Mildred Pierced: A Toby Peters Mystery Read online

  Mildred Pierced

  Stuart M. Kaminsky

  A MysteriousPress.com

  Open Road Integrated Media Ebook

  And this one is for

  the one and only Annie Miller

  “Why so disheartened!” he exclaimed. “The scoundrel must be concealed behind some of these trees, and may yet be secured. We are not safe while he goes at large.”

  —James Fenimore Cooper,

  The Last of the Mohicans

  CHAPTER 1

  UNTIL WEDNESDAY AFTERNOON January 5, 1944, there had been no deaths, intentional or accidental, caused by the firing of a crossbow in the recorded history of Los Angeles County.

  On that day, while the German army of Field Marshal Fritz von Manstein was retreating into the Pripet marshes in Poland and the U.S. Marines were driving the Japanese back at Cape Gloucester in New Britain in the Pacific, Mildred Binder Minck made history.

  The day after Mildred’s historic demise, I sat across from her grieving widower, Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., in a room in the Los Angeles County Jail.

  The Los Angeles County Hall of Justice on Temple Street between Broadway and Spring takes up a city block. It’s fourteen stories of limestone and granite, an Italian Renaissance style building with rusticated stonework, heavy cornices, and a two-story colonnade at the top.

  The L.A. County Jail occupies the five top stories. Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., was occupying only one chair on the fourth floor of the jail. He faced me through a wall of thick wire mesh.

  “Toby, I didn’t do it,” he said.

  Shelly Minck is not a thing of beauty to behold when he’s at his best, happily drilling into or removing the tooth of a trapped patient. Seated on the other side of the wire, he was not at his best.

  “I mean, I don’t think I did it,” he added.

  Shelly wore a pair of dark slacks and a long-sleeved wrinkled gray shirt. His thick glasses rested, as they usually did, at the end of his ample nose. Beads of sweat danced on his bald head and his large stomach heaved with frequent sighs.

  “They won’t let me have a cigar,” he complained. “Is that fair?”

  I didn’t answer. He squinted around the room. Along either side of the mesh wall were chairs facing each other, twelve chairs, and a narrow wooden shelf on either side so prisoners could drum their fingers, fold their hands, or examine their bitten nails. On the other side, lawyers could take notes or safely give their clients bad news.

  There was only one other prisoner with a visitor. He was a thin man with wild hair who needed a shave. His visitor was an even thinner woman with even more wild hair, who needed to decide which of the three colors that roamed through that hair was the one she planned to live with.

  It was early in the morning, and each newly arrested inmate was allowed a morning visitor the day after his arrest.

  “You should have called Marty Leib,” I said.

  Marty Leib was a criminal defense attorney whom I called when I needed legal rescue. As a licensed private investigator, I needed rescue more often than I could afford so I saved his services for emergencies. Marty was good, expensive, immoral. He wore fine clothes, weighed about three hundred pounds, and always seemed happy to hear from me and start the fee clock ticking.

  “You call him for me. It’s you I need. You find criminals,” said Shelly.

  “I conduct investigations for paying clients,” I said.

  Shelly looked hurt. Shelly looked as if he were going to weep. I cut him off.

  “Okay, I’ll call Marty.”

  “And you’ll help me?”

  I sublet a small office off of Sheldon Minck’s dental chamber of horrors in the Farraday Building downtown. The office was not soundproof. I knew when Shelly had a patient. I could hear the drill, the screams and Shelly’s soothing voice either singing or trying to calm the hysterical patient with his singing. Shelly thought he sounded like Nelson Eddy. On one of his better days, I thought he approached Andy Devine.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  He looked at his hands. His glasses almost fell off. He pushed them back.

  “Why would I kill Mildred?”

  I could come up with four good reasons. Mildred had not long ago thrown Shelly out of their house, cleaned out their joint bank account, taken in a slightly overage stuntman, and filed for divorce demanding half of everything Shelly would make for the rest of his life.

  Since Mildred had thrown him out, Shelly had been living in a very small hotel room.

  “She had a few faults, but I loved her, Toby,” he said with less-than-attractive but probably sincere emotion.

  I believed him, though I had no idea why he had blinded himself to Mildred’s “few faults.” Mildred was skinny, homely, harping, and unfaithful. She belittled Shelly in front of other people and made it clear that any pal of his was probably not worth space on the planet. I stood at the top of Mildred’s list of the unworthy.

  “I know, Shel,” I said. “What were you doing in Lincoln Park at eleven in the morning with a crossbow?”

  “Shooting it,” he explained.

  I nodded.

  “Not at Mildred,” he added quickly. “I set up a target. I didn’t know Mildred was there. I don’t know what she was doing there. I didn’t even see her till she fell.”

  “You’ve got a great defense, Shelly,” I said. “You couldn’t see what you were shooting at, missed the target, and hit your wife who you didn’t know was there. Did you have your glasses off?”

  “No,” he insisted loudly enough that the skinny prisoner and his visitor five chairs down to his right turned to look our way. “I didn’t take my glasses off. Well, I did, but that was before I fired. I wiped the sweat from my eyes.”

  “Are you an expert with a crossbow, Shel?”

  “No, I’ve only fired it five times. I’m getting better, but I think I’ll give it up now.”

  “Might be a good idea,” I said. “Why a crossbow?”

  “I’ve joined Lawrence Timerjack’s Survivors for the Future,” he said. “We learn how to make our own weapons and use them, forage for food, hide from the enemy and survive. I’m a Pigeon now. When I complete the training, I become a Pathfinder.”

  I needed a cup of coffee.

  “You see,” Shelly said, leaning forward. “Our bible is the complete works of the first great American novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, who devoted his life to writing about surviving on the frontier.”

  “And killing Indians,” I said.

  “That, too,” he agreed. “Pigeons are the lowest level. Pigeon is the Delaware nickname for the young Natty Bumppo.”

  “Who?”

  “Natty Bumppo,” he said with enthusiasm. “He went from being called the Pathfinder, to Deerslayer and then—”

  “Why?” I asked.

  “Why what?”

  “Why do you want to become a Survivor for the Future?”

  “In case America is overrun by the Asian hordes, or the Arabs or Nazis or creatures from another planet or the government goes nuts. It could happen.”

  “We’re winning the war, Shel,” I tried. “It’s almost over.”

  He shook his head at my naïveté.

  “This time,” he said. “But the next time? What if we have to move to Australia or some jungle somewhere or a desert?”

  “Where do the Survivors for the Future hang around?”

  “We don’t hang around,” he said, mustering a healthy touch of indignation as he adjusted his glasses again. “We have a campsite and cabins on Hollywood Lake. It’s secluded, rustic, wooded, the ideal place—”

  “Let’s try something else,” I interrupted. “If you
didn’t kill Mildred, who did?”

  “I don’t know. I was standing straight, both eyes open, focused, bow pulled back, bolt in place. Concentrating, you know?”

  “Bolt?”

  “Crossbows shoot bolts or quarrels or arrows,” he explained. “Depends on where they’re made. A bolt is … well, a bolt of metal, sort of shaped like a pointy pencil with a kind of tail, all one piece of metal.”

  “How many of these bolts had you fired yesterday before …”

  “None,” Shelly said, holding up a single finger. “That was the first. I had three bolts with me. The police took the other two. The ones I didn’t shoot.”

  Shelly looked dreamily past my right shoulder. I turned to see what he was looking at. It was a painting of Indians greeting Spanish conquistadors on the Pacific coast. The Indians were holding out baskets of food. The Spanish, in full armor, were holding out what looked like orange blankets. The Indians were wearing tomahawks on their hips. The Spaniards were wearing swords. There wasn’t a crossbow in sight.

  “Shelly?”

  “Huh?”

  “In the park. Crossbow. You pulled the string or whatever it’s called back and then …”

  “I fired,” he said.

  Silence while he shook his head and then focused, slightly open-mouthed, on something behind me.

  “Shelly.”

  “Huh?”

  “I need you here in Los Angeles,” I said. “Not in the woods with the Deerfinder.”

  He sighed deeply. “Deerslayer. I looked up and there was Mildred, lying there ten feet from the target. I dropped the crossbow and ran to her. She was dead, Toby, dead, a hole in her chest. I looked around for help and there was this woman standing there, back where I’d shot from. She was holding a paper bag.”

  “She saw what happened?”

  “I guess,” he said. “No, she must have, but she started to run. I called to her and tried to get up to go after her, but she was gone.”

  “And then …?”

  “A kid came. Asked me what was wrong. I told him my wife was hurt, that I thought she had a heart attack. He looked at Mildred and said he saw blood.”

  “And you—”

  “I think I closed my eyes and cried. When I opened them, the kid was gone.”

  He shrugged.

  “What did the kid look like?”

  “Skinny, reddish hair, maybe fifteen, sixteen.”

  “That’s when the police came?”

  He hesitated, looked as if he were going to say something, and then simply nodded.

  “She was with the two policemen,” he said. “The woman with the paper bag. She was pointing to me and saying she saw me do it. That’s when I recognized her.”

  “Who is she?”

  “Joan Crawford,” he said.

  “You mean someone who looks like Joan Crawford.”

  “I guess.” He shook his head again. “This woman was shorter than Crawford and she’s got regular shoulders. And she told the police her name was Billie Castle or something like that.”

  The skinny couple five or six chairs down had their faces almost against the mesh now, whispering. Maybe she was going to slip him a wire cutter. Shelly and I both looked at them.

  “I’m forlorn,” Shelly said, looking back at me with as insincere a look of woe as I had ever seen from him, and I had seen many.

  “I’ll call Marty Leib,” I said.

  “And you’ll find out who killed Mildred?” he asked as I got up.

  “I’ll do what I can.”

  “I can pay. Now that Mildred’s dead, I’ll get the house back, and I won’t have to give her any more money.”

  There was no point in telling him not to pass that information on to the police. They would find it out on their own.

  “You work out payment with Marty,” I said. “I’ll just charge you expenses.”

  “You’re a friend,” Shelly said with the sincerity of a bad child actor. “And Toby …”

  “Yes, Shel.”

  “When you come back, bring me some cigars, nothing expensive. I’ve got to have them. It’s like life or death.”

  I nodded. Life or death might well be involved here, but it wasn’t about cigars.

  “I’ll see what I can do,” I said.

  I didn’t look back at him when the guard let me out of the room. In the hall waiting for the elevator, I pulled out my notebook, crumpled, wire, spirals bent, found the blunt pencil in my pocket and wrote three names: Joan Crawford?, Lawrence Timerjack, and Phil Pevsner. There was a question mark after the name of Joan Crawford because I knew that Crawford had once used the name Billie Cassin, and that she was born with the unlikely name Lucille Fay Le Sueur. I knew because I had worked at Warner Brothers as a security guard and had plenty of time to read the fan magazines, even though it was considered an act of treachery by the Brothers Warner to read about MGM stars like Crawford.

  Phil Pevsner is my brother, a lieutenant in the Los Angeles Police Department. He works out of the Wilshire Station. I was born Tobias Leo Pevsner and changed my name to Toby Peters when I became a cop. That was before my Warner Brothers days. My brother had never forgiven me for the name change, but then again, there was a long list of things for which he had never forgiven me and a short list for things for which he had forgiven me. I was working on making the long list shorter, which wasn’t always easy given his temper and my inability to keep from making him mad.

  I headed for my brother.

  When I found a parking space for my Crosley, I checked the grocery list in my pocket. I was supposed to pick up what was on the list for my landlady, Mrs. Plaut. Irene Plaut was ancient and determined. Neither ration stamps nor common sense got in her way, and when one of the tenants in her boardinghouse tried to employ logic, her hearing aid conveniently failed.

  The Ration Board allotted each American forty-eight points a month and warned us not to use them all up during the first week.

  I was to pick up a pound of bacon (no more than thirty-nine cents), a pound of oleo (no more than seventeen cents), a No. 2 can of green beans (for eleven cents), and two pounds of sirloin steak at forty-two cents a pound. The tenants had all chipped in their ration coupons, and Mrs. Plaut had given me exactly enough cash.

  When she had caught me hurrying down the stairs that morning, heading for the door and my meeting with Sheldon Minck, she had handed me the list, instructions, coupons. She grabbed my arm. She weighs about as much as a sponge cake and stands no more than four-feet-eight, but she has the grip of a Swedish plumber.

  “Breakfast,” she had said.

  “No time,” I answered. “Dr. Minck is in trouble.”

  “Then he should see an eye doctor,” she said. “Not an exterminator.”

  Mrs. Plaut is actually under the dual delusion that I am not only an exterminator, but also a book editor. Both fantasies had been gleaned from bits of conversation which then were cemented in her mind as undeniable truth. Thus, one of my duties as a tenant in the House of Plaut on Heliotrope Street was to read chapters of the ongoing family history she was writing.

  “An eye doctor?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “That’s what the mister did when he was seeing double before the big war—not this one, but the big one.”

  “He’s in trouble,” I had semi-shouted, “not seeing double.”

  “Bugs?”

  “What?” I said, wondering where this was going.

  “He has bugs?”

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Unsanitary,” she said with disapproval. “I’ve given my bird a new name.”

  “Great,” I said, trying to escape.

  Mrs. Plaut was constantly changing the name of her squawking bird, which either sat asleep on the perch in its cage or went wild. Mrs. Plaut’s rooms were right off the front door at the bottom of the stairs. The door was open.

  Getting past her was a challenge I rarely met. The bird was quiet.

  “I have renamed him Jamaica R
ed,” she said.

  The bird was brown and green, some kind of little parrot. I doubted if it came from Jamaica.

  “Great name,” I said.

  She smiled.

  “He seems to like it. It soothes his savage breast.”

  With that, she had let go of my arm and I fled.

  The Crosley didn’t use much gas, which was good because there was a major gas shortage. It didn’t matter if you had the coupons or not. There just wasn’t much gas, which suddenly made my tiny automobile a valuable means of transportation. No-Neck Arnie the mechanic had offered me what I had bought it from him for plus forty dollars. I had turned him down. It wasn’t easy getting in and out of, but it was easy to park and seemed to run on the memory of gasoline.

  There were four people waiting on a wooden bench in the lobby facing the uniformed desk clerk at the Wilshire Street Station, a warhorse named Corso whom I knew would be ready for pasture in less than a year.

  “Toby,” he called out. “How’s it going?”

  “I’m blessed with beauty, wealth, and a heart full of fellowship,” I said. “Life is wonderful.”

  Corso shook his head and laughed, but it sounded more like a grunt.

  It didn’t take much to make him laugh. He had been born with the looks of a bewildered bull. I was a flat-nosed former cop pushing fifty who looked more like a backup thug in a gangster picture than a leading man. I lived from client to client and sometimes kept from getting behind on my rent by filling in for a vacationing or sick house detective in one of the downtown hotels.

  I started for the stairs when he waved me back.

  “She’s in the hospital again,” Corso said softly, looking at the family of four sitting on the bench patiently to be sure they weren’t listening.

  “She” was my brother Phil’s wife, Ruth, the mother of my two nephews, Nathan and David, and my four-year-old niece, Lucy. Ruth had been sick for almost two years, in and out of the hospital, almost not making it out the last two times. I had been at their house two Sundays ago. There was almost nothing left of Ruth, yet she had made dinner and tried to pay attention to the conversation. We had listened to The Aldrich Family, or pretended to.