“Well Toby, my lad,” a mellow voice broke through wherever I was dreaming, “we have a new theory about you.”
I opened my eyes to the placid face above me. It was a tolerant face, the face of a man of sixty or more who had seen much and wanted to go home to a hot bath and a drink. He could have been a priest or a soldier. He could even have been a cop, but I guessed that he was a doctor. The white uniform and stethoscope around his neck were my best clues. It also helped that I recognized the emergency room at L.A. County. I’d been there often enough before.
“My name is Dr. Melanks,” he said, picking up a thick file. I knew it was mine. I remembered the time Doc Parry had held it up with a shake of the head not much different from kindly Doc Melanks’s. Parry was off in the Pacific somewhere seeing cases even more interesting than mine. I was used to thick files about me. I even took kind of a perverse pride in them.
“Can you hear me?” Melanks asked, rubbing the bridge of his nose. The backs of his fingers had fine gray hairs growing at the knuckles.
“A few members of the staff now believe that the constant reign of terror to your anatomy is causing a building up of resistance by your body. Not that you are immune to damage but that your body has somehow said, ‘What the hell, I can take anything.’ Your skull no longer deserves the anatomical right to be referred to as a skull. We are not quite sure what to call it.”
I tried to sit up and made it to one elbow. I was in a hospital gown.
“The closest thing I have seen to what we are laughingly calling your cranium belonged to a punch-drunk fighter named Ramirez who, when his career was finished, made an occasional fifty cents by battering down doors with his head. Mr. Ramirez was incapable of coherent speech by that time and seemed to think he was a robot. Are you following the allegorical level of my tale, Mr. Peters?”
“If I continue to get hit in the head, my brain will turn to Junket pudding,” I said.
“Your brain is almost certainly pudding by now,” said Dr. Melanks. “I simply want you to sign it over to me on your death. I am sixty-seven and suffering from arthritis, a weak heart, mild sclerosis, and a very poor hereditary profile, but I should outlive you by a comfortable margin.”
He put down the chart, stepped in front of me, lifted my eyelids, shined a little flashlight into them, breathing mint in my face, and stood back.
“I’m not even going to bother to warn you,” he said. “It won’t do any good. I can see that Parry and a number of others have told you of the consequences of your folly. If you can rise, do so. If you can walk, amaze me with the sight. You have two dozen stitches in your head, at the base of your scalp.”
“I can feel them,” I said, sitting up and touching the bandage.
“A good omen,” sighed Melanks. “The whole thing is free of charge, of course, on the condition that you come back here in three days to let me take the stitches out and engage in a bit of anatomical phrenology for the medical students, who should see everything at least once.”
I stood and looked around for my clothes.
“Would you like to go through that door headfirst?” he said wearily. “I could sew you up again. I’ve already missed my dinner and part of my sleep. It would be an education to me in my declining years.”
I had enough of Doc Melanks’s sarcasm. What I needed was some pants before the police dropped in for a chat.
Melanks shook his head one more time and exited with a flourish and a swish of his white coat. He was followed almost immediately by Phil and Steve Seidman.
Phil had shaved since yesterday, and Seidman looked even more pale in the hospital light. Seidman leaned against the door, which he closed behind him, and Phil found a chrome-legged chair to sit on. He looked around the room as if I weren’t there, admiring the table, medicine cabinet, and the poison chart on the wall. Nobody spoke. This went on for about three minutes, when I gave up.
“Ressner killed him,” I said.
This started no general discussion, so I plunged forward, going to the metal cabinet in the corner to search for my clothes. They weren’t there.
“Ressner’s doctor told me he might go after Talbott,” I said. “So I went to Talbott’s house. You can check with Brenda Stallings. You remember her. Flynn case in ’39. She told me Talbott was out with Ressner at the Manhattan. I went there and followed them into the back room. I just followed the trail of blood to the back door and Ressner laid me out.”
“You saw Ressner?” Seidman asked.
“No, but it’s the same setup as the Grayson killing, isn’t it?”
Phil scratched his head and looked at his fingernails.
“I didn’t kill him,” I repeated.
“We don’t think you did,” said Seidman. Phil remained mute. “But this is going to be big news in tomorrow’s paper and on the radio. You better hope the Japs make a run on Corregidor. You’re all we’ve got and Talbott is big news. We’ll throw you to the newspapers so they’ll stay off our tochis for a week or so.”
“Nailing me won’t get you Ressner,” I said. “And he’ll just go after Mae West or De Mille.”
“We’ll put some coverage on them,” said Seidman. “How much chance have you got of turning up Ressner?”
I looked at Phil, who sat in the chrome chair and listened as if he were at a private performance of a new play.
“I’ll have him in twenty-four hours,” I said, having no idea where Ressner might be. Hell, I didn’t even know where my pants were.
“Horseshit,” said Phil finally.
I gave a deep fake sigh and clutched my heart.
“Thank God,” I said. “I thought the newspapers had cut out your heart.”
“No,” said Phil standing and stretching. His belly sagged as he took a step toward me. “Just my tongue. I asked you for a favor. I asked you to protect someone and keep things quiet. That’s supposed to be what you do best. Shit, that’s the only thing you can do. And look at this. A big state land developer and a movie star are dead.”
“People are dying by the hundreds on both sides of the ocean,” I reminded him.
“But I’m not responsible for them,” said Phil, stepping in front of me. I pulled back and he went on. “I’m not going to belt you. What I’m going to do is give you twenty-four hours. Then I’m going to have to haul you in, and you’re going to have to warm your toes in County if you can’t make bond while we try to find Ressner, and Mae West gets dragged into this. You get my drift, brother?”
“Pulsating through my stitches,” I said. “Now if you can get me a pair of pants, I’ll be on my way.”
“You want to let us in on this and save us all some time and grief?” asked Seidman.
“I think I’ll do it my way,” I said, knowing that my way was to blunder forward with my head down like Ramirez till I hit the right door. Without another word they left the room.
“My pants,” I shouted after them and followed them into the hall. They kept marching right through the waiting room past the mottled crew of black, yellow, white, brown, and green people in various states of emergency. The ones who were able looked up at me. Some, no doubt, wondered why the police had taken my pants.
Back in the treatment room I went to the phone and called Mrs. Plaut’s.
“Hell ….” Mrs. Plaut started, but someone was wrestling her for the phone.
“Mr. Gunther,” I heard her squeal.
Then Gunther came on. “Yes?”
“It’s me, Toby,” I said.
“I hoped it would be.”
Behind him I heard Mrs. Plaut cry, “One more such incident, Mr. Gunther, and you shall have to pack up all your neat little clothes and get your rump out of here.”
I explained my predicament to Gunther, who had been worrying about me, and he told me that he had already had my milk-stained suit cleaned and pressed and the button sewed back on. It would take him no more than fifteen minutes or so to get to the hospital.
While I waited in the room wondering what I would do next, a pair of nurses stuck their heads in. The younger of the two said, “That’s him.” The older one looked at me in awe and held up an X ray, which I assumed was my skull. I considered slinging something at them the way the chimps did in the zoo, but decided to preserve whatever dignity I might have left, which amounted to less than that of Huntz Hall’s character in the Bowery Boys movies.
Gunther made it in sixteen minutes according to the wall clock and four minutes according to my old man’s watch. I was dressed a few seconds later and signing my release papers seconds after that, with Dr. Melanks hovering over me with a cup of coffee.
“I was only half joking about having you sign your body over to me,” he said. “I’d like to watch a good pathologist going at your skull.”
“Bye doc,” I grinned, fitting on the hat that Gunther had brought so that it rested just above the bandage at the back of my head. “Watch your blood pressure.”
Gunther drove me to Fairfax, suggesting that I come home and get a good night’s rest before I retrieved my car. I told him that it probably wouldn’t be there if I waited till morning. The cops would have towed it away. He shrugged, stepped on his elongated gas pedal, and hurried into the night with his radio tuned to Gene Autry.
The Ford was still in front of the fireplug when we got there. It was decorated by four parking tickets. I shoved them into the glove compartment, started the engine, wondered how much gas I had used, and followed Gunther back to Hollywood. The bumper next to me bobbed up and down, scratching at the upholstery. I parked in front of Mrs. Plaut’s and hauled the bumper up to my room. I couldn’t sleep on my back because of the stitches. Sleeping on my stomach meant a sure headache in the morning. I propped myself on my side with pillows as a compromise and considered retirement and a new career.
Maybe Arnie could teach me the car business, or Shelly could give me a two-week course in dentistry, or Jeremy could make me the Farraday janitor, or Gunther could teach me how to speak Norwegian so I could translate the classics. Maybe. I slept surprisingly well.