The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (23 page)

“And now someone follows you,” she added, licking cake frosting from her fingers.

“I’d rather not—”

“You have no choice. He will find you. This cake is too dry. Not enough butter.”

“Butter is hard to come by,” I said. “There’s a war on.”

Half an hour later, after telling Dave and Nate how their father had saved my life by putting a pair of bullets in Straight-Ahead and avoiding Shelly and Mildred downing two more Pepsis and a piece of cake shaped like a book, I scooped up Mrs. Plaut and Gunther and departed.

“Weddings make the Plaut women weep,” said Mrs. Plaut, clutching her purse. She wasn’t weeping. Gunther looked unusually sober and said nothing.

I drove them back to Heliotrope, noting the Pontiac on my tail.

“Toby,” Gunther said from the backseat.

“I see,” I answered.

When I dropped them at the door, Mrs. Plaut said, “Photographs tomorrow morning.”

“I tremble with anticipation,” I said, grinning.

“I’ve told you about sarcasm,” she said, her face at my open car window. “Cousin Gaylord never recovered from it.”

“Try the Aurex,” I said. “It’d be a shame to have it go to waste.”

“Be careful, Toby,” Gunther called, looking back down the street to where the Pontiac had pulled in.

I pulled away and spent the next twenty minutes losing the guy in the Pontiac. He wasn’t a pro but he was determined. He ran a couple of lights on 8th Street, cut off a flower truck on Alameda, and almost kissed my bumper on Banning. Luckily for him he was trailing a yellow Crosley that was easy to spot and had the pickup of a kiddie car. I pulled into a driveway on Inez right near Hollenbeck Park when I lost eye contact with him after a left turn. I drove right into some guy’s open garage and cut the engine. In my rearview from the shadows of the garage I saw the Pontiac speed down the street.

“What are you doing?” came a voice and then a face through my passenger window. The face belonged to a man who looked like Lionel Barrymore.

“Good afternoon,” I said. “Mr. Barrymore?”

“No,” he responded. My name is Harris, Anton Harris.”

“You’re not an actor?”

“I’m a tree surgeon,” he said. “And you’re in my garage. You really think I look like Lionel Barrymore?”

“Yes,” I said, checking for the Pontiac in the mirror.

Anton Harris smiled. “I always thought so,” he said. “But Betty and the kids don’t think I look like anybody.”

I left Anton Harris, sure he would make for the nearest mirror, and backed into Inez. No Pontiac. I took a right, watching my rnirror, and slowly made my way back to 14th Street. I parked a block away from Straight-Ahead’s apartment and locked the car. I also paid two Mexican kids who should have been in school fifty cents to watch my car, with the promise of another fifty cents when I came back.

No one stopped me from entering the apartment building. No baby cried this time as I went up the stairs. I looked at Straight-Ahead’s door. There was a padlock on it and a sign indicating that no one was to enter without police permission. Someone had already written an obscenity on the sign. I went up to the roof. No one was there. No one had found the box with the files and cash.

I made my way back to the street and to my car. The two kids were there and my hubcaps were still in place. I gave them each another quarter as I had promised and drove away.

I hit Chaplin’s place at five and went through the same procedure to get in. The butler walked even slower this time but he didn’t lead me into the house. We walked around it and he pointed down the hill and beyond the tennis court. That was as far as my guide was going to go. The rest of the safari was up to me.

Chaplin was sitting in a clearing beyond the tennis courts. The clearing was covered in concrete and in the center was a sewer with a manhole cover. Chaplin was sitting on a rock with his legs folded and his chin on his fist. He wore a loose-fitting white shirt with the sleeves rolled up to the elbow and a pair of dark trousers, creaseless and trim.

“Mr. Chaplin,” I said softly.

He seemed to be hypnotized by the manhole cover. Finally, he sighed and spoke without looking up at me.

“There are comic possibilities to a manhole cover that have never been explored,” he said. “I mean the cover itself, not the hole. The trick is to take a natural object and turn it into a symbolic prop.”

“Like the globe balloon in
The Great Dictator
or the buns in
The Gold Rush
,” I said.

Chaplin looked up at me and cocked his head to one side like a small bird. “Precisely,” he said. “The manhole cover can be made of wood, a light wood but not too light. It must look heavy and have a sense of solidity, but not the weight. It is the door to our foul refuse. I’ll open that Pandora’s box and engage in a display with the cover, balancing, dancing, perhaps using it to ward off villainous pursuers. No, it lacks meaning. A plate to eat from? No …”

“A wheel you can put on a car that just lost one,” I suggested, getting into the spirit. “The manhole cover replaces the missing wheel so you can escape. Then the guy following you falls into the open hole.”

Chaplin eyed me for as long as a minute.

“Possibilities,” he said. “I doubt I’ll use it at all but it has possibilities. You’ve come to report on your investigation of the Larchmonts. Bascomb said you have something for me.”

Chaplin’s eyes fell on the box under my arm. I sat on the rock next to him and made a show of opening the box. The money was in an envelope. I opened the envelope, showed him the contents, and handed it to him. His eyes opened wide.

“It’s all here?”

“Count it,” I said. “The Larchmonts are out of business, at least in California. You want the details?”

“That won’t be necessary,” he said. “Neither will I need to count this other than the five hundred dollars we agreed upon.”

He counted off the five hundred in fifty-dollar bills and handed them to me. I stuffed the wad into my front pocket.

“You’ll stay for dinner, I trust,” he said, rising. “My sons are home and we are having squab. After which I plan to tell some particularly blood-curdling ghost stories.”

“Not tonight,” I said, standing.

Chaplin walked me up the hill. He looked even smaller outdoors than he had inside a few days earlier, but he also looked healthier.

“You’ll come Sunday to the little party I have planned?” he said. “I would like to propose a small but not insignificant role for you in the film on which I am now working.”

“If nothing else comes up, but I think I’ll pass on the acting.”

“As you wish,” he said at the gate, holding his hand out. I shook it and he said, “And the papers. What do you plan for them?”

“I’ll build a little raft and burn them at sea, like
Beau Geste.
”

Chaplin shook his head. “A romantic, but, ah, so too am I.”

He let me out and I turned to watch him hurry back up the path. He didn’t waddle like the tramp and he wasn’t wearing the costume. The hair was almost white instead of black but it was the same curly hair. All the scene needed was “The End” to come up out of the lawn.

I got in the Crosley and drove back downtown. It was too late to get to the bank. I had six hundred bucks. The world was mine. I could move into a new office. I knew I wouldn’t but it was good to know I could.

Instead of heading for the office, I drove over to Spring and went into Levy’s for the Friday special. I asked Carmen if she wanted to go to a John Wayne premiere on Monday. Maybe even meet the Duke. It was fine with Carmen, who managed a dark smile. Before the waiter served me the soup at the corner table I had picked out so I could watch Carmen breathe, I went into the kitchen. The chef was a Negro named Walter. We had talked a couple of times. He was the best Jewish cook in Los Angeles.

“Got a fire going?” I asked.

Walter, sweating from the heat of the kitchen, pointed to the stove.

“You mind?” I asked.

Walter was too busy with the dinner trade to answer with more than a nod. I burned the letters and papers two or three at a time and swept the ashes into the garbage can in the corner. It took about five minutes.

“Thanks, Walter,” I said.

“I gave you the stuffed peppers ’stead of the fish,” he said. “Trust me.”

“I do,” I said. “Thanks.”

When I got back to my table the cabbage soup and the stuffed peppers were waiting. So was a well-dressed blond young man.

“You’re Toby Peters,” he said in a foreign accent.

“And you’ve been following me around in a Pontiac,” I said, crumbling some crackers into my soup and smiling over his shoulder at Carmen.

“A friend of mine needs your help,” he said.

“I’m going on vacation,” I said, taking a mouthful of cabbage soup. When I was a kid I had hated cabbage soup, but at some point I couldn’t remember, I had decided I loved the stuff. It didn’t beat a good bowl of Wheaties, but it was close.

“My friend can pay,” he said.

“I just came into a pile of money,” I said. “You want to eat the stuffed peppers? I’ll get another order.”

He didn’t want them, so I finished my soup and moved on to the peppers while he considered his next move. Walter was, as always, right. The peppers were terrific.

“What’s your friend’s problem and who is he?” I asked, feeling in a good mood.

“Someone is trying to convince the United States government that he is a spy,” the young man said, looking around the restaurant to see if anyone was listening or watching.

“Who is he?” I asked, finishing off the second and last stuffed pepper.

“Albert Einstein,” the man whispered.

“I think I’ll have dessert,” I said. “They make a great rice pudding.”

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This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, businesses, companies, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

copyright © 1986 by Stuart M. Kaminksy

cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

This edition published in 2011 by
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/Open Road Integrated Media

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