A Fatal Glass of Beer Read Free Page A

chair. If I looked out the window behind my chair I got a beautiful view of the alley six floors down, where my Crosley was parked and being guarded for two bits by the latest in the series of homeless and often alcoholic or semi-mad wanderers who camped for days, weeks, or months in the shells of an abandoned truck and two abandoned cars.
    There was barely room enough on the other side of my desk for two wooden chairs. Past the wall behind the chairs lay Shelly’s domain. On the same wall, where I could look across at them from my desk, were two items hanging from nails. The first was my license to practice. The second was a photograph of a man, two boys, and a dog. The man was my father. The older boy with the big shoulders and sullen frown was my brother, Phil. The other boy, thinner, his nose already broken once, was me, wearing something that looked like a smile. Our father’s head was tilted slightly to one side, toward Phil, and he had his arms around our shoulders. The picture was taken in front of my father’s grocery store in Glendale. This was our family. My mother had died giving birth to me. Jeremy Butler, my landlord at the Faraday—who had once been a professional wrestler and was now a self-published poet who bought up shabby houses on the fringes of the city and personally renovated them—felt that Phil blamed me for my mother’s death. Our father worked sixteen hours a day and died doing inventory at the age of sixty-four.
    I had changed my name from Tobias Pevsner to Toby Peters and dropped out of the college where I had almost finished two years, earning grades that approached the fine edge of despair. Two more reasons for my ill-tempered brother to be upset with me. By then he was an L.A. cop and not yet married. He had come back from the war we hadn’t won filled with anger over anything that resembled a threat to the laws of the nation in general and Los Angeles County in particular. His rise in the ranks over the years had come in spite of his frequent abuse of suspects. His marriage and two children had tempered him, but only at home. There were two Phils. One of them had paid my way through those two years of college. To try to make it up to him, I had joined the Glendale Police Department. After a couple of years of being blind-sided by drunks, covering for a drunken partner, I had taken a job on the security staff of Warner Brothers and been fired after a few years by Jack Warner himself after I flattened a famous cowboy star who was doing his best to molest a pre-starlet. I had enough of uniforms and became a private investigator. That was about the time my wife, Anne, left me and got a quick divorce.
    “You are a child,” she had said. “You’ve always been one. You’re irresponsible and you’ll be that way till the day you die. And the problem is that you like being a child. You’re never going to grow up and I don’t want to be your mother.”
    She was right. I loved Anne. Still do, though she was about to take her third husband, a rising movie star named Preston Stewart, who was ten years younger than she was. The wedding was in six days. I had been invited to the reception; I don’t know why. Probably a mistake, but I was thinking seriously about going, at least to get a good off-screen look at Preston Stewart.
    “He’s out there,” Violet said, jerking a thumb back at the door as I scrutinized the message in front of me.
    I looked up at her and glanced over at the painting of the woman with two small boys in her arms. The painting filled the wall to my left. It was a genuine Dali, a gift of the artist. Madonna and two children. Dali and his dead brother on one wall, me and Phil on the other.
    “Who’s out there?”
    “Fields,” she said. “Says he has to see you now .”
    I opened my top drawer, swept old letters, flyers, thumbtacks, notes, and this morning’s L.A. Times into it before I got up. Violet was reaching for the knob when she paused and said, “Beau Jack