Stuart Kaminsky - Now You See It

I saw someone dart from behind a whirling metal air vent I was more surprised than I had been by Blackstone’s floating lightbulb. The shooter had gone up, too.

He was lean and fast and about thirty feet away. I couldn’t see his face, but I could see that he was carrying something in one hand. I had no gun, but he did, a very little one that shot pellets, but enough of a weapon to make a hole in Gwen’s chest and, with a lucky or accurate shot, take out an eye and lodge in whatever small brain I may have had.

He dashed. I followed. And then he was gone. I stopped and looked around, panting. A chimney a few feet from a square brick seven-foot-high block with a door. The door was closed. I was pretty sure it hadn’t been opened.

I stood waiting, still panting.

“Come out,” I said. “Hands out and empty.”

Nothing. I took a step forward.

“There are two guns up here,” I said. “Mine, which shoots real bullets, and yours which shoots little balls. If I find you with a gun in your hand.…”

He stepped out from behind the wall next to the door, gun at arm’s length and fired. He was a damned good shot. The pellet thudded into my left shoulder. I spun around. The door opened. Yellow light beamed out. I had a clear shot at his back, if I had a gun. With an electric ache in my shoulder slowing me down, I headed for the open door looking around for a weapon, a brick, a stick, something, anything. I came up with nothing.

A few feet from the door, I suddenly felt like I was going to lose my last meal, a couple of tacos, and a Pepsi at Manny’s on Hoover.I stopped and leaned over. By the light of the open door, I watched blood dropping lazily from the wound in my shoulder.

There was no point in chasing him. I hoped the cops downstairs would stop him.

I stood up and moved toward the open door. Three steps below me was the turban, its green stone catching the yellow light. A few steps further down were the beard and mustache. I had seen a collection of guns in Ott’s house. I had seen a poster of a man with a beard and mustache in a turban on his wall. And the turban, right down to the green piece of glass, looked just like the one on the steps. Not proof, but I didn’t need proof. I was a private investigator, not a cop. I went down, slowly picking up the evidence.

When I reached down to pick up the turban, a young cop, with very pink cheeks, the visor of his cap perfectly balanced over his eyes, stepped out and leveled his gun at me.

“Don’t move,” he said.

I froze.

“Arms up and come down slowly,” he said.

I got my right arm up. My left throbbed with pellet pain, but I managed to get it almost to shoulder level.

“You’re bleeding,” he said as I came down the last few steps.

“I’ve been shot. Did someone come past you on the way up?”

“No,” he said.

“I need a doctor,” I said.

“There’s one downstairs with the woman you shot,” he said backing away, gun leveled at my chest.

“I didn’t shoot her,” I said.

“Tell the detectives,” he said.

He moved behind me and picked up the turban, beard, and mustache.

It didn’t look great for me, but I was reasonably sure I could talk my way out of it. This time, I’d just tell the truth. With about three quarters of the detectives in the Los Angeles Police Department, it would have worked.

But it was John Cawelti waiting for me in the lobby of the Blue-dorn Apartments.

At the L.A. county hospital emergency room, a kid doctor plucked the pellet from Gwen’s chest and said she would have to stay overnight. Then he took the pellet from my shoulder and patched me up.

“I’ve never seen so many scars on a living human,” the kid said.

“And each one has a story,” I said.

“War?”

“No, mostly mistakes, bad timing, stupidity,” I said.

The pellet had barely penetrated the flesh. At the distance I had been shot, that was about the best the shooter could have hoped for other than hitting my eye.

“You’ll be fine,” said the kid doctor dressed in crumpled whites who looked as if he hadn’t slept in a week. “In Casino if that had been a bullet, we would have pulled it out, splashed on some iodine and a bandage and handed you your rifle.” No overnight for me.

Two waiting uniformed cops took me to the Wilshire Station.

I knew the Wilshire Station. My brother had been a captain there. That was right after he had been a lieutenant and right before he had been busted back to lieutenant again.

Lieutenant John Cawelti, he of the pocked face, red hair parted in the middle, and perpetual look of badly concealed hatred for all things Pevsner or Peters, sat behind a desk in a small office.

He pointed to the chair on the other side of the desk and got up to close the door and stepped over to me.

“Where do we start?” Cawelti said standing over me.

The office hadn’t changed much since Phil had left it less than a month before. Same desk with a murky window behind in and a view of a brick wall. Same three chairs, one behind the desk, two in front of it. The top of the desk had a full in-box in the left corner and a full out-box in the right, with a few files laid out unevenly between them. A coffee-mug stain marked the top file. The only change I could see was the plaque on the wall across from the desk.

I turned my head to look at the plaque, ignoring Cawelti who hovered over me with Listerine breath. The plaque read: To John Merwin Cawelti, in recognition of his efforts on behalf of the Los Angeles Police Department’s annual picnic for the widows and orphans of our comrades who have fallen in the line of duty. Both the Mayor and the Chief of Police had signed it. About half the members of the department had the same plaque.

“Where do we start?” Cawelti insisted.

“Merwin?” I said turning my head and looking up at him.

He pointed a finger at me and jabbed it into the spot where the pellet had struck. I did more than wince. I clamped my teeth together and almost passed out.

“I want my lawyer,” I said.

“Why?” he asked. “You haven’t been accused of anything yet?”

“Then I want to leave,” I said, starting to get up.

I leaned quickly to my right to avoid the jabbing finger.

“You shot Birmingham,” he said.

“Cunningham, and I didn’t shoot him.”

“You shot him and went after the girl because she saw you shoot him. Then you shot her.”

“And then I shot myself,” I said.

“Yeah. And pitched the gun. We’re looking for it.”

“Ask the girl,” I said. “She’ll tell you I didn’t shoot her.”