To Catch a Spy (15 page)

“Never mentioned anyone to me that I remember. Like I said, he was an odd little guy. Listen, you interested in a phonograph? I’ll throw in six transcriptions of Sherlock Holmes shows.”

“I thought you said it was illegal to sell radio shows.”

“The law is murky,” Baron said.

“I think I’ll take the brown Bakelite radio,” I said.

When he made out the sales slip, Baron said, “Do me a favor. If you talk to your friend Martin, don’t mention anything I said about him. He’s a good customer.”

“I promise I won’t mention anything either of us said.”

I took my new radio and considered making a stop at the Chinese restaurant. It smelled good. It smelled like a Chinese restaurant. But I had another stop to make.

I put the radio on the floor in front of the passenger seat and headed for Wesley Flynn’s Typewriter Repair and Maintenance.

There had been no phonograph or radio in Bruno Volkman’s apartment. And I hadn’t seen a typewriter, although I hadn’t done a complete search of the closet where I’d found his body. I had the feeling that Bruno didn’t keep his recording equipment or his typewriter in his apartment where someone might find them and have some questions about what they were doing there.

Wesley Flynn’s shop was a wooden one-story building that had once been painted gray. It sagged on one side as if it were considering sitting down.

Parking was no problem. There was a small lot next to the building and only one battered small truck in it. The door stuck when I tried to open it, and I had to give it a push with my shoulder.

Baron’s had been neatly laid out. Flynn’s was a mess. Typewriters sat on shelves, on the floor, on top of each other. Some had white tags on their shift arms. There were machines with most of the keys missing and others without a roller bar.

Behind a counter, next to a cash register, sat an old man wearing a green visor. He sat on a stool reading an old issue of
Life
magazine. The cover of the magazine showed Fred Astaire dancing with his small son.

“Flynn?” I asked.

He looked up and sighed. I had disturbed his reading.

“Yeah.”

“Looking for a typewriter,” I said.

“Turn your head any direction,” the old man said, tilting his head back to get a better look at me from under his visor. “See something you like, I can put it in shape for you. Got a few that work pretty good just as they sit.”

“I’m looking for a typewriter a friend of mine may have bought from you,” I said, taking Volkman’s photograph from my pocket and moving to the counter.

The old man squinted at the photograph.

“A while ago,” he said. “Maybe six, eight months. Remington. Nice machine. Old. About 1912. Probably should have held on to it till it became an antique. Probably would have if I thought I’d live long enough so’s it would be old enough to sell as one.”

“He only came in once?” I asked.

“Came in four, five times. Kept messing up the keys, couldn’t change a ribbon, didn’t know how to clean it. Said he was writing a book about horses. No one asked him, but he told me. Didn’t look like the horse type, but who knows?”

“Who knows?” I said.

“So you don’t want to buy a typewriter?” he asked. “You just want to find the guy who bought the old Remington?”

“Yes.”

“You some kind of process server?”

“Something like that,” I said.

“You Look like you’ve seen your share,” he said. “I’ve got an address for him somewhere.”

“That might help.”

“Cost you,” he said. “Five bucks.”

“If it’s not on Boyle Avenue, I might buy it.”

He pulled out three cigar boxes from under the counter and started to go through the first one, taking sales slips and flopping them in front of him.

“Here,” he said. “Two-oh-two West First.”

“That’s the
Los Angeles Times
building,” I said.

He began stuffing the sales slips back in the box, leaving the one he had just fished out on the side.

“What name did he give?”

The old man glanced at the slip again.

“Fred Lowe.”

Bruno Volkman had a hell of a lot of names.

“Fred Lowe who lives in the
Los Angeles Times
building,” I said, pulling out my wallet. I handed him a five-dollar bill, which he put into his cash register.

Bruno Volkman had purchased recording equipment and a typewriter he didn’t want traced to him. Somewhere, there were recordings and typed files that Volkman had plans for. Since he had contacted Cary Grant, I figured he had decided to do some selling.

“How’s business?” I asked politely, putting my wallet back in my pocket.

The old man looked around.

“Nonexistent,” he said. “Don’t much care. Got a little house all paid for, enough in the bank, and not that many years to worry about. Place is about to fall down, and I lost interest in fixing these damn machines before the war even started.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Just the way things are,” he said. “I’ve got a good offer for this lot. Some movie director’s wife wants to build a Hungarian restaurant, or maybe it’s Rumanian. I’ll take it and throw in all the contents of this building. In fact, that’ll be a condition. They take this junk or I don’t sell. You want a free typewriter?”

“No, thanks,” I said.

He shrugged and went back to his
Life
magazine. I went back to my Crosley. My radio was still there.

When I arrived at the Farraday after stopping for a couple of hot dogs and a Pepsi, Violet waved me over before I could go through the door to Shelly’s office.

“He’s in the chair,” she whispered.

“He?”

“Mountain,” she said even more softly. “Dr. Minck needs complete quiet.”

“And I need to get to my office, humble though it may be,” I said.

“Just another minute or two,” she said. “He’s been in there for almost an hour.”

There was no sound from beyond the door.

“You’ve got a message,” she said, moving to her little desk and retrieving a small slip of paper. I looked at it. “Mr. Leach says to call him.”

“Thanks, Violet,” I said.

“Nice radio,” she said, looking at the Bakelite model I carried under my right arm.

“Thanks,” I said. “I didn’t want to leave it in the car.”

The door to Shelly’s office opened, and Sheldon Minck, head covered in perspiration, cigar moist in the corner of his mouth, glasses about to fall to the floor, blood forming crawling blobs on his dirty white lab coat, stood before us with a smile.

“Got it,” he said, showing us a tooth that looked very much like the one that was sitting in my pocket. “You can see, right here, the decay. Must have been hurting him like the devil.”

In the chair behind him, Mountain groaned as he started to wake up.

Shelly grinned and raised his eyebrows, then turned to his patient. I followed him. Mountain sat up groggily, his eyes trying to focus.

Sheldon Minck held the tooth up for him to see.

“Here it is,” he said.

Mountain looked at the tooth and then touched it.

“Mirror,” he said.

Sheldon reached for the small round mirror on the tray next to the dental chair. He rubbed its surface on a relatively bloodless part of his lab coat and handed it to the big, bearded man, who held it out and examined himself.

“How do I look?” he asked me.

“Fierce,” I said.

Actually, he looked ugly as hell. He had looked ugly before losing the teeth. He looked a lot worse now.

“Really?” he asked.

“I wouldn’t lie to you,” I said.

Mountain managed a facial expression that I’m sure was intended as a grin.

“Good job, Doc,” he said, taking Sheldon’s hand.

“Skill,” said Sheldon. “It’s what I do, how I help my patients.”

I went to my office as Sheldon was almost crushed to the floor as he tried to help Mountain to his feet.

First things first. I called Cary Grant. He answered after two rings.

“Peters,” he said. “Did you find anything?”

“No George Hall,” I said. “But Volkman was transcribing conversations and probably typing them up.”

“Can you find them?” he asked.

“I can try.”

“Good, meanwhile I’ve got some news. Bad news. I checked on Cookinham, got his address from the studio. He has a house in Van Nuys, a modest place.”

“You went there?”

“Yes.”

“And you found Cookinham? What did he say?”

“Nothing. He was dead. I knocked at the door, but there was no answer. The door was open. I went in and called for him. The place was dark, shades down and a bad smell. I found him in the bedroom with a gun in his hand and a bullet in his head.”

“Suicide?”

“Maybe,” he said. “I didn’t look too carefully, but I did see a typewriter and something that might have been recording equipment on the kitchen table.”

“Any records?” I asked.

“I didn’t stay around long enough to look. If I get caught in a situation like that, you can kiss my career good-bye.”

“I’ll have to go take a look,” I said. “What’s the address?”

He gave it to me.

“Be careful,” he said. “Peters, I’ve never really seen anything like that before.”

“I have,” I said.

“I kept thinking it was like a movie,” said Grant quietly. “Not quite real. A set. B-movie lighting. Makeup. Maybe it’s because I really didn’t know the man.”

“Maybe,” I said. “I’ll get back to you after I check on the house.”

The house was small, a one-bedroom off of Tampa Avenue. The grass in the front yard was recently mowed, and a small bird I couldn’t identify was perched on the mailbox at the curb. The Aldrich family could have lived there.

There were hedges between the houses on the street and no house at all across from Cookinham’s. Crosleys are easy to remember, so I parked a block away and walked back slowly, whistling “
Hindustan,
” ready to give a smile to anyone I might meet. Maybe I’d even say, “Top of the mornin.’”

But I didn’t meet anyone. The door to Cookinham’s house was open, just as Cary Grant had said. I walked in, closed it behind me, and looked around. There was the smell Grant had warned me about, but there was also lots of sun coming through the windows. Grant had said the shades were down. I decided to hurry.

Neat little living room, not much furniture, but full bookshelves against the walls. There were a few record albums about eye level on a shelf near a window.

I removed one. It was Nelson Eddy singing his favorite arias. There was a photograph of Eddy on the cover, his mouth open in song. I tried all the albums. Strauss waltzes, Rise Stevens singing favorite arias, Bing Crosby Christmas songs, Renata Tebaldi in
Tosca.

I moved to the bedroom. Cookinham, in his pajamas, was seated on the bed looking at the mirror across from him with dead eyes and mouth open. He looked pretty much the way he did in the photograph in my pocket, but he had acquired a hole in his right temple and a gun in his right hand.

There were three framed photographs on his dresser. One was the same as the photograph in my pocket. The second, a smaller one, was of a younger Cookinham standing in front of a waterfall, and the last was of a trio of girls about twelve years old, arms around each others’ shoulders, grinning at the camera. Something about their clothes made me think the picture had not been taken in the United States. The interesting photograph was the one that was missing. There was a very thin layer of dust on the top of the dresser and the faint but definite outline of the edges of a larger frame.

A jacket was draped over a chair near the bed. I checked the pockets. Empty. Then I checked his trousers, which were neatly laid out on the same chair. No notebook. A wallet with thirty-eight dollars. No cards. I made a quick search of drawers and the closet. Nothing very interesting. There was no suicide note.

In the kitchen, a typewriter and a fake-leather covered box about the size of a phonograph player sat on a small Formica table. Inside the box was a turntable with an attached microphone. There was no paper in or near the typewriter and no record on or near the turntable.

I could have done a better job, but I remembered those shades being up and decided to get out fast. As it turned out, I got out just fast enough. I was halfway up the block with my car in sight when a Los Angeles police car sped down the street and came to a screeching halt in front of Cookinham’s house.

About forty minutes later and low on gas, I was back at Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse. Mrs. Plaut did not greet me when I came in. The door to her rooms was closed. I trudged up the stairs with my new radio and the pile of papers I had accumulated.

I put the radio and the papers on the table next to the phone on the second-floor landing, dug out some coins, and called Cary Grant. The phone rang. It kept ringing. Eight times. I was about to hang up, when he came on.

“Yes?”

“It’s me, Peters,” I said. “I went there. Didn’t find much.”

“We should tell the police,” he said.

“They already know.”

I told him about the two FBI agents.

“That’s not good,” he said. I didn’t say anything, so he went on. “The people I’m working with need to find this Hall and whoever else is involved.”

“The people you’re working with?”

“I can’t really say more,” he said. “I’m afraid you’ll just have to trust me.”

“I’m afraid I will,” I agreed.

“I’ve got to run,” he said. “I have a meeting in an hour about a new movie. The script looks good. I get to go back to my roots, play a shiftless cockney. They’ve got Ethel Barrymore lined up to play my mother.”

“Good luck,” I said.

“I’ll be back in two hours,” he said. “Call me if you find out anything more.”

He hung up and so did I.

Gunther was in his room when I knocked. He told me to come in. He was seated at his desk, two books open in front of him and a pen in his hand.

“Toby,” he said. “I’m afraid we still have no luck in our search for George Hall. I’ve located a bedridden Negro who was a railroad porter, and another George Hall is a chicken rancher, who moved many months ago when his wife died.”

“Jeremy went home?”