You Bet Your Life: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Three) Read Online Free PDF Page A

didn’t look quite respectable enough to stay. It was my running problem regardless of what clothes I wore, but it was more acute at the moment. People in the lobby were looking toward us, and both of us kept our voices down.
    “I’ll pay two days in advance,” I said. “My name is Peters, Toby Peters of MGM.”
    The clerk’s eyes opened in understanding and his head rose from despair.
    “You’re a movie person?”
    “Yes,” I said. “From Hollywood. I was there this morning.”
    The clerk obviously believed movie people were exempt from decent dress. He turned the guest book toward me. I signed.
    “Yes, Mr. Peters,” he beamed, “I’ve seen some of your work.”
    “Good,” I said taking the key to 605 and shooing away the bellboy. I wondered which piece of work he had seen—the guy who fell out of my window in Los Angeles the year before when he tried to kill me, or maybe the flea bag desk clerk I had pushed around a few months ago.
    A middle-aged couple got on the elevator with me. By middle age I mean they were a year or two older than me. The lower range of middle age went up miraculously each year, managing to stay just ahead of me. If I lived long enough, I might entirely eliminate middle age from my experience. Someday I’ll just wake up and admit that I’m old.
    The thought depressed me almost as much as I depressed the couple on the elevator. I didn’t depress the elevator man. He just looked at his numbers and minded his own business. Up to now he was my favorite person in Chicago.
    The couple got off at four. Before the door was closed, they whispered, “Who do you think—”
    I got off at six, found the right door, and went in. My room was dark, carpeted, and small. I turned on the radio. Kate Smith was in the middle of “The Last Time I Saw Paris.” I checked my gun and my cash. They were both there. I couldn’t see anything out the window. It was frosted over. Light was coming through from LaSalle Street.
    I went back in the hall and pushed the elevator button. It came up empty, and I offered the kid a quarter for the newspaper under his chair. He said I would get my own for two cents by riding down to the lobby. I didn’t want to face the lobby again.
    “I’m in the movies,” I explained.
    He understood, which was more than I did, and exchanged the paper for a quarter. I locked my door just as Kate sang “and every time I think of him, I’ll think of him that way.” I turned off the radio, ran a hot bath, took off my clothes and soaked my weary back while I read The Chicago Tribune, which told me it was “The World’s Greatest Newspaper.”
    The headline said “30 Senators For War.” Senator Burton K. Wheeler warned me about “war madness” and said Roosevelt was preaching “hate and fear.” That cheered me almost as much as thinking about middle age, so I moved to another page where I found that the Nazis had attacked sixteen British merchant ships and destroyed twelve. At a mayors’ conference, LaGuardia of New York told mayors to prepare for bombing attacks. Jews in Holland were being barred by the Nazis as blood donors. General Marshall was worried about Japan building up air power in the Pacific. He was answering by sending 500 troops to Manila. The Japs didn’t worry me. I had word straight from the dentist who shares my office in Los Angeles. Dr. Shelly Minck, who had voted for Wilkie, assured me that we could beat the Japanese in two weeks. That was reassuring, but I wondered what those 500 troops were going to do against airplanes.
    Even Dick Tracy was depressing. Some guy in a small-town lockup was offering a constable a hundred bucks. “I’d like to take a trip to, say, California,” said the balloon over the guy’s head. So would I, I thought, and found some ads for stores selling coats so I could get a line on costs.
    I took a pain pill for my back and went to bed. I dreamt about Cincinnati.
    When I got up it was morning. At least my watch said it was