Mildred Pierced (7 page)

“Peach syrup,” I explained. “Someone tried to kill me with a dart, probably poisoned. Hit the peach can, instead.”

I held up the dart.

She looked up at it and me and shook her head. She was used to angry customers. She merely rang me up, took my coupons, put my groceries in a brown sack.

I headed for the door. Behind me I heard her say, loud enough to be sure I heard, “Hey, Glad, watch my checkout for a second. I gotta wash my hands and the counter. Some nut just syruped the place.”

I went carefully to my car, opened the door and put the groceries inside. I placed the dart on the seat next to me on top of an old
Popular Science
magazine with the drawing of a monorail Train of the Future on the cover.

Someone had either tried to scare the hell out of me, or kill me, or maybe just inflict a little warning pain. The question was “Why?”

Best guess was that someone didn’t want me trying to help Shelly. Looked at one way, this was a good thing. It meant that someone else had probably killed Mildred.

I pulled out into traffic with my windows closed and turned on the radio. A girl was singing something that sounded like opera.

I had another thought. Why had whoever it was shot at me with a dart? Why not hit me on the head or blow a hole in me or cut my throat or … I didn’t want to follow this particular line of thought.

The girl on the radio now stopped singing. The drowsy voice of Major Bowes came on after the applause, saying that
The Original Amateur Hour
was always pleased to discover such talent and reminding us that we had just heard “‘The Bell Song’ sung by little Miss Louise Hornerhoven of French Lick, Indiana.”

Major Bowes also informed me that Miss Lily Pons, who had made “The Bell Song” famous, had an entry in the Madison Square Garden Poultry Show.

“A silver-faced Cochin hen named Gilda Rosina,” the Major droned. “And I was informed just before we went on the air that another great opera star, tenor Lauritz Melchior, has won a prize at the show with his cock named Great Tristan.”

The studio audience applauded wildly, Miss Louise Hornerhoven of French Lick now forgotten.

I headed for the boardinghouse. At Mrs. Plaut’s was someone I had to talk to about crossbows and darts.

G
UNTHER
W
HERTHMAN TOLD
me to come in when I knocked at his door. Gunther was probably my closest friend. He was certainly my nearest neighbor, one door down from me at Mrs. Plaut’s.

Gunther had lived in the boardinghouse before I got there, and when I helped him—he had been wrongly charged with murdering a Munchkin on the set of
The Wizard of Oz
—he convinced me to move into a room chez Plaut.

Gunther worked out of his room, a tasteful den with a desk, full bookshelves lining the walls, two comfortable armchairs and a small bed in one corner near the window.

The bed was small because Gunther doesn’t need a big one. He is three feet tall.

When I entered, Gunther was at his desk, pencil in hand, pad of paper in front of him next to his typewriter. Gunther made a good living translating books and articles from or into any of several languages. He worked for government agencies, big businesses and publishers. He wore three-piece suits and Windsor-knotted ties even when he had no plans for leaving Mrs. Plaut’s.

“News of Dr. Minck?” he asked with only a trace of his native accent.

“Doesn’t look good,” I said, sitting in the armchair facing him.

I had dropped off the groceries downstairs with Mrs. Plaut. She had told me that I had done a satisfactory job but that I was late.

“Someone tried to kill me with a blowgun in the grocery store,” I had said, holding up the dart.

She had peered at it over her glasses. “Don’t go to that store anymore,” she said.

I told her I wouldn’t, and she handed me some sheets of lined paper filled with her distinctive handwriting, clear, clean, small, and invincible.

“This is a singular adventure,” she said, nodding at the pages. “It marks a crucial moment on my father’s side of the equation, a moment which might well have resulted in my father not being born.”

“I see,” I said.

“How can you, Mr. Peelers?” she asked. “You haven’t read it yet.”

I had long ago given up any attempt to convince Mrs. Plaut that I was neither an exterminator nor a book editor. I had some theories about how she had come to this conclusion, all of them connected to being almost deaf, unswervingly determined, and able to reconcile almost any contradiction that came her way.

She had been better since Gunther and I had given her a hearing aid, a Zenith Radionic, forty dollars, complete with radionic tubes, crystal microphones, and batteries. She had been better when she chose to wear it, which was seldom. Mrs. Plaut was somewhere over eighty years old and sometimes mentally over the rainbow. A broom handle of a little woman, she was strong, tireless and impossible to resist.

“Snuggle in and read it tonight,” she said. “After dinner. Dinner is at six twenty-seven. Please inform Mr. Gunther.”

I looked at Jamaica Red in his cage. He was busy pecking at his little glass bowl of seeds.

I had gone upstairs, bypassed my own room, and gone straight to Gunther’s, where I now sat.

“Dinner’s at six twenty-seven,” I said.

Gunther nodded in acceptance, and I held up the dart.

“Know what this is?”

Gunther put on his glasses, got down from his chair, and approached. I handed him the dart, saying, “Be careful. There may be poison on the tip.”

He took it carefully.

“Blowgun,” he said. “I have seen darts like this before. Pietro Guilermo, the knife thrower in the Romero Circus, had a blow-gun. He was a very versatile performer. The circus was small. When he threw knives, he wore a gypsy costume and earrings. When he used the blowgun to pop balloons, he covered himself with black makeup and became Zumbugo of New Guinea.”

“He ever use a crossbow?”

“No.” Gunther turned over the dart.

“Ever have a live target?”

“Yes. Me. Remember, the Romero Circus was small. I was primarily an acrobatic clown, but I helped with the other acts.”

“What can you tell me about blowguns and crossbows?”

“Very little, I’m sorry to say. But I know someone who can tell you anything you want to know, August Blake at the Southwest Museum. He is an expert on ancient weapons. If you like, I’ll call him.”

I told Gunther that I’d like to talk to August Blake as soon as possible. Gunther reached into the inner pocket of his jacket, came up with a leather address book and found the number he was looking for.

“I will be back in a moment.”

There was a small stool near the phone on the landing. Gunther stood on that when he used the wall-mounted pay phone. I stayed in the chair. Gunther was back in about five minutes.

“August Blake is on the phone. He can see us at eight at the museum. Would that be acceptable?”

“Eight is perfect,” I said.

This time Gunther was back in less than a minute.

“The museum is open till five,” Gunther said. “But August is working late tonight on a recently unearthed Mayan discovery, a double-edged ax never before considered a Mayan weapon or tool.”

I thanked Gunther, went to my room and clicked on the floor lamp. The room hadn’t changed. Next to the closet on my left was my bed, neatly made up with the little pillow Mrs. Plaut had given me, which bore the words “God Bless Our Happy Home.” Because of my unreliable back—the gift of a large Negro gentleman who had once given me a bear hug—I always pulled the mattress to the floor when I slept. I had to sleep on my back on something reasonably firm.

The large man who had done the damage to my back had wanted to talk to Mickey Rooney at an Andy Hardy premiere. I had been hired for the night to protect the star.

Each morning Mrs. Plaut woke me, looked at my position on the floor, closed her eyes, and shook her head at what she considered my eccentricity.

“I assume,” she had said the first time she discovered me that way, “that this is part and parcel of your religious practice. I respect the rites of all castes and sects, but you will have to return the mattress to the bed each morning you engage in this practice.”

And that is what I did.

Next to the window was a small wooden table with two chairs. Behind it was a refrigerator and another table on which sat a hot plate and an Arvin radio. Near the lamp was an armchair with lace doilies carefully placed on each arm of the chair, a dresser with a Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall over it. The clock told the right time. My father’s watch on my wrist was seldom within a two-hour range. The Beech-Nut clock said I had about fifteen minutes to get downstairs for dinner.

The window was open. Dash, an orange cat to whom I sometimes belonged, sat on the ledge looking at me. There was a tree next to the window with a branch that almost touched my sill. Like me, he came and went whenever he pleased. I was always good for some milk and occasional cans of tuna or pieces of chicken filched from Mrs. Plaut’s table.

I went to the refrigerator and got some milk while Dash waited patiently. I had time to grab my dopp kit, go to the bathroom on the landing, wash my face, shave with my Gillette, brush my teeth with Teel, get my kit back in my room, and make it down the stairs and into Mrs. Plaut’s rooms, where I assumed my place at the communal table.

“Punctual,” Mrs. Plaut said from her chair at the table near the kitchen.

Gunther sat at my right. Across from us were the other boarders: the one-armed car salesman Ben Bidwell and Mrs. Plaut’s shy and pretty niece Emma Simcox. Miss Simcox was in her thirties, a light-skinned, pretty Negro. Mr. Bidwell was a ruddy-faced lean man in his forties. Bidwell and Simcox had begun to keep company. They were a good match. She hardly ever spoke, and he hardly ever stopped speaking.

“Hmm, smells great,” Bidwell said, looking at the food on the table.

On a platter in front of us was a platter of baked macaroni with five flat rectangular browned slices of something familiar-looking on top.

“Spam,” said Bidwell, smiling at Emma Simcox.

“Prem,” Mrs. Plaut corrected. “Like Swift’s Premium Ham, it’s sugar cured. Made with Parmesan cheese, margarine, highly nutritious, lots of protein, and B-complex vitamins.”

It didn’t smell bad, and I was hungry. Mrs. Plaut nodded for her niece to serve herself, and the meal began. Dinner conversation consisted primarily of Ben Bidwell assuring us that right after the war the price of new cars would be about nine hundred dollars “unless you want to go for one of the luxury models General Motors is planning. They’ll hit as much as fourteen hundred.”

The vegetable for the meal was boiled beets, and dessert was steamed farina molasses pudding which, Mrs. Plaut proudly announced, cost a total of thirty-four cents.

Gunther and I excused ourselves after dessert, and Mrs. Plaut reminded me to be sure to read the new pages of family history she had given me.

In the car, we listened to Joan Davis on
Sealtest Village Store.
Joan, in her cracking voice, was telling Mr. Heinzwig the butcher to “trim the fat, get rid of the water, and keep your thumb off the scale.”

The Southwest Museum was on Marion Way and Museum Drive overlooking the Arroyo Seco and Sycamore Grove.

My father had taken my brother and me to the opening of the museum in 1914. It was memorable because it was one of the few Sundays he had taken off from working in our small grocery store in Glendale.

Thirty years later, the museum looked just the way I remembered it, a white concrete building without ornament, a tile-roofed tower at one end and a high, square tower at the other.

We parked in the lot and walked through the entrance, a brightly colored Mayan portal designed, as Gunther now informed me, in the manner of the entry at the House of Nuns at Chichen Itza in the Yucatan. Inside the portal was a long tunnel, 260 feet long, according to Gunther. It led into the base of the hill on which the building stood. Dioramas on each side of the illuminated tunnel depicted the history of the primitive Asian migrants who millennia earlier had settled the western American coast.

At the end of the tunnel stood a man. Behind him was an elevator, its doors open.

“Good evening,” the man said, his voice echoing eerily down the tunnel.

August Blake was around sixty, with white hair. A solid block of a man with a clean-shaven face, he gave us a Santa Claus smile of greeting.

He held out his hand. Gunther and I shook it in turns, and Gunther introduced me.

“Come,” said Blake, stepping back so we could enter the elevator.

The doors closed behind us after we entered, and we faced front. Blake said, “The lower lobby is one hundred and eight feet above us.”

It took about twenty seconds before the elevator stopped and the doors opened.

“The lights are dimmed,” he explained as we stepped out. “Museum’s closed, the blackout, money saved.”

The lobby was a broad room lined with American Indian exhibits. There was something ghostly about the shadows, the musty smell and the faint sounds of creaking.

Blake led the way to a stairway in the center of the room. We walked up to and through a room marked “Plains Indians.” We passed a tepee.

“Blackfeet, Cheyenne, Crow and Arapahoe,” said Blake with pride, his voice and footsteps still echoing. “Clothing and weapons. The weapons are my particular interest.”

He guided us into the south wing of the building and past the closed doors of an auditorium. “Torrance Tower,” he said, opening a door through which we followed him. “My office is this way, past the library.”

About thirty feet farther, we stopped at a door with Blake’s name on it in black letters. Inside the room it was bright, a contrast to the darkness we had just been led through.

There was a large cluttered desk in one corner and an even larger table in the center of the room. On it were bones, bows, arrows, something that looked like a peace pipe, and large, open books. There were also three magnifying glasses and a microscope. The walls were floor-to-ceiling bookshelves.