“I’m here,” he said wearily, “but I’m not sure you’re all there. I’ll tell Phil and see what he wants to do.” He hung up and I gave the phone back to the lockup officer.
It was night and the cell I was taken to was small and smelled of nightmares. There were two bunks in the cell and a weak light in the ceiling. On the wall between the bunks was a chalk drawing of Smokey Stover. Someone was lying on the bunk on the left. Doc Olson’s clothes and I took the bunk on the right.
“I didn’t do it,” said the voice from the other bunk. The guy in it was lying on his back, his right arm across his eyes.
“I believe you,” I said, checking the bunk for bugs.
The other guy began to snore and I lay back trying to think. Had I stumbled into some unrelated murder? Had some jealous hulk that Anne Olson picked up strangled her husband, and I just had the dumb luck to walk in at the wrong time? Where was Anne Olson? Had Olson been knocked off because of the kidnapping of the president’s dog? Why? I knew I was too edgy to sleep, but knowing is not the same as feeling. I was asleep in minutes. My body had been through enough in forty-seven years to know when it needed a break, even if my mind didn’t.
I dreamed that Guy Kibbe and I were sitting on Doc Olson’s naked stomach. He was floating and we were out in the middle of the ocean. From a faraway island, a woman’s voice called, “Out here damned spot.” Using our hands, we paddled for it on the bouyant corpse. When we reached the island, my ex-wife Anne and Koko the clown were hand-in-hand, dancing on the beach. We got off of Olson, and the four of us watched him float out to sea. For some reason, it was a tender moment. Something was about to happen. Anne was about to speak and tell me something important, but she never did. Someone shook me awake and I was back in the cell.
“Come on,” said Seidman.
“She was going to tell me the answer,” I said, sitting up and looking over at my cellmate, whose arm was still covering his eyes.
“Sure,” said Seidman. His jaw was slightly swollen.
“You snore,” said the guy from the other bunk.
“You did it,” I answered, following Seidman out of the cell.
Some bookwork, discussion, and dirty looks passed between Seidman and Downs, but in a few minutes the final touches were made and I was on my way, seated next to Seidman.
“I got the report from Hindryx,” he said, heading into the night. “That the way it was?”
“The way I said it.”
That was all we said for the next half-hour till we got to the Wilshire station. It was four in the morning according to the clock downstairs and the night man had replaced Veldu. I didn’t know the night man so we exchanged nothing. We bypassed the squadroom and went to an office in the hall with CAPTAIN LOWELL B. PRONZINI stenciled on the door in black letters that were peeling off from years of scratching and a few dozen washings. Lowell B. had just retired. It was, I found, the office of Captain Phil Pevsner. It was bigger than his old one, had three chairs besides the one behind the desk, and probably looked out on the parking lot. I couldn’t tell. It was too dark. The desk was just as old as the last one and there were two battered file cabinets in the corner.
“Coming up in the world, ain’t you Rico?” I said to Phil, who sat rocking in his new swivel chair behind the desk.
“What’s Eleanor Roosevelt got to do with this shit?” he said, still rocking.
Seidman took one of the chairs, moved it to the corner, and sat down to swallow a pill and massage his right cheek, beneath which lurked the work that Shelly had done on him.
“Nothing,” I said.
Phil stopped rocking for a second, looked forward at me, a day’s stubble of gray beard on his chin. He said nothing and went from rocking to swiveling in his chair.
“Try again,” sighed Seidman from the corner.
Phil paused, looking bored, and reached for the metal cup of coffee on his desk. He discovered it was empty, got mad at the cup, and threw it in the garbage can near the desk. The garbage can was brown, metal, and not new.
“Ruth can make some curtains,” I said, “turn this into-”
“Eleanor Roosevelt,” Phil said, rubbing his temples.
“Eleanor Roosevelt,” I agreed, and told him everything, her fears, the dog, everything. “You believe me?” I concluded.
Phil’s hands went up in a resigned gesture of indecision. He looked at Seidman, whose tongue was in his cheek testing his inflamed gums. He had no opinion.
“Go home,” Phil said, swiveling away from me to look out of the dark window.
“Aren’t you going to tell me to stop looking for the dog?” I asked. “To keep out of it, to-”
“Would it do any good?” Phil said.
“No,” I agreed, “but that’s the routine. Aren’t we partners anymore?”
“We never were, “sighed Phil. “Downs and Hindryx gave me four days to come up with something or they’re pulling you back in. I leaned on them a little. They’re a pair of shits.”
“They have great respect for you too,” I added.
“And they’ve got a friend in the Wilshire who’ll be watching things for them,” Seidman added behind me.
“Let me guess,” I said. “Cawelti? Hell, Phil, just pull in Anne Olson. She must have panicked. She’ll back my story.”
“Go home,” said Phil. “Now.” He spun around, stood up, and turned his red face to me. The tie was back on. Old habits.
“I’m going,” I said, backing away. “My car is in Sherman Oaks. It’s on your way back to North Hollywood. How about dropping me off?”
“Go,” said Phil so softly that I could only tell what he was saying by watching his lips. I went.
I was almost to the front door of the station when Seidman caught up to me.
“I’ll take you to your car,” he said.
“You don’t live in the valley.”
“Can’t sleep with this toothache,” he said. “Besides, Phil doesn’t want to take a chance on you going back to Olson’s when you get the car.”
Seidman led the way to his car and we drove without talking. The sun was just coming up on the far side of the valley when we made the turn onto the cul-de-sac. It was Saturday morning. Seidman took my thanks without comment and waited to be sure I made a U-turn and drove away. He followed me and then veered off when he was sure I was on my way up Coldwater Canyon Drive. He had no worries. I was headed home wearing a dead man’s suit. When I got over the hills, a stop light caught me and a guy on the radio said Robert S. James, the rattlesnake killer, had just been hanged at San Quentin. He was, said the announcer with a pregnant pause, “calm to the end.”
I looked in the rearview mirror at my face. My chin was covered with stubble just like my brother’s, the same gray field of hard times.
6
Mrs. Plaut was singing her Fanny Brice rendition of “I’m Cooking Breakfast for the One I Love,” complete with Yiddish accent, when I pushed open the door of her boarding house on Heliotrope. My plan was simple, to get to my room and fall asleep, but to accomplish that I had to make it past Mrs. Plaut.
She didn’t hear me come in. There wasn’t much that Mrs. Plaut could hear, but she made up in determination what she lacked in hearing. She stood about four and a half feet high and was somewhere in the range of eighty years old. Her age, sex, and hearing impairment deprived the U.S. Army of the services of the most able assistant General Patton could have hoped for.
The door to her rooms on the main floor were open. I moved past slowly and quietly, noticing that she was back in the kitchen and the smell of something good was wafting into the hall. I got to the first step when her voice stopped me.
“Mr. Peelers,” she shouted. “Mr. Peelers. You must wait for comments and messages.”
I put one hand on the wall and turned to face the inevitable. Not only did Mrs. Plaut not know my name, but she had latched onto the delusion that I was a pest exterminator who was somehow involved in the publishing industry. My periodic efforts to explain something approaching the truth to her only managed to tire me out and thrust the woman deeper into delusion. The situation was complicated by the fact that Mrs. Plaut was, with great and typical determination, writing the definitive history of her family. She had completed over fifteen hundred pages, neatly printed. It was my task to edit and comment on the chapters as she finished them.