Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) (2 page)

“Why don’t we just hold it right there?” the voice behind me called. He was about a pool-cue length away from me, holding a gun level at my stomach. There wasn’t much hair on his head, a few wisps. The night breeze caught them and made them dance crazily, but there was nothing crazy in his eyes. He wasn’t young, maybe fifty-five, but he had been around. Even the neat, well-pressed blue suit couldn’t let him pass for executive material. The face was dark, hard like a tree. It wasn’t his face or the gun that clinched things. No, it was the way he looked down at the shredded corpse, let out a little “tsk” of regret and turned his attention to me.

“You know what you cost me, cheap shot?” he said shaking his head.

“I’ve got a feeling I’m going to find out.”

He came another step toward me still shaking his head, his few hairs still flying wildly.

“You took a meal ticket right out of my pocket,” he said, patting his pocket as if I had literally taken a piece of cardboard from him. “You know what I was picking up per week for keeping him in one piece?”

He was about four feet from me now. He was either going to take a chance on getting close enough to hit me and give himself some satisfaction, or he was going to play it smart and stay far enough away so I couldn’t do anything dumb like go for his gun. He decided to be smart and stopped.

“How much were you picking up?” I asked, not sure myself if I wanted him to keep coming or back off.

“One hundred a week,” he said.

“Dollars?” I asked.

“What the hell else?” he said angrily.

“Dog biscuits,” I tried.

“You’re a goddamn comic, aren’t you?” he said, holding the gun out. “You turn a guy into chopped liver and you make jokes? I’m no youngster here, you know?”

“I can see that,” I said.

“No youngster,” he repeated, shaking his head sadly. “You think a lot of good things come along like this?”

“No,” I said, this time speaking from experience.

“No is right. Now what the hell do I do for chrissake? Do I shoot you? I never shot anybody. I’m just a guy doing a job. I’m supposed to keep him alive and now look at him. He’s not alive.”

I looked at the body, but I knew full well he was dead.

“Why don’t we just go up to the house and call the cops?” I suggested. “First we tell Mrs. Howard and then we call the cops.”

Most of the remaining light now was from the open door of the house. The shadows of the man and me and the corpse were long. The ocean cleared its throat behind us.

“Who was that running away?” he said. “And how do you know Mrs. Howard?”

“I didn’t see anybody running, and I used to be married to her. My name’s Toby Peters. What’s yours?”

“Carl Paitch, but my giving you my name doesn’t make us buddies. I still figure you for doing Howard over there.”

“So?” I prodded.

“So,” he said with a shrug and finally patted down his flying hair. “Who really gives a shit. You know what I mean? Let’s go up to the house.”

He started to lead the way, thought better of it, and waved me forward with his gun. His hair was dancing again by the time I passed him and started up the sandy hillside. It had been easier going down than it was climbing up. My shoes were full of sand when I got to the open door and stepped in. I reached down to take off my shoes and Paitch almost bumped into me. I could have taken the gun from him then, but what would have been the point?

“Things like this happen to me all the goddamn time,” he said, plopping into a chair in the little hallway. It was one of those old-looking chairs with fuzzy dark red on the seat and old dark wood all over. His gun was now pointing at the small Persian carpet.

“I’d say it was Ralph Howard it happened to this time,” I said, dumping sand out the door onto the small wooden porch.

“That’s not what I meant,” he explained, not looking at me. “I just can’t hold onto a job. The big ones always get away. You know what I’m saying?”

“The big ones always get away,” I said, putting my shoes back on.

“That’s what I’m saying,” he repeated.

“How about calling the cops and getting Mrs. Howard?” I said.

Paitch’s wild few strands of hair were draped over his eyes. Ralph Howard had picked one hell of a soft banana to keep him alive.

“The police?” came a voice from above. I looked up at Anne coming down the stairway. I hadn’t seen her for a few months. She had dropped a few pounds. Her black hair was swept back and she was wearing white, all white like Lana Turner in
The Postman Always Rings Twice
. She looked better than she ever had when she’d been married to me, but there were good reasons. She might not be looking quite so good in a few seconds.

“Anne,” I said, taking a step toward her. She saw something in my eyes and stopped three steps above me so she could keep from contact, keep from knowing.

“What happened … Ralph?”

Her eyes were brown and wet as always, and I knew if I wandered through the house it would be brown and white and clean, everything in place, a world made neat as Anne always wanted, a world far different from the one she had shared with me. I was enough chaos for one lifetime. Ralph had been money and order and reliability, and here I was again to leave coffee grounds on the rug.

“Dead,” called Paitch, trying to rally his minimal resources. “Out on the beach. Someone beat the crap out of him, Mrs. Howard. I didn’t even know he—”

“How about calling the cops, Carl,” I said without looking at him.

Anne’s face was calm and still and white. She let her tongue touch her lower lip, one of the few signs of emotion she was willing to show or couldn’t control.

“Toby, I …”

“This guy was standing over him, Mrs. Howard,” Paitch said, waving his gun in my general direction. “And another guy was running away.”

“Make the call, Carl,” I repeated.

“You know there was nothing I could do about it,” he rambled on. “I got to take time to eat too, don’t I? A man’s got to eat, doesn’t he?”

“No he doesn’t, Carl,” I said. “The telephone.”

“Call the police, Mr. Paitch,” Anne said firmly, her eyes still on me.

“I’m calling the cops,” Paitch said decisively as if he had just thought of it. “Right now.” And he turned and went through the door of a darkened room behind him. Anne and I didn’t say anything for a second or two, just listened to Paitch bungle into odd pieces of furniture, find the light, and finally pick up the phone.

“I’m not going to break, Toby,” she said softly, putting her head forward. She had clasped her hands tightly together, and the effort to keep it in sent a shiver through her.

“I know, Anne,” I said.

Paitch’s voice wasn’t booming but it was loud and clear from inside the room.

“Ralph Howard. Right. Yes. I’m sure. You don’t have a face like, that if you’re alive I’m telling you.”

Anne’s eyes blinked, and I hurried over to close the door where Paitch was making the call. We could still hear his voice, but not the words. Anne had taken the last two steps down and I moved to her, held out my hand, but she unclasped hers and held up a palm to keep me away. I knew what she was saying. A touch from me, maybe from anyone, would break her and she didn’t want to break, at least not yet, maybe not at all.

“Let’s go in here,” she said, turning to a room off the hallway. I followed her and stood in the doorway as she turned on the lights. The room was brown and white, and clean. No children or oafs treaded here, just civilized people, but it wasn’t a civilized person who had done the job on the corpse on the beach.

“Would you like something to drink?” she said, looking around, unable to remember for the moment where the drinks were. If she weren’t about to crack, she would remember that the beer I drink isn’t found in a liquor cabinet. “A Pepsi?” she asked, striding toward a cabinet, brown and very old, in a corner. The floor was finely polished dark wood with a white and brown checkered rug, a big plush checkerboard in the center.

“No, thanks,” I said.

“Right,” she went on, still walking. “I’ll have something.”

“You want me to get it for you?”

“No,” she said. “I want something to do.

“How about crying?” I asked softly.

“Maybe later,” she said. “Definitely later. But we’ve got business now before the police come.”

I shut up, was careful not to step on the rug, and stood patiently while she slowly made herself a drink, took a sip, shuddered, and turned back toward me across the long room. The light from two lamps was dim, and her face was hidden in darkness, but her voice had a sob in it and I was sure her eyes were more than usually moist.

“I’m not much of a drinker,” she said, tossing her dark hair back and looking into the amber liquid in her glass as if it held some secret.

“I know,” I answered. “Anne …”

“I know,” she said with a sigh, looking up at me. “About a week ago someone tried to kill Ralph. I saw it, Toby, I was there. We were crossing Melrose on a Saturday. We had just come out of Marko’s after dinner. A car came right at us, no other traffic, nothing. Right at us. Ralph pushed me back and the car missed him by inches. Ralph was shaken, but he said something about a drunk driver. I saw the driver’s face. He wasn’t drunk.”

“What did he look like?” I asked.

Anne swirled her drink and continued to avoid my eyes. “A man. I don’t know. He looked tough, dark. I don’t remember, Toby, and before you ask, I don’t think I would recognize him again. The next day, Ralph hired Paitch.”

Ralph could have done a hell of a lot better than Paitch, I thought, but there was no point in saying it now.

“And everything was fine till today, which is why you called me?” I said, wanting to sit on the harder arm of one of the chairs. The cushion I was on was too soft, and my bad back gave me a very small warning. I shifted my weight.

“No,” she said, dragging out the word. “There were signs all the time since that car tried to hit him. He was nervous, his mind, memory couldn’t stay in the room. And he began to have some problems at work.”

Ralph worked for Trans World Airlines, a vice president or something like it. He had been with the company since it started and was greatly respected by Howard Hughes, though I had only Anne’s word for that. She too had worked for TWA, where she had met Ralph. I had met husband number two a few times.

“What kind of problems?” I prompted, realizing that Anne had paused, her own thoughts wandering. But she came back strong.

“Nothing terrible,” she said. “Just a drop in his attention. A contract he was handling for replacement parts was delayed and resulted in a cost rise. Costs are rocketing since the war. He spent more and more time on his new hobby.”

“Which was?” I asked, forcing myself not to look at my watch, which wasn’t very difficult. The watch had belonged to my father. It was accidentally right about twice during a normal day. I wanted to prompt her again, get something more before the police arrived or Paitch decided to walk in, but I played the role of patient listener.

“Boxing,” she sighed, looking up at me defiantly, expecting some wise-ass comment.

“Ralph was boxing?” I said.

“Ralph had bought contracts or parts of contracts of some professional boxers. I think he had quite a bit of money invested.”

I couldn’t sit a second longer or my back would have locked. I pushed myself up and kept my voice low, stepping toward her.

“That doesn’t sound like Ralph,” I said. “Not that I knew Ralph very well mind you, but it doesn’t—”

“It wasn’t” she agreed, finishing off her drink in two quick gulps. Then she laughed, a small laugh. “I haven’t drunk in years, Toby. Do you know why? Because drinking makes you fat.”

I thought about all the skinny drunks my landlord was always hauling out of the dark corners of the Farraday Building on Hoover, where I had my office. Maybe alcohol made women fat and men skinny? I didn’t share the insight with Anne.

“I don’t have to worry about that any more though, do I?”

I didn’t answer and she went on.

“I own this house,” she said, looking at the ceiling where a cone of light from the lamp made a path to the far corner. “Ralph had a big insurance policy and a bank account. I don’t have to worry about how I look any more.”

“Annie,” I said, wanting to reach out and touch her. “You’re not going to change. I couldn’t change you. You couldn’t change me.”

“We will see, Tobias,” she said, biting her lower lip. “We will see.”

The idea of Ralph getting mixed up with boxing reminded me of Joe Louis. Had Louis been there to see Ralph? Maybe it wasn’t just an unlucky break for the Brown Bomber. Maybe I had put my foot through a rotten egg.

“Do you know why he got interested in boxing?” she said, sounding slightly drunk. There was no way the alcohol could have worked that quickly. She wanted it to happen, needed it, and had helped it along.

I shook my head.

“Because of you. He never said so, but it didn’t take much to figure it out. You’re tough, had more fights than I want to think about, and he knew you were interested in boxing.”