Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery (14 page)

“No, before the shooting,” I said.

“Let’s see. People moving around in those costumes, moving that stuff, animals in cages. Everyone trying to be quiet ‘cause the show was going on you know.”

“I know.”

He looked at his pipe again.

“Thinking back,” he said. “Did see that one who got himself shot and killed. Talked to him. He was a talker. Asked questions. I had answers, but I don’t think they were the ones he wanted. He went upstairs. Think maybe I saw him going into one of the doors up there, dressing rooms.”

“You didn’t hear the shot?”

“Who says?”

“I thought …”

“No, I didn’t hear the shot. Nothing wrong with my hearing. I’ve got perfect pitch. Always did. Born with it. ‘God’s gift,’ my mother used to say. ‘God’s curse,’ my father said, because it got me into musical comedy, opera.”

He was lost in reverie. I pulled him back.

“Gunshot.”

“Never heard it. Buzz saw was going,” he said. “Looked up some point. Not too many people backstage then. Saw the one, what’s her name, long legs, little tiger costume.”

“Gwen,” I said.

“That’s the one,” he said with a nod. “She was about at the top of the stairs. Someone came out of the dressing room behind her. She turned and ran down the stairs, right past me, out that door there.”

“The other person, the one who came out of the dressing room?”

“Nice suit, beard, one of those turban things on his head.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

Raymond Ramutka was in no hurry. He played with the tobacco in his pipe with a stained thumb and hummed something.

“What did he do,” he repeated. “Don’t know. Don’t think he came down the stairs. Don’t know. I watched her go through the door.”

“Thanks,” I said.

About a minute later I saw Jimmy Clark, the freckled kid, carrying a wooden cage big enough for a cougar. There was a handle on top, and it took both his hands to carry it.

“Want a hand?” I asked.

“No place to grab except the handle,” he said. “But thanks.”

He put it down and looked at a spot behind the curtains, probably gauging how much further he had to go.

“The other night,” I said. “What did you see?”

“Police asked me this,” he said. “I’ll tell you the same. I was standing about here. Even with the buzz saw, I heard the shot. I knew it was a shot. I’ve heard lots of shots.”

“Army?” I asked.

“Yeah, a grunt. Infantry. Got this,” he said, touching his leg, “getting off a landing barge on a little island near Guam. Didn’t even make it out of the water. Jap shell hit about then yards away from me, went in, blew. Never got to the island.”

He didn’t look a minute older than eighteen.

“The shot,” I reminded him.

“Oh yea. I heard it. “I was standing there with Meagan and Joyce. I looked up, saw Gwen running down. Saw this guy up there. Turban, beard. I think he had a gun in his hand.”

“A pellet gun?” I asked.

“Don’t think so,” he said. “Looked bigger, heavier. Anyway, he came running down the stairs behind Gwen. I knew something bad had happened. Just had the feeling. Her tiger tail was wagging. You know?”

“I know.”

“The man?”

“Stage right and gone,” he said. “If I could run, I would have gone for him.”

“He had a gun,” I said.

“Yeah, right. Well maybe I wouldn’t have gone for him but I like to think I would have.”

“Did the guy with the beard look familiar?”

“Well maybe, yeah, sort of,” he said plunging his hands into his pockets. But I can’t place him.”

“Keep trying,” I said.

“I will,” he said.

He rubbed his hands together, took in a breath and picked up the box again.

I found Pete Bouton standing in the wings to the right of the stage. His arms were folded and he was watching his brother slowly go over a number in the act, one that involved swords and a colorful big box that was about the size and shape of an outhouse.

“High,” Pete said. “Anything?”

“Not yet,” I said.

He looked out on the stage.

“Want to know the real trick?’ he asked. The real skill?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Timing, practice, confidence, making it look easy. Don’t let them see you sweat. We used to work together on stage, but I’m more comfortable making things work, watching from the wings.”

“You were in the wings when Cunnningham died?”

“I was. I didn’t hear the shot, but I did hear people talking behind me. I turned. There were four or five people. Joyce, Meagan, Al Grinker, looking toward the stairs leading up to the dressing room. They tell me Gwen ran down. They tell me a man in a beard and a turban came out of the dressing room with a gun.”

“But you didn’t see this?”

“Not from here,” he said. “Just the people looking up.”

I looked back. I could see the bottom of the steps but nothing of the upper landing where the dressing rooms were.

I looked at Bouton who was definitely worried.

“I don’t like this dinner thing tonight,” he said. “When Ott showed up here after the shooting, he was wild, threatened Harry. But my brother doesn’t back away from a challenge.”

“Ott’s got some kind of surprise,” I said.

“So has Harry,” he said.

I talked to everyone I could find who had been there when Cunningham was shot. They all told pretty much the same story. The only difference, and it was a big one, was that some of them said they thought they saw the man with the beard and gun come down the stairs and either go into the shadows stage right, through the door to the outside, or saw him move the other way outside the dressing room. Some said he was holding a gun. Some said he wasn’t.

I went up the stairs, passing a girl in blue tights. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a kind of tail. She reminded me of Ann Miller, which reminded me of Ann Preston who used to be Ann Peters.

“You looked cute in that costume the other night,” she said as she passed.

“Cute is what I aim for,” I said.

There were two doors beyond the dressing room where Cunningham had been killed. One was a closet with no windows. The other was a storage room with no windows. Around the corner was a dead-end alcove. The alcove was small. Over the railing were rungs fitted into the wall, a ladder down to the stage level and up to the roof.

I didn’t bother to climb down. It would just take me where I had been. I went up, pushed the trapdoor open, climbed out, and looked around. Nothing much to see. I walked around the roof to see if there was some way onto it. There was—a fire escape. So, the guy in the turban could have climbed up the fire escape and through the trapdoor. I checked my watch. Useless. It had been my father’s. It kept its own time. I had another stop I wanted to make but I wasn’t sure I had time. I had a tuxedo to put on, shoes to polish, maybe a murder to stop.

I went back down the stairs, waved at Raymond Ramutka who leaned against the wall near the rear door, probably remembering the score of
Tosca
.

I decided to make a quick stop.

I checked the phone booth and found a listing for
The Pelle-grino Agency, Robert Cunningham, confidential investigations
. The address was on San Vicente. When I got there, I walked into The Pellegrino Bar.

The Pellegrino Bar wasn’t exactly a dump. The neighborhood was just good enough to keep it from getting a label like that. It was small, dark, clean, and smelled of beer, even when no one was drinking it. The dark windows were glowing with neon beer signs, one of which for Falstaff flickered in the first stages of death.

Early afternoon. One customer at the bar. None in the four booths to the right. Customer and barkeep looked over at me when I came in. The customer, short, round, and needing a shave, was about sixty. He was wearing a gray cap worn off to the side. He wasn’t trying to be rakish. He looked as if he were about to burp. Both of his plump hands went to the glass of beer in front of him as if he were afraid I was going to snatch it from him.

The bartender was a woman. She was huge, sad of face, and did not look particularly happy to see another customer come in. A voice on the radio said the British had crossed the Odon River after beating back nine Nazi attacks. The bartender changed the station. The Dorsey brothers’ band was halfway through
I Should Care
.

I went to the bar. The bartender moved slowly in front of me, hands on the bar. She was supposed to say, “What’ll it be?”

But she didn’t. She didn’t say anything. Just glowered at me.

“Pepsi, ice,” I said.

“And?” she asked.

“What makes you think there’s an ‘and’?”

“Three in the afternoon, weekday, you order a Pepsi,” she said.

“Maybe I just came for the quiet surroundings and friendly atmosphere,” I said. “Maybe I’m just thirsty.”

“And maybe I’m standing back here waiting for Hal Wallis to come in and discover me,” she said.

“Cunningham,” I said. “Telephone book says this is his office.”

“Back booth over there,” she said. “Paid five bucks a month to sit there a few hours a week and for me to take messages. I answer the phone ‘Pellegrino.’” If they asked for Cunningham, I let him know or took a message.”

“You’re using the past tense,” I said.

“Because he’s dead,” she said.

“Cops have been here, right?” I asked.

She just looked at me. “One nasty son-of-a-bitch,” was all she said.

“Red hair, bad skin,” I guessed.

“That’s the one.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Okay,” she said, leaning toward me over the bar. “Now I know what game we’re playing. I’ll get your Pepsi. You decide on the going rate for answers.”

She moved down the bar. The pudgy drunk held up his hand for service. She ignored him. He burped loudly. He almost lost his cap.

“You’re not a cop,” she said.

“I’m not a cop,” I agreed, reaching for the Pepsi. In spite of two cubes of ice, it was still warm.

“He left two wooden fruit crates full of stuff,” she said.

“Did the cop look through them?”

“He did.”

“He take them?”

“Nope.”

“I’d like to look through them.”

“Not a problem,” she said, smiling a smile I did not like, a smile that was about to cost Harry Blackstone some money.

“Ten bucks.”

“Forty,” she said.

“Thirty,” I countered.

“I’ve got no time for games,” she said.

I looked at the drunk who was about to fall off his stool. I could see that she had a lot to do. I opened my wallet and counted out forty dollars, all tens. She took them, tucked them into a pocket and said, “The Pepsi’s on me. Come on.”

She went to the end of the bar and pointed at the rear booth, Cunningham’s office. I sat in it with my Pepsi and faced the front door. The dark wooden table was a jumble of rings left by countless glasses and the burn marks of enough cigarettes to kill the population of Moscow, Idaho.

In less than a minute, she came from behind the bar with a crate in her hands. She placed it on the table in front of me and then went back for a second crate. Then she moved behind the bar again, leaving me looking at a full-color picture on the end of the crate of a smiling blonde with frizzy short hair and impossibly white teeth. The blonde was holding a glass of orange juice and above her head were the words, “Sun Drenched Direct From Florida.”

I spent the next hour drinking warm Pepsi, watching the drunk, exchanging glances of less-than-love with the bartender, and discovering something interesting among the letters, notes, candy wrappers, and bills that were the legacy of Robert Cunningham.

I discovered that Cunningham had lots of bills that didn’t look as if they had been paid. I also learned that he couldn’t spell. Examples included: instatution, sirvalence, proseed, cab fair, and naturul.

If there was anything worth taking, Cawelti had probably taken it. But I kept looking. I almost missed it. A scrap of paper torn out of a notebook. It was unwrinkled and might have fallen to the bottom of the pile when Cawelti was going through the contents of the boxes. Cunningham’s handwriting was as bad as his spelling, but I could make it out:

        A Thousand and One Nights, Wild, Thursday at eight. Culumbia.

Cunningham had said “Wild on Thursday” to Gwen before he died. Tomorrow was Thursday. I had a pretty good idea of what it meant, but I didn’t have time now to check. I folded the sheet, put it in my wallet, finished my third Pepsi, made a trip to the gents’ and waved good-bye to the barkeep and the drunk, who smiled.

I had a tuxedo to put on, a party to go to, and a magician to protect.

        
A number of items are placed on the table. No limit to the number of items. You work with an accomplice who goes to the corner and covers his or her eyes or even goes in another room. The victim points to an object on the table. The accomplice returns. The magician points to each object saying nothing and pointing in the same way. The accomplice correctly identifies the object as the one selected when the magician points to it. Solution: Be sure there are objects of a number of colors, including black. Point to a black item as you go around only if the next item is the correct one. If the victim has chosen a black item, it makes no difference, just so the accomplice knows that the chosen object will be pointed to after the first item the magician points to
.

—
From the
Blackstone, The Magic Detective
radio show

“Y
OU LOOK ELEGANT,
”
Anita said, stepping back.

We were in her apartment, and I was standing in front of her full-length mirror.

She was either blind or being kind.

The stiff in the mirror looked like the uncomfortable bodyguard for a mobster. The tux was black and pressed. The black bow tie had been tied perfectly by Anita. My shoes were shined. My hair was brushed back and glistening with Vitalis. It was my face that gave me away. It was the middle-aged face of an ex-boxer who had taken at least eight or ten too many blows to the face. I had never been a boxer, but I had lost more than my share of battles. My nose was flat. My cheeks were rough, and you didn’t have to look too closely to see a small white scar over my right eye and another one just left of my chin. It was a good face for someone in my business.