Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) (13 page)

“See,” Parkman shouted behind the desk. “Body punches. All body punches.”

“Didn’t want to break my hands,” Louis explained, helping me up. “These are the two I saw there on the beach.”

“It’s getting curious,” I said, unable to stand up.

“Take small breaths,” Louis advised. “Real small, like a dog.”

I panted. It helped.

“What are you doing here?” I asked when I could. “Not that I’m complaining.”

“Came looking for Mr. Parkman,” Louis explained. “Settle up for the workout and to see Josh. I want him to work my corner after the war, with Chappie and Roxie gone.”

“I’ll drink to that,” I said, propping myself on the desk and looking around with eyes that felt as if they might pop out of the sockets. Mush and Silvio were down, but only Mush was out. Silvio was moaning low.

“Call the cops,” I told Parkman. “Champ, you’d better do some roadwork. I’ll try to keep you clean on this, but you might have to identify our two sparring partners.”

“If you say so,” Louis said. “Sure you can handle them, now?”

I reached down and took the gun out from under Silvio’s jacket. He moaned some more and tried to find his stomach with his right hand, but it eluded him.

Behind us, Parkman was talking into the phone.

I walked with Louis out of the outer office and into the gym.

“I got to go back to New York,” he said. “Might have to go tomorrow unless I get mixed up with this. Truth is I want to get back to my wife. We tried for a baby last year. Marva had a miscarriage.”

The action in the gym had almost come to a stop. People were looking at Louis instead of their bags and sparring partners.

“It’s going to be hard to deny you were here,” I said, looking around. Louis looked, too.

“Do what you can,” he said, taking my hand. “You can find me at the Braxton Hotel at least through tomorrow.”

I turned back into the alcove near Al Parkman’s office after I watched Corporal Louis pat China Rogers on the back and disappear down the steps. The door to the outer office was locked, which I didn’t like. I hadn’t even closed the door. I liked even less the six shots that came from behind it. I threw my elbow into the rectangle with Parkman’s name on it, let the glass clear, and reached in to open the door. I could hear steps behind me from the gym, running to see what was going on.

Glass crunched under my feet, and I felt pain in my stomach from the blow Mush had thrown, but I knew I’d feel worse if Parkman was dead.

The inner door was locked, too, and it was harder to get through. I threw my shoulder against it and pleaded with my stomach not to turn against me just yet. The door didn’t open. I stepped back and kicked it three or four times, and it popped open.

Silvio and Mush were still in place on the floor, only the count was final now. There were spots of red, three on Silvio’s face, little holes. Dripping red. He looked surprised. Mush was on his stomach. At least one bullet had gone into his back.

And Parkman? Parkman was gone.

6

“O
kay, little brother,” Phil said, slamming the top drawer of his desk two hours later. “Where do we start?”

The pile of reports, files, and odd scraps of paper in front of Phil was about four inches high. He patted it, rubbed his meaty right hand on the surface of his desk, and looked at me. Phil’s office was big and empty. It echoed. He had spent almost a decade in the small lieutenant’s cubbyhole in the squadroom down the hall. In the month he had been in this new office, he had made no effort to adjust to it, fit into it. Maybe he felt he wouldn’t be there long, that he would be back in his cubbyhole when the war ended and younger vets came home. His temper had kept him in that cubbyhole longer than he should have been there, a temper that crackled at nearby criminals, whose rights ended at Phil’s knuckles.

The wooden floor of Phil’s office was stained with years of grime. The desk was the battered one his predecessor Capt. Fred Molin had left behind. The window was uncovered, and there were no pictures on the brown walls. A file cabinet did stand in one corner and Steve Seidman leaned against it listening.

After I found the bodies of Mush and Silvio, I had made my way through the pack of boxers trying to see what was happening, and had gone through the gym and down the steps. Gunther was gone. I was just heading back to Reed’s when the squad car came flying down Figueroa, full siren. Parkman had called them during the fight. They would find more than a couple of bloody noses.

Now I sat looking at Phil, who reached up to loosen his collar, which was already unbuttoned. I didn’t know where to start.

“No answer?” he said. “Then I’ll pick a place.” He pulled off the top report.

“Ferdinand ‘Mush’ Margolis, thirty-two, automobile salesman,” he read and then looked up. “Mush did very well as a car salesman last year in spite of the fact that there were no cars to sell. Very enterprising young man except when he got into a little trouble here and there. Look here. We even have an arrest for murder. Never went to trial. One scar on the face, cause unknown.”

He put the report on the side and took up the next one.

“Silvio Defatto, twenty-nine, also a car salesman. Like Margolis, he seems to have had a reasonably successful boxing career back East. Beyond that his life is sadly lacking in detail.”

Phil put this report away, too, and looked at me.

“Your friend Parkman is not a pro at shooting people,” he said. “Point blank in a small room, and he hit them all over the place. It took him everything he had in the gun to kill them.”

“He might have been scared,” I suggested.

“They were lying on the goddamn floor for chrissake,” he shouted. “And where the hell is Parkman? He’s not back at his house. The way he was dressed we should be able to spot him two blocks away in the dark. Next item.” This report was a bit thicker than the first two.

“Joseph Louis Barrow. Born May 13, 1914, Lafayette, Alabama. Current weight two hundred pounds. Height six feet, one and a half inches. Managed by John Roxborough, now in prison, and trained by the late Jack Blackburn, who was once convicted of murder. Joseph Louis Barrow of Detroit, who, according to you, happens to have been jogging on the beach when a man was beaten to death and happens to have run into the same two men in a gym a few hours ago just before they were murdered. You did a great job of keeping him out of trouble, Tobias.”

“There—” I began.

“I entered the name Joseph Barrow of Detroit on the report,” Seidman said from the corner. “We sent Cawelti and Burns to talk to him.”

“Phil—” I began, but he cut me off again, holding up his left hand.

“There’s more,” he said, opening the folder in front of him. “Your corpse on the beach, identified by Anne, who didn’t have much to identify. According to the medical examiner, he didn’t die on the beach. Not enough blood in the sand. He was dead a couple of hours when you got there. If Louis saw Defatto and Margolis with the body, they were dumping him, bringing him home.”

“So Louis is off the hook?” I said.

“If,” Seidman said behind us, “he can get someone to say he was with her two hours before the discovery of the body.”

“I told you the problem there,” I said. “He was with a woman, a white—”

Phil got up from behind the desk, took the folder on Ralph Howard, and threw it at me. “I don’t give a shit who he was with,” he shouted. “I want a name.”

“No fuss, no muss, no publicity,” Seidman said. “We just talk to her. She says he was with her, we just prepare a single-sheet report and put it in the investigation file. Discoverer of the body, Joseph Barrow of Detroit, reported seeing two men leaving the location where body was discovered. Barrow’s presence at the time of the actual murder was established by a reliable citizen, and we fill in the name. That’s it.”

I reached for the phone on Phil’s desk. He sat back while I got the Braxton and Joe Louis’s room. I told him two cops were on the way to talk to him, told him he wouldn’t wind up in the newspapers, and asked for the name of the woman in Santa Monica who would give him the alibi. It took a promise I wasn’t sure I could deliver to get the name and address, but I got them. I hung up smiling. The name he had given me was more than familiar. I gave Phil the name.

“Meara’s waiting outside,” Phil said. “He figures the Howard killing and this afternoon’s shooting gallery are tied together, and he’s damn right. He wants to talk to you again. He wants reports. He wants results. Everybody wants.”

“And you’re going to give him …” I said.

“Shit,” said Phil, shouting. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“Phil,” Seidman said gently, stepping from the corner. “Take it easy. You’ve got it all under control.”

Phil glared at me, his face a fleshy pink. His right hand had crushed a sheet of paper and he was squeezing it as if it were Meara’s neck. Or mine. He shrugged, nodded in agreement, threw the crumpled paper on his desk, and sat again, opening the final and thickest folder.

“Lipparini,” he read, “Monty. Owner of M. L. Auto Sales. Wife Chloe, three kids. Investments all over the valley. Just opened the M. L. Coffee Company in Encino. Respectable businessman, right? Three or four arrests when he was younger. No convictions. Brought in for questioning more times than I can count. But an honest citizen, right?”

“Right,” I agreed. I knew that look in Phil’s eyes, that wild look.

“Wrong,” he shouted, rubbing his hand across the steely bristles on his head. “Wrong. The maggot is a killer. He killed at least two people in Jersey before he came here. It’s in the report, but there was no evidence, no witnesses. He killed a woman in Los Angeles six years ago. Only witness disappeared. Since then he’s had other people do his killing.”

“Like Mush and Silvio,” I suggested.

“Mush and Silvio,” he agreed. “And Lipparini has parties with movie stars and gets his picture in the papers. And Steve can’t get enough money together to buy a house, and I can’t pay off my kid’s hospital bills.”

Phil’s son, my nephew Dave, had been hit by a car a few years back. The doctor’s bills had wiped out Phil’s savings. He didn’t know it, but I had kicked in a few bucks to his wife Ruth from time to time when I had a few, which, I realized, I now had.

“You think Lipparini had Howard killed?” he asked.

“I don’t know, Phil,” I said. “Maybe. Why don’t you ask him?”

“Meara’s asking him now, in my old office,” he said. “Two of his salesmen get killed, you think the man might have an idea or two. You think Meara’s going to get hamster shit out of Lipparini?”

“No,” I said.

“No,” Phil agreed. “So we keep looking for Parkman, and Lipparini goes off to some country club dance. We look for Parkman and hope we get to him before Lipparini, who might not like flashy little fight promoters punctuating his hired help. Things like that happen enough, and you might lose some credibility in the business.”

“You want me to go with Meara?” I said.

Phil didn’t answer. His elbows were on the desk and his head in his hands.

“You want Toby to go with Meara?” Seidman repeated.

“Get out,” Phil said without looking up. “You think this is the only case we’re working on? I’ve still got the Citizens to Prevent Crime coming in this afternoon. A group of businessmen who think the Mexicans in the zoot suits are going to organize and come after them with key chains and machetes. And we’ve got the asshole in MacArthur Park who keeps showing his dong to old ladies. And I still haven’t finished the damn duty roster. Get out.”

“Phil, I …” I began. Usually at this point I’d come up with a few words to provoke him into fury, but I didn’t have the heart.

“Just take off, Toby,” Seidman said. “I’ve got an appointment with Minck at ten in the morning. Maybe I’ll see you then.”

Phil looked up, started to put the reports in a neat pile, and said gruffly, “Go on. I’ll be all right. Maybe I’ll get Meara to lose his temper so I can squeeze his fat neck till his red little eyes pop.”

The idea seemed to cheer Phil a bit, so I went out into the hall and closed the door behind me. I might be able to catch Lipparini if I hurried. So I hurried, pushed through the squadroom door, and looked over the room filled with cops, creeps, and bewildered honest citizens. No one seemed to have made even a halfhearted attempt to clean the floor since I’d last been here. The massive Sergeant Veldu was sitting against his desk eating a burger and listening to a thin, scraggly woman with a high voice who leaned forward toward him and gestured with both hands.

“He had on a coat,” she said. “I said to myself, ‘Who needs a coat in this weather?’ That’s what I asked myself. Then I found out. Open comes the coat and there’s nothing under.”

“What’d he look like?” Veldu said through a mouthful.

“I dunno,” the woman screamed. “All I could see was his thing.”

“What’d that look like?” Veldu asked.

“A hairy popsicle,” she said and Veldu choked, gasped, and coughed, sending a spray of burger, lettuce, and bun in the general direction of a wild-haired kid handcuffed to a nearby chair.

“What’re you laughing at?” the woman said. “It’s not funny.”

Veldu kept laughing as the handcuffed kid whimpered, “Hey, watch what you’re chewing there, huh?”