Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) (17 page)

“How comfortable?” I asked.

“One hundred and eighty thousand dollars,” she said, biting her lower lip. “The company paid half the premiums. It’s standard. Working for an airline can be dangerous, even for executives.”

We chatted about the weather, the beach litter, and a few mutual acquaintances from the past including Ruth and Phil. I knew Anne had meant last night as no more than two curious and once-familiar bodies comforting each other. Anne always meant what she said.

“I went to a psychiatrist last year,” she said, offering me more coffee. I turned it down and she went on. “It’s a new fad among the moderately well-to-do. He told me that I had married you because I wanted a little boy, and you satisfied that need. I wanted a child and couldn’t have one, and you wanted a mother you had never really had.”

I wanted to escape, but I shook my head politely and nibbled at the crust of my toast, which I didn’t really want unless I could dip it into my coffee. I had controlled the urge, remembering Anne’s morning look of veiled disgust when I had dipped, sopped, or sponged food in the past.

“I divorced you when I stopped wanting to play mother,” she went on. “You wanted to keep playing baby. So, I married Ralph, who was …”

“A father figure,” I said. “I could have saved you fifteen bucks a session.”

“It was twenty-five,” she said with a smile, “and your telling me wouldn’t have made it true. It wasn’t true until I told myself and believed it.”

“Now you’ve got no father figure and you don’t want to go back to the little boy. You’re right. The little boy is pushing fifty and you outgrew him long ago. I understand. I don’t like it, but I understand. Can I use the phone?”

There was a phone on the heavy wooden table by the door. I got up and went to it. I could have waited an hour, two maybe, but I didn’t like this conversation.

“Hello, Shel,” I said when he answered after the third ring.

“I’m not talking to you, Toby,” he said. I could imagine him pursing his chubby lips.

“Don’t talk to me then, Shel, just tell me if I’ve had any calls.”

“Ha, how can I give you your messages if I’m not talking to you?”

“Shel, you’ve been talking to me to tell me you’re not talking to me. Do I have any messages?”

“Your brother,” he said. “He called. Toby, what am I going to do with a waiter’s uniform? And what about my suit? That was a good suit. I’ve only got two suits.”

“You can wear the waiter’s costume to the next costume ball of the dental association,” I said.

“The dental association doesn’t have a costume ball. Maybe I could sell it to a costume shop?”

“Great idea, Shel,” I said, wondering how much demand there was for a little fat waiter’s costume. “If they won’t take it, I’ll buy you a new suit.”

“Well …” he began and I said, “Good-bye, Shel. I’ll talk to you later.”

Anne was politely not listening or pretending that she wasn’t. Her small smile betrayed her as she helped Anjelica clear the table. I called the Wilshire Station and asked for Captain Pevsner, who came on almost immediately.

“Toby,” he said calmly. “You and that fat mouth-butcher went to see Monty Lipparini last night.”

“Right, Phil. Is he complaining? I made a deal with him and—”

“He’s not complaining,” Phil said. “He won’t complain to anybody any more. Monty Lipparini is dead. Your sloppy marksman gunned him down outside of Marty’s Lounge in Beverly Hills. You better get in here.”

“Phil, if I—”

“We’ve got four bodies, Toby. They’re laying all over the county,” he said too calmly. I could imagine Seidman in front of him, indicating that he should stay calm. “And Steve got the feeling talking to some of Lipparini’s people that they’d like to have a little talk with you.”

“Phil,” I said earnestly. “Lipparini has a bodyguard. I don’t know his name. Looks a little like a blown-up Moe Howard.”

“Genette, Jerry Genette.” He sighed. “He doesn’t look anything like Moe Howard for chrissake. We questioned him. We’re questioning everybody, even George Raft. This case is going to be all over the papers in the morning. Lipparini was rat shit, but he had a name. And by the way, Louis’s lady friend says she never heard of him. I’m pulling him in, too. Get in here.”

“Parkman,” I tried.

“We’re still looking,” Phil answered. “Toby, get your ass in here. Meara wants you for this one. Lipparini’s friends want you. And I want you. You take your choice.”

“I try to find who killed everyone,” I said. “That’s my choice. And don’t pull Louis in yet. I think Louis’s lady friend might have an encounter with the Lord and decide to tell the truth.”

“Get in—” he began and I hung up.

“Got to go,” I said to Anne. “Meara is probably going to be here soon. A lot of people might be here soon. Tell them all whatever they want to hear, that I was here, that I was dressed like the Easter Bunny, the truth.”

“Take care, Tobias Leo Pevsner,” she said. She put down a dish and held her hand out to me. I took it, let it go reluctantly, said “
Adiós
” to Anjelica just like the Cisco Kid, and got the hell out of there as fast as I could go.

The morning was sunny, warm, and without a breeze. I got into my car and drove down the highway. A black sedan looked as if it might be tailing me, so I pulled into a circular driveway in front of a big beach house. I waved at the guy in shorts and sunglasses who came out to greet me and then pulled back onto the highway. The black sedan was far ahead and moving. Then I drove the last few hundred yards to the house I was looking for.

The house was about half a mile from Anne’s and a little closer to the beach. It was a two-story wooden spider of a beach house built against the jagged hillside and supported by beams sunk into the sand and resting on rock below. A lot of these had been going up lately as Santa Monica became a place where the rich could spend a quiet weekend. The problem with the housing boom was the war. These unsteady sentinels would be the first to go in an invasion, but there were movie stars and people getting rich on selling guns and butter who didn’t seem to worry about it or the possibility of the Pacific rolling over in anger to take the house and part of the hill some night when the water banshees were howling.

I stepped onto the wooden porch and looked down between the boards at the rocky beach twenty feet below. It made me nervous, but I kept going and knocked at the door.

The last two times Brenda Stallings had opened a door for me, I had wound up being seduced and shot by her and getting both of her husbands killed. I wasn’t sure I wanted to cross this threshold again.

“I’m not married, Peters,” she said. “There’s no one here you can get killed.”

She looked the same—cool, blonde, every hair perfect, her lips red and recently painted, her white dress a towelly material belted with a sash at her thin waist. She didn’t look a minute over twenty-five and couldn’t have been a year under thirty-eight. Brenda had been a wealthy society deb about seventeen years earlier. She had doubled for Harlow and then, after a short, successful film career, she had married a blackmailing actor named Harry Beaumont, who now resided in Roseland Cemetery. Her second husband, Richard Talbott, the star of
Captain Daring
and others of its ilk, had been knifed over a year ago by a nut I was trailing.

“Before you ask,” she said, “Lynn is in New York and has in fact just married a producer several years older than I am and very interested in having a family in addition to the two he already has by his previous wives.”

“Which means?” I asked, still standing on the porch.

“I may soon be a grandmother,” she said. “Do I look like a grandmother?”

“Do I look like Robert Taylor?” I answered.

“There may be hope for you, Peters,” she said with a twisted smile that didn’t make her look less beautiful. “Come in.”

“No guns,” I said, stepping past her.

“No guns,” she said, showing her hands.

White was her color. Her last two houses had been white on white on white, and this one was no exception. The carpet was white and the walls and furniture in the living room were white with tasteful blond wooden tables. Both of Brenda’s previous husbands were honored by portraits on the wall. They seemed to be looking at each other and wondering what the hell they had done to deserve this.

There was a giant glass door facing the ocean. Beyond the sliding door was a porch and wooden steps leading down to the sand. The door was open, and the sound of rolling sea mixed with beach voices.

“Nice place,” I said.

She shrugged, found a cigarette, lit it with an Oscar that had been turned into a lighter.

“Sand gets into the carpet, sand and salt air,” she said, looking at the floor and then at me. “It looks as if you’ve had your share of sand and salt water in the last year or two.”

“I don’t weather very well,” I said.

She looked at me with curiosity, folded her arms, showing scarlet fingernails, played with her cigarette.

“You want to know why I’m here?” I said with a smile.

“I assumed it wasn’t just to talk about the good old days,” she said, taking a white marble ashtray and wandering to the glass door. The light hit her from behind as she knew it would. It was perfect.

“Joe Louis,” I said.

She laughed and said, “Of course. Are you going to get him maimed? Please try to bear in mind that I’m not married to him.”

“You told the police you didn’t know him,” I reminded her.

“Peters, what would you tell the police in my place? My friends, or the only people I know on an extended basis, would think nothing of my friendship with Joe Louis. However, I don’t want newspapers, magazines, and radio reporters camped on my door, and I don’t want certain people with whom I plan to enter into business to have second thoughts about my viability as a partner.”

She had begun pacing the room and smoking fiercely as she talked, which gave me some hope. I hadn’t been thrown out, and she hadn’t sat or stood calmly lying to me. Something was working at her, and I went for it.

“He’s a decent guy,” I said.

“He rides horses better than either of my two husbands, and he plays better golf than they did,” she said. “And he excels in other areas, too. And you are right. He’s a decent guy.”

“The cops are trying to nail him for a murder down the beach,” I said. I had been leaning against the wall, watching her stalk the room like a Persian cat. She walked nicely, glided across the carpet. “All you have to say is that he was staying with you and had a reason for being here.”

She stopped and stared at me, putting out her cigarette and placing the ashtray on one of the wooden tables.

“Is that
all
I have to do?” she said, pursing her lips. “That and face the consequences?”

“The police will keep it out of the papers,” I assured her, but she and I knew there was no guarantee of that.

“Shit,” she said and stamped her foot and bit her lower lip. “Shit, shit, shit.”

“And more shit,” I agreed.

“I don’t want to be a grandmother,” she said.

“I don’t want to be an ice fisherman in Alaska,” I said, “but what choice do I have?”

Her shoulders sagged slightly. Everything she did was a pose. I wondered if she practiced in front of a mirror.

“I suppose in a sick kind of way I owe you something, Peters,” she said, turning to me with her hands on her hips. It was the same pose, the same tone, and maybe even close to the same words she had shot at Warren William in
It Takes a Lady
.

“
It Takes a Lady
, 1936,” I said.

“God no. It was
Vagabond From Genesis
, 1934,” she said. “Can’t help it. Too many rehearsals, too many directors. The only place I can be original is in bed. Do you remember?”

“It was a pool house and a deck chair, and you were stalling to keep me from finding your daughter,” I said. “Yes, you were original, but now …”

“I’m stalling,” she said. “Brenda Stallings. All right. Tell your policeman friends I’ll verify that the Brown Bomber, the Detroit Dynamite, the Sepia Socker, the Champ was here because I invited him and all the rest. Do you think I might succeed in bribing the police to keep it quiet?”

“No,” I said. “It would take care of a few of them but not enough to guarantee anything.”

The phone rang, a white phone on the table near the white sofa.

“Then our visit is over?” she said, a trace of weariness touching the corners of her mouth.

“Over,” I agreed between rings.

“You can let yourself out,” she said, stepping toward the phone. “Does your back ever …” she said, pausing with her hand over the phone and looking at me.

“No, just a scar, a nice conversation piece when I show my body off for girls on the beach,” I said.

“As I recall, you had plenty of scars on your body,” she said seductively, falling into her best-known character, Lucinda in
Belle of Forever
. Then, looking back at the insistent phone, she sighed. “A grandmother.”

I left the room and headed for the door. Behind me I could hear her on the phone,