next room. Life had been Germanized in the last week and would probably be more so when the war actually came.
There was a knock on the door. The knocker turned out to be one of Hughes’ bodyguards. “You asked for these,” he said, handing me an envelope.
“Thanks,” I said. He left without another word. I opened the envelope and found photographs of everyone who had been at the Hughes party. I spread them on my table.
A few minutes later, there was a slight, tentative knock at the door.
“Come in,” I called and looked back over my shoulder. Gunther came in politely.
“Do you have any tea, Toby?” he said. “I have a client and…”
“Sure,” I said. “You know where it is. Take what you need.”
Wherthman was as quiet as he could be, which was pretty damn quiet, but he had trouble finding the tea. He took enough time that his client came to the door.
“Gunther?” a tentative voice asked.
“I’m getting some tea,” Gunther said.
“Come on in,” I said, staring at the photographs. I just kept waiting for the photographs or my mind to tell me something.
I heard the footsteps of the client come into the room and stop not far from me.
“Here they are,” said Gunther.
“Schell!” said the client with a heavy German accent.
I rolled over to face the man. He was staring at the picture of the Schell brothers on my wall.
Gunther Wherthman’s client was about my age and height. He wore blue denim trousers and jacket and a white shirt without a tie. In his mouth was a nickel American cigar. He had a two-day growth of beard and wore a pair of rimless glasses on his slightly hooked nose.
“You know them?” I said, rolling over and getting up.
The client looked at me with amusement and nodded.
“Berlin, 1933,” he said. “They were brownshirts, Nazis. They arrested me. I have a lump on my back as a souvenir. I hope they are well.” The accent was heavy, but I could make out the words.
“They’re both dead,” I said, “murdered in the last two days.”
The client shrugged and pulled on his cigar.
“Don’t go away, please,” I told the client. “Gunther, why don’t you make the tea here?” I pointed to the photographs on the table of everyone who had been at the Hughes’ house for the party. Martin Schell’s picture was on the top.
“Yes,” said the client. “That’s him.”
“Sit down,” I said, offering him one of my three chairs. “How about some cereal?”
He looked with distaste at my Kellogg’s carton on the table and said, “We didn’t eat that kind of thing in Augsburg.”
“We have work, Toby,” Gunther said.
“A minute, Gunther,” I pleaded.
The client looked at the rest of the spread-out photographs and put his finger on one.
“Ah,” he said. “I knew this one too. The three of them were together when they came for me in Berlin. They’d been out enjoying themselves one evening and they continued their entertainment at my expense.”
“God sent you,” I said, smiling at him.
“I do not believe in God,” said the man with some irritation. “I am a Communist, which, by the way, is why I am not in Berlin at the moment. I might also mention that there are, perhaps, thirty or forty Berliners in Los Angeles at the moment who would remember that trio.”
“Mister.…”
“Brecht,” said the client, holding up the photograph. “Bertold Brecht.”
“Mr. Brecht,” I said. “You may have just solved a murder.”
“Humm,” he said. “I should like that.”
Wherthman poured us all some tea, and Brecht told me his tale about the Schells. His cigar was turning the room into a putrid cloud, but I wanted to hold onto him.
“It wouldn’t have taken much to recognize the Schells,” said Brecht. “If you lived in Berlin in 1933 and had trouble with the Nazis, you probably met the Schells. Gunther, I’ll have to go now. I’ve enjoyed the tea and the conversation. I’d like you to finish the poems. I’ve got a young man named Bentley working on the play. Now, Mr. Peters, should you need me further, Gunther has my phone number and my address in Santa Monica.”
We shook hands and he left with his hands deep in his pockets.
Gunther and I finished our tea, and Gunther explained that Brecht had been a famous young playwright in Germany. Apparently he had only been in the United States about six months. According to Gunther, he had taken a ship from Russia to San Pedro and settled down a few miles from where he landed.
“He had always been no more than a step or two ahead of the Nazis,” said Wherthman.
“He’s Jewish?” I asked.
“No, family was Protestant-Catholic. But as he told you, he is a Marxist.”
I finished my tea, scratched my stomach and turned to the pictures on the wall.
“Now,” I said, “if I can only figure out why Schell wrote ‘unkind’ on the table in his blood while he was being strangled, I may have most of this sorted out.”
Gunther finished his tea and got down from the chair to move to my side. Since his head came just above my belt, he had to look almost straight up to see the photograph.
“That doesn’t say ‘unkind’,” he said to me.
I looked down at him.
“It says ‘ein kind’-a child-in German. It isn’t English.”
Of course, Wolfgang Schell was German. He wouldn’t write in English when he was dying. But the new possibility that followed didn’t give me a lot of cheer. Had Schell been trying to leave a message that he had been strangled by a child?
CHAPTER TEN
I decided to be unreachable for a few days, just in case Phil put things together faster than I thought he would. Using a semisturdy suitcase given as a fee by a pawnbroker named Hy O’Brien, I packed in a record four minutes, asked Gunther to keep an eye on the room for me and headed into the morning. I made it to my car just in time to have Jimmy Fiddler tell me that Milton Berle had married Joyce Matthews and Ronald Reagan was right behind Erroll Flynn in fan mail at Warner Brothers with Jimmy Cagney a close third. It sounded unlikely to me, and I was about to tell Fiddler so when I felt something cold and hard on my neck.
My guess was that my injuries had caught up with me and the first sign of paralysis had struck. When a short, thick head and little eyes appeared in my rear-view mirror, I breathed a weary sigh. Life seemed to be a never-ending series of attacks punctuated by periods of confusion. This was an attack, and the wheezer had a gun to my neck. His nose was held together by a strip of tape, and his face showed a variety of scars from the lumps I had smashed in his face. Overall, I would have called my work a triumph of cosmetic surgery, but I had the feeling that Wheezer thought otherwise.
“
Since I couldn’t speak German, any attempt at conversation seemed pointless without an interpreter. I didn’t think Wheezer would want me to head back and get Gunther, but I didn’t want conversation to die, or I might follow the example.
“
“
He was sweating, and the Luger in his hand bumped on my neck.
