CHAPTER THREE

Faulkner was a wiry guy about my age and height with a small mustache and a chip on his shoulder the size of Catalina Island. He had a high-bridged, almost Indian nose with heavy-lidded, deep-set brown eyes. His face was tan and he held a blackened pipe in his thin lips. I couldn’t tell what was going on in his head other than that he had a distaste for the room, the situation, me, and possibly life in general. His eyes seemed to show melancholy, calculation, and a private sense of humor at the same time, as if he saw himself as a tragic figure and accepted the role, maybe even welcomed it. I can’t say I liked him immediately. I wondered whether he knew any vampire poems.

“Your client,” Cawelti said, ushering Faulkner to the chair across from Phil’s desk and backing out with feigned respect. Faulkner didn’t sit. He didn’t offer his hand. He took the pipe out of his mouth and examined me.

“Forgive my lack of social grace in these surroundings, Mister …”

“Peters,” I said. “Toby Peters. Private investigator working for Martin Leib and, I guess, Warner Brothers on your behalf.”

Faulkner’s voice was a little deeper than I had expected and distinctly Southern. I was having trouble with my words, trying to be formal and knowing I was unnatural. He had that effect. Faulkner stood behind the chair playing with his pipe, and I walked over to the window behind Phil’s desk and pretended to look out. Since it faced a brick wall four feet away and hadn’t been cleaned for a generation of two, I couldn’t see anything.

“I don’t think they’re going to give us a lot of time in here,” I said, “so I’d appreciate it if you’d just tell your story.”

I pulled out my notebook with the worn spirals. It had a few ragged pages left. I could finish up on the back of the letter in my pocket from a hotel in Fresno complaining that I owed them for a night’s lodging from a lifetime or two ago. I turned my eyes to Faulkner, who looked as if he might be deciding to tell me to go to hell. An almost nonexistent move of his shoulder made me think he had chosen possible salvation over dignity. I almost wrote that down, but I didn’t have enough paper and the nub of my pencil might not last long. I also thought I had stolen the line from the one Faulkner novel I had read.

“There is irony in your request,” Faulkner said, examining his pipe for defects and appreciating the embers. “I’ve just delivered a collection of stories to my publisher, none of which is as bizarre as this. I was going to start by saying—as I told the police—that I have killed no one.”

“I understand how you feel,” I said, scratching away to visible lead with my grimy thumb so I’d have a pencil to work with.

“Unfortunately,” Faulkner went on softly, “I don’t need sympathy. I need professional help. My inclination is simply to be irate and insist on my release, but apparently someone has gone through quite an effort to make that impossible.”

“You mean you think you’ve been framed?” I said, to stay in the conversation.

“Consider the alternative,” he continued. “It is either that or else I have gone mad, which is certainly a possibility, given the state of the world, though I doubt my madness would manifest itself as an attack on my agent. I would be much more likely to attack a publisher. May I suggest we sit down?”

I nodded, and he sat in the chair across from the desk, leaving me Phil’s chair in which I was forbidden to sit on pain of decapitation. I sat. It helped establish a client-professional air in the rancid room, and it gave me a little extra to worry about. Faulkner crossed his legs and examined the back of his right hand. My feet started to go up on the desk. I resisted and planted them on the wooden floor.

“My tale is simple,” Faulkner began with clear distaste for the task. “I met Jacques Shatzkin but once, for lunch at that restaurant with the aquarium window on Sixth Street.”

“Bernstein’s Fish Grotto,” I supplied. “Why did you meet?”

Faulkner shifted the ashes in his pipe with a thin finger, cleaned his finger on a handkerchief from his tweed jacket pocket, made sure his tie was in place, and spoke softly.

“He called me and said he wanted to discuss a business arrangement that might be reasonably lucrative for me. I have an agent, but Mr. Shatzkin has—had—a good reputation, and I am somewhat in need of money.”

“May I …” I started, but stopped when I looked at Faulkner’s face. It had turned slightly red.

“I do not suffer from false humility,” he said, “or at least I so delude myself. I earned less than thirty-two hundred dollars last year. I have a home and a family, and I carry the burden of assumption on the part of the public that I am financially solvent as the result of a family estate that does not exist and enormous royalties that have never existed. I have had but one economic success.”

“Pylon,” I tried. I had fond memories of the book. I had once hidden evidence, a pornographic photograph, in my copy.

“Sanctuary,” Faulkner corrected. “And the money from that has been long dispersed. I am in Los Angeles to seek employment from Warner Brothers with the help of my agent and Mr. Howard Hawks. Mr. Warner, so far, has not seen fit to make me a generous offer, or a firm offer of any kind. I am inclined to accept whatever offer I may get. So, when Mr. Shatzkin called …”

“Where did he call you?” I asked.

“At my hotel, the Hollywood,” said Faulkner, finding a match and getting his pipe going.

“He called you and you met at the restaurant?”

“We met at Mr. Shatzkin’s office building,” Faulkner puffed, “and then went to the restaurant where I had lobster naturale and he had a large shrimp salad. You have that?”

I wrote it down. In spite of Faulkner’s sarcasm, it might be something to check. It might not be, probably wouldn’t be, but you took what you could get and carried it. I was tempted to tell Faulkner to stick to his writing and let me stick to my job.

“Mr. Shatzkin offered me the rings of Saturn, the moon, and Biloxi,” Faulkner went on. “I told him I would check with my agent and get back to him. We parted amicably outside the restaurant, and he promised to call me. He never did, and I never saw him again.”

“And you never met Mrs. Shatzkin?”

“I never had that pleasure,” he said sarcastically.

“How did Shatzkin seem?” I went on.

“Seem,” Faulkner repeated, making it clear I had chosen the wrong word. “A bit too earnest, too fawning, too false, exactly what I expected in and of Hollywood.”

“You own a gun?”

“Yes, several; they are all in Oxford, Mississippi, in my study at Rowan Oak. They are locked securely away; I have an eight-year-old daughter. I brought none with me. I did not expect to be attacked, nor to commit murder or robbery.”

That did it. I put down the envelope I was writing on and looked up at him. I noticed that my legs had made their way up to the desk when I wasn’t looking. The hell with it.

“Look, Mr. Faulkner, I’ve got a job to do and you want to stay alive and out of jail and the newspapers—at least I think you do. We’re in the same boat. I need the money for this case. I’m reasonably good at what I do, but I’m also somewhat human. If you tickle me and don’t hit scar tissue, I laugh. If you torture me and hit an old wound, I cry.”

“I recognize the allusion,” Faulkner said, “and appreciate the point. I will try to be more civil, but the circumstances do affect my behavior. It is not just my life, but the world that is bitched proper this time, isn’t it? I’d like to be dictator now. I’d take all Congressmen who refused to make military appropriations and I’d send them to the Philippines. On this day a year from now I don’t think there’ll be one present second lieutenant alive. And here we are playing games with a meaningless murder, and I sit a helpless … forgive me, Mr. Peters, but perhaps you can better understand my emotions.”

“Apology accepted,” I said. I didn’t exactly like him now, but at least he seemed like a human being instead of a Southern imitation of George Sanders. “The shooting took place at nine or so last night. Where were you?”

“As I told the officer who brought me in here,” he said, drawing on his pipe to regain his calm exterior, “I was working with a writer named Jerry Vernoff. We were in my hotel room. My agent, Bill Herndon, and I had agreed to try to work up a story treatment for Warners as a preliminary step to possible employment. Mr. Vernoff has worked extensively on story treatments for various studios and has a reputation for working quickly and commercially. I believe someone at Warners suggested the possible collaboration. We ate dinner at the hotel.”

“Which makes it unlikely that you would have had a dinner appointment with Shatzkin,” I concluded. He nodded in agreement. I didn’t have a pinhead of an idea what was going on, but I had some names to work with. I put the notebook and envelope in my pocket and was about to order my feet off the desk when the door came open. If I had been listening to the waves of voices and sounds in the outer squad room instead of getting absorbed in my job, I might have heard Phil’s Frankenstein tread, but such was not to be.

Phil looked at Faulkner and then at me, and he turned as red as the ketchup stain on his shirt. Behind him, Cawelti stood in anticipation of something he could see expanding in my brother like a berserk balloon, something that had to come out or explode. My right foot had fallen asleep or I would have forced it down, but I couldn’t move it. Phil took the one step from the door to the desk, his double-ham of a hand descending in slow motion. I watched in fascination as it hit my right knee, spinning me out of the chair and against the wall. I sank to the floor with Phil taking another step toward me, and then Faulkner’s voice broke over his shoulder.

“Pardon me, Lieutenant,” he said, “but you seem to have the scenario wrong. I was under the impression that the police beat up the suspects, not their lawyers’ representatives.”

Phil paused and looked back at Faulkner, who met his eyes and held them. That lasted long enough for me to scramble to my feet, but my knee was sore and almost gave way. Cawelti stood in the door with a touch of smirk on his face. Phil caught the look out of the corner of his eye and realized he was surrounded by adversaries. Normally, he would have bulled his way through all three of us, breaking Faulkner first like a twig, stomping on Cawelti, and saving me for something special, but time had mellowed Phil and he settled for, “Get your asses out of here, fast, all of you.”

I hobbled to the door as Phil bumped past me, sat down in his now-contaminated chair, and stuck his head into the Faulkner file. Faulkner followed me slowly, and Cawelti closed the door behind us.

“He’s my brother,” I explained to Faulkner.

Faulkner nodded knowingly and replied, “Yes, I too have had brothers.”

That struck me as a strange way of stating things, but I didn’t question it. I was suddenly aware that the entire squad room was quiet and faces were aimed in our direction. At first I thought it might be recognition of Faulkner. Then I realized that Phil had made one hell of a noise throwing me against the wall. The silence lasted a couple of beats, and then everyone went back to his or her own private world.

“I’ll be in touch with Mr. Leib as soon as I have anything,” I told Faulkner. There was no point in telling him to take it easy or that everything would be all right, that I would take care of his problems and Bela Lugosi’s and save Corregidor within two days. I wasn’t even sure I could make it to my car on my wounded knee.

Cawelti led the way for Faulkner, and the two disappeared through the haphazard maze of desks. I tried to hide my limp as I eased over to a familiar face, that of Sergeant Steve Seidman, who was looking up at me as I made my way to his desk. He was a thin, white-faced, sandy-haired cadaver of a cop in a gray suit, the only suit I had ever seen him wear. Maybe he had a closet full of duplicates. Seidman was the closest thing my brother had to a partner. Seidman’s strength was his inability to be ruffled. His idiosyncracy was his genuine respect for Phil.

“How’s it going, Toby?” he said as I leaned against his desk, trying to hide a grimace of pain or turn it into something resembling a smile. A uniformed cop ambled past me with an old man manacled to his wrist. The old man gave me a toothless grin. On Seidman’s desk was an ugly chunk of metal vaguely the shape of a club. Seidman saw me looking at it.

“Got that from a medical student at USC,” he explained. “A guy tried to mug him and his girlfriend. Med student picked up this handy-dandy all-purpose piece of junk from the gutter and exposed the guy’s brain with it. Broad daylight. Cop across the street in a diner saw the tail end and held off long enough to gulp his coffee. If he had moved a little faster, he could have saved the mugger a lot of surgery and me a lot of work.”

“The point?” I asked.

“Phil has a lot of cases on his mind,” he said.

“Phil is fifty and will never be more than a lieutenant,” I said. “Surliness is a way of life for him. He’s at war and the world is full of enemies, including me.”

“Maybe so,” sighed Seidman. I looked into the eyes in his sunken face. They were as black and faraway as the night sky. There was no distinction between the iris and the pupil. It was one wide-deep circle to infinity.

“Faulkner,” I said, above the start of an argument in a distant corner. The manacled old man had punched the cop in the kidney, and the cop had restrained himself admirably, limiting his wrath to one elbow in the old guy’s stomach and a lot of shouting. Seidman looked over at the conflict without emotion and spoke to me.

“Cawelti’s case,” he said. “Looks like a tight one. One live witness. One dead man who identified the killer. One gun found in Faulkner’s hotel room. Who could ask for more?”

“I could,” I said.

Seidman’s voice went down so that I could hardly hear it.

“So could Cawelti,” he said. “He’s not looking into corners. Wants to wrap this up tight, get his name in the papers, a pat on the head from Phil, and a nice note in his personnel file.”

“What about Faulkner’s alibi?” I tried, looking around for the well-groomed lady, but she was gone.

“That writer, Vernoff, says Faulkner went out alone for a drink just before nine,” Seidman said. “Plenty of time to pump a few drinks into himself and a few shots of something more deadly into Shatzkin and hurry back to the hotel.”

“Something sound wrong with that to you?” I said.

Seidman shrugged. “Hell of a complicated way to commit a murder. No motive.” Seidman’s eyes moved up and over toward Phil’s door behind my back. I could sense the hulking presence of my brother behind me. I got off Seidman’s desk and limped toward the squad room door. I got four feet before Phil’s hand grabbed my left shoulder. I turned, wondering what he had in store for me this time.

“This has been a hell of a week,” he said as quietly as he could, which was not very quiet. It was as close as he had ever come to an apology.

“They all are,” I said.

“They all are,” he agreed and turned to stalk back into his office.

The two Japanese kids were still on the bench waiting for someone to take them away and shoot them for treason. Coronet, the desk sergeant, was keeping his eye on them to the point where a good lightfinger could have taken his gun, his uniform, and the rusty fixtures of the Wilshire station without his knowing it. My knee throbbed, but I made it across the tile floor and out the door into the cold. In my pocket was a comfortable advance from Martin Leib and a few notes. I went to the drugstore at the corner, got some coffee and a second breakfast of Shredded Wheat, and tried to decide what to do next.

The waitress, who recognized me from previous visits and probably thought I was a cop from down the street, served me quietly, but her radio blasted the news behind her. Corregidor was beating back the Japanese, and the Nazi drive into Russia was being stalled by bad weather and angry Russians. Dorothy Thompson was getting a divorce from Sinclair Lewis, and the Joe Louis/Buddy Baer rematch was definitely going to be covered on the radio. It was too hard to think, and I had too many things to think about. I needed a new notebook and some toothpaste. I picked up a can of Pepsodent tooth powder for thirty-nine cents and for another ten cents got Bob Hope’s book They Got Me Covered as a premium. I figured I’d go home, soak my knee in the bath, and let Hope cheer me up while I decided what to do next.

I got into my specked Buick, ground it into gear, and made for Wilshire, dropping the idea of Carmen and the Florentine Room. My intentions shifted. The next day was Sunday. Maybe I’d take my two nephews Nate and Davey to see Dumbo. At least that’s what I’d tell Phil and Ruth. I would really take them back to Billings’s adobe theater for Host to a Ghost and Revolt of the Zombies. I knew I could trust the boys to tell a lie for their dear old Uncle Toby.

On the way home the knee almost decided to stop peddling gas, so I detoured slightly to County Hospital and groaned into the emergency room, past the numb row of urban walking wounded to a woman in white inside a window-frame reception area. Only her head was showing. She was simply short but looked decapitated.

“I want to see Doctor Parry,” I told the disembodied head with its shock of stiff red hair. “He’s my nephew.”

“He is no longer at County,” she said. I hoped her hands would come up to get rid of the headless image, but they didn’t. “Joined the Army.”

Parry was not my nephew. He was a young resident whom I had attached myself to as my personal medic. I felt depressed as hell and in real need of that hot bath and Bob Hope.

“If you’ll have a seat,” said the head, “someone else can take care of you.”

I looked around and estimated the wait before I received medical attention as four weeks to a decade. I could have bullied and tricked my way in, but I was too depressed.

“What is your emergency?” tried the head flatly.

“Mortality,” I said, dragging my foot behind me toward the door like the Universal Mummy.

Back at the boarding house, I pulled myself up the stairs trying to avoid Mrs. Plaut, who caught me before I made it to the top. She was as close to deaf as a human can be and still function, but she had heard me clumping.

“You had a call, Mr. Peelers,” she said. “Don’t remember who it was. I think he said Charlie McCarthy. Couldn’t be.” Her almost-eighty-year-old frame turned away. “And there’s no hot water. I forgot to pay the gas bill again. I’ll take care of it first thing Monday.”

“Thanks,” I said, completing my journey up the fourteen stairs, clutching my Walgreen’s bag to my bosom.

Gunther came into the hall and looked with some concern at my leg.

“Phil,” I explained.

Gunther had encountered Phil before and needed no further explanation.

“No hot water,” he said.

“I know,” I said back.

“I’ll boil some on your hot plate,” he volunteered and disappeared into my room. I followed him, threw my coat on the one semicomfortable chair in the room, and took off my clothes. Gunther went back to his room for a huge pot. I stripped to my underwear and watched him struggle with the pot that weighed about as much as he did, but I didn’t offer to help. Pride should be respected.

I made it to the bathroom, found it unoccupied, and went inside. I brushed my teeth and let some cold water into the tub.

I got through a few lines of the Hope book: “There was a great excitement at the little house next door to the Barretts of Wimpole Street. My best friend was having a baby. Me.”

That was as far as I got. Gunther, like a diminutive Gunga Din, lugged the boiling water in and dumped it into the tub. I climbed in and let out a groan. Gunther climbed up on the toilet seat and waited patiently.

“You wish company or not?” he asked.

I explained the Faulkner case and asked Gunther to try to track down someone at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto who might have seen or remembered Faulkner or Shatzkin and find out whether Shatzkin had made a reservation the day he met Faulkner. I would try for Mrs. Shatzkin and Vernoff the writer. I also had some guilt pangs about Lugosi and again considered picking up Dave and Nate later in the afternoon and taking them to the show where I could spend a few minutes with Billings.

“Life gets ted-jus, don’t it,” I said.

“That is an idiom?” Gunther said seriously, perched upon the toilet seat.

“Line from a song by a guy named Bert Williams,” I said, pulling myself out of the tub. “And now to work.”