Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) (3 page)

Interested was a mild word and Anne knew it.

“Ralph was a gentle, determined businessman,” she went on, looking at me angrily as if I was about to mount an argument. “He was …”

“Everything I’m not,” I finished.

“Just about,” she said. “I wanted him because of that. I loved him because of that and the poor …” She sobbed, shaking her head. “The poor …”

“Bastard,” I supplied.

“… thought he had to compete with you.”

“Hey, Annie,” I said, now no more than a foot from her. “I’m not responsible for Ralph getting killed. I’ve come close to being responsible for me getting killed, but Ralph packed his own suitcase.”

“He expected to get killed tonight,” she said. Her fingers had gone white around the fragile, now empty glass. I reached out and took it from her. My fingers touched her but she didn’t pull back. I put the glass on a table and waited.

“He got a call this afternoon,” she said. “I don’t know who or what or why. I heard the phone ring. I know he answered, and then he came to me. I was upstairs reading. He said he had to go out. He looked, I don’t know, strange, nervous. He told me he loved me and I made some joke about knowing it, but now I think he was saying good-bye or at least a just-in-case good-bye. He kissed me and went out, didn’t say where he was going or who he was going to meet. I got frightened, Toby, and I called you. But I called too late.”

I touched her arm. She shuddered and then leaned against me. She smelled like old memories and tears, and her breasts were warm through her white dress, and I felt guilty but what the hell, I hugged her.

My timing was great. While I held her a voice came from behind me.

“I don’t want to disturb anything here, but are you the folks with the body?”

Anne pulled away, and I turned to face a beefy man with a red face. He was somewhere in his fifties and looked like a bloated salami. He hadn’t taken his hat off. His rumpled suit was dark, and the hat almost matched. It sat on the back of his head, his gray hair matted in front of it and over his forehead.

“This is the widow,” I said to the cop, who I recognized but didn’t know by name. My brother is a captain at the Wilshire, and years back I’d been a uniform in Glendale. Even without the connection, I’d met most of the cops who had been around for a while. This guy worked out of Santa Monica. He had an Irish name and the reputation for not being fond of work.

“I know you,” he said, pointing a finger at me and stepping in. I could feel his presence doing something to Anne, and I knew what it was. The cop was behaving the way I usually did, and I knew how she reacted to that.

“I assume you are a policeman,” she said firmly.

The cop stopped and looked at her with the trace of a sneer.

“And you’re the …” he said.

“I’m the widow,” she finished. “And you are an insensitive heap of offal. How did you get in here?”

“Door was open,” the cop said. “I just walked in and found you and … I know who you are, Peters, the private keyhole who got into all kinds of shit in Venice a few years ago.”

“And I know who you are,” I said, remembering. “You’re a pickled cop named Meara. Your name just came to me when you got close enough for me to smell the cheap whiskey.”

Meara smiled and shook his head. “I heard you had a big mouth,” he said. “I guess you use it to console widows too.”

“Meara,” I said with a grin, “how would you like a nose like mine?”

“I’ll ask you a different one,” he countered. “How’d you like an hour with me back at the station? Just a quiet cup of tea and some literary talk in our library.”

“Officer,” Anne said softly.

“Sergeant,” Meara corrected.

“Sergeant,” she said, stepping past me to face him. “Mr. Peters is an old friend. In fact, Mr. Peters and I were once married. I called him earlier today to come out here and see if he could help Ralph, my husband, to stay alive. Now don’t you think your time would be better spent looking at the … at my husband?”

I started to put my arm around her, but she sensed it and stepped away.

“Got a man doing just that,” Meara said. “Fella who seems to work here met us outside and led my man down to the corpse. I thought I’d just check out the bereaved and get some background.”

He gave me a less than cheerful look and plopped down in an armchair.

“Sorry if I jumped to anything,” he said with no touch of regret in his voice. If anything, his sarcasm had increased. “Just doing my job. It’s been a tough day.”

“We sympathize with you, Meara,” I said.

Voices were coming from the hallway, and Paitch appeared with a young man dressed exactly like Meara. There was something wacky about him, but I couldn’t tell what it was right away, not until he stepped over to Meara’s side with Paitch behind him. One of his eyes was looking into a dark corner. The other was looking at me. I figured that the one on me was the real one. It was the other that had kept him 4F. At least that’s what I figured until he started to talk, and then I subtracted 4F from his IQ and got about a 9D, my shoe size.

“He’s dead, Sergeant,” the young man said.

“Thank you, Officer Belleforte,” Meara said, his eyes moving from me to Anne. “We did have some evidence that he might be.”

“Face is smashed to hell,” Belleforte said.

Anne started to sag at my side.

“You want me to call the Medical Examiner?” Belleforte said, looking at Meara and the coffee table ten feet away.

“Either that or leave the body out there as a tourist attraction or to scare away the Japs if they decide to land,” Meara said, enjoying himself. He had his hands folded on his belly.

“I’ll call the examiner,” Belleforte decided, moving toward the door. “There’s sand all over him. You want me to get samples?”

“If a man is found dead on the beach,” Meara sighed, “there is a good chance that some sand will be found on his body.”

“But,” countered Belleforte, “what if he was killed someplace else and brought here? The sand might be different.”

Meara closed his eyes, unclasped his hands, and made a shooing gesture toward the door. Belleforte hurried out of the room.

“Boy’s head is filled with sand,” he said. “That’s what we’ve got to work with because of the Japs and the Nazis.”

Paitch had placed himself behind and to one side of Meara, probably hoping to be out of sight and awareness.

“And you,” Meara said, opening his eyes and pointing over his shoulder without looking. “What the hell do you do around here?”

“Me?” asked Paitch, looking at me and Anne to be sure the question was his to field.

“No,” said Meara. “One of the other six fellas with you.”

Paitch rubbed his nose and touched his face and let the little finger of his left hand touch his lower lip. “I’m Mr. Howard’s bodyguard,” he said almost in a whisper. “I mean I was his bodyguard. I don’t think anybody’s going to pay me to guard his body now that it’s dead.”

“Okay,” I said. “That’s enough, Meara. Mrs. Howard isn’t up to this act. You want to play Old King Cole, do it without her.”

But he wasn’t going to do it without her, and it turned into a long, long night.

2

I
t was after two in the morning when I got to Mrs. Plaut’s Boarding House on Heliotrope in Hollywood, where I rented a small, less than luxury room. Since I didn’t want a luxury room, I didn’t mind putting up with Mrs. Plaut, about whom more anon. I got that “anon” from my next-door neighbor Gunther, who happens to be a midget. Gunther is my friend, has been since I helped get him off a murder charge back in 1940. Gunther had gotten me into Mrs. Plaut’s at a time when rooms were hard to come by. Now they were impossible to find.

The house was dark when I walked up the gray wooden front steps. I had found a parking space across the street, a little close to a driveway, but what the hell. Somewhere far away a dog was whimpering.

I let myself in, took off my shoes, and tiptoed across the creaking floor toward the stairs. Mrs. Plaut was several thousand years old, had been for generations. She was almost deaf though she had the senses of a movie Indian. She felt every vibration in the house. Getting past her, day or night, was a challenge I had seldom met. The eighty-watt bulb encased in a snowy white cover overhead snapped on, and she stood in the doorway of her rooms, a tiny, frail figure in an oversized maroon robe. Her hands were folded against her chest.

“Mr. Peelers,” she said loudly. “Do you know what time it is?”

“No,” I said, looking at my watch, which suggested seven of some day, year, or century that had already passed or might never come.

“It is nearly three in the
A.M.,”
she supplied. “And you are not being considerate of the feelings of others. You are waking people.”

Her little chin pointed at me and I knew I would never suggest to her that the only one waking anyone up was her. Behind her in the darkness of her rooms I could hear her recently acquired canary, Sweet Alice, chirping away.

“Mr. Hill must get up at six to deliver the mail,” she said. “And I will be preparing breakfast at that same hour. What do you have to say to that?”

There was nothing to say to it. I wanted to get to my room, take off some of my clothes, and plop on the mattress I had placed on the floor to keep my back from living rigor mortis. I shrugged and tried to look sheepishly contrite, which probably made me look instead something like a bulldog imitating Baby Sandy.

“Have you been killing persons again?” she asked.

There seemed to be some question in Mrs. Plaut’s mind about just what I did for a living. At times she seemed to think I was an exterminator, not an unreasonable conclusion based on bits and pieces she might have picked up in the two years I had lived in this bit of heaven on Heliotrope, but she had also latched onto the idea that I did some editing for a publisher she never quite identified. For more than a year I had been reading and editing her massive family history. It was easier than trying to explain things to her.

“I’ve killed no one today, Mrs. Plaut,” I said. “Cross my heart and hope to die.”

“Don’t do that,” she said, shaking her wrinkled hand at me. “Cousin Christopher did that. Crossed his heart and hoped to die and fell down dead. He had just sworn to his wife, Cousin Roweana, that he had never lusted after the Mexican woman who did the cleaning. Do not cross your heart like that, Mr. Peelers.”

I took a few shuffling steps toward the stairs, but Mrs. Plaut, robe flowing, outflanked me. I shrugged, a tired, beaten man, and waited for whatever was coming.

“Gas will soon be rationed,” she said.

“That a fact?” I said.

“I have told you about your occasional lack of respect,” she said.

“I apologize,” I said, trying to ease past her, but she was having none of it.

“I think it reasonable that you contribute some stamps to the upkeep of this house,” she said.

A week earlier she had wheedled my sugar stamps out of me, but gas was going too far.

“You don’t even drive,” I said. “You haven’t had your Ford out of the garage since 1920-something.”

“Twenty-eight,” she said. “Husband died in twenty-seven, but the vehicle is ready as am I.”

“We’ll discuss it in the
A.M.,
” I said.

“And,” she went on after I had earned a minor victory by finally getting past her and up four stairs, “I would like to know how you have reacted to the revisions on the chapter about the Davis mining ventures. My uncle is still lost in that mine outside of Turlock.”

There was no chance that her uncle was still lost in the mine, since the incident had taken place forty years earlier and Uncle Case was already sixty when he wandered into the darkness in search of silver.

“Sanctuary,” I said, putting my palms up and showing my shoes in one hand.

“You are on the verge of being a hopeless case, Mr. Peelers,” she said, turning her back on me. Sweet Alice chirped on happily. As Mrs. Plaut turned away from me I could see the words
Horn of Plenty
in white letters on the back of her red robe. I hoped I would never be curious enough to try to ask what those words might mean. There are some mysteries better left unsolved.

I got to the top landing, moved past the pay phone, and groped my way along the wall. Mrs. Plaut had turned off the downstairs light and there was none upstairs.

“Toby?” came Gunther’s voice out of the darkness, his Swiss accent clear even in the single word.

There was some moonlight coming through the window at the end of the hallway, but my eyes hadn’t adjusted to it yet. I stopped, not wanting to trip over Gunther or knee him in the nose.

“You are all right?” he said.

“I’m okay, Gunther,” I said.

“I heard Mrs. Plaut,” he said, “and I couldn’t help noticing the time. I hope you don’t think I’m being overly concerned.”

“No,” I said, figuring that his voice was coming from the doorway of his room, next to mine. “It’s been a long night. Ralph Howard seems to have gotten himself murdered.”

Gunther had come with me to Anne and Ralph’s wedding. I hadn’t been able to face it alone. At first Anne had thought I had brought the dapper little man as a joke, an insult, but Gunther’s politeness had overcome that and he had gotten along well with Ralph and Anne though the visit had been brief.