Stuart Kaminsky - He Done Her Wrong

“Or her dinner,” came a powerful rasp.

“As the case may be,” conceded Campbell, sitting with a smirk that indicated clearly who he expected to win the quiz.

“Sounds like a fine idea,” agreed Lachtman, looking around for support. Margaritte turned her head away. Meanwhile, Aardvark’s head was sinking dangerously close to the pool of melted sherbet. I nudged him, and he roused himself into something that resembled being awake.

“Settled,” said Lachtman. “I’ll prepare the quiz. And that’s it for tonight. I’m glad you could all-”

Campbell was already up and had turned his back to address a group at another table before Lachtman could finish his goodbye.

With the possible exception of Campbell, who didn’t seem to be a particularly good suspect, no one in the room really resembled the one who had tried to kill me two days earlier at Mae West’s party, but then again it was hard to know. The person might well be a woman, though there were some reasons to think it wasn’t.

With the opportunity for the deerstalker gone till the next meeting, Lachtman turned to me.

“Thank you for coming to speak to us tonight, Mr. Pastor. We’ve all learned a great deal about how a detective works.”

His words and the response of the group had made it clear that they really didn’t care how a real detective worked and that I had, as many times before in my battered life, disappointed people who expected more from me.

Margaritte Lachtman moved to her husband’s side as the crowd aimed for the door.

“It was fun,” I lied. “Was this the entire group or were there some members who couldn’t make it?”

“Everyone was here,” Lachtman said, looking at his wife for confirmation. She didn’t confirm.

“Ressner,” she corrected. “Jeffrey Ressner.”

“Yes, oh yes, Mr. Ressner,” Lachtman remembered, with a look on his face that reminded me of the time my brother had slipped me a worm at a Saturday matinee when I had asked for the popcorn.

“What about Mr. Reesner?” I said with a small smile.

“He hasn’t come in several years, though he called yesterday and said he was back,” said Lachtman, looking at the door. “He knows the Canon well and many other things, but-”

“He is a bit difficult, or was in the past,” completed Margaritte, handing Lachtman his shopping bag.

“Maybe it’s just too far for him to come,” I tried.

“He doesn’t live that far, no farther than some members, somewhere in the valley with his daughter,” he said.

That was as far as I could push. I should be able to find a Jeffrey Ressner in the valley phone books. Of course he might be living with a daughter under her name, and she might have a married name, and Lachtman would surely have an address for him, and I might have to come back and get it, but for now I had a lead.

“It was good to meet you, Mr. Peters,” said Margaritte Lachtman, extending her hand. Maybe it was one Pepsi too many and an overload of caloric energy, but her hand felt like Anne’s and I didn’t want to let it go. She pulled away and moved toward Alvin Aardvark, who had passed out at the main table. Busboys and waiters were clearing up around him as I moved to leave.

In the next room the salesmen masquerading as politicians were laughing, probably at the jokes of their boss. I didn’t laugh when Campbell swooped in front of me as I took a step into the hall.

“You were asking about Jeffrey Ressner,” he said.

I shrugged. “Not particularly.”

“You were asking,” he insisted, pointing his cane at me. I considered taking it from him and playing a few Krupa tunes on his head. “I suggest you stay away from him. He is more dangerous than Lethal and Lightning.”

“Lethal and Lightning?”

“Yesterday at San Quentin,” he said softly between the peals of next-door laughter, “Robert S. James was hanged. He was a barber convicted of killing pregnant Mary Bush James, his wife, for twenty-one thousand dollars insurance. He drowned her after failing to kill her by forcing her to put her feet into a box that contained two rented rattlesnakes named Lethal and Lightning. A tale worthy of the master himself.”

“I’ll keep it in mind,” I said.

With that Campbell made a move intended, I think, to give the impression that he had disappeared into the shadows behind a potted palm. Instead, he tripped over the scurrying, chunky little beagle of a waiter and fell with his cane clattering and his hand grabbing for fronds.

“Drunken fart,” mumbled the waiter, hurrying on.

I tried to pretend that I hadn’t seen Campbell’s failed exit and headed for the door and home.

Dinah Shore sang “One Dozen Roses” to me as I drove to my office in the Farraday Building the next morning. I took Melrose to Vermont and cut across at Ninth. The news tried to come on and tell me about the Russian front and to remind me that they were going to draft 1Bs, but I wouldn’t listen. I turned the radio off as I pulled into the alley off Hoover, where I usually parked between garbage cans and piles of soggy newspapers. The newspapers were gone. Kids had grabbed them up on red wagons and carted them off to school paper drives.

There were no downtown bums sleeping it off at the back door, and the world inside the dark coolness of the Farraday Building was (as I always remembered it) filled with the smell of Lysol, faint echoes, and the distant clicking of machines including typewriters, the mildly porno press on the third floor, and an out-of-tune piano.

My back, which would have qualified me as 4F even if I weren’t too old and didn’t have too many dents in my cranium and the red kiss of two bullet wounds in my gut, was giving me warnings. Soaking in rain and a cold pool had done me no good. So I moved slowly and quietly. Somewhere in the depths of cracked marble and pebble glass office windows Jeremy Butler lurked, cleaning and rhyming. If he spotted me moving slowly, he’d insist on working on my back. His manipulations always gave me relief, but the immediate pain of his knee in my back and his hairy arms around my chest was sought only in the most extreme emergencies. I had no emergency.

My plan, as I walked the wide fake marble stairs upward toward the fourth floor, was to track down Ressner or whoever the extortionist was and turn him over to the cops before he went for Mae West again or made a move at me for messing up his scam. I hadn’t liked the cracked voice behind all that makeup and I didn’t look forward to opening my front door one day and finding Ressner disguised at Rita Hayworth with a gun in his hand.

On the second floor I paused to give my back a rest and heard the echo of footsteps below and the opening of the elevator door. It was a newcomer to the Farraday Building. Only newcomers or the terminally ill rode the elevator, an ornate brass cage that gave the illusion it wasn’t moving at all, that the building was slowly sinking around it. Usually it stalled by the second floor, and the rider had to force the metal door open and walk the rest of the way. Bad back and all, I was sure I’d beat the elevator to four, for it was going that far, with enough time to spare for a cup of Shelly Minck’s caramel thick coffee.

Somewhere in the deck of offices on two, a groan rattled the glass of an unseen door. My guess was that it came from the offices of the Bookends of Jesus, a recent Farraday tenant run by twin grinners with white hair and Iowa accents. Jeremy had said that they had nothing in their office but heavy cartons and a telephone, which made them among the more stable occupants of the Farraday.

My favorite tenant, however, was Alice Palice, who in the farthest corner of the third floor ran Artistic Books, an economical operation consisting of one small porno printing press weighing 250 pounds, considerably less than Alice, who frequently had to hoist the machine on her shoulder and run like hell when a complaint came. I think Alice had designs on Jeremy, the only creature in greater Los Angeles who could lift both Alice and her nonportable press.