The Fala Factor: A Toby Peters Mystery Page 5

  “That’s a threat,” I said, unable to free myself from Bass.

  “That is a statement of true concern,” said Olson, nodding his head to Bass, who caught the signal, opened the door with his free hand, and pushed me into the narrow white corridor. I slammed against the wall and would have fallen if Bass hadn’t pulled me up. Olson stood in the open door.

  “It’s not this easy, Olson,” I said.

  The smile on his face almost dropped as he quietly closed the door. Bass gave me a shove down the corridor and I banged off of another wall. The crash of my body sent’a shiver through the walls, and animals all over the place picked it or something up and went jungle-wild. Down in the darkness behind us dogs barked, and a parrot voice screamed, “I’m Henry the Eighth I am.”

  I pulled myself up as bloody-coated Bass stalked forward, expressionless.

  “Now hold it,” I said, holding up a hand. “I’m going and I don’t need any help.”

  He pushed me with an open palm and I staggered back as the sound of Louis Couperin, not to be confused with his nephew François Couperin, came from some speaker in the ceiling.

  Bass reached out for another push, which would have sent me up against the door to the waiting room. As his hand came out, I pushed it out of the way with my shoulder as I stepped in and threw a solid right at his midsection. I wanted to knock the wind out of him. I never punched at the face. It usually led to a broken hand. The place to hit was the solar plexus. I hit. I know I hit, but Bass’s reaction might have suggested something else to a passing Doberman. Bass looked displeased.

  “I don’t like fighting,” he said.

  “That’s because you never have to do it,” I said. “Now just let me—”

  His left hand caught my neck, and his right arm went around my waist. I could feel his fingers digging in to a catchy passage from Couperin and the increasingly hysterical counterpoint of “I’m Henry the Eighth” and assorted dog howls. Up in the air I went, feeling light and dreamy. I floated through the door to the waiting room, which was now dark, and swooshed across the room to the door. The hand on my neck came loose, opened the door, and then returned to my neck. It was at this point that I had the sensation of defying gravity. The setting sun was above me when I landed against a bush. Something scraped against my arm, and I slid to a sitting position, facing the doorway in which Bass stood.

  “Watch your hand,” he said emotionlessly.

  I looked down at my dangling left arm and saw that it hovered over a small natural mound probably left by an animal.

  “Thanks,” I said, moving away from it.

  Bass didn’t answer. He closed the door. I rolled over and stood up, looking down the street, but there was no one watching. My neck hurt, my stomach was sore, and my arm was scratched. That would all heal. The problem was my torn sleeve.

  There is, I am sure, an easier way to get information than making people angry, but we each go with our own talents. Mine happens to be that of a class-A, number-one, pain-in-the-ass. I’ve got the wounds to prove it. I’m a walking, or crawling, museum of proof. I could give a tour of my body. Here’s the hole made by a bullet when I got a movie star with a gun in her hand angry. (It was at that point that I should have learned not to go with my talent for provoking when the provokee has a gun in his or her hand.) Here’s a bullet scar earned the following year from a crooked cop under similar circumstances, and my skull is a phrenologist’s nightmare of scar tissue, lumps, and unnatural protuberances. Each success had brought with it a permanent memory for me to wear.

  My limbs worked and I was pleased with the results of my sparring with Dr. Olson. Unless I had read him wrong, and I doubted that I had, he was my man. In case I was being watched from the clinic, I limped very slowly to my car, doing my best to look defeated and demolished. I climbed in with a grunt, started the engine, and pulled slowly away after making a U-turn. I went as far as Sherman, turned right, found a driveway where I almost collided with a garbage truck, and pulled back into going-home traffic. A left turn had me back on the cul-de-sac, where I pulled over to watch the clinic from a distance.

  The sun was still up but about to drop behind the hills when Bass came out of the front door. He was out of his bloody coat and wearing a light jacket. He carried a little gym bag in one hand as he went massively up the sidewalk and headed for Sherman. I slouched down after a quick adjustment of the mirror, and watched him in its reflection as he came to the corner and turned out of sight.

  When I sat up again, the clinic looked dark. My stomach growled and my body throbbed. It would have been nice to get something for my arm and take a hot bath but I couldn’t afford to give Olson time to recover. Without Bass around, I was sure I could break him; well, I was sure I had a chance at it.

  Darkness came in about an hour and I slipped out of the car and stood to keep my back from locking. I felt awful. I felt tired. I felt like great things were about to happen, but where the hell was Doc Olson? Was he working late doing a Bach-accompanied appendectomy on a dancing bear? Do animals have appendixes?

  I gave it another ten minutes and then moved across the dark street toward the clinic. Lights shone through the trees from some of the houses set back from the street. Some of the lights came from a house directly behind the clinic and down a driveway. I circled the clinic, careful of where I was stepping, found no lights on and heard no sounds of music, only a crying dog and the parrot, who had stopped talking and was now croaking.

  I moved back to the driveway and began to make my way down the gravel path to the house behind the clinic. There was still a final flare of light from the sun, which merged with the house lights to let me make my way to the front door of a two-story brick house of no great distinction.

  No one answered my first knock or my second. The knocker was large, cast iron, and in the shape of a tiger’s head. It was loud. I tried again and something stirred inside.

  “Coming, coming, coming, for chrissake, coming,” a woman’s voice said from inside.

  There was a fumbling and grumbling behind the door and it came open to reveal a very ample and not sober woman in her thirties in a red silk blouse and matching skirt.

  “Mrs. Olson?” I said with a gentle smile, which, I guessed, would make my pushed-in face less jarring.

  She was all right for quantity though I couldn’t say much for quality at that point. She was dark, her hair black and straight, down to her shoulders. She was made up for a night out rather than a night in and she was coming out of the red thing she was wearing. She looked at me without answering, so I repeated, “Mrs. Olson?”

  “Right,” she said.

  “Can I come in?”

  She shrugged, opened the door wider, and gestured with a free hand with bright red nails that I should step through. I did and she closed the door behind me.

  “I’ve got some business with your husband,” I said.

  She looked at me again and said, “Someone bit a hole in your arm.”

  Before I could make up a lie, she turned and moved into a room to the left of the little hallway we were standing in. I followed her and found myself in a living room with old-fashioned furniture and one table lamp that gave off enough light to see everything dimly. Mrs. Olson moved nicely to a small table, where she picked up a glass of something amber and took a sip.

  “A drink?” she said, holding out the glass.

  “I recognize it,” I said.

  “You want one?”

  “Maybe after I talk to your husband,” I said.

  She moved out of the darkness and stood in front of me, her mouth open in a little smile. Her hand came out and touched my sleeve.

  “Why don’t you take that jacket off,” she said with clear mischief playing around her mouth. “Roy is taking a bath. Roy takes long, long baths. You know why Roy takes long baths?”

  “Because he gets dirty,” I tried.

  “Because he dreads smelling like the clinic. He is constantly cleaning, scrubbing,” she said. “
He’ll be in the tub for an hour.” Her eyebrows went up as if it was my turn and I could see that she was swaying slightly, as if she heard music too high-pitched for human ears.

  “I’ll wait,” I said.

  “Maybe we can do something while you wait,” she said, the smell of alcohol coming from her breath as she moved close to me. “Roy’s usual callers are not very interesting and not very friendly. Are you interesting and friendly?”

  “I am interesting and friendly,” I said. “Let’s talk.”

  “My name is Anne,” she said.

  “My wife’s name was Anne too,” I said.

  “Was? Is she dead?”

  “No, remarried.”

  “Poor man,” she said, showing mock sympathy and taking another sip. “Maybe we can help you to forget. What’s your name?”

  “Toby,” I said.

  “Roy treated a schnauzer named Toby last year in Washington,” she said. “He had cataracts.”

  “Terrific,” I said as she reached up to touch my cheek. “Tell me about Washington.”

  “People were too busy to pay attention to each other,” she said. “Are you too busy to pay attention, Toby?”

  What the hell. I kissed her while her husband was upstairs washing away the day’s blood. It felt good. It felt more than good and it was going to get a lot more complicated if I didn’t do something, but I couldn’t do anything except think that she tasted great, that her name was Anne, and that the world didn’t make much sense.

  While we were pressed together, I felt her right hand move under my jacket and travel down my chest. My eyes were closed and I didn’t give a damn about the sound from far away. I told it to go away, to wait, to turn into music.

  “Water,” I said, pulling my mouth from her, but not too far.

  “Huh,” she said dreamily.

  “Water,” I repeated.

  “We can’t, honey,” she said opening her eyes. “Roy’s up there taking a bath.”

  “I hear water dripping from upstairs. Listen.”

  She gave me a look of impatience, blew out some air from puffed cheeks, and listened.

  “You’re right,” she said without great interest. “Water dripping.”

  “It’s dripping on my head,” I added.

  Anne Olson looked up at the low ceiling, a move that almost made her lose her already unstable balance. There was a distinct spot on the ceiling.

  “Bathroom?” I said.

  She tried to figure out the layout of the house and then, coming to a conclusion, said, “Bathroom.”

  “I’m going up,” I said as she reached for me again, moving forward, her lips open in that smile. I jumped past her, went for the hall, took the stairs two at a time, turned the corner, and moved down a small hallway to the bathroom door.

  “Olson,” I called. “Are you all right?”

  There was no answer but something moved behind the door.

  “Olson?” I tried again, my hand on the knob. More silence. Water was coming through the opening under the door. I turned the handle and stepped in, trying not to slip on the wet tile.

  Doc Olson was in the bathtub, pink and nude but not smiling. His neck was purple and the water flowed slowly and steadily over the rim of the tub. His eyes were open. His mouth was open. And I could see that he was dead.

  A sloshy brown bath towel floated over my foot and I glanced down. Something moved behind me and I knew I had made a mistake. Doc Olson and I were not alone in the bathroom.

  The order of events that followed is still a matter of speculation for those who delve into the blotters of the Los Angeles Police Department for tidbits, tales, and history. I’m not even sure of what happened. I know I turned. I know that when turning I stepped on the floating towel and slipped. What I don’t know is whether the hand that pushed me struck before I slipped or was the cause of my slipping. A minor point, you might say, but if I could have managed to keep my balance while others were losing theirs, at least one more murder might have been prevented, not to mention what happened to me.

  So I tripped backwards, seeing ceiling and the right arm of a murderer as it went through the bathroom door attached to the man himself. That told me one thing that should have been of comfort. He wasn’t sticking around to do to me what he had done to Olson. But I wasn’t thinking about that at the moment, or about the fact that for the second time in a few hours I was up in the air after being roughed up by someone associated with the late Doc Olson, upon whom I now found myself lying.

  His body cushioned me neatly and kept me from a concussion or worse. There was no point in thanking him. My added bulk displaced a wave of water and my clothes took in moisture like a loan shark takes in IOUs. I reached back with a grunt to push myself up and found my hand in Olson’s face. It was at this moment that the bathroom door pushed open and instead of letting go of Olson, I pushed harder to get myself up to face the killer, who had decided to come back and do me in. It was Anne Olson, however, who stood in the doorway to the bathroom, almost up to her ankles from a new wave of water I had displaced. She watched my hand pushing her husband’s face under and she did a most reasonable thing; she screamed.

  “No,” I said, letting go of Olson and falling forward on him to take in a lungful of water. When I came up sputtering, she was still standing there, her hands to her mouth.

  “Wrong,” I gagged, coughing up water and managing to get one leg over the side of the tub. “I—” and a cough took me. She backed away into the hall and against the far wall. Her blouse was open. Drunkenness was gone. Seeing someone sitting on your dead husband in the bathtub can have a sobering effect. I flopped onto the floor, dripping, and tried to hold a heavy arm up to her in explanation.

  “Not … what you think,” I gasped, down on my hands and knees. “That man, the one who ran past …”

  “Man?” she whimpered, looking at me as if I were Harpo Marx. “What man?”

  I tried to stand, slipped, and, with a magnificent effort, managed not to cry. There is no limit to man’s heroic possibilities when the last nickel is on the numbers.

  “I didn’t do this,” I said, managing to get back to my knees. “I didn’t have time … just got up here.”

  “He’s dead. Roy’s dead,” she cried.

  I looked back at Roy because she was looking at him, though I didn’t expect to see anything new. The naked corpse had turned sideways, away from us as if he were trying to sleep and our loud conversation had disturbed him.

  “He’s dead,” I agreed, reaching for the toilet to help myself up. I managed and took a step forward. Anne Olson rushed forward. I thought she had experienced a change of heart and was going to help me. Instead, she closed the bathroom door. I lurched forward and tried the handle. My hands were too wet to turn it.

  “Hold it,” I yelled. “I didn’t do this. The killer might still be around. I might be able to catch him.”

  I grabbed the knob with two hands and turned but nothing happened. What the hell kind of bathroom door locked from the outside? The answer was clear: a bathroom in the house of Anne and the late Dr. Roy Olson.

  “Anne,” I shouted, hearing her breathing on the other side. “For God’s sake let me out. Listen to me.”

  Some water decided to come out of my lungs at that point and I was paralyzed with coughing. Over it I could hear Anne Olson’s footsteps padding down the hall.

  “Wait.” I coughed again, but she was gone.

  I tried the door again but it was solid and locked. The room was too small and too soggy for me to back up and throw my shoulder against it.

  “Open the damn door or I’ll use his corpse as a battering ram,” I shouted stupidly.

  There wasn’t much I could do. Using the sink, I went back to the tub and turned off the running water. Then I sat on the closed toilet seat and looked at Olson’s corpse. He had nothing to say so I tried the door again. Nothing. Taking off my shoes and socks, I climbed onto the rim of the tub, being careful not to put my footprints on the
corpse, and opened the small pebble-glass window in the wall. It was too small to crawl through, and I couldn’t see anything. There wasn’t much point in shouting. The nearest house was a few hundred yards away through the trees and there was no way, without stepping on Olson, that I could even get my head out the window. The open window did let in some cool air.

  It was time to think. Time to act. I took off all my clothes, dried off with a towel Olson probably had planned to use, checked my dad’s watch, which was ticking merrily away and telling me it was three o’clock on some day in never-never land. With the spigot turned off, the water drained out, mostly under the door. I sopped up most of what remained on the tile floor with the towel I had used and a stack of other towels. I didn’t let the water out of the tub. There had been enough tampering with evidence. Having done all that, I sat on the toilet and checked myself for wounds. The scratch on my arm from the bushes didn’t look too bad. The bruises were minor on the rest of my body.

  So, I sat naked with a naked corpse in a bathroom in Sherman Oaks and for a nutty moment considered posing as The Thinker. Maybe five minutes passed, during which I turned Olson over so I could see his face. I couldn’t decide what was worse, not seeing him and wondering how he looked or seeing him. In another five minutes I was shivering and had made a decision. There were dry clothes in the room neatly hung on wooden hangers, the clothes Olson was going to put on after his bath. We were approximately the same size, so I put them on.

  I had the underpants on, a few sizes too big, and one foot in the trousers when the door popped open and I turned off-balance to face a uniformed cop about sixty years old. He had probably seen it all, but he had never seen this.

  “It’s not what it looks like,” I said, removing the pants carefully, to keep the gun in his hand from getting jumpy.

  “Son,” he said, looking from me to Olson, “I don’t know what the hell this looks like and I’m gonna do my damned best not to think about it. Now you just step out here in the hall nice and slow like a good fellow, or I’ll start pulling this trigger and not stop till I’m out of bullets.”