The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (6 page)

“It’s not Jim Beam,” he said.

“It’s not embalming fluid either,” I reminded him, and he nodded.

“I didn’t see this Alex. Came in behind when I was talking to Teddy. I sensed someone was there, could see it in our Teddy’s rusted eyes, but couldn’t turn in time. Felt the lead and thought it was over. Then Merit Beason went down and played dead.”

“At least they didn’t shoot you with my gun,” I said. “You want more water?”

“No,” he said. “I’m feeling a bit wary, the truth be told.”

“My gun,” I said after a pause for Merit to catch his breath.

“Gone,” he said.

“The body of Lewis Vance?” I tried.

“Gone. They took the body, planted it somewhere, maybe in the Alhambra, maybe in the lobby of the Brown Derby, maybe in the desert.”

“So,” I said with a sigh.

“Yes,” Merit agreed, closing his eyes. “Someone who killed a gent in the Alhambra and who bears an ill will toward John Wayne is out on the streets of this city with your thirty-eight. It gives us pause.”

“It gives us pause,” I agreed.

“Merit Beason thinks that Alex should be located, disarmed, and manacled before he makes headlines.”

“How are you doing? I said, getting ready to hit the streets.”

“Bullet went in, went out,” he said. “Not the first time and, possibly, not the last.” His hand went up unconsciously to his stiff neck, his body remembering the last bullet he had taken, the one that had given him his dignity and his nickname.

“The doctors say Merit Beason will be out in a week, working in two. Nurses say it will be a day or two. Let’s go with the nurses.”

“I do when the opportunity arises,” I joked.

Straight-Ahead did not smile and neither did the white-uniformed doctor who stepped into the room. “Can’t you read the sign on the door?” he said angrily.

I recognized him before he realized who I was, though I was sure Dr. Marcus Parry had changed a hell of a lot more than I had in the past year or two since I had last seen him. He looked shorter, thinner, paler. His blond hair was darker and his forehead higher. He was somewhere in his late twenties but he looked my age.

“Peters,” he said.

“Guilty,” I agreed.

“Get out,” he said.

“Good to see you again, too,” I answered with a grin.

Parry was not charmed.

“My fault, Doc,” whispered Straight-Ahead. “I called him, told him to come.”

“This is your closest relative?” Parry asked, shaking his head incredulously and plunging both hands in the pockets of his white hospital jacket.

“Got no relatives in California,” Merit said with what looked like a smile. “Beason clan remained in Nevada. Friends are few. We come into the world alone, leave it alone.”

“Those are his cheery words for the day,” I said.

Parry was still not amused.

“Last request from the recovering patient,” Straight-Ahead said as I walked to the door. “Call Jack Ellis. He’s between jobs. See if he can take over at the Alhambra for a night or two. Merit Beason would ask you but you have to hit the streets in search of our Alex and Teddy. The call would be made from here but the Axis seems to have snuck in this morning and removed the phone.”

“I’ll take care of it,” I said, and eased past Doc Parry and into the hall. Parry followed me, closing the door behind us. Before he had been drafted, Parry had done his residency in the Emergency Room of County Hospital, and I’d used him as my personal physician, a job he had taken reluctantly and out of curiosity, wondering how long my skull could survive the forces of evil using it for a Chinese gong.

“Glad you’re back,” I said, putting out my hand. Parry didn’t take it.

“That man is sixty years old,” he said, nodding at Straight-Ahead’s door.

“He’s as strong as a bull.”

“Bulls get slaughtered by the thousands every day,” he said. “He’s alive because he’s strong, but things go wrong. One minute a patient is recovering nicely, the next we’re fighting to save his life.”

“I’ll stay away,” I said. “How are you?”

He took one hand out of his pocket to push his few strands of mousy hair back.

“Shorter,” he said with a bitter smile.

“Shorter?”

He reached down awkwardly to pull up his right pant leg. His wooden leg was as black as Henry Armstrong’s. I couldn’t tell if it was ebony or mahogany or something else, and I didn’t feel like asking.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“And I’m now an internist,” he said.

“I thought you were a surgeon.”

“Surgeon’s have to stand up and do surgery, sometimes for hours,” he explained. “I can’t stand up for more than twenty minutes without pain. Ever hear of a surgeon who operated sitting down?”

“Why not,” I tried.

“Go to medical school for four years, then do an internship and a couple of years of residency and we’ll talk about it,” he answered.

“I got in a couple of years of college,” I said, “and lots of years in the field.”

“Different fields,” Parry said, nodding at the burly nurse who passed us. “You want me to hire you to go back to that island and find my leg? I don’t think it can be put back on but this war is a devil’s send for surgeons. We get to do so many things, try new ideas. The human guinea pigs are carted in by the dozens. I got to be one of them.”

“Well, I’d love to stay around here and have you cheer me up, but I’ve got work to do,” I said. “Did you know Herbert Marshall has a wooden leg? Sarah Bernhardt had one. That pitcher for the White Sox, Monty Stratton, had one.”

“Surgeons all,” he said.

“Hell, maybe you can pitch or act,” I said.

The smile was there. Not much of a smile, but a smile. I considered it a small triumph.

“Get out, Peters,” he said.

I saluted him with two fingers to my forehead, like Jimmy Cagney in
The Public Enemy
, and hurried down the hall in search of a telephone.

I didn’t find one till I had made my way back to the lobby. The Edna May Oliver receptionist spotted me coming from the bowels of the hospital and rose from her chair in indignation, ignoring the old man who was leaning forward to take the visitor’s card from her hand.

“It’s a boy,” I called, heading for the phones in the corner. The uniformed guard smiled and a young couple waiting on a bench near a window looked up beaming, the woman’s large stomach extending empathy.

I made three calls with my three nickels. One was to Shelly Minck, the dentist with whom I share space in the Farraday Building. Shelly had things to tell me. I didn’t have time to listen. I told him I’d be coming to the office later.

“Toby,” he insisted. “I’ve got a new idea for drumming up business.”

“And I’ve got a life to save, a gun to get back, and a body to find,” I said.

“Well, what the hell is more important?” Shelly asked.

“Business first,” I agreed. “The oral hygiene of an ignorant public that yearns for the talents of Dr. Sheldon Minck.”

“A half-page ad in the telephone directory and the
Times
,” he said. “Plates.”

“You’re going to sell plates, Shel?”

“Not plates you eat off of,” he said with exasperation. “Plates you eat with, in your mouth.”

“Right, Shelly. I’ve—”

“See yourself as others see you,” he said, probably reading a copy he had written on the wall. “Take the mirror test. Plates can look natural. Happy days are here again. Pay later. Don’t worry about money. Plates repaired while you wait. What do you think?”

“Sounds terrific, Shelly. Now I’m hanging up.”

“And my picture pointing at a mirror. I mean a picture of a mirror,” he said dreamily. “If I can only get Mildred to invest a little of her money in the ads, I’m sure it will pay back in a matter of weeks.”

The chances of Mildred Minck dipping into the money she had inherited from her Uncle Abel were about equal to those of MacArthur calling it a day and giving up on the Pacific.

“I’m hanging up, Shelly,” and I did.

A chunky balding man in a suit and carrying a briefcase bounced impatiently on his heels waiting for the phone.

“It’s a boy,” I said, dropping my second nickel into the phone. The businessman was not touched.

Information didn’t have a phone number for John Wayne. That didn’t surprise me but it had been worth a try. There were other ways of reaching him, but they would take a little time. I dropped my last nickel into the phone and didn’t turn to explain to the bouncing businessman behind me. I let my voice rise when I said, “Wilshire Station? I’d like to speak to Captain Pevsner.”

“Wait,” came the raspy man’s voice on the other end. I waited, imagining my gun being used in a series of murders, robberies, and assorted displays of public mayhem.

“Busy,” came the male voice in a few seconds.

“How about Lieutenant Seidman?” I asked.

“Vacation.”

“I’m coming in to see Captain Pevsner. Tell him his brother’s on the way.”

“Brother,” said the voice on the other end.

“Get it?” I tried.

“Got it,” he answered.

“Good,” I said, happy to have gotten more than a one-word answer. I hung up and made way for the businessman.

I turned on the car radio and found that Jinx Falkenburg wanted me to try Royal Crown Cola. I decided to try it once for Jinx, though I didn’t think I could be disloyal to Pepsi. I daydreamed my way onto Pico and took in the fact that the Pico Theater was showing Hitchcock’s
Suspicion.
If I could wrap this up quickly I would try to persuade Carmen, the cashier at Levy’s on Spring, to join me for a taco or two and a movie. I would have liked to call my ex-wife, Anne, recently widowed from husband two, and push her for a cup of coffee, some conversation, and a further crack in our thawing relationship, but she was not back from her trip East to visit her parents and get away from the messy demise of Ralph.

For some reason I started to sing “Mississippi Mud” like Bing Crosby and the Rhythm Boys, while tapping time on the steering wheel, and just managed to avoid a collision with a beer truck. At ten-fifteen “Vic and Sade” came on and I shut up while Sade recounted the tale of the mailman with different color eyes who was drawing the attention of the neighborhood spinsters.

It took the sight of the Wilshire Station to erase the sweet smile from my face, but though clientless, I felt that things were going my way in spite of the missing gun, missing body, and missing killer. Almost anything was better than wearing a uniform and guarding the Goleta gate house.

I parked a block away. There were spaces right in front of the station but I didn’t know how this session was going to go and I didn’t want people who were less than pals, including my brother the cop, taking things out on my helpless vehicle. A good portion of my meager income over the past decade had gone to replacing cars and paying for parking tickets that were all too often gifts of police wanting to teach me a much-needed lesson in civic responsibility.

The sky was clear and the wind gentle as I climbed the stone steps and entered the grayness of the reception area. The area was empty except for the overage police sergeant who sat at a desk behind the low railing.

“Veldu,” I said.

“Peters,” he responded. “Hell of a world.”

“Hell of a world,” I agreed, walking past him to the wooden stairway.

“He’s not in a good mood,” Veldu called after me.

“I wouldn’t have it any other way,” I said. His laugh echoed up the stairs and mixed with the stale smells coming down from above.

In an effort to conserve energy, the janitors in all the Los Angeles police stations had been told to replace bulbs as they died with ones with lower wattage. The result was an estimated saving of $18,000 a year in electric bills and the medical loss of about $24,000 from overage and overweight cops and robbers falling down unlighted stairs or plowing into the walls of darkened toilets.

My brother’s office was upstairs and down the hall to the right. He had graduated from the cubbyhole inside the squad-room he had had as a lieutenant to this private space across the hall.

I knocked. He didn’t answer. I knocked again.

“Who the hell is it?” he shouted.

“Toby,” I said.

“Shit,” he shouted.

I opened the door and stepped in. Phil gave me a gray look and swiveled in his chair, the phone in his hand pressed against his ear. I sat down in one of the two wooden chairs in front of his desk. The room looked like a monk’s cell. At least it looked like the monks’ cells I’d seen in a few movies. It was big and empty, with the exception of Phil’s desk, the chairs, and a cabinet in the corner. The windows had incongruous curtains made by Phil’s wife, Ruth. Instead of brightening the place, they reminded the visitor of how much in need of work the rest of the room was. The wooden floor was uncovered and worn from the weight of cops and robbers crossing it since the turn of the century. Phil fit the room perfectly. He was pushing 240 pounds, fifty-two years, and a bad temper he had trouble keeping in check. His steel gray hair was cut short and bristly. Phil ran his hand over it absently, when he wasn’t adjusting his tie or rearranging his desk, while he talked or worked. His hands longed for the old days on the street when he had been able to reach out and put his pulpy fingers around the neck of some grafter, grifter, or grabber and teach him the error of his ways. Promotion and respectability were ruining Phil, and the increase in salary wasn’t compensating. The conversation he was having on the phone seemed a case in point.

“That’s the shore patrol’s job,” he said, pulling at his collar. “I didn’t tell them to put those thirty-two taverns and bars off limits … I know. I know, but before, it took us five officers to patrol Fifth and Main Street. If we enforce this, it will take fifteen officers. I don’t have fifteen officers to change diapers for swabs and GIs.”

Whoever was on the other end of the call took over, and Phil had to sit and listen, nodding his head and looking at me with distaste. I shrugged and examined the decor, the dirty walls, the backs of the photographs of Ruth and his three kids on his desk.

“I know there’s a war on,” Phil got in. But whoever the other person was, he took over again and I could see that Phil was losing. Phil hid his impending defeat well, but, as his brother, I could tell the truth from subtle hints like the gritting of his teeth and the hurling of a pencil across the room. I watched the pencil fly like an anemic miniature javelin, mark the wall with a small graphite check, and clatter to the floor.