The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance Read Online Free PDF

an arm around me and leaning down to whisper. “But I can’t. The wife and I don’t see eye-to-eye, so I camp out in hotels.”
    “I’ve heard something about it,” I said.
    “You have?” he asked suspiciously. Maybe now I did catch the first small signs of slurred speech. I knew the three beers I had put away were having a slight effect on my midnight patter. My normal gargle for tacos was a couple of Pepsis.
    “I’m a detective,” I reminded him. “We keep our ears open and wear flowers in our buttonholes when we can afford them.”
    There was nothing else to say. The Duke thanked me for getting him out of the Alhambra and popping for the tacos, and we parted, going in opposite directions. I watched him lope down Broadway past a lone couple, who recognized him and turned to watch his familiar walk, then I turned south and went for my own car, which was still where I had left it. I managed to climb in and get it started before the staggering panhandler got to me. He had been advancing slowly, his too warm topcoat flapping in the muggy breeze, his hands already out like Lon Chaney, Jr., as the Mummy.
    I made it to Heliotrope in Hollywood and parked in front of home, Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house. For the past month or so I had been considering the purchase of a rope ladder, one I could drop from my room window so I could enter and exit without encountering Mrs. Plaut, who, I was now convinced, never slept. But I knew I’d never buy the ladder, would never take time off to buy it and install it and use it. Hell, if I could follow through on an idea like that, I wouldn’t be filling in as a night watchman at an old people’s home or a substitute house dick in second-rate hotels. There was no moving from Mrs. Plaut’s. Rooms were hard to get in the middle of a war. Besides, my best friend lived at the Plaut Palace and I didn’t want to insult or hurt Gunther Wherthman’s feelings.
    I trudged up the walk and the three white wooden steps, not trying to be particularly quiet. Being particularly quiet, even taking off my shoes, had never saved me from Mrs. Plaut. Since she was as close to deaf as one could be without benefit of a precise sign on her chest, I had often wondered by what uncanny sense she detected even the slightest presence in or near her domicile. Gunther was of the opinion that she felt vibrations through the wooden floor. Joe Hill, the postman who lived in the loft, thought she was a witch, but whatever it was, the minute and quite ancient and feisty Mrs. Plaut was better than radar.
    I sensed her before I saw her in the shadows on the front porch. She sat on the white wooden porch swing rocking, her feet not quite touching the wooden planks of the porch.
    “Photographs, Mr. Peelers,” she said.
    “It’s after midnight, Mrs. Plaut. What are you still doing up?” I knew she wouldn’t hear me, but after nearly fifty years of almost normal conversation with people, habits die hard.
    “What do you think of photographs?” she went on. The porch swing stopped, ending the rusty creaking. The question, stated in her insistent and too loud voice, penetrated, I was sure, every sleeping house on the block. Now the neighborhood awaited my opinion on the art of photography at midnight.
    “I think photographs are great,” I said. “I’ve got one of my old dog, my brother, and my dad on my office wall where I can see them and—”
    “Family photographs are the best,” she answered relevantly. And then I realized that it was not relevance but coincidence that had created apparent reason. She went on, “I believe we should incorporate photographs in the book.”
    Now I understood. For more than two years Mrs. Plaut had been submitting to me neatly written pages of her family history. At some juncture and confused moment in our early encounters, Mrs. Plaut had decided that I was both an exterminator and an editor. No amount of explanation had destroyed this illusion, and to preserve what little