sat in the chair opposite Phil’s desk and watched him sharpen a pair of pencils, lay out a pad of paper, and rearrange the photographs of his wife, Ruth, my two nephews, Nate and Dave, and my niece, Lucy.
There are some who say my brother and I look alike. And there are others who have better vision or tell the truth. Phil is five years older than I am, a bear with short white hair, hair that had been white since Phil returned from the Great War twenty-five years earlier. We’re the same height but his eyes are pale gray and mine are dark brown. He looked like a filled-out version of our father, who had died a few years after Phil came back from France. I looked like the photographs of our mother, who had died when I was born, a fact that Jeremy Butler thought accounted for the lifetime of love-hate, war-peace between us. Phil’s tie was open. His eyes were blank and his lips pursed.
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