Peeper (8 page)

Ralph waited another minute, then crept forward and put his good eye to the peephole in the door. The foyer was deserted. Quickly he opened the door and stepped out. O'Leary started back downstairs.

Coughing loudly to cover the noise, Ralph slammed the door. Without pausing he hammered on it. “C'mon, Vinnie, I locked myself out! Vinnie?”

“Nobody's home. I was just there.”

Ralph jumped convincingly and turned toward O'Leary. A seam tore; he'd caught one flap of his suitcoat between the door and the frame. He leaned against the door. “I didn't know you was there. I left my key in the apartment.”

“You won't need it. I just came from there. One of our boys did a good job on your door.” The arson investigator paused on the stairs with his hands in his pockets. The cigarette in his mouth was leaking ash onto his sportcoat, which already had a hole burned in one lapel. “I wanted to ask your landlord what time Miss Dane usually came home. Maybe you can tell me.”

Ralph tugged at his coat. It wouldn't budge. “Oh, different times; you know.”

“I don't know. That's why I asked.”

“Well, you don't set your watch by no whores. Unless you're in bed with them, ha.”

“See, that's the problem. If nobody could predict when she'd be out or how long, how'd the torch know when to go in and rig the switch?”

“Yeah. Boy, that's a toughie.” With his hidden hand he tried opening the door a crack. It had locked when he slammed it.

“Can we go up to your apartment? I'd like to ask you some more questions.”

“Could we make it later? I got a date.”

“I thought you were just coming in.”

“I was. Standing here waiting for Vinnie I remembered I'm late.”

“Another blackout?”

“Nope. Just running behind.”

“You been in a fight?”

Ralph touched his fat lip. His nose had stopped bleeding, but he had a knot on his forehead from the coffee table leg. “I took a brodie down the fucking stairs.”

“You just got here, you said.”

“Not these stairs. Another stairs.”

“You ought to leave yourself alone. You find out yet who those friends were this morning?”

“Working on it.” Ralph crossed his ankles.

“Hope you come up with something. Listen, I won't keep you.”

“I guess I can wait a minute for Vinnie. I'll need that key later and he might be asleep. I guess they need you back at headquarters.”

“News to me.” The column of ash on O'Leary's cigarette grew long and plopped to his coat. He didn't brush it off. “She might make it, they're saying now.”

“Who?”

“Lyla Dane. Doctors say she's holding her own and if that keeps up her chances get better by the minute. Coming out of the coma is something else again.”

“That's great. Her maybe making it, I mean.”

“Yeah. Listen, I took a look through that hole in your door.”

Oh, shit. “Yeah?”

“What made the mess, the explosion or the firemen?”

“Neither. I ain't had much time to tidy up lately.”

“You ought to see my rec room. Good name for it.” O'Leary came down the rest of the way and grasped the front-door handle. “Hey, what about your tie?”

“Tie?”

“You know, that thing that goes around your neck.”

“Neck?”

“I mean, I know times have changed for the kids, but guys like you and me need all the help we can get on dates. They like it when you dress up, no matter what they say.”

“Oh.” Ralph felt the blood coming back into his face. “This ain't that kind of date.”

“Suit yourself.” O'Leary snapped away his burning butt. “Let me know when your memory kicks in. You're still on the list.”

When he had left, Ralph used the celluloid window again, freed his coat, and mopped his sweat off the doorknob with his handkerchief.

Back in his apartment he drained the last two drops from the gin bottle he'd awakened with that morning—it was the only thing still where he'd left it—and went into the bathroom to splash water on his face. Someone, either Vinnie or his killer, had pulled the broken corner out of the back of the medicine cabinet and failed to replace it.

Two scenarios. Either Vinnie had discovered Carpenter tossing the place and gotten himself throttled for it, or it had happened the other way around when Carpenter came to search for the film and found Vinnie already engaged in the same task. It didn't much matter to Vinnie which way it went. Ralph would miss him. Mrs. Capablanca and Ralph didn't get along, and if Lucille Lovechild was any indication of how widows carried on their late husbands' works, it looked like he'd be changing his address soon. At least he'd get to keep his camera.

If it still worked. Someone had pried open the back, found it innocent of film, and thrown it on the bedroom floor. All Ralph could determine from pressing the button was that the shutter still stuck. He put it in the closet—stripped, like the rest of the room.

Finding the telephone took some doing. The nightstand he kept it on had been dumped over along with his old bureau and his mattress and bedding, and he had to start at the wall and trace the cord to where the instrument lay buried under a pile of underwear, Archie comic books, and two pillows whose slips needed changing. It was squawking, a healthy sign. He worked the plunger and called Neal English at his home.

“Go away, Ralph.”

“Neal, I hope you got that film stashed in a safe place.”

“You got my cut yet?”

“Not yet, for chrissake. I'm just checking on my insurance. Things are getting heavy.”

“That's just your fat butt.”

“C'mon, Neal!”

“Don't get your balls in an uproar. I put it in my box at the bank.”

“Hey, thanks, buddy.”

“I'm not your buddy, asshole. I can't bleed you if I don't take care of the goods.” He hung up.

Ralph was feeling better. There would be hell to pay when Vinnie turned up dead, but landlords were nobody's favorite people anyway, and smut peddlers even less so. The list of suspects ranged from a little old lady who couldn't get her faucet fixed to the Pope. Which, come to think of it, wasn't so far off the mark. Mrs. Gelatto had seen Ralph on the stairs with the body, but blind-as-a-bat eyewitnesses were hard to credit. All he had to do was keep his mouth shut. As for Carpenter, now that he knew Ralph didn't carry the film with him or have it hidden in his apartment, Ralph was a lot more dangerous to him dead than alive.

Even so, Ralph spent half an hour looking through the debris for his revolver. It was a piece of junk, an off-brand Italian piece rebored to American .38 caliber that he'd bought for forty dollars from a pawnbroker on Gratiot when he was still working for Great Lakes Universal Life, Casualty, Auto, and Paternity; but with his door in splinters he'd have felt safer with it inside his reach. He couldn't find it, however.

Realizing suddenly that he hadn't had a nibble of anything all day that couldn't be poured into a glass, he scouted out the refrigerator. He came up with a slice of headcheese that had begun to turn blue around the edges and a quart of milk that didn't smell too suspicious. Someone had been in there as well, he was pretty sure; but not looking for food. He stuck the meat between two slices of bread and ate it, washing it down with milk straight from the carton. It had always amazed him how much better barley was than anything else fermented.

He flipped the knob on the TV but got nothing on any channel. Investigating, he discovered that someone had pulled the set away from the wall, unscrewed the back panel, and torn apart the works. After that he went to bed, but before he climbed under the covers he went back into the living room and retrieved the coffee table leg. As a weapon it had proven itself, if only upon him.

The telephone pulled him out of an erotic dream.

“Whoever you are, you'd better hang up right now, or I'll find out where you live and order a truckload of pigshit and give them your address.”

The caller cleared his throat. “Mr. Poteet?”

“Who the hell is this?”

“This is Philip Steelcase.”

“Who the hell is Philip Steelcase?”

“Bishop Steelcase, Mr. Poteet. You can't have forgotten.”

He sat up, scratched his head, and hung the alarm clock in front of his good eye. “It's almost midnight!” he whined.

“Thank you. I wonder if you could meet me in the St. Balthazar rectory at noon tomorrow.”

“And let you slip me another mickey?”

“I regret that very much. If you'll see me, I'll show you just how much.”

“What's that supposed to mean?”

“It means you win, Mr. Poteet. I accept your terms. The retainer was two thousand per month, I believe. In any case I should like to discuss the arrangements.”

Ralph said he'd be there and fell out of bed, spearing a buttock with the nail attached to the table leg.

Chapter 10

“New rule, Poteet.”

Lucille Lovechild had her glasses off, always a bad sign. Today she was wearing a steel-gray suit and a navy turtleneck sweater that made her look like a U-boat commander. She stood with her fingers spread on her desktop, her usual attitude when Ralph was in the room.

He said, “Let 'er rip,
Commandante.”

“You are not to talk to any of my operatives.”

“I'm one of your operatives.”

“You're a file clerk.”

“Talk about what?”

“Anything. Politics, religion, the weather, sex, the investigation business, who played Little Luke on
The Real McCoys.”

“Michael Winkleman.”

“Who cares? If you see someone in the hall who compliments you on your choice of ties—an unlikely event, granted, but myopia and electrical blackouts are common hazards—you will continue past without acknowledgment. I can put it in writing if you like.”

“What's wrong with my tie?” He had put on the lucky one this morning. After having been used as a garrote it was a little wrinkled, but just handling it last night had landed him an endowment of two grand per month—although he was considering asking for more.

She said, “You can wear a boa constrictor around your neck for all I care; in fact, I'd prefer it. I just don't want you associating with any of my people.”

“What's this one about?”

“Very early this morning, for the second morning in a row, I was awakened by a telephone call. It was young Chuck Waverly, asking me to come down to the Wayne County Jail and post bail for him. He was under arrest for criminal trespass and assault.”

“Who'd he hit?”

“A fist belonging to a guest in room six of the Acre of Ecstasy Motel in East Detroit, repeatedly. The charge of assault in this case refers to invasion of privacy with a camera. It seems that Waverly broke into the room while it was occupied and started taking pictures of the registered guest while
he
was occupying a young woman who gave her name to the police as Tiffany Waterford. It seems you told him to do it.”

“If a guy wants to dip his stick, he don't need my advice. If he did, I wouldn't of steered him to a dump like the Acre of Ecstasy. They got that liquid soap there that smells like—”

“I mean Waverly.”

“Which one's he, the dumpy guy in back?”

“You're
the dumpy guy in back. You know very well whom I mean.”

“Did he hang on to the camera?”

“What's that got to do with anything?”

“Hell, Lucille—”

“Mrs. Lovechild.”

“Hell, Mrs. Lovechild—”

“Don't curse in this office, you son of a bitch.”

“Jiminy cricket, Mrs. L., if he got the pictures—”

“Jimmy cricket?”

“If he got the pictures and he hung on to them, you ought to give him a raise. Me, too, for putting him wise. Them shots of Klugman getting his oil changed will clear up that insurance beef like—”

“The pictures he took were of Arthur Hieronymous Blund, midwestern sales representative for the Needleman Farm Implements Corporation of Urbana, Illinois. It was the wrong room. Mr. Blund is threatening to sue.”

“Is there a Mrs. Blund?”

“I wouldn't know. I never heard of him until I saw his name on the arrest report.”

“If there is, he won't sue. Chances are he won't even if there ain't. He might if the broad's name was anything but Tiffany. Can you picture Judge Wapner hearing that one?”

“I didn't call you in here to collaborate on a what-to-name-the-baby book. From now on Chuck Waverly and everything under this roof with ears to listen to your line of crap are off limits.” She sniffed the air. “Have you been drinking?”

“Drinking and stinking.” He aimed a matchstick at his mouth and got it on the second try.

“I knew it! You come in here battered up from some barroom brawl, limping—”

“I sat on a nail.”

“Take that thing out of your mouth,” she said.

“How come?”

“Because I'm going to kiss you, that's how come.”

“Jesus, Lucille—I mean, golly gumwart, Mrs. Lovechild, I never figured—” He missed the matchstick and grasped his nose between thumb and forefinger. It wouldn't come loose.

“Never mind. The urge has passed. The reason I wanted to kiss you is you just broke a rule. I gave you till Friday before you broke down on the alcohol thing, but you must think it's my birthday. I've dreamed of saying these words: You're fired.”

“I quit.”

“No, you're fired.”

“Quit.”

“Fired.”

“I said I quit before you said you're fired.”

“You did not. I said you're fired first.”

“Yeah, well, you're ugly.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“You should. If I had a face like yours I'd shave my ass and walk around on my hands.”