The Metaphysical Ukulele

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The Metaphysical Ukulele Page 8

by Sean Carswell


  I took a stool on the short end of the bar and ordered a scotch, neat. The bartender never had the bottle far away from this corner. He poured me three fingers in a dirty glass. I threw down two bits for the drink and asked the writer closest to me if he knew this Chandler. “Know him?” The writer looked at me as if I’d just asked if he’d heard of Culbert Olson. “Why, of course. Everyone knows old Ray.”

  A few more of the gaggle nodded along. They all knew old Ray.

  I asked my questions with a little more volume in my voice. One writer talking was as good as any other. Whoever wanted to chirp up could. “This Ray, he’s a pal of yours?”

  “Sure.” He was chummy with all the writers.

  “A fine fellow, that Ray? A real square gee?”

  “Did more entertaining in the writers’ room than on the page. Always had a story at the ready.”

  “A real yarn-spinner, is he?”

  “Yes he is.”

  “And what are these yarns about?”

  Depends on the day. Sometimes, he spoke of the booming Southern California oil fields before the Depression settled in. Sometimes about the first of these world wars, about his time wearing a kilt for a Canadian division, leading his men into a slaughterhouse, though the writers disagreed as to where this slaughterhouse was—France? Germany? Didn’t matter—and limping out of there with a bullet lodged in his thigh. Sometimes he told stories of booze and broads and the Black Mask, scribbling stories that left him so broke he breakfasted on shoe leather.

  “So he’s a sad sort with these stories, is he? Nothing but corruption and war and poverty?”

  “Why, no,” the writer nearest told me. “He always manages to put a nice twist on the yarns. You walk away laughing, more than not.”

  I saw an angle and pursued it. “So he’s the comical sort? Maybe tells his tales with ukulele accompaniment?”

  A writer in the middle of the cluster stood from his bar stool. He was squinty-eyed and puffy from middle age. His nose advertised far too many veins for a man on his side of fifty. “Say,” he said. “What’s this about, Mister?”

  I shrugged and let my glance linger beyond his soft shoulder. There at the table behind him sat a broad who looked perhaps too interested in our conversation. She ran an emerald-polished fingernail around the rim of a rocks glass filled with a pale green liquid that could only be a gimlet. I knew enough to know that this was the dame I needed to speak with.

  Now, in Chandler’s fictional world, there are blondes and there are blondes. There are tall blondes dressed better than the Duchess of Windsor who sway elegantly across rooms. There are blondes too tall to be cute, wearing street dresses of pale blue wool and small cockeyed hats that hang on their ears like butterflies. There are two-hundred-forty-pound blondes who run the show and wavy-haired blondes who carry little Colts and laugh a laugh strained and taut as a mandolin wire. There are blondes who sit in the driver’s seat in a mink and make the Rolls Royce around them look like just another automobile. There are blondes with faces so pretty you have to wear brass knuckles every time you take them out. There are blondes who fall in love with you and still love you after you kill their husband. There are blondes who will meet you in a supermarket and stroll among the strained peas in baby jars and plot murder for a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy. There’s a small and delicately-put-together blonde who fills the room with a perfume called Trouble, who can lower her lashes until they almost cuddle her cheeks and send you into a world of wealth and corruption, along mean streets nearly powerful enough to make you mean yourself, and she’ll give you little more than a kind word and a faith in your own hard-earned honor to guide you through.

  This beauty here at Musso and Frank’s, though, was a brunette. She wore a white day dress with green flowers and a green bow tied around the waste. Her shoes were the fashionable Tippecanoe, which looked like green moccasins coming and going, but looked like sandals when she stopped and gave you a gander of the middle. She crossed her legs and let one Tippecanoe dangle loose off her heel. She was the kind of woman who learned to hold her own anywhere she walked, be it a San Pedro public school or a typing pool or a Paramount screening room. She had the look of a secretary who can only exist in that flawed-fantasy-come-true which is Hollywood, where a lack of imagination projected onto a giant screen can create an industry with enough wealth to put an illuminated pool in every backyard. I carried my scotch to her table and sat opposite her.

  “If I don’t miss my guess,” I said, “you’re one of those Paramount secretaries who does all the real writing on pictures.”

  A bar light ping-ed off her cobalt eyes as she locked them onto mine. “And who would you be?”

  “Just a match someone struck to light a fire under a writer. A guy named Chandler. Know him?”

  The secretary exhaled heavy and hard like a slashed tire. She glanced at the scalloped shoulder of her day dress. “Know him? I still have his handprints all over me.”

  “You worked for him, then, did you?”

  She took a slow drag on her cigarette, then popped the smoke out in one quick puff. “I guess that depends on how you define work.”

  “How did the studio define it?”

  “Apparently for them, ‘work’ meant taking dictation on all the passes Ray made after me. He spent his days telling me about his old wife and her illnesses and his involuntary abstinence. Does that sound like work to you?”

  “It sounds to me like listening to a man who doesn’t know anything about women.”

  The secretary lifted her gimlet to her lips. They were painted a dark red, the color blood gets long after homicide has closed the investigation and the crime is remembered only by a stain on the sidewalk. “Exactly,” she said. “Does a woman want to hear about an old man and his older old lady and their sad life? Does a woman want to be wooed with lines about how little sex he’s having and about how she’ll do? I don’t think so. A man could notice a dress once in a while. He could ask about me now and then. Or at least once.” She ran her finger through her soft brown hair. “He could notice these curls that take a night in hot rollers to get.”

  “They are lovely,” I said.

  She unlocked her eyes from mine and glanced down at the scarred mahogany of the table in front of us. “Well,” she said. Her coloring seemed to change as the dim light of dusk crept across the bar. I didn’t flatter myself to see a blush in there anywhere.

  “In these woeful attempts to woo,” I asked. “Did he ever play a ukulele?”

  “A what?” Her gaze darted back up to meet mine. “A ukulele?”

  I nodded, slightly as possible.

  “Sure, Mister,” she said. “He keeps it in the rubber room right down the hall from the one you live in.”

  I drained my scotch and picked up my hat. Everything in this watering hole seemed to dry into dust.

  The light of the next morning brought me no more wisdom. I still had a nutty case and a writer blocked. I was two days late solving a mystery I’d learned about one day before, and I didn’t have much to go on. I knew the scribbler drank too much, which is about as much of a surprise as knowing a millionaire is part criminal. I knew he couldn’t write at the studios, but who could? I’d seen plenty of movies, but never one that looked like it had been written on purpose. I knew he pawed at his secretary just like every man who has a secretary to paw at does. I knew he had a wife considerably older than him. That might mean something. And I knew he liked to tell stories around the writing room, so my best bet would be to sit in that writing room and listen. I called Candy and asked him for a studio pass. He told me the executive’s card he gave me would work. I salvaged the card from my ash tray, wiped it gray with my handkerchief, and took the red car down Melrose.

  I found the writing room empty and Chandler in his bungalow, doing what, as far as I can tell, most writers do with most of their time: nothing. He gazed out his office window at the view of the bungalow across the sidewalk and its window with the view of hi
m. He wore his shirt sleeves and looked tired. His tie was rumpled. A beige jacket hung on the hat tree next to his desk, alongside a beige fedora and a beige overcoat. Everything about the guy looked a little beige.

  I stepped into his office without knocking. Why not? The door was open. Chandler spoke as if I’d hit my mark and that was his cue to begin the monologue. “Hollywood will bleed you white,” he said.

  “Excuse me?”

  Chandler kept his gaze where it had been: on that little patch of open air between writers’ bungalows. He didn’t look for an introduction and I didn’t offer one. He was a smart enough cookie. Who else could I be but some other cowboy with a stick to prod this beast into writing? A weak patch of stale yellow sunlight nestled up on Chandler’s papery skin.

  “There is no such thing as an art of the screenplay,” Chandler said, maybe to me, maybe to that sidewalk outside. “There never will be as long as the system lasts. The essence of this system is to exploit talent without permitting it the right to be talent.”

  I stepped fully inside the office and took a seat on the red striped sofa. A pair of beige leather brogans sat on the floor beside me. I’d known brogans only as work shoes, but these brogans—with the leather soft and unscuffed as the air of a new day—had an elegance to them.

  Chandler kept talking. “To me the interesting point about Hollywood’s writers of talent is not how few or how many there are, but how little of worth their talent is allowed to achieve. Writers are employed to write screenplays on the theory that, being writers, they have a particular gift and training for the job, and are then prevented from doing it with any independence or finality whatsoever, on the theory that, being merely writers, they know nothing about making pictures. It takes a producer to tell them that.”

  Chandler stood and walked around his desk. He regarded me directly for the first time. With his thin lips and horn-rimmed glasses, he looked more like a professor than a Hollywood screenwriter. The fact that he was engaged in a lecture with no concern whether or not an audience was listening only compounded this impression. “So what is required of my talent today?” he asked, though he didn’t ask me. “To make a vehicle for some glamorpuss named Moronica Lake with two expressions and eighteen changes of costume. And for Alan Ladd, some male idol of the muddle millions with a permanent hangover, six worn-out acting tricks, and the mentality of a chicken-strangler. Pictures for purposes as these, Hollywood lovingly and carefully makes.”

  Enough was enough. I didn’t have time to hear the cries of a typist who makes twelve hundred a week. His suit may have been rumpled and beige, but it still had the cut of a West Hollywood tailor. Just because he wore it like a cheap suit didn’t make it cheap. If he couldn’t write with a pillow of money like that to rest his head on every night, then to hell with him. If some big studio organ grinder wanted me to poke this monkey into dancing, then so be it. I’d poke.

  “So what are you going to do about it?” I asked Chandler.

  Chandler seemed surprised that I had a voice at all. But what followed next indicated that he’d taken my question to heart and come up with the most ridiculous answer he could muster. He turned back to the desk, picked up the phone, and asked to be connected to his producer. Three seconds later, he laid out his demands.

  This Chandler was a booze hound on the mend. He’d been strictly tea and crumpets while he typed up this latest masterpiece of glamorpuss expressions. But if they wanted him to finish it, he had to get liquored up enough to lubricate that dry brain of his. So he proposed that he’d return to his home and write from there. The studio would provide two limousines to be on call outside his house, each with a driver working an alternate twelve-hour shift. The limousines could run the script pages to the studio while they were still warm from the secretary’s typewriter. The limousines had to be Cadillac. Chandler insisted on this point. If his maid needed to rush to the market for his next bottle of rye or his wife needed to rush to the hospital because he was driving her mad, she needed to do it in style. I didn’t hear him specify anything about the drivers. Perhaps one had to quote passages from “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” on request and the other had to know the Song of Solomon.

  He also demanded six secretaries. They would work in pairs, eight-hour shifts apiece. Whenever he had a thought of fleeting brilliance, they’d be there to take dictation. He called out one of the secretaries by name. I knew that name. She’d show up wearing a pair of Tippecanoes and a green day dress. She’d have to starch it so it would keep its shape when his paws ran all over it.

  And, of course, there must be booze enough to get him through the last act.

  Chandler paused after making his demands, but only long enough to hear some sap say “Okay.” He grabbed his coat from the hat rack, stuffed his arms inside, and fluttered out of the room with neither word nor glance for me.

  I now had the writer’s office to myself. It was the perfect opportunity to hunt for a funny-looking ukulele. A regular shamus would have taken that opportunity and turned the office upside down. Not me. I stretched out on the couch and thought over the situation, which I couldn’t help feeling was coming rapidly to an end. Despite the dusty morning sun filtering through a bungalow window, time had gotten too late to find anything the studio would pay me for. The ukulele didn’t do anything that the booze wouldn’t. It was one bottom-shelf muse or another. I had nothing more to do than linger long enough to get fired.

  Outside the bungalow was a bustle of activity. Low-rank studio personnel raced each other to get things going on this picture again. They rustled up secretaries and Cadillac limousines and drivers and steno pads and portable typewriters. They found producers’ hats and ushered the producers off to three-martini lunches with a ukulele-less writer trying to unblock the blocked. They clawed past each other in a climb they must have envisioned would get them to the top of this dung heap, without realizing that the smell is the same no matter where you are on the pile. I kicked off my wingtips. One fell to the ground. The other lingered on the arm of the sofa, next to my stocking feet. I lay there, watching gravity pull on that shoe. I waited for it to drop.

  Candy came out of the bustle and into the bungalow. He was still a picture of futile aspirations in his thinning flannel suit. “There you are,” he said.

  I sat up and slid my shoes back onto my feet. I knew his business, but I didn’t let on anything I didn’t have to. I said, “Here I am.”

  “I don’t know how you did it,” he said, “but you got Chandler to give us the ransom note.” He tossed that same envelope full of double sawbucks onto my lap. “That’s all we needed.”

  I stood up and walked over to him and gave him a hard stare. “You hired me to find a ukulele and I’ll find it.”

  “We hired you to light a fire under a writer, and his ass is burning. Your job is done.”

  I jammed the envelope into his bony chest. He caved it in like I’d hit him with my fist and not a stack of paper. I held the dough close to his heart, waiting for him to take it. He didn’t budge. He just stared at me with those sad monkey eyes. The organ grinder had played a tune for him and he only knew this one dance step. I let go of the money. It fell to the ground. A fan of Jacksons lay at his feet. I told him, “The picture business is just like this town itself. It looks like paradise but the air is poison.”

  Two days later, I was back in my little office. Two days’ mail lay scattered in front of the mail slot. I went through it in a regular double play, from the floor to the desk to the waste-basket, Tinkers to Evers to Chance. I opened the window to my office and let two days’ dust and dinginess float out. On the window sill a bee with tattered wings was crawling along the woodwork, buzzing in a tired, remote sort of way, as if she knew it wasn’t any use. She was finished. She had flown too many missions and would never get back to the hive again.

  The one thing of interest in my mail was that same envelope Candy had given me twice and taken back twice. Now he’d given it a third time. It still car
ried the same cargo. If I were to be a man of honor, then, the best man for this world and a good enough man for any world, I’d have to follow through with it. I’d have to find that damn ukulele.

  With no leads on a case that was chewed up like an old string, I did what ordinary folks do when they lose something. I think about where that something belongs and look there first. I asked myself, “If I had a banjo ukulele and it wasn’t in my rubber room in Camarillo, where would I keep it?”

  My regular room at home would be my best guess.

  When the maid opened the door at 6520 Drexel Avenue the silence in the living room slapped me in the face. Chandler snored on the davenport. Two odd secretaries sat on two odd chairs studying the latest fashions in the latest magazines. A gin bottle poked its head out of a champagne bucket on the library table in front of the davenport. The maid stood by the door shooting me with daggers from her eyes. “May I help you?” she asked.

  All the words were in her sentence, but she said it in that choppy Chinatown way. Something was off about it. She sounded less like someone from Chinatown and more like someone from Echo Park imitating a Chinese accent. Her uniform matched her accent. The collar and apron were made of white lace. The rest was a fuzzy black wool. Chandler may well have stolen this get-up from Butterfly McQueen’s dressing room.

  “The studio sent me,” I said. I held out the studio executive’s card that Candy had given me. Pipe ash scarred the white of the card.

  The maid took the card and studied it like it was money made on a letterpress at home. “Mr. Chandler’s asleep.”

  “You forgot to drop the s,” I said.

  “What?”

  “If you were really Chinese, you’d say, ‘Mr. Chandler asleep,’ not ‘Mr. Chandler’s asleep.’ You’d drop the s.”

  The maid put one hand on the door in preparation for shutting it in my face. “Have it your way. Mr. Chandler asleep. Asshole.”

  She started to close the door on me, but I stopped it with my foot. “I’ll just come in and have a look around.”

 

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