Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) (19 page)

I moved to the bedroom and put on my underpants and trousers. There is something about dying naked that scares the hell out of me. Dying with clothes on isn’t much better. I couldn’t put on the jacket. The killer had torn it into four or five pieces and I thought I knew why. I gathered what I had to gather, turned off the lamp, and got the hell out of the Ocean Breeze. When I got to my car, I opened the glove compartment and got my gun out. I drove with it in my lap.

There was no going back to Anne’s. The killer had followed me from there and had waited for night to take a shot at me. I tried to imagine a shoot-out between the two of us. I was probably a slightly better shot than the person who was coming for me, but just slightly. At five feet I knew I could hit Mush and Silvio lying on the floor. It had been a problem for the killer. I didn’t know how close the killer had been when Lipparini was gunned down.

There were no lights on at Doc Hodgdon’s house when I pulled up in front of it a little before eleven, at least none that I could see from the street. It was a frame house, the first floor of which Doc Hodgdon had converted to office space for his orthopedic practice in 1919. They didn’t call it orthopedics in 1919. He still didn’t. He was a specialist in backs and bones. I had met Doc six years earlier at the YMCA, and we had started playing handball somewhat regularly. He was old when I met him. Six years later I had still never managed to beat him. He wasn’t fast, but he wasn’t slow either. He beat me on smarts and a strong right hand. Maybe the hand came with the orthopedic business.

I limped up the walk and stairs and knocked. Hodgdon’s secretary-receptionist Myra and I had clashed a couple of times, and I was hoping she wouldn’t be working late, trying to reconstruct a skeleton. I rang the bell and waited, peering through the small square window in the door. A light came on somewhere and got brighter when a door deep inside the house opened. Then I saw Hodgdon walking to the door and flipping on the light.

“I have a feeling this isn’t a social call,” Hodgdon said, looking at me. He was wearing a red flannel shirt. His gray hair was curly and looked as if he had just rinsed it in Prell.

“Repairs,” I said. “Can I come in? I can pay the bill this time.”

We crossed the room to his office. He switched on the light and turned to examine me. “Toby,” he said tolerantly. “The county hospital has an emergency room for things like this. If your back is the problem, however, we can wait till morning after I give you a few pills.”

“Can’t go to the hospital,” I said. “The good guys and the bad guys are looking for me.”

He shook his head and motioned for me to sit on the examining table. Then he looked at my face. “How’d you get that?” he said, looking for something to use on my face, something I feared would feel like knives dipped in frozen lime juice.

“Someone was trying to teach me to read,” I explained, “but I didn’t learn fast enough.”

“When we speak cryptically, we run the risk of being treated cryptically,” he said, pouring something from a bottle onto a piece of white cloth he extracted from a jar.

“I’ll try to remember that,” I said as he applied the compress to my face. “
Yigh
,” I said or shouted.

“That’s what they all say,” he whispered. “But it doesn’t change the situation. You didn’t just get that. It should have been cleaned at least twenty-four hours ago.”

There was an electric tingling across the side of my face for the count of four or five and then no feeling at all.

“Didn’t come about my face, Doc,” I said.

He looked at me, resurveying my limbs, and said, “Are you going to tell me or do I guess. If I guess, I’m afraid you are going to walk out of here with a lobotomy, which ultimately may be the best thing for you. Did this teacher of yours happen to work on your skull?”

“A little,” I said. “But that’s not it. My foot’s cut, and I can’t sit around waiting for it to heal. I’ve got a killer to catch.” With clenched teeth I took off my shoe and sock, which stuck to the wound.

“Well,” he said, motioning me back on the table so he could prop up my leg and get a better look. “Most of my patients don’t have reasons as pressing or colorful as yours for being treated quickly. My guess is you decided to hop around on ground glass.”

“It was either that or get shot,” I explained.

“Of course,” he said, putting his nose down to the wound and lifting my foot.

I giggled. “You’re tickling,” I explained.

“I’m surprised you have any sensation in the bottom of that foot. I don’t think you’re going to be playing handball for a month or two, but I’ll be open to modifying that diagnosis. I’ve witnessed your recuperative powers before. Hold still and think about the sound of rain, a woman of whom you are particularly fond, or a story you want to recall. There will, I’m afraid, be some pain connected with this.”

I thought about Anne, my father’s grocery in Glendale, and tried to recall the plot of a movie I’d seen a few years ago with James Cagney as a gangster who became a dancer, or maybe he was a boxer who became a dancer, or maybe I was thinking of two different James Cagney movies or maybe I was thinking about George Raft. No, I was thinking about the pain in the bottom of my foot as Doc Hodgdon worked to remove pieces of glass and dirt and to clean it out with corrosive liquids.

“Done in a few more minutes,” he said.

I wasn’t looking. My eyes wandered around the little room and rested on the painting on the wall, a group of peasants in some village maybe a hundred years ago. They were gathered around a well in what looked like a town square, watching a young woman in ragged dress drawing water into a big, washed-out green vase.

“Nice picture,” I said without quite opening my mouth.

“Wife liked it,” he said, not looking up but finding some new tool to probe my underfoot. “I think she thought she looked like the girl.”

“Did she?”

“I thought so,” he said. “That’s why it’s still there. You’re done. But don’t get down. I assume you were serious about having to find a murderer.”

“I was serious,” I said as seriously as I could.

“I put some sutures in the foot. It’s going to throb, but that’s not a new experience for you. I’ll put on a thin absorbent bandage and plenty of tape. You may be all right, but I doubt it.”

“Thanks, Doc,” I said as he applied the tape.

“I know your game, Peters,” he said, stepping back to examine his work. “Destroy your body so I’ll take pity on you. Eventually, time will take its toll on me and work with pity on your side, and I’ll be ripe for you to win a handball game.”

“That’s the plan,” I agreed, reaching down to put my sock back on. There was some pain, but it was tolerable. Getting the shoe on was a bit tougher.

“Foot’s going to swell,” he said, gathering his tools and moving to the small sink in the corner to clean them. “Maybe a lot. Maybe not so much. Might have some trouble getting a shoe on, not to mention walking. I am, however, aware of the extremes humans can tolerate if motivated. A primary problem with patients is that they know they’re sick. They give themselves conventional time to recover. Something like the job I just did on you could keep a sensible person who knew the rules off his feet for a week at least. You could ruin the sympathy racket, Toby.”

He took the washed instruments and put them in a steel container about the size of a breadbox. A piece of adhesive was stuck to the box and in pencil on the adhesive was written
For sterilization
. Maybe some day I would drag Shelly over here.

“A beer?” he said, turning his back to me.

“Sounds just fine,” I said.

“Well, hobble after me and we’ll open some bottles.”

After a few bottles of Goebels beer at the kitchen table, I said, “Well, aren’t you going to give me the warning? My body can’t take this kind of abuse. I won’t feel right unless I hear it.”

“Why?”

“Because you’re right. I should stop, but some people are surgeons, some telephone repairmen, some detectives who meet some not-very-nice people.”

Hodgdon took a drink of beer from the tall glass and watched me do the same before he spoke. “Too late to change you,” he said. “You only change the very young because you’ve got things going for you like fear and authority and their flexibility. You can change the old too sometimes because they too get frightened, but you are a pterodactyl, a creature who should have been trapped in a tar pit a millenium ago. You fly and hunt and don’t think about your own extinction.”

He poured himself another beer and I said, “Doc, I think you are just a bit drunk.”

“I had a few beers before you got here,” he admitted, holding his glass up to examine the foam, slowly searching for the bottom of the glass. “These two beers with you are two over my limit. I’m not a drinking man.”

We sat talking about his son in Indianapolis, who was also a doctor, and his daughter, who had married an insurance salesman in Chicago.

“Jean and the kids are going to visit me this summer,” he said. “Alex, her husband, doesn’t want them to come. The Japanese might be here any day. Tojo landing up in Monterey and running down here swinging his sword. Some people live frightened lives, Peters.”

“I guess he’s just worrying about his family,” I said.

“World’s not big enough to hide in anymore,” Hodgdon said, reaching over to pour me more beer. “You go out the door in the morning and you run the risk of getting your lumbar turned to chalk by a delivery truck. No, it’s better to dance occassionally on broken glass than to stay away from bottles.”

We finished about an hour later, and I tried to pay him twenty bucks for the treatment.

“Make it five,” he said. “That will satisfy your honor and pay my expenses, even cover the beer.”

Armed with a bottle of pain pills and a warm feeling for even my enemies, I said good-bye to Doc Hodgdon and went back to my car. I didn’t remember my foot hurt till I was almost a block away.

I drove slowly back to Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house, making extra turns, checking for headlights behind me. I thought I had gotten rid of that sedan earlier in the day, but I had been almost dead wrong. I didn’t want to be wrong again.

I parked almost two blocks away from the boarding house, in the lot of the Church of Tomorrow. Mrs. Plaut was a member in good standing. That might count for something in heaven when they doled out punishment for those who parked near the church and didn’t go in.

There was no black sedan on Heliotrope as I walked on the opposite side of the street, my .38 bulging in my pants pocket. I climbed over the white wooden railing of the boarding house, eased through the shadows to the door, and went in.

Mrs. Plaut caught me before I had taken two steps.

“Mr. Peelers, you look worse than Custer,” she said, her hand going to the throat of her brown Victorian dress.

“I was almost General Custer,” I admitted. “Trapped at the Battle of Ocean Breeze.”

“My great Uncle Kenan Waltz was at the Little Big Horn,” she said, shaking her head at me.

“I know,” I reminded her. “I read the chapter.”

“Wait,” she said and scurried back into her room. I looked back at the door, my hand on the gun, and waited. She appeared with a dark, red bottle and a small tube along with a roll of gauze.

“Your foot, in case you have not noticed, is bleeding,” she said, handing me the bottle, tube, and gauze. I tried to take it with one hand.

“You can let your gun alone for a second,” she said. “I will not shoot you, and the people who have been looking for you are not present. It pains me to say this, Mr. Peelers, but many of those with whom you associate are most unsavory, most unsavory.”

“I know,” I agreed. “It’s part of the business.”

“It’s probably part of your business,” she mused. “Though I can’t imagine why people would get so upset with an exterminator that you would need a pistol. You can explain it when time permits. Meanwhile, I insist that you do not shoot anyone in here tonight, or for that matter, at any time in the future. If they shoot you, that is another matter, one quite outside of your control.”

“Thanks, Mrs. Plaut,” I said, hobbling to the stairs.

“Least you could do is say thanks,” she said.

I wanted to shout thanks to her, but couldn’t risk it. Police, mobsters, and a killer might be outside. With luck they might all bump into each other and eliminate the competition for my scalp.

Gunther was waiting for me at the top of the stairs. My foot was hurting now from glass, gravel, medical treatment, and the unknown pieces of past lives of the Ocean Breeze Apartments.

“Toby,” he whispered, “many have been looking for you.”

“I know, Gunther,” I said. “One of them found me.”

“Can I help?” he said.

“I’m going into my room, where I’m going to take care of some cuts and bruises,” I said, “which might be a bit of trouble since I don’t want to turn my light on. Then I am going to try to get a few hours rest.”

I took the pistol out of my pocket and handed it to Gunther. It filled both of his hands.

“If you can read a book out here with the gun handy, I’d appreciate it. You can hear anyone coming up the stairs.”

“And what shall I do?” he asked seriously.