Stuart Kaminsky - The Fala Factor

His body cushioned me neatly and kept me from a concussion or worse. There was no point in thanking him. My added bulk displaced a wave of water and my clothes took in moisture like a loan shark takes in IOUs. I reached back with a grunt to push myself up and found my hand in Olson’s face. It was at this moment that the bathroom door pushed open and instead of letting go of Olson, I pushed harder to get myself up to face the killer, who had decided to come back and do me in. It was Anne Olson, however, who stood in the doorway to the bathroom, almost up to her ankles from a new wave of water I had displaced. She watched my hand pushing her husband’s face under and she did a most reasonable thing; she screamed.

“No,” I said, letting go of Olson and falling forward on him to take in a lungful of water. When I came up sputtering, she was still standing there, her hands to her mouth.

“Wrong,” I gagged, coughing up water and managing to get one leg over the side of the tub. “I-” and a cough took me. She backed away into the hall and against the far wall. Her blouse was open. Drunkenness was gone. Seeing someone sitting on your dead husband in the bathtub can have a sobering effect. I flopped onto the floor, dripping, and tried to hold a heavy arm up to her in explanation.

“Not … what you think,” I gasped, down on my hands and knees. “That man, the one who ran past …”

“Man?” she whimpered, looking at me as if I were Harpo Marx. “What man?”

I tried to stand, slipped, and, with a magnificent effort, managed not to cry. There is no limit to man’s heroic possibilities when the last nickel is on the numbers.

“I didn’t do this,” I said, managing to get back to my knees. “I didn’t have time … just got up here.”

“He’s dead. Roy’s dead,” she cried.

I looked back at Roy because she was looking at him, though I didn’t expect to see anything new. The naked corpse had turned sideways, away from us as if he were trying to sleep and our loud conversation had disturbed him.

“He’s dead,” I agreed, reaching for the toilet to help myself up. I managed and took a step forward. Anne Olson rushed forward. I thought she had experienced a change of heart and was going to help me. Instead, she closed the bathroom door. I lurched forward and tried the handle. My hands were too wet to turn it.

“Hold it,” I yelled. “I didn’t do this. The killer might still be around. I might be able to catch him.”

I grabbed the knob with two hands and turned but nothing happened. What the hell kind of bathroom door locked from the outside? The answer was clear: a bathroom in the house of Anne and the late Dr. Roy Olson.

“Anne,” I shouted, hearing her breathing on the other side. “For God’s sake let me out. Listen to me.”

Some water decided to come out of my lungs at that point and I was paralyzed with coughing. Over it I could hear Anne Olson’s footsteps padding down the hall.

“Wait.” I coughed again, but she was gone.

I tried the door again but it was solid and locked. The room was too small and too soggy for me to back up and throw my shoulder against it.

“Open the damn door or I’ll use his corpse as a battering ram,” I shouted stupidly.

There wasn’t much I could do. Using the sink, I went back to the tub and turned off the running water. Then I sat on the closed toilet seat and looked at Olson’s corpse. He had nothing to say so I tried the door again. Nothing. Taking off my shoes and socks, I climbed onto the rim of the tub, being careful not to put my footprints on the corpse, and opened the small pebble-glass window in the wall. It was too small to crawl through, and I couldn’t see anything. There wasn’t much point in shouting. The nearest house was a few hundred yards away through the trees and there was no way, without stepping on Olson, that I could even get my head out the window. The open window did let in some cool air.

It was time to think. Time to act. I took off all my clothes, dried off with a towel Olson probably had planned to use, checked my dad’s watch, which was ticking merrily away and telling me it was three o’clock on some day in never-never land. With the spigot turned off, the water drained out, mostly under the door. I sopped up most of what remained on the tile floor with the towel I had used and a stack of other towels. I didn’t let the water out of the tub. There had been enough tampering with evidence. Having done all that, I sat on the toilet and checked myself for wounds. The scratch on my arm from the bushes didn’t look too bad. The bruises were minor on the rest of my body.

So, I sat naked with a naked corpse in a bathroom in Sherman Oaks and for a nutty moment considered posing as The Thinker. Maybe five minutes passed, during which I turned Olson over so I could see his face. I couldn’t decide what was worse, not seeing him and wondering how he looked or seeing him. In another five minutes I was shivering and had made a decision. There were dry clothes in the room neatly hung on wooden hangers, the clothes Olson was going to put on after his bath. We were approximately the same size, so I put them on.

I had the underpants on, a few sizes too big, and one foot in the trousers when the door popped open and I turned off-balance to face a uniformed cop about sixty years old. He had probably seen it all, but he had never seen this.

“It’s not what it looks like,” I said, removing the pants carefully, to keep the gun in his hand from getting jumpy.

“Son,” he said, looking from me to Olson, “I don’t know what the hell this looks like and I’m gonna do my damned best not to think about it. Now you just step out here in the hall nice and slow like a good fellow, or I’ll start pulling this trigger and not stop till I’m out of bullets.”

“I’m moving,” I said with as pleasant a grin as my battered face could muster.

My hands were out to show they were empty, and as I stepped into the hall he backed away, the gun level at my stomach.

“My clothes were wet,” I explained.

“Don’t talk,” the cop said, still looking at me. “This is crazy enough without you giving me the fantods. We’ll just call the station again.”

“My name’s Peters,” I said. “I’m a private investigator. I didn’t kill that man. The killer went out as I came in.”

“Makes no never-you-mind to me,” the cop said. “Just stand there quiet, or better yet, sit yourself down on the floor till I get some help here.”

“My brother’s Lieut-Captain Phil Pevsner of the LA.P.D. He knows about this case,” I said. “Call him.”

It was the first thing I could think of and probably not a particularly good idea since it was a partial lie and Phil might be less willing to listen than some unknown sergeant working Sherman Oaks.

“All in good time,” said the cop, reaching for a phone on a little white table in the hall. “You’re just talking to a soldier of law here. Now sit.”

I sat on the floor, resigned, while he made his call.

When he finished, the old cop took off his cap without taking his eyes from me. He was on the thin side except for his little basketball belly and he wore a dark toupee that didn’t match his sideburns.

“You got your share of scars there,” he said conversationally, trying to humor the madman.

“Right,” I agreed. “You want to know what happened in there?”

“Nope,” he said, showing a little smile. “I want to get home and finish reading the copy of Dragon Seed my wife bought me. I don’t want to think about this at all. Who you got in the Kentucky Derby tomorrow? Picked up a bookie the other day who told me to back Shut Out.”

The conversation for the next ten minutes was one-sided. The old cop, who said his name was Max Citron, talked and I tried not to listen as I sat in Olson’s undershorts, shaken by an occasional chill. I don’t know how long it was till the next two cops came. The first thing they decided after consulting with Citron was that I could put on an old suit of Roy Olson’s. He wouldn’t be needing it. Citron disappeared, came back with a gray suit, and I dressed while the new cops, both detectives, whose names were Downs and Hindryx, examined the bathroom, listened to my tale, wrote down what I said, and appeared to have no interest in the whole business.