The Devil Met a Lady (15 page)

There was one step up to a wooden porch with a leaking roof. The boards didn’t creak under my feet. They just sagged like soaked cotton.

I didn’t expect the door to be open and it wasn’t. I could ring the bell and there was some chance it would work, but there might be five ways out of the place, and I was in no condition to run around back and chase Pinketts who, as I remembered from the last time he took off, was pretty damn fast.

I moved to the window to the left of the door. It had a screen and the screen had jagged holes. I played with the screen. It fell off with a plop. The window was latched, but the latch was loose. I played with the window, trying to loosen the screws in the latch. They gave a little, but the window wiggled and made noise. What the hell. I pushed up steady and hard and the latch did a double somersault inside and landed on the floor. Charlie Spivak would have given me a quieter entrance.

I listened for a few seconds. Rain on the roof. Maybe something inside, but no footsteps … or very, very quiet ones. I put my leg through the open window, found floor, and went in. I stood still for about ten seconds and was almost sure I heard a voice. I closed the window very slowly. When it was firmly down, I was sure.

It was Pinketts.

Either the person he was talking to was very quiet or he was on the phone. It sounded like his phone voice. Everyone has a phone voice.

I needed a flashlight. The only one I had was in the Crosley, which was, I hoped, still parked in front of the Farraday. I had no idea where my .38 was, but the Buck Rogers flashlight, shaped like a space gun, had been a present from my nephews. It had almost gotten me killed when Greta Garbo … Pinketts raised his voice, pleading.

There was something, a thin glow, ahead of me that might have been light coming under a door. I moved toward it and Pinketts’s voice. My knee hit a table or an anvil and I pulled in a deep breath.

Pinketts kept talking me toward him and I kept coming. I was close enough now to hear his end of the conversation.

“… if you think I would sell out a partner for a few hundred dollars,” he said indignantly. “Pride has depth or it has no meaning. Don’t threaten. I will not be panicked by reality.”

I put my hand on the door and felt my way to the door-knob. The rain was slowing down outside and Pinketts was on a righteous ramble.

“Yes, yes, die,” he said as I turned the knob. “I would rather die. What meaning is there in life, my enemy, if we are unable to go beyond simple sustenance and pleasure, if we sell our virtues for a luxury?”

I pushed open the door slowly, carefully, a crack that sliced light across the dark room behind me. Pinketts’s voice was loud and clear now and not far away.

“Listen, of course, I’ll listen,” he said with a laugh. “When have you known me not to listen? Of course I would prefer to survive.”

I couldn’t see him but I knew he was close. On a good day, if he wasn’t carrying a mace, a blowtorch, or Gatling gun, I could probably take Pinketts, especially since he was especially fond of his straight nose. But the night and the day had been hard. If I was lucky, I’d take him from behind, turn him around, and put one low in his stomach. Then, while he considered the follies of his life, I’d politely ask him for the damned record he had almost certainly stolen.

Dim light came from a lamp across the bedroom, next to a narrow canopy bed. Where the hell was he?

“Yes,” he said. “But it seems I have a visitor.”

I turned. He had been standing behind the door. There was no phone in his hand, but there was a bat—a runt of a bat, but big enough for this game. He swung and the bat caught me in the chest.

I fell backward and the floor hit my tailbone.

“Don’t get up, Toby,” Pinketts said, taking two steps forward to stand over me. He held the bat over his head in two hands. “I warn you. You have my word as a Pinketts that I will strike and strike with a desperate fury such as only the most passionate crusaders may have known.”

I had nothing to say only because I couldn’t catch my breath. I went for small gulps of air and almost had time to wonder if I had added a cracked rib or two to the night’s entertainment.

The bat was about a foot over my head. I could clearly see the grain and the letters burned into it: Souvenir of Lodi.

“Can you speak?” he asked.

I looked up at him. He was wearing a brown sweater with a yellow deer woven into it. The collar of his shirt under the sweater was out on the right and in on the left. The light was bad, but I had the impression that his pants were a tad wrinkled and his socks didn’t match. There was no scarf around his neck and no lean cigar in his mouth. This was not the sartorial Pinketts of memory.

“Record,” I gasped.

“No,” he said. “The record was set no more than two months ago when another burglar entered my mother’s house. I dispatched him and sent him flying with this selfsame weapon in two minutes.”

“Record you stole,” I growled while I hyperventilated.

“I don’t have any record,” he said.

“Wiklund doesn’t have it,” I said slowly. “It was in that house or his car. You went running off with something in your hand. I’m betting it was the record and not a bottle of Mission Bell wine.”

In fact, I hadn’t seen Pinketts run away and certainly hadn’t seen anything in his hands, but this was the moment of truth.

“Toby, Toby,” he whined, shaking his head in disappointment that his old and trusted buddy did not believe him.

“Andrea, Andrea,” I answered. “Can I get up?”

“You may,” he said. “I don’t know if you can.”

“Thanks for the grammar lesson,” I said, getting to one knee.

“When English is not one’s first language, one delights in the nuances,” he said.

“You were born in Santa Rosa, Andrea,” I said, now leaning over, hands on knees, trying to look even worse than I felt, as I breathed deeply, clenched my teeth, and rubbed my tightly taped ribs. “Your mother’s name is Dixie, ran Dixie’s House of Pleasure, located just behind Dixie’s Bar on Rose Avenue.”

I was ready for my move. Well, not really ready, but as close to it as I probably would be for the rest of the night.

“How do you know?” he asked, stepping back.

“You told me,” I said. “Five years ago in the shed behind Bette Davis’s house while we were waiting for her husband, Lefty.”

“My mother’s sleeping in the next room,” Pinketts said, pointing to the door with his bat. “Keep your voice down.”

I staggered a step forward, ready to grab the bat or at least block it with some part of my body other than my head or ribs. Pinketts now had a gun in his hand. I recognized it. It was mine.

“Stop,” he said. “I don’t want to shoot you, Toby.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“It would wake up my mother,” he explained. “Dixie sleeps like a redwood. But a gunshot … I would prefer a quieter solution.”

We were about ten feet apart.

“Question,” I said. “Why’d you shoot Niles?”

“Answer,” he said. “I didn’t. I pride myself on my ability to deal with problems with my manner, my eloquence. I don’t shoot people.”

“Then,” I said, taking another step forward, “what’s the gun for?”

“Every person who has shot someone for the first time could have said, just moments before the act, that he had never shot anyone. I don’t think it is any consolation to be the first exception to my enviable record, do you?”

“The record,” I said. “I’m cold. I’m wet. My face hurts. My back hurts. My ribs hurt and I am damned mad at you. I don’t want to stand around talking.”

I took two steps toward him. Pinketts leveled the gun at my face.

“No,” he said with a smile. “No, no, Toby. I can’t let you touch me. I’m so close, so close to having enough to get out of this house, this, this …”

“The record,” I said. “I want it.”

“The record, the record,” he hissed. “There is plenty for both of us. Wiklund will pay to get it back. He has a client who will pay, who knows, he thought a hundred thousand, maybe two. He’ll pay us half that or maybe, maybe Davis’s husband or Davis will pay us more? Or … who knows? The possibilities are almost endless.”

“How are you going to keep Wiklund from killing us?” I said, sliding half a foot closer to him.

“I will be in a very small town on a very large beach in Chile,” he said. “And when the war ends, I go back to the village of my ancestors in Rumania, buy a villa, and live like a king.”

“On twenty-five thousand bucks?” I asked.

“Fifty,” he said. “And we’re talking about Rumania, not Paris.”

“I thought we were splitting,” I said, now only half-a-dozen feet away.

“Then I’ll ask for more, much more,” he said, showing lots of teeth. “I am not afraid of audacity.”

“Give me my gun, Pinketts,” I said. “You don’t want to wake Dixie.”

He pulled back the hammer and said softly, “There is no Dixie. My mother is dead.”

It was at that moment that a voice behind Pinketts said, “Stop.”

Pinketts turned toward the warning and made two mistakes. He swung the bat somewhere in the general area of where the average man’s head might be, and then he fired the pistol where even a short person’s stomach might reasonably be expected. The bat missed Gunther by almost a yard. The bullet, unless I was wrong, missed his head by an inch or two.

Gunther spun and threw his elbow out with a snap into Pinketts’s groin. Pinketts bent over, dropped his bat and gun, and rolled over into a dresser.

“Thanks, Gunther,” I said.

“Dirty,” gasped Pinketts. “Dirty fighting.”

“One of the few useful things I learned in my circus days,” said Gunther, reaching back to help Pinketts to his feet. Pinketts scuttled back, fearing another attack.

“The record, Andrea,” I said. “Tell me where it is and I’ll take your word that you didn’t kill Niles.”

“Why?” he asked, sitting against the wall, face red, hands protecting his agony.

“Because I believe you,” I said. “You shot at Gunther. You meant to kill him which means you probably meant to kill me which means you probably told me the truth when you said you didn’t kill Niles because if you had you had no reason to lie since you were going to kill us anyway. You follow that, Gunther?”

“Somewhat,” said Gunther, who had picked up the weapon and was now aiming it at Pinketts.

“But,” said Pinketts, “I lied about my mother.”

“Whose side are you on, here, Andrea? Look, someone probably heard that shot. Somebody might just have called the cops.”

“It’s in the room off the kitchen,” he said, pointing to a door near the bed. “Records. Albums. It’s in the Rise Stevens
Carmen
.”

“What did you do with the
Carmen
recording?” asked Gunther.

“I threw it away,” said Pinketts.

Gunther said four words in a language that might have been German, but were certainly not meant to convey approval of Pinketts’s action.

“Watch him, Gunther,” I said, and slouched toward the door.

I opened it, found the light switch, and looked around the room. It was stacked to the ceiling with record albums.

“Where?” I called.

“Near the window. Third shelf up, almost at the end,” Pinketts answered.

I moved to the right place, reached up, and heard a gunshot. I moved as fast as I could back to the bedroom. Gunther was alone.

“I may have shot him,” said Gunther, gesturing toward the open door.

I took the gun from Gunther’s hand and stepped past him in time to see Pinketts go through the front door. I didn’t follow him. I was too battered to catch him, and Gunther was too small.

“Let’s look for that record,” I said, tucking the .38 into my belt. “I’d give us five minutes, maybe less, before the police come through that door.”

We looked. He took the low shelves. I took the high ones. I found the
Carmen
album in less than forty seconds, opened it, and knew that Pinketts had lied. The record clearly and commercially was labeled
Carmen
. We strewed records around. I strewed faster. Gunther didn’t want to break them.

“Pons,” he said, holding up an album with Lily Pons’s picture on the cover. “Here it is. Not Stevens and
Carmen
. Pons and
Carmen
.”

He handed the record to me. The word “Davis” was scrawled on the otherwise blank label.

“Back in the album,” I said, handing it back to him.

We went out the rear door as a car pulled up in front of the house with a wet-street squeal. There was a fence across the soggy yard.

I sloshed to it with Gunther at my side and scrambled over. I reached back for Gunther, but he just handed me the album, vaulted up, and came down next to me.

“Circus?” I asked.

“Well, perhaps I learned
two
useful things with the Ringling Brothers,” he admitted.

The next step was to make our way back to Gunther’s car, which took us about five minutes. We climbed in and looked back at the police car parked in front of Pinketts’s house. Then Gunther pulled away from the curb.

“Invigorating,” he said. “I am sorry, however, that I allowed that man to escape.”

“Doesn’t matter, Gunther,” I said, rubbing my ribs and clutching the album. “I didn’t know what to do with him anyway.”

“And so,” he asked. “Where?”

“To hide a record.”

Gunther dropped me off at the hotel a little after midnight. I was wet, tired, in about average pain for a nearly half-century-old body that had been beaten like a Chinese gong.

The lobby was empty and Cosacos, the desk clerk who had checked Bette Davis and me in the night before, looked up from the book he was reading and registered indifference.

“Evening,” I said, moving past him toward the elevator.

“Reading an interesting new book here,” he said.

“That so,” said I, continuing across the lobby.

“’Bout a woman who disappears,” he said, a little louder.

“Sounds interesting,” I said.

I was at the elevator door now. I pushed the button and watched the arrow.

“It’s called
Laura
,” the clerk said. “By Vera Caspary.”

The arrow moved slowly down … 9–8–7–6—