The Howard Hughes Affair: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Four) (11 page)

Major Barton’s home was in Westwood, a small house set back on an untrimmed lawn. I didn’t know if he was there, but I had gotten nowhere trying to reach him by phone, and Trudi Gurstwald plus his phone number in Frye’s wallet had made him my A Number-One Suspect. It was worth a chance.

Barton was home. He answered the door himself and he was in-uniform, or at least partly in uniform. His jacket, tie and shoes were not on and I had the impression we had interrupted him while he was dressing. He was about fifty, a little taller than I and working hard to keep his stomach in by will power instead of exercise. His nose had the red touch of a drinker, and his breath confirmed Hughes’ information.

“Mr. Rathbone,” he said in surprise. “To what do I owe this visit?”

“Good afternoon, Major,” Rathbone said amiably, “this is Mr. Peters. He is working for Howard Hughes, and he’d like some help with something you may be able to assist him with. May we come in?”

Rathbone stepped forward the way he did as Holmes in
The Hound of the Baskervilles
movie, and I followed behind.

“I was just on my way out,” Barton said, trying to get ahead of us to cover the mess and bottles in his living room.

“We won’t take a moment,” smiled Rathbone. “I’m sure you want to cooperate with Mr. Hughes’ emissary.”

“Of course,” said Barton. “Just give me a minute to finish dressing, gentlemen. Make yourself at home. Have a drink.”

We went into Barton’s living room, and Rathbone immediately opened a window to let out the stale smell, then sat down comfortably. The room was small, darkly carpeted with a sofa and some chairs. The chairs looked expensive, far from new, and not recently dusted. They were striped black and brown and looked lived in. On the wall was a picture of Napoleon on a horse. The horse was up on his hind feet and Napoleon was looking at me with his sword raised before he joined the battle in the background.

Barton came back in a few minutes, smelling of Sen–Sen and after-shave lotion. But the alcohol still came through.

“Mrs. Barton is out of town for a few days,” he said, having a seat. “Please excuse the condition of the house.”

“This is confidential, Major,” I said, pulling a seat as close to him as I could. “You’re assigned to…”

“Special duty working with various aircraft manufacturers on proposals for new weaponry,” he supplied. “Hughes Aircraft is one of those manufacturers.”

“Good,” I said. “Mr. Hughes has reason to believe that something may have been copied at his house the night of the dinner party, something valuable relating to the very weapons you’re talking about. Did you happen to see anything suspicious?”

Barton thought for a few seconds and then came up empty.

“Sorry,” he said. “Nothing happened out of the ordinary as far as I was concerned, though Hughes did behave a bit strangely after dinner and put a rather abrupt end to what I thought was going to be an evening of discussion. I think Mr. Rathbone will confirm that.”

“I confirm your observation about Hughes,” said Rathbone, staring at the man and taking out his silver cigarette case.

“Major Barton,” I went on, “what would you say if I told you someone in the house that night has told us that they saw you coming out of Mr. Hughes’ study shortly after dinner and that you looked nervous? What would you say?”

“I’d say they were a goddamn liar,” Barton said indignantly, rising. “I’d say let them say that to my face.”

“Well,” I said, “maybe we can arrange that. It’s gotten pretty important. You see, a guy named Frye was murdered this morning, and I think it’s related to what happened at Hughes’ house. You wouldn’t know anything about that, would you, Major?”

Barton flushed and stood up, staring at the impassive Rathbone and at me.

“What made me think you might know, Major,” I pressed on, “was the fact that Frye had your phone number in his pocket. Why was that?”

“I don’t know,” Barton gasped.

“The police have his wallet with your number in it. They’ll be coming to see you soon themselves.”

“I’ll ask you to leave my house now, Mr. Peters,” he said. “My record and my reputation are enough.…”

“To make a sailor blush,” said Rathbone. “Tell me, Major, why are you still a major at your age? Shouldn’t a West Point man have made Colonel by the age of fifty?”

“How do you know all that?” Barton started.

“Your West Point diploma is on the wall and the year of your graduation, indicating your approximate age,” Rathbone explained. “Could your drinking have something to do with it? You do a very bad job of hiding it, you know. And where, pray tell, is your wife? From the look of this place, no one has taken care of it for some time except a gardener. No Major Barton, I rather fancy your job is not as important as you’ve indicated and that you’ve been given this assignment to keep you from embarrassing superiors or some influential friend who is protecting you. A military classmate, perhaps?”

Barton licked his lips, almost defeated, and Rathbone lit a cigarette, turning his eyes from Barton for the first time. Barton reached for a bottle and poured himself a drink. He didn’t offer us one.

“I can’t tell you anything,” he said. “I’m going to report what I know to my superiors as soon as you leave, and they can do with it what they will. You’ll get no more from me.”

“I think we’ve gotten quite a bit,” said Rathbone. “Perhaps you’ll be more inclined to talk to us after you’ve seen your superiors.”

“Perhaps,” said Barton, “but I doubt it.” He downed his drink and went silent.

Rathbone indicated that we should leave, and we did, but not before we saw Barton pour himself another drink. On the front steps, Rathbone said:

“Sorry about that, Peters, but I couldn’t resist playing Holmes. I quite enjoyed it.”

“That’s all right,” I said. “Except I started to feel like Watson, and that didn’t do anything for my self-image.”

“Well,” he said. “Comfort yourself. Nigel plays Watson as much more of a loveable bumbler than Conan Doyle intended. After all, Watson was very much Conan Doyle—doctor, admirer of ratiocination, solidly built. Our version is a bit more comic. Now I suggest we have something to eat and return in an hour to question Major Barton again, when he has made himself more vulnerable with drink and fear.”

“You don’t buy his tale about going to his superiors,” I said, getting in the car.

“No,” said Rathbone, getting in the driver’s seat and pulling into light traffic. “I can’t believe a West Point man, even one who tends to drink, would go to a meeting with his superiors with his shoes unpolished. He certainly wouldn’t after having a few drinks.”

We found a small steak place for lunch. Since it was after one in the afternoon, it wasn’t crowded, and no one but the waiter stared at Rathbone. We ate, with him urging me to talk about what it was like being a private detective. It was nothing like being Sherlock Holmes.

“Well,” I said, “for a month back in ’39 I was a night bouncer at a hot dog stand in Watts. Four bucks a night and almost all you could eat.

“Later that same year I filled in for the hotel dick at a place in Fresno. One month again, room and board, mostly old women cheating at bridge. But one night we had a woman come running out of a shower screaming rape and I followed a trail of wet footprints down the hall and into a room. I found a guy in a closet. He scared the hell out of me, jaybird naked and covered with blood. Never did find out where the blood came from. The woman hadn’t bled. Never found out how he got in the room or hotel either. He wasn’t registered, and the room belonged to a priest who was in town for a convention and had left his door and said he never knew the locked.”

“What did the man in the closet say?”

“Nothing,” I said. “He turned out to be the father of a famous radio comedian. Fresno cops wouldn’t tell me who, and they let him go. He hadn’t raped the old gal in the shower, just turned up in there naked and bloody and scared hell out of her. And that guy’s still wandering the streets of Fresno or L.A.”

“An entirely different genre,” Rathbone observed, sipping a wine of uncertain vintage while I downed my second beer and made a mental note to get to the Y as soon as possible before my brother and I had matching beer bellies. On the way out of the steak place, the waiter asked Rathbone for an autograph and got it on a menu.

“For my wife,” said the waiter, a thin guy with his hair combed straight back.

“It always is,” said Rathbone when the waiter left.

He allowed me to take the check after I assured him it was on Howard Hughes.

We went back to Major Barton’s little house with a good meal under our belts and almost an hour and a half behind us. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was promising a hot Christmas.

I knocked but Barton didn’t answer. I knocked again, deciding Rathbone had probably been wrong and Barton had gone with a couple of drinks and unpolished shoes to his superior officer to lay down his secret of the Hughes night, if he had such a secret other than his own spying.

Rathbone tried the door and it wasn’t locked.

“Major,” I called. No answer. We stepped in and found the major just where we had left him, in full uniform, glass in hand but with the addition of a pair of messy red stains on his shirt. Someone had shot him at close range. I’d seen a lot of corpses in my day and that day included the morning and the guy in Shelly’s chair; but though I knew Rathbone had been in the war, I wasn’t sure what he had seen. I turned, and he was looking around the room.

“You needn’t worry about me, Toby,” he said. “I had proximity to more corpses during the war than a man would care to have in a lifetime. Once I had to step on a decomposed corpse while running from the Germans. I’ve seen corpses, especially corpses in uniform—though never that uniform.… Curious.”

“What?” I said.

“The neighbors,” he said.

“What neighbors?” I said.

“Precisely,” said Rathbone. “We left the window open when we departed and it’s still open. There are people on the street. A bullet makes quite a bit of noise. Why isn’t anyone here? Why aren’t the police here?”

I looked at Barton but didn’t touch him. There was nothing around that seemed to help.

“Might have used a silencer,” I said.

“To kill quietly,” Rathbone said, looking down at Barton. “A particularly chilling concept.”

“He’s been dead for more than a few minutes,” I said. “Blood is starting to dry. So no one’s called the police, and I don’t think I’ll stick around to do it. They don’t like it when you discover two corpses in one day. How about we just leave here quietly and I make an anonymous call?”

“If you think it best,” he said, and we left. Rathbone had to get home and prepare for a dinner, so he drove me to Al’s garage, and I promised to call and keep him informed.

The bumper was back on and I was short of suspects. My favorite had just been shot. Maybe he had passed on the Hughes plans to an accomplice who was afraid he would talk and killed him. Maybe he had seen someone else in Hughes’ room and that person had killed him. And maybe one of these maybes had seen me and Rathbone coming out of Barton’s. Or just maybe someone who had nothing to do with the case had killed him, but that would have been one hell of a coincidence. I believed in coincidences, but I didn’t count on them. I always counted on my fingers and hoped I never had to go over ten on any problem, but this one required an adding machine.

I pulled in at a grocery store, picked up three boxes of Kellogg’s Corn Flakes, 11 -ounce size for 17 cents, three bars of Lifebuoy for 19 cents, and one pound can of Campbell’s Pork and Beans for 7 cents. I also picked up a Weber’s bread and a can of Bab-o. That and a bottle of milk was my grocery shopping for the week. Then I called the cops with my best Italian accent and told them where they could find a corpse named Barton. Finally I called Norma Fomey at Warner Brothers. She didn’t want to see me and laughed when I said she might be a suspect. After she made a few smart cracks, I said she reminded me of a Warner Brothers version of Dorothy Parker. She liked that.

I drove to the studio where I had put in four years as a guard. I had time for both
Superman
and
Don Winslow
on the radio because of the traffic, and I pulled up to the Warner gate to the music of Bing Crosby singing “Shepherd’s Serenade.”

The guy on the gate was someone I didn’t know. I just told him my name and the fact that Norma Forney was expecting me. He told me she was in an office near Studio 5, and I didn’t wait for directions. I knew the way. The last time I had been there was to catch a murderer. I had left with the help of Errol Flynn and an ambulance. My memories of Warner Brothers were not the best, and I was anxious to be in and out of there. I found the building, parked in a space reserved for Hal Wallis, and hurried up to the office. There was no secretary. A woman was sitting behind a desk with a typewriter on it. Her hands were behind her head and a pencil was in her mouth.

“Norma Forney?” I said. She looked up.

“Peters?” she said through the pencil.

She was about thirty with a good-looking smart face and blue eyes. Her dress was dark, black, and made out of something shiny like satin. Her dark hair was cut short and she wore a small hat with a single long pheasant feather.