He Done Her Wrong: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Eight) (Toby Peters Mysteries) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Page A

in my jacket pocket. He unwrapped his and began to chew.
    “Naw,” he said. “That makeup, the whole ambience is out of touch.”
    “Ambience?” I repeated.
    “Heard it on ‘Believe It or Not’ last night,” Coronet nodded. “Very educational show. You should catch it.”
    “I will,” I said and went up the twenty creaking brown stairs through the often-kicked wooden door at the top and into the squad room. As it always did, the room smelled of food, humanity, and stale smoke.
    Business was booming. Fat Sergeant Veldu sat at his desk with one salami hand in the ample hair of a Mexican kid. Veldu was holding the kid’s face inches from his own and whispering. The kid looked scared. I couldn’t hear what Veldu whispered because there was too much going on.
    Two women dressed for a big night out were sitting on a bench in the corner, smoking and talking as if they were waiting for the maître d’ to lead them to a seat at the Café La Male. One of the women, a blond, had a black and purple eye. The other woman had a thick bandage over her ear.
    The blond laughed and said over the noise, “You should have bit it off.”
    Next to them a ragbag wino in a long coat was looking through Veldu’s wastebasket. Veldu reached back without taking his hand from the Mexican kid or moving his eyes and coshed the ragbag with his free hand. The ragbag sat up.
    My least favorite detective in the solar system, John Cawelti, was sipping coffee and playing with a pencil while he listened to someone on the phone, who didn’t give him a chance to speak. Cawelti’s checked jacket was off, and his shoulder holster rested comfortably over his heart. As always, except for one time when Jeremy Butler had shaken him up, Cawelti’s black hair was plastered down and parted in the middle as if he were about to try out for tenor in a barbershop quartet. He looked up and saw me. I smiled at him. It was love at first sight. Then he made the little gesture that cemented our relationship, and I mouthed “Same to you” and winked. He glared for a few seconds more, jabbed his pencil into his desk, and turned away.
    Two uniformed cops were standing over a seated guy built like a Norwegian tanker. He tried to stand but they pushed him back. He paused, blank-faced, tried to stand again, and the cops pushed him down again. Neither side seemed to be enjoying the game. I could see why the cops didn’t want him to get to his feet. He was a dead ringer for heavyweight contender Tami Mauriello.
    I spotted Seidman in the corner sitting on his desk going through some papers and made my way to him over bums, through bruisers, ladies of last night, cops, and piles of paper.
    He didn’t bother to look up. He had cops’ eyes and knew when I’d stepped into the squad room.
    “Usually we have to go out and find you,” he said in his dead, even voice, which matched his complexion. “We changing the rules?”
    “I’m getting older and mellower, Steve,” I said, sitting next to him on the desk and trying to read with him. He put the papers down, folded his arms over his thin chest, and looked at me.
    “So am I, Toby,” he said. “And I’ve been up all night. So has Phil. Now if you go into his office and get him riled up and I have to come in and make peace, I may move a little slower than usual. You may not be lucky. Give it a rest. There’s a war on.”
    “Blessed are the peacemakers,” I said.
    “For they shall inherit the pieces,” he replied. “Go on in. Wait. This is a dumb question but I’ll ask it for the record. Did you kill that Grayson in Plaza Del Lago?”
    “No,” I said, plunging my hands in my pockets and dancing out of the way of Veldu and the Mexican kid, who was waltzing toward the private interrogation room in the far corner.
    Seidman went back to reading his file, and I knocked on Phil’s office door.
    “Come in,” he said. In I went.
    Phil was seated at his desk. His back was turned, and he was scratching his