Murder on a Yellow Brick Road

8

The moon was swaying gently in the sky. It was a dull red against the darkness. I watched it, almost hypnotized. Something was behind the moon, but I ignored it. I had never seen the moon swaying before. The thing behind the moon became clearer. It was a face. Not only did I have a murderer to deal with, I had to figure out why the moon was swaying and why there was a face behind it.

A streak of pain hit my head and I moaned. I was lying on my back and the floor was cold under me. I pushed myself up in pain and touched my head where Grundy had banged it against the wall. My hand came away wet and sticky.

The moon was red because my own blood was dripping into my dazed eyes. I looked at the moon again and the face behind it became clear; it was Clark Gable. Then more of the moon mystery was solved. The moon was a small light bulb dangling from the ceiling, rocking gently in front of a portrait of Clark Gable. The bulb didn’t give much light, but I could see a sky full of paintings in front of it and behind it.

The pain and blood told me I probably wasn’t dead. By straining with the information I was getting, I figured out that I was on the floor of a big prop room.

When I tried to stand, I went back on my knees and leaned against something that was not quite a prop. It felt like a human knee. My hands found the rest of the body, and I could tell from what I felt that it was Grundy or someone else who had spent a lot of time worrying about his body. Whoever it was had no more earthly worries. A knife was sticking firmly in his chest.

With a lot of effort and some help from a table, I pulled myself up and held the light bulb toward the body. It was Grundy. His eyes were opened and startled. As far as I could see, there was no trail of blood on the floor. It looked as if he had been killed where he sat.

In contrast, there was plenty of blood where I had been lying on the floor. It was my blood. My mind was working well enough to tell me to get the hell out of there, but my head wouldn’t cooperate. There seemed to be a kind of aisle going past Grundy’s body. I made my way along it, feeling past furniture and props as I went.

In a few thousand years, I reached the door of a freight elevator, which I managed to get open. I got myself inside and leaned against a wall, not knowing if I was up or down. I pushed all three buttons on the wall and the elevator moved. When it stopped, I staggered out. It was almost dawn, and I wanted to get somewhere where I could think. If Grundy was the killer, who killed Grundy?

Whoever did it had saved my life, but I had little else to thank them for. They’d left me with a corpse. I couldn’t figure out where I was on the lot, so I wandered around for about ten minutes. Then I saw Hoff’s office and made it to my car. Someone was leaning on it. Someone else was standing next to the leaner. The guy leaning on my car was my brother the cop. The guy with him was Sergeant Steve Seidman.

I stopped, waiting for Phil to rush at me and lay me out with a right to whatever part of my body least expected it. He did move toward me quickly, but there was no punch. I must have looked great.

“What the hell happened to you?” he hissed between his teeth.

“I got fresh with Joan Crawford,” I said, and fell forward in his arms.

I didn’t quite go all the way out this time. Events took place over and around me in a kind of soup as the sun rose. Officer Rashkow appeared from nowhere, and Phil told him to get an ambulance. Seidman was told to try to figure out where I had come from. Phil picked me up and brought me somewhere, but I couldn’t make it out. Then Judy Garland’s face appeared above me.

“Mr. Peters? Oh, Mr. Peters, are you all right? Will he be all right?” She sounded scared and concerned and I wanted to reassure her, but I couldn’t talk.

Then I felt myself lifted and traveling. There were sirens, and I wished they would shut up so I could rest.

When I opened my eyes again, the sun was bright above me, but it wasn’t the sun, it was the ceiling light in an emergency room. The face above me was familiar. It belonged to a kid named Dr. Parry who had fished that bullet out of me not long ago. He was dressed in white and had blonde hair and glasses. He was sewing my scalp.

“You are a stupid man, Peters,” he said, sewing away. “Your head is a battleground of contusions and fractures. The human body is not built to take this abuse. That head’s going to come open like an egg one of these times.”

“How bad is it?” I asked.

Neither he nor I could make out what I said. I tried again slowly. “How bad?”

“Concussion, hairline fracture, fifteen stitches,” he said. “Maybe sixteen.”

A nurse stood next to him and said nothing. She reminded me of my father’s favorite reading lamp-tall, thin, and white.

When he’d finished, they helped me up. My jacket was gone, and my shirt was bloody.

“You’ll live again,” said Parry, cleaning his hands in a sink. “You think you can tolerate our company long enough to spend a day here while we watch you for any little problems like brain damage?”

He didn’t wait for an answer. I was placed in a wheelchair, and the nurse built like a lamp wheeled me into the hall. Phil was standing there with his arms folded and displeasure on his face. I closed my eyes in agony.

A guy with a Southern accent x-rayed my head none-too-gently while chewing gum. The nurse wheeled me back down the hall past Phil. Doc Parry checked me out and asked me to do some tough things like following his finger with my eyes and telling him my name and address. I passed the test.

“You are a mass of scar tissue shaped like a man,” he said, “but you’re probably all right.” He nodded and the frail nurse wheeled me back in the hall. Phil followed us down a corridor and into an elevator. No one spoke. We went up to a room and the nurse helped me into a gown. Her touch did nothing for me, and I apparently did nothing for her.

“You want these kept?” she said, holding my bloody clothes up for me to see.

I said no and laid back on the bed. As soon as my stitched head hit the pillow I shot up in pain. Phil was leaning against the window.

“We found Grundy,” he said. I turned on my stomach and groaned. “You’re doing great, Toby. We’ve got you for two murders, Peese and Grundy. Your prints are on the knife, aren’t they?”

“You tell me,” I said.

“I’m telling you. You’ve done some stupid things in your life, but yesterday may mark your all-time high. I told you to come to my office, and you went after Grundy. What happened? He push you around, and you stabbed him in self-defense?”

“No,” I said. “I went out when he cracked my head. When I woke up, he was sitting in front of me with a knife in him, just like Cash, the one on the Yellow Brick Road. That suggest anything to you, like the same murderer?”

“I thought you said Grundy threw Peese out the window?”

“Right,” I said. “It had something to do with pornographic movies Grundy was making with midgets. He was stealing footage from M.G.M. and… Did you find that roll of film?”

“Toby, Toby,” he said moving toward me, “there was no roll of film. The main witness we had against the little Nazi…”

“He’s Swiss…”

“… is dead,” continued Phil. “The best alternate suspect, Peese, is dead. You were with both of them before they died. You argued with both of them. You are up to your ass in trouble.”

“Search Grundy’s place,” I said. “Maybe you’ll find some names, numbers.”

“Anything worth getting, you’ve got,” said Phil. “You went over that place fast and messy.”

“You mean someone went through Grundy’s things?”

“You know it, Toby.”

Phil put his hand on my leg and started to squeeze. The nurse came in.

“I’d like some rest now,” I said.

“I’ll see you a little later, Toby,” Phil said, pushing past the nurse.

“That’s my brother,” I told her. She didn’t look impressed.

In the hall I could hear Phil asking the nurse when she came out how long I’d be laid up. She said I wouldn’t be able to move for a day at least.

There was a phone next to the bed. I called Shelly Minck, told him to get to my place, get my last suit, put it in a bag, and come to the hospital. I also told him to pick up a clean white smock, and come up to my room. If anyone asked him, I said, he should identify himself as Dr. Minck.

“That’s who I am,” he said.

“Then you won’t be lying,” I answered and hung up.

The nurse came in with a pill and a newspaper for me. I pretended to take the pill, and I took the paper. It told me that 50,000,000 people were expected to vote today. It told me that the first election results were from Sharon, New Hampshire, where Willkie had taken the lead 24-7. On the next page, a Japanese Ambassador named Yoshiaki Muira from Japan said the United States and his country would not fight over China.

It took Shelly over two hours to get to the hospital. He hadn’t changed into a clean smock, and he came in waving his cigar. The important thing was that he came in and he had a small black suitcase with him.

The room bounced me around while I dressed, and Shelly kept talking about root canals. I almost threw up, but managed to keep it down.

“See if you can get a wheelchair,” I said.

I sat on the edge of the bed waiting for the nausea to pass while Shelly was gone. He came back with a chair, and I climbed in. He pushed me into the hall and down the corridor, talking all the time about tooth decay. I hoped no one stopped to listen to him. We made it out of the hospital with no problems, and Shelly helped me to his car. I didn’t know where mine was. My gun was either in the trunk or Phil had it, unless the killer had gone through the trouble of getting my keys when I was out, then getting the gun and putting the keys back. I doubted it, but what the hell did I know.

Shelly drove around, squinting through his glasses, while I tried to think. His driving was a series of near misses which he didn’t seem to notice. It was hard to think.

Somewhere about 8000 on Sunset he pulled to the curb. His Ford was a ’37 in only slightly better shape than my Buick. I took one of the pain pills Shelly gave me and watched while he bought a map to the stars’ homes. The seller was a guy sitting under a big umbrella. He rocked back and forth on a wicker rocker and had his feet up on a chair whose back had been sawed off. He was in no hurry. He might not be making much money, but no one was trying to kill him. I thought about asking him for a job. I’d take the chair without a back.

Shelly drove on looking for Jack Benny’s house. Somewhere beneath the stitches my brain was working. An idea was coming.

Shelly turned on the radio, and we found out that Hank Greenberg, the Detroit outfielder, had been named Most Valuable Player in the American League. Twenty minutes later we stopped at Awful Fresh MacFarlane for a twenty-nine cent pound of candy in a paper bag. We were somewhere between Union and Hoover, and I asked Shelly to look up an address for me. He found three listings for a James Cash. I borrowed some change from him and went into a bar. What I really wanted to do was go home, but too many people knew where that was. I couldn’t even go back to the office.

The Cash idea was a longshot, but I didn’t have any short ones. My head felt better with Shelly’s pill inside me, and with a hat on I looked almost respectable. I called the first James Cash. It was a Venice number. James Cash answered, and I said he was the wrong one. I called the second in Burbank, and a woman with a very small voice answered. I asked for James Cash, and she told me he was dead. I asked if he was the same James Cash who had worked in The Wizard of Oz, and she said he was; she agreed to see me.

Shelly was tired, and I was feeling better, so I dropped him a block from the office. He wanted to work for a few hours more. We agreed that I’d return his Ford later. He reminded me to vote, and I told him I’d try.

“Go with a winner for a change, Toby,” he said. “Willkie.”

I made it out to Burbank on one more pain pill, a Pepsi, and two chicken tacos. It was a little after noon when I pulled into a driveway next to a sign that readVISIT OUR FURNISHED MODEL HOME. The Ford bumped through the field toward a quartet of small, white wooden homes. They were lined up in a field of mud. Each one was exactly like the one next to it. Some of these developments could line up the little homes for miles. This one was just getting started.

The house I was looking for was on the end. The view must have been terrific from the inside: nothing but rubble, telephone poles, and dirt that had broken the monotony last night by turning to mud.

Cash’s little woman was a very little woman. I leaned over to shake her hand. She was kind of chunky with a pleasant face and dark hair, probably in her thirties. She led me into a living room with normal size furniture and went out to get me a cup of coffee and a piece of banana cake.

“How can I help you?” she said.

“I’m working for M.G.M.,” I explained. “We want to find out just what happened to Mr. Cash.”

“I told the police everything I knew,” she said, “but it didn’t seem to help.”

“Everything?” I said. The cup shook slightly in her little hand. There was no toughness in her, and I wanted to go easy.

“You want to tell me about the movies he was working on?” I said softly.

She started to cry, and I let her. The banana cake was good. I had a second piece and indicated that I would appreciate another cup of coffee. She was happy to get it for me. When she came back, she sat on a chair in front of me. I could see from the brand that she wore children’s shoes.

“James didn’t know I knew about what he was doing,” she said, “but I knew. I think he was trying to get out of it, and whoever did it didn’t want him to.”

“You think he was going to the police?” I said.

“He didn’t exactly say so, but Thursday night he said we could move back East soon.” The tears were coming back. “James had a difficult life. We were only married a few months ago. We wanted children, but all we could afford was this. He was ashamed of what he was doing, Mr. Peters.”

If he was ashamed of it, he was damned good at hiding it if the porno pictures I saw were any evidence, but the lady deserved her grief.

“I’m sure he was, Mrs. Cash,” I said, patting her shoulder. “And you didn’t tell the police any of this?”

“No, I didn’t think it would do James’ memory any good.”

“You did the right thing,” I said. “Did the police look through your husband’s things?”

She said they had, but she had held out one thing from them, an address book he kept hidden.

“I knew those addresses were of the people he was working with.”

“One of them might have murdered him,” I said.

“They probably did,” she said, “but finding the killer won’t bring James back, and letting everyone know what he was involved in might get back East.”

“And you’re going back East?”

“Yes,” she said. “My parents live in Missouri. They’re not little people. They’re getting old, and they want me back. I haven’t got anything but this house, and it’s not paid for. If James was getting a lot of money for what he was doing, he had it put somewhere I don’t know about.”

She got me the notebook and asked me to promise not to tell anyone where I got it. In return for the book I promised to try to keep Cash’s name away from any pornography publicity.

She shook my hand, and I went outside. The sky was dark in the North. Maybe a twister would come and lift Cash’s house out of the mud and carry it over the rainbow. Maybe elephants would shit diamonds.

Glendale was a few minutes away so I drove to my ancestral homeland and went into The Elite Diner, a block away from the police station where I had once worked. The counter man knew me, and we said hello. He had once been a cop, too. He showed me a stomach scar he had picked up since I last saw him, and I showed him my head. He said I was the winner and brought me some coffee; I didn’t want anything with it. Most of the names in Cash’s little green notebook didn’t show anything I didn’t already know. Grundy’s name was in it. So was Peese’s. There were others I didn’t recognize, probably old friends. Maybe people in the business with him. There were a couple of numbers after initials. One of them struck me as familiar. I looked at it for a while until it blurred and came back into focus.

Night was coming over the mountains. I thanked the ex-cop and drove slowly toward the setting sun. Everything fit now. It didn’t make sense, but it fit. All the tinkertoy facts built into a tower of truth, an ugly tower built by a sick child, but it was hard to turn away from.

The drive back took about an hour. I should have been in a hurry, but I wasn’t. No matter how the day ended the next one would look dirty. Maybe Raymond Chandler had been right about the shoddy merchandise and shoddy people. Maybe old Toby Peters and his optimism were finally dead. Maybe Toby Peters would stop laughing at the crap he lived in. Maybe.