To Catch a Spy (6 page)

The phone rang. I picked it up.

“You have the package?” he asked. He had a high voice with maybe a hint of an accent.

“You know I do.”

“Hold it up now so I can see it,” he said.

I did nothing.

“Yes,” he said. “I see it.”

He was not very good at this game, but it was his game.

“You know where Elysian Park is?” he asked.

“I know.”

“Go to the entrance on North Broadway,” he said.

“The park closes at eight.”

“About one hundred yards to your left, facing the front, is a service entrance,” he said. “The gate will be unlocked. Drive in and close it behind you. You know how to get to the Memorial Grove?”

“Yeah.”

“Go there now. Park. Walk toward the trees.”

He hung up. I got back in the Crosley and started to drive. Elysian Park, on the north side of the city, covers about six hundred acres of land along the Los Angeles River. It has seven miles of paved roads with hairpin curves through arroyo-gashed hills, matted tangles of wild roses, creepers, blue gum eucalyptus, drooping pepper trees, and gnarled live oaks. There are ten miles of foot trails through canyons and up steep hills. The Memorial Grove is a neatly arranged grove of trees with bronze tablets laid out in memory of World War I dead.

I hadn’t been to the park in five or six years, maybe more. My ex-wife and I had taken our lunch to the picnic grounds and walked down a path along the river. I thought about Anne for a few seconds. The city was full of memories of her. I turned on the radio. Music, sound. I didn’t care. I hummed “Anything Goes.” The band on the radio was playing “Stardust.” The two didn’t go together.

North Broadway wasn’t busy, and I had no trouble finding the service entrance gate. I left the motor running, got out, opened the gate, went back to the car, and drove in. I got out again and closed the gates and got back in the Crosley. It was dark in front of me. My headlights were stronger than the bulbs in refrigerators, but not by much. I drove slowly, trying to remember the way to the Memorial Grove. I almost made a wrong turn, but my lights caught a sign with an arrow telling me which way to go.

I parked as close to the Memorial Grove as I could and got out. I had one hand on the .38 in my pocket and the other around the pouch of bills in the other pocket. A flashlight would have been a good idea. The moon wasn’t giving me much help. I stood looking at the black outline of trees, leaves rustling from a thin breeze. I waited as my eyes adjusted to the darkness.

A spot of light. About thirty yards ahead and to my right. I watched it move toward me, disappearing a few times as it went by a tree between it and me. Then, about fifteen yards away, the light stopped moving.

“Come,” came the voice behind the light, the same voice I had heard on the phone a half an hour earlier.

I moved toward the beam of light and felt it find my face.

“Show your hands,” the voice said.

I did.

“Now show what you have brought me.”

I took the pouch out of my pocket and held it up.

“Show me what you brought,” I said, taking the .38 out of my other pocket.

There was a rustle behind the beam, and then a hand came out from behind it, holding an envelope.

“It’s in here,” he said. “Move forward slowly.”

I did. When I was no more than a few yards from him, I could see his shape beyond the light. He was short, thin. He had hair. That was about all I could tell.

“We exchange at the same time,” he said, holding his envelope out.

I followed his example.

His small hand went around the pouch, and my fingers touched his envelope. Things were going well so far, but that changed.

Two shots sounded from behind the beam of light. There was a man gasping. The flashlight fell and landed with its beam headed into the night. I got down on one knee and aimed into the darkness toward where I thought the gun shot had been fired from. I had no hope of hitting anyone. I was breathing hard, hard enough that I didn’t hear whoever had come up behind me and hit me twice on the back of the head and neck. It might have been more than twice. I was out after the second blow.

I’ve been knocked out before. The best part is being out. The worst part is coming to and feeling the pain. I felt a lot of pain. I was on my face, my neck hot, my head throbbing. I had grass in my mouth and something was crawling on my cheek. I brushed it away. It hurt to brush it away.

The flashlight was about six feet from me and still on, aimed at nothing. I crawled to it, took it in my left hand, and reached for my pocket, hoping the .38 was there. It wasn’t. I stood, legs uninterested in cooperating, and pointed the beam toward the tree where I had made the exchange. It took me a few seconds to realize three things. First, I didn’t have the envelope that had been handed to me. Second, I couldn’t find the pouch with Cary Grant’s money. Third, I saw my gun lying on the ground about a yard in front of a man sitting with his back against a tree.

He was almost paper white. Part of the reason was the cold beam of the flashlight, but part of it was because he was losing blood. Some of it was trickling out of his right ear. He was sitting in a small pool of his own blood.

I moved toward him, picked up my gun, and shone the flashlight in all directions. Nothing. No one. I knelt next to the little man, whose eyes rolled up toward my face. He said something, but it was so low I couldn’t understand it, and, besides, it sounded like German.

“I don’t understand German,” I said.

His next words, the last he would ever speak, came out with a gurgle. He grasped my sleeve.

“George Hall,” he said.

He let go of my sleeve and died. His eyes closed. His head slumped to the right.

The little man was wearing a watch. I turned his left wrist and pointed the beam at it. It was almost one. I sat down next to the dead man with my back against the same tree and put my gun on the ground between my legs.

Thoughts at the moment:

Get to a doctor. You were warned by Doc Hodgdon that you’d be in big trouble with another concussion.

My head, neck, and left shoulder hurt, really hurt, drumming, throbbing, beating, damned hurt.

I should get the hell out of there.

Or, I should go find a phone and call the police.

Or, I should go find a phone and call Cary Grant and tell him what had happened.

What I decided to do was just sit there breathing hard on the cool grass. I looked over at the dead man and closed my eyes, not because I was looking at death but because of the pain. I forced myself to turn slightly and reach into his jacket pocket. He was wearing a light brown suit with a white shirt and a silk tie with alternating thin black, brown, and white stripes on a slight angle.

I found his wallet and looked through it.

Thirty-two dollars, three business cards, and a California driver’s license. His name was Bruno Volkman. His address was in Burbank. I took out my notebook and scribbled the address. Then I pocketed the business cards, left the money in the wallet, and put it back in his pocket. I checked the other pockets. Nothing.

I still wasn’t sure of what to do next other than try to get up and back to my car. Maybe I should crawl? No, I put my gun in my jacket pocket, held the flashlight in my left hand, and used the tree to help me stand. I was disoriented. It took me a few sweeps of the grove before I figured out where I had parked. I staggered in the right direction. I staggered right into a uniformed cop, who stepped back, one hand on the gun in his holster and the other on a flashlight he clicked on. He had steady eyes and a serious look on his face. I knew a lot of cops, but not many in this district and not this one.

“What’re you doing in here?” he asked. “The park is closed.”

I shook my head.

“That your car on the road? Crosley?”

“Yes.”

“You hear any gunshots?” he asked.

“Gunshots,” I repeated. “Well …”

“How much have you had to drink?” he asked.

He thought I was drunk. I decided that it might be better that way. Then I decided that my decision was wrong. He was going to ask me for identification. He was going to find the dead man with what I was sure were a pair of holes in his back. If he didn’t find the body tonight, someone would find him in the morning and then the police would find me.

“I had a Pepsi around ten-thirty,” I said. “There’s a dead man back there, sitting by a tree.”

I nodded in the direction from which I had come.

The cop’s gun was out now and aimed in my direction. He took a step back.

“You armed?” he asked.

I nodded to let him know I was.

“Right jacket pocket,” I said. “I didn’t shoot him. Someone shot him and hit me from behind.… Wait a second! Someone shot him from behind and someone hit me from behind. There had to be two of them.”

Gun aimed at my stomach, the cop stepped forward and took the .38 from my pocket. He smelled the barrel.

“It hasn’t been fired. Why are you carrying a weapon?”

“I’m a private investigator. I have a license.”

“Show me.”

I slowly fished my wallet out and handed it to him. He turned the flashlight on it, checked my identification and gun permit and then re-aimed the beam in my face.

“Let’s go take a look at your dead man,” the cop said.

“I need a doctor.”

“We’ll get you one,” he said, herding me back toward the tree.

We had about forty yards to go. Every step was pure pain, from the electric padding that coated my feet to the jabs of agony at the top of my head. The cop, about six paces behind me, pointed the flashlight in front of him and scanned the trees.

“Which tree?” he asked.

I was pretty sure we were looking at it. There was no body.

“Someone took him,” I explained.

“Took the dead guy, the one who was shot?”

“Looks that way,” I said. “Check the tree and the ground.”

“Stand right there,” he said, moving to the tree and flicking his light on it and then on the nearby ground.

“Blood?” I asked.

“Blood,” he confirmed.

He got up and moved in front of me.

“Turn around.”

I turned.

“You’ve got a pretty big gash back there,” he said. “Let’s get you to a doctor.”

“You think that’s my blood on the tree?” I asked.

“What I think, between you and me and the wind, grass, and trees is that you came out here with a fruity friend and had a fight. He hit you and ran. We get a few like you every couple of months.”

“I look like a …?” I was trying to understand.

“Call it whatever you like,” he said. “You pansies come in all brands and sizes. Can you drive?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Good. I’m going to do you a favor. Get in your car. I’ll drive behind you. You know where the hospital is?”

“County?”

“County. Drive there slow. I’ll be right behind you. When I see you get out of your car at the hospital, I leave. What I want is for you to stay the hell out of this park and never come back. That or I take you in, and I don’t have the time to fill out the papers. So, sure you can drive?”

“I can drive,” I said.

“Let’s go,” he said. We trudged in the general direction of where I had parked.

CHAPTER

5

“I could, except for the fact that you are walking unsteadily and talking incoherently, declare you legally dead.”

The statement was made by an old acquaintance of mine, Dr. Marcus Parry, who seemed to live in the emergency room of Los Angeles County Hospital. He had seen me the last two times I had concussions. He agreed with my handball-playing friend, Doc Hodgdon, that I couldn’t take any more blows to the head. Parry was just barely in his forties and back from the war for about a year. When he had left, he had been a lanky smiling man with blonde hair. When he came back, he had lost his smile and much of his hair. He looked ten years older than he was.

I was on an examining table, where he had stitched my scalp and checked my neck and shoulders. There was light coming through a white frosted pane of glass. There were three X-rays hanging next to each other.

“They’re in chronological order,” he said. “This one.” He pointed to the one farthest left. “This old four-year-old one shows depressions in the skull. Next one shows your skull beginning to look like an overused Ping-Pong ball. Let’s jump to today’s. Look.”

I looked at it. It looked exactly like the others.

“I’ve seen healthier skulls on corpses exhumed after six months,” Parry said. “And the scar tissue you’ve … what’s the use? You’re not going to change.”

“It’s what I do,” I said.

“What you do. I see. Could you possibly consider doing something else?”

“What?”

“Cleaning toilets in the hospital would be a good start,” he said, flipping a switch and turning off the light behind the glass. “Safer and probably pays more than you make now.”

“I’ll think about it.”

“No you won’t,” he said with a sigh, gathering his X rays of my head. “I’ve got a file on you, Peters. Someday I’ll write an article about your body. You’re a testament to what the human body outside of a war zone can take.”

“Thanks.”

“It wasn’t a compliment. It was a comment on your stupidity.”

“Determination,” I amended.

He shook his head and motioned for me to follow him. I did. He had a tiny office with no windows. On his desk were three small bottles of pills.

“Take this one for pain,” he said, handing me the first. “This one for balance. And this one for good luck. All three twice a day. Got it?”

“Got it,” I said, picking up the bottles and putting them in my jacket pocket.

“How are you feeling?”

“Truth?”

“No,” he said. “Lie to me. I’m the doctor. It’s always best to lie to the doctor.”

“I’ve felt better. Head still hurts. Shoulder’s sore. But I can walk pretty steadily.”

“Go home,” he said, looking up at a nurse at his door. She might have been eighty or older. She motioned to him.

“Got to go,” he said. “Busy tonight. Not like last night. New Year’s Eve is always busy, but tonight’s busy enough.”