Mildred Pierced Read Free Page A

hasn’t got long.”
    “I’m sorry.”
    “I know. You didn’t come to ask about Ruth.”
    “No.”
    “You came about Minck.”
    I nodded.
    “Not my case. Not in the district,” he said. “I did ask to look at the report.”
    “And?”
    He reached over to the six-inch pile of files and memos in his IN box, took a single sheet from the top, and laid it in front of him.
    “He’s a lunatic, Tobias.”
    “I know.”
    “No,” Phil said again. “A lunatic. In the park with a goddamn crossbow? We could put him away for that. He’s half blind and all stupid. Shoots his wife with an arrow on a sunny day with a witness.”
    “Bolt,” I said. “Not an arrow, a bolt. Crossbows fire bolts, quarrels …”
    “Who gives a shit?” Phil said. “He killed her. He can plead insanity. You’re getting Leib for him?”
    “Yes.”
    “Any judge in his right mind will buy insanity after talking to Minck for five minutes, especially with Leib next to him,” said Phil. “Ballistics is looking at the bow and the piece of metal that killed her. They don’t know what to do with it. I could tell them where they could put that…”
    “Bolt,” I supplied. “Where did it hit her?”
    “Perfect shot,” said Phil. “Right in the heart.”
    “How far away was he?”
    “Witness says about twenty yards.”
    “Phil, can you imagine Shelly firing anything including a cannon and hitting a target twenty yards away?”
    “I can imagine almost anything,” he said. “I can imagine a lucky shot or an unlucky one. If insanity doesn’t work, he can claim it was an accident. He doesn’t look like Robin Hood. He doesn’t even look like the fat guy who played Friar Tuck.”
    “Eugene Pallette,” I said.
    “I’ll remember that.”
    “He didn’t do it, Phil,” I said.
    “You’re sure?”
    “No,” I said. “But I’m staying with it till I am sure.”
    “Good luck,” he said.
    “How are you holding up?”
    “How do I look?”
    “I’ve seen you better. I’ve seen you worse.”
    “The commissioner’s seeing me this afternoon,” he said, turning his head away to look at a blank wall.
    “What happened?”
    He didn’t answer, so I guessed, “You hit a suspect.”
    “I beat the hell out of the bastard,” Phil said. “Shoot-out last night at the playground on Ocean View. Two guys with guns, a grudge over a woman with practically no teeth, their guts full of cheap wine. One of them, Herman Winterhoff, accidentally shot an eleven-year-old girl minding her own business. The officers who took the call brought him in for interrogation. When I got to Winterhoff, the bastard was smiling at me. He wasn’t smiling when I left the room.”
    “Witnesses?”
    “Cawelti, Minor, Harell.”
    “They’ll back you.”
    “Not Cawelti,” he said.
    He was right. The redheaded, pockmarked detective John Cawelti was not going to be part of the blue wall of silence for Phil, whom he hated only a little less than Cawelti hated me. Cawelti was probably picturing himself in this luxury office.
    “You’ll be all right,” I said. “You’ve got a lot on your mind. The commissioner will—”
    “Not this time.” Phil turned his back to me again.
    “Phil?”
    He didn’t answer. I didn’t try again. I got up and went to the door. I thought of saying “Good luck” or “I’ll call about Ruth” or something, but Phil was lost in whatever world he was trying to hide in.
    There had been one witness to Mildred’s death. It was time to see her.

CHAPTER  2
     
    I KNEW WHERE Joan Crawford’s house was in Brentwood. That wasn’t hard to find. Getting her to talk to me would be the hard part, so I called in a favor from Fred Astaire who knew her. I had recently worked for and with him to get him out of a bad situation. I liked Astaire and he liked me, enough to make a call to Crawford.
    Until the war, movie stars had been indentured—and usually well paid—by studios which, when the price was right, loaned them to other studios.