Read He Done Her Wrong: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Eight) (Toby Peters Mysteries) for Free Online Page B

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CHAPTER 3

     
    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.
    When I hit four, the elevator was far below and making a familiar weary metal sound.
    Bookies, alcoholic doctors, baby photographers with thick glasses, and con artists on the way down paced and called behind their glass cages as I went up one more flight in the Farraday. In the building across the street the same thing was happening. I imagined a world of multiplied Farraday Buildings teeming with mildew and the last gasp of false energy. I wondered how many of the people in these buildings were 1Bs. Maybe