Buried Caesars Read online

  “You think you’re funny? We’ll show you funny. Mr. Pintacki said do what we have to do, and then we can do what we want to do. You know what I want to do?” Conrad asked.

  “Become a hairdresser,” I guessed.

  Shelly gasped.

  “I want to throw you out that window, shoot your face, kick your stomach in, tear out your heart,” he hissed through clenched teeth.

  “I think you should rearrange the order or you’ll miss out on some of the fun,” I said, stalling.

  “Give it over, now,” said Wylie.

  Some of the desperation left me. Shelly was sputtering but we had some hope. They hadn’t just come to get rid of me. They wanted something they thought I had, and I was pretty sure of what it was. It changed things around, but I could deal with it.

  “I give it to you and you throw us out the window,” I said. “Not much in it for us.”

  Shelly struggled to get free but Conrad pinched the dentist’s cheek.

  “We’ll throw you out second,” Wylie offered. “Mr. Pintacki wants the papers.”

  “I’ll bring them to him,” I said, starting to get up. “Where is he?”

  Wylie poked the gun at my chest in warning.

  “No,” said Wylie. “He said for us to bring it, not you. He’s not happy with you.”

  “Sorry to hear that,” I said, “but …”

  “No buts,” shouted Wylie, leaning over the desk and putting the barrel of my pistol against my forehead. Even he wouldn’t miss at that distance.

  It was at that moment the door to Shelly’s office opened again. There was a pause, some footsteps, and the door to my office swung slowly inward. Wylie put his gun into the sling on his right arm and Conrad let go of Shelly’s neck. Shelly collapsed into my guest chair, his face looking like a cinnamon heart.

  A Negro man about my age, with a paunch and wearing a green sports jacket that didn’t come near matching his blue slacks, stepped in carrying a small package under his arm. He was a pro. He didn’t look left or right at Conrad or Wylie, who watched in confusion. The man simply ignored the panting Shelly.

  “Cash,” he said, looking across the desk at me with determined dark eyes.

  I handed him the twenty. He passed over the package and left, closing the door quietly behind him.

  “Book of the month,” I said. “Office delivery.”

  “The MacArthur papers,” said Wylie, retrieving his gun from the sling. “Hell with books.”

  I tore open the package carefully and pushed my right hand into it, looking over at the frightened, panting Sheldon Minck. I found the barrel of the Luger and decided to take the risk. I lifted the package in my left hand and let the pistol drop out into my right. I aimed it directly at Wylie’s left eye.

  Shelly finally found his voice and groaned, “I’m too old for this.”

  Wylie, however, didn’t waver. “I’m not scared,” he said. “Conrad’s not scared.”

  I wasn’t sure about Conrad. I couldn’t turn to see him but hysteria was the closest I could come to describing what I saw on Wylie’s face.

  “So what do we do?” I asked. “Shoot each other?”

  “I guess,” said Wylie, resigned.

  “I thought Pintacki wanted the MacArthur papers,” I said.

  “That’s right, Wylie,” Conrad agreed.

  “That’s right,” croaked Shelly, without knowing what we were talking about.

  The Luger in my right hand was aimed directly at Wylie. I grasped Mrs. Plaut’s chapters, and held them up.

  “Let’s deal,” I said.

  Wylie’s eyes were not in a dealing mood but he wasn’t too far gone yet to forget what he had come for.

  “Deal, Wylie,” Conrad urged.

  “My arm is busted ’cause of him,” whined Wylie. “Conrad, don’t you know we have been humiliated? You got no pride or something?”

  I reached back to the open window with the envelope and dangled it outside.

  “What are you up to?” Wylie asked.

  “Here’s the deal,” I said. “I’m dropping the MacArthur papers out the window. They’ll go flying all over the place, but you might be able to get it all together if you hurry. I’m counting to three and and then I’m dropping the envelope. You can start shooting or go out the door and down the stairs and see if you can put it all together.”

  “Hold it,” hissed Wylie.

  Shelly groaned.

  “One,” I said with a grin.

  “I want to shoot him,” Wylie said, fluttering his slung arm like a broken wing.

  “We can do that later,” Conrad said.

  “Two,” I went on, my Luger aimed just above my .38 in Wylie’s hand.

  “It started like … I don’t know, such a good morning,” Shelly said to Conrad.

  “Three,” I said and I dropped the pages.

  “Shit,” cried Wylie. He backed toward the door, unable to grab for the knob with one hand in a sling and the other holding my gun. Conrad reached back and threw the door open. I kept my pistol leveled at Wylie’s chest. I could see him considering a shot and then giving in. “Not over,” he said and following Conrad out, running.

  When we heard the outer door bang open, Shelly said, “That was Mrs. Plaut’s book. Why the hell do they want to kill you to get Mrs. Plaut’s book? It’s good but it’s not that good.”

  I reached for the phone and dialed the police. I told them two guys in overalls and carrying heat were in the alleyway behind the Farraday, throwing Nazi propaganda leaflets and shouting “Heil Hitler.” I told him the two were shooting at the peace-loving tenants of the building, and to prove it I fired a shot through the window. I screamed once in mock agony for good luck and hung up.

  “Toby, what the hell is going on?”

  “Secret stuff, Shel,” I said, looking out the window. The last sheets of Mrs. Plaut’s chapter were coming to rest on the grease and grime of the alleyway. Zanzibar and a few of his pals, who were busily pulling the seats out of the DeSoto, paused to gather in stray pages.

  “I’m a dentist,” groaned Sheldon Minck. “How does this kind of thing look to my patients? If Sam comes in and …”

  “I don’t think Sam’s coming,” I said, as Conrad and Wylie dashed through the Farraday’s back door and surveyed the mess of manuscript pages. Wylie started by ripping sheets out of the hands of Zanzibar Al and his boys. Conrad kneeled and gathered them in. He looked a little dizzy, probably delayed reaction from the bashing in by Mrs. Plaut, as formidable a toyweight as any who ever trod the canvas.

  “Not coming …” Shelly sputtered.

  “They’re not reading it,” I said, pleased. Conrad and Wylie didn’t even glance at the sheets. They had too much to do and didn’t know how much time they had to do it. Also, they may not have been able to read.

  “They’re saving it for a cocktail and a warm bath,” sighed Shelly.

  Shelly joined me at the window to watch Wylie and Conrad, with some unrequested assistance from one of Zanzibar Al’s boys, who seemed confused about whose side he was on. They had gathered the final sheets when the siren squealed somewhere in the direction of Alvarado.

  The keys to the DeSoto were in the car door. Wylie got in the passenger side. Conrad grabbed the keys and got in the driver’s side.

  The engine turned over, the DeSoto backed into a brick wall, then shot down the alley, narrowly missing Zanzibar Al himself, who danced out of the way. The police car caromed down from the other end of the alleyway and Zanzibar’s crew pointed in unison at the retreating DeSoto. The cops paused, saw them and shot out after the fleeing pair.

  The alley went quiet and Al looked up at me.

  “I’m sorry,” I shouted. “About the car.”

  “I am not,” he gargled back. “Material goods, You become attached to them. They’ve relieved me and we have relieved them.”

  Zanzibar Al pulled the DeSoto radio from behind his back.

  I put in a call to No-Neck Arnie the mechanic, who tri
ed to convince me to apply for a C gas-ration book so he could make a deal with me for the coupons I didn’t use.

  “Here’s how it’s going to work,” Arnie said, while I listened to the siren pull farther and farther away. “An A book will have a year’s supply of coupons, giving 2,880 miles of driving on the basis of four gallons of gas to a coupon. You follow?”

  “No.”

  “Try,” he said. “That’s based on the government’s official estimate of 15 miles to the gallon. Of the total, 1,080 are supposed to be for family driving and 1,800 for the job.”

  “Fascinating, Arnie,” I said.

  “A B book,” he went on, “will be for drivers whose job requires more than 1,080 miles per year. Trouble is you gotta agree to share the car, but how’s the government to know?”

  “They won’t,” I said.

  “Right. Now, the C book,” he said, getting into it. “That’s for drivers who fall into fourteen classifications of essential occupations involving driving more than 470 miles a month. You get ninety-six coupons every three months, good for four gallons a coupon.”

  “But you have to pay for the gas,” I said, trying to get into this because with a war on it paid to be nice to your mechanic.

  “Sure, but what I’m talking here is you applying for an occupational allowance. You and Minck both. I’ll take the extra coupons off your hands for a fair price.”

  “I’ll think about it,” I said, but I knew I wouldn’t think about it. I knew if I did it I’d have dreams of jeeps full of soldiers in some jungle running out of gas because I picked up a few bucks from No-Neck Arnie. “Arnie, my car’s a half block down from my house, front tires flat. Can you pick it up, fix it, and bring it to your place?”

  “Sure,” he said. “Twenty bucks. Ten if you think seriously about applying for a C coupon.”

  “I’ll pay the twenty,” I said.

  “Suit yourself,” he said with a deep sigh to let me know what I’d be missing. “You can pick it up here after four.”

  I hung up, gave a sigh of my own, and tried to figure out the least awkward way to walk down the street and hail a cab with a loaded oversized Luger in my pocket.

  11

  Shelly wouldn’t talk to me. He sat in his dental chair sulking behind the morning paper.

  He had been choked, humiliated and kept in the dark. The patient he had started to clean up for, Dashiell Hammett, probably wasn’t coming. With good reason, Sheldon Minck assumed it was all my fault.

  “They won’t come back, Shel,” I said. “They know I’ll get out of here. Besides, I’ll have them nailed by the end of the day if the cops don’t catch them now.”

  A distant siren suggested that the cops hadn’t caught up with Wylie and Conrad, which didn’t say much for the Los Angeles Police Department since Conrad was driving with a concussion. But, then again, the police had lost most of their youngest and sharpest to the armed forces.

  Shelly grunted and rustled his paper. A puff of angry cigar smoke curled over the top of the pages.

  “I’ll check in later,” I said. “You’ll have to interview Louise-Mary without me.”

  “Louise-Marie,” he corrected.

  “Louise-Marie,” I amended. “Mildred will hate her.”

  To this he did not even grunt. I went down to the sixth-floor landing of the Farraday. It was still early. Most of the tenants—baby photographers, pornographers, fortune tellers, correspondence-school operators, assorted quacks, hacks and shysters—wouldn’t be arriving for a while, but I could tell from the aroma of fresh Lysol that Jeremy or Alice or both were on the job. I followed the scent and found Jeremy on the fourth floor just outside the door of a small-time bookie named Desnos Lyme. The sign on the door read: LYME AND ASSOCIATE, INVESTMENTS.

  Jeremy kneeled next to the door, bucket on one side of him, Lysol bottle on the other, chamois in hand. He wore a clean red-flannel shirt and dark slacks and, in the demi-darkness of the early-morning windowless interior of the Farraday core, enough light came from the bulbs to shine off Jeremy’s shaved head. He had worked his weight down to about 250 pounds, but he still looked like an intelligent mountain.

  “Jeremy,” I said. “I need a favor.”

  Jeremy paused. He took a beat to change roles from landlord to friend, but just a beat.

  “Yes,” said Jeremy, eager to get back to his battle with the inevitable grime of the Farraday.

  “A pair of minor-league menaces named Conrad and Wylie just broke into my office, pushed Shelly around a little and waved a gun. It’s part of a case I’m on. I don’t think they’ll come back but I’d like you to keep an eye on Shelly for the rest of the day just in case. You can’t miss these two; one has his arm in a sling, the other has a patched head. They always wear overalls. And they’re both big, not as big as you, but big.”

  Jeremy didn’t answer. He simply nodded.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Toby,” he said, as I turned to leave. “The hourglass of life is dropping its silent sand. We must savor each grain and be careful not to crack the glass.”

  “Comforting thought, Jeremy,” I said, taking a step toward the stairs. My footsteps echoed below.

  “You miss my point,” said Jeremy. “I was not making an existential observation.”

  “Sorry,” I said, not even worrying about what he meant.

  “Whatever life is, and I am inclined at least poetically to consider it a continuum, a river of being in which the essence of energy—energy which includes you and me—must flow, will flow and has flown since the beginning of time.”

  “Gotcha,” I said, taking another step.

  “No,” he went on, “my point is that in this present existence in present time we should honor life and not insult it. Too often you insult it. It is time to consider reflection and contemplation, Toby. You are of an age.”

  “I’ll think about it, Jeremy,” I said, finally getting to the stairs. “Meanwhile …”

  “If those two show up and cause trouble,” Jeremy said, reaching down for his Lysol, “I’ll crush their heads like ripe pomegranates.”

  “I’d appreciate that. How’s Alice?”

  “Pregnant,” he said.

  I stopped and turned around to face him. I’d never thought of the enormous Alice as a mother. In fact, I’d never thought about how old Alice Pallice Butler might be. I knew Jeremy had to be at least sixty.

  “Congratulations,” I said.

  “A new hourglass to be shined, protected and savored,” he said. His face was shadowed but I could see the small hint of what might have been a smile on his usually expressionless face. “To create a new life is poetry but too few of the poets recognize their aesthetic powers.”

  “When’s the baby due?” I asked.

  “May,” he said.

  “These are hard times for having a baby,” I said.

  “When were the easy times? When were the right times? When were the best times?” He was back to cleaning the walls, and a new wave of Lysol aroma wafted toward me from the open bottle. “You too are capable of poetry, Toby.”

  “Not so’s you’d notice,” I said. “I’ll leave it to you and Alice. I really am happy for you, Jeremy.”

  “I believe you are. Now if you and the world will survive long enough to meet my child, I will be very pleased.”

  I left Jeremy to his endless chore and hurried down the polished stone steps and along the omate black-painted metal railing, remembering the time I had seen Jeremy calmly throw a crazed giant thirty years younger and thirty pounds heavier across the waiting room of a veterinarian’s office. There had been no joy in it for Jeremy, just something he could do and had to do to save my life. He had read me his poetry for years and never shown the slightest emotion other than a resigned melancholy. Even his marriage to Alice had been sober, but I had just seen the touch of a smile on that corded face and it made me feel vulnerable and just a little scared.

  My plan was simple. Pintacki didn’t have the MacArth
ur papers. I had some idea of who might have them, but no idea of why. I needed a car.

  There were probably ways to borrow a car and better places, but I caught a cab on Hoover and told him to drive me to Culver City. I watched the city wake up as we went west on Pico, cut down Hill and turned a few blocks short of the M.G.M. Studios to the street where Ann lived. I looked around for Ann’s car before paying the cabbie, got a receipt and let the cab go. Her shining little black Ford was parked on the street behind a not-so-bright Chrysler.

  I didn’t bother to check my watch as I walked across the courtyard and past the pond. I figured it was still early. I knocked and waited. I knocked again and finally heard soft footsteps padding and a voice answer dreamily, “Who is it?”

  “Toby,” I said.

  The pause was half of forever, the time it would take for a butterfly’s wings to wear down a bowling ball. Then the chain inside clanked, the handle turned and the door opened a crack. Her thick hair was falling over her eyes and she was wearing a blue and white silk robe she had bought when we were still married. Her eyes were a bit puffy but she looked soft and warm.

  “How did the interview go?” I asked.

  The crack didn’t widen.

  “Fine,” she said. “I got the job.”

  “Great. Can I come in?”

  “I … I’m sorry. I’ve got to get up and get to work.”

  “Well, you can tell me about the job while you get dressed,” I said amiably.

  “I’m sorry,” she said. “You should have called.”

  “Too early in the morning. I didn’t want to wake you.”

  “Toby, please …”

  “Can I borrow your car for a few hours?” I asked.

  “My … no … I need it to …” she stammered.

  “I’m on this case,” I started to explain. “Vital to the war effort. Two guys …”

  “I don’t want to hear, Toby,” she whispered. “I don’t want to know about your cases. We’re not married, remember? I don’t have to know. I don’t have to wonder. I don’t have to worry. I don’t have to be responsible for you. You are two husbands ago, Toby. I appreciate what you’ve done for me but let’s just stop it here.”