Buried Caesars (7 page)

“What’ll it be, sports?” the waiter asked as we sat.

“Anarchy,” said Hammett, putting the cat on the table.

“I don’t recommend it,” said the waiter. “How about the salad, fried squid, a couple glasses of wine and some baklava instead?”

Hammett shrugged and nodded. “And the same for the cat.”

The waiter nodded and gulped down some of his baseball. He looked me over, decided he didn’t need my opinion, and wandered slowly toward the short-order window, behind which stood a dark, thin, sweating man in an undershirt and white chef’s toque.

“Well?” Hammett said when the waiter was gone.

“I go to Angel Springs,” I said.

“I know somebody there,” Hammett said, absently petting the cat, which closed its eyes in delight. “Might be able to open a door or two.”

“Okay,
we
go to Angel Springs,” I amended as the waiter brought a basket of bread and glasses of red wine. Hammett poured his wine into his butter saucer and let the cat drink it. I didn’t see how die wine could hurt the cat, or Hammett for that matter. It had been watered to the point where you could brush your teeth with it.

The fried squid was good and the wine deceptive. I was feeling a little sleepy when the small cups of black tar came and woke me up.

“You want to drive?” I asked, after I had paid the check and we headed for the door, cat purring under Hammett’s arm.

“I don’t drive,” he said, waving at the waiter, who let his eyes droop to let us know what a pleasure it had been to serve us. “Had an accident when I was driving a bus during the war in ’18. Some people got hurt. I haven’t been behind a wheel since.”

“Suit yourself,” I said, and he did.

I drove him back to his room in the Kingston Hotel on Beverly. He explained that he usually stayed at the Beverly Hills Hotel, where he had run up some bills that made the maids blush, but the Kingston was a better place to keep a low profile. I promised to be back for him in and hour or so. I had a few places to go before I went to Mrs. Plain’s and packed a change of underwear. Hammett took the cat.

I lied about the underwear. I had nothing to pack but I did want to see Ann. I figured I could just make it to her new apartment in Culver City and back in an hour. I was right, but there were a few things I hadn’t counted on. One of them was my brother, Phil.

A
nn’s apartment was one of eight facing a courtyard with a little fish pond in the middle. I took a quick look at the fish. They were gold and black, big-eyed and gulping. The pond looked like it could use a cleaning. The red brick courtyard itself was filled with small, thick-stemmed plants with big leaves. It was like thousands of other little places in California cities, trying to look tropical instead of small and cluttered.

Ann had come down fast. This wasn’t even as nice as the apartment complex she had lived in before she married Ralph and moved to Santa Monica.

Number seven was tucked into a corner. I knocked at the door, heart pounding, half hoping she wouldn’t be home. But she was.

“Toby,” she said, opening the door with a smile. Then she realized what she had done, took back the smile and went politely sober.

She looked like Ann: dark, full-bodied, a light green dress. Her hair was naturally curly and black and barely touched her shoulders. Her body was ample, and her lips pink without makeup.

“Ann,” I said. “Just stopped by to see if you needed …”

“What I need I’ll get on my own, thanks,” she said.

I didn’t go away and she was too polite to close the door on me, though there were times in the past when she had managed to overcome such civility.

“You want to come in,” she said, her hand still on the door, her fingernails red, catching the afternoon sun. Ann had class.

“For a minute,” I said. “I’m on my way out of town, Angel Springs, on a case.”

She stepped back and let me enter. The place was small. I could see beyond the living room to a small bedroom and a kitchen–dining room on the left. Her house in Santa Monica on the beach had five bedrooms, a servant’s quarters and a bathroom that would have held this entire apartment with room left over for a volleyball court.

I recognized some of the English-style furniture from her old house.

“Can I sit?” I asked.

“I don’t think so,” she said with a wary and weary smile, looking at the gold watch on her left wrist. “I don’t think you have it in you. But you may. I’ll have to leave in about ten minutes. I’ve got a job interview with Republic Airlines at four.”

“You look voluptuous,” I said, sitting on a bowlegged chair.

“I’m sagging, Toby,” she said, sitting across from me on another bowlegged chair. She didn’t offer me anything to drink.

“Never,” I said.

“I’m almost forty-five,” she said, playing with the bracelet on her wrist. “My husband died leaving me nothing and I have to go back to work. I’m a tired woman, Toby. Why don’t you just stop doing this and go chase someone who doesn’t know your underwear size and the way you snore when you don’t sleep on your left side?”

“How much did you clear for the house?” I asked, ignoring her question.

Ann crossed her legs and looked down at her nails.

“Enough to put away a little. We owed a lot on it.”

“You don’t look tired. You look like a twenty-two-year-old right out of college and ready to enjoy her first apartment and new job,” I said. “You just think you should feel tired and depressed.”

Ann shrugged, got up and straightened her dress.

“I need this job, Toby,” she said. “This dress, from J. J. Haggarty’s, complete with peplum, drapes and pleats, cost me $49.95. The shoes, Peacock’s, also from Haggarty, suede pumps, cost $12.95. I need the job to pay for the clothes and I need the clothes to get the job.”

She adjusted a little green hat, the price of which she hadn’t quoted, checked herself in a mirror near the door and sighed.

“Ralph wasn’t worth faking it for, Annie,” I said, standing.

“You didn’t know him,” she said.

“Well enough,” I answered. “You want to spend an hour in bed? No, forget I asked that. I couldn’t help it. It came over me. You look so …”

“Voluptuous,” she completed with a grin and a shake of the head. “Toby, the gravy’s in the navy. There are eight women to every man and most of the men still around aren’t carrying their weight. Even at your age you don’t have to chase an ex-wife who knows what your socks will smell like if you take off your shoes.”

“You always had a way with words, Ann,” I said. “I don’t want war widows and riveters.”

“I’ve got to go, Toby,” she said, looking at her watch again. “Next time, wait for a formal invitation. It’s not that I’m ungrateful for what you did when Ralph died, but …”

“One question and I’m gone,” I said as she picked up her purse from a chair near the door.

“Ask it and go,” she said.

“You need a ride?”

“No,” shesaid. “I still have Ralph’s car. Now …”

“That wasn’t the real question I want to ask,” I jumped in as she opened the door. “Honest answer. Wouldn’t you like to feel our bodies together again?”

“Honest answer?” she asked, looking at me with shiny brown eyes as big as the dials on an upright Philco radio. “Yes, I would. There were things you were very good at, Tobias. Very good. And it felt good; feels good, to know you want me, but I’m not going to start getting used to you dropping in when you want to, getting to depend on you again, getting disappointed again, shopping for your cereal, listening to your bizarre excuses. You are the oldest twelve-year-old in California. If I wanted children, I would have had them with you.”

“I guess that means …” I began.

“I’ll think about it, but not very hard,” she said, opening the door for me to leave. I could smell her perfume as we moved to the door and out. I didn’t smile, just stepped past her into the courtyard as she locked the door behind us.

“Nice fish,” I said, looking at the pond.

“Building manager says there were more,” she said, looking at me. “But one of the tenants threw in a small fish he caught at Lake Arrowhead. It ate its way through the smaller fish and had downed two big ones when the manager pulled him out.”

“Moral?” I asked.

“Don’t throw odd fish in with the domestic ones,” she said. She turned and walked down the red brick path, past a green elephant-eared plant and into the late afternoon. I didn’t follow, didn’t say anything. I made the mistake of going back to the pond to look at the fish.

They swam in odd patterns, looking for something to eat or be eaten by. Black and gold splashes of paint with tails that …

“Fish belong in soup,” came a familiar voice behind me.

I played it right. I didn’t turn, just kept looking at a big gold one with bulging eyes and a mouth that opened and closed over slightly brackish water.

“Fish are fascinating,” I said.

“Why?” asked Lieutenant Steve Seidman of the Los Angeles Police Department.

“You need a soul to understand, Lieutenant,” I said, turning to him with a sigh.

“That explains it,” he said flatly. There was no expression on his pale skeleton face. For years there had been rumors that Seidman had a rare disease and would soon be gone, but other cops faded and died around him and Seidman went on, a pale shadow beside his boss, my brother, Captain Phil Pevsner of the Wilshire District.

“What we have here is one hell of a coincidence,” I said. “Or …”

“Phil-wants to see you,” he said, looking at the fish but seeing nothing that interested him.

“Should I ask?”

“I would,” he said.

“Right. Why does he want to see me?”

“Fellow named Hower got himself killed down in Pacific Palisades. Found the body about an hour ago,” Seidman explained. “We got a call about thé same time suggesting that you might know something, about it.”

“And my brother had you …”

“And four other detectives,” he interjected.

“… come out looking for me. You got lucky.”

“No,” said Seidman. “Phil called people you know and found out that Ann got back to town today. He figured you’d come here looking for her. Said you couldn’t stay away from her.”

“Betrayed by love,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” he said. “I’ve been a cop all my life. Let’s go.”

And we went. Seidman trusted me enough to let me drive my Crosley ahead of him. We got to the Wilshire Station in fifteen minutes, bucking the traffic. The Wilshire had been the hotbed of police activity back in 1923 when my brother Phil joined the force. Phil had come in during Prohibition when the department was at its most corrupt. He became a cop the same month the city fathers appointed August Vollmer, the father of police science, to a one-year term to clean up the L.A.P.D. Vollmer, a clean-living police chief from Berkeley, got nowhere, and when his term was about to expire in September of 1924, billboards began to appear all over the city, saying: “
THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER WILL BE THE LAST OF AUGUST
.” And it was. I remember seeing the signs and asking Phil what they meant. I remember he rapped me in the head and told me to shut up.

I parked in a space on the street and met Seidman in the lobby. The desk sergeant was a young balding guy named Rashkow who’d had his brains shaken and his left leg peppered with shrapnel defending some small island in the Pacific a year before. He was back now and doing desk duty.

I waved at him and he waved back. Rashkow was busy with an angry little woman in a cloth coat and an enormous fat man with a baby face. The fat man was rocking from one foot to the other like a kid who had wet his diaper.

“Lindsey,” Rashkow was saying, “you were told that you couldn’t sit on Mrs. Wiskler’s dogs, now weren’t you?”

Seidman let me lead the way up the narrow dark stairway and around to the left, past the squad room, to my brother’s office. I knocked and went in when Phil grunted. Seidman stayed outside.

“I’m in a good mood, Toby,” Phil said, looking up at me from his desk. He was clearly packing. There were two cardboard boxes on his desk, botrffilled. The drawers of his desk were open. His tie was open wide and he looked at me and ran his thick right hand through his short steely gray hair. Phil pulled his gut in and stood up with a deep sigh.

“That’s good, Phil,” I said. “You’re moving?”

“Back to the old office,” he said, face pink. “No more administration. I’ll have a case load, regular squad. No more being nice to old ladies and storekeepers.”

“Back to head bashing,” I said. “Couldn’t happen to a nicer guy.”

“I told you,” Phil said, pointing a finger at me. “I am in a good mood. Don’t provoke me. And before you can ask, Ruth is fine. Nate and Dave and Lucy are fine. Now, what’s going on with this crap in Pacific Palisades. Why’d they call me?”

“I …”

“I think we’ve got a pair of gatekeepers who can identify you,” he cut in. “So don’t give me any of your cockeyed stories.”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said. “I just found the body.”

“I know that,” Phil said, emptying a drawer into one of the boxes. Paper clips, broken pencils and pieces of paper fluttered. Some of it got into the box. “Medical examiner just called. Hower was killed last night. You didn’t get there till this morning. What the hell were you doing there? Who was the guy you were with? Why is someone calling me and trying to nail you with murder one?”