A Few Minutes Past Midnight (9 page)

“Yes.”

“It is coming from there,” Simon said, looking in two entirely different directions at the same time.

The two Delawarians took aim into the darkness from where there was abundant evidence the sound was coming. The evidence was the smell of horses and men who had not bathed in some time.

“Halt,” McNally is reported to have said.

“Identify yourselves,” cried my great-great-grandfather.

“It is the party of General Washington,” came a voice.

“The password,” called Simon.

“There is no password,” came the voice which McNally described as either being filled with exasperation or just plain tired, or doing a good job of acting.

“The password is ‘Allentown,’” shouted Simon.

“Allentown, then,” answered the weary voice.

“I just told you that. So it doesn’t count.”

“General Washington is tired,” the man said. “Let us enter the clearing so you can see our uniforms.”

“Anyone can steal uniforms,” said Simon.

“We haven’t the time for this,” came the voice from the dark. “Put up your weapons and let us pass. There is a battle looming tomorrow and the general needs sleep.

“Will one of you please fetch an officer who will provide a modicum of sense to this situation.”

With that my great-great-grandfather knew, or thought he knew, that these were not Americans. Americans would not use the word “modicum.” My great-great-grandfather was not sure what the word meant but he was certain it was something the British or Chinese would say. And so he fired into the darkness.

The horses in the darkness were displeased and loud and a man groaned. Then shots were fired back at my great-great-grandfather and McNally, who later claimed to have returned the fire.

McNally was hit by a ball in his left leg. He said he took it without a scream. I am convinced that he danced around crying, “It hurts.” It was that wound that sent him home early from the war. Well, not home but to Simon’s family.

The five or six or seven men on horses came into the clearing.

“You have killed Colonel Pryor,” the man on the horse said and indeed an officer was slumped over atop his horse. Next to him rode General George Washington himself.

“What is your name?” General Washington is reported to have said.

“Simon.”

“Simon, you have killed a gallant soldier and came near killing me,” said Washington trying to keep his horse from going crazy nuts. “You have nearly accomplished what the British have been unable to do.”

“It was an error in judgment,” my great-great-grandfather said.

“Your eyes are crossed,” said Washington.

“From birth,” said Simon.

Washington and the dead fellow and the others rode past McNally and my great-great-grandfather. My great-great-grandfather went into a much understandable panic.

“They shall surely kill me,” he said.

“My leg hurts,” McNally kept saying.

With this my great-great-grandfather threw his rifle into the woods and shouted, “I am heading north to hide in Canada.”

McNally claimed that my great-great-grandfather actually had headed west. There is some support for this view. Reports came back to my great-great-grandmother and her kin for more than a dozen years that a cross-eyed wild man in the Ohio territory was occasionally seen quite naked singing something about General, later President, Washington being dead. He was known as Cross-eyed Crazy Joe and became legendary. Sometimes at night in the dark he was heard to change his voice and say, “Your eyes are crossed.” There is little doubt that this poor creature was my great-great-grandfather Simon.

The end of this section. Good night.

I cleaned up the bowls, put out the lights, and lay down on my mattress, one pillow behind my head, another next to me to keep me from rolling over. I couldn’t sleep on my stomach. The bad back. I had a thin patchwork quilt over me that Mrs. Plaut had made. I heard Dash leap to the window and go out into the cool night.

When I woke it was raining. My Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall said it was a few minutes after seven. I got up, my back warning me to move slowly. It was too early to call Gunther at Fiona Sullivan’s and I didn’t know what time Chaplin had gotten to bed.

I could hear the sound of rain on the window. Dash was sitting on my table watching it. It wasn’t raining hard but it was enough to keep the sky gray.

I gathered my Kreml shampoo, Dr. West’s Miracle-Tuft toothbrush (medium), Pepsodent, and Gem razor, and staggered to the bathroom where I brought myself to some semblance of life. Back in my room I dressed in reasonably clean brown Yank slacks, a definitely clean white shirt with a hole torn low on the tail which I could tuck in and hide, and a dark raincoat. I rolled up my mattress, copied the list of women’s names from Howard Sawyer’s desk, and wrote a note to Chaplin: “Dear Mr. Voodoo, I’m on the job. Please stay inside. I’ll get back to you as soon as I can.”

I slid the note under the door of the room Chaplin was in, next to Miss Simcox. Through the curtained window at the end of the landing, I could see the rain coming down gently. Chaplin would wake to its sound and a reasonable view of Mrs. Plaut’s garage.

Mrs. Plaut was an early riser. There were times when I was convinced that she didn’t sleep, that she stayed up all night writing her family history, searching for recipes, cleaning crevices.

My shoes were in my hand as I tiptoed past Mrs. Plaut’s door toward the outside. I came very close to making it this time.

“Mr. Peelers,” she said behind me. “Why are you tippy-toeing?”

“Didn’t want to wake anyone,” I said.

“That makes no sense,” she said sternly. She was fully dressed and wearing her blue apron, the one she always wore when she did battle with dust. “I have no cake in the oven. What about my chapter?”

“I left it on my table,” I said trying to find the right voice level between letting the boarders sleep and getting through to Mrs. Plaut.

She nodded and said, “And what are your thoughts?”

“Riveting,” I said.

She smiled.

“Suggestions?”

“Don’t change a word,” I said. “Not one word.”

“Nothing I can do about the bird,” she said sadly. “Westinghouse is a talker. It is all gibberish or Polish or some such like, but it is talking. Where are you going?”

“I think a man murdered five women,” I said. “I’m going to try to stop him from killing any more.”

“I prefer it when you are not making morbid jokes in bad taste,” she said.

“I’m sorry,” I answered backing to the door.

“Put on your shoes,” she said.

I put on my shoes, but I didn’t stop to tie them.

“I’m making eggs mullah for Mr. Voodoo and the others this
A.M.
in addition to the vitamin pie,” she said. “You may stay.”

“Can’t.”

“Extermination or editing?”

“Extermination,” I said.

“You should have said so,” said Mrs. Plaut. “Meet the day with a smile even though the rain may fall. That is what the Mister said right up to the day he died.”

I escaped and stood on the porch for a beat. The rain was a light drizzle. I ran for the Crosley, keys in hand. My brother was probably already in his office. I wanted to catch him before he went out on the street.

On the way I stopped at the Big Round Donut, a shop shaped like a giant donut. I got two coffees and four donuts, three for Phil, one for me.

Armed with this offering in a brown bag, I drove to the Wilshire Avenue police station.

CHAPTER

6

M
Y BROTHER HAD
a small cubicle of an office on the far side of the squad room. I made my way around desks of working cops filing out reports or talking to victims or suspects. Phones rang, typewriters chattered, men and women wept, the guilty proclaimed their innocence as convincingly as if they had been innocent, and the innocent looked as guilty as if they had committed a crime.

One wide-eyed kid with a scraggly beard and no shirt was leaning forward toward a cop who paid no attention to him. The kid was trying to read what the cop was typing. The cop didn’t care. He bit his lower lip.

“How do you spell ‘orchestra’?” he asked the kid.

None of the cops were young. The young ones were in the army. This was an army of retreads and men who had been persuaded to put off retirement till the war ended. For some of the cops, the war had been a secret gift. They had been scheduled for retirement with no idea of what they were going to do. They couldn’t retire to California. They were already here.

My brother, behind the door and through the walls of his small office, could hear every sound in the room I was wading through. He liked it that way. Once he had been promoted to captain and sent across the hall to a big, quiet office. When demotion came, I think he secretly welcomed it.

I stood in front of his office door for a beat. His name was painted on the frosted glass in black letters: Lieutenant Phillip Pevsner.

My name is Toby Peters. As I said, I was born Tobias Leo Pevsner. Just before I became a cop I changed my name to Toby Peters. Why? Less ethnic, easier to remember. That’s what I told myself. Now I tell myself other things. Maybe I changed my name to put some distance between me and my past, between me and my brother. My mother had died when I was born. My father had died when I was a kid. I can’t remember much about being a kid in Glendale other than that I didn’t like it.

My brother never changed his name, never considered it, and didn’t like the fact that I had. There was a lot about me that Phil didn’t like. He didn’t like my work. I had started out as a cop like him, but I had become a studio guard at Warner Brothers and then a private investigator. I had joined the enemy. I had been married. Ann had left me. No kids unless you count me as one, which Ann did. So, I was just passing through, nothing to leave behind.

Phil had a wife, Ruth, and two sons, Nathan and David, and a two-year old daughter, Lucy. Nate was eleven. Dave was thirteen. Phil had a home in North Hollywood. He was a responsible father, a good husband, and he had a steady job.

When I was a kid, Phil had joined the army. He didn’t talk much about the war, the war to end all wars, the war now called the First World War. Twenty-three years had passed since he came through the door of our house and took off his uniform for the last time. Two days later he was wearing a blue police uniform. In those twenty-three years, I don’t think I ever saw him smile with joy. He was dead serious. I was always a kid. Now, nearing fifty, I still didn’t know what I wanted to do when I grew up.

Phil knew what he wanted. He wanted every criminal jailed, crippled, beaten, or run out of town. It was his personal responsibility to do these things. The philosophy was simple, but it had gotten him into a hell of a lot of trouble. For a little over a year he had been a captain in the Los Angeles Police Department, but his heart had been in the streets not behind a desk. His take-no-prisoners approach had gotten him booted back down to lieutenant, which was probably still a notch higher than his temper could handle.

I knocked and he told me to come in.

Phil had a thin stack of stapled papers in his hands. His teeth were clenched. He didn’t like what he was reading and when he looked up, he didn’t like what he saw.

Phil is about my height, but he is about a foot wider than I am. He’s a small tank with steel-white hair cut buzz short. I once said he looked like Ward Bond with a very bad attitude. Phil took it as a compliment.

“Close the door,” he said, putting the papers down on his cluttered desk.

I closed the door.

“Sit,” he ordered.

I sat at the single chair across from his desk.

“You’ve got five minutes,” he said, checking his watch.

I looked at my father’s watch on my wrist. It told me the time was 11:14, which wasn’t off by more than three hours. Phil looked at the watch and sat back, his big hands flat on the desk.

“The boys are fine,” he said. “Ruth isn’t doing all that great. The doctors aren’t sure what it is this time. They’re working on it. Lucy and the boys would like to see you. So would Ruth. Don’t ask me why. That ends family news. State your business and leave.”

I took out the list of names and handed it across to him. He took it and looked at it and then at me.

“Fascinating,” he said. “Who are they?”

“I think the first five were killed by a man named Howard Sawyer,” I said. “I think he’s planning to kill the next four.”

Phil didn’t look impressed.

“I think he moves in with them, takes what they have, and gets rid of them.”

He still didn’t look impressed. I didn’t mention Charlie Chaplin.

“Where did you get this?” he asked.

“Sixth woman on the list, Fiona Sullivan. She’s engaged to Sawyer, but he’s among the missing.”

“You working for her?” Phil asked.

“I’d like to keep her and the others alive,” I said.

“You’re a saint, Tobias,” he said, shaking his head in disbelief. “What’s really going on?”

“Just check on those five at the top,” I said. “See if they’re alive. See if there’s a connection. Okay, I’m working for someone else this Sawyer may want to kill.”

“May?”

“I think so,” I said.

Someone in the squad room went wild with hiccuping laughter. Phil looked toward the door. Crime wasn’t funny. He was trying to place the laugh. Was it one of his men? He turned back to the list I had given him.

“You know how long it would take to do this?” he asked calmly. “That’s assuming your ladies are dead and were residents of Los Angeles County?”