The Fala Factor

5

The order of events that followed is still a matter of speculation for those who delve into the blotters of the Los Angeles Police Department for tidbits, tales, and history. I’m not even sure of what happened. I know I turned. I know that when turning I stepped on the floating towel and slipped. What I don’t know is whether the hand that pushed me struck before I slipped or was the cause of my slipping. A minor point, you might say, but if I could have managed to keep my balance while others were losing theirs, at least one more murder might have been prevented, not to mention what happened to me.

So I tripped backwards, seeing ceiling and the right arm of a murderer as it went through the bathroom door attached to the man himself. That told me one thing that should have been of comfort. He wasn’t sticking around to do to me what he had done to Olson. But I wasn’t thinking about that at the moment, or about the fact that for the second time in a few hours I was up in the air after being roughed up by someone associated with the late Doc Olson, upon whom I now found myself lying.

His body cushioned me neatly and kept me from a concussion or worse. There was no point in thanking him. My added bulk displaced a wave of water and my clothes took in moisture like a loan shark takes in IOUs. I reached back with a grunt to push myself up and found my hand in Olson’s face. It was at this moment that the bathroom door pushed open and instead of letting go of Olson, I pushed harder to get myself up to face the killer, who had decided to come back and do me in. It was Anne Olson, however, who stood in the doorway to the bathroom, almost up to her ankles from a new wave of water I had displaced. She watched my hand pushing her husband’s face under and she did a most reasonable thing; she screamed.

“No,” I said, letting go of Olson and falling forward on him to take in a lungful of water. When I came up sputtering, she was still standing there, her hands to her mouth.

“Wrong,” I gagged, coughing up water and managing to get one leg over the side of the tub. “I-” and a cough took me. She backed away into the hall and against the far wall. Her blouse was open. Drunkenness was gone. Seeing someone sitting on your dead husband in the bathtub can have a sobering effect. I flopped onto the floor, dripping, and tried to hold a heavy arm up to her in explanation.

“Not … what you think,” I gasped, down on my hands and knees. “That man, the one who ran past …”

“Man?” she whimpered, looking at me as if I were Harpo Marx. “What man?”

I tried to stand, slipped, and, with a magnificent effort, managed not to cry. There is no limit to man’s heroic possibilities when the last nickel is on the numbers.

“I didn’t do this,” I said, managing to get back to my knees. “I didn’t have time … just got up here.”

“He’s dead. Roy’s dead,” she cried.

I looked back at Roy because she was looking at him, though I didn’t expect to see anything new. The naked corpse had turned sideways, away from us as if he were trying to sleep and our loud conversation had disturbed him.

“He’s dead,” I agreed, reaching for the toilet to help myself up. I managed and took a step forward. Anne Olson rushed forward. I thought she had experienced a change of heart and was going to help me. Instead, she closed the bathroom door. I lurched forward and tried the handle. My hands were too wet to turn it.

“Hold it,” I yelled. “I didn’t do this. The killer might still be around. I might be able to catch him.”

I grabbed the knob with two hands and turned but nothing happened. What the hell kind of bathroom door locked from the outside? The answer was clear: a bathroom in the house of Anne and the late Dr. Roy Olson.

“Anne,” I shouted, hearing her breathing on the other side. “For God’s sake let me out. Listen to me.”

Some water decided to come out of my lungs at that point and I was paralyzed with coughing. Over it I could hear Anne Olson’s footsteps padding down the hall.

“Wait.” I coughed again, but she was gone.

I tried the door again but it was solid and locked. The room was too small and too soggy for me to back up and throw my shoulder against it.

“Open the damn door or I’ll use his corpse as a battering ram,” I shouted stupidly.

There wasn’t much I could do. Using the sink, I went back to the tub and turned off the running water. Then I sat on the closed toilet seat and looked at Olson’s corpse. He had nothing to say so I tried the door again. Nothing. Taking off my shoes and socks, I climbed onto the rim of the tub, being careful not to put my footprints on the corpse, and opened the small pebble-glass window in the wall. It was too small to crawl through, and I couldn’t see anything. There wasn’t much point in shouting. The nearest house was a few hundred yards away through the trees and there was no way, without stepping on Olson, that I could even get my head out the window. The open window did let in some cool air.

It was time to think. Time to act. I took off all my clothes, dried off with a towel Olson probably had planned to use, checked my dad’s watch, which was ticking merrily away and telling me it was three o’clock on some day in never-never land. With the spigot turned off, the water drained out, mostly under the door. I sopped up most of what remained on the tile floor with the towel I had used and a stack of other towels. I didn’t let the water out of the tub. There had been enough tampering with evidence. Having done all that, I sat on the toilet and checked myself for wounds. The scratch on my arm from the bushes didn’t look too bad. The bruises were minor on the rest of my body.

So, I sat naked with a naked corpse in a bathroom in Sherman Oaks and for a nutty moment considered posing as The Thinker. Maybe five minutes passed, during which I turned Olson over so I could see his face. I couldn’t decide what was worse, not seeing him and wondering how he looked or seeing him. In another five minutes I was shivering and had made a decision. There were dry clothes in the room neatly hung on wooden hangers, the clothes Olson was going to put on after his bath. We were approximately the same size, so I put them on.

I had the underpants on, a few sizes too big, and one foot in the trousers when the door popped open and I turned off-balance to face a uniformed cop about sixty years old. He had probably seen it all, but he had never seen this.

“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, removing the pants carefully, to keep the gun in his hand from getting jumpy.

“Son,” he said, looking from me to Olson, “I don’t know what the hell this looks like and I’m gonna do my damned best not to think about it. Now you just step out here in the hall nice and slow like a good fellow, or I’ll start pulling this trigger and not stop till I’m out of bullets.”

“I’m moving,” I said with as pleasant a grin as my battered face could muster.

My hands were out to show they were empty, and as I stepped into the hall he backed away, the gun level at my stomach.

“My clothes were wet,” I explained.

“Don’t talk,” the cop said, still looking at me. “This is crazy enough without you giving me the fantods. We’ll just call the station again.”

“My name’s Peters,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. I didn’t kill that man. The killer went out as I came in.”

“Makes no never-you-mind to me,” the cop said. “Just stand there quiet, or better yet, sit yourself down on the floor till I get some help here.”

“My brother’s Lieut-Captain Phil Pevsner of the LA.P.D. He knows about this case,” I said. “Call him.”

It was the first thing I could think of and probably not a particularly good idea since it was a partial lie and Phil might be less willing to listen than some unknown sergeant working Sherman Oaks.

“All in good time,” said the cop, reaching for a phone on a little white table in the hall. “You’re just talking to a soldier of law here. Now sit.”

I sat on the floor, resigned, while he made his call.

When he finished, the old cop took off his cap without taking his eyes from me. He was on the thin side except for his little basketball belly and he wore a dark toupee that didn’t match his sideburns.

“You got your share of scars there,” he said conversationally, trying to humor the madman.

“Right,” I agreed. “You want to know what happened in there?”

“Nope,” he said, showing a little smile. “I want to get home and finish reading the copy of Dragon Seed my wife bought me. I don’t want to think about this at all. Who you got in the Kentucky Derby tomorrow? Picked up a bookie the other day who told me to back Shut Out.”

The conversation for the next ten minutes was one-sided. The old cop, who said his name was Max Citron, talked and I tried not to listen as I sat in Olson’s undershorts, shaken by an occasional chill. I don’t know how long it was till the next two cops came. The first thing they decided after consulting with Citron was that I could put on an old suit of Roy Olson’s. He wouldn’t be needing it. Citron disappeared, came back with a gray suit, and I dressed while the new cops, both detectives, whose names were Downs and Hindryx, examined the bathroom, listened to my tale, wrote down what I said, and appeared to have no interest in the whole business.

“So the dead guy is a vet named Olson,” Downs said, looking down at his notes as we stood in the hallway downstairs. He was dark-suited, thin, weary, and wore a toothpick in the corner of his mouth.

“Roy Olson,” his partner, a squat redhead, filled in.

“Right,” Downs said. “You had some beef with him or something sick going. You were in the tub together and things got out of hand. All a mistake, right?”

“That’s not what happened,” I said, shaking my head patiently. “Ask Mrs. Olson. Where is she?”

“No Mrs. Olson here. Nobody but you,” Hindryx said, nodding back into the house.

For a second time, I explained what had happened. The two cops wrote it down dutifully so that my two tellings could be checked against each other and whatever additional tales I might tell. Hindryx wrote it, grunted occasionally, and put his notebook away.

“Where’s your car?” said Down.

I told him and he decided it would be fine right there until it could be checked out.

“Cop who found you said you’re Phil Pevsner’s brother, that right?” said Downs.

“It’s right,” I said.

“He’s an asshole,” said Downs, looking at me for contradiction.

“You want me to tell him you said that?” I answered.

Downs shrugged. “Suit yourself,” he said, shifting his toothpick to the other side of his mouth.

The next hour was a trip down memory lane. Printed, booked, checked for priors, questioned again, and headed for the lockup. I had a single call I could make. I told the cop at the local that I wanted to make a few calls, that there was no law that said I could make only one, that the cops got that idea from William Powell movies, but he didn’t budge. One call it would be.

I’d been through this before. I wouldn’t get a bail hearing on a murder charge so there was no point in calling Gunther to get me out. They’d want to keep me for a psychiatrist to talk to after what had happened. So I called the Wilshire District station. Veldu was still on duty, a double shift he explained as the lockup cop checked his watch to be sure I didn’t take too much time. Phil was home but Seidman was still there. I talked to him and gave him a quick explanation.

“Steve,” I said when he didn’t answer. “You there?”

“I’m here,” he said wearily, “but I’m not sure you’re all there. I’ll tell Phil and see what he wants to do.” He hung up and I gave the phone back to the lockup officer.

It was night and the cell I was taken to was small and smelled of nightmares. There were two bunks in the cell and a weak light in the ceiling. On the wall between the bunks was a chalk drawing of Smokey Stover. Someone was lying on the bunk on the left. Doc Olson’s clothes and I took the bunk on the right.

“I didn’t do it,” said the voice from the other bunk. The guy in it was lying on his back, his right arm across his eyes.

“I believe you,” I said, checking the bunk for bugs.

The other guy began to snore and I lay back trying to think. Had I stumbled into some unrelated murder? Had some jealous hulk that Anne Olson picked up strangled her husband, and I just had the dumb luck to walk in at the wrong time? Where was Anne Olson? Had Olson been knocked off because of the kidnapping of the president’s dog? Why? I knew I was too edgy to sleep, but knowing is not the same as feeling. I was asleep in minutes. My body had been through enough in forty-seven years to know when it needed a break, even if my mind didn’t.

I dreamed that Guy Kibbe and I were sitting on Doc Olson’s naked stomach. He was floating and we were out in the middle of the ocean. From a faraway island, a woman’s voice called, “Out here damned spot.” Using our hands, we paddled for it on the bouyant corpse. When we reached the island, my ex-wife Anne and Koko the clown were hand-in-hand, dancing on the beach. We got off of Olson, and the four of us watched him float out to sea. For some reason, it was a tender moment. Something was about to happen. Anne was about to speak and tell me something important, but she never did. Someone shook me awake and I was back in the cell.

“Come on,” said Seidman.

“She was going to tell me the answer,” I said, sitting up and looking over at my cellmate, whose arm was still covering his eyes.

“Sure,” said Seidman. His jaw was slightly swollen.

“You snore,” said the guy from the other bunk.

“You did it,” I answered, following Seidman out of the cell.

Some bookwork, discussion, and dirty looks passed between Seidman and Downs, but in a few minutes the final touches were made and I was on my way, seated next to Seidman.

“I got the report from Hindryx,” he said, heading into the night. “That the way it was?”

“The way I said it.”

That was all we said for the next half-hour till we got to the Wilshire station. It was four in the morning according to the clock downstairs and the night man had replaced Veldu. I didn’t know the night man so we exchanged nothing. We bypassed the squadroom and went to an office in the hall with CAPTAIN LOWELL B. PRONZINI stenciled on the door in black letters that were peeling off from years of scratching and a few dozen washings. Lowell B. had just retired. It was, I found, the office of Captain Phil Pevsner. It was bigger than his old one, had three chairs besides the one behind the desk, and probably looked out on the parking lot. I couldn’t tell. It was too dark. The desk was just as old as the last one and there were two battered file cabinets in the corner.

“Coming up in the world, ain’t you Rico?” I said to Phil, who sat rocking in his new swivel chair behind the desk.

“What’s Eleanor Roosevelt got to do with this shit?” he said, still rocking.

Seidman took one of the chairs, moved it to the corner, and sat down to swallow a pill and massage his right cheek, beneath which lurked the work that Shelly had done on him.

“Nothing,” I said.

Phil stopped rocking for a second, looked forward at me, a day’s stubble of gray beard on his chin. He said nothing and went from rocking to swiveling in his chair.

“Try again,” sighed Seidman from the corner.

Phil paused, looking bored, and reached for the metal cup of coffee on his desk. He discovered it was empty, got mad at the cup, and threw it in the garbage can near the desk. The garbage can was brown, metal, and not new.

“Ruth can make some curtains,” I said, “turn this into-”

“Eleanor Roosevelt,” Phil said, rubbing his temples.

“Eleanor Roosevelt,” I agreed, and told him everything, her fears, the dog, everything. “You believe me?” I concluded.

Phil’s hands went up in a resigned gesture of indecision. He looked at Seidman, whose tongue was in his cheek testing his inflamed gums. He had no opinion.

“Go home,” Phil said, swiveling away from me to look out of the dark window.

“Aren’t you going to tell me to stop looking for the dog?” I asked. “To keep out of it, to-”

“Would it do any good?” Phil said.

“No,” I agreed, “but that’s the routine. Aren’t we partners anymore?”

“We never were, “sighed Phil. “Downs and Hindryx gave me four days to come up with something or they’re pulling you back in. I leaned on them a little. They’re a pair of shits.”

“They have great respect for you too,” I added.

“And they’ve got a friend in the Wilshire who’ll be watching things for them,” Seidman added behind me.

“Let me guess,” I said. “Cawelti? Hell, Phil, just pull in Anne Olson. She must have panicked. She’ll back my story.”

“Go home,” said Phil. “Now.” He spun around, stood up, and turned his red face to me. The tie was back on. Old habits.

“I’m going,” I said, backing away. “My car is in Sherman Oaks. It’s on your way back to North Hollywood. How about dropping me off?”

“Go,” said Phil so softly that I could only tell what he was saying by watching his lips. I went.

I was almost to the front door of the station when Seidman caught up to me.

“I’ll take you to your car,” he said.

“You don’t live in the valley.”

“Can’t sleep with this toothache,” he said. “Besides, Phil doesn’t want to take a chance on you going back to Olson’s when you get the car.”

Seidman led the way to his car and we drove without talking. The sun was just coming up on the far side of the valley when we made the turn onto the cul-de-sac. It was Saturday morning. Seidman took my thanks without comment and waited to be sure I made a U-turn and drove away. He followed me and then veered off when he was sure I was on my way up Coldwater Canyon Drive. He had no worries. I was headed home wearing a dead man’s suit. When I got over the hills, a stop light caught me and a guy on the radio said Robert S. James, the rattlesnake killer, had just been hanged at San Quentin. He was, said the announcer with a pregnant pause, “calm to the end.”

I looked in the rearview mirror at my face. My chin was covered with stubble just like my brother’s, the same gray field of hard times.