Murder on a Yellow Brick Road tp-2

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I pulled away from the door as small footsteps moved toward it. The door opened, and I saw the smallest human I’d ever seen. Wherthman would have stood a head taller if they were side by side. I noticed that, like Wherthman, he was well proportioned. He didn’t look deformed in any way, but he sounded it.

  He let out a stream of “fucks” and “assholes” and some colorful additional things about sex and bowel movement. It was a small education.

  Peese wore a fancy white embroidered shirt and a soft sweater. I would have spent more time looking at him, but I noticed something else as we stepped into a large room. All of the furniture was scaled down to his size. A door was opened in the wall and I could see into the bedroom. It, too, was scaled down.

  He turned and sat in a small dark armchair. His face was childlike, but there was ancient anger on it. He was one of the small, bitter people of the world. Some of them are six feet tall, but their palms sweat; they keep their heads low and turn them only briefly upward as they pass you with the sneer of the cornered animal unsure of whether to bite or cry. He lit a cigar and said, “Sit down.”

  I wasn’t sure where to sit. The couch was too small and the little table in the room too fragile looking. He watched my awkward search for a perch and smiled viciously. He puffed at the full size cigar and leaned back.

  “You don’t get many full size visitors?” I asked, deciding to sit on the floor. The carpet was dark green and soft enough.

  “I get them all sizes,” he said.

  “I get it,” I went on, placing my hat on the floor and my back against the wall. “You like full-sized people to feel awkward and clumsy in here.”

  “You’re a smart man, Penis,” he said with a grin.

  “The name’s Peters, John Franklin. Remember it and I’ll remember not to step on you,” I said, returning the grin. Wherthman had told me that my brother Phil had used that line on him. It had done wonders to ruin Wherthman’s disposition. I wished the same on Peese, but I didn’t get it.

  “Well,” he said puffing away, “I feel awkward most of the time in your houses, your buildings. I enjoy having people like you feel foolish.”

  He had a point, but I wasn’t going to start giving him points.

  “I do keep a few bloated chairs for friends,” he said. Since he didn’t run to a closet to fetch a chair, I assumed I wasn’t in the elite company of his friends. But, after all, we had just met.

  “It’s been pleasant getting acquainted with you, John Franklin, and I hate to cut off this stimulating conversation, but I have a few questions.”

  “I don’t have any answers,” he puffed. The room was getting smokey and smelled like leftover cow’s breath. I wanted to get out as fast as I could.

  “Let’s try,” I said, shifting my weight on the floor. “Why did you kill Cash?”

  A cloud of smoke cleared, and I could see his eyes. I wondered if I could defend myself against a knife attack from him while seated on the floor. No knife came out.

  “I didn’t kill him,” said Peese. “Didn’t know he was dead. Sorry to hear it.”

  “You sound like you’ll never recover from the shock.”

  “I’ll get over it,” he answered.

  We made a fair act, but I wasn’t sure which of us was Bergen and which was Charlie McCarthy.

  “What business were you in with Cash?” I tried.

  “We weren’t. I knew him.”

  “What business are you in?” I pushed on. He didn’t answer. I wanted to go flat on my back, but that would have made me too vulnerable. “This is a pretty nice place. You live in a fancy hotel, bring in your own furniture, smoke big cigars, wear fancy clothes. A few months ago you were cadging nickels to make the rent in a Main Street flop. Moving up in the world, ain’t you, Rico?”

  His face turned red, but it wasn’t going to be that easy to get him. He was still talking, which meant maybe that he knew something. He might be my man or one of them.

  “I do some acting,” he said, leaning back and blowing a cloud in my direction.

  “Pays real nice, doesn’t it? What’ve you been acting in? Oz finished shooting over a year ago, and that didn’t make you rich.”

  He squirmed a little, but not much.

  “I don’t have to give you a list of credits,” he said. “You got better questions?”

  “You got better answers? What about the fights you had with Cash?” I stood up. I’d lost the battle to try to appear comfortable. He could have that one.

  “Who says we fought?” Peese shouted. “We were pals. We didn’t fight.”

  “You don’t seem all broken up over the death of your pal,” I said, hovering over him. He looked up, but he didn’t look scared, just mad.

  “Who said I fought with Cash?” he insisted.

  “Wherthman. Gunther Wherthman,” I said.

  He laughed and pointed his cigar at me.

  “What would you expect him to say? He’s trying to put the murder rap on someone else and picked me. He didn’t like Cash, and he doesn’t like me.”

  It was my turn to smile.

  “Why would Wherthman want to put the rap on you?” I asked innocently, just oozing with curiosity.

  “Because the cops know he did it,” said Peese through his teeth.

  “Where’d you hear that?”

  “You told me when you were out in the fucking hall.”

  I said no, and he tried again.

  “I must have heard it on the radio or read it in the papers.”

  I said no again.

  “That’s all I’ve got to say,” Peese said, standing. “Now get out and don’t come back, and if you tell the cops anything about what I said, I’ll swear you made it up.”

  I started toward the door and tried one more trick.

  “Someone else saw you arguing with Cash,” I said. “Saw you Friday morning at Metro just before Cash was killed. Identified you.”

  “Who?” he demanded, grabbing my sleeve. I looked down with my best serious face.

  “A guy named Grundy, a photographer,” I said. “Identified you right down to your angelic voice.”

  Peese exploded and stamped on the floor. He reminded me of a childhood picture of Rumpelstilskin. I thought he was going to put his foot into the ceiling of Apartment 809.

  “That double-crossing bastard!” he shouted. “That muscle freak is lying.”

  “Be seeing you,” I said, opening the door. He rushed at me and threw a punch at my groin as I turned to wave to him. The punch hit me in the stomach, and I tumbled back into the hall on my back. He slammed the door. There wasn’t much I could do about it. I’d come up with some information, but I’d paid for it by being laid out by a midget.

  My wind came back slowly after three or four good gasps. Then I went to the door to listen. I could hear Peese asking the telephone operator for a number. I couldn’t make out the number he asked for. We both waited for what must have been a dozen rings. Peese hung up with a bang, and I pulled my ear from the door and limped to the elevator.

  By the time I dropped to the sixth floor and a lady with purple hair got on with a purple dog in her arms, I knew a few things. Grundy was probably the guy who had taken the shots at me. He was the only one of the three witnesses who had heard the two midgets arguing on Friday morning. He had identified one of them as having an accent and being called Gunther. Gable’s testimony about the size of the two midgets might put a small hole in that. How many German accented midgets named Gunther could there be in L.A.? But I wasn’t sure it was enough. If Grundy and Peese were in on something together, as soon as Peese talked to Grundy, he’d be calmed down again. With his temper, though, I doubted if Peese could go through an hour with my brother without giving everything away.

  All I had to do was dump the information in my brother’s lap and hope he’d pull in Grundy and Peese and put them in different rooms. I had no idea of which one of them had actually killed Cash or why, but I didn’t much care, either. Phil could worry about t
hat.

  When we got to the lobby, the purple dog snapped at me, and the purple lady gave me a dirty look. The desk clerk picked up the look, and I picked up Chandler, who was calmly leaning against a wall watching the people walk in and picking up the atmosphere.

  “Get any good dialogue?” I asked.

  “Fair,” he said, putting his pipe away. “What about you?”

  As we headed out to the street and under the hotel canopy, I told Chandler that Peese looked like the man I wanted, and that a muscle-heavy photographer seemed to be in it with him.

  “And you’re going to turn it over to the police?” he asked. “You’re not going to try to find out why Cash was murdered, or why they tried to kill you and Judy Garland?”

  “They tried to kill me because I was putting the pieces together to prove Wherthman didn’t do it,” I explained. “They figured my next step was to Peese, and they were right. My curiosity ends there.”

  It wasn’t exactly the truth, and something still gnawed at me. Chandler’s detectives were probably full of germs of curiosity and covered with the poison ivy of responsibility. Those diseases could get you killed in my business. It was still a mess, and I wasn’t sure Phil would or could pull it off with what I had; but short of trying to force a confession out of Grundy, I was finished. If a forty-five-pound midget could flatten me with a single punch, what would Grundy do to me? He might not be able to shoot straight, but there was nothing wrong with his hands.

  I was facing out toward the street when I saw the woman. There were a lot of people walking in both directions, but she had stopped and was looking up. She had a big brown paper bag in her arms and a look on her face I’d never seen. Her hand went to her mouth and the package fell. She had just been to a Chinese carry-out place. The little white cartons exploded on the sidewalk. Shrapnels of rice and egg roll flecked the unwary. I stepped out from under the canopy and looked up. Someone seemed to be hanging out of a window in the hotel. Someone else was not helping him get back in. It was hard to look up into the sun, but the lady and I saw that much. Other people were looking up now, too.

  About fifty people saw the hanging man fall. He tumbled over in five or six circles without a sound before he hit the top of a passing Sunshine Cab and bounced off onto the sidewalk about fifteen feet from me. The body almost hit the purple lady with the purple poodle. I don’t know what Chandler did, but I stepped forward a foot or two to be sure the body was Peese’s. It was, though he’d be hard to identify by anything but his size and the clothes he was wearing. His face had hit the Sunshine Cab on the way down.

  I turned to Chandler, who looked grim but controlled, as if he had always expected to see something like this, and life had proved him right.

  “That’s Peese,” I said, and ran back into the hotel.

  People were pushing past me to get out and see what had happened. Someone asked me. I pushed and ran for the door markedSTAIRWAY. I pulled out my. 38 and started to run up the stairs two or three at a time, listening for footsteps above me. The killer might take the elevator, or he might take the stairs. I didn’t know how many stairways there were in the hotel. I doubted if he would risk attracting attention by going down the fire escape. I also gambled that he wouldn’t want to cut off his options by using the elevator.

  Somewhere I guessed wrong. No one came down the stairs. By the ninth floor I was winded, but my handball hours and running kept me up, and my back didn’t scream. No one was in the hall. It would take a few minutes for someone to figure out what floor Peese had flown from. The desk clerk would identify him, and the cops would be coming. Peese’s door was open. I stepped in, not expecting to find anything or anyone; I was right. The window was open and I had no intention of looking out. I put my gun away and looked around the place quickly, not worrying about prints. I had visited the place earlier and there were witnesses to it. There was also a witness to my being on the sidewalk when Peese went flying. Chandler’s testimony would probably be good enough even for my brother, but I didn’t wait to be tied up explaining things. I hurried through the place and found a closet. It was open, and a little chair stood inside. I stood on the chair and looked where someone had apparently looked a few minutes before. Standing on the chair, I was eye level with a shelf. I turned on the closet light. The shelf was empty but the dust showed the outline of a circle the size of a big plate.

  I got down trying to figure what might be shaped like that. I kept figuring as I left the apartment and headed for the elevator. When it opened, the desk clerk I had talked to in the lobby was on it. So was a uniformed cop complete with cap, dark tie, long sleeves, and a serious look on his freckled young face. They stepped off, and I stepped on.

  The doors were closing when I heard the clerk say, “That’s him. The man who was with Mr. Peese.”

  The young cop turned to me too late. The elevator doors closed. He had a few choices. He could run down the stairs and stand a good chance of heading me off if the elevator made any stops. He could call the lobby and have someone try to stop me. If he were really stupid, he’d wait for another elevator. I counted on him taking about fifteen seconds to make up his mind unless he was really a sharp rookie. He didn’t look all that sharp. I put my luck on the elevator instead of getting out and running down.

  My luck held. No one got on the elevator, and I hit the lobby in about fifteen seconds. The lobby was almost empty, except for a few people looking out of the windows at the body. Everyone else was already outside. Chandler spotted me hurrying through the door and stepped over to me.

  “I think I saw your man,” he said. He described Grundy right down to the biceps and bleached hair.

  “Was he carrying anything?” I asked.

  “Yes,” said Chandler. “A can, a big tin can. Looked something like a giant nickel.”

  “About two feet across?” I asked, looking back over my shoulder for the cop.

  “Yes,” he said. “What was it?”

  “Film,” I said. “Movies. Whoever killed Peese took the film from the apartment.”

  Chandler scratched his head and pushed his glasses back to keep them from falling.

  “What’s on the film?” he asked.

  “I don’t know,” I said, “but I know who to ask.”

  I took his hand, shook it, and thanked him for his help. I also told him that I might be needing his help with the police. The crowd around Peese’s body had reached riot size.

  “Of course,” he said. “You’re going after the killer?”

  I shrugged, and he looked pleased. I was doing what private detectives are supposed to do. I was walking the mean streets. I was acting like a damn fool.

  7

  Grundy had a can of movie film and, for all he knew, all the time left in his life to put it away. He didn’t know I was behind him. With luck I might even get to his place before him, if that’s where he was going.

  He wasn’t going there. I parked on Highland and went to his door. It was open. The upstairs door wasn’t. I knocked and prepared to greet him with a gun in my hand, but he didn’t answer. I listened at the door and heard nothing. I could have jimmied the door without much trouble, but what I was looking for wasn’t there. I wanted Grundy and that film. He was probably driving around with it in his trunk. I didn’t even know what his car looked like though I’d seen it twice, once when he took a shot at me on Normandie and once when he was pulling out of the Happy Byways Motor Court after trying for me again.

  I went back to the restaurant where I’d watched him eat. The frizzy waitress was there, and her face was blank. She probably hypnotized herself into not thinking or feeling till the work day was over. The trouble with that was eventually the hypnotism doesn’t wear off at quitting time, and you’re like that all the time. It happens to waitresses, senators, movie stars, and cops.

  I ordered a coffee from her while I sat at the counter and remembered too late that the coffee there was awful. It was late in the afternoon so I added a tuna sandwich and a grilled ch
eese on white. Nothing much was going on in the restaurant. It was well past lunch and too early for dinner. An old guy with thick glasses and a cigarette stuck to his lower lip sat at a back booth reading the newspaper and nursing a coffee and roll. He was the only customer. The frizzy waitress had her elbows on the counter next to the cash register. She looked at the window, but I didn’t think she saw anything.

  “I was in here the other day with Barney Grundy,” I reminded her.

  She got off her elbows and looked at me, trying to place me. I’ve got an easy face to remember, but she couldn’t place it. All she had seen was Grundy, but he wasn’t here now.

  “You a friend of his?” Her head tilted to the side like a curious bird. A touch of rouge that hadn’t been absorbed stood out on her cheek. She looked like an unfinished clown, and I felt sorry for her.

  “We’ve been spending a lot of time together,” I said, finishing the grilled cheese first because it was hot. “He’s really something.”

  “He sure is,” she said, a smile touching her face.

  “Come in here a lot?”

  “Just about every day,” she said.

  “I was just over at his place. He wasn’t there.” I started on my tuna sandwich. It had too much mayonaise, which is just how I like it.

  “He’s working out down at Santa Monica,” she said. “This is the time every day. I thought you were his friend. You’re a friend, and you don’t know that?”

  “I’m a business friend,” I said. “I work for M.G. M and I’ve got to reach him about a film he has. If I can find him fast, it could mean a big difference in his life. You know the name of the place in Santa Monica where he works out?”

  She looked at me suspiciously, and I went on drinking my coffee without looking at her. I looked at my watch.

  “I’ve got to be back at the studio with an answer tonight,” I sighed. “I’d sure like Barney to get this chance.”