The Howard Hughes Affair: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Four) (18 page)

When the State police arrived a half hour later, they found a silent gathering in the billiard room. The cop in charge was a beefy pro named Bill Horrigan, who asked Nelson what he had touched and told us all to get out of the room while his men went over it. We went out. An hour later, Rathbone and I were headed back to Los Angeles in his car.

“We’ve had a busy murderer,” I said.

“I don’t think so,” said Rathbone, pulling into a roadside restaurant called Jason’s. “I mean it’s quite likely we have more than one murderer involved here.”

“Which will simply complicate my life further,” I said.

Over a steak sandwich, Rathbone explained:

“Murder Number One in your office was a strangling. The killer did not have a gun and was apparently quite strong. Strong enough to take a bullet and still strangle the unfortunate Mr. Schell. Victim Number Two, Major Barton, was shot cleanly through the heart, while Victim Number Three on the billiard table was stabbed in rage by someone who knew him.”

“Too much,” I said, sinking my teeth into fat and meat. “You work it out your way and I’ll go mine, with my feet and a big mouth, which reminds me.”

I excused myself and made a call to Dean at the Romaine Office and told him about the corpse at Hughes’ house. Knowing Hughes’ love of secrecy and his contacts, I thought he might want to set his machinery going to keep Hughes’ name out of it. Dean said thanks and hung up.

Rathbone drove me back to his house and my car, wished me luck and said he’d see me on Saturday at Hughes’ house. Then I drove back to my rooming house. I didn’t feel like facing Shelly yet, and I didn’t think I had anything to fear at home. The skeleton, Schell, who was looking for me was dead. What I had to do fast was put the puzzle together. Phil would probably see a report on the second dead Schell, make some inquiries, find out about my being at the Hughes house and call me back for a talk.

The rope-skippers were gone when I pulled up and Mrs. Plaut, seated on her porch swing, greeted me with a hearty “Hello Tony.”

I waved back and tried to step past her.

“A lady called you,” she said, reaching out to hold me with a bony hand. “Very bad English. Said her name was Judy, but you shouldn’t call her.”

“Thanks,” I said, figuring she meant Trudi Gurstwald.

“Did you hear about the shooting here last night?” she said, moving her arm to let me pass.

“Yes,” I said. “You told me this morning.”

“Oh yes,” she remembered, “I told you this morning.”

I made it up the stairs and into my room. In the next room, I could hear Gunther and someone with a high voice arguing in German. I tried to put it from my mind while I pulled the two photographs out of my pocket. I flattened the Schell Brothers and thumbtacked them to my wall. They were a somber pair. I didn’t like the fact that the picture reminded me of the photograph in my office of Phil and me. I thumbtacked the second photograph of the word in blood next to it and took off my shoes.

I got on the floor on my mattress to take the weight off my back, touched my sore cheek with my tongue and stared at the photographs, waiting for them to talk, but they said nothing. The only voices were in German from the next room. Life had been Germanized in the last week and would probably be more so when the war actually came.

There was a knock on the door. The knocker turned out to be one of Hughes’ bodyguards. “You asked for these,” he said, handing me an envelope.

“Thanks,” I said. He left without another word. I opened the envelope and found photographs of everyone who had been at the Hughes party. I spread them on my table.

A few minutes later, there was a slight, tentative knock at the door.

“Come in,” I called and looked back over my shoulder. Gunther came in politely.

“Do you have any tea, Toby?” he said. “I have a client and…”

“Sure,” I said. “You know where it is. Take what you need.”

Wherthman was as quiet as he could be, which was pretty damn quiet, but he had trouble finding the tea. He took enough time that his client came to the door.

“Gunther?” a tentative voice asked.

“I’m getting some tea,” Gunther said.

“Come on in,” I said, staring at the photographs. I just kept waiting for the photographs or my mind to tell me something.

I heard the footsteps of the client come into the room and stop not far from me.

“Here they are,” said Gunther.

“Schell!” said the client with a heavy German accent.

I rolled over to face the man. He was staring at the picture of the Schell brothers on my wall.

Gunther Wherthman’s client was about my age and height. He wore blue denim trousers and jacket and a white shirt without a tie. In his mouth was a nickel American cigar. He had a two-day growth of beard and wore a pair of rimless glasses on his slightly hooked nose.

“You know them?” I said, rolling over and getting up.

The client looked at me with amusement and nodded.

“Berlin, 1933,” he said. “They were brownshirts, Nazis. They arrested me. I have a lump on my back as a souvenir. I hope they are well.” The accent was heavy, but I could make out the words.

“They’re both dead,” I said, “murdered in the last two days.”

The client shrugged and pulled on his cigar.

“Don’t go away, please,” I told the client. “Gunther, why don’t you make the tea here?” I pointed to the photographs on the table of everyone who had been at the Hughes’ house for the party. Martin Schell’s picture was on the top.

“Yes,” said the client. “That’s him.”

“Sit down,” I said, offering him one of my three chairs. “How about some cereal?”

He looked with distaste at my Kellogg’s carton on the table and said, “We didn’t eat that kind of thing in Augsburg.”

“We have work, Toby,” Gunther said.

“A minute, Gunther,” I pleaded.

The client looked at the rest of the spread-out photographs and put his finger on one.

“Ah,” he said. “I knew this one too. The three of them were together when they came for me in Berlin. They’d been out enjoying themselves one evening and they continued their entertainment at my expense.”

“God sent you,” I said, smiling at him.

“I do not believe in God,” said the man with some irritation. “I am a Communist, which, by the way, is why I am not in Berlin at the moment. I might also mention that there are, perhaps, thirty or forty Berliners in Los Angeles at the moment who would remember that trio.”

“Mister.…”

“Brecht,” said the client, holding up the photograph. “Bertold Brecht.”

“Mr. Brecht,” I said. “You may have just solved a murder.”

“Humm,” he said. “I should like that.”

Wherthman poured us all some tea, and Brecht told me his tale about the Schells. His cigar was turning the room into a putrid cloud, but I wanted to hold onto him.

“It wouldn’t have taken much to recognize the Schells,” said Brecht. “If you lived in Berlin in 1933 and had trouble with the Nazis, you probably met the Schells. Gunther, I’ll have to go now. I’ve enjoyed the tea and the conversation. I’d like you to finish the poems. I’ve got a young man named Bentley working on the play. Now, Mr. Peters, should you need me further, Gunther has my phone number and my address in Santa Monica.”

We shook hands and he left with his hands deep in his pockets.

Gunther and I finished our tea, and Gunther explained that Brecht had been a famous young playwright in Germany. Apparently he had only been in the United States about six months. According to Gunther, he had taken a ship from Russia to San Pedro and settled down a few miles from where he landed.

“He had always been no more than a step or two ahead of the Nazis,” said Wherthman.

“He’s Jewish?” I asked.

“No, family was Protestant-Catholic. But as he told you, he is a Marxist.”

I finished my tea, scratched my stomach and turned to the pictures on the wall.

“Now,” I said, “if I can only figure out why Schell wrote ‘unkind’ on the table in his blood while he was being strangled, I may have most of this sorted out.”

Gunther finished his tea and got down from the chair to move to my side. Since his head came just above my belt, he had to look almost straight up to see the photograph.

“That doesn’t say ‘unkind’,” he said to me.

I looked down at him.

“It says ‘ein kind’—a child—in German. It isn’t English.”

Of course, Wolfgang Schell was German. He wouldn’t write in English when he was dying. But the new possibility that followed didn’t give me a lot of cheer. Had Schell been trying to leave a message that he had been strangled by a child?

CHAPTER TEN

I
decided to be unreachable for a few days, just in case Phil put things together faster than I thought he would. Using a semisturdy suitcase given as a fee by a pawnbroker named Hy O’Brien, I packed in a record four minutes, asked Gunther to keep an eye on the room for me and headed into the morning. I made it to my car just in time to have Jimmy Fiddler tell me that Milton Berle had married Joyce Matthews and Ronald Reagan was right behind Erroll Flynn in fan mail at Warner Brothers with Jimmy Cagney a close third. It sounded unlikely to me, and I was about to tell Fiddler so when I felt something cold and hard on my neck.

My guess was that my injuries had caught up with me and the first sign of paralysis had struck. When a short, thick head and little eyes appeared in my rear-view mirror, I breathed a weary sigh. Life seemed to be a never-ending series of attacks punctuated by periods of confusion. This was an attack, and the wheezer had a gun to my neck. His nose was held together by a strip of tape, and his face showed a variety of scars from the lumps I had smashed in his face. Overall, I would have called my work a triumph of cosmetic surgery, but I had the feeling that Wheezer thought otherwise.

“
Aross miten zu en leben
,” he said, or something to that effect. His face looked more confused than angry, and I had a fair idea why. He couldn’t speak English.

Since I couldn’t speak German, any attempt at conversation seemed pointless without an interpreter. I didn’t think Wheezer would want me to head back and get Gunther, but I didn’t want conversation to die, or I might follow the example.

“
Voss vills du?
” I said, heading for Broadway and as much traffic as I could find.

“
Give tsu mier du parperen du cameram
,” he said.

He was sweating, and the Luger in his hand bumped on my neck.

“Certainly,” I said, “whatever you say. Wass you … oh shit.”

“
Paperen, cameren
,” he said again, impatiently looking out of the window to see if anyone was watching. Not being familiar with L.A. and the neighborhood, he didn’t know that he probably could have had a horizontal guillotine around my neck, and the chance of anyone paying attention would have been nonexistent, unless a tourist from Delaware happened to have lost his way.

“Pictures, pictures,” he said, the sweat dripping from his furrowed brow, and loosening the tape on his nose he blurted out “
Paperen, cameren
.”

We were making progress, though we were a long way from Wendell Wilke’s One World. Wheezer thought I had some papers, plans, or photographs, probably the stolen Hughes plans, though why he should think I had them was a new mystery.

“
Schell
,” he said.

I thought he was saying the German word for fast, so I pointed to the thick traffic ahead.

“
Nicht Schnell
” he bellowed, hitting me on the lump already on my head and almost knocking me out. “Schell. Martin Schell.”

The car veered while I tried to make one image out of the vibrating three or four I was seeing. I managed to get them down to a double image. The truck driver I had almost hit leaped out of his cab, tilted his cap back and started for me. Wheezer pointed his Luger at the driver, who promptly returned to his truck and toilets or whatever was in it.

“Take it easy, Hans,” I said slowly, hoping to either calm him or get through to him. I did neither. He hit me again. I was more ready for it this time and held the car steadier, but the blood trickling down my neck brought nausea.

“Look,” I said, getting angry and desperate, “if you keep
gaspolotzing
me
en kopf
, you’ll get
dreck. Farshteh?
”

His face was a confused mask of sweat. He peeled the moist tape from his sweating nose, revealing a cut that must have hit bone and was barely clotting. It should have had a few stitches.

My guess was that Wheezer knew Martin Schell was gone. He thought I had strangled Wolfgang Schell, and he probably figured I had gotten to Martin too, who had been out gunning for me. Apparently Martin had the plans, and Wheezer thought I had done him in and taken them. At least that was the best I could do. His face told me reasoning with him was impossible. I either gave him some plans or he blew my head off. I had the feeling that even if I gave him the plans I didn’t have, he would blow my head off. He had already paved the way by chipping a hole in my scalp.