Mildred Pierced (2 page)

The Ration Board allotted each American forty-eight points a month and warned us not to use them all up during the first week.

I was to pick up a pound of bacon (no more than thirty-nine cents), a pound of oleo (no more than seventeen cents), a No. 2 can of green beans (for eleven cents), and two pounds of sirloin steak at forty-two cents a pound. The tenants had all chipped in their ration coupons, and Mrs. Plaut had given me exactly enough cash.

When she had caught me hurrying down the stairs that morning, heading for the door and my meeting with Sheldon Minck, she had handed me the list, instructions, coupons. She grabbed my arm. She weighs about as much as a sponge cake and stands no more than four-feet-eight, but she has the grip of a Swedish plumber.

“Breakfast,” she had said.

“No time,” I answered. “Dr. Minck is in trouble.”

“Then he should see an eye doctor,” she said. “Not an exterminator.”

Mrs. Plaut is actually under the dual delusion that I am not only an exterminator, but also a book editor. Both fantasies had been gleaned from bits of conversation which then were cemented in her mind as undeniable truth. Thus, one of my duties as a tenant in the House of Plaut on Heliotrope Street was to read chapters of the ongoing family history she was writing.

“An eye doctor?” I asked before I could stop myself.

“That’s what the mister did when he was seeing double before the big war—not this one, but the
big
one.”

“He’s in trouble,” I had semi-shouted, “not seeing double.”

“Bugs?”

“What?” I said, wondering where this was going.

“He has bugs?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Unsanitary,” she said with disapproval. “I’ve given my bird a new name.”

“Great,” I said, trying to escape.

Mrs. Plaut was constantly changing the name of her squawking bird, which either sat asleep on the perch in its cage or went wild. Mrs. Plaut’s rooms were right off the front door at the bottom of the stairs. The door was open.

Getting past her was a challenge I rarely met. The bird was quiet.

“I have renamed him Jamaica Red,” she said.

The bird was brown and green, some kind of little parrot. I doubted if it came from Jamaica.

“Great name,” I said.

She smiled.

“He seems to like it. It soothes his savage breast.”

With that, she had let go of my arm and I fled.

The Crosley didn’t use much gas, which was good because there was a major gas shortage. It didn’t matter if you had the coupons or not. There just wasn’t much gas, which suddenly made my tiny automobile a valuable means of transportation. No-Neck Arnie the mechanic had offered me what I had bought it from him for plus forty dollars. I had turned him down. It wasn’t easy getting in and out of, but it was easy to park and seemed to run on the memory of gasoline.

There were four people waiting on a wooden bench in the lobby facing the uniformed desk clerk at the Wilshire Street Station, a warhorse named Corso whom I knew would be ready for pasture in less than a year.

“Toby,” he called out. “How’s it going?”

“I’m blessed with beauty, wealth, and a heart full of fellowship,” I said. “Life is wonderful.”

Corso shook his head and laughed, but it sounded more like a grunt.

It didn’t take much to make him laugh. He had been born with the looks of a bewildered bull. I was a flat-nosed former cop pushing fifty who looked more like a backup thug in a gangster picture than a leading man. I lived from client to client and sometimes kept from getting behind on my rent by filling in for a vacationing or sick house detective in one of the downtown hotels.

I started for the stairs when he waved me back.

“She’s in the hospital again,” Corso said softly, looking at the family of four sitting on the bench patiently to be sure they weren’t listening.

“She” was my brother Phil’s wife, Ruth, the mother of my two nephews, Nathan and David, and my four-year-old niece, Lucy. Ruth had been sick for almost two years, in and out of the hospital, almost not making it out the last two times. I had been at their house two Sundays ago. There was almost nothing left of Ruth, yet she had made dinner and tried to pay attention to the conversation. We had listened to
The Aldrich Family
, or pretended to.

“How bad?” I asked.

Corso shrugged.

“Don’t know. Can’t be good. Thought you should know before you went up to see him. You know?”

I knew. Phil didn’t accept frustration, which was most of the reason he had been reduced from captain to lieutenant a little over a year earlier. Death was an enemy. Every criminal on both sides of the prison walls was an enemy. When I wasn’t being careful, I was a convenient focus for his rage. He wasn’t going gently into that good night, and he wouldn’t let anyone else, either.

“I’ll be careful,” I told Corso and tapped my palm on his desk.

“Just thought you should know,” he said.

I nodded and went up the wooden stairs to the landing and into the squad room. It was a quiet morning. There were nine desks in the space designed for six desks. Along the door by the wall was a wooden bench. No one was sitting on it. Four of the desks had cops behind them. Two were typing reports. Two were talking to victims, witnesses, or suspects. It was hard to tell since both of the people in the chairs next to the desks were young Mexicans who looked decidedly unhappy. The rest of the cops were probably out on the street.

The squad room didn’t smell or look as bad as it usually did. The walls hadn’t been cleaned, but the floor was relatively free of crumpled paper, cigarette packs, and candy wrappers. The windows seemed to be letting in a little more light, but not enough.

I crossed the room behind the desks and knocked at the door of my brother’s office. No answer. I knocked again. No answer. I opened the door.

Phil’s office was about twice the size of mine, which meant his office was small. It looked as if a Benedictine monk had furnished it. Two chairs. A desk. One window behind the desk. Nothing on the walls. The office of a man who could empty his drawers into a box and be moved out in two minutes or less.

Phil sat behind the desk, his back to me, hands behind his head looking out of the window at nothing.

“Did I say ‘come in’?” he said evenly. Definitely a bad sign.

“No.”

I left it at that. He sighed, rubbed the military-style short gray hair on his head and swiveled toward me. He was twenty pounds heavier than I was, five years older, and made up in weary hardness what he lacked in homeliness.

He was wearing suspenders today over a white shirt. He folded his hands on the desk and looked up at me.

“Sit down,” he said.

I sat. I said nothing. He said nothing. He didn’t seem to be in a hurry. This was a tranquil Phil I had never seen before. I didn’t like it. I didn’t trust it.

“Can I take you out for lunch?” I asked.

“Too early. Not hungry.”

“Can I get you a coffee?”

“You know about Ruth?” he said.

“Yeah.”

“I’m taking some time off to be with her.” He looked down at his hands. “She hasn’t got long.”

“I’m sorry.”

“I know. You didn’t come to ask about Ruth.”

“No.”

“You came about Minck.”

I nodded.

“Not my case. Not in the district,” he said. “I
did
ask to look at the report.”

“And?”

He reached over to the six-inch pile of files and memos in his IN box, took a single sheet from the top, and laid it in front of him.

“He’s a lunatic, Tobias.”

“I know.”

“No,” Phil said again. “A lunatic. In the park with a goddamn crossbow? We could put him away for that. He’s half blind and all stupid. Shoots his wife with an arrow on a sunny day with a witness.”

“Bolt,” I said. “Not an arrow, a bolt. Crossbows fire bolts, quarrels …”

“Who gives a shit?” Phil said. “He killed her. He can plead insanity. You’re getting Leib for him?”

“Yes.”

“Any judge in his right mind will buy insanity after talking to Minck for five minutes, especially with Leib next to him,” said Phil. “Ballistics is looking at the bow and the piece of metal that killed her. They don’t know what to do with it. I could tell them where they could put that…”

“Bolt,” I supplied. “Where did it hit her?”

“Perfect shot,” said Phil. “Right in the heart.”

“How far away was he?”

“Witness says about twenty yards.”

“Phil, can you imagine Shelly firing anything including a cannon and hitting a target twenty yards away?”

“I can imagine almost anything,” he said. “I can imagine a lucky shot or an unlucky one. If insanity doesn’t work, he can claim it was an accident. He doesn’t look like Robin Hood. He doesn’t even look like the fat guy who played Friar Tuck.”

“Eugene Pallette,” I said.

“I’ll remember that.”

“He didn’t do it, Phil,” I said.

“You’re sure?”

“No,” I said. “But I’m staying with it till I am sure.”

“Good luck,” he said.

“How are you holding up?”

“How do I look?”

“I’ve seen you better. I’ve seen you worse.”

“The commissioner’s seeing me this afternoon,” he said, turning his head away to look at a blank wall.

“What happened?”

He didn’t answer, so I guessed, “You hit a suspect.”

“I beat the hell out of the bastard,” Phil said. “Shoot-out last night at the playground on Ocean View. Two guys with guns, a grudge over a woman with practically no teeth, their guts full of cheap wine. One of them, Herman Winterhoff, accidentally shot an eleven-year-old girl minding her own business. The officers who took the call brought him in for interrogation. When I got to Winterhoff, the bastard was smiling at me. He wasn’t smiling when I left the room.”

“Witnesses?”

“Cawelti, Minor, Harell.”

“They’ll back you.”

“Not Cawelti,” he said.

He was right. The redheaded, pockmarked detective John Cawelti was not going to be part of the blue wall of silence for Phil, whom he hated only a little less than Cawelti hated me. Cawelti was probably picturing himself in this luxury office.

“You’ll be all right,” I said. “You’ve got a lot on your mind. The commissioner will—”

“Not this time.” Phil turned his back to me again.

“Phil?”

He didn’t answer. I didn’t try again. I got up and went to the door. I thought of saying “Good luck” or “I’ll call about Ruth” or something, but Phil was lost in whatever world he was trying to hide in.

There had been one witness to Mildred’s death. It was time to see her.

I
KNEW WHERE
Joan Crawford’s house was in Brentwood. That wasn’t hard to find. Getting her to talk to me would be the hard part, so I called in a favor from Fred Astaire who knew her. I had recently worked for and with him to get him out of a bad situation. I liked Astaire and he liked me, enough to make a call to Crawford.

Until the war, movie stars had been indentured—and usually well paid—by studios which, when the price was right, loaned them to other studios. Astaire had been with RKO. Crawford, until she walked out or was pushed out of her contract two years earlier, had been with MGM. Most of the people I knew in the business had been with or still were with Warner Brothers. I had spent five years there as a security guard until the day I punched a B-movie cowboy star who had been making a young actress more than uncomfortable on the set. I broke his nose. They had to shoot the movie he was making around him. I had the distinction of being fired directly by Harry Warner.

I knew a little about Crawford, the things that everyone—fans and movie people—knew, and some things only a few people knew. For example, everyone knew that she had been married to Douglas Fairbanks, Jr. and Franchot Tone and was now married to Phillip Terry, whose movie career had taken a dive into the La Brea Tar Pits.

Crawford had been linked romantically to almost every male star she had ever acted with, which made the list stretch all the way back to Lon Chaney, Sr., in the silent days, and on up to Robert Montgomery and Clark Gable in the more recent past.

Crawford also had the reputation of being unpredictable. Thirty-nine years old the morning I rang her bell, she was reportedly supportive of younger actors. Actresses her own age or close to it, however, could expect no mercy.

The world knew she had two young adopted children, Christina and Phillip, Jr. The world did not know, but Astaire told me, that she was “unusually interested in cleanliness.”

“Every time she gets a new husband, she changes the toilet seats,” he said on the phone. “She … you’ll see. She’s an underrated actress, and an underrated dancer. I worked with her in my first picture. Never got the chance again, but she was generous, rehearsed hard. I’d be happy to be in a picture with her again. I’ll give her a call.”

My pants were tan and reasonably clean if a bit frayed at the bottom should someone look closely. My shirt was white and not too badly wrinkled. My tie was simple, dark brown, and showed none of the stains I knew had to be there.

Before I rang the doorbell, I looked at my reflection in the small window at eye level. I’m not sure I’d open the door for the face I saw: My nose is almost flat, and some of the scar tissue shows if you look closely. I have a lopsided grin that looks more like a threat than a smile. I brushed back my dark hair, which revealed more than a little gray and tried not to smile.

I rang again.

She opened the door. I recognized the face. It was definitely Joan Crawford, shorter than I imagined her, about five-four, softer looking without makeup. She was wearing a blue-and-white bandanna around her hair and was dressed in slacks and a dark shirt, covered by a green-stained white apron. She wore heavy gloves and carried a pointed trowel in her right hand.

“You’re …?” She examined me.

“Toby Peters,” I said. “Fred Astaire said he was going to call you about me.”

“He did. Come in, but take off your shoes and leave them in the hallway.”