Mildred Pierced: A Toby Peters Mystery

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  She had been better since Gunther and I had given her a hearing aid, a Zenith Radionic, forty dollars, complete with radionic tubes, crystal microphones, and batteries. She had been better when she chose to wear it, which was seldom. Mrs. Plaut was somewhere over eighty years old and sometimes mentally over the rainbow. A broom handle of a little woman, she was strong, tireless and impossible to resist.

  “Snuggle in and read it tonight,” she said. “After dinner. Dinner is at six twenty-seven. Please inform Mr. Gunther.”

  I looked at Jamaica Red in his cage. He was busy pecking at his little glass bowl of seeds.

  I had gone upstairs, bypassed my own room, and gone straight to Gunther’s, where I now sat.

  “Dinner’s at six twenty-seven,” I said.

  Gunther nodded in acceptance, and I held up the dart.

  “Know what this is?”

  Gunther put on his glasses, got down from his chair, and approached. I handed him the dart, saying, “Be careful. There may be poison on the tip.”

  He took it carefully.

  “Blowgun,” he said. “I have seen darts like this before. Pietro Guilermo, the knife thrower in the Romero Circus, had a blow-gun. He was a very versatile performer. The circus was small. When he threw knives, he wore a gypsy costume and earrings. When he used the blowgun to pop balloons, he covered himself with black makeup and became Zumbugo of New Guinea.”

  “He ever use a crossbow?”

  “No.” Gunther turned over the dart.

  “Ever have a live target?”

  “Yes. Me. Remember, the Romero Circus was small. I was primarily an acrobatic clown, but I helped with the other acts.”

  “What can you tell me about blowguns and crossbows?”

  “Very little, I’m sorry to say. But I know someone who can tell you anything you want to know, August Blake at the Southwest Museum. He is an expert on ancient weapons. If you like, I’ll call him.”

  I told Gunther that I’d like to talk to August Blake as soon as possible. Gunther reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, came up with a leather address book and found the number he was looking for.

  “I will be back in a moment.”

  There was a small stool near the phone on the landing. Gunther stood on that when he used the wall-mounted pay phone. I stayed in the chair. Gunther was back in about five minutes.

  “August Blake is on the phone. He can see us at eight at the museum. Would that be acceptable?”

  “Eight is perfect,” I said.

  This time Gunther was back in less than a minute.

  “The museum is open till five,” Gunther said. “But August is working late tonight on a recently unearthed Mayan discovery, a double-edged ax never before considered a Mayan weapon or tool.”

  I thanked Gunther, went to my room and clicked on the floor lamp. The room hadn’t changed. Next to the closet on my left was my bed, neatly made up with the little pillow Mrs. Plaut had given me, which bore the words “God Bless Our Happy Home.” Because of my unreliable back—the gift of a large Negro gentleman who had once given me a bear hug—I always pulled the mattress to the floor when I slept. I had to sleep on my back on something reasonably firm.

  The large man who had done the damage to my back had wanted to talk to Mickey Rooney at an Andy Hardy premiere. I had been hired for the night to protect the star.

  Each morning Mrs. Plaut woke me, looked at my position on the floor, closed her eyes, and shook her head at what she considered my eccentricity.

  “I assume,” she had said the first time she discovered me that way, “that this is part and parcel of your religious practice. I respect the rites of all castes and sects, but you will have to return the mattress to the bed each morning you engage in this practice.”

  And that is what I did.

  Next to the window was a small wooden table with two chairs. Behind it was a refrigerator and another table on which sat a hot plate and an Arvin radio. Near the lamp was an armchair with lace doilies carefully placed on each arm of the chair, a dresser with a Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall over it. The clock told the right time. My father’s watch on my wrist was seldom within a two-hour range. The Beech-Nut clock said I had about fifteen minutes to get downstairs for dinner.

  The window was open. Dash, an orange cat to whom I sometimes belonged, sat on the ledge looking at me. There was a tree next to the window with a branch that almost touched my sill. Like me, he came and went whenever he pleased. I was always good for some milk and occasional cans of tuna or pieces of chicken filched from Mrs. Plaut’s table.

  I went to the refrigerator and got some milk while Dash waited patiently. I had time to grab my dopp kit, go to the bathroom on the landing, wash my face, shave with my Gillette, brush my teeth with Teel, get my kit back in my room, and make it down the stairs and into Mrs. Plaut’s rooms, where I assumed my place at the communal table.

  “Punctual,” Mrs. Plaut said from her chair at the table near the kitchen.

  Gunther sat at my right. Across from us were the other boarders: the one-armed car salesman Ben Bidwell and Mrs. Plaut’s shy and pretty niece Emma Simcox. Miss Simcox was in her thirties, a light-skinned, pretty Negro. Mr. Bidwell was a ruddy-faced lean man in his forties. Bidwell and Simcox had begun to keep company. They were a good match. She hardly ever spoke, and he hardly ever stopped speaking.

  “Hmm, smells great,” Bidwell said, looking at the food on the table.

  On a platter in front of us was a platter of baked macaroni with five flat rectangular browned slices of something familiar-looking on top.

  “Spam,” said Bidwell, smiling at Emma Simcox.

  “Prem,” Mrs. Plaut corrected. “Like Swift’s Premium Ham, it’s sugar cured. Made with Parmesan cheese, margarine, highly nutritious, lots of protein, and B-complex vitamins.”

  It didn’t smell bad, and I was hungry. Mrs. Plaut nodded for her niece to serve herself, and the meal began. Dinner conversation consisted primarily of Ben Bidwell assuring us that right after the war the price of new cars would be about nine hundred dollars “unless you want to go for one of the luxury models General Motors is planning. They’ll hit as much as fourteen hundred.”

  The vegetable for the meal was boiled beets, and dessert was steamed farina molasses pudding which, Mrs. Plaut proudly announced, cost a total of thirty-four cents.

  Gunther and I excused ourselves after dessert, and Mrs. Plaut reminded me to be sure to read the new pages of family history she had given me.

  In the car, we listened to Joan Davis on Sealtest Village Store. Joan, in her cracking voice, was telling Mr. Heinzwig the butcher to “trim the fat, get rid of the water, and keep your thumb off the scale.”

  The Southwest Museum was on Marion Way and Museum Drive overlooking the Arroyo Seco and Sycamore Grove.

  My father had taken my brother and me to the opening of the museum in 1914. It was memorable because it was one of the few Sundays he had taken off from working in our small grocery store in Glendale.

  Thirty years later, the museum looked just the way I remembered it, a white concrete building without ornament, a tile-roofed tower at one end and a high, square tower at the other.

  We parked in the lot and walked through the entrance, a brightly colored Mayan portal designed, as Gunther now informed me, in the manner of the entry at the House of Nuns at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. Inside the portal was a long tunnel, 260 feet long, according to Gunther. It led into the base of the hill on which the building stood. Dioramas on each side of the illuminated tunnel depicted the history of the primitive Asian migrants who millennia earlier had settled the western American coast.

  At the end of the tunnel stood a man. Behind him was an elevator, its doors open.

  “Good evening,” the man said, his voice echoing eerily down the tunnel.

  August Blake was around sixty, with white hair. A solid block of a man with a clean-shaven face, he gave us a Santa Claus smile of greeting.

  He held out his hand.
Gunther and I shook it in turns, and Gunther introduced me.

  “Come,” said Blake, stepping back so we could enter the elevator.

  The doors closed behind us after we entered, and we faced front. Blake said, “The lower lobby is one hundred and eight feet above us.”

  It took about twenty seconds before the elevator stopped and the doors opened.

  “The lights are dimmed,” he explained as we stepped out. “Museum’s closed, the blackout, money saved.”

  The lobby was a broad room lined with American Indian exhibits. There was something ghostly about the shadows, the musty smell and the faint sounds of creaking.

  Blake led the way to a stairway in the center of the room. We walked up to and through a room marked “Plains Indians.” We passed a tepee.

  “Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow and Arapahoe,” said Blake with pride, his voice and footsteps still echoing. “Clothing and weapons. The weapons are my particular interest.”

  He guided us into the south wing of the building and past the closed doors of an auditorium. “Torrance Tower,” he said, opening a door through which we followed him. “My office is this way, past the library.”

  About thirty feet farther, we stopped at a door with Blake’s name on it in black letters. Inside the room it was bright, a contrast to the darkness we had just been led through.

  There was a large cluttered desk in one corner and an even larger table in the center of the room. On it were bones, bows, arrows, something that looked like a peace pipe, and large, open books. There were also three magnifying glasses and a microscope. The walls were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.

  Blake led us to the table.

  “You have it with you? The dart?”

  I removed it from the handkerchief I had wrapped around it. He took it and turned it. Held it up to the light. He picked up a magnifying glass and examined it slowly.

  “Blowguns have been around for more than 40,000 years,” he said, looking at the dart. “Popped up all over the world. Serendipity. The hand of God or gods. This dart is made from river cane, Gigantis arundaris, probably the same material the blowgun that shot it is made of.”

  “Poisoned?” Gunther asked.

  “No. No need. A blowgun three or more feet long with a ten-inch dart in the hands of a Cherokee hunter could be shot accurately enough to pierce the eye of a deer at fifty feet. African tribes and South Sea Islanders used poisons in battle and hunting. But this isn’t a hunting dart.”

  “What is it?” I asked.

  “Too short, suggests a short blowgun, probably two feet. Could still be deadly accurate from twenty feet or even more. Person who made this dart knew what he—”

  “—or she,” I said.

  “Never heard of a woman using a blowgun,” Blake said with a smile. “But why not? Good lungs, steady hands, a hard blow. Person who made this ground the point the way it’s supposed to be. Amateurs whittle. This purple fluff on the end—”

  He held it out for us to look at.

  “It’s called fletching. This one is cotton, light, fluffy, fills the hole so there’s something to blow against.”

  “What do you know about crossbows?” I asked.

  He handed me the dart, and I rewrapped it and returned it to my pocket.

  “Ancient and primitive weapons of all manner are my passion,” he said. “Along with chocolate ice cream. What would you like to know?”

  “First,” I said, “how accurate are they?”

  “Remarkably in skilled hands,” he said. “By 1330 in Europe they were making prods—”

  “Prods?”

  “Springs,” he explained. “Of steel with pulls of fifty pounds and much more. Deadly at distances well over one hundred and fifty feet.”

  “Are they hard to make?”

  “Not if you know what you are doing,” he said. “It’s relatively easy to buy plans for crossbows, or to buy them already made.”

  “The things they shoot—bolts, quarrels, whatever,” I said. “Are they all pretty much the same?’

  “No,” he said. “Different lengths, designs, even special specifications for the avid user.”

  “Is there any way of telling if one of these bolts came from a particular, I mean, a specific crossbow?”

  “You mean like ballistics with a bullet? No, but if you show me a bolt and a crossbow, I can tell you if that bolt was shot from that specific design of crossbow.”

  I looked at Gunther. He didn’t seem to have any questions.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Would you be willing to testify in court as a crossbow expert?”

  Blake beamed.

  “Murder case?” he asked.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Sure.”

  I thanked him. He ushered us back to the tunnel, shook our hands and got back in the elevator.

  Dinah Shore sang “April in Paris” to us in the car as we headed back to Hollywood and Mrs. Plaut’s.

  Back at Mrs. Plaut’s, I got undressed, put on a pair of clean boxer shorts, pulled the mattress to the floor, and sat in my armchair reading Mrs. Plaut’s pages:

  THE EPISODE OF THE SILVER CREEK GHOST

  He is said to have had a small but distinctly purple wart on the end of his nose, which was the only distraction from what was generally agreed to be a face rivaling that of the infamous but handsome male members of the Booth family, particularly Edwin not the one who shot Mr. President Abraham Lincoln. My grandfather Wallace Edward Hamilton Simcox whose name was longer than he was tall since he is reported to have been no more than five feet and three inches in height even before he shrunk from the natural mystery of age.

  My grandfather resided in Silver Creek, Colorado with my grandmother and their two sons, Wayne and Warren. My grandfather was the foreman of the December Silver Mine, a very responsible job.

  It is reported though I don’t remember it myself that my grandfather was weak of eye, fond of the bottle and possessed no sense of direction often walking two miles the wrong way to work though he traversed the self same road for more than twenty-five years.

  One night after stopping after work at the Horseback Saloon to get quite stinking drunk which he felt was his right and obligation as a hard working man once a week, he recalled that he had left a lantern burning near a shaft. He had done no such of a thing but the recollection had come to him in his cups.

  Mason Thurling, who made a meager but honest living cleaning the spittoons at the Horseback, had volunteered to accompany my father back to the mine to be sure he went in the right direction. All in the Horseback thought this an idea of merit. We are talking about a barroom filled with drunken louts who would not know an idea of merit were it branded on their bicuspids and they could taste it.

  Mason Thurling was the town drunk in a town of drunks, an accomplishment of no small stature.

  And so they proceeded back to the December on a moonless night. They discovered no lamp left lit and in the darkness Mason tumbled over a wheelbarrow and went unconscious. My grandfather stumbled toward the mineshaft and was about to step into it when the ghost appeared glowing in front of him.

  Stop you goddamned fool the ghost so said to my grandfather who stopped.

  The ghost so my grandfather said afterwards looked exactly like Dolly Madison though when questioned my grandfather could not give accurate information on where he might have seen Dolly Madison’s image.

  My grandfather took several steps back and tripped over Mason Thurling who awoke with a start seeing the ghost. Mason’s hand was broken in the incident and was of little use from that night forth forcing him to become left handed and change his profession to that of itinerant harmonica player along with a hare-lipped Indian who played a broad repertoire of Stephen Foster tunes.

  Due to his repute as a drunk there were few who believed Mason’s confirmation of the sighting of Dolly Madison’s ghost. However it must be recalled that my grandfather would have certainly been smashed to blood and bone had not he seen the ghost or vision. D
ead he would have been unable to return home where that very night my grandmother conceived my father William which led to the birth of my mother Dolly Madison Simcox which led to me Irene named not for a ghost but a seamstress who had not taken the gesture of my being given her name as payment for a dress.

  I turned off the lights, got on the floor with a pillow under my head and closed my eyes. And the dreams came. Two I couldn’t remember, but the last one—that one I remembered.

  I was in Cincinnati. I don’t know what I was doing in Cincinnati. I don’t know why I dream about Cincinnati. I’ve never been to Cincinnati, but the Cincinnati of my dreams is a vast city without people.

  It was night. Street lights were on. I was standing in front of the door of a modest one-story brick house. The door opened slowly. I wanted to back away but my legs wouldn’t move. Over my shoulder a voice whispered, “Oh-oh, now you’re in for it, bub.” I turned my head toward the voice. It was Koko the Clown. He nodded his head toward the door letting me know I should pay attention.

  The door was open all the way now. The house was dark inside, but a woman stood glowing in front of me. She was wearing a Colonial costume complete with bonnet. In her hands was a crossbow. She was aiming it at me. I knew she had to be Dolley Madison.

  I tried to think of something to say to her, something to stop her, to assure her I voted for her husband, that I’d once been to Madison, Wisconsin, and walked down Madison Avenue in New York.

  She raised the crossbow higher. It was pointed at the top of my head. I reached up and felt an apple balanced in my hair. Koko snatched the apple and took a big bite, and Dolley Madison lowered the crossbow. It was aiming at my chest now. I knew her finger was tightening on the trigger.

  “I told you you were in for it, bub,” Koko said, and a bright light hit my face and a woman’s voice said, “Time.”

  I opened my eyes. Mrs. Plaut stood in the doorway of my room, the hall light behind her.

  “Time,” she repeated. “It’s seven.”

  I left Mrs. Plaut’s a few minutes later and hurried to pick up Joan Crawford.