A Fatal Glass of Beer (24 page)

“You are being sarcastic,” she said.

“I am being tired,” I answered. “Now, if I could just …”

Her hand was out, expecting something. Then I realized what she was expecting. I put my bag down on the porch swing and took out her manuscript.

“W. C. Fields loved it,” I said. “He thinks it might be movie material. Wants to see you about it. He’ll call.”

“I’ll consider it,” she said seriously. “Did you comment?”

“In the margins,” I said. “I love it.”

She clutched broom and manuscript to her bosom and stepped out of the way to let me through. The photograph of Eleanor Roosevelt that hung on the porch wall was tilted. I adjusted it. Eleanor Roosevelt had signed it and given it to me. I had turned it over as a token of peace to Mrs. Plaut who, thinking it was Marie Dressler, proudly displayed it on the porch.

“Mr. Wherthman returned this morning,” she said, following me into the house.

“I know,” I said, heading for the stairs.

“I put a bowl of Aunt Ellendorf’s peanut-butter rice pudding on your table,” she said as I trudged up the stairs.

“Sounds like what I need,” I said.

I was at the top of the stairs now. The phone was ringing.

“Someone’s been calling for you all morning,” she said from below, shifting the manuscript under her right arm.

“Who?”

The phone kept ringing.

“Man. Didn’t leave a name. Mr. Hill took one of the calls before he went off to deliver his letters.”

I paused, looking at the phone on the wall.

“I plan to let it ring next time,” she said. “It is not unreasonable to expect the boarders to answer their own phone so I don’t have to go running up the stairs every five minutes.”

“The phone’s ringing now,” I said, wondering how she had heard it the previous times.

“I think the phone is ringing right now,” she said.

I picked up the receiver and said, “Plaut Boardinghouse.”

“Peters,” said a man. “I’ve been trying to reach you.”

The voice was familiar but I couldn’t place it.

“You’ve reached me.”

“Two men are dead,” he said. “The money is gone. It’s not coming back. You want to live, tell Fields you’re through, and find another client.”

“Even if I quit, the FBI is after you.”

“That’s not your problem. Just take the warning.”

“I appreciate the warning,” I said.

Behind him I heard a voice shout in the distance, “Just tell the bastard I’ll rip his head off and throw it and his lawyer out the window if he doesn’t cooperate.”

“Take it to heart,” the caller answered and hung up.

I did the same, picked up my bag, and went to my room. It was neat, clean, the mattress on the bed with a colorful purple-flowered orange blanket with tucked-in military corners. The small sofa’s pillows were fluffed up and the “God Bless Our Happy Home” pillow rested in one corner. The Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall told me it was nearing noon. I put down my suitcase and went to my small table near the window, where a soup bowl sat covered by a dish. A spoon rested on a nearby napkin.

I took off the dish and looked down at Mrs. Plaut s Aunt Ellendorf s red-brown peanut-butter rice pudding. The window was open about four inches. There was a scratch on the sill and Dash scrambled through the opening and leapt onto the table.

I tool a spoonful of the pudding. It looked like … but I was hungry. It wasn’t bad. Dash sat and watched me.

“Want some?” I asked.

Dash looked at me blankly. He was independent, but I think we were friends. I didn’t own him. He didn’t own me. He just visited whenever he felt the urge, which was almost every day. Sometimes he slept with me on the mattress. Dash and I had met when he saved my life one day, jumping out of a closet onto the face of someone who had good reason for wanting to kill me.

I got a bowl from my small cupboard and scooped about half of what was left of the pudding into it. Then I put it on the floor. Dash jumped down, smelled it, and began to eat. He finished and looked up at me for more. I poured him what was left of the oversized portion Mrs. Plaut had given me.

I took off all my clothes but my underwear, found a white T-shirt and put it on, and then considered whether I had to go through the trouble of pulling the mattress on the floor or just taking a chance and getting into the bed. Experience told me that, no matter how tired I was, if I wanted a working back, the mattress had to come down. I was home. I could get a few hours’ sleep. Just one more chore. Pull the mattress down.

I managed, with Dash watching me from across the room where he was cleaning himself. I got onto the mattress and lay back. With the window open, there was enough cool air coming through to send me under the covers. I lay on my back, not wanting to think about Fields and the case, but … why had the killer called and threatened me? I was nothing compared to the FBI, unless he thought I knew something, which I didn’t think I did. I tried to place the voice, but I couldn’t. And that other familiar voice in the background, talking about tearing off my head and throwing my lawyer out the window. My lawyer, Marty Lieb, weighs close to three hundred pounds. It wouldn’t be a pleasant sight. And yet there was something about that second voice. I couldn’t shake the feeling that the voice was familiar. And now I was beginning to think that the voice of the caller was also familiar. Half asleep, the only thing I could make of it was that the killer had a partner and I was too tired to make sense. I closed my eyes. Dash came to the bed and nestled against my side. I think I patted his back. I don’t know. I was asleep.

I knew I was asleep because Koko the Clown was back, sitting on my chest. Somehow I knew I was a kid. From far away, a voice shouted, “Damn it.”

Koko held a finger up to his lips and winked. He reached over and closed my eyes. I knew he wanted me to pretend I was asleep, which I was. A door opened and through my closed eyes I could see. I could see a shadow figure, the same figure from my last remembered dream, in a doorway about a dozen feet away.

“You forgot to close it again,” the figure said. It was the man who had threatened to tear off my head. “I slammed it on my finger. My finger’s broken.”

He moved toward my bed.

Koko leapt into the air and began to fly around the head of the creature coming toward me. He was joined by Bimbo, Betty Boop, and Betty’s grandpa. The creature tried to swat at the animations but he couldn’t hit them. He was real. They were not. It was my dream. He backed off toward the door and said, “You’re not sleeping. You hear me? I’ll get you when you wake up. I’ll break your nose again.”

He backed out of the room, holding his throbbing thumb. Koko, full-size now, closed the door. Betty, Bimbo, and grandpa were gone.

“You get it?” Koko asked, turning to me.

“Get it?” I asked, sitting up, hearing my little-boy voice, looking at my little-boy arms.

“Look around,” said Koko, rushing across the room and slamming into the wall.

He fell, landed on his back, and jumped up.

I looked around the room. It was familiar. It ought to be. I had slept in it for almost eighteen years while I was growing up. When my brother, Phil, was in the army fighting the Huns, it had become mine alone, and when he came back, he had moved out into a one-room apartment of his own. He had taken Kaiser Wilhelm, his German shepherd, with him, and I had been stuck with a tank of goldfish, most of which died within weeks, which made me stop giving them names. The last goldfish was alive for five months before I named him Hoot Gibson. He died a few weeks later. He had, like my phone caller, been better off anonymous. But there, now, in a huge bowl, swam Hoot Gibson the goldfish, the size of a human. Koko jumped into the bowl and swam around with him for a second. Then Koko and Hoot looked at the closed door and said, together, in bubbly underwater voices, “Get it?”

Finally I did, but I didn’t wake up. I had two more dreams. In one, W. C. Fields stood in his living room, billiard cue in hand, whirling around to keep away a dark faceless figure walking toward him. Fields was waving the cue around so quickly that it whirred and was almost invisible. The figure moving toward him paused and pulled out a gun. I was on the balcony over Fields’s living room, looking down, no gun, nothing, helpless, watching. I tried to say something but no words came out, and then I was in the third dream. I was standing in front of another faceless man. This one was dressed in black and held a book in front of him. Behind him were a pile of small books, Fields’s remaining bankbooks. John Neuenfeldt, the accountant, was sitting on a pillow, going through the bankbooks, looking for something. Then I was aware that someone had taken each of my arms. I looked. On my right was Anne, my ex-wife. On my left was Anita Maloney, my high-school prom date, the woman I was now getting serious about. Anne and Anita. The names were alike. This was the first time I had noticed. I wanted to remember that when I woke up. The man in black coughed to get our attention and I knew I was about to get married to two women.

Neuenfeldt paused in his counting, turned on his pillow, and said, “Now do you get it?”

He was about to say more, but something woke me.

I sat up quickly, felt a twinge in my back from the sudden movement—I usually got up slowly, I had a ritual for getting up, to appease my unpredictable back—and looked up at Mrs. Plaut.

“Did you like the pudding?” she asked.

I nodded.

“You gave some of it to the cat,” she said.

“The cat?” I answered groggily.

“Bowl’s on the floor,” she said. “You taken to eating from bowls on the floor?”

“No,” I said. “The pudding was great.”

“Plenty more,” she said. “But not for cats.”

I looked around. Dash was gone. He usually disappeared when Mrs. Plaut came into the room. He seemed to sense her coming. I looked at the Beech-Nut clock on the wall. It was after four.

“Another phone call,” she said.

She left without another word, and I got up carefully and pulled on my pants. Then, barefoot and in my undershirt, I went out the door and to the phone.

“Peters,” I said.

“No use,” said Sheldon Minck, almost in tears. “Mildred said Violet goes or I can’t come home.”

“Then don’t go home,” I said.

“I love my wife,” he said.

Mildred Minck was a plain-faced, overly made-up woman of average height and less than average weight who had made Shelly’s life a near hell. She bossed, threatened, punished, and twice that I knew of—once with a Peter Lorre imitator who she was later accused of killing—had affairs. Besides that, Mildred Minck hated me.

“Violet’s not going,” I said.

“Toby,” he pleaded.

“Are you in the office?”

“Yes,” he said. “I can’t go home till I call and say Violet’s fired. She doesn’t buy the argument that Violet’s working for you. Mildred doesn’t care.”

“See if you can find Jeremy,” I said. “I’ll be there in about an hour and a half.”

There was a slight groan in the background.

“Got a patient under anesthetic,” he said. “Wisdom teeth look like rotten apples. I’ll find Jeremy.”

I hung up and stood still for a few seconds, grasping at my dreams.

“Get it?” Koko had asked.

I got it, but I couldn’t figure it out. The voice I had heard behind the killer who called me on the phone before I went to bed, the voice that threatened to tear off my head and throw it and my lawyer out the window, now had a face.

It was my brother, Phil Pevsner, the cop.

Thou shalt not use the name of the Lord in vain, unless you’ve exhausted all the four-letter words in your arsenal.

I had no trouble finding a place to park my Crosley on the street near the Wilshire Police Station. I had placed my .38 and the holster in the glove compartment and locked it. Even though I was within full view of the police station, I also locked my doors. The most logical place to find car thieves and other criminals is near police stations. Lack of evidence and a good lawyer will too often get a known offender out of lockup, onto the street for a good breath of air, and feeling ready for quick auto break-in and theft. A handy car on the street is ready-made transportation.

In my case, I was more concerned about the gun in the glove compartment. The Crosley was hardly prime material for window breaking and hot-wiring. There were plenty of better choices on the street, all a little farther away from the Wilshire Station.

A pair of hung-over sailors, one young, one not so young, came out of the station-house door and down the steps. Their uniforms were a mess and the young one had a closed black-and-red eye. They walked slowly down to the street.

Inside, the place was alive. People filled the benches, waiting to make their complaints to the single desk officer. There were mothers with little babies, a man with a beard babbling to another bearded man in a language I couldn’t begin to identify. There were a couple of Mexican kids in zoot suits talking in Spanish and waiting their turn. One needed a shave. The other looked too young to shave.

The cop at the desk, Constantine Keratides, better known as Connie the Greek, was a desk sergeant and had been for almost twenty-five years, which was fine with him. He was losing his hair, working on expanding his belly, perfect at dealing with whatever maniac appeared before him, and counting his days till retirement.

Someone ripped your son’s ear off and shot your husband in the knee? Have a seat and I’ll take care of it. Someone stole your ice-cream truck and gave away your entire stock to kids in the park? Have a seat.

I waved to Connie, who was patiently listening to the tale of a well-dressed couple who said they had been held up outside their hotel room. The couple were not happy. The couple were not young. The man was notifying Connie that he was a member of congress.

Connie was unimpressed. In his time, he had seen congressmen, movie stars, mayors, ministers, and world-renowned surgeons, all of whom had committed crimes or had crimes committed on them. Sometimes both. Connie nodded, took a few notes as I walked up the worn, wooden stairs that led to the squad room. I walked quietly down the hall past the door marked “John Cawelti, Captain.” John was a redheaded, pockmarked cop who was sure the world was out to get him. He was right. He was one unlikable human being. Cawelti had replaced my brother, Phil, who had held the job of running the station for a little over a year. Phil had hated it. He longed for the streets and the criminals, not the public relations of dealing with the chief of police’s office, local politicians, and the merchants’ association. Phil was now back in his small office, back to being a lieutenant. As bad as Phil had been, Cawelti was worse and was barely hanging on to his promotion. Most, including me, figured his promotion had been a favor from a higher-up in the department for covering up something big.