“Ressner would be allowed to escape. He’d go looking for his benevolent wife and loving daughter.”
“It worked fine to that point. He got in touch with Delores and told her he was at the Los Olvidados Hotel. She went to see him and let him hatch his scheme against Mae West. It was all right if he got caught. It would show the world how mad he was, and you could let him escape again. As it turned out, he wasn’t caught. He ran into me and got away.”
“That was a problem. I tracked him down through the Engineer’s Thumbs and you knew I might catch up with him before the whole scheme went through. So you got him to go into his Dr. Winning act with me, throw me off, use me. He thought he was toying with me. What he was doing was setting me up as a witness, a witness to a pair of murders I’d pin on him. How am I doing so far?”
“This is ridiculous,” Mrs. Grayson said, standing up and almost weeping.
“Right,” I agreed, “but close to what happened. I came running up here, and Delores intercepted me, telling me that Daddy was in the next room talking to the mean old stepfather. I swallowed it whole and went in. Here’s the point where I have some choices. Any one of the three of you could have put the knife in Grayson. I’m putting my money on Delores, who did him in and then came out in her bathing suit to greet me and serve me a cup of coffee. My guess is you killed him when you saw me coming up the driveway and hustled Ressner into the Packard to make a run for it and look guilty as hell. Is this coffee poisoned?”
“I’m sorry,” Delores said. “But it’s not.”
“O.K.,” I went on, finishing the coffee. “I didn’t catch Ressner. So you got me on Talbott’s trail. Ressner is crazy but he’s no fool. Why would he call Talbott and give his right name? He was acting like a man who wanted to get caught, and catch him I did at the Manhattan Bar. More guesswork now. Ressner got Talbott in the back room. You waited for me, knowing I’d take the bait again. I’m not too bright and easy to hook. You hustled Ressner out after stabbing Talbott. My bet this time is that Doc Winning did the killing and blasted me when I went through the door. You all killed Grayson for the money you girls will inherit You killed Talbott for one or two reasons I don’t know about. I’ll give you one good one. With Talbott’s murder filling the newspapers, Grayson would be lost in the shuffle. But I was still on the trail, and I might foul things up, so you cooked up the wild turkey chase to Fresno, pinched my wallet-I’ll give that one to Delores who probably followed me in the Packard-and let me walk into the Winning Institute while Daddy went nuts with another shot at Mae West and this morning’s mess with Cecil B. De Mille. I tell you he is one inept madman, but my guess is that he’s probably harmless or was until Doc Winning put a bug in his ear and sealed the ear. Last idea, you would have been happy if Jeffrey Ressner met with an accident while rampaging after celebrities. He almost did have that accident. If he got caught, you’d get your hands on him fast and see to it that he didn’t say anything embarrassing. But even if he did, no one was likely to believe him.
“It wasn’t a bad scheme,” I concluded. “Just too complicated. Too many holes. Too much ad-libbing. Believe me, it’s the dumb ones who are hard to catch. They just do it and run. Then they keep their mouth shut and may never get caught. It’s you cutie pies who stick your feet in the frosting.”
“I never wanted Jeffrey to be hurt,” Mrs. Grayson said earnestly.
“None of us want Mr. Ressner hurt,” said Winning, fumbling for his pipe, finding it, and putting it nervously into the corner of his mouth. “I’m afraid, Mr. Peters, you just created, as you said, a ghost story. You certainly have no evidence for any of this.”
“Right,” I said, standing up. “I can’t prove any of this, but with what Ressner is probably saying right now-”
“He’s psychotic,” said Winning, removing his pipe. “Any psychiatrist will confirm his condition. As you just said, no one is going to believe him.”
“But they’d probably believe me,” I said. “I wonder what happens when I tell my tale to my brother the Homicide cop and he takes each one of you into a little office for some coffee and a chat. You’ll start stepping all over one another’s story, and my bet is the poor widow will crack before the first cup is cool. I’ve got about two bucks in change I’ll bet on it, and I know a bookie who would give about eight to one against Mrs. Grayson after looking at her for thirty seconds.”
“I think you underestimate us and overestimate yourself, Mr. Peters,” said Delores, walking over to calm her mother, who was close to hysteria.
“Maybe. Why don’t we just wait and see? I’ll leave you three here to talk it over.” I made a move to the door, but Winning’s voice stopped me.
“Wait. Peters, I think I have something that will show you how wrong you are, that will convince you.”
I turned to look at him, at all of them, and waited. He moved quickly into the back of the house, fumbled in one of the rooms, and came in holding a.38 automatic.
“Just stand still, Peters, while we consider our next step.”
Mrs. Grayson was weeping now, and Delores moved to her side.
“The next step is obvious. You kill him, and we bury him in the desert,” she said.
“All right,” sighed Winning.
“Two questions for a dying man?” I asked.
“Very fast ones, Peters, this is upsetting Mrs. Grayson,” he said.
“Sorry. How good was my story?”
“So-so,” he admitted. “A few details were off, but very close. Your second question?”
“Is that my gun?”
“It is,” he said. “Now Delores, I suggest you take your mother to her room for a while.” Delores and Jeanette obeyed and left Winning and me alone.
“That gun makes a big noise when it goes off,” I said, taking a step toward him.
“There’s no one around to hear it for half a mile, and there’s nothing at all unusual about shooting at prairie dogs at night,” he said.
I took another step toward him and he raised the gun to fire. With my next step he did fire but nothing happened. The step after that I was in front of him and threw a punch that came from the floor. He pulled the trigger again as he fell. The bullet took off through the window and into the night. I kicked the gun out of his hand and he rolled over moaning and holding his chin.
“I think it’s broken,” he moaned.
“We can only hope,” I said, going through his pockets and finding my wallet. “No bullet in the first chamber,” I explained. “Never is. That’s the trouble with being an amateur.”
I made a long-distance call to Phil and invited the family back into the living room to wait for the state police. They came in about twenty minutes and led us all out after I turned the gun over to them. Phil had called, and I was sure I’d be spending a night in the lockup at the worst. I didn’t know what would happen to Winning and the Grayson girls. I didn’t care.
CHAPTER 17
The stitches came out of my head three days later, the morning Phil told me that Winning and the Graysons were being booked for murder. The case was pretty good if not perfect. If Mrs. Grayson didn’t take back her confession, they’d all do a lot of hard time.
The story had made the first pages of papers all across the country, primarily because Richard Talbott was one of the victims. The double murder shared space with the Japanese taking of Corregidor and the Russian counteroffensive.
There was no thank-you note from Anne for the hat, but I hadn’t expected one. There was no thank-you note from Arnie either when I collected on four overdue bills, one of them going back to 1939. Barely veiled threats and, in the case of the 1939 bill, the casual showing of my shoulder holster had done the trick. The guy was a close-to- the-ground mutt who owned a hot dog stand in Tarzana. If he had given me trouble, he would have discovered an empty holster. I had hocked my.38 at Wiley’s Pawn shop on Vine when the police returned it to me. With the five bucks I got for it and the eighteen left in my wallet when I got it back from Winning in Plaza Del Lago, I had enough to pay back Rosie and eat, especially with a free meal with my brother’s family.
I had dinner with them in North Hollywood on Saturday. Ruth was a better cook than Mrs. Plaut’s Aunt Jessica, but I had to spend part of the time looking out for my niece, Lucy, whose favorite game was to sneak up
