Drops of the liquid spotted the tile floor and left a trail to the corner of the room where an emergency exit door stood. It was slightly open. I pushed it and started to step out. The sky was going black again. I had time to notice that and some vague shapes in front of me when something caught me in the stomach. Some agonized animal bellowed “Arggghh,” and I had the feeling that I was being turned upside down and thrown on my back by a giant baby. Then there was nothing.
Koko the clown came and perched on my nose. Behind him someone spoke. I thought the voice said, “Too late again,” but I wasn’t sure. Koko grinned down at me and wanted to play.
I didn’t want to play. This was it. I wasn’t so far from fifty, with no money in the sock, a body that threatened to leave me, an ex-wife…. The hell with that. I’d gone over it before. Get up and keep going, I told myself. Koko could skate around and play tricks on Uncle Max. The Nazis and the Japs could throw what they had at us. My job was an easy one. Just get up and go back to work, but I couldn’t do it. My eyes just wouldn’t open. I suggested a game to Koko, sly fox that I was. If he’d open my eyes, I’d play with him. I chuckled, knowing that if he helped me open my eyes I’d be awake and I wouldn’t have to play with him. I’d have a more dangerous game to play. Koko, the sucker, agreed, and my eyes opened to a bright light. I closed them again.
“This one ain’t dead,” an incredulous voice said.
“He’s bloodier than the other one,” came another voice. “You hear me fella?”
“I hear you,” I said.
“What he say?” came the first voice again.
“I think he said ‘I dare you,’” said the second voice. I opened my eyes again and turned from the flashlight to look into the open eyes of Richard Talbott. They were big and brown and dead, and rain was pelting his famous cheeks. So much for Brenda Stallings’s luck and mine.
I tried to sit up, but hands held me back.
“You better just lie there till an ambulance comes,” came the first voice, which, in the cloud-covered darkness, I could see belonged to a cop in a raincoat, a young cop.
“I’ll get pneumonia lying here,” I told him. “And I’ve got a bad back.”
The second cop was not much older than the first.
“I think you better not move,” he commanded.
I sat up and looked over at Talbott. There was a knife sticking out of his chest, just about where the other one had been posted in Grayson.
“You think I did this?” I said, wiping rain and blood from my face.
“I don’t think anything,” said the second cop. “But you’re not going anywhere.”
“Hell, Sol, let’s get him inside,” said the younger cop. “There’s no point in our standing out here in the rain. If he wants to move, it’s his worry.”
Sol grunted and looked at me.
“O.K. You try anything and you get this flashlight across your face,” Sol warned.
“Just what I need,” I groaned and let them drag me through the exit door and back into the private room in the Manhattan.
They sat me on a chair and found some towels to sop up the blood in my hair. I could feel the cut but not how deep it was.
“You want to tell us what happened?” tried Sol’s partner, the kid.
“No,” I said. “I’ll just have to tell it again. Call Lieutenant Pevsner or Sergeant Seidman at the Wilshire station. They’re Homicide. Tell them what you found and that I’m Toby Peters.”
“You a cop?” said Sol.
“No,” I said. “A victim.”
“You kill that guy out there?” said the kid.
“That guy is Richard Talbott,” I said, closing my eyes.
“The big actor?” Sol cried.
I nodded.
“The guy with the scythe gets ’em all,” said Sol wisely.
“The long and the short and the tall,” I agreed and closed my eyes, pretending to go out again.
CHAPTER 8
“Well Toby, my lad,” a mellow voice broke through wherever I was dreaming, “we have a new theory about you.”
I opened my eyes to the placid face above me. It was a tolerant face, the face of a man of sixty or more who had seen much and wanted to go home to a hot bath and a drink. He could have been a priest or a soldier. He could even have been a cop, but I guessed that he was a doctor. The white uniform and stethoscope around his neck were my best clues. It also helped that I recognized the emergency room at L.A. County. I’d been there often enough before.
“My name is Dr. Melanks,” he said, picking up a thick file. I knew it was mine. I remembered the time Doc Parry had held it up with a shake of the head not much different from kindly Doc Melanks’s. Parry was off in the Pacific somewhere seeing cases even more interesting than mine. I was used to thick files about me. I even took kind of a perverse pride in them.
“Can you hear me?” Melanks asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose. The backs of his fingers had fine gray hairs growing at the knuckles.
“A few members of the staff now believe that the constant reign of terror to your anatomy is causing a building up of resistance by your body. Not that you are immune to damage but that your body has somehow said, ‘What the hell, I can take anything.’ Your skull no longer deserves the anatomical right to be referred to as a skull. We are not quite sure what to call it.”
I tried to sit up and made it to one elbow. I was in a hospital gown.
“The closest thing I have seen to what we are laughingly calling your cranium belonged to a punch-drunk fighter named Ramirez who, when his career was finished, made an occasional fifty cents by battering down doors with his head. Mr. Ramirez was incapable of coherent speech by that time and seemed to think he was a robot. Are you following the allegorical level of my tale, Mr. Peters?”
“If I continue to get hit in the head, my brain will turn to Junket pudding,” I said.
“Your brain is almost certainly pudding by now,” said Dr. Melanks. “I simply want you to sign it over to me on your death. I am sixty-seven and suffering from arthritis, a weak heart, mild sclerosis, and a very poor hereditary profile, but I should outlive you by a comfortable margin.”
He put down the chart, stepped in front of me, lifted my eyelids, shined a little flashlight into them, breathing mint in my face, and stood back.
“I’m not even going to bother to warn you,” he said. “It won’t do any good. I can see that Parry and a number of others have told you of the consequences of your folly. If you can rise, do so. If you can walk, amaze me with the sight. You have two dozen stitches in your head, at the base of your scalp.”
“I can feel them,” I said, sitting up and touching the bandage.
“A good omen,” sighed Melanks. “The whole thing is free of charge, of course, on the condition that you come back here in three days to let me take the stitches out and engage in a bit of anatomical phrenology for the medical students, who should see everything at least once.”
I stood and looked around for my clothes.
“Would you like to go through that door headfirst?” he said wearily. “I could sew you up again. I’ve already missed my dinner and part of my sleep. It would be an education to me in my declining years.”
I had enough of Doc Melanks’s sarcasm. What I needed was some pants before the police dropped in for a chat.
Melanks shook his head one more time and exited with a flourish and a swish of his white coat. He was followed almost immediately by Phil and Steve Seidman.
Phil had shaved since yesterday, and Seidman looked even more pale in the hospital light. Seidman leaned against the door, which he closed behind him, and Phil found a chrome-legged chair to sit on. He looked around the room as if I weren’t there, admiring the table, medicine cabinet, and the poison chart on the wall. Nobody spoke. This went on for about three minutes, when I gave up.