Tomorrow Is Another day

Chapter 2

Captain G. Lane Price was sitting behind his desk, wearing what looked like the same uniform he had worn a little over ten years ago when he'd shaken my hand, wished me well with my life as a civilian, and gone to lunch with the mayor of Glendale.

Captain G. Lane Price was leaning over to polish his shoes with a spritz from the bottle of Griffin ABC Liquid Black that sat on his desk.

The "G" stood for Gene. Lane Price did not think of himself as a "Gene." At least he hadn't two or three decades ago when he was considering a career in movies, politics, or public relations, whichever came first.

"Pevsner," he grunted, looking up at me for an instant and then returning to the task of shining his shoes. "Don't look much different. A pound here, there. A little gray at the sideburns."

"The scars don't show," I said, standing in the large masculine office complete with leather-covered chairs, a massive desk, and pictures on the walls of dead animals and dead politicians.

"Something to be thankful for. Have a seat."

"And I changed my name to Peters a long time ago, Toby Peters."

"Suit yourself," he said. "Nothing new in the City of Angels."

I sat.

Lane Price was a little more bald, a little more hefty, and a lot darker under the eyes than he had been when I left the Glendale Police Department. Price had always looked like a man who just woke up. Now he looked like a man who wanted to go back to sleep.

"How they look to you?" he said, pulling his chair out from behind the desk so he could show me his shoes.

"Ready for inspection by Patton himself," I said.

"Maybe," he said, pursing his lips and examining his work. "Maybe. But I don't figure the wife and her brother'll be after my shoes. There's plenty to criticize on the way down to keep them occupied." He rolled his chair back behind the desk, tapped his fingers on the clear surface of the desk, and continued, "Last I heard you were doing security at Columbia."

"Warners," I corrected. "Got canned for punching a cowboy star."

"Not Bob Steele?" the chief asked seriously.

"No," I said, to his relief. "I'm a licensed investigator in L.A. County."

"How's the wife?…"

"Anne and me," I said, wanting to kick off my tight shoes. "We got divorced when I was at Warners."

"Happens," said Price with a sympathetic shake of the head. "You kill that guy in the Mozambique?"

"No," I said.

G. Lane Price nodded. I wasn't sure what the nod meant. He robbed the top of his head like Guy Kibbee.

"Somebody killed him," G. Lane went on.

"Looked that way to me," I agreed.

We were getting along just fine so far.

"Two of my men, Frank Oznati and Carmen Harris. They were in the Mozambique with their wives, they say your friend, one who looks like Robert Taylor, started a fight and ran, and you went after Ramone."

"Carmen?" I asked. "There're cops named Carmen now?"

Price shrugged.

"Tends to put a chip on your shoulder," he said. "You went after Ramone. Lou Canton says…"

"Lou?…"

"Old piano player. Says when he and Ramone left the stage when the fight started, Ramone said he saw someone he knew in the audience. Canton says Al looked scared. Canton helped him to his dressing room and went out to call the station. No phone backstage and he was afraid to go back into the bar."

"Interesting," I said.

"Depends," said Price. "Maybe two, three minutes after you go backstage, you come out and announce that Ra-mone's dead."

"Right."

"Right," Price said, nodding and pursing his lips. "Questions. Why did you go backstage? What did you see? Who was the guy you were with? And what were you doing in the Mozambique?"

"Which one do you want first?" I asked.

"Take your pick and take your time," the chief said, leaning back and folding his hands behind his head. "Longer we take, the less time I have to spend at my wife's brother's house. Then, after you tell me, you tell it all to Officer Cooper, who takes it down so you can sign."

"I need a lawyer?" I asked.

"This day and age everyone needs a lawyer," Price said, sighing.

"Al Ramone used to be an actor," I said.

"That a fact? Which question you answering?"

"He owed my client a few dollars," I said, turning my most sincere unblinking look at the chief. It was wasted. His eyes were closed.

"A few?" he said, eyes still closed.

"Two hundred and change," I said. "I get forty bucks if I collect from Ramone."

"Client got a name?" Price asked dreamily.

"Everybody's got a name," I said.

"Can I trouble you for it?"

"I don't…"

"Just to check if you're on the up-and-up about this," he said, opening one eye to watch my reaction.

"Sheldon Minck," I said. "A dentist in L.A. In the Farra-day Building."

"Report says Ramone had a full set of dentures in his lap. What'd he need with a dentist?"

"Old bill," I said.

"This dentist, he doesn't happen to look like, say, some movie star, Robert Taylor maybe?"

Both of Price's eyes were open now.

"Dr. Minck is five-six, about two hundred pounds, bald, and sporting glasses as thick as Yorba Linda."

"Guy who was with you who started the fight…" Lane Price went on, checking his watch.

"Don't know anything about him. Just a guy who had a few drinks and was looking for someone to tell his troubles to. He offered me a beer. I took it. He started to tell me the story of his life and wife in Omaha. Then Ramone came out… and everything started when the guy from Omaha punched your man and was gone. Ramone left the stage and I went after him." ' "Guy from Omaha looked like a movie star," the chief said, sitting up again.

"Maybe," I said. "A little like Edward G. Robinson maybe."

"Not the way I heard it," said the chief.

"Closest star I can give you," I apologized, holding my hands up.

"Backstage. Next scene," said Price. "And slow it down. This is a homicide."

"Looked for Ramone. Couldn't find him. Went into the toilet and there he was."

"That's it?"

"That's it. Didn't see anybody. Didn't hear anything."

The chief started to open his desk drawer, changed his mind, and closed it again.

"Curtain rod from his dressing room," said Price. "Skewered like that Hungarian stuff I hate."

Price demonstrated a two-handed jab with a curtain rod aimed, I guessed, at an imaginary brother-in-law.

"Damn thing doesn't even have a point," he went on. "I mean the curtain rod. Take some strength, don't you know, even if you got lucky and went in right under the ribs, which he did."

"Take some strength," I agreed.

Price stood up and worked the kinks out of his legs.

"Got the knees of an old ballet dancer," he said.

I held back a good comeback with another one in the wings and just nodded. Price had no sense of humor.

"Hell," he said. "I'll buy your story but I'll check it out. Can't see any reason you'd go coconuts on me with a curtain rod for forty bucks. Hell, these are boom times, boom times this side of the Rockies. People don't kill for forty bucks, but you never know."

"You never know," I agreed.

He was standing over me now, looking down, his face sour with the realization that he'd soon be back with the little woman and her brother.

"Some of what you told me is maybe half true," he said. "I find it's not and you killed Ramone, I'll haul you back to Glendale so fast your ears'll bleed."

"I'm always happy to come back home," I said, "but I didn't…"

"Hell," he said with another sigh. "I'm shorthanded here, Peters. You get cleared on this I'll take you back, promotion to sergeant."

I stood up now.

"Damn war's got my good men. Thinking of taking on women for street work," he said to a photograph on the wall of Herbert Hoover.

"I'll think about it," I said as Price walked to his door and opened it.

"No, you won't," he said. "I'm gonna have to make it for the duration with Carmen, Frank, amazons, little kids, and dwarfs."

"Little persons," I corrected.

He looked back at me, puzzled.

"Little persons. They don't like to be called dwarfs. My best friend is a little person."

"That a fact?" said Price.

I nodded as he called out the door for Officer Cooper.

"Those sailors didn't start that fight with our cops, and the guy in the booth didn't either," I said as he stepped away from the door, leaving it open. "Your boys started it."

"Figures," said Price, adjusting his suit jacket. "Damn thing is I can't get rid of 'em. They're tough, stupid, and 4-F, one for a trick shoulder and the other for flat feet. Best I can do. When Johnny comes marching home, Frank and Carmen can join the job market. Wait. Now things are coming back to me here. You used to live on…"

"Linden," I said. "My dad had a grocery store on Canada."

"You had a brother…" he said, squinting at me and trying to remember.

"Phil. He's a cop. Wilshire District. Captain."

"Change his name too?"

"No," I said. "He's still Pevsner."

"Think he'd be interested in a return to his family roots?" asked Price hopefully.

"You can ask," I said as Officer Cooper, lean, teen, and neatly pressed, came in with a notebook in hand.

"How do I look?" asked Price, tugging at his jacket.

"Elegant," I said before Cooper could speak.

"Distinguished," said Cooper seriously.

"Can't trust either of you," Price said. "Take his statement and send him home."

Cooper nodded.

"My car's still at the Mozambique," I said as Price went out the door.

"Cooper," called the chief.

"I'll take him back," said the young cop as the door slammed.

"Doesn't care for his brother-in-law," I said.

"Brother-in-law's the county water commissioner," Cooper was whispering, even though the chief's freshly polished shoes were tapping well down the hallway.

I checked my watch. It told me it was eight-twenty. My watch was wrong as usual. It was the only thing my old man left me besides memories.

"It's five after midnight," Cooper said.

"Let's get to it," I said, sitting again.

Cooper didn't take the chief's chair. He sat opposite me in a chair in front of the desk, balancing the notebook in his lap.

"You know there's more than one way to spell cagey," I said.

"Never thought much about it," Cooper said, smoothing his pants and taking out his pencil.

It took about ten minutes to give my statement and another twenty for Cooper to type it up for my signature. I signed and he drove me back to my car in the parking lot of the Mozambique. There was one other car in the lot, an old Ford that glowed with wax or fresh paint by the night light of the Mozambique window.

"Ramone's car?" I asked.

"Wouldn't know," said Cooper.

I got out and went to my Crosley. It wasn't locked. I slid in and started the engine. Cooper just sat there watching me. I pulled out into the street and headed north. When I got to the first corner, I turned right, parked at the curb, turned off the lights, and turned my engine off.

I rolled my window open and thought I heard the sound of Cooper's patrol car pulling out on the dead street behind me. I waited a few minutes, got out of the car, and headed for the Mozambique in the shadows.

The place was dark and the front door was locked. I knocked gently, hoping Lester had had enough for the night and had gone home instead of sitting in the dark on a tinder pile of broken chairs, tables, shot glasses, and beer mugs.

"Wow," Sidney screamed inside.

I waited a few beats, ready with a lie for Lester, Officer Cooper, or an air-raid warden, but I didn't need it. I went to the east side of the Mozambique along the pink adobe wall to the window of Al Ramone's dressing room. It was closed now, but I doubted if anyone had fixed the latch in the last hour. It didn't make much noise as I slid it up and carefully climbed inside.

When I got inside I felt my way past the little dressing table and along the wall to the door. There wasn't much light from moon, stars, or the all-night ten-watt light bulb somewhere ahead of me through the open door.

I didn't bang my shins or walk into anything as I inched along the wall and smelled the night dust and alcohol. Across from the wall, I could make out a dark shadowed area where the rest room should be. Something? A creak? Sidney? Maybe Lester let Sidney fly around the Mozambique at night, a guard cockatoo with beak and claw and limited vocabulary.

Quiet.

I pulled the door of the broom closet open, groped till I found the bucket, turned it over, balanced myself on it, holding onto the lower shelf. Then I searched for and found the envelope with Gable's four fifty-dollar bills, his card, the killer's poem and notes, and the photograph I'd plucked from Ramone's mirror. I pulled the envelope down and tucked it into my Windbreaker pocket as I got off the bucket.

I was back in the little alcove, getting used to the ten-watt light, and was almost inside of Al Ramone's dressing room when the toilet flushed. I pushed my back against the wall, trying to cover myself with shadow, knowing I should just make a break for the window when the rest-room door came open and the light behind the man in the doorway lit me like Dame Myra Hess at the Hollywood Bowl.