small booth was a dozing engineer. I pushed my face against the glass and pounded harder on the window. The engineer looked up at my flattened visage, rubbed his mouth with his open palm and reached for his glasses, but a sound behind me told me I had no time to wait. I turned a corridor, sure I was leaving a trail of blood from my increasingly painful foot in NBC’s clean blue carpet, and pushed through the first door that would open. I fell flat, landing on a table piled with records. The table cracked and records went rolling and flying. My breath was gone. I pushed myself to my knees, wiped sweat from my eyes and listened. No footsteps, just the distant sound of Tommy Dorsey playing “This Love of Mine.”
I reached over to close the door behind me, gasping for air. I was in a small record storage room. With the slight light from under the door, I could see that there was only one way in or out of the room. Then a shadow appeared under the door. Someone was standing on the other side.
I was scared and angry-angry because anyone in his right mind would have given odds that the destruction of NBC would have brought an army of guards swooping down even at two in the morning. Anger didn’t keep fear from turning my stomach. I reached back and felt my way around a large cabinet. It opened with almost no noise and I found enough room inside even with the stacks of records to climb in and close the door behind me. The door wouldn’t stay shut, but by holding onto the sharp end of a corroded nail that stuck through the wood, I was able to keep it closed. I knew my fingers would cramp eventually, and I would have been more comfortable in a position other than on my back with my throbbing foot in the air and the Andrews Sisters’ version of “Elmer’s Tune” poking my neck, but I was alive and had hope.
The door to the small room opened and I heard a foot crunch against one of the records I had scattered. Footsteps on more records, and the light came on in the room and filtered through the cracks in the cabinet.
The footsteps made it clear that the killer was no more than the length of a tall man away. The length dwindled to midget height with one step and there was a tug at the cabinet door. I held onto my rusty nail as tightly as I could, folded upside down on my back. The cabinet door opened and the light hit my face.
My hope that some of the noise had penetrated the brain of a curious guard fell away when I saw the long pistol. I tumbled out of my tiny tomb as the killer stepped back and levelled the gun at me. There was no great hurry now. I put my back against the wall and stood up to take the shot. My knees were too cramped and weak to even consider a lunge. I shrugged and looked up at the face behind the rifle. It was a familiar face, the face of someone who had killed at least two people. The barrel of the gun came up and I revised the body count upward by one.
CHAPTER TWO
It had all started six days earlier. Actually, where it started is a question of what you’re interested in. It started for me in about March of 1897 when my father and mother decided to have a second offspring and God provided a convenient rainstorm one afternoon, so they could close their grocery and work on it. Nine months later on November 14, Tobias Leo Pevsner, who was to become Toby Peters, detective and shoeless victim, was born. Jump 44 years, a broken nose, a broken marriage, and as many broken promises as there are abandoned wrecks along the Pacific Coast Highway and you find yourself in my rooming house, on a Monday, one week before my showdown at NBC.
On the Friday before, I had called a number given to me by my ex-wife Anne, who worked for Transcontinental and World Airlines. According to Anne, her boss’s boss, Howard Hughes, wanted a good, honest detective. I qualified for at least the second half of that requirement. I had called the number and spent the weekend at the library getting information on Hughes. He had broken all sorts of long distance flying records, owned Hughes Aircraft in Culver City, Hughes Tool Company, a good chunk of Transcontinental, the Caddo Corporation for making movies, a brewery in Texas and large parts of six states. I was impressed, primarily because I figured it would be reasonable to ask a guy like Hughes for $50 a day, which was so far out of line that anyone but a millionaire would have laughed at it.
On Monday morning, I was sitting in my room eating a very large bowl of Kellogg’s All-Bran, the natural laxative cereal. I had been living in a rooming house in Hollywood for almost three months at $15 a month.
I had no faith in the rooming house lasting a long time. My last place was being levelled by a bulldozer to make way for a supermarket. I had been thrown out of the apartment I had lived in before that when a guy shot it up and took an unintended dive out of my window. The rooming house was a change of pace in a quiet neighborhood. It had been an impulsive move toward domestic tranquility, but the quiet street and deaf landlady were already driving me away from what little sanity I had.
The deaf landlady, Mrs. Plaut, kept the room clean, which relieved me of the small, infrequent guilt I had always felt about the other places I had lived in and let rot around me. I had a hot plate in a corner, a sink, a small refrigerator, some dishes, a table and three chairs, a rug, a bed with a purple blanket made by Mrs. Plaut that said “God Bless Us Every One” in pink stitching, and a sofa with little doilies on the arms that I was afraid to touch.
The six people who lived in the place generally minded their own business. I wasn’t even sure who they all were, since my hours were unusual and I didn’t socialize much in the hall or join in the weekly poker game Mrs. Plaut held in the living room downstairs. Eventually, I would have to accept her invitation since she assured me the stakes were “moderate.” I had trouble picturing her wrapped in her old shawl crocheting doilies as she “raised a sawbuck” over the eleven-cent bet of Mr. Hill, the nearsighted accountant.
The phone in the hall rang and I could hear Mrs. Plaut cackling to someone. Then I heard the slap of her slippered feet come down the hall. I could almost smell the faded flowers on her print dress when she knocked on my door.
“Tony,” she whispered. I had spent the better part of the first evening I moved in trying to tell her my name was Toby, but she had smiled knowingly and kept calling me Tony Peelers. I had enough names and could have done without it, but some things aren’t worth the effort.
“O.K.,” I shouted, shoveling down All-Bran so it wouldn’t get soggy while I went to the phone.
“Tony,” she went on. “Are you there? You have a telephone call.”
“I’m here. I’ll be right there.”
Her feet padded away, and I hurried to the door, pulling on my pants. I hobbled down the corridor to hear Mrs. Plaut saying into the phone, “I’m sorry, but Tony is not home. Would you care to leave a message?”
I managed to pull my belt tight and wave to Mrs. Plaut, who ignored me. We wrestled for the phone for a few seconds. Since I was thirty years younger than she was and fifty pounds heavier, I almost succeeded in getting the phone from her fingers. I finally forced my face in front of her, and recognition dawned. She let me have the phone and I panted into it.
“Peters here.”
“Mr. Hughes would like to see you today,” a male voice said.
“All right, where?”
“Be at 7000 Romaine at 11. That gives you one hour.”
“One hour,” I said. “What’s it about?”
The guy on the other end hung up and so did I.
I finished my cereal, had another bowl with sugar and milk and found out from the L.A.
I also discovered from the “Private Lives” cartoon that “Berlin’s most luxurious boudoir belongs, not to a movie star, but to Reinhard Heydrich the cold-blooded killer who governs what was once Czecho-Slovakia.”
Armed with all this information, I shaved, finished dressing, rinsed out my bowl, pretended I didn’t notice my unmade bed and went into the rain ignoring the twinge in my bad back that promised trouble if the rain kept
