High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six)

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Now talk, mister, and make it quick,” said Cooper.

  What I wanted to do was ask Cooper why the letters and number on his Yankee uniform were backward, but what I did was talk fast.

  “Some time, maybe three weeks, four weeks ago, you called my office, asked me to call you back. I got a message the next day telling me to forget it. I’d guess someone got in touch with you, said he was Peters and took the case.”

  “What case?” grumbled Lefty.

  “It’s okay,” said Cooper. “Give me a few minutes with this man, Lefty, and I’ll be right back with you.”

  Lefty shrugged and walked back toward first base.

  “From what I can piece together,” I said, “someone is trying to blackmail you or threaten you into working on a film for a producer you don’t want to deal with. Right so far?”

  Cooper’s face twisted into a pained grin, but I wasn’t sure if it was because of my remarks or indigestion.

  “This morning I was taken by two goons from Chicago for a ride to see a guy named Lombardi, who told me to help convince you to take the movie job.”

  The name Lombardi struck something in Cooper’s sad eyes. He had been giving me part of his attention. Now I had all of it.

  “Lombardi found the real Toby Peters—me. Threatened the real one.”

  “I see,” said Cooper, removing his baseball cap and rubbing his sweating brow with his sleeve. With the cap off his face, he showed every one of his forty years. He looked like a man in agony.

  “Then who is the man who posed as you?” Cooper asked reasonably.

  “Describe him,” I said.

  “Maybe fifty, roly-poly sweaty fella, bald head, smokes cheap cigars …”

  “… and wears thick glasses that keep creeping down his nose,” I finished.

  “You know him,” said Cooper.

  “I know him and he’s no private detective. He’s a dentist.”

  “A dentist?” gulped Cooper. “I’ve got to admit I wasn’t impressed with him, but you came recommended by a fella I know at Paramount and … okay. What now?”

  “I’ll take care of the detective-dentist,” I said. “How much have you paid him?”

  “Let’s see, about three hundred,” Cooper said, raising his forehead.

  “You have a few minutes to answer some questions and tell me what’s happening, and I’ll take over the case.”

  Cooper looked puzzled, which seemed perfectly reasonable to me. He looked into my brown eyes and saw no answers. He looked into the first-baseman’s glove in his left hand and saw no answers. He looked over at Lefty, who was kicking dirt behind first base, and saw no answers.

  “Okay, give me a few minutes to change clothes,” he finally said and then shouted at Lefty, “Let’s call it a day.”

  Lefty waved back and walked in our direction as Cooper disappeared under the stands, walking slowly. Lefty shook his head for the entire distance from first base to my side.

  “What the hell is going on here?” he asked. “How am I going to teach him how to throw with all these interruptions? Throws the ball like an old woman tossing a hot biscuit. Has a hell of a time getting his right arm over his head. We’re working on it, though. He’s willing enough, I’ll give him that, but he doesn’t know from old radiators about baseball. How can you grow up in this country and not know baseball?”

  “It happens,” I sympathized. “Why are the letters on his uniform reversed?”

  “Gehrig was a southpaw, a first baseman,” explained Lefty. “No way in the world I’m ever going to get Cooper to throw with his left hand. So some guy at Goldwyn got the idea of reversing the film so it looks as if he’s throwing with the left when he’s throwing with the right. That’s why the letters have to be reversed. He’s got uniforms both ways. He works out in them to get the feel.”

  “So in the movie he’ll be standing at third base instead of first?”

  “How the hell do I know?” Lefty growled. “The whole thing’s a mistake. Cooper’s a mess. He has a bad back and broken bones all over the place. He couldn’t get through two innings of a real game even if he knew how to play. Gehrig played 2,130 straight games. Nobody’s ever going to do that again. Hell, Cooper doesn’t even look like Gehrig.”

  “People who go to movies don’t care,” I said.

  “I care,” said Lefty, pointing to himself. “Say, listen, Cooper is a good guy. He’s trying, but this is baseball we’re talking.”

  Five minutes later Cooper was back, but it was a different Cooper. He was wearing a body-tailored pinstripe suit, a spotlessly clean camel’s hair coat and a white fedora.

  “If you can give me a ride, Mr. Peters, we can talk on my way home,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Lefty.”

  Lefty said good-bye and ambled away, and I agreed to drive Cooper home.

  “I didn’t want to do this baseball picture,” Cooper explained, getting into the Buick. I managed to slide a few napkins from my pocket under him before his camel’s hair coat hit the grease spot where the cold-cut bag had been.

  I pulled into the street, and he kept talking.

  “Baseball’s my father’s game, not mine,” he said softly. “About a month ago the Judge, my father, was hit by a car. He’s 76.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “It was the Judge’s idea for me to play Gehrig. My games are fast cars and good hunting, and my weakness is young ladies.”

  “I see,” I said.

  “No, you don’t,” he said, still softly. “When you mentioned Mr. Lombardi’s name back there,” he said, pointing his thumb behind us, “it reminded me of a certain young lady. She was, she said, a fan. This was back about six, seven years ago, maybe longer—a pretty blonde thing, a little on the thin side. The ones who want to get into the movies usually are. We were friendly for a few months, and then I found out she had been a friend of Lombardi’s and that he was looking for her. She packed up and went, and that was the end of it.”

  “And now?” I urged him on.

  “Now I’m interested in keeping my wife and daughter safe and getting on with my work.”

  “What’s stopping you?”

  “About a month ago, just before I called you,” he said, looking out the window, “a man came up to me, tough-looking gent about your size, built like a giant brick. He gave me a list of reasons why I should make a movie for a third-rate producer-director named Max Gelhorn. That list included a reminder of Lola …”

  “The thin blonde …”

  “Right,” said Cooper, “and a few other things which seemed much more substantial and which I’d rather not go into with you if I don’t have to.”

  “You might have to at some point,” I said.

  “If it comes to that, I’ll decide. Now I’d like to say I punched out that man and laid him flat like one of the characters I play, but to tell it straight, Mr. Peters …”

  “Toby …”

  “Toby,” he went on, “I’m no fighter. I’m an actor. I’ve been mended and patched up, but I have more wounds than a war veteran. My pelvis was broken when I was a kid. It never mended. I can’t sit on a horse straight. I have about half my hearing. A bomb went off too close to my ear one day about ten years back when I was doing a war picture with Fay Wray. My stomach is bad, my arms are weak from too many movie falls and to put it straight, I don’t think I could give your sister a good tussle.”

  “I don’t have a sister,” I said.

  “Wishful thinking,” said Cooper with a big grin. “What else do you need from me?”

  “Simple. What do you want me to do?”

  “I guess the same thing I told the little bald fella. Find out who the guy who looks like a brick is, stop him from bothering me and maybe find out where he got all that information on me.”

  The sky was now dark, but not from the clouds. Night had come. I glanced at my watch. It said six o’clock but it seldom told me the truth. No amount of fixing had ever done it any good. It had been left to me by my fa
ther along with a pile of debts back in ’32. I had never learned not to count on the old man, and now it was hard to stop counting on that watch.

  “And there’s no chance that you’d do the picture for Gelhorn?” I asked, following his directions to his house.

  “Nope,” he said. “I’m under contract to Goldwyn and I don’t want to do the picture. I’m sorry about Lombardi’s threat to you, but …”

  “That’s all right,” I said, pulling into his driveway. “It’s part of the job.”

  “I’m going to be taking a few days off for some hunting with a friend in Utah before we start shooting,” he said, shaking my hand. “If you have to reach me, call this number.” He pulled out a card and handed it to me. “Now about money …”

  “I don’t have a card, at least not one with my real name on it,” I said. “How about thirty dollars a day and expenses?”

  “The fat fella got forty dollars,” Cooper said, working his brittle body out of the Buick.

  “Figures,” I said. “I’ll get the rest of the information I need from him.”

  Cooper fished a wallet from his finely tailored suit and handed me three twenties.

  “I’ll give you a detailed accounting when the job ends,” I said.

  “Good enough,” he said and turned to walk to his door. My napkins had not quite done their job. A distinct ameba-shaped grease spot stood out on the rear of Cooper’s expensive coat. Lombardi had managed to stain the perfect image by proxy.

  I looked at the sixty bucks, examined the autographs of the Yankees and headed into the night. I had to deal with the fake Toby Peters, but that could wait till the morning.

  With sixty bucks in my pocket, I went home and called Carmen, the cashier at Levy’s Restaurant. Carmen and I had been sparring for nearly three years, and I was determined to move up the pace. After all, Marco from Chicago might be right. The Japanese might land any minute, and even if they didn’t, I might be a few dozen kosher-style hot dogs in the near future. The time was now. I invited her to go to the Hitching Post on Hollywood and Vine to see Johnny Mack Brown in West of Carson City. She said she wanted to go to the Olympic and see I Take This Woman with Spencer Tracy. For some reason Ginger Rogers and George Brent were going to be there in person. We compromised and agreed to go to the Biltmore Bowl to hear Phil Harris and his orchestra and play a little gin rummy.

  I was supposed to pick her up at nine. It would have been a fine evening. My assault on the widow Carmen was well planned. I shaved carefully with my Gillette Blue Blade and bathed languidly with my Swan soap. I ignored the pounding of Mr. Hill, the retired accountant, by humming “This Love of Mine” to drown out his passionate plea for the toilet.

  I put on my clean suit and headed into the night, managing to avoid Mrs. Plaut. I did not, however, manage to avoid the fist of the man who came up to me as I opened my car door. The first punch to my stomach doubled me over. My face hit the top of the car. The second punch, also delivered to my midsection, had me kissing my knees. I sank to the street. A car passed by. Its headlights spotted my face, but it didn’t slow down.

  I turned to look at my mugger while gasping to pull in air. There wasn’t much I could see from the ground, but his shape was clear. Cooper had been right. He looked like a giant brick.

  “You hear me,” he said in a high voice that seemed to come from someone else, definitely not from the cement truck that had me doubled over in the street. “Cooper does the picture or I’ll turn you into hamburger.”

  In spite of the pain I managed a laugh, but it must have sounded like a mad gasp. The brick backed away. If Cooper didn’t do the picture, Lombardi would turn my hand into hot dogs and my mugger would turn the rest of me into hamburger. I wondered what my cost per pound was on the open market.

  “You nuts bastard,” he spat, leaning over me, “you keep your nose out or you disappear, you got it?” He gave me a little kick in the kidney to be sure he had my attention. “You got it?”

  “Got it,” I said, and he vanished.

  I got to my feet and staggered back, almost falling into a passing car. My clothes were dirty and my shirt torn. I managed to find some smog-filled air and enough pride to stand reasonably straight. I made my way back to Mrs. Plaut’s porch and up the stairs, fighting back nausea.

  Mrs. Plaut met me in the hall. “Exterminating again?” she said sweetly.

  I nodded, unable to speak, as I grasped the railing and started upstairs. I wondered what Mrs. Plaut thought I was exterminating, giant rats in hand-to-hand combat? I was determined to make the date with Carmen, but my body said no, the idiocy you could pull off at twenty-five is off limits at forty-five. This time Mr. Hill wouldn’t let me in the toilet, so I sat in my room hyperventilating for five minutes before I called Carmen and told her I had to work. She said it was okay if I’d promise to take her to the fights Thursday at the Hollywood Legion Stadium. Red Green the “Waterfront Kid” and Mexican George Morelia were the main event. I said sure and hung up.

  There are days like this in my business. They come maybe once a year, but they certainly make life interesting. I managed to pry open a 37-cent can of Spam and a dietetically nonfattening bottle of Acme Beer, the beer with the high I.Q. (It Quenches). And then I slept like a baby—a baby cutting new teeth.

  CHAPTER THREE

  The tenants of the Farraday Building included bookies, alcoholic doctors, baby photographers with astigmatism, con artists who were long on con and short on artistry and third-rate dentists. Actually there was only one dentist in the Farraday at the present time. He had moved down from second-rate to third-rate as a result of filthy fingernails, poor eyesight and an indifference to his victims that would have put the Inquisition to shame. I sublet my office from Sheldon Minck, D.D.S. We were on the fourth floor of the Farraday, which involved a scenic trip up the stairs in order to avoid the decrepit elevator which our landlord, Jeremy Butler, was constantly trying to repair. In fact, Jeremy’s principal goal in life was to keep mildew, bums, tenants and time from wearing down the Farraday. Jeremy, former pro wrestler and part-time poet, was barely holding his own.

  It was a Tuesday morning, and I felt pretty good, I mean if you discount the sore stomach and kidney; and in my business you either discounted such things or you paid the full price. My three weeks at the Ocean Palms made me welcome the smell of Lysol when I walked up the fake marble stairs.

  On the third floor I heard someone singing or moaning deep in the darkness of the corridor near the doorway of Artistic Books, Inc. Artistic Books was run by a gentlewoman named Alice Palice. It was an economical operation, consisting of one small printing press which weighed only 250 pounds. Alice, who looked something like a printing press herself, could easily hoist the press on her shoulder and move it to another office when the going got rough.

  Clients almost never came to my office. I discouraged it. When someone called, I usually went to him or arranged a meeting at the drugstore on the corner or Manny’s taco stand, depending on how much class the potential client had.

  During the three weeks I had been away. Shelly had changed the lettering on our outer door. He was under the delusion that something would catch the eye of passersby and pull them in. Since few drunks could stand the altitude and only bums came up seeking warmth, off-the-street traffic was minimal.

  The new lettering read:

  Sheldon P. Minck, D.D.S., S.D.

  Dentist and Oral Surgeon

  and in much smaller letters:

  Toby Peters

  Private Investigation

  Shelly was not an oral surgeon, though he practiced it. I didn’t know what the penalty was for impersonating an oral surgeon. Perhaps the dental society took away your mirror on a stick. I knew the “S.D.” didn’t mean anything and the initial “P” had been a recent idea.

  I went through our reception room which we had cleaned up after a few mishaps the year before, but Shelly and I had quickly reduced the small room to its prior state: three wooden chairs, s
mall table with an overflowing ashtray and copies of magazines from previous decades. Past the reception room was Shelly’s dental office, and beyond that the closet that served as my office.

  Shelly was working on someone in the chair when he heard me close the door. “Be with you in a minute. Have a seat.”

  I walked over to him and he turned his myopic eyes in my direction, took the wet cigar out of his mouth, wiped his sweating bald head and smiled a sickly grin. “Toby, hey.”

  “Yeah, Shelly, hey,” I said. Then I saw the patient in the chair, an old birdlike guy named Stange who had wrecked the office last year in a pathetic attempt at robbery.

  “What’s he doing here?” I asked, leaning over Shelly’s shoulder.

  Stange smiled through his stubbly face, showing his single tooth.

  “The challenge was too great, too great,” sighed Shelly, seriously pausing to clean the sharp instrument in his hand on his dirty, once-white smock. “This mouth is a challenge I can’t refuse. I can build on that tooth, Toby. I know I can. I can construct a mouthful of teeth. I can experiment with new techniques, planting teeth, wires, stuff like that. Mr. Stange and I have an understanding. No more troubles. Right, Karl?”

  Karl beamed, and Shelly patted him on the shoulder—a very grubby shoulder.

  “I think you should start by putting a wire in his gums, right over there,” I said, pointing to a spot in Stange’s mouth but being careful not to touch him.

  Shelly shrugged and shook his head to show I didn’t know what I was talking about. “No anchorage. None. I plan to drill a hole right there.” He touched Stange’s red-white gums with the sharp instrument, and the old bird jumped four inches.

  “Sorry, Shel,” I said. “You’ll have to put the wire on top.”

  Shelly turned to me, all five and a half feet filled with indignation.

  “Say, who’s the dentist around here, you or me?”