He Done Her Wrong: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Eight) (Toby Peters Mysteries) (17 page)

A search of the room turned up enough change to make the phone calls I needed to make. The first was to Dr. Winning. He answered on the second ring.

“Mr. Peters,” he said evenly. “You have found Mr. Ressner?”

“Not quite,” I said. “I’m following his trail, though. He produced another corpse yesterday. Richard Talbott the actor.”

There was a silence on Winning’s end. Obviously, he didn’t read the L.A. papers, though I would have pegged Talbott’s death for national news. I waited.

“This is terrible,” he finally said, which was accurate but not very imaginative. “What are you going to do?”

“Find him,” I said. “I’m going to call the ex-Mrs. Ressner, the widow Grayson, and her daughter to see what I can dig up. Then I thought I’d come up and see you, maybe check Ressner’s room, talk to some of the staff or patients who knew him.”

More silence and then, “I’m not sure that would be wise. Many of the patients do not know Mr. Ressner is gone. The balance in a mental hospital such as ours is very delicate, very delicate.”

“I’ll be my most charming, doctor. I just don’t have enough to go on to find Ressner and I have less than two days before the cops come down on my already sore back. Not to mention that he might go for Mae West or De Mille next.”

“All right,” Winning gave in. “I’ll prepare the staff for your arrival. When might you be coming?”

“I’ll leave this afternoon. Should get there by tonight unless I get groggy and have to stop someplace on the way. Ressner did a tune on my head. One more thing, doc. I’ll need another cash payment.”

“I’ll have what you need when you arrive,” he said.

He gave me directions on how to get to the Winning Institute. His voice had gone drier and drier and seemed about to crack when we hung up. We both had trouble, and its name was Ressner.

I pulled out some more change and dialed the Grayson number in Plaza Del Lago. It rang and rang and rang and I waited till the baritone cowboy answered, “Grayson residence.”

“Dis be Thor landscape, you know,” I said as deeply as I could. “I must talk Mrs. Grayson. Joshua tree needs vork now, today or it die like dis, bang, bang, puff.”

“I’m afraid she can’t talk, Mr. Thor—”

“Mr. Gundersen,” I corrected.

“Mr. Gundersen,” he sighed with obvious exasperation reserved only for those who spoke with an accent, as if they couldn’t detect sarcasm. “Mr. Grayson died just a few days ago and—”

“And the Joshua vill die, too,” I said insistently.

In the background I could hear stirring and voices, and then a woman came on, voice high and nervous like Billie Burke.

“Yes, who is this?”

“Thor,” I said. “Your husband Grayson vant me take care from your Joshua. Is all right I do it?”

“Yes, yes, of course, do whatever you must do, whatever Harold wanted,” she bleated.

“Good, friend here vants to speak to you.” I moved the phone from my ear, cleared my throat, and went to my best Toby Peters. “Mrs. Grayson, I’m an investigator for the Winning Institute. We’re trying to find your former husband.”

“I am very confused,” she said with a very confused sob. “What are you doing with Mr. Thor, and I thought Harold was killed by some little detective.”

Some little detective. O.K.

“Have you seen Jeffrey Ressner in the last week?” I demanded.

“Why yes. I told the policeman, the state policeman.” Her voice quivered. “I told Jeffrey that he had to go back, but I was never very good at telling Jeffrey or Delores or anyone what they should do.”

“What did Ressner want from you?”

“Money, and a call to the institute to tell them not to look for him. He was most insistent.”

“Did he tell you where he was going, where he would be, where he was staying?”

“No, no.”

“Do you have any idea of where he might be?”

The pause was enough to make me plunge on.

“For his sake, Mrs. Grayson. For your daughter and many innocent people. You must tell me.” I was into my Dr. Christian act.

“There is a hotel in Hollywood, just off Vine. We stayed there when Delores was born and Jeffrey wanted to be an actor. He liked it there, the Los Olvidados. Something he said. I don’t remember quite what made me think …”

“I know the place,” I said. “Keep the cowboy nearby and tell Delores Toby will call her.”

“Toby?” she repeated. “What about Mr. Gunderson and the Joshua?”

“He’ll be out as soon as he can.”

I hung up, turned around, and almost bumped into Mrs. Plaut, who was standing with a broom in her hand staring at me.

“Childish,” she said.

I agreed but said nothing as I eased past her and headed down the stairs. I had a lead and might not have to head for Fresno after all.

It was a Tuesday morning. Kids were in school and the street was clear. I got in the Ford and it started with no trouble. The radio still didn’t work, and I fought down the knowledge that I was doomed to endless worry about whether the car would have gas in it. I put my .38 in the glove compartment and vowed to keep a little notebook on when I filled up with gas. I knew I wouldn’t do it.

There was no problem finding the Los Olvidados apartment hotel. It was a paint-peeling dump on Selma with a sagging palm out in front that looked as if it had a hangover.

The lobby was dark with a fluorescent light sputtering and crackling in the corner. The desk in the lobby was just big enough for one human to get behind, and one was there, a woman reading
Collier’s
magazine and puffing on a cigarette. She was thin as a rolled-up weekday paper, and her hair was brown wire tied up in a bun.

“Can I do you for?” she said, lifting her eyes but not her head.

“Guy named Ressner registered?”

She gave me a little more attention.

“You a friend?”

“I’m more than a friend,” I said and pulled out my wallet to flash the Dick Tracy badge I’d bought from my nephew Dave. She caught the glint but didn’t ask to see it.

“Got no Ressner registered,” she said. “What’s he look like?”

“Don’t know,” I said. “He would have come here within the last week or so. Can you go through the names? Maybe something will ring a bell.”

She lifted her bony elbow from the desk, rolled up the sleeve of her brown sweater, and put her cigarette in a tin tray. Then she pulled the gray register with a red ribbon in it and started on the names.

“Griffith, Warren, LaSconda, Benetiz, Skrinski, Grayson, Beel—”

“Grayson,” I stopped her. “First name?”

“Talbott,” she said. “Talbott Grayson. Hell of a name, but we get a lot of guys want to be actors and make up all kinds of crazy-ass names. Know what I mean?”

I knew this time. He had taken the names of the two men he planned to kill.

“Is he in now?” I said, putting on the friendly grin meant to calm people, but which usually had the opposite effect.

“Don’t know,” she said. “Don’t even remember what he looks like. So many come through. He’s in three D. You going up?”

“I’m going up,” I said. “You want to give me a passkey?”

“I don’t know,” she said, cautiously hiking up her sweater to reveal knobby elbows.

“Suit yourself,” I shrugged. “I can kick the door down. Or you can come with me. It might get a little pushy, so if you come, just stand back.”

“I’ll stay here. Got to watch the desk,” she decided, handing me the key. “Bring it right back, and if you got to take him out, take him real quiet.”

“Real quiet,” I said.

I found the stairway, a dark, narrow gangway, and hurried up. My head was beating and I reached up to touch my bandage, fearing that it was coming off. I owed Ressner something.

Three D was at the end of a hall that smelled stale and a little wet.

I knocked, prepared to imitate the woman at the desk, the mailman, or General Wainwright. It would come to me when Ressner answered. I gripped the .38 in my pocket and knocked again. No answer. The key fit perfectly and turned easily.

“Mr. Talbott?” I squeaked, trying to do Butterfly McQueen in
Gone with the Wind
. No answer. I pulled the gun out, ready to give Ressner an airing, but it was clear that he wasn’t there. There really wasn’t anyplace to hide. There was one small room and a clearly visible little bathroom. It was typical prewar furnished with a bed in the corner that could look a little like a couch if the thick flower spread was put on just right, which it wasn’t, a chair with a wild spring ready to goose the guest, a small table, a battered dresser, and a painting on the wall of an Oriental woman dancing with a fan in front of her nose.

The place looked empty. Drawers were open, tin wastebasket on its side. I moved to the little table, where I could see a piece of paper with some writing on it. My guess, as I took the few steps to the table, was that I’d wind up warning the woman at the desk and then come back up here to wait out the day and night in the hope that Ressner would show again, though it didn’t look likely. Then I read the note:

TOO LATE, PETERS. TRY AGAIN. I’M JUST A LITTLE AHEAD OF YOU.

I put my gun in my pocket, folded the note, put it in another pocket, and went through the wastebasket. Nothing there.

I left the room and went back down the stairs.

“Not there?” hoarse-whispered the wiry woman, pointing up with her cigarette.

“No,” I said, throwing her the key and hurrying across the lobby.

“What do I do if he comes back?” she continued to whisper.

“He’s not coming back,” I said.

I breathed deeply when I got outside, looked up at the spring sun, and felt great. I was on my way beyond Fresno.

CHAPTER 10

I stopped to get gas at a Sinclair station before I left L.A. and got a dirty look from an attendant with a Deep South accent when the Ford only took two gallons.

There was nothing much to take my mind off the pain in my scalp except the light morning traffic and my right-handed playing with the radio. Once I’d cleared town and hit 43, static hummed instead of spitting, and once, I actually got the faint murmur of a station.

A hellfire and dammit-all preacher warned me and the rest of the coast that we’d better mend our ways fast if we were going to have the moral stamina to fight off the Japanese. He pronounced stamina in three distinct syllables: sta—min—nuh. He was all I could get, so I let him keep me company, quoting from the Bible all the way to Corcoran.

I had a chicken sandwich and some war talk at the Elite Roadside Diner. The war talk was depressing, the chicken sandwich decent when washed down with the Elite’s homemade orange drink.

The overtoothed guy who gave me the orange drink asked about my head, and I told him I’d got drunk and tried to ram down a door. This seemed reasonable to him.

Back on the road, the Bible belter deserted me. His voice had begun to give out, and he turned the microphone over to a woman who began to confess her sins to accompanying organ music. Her list was amazingly long and lacking in detail. After twenty miles, somewhere near Selma, the station began to fade, and my head began to crackle with static, which worried me, since I had turned off the radio. The sun was still up, bouncing out towards the ocean beyond the hills. I decided to stop for the night and tackle Winning in the morning. The problem was that I couldn’t find an auto court for another ten miles, and the one I did spot was a series of gray wooden outhouses with a sign saying
FREE RADIO.
I pulled into the sandy driveway of Rose’s Rodeo Auto Hotel, got out, stretched my legs, and went in to see if there were any vacancies. I expected to have my choice.