Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) Page 2

  “Toby, I …”

  “This guy was standing over him, Mrs. Howard,” Paitch said, waving his gun in my general direction. “And another guy was running away.”

  “Make the call, Carl,” I repeated.

  “You know there was nothing I could do about it,” he rambled on. “I got to take time to eat too, don’t I? A man’s got to eat, doesn’t he?”

  “No he doesn’t, Carl,” I said. “The telephone.”

  “Call the police, Mr. Paitch,” Anne said firmly, her eyes still on me.

  “I’m calling the cops,” Paitch said decisively as if he had just thought of it. “Right now.” And he turned and went through the door of a darkened room behind him. Anne and I didn’t say anything for a second or two, just listened to Paitch bungle into odd pieces of furniture, find the light, and finally pick up the phone.

  “I’m not going to break, Toby,” she said softly, putting her head forward. She had clasped her hands tightly together, and the effort to keep it in sent a shiver through her.

  “I know, Anne,” I said.

  Paitch’s voice wasn’t booming but it was loud and clear from inside the room.

  “Ralph Howard. Right. Yes. I’m sure. You don’t have a face like, that if you’re alive I’m telling you.”

  Anne’s eyes blinked, and I hurried over to close the door where Paitch was making the call. We could still hear his voice, but not the words. Anne had taken the last two steps down and I moved to her, held out my hand, but she unclasped hers and held up a palm to keep me away. I knew what she was saying. A touch from me, maybe from anyone, would break her and she didn’t want to break, at least not yet, maybe not at all.

  “Let’s go in here,” she said, turning to a room off the hallway. I followed her and stood in the doorway as she turned on the lights. The room was brown and white, and clean. No children or oafs treaded here, just civilized people, but it wasn’t a civilized person who had done the job on the corpse on the beach.

  “Would you like something to drink?” she said, looking around, unable to remember for the moment where the drinks were. If she weren’t about to crack, she would remember that the beer I drink isn’t found in a liquor cabinet. “A Pepsi?” she asked, striding toward a cabinet, brown and very old, in a corner. The floor was finely polished dark wood with a white and brown checkered rug, a big plush checkerboard in the center.

  “No, thanks,” I said.

  “Right,” she went on, still walking. “I’ll have something.”

  “You want me to get it for you?”

  “No,” she said. “I want something to do.

  “How about crying?” I asked softly.

  “Maybe later,” she said. “Definitely later. But we’ve got business now before the police come.”

  I shut up, was careful not to step on the rug, and stood patiently while she slowly made herself a drink, took a sip, shuddered, and turned back toward me across the long room. The light from two lamps was dim, and her face was hidden in darkness, but her voice had a sob in it and I was sure her eyes were more than usually moist.

  “I’m not much of a drinker,” she said, tossing her dark hair back and looking into the amber liquid in her glass as if it held some secret.

  “I know,” I answered. “Anne …”

  “I know,” she said with a sigh, looking up at me. “About a week ago someone tried to kill Ralph. I saw it, Toby, I was there. We were crossing Melrose on a Saturday. We had just come out of Marko’s after dinner. A car came right at us, no other traffic, nothing. Right at us. Ralph pushed me back and the car missed him by inches. Ralph was shaken, but he said something about a drunk driver. I saw the driver’s face. He wasn’t drunk.”

  “What did he look like?” I asked.

  Anne swirled her drink and continued to avoid my eyes. “A man. I don’t know. He looked tough, dark. I don’t remember, Toby, and before you ask, I don’t think I would recognize him again. The next day, Ralph hired Paitch.”

  Ralph could have done a hell of a lot better than Paitch, I thought, but there was no point in saying it now.

  “And everything was fine till today, which is why you called me?” I said, wanting to sit on the harder arm of one of the chairs. The cushion I was on was too soft, and my bad back gave me a very small warning. I shifted my weight.

  “No,” she said, dragging out the word. “There were signs all the time since that car tried to hit him. He was nervous, his mind, memory couldn’t stay in the room. And he began to have some problems at work.”

  Ralph worked for Trans World Airlines, a vice president or something like it. He had been with the company since it started and was greatly respected by Howard Hughes, though I had only Anne’s word for that. She too had worked for TWA, where she had met Ralph. I had met husband number two a few times.

  “What kind of problems?” I prompted, realizing that Anne had paused, her own thoughts wandering. But she came back strong.

  “Nothing terrible,” she said. “Just a drop in his attention. A contract he was handling for replacement parts was delayed and resulted in a cost rise. Costs are rocketing since the war. He spent more and more time on his new hobby.”

  “Which was?” I asked, forcing myself not to look at my watch, which wasn’t very difficult. The watch had belonged to my father. It was accidentally right about twice during a normal day. I wanted to prompt her again, get something more before the police arrived or Paitch decided to walk in, but I played the role of patient listener.

  “Boxing,” she sighed, looking up at me defiantly, expecting some wise-ass comment.

  “Ralph was boxing?” I said.

  “Ralph had bought contracts or parts of contracts of some professional boxers. I think he had quite a bit of money invested.”

  I couldn’t sit a second longer or my back would have locked. I pushed myself up and kept my voice low, stepping toward her.

  “That doesn’t sound like Ralph,” I said. “Not that I knew Ralph very well mind you, but it doesn’t—”

  “It wasn’t” she agreed, finishing off her drink in two quick gulps. Then she laughed, a small laugh. “I haven’t drunk in years, Toby. Do you know why? Because drinking makes you fat.”

  I thought about all the skinny drunks my landlord was always hauling out of the dark corners of the Farraday Building on Hoover, where I had my office. Maybe alcohol made women fat and men skinny? I didn’t share the insight with Anne.

  “I don’t have to worry about that any more though, do I?”

  I didn’t answer and she went on.

  “I own this house,” she said, looking at the ceiling where a cone of light from the lamp made a path to the far corner. “Ralph had a big insurance policy and a bank account. I don’t have to worry about how I look any more.”

  “Annie,” I said, wanting to reach out and touch her. “You’re not going to change. I couldn’t change you. You couldn’t change me.”

  “We will see, Tobias,” she said, biting her lower lip. “We will see.”

  The idea of Ralph getting mixed up with boxing reminded me of Joe Louis. Had Louis been there to see Ralph? Maybe it wasn’t just an unlucky break for the Brown Bomber. Maybe I had put my foot through a rotten egg.

  “Do you know why he got interested in boxing?” she said, sounding slightly drunk. There was no way the alcohol could have worked that quickly. She wanted it to happen, needed it, and had helped it along.

  I shook my head.

  “Because of you. He never said so, but it didn’t take much to figure it out. You’re tough, had more fights than I want to think about, and he knew you were interested in boxing.”

  Interested was a mild word and Anne knew it.

  “Ralph was a gentle, determined businessman,” she went on, looking at me angrily as if I was about to mount an argument. “He was …”

  “Everything I’m not,” I finished.

  “Just about,” she said. “I wanted him because of that. I loved him because of that and the poo
r …” She sobbed, shaking her head. “The poor …”

  “Bastard,” I supplied.

  “… thought he had to compete with you.”

  “Hey, Annie,” I said, now no more than a foot from her. “I’m not responsible for Ralph getting killed. I’ve come close to being responsible for me getting killed, but Ralph packed his own suitcase.”

  “He expected to get killed tonight,” she said. Her fingers had gone white around the fragile, now empty glass. I reached out and took it from her. My fingers touched her but she didn’t pull back. I put the glass on a table and waited.

  “He got a call this afternoon,” she said. “I don’t know who or what or why. I heard the phone ring. I know he answered, and then he came to me. I was upstairs reading. He said he had to go out. He looked, I don’t know, strange, nervous. He told me he loved me and I made some joke about knowing it, but now I think he was saying good-bye or at least a just-in-case good-bye. He kissed me and went out, didn’t say where he was going or who he was going to meet. I got frightened, Toby, and I called you. But I called too late.”

  I touched her arm. She shuddered and then leaned against me. She smelled like old memories and tears, and her breasts were warm through her white dress, and I felt guilty but what the hell, I hugged her.

  My timing was great. While I held her a voice came from behind me.

  “I don’t want to disturb anything here, but are you the folks with the body?”

  Anne pulled away, and I turned to face a beefy man with a red face. He was somewhere in his fifties and looked like a bloated salami. He hadn’t taken his hat off. His rumpled suit was dark, and the hat almost matched. It sat on the back of his head, his gray hair matted in front of it and over his forehead.

  “This is the widow,” I said to the cop, who I recognized but didn’t know by name. My brother is a captain at the Wilshire, and years back I’d been a uniform in Glendale. Even without the connection, I’d met most of the cops who had been around for a while. This guy worked out of Santa Monica. He had an Irish name and the reputation for not being fond of work.

  “I know you,” he said, pointing a finger at me and stepping in. I could feel his presence doing something to Anne, and I knew what it was. The cop was behaving the way I usually did, and I knew how she reacted to that.

  “I assume you are a policeman,” she said firmly.

  The cop stopped and looked at her with the trace of a sneer.

  “And you’re the …” he said.

  “I’m the widow,” she finished. “And you are an insensitive heap of offal. How did you get in here?”

  “Door was open,” the cop said. “I just walked in and found you and … I know who you are, Peters, the private keyhole who got into all kinds of shit in Venice a few years ago.”

  “And I know who you are,” I said, remembering. “You’re a pickled cop named Meara. Your name just came to me when you got close enough for me to smell the cheap whiskey.”

  Meara smiled and shook his head. “I heard you had a big mouth,” he said. “I guess you use it to console widows too.”

  “Meara,” I said with a grin, “how would you like a nose like mine?”

  “I’ll ask you a different one,” he countered. “How’d you like an hour with me back at the station? Just a quiet cup of tea and some literary talk in our library.”

  “Officer,” Anne said softly.

  “Sergeant,” Meara corrected.

  “Sergeant,” she said, stepping past me to face him. “Mr. Peters is an old friend. In fact, Mr. Peters and I were once married. I called him earlier today to come out here and see if he could help Ralph, my husband, to stay alive. Now don’t you think your time would be better spent looking at the … at my husband?”

  I started to put my arm around her, but she sensed it and stepped away.

  “Got a man doing just that,” Meara said. “Fella who seems to work here met us outside and led my man down to the corpse. I thought I’d just check out the bereaved and get some background.”

  He gave me a less than cheerful look and plopped down in an armchair.

  “Sorry if I jumped to anything,” he said with no touch of regret in his voice. If anything, his sarcasm had increased. “Just doing my job. It’s been a tough day.”

  “We sympathize with you, Meara,” I said.

  Voices were coming from the hallway, and Paitch appeared with a young man dressed exactly like Meara. There was something wacky about him, but I couldn’t tell what it was right away, not until he stepped over to Meara’s side with Paitch behind him. One of his eyes was looking into a dark corner. The other was looking at me. I figured that the one on me was the real one. It was the other that had kept him 4F. At least that’s what I figured until he started to talk, and then I subtracted 4F from his IQ and got about a 9D, my shoe size.

  “He’s dead, Sergeant,” the young man said.

  “Thank you, Officer Belleforte,” Meara said, his eyes moving from me to Anne. “We did have some evidence that he might be.”

  “Face is smashed to hell,” Belleforte said.

  Anne started to sag at my side.

  “You want me to call the Medical Examiner?” Belleforte said, looking at Meara and the coffee table ten feet away.

  “Either that or leave the body out there as a tourist attraction or to scare away the Japs if they decide to land,” Meara said, enjoying himself. He had his hands folded on his belly.

  “I’ll call the examiner,” Belleforte decided, moving toward the door. “There’s sand all over him. You want me to get samples?”

  “If a man is found dead on the beach,” Meara sighed, “there is a good chance that some sand will be found on his body.”

  “But,” countered Belleforte, “what if he was killed someplace else and brought here? The sand might be different.”

  Meara closed his eyes, unclasped his hands, and made a shooing gesture toward the door. Belleforte hurried out of the room.

  “Boy’s head is filled with sand,” he said. “That’s what we’ve got to work with because of the Japs and the Nazis.”

  Paitch had placed himself behind and to one side of Meara, probably hoping to be out of sight and awareness.

  “And you,” Meara said, opening his eyes and pointing over his shoulder without looking. “What the hell do you do around here?”

  “Me?” asked Paitch, looking at me and Anne to be sure the question was his to field.

  “No,” said Meara. “One of the other six fellas with you.”

  Paitch rubbed his nose and touched his face and let the little finger of his left hand touch his lower lip. “I’m Mr. Howard’s bodyguard,” he said almost in a whisper. “I mean I was his bodyguard. I don’t think anybody’s going to pay me to guard his body now that it’s dead.”

  “Okay,” I said. “That’s enough, Meara. Mrs. Howard isn’t up to this act. You want to play Old King Cole, do it without her.”

  But he wasn’t going to do it without her, and it turned into a long, long night.

  2

  It was after two in the morning when I got to Mrs. Plaut’s Boarding House on Heliotrope in Hollywood, where I rented a small, less than luxury room. Since I didn’t want a luxury room, I didn’t mind putting up with Mrs. Plaut, about whom more anon. I got that “anon” from my next-door neighbor Gunther, who happens to be a midget. Gunther is my friend, has been since I helped get him off a murder charge back in 1940. Gunther had gotten me into Mrs. Plaut’s at a time when rooms were hard to come by. Now they were impossible to find.

  The house was dark when I walked up the gray wooden front steps. I had found a parking space across the street, a little close to a driveway, but what the hell. Somewhere far away a dog was whimpering.

  I let myself in, took off my shoes, and tiptoed across the creaking floor toward the stairs. Mrs. Plaut was several thousand years old, had been for generations. She was almost deaf though she had the senses of a movie Indian. She felt every vibration in the house. Getting
past her, day or night, was a challenge I had seldom met. The eighty-watt bulb encased in a snowy white cover overhead snapped on, and she stood in the doorway of her rooms, a tiny, frail figure in an oversized maroon robe. Her hands were folded against her chest.

  “Mr. Peelers,” she said loudly. “Do you know what time it is?”

  “No,” I said, looking at my watch, which suggested seven of some day, year, or century that had already passed or might never come.

  “It is nearly three in the A.M.,” she supplied. “And you are not being considerate of the feelings of others. You are waking people.”

  Her little chin pointed at me and I knew I would never suggest to her that the only one waking anyone up was her. Behind her in the darkness of her rooms I could hear her recently acquired canary, Sweet Alice, chirping away.

  “Mr. Hill must get up at six to deliver the mail,” she said. “And I will be preparing breakfast at that same hour. What do you have to say to that?”

  There was nothing to say to it. I wanted to get to my room, take off some of my clothes, and plop on the mattress I had placed on the floor to keep my back from living rigor mortis. I shrugged and tried to look sheepishly contrite, which probably made me look instead something like a bulldog imitating Baby Sandy.

  “Have you been killing persons again?” she asked.

  There seemed to be some question in Mrs. Plaut’s mind about just what I did for a living. At times she seemed to think I was an exterminator, not an unreasonable conclusion based on bits and pieces she might have picked up in the two years I had lived in this bit of heaven on Heliotrope, but she had also latched onto the idea that I did some editing for a publisher she never quite identified. For more than a year I had been reading and editing her massive family history. It was easier than trying to explain things to her.

  “I’ve killed no one today, Mrs. Plaut,” I said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

  “Don’t do that,” she said, shaking her wrinkled hand at me. “Cousin Christopher did that. Crossed his heart and hoped to die and fell down dead. He had just sworn to his wife, Cousin Roweana, that he had never lusted after the Mexican woman who did the cleaning. Do not cross your heart like that, Mr. Peelers.”