Stuart Kaminsky - High Midnight

I went to the hall phone and called the Wilshire Police District Office. It wasn’t quite in this area, but that’s where my brother Phil was in charge of homicide.

Phil wasn’t at the station: The sergeant on the desk said he’d give me Officer Cawelti. I said no thanks. Cawelti and I were not sleep-over friends.

I called Phil at home. His wife Ruth answered sleepily.

“Ruth, this is Toby. Did I wake you?”

“No, what time is it? The baby’s up with something. What’s wrong, Toby?”

Before I could say more I could hear a grunt and the bouncing of springs. Behind that was the cry of my niece Lucy.

“Toby,” came Phil’s voice, wavering between concern and anger, “what do you want?”

“I’ve got something for the boys,” I said softly. “I picked up autographs of Babe Ruth, Bill Dickey, Mark Koenig and Bob Meusel this morning.”

“You’re drunk,” hissed Phil.

“I’ve also got something for you-your favorite-a corpse.”

“Where?” he said soberly.

“Here, in my room.”

“You did it?” asked Phil seriously.

“No, someone left him as a present.”

“I’ll be there in half an hour.”

While I waited for Phil I went carefully through Costello’s pockets. They didn’t tell me much except that his last name was Santucci, that he was from Chicago and that he was married. He had forty bucks and a holster with a gun which hadn’t been fired. I thought over his nonsense comments and tried to make sense of them. I woke Gunther, who came in wearing a tiny gray bathrobe with a sash. Gunther avoided examining the corpse and told me that he had heard some noises in my room about an hour earlier, but that since I hadn’t answered when he knocked, he had assumed I was all right.

I told Gunther about my conversation a few minutes ago with the now-dead Costello, and Gunther listened seriously, touched his tiny chin and hurried to his room for a pencil and paper.

“I think I understand,” he said animatedly. “You asked him who killed him and he said …”

“He. No. Yes,” I finished, looking at Costello’s head.

“Okay,” I went on, wanting to make a Spam sandwich but thinking it might look bad if my brother came while I was munching over the corpse. “He was killed by He. Yes. No Yes.”

“Is there a street perhaps or a place in Los Angeles called Yesno or Yezno or Yeznoyes or …”

“That’s it, Gunther,” I said, pointing a finger at him. “No Yes. Noyes. There is a street called Noyes in Burbank, and that’s where I was tonight. Costello didn’t know how to pronounce it. Maybe he was telling us where he was killed, not who killed him. So what do we have?”

You have,” explained Gunther, “a man who was murdered on Noyes Street.”

“I don’t see what difference where he was killed makes. But that’s my knife in his back. Either the killer came here earlier and took it, or he got Costello here somehow and killed him. Either way he was dumped here to get me in trouble and out of a case I’m on.”

There was a loud knock at the door downstairs.

“Phil,” I said, and Gunther put his hands in his robe and hurried back to his room. He had no affection for Phil, and Phil in a bad mood would think nothing of drop-kicking Gunther through the window.

There was no chance that Mrs. Plaut would hear the door no matter how hard Phil pounded. I ran down and opened it.

Phil Pevsner, brother of Tobias Leo Pevsner who at an early age became Toby Peters, was a little taller than me, a little broader, a few years older and much heavier. His hair was close-cut, curly and the color of steel. His thick, strong fingers scratched constantly from habit; dandruff or perplexity, I’ve never been sure. He started doing it in 1918 when he came back from the war. Phil hadn’t even bothered with the tie he usually kept unmade around his neck. Behind him stood Sergeant Steve Seidman, a cadaverous man who had little to say and was my brother’s partner. Seidman was a strange creature, a man who actually liked my brother.

“Where is it?” Phil said through his teeth.

I handed him the crumpled sheet with the Yankee autographs. He crushed it in his fist and was about to fling it in my face.

“They’re real,” I said, holding up my hands. “For Dave and Nate.”

He shoved the paper into his pocket and pushed me out of the way. Seidman followed behind, giving me a shake of his head to show me he disapproved of my not growing up.

In my room, we stood looking down at Costello solemnly for a few seconds before Phil sighed and Seidman began to examine the body.

“Now,” said Phil, grabbing my shirt and looking into my eyes, “start talking-fast, clear and straight.”

Phil hated crime just a little more than he hated me. His impulse was to smash a hole through criminals and brothers and make straight for whatever sunlight and peace might be on the other side. Sometimes I thought Phil might have a few screws rattling around in his head. For more than twenty-five years he had been trying to clean up Los Angeles. The more he cleaned up and the more criminals he found, the more corpses came. At one point he had even charged a two-bit gunman with picking wildflowers, a crime punishable in Los Angeles by a $200 fine and up to six months in jail. There was no end to being a cop, and that frustrated him. Since he could never really win, he hated each new murderer and victim, who reminded him that things were getting worse instead of better, that Phil Pevsner would not make it a better world for his three kids. Since I seemed to be in the business of bringing him more business, I was not one of his favorite Californians.

“I don’t know his name,” I said. “He’s from Chicago, a minor hood. A case I’m on has something to do with a guy named Lombardi, who just came here from the East to start a sausage factory.”

“A case?” said Phil evenly. “Tell me more about it.”

“Client,” I said and smiled. “I have to check with the client.”

“How many times did I tell you there is no such thing for private detectives? You’re not a priest or a lawyer. Sam Spade was full of shit.” Phil shook me around a little to see if sense would find an accidental resting place in my head. It wouldn’t.

“I’m not talking about the law,” I said. “I’m talking about ethics.”

Phil laughed. I didn’t like the laugh. I think he was getting ready to go for the long-distance Toby-throwing record. So I talked fast.

“This guy and another Chicago hood named Marco were tailing me. They picked me up yesterday and they’ve been on my tail since.”

“So you got upset and skewered one of them when he came to lean on you,” Phil explained.

“No,” I said. “I was out for the night at a bar in Burbank. You can check at the bar. It wasn’t crowded.”

“That’s not proof of anything, and you know it,” shouted Phil. “You recognize the knife?”

“Which knife?” I said innocently.

“The one in the guy’s back, you smartass piece of …” If I had enough nose left for him to break, he would have done it. Seidman put a hand on his shoulder and stepped between us. Phil backed off, his face red, his teeth grinding.

“Back off, Toby,” Seidman whispered. He had seen this game of bait-the-brother between me and Phil before. He had tried to figure it out and had tried to reason with both of us, me to stop needling Phil and Phil to stop taking the hook. The Pevsner brothers are a proud and foolish lot. We have no interest in listening to reason.

“You think you can keep from driving him to kill you while I call the evidence boys and the coroner?” Seidman said, looking over at Phil, who was glaring angrily at the corpse.

“Okay,” I said, and Seidman went out to use the hall phone.