The Howard Hughes Affair: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Four) (14 page)

Hodgdon played the angles and never moved more than he had to. He played it smart. I played it frenzied and ran myself into exhaustion. I sometimes wondered what was in it for him to play against me, since I was the only one who got a lot of exercise and had anything to gain from a victory.

With my mind pleasantly blank, I went for a low shot and hit the wall head on. It had happened before, but that didn’t make it any better.

Flat on my back on the cool wooden floor, my eyes looked up at the open space high on the rear wall of the court, where people could watch the game or wait their turn. The face of a skeleton looked down at me, attached to a lean, powerful, dark-suited body. I tried to sit up but fell back, dazed.

“How you feeling?” Doc Hodgdon asked, helping me up. I had trouble standing, and Doc helped me off the court and down to the locker room, where I surveyed the damage to my forehead in a shower room mirror. It was slightly swollen, matching the lump on the back of my head. My eyes looked bewildered. Reflected in the mirror, I could see Doc Hodgdon bouncing his handball.

“It feels all right,” I said, running cold water into my cupped hands. I brought my face down to the hands.

“Sure you’re O.K.?” asked Doc.

“Fine. All right. Go on back, I think I’ll call it a night, Doc. Thanks for the game,”

Doc turned, and as I examined myself in the mirror again, I saw him pull off his sweat-stained shirt and watched the crescent-shaped scar low on his back disappear as he left the shower room. The rushing sound of water soothed my eyes, and the smell of sweat satisfied my senses—the compensations of a wounded athlete.

I took my T-shirt off carefully to avoid the sudden dizziness that might drop me to the floor, and was about to move to the showers when I decided to take a last look at my head. The mirror had clouded with steam, and as I wiped it clean I saw the image of the cadaverous man who had been in the gallery over the handball court. His arms were folded and he stared at me with a slight smile.

I tried to ignore him, but a shudder ran through me as if an ice cream cone had touched my bare flesh. I hurried to the shower, where I stood slump-shouldered, letting warm soothing water hit my many scars. More alert, but still heavy-legged, I picked up my shoes, jock, socks and shoes and returned to my locker, where I pulled out my towel and began to dry myself. I dressed slowly, and as I finished I sensed someone behind me. Before I turned, I knew it was the cadaverous man with the deep, dark eyes. He was about five feet away, and I glanced at him. He was wearing a dark suit with no tie. He was over six feet tall. He was nearly bald, and the cadaverous impression of his face was partly a result of this and partly his sunken eyes and a nose smashed almost as. flat as my own. The man leaned against a locker, his arms folded, and spoke in a whisper. I didn’t like the German accent.

“Please come with me quietly.”

It was more than a request and I tried to figure the man. Maybe he didn’t have anything to do with the Hughes case and the two bodies. Maybe he was a determined homosexual, a strong-arm thief, or simply a lunatic who liked scaring people. The neighborhood around the Y was a grab bag of slums and wealth, sanity and insanity. My eyes took in the locker room. It was empty. I turned to stand face to face with the man. A bench stood between us.

“What’s up?” I said, stalling until I could think of something to do.

“Nothing,” said the man. “We simply want to talk to you quietly about the events of the last day or so.” I looked around for the rest of the “we” and saw no one till the man in black allowed his jacket to open enough to show an equally black holster with a large gun.

I devised a brilliant plan on the spot and threw my gym clothes in the guy’s face. Shoes, shorts, handball gloves, a lock and a roll of tape hit him, and I turned and ran along the edge of the lockers down two rows. I stopped, looking and listening for possible help. My heart was doing a rhumba that Jerry the dancer would have been proud of.

I could hear the cadaverous man coming down the other aisle. One of the tall lockers near me was partly open. It was narrow, but by ducking slightly and pulling my shoulders together, I squeezed in and pulled the door closed. The metal locker floor gave slightly under my weight.

My pursuer stopped and listened. Footsteps raced around the row of lockers, and I knew the man had heard the locker close. I held my breath as I listened to him make his way down, opening lockers one at a time. Through the slit in the locker door, I watched the man work his way toward me. I had no more than a few seconds before the skeleton with the gun would open the door.

I waited till he was outside my locker and then pushed on the door as hard as I could. Both the door and my body hit the man, sending him backwards over the wooden bench. I was definitely not working myself into his good graces.

I scrambled up and ran through a fire exit in the corner. No one was outside as I headed for the mesh fence that surrounded the tennis courts behind the gym. A drizzle had started. The courts were empty and still wet from yesterday’s rain. I leaped for the fence, clinging as my feet missed the links and dropped to the asphalt court surface just as the man arrived behind me. Instead of following over the fence, he raced for the entrance to the courts about thirty yards away. It was the only way out, and I was too tired to beat him to it. I thought of going back over the fence and turned to give it a hell of a try, but going over the first time on top of my workout had taken too much out of me. Ten years earlier, I would have made it. I was almost to the top on pure stubbornness when I felt the pull at my leg. I looked around in the drizzle for someone to call, but there was no one in sight.

I tumbled back into the court and fell into a shallow puddle. The man hovered over me looking casually toward the Y and the street, as if he were enjoying an outing on a clear day. He was smiling a friendly smile as he helped me up and brushed water from my clothes. He kept one hand on his gun under his jacket and I was convinced he could get it out quickly. I didn’t like his smile.

“Very quietly,” he whispered. “Move very slowly and ask no questions.”

There was no point in fighting. The man put an arm around my shoulder and led me slowly back toward and around to the front of the Y. We passed a girl with a book over her head to keep off the rain, but I didn’t say anything. There was nothing she could do to help.

He led me to the big black Caddy that had chased me earlier. The front grill was bent from where it had hit the cab. He opened the back door and motioned me in. I went and he slid next to me. A thick-necked gorilla in the front seat drove off.

I thought I might catch my breath, regain some strength and go out the door at the first traffic light if there were enough people around. We turned down Pico and came to a red light in about three minutes. I tried to pull the lock button up, but it didn’t move. The man with the skeleton face didn’t even turn his head.

For a few seconds, I considered that I might be dreaming, that I had suffered a concussion and passed out on the gym floor or in the locker room. Young Doctor Parry had warned me about further blows to the head, and I was already two above the limit. Maybe I was back in Cincinnati and these were friends of Koko the Clown.

A solid gun in my side convinced me that I wasn’t dreaming and the skeleton man said softly, “Don’t try anything more. And be very quiet.”

We drove out of the drizzle and through Topanga Canyon. In about fifteen minutes we were in Ventura County, and after another twenty minutes we turned into a driveway in Calabasas. I didn’t like it, especially the fact that I hadn’t been blindfolded. These gentlemen weren’t worried about my seeing where I was being taken, which led me to the conclusion that I might not be coming back from this trip.

CHAPTER EIGHT

I
could think of a few dozen things I didn’t like about the situation, not the least of which was the fact that the two dark-suited gentlemen who were my hosts began to speak to each other in German as they led me into an isolated house on an isolated hill. The skeleton man’s gun was out now, and my chance for a run was down to nothing. The gun was a big bulky Luger that could make a big bulky hole in a man, woman, child or tree.

The house itself was badly lit even with the lights turned on. Some of the furniture was covered with sheets, as if the owners were on a vacation. I was led to a wooden chair in the living room and told to sit down. I did. The skeleton man hovered over me with his gun while the short man with the neck muscles and a decided wheeze tied my hands behind me. He was good at it.

There appeared to be some Germanic debate between the two about how to handle me. I was pulling for the wheezer in spite of what he had done to my wrists. I had the distinct feeling that the smiling corpse did not like me, though I couldn’t remember having met him before. I was sure I would have remembered.

Skeleton won the debate and the wheezer walked to a radio on a table and turned it on loud. He found
Mr.District Attorney
just as Harrington was telling Miss Miller that he was worried about the D.A. Skeleton didn’t seem to like
Mr.District Attorney
. He told the wheezer something in German. The wheezer found some music and turned it up loud.

“Mr. Peters,” said the skeleton, turning to me, “we have some questions for you to answer. If you answer them, we have no trouble and we take you back home with a minimum of pain.”

He was a clever one. I had to hand him that. He wasn’t telling me I would get off scot free if I talked. He figured I wouldn’t buy that. His hope was that I’d settle for a little abuse in exchange for freedom and not think about the likelihood of the abuse being eternal.

“There are some things I can tell you,” I said. “And some things I can’t. I’ve got a client.” I also figured that if I told them everything that I would no longer be needed. I wasn’t even sure of what “everything” was.

“We’ll start with what you can tell us, then,” said the skeleton man to the music of Guy Lombardo. Skeleton man was putting on a pair of gloves. “Before we begin, however, I’d like to know if you have any problems, illnesses we have to be careful of. We don’t want you to pass out before you give us what we need. You understand?”

We exchanged professional grins and I said I understood. I played Br’er Rabbit and told him I had ulcers. I had no ulcers. I also had no desire to be hit in the stomach, but considering the state of my head, I tried to steer him to my midsection. As useless as my head had been, it might still have a function in the future if I ever got there.

Skeleton hit me hard in the stomach to the accompaniment of Guy Lombardo playing “Happy Days are Here Again.” My satisfaction at having tricked the skeleton was tempered by the pain in my stomach and the taste of nausea in my mouth.

“I thought you wanted me awake,” I gasped.

“But I hit you so gently, Mr. Peters. Now, tell us why you killed Frye, the man in your office last night. We’ll start with that.”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said. “He tried to kill me and someone killed him after he knocked me out. That’s the truth.”

“Suppose you go over everything that happened,” he said, nodding to the man at the radio to run the volume down so he could hear me. “You must believe that we did not want Mr. Frye to kill you. He was, how do you say it, overzealous. We simply wanted to frighten you a bit. Please believe me.”

“I believe you,” I gasped, swallowing. Then I told him what happened the night before, leaving out the visit by Trudi Gurstwald and leaving out Hughes. When I got to the point about Frye’s message in blood and said he had written “unkind,” Fritz-the-skeleton looked puzzled, but Hans at the radio had an inspiration and started to babble something. Skeleton told him to be quiet.

“That was very good, Mr. Peters,” said Skeleton. “Now suppose you tell us how much you have found out in your quest to discover who supposedly stole some of Mr. Howard Hughes’ military plans. Yes, we know about that.”

“I can’t tell you any more,” I said, looking straight up at him. There was a little more I could tell him. I could have told him about the holes in Major Barton’s chest, assuming he hadn’t put them there. I could have told him about Bugsy Siegel. I didn’t think it meant much, but I decided not to tell him in the hope that stalling would keep me alive long enough to work something out.

Skeleton put his gloved hands together and shook his head sadly. “Mr. Peters,” he said. “We can easily cut your insides out so the birds can carry them home to their young. Would you like that?”

“You have a way with words,” I said, and he hit me again in the stomach. It was bad. If I had a bleeding ulcer, it would have been worse. Which gave me an idea. I bit the inside of my cheek hard. It hurt like hell, battling the ache in my stomach for the pain championship. I tasted blood, leaned forward and spit a red mass at Skeleton’s feet. He danced back quickly.

“Ulcer, bleeding,” I gasped and pretended to pass out.

I rolled my eyes back instantly and held them, looking somewhere into the top of my skull. Skeleton lifted my head by the hair and forced my right eye open. Since I was looking into my skull, I couldn’t see him, but my blank eye seemed to convince him I was out and bleeding internally from a ruptured ulcer.

The boys had a discussion in German, and I waited while they decided whether to kill me or keep me for a while. I was betting on their keeping me, since I hadn’t told them anything much yet. I was counting on them expecting a terrified man With internal injuries who would gladly talk to keep from further pain. The blood from my cut cheek dribbled down my partly open mouth. I was giving them the best show I could.