“All right,” sighed Winning.
“Two questions for a dying man?” I asked.
“Very fast ones, Peters, this is upsetting Mrs. Grayson,” he said.
“Sorry. How good was my story?”
“So-so,” he admitted. “A few details were off, but very close. Your second question?”
“Is that my gun?”
“It is,” he said. “Now Delores, I suggest you take your mother to her room for a while.” Delores and Jeanette obeyed and left Winning and me alone.
“That gun makes a big noise when it goes off,” I said, taking a step toward him.
“There’s no one around to hear it for half a mile, and there’s nothing at all unusual about shooting at prairie dogs at night,” he said.
I took another step toward him and he raised the gun to fire. With my next step he did fire but nothing happened. The step after that I was in front of him and threw a punch that came from the floor. He pulled the trigger again as he fell. The bullet took off through the window and into the night. I kicked the gun out of his hand and he rolled over moaning and holding his chin.
“I think it’s broken,” he moaned.
“We can only hope,” I said, going through his pockets and finding my wallet. “No bullet in the first chamber,” I explained. “Never is. That’s the trouble with being an amateur.”
I made a long-distance call to Phil and invited the family back into the living room to wait for the state police. They came in about twenty minutes and led us all out after I turned the gun over to them. Phil had called, and I was sure I’d be spending a night in the lockup at the worst. I didn’t know what would happen to Winning and the Grayson girls. I didn’t care.
CHAPTER 17
The stitches came out of my head three days later, the morning Phil told me that Winning and the Graysons were being booked for murder. The case was pretty good if not perfect. If Mrs. Grayson didn’t take back her confession, they’d all do a lot of hard time.
The story had made the first pages of papers all across the country, primarily because Richard Talbott was one of the victims. The double murder shared space with the Japanese taking of Corregidor and the Russian counteroffensive.
There was no thank-you note from Anne for the hat, but I hadn’t expected one. There was no thank-you note from Arnie either when I collected on four overdue bills, one of them going back to 1939. Barely veiled threats and, in the case of the 1939 bill, the casual showing of my shoulder holster had done the trick. The guy was a close-to-the-ground mutt who owned a hot dog stand in Tarzana. If he had given me trouble, he would have discovered an empty holster. I had hocked my.38 at Wiley’s Pawn shop on Vine when the police returned it to me. With the five bucks I got for it and the eighteen left in my wallet when I got it back from Winning in Plaza Del Lago, I had enough to pay back Rosie and eat, especially with a free meal with my brother’s family.
I had dinner with them in North Hollywood on Saturday. Ruth was a better cook than Mrs. Plaut’s Aunt Jessica, but I had to spend part of the time looking out for my niece, Lucy, whose favorite game was to sneak up behind family members, yell “Surprise,” and whollop them with whatever was at hand, a doll, an old lock, a toy gun. She had started the game as a baby and was having trouble breaking the habit at the age of almost three.
“President’s eating fresh fruit and cutting back on desserts with sugar,” Ruth said, apologizing for not having made my favorite chocolate pudding pie. I peeled a navel orange and ate it, watching for Lucy and keeping a hand ready to defend my not-completely-healed head.
Phil said nothing. Well, almost nothing. At one point he asked to have the stew passed to him.
After dinner the boys and I left. I thought Phil wanted to say something, but he didn’t. Ruth said they had to be home by eleven, and out we went.
I couldn’t find much to see, and I wanted to play it safe, so we saw My Gal Sal with Rita Hayworth and Victor Mature.
“I wish I could do that,” Nat said when we got out of the show.
“What?” asked his brother, shoveling in the last greasy drops of popcorn.
“Make my whole scalp go up and down like Victor Mature when he’s thinking. Can you do that, Uncle Toby?”
I tried and failed and then asked the boys casually how their father had been in the last week or so.
“Like always,” said Nat. “Busy. We were supposed to go to the park last week for a picnic, but he was chasing crazy killers again. He keeps catching them but there’s always more.”
Dave dropped the empty popcorn box in a wastebasket, and we all climbed in the front seat of the car.
“Are you going to be cops?” I asked.
“I think I’ll be a private cop so I can shoot rat-faced hoods like you do,” Nat said seriously.
“The problem is they usually shoot me first,” I said.
“I’ll think about it,” he said. “Dave will probably be a comedian in dives around the city and Lucy will be a has-been.”
“You’ve got it all worked out,” I said.
“It pays to plan ahead,” Nat said, punching his brother in the shoulder for no reason I could see.
On the morning the stitches came out, I got a check in the mail from my last client, Emmett Kelly the circus clown. He invited me to drop in on him if I came East. I read the letter over a taco at Manny’s and figured out that I now had enough money to pay my fifteen bucks rent to Mrs. Plaut and ten to Jeremy for the office. I gave Arnie twenty more bucks toward the now-repaired Ford and still had enough to eat for another week or two if I drove very little and made no further moves in my so-far-unsuccessful assault on Carmen the cashier at Levy’s Grill.
So, on the morning the stitches came out I went over to the Hope Street YMCA after setting up a handball game with Doc Hodgdon, the sixty-six-year-old orthopedic surgeon, who as usual barely worked up a sweat in disposing of me 21-4, 21-9. I slumped to the locker room with Hodgdon looking for someone else to take on before he went back to manipulating the spines of the wretched.
I went back to my boardinghouse and called the Winning Institute, where I was informed that the institute was undergoing a name change. Henceforth, the place would be called the Fresno Institute for Mental Research. Dr. Vadergreff was now in charge, though Dr. Winning was eventually expected to return.
In ninety-nine years to life, I thought, and asked for special permission to speak to Sklodovich.
“I’m sorry,” the woman on the other end said, “there is no one in the institute with that name.”
“Cortland,” I said.
“We do have such a patient,” the woman said, “but I’m afraid you cannot speak to him. There are strict orders-”
“Let me talk to Dr. Vadergreff,” I jumped in. “Tell him it’s Toby Peters. I don’t care where he is or what he is doing.”
The line clicked off. For a second or two I thought she had cut me off, but the line clicked back on, and I recognized Dr. Vadergreff’s voice through his first cough.
“Yes, Mr.Peters,” he said in his best doctor manner.
“I want to talk to Cortland,” I said. “If I don’t, I’ll initiate a lawsuit against your little castle for kidnapping me. It might not hold up, but with the publicity you’ve already had, you’ll have to pack up the place stone by stone and move it to Canada.”
“I see,” he said. “I’m not sure it would be good for Mr. Cortland.”
“I have great respect for your opinion,” I said, “but at the moment I think you should shove it in a tin can and get Cortland on the horn.”
The phone went down hard, and I looked down the stairs to watch Mrs. Plaut slowly rising toward me, her glasses firmly planted, her eyes narrow, a pile of papers under her arm. I turned toward the phone as she moved behind me and pretended not to see her. I kept saying “uh huh, huh uh” to a dead phone until Cortland came on.
“Haven’t talked on a phone for four or five years,” he said.