Think Fast, Mr. Peters

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “I remember,” I said. “And they shelled Goleta in February. How about a towel?”

  He threw me a white towel and shook his head.

  “It’s getting so …” Alf or Ralph started and then paused.

  I never found out what it was getting. I went into the locker room, found my locker, got undressed, put on my jock, shorts, socks, gym shoes, and sweat shirt, put on my sweat-stiff leather gloves, and trotted up to the gym. My arm didn’t exactly ache, but it let me know that it didn’t want any part of this place or what I planned to do. After I’d warmed up with some exercises Doc Hodgdon had given me, a big guy in his late thirties with straight hair that fell over his face like Gene Tunney showed up, gave me a dirty look, and started shadow boxing in a corner of the gym. I made for the punching bag in the corner. The heavy bag dangled next to it. Since the big guy shadow boxing was wearing gloves I figured I’d volunteer to hold the heavy bag for him if he’d do it for me, providing he planned to use it. It was easier than chasing the bag.

  “I’ll hold the bag for you, you hold it for me,” I said.

  He grunted, threw me a look of hate, and went on punching shadows.

  “Don’t mention it,” I said and moved to the punching bag.

  I’d been working the small bag about five minutes when I felt someone standing over my shoulder. I kept working. My arm was aching now but I had worked up a sweat. I could smell it, feel it. It felt good. I felt good, probably good enough to play a couple games of handball with old Doc Hodgdon if he happened to be around.

  “Hey,” the big guy said.

  I kept punching and grunted, “Huh?”

  “I was on this bag,” he said.

  I kept punching. I had about two more minutes to do through the pain.

  “Be through in … two … minutes,” I grunted.

  “You’re through now,” he said and spun me around by the shoulder. I lost my balance and did a Russian dance going backward to keep from falling. When I knew I wasn’t going to go down, I looked at him again. He was big, maybe six-two, a good four inches over me. He also went about 220 pounds to my 180. I was old enough to be his old man, though I might have had to do it fooling about in the back of my father’s grocery store in Glendale after high school. The guy stood looking at me, sweat trickling down his smooth chest. I looked at his eyes, his nose, his ears, his body, and I shook my head.

  Without catching my breath I walked toward him. He looked mean, angry, much angrier than I had ever seen Tunney. Maybe he had just lost his job. Maybe his wife was giving him a hard time. Maybe he’d just been drafted. Maybe he was just your ordinary, everyday jerk. They’re easy to find.

  “Step away from the bag, son,” I said.

  He laughed. There were too many cigarettes in that hacking laugh.

  I didn’t laugh, just walked up to him, hands at my sides and spoke softly.

  “See this face,” I said.

  He was smirking, ready for me, but he looked at my face, the smashed nose, the scar tissue, and something in my eyes.

  “There are more scars on the body if I take off this shirt,” I said, “but I’m not going to have to do that. Son, you’ve never really been hurt. I can see it in your eyes, on your face, your body. You’re big and pretty tough, but you don’t know what it’s like to be hurt. I do. And if you don’t back away you are going to learn what being hurt feels like it. I might get hurt a lot more, but I know what it’s like.”

  “You …” he began wiping his dangling hair from his face with the back of his hand.

  “Hey,” I interrupted. “I don’t want to talk to you. I don’t want to play games with you. I just want to finish my workout and get back to work. So, what’ll it be? Do you move away from the bag or do we both get hurt?”

  I knew he was moving before he did. I knew it when I took a step past him and his hand didn’t go out to grab me again.

  “You shit,” he muttered.

  “When I can, son,” I said, “but the older you get, the harder it gets.”

  I hit the bag and ignored him, or did my best to make it look like I ignored him. I didn’t really let myself go on the bag till I heard him stalk across the gym floor and go through the locker room door. As soon as the door slammed, I stopped punching. The pause had stiffened my sore arm and the last minute of punching had been numb agony, but I was sure I felt better than the big guy, who was probably kicking lockers by now and trying to find some way not to admit that a battered middle-aged mug had forced him to admit that he was scared.

  All in all, it was a good workout. I didn’t look for Doc Hodgdon, couldn’t have raised my hand for a game, and I always needed both hands to play the seventy-year-old orthopedist dead even. Hell, I couldn’t beat him with two good hands. There was an outside chance that the guy in the gym would talk himself into coming back for me, but it wasn’t much of a chance so I didn’t worry while I stripped and showered.

  On the way out of the gym, I tossed the dirty towel to Ralph or Alf, who caught it and dumped it into the barrel behind him.

  “Nimitz really got them,” he said to me. “They won’t be sending ships back to the coast, right?”

  “Not a chance,” I agreed. God didn’t call me a liar and have the Japanese send a shell through YMCA roof, but I wasn’t sure the Battle of Midway had won the war. I didn’t think Ralph/Alf was too sure of it either.

  “Watch yourself,” he called as I headed out. “It’s a jungle out there.”

  “It’s a jungle in here,” I called back. “It’s a jungle no matter where you look.”

  The sky was clear and free of kamikazes. I got in my Crosley and headed downtown to see a man who might be able to help me find the elusive Mildred Minck.

  4

  Sal Lurtzma’s office was on 10th not far from the Farraday, but the building it was in was as far from the Farraday in class as the Brown Derby from Manny’s Taco Shack. To begin with, Lurtzma’s building didn’t even have a name. Every building in downtown Los Angeles has a name, the name of a tree, a fern, the guy who built it, designed it, bought it. Every building, even the decaying last century converted stone mansions and the hurry-up-and-build-them-to-last-a-week brick rectangles.

  But Lurtzma was just in a narrow five-story office building with no elevator and three offices on each floor. He was on the fourth floor. I’d been there maybe six, seven times in the last ten years to track someone down.

  I parked the Crosley two blocks away in a church parking lot whose concrete was buckled and showed sprigs of weed and grass between the cracks. I got out, opened my trunk, and rummaged through a box of junk for the right sign. I found one about the size of a license plate with the word Deacon printed on it. Alice Pallis, who used to run a pornographic printing business in the Farraday, had made up the cards for me after she went straight and married Jeremy Butler, the Farraday landlord. Alice and Butler were a match made in the Rose Bowl. She could carry a 200-pound printing press in one hand and hold off a cop with the other. In turn, Jeremy, who had not long ago been a professional wrestler, the Terror of Tarzana, could hold Alice in one arm while she held the printing press. I don’t think they ever really tried that trick but I was confident they could do it.

  But I digress. I put the Deacon sign inside the front windshield and locked the door so no one could steal the sign. Then I ambled the few blocks to Lurtzma’s office building. Sal had once been fat. Once wasn’t all that long ago. People still referred to him as Fat Sal, but he was fat no longer. The first time I saw him after he had dropped from 400 to anemic I asked what had happened. I should have said he looked good when I asked, but it wouldn’t have been true. At 400 he looked like a tomato with a white cotton ball of hair where the stem should be. At 145 he looked like a wrinkled broom whose bristles had gone limp and white. He should have stopped somewhere between.

  “I lost a lot of weight,” he had explained.

  “Right,” I had said, seeing that he had no intention of explaining the miracle.

&nbs
p; Some said he had gone through a terrible illness and recovered just when it looked as if he were going to join the great talent agents of the past in the waiting room outside God’s office.

  “I’ve got a guy for you, God,” Sal would say when he got in to see the Big Producer, “a guy who can play an angel better than Freddie Bartholomew. Trust me. Try him. Have I ever steered you up the wrong avenue?”

  Others, particularly a lounge singer named Claire, claimed that Sal had lost the weight for love of both sisters in a singing act, Carlotta and Maria Escondera. Anyway, according to Claire, Sal had lost the pounds to get into the competition for the girls. I don’t know the outcome—if Claire was right—but I did know that Sal was not married to Carlotta, Maria, or anyone else.

  I stopped in front of the fourth-floor door marked Sal Lurtzma, Talent. I knocked. I heard something inside. I knocked again. Nothing. I opened the door and walked in. Sal was behind his desk in his sweat-stained white shirt, sleeves rolled up to show freckled arms covered with white hair. He was talking on the telephone with his back to the door. Standing next to him, leaning forward, was a thin, hawkfaced man with a balding head and sad eyes. The hawk-faced man was dressed entirely in black, jacket, slacks, even the shirt, socks, and shoes. On his stiffly held right wrist sat a green and red parrot, head tilted as if he were listening carefully to Sal’s conversation.

  The bird was the first to notice me. I stepped in and closed the door. Sal’s voice rose, paused, rose higher, complained, cajoled. Sal’s desk was piled high with photographs of actors, copies of Variety. The chairs in front of the desk and the one lounge against the wall were vintage stuff, ready to give up. But Sal was never ready to give up on a client, hadn’t given up on one in the fifty years he had been in the business. The walls were covered, top to bottom, with photographs of clients, some of them dating back to 1900, but one looked in vain, as I had a few times waiting for Sal on the phone, to find a single face or name the local barber would recognize. Sal specialized in losers. I sat on the lounge and waited. Listening to Sal on the phone was an experience.

  “Because he can,” Sal insisted on the phone. “He can. I say he can. You can hear that he can. Do I lie? Does Sal Lurtzma lie? Have you ever known me to … no, no, no. That was not a lie, Celeste. I beg to differ with you on that one. It was not lie. It was an error on my part. He looked much taller in my office, much taller. Yes … well, who knows? But other than that, have I ever given you cause to think I was not telling you the complete truth about a … that’s not fair, Celeste. I thought we were never going to mention them. I really thought they were three sisters. I did. They looked like sisters, didn’t they? Two of them were cousins and the third was a boy, not a man, a boy. Well, if you’re going to dredge up the past and not listen you’re going to miss an act like you’ve never seen or heard. OK. All right. So you don’t believe. How about I put him on the phone? Yes, right now. Why not? Here he is.”

  Sal put his hand over the mouthpiece and swiveled in his chair to face the man in black and the bird. He also spotted me, rolled his eyes, and mouthed “Wait.” Then he said to the man: “Put the bird on the phone.”

  “The phone?” the man asked with a decided European accent I couldn’t place.

  “The phone, Edgar, the phone, the phone,” Sal whispered hoarsely and then, into the phone, said, “He’ll be on in a second, Celeste, just a second.” Hand back over the mouthpiece and addressing Edgar, Sal said, “Have him do Zasu Pitts, or what was that other one?”

  “Patsy Kelly?” Edgar tried.

  “Whichever, Sal said impatiently, holding up the phone.

  Edgar shrugged his thin shoulders, whispered something in the parrot’s ear and held him out next to the phone. The bird looked at the phone, looked at Sal, looked at me, pecked the mouthpiece.

  “Talk, talk, or you’re Guatemalan lunch,” Sal said.

  “I’ll not allow that you speak in that manner,” Edgar said indignantly.

  “Sorry, sorry,” sighed Sal, who turned to me with an even deeper sigh and a glance at bird and man to let me see what trials he had to go through for his clients.

  The bird gawked and then, quite clearly, albeit with an accent very much like Edgar’s, said, “I really must do my hair. I really must.”

  Sal’s hand shot over the mouthpiece and the bird pecked at it.

  “I said Zasu Pitts or Patsy Kelly,” he hissed at Edgar. “Not Hepburn. Everybody does Hepburn. Shit.”

  “Bad bird,” Edgar said to the bird, but the bird didn’t seem to care.

  The Hepburn imitation had stunk, but at least I knew it was supposed to be Hepburn. On the phone again Sal, sweat trickling down his forehead, his white hair a fluff of madness, said, “Well Celeste? Yeah, sure … I, but it’s a bird for Chrissake, a bird, not Dennis Day. How do you know it was … you take my word it’s a bird. What do you think it is, a goddamn gorilla? No … wait. I’m sorry. It’s a bird. A bird …. Because the guy who taught him has an accent. I know Kate Hepburn doesn’t have an accent. Yeah, his Zasu Pitts has an accent. They all have accents. I don’t know. I don’t know, Celeste, I’ll have to ask.”

  Hand over the mouthpiece again and again addressing Edgar, “Can he do Maurice Chevalier, Jean Gabin?”

  Edgar emphatically shook his head in the negative. Near defeat, Sal returned to Celeste on the phone.

  “He can’t do Chevalier or Gabin, Celeste, What do you want me to do? Right. No, Edgar’s not a ventriloquist. I don’t handle ventriloquists anymore. You know that. You will? You do? You can? Wonderful Celeste. Wonderful … of course … my guarantee … my word … my reputation. They’ll be right over. Make it twenty minutes tops. So, what can I say? I’m sending you a gold mine.”

  Sal hung up and turned suddenly in his chair with a wet smile on his red face. His nose came within attack distance of the bird, who took a shot at him. Sal pulled his head back and almost fell over.

  “Edgar,” he said through closed teeth. “I got you an audition for you with Celeste Malmgren at Columbia.” He pulled a sheet of paper from the mess on his desk and scribbled something furiously. “Here’s the address. Get right over there. They’re looking for novelty acts for a short. They’re shooting it in color. Can you paint what’s-his-name’s wings pink or something? It’d help.”

  Edgar stood erect and with his free hand reached over to stroke the bird, which accepted the hand with closed eyes.

  “She is a she, Mr. Lurteesma,” Edgar said with dignity. “Her name is Jeanette. And I do not paint her wings.” He took the address from Sal and held his arm down to the open-doored cage so Jeanette could jump in. Jeanette didn’t hesitate. She hopped through the door onto a perch and leaned back to pull the cage door shut with her beak.

  “A suggestion, Edgar,” Sal said. “Teach her to do some male actors or cartoon characters. You know what I mean? I mean, you know, who the hell knows if a parrot is a male or a female?

  “I know,” Edgar said with a smirk. “Jeanette knows.”

  “Right,” Sal said shaking his head. “And other parrots know. Good luck.”

  Edgar picked up the cage, glanced at me, looked back at Sal, and said, “We thank you.”

  “A day that will live in infamy,” Jeanette said.

  “That was Roosevelt,” Sal said, standing as Edgar moved around the desk and past me toward the door. “Roosevelt. Roosevelt’s a goddamn man.”

  “I did not teach her that,” Edgar said, “and I will not encourage her, what you say, confusion gender.”

  From the coat rack in the corner, Edgar retrieved a black hat, perched it on his head, and left the office.

  “Peters,” Sal said to me, pulling out a crumpled handkerchief to wipe his brow, neck, hair, “take my advice. Stay away from animal acts.”

  “I try to, Sal,” I said.

  “They’re stupid and they smell, even the little ones,” he said shaking his head and glaring at the door through which Edgar and Jeanette had recently passed.

  “I
’ve noticed that, Sal,” I sympathized.

  “And they die young,” he added.

  “They can’t help it, Sal,” I said.

  “I know that, I know,” he said pulling himself together. “Right, now what can I do for you?”

  “Usual fee?” I asked.

  “Cash up front,” he said. “A man’s got to eat, even it it’s only Shredded Ralston.”

  Since Shredded Ralston was one of my favorite foods, I said nothing on the subject and went to the heart of the matter.

  “Peter Lorre,” I said.

  Sal sighed a Sal sigh. “Look around. How long have you known me? You think I handle Peter Lorre? I got a realistic view of myself here and no damn view from the window.”

  With that he got up to look out the window before turning back to me. His suit was crumpled.

  “Not the real Peter Lorre,” I explained. “Imitators. Either ones you handle or know about.”

  “You making a joke?” he asked. He then informed the pictures on one wall. “He’s making a joke.” Then back to me. “This town is up to its ass in Peter Lorre imitators. Everyone does Peter Lorre and Jimmy Durante, and Jean Sablon. Hell, I should have asked Edgar if the damn bird could do Jean Sablon. I’ve got Jimmy Stewarts, Clark Gables and more Bette Davises than you’d need in a lifetime.”

  “I don’t need Bette Davises,” I said sweetly, still seated on the lounge. “I need someone who looks like Lorre, enough like Lorre to maybe fool someone.”

  “Oh,” said Sal, rubbing his hands together and then looking at them to see if the rubbing had created something magic. “I thought you were talking voice. Hell, I’ve got two who are pretty good, not great, but pretty good.”

  “I probably want a great one,” I said.

  “Great I don’t have,” Sal said, suddenly sad. “I don’t get great. I can live without getting great, but … wait. Millman. I think it was Millman had a guy who was a dead ringer, or that’s what Millman said, but who can trust Millman?”

  “Mrs. Millman?” I tried.