The Howard Hughes Affair: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Four) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page B

and said he never knew the locked.”
    “What did the man in the closet say?”
    “Nothing,” I said. “He turned out to be the father of a famous radio comedian. Fresno cops wouldn’t tell me who, and they let him go. He hadn’t raped the old gal in the shower, just turned up in there naked and bloody and scared hell out of her. And that guy’s still wandering the streets of Fresno or L.A.”
    “An entirely different genre,” Rathbone observed, sipping a wine of uncertain vintage while I downed my second beer and made a mental note to get to the Y as soon as possible before my brother and I had matching beer bellies. On the way out of the steak place, the waiter asked Rathbone for an autograph and got it on a menu.
    “For my wife,” said the waiter, a thin guy with his hair combed straight back.
    “It always is,” said Rathbone when the waiter left.
    He allowed me to take the check after I assured him it was on Howard Hughes.
    We went back to Major Barton’s little house with a good meal under our belts and almost an hour and a half behind us. It was late in the afternoon, and the sun was promising a hot Christmas.
    I knocked but Barton didn’t answer. I knocked again, deciding Rathbone had probably been wrong and Barton had gone with a couple of drinks and unpolished shoes to his superior officer to lay down his secret of the Hughes night, if he had such a secret other than his own spying.
    Rathbone tried the door and it wasn’t locked.
    “Major,” I called. No answer. We stepped in and found the major just where we had left him, in full uniform, glass in hand but with the addition of a pair of messy red stains on his shirt. Someone had shot him at close range. I’d seen a lot of corpses in my day and that day included the morning and the guy in Shelly’s chair; but though I knew Rathbone had been in the war, I wasn’t sure what he had seen. I turned, and he was looking around the room.
    “You needn’t worry about me, Toby,” he said. “I had proximity to more corpses during the war than a man would care to have in a lifetime. Once I had to step on a decomposed corpse while running from the Germans. I’ve seen corpses, especially corpses in uniform—though never that uniform.… Curious.”
    “What?” I said.
    “The neighbors,” he said.
    “What neighbors?” I said.
    “Precisely,” said Rathbone. “We left the window open when we departed and it’s still open. There are people on the street. A bullet makes quite a bit of noise. Why isn’t anyone here? Why aren’t the police here?”
    I looked at Barton but didn’t touch him. There was nothing around that seemed to help.
    “Might have used a silencer,” I said.
    “To kill quietly,” Rathbone said, looking down at Barton. “A particularly chilling concept.”
    “He’s been dead for more than a few minutes,” I said. “Blood is starting to dry. So no one’s called the police, and I don’t think I’ll stick around to do it. They don’t like it when you discover two corpses in one day. How about we just leave here quietly and I make an anonymous call?”
    “If you think it best,” he said, and we left. Rathbone had to get home and prepare for a dinner, so he drove me to Al’s garage, and I promised to call and keep him informed.
    The bumper was back on and I was short of suspects. My favorite had just been shot. Maybe he had passed on the Hughes plans to an accomplice who was afraid he would talk and killed him. Maybe he had seen someone else in Hughes’ room and that person had killed him. And maybe one of these maybes had seen me and Rathbone coming out of Barton’s. Or just maybe someone who had nothing to do with the case had killed him, but that would have been one hell of a coincidence. I believed in coincidences, but I didn’t count on them. I always counted on my fingers and hoped I never had to go over ten on any problem, but this one required an adding machine.
    I pulled in at a grocery store, picked up three