“I don’t know,” I said with a smile. “Who’s the detective around here, you or me?”
Shelly turned from me and stuck his head in the Stange-bird beak. “I’m busy,” he said.
“Gary Cooper,” I said.
“No time for new patients.” He waved over his shoulder with his cigar. “I’ve got all I can handle now.” Shelly was nervously jabbing balls of cotton into Stange’s mouth. Some of it looked used.
“You’re going to choke him,” I said, craning my neck to watch Stange’s face turn purple. Shelly grunted.
“Shelly,” I insisted.
“I gotta work fast,” he said. “The First District of the Los Angeles Dental Society is meeting today from four-thirty to ten-thirty at the Hollywood Roosevelt on how dentists can cooperate with doctors in emergencies. Maybe I can pick up some first-aid ideas and expand the business.”
I waited for a few seconds while Shelly went after the world’s mouth-packing title. Glancing around the office, I saw it hadn’t changed. Piles of dental magazines and crossword-puzzle books. Uncleaned instruments in the sink, where the water dripped steadily. Coffee on the hot plate.
“My present plan is to break the coffee pot over your head,” I said.
“You’ve got a message,” Shelly responded urgently.
“Maybe I’ll break a chair over your head instead. Or maybe I’ll break Mister Stange over your head.”
Mr. Stange made a flaying effort to rise, but Shelly shoved him back.
“Instrument case in the drawer under the coffee,” Shelly mumbled, pointing vaguely.
I shuffled through the pile of napkins, rusty instruments and old campaign literature for Al Smith in the drawer and found the instrument case. Inside it was an envelope marked “TP,” and inside the envelope was $267 and three dimes.
“I was holding it for you,” Shelly said, his back still to me.
“There should be three hundred or more from Cooper,” I said, pocketing the envelope.
“Expenses,” he explained. “You know you can’t conduct an investigation for nothing. I got a pair of binoculars and …”
“Shelly, what the hell did you do it for?”
“Not now, I’ve got a patient,” Shelly stage-whispered.
“Your patient can wait,” I said, removing the empty pot on the hot plate. Shelly had drunk all the coffee, and the pot was filling with steam. At least once a year the coffee pot exploded. Once it went out the reception-room window like a cannonball, nearly decapitating Shelly’s wife Mildred as she came in.
“Okay, okay,” Shelly said with an enormous sigh. He turned and faced me, removing his glasses so he wouldn’t have to see how I’d take his explanation. “I wanted to help.”
I shook my head no but realized that he couldn’t see me, so I said, “No. Try again.”
“All right. I wanted to see if I could do it, to meet a movie star. You get to meet movie stars, famous people, and I spend my life in people’s mouths and the quality of mouth in this neighborhood could stand upgrading. I mean I love my job, but …”
“What about Cary Grant?” I said. “You worked on his mouth, didn’t you?”
“That was a lie,” Shelly said. I moved across the room, but Shelly continued to talk to the coffee pot, refusing to put his glasses back on.
“So you wanted to meet Gary Cooper and play detective,” I said. At the sound of my voice from another part of the room, Shelly put on his glasses and found me. Mr. Stange was gagging behind him.
“I didn’t do a bad job,” Shelly said.
“Just tell me what you did and what you found out. Tell me fast.”
“There’s a notebook in your bottom drawer,” said Shelly, looking at the stub of his cigar. “I made a report. I think I was getting somewhere, Toby. I really think that a dentist’s point of view brings a new perspective to the detective business. I really do.”
“Shel, you pull this again and I’ll turn dentist and pull all your teeth.” I gave him a big smile and went into my office, slamming the door behind me.
Shelly mumbled something about gratitude before he went back to Mr. Strange’s foul mouth.
The report was there, in a 1935 ledger book. It was surprisingly good. The words were printed in tiny letters. He had interviewed four people who were interested in getting Cooper to do the film he didn’t want to do. The picture was called High Midnight, and its producer was Max Gelhorn. Shelly had his address written neatly: an office building on Sunset, the far side of Sunset where you could have the Sunset address but be in a neighborhood few respectable tourists visit. According to Shelly, everyone he talked to cooperated when he put a little pressure on them. Actually there wasn’t much information. There was a trade-journal clipping on Gelhorn, indicating that his prime had been reached in the late 1920s, when he had produced a series of two-reel Westerns starring someone named Tall Mickey Fargo.
The next name on Shelly’s list was Lola Farmer, an actress with no major credits, who was to star with Cooper in High Midnight. I wondered if this might be the Lola whom Cooper said he had dallied with and who had gone back to Lombardi. Things were already getting complicated. Lola’s address was the Big Bear Bar in Burbank. Name number three was none other than Tall Mickey Fargo, who was set to play the villain in High Midnight.
A clipping from a shopping-center newsletter which Shelly had plucked had an interview with Fargo that mentioned his forthcoming co-starring role with Cooper. There was a photograph of Fargo in the clipping; and I recognized the thin, dark man with the pencil mustache and the almost-comical oversize cowboy hat. I’d seen him in movies when I was a kid. He had always been one of the gang who got killed in the first shootout with the hero. The last name on the list was Curtis Bowie, who had written the screenplay for High Midnight. It was certainly a quartet who needed Cooper for the project. The Los Angeles addresses for both Bowie and Fargo made it clear that they weren’t rolling in the wealth of Hollywood.
I copied the addresses, took the clippings and shoved them in my pocket. Then I returned the one call that had come in my three-week absence. It was from a woman named Carol Slingo in San Pedro. Her parrot had been murdered by an intruder, stabbed with a scissors. There was an empty bottle of nassal spray near the cage, indicating that the murderer had first tried to spray the parrot to death. Mrs. Slingo was angry because the police had refused to pursue the matter with “sufficient concern.” Her theory was that the parrot had been killed to silence him, to keep him from identifying the intruder. I asked if the parrot could do such a thing and she admitted he couldn’t, but the intruder might not know that, especially when he heard the parrot talking. I told her I’d get back to her or have my assistant Mr. Minck look into it as soon as we had time.
While I talked to Mrs. Slingo from San Pedro, I reexamined my office, especially the framed copy of my private investigator’s certificate on the wall next to the photograph. I don’t keep photographs except for this one. In it my older brother Phil has his arm around me, and I’m holding the collar of our dog Murphy. Murphy was a Beagle I renamed Kaiser Wilhelm when Phil returned wounded from his couple of months in World War I. Our old man is standing next to us, his eyes turned proudly on his sons. Both Phil at fourteen and my old man at fifty were tall and heavy, and I was a scrawny ten-year-old. The main puzzle of the photograph for me is whether my nose had already been broken once by then. I can’t tell. I’ve asked people, even my brother, who was the first to break the nose. Phil doesn’t care or remember. He has broken too many noses since then to recall the date of such a minor event.
I left the office with a glance at Shelly’s back. He was hunched over Mr. Stange, cooing, “Just a little wider, a little wider, uh, hu, just a ….”
The groaner was gone from the third floor, and the Farraday was coming to something resembling life. Life at the Farraday began sluggishly a little before noon and never got into high gear. In the lobby I encountered Jeremy Butler, massive hands on massive hips, looking critically at the dark tile floor.
“Toby,” he said, “you think it needs a scrubbing today? I did it yesterday, but …”
“It looks fine, Jeremy, fine. How’s the poetry business?”
“It’s not a business. It’s an act of expression. North States Review is publishing my poem on the war. It’s a damn war, Toby.”
“That it is,” I agreed.
“U-boats near the Panama Canal,” he sighed, kneeling to examine a scuff mark. “You know they’re considering martial law in southern California to control enemy aliens and American-born Japanese? The Times says there are 100,000. You think they’ll put Hal Yamashura in jail? They might if this gets crazy enough.”
“I don’t know, Jeremy,” I said.
Jeremy raised his huge, well-balanced bulk and turned toward me. “Man was looking for you yesterday. A guy with violence steaming in him. I could feel it.”
“Solid guy, looked like a big brick?” I tried.
“That’s him,” he said. “You need some help?”
“I don’t think so. If I do, I know where to find you.”
I went out into the cold, buttoned my coat, pulled down my hat and went for my Buick. I had a pocketful of dollars, a case to work on and a dead parrot for backup. That was enough to keep my mind off the war for a few hours.
My first stop was Max Gelhorn’s office on Sunset. It was a thin, undernourished office building huddled between a one-story short-order diner with a 25-cent breakfast special and a bar with brown windows that advertised Eastside Beer and Ale.
Gelhorn’s office was an elevator ride to the third floor and a walk down an uncarpeted corridor. A chunky girl with a cold sat behind the reception desk. She wore a blue suit. Behind her I could see Gelhorn’s open office. The operation was as small as it could be. Gelhorn Productions was not in the bucks.
“I’m here to see Max Gelhorn,” I said, looking around with as much superiority as I could master.
“He is on location,” she sniffled.
“Location?”
“He is shooting a Western movie,” she explained. “For PRC.”
“And where might this location be?” I asked.
She groped for a fresh Kleenex just in time to keep from offending me. “Not at liberty to say,” she said.
“My name is Fligdish, from the Fourth Commercial Bank of New York City,” I said sweetly. “If Mr. Gelhorn wants to talk about refinancing High Midnight, it will be today or not at all. I have other appointments and a plane to catch this evening.” I looked at my father’s watch with impatience. It told me it was half past five. I moved it slightly and I saw that the no-longer-attached hour hand spun around when I jiggled it.
“Burbank,” she said, scribbling a street-corner address on a pad and tearing the paper off to hand to me.
“Thank you,” I said. “Take care of that cold.”
“How?” she said miserably as I left the office.
The odds were pretty good that one of the four people Shelly had interviewed was behind the man-who-looked-like-a-brick. They were the people who knew he/I/someone was on the case. I had nothing else to go on, anyway. My engine was making a slight pinging sound that had in the past gradually become a forty-three-dollar symphony. Maybe I could finish this case before putting the car in dry dock.
I turned on the radio long enough to find that Dolph Camilli, the National League’s Most Valuable Player with 34 home runs and 120 runs batted in, had signed again with the Brooklyn Dodgers for $20,000. I was too old to become a baseball player and too homely to be a movie star.
The street corner in Burbank was behind a factory. The street corner was actually a huge vacant lot leading up to a hill with a few trees on it. The hill went up sharply to about the height of a three-story building. Plunked in the middle of this vacant lot were four horses, a half-dozen guys with cowboy outfits, a man with a camera and an assortment of other people shivering in a small circle next to a wooden shack, which was being moved around by a thin girl and two guys in sweaters.
When I parked and moved toward them, one man separated himself from the pack and strode toward me with a smile. Behind his back he whispered, “Set it up fast, Herman.” The wind had been blowing my way or I wouldn’t have heard him. He was a little taller, a little younger and seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic than I was about life, but then again he was clearly faking.
“I,” he said, holding out a hand, “am Max Gelhorn. Can I be of some service to you?”
Behind him the sweatered crew tied horses to a quickly constructed rail in front of the shack, cowboys checked their guns and the camera was lugged back to take it all in.
“You have a permit to shoot here?” I asked sternly.
“Permit?” Gelhorn looked puzzled. He was wearing a coat over his heavy woolen sweater. His yellow-gray hair was massive and blowing wild. “I checked with Mr. Payson and he said-”
“Payson?” I said suspiciously. “There is no Mr. Payson.”
“Maybe I got the name wrong,” Gelhorn mused, glancing over his shoulder to see how quickly things were being set up.
“You don’t have permission to shoot here, do you?” I said through clenched teeth.
“Well, not exactly,” said Gelhorn, “but well be out of here in an hour at the most and…. Say, how would you like to be in this picture? You’d be perfect Not much, just a small part in this shot holding a horse. Doris,” he shouted, and the girl in the sweater came running. She was a pale, panting, pinched creature with rimless glasses and pigtails. Her age was something between eighteen and thirty. “Doris,” Gelhorn repeated with mock enthusiasm, “I think this gentleman would be perfect as the bandit holding the horses. What do you think?”
“Perfect,” agreed Doris, picking up her cue.
“Well, Mr….” Gelhorn began.
“Peters,” I said. The name killed a birdie in his head but he chalked it up to minor coincidence. I forced the issue. “Toby Peters,” I said.
“Who are you?” Gelhorn demanded, dropping the hand-wringing act and taking on steam without heat.
“Toby Peters, private investigator.”
“You’ve changed in a week,” sneered Gelhorn. “You used to be short, fat, obnoxious and stupid. You are no longer fat.”
“That was my junior partner, using my name while I was on vacation,” I explained. “I’d be careful how you talk about him in his presence. He’s a jujitsu expert.”
“Really,” said Gelhorn. “Well, it has been unpleasant talking to you, but I’ve got to get back to my film.” He turned, and Doris followed, looking back at me with curiosity.
“I had a talk with Mr. Lombardi yesterday,” I said. That stopped Gelhorn so dead in his tracks that he almost toppled over. He turned to me with a quizzical look. “Lombardi? I don’t know any-”
“Of course not,” I said. “You want to talk before I report back to Mr. Cooper that I found you most uncooperative? You don’t want to kill your chances of getting Cooper for High Midnight.”
Gelhorn hurried back to me and panted, “Then he is considering the offer?”
I shrugged. “Depends on what I tell him.”
“I made a straight offer,” said Gelhorn as blandly as he could.
“What made you think the highest-salaried actor in Hollywood, the actor who is probably going to win his second Academy Award, is going to make a low-budget Western with you? What’s in it for him?”
“That,” said Gelhorn, “is between Mr. Cooper and me.”
“It can’t be that you got the idea of putting pressure on Cooper to come into this?”
From a hot-dog stand on the corner, the sound of music cut through the wind.
“I don’t need Gary Cooper,” Max Gelhorn said, plunging his hands into his pockets.
“Of course not,” I agreed. “I can see that. I’ve seen that plush office of yours, and I can see the epic you’re shooting in an empty lot.”
A whistle blew behind us and drowned out his answer. Seconds later workers from the factory were
streaming out and heading for the hot-dog stand for lunch. Some of them glanced at the movie crew and hurried to get their sandwiches so they could spend their break watching.
“Perhaps we could talk after I get this scene,” Gelhorn said, looking anxiously at the workers and probably fearing that a factory foreman would appear to boot him off the vacant lot.
“Okay,” I said.
“We’ll have a cup of coffee,” he said amiably, backing away. “Uh, and how about holding the horse in this shot. We’re a bit short-handed, and you look perfect.”
“Why not,” I said with a grin that never looked like a grin.
Doris fished out a cowboy hat and vest and took my coat and jacket Gelhorn told me to stand on the far side of the horses so my pants and shoes wouldn’t show on camera. Then Gelhorn went mad with activity. The cameraman, a little guy with a heavy German accent began arguing with him about how little space there was to shoot.
“You want the cowboys should ride behind a hot-dog stand?” he squeaked. “Or up the hill to that garage?”
“I know it’s tight, Hugo, but that’s what we’ve got. Just do it. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee after.”
An overweight actor in a cowboy suit lumbered up to Gelhorn, waving a script “Max,” he cried, “how the hell am I supposed to do this? You said you’d get a stunt man. I can’t-”
“Mickey,” whispered Gelhorn, “a stunt man is at least twenty bucks, even a lousy stuntman. You’ve done harder than this before. I’ll give you an extra te … five.”
I adjusted my cowboy hat and stepped out from behind the horses to get a better look at Tall Mickey Fargo. It was the same man whose picture I had in my pocket, but someone had put a balloon inside him and blown it up. He was a bloated caricature. I couldn’t imagine him getting on a horse, let alone doing a stunt, but the five dollars proved too much for him, and he agreed.
It was cold without my coat, so I huddled back among the horses. One of them tried to nuzzle me. I’ve got nothing against animals as long as they leave me alone. I think human responsibilities are too much and I never understood why anyone would choose to take on responsibility for an animal. Unfortunately, all animals love me. Maybe I just smell from salty sweat. A factory worker with a bottle of Nehi and a sandwich came up to me and asked what we were shooting.
High Midnight tp-6 Page 4