Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) (10 page)

I turned, expecting to see Moe doing a comedy act that I’d just have time to applaud before he shot me, but he wasn’t there. I could hear him still struggling in the room I’d come out of. Then Rita Hayworth spoke again, and I realized that I was somewhere in the Lex Theater, next door to Reed’s.
My Gal Sal
was all around me. I turned again and went through the door, found myself on a narrow metal stairway, and went down in darkness to another door. Beyond this door, Rita Hayworth’s voice called to me. I stepped in and found myself in the theater looking up at Victor Mature’s teeth. His forehead wrinkled at me, and I moved up the aisle toward the exit. There were a few people in the theater who paid no attention, but a spindly guy with a bow tie stepped in front of me when I hit the lobby.

“I don’t remember your purchasing a ticket,” he said.

“I came in with the fat lady,” I answered. “My aunt. I was just getting up to get some popcorn when I slipped on something wet on the floor. Fell down and scraped my face. Look at this.” I pointed to my bruised cheek. “I may need stitches,” I said. “I may sue you.”

“It’s not our fault if a customer spills—” he began, now on the defensive.

“I don’t care,” I said. “I don’t want to sue you. I just want to get to a doctor. But since you bring it up, there is a big man in there, a tough-looking ape who went into a door near the stage. He didn’t look like anyone I’ve seen working here.”

“Door near the—” he began.

“Can’t miss him,” I said, moving away through the lobby, past the candy counter toward the exit. I stopped outside the theater on the street, standing in the sputtering light of the remaining bulbs in the Lex’s sign. Larry and Curly weren’t waiting outside of Reed’s. I turned left, walking fast, looked back over my shoulder, and crossed the street at the corner. Then I worked my way back to hide in a doorway and watch the front of Reed’s. From the darkness of the doorway, I saw Moe come out of the Lex, shaking off the spindly guy with the bow tie. Moe looked up and down the street, didn’t see what he was looking for, yelled “Shit,” and went through the door to Reed’s. I made my way fast to a Rexall’s on the corner and found the pay phone and the Los Angeles book. Reed’s was listed.

I dropped my nickel and dialed the number. It rang six times before Parkman answered, his voice cracking, “Yes?”

“Put the ape on the phone,” I said. “The lead singer.”

“It’s for you,” Parkman said, and Moe came on.

“Yeah?”

“I just called the cops,” I said. “They should be there in a minute or two. It might be a good idea if Parkman’s in one piece when they get there.”

“I’m gonna find you, you piece of—” he started.

“I’m not hard to find if you can read a phone book,” I said. “Which means I’m safe from you at least till you get through second grade.” I hung up.

I figured the Stooges would go for their car and get the hell out of there. I went to the luncheonette counter in the drugstore, sat on a red leatherette-covered stool near the window, and I’d behind a menu, watching Reed’s door.

“What’ll you have?” asked the waitress, who seemed to be full of uniformed good cheer. She was pudgy, pink, and not very busy. I ordered the lamb stew with vegetables for twenty-two cents with a nickel order of cole slaw and a Pepsi.

“I might have some pie later,” I said, to explain why I held onto the menu.

“Take all night,” she said. “I’m on till we close.”

The Stooges came out of the door to Reed’s just as she turned away with my order. They didn’t look around, just went for a dark sedan that happened to be parked right behind my car in front of Reed’s. They drove away, burning rationed rubber, and I put the menu down. Parkman came through the door of the gym, turned and locked it, looked around the street to see what new surprises were in store for him, shuddered, and hurried away into the night.

I finished my dinner and, at the happy waitress’s suggestion, took on a slice of blueberry pie.

“You want some advice,” she said as she watched her lone customer eat.

“I want some advice,” I said.

“Take care of that face. Looks like it could get infected or something.”

I finished up, bought some peroxide and cotton, and headed for my car.

On the way home I thought about Monty Lipparini. I knew the name but not the man. He had moved West about ten years ago from Philadelphia, supposedly a mob front man. Lipparini made the papers every once in a while, showed up at fights, made donations to charity, and never let anyone know what he had his hands into except for his automobile dealership. That he had a piece of various fighters didn’t surprise me. It didn’t even surprise me that he had found a way to get Ralph Howard to front for him, but it didn’t make sense that he would have Ralph killed rather than work on Ralph to pay him whatever he owed, if he owed.

“You can’t collect from a dead man,” Lipparini had told a reporter once, and the quote had been picked up and repeated on the street—the businessman’s creed, only sometimes someone got a little antsy and there was a dead man.

The next step, after a good night’s sleep, was to find Lipparini or let him find me. With my cotton and peroxide at my side, I drove back to Hollywood, listening to the radio.

Gas rationing, I found, was here. That was the bad news. The good news, according to the Blue Network, was that the RAF had hit the Krupp plant in Essen with 1,036 planes. The other bad news, at least for Charlie Chaplin, was that Paulette Goddard had divorced him in Mexico. That was enough news. I turned the dial to the “Battle of the Sexes.” Four male and four female doctors were trading insults. I didn’t listen long enough to find out who won.

Mrs. Plaut and I had a brief but fruitful chat in which I discovered that no one had called me, that I was expected to turn over one-third of my gas rationing allotment when it came, and that I had a very bad bruise on my cheek. My conversation with Gunther was more pleasant. He was translating John Steinbeck’s new book,
The Moon is Down
, into Norwegian. He guessed that the government planned to sneak copies into Norway to undermine the Nazis and give moral support to the resistance. I listened while I finished off one of my bottles of Spur. In consideration of Gunther, I drank it from my Porky Pig glass rather than from the bottle.

After I worked on my face in the bathroom down the hall and downed a handful of aspirin for my head, I went back to my room and told Gunther what had happened, how I got the bruise, and what I planned to do.

“Of course,” he said, “I will be most happy to be of assistance in any way I can possibly be of such assistance.”

I thought of a way and offered to pay him for his help, but he was offended.

“I need no money, Toby,” he said. “It satisfies to feel that my service can aid in a worthwhile cause. I should not like to see the image of Mr. Joseph Louis affected, and I should like in some way to possibly contribute to finding these killers and putting to rest your former spouse’s concerns in this matter.”

I thanked him and suggested that he track down Parkman, follow him, keep an eye on him, and let me know if the Three Stooges showed up. Gunther agreed with enthusiasm. I knew he would be on it by dawn, that he would stay in his car with the special built-up pedals a discreet distance behind Parkman at all times. I advised him not to go into Reed’s, just to watch the door. A midget in a gym might be too easy to spot. There was no sixty-five-pound category.

When Gunther left my room around midnight, I wound my watch and wondered if it was too late to call Carmen the cashier at Levy’s restaurant on Spring. She would be getting off in twenty minutes. My blood was up and I didn’t feel like sleeping. I actually started toward the door to the hall with nickel in my hand. Then I stopped. Something made me feel that a call to Carmen would betray Anne. It was stupid. Anne had promised me nothing, given me no opening, no real hope. She needed a friend. That was all. I should do what I could for her and get back to my own life. She would. Anne always bounced back. I put the nickel back in. my pocket, took off my suit, and sat at my table for another hour working on Mrs. Plant’s manuscript. I read to the end of the chapter and found that:

Uncle Machen urged the crazy man known as Kyle to accompany him to the mine, but Kyle, who was crazy but not stupid, declined and said that he would rather return to Walter’s Lump and live out his days as a bachelor, to which Uncle Machen said, “Bunk.”

It was then that Uncle Machen ventured into the mine once again in search of God-knows-what, gold and his brother Albert, who may himself have disappeared in the mine the year before.

The ways of the Lord and the Doyle family are various and, I am sorry to say, sometimes wicked. Uncle Albert turned up in Juarez some months later, living with a Mexican family engaged in manufacturing cigars of an inferior nature. In the meanwhile, Uncle Machen bad entered the mine never to be seen again. I say never to be seen because it was claimed that he was frequently heard, him or his ghost, singing “Lead Kindly Light” or a bawdy ballad learned in his days as a cleanup boy in the Red Water saloon of New Orleans.

Such are the travails of the Doyle family.

Such are the travails, I agreed, putting the manuscript aside and heading for my mattress. Sleeping proved to be a dilemma. I had to stay on my left side to keep my bruised face from touching the pillow. I think it took me all of ten minutes to fall asleep.

5

A
fter placing Mrs. Plaut’s chapter gently and quietly in front of her door in the morning, I hurried to my car and drove downtown. I told Arnie the no-neck mechanic to fix the gas gauge and hurried to the office.

The lobby was empty, the building was echoing and humming, and my cheek was puffy and tender, but I felt good. Even with the twenty bucks Arnie would gouge from me for fixing the gauge I was still well over six hundred bucks. I considered going to the bank and opening an account. It would be the first one I’d had since Anne and I had been married. There had never been much in that account, at least not much that I supplied.

Shelly had taken the word
DISCREET
off of the door, but he hadn’t bothered to center the remaining
INVESTIGATIONS,
so the word sat off to the right under my name, looking as if it were about to fall off the window. Shelly was at work on a patient when I came in. I couldn’t see who he was, but Shelly was strangely silent. With a victim in the chair, Sheldon Minck normally babbled, sang, or hummed away.

“Any messages, Shel?” I asked.

He grunted something that sounded negative and stood back from his patient. In the chair sat Lt. Steve Seidman, his mouth open, a white towel around his neck, and a pistol in his lap.

Shelly looked at me, pleading, his scalp covered with sweat.

“Hi, Steve,” I said. Seidman nodded, his face more pale than usual.

Shelly was mouthing something to me, trying to conceal his mime from his patient.

“What are you trying to say, Shel?” I asked.

“He’s going to shoot me,” Shelly whispered, his voice dry. He grabbed at his glasses just as they were about to clatter to the floor. “He’s going to shoot me if I don’t fix his teeth right.”

“Sounds reasonable to me,” I said.

“That’s not funny, Toby,” Shelly said, moving toward me, a thin, pointed instrument in his hand. “You’ve got to help me. Reason with him for God’s sake.”

“Okay, Shel,” I said, backing away before he could put a sweaty hand on my no longer new suit. I had brushed it off, but it had picked up dirt from Reed’s gym and the roof outside Parkman’s window and several trips, spills, and plunges in the night. I needed a change of clothes and resolved to put out a few dollars of Joe Louis’s money. “Steve, are you planning to shoot Sheldon if he messes up your teeth again?”

Seidman nodded affirmatively.

“He wouldn’t do that,” Shelly said, looking back at Seidman. “He’s a policeman. He wouldn’t shoot someone, a fellow professional, for an honest human error.”

“I don’t know, Shel,” I said, moving to my door. “He might. And I don’t think performing oral surgery without a certificate falls under the heading of honest human mistakes.”

Shelly held his hands up to the sky. “What would my father say if he could see this, see what his son is surrounded by?”

“I don’t know, Shel,” I said sympathetically. “Why don’t we call him and ask him. But didn’t you tell me once he wouldn’t talk to you after you cleaned his teeth in ’sixteen?”

“I was just starting out then,” Shelly said. “Aren’t you going to help me anymore? Is that all you have to say?”

“No, I think you’d better get back to work on Lieutentant Seidman and be very, very careful.”

Seidman was tapping the barrel of his gun against the arm of the chair to attract Shelly’s attention. Shelly turned with resignation back to his patient, and I went into my office, pausing to rinse a white cup that had
Welcome to Juarez
written on it and pour coffee from the pot near the sink.

There was no mail on my desk. I placed my Juarez coffee cup down, watched the steam curl from it for a second or two, and pulled out the list of names I had copied from Ralph’s notebook. I also took out my wallet, removed five hundred dollars, and put it in my lower desk drawer, in the pages of a hard-cover copy of
The Collected Poetry of William Blake
. Jeremy had given me the book for my birthday a year ago. I’d never read it, and I couldn’t imagine anyone who might come into my office reading it, at least not the people who might come into my office and go through the drawers.