“You own a gun?”
“Yes, several; they are all in Oxford, Mississippi, in my study at Rowan Oak. They are locked securely away; I have an eight-year-old daughter. I brought none with me. I did not expect to be attacked, nor to commit murder or robbery.”
That did it. I put down the envelope I was writing on and looked up at him. I noticed that my legs had made their way up to the desk when I wasn’t looking. The hell with it.
“Look, Mr. Faulkner, I’ve got a job to do and you want to stay alive and out of jail and the newspapers-at least I think you do. We’re in the same boat. I need the money for this case. I’m reasonably good at what I do, but I’m also somewhat human. If you tickle me and don’t hit scar tissue, I laugh. If you torture me and hit an old wound, I cry.”
“I recognize the allusion,” Faulkner said, “and appreciate the point. I will try to be more civil, but the circumstances do affect my behavior. It is not just my life, but the world that is bitched proper this time, isn’t it? I’d like to be dictator now. I’d take all Congressmen who refused to make military appropriations and I’d send them to the Philippines. On this day a year from now I don’t think there’ll be one present second lieutenant alive. And here we are playing games with a meaningless murder, and I sit a helpless… forgive me, Mr. Peters, but perhaps you can better understand my emotions.”
“Apology accepted,” I said. I didn’t exactly like him now, but at least he seemed like a human being instead of a Southern imitation of George Sanders. “The shooting took place at nine or so last night. Where were you?”
“As I told the officer who brought me in here,” he said, drawing on his pipe to regain his calm exterior, “I was working with a writer named Jerry Vernoff. We were in my hotel room. My agent, Bill Herndon, and I had agreed to try to work up a story treatment for Warners as a preliminary step to possible employment. Mr. Vernoff has worked extensively on story treatments for various studios and has a reputation for working quickly and commercially. I believe someone at Warners suggested the possible collaboration. We ate dinner at the hotel.”
“Which makes it unlikely that you would have had a dinner appointment with Shatzkin,” I concluded. He nodded in agreement. I didn’t have a pinhead of an idea what was going on, but I had some names to work with. I put the notebook and envelope in my pocket and was about to order my feet off the desk when the door came open. If I had been listening to the waves of voices and sounds in the outer squad room instead of getting absorbed in my job, I might have heard Phil’s Frankenstein tread, but such was not to be.
Phil looked at Faulkner and then at me, and he turned as red as the ketchup stain on his shirt. Behind him, Cawelti stood in anticipation of something he could see expanding in my brother like a berserk balloon, something that had to come out or explode. My right foot had fallen asleep or I would have forced it down, but I couldn’t move it. Phil took the one step from the door to the desk, his double-ham of a hand descending in slow motion. I watched in fascination as it hit my right knee, spinning me out of the chair and against the wall. I sank to the floor with Phil taking another step toward me, and then Faulkner’s voice broke over his shoulder.
“Pardon me, Lieutenant,” he said, “but you seem to have the scenario wrong. I was under the impression that the police beat up the suspects, not their lawyers’ representatives.”
Phil paused and looked back at Faulkner, who met his eyes and held them. That lasted long enough for me to scramble to my feet, but my knee was sore and almost gave way. Cawelti stood in the door with a touch of smirk on his face. Phil caught the look out of the corner of his eye and realized he was surrounded by adversaries. Normally, he would have bulled his way through all three of us, breaking Faulkner first like a twig, stomping on Cawelti, and saving me for something special, but time had mellowed Phil and he settled for, “Get your asses out of here, fast, all of you.”
I hobbled to the door as Phil bumped past me, sat down in his now-contaminated chair, and stuck his head into the Faulkner file. Faulkner followed me slowly, and Cawelti closed the door behind us.
“He’s my brother,” I explained to Faulkner.
Faulkner nodded knowingly and replied, “Yes, I too have had brothers.” That struck me as a strange way of stating things, but I didn’t question it. I was suddenly aware that the entire squad room was quiet and faces were aimed in our direction. At first I thought it might be recognition of Faulkner. Then I realized that Phil had made one hell of a noise throwing me against the wall. The silence lasted a couple of beats, and then everyone went back to his or her own private world.
“I’ll be in touch with Mr. Leib as soon as I have anything,” I told Faulkner. There was no point in telling him to take it easy or that everything would be all right, that I would take care of his problems and Bela Lugosi’s and save Corregidor within two days. I wasn’t even sure I could make it to my car on my wounded knee.
Cawelti led the way for Faulkner, and the two disappeared through the haphazard maze of desks. I tried to hide my limp as I eased over to a familiar face, that of Sergeant Steve Seidman, who was looking up at me as I made my way to his desk. He was a thin, white-faced, sandy-haired cadaver of a cop in a gray suit, the only suit I had ever seen him wear. Maybe he had a closet full of duplicates. Seidman was the closest thing my brother had to a partner. Seidman’s strength was his inability to be ruffled. His idiosyncracy was his genuine respect for Phil.
“How’s it going, Toby?” he said as I leaned against his desk, trying to hide a grimace of pain or turn it into something resembling a smile. A uniformed cop ambled past me with an old man manacled to his wrist. The old man gave me a toothless grin. On Seidman’s desk was an ugly chunk of metal vaguely the shape of a club. Seidman saw me looking at it.
“Got that from a medical student at USC,” he explained. “A guy tried to mug him and his girlfriend. Med student picked up this handy-dandy all-purpose piece of junk from the gutter and exposed the guy’s brain with it. Broad daylight. Cop across the street in a diner saw the tail end and held off long enough to gulp his coffee. If he had moved a little faster, he could have saved the mugger a lot of surgery and me a lot of work.”
“The point?” I asked.
“Phil has a lot of cases on his mind,” he said.
“Phil is fifty and will never be more than a lieutenant,” I said. “Surliness is a way of life for him. He’s at war and the world is full of enemies, including me.”
“Maybe so,” sighed Seidman. I looked into the eyes in his sunken face. They were as black and faraway as the night sky. There was no distinction between the iris and the pupil. It was one wide, deep circle to infinity.
“Faulkner,” I said, above the start of an argument in a distant corner. The manacled old man had punched the cop in the kidney, and the cop had restrained himself admirably, limiting his wrath to one elbow in the old guy’s stomach and a lot of shouting. Seidman looked over at the conflict without emotion and spoke to me.
“Cawelti’s case,” he said. “Looks like a tight one. One live witness. One dead man who identified the killer. One gun found in Faulkner’s hotel room. Who could ask for more?”
“I could,” I said.
Seidman’s voice went down so that I could hardly hear it.
“So could Cawelti,” he said. “He’s not looking into corners. Wants to wrap this up tight, get his name in the papers, a pat on the head from Phil, and a nice note in his personnel file.”
“What about Faulkner’s alibi?” I tried, looking around for the well-groomed lady, but she was gone.
“That writer, Vernoff, says Faulkner went out alone for a drink just before nine,” Seidman said. “Plenty of time to pump a few drinks into himself and a few shots of something more deadly into Shatzkin and hurry back to the hotel.”
“Something sound wrong with that to you?” I said.
Seidman shrugged. “Hell of a complicated way to commit a murder. No motive.” Seidman’s eyes moved up and over toward Phil’s door behind my back. I could sense the hulking presence of my brother behind me. I got off Seidman’s desk and limped toward the squad room door. I got four feet before Phil’s hand grabbed my left shoulder. I turned, wondering what he had in store for me this time.
“This has been a hell of a week,” he said as quietly as he could, which was not very quiet. It was as close as he had ever come to an apology.
“They all are,” I said.
“They all are,” he agreed and turned to stalk back into his office.
The two Japanese kids were still on the bench waiting for someone to take them away and shoot them for treason. Coronet, the desk sergeant, was keeping his eye on them to the point where a good lightfinger could have taken his gun, his uniform, and the rusty fixtures of the Wilshire station without his knowing it. My knee throbbed, but I made it across the tile floor and out the door into the cold. In my pocket was a comfortable advance from Martin Leib and a few notes. I went to the drugstore at the corner, got some coffee and a second breakfast of
