Read Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery for Free Online

handle,” he called as I walked down the hallway of posters. “Just say the magic words.”
    “Abracadabra,” I said standing in front of the door.
    “No,” called Ott. “That’s for getting in. The other words.”
    “Open Sesame,” I said.
    The door swung open suddenly, missing me by a few inches.
    Behind me Ott said, “I’ve been meaning to get that fixed before someone got hurt.”
    I went outside. The door closed. The stone gargoyles watched me leave.
    I drove home, Mrs. Irene Plaut’s boarding house on Heliotrope in Hollywood. I hadn’t let onto Ott, but the dribble glass had done more damage than I let show. My shirt was soaked with sticky Pepsi. I had to change.
    I found a Bill Stern sports report on the radio. Bucky Walters of the Reds was on his way to winning 30 games. A bunch of pitchers looked like they were going to win 20 including George Munger of the Cards, Bill Voiselle of the Giants, Rip Sewell of the Pirates, Ted Hughson of the Red Sox, Hank Borowy of the Yankees, Hal Newhouser of the Tigers, and Bill Detrich of the White Sox. It was a pitcher’s season.
    There was a parking space right in front of Mrs. Plaut’s. It was small, but so was the Crosley. I hadn’t picked up a parking ticket in almost two years, which is quite an accomplishment given the Los Angeles traffic regulations that seemed to be designed to guarantee an unlimited source of revenue from drivers who couldn’t keep it all straight.
    The Los Angeles speed limit was twenty miles an hour in business districts, twenty-five miles an hour in residential districts. Right turns were permitted against the red from the right-hand lane after a full stop, but pedestrians and vehicles proceeding with a signal had the right of way. There was no parking along red or yellow curbs, three-minute parking along white curbs, fifteen-minute parking at green curbs. Along unmarked curbs, you could park for forty-five minutes in the Central Traffic District from seven in the morning till four-thirty in the afternoon, but there was no parking in the district from four-thirty to six p.m. Parking was unlimited from six p.m. till two a.m. From two to four a.m. there was a thirty-minute parking limit, but parking was unlimited from four till seven a.m.
    Having parked legally, I plucked at my moist shirt as I walked up the sidewalk to the porch where Mrs. Plaut, tiny, thin, ancient and determined, sat on the porch swing, a pencil in one hand, and a pad of lined paper in the other. That meant one of two things, neither of which boded well for me. She was either working on her family history, which was now several thousand pages long or she was doing a grocery list.
    If it were the history, I would soon be getting a pile of neatly written pages to read and approve. Mrs. Plaut, more than a little hard of hearing and often in audio contact with a world the rest of us couldn’t hear, believed that I was two things, a book editor and an exterminator. She did not think the combination odd and had once told me that the long-gone Mr. Plaut had once been a prospector, stagecoach driver, and tree surgeon at the same time.
    If she were working on her grocery list, it would mean a trip to the nearest Ralph’s, which I didn’t mind. What I minded was the mind-numbing explanation of the rationing system, which Mrs. Plaut had mastered and I was expected to remember.
    “Mr. Peelers,” she said, looking up at me.
    I had long ago decided not to correct her.
    “It is I,” I said.
    “I was going to give you this list this evening, but as luck would have it, here you are.”
    “Here I am, as luck would have it,” I said. “I need a shower and a change of clothes.”
    She looked at me and said,
    “You need a shower and a change of clothes.”
    “I’ll do that.”
    “Shopping list,” she said, handing me the sheet she had been working on. I didn’t look at it.
    “We’re having beef heart stew tonight, if you can do the shopping this afternoon.”
    “I’ll