The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance Read online

The smell of food hit me when I pushed the doors open and entered the squad room. It was the familiar smell of a room where men work around the clock and sometimes the people and food they bring in are a bit ripe. The room, cluttered with desks and files, was cleaner than usual. It wasn’t clean, but on Sunday an old colored guy named Nero Suggs had peeled away the top layer of filth and found someplace to dump the waste baskets.

  There were four or five cops around beside Cawelti and a couple of citizens and citizens who prey on citizens. Cawelti was sitting at his desk off to the right, just a little removed from his fellow officers. He was one-finger typing a report, and his red face and poor complexion and his reddish straight hair parted down the middle like a comic bartender’s stood out across the room. A thin guy of about sixty in a suit was sitting on the chair within easy reach of Cawelti. I couldn’t tell if the graying wisp was a good citizen or a bad guy. I could see he was scared, as if someone were about to hit him. I took two steps toward Cawelti’s desk and Cawelti reached over and slapped the man in the head.

  “Don’t hit me in the head like that,” the man said, recoiling and holding his slapped head with an open palm.

  Cawelti didn’t apologize or promise better things for the future. He went back to his report. When I was a foot or two from the desk, the wispy man looked up at me ready to protect himself from an attack on a new front.

  “Cawelti,” I said, but he didn’t grunt, just pondered over the spelling of some troublesome word. He made a decision and went on. In the corner a couple of fat cops thought of something funny. One of them thought it was so funny he spilled half his coffee on an unoccupied desk. He didn’t bother to clean it up.

  “Sergeant,” I tried. The wispy man in the chair shivered.

  “Peters,” he said without looking back at me, “go away.”

  “I’m here about the Beason case,” I said.

  “There is no Beason case,” Cawelti said, getting in two more letters on his typewriter. “Hotel dick gets shot by hash-headed hotel clerk. Clerk grabs ten grand from the safe and runs. What do you think we’re going to do, send out an all-states on Teddy Spaghetti? Maybe we should call back the troops from Europe, go house to house. I’ve got to work here.”

  “A man’s been shot,” I said. “I’ve always been able to rely on your compassion.”

  “Go tell your jokes to your brother,” he said. “I’ve got a murder case I’m wrapping up. Beason will get better. Long-retti will turn up on a garbage heap some morning. Case closed.”

  “But—” I began, and he turned to face me. As he turned, his eyes met those of the thin man with the white hair and the neat suit. Before the man knew what was coming, Cawelti reached out and hit him again with an open palm, this time on the other side of the man’s head.

  “I told you, don’t hit me,” the man said. Then he looked at me for help. “You heard me tell him. It hurts to be hit like that.”

  Cawelti shrugged and gave me his attention. “I’ve got paperwork on this weed,” he said, nodding at the slapped man. “Mr. Patterson of the firm of Patterson and Walker owns the New Hollywood apartment building on La Cienega. You know it?”

  “New building, about fourteen stories, went up just before the war started,” I said.

  Cawelti nodded yes and went on.

  “Mr. Patterson here made a mistake. He gave the tenants long leases and reasonable rents. Times were still a little hard. Then the war comes and rents fly and everyone’s moving to Los Angeles to make war money building boats and airplanes and Mr. Patterson starts feeling sorry for himself for all the money he could be making so he tries to get his tenants to move. Mr. Patterson here is ingenious at making his tenants move and breaking their leases, aren’t you, Mr. Patterson.”

  Patterson cringed, expecting another blow, but didn’t answer.

  “Threats from hired hands, mysterious break-ins, plumbing problems,” Cawelti went on. “Then Mr. Patterson makes a mistake. Up on the tenth floor lives an old guy with a heart problem.”

  “Ninth floor,” Patterson corrected.

  “Mr. Patterson fixed the light on the elevator so that when the old guy gets on, the lights go bam-bam-bam. The old guy looks up and thinks maybe the elevator is falling and he’s only going to be fit for burial in a Mason jar when it hits bottom. Old guy gets a heart attack. Vacant apartment. Only trouble is, Mr. Patterson didn’t have time to fix the elevator lights again before we found the naughty little trick.”

  “I didn’t do this thing,” Patterson protested to me, turning in his chair, palms up, pleading. I was unconvinced.

  “Proving it is proving hard but not impossible,” Cawelti went on, giving Patterson a look that promised pain. “And Mr. Patterson is not cooperating. He is not confessing like a good citizen.”

  “So you haven’t got time for Beason,” I concluded.

  “You got it,” he said, returning to his report.

  “Beason tells me that Teddy and some guy he’s working with named Alex are out to get a movie star,” I said. “Two hash heads loose with a gun shooting at a movie star could embarrass you, John.”

  “Don’t call me John,” he said without turning. “You want to walk out of here instead of crawl, don’t call me John. In fact, don’t call me at all, just get out now.”

  “Right,” I said. “If John Wayne catches a bullet in his teeth, I’ll tell the Times how interested the police were in keeping him alive.”

  Cawelti spun around, suddenly very angry or very interested. The move was so quick that Patterson leaped from his chair with a howl.

  “Sit down,” Cawelti yelled. Across the room the cops stopped joking for a minute in the hope of seeing some real mayhem, but Patterson sat down and Cawelti just stared red-faced at me. The cops went back to their coffee and ringing phones.

  “John Wayne, someone might be trying to kill John Wayne?” he asked.

  “Could be,” I said.

  “Shit. They can’t do that.” His right hand went out and grabbed the nearest piece of paper, crunching it into an ugly Christmas ball. He stood up leaning toward me. He had me by about three inches.

  “I’ll find that little son of a bitch,” he hissed. “Kill John Wayne. What the hell is this world coming to?”

  Patterson shrugged, but Cawelti didn’t see him.

  “Wayne’s the only damn movie star who means anything except for Spencer Tracy,” Cawelti explained. “I’ll get on it but you better be giving me this straight. And what’s it all got to do with you?”

  “It’s my gun Teddy has,” I explained.

  Cawelti’s red face looked like a traffic light.

  “Beason borrowed it,” I improvised. “He had trouble with his own. Both of us have permits. When this Alex shot Beason, he took my thirty-eight from him.”

  Cawelti looked down at his desk, his hands supporting him amid the pile of papers. He turned to Patterson and said, “Do you believe this guy?”

  Patterson knew a cue when he heard one. He shook his head no.

  “I know I’m going to get shit for an answer, but I’ll ask anyway. It’s my job. Why John Wayne? Why the Duke?”

  “Wayne’s a client.” I plunged in even deeper. “Maybe Teddy’s gone off the top. He knew me, doesn’t like me. Maybe he saw me with Wayne. In fact, I had a late dinner with Wayne last night at Manny’s on Broadway.”

  Cawelti cocked his head like a bird.

  “Check with Manny if you don’t believe me. Check with Wayne.”

  “I could meet John Wayne,” Cawelti said.

  “Sure, I th—”

  “I’ll look for Teddy and the gun. You stay with Wayne,” Cawelti said. “And I want to talk to Wayne. That’s part of the deal.”

  I could have pointed out that citizens shouldn’t have to make deals to get the police to protect them, but I had some part of my brain still functioning. I nodded in agreement.

  “Now get out. I think there’s a lot of shit about this thing you’re not dumping on my desk,” Cawelti said, and
he was damn right. “I’ll find out what it is and we’ll have that little talk I’ve been promising you. I can be a persuasive talker, can’t I, Mr. Patterson?”

  “Very persuasive,” Patterson agreed.

  “I’ll be in touch,” I said, turning to leave and almost bumping into a cop dragging a man in a trench coat behind him. The cop, named Bresnahan, was handcuffed to the trench-coated guy, who wore a little white cap. The trench coat flopped open for a second as the man teetered, revealing nothing but his scrawny body.

  “Toby, how’s it going?” Bresnahan said, yanking the flasher up to his feet.

  “Fair enough,” I said. “There’s an Army Boxing Show at the Hollywood Legion Wednesday.”

  “Naw,” said Bresnahan, who had done some amateur fighting. “Their hearts aren’t in it unless rankings are on the line. I’ll wait till the war’s over and the guys with heart come back.”

  Behind me I could hear Cawelti explaining to Patterson how John Wayne got his nickname “Duke.”

  “It was his dog,” Cawelti said seriously, as if explaining history to a dense student. “He had a dog named Duke when he was a kid. Glendale firemen started calling the kid and the dog Duke and it stuck.”

  Someone moaned behind me as I went out the squad room door. I would have put my money on Bresnahan’s flasher, but Cawelti’s good moods didn’t last very long and Patterson might be on the floor with remnants of some cop’s Italian beef dinner and the blood of the guilty and innocent alike.

  Cawelti had given me two things I hadn’t had when I came in, a headache and the information that Teddy not only had my gun and Vance’s corpse but $10,000. Ten grand was a lot for a dump like the Alhambra to have in the safe. I’d have to ask Straight-Ahead about it when he was up and marching.

  I got my first death threat of the day when I got back to my office in the Farraday. I had parked in No-Neck Arnie’s garage, answered politely when he asked me how the car he had sold me was doing, told him I wasn’t ready to fix the door that wouldn’t open, and hiked the two blocks to the Farraday. My back jingled nervously and I told myself to call Doc Hodgdon, the old orthopedic specialist who I played handball with at the Y on Hope and who, occasionally, got me back on my feet when my limbs creaked or cracked.

  The office I shared with Dr. Minck was on the top floor of the four-story Farraday Building on Hoover near Ninth. The Farraday was owned by Jeremy Butler, a mountain of a bald man who had made a reasonably good living and a good name for himself as a professional wrestler before retiring to write poetry and manage property he had bought with his sweat. He lived at the Farraday and dedicated himself to keeping the building clean of dust, decay, and neighborhood bums who found their way into the cool recesses of the building.

  The steel elevator sat on the main floor, waiting for the unsuspecting to climb in and be trapped into the longest ride this side of the Orient Express. I started slowly up the fake marble stairs, listening to the early afternoon sounds of tenants, the distant whirl of a printing press, the sound of arguing voices, and someone who might have been singing or might have been calling out for help.

  On the fourth floor I wandered through the not unpleasant smell of generously sprinkled Lysol and opened our outer office door. The pebbled, opaque glass window had a neatly printed notice in black letters:

  DR. SHELDON MINCK, DENTIST, D.D.S., S.D.

  PAINLESS DENTISTRY AND PERFECT

  PLATES SINCE 1916

  TOBY PETERS, INVESTIGATOR

  Shelly had agreed to this compromise after pleas, promises, and threats from me. His idea of door lettering was much more fanciful and less given to truth.

  The small anteroom held two chairs, a small table, overfull ashtrays, and a pile of magazines in disarray and with covers missing. Jinx Falkenburg looked up at me from one of the magazines. She was everywhere. I wondered if it was time for me to write her a fan letter, maybe try to talk her into trying Pepsi. I pushed through the anteroom door expecting to see Shelly torturing a patient or sitting in his dental chair reading, but the room was empty and silent except for the dripping of water into a cup in the sink near my office. The sink was, once again, piled with dishes and coffee cups. For almost a month after a dental association inspection, Shelly had kept the place reasonably clean, but old habits, like old house detectives, die hard. I turned the handle to slow down the dripping water and noticed that the door to my office was open slightly.

  My office off Shelly’s was slightly larger than a toilet stall at Union Station. There was a very small desk with a chair and one window behind it. There were also two chairs across the desk, which could be squeezed into comfortably by normal-size people. The chairs needed replacing, as did the plaster on the ceiling. The walls were dirty white and undecorated except for my dusty framed private investigator’s license and a photograph from when I was a kid. The photo showed me, my dad, and my brother, Phil, plus our dog Kaiser Wilhelm. It wasn’t much, but it was home, except when I had a client. I did my best to keep clients away from Shelly and my office.

  Shelly, who was seated behind my desk, didn’t seem surprised or embarrassed by my entrance. He was writing something with one of my pencils, leaning close to the paper, peering with myopic eyes through his thick glasses. His ever-present cigar was shifting from side to side in his mouth, and tiny beads of sweat were dancing on his brow.

  “Toby, advertising is the key to the future. I’m convinced of it,” he said, removing his cigar to point its wet end at me.

  “What are you doing in my office, Sheldon?” I said, leaving the door open behind me.

  “I’m writing,” he said, pointing at the paper. “I’m working on our futures, both of our futures. Translucent teeth.” Then he read: ‘“A size for every face. A size for every case. A shade for every complexion.’ How do you like that?”

  “I’ve heard it somewhere,” I said. “I’ve got work to do Shel.”

  He waved my work away with a free left hand and then wiped the hand on his unclean white smock.

  “Listen.” He read again: “‘Toby Peters, Investigations. You may know but can you prove it? True facts secured and submitted in confidential reports. Local and national investigations. Missing persons our specialty.’”

  “Our specialty?” I asked, still standing. “There’s only me. And I haven’t got money for ads. I can’t pay for my gas as it is and if you don’t get out from behind there and let me work I may have trouble coming up with my rent for this place.”

  Shelly got up with a sigh and looked at me as if I were a pathetic child.

  “You don’t understand,” he said. “You’ve got to invest to earn.”

  I came around the desk, looked out the window, vowed to clean it, and sat down, easing Shelly out of the way. “Did Mildred give you the money for your ad campaign?”

  “Not yet,” he admitted, “but I’m working on her, got tickets for Life with Father at the Music Box. Dorothy Gish and Louis Calhern. Might try to talk to Gish. Her teeth—”

  “Any messages for me, Shel,” I asked, handing him the sheet of scrawling he had left on my desk.

  “I’m talking about your future here, Toby,” he said. “You’re not getting any younger.”

  “Thank God one of us isn’t,” I said, shuffling through the junk mail. “Messages?”

  Shelly put the cigar back in his mouth, adjusted his slipping glasses, and slapped his sides.

  “Yeah, you got messages. Let’s see. I wrote them down somewhere. Your landlady called. Something about a photograph she found. Hy called—”

  “Which …?”

  “The one from Hy of Hy’s Clothes for Him on Hollywood,” said Shelly. “He says you owe him eight dollars and something.”

  “That it?” I asked, hearing the door to the outer office open.

  “No, some guy called. Said his name was Alex. Said something nuts like stay out of it or away from it if you don’t want what Lance got.”

  “Lance? You mean Vance?”

  “V
ance, Lance.” Shelly shrugged.

  “You think you might have passed on this death threat a little earlier,” I asked amiably.

  “I had a patient,” Shelly said. “You get nut calls all the time. How am I supposed to know what’s a threat and who’s a nut? I got to go.” Someone entered the outer office and Shelly left, closing the door behind him. I searched the top of my desk for the message from Alex. I found it sticking to a letter from Hollywood Tennis and Golf Shop promising me a great discount on restringing my racket.

  The note from Shelly didn’t help much. I could make out the name “Alex” and the words “Stay up” or “Stay out.”

  I spent the next twenty minutes trying to find John Wayne and listening to the groans from one of Shelly’s patients over Shelly’s off-key singing of “I’ve Got a Gal in Kalamazoo.” I finally got through to Wayne at the Allegheny Hotel through a tip from a guy in the security office at Republic Pictures.

  “Hello,” came Wayne’s voice, a little boozy or sleepy.

  “It’s me, Toby Peters,” I said. “We’ve got to talk about cleaning up after the party last night.”

  “I thought the party was all cleaned up.”

  “Not quite. Can you talk?”

  “I can talk.” He sighed. “I’ve got a friend here but he’s all right.”

  “Vance’s body is missing. Teddy the clerk shot Straight-Ahead with my gun and got away with ten thousand dollars. There’s also reason to believe that Teddy is working with some guy named Alex, who may have a grudge against you.”

  “You and your friend really cleaned things up,” he said with reasonable exasperation.

  “It happens like that sometimes. I’ve talked to the police, and a cop named Cawelti who’s a fan of yours is working with me to find Teddy and Alex. I just want to be sure nothing happens to you. If I tracked you down, Alex might be able to, too.”

  “I’m going on a fishing trip with a couple of friends this afternoon,” Wayne said. “We won’t tell anyone but my manager where we are and I’ll tell him not to tell anyone. I’ll be gone about a week.”

  “Your friends are …” I started.