He laughed and pointed his cigar at me.
“What would you expect him to say? He’s trying to put the murder rap on someone else and picked me. He didn’t like Cash, and he doesn’t like me.”
It was my turn to smile.
“Why would Wherthman want to put the rap on you?” I asked innocently, just oozing with curiosity.
“Because the cops know he did it,” said Peese through his teeth.
“Where’d you hear that?”
“You told me when you were out in the fucking hall.”
I said no, and he tried again.
“I must have heard it on the radio or read it in the papers.”
I said no again.
“That’s all I’ve got to say,” Peese said, standing. “Now get out and don’t come back, and if you tell the cops anything about what I said, I’ll swear you made it up.”
I started toward the door and tried one more trick.
“Someone else saw you arguing with Cash,” I said. “Saw you Friday morning at Metro just before Cash was killed. Identified you.”
“Who?” he demanded, grabbing my sleeve. I looked down with my best serious face.
“A guy named Grundy, a photographer,” I said. “Identified you right down to your angelic voice.”
Peese exploded and stamped on the floor. He reminded me of a childhood picture of Rumpelstilskin. I thought he was going to put his foot into the ceiling of Apartment 809.
“That double-crossing bastard!” he shouted. “That muscle freak is lying.”
“Be seeing you,” I said, opening the door. He rushed at me and threw a punch at my groin as I turned to wave to him. The punch hit me in the stomach, and I tumbled back into the hall on my back. He slammed the door. There wasn’t much I could do about it. I’d come up with some information, but I’d paid for it by being laid out by a midget.
My wind came back slowly after three or four good gasps. Then I went to the door to listen. I could hear Peese asking the telephone operator for a number. I couldn’t make out the number he asked for. We both waited for what must have been a dozen rings. Peese hung up with a bang, and I pulled my ear from the door and limped to the elevator.
By the time I dropped to the sixth floor and a lady with purple hair got on with a purple dog in her arms, I knew a few things. Grundy was probably the guy who had taken the shots at me. He was the only one of the three witnesses who had heard the two midgets arguing on Friday morning. He had identified one of them as having an accent and being called Gunther. Gable’s testimony about the size of the two midgets might put a small hole in that. How many German accented midgets named Gunther could there be in L.A.? But I wasn’t sure it was enough. If Grundy and Peese were in on something together, as soon as Peese talked to Grundy, he’d be calmed down again. With his temper, though, I doubted if Peese could go through an hour with my brother without giving everything away.
All I had to do was dump the information in my brother’s lap and hope he’d pull in Grundy and Peese and put them in different rooms. I had no idea of which one of them had actually killed Cash or why, but I didn’t much care, either. Phil could worry about that.
When we got to the lobby, the purple dog snapped at me, and the purple lady gave me a dirty look. The desk clerk picked up the look, and I picked up Chandler, who was calmly leaning against a wall watching the people walk in and picking up the atmosphere.
“Get any good dialogue?” I asked.
“Fair,” he said, putting his pipe away. “What about you?”
As we headed out to the street and under the hotel canopy, I told Chandler that Peese looked like the man I wanted, and that a muscle-heavy photographer seemed to be in it with him.
“And you’re going to turn it over to the police?” he asked. “You’re not going to try to find out why Cash was murdered, or why they tried to kill you and Judy Garland?”
“They tried to kill me because I was putting the pieces together to prove Wherthman didn’t do it,” I explained. “They figured my next step was to Peese, and they were right. My curiosity ends there.”
It wasn’t exactly the truth, and something still gnawed at me. Chandler’s detectives were probably full of germs of curiosity and covered with the poison ivy of responsibility. Those diseases could get you killed in my business. It was still a mess, and I wasn’t sure Phil would or could pull it off with what I had; but short of trying to force a confession out of Grundy, I was finished. If a forty-five-pound midget could flatten me with a single punch, what would Grundy do to me? He might not be able to shoot straight, but there was nothing wrong with his hands.
I was facing out toward the street when I saw the woman. There were a lot of people walking in both directions, but she had stopped and was looking up. She had a big brown paper bag in her arms and a look on her face I’d never seen. Her hand went to her mouth and the package fell. She had just been to a Chinese carry-out place. The little white cartons exploded on the sidewalk. Shrapnels of rice and egg roll flecked the unwary. I stepped out from under the canopy and looked up. Someone seemed to be hanging out of a window in the hotel. Someone else was not helping him get back in. It was hard to look up into the sun, but the lady and I saw that much. Other people were looking up now, too.
About fifty people saw the hanging man fall. He tumbled over in five or six circles without a sound before he hit the top of a passing Sunshine Cab and bounced off onto the sidewalk about fifteen feet from me. The body almost hit the purple lady with the purple poodle. I don’t know what Chandler did, but I stepped forward a foot or two to be sure the body was Peese’s. It was, though he’d be hard to identify by anything but his size and the clothes he was wearing. His face had hit the Sunshine Cab on the way down.
I turned to Chandler, who looked grim but controlled, as if he had always expected to see something like this, and life had proved him right.
“That’s Peese,” I said, and ran back into the hotel.
People were pushing past me to get out and see what had happened. Someone asked me. I pushed and ran for the door markedSTAIRWAY. I pulled out my. 38 and started to run up the stairs two or three at a time, listening for footsteps above me. The killer might take the elevator, or he might take the stairs. I didn’t know how many stairways there were in the hotel. I doubted if he would risk attracting attention by going down the fire escape. I also gambled that he wouldn’t want to cut off his options by using the elevator.
Somewhere I guessed wrong. No one came down the stairs. By the ninth floor I was winded, but my handball hours and running kept me up, and my back didn’t scream. No one was in the hall. It would take a few minutes for someone to figure out what floor Peese had flown from. The desk clerk would identify him, and the cops would be coming. Peese’s door was open. I stepped in, not expecting to find anything or anyone; I was right. The window was open and I had no intention of looking out. I put my gun away and looked around the place quickly, not worrying about prints. I had visited the place earlier and there were witnesses to it. There was also a witness to my being on the sidewalk when Peese went flying. Chandler’s testimony would probably be good enough even for my brother, but I didn’t wait to be tied up explaining things. I hurried through the place and found a closet. It was open, and a little chair stood inside. I stood on the chair and looked where someone had apparently looked a few minutes before. Standing on the chair, I was eye level with a shelf. I turned on the closet light. The shelf was empty but the dust showed the outline of a circle the size of a big plate.
I got down trying to figure what might be shaped like that. I kept figuring as I left the apartment and headed for the elevator. When it opened, the desk clerk I had talked to in the lobby was on it. So was a uniformed cop complete with cap, dark tie, long sleeves, and a serious look on his freckled young face. They stepped off, and I stepped on.