He Done Her Wrong: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Eight) (Toby Peters Mysteries) (5 page)

I said something to Aardvark, but he only grunted morosely, staring into his sherbet. He seemed to have a fondness for concentrating on melting things.

When dinner was over, Lachtman pulled some notes from his May Company shopping bag. I could also see a Holmes deerstalker cap in the bag and watched Lachtman’s right hand waver over it, almost touch it and pull away. He looked up at his wife, who gave him no sign either way.

“‘Darkness,’” she said softly.

“The title of chapter four of ‘The Valley of Fear,’” Lachtman answered, but couldn’t bring himself to whip out the hat and plunk it on his head. Throughout the rest of the next hour of the meeting I caught him reaching into that bag six times. He never did get up enough nerve to touch it, let alone put it on his head. I was tempted to do it for him, like my sister-in-law Ruth plunking a leather aviator’s cap on one of my nephews, Nat or Dave.

The preliminaries were painful and unswift. The Pierces had small photographs of London taken in 1937. They were passed around photo by photo while the Pierces alternated in telling how they thought each photo showed some location from a Holmes story.

The next order of business was the mysterious Campbell report. Lachtman gave the floor over to Richard Campbell, who turned out to be the man with the cape. He rose with a flourish, threw back his cape, stroked his thin moustache, and strode to the front table past a beagle-faced waiter, who had already started to clear off plates. Campbell gave the waiter a deadly glare, which did no good, and spoke.

“My report,” he began, the time between the two words equaling the duration of the Battle of Midway, “is not fully prepared. But it soon will be. Mark my word. It soon will be.”

With that he returned to his seat and folded his arms, waiting for someone to dare criticize him.

“Cynthia Brewer,” mumbled Aardvark.

The superior sneer left Campbell’s face. His eyes darted back and forth as if reading frantically through his memory of all the tales of Conan Doyle in a mad frenzy to recover the forgotten name.

“Challenge,” he shouted at Aardvark, who didn’t look up.

“He challenged,” I said to Randisi, whose eyes were cast forlornly on the disappearing sherbet.

“What?” said Aardvark, brushing a wisp of orange hair from his forehead.

“He challenged Cynthia Brewer,” came a voice, an old lady voice.

Aardvark’s confusion was evident.

“He challenged Cynthia Brewer?”

“He did,” I said. “Who is she?”

“She’s a sophomore in my early American history class,” he said. “How does he know her? I was just thinking …”

“And now,” said Lachtman the meek and bald, rising with a prod from Officer Margaritte before he could make another swipe at the deerstalker challenging him in his shopping bag, “Lou will introduce our speaker for the night.”

He sat down and all eyes turned to Randisi, whose head was down completely, lost in the scotch memory of Cynthia Brewer.

We waited for several moments for Randisi to stir, but the best he could do was reach up and remove his name card. We all watched in fascination as he turned it right-side up, considered putting it back on, and let it fall to the table. I introduced myself.

“What part,” asked an ancient woman with incongruously blond hair, “does deduction play in your solving cases?”

“Almost none,” I said.

“Then how do you help your clients, catch criminals, restore order?” demanded Campbell.

“I’m stubborn,” I said, looking around the room for my suspect. “I take whatever passes for a lead, and I keep after it. Sometimes I go after ten leads before I get anywhere, and sometimes I go after twenty leads and never get anywhere. My trick is to never give up.”

“Do the police ever seek your help on baffling cases?” came another female question.

The question had a sting to it. She was thinking Holmes. I was thinking that my being in this very room was the result of the only time in my life that a cop had asked me for help. I skipped that exception and gave the rule: that cops thought I was a pest, which I was, that they caught far more con men, thieves, and killers than I did and did it a lot more efficiently.

More questions came, and I kept giving answers, but not the ones they wanted to hear. The only one that seemed to please them was that I liked my work.

When I sat down Lachtman got up, thanked me, and everyone clapped politely. The meeting ended with Lachtman asking for suggestions about the next meeting. One little old lady, filled with enthusiasm, said aloud, “I’ve got it. Let’s put on a play.”

While this never failed to get a rise from Judy Garland when Mickey Rooney said it, no one in the group even gave an indication that the woman had spoken.

Campbell rapped his cane on the table and stood.

“I suggest that when next we meet, we have a Sherlockian quiz prepared by our current president and that the winner of that quiz have his dinner paid for.”

“Or her dinner,” came a powerful rasp.

“As the case may be,” conceded Campbell, sitting with a smirk that indicated clearly who he expected to win the quiz.

“Sounds like a fine idea,” agreed Lachtman, looking around for support. Margaritte turned her head away. Meanwhile, Aardvark’s head was sinking dangerously close to the pool of melted sherbet. I nudged him, and he roused himself into something that resembled being awake.

“Settled,” said Lachtman. “I’ll prepare the quiz. And that’s it for tonight. I’m glad you could all—”

Campbell was already up and had turned his back to address a group at another table before Lachtman could finish his goodbye.

With the possible exception of Campbell, who didn’t seem to be a particularly good suspect, no one in the room really resembled the one who had tried to kill me two days earlier at Mae West’s party, but then again it was hard to know. The person might well be a woman, though there were some reasons to think it wasn’t.

With the opportunity for the deerstalker gone till the next meeting, Lachtman turned to me.

“Thank you for coming to speak to us tonight, Mr. Pastor. We’ve all learned a great deal about how a detective works.”

His words and the response of the group had made it clear that they really didn’t care how a real detective worked and that I had, as many times before in my battered life, disappointed people who expected more from me.

Margaritte Lachtman moved to her husband’s side as the crowd aimed for the door.

“It was fun,” I lied. “Was this the entire group or were there some members who couldn’t make it?”

“Everyone was here,” Lachtman said, looking at his wife for confirmation. She didn’t confirm.

“Ressner,” she corrected. “Jeffrey Ressner.”

“Yes, oh yes, Mr. Ressner,” Lachtman remembered, with a look on his face that reminded me of the time my brother had slipped me a worm at a Saturday matinee when I had asked for the popcorn.

“What about Mr. Reesner?” I said with a small smile.

“He hasn’t come in several years, though he called yesterday and said he was back,” said Lachtman, looking at the door. “He knows the Canon well and many other things, but—”

“He is a bit difficult, or was in the past,” completed Margaritte, handing Lachtman his shopping bag.

“Maybe it’s just too far for him to come,” I tried.

“He doesn’t live that far, no farther than some members, somewhere in the valley with his daughter,” he said.

That was as far as I could push. I should be able to find a Jeffrey Ressner in the valley phone books. Of course he might be living with a daughter under her name, and she might have a married name, and Lachtman would surely have an address for him, and I might have to come back and get it, but for now I had a lead.

“It was good to meet you, Mr. Peters,” said Margaritte Lachtman, extending her hand. Maybe it was one Pepsi too many and an overload of caloric energy, but her hand felt like Anne’s and I didn’t want to let it go. She pulled away and moved toward Alvin Aardvark, who had passed out at the main table. Busboys and waiters were clearing up around him as I moved to leave.

In the next room the salesmen masquerading as politicians were laughing, probably at the jokes of their boss. I didn’t laugh when Campbell swooped in front of me as I took a step into the hall.

“You were asking about Jeffrey Ressner,” he said.

I shrugged. “Not particularly.”

“You were asking,” he insisted, pointing his cane at me. I considered taking it from him and playing a few Krupa tunes on his head. “I suggest you stay away from him. He is more dangerous than Lethal and Lightning.”

“Lethal and Lightning?”

“Yesterday at San Quentin,” he said softly between the peals of next-door laughter, “Robert S. James was hanged. He was a barber convicted of killing pregnant Mary Bush James, his wife, for twenty-one thousand dollars insurance. He drowned her after failing to kill her by forcing her to put her feet into a box that contained two rented rattlesnakes named Lethal and Lightning. A tale worthy of the master himself.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

With that Campbell made a move intended, I think, to give the impression that he had disappeared into the shadows behind a potted palm. Instead, he tripped over the scurrying, chunky little beagle of a waiter and fell with his cane clattering and his hand grabbing for fronds.

“Drunken fart,” mumbled the waiter, hurrying on.

I tried to pretend that I hadn’t seen Campbell’s failed exit and headed for the door and home.

CHAPTER 3

Dinah Shore sang “One Dozen Roses” to me as I drove to my office in the Farraday Building the next morning. I took Melrose to Vermont and cut across at Ninth. The news tried to come on and tell me about the Russian front and to remind me that they were going to draft 1Bs, but I wouldn’t listen. I turned the radio off as I pulled into the alley off Hoover, where I usually parked between garbage cans and piles of soggy newspapers. The newspapers were gone. Kids had grabbed them up on red wagons and carted them off to school paper drives.

There were no downtown bums sleeping it off at the back door, and the world inside the dark coolness of the Farraday Building was (as I always remembered it) filled with the smell of Lysol, faint echoes, and the distant clicking of machines including typewriters, the mildly porno press on the third floor, and an out-of-tune piano.

My back, which would have qualified me as 4F even if I weren’t too old and didn’t have too many dents in my cranium and the red kiss of two bullet wounds in my gut, was giving me warnings. Soaking in rain and a cold pool had done me no good. So I moved slowly and quietly. Somewhere in the depths of cracked marble and pebble glass office windows Jeremy Butler lurked, cleaning and rhyming. If he spotted me moving slowly, he’d insist on working on my back. His manipulations always gave me relief, but the immediate pain of his knee in my back and his hairy arms around my chest was sought only in the most extreme emergencies. I had no emergency.

My plan, as I walked the wide fake marble stairs upward toward the fourth floor, was to track down Ressner or whoever the extortionist was and turn him over to the cops before he went for Mae West again or made a move at me for messing up his scam. I hadn’t liked the cracked voice behind all that makeup and I didn’t look forward to opening my front door one day and finding Ressner disguised at Rita Hayworth with a gun in his hand.