High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) (2 page)

It was almost two in the afternoon when we got where we were going. The rain had stopped, but the sky was dark, and disgruntled thunder rumbled over the ocean a few blocks away. We were in the parking lot of a new low white brick building, a one-story affair with a few construction company trucks still around to provide finishing touches. Costello led the way through construction rubble and into the building through a double wooden door marked Delivery Entrance.

Marco breathed tabasco sauce on my neck as we moved into the damp half-light. The lights hadn’t been installed yet, and the building had that new smell of mud and clay with a touch of garlic. Something moved in the corner, and three men stepped forward from the shadows of the broad room we were in. A boom of thunder shook the walls.

“You do a little sightseeing on the way?” said the man in the lead, with a slight accent I couldn’t place. He was about fifty, with thin, dark hair and a mottled complexion. He was wearing a clean white smock and had his hands in his pockets like a doctor approaching a troublesome patient. The two men behind him were also wearing white smocks and serious scowls. One of them carried a large plate.

The guy with the bad complexion stepped forward and looked at me. I seemed to be what he expected. I’m about five foot nine, weigh about 160 and have a nose smashed flat by fists and fate. I look as if I’ve seen it all and it has seen and danced on me.

“Mr. Lombardi …” Marco began with what was probably going to be an apology, but Lombardi cut him off with a stare and clenched teeth that made it clear Marco had made a mistake in using his name. He held the glare for about ten seconds and then held up his left hand. One of the two guys in white, the one with the plate, stepped forward. I was sure there would be a dagger on the plate and I was about to be dispatched, with Marco following me in a matter of seconds.

“Try this,” said Lombardi. He took the plate from the guy on his left and held it out to me. There were slices of pastrami, corned beef and salami and something else on it. I reached for the salami and took a bite.

“Well?” said Lombardi.

I looked around at Costello and Marco and the two guys in white while I chewed. They were all looking at me.

“Good,” I said.

“Just good?” said Lombardi. “Try the pastrami and the tongue.”

I tried the pastrami.

“Very good,” I said. This guy had gone through a lot to get my approval of some cold cuts, and he didn’t seem like the type who would respond well to criticism. I finished the pieces of meat and accepted the offer of a slice of pickled cow’s tongue. I don’t know how it tasted. It was a little hard to taste anything with Lombardi’s face inches from mine, his right eyebrow up, his tongue a little out, waiting for my reaction.

I smiled and nodded in appreciation as I gulped down the tongue slice.

“See,” grinned Lombardi, “a native likes it.”

We were pals now. He put his right arm over my shoulder and led me into a corner away from the others.

“I got this idea back East,” he whispered into my ear. “A guy I know said the delicatessen in Los Angeles was awful, couldn’t get a decent pastrami, no smoked fish, lox, nothing. So about a year ago I decided to move out here, semi-retire, open a kosher-style factory.”

“Kosher-style?” I asked sweetly.

Lombardi nodded and pointed back at the guy in white who had held the platter of meat. “Stevie’s old lady was Jewish. Stevie will manage the factory.”

“Oh,” I said as we walked in a little circle, Lombardi’s arm getting heavier on my shoulder. “And how do I—”

“You see,” Lombardi went on, pausing only to touch a shiny new slicing machine delicately, “there are maybe a couple thousand, maybe more, restaurants in LA that should be carrying my line. With my two imported salesmen from Chicago and my own men, we should be able to convince most of them to take a good supply each and every day. You agree?” I agreed.

“Good,” he went on with a wink. “Now this can run into big money—not as big as some other things I could have gone into, but this is a labor of love, you know what I mean?”

“A labor of love,” I agreed, wanting to shift his arm from my shoulder.

“But,” he said, stopping suddenly and gripping my shoulder, “there is a problem.”

“A problem,” I repeated, since repeating seemed to be getting me into the least trouble.

“A problem,” he nodded sadly. “Someone is stirring into things I don’t want stirred into, things from a long time ago that could embarrass a friend of mine, maybe cause trouble for my business. We don’t want trouble for my business, do we?”

“We do not,” I said emphatically.

Lombardi bit his lower lip and did some more nodding. I was saying the right thing. He gave me a playful punch on the shoulder.

“Good, good,” he whispered. “I knew we could get along. Now all you have to do is string a certain client of yours along for a week or two and then tell him that there’s nothing to worry about and that you advise him to do what a certain producer wants done. You know what to say.”

“I do?”

The friendly look began to fade from Lombardi’s face, and he looked at Marco and Costello.

“You do,” he said.

“I haven’t got a client,” I said. “Haven’t had one for months. I’m filling in as house dick at the …”

Lombardi’s finger had gone up to his lips and touched them, a signal I took for me to shut up.

“You know,” he said, “I was not the nicest kid on my block when I was a kid. I have a bad temper.”

“You?”

“Yes,” he said with a shrug. “It’s hard to believe, but it’s true, and sometimes I get crazy ideas.” His free hand went up to his head to show me that the ideas came from there and not from a lower region. “Like I wonder what hot dogs would taste like if they were mixed with meat and bones from the right hand of a private detective. You ever wonder things like that?”

I couldn’t get any words out, but I shook my head slowly to indicate that my curiosity never went in that direction.

“Well,” Lombardi continued, “you go have a talk with Mr. Cooper …”

“Cooper?” I said.

“Cooper,” he repeated as if I were feebleminded.

“Are you sure you have the right private detective?” I tried.

“Your name is Toby Peters. Office on Hoover?”

“Right.”

“You’re the right one.”

“Right. I’m to talk to Cooper. Tell him there is nothing I can find. Tell him he should do what the producer wants.”

“You’ve got it,” said Lombardi, “and be sure my name and our little visit don’t come up in the conversation.”

We had marched around the big room with our conversation punctuated by thunder, rain and one loud, nervous taco burp from Marco. We were back where we started, with the guys in white on one side and Marco and Costello behind me.

“Mind telling me which Cooper?” I said.

“You are joking,” said Lombardi. “I can appreciate a sense of humor. Our friends from Chicago, they don’t have much sense of humor, and they’re going to be keeping an eye on you for a while, just to be sure you understand our deal. Here, I got a little something to remember me by.”

The other guy in white stepped forward, his hands behind his back. I tightened my stomach muscles and pursed my lips to protect my teeth from whatever he was going to hit me with. His right hand came out with a brown paper bag.

Lombardi took the bag and handed it to me. “Assortment of cold cuts. Take them. Enjoy them. And do what we agreed. Remember my crazy ideas.”

“Hot dogs,” I said.

“You got it,” he grinned, releasing my shoulder. “I hope I don’t see you again, Mr. Peters.”

What do you say to that kind of parting line? I turned, brown paper bag in my hand. Marco and Costello took their places at my side and walked me toward the door. Behind us I could hear Lombardi’s voice getting back to business, talking kosher-style bologna and expansion into the West Coast lox box market.

The rain had stopped. It was still dark, but the black clouds were drifting inland fast.

“Did you hear what he said?” Marco groaned. “He wants us to stay around here and sell salami.”

“Salami, beer,” Costello said with a shrug to show it was all the same to him, all the while prodding me into the backseat of the car. Marco got into the driver’s seat, grumbling.

“Where you want us to take you?” Costello said. His gun remained in his shoulder holster. For him, the whole thing was over. He had only a few more lines to deliver.

I told them to take me back to the Ocean Palms. This time I gave directions right away, and we were back there in twenty minutes.

As I got out, still clutching my now grease stained brown bag, Costello delivered his line. “You want to keep breathing this wet air, you do what you were told. We’re gonna keep an eye on you. Right, Marco?”

Marco neither turned nor responded. His mind was filled with images of Japanese soldiers on
banzai
charges down La Cienega or cracks suddenly opening in the ground on Sunset. I went into the Ocean Palms and was greeted by the manager, James R. Schwoch, a thin guy with bug eyes, nervous hands and a frequent glance over his shoulder for eavesdroppers. He wore the same brown suit and tie he had worn since I met him.

“Where have you been?” he demanded.

“I was kidnapped by the new cold cut king of Santa Monica,” I explained.

Schwoch sneered.

“Get up to 212. Someone tried to commit suicide.”

The someone was an eighteen-year-old girl from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, whose money had run out with her new boyfriend. She didn’t want any of my pastrami, but I got her to accept twenty bucks, almost a week’s pay, for a bus ticket back home. She thanked me and I told her that no one had ever really killed herself on eighteen aspirin. She said that was all she could afford. She had considered cutting her wrists or jumping out the window, but her imagination was too good. When I got her packed, I used the phone in her room to call Jack Ellis.

“How’s the leg?” I asked.

“Cast up to my ass, but I can walk,” he said. “Goddamn thing is driving me nuts. I can’t read, can’t listen to the radio. All I can do is think about how much it itches.”

“Can you come back to work?”

“I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’d take my mind off the itching. What’s up?”

I sketched it out and told him it would only take me a few days, but if he couldn’t make it back I’d get someone else to fil in.

“No,” Ellis said. “Maybe I can get a chance to kick a few sailors with this cast.”

“That’s unpatriotic. There’s a war going on.”

“Right,” he said. “Between me and the US armed forces. I’ll get my wife to drive me down. You can take off.”

I tried to get the twenty bucks back from Schwoch but he wasn’t having any. It had been my idea to give the girl the money, not his. I told him Ellis was coming back, and he liked the idea. I wondered if he would give Ellis the hotel manager’s equivalent of the purple heart, but I didn’t wait around to see. I didn’t know how long my brown paper bag would hold up, and I had some thinking to do.

My ’34 Buick had recently been painted a straight dark blue by No-neck Arnie, the mechanic on Eleventh. The paint was already bubbling. I had sixty bucks and a problem. The immediate problem was the stain on the seat next to me being made by the Lombardi kosher-style cold cuts. The next problem was a client I supposedly had named Cooper. I turned on the car radio and listened to the war news for a few seconds and then turned to KFI to catch Don Winslow, who was winning the war even if we weren’t.

What did I have? A client named Cooper, who had something to do with movies. Lombardi, who had recently moved to the Coast from the East and wanted to remain a noncelebrity. How many Coopers were there? Gladys Cooper, Jackie Cooper, Meriam C. Cooper, Gary Cooper. Something pinged in my head. Something about Gary Cooper. I urged it to come out. Don Winslow urged a spy to come out of a submarine, but both remained inside.

The sky was clearing but the day was still damned cold when I pulled in front of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house on Heliotrope, where I lived. Mrs. Plaut greeted me on the porch. She was somewhere in the vicinity of eighty years old, with more determination than the Russians holding Leningrad and as much hearing as a light pole. She was under the impression that I was an exterminator with connections in the movie industry. With my help, she was writing a history of her family.

“Mr. Peelers, you are home early,” she said.

“Yes,” I said. “I …”

“Yes, problems,” she sighed as I came on the porch. “My father used to say this is a doggie dog world.”

“Right,” I said, trying to skip past her.

“I’ll have another chapter by Saturday,” she said, putting her bony arm out, an arm that had uncanny strength.

“Right,” I said, easing past her with my brown bag held out to keep from further ruining my suit.

I did not bound up the stairs, but I went as quickly as I could. I passed my own door and knocked at Gunther’s. Gunther Wherthman was my next-door neighbor and probably my best friend. Gunther, all three foot nine of him, answered immediately. He was, as always, dressed in a three-piece suit, though he worked at home translating books from German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Danish into English. Gunther was Swiss. We had met on a case of mine.