The Devil Met a Lady

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  There were three of them: Hans and Fritz, both big, one blond, one dark; one broad, the other lean. Hans was broad and blond. Fritz was smaller but meaner. I ought to know. He had tried to skewer me with a fencepost two nights before. The third stooge, Jeffers, short, nervous, with slicked-back dark hair and a nose that pointed a little to the left, was talking to the desk clerk.

  I turned my back when Fritz started to scan the crowd, but before I turned I saw what I didn’t want to see—Scott Cosacos, the logical night clerk, was just coming on duty, relieving the slightly more savory-looking younger man with no hair, who was talking to Jeffers.

  When the telephone operator came on, I told her I’d changed my mind, hung up, and made it to the stairs, hiding behind a pair of salesmen talking about friction bolts, a trio of teenage sailors arguing about beer, a weary lady of the afternoon, and a family of five who looked like they were on vacation from Moline, Illinois.

  On the stairway, I turned around carefully and saw Jeffers watching Scott Cosacos, whose eyes lifted over their heads and moved around the crowd. I pressed against the wall and hurried upward.

  Going up was not easy. I have a bad back and my leg was recovering from a not-distant break of major proportions. On top of that there were the wounds of the previous two nights.

  “You didn’t get the Graham crackers,” Bette Davis observed from the table where she was smoking and staring at the cards.

  “We’re going,” I said, throwing things into the suitcase. “They’re downstairs.”

  “No,” she said, standing.

  “Yes,” I said, throwing the cards into the case and snapping it shut. “Put your shoes on.”

  She obeyed quickly.

  “One more time,” I said, hoisting the suitcase. “Maybe it’s time we went to the police.”

  “No,” she said. “There will be pictures, photographers, stories. And Farney has specifically …”

  “Hans and Fritz could kill us. That might be a little more inconvenient than the police.”

  I was at the door now, opening it slightly.

  “No police.”

  “Okay, then,” I whispered, ushering her out into the hall. “Let’s go.”

  The hallway was empty. My .38 was tucked in my belt.

  Stairs or elevator. I figured there were no odds on Cosacos not telling Jeffers, Hans, and Fritz where Mr. and Mrs. Giddins were.

  “Stairs,” I said, though my leg and back said elevator.

  She followed. Less than a flight down I heard footsteps coming up. Could be anyone looking for exercise. Could be. I motioned for her to follow me back upstairs. On the sixth floor I pushed the elevator button as I watched the stairwell.

  Five, ten seconds. Twenty. The elevator clicked into place and the doors started to open as Fritz came into view, taking the last two or three stairs in one stride. There was something in his hand.

  “In, fast,” I said, shoving Davis into the elevator. She didn’t move. I shoved her again. Still she didn’t move. And then I looked. Hans and Jeffers were standing against the rear wall of the elevator. Hans had his arms folded, which would have been a good sign if Jeffers hadn’t had a pistol in his hand. I considered our options.

  Hans reached forward and held the elevator door open as Jeffers said, “Step in, put your suitcase slowly on the floor, hand me your gun, and turn around.”

  Fritz was behind us now, blocking our way if we stupidly decided to run for the stairs.

  “Now, see here,” Bette Davis said indignantly. “We are not getting in your elevator. We are not going with you. If you do not leave immediately, I will scream, a scream such as you have never even imagined. You have no intention of shooting us and we have no intention of coming with you. I’ve seen as much of you as I intend to see. So take your two-bit gangster act and sell it to Monogram.”

  The elevator door began to rattle, anxious to respond to calls above and below.

  “You are one hell of a great actress, lady,” Jeffers said with a smile. “We’ll have plenty of time for your next performance when we get where we’re going. Now, I am going to count to three—then, if you are not on this elevator, I will shoot Mr. Peters. My colleague will restrain and gag you and carry you down the service stairs to an automobile waiting at the service entrance.”

  “I don’t think so,” said Davis, looking at me and then Jeffers with a confident smile.

  “One,” said Jeffers.

  The elevator door begged to close.

  “Two,” he said.

  Hans and Fritz waited patiently, Fritz standing directly behind Bette Davis.

  “Get in,” I said to her.

  “He is bluffing,” she said.

  “I don’t think so,” I said.

  Jeffers cocked his head to one side and aimed his revolver at my head. Fritz moved a little to his left to avoid the splatter of blood.

  “All right,” said Davis with a sigh.

  Jeffers lowered the gun, and Fritz ushered the two of us into the elevator. The doors closed in relief and we began to go down.

  “God, what a moment,” said Jeffers. “A scene with Bette Davis. If that jackass of an agent of mine could have seen me. I was good, wasn’t I?”

  “Walter Brennan is shivering in fright from the threat you pose to his career,” she said.

  “She’s amazing,” said Jeffers to Hans, who stood stone-faced. “Amazing,” he repeated, looking at me as the elevator slowed down.

  “Amazing,” I agreed.

  “He was bluffing,” Bette Davis said.

  “No,” said Jeffers soberly. “I wasn’t. And I’ll shoot you both and whoever gets on this elevator if you pull anything.”

  “Your dialogue is deteriorating,” she said as the elevator doors opened slowly on the third floor and an ancient couple dressed in their Iowa-farm best got on and glared at us.

  “Slowest damned elevator I’ve ever seen,” the man said accusingly.

  Jeffers smiled and nodded agreement. The sight of Jeffers, me, and the Katzenjammer Kids was enough to silence the old woman, who faced front stoically. The old man, who wore glasses, a gray suit, and a scowl, looked at Bette Davis, blinked and turned front also.

  When we reached the lobby, the door clanked open and the old couple stepped out. The man whispered something and the twig-thin old woman looked back at us as Fritz urged us toward the front door.

  “Nonsense,” the old woman whispered. “She doesn’t look anything like Joan Crawford.”

  And as we wove our way through the lobby crowd with Jeffers’s buddy-buddy arm around my shoulder, his pistol under my jacket pressed into my spine, Bette Davis uttered, “Is there no end to the humiliation I must endure?”

  I didn’t answer but I felt like saying that humiliation was not in the same class with what I was sure Jeffers planned for me when he got us somewhere away from Joan Crawford’s admiring fans.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Let’s go back a little. Not long and not far, only three days and a few blocks from the Great Palms Hotel. On Monday, February 1, 1943, I was sitting in my office on the fourth floor of the Farraday Building on Hoover and Ninth, a few doors down from Manny’s Tacos.

  My office is my private domain, monk’s cell, my refuge or, as Bette Davis might observe, a dump. Few ever enter the office of Toby Peters, Private Investigator, especially clients. Aside from me, only a cat named Dash, a fat orange lump who belongs to no one but lives with me, spends a lot of time there. Sheldon Minck, the dentist with whom I share the suite, is permitted to bring me announcements of visitors; Jeremy Butler, who owns the Farraday and is an enormous ex-wrestler who lives on the floor above us with his wife and new daughter, can enter whenever he wishes.

  There are those who might say that I keep clients away from my office because it is little more than a closet inside the less-than-clean disaster of a dental surgery where Shelly practices incompetent alchemy and benevolent sadism. There are those who might say that my office, which smells like a fat orange cat,
is unimpressive: a small cluttered and battered desk; a single window five stories above an alley where a bum who keeps changing his name resides in the rusting shell of a Buick; a cracked ceiling; barely enough room for two wooden chairs beside my own; a bleary blown-up photograph on the wall of me, my brother Phil, our father wearing his grocer’s apron, and our dog Kaiser Wilhelm.

  And there are those who might wonder at the strange painting that covers one entire wall, the painting of a woman lovingly cradling two small naked boy babies. Someone might think the woman was my mother, and the boy babies me and my brother Phil. In fact, they were Salvador Dali, his dead brother, and his mother, who was still alive as far as I knew. Dali had given me the painting as payment for a job I had done for him.

  There are those who might say many things about the office of Toby Peters, Private Investigator, if they had the interest or opportunity.

  On Monday, I was blissfully, ignorantly, and unaccountably content. Nothing in my life, outside of having enough money to pay my overdue bills, accounted for this feeling.

  Sure, the war news was good. The Los Angeles Times front page told me that Nazi Stalingrad Chief Field Marshal General Friedrich von Paulus and sixteen other generals had been captured by the Russians, and that the Germans had suffered their worst defeat of the war, one hundred thousand men killed. And there, right in front of me, was the announcement that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had just returned from a two-week tour of the Pacific, saying the Japanese resistance on Guadalcanal would end in thirty days.

  I had forty dollars in my wallet and another three hundred in my only other pair of shoes, in a closet at Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house, where I lived. The money was in payment for a case I handled for Greta Garbo in one day. The fee was only two hundred bucks. The extra hundred and forty was a bonus to insure my promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened, ever. I had told her the bonus wasn’t necessary. She had insisted. I had held out for five whole seconds.

  Those who seek my services through former clients, friends, acquaintances, and ex-wives have learned that I don’t sell brilliant deductions and a vast network of contacts in high places. What I do sell is dogged persistence, confidentiality, and a face that had once been described by Peter Lorre as “classic expressionism.”

  As a result, I’m frequently looking for part-time jobs, hanging around Levy’s restaurant on Spring Street trying to seduce Carmen the cashier into a romantic nightlife of cowboy movies and hot-dog stands on the beach. When not pursuing the ample Carmen, I prowl after the even more elusive Anne Mitzenmacher, my former wife who divorced me half-a-dozen years and a few thousand busted promises ago. My brother, who’s an L.A. Police captain, has no use for me, and I have some very lonely days and some damned good ones. This Monday was a damned good one.

  If I wanted to work, which I didn’t, since I was sitting on the vast wealth I had earned from Garbo, I could have done a night house-detective stint at any of five downtown hotels. No, I was preparing to go down to Levy’s restaurant and boldly invite Carmen to join me for a few days in Lake Tahoe. Maybe she would accept. Maybe she would let me pay for a sitter so her twelve-year-old son didn’t have to join us. Maybe she would utter more than a few weary words and display something beyond complete, widemouthed indifference.

  “Have you noticed,” I told Dash, who had been nibbling at an open envelope containing an invitation to join the Vegetarian Party, “that my vocabulary has improved as a result of my association with Jeremy?”

  Dash didn’t give a rat’s tail. He kept munching.

  “The key to success is convincing the world that you went to a school east of Denver,” I told Dash.

  Dash looked up with a strip of envelope flap glued to his nose. I reached over and removed it.

  The phone rang. I picked it up.

  “Toby Peters Agency,” I said, dropping my voice a few decibels to client-confidence level. With potential clients I was a baritone, at least for the first day.

  “My name is Arthur Farnsworth,” the man said in a back-East voice that suggested a good education or a top-notch language coach. “I’ve been told you might be able to help me.”

  “Mr. Farnsworth,” I said. “I’m afraid you caught me at a bad time. I’m about to go on vacation. If your case can wait a week, I’ll be happy to talk. If it can’t, I can recommend—”

  “No,” Farnsworth shouted loud enough to make Dash look up from his tasty envelope. “This is very important and the person who recommended you said no one else would do.”

  “Look—” I began.

  “National security is involved here, Mr. Peters,” he said. “Give me five minutes of your time. I’ll come right over.”

  “No,” I said. “I’ll tell you what. I was on my way out for lunch. You know Levy’s Grill on Spring Street?”

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Can you make it in fifteen minutes?”

  “Twenty-five,” he said.

  “Twenty-five,” I agreed. “Just ask the cashier who I am.”

  I hung up the phone and didn’t bother to check the watch on my wrist. The watch had belonged to my father. I got it when he died. It was the only thing I got from him besides vague memories and a lopsided grin. The watch had refused, in the more than three decades I’d had it, to simply quit. It also refused to come close to the right time. I loved that watch. It reminded me of me.

  “You want to come with me or stay here?” I asked Dash.

  He looked up from the confettied envelope and blinked a couple of times.

  “Why don’t you come with me?” I said, picking him up. “Shelly’ll probably forget to feed you. You can eat what’s left of the upholstery in my car.”

  This seemed a good idea to Dash. At least he didn’t protest.

  The phone rang. I debated answering. I didn’t have much time to make it to Levy’s, charm Carmen, order a Levy’s Patriotic Reuben—with Kraft cheese and coleslaw instead of Swiss and sauerkraut—and be ready for Farnsworth of the East.

  I picked up the phone.

  “Mr. Peelers?” blasted the voice of my ancient landlady, Mrs. Plaut.

  I put the receiver down on the desk. There was no point in telling Mrs. Plaut that I had to hurry to meet a potential client, or even that the Farraday Building was surrounded by savage Eskimos. I had learned through hard and painful experience that the only way to deal with Mrs. Plaut was to hear her out and, if at all possible, obey. Any other path led to a labyrinth of confusion, apology, and failure. Occasionally, and to my deep regret, I sometimes forgot this simple truth.

  “It’s me, Mrs. Plaut.”

  “It is you,” she shouted.

  “It is.”

  “Good. It is necessary for you to stop at Ralph’s Market,” she said. “Please get your pencil.”

  I put Dash back down on the desk, pulled the notebook out of my rear pocket, and found a pencil on the desk.

  “Ready,” I said.

  “Are you prepared?”

  “I am prepared.”

  Though she was nearly deaf, Mrs. Plaut heard reasonably well on the telephone. The problem was that she assumed others couldn’t hear unless she helped the sound along the wires by shouting. I wrote dutifully as she made her way carefully through the list.

  “A big box of Climalene. Two Waldorf toilet tissues. Pay no more than a nickel for each. A jar of Musterole. A box of French’s Birdseed, for Dexter. The kind Virginia Bruce gives her canary. A box of Aunt Jemima Ready-Mix Pancakes. An Arrid Cream Deodorant. The thirty-nine-cent jar, not the tencent or the fifty-nine-cent one. One pound of Durkee’s Vegetable Oleomargarine. A jar of Spry. Four cans of Prem. That’s Prem, not Spam. Last time you brought Spam. Spam is not sugar-cured.”

  “I understand.”

  “And a Silvercup bread. And a milk. And, Mr. Peelers, I must remind you that U.S. Government wartime milk regulations go into effect today,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said neutrally.

  “There will be a three-cent
deposit on the store bottle. The radio says that half a million bottles a year are not returned. These bottles are needed for the war effort.”

  “Thank you for the information,” I said.

  “There is a point to my conveying this information to you, Mr. Peelers.”

  “I never doubted it, Mrs. Plaut.”

  “You are using a milk bottle in your room for a penny bank and another for a flowerpot. You have forty-two pennies in that bank and have not added one in many months. The flower in your milk bottle died more than a month ago.”

  “Take the bottles, Mrs. Plaut,” I said.

  “Good. I’ll reimburse you for the groceries when I check them. Do not be late.”

  With that she hung up. I did the same, tucked my notebook into my back pocket, reached down, swooping a dazed Dash under my arm, and headed for the door, where I almost ran into Jeremy Butler.

  Jeremy was massive, bald, and somewhere in his mid-sixties. He was wearing a gray long-sleeved sweat shirt and dark pants. Jeremy owned at least three buildings, including the Farraday. He managed and kept them with his wife, Alice Pallis, who almost matched him in bulk and strength. He also found time to write and publish poetry and to engage in adoration of his and Alice’s baby, Natasha, a beauty whose existence belied her heredity.

  “On the way out,” I said. “Client.”

  “I won’t keep you,” said Jeremy. “Did you hear the news?”

  “Stalingrad,” I said, moving past him.

  “No,” he said seriously. “Edna St. Vincent Millay received the Medal of the Poetry Society of America in New York. Alice and I are holding a small party tonight in her honor. We’ll have readings from The Murder of Lidice and some sonnets. I’m also composing a brief poem in her honor.”

  “I’ll do my best to be there,” I said. “Will you do me a favor?”

  Jeremy said nothing.

  “Take care of Dash for a while.”

  Jeremy took the docile cat.

  “Thanks.”