“That a fact?” he said.
“A fact,” I said, watching the foam spill over the side of the mug he placed in front of me on a cardboard coaster. “Want to take the beer back?”
“To your good health,” he said with a shrug.
“And yours,” I agreed, toasting him and taking a drink.
“So, what you been up to?” he said, figuring maybe that I hadn’t just dropped into the Mozambique for old time’s sake.
“Worked security at Warner Brothers. Been doing private investigations for a while,” I said, downing more beer.
“Tagged you for the army,” Gannett said, leaning over and cleaning up the beer spill on his slick bar.
Gannett hadn’t tagged me for anything, hadn’t even thought about me since Babe Ruth retired from the Boston Braves.
“I’m pushing fifty, Lester,” I said.
“No shit,” he said, shaking his head. “I’d have said you were thirty-five tops. I’m fifty-two and look it, but you …”
I looked at myself in the mirror behind the bar. The face belonged to a middleweight who had gone too many losing rounds at least two decades earlier.
“I’ll bet you tell that to all the customers,” I said, downing the rest of the beer and eyeing the empty mug.
“Most,” Gannett agreed. “Most. Want another?”
This time I shrugged.
“It’s on you, Peters,” he said. “Old times is old times, but …”
I fished out a quarter and plucked it on the bar.
The piano guy who looked like Clifton Webb finished his song and two people applauded politely, the kid with the infant hooker and the old sailor. The piano player nodded and launched into “Moonlight and Roses.”
One night back when I was a Glendale cop, my partner Matt and I took a call about a fight in the Mozambique. Matt was a wheezer thinking about retiring to a small orange grove near Lompoc. I was a guy with a wife and gun.
The fight was over when we got there. A guy as big as a red Los Angeles trolley with an unsmiling flat face was standing on the stomach of a decidedly smaller guy who wasn’t moving and may not have been breathing. They were right in front of the bandstand. Tables and chairs were overturned and any customers who might have been around five minutes earlier were all on their way home to listen to Stoopnagle and Bud.
“He’s a Samoan,” Lester Gannett had whispered to us from behind the bar.
“The big guy or the one on the floor?” I asked.
“Big guy,” he said. “Other one’s Charlie Westfarland or something like that. Welsh, Irish. Something. Who knows?”
“Helpful information,” I said, while my partner tipped his blue cap back and sat at the bar, facing the path of destruction to the bandstand.
“Little guy, Charlie, thought Andy was a Jap,” Lester explained. “Said something. You know. Harmless. And Andy goes stark nuts.”
“Big guy?” I asked.
“Big guy,” Gannett confirmed. “Been coming in for a week. On a construction job, something over near the cemetery. Who knows? Will you just get him the hell out of here? Night crowd’ll be coming soon and I got a singer. It’s Friday, you know. I got a singer, Fridays.”
“Give you seven to four the Samoan falls off the other guy inside a minute,” said my partner.
I looked at the two men among the mess of broken chairs and scattered tables. The big Samoan, a dreamy look in his eyes, was riding the unconscious guy as if he were a log.
“Matt,” I said. “Little guy might be dead.”
Matt touched his chin, thought for a beat, and said, “Even money. Take dead or alive. Your pick.”
I’d left him sitting there trying to make the same bet with Gannett, who seemed to be considering it seriously.
“Andy,” I had said, my hands folded in front of me as I approached the Samoan, my best Officer Gently smile on my face. “What’ve we got here?”
Andy returned from Oz and looked at me with no expression. He just kept rocking on little Charlie’s bigoted chest.
“Well,” I said. “I’d say we’ve got a situation.”
Andy reached up and scratched his thick neck.
“I’d say you’d better step off the very quiet gentleman so I can see if he’s alive.”
Andy stopped scratching and continued to eye me, as if I were about to do something that might interest him. I looked back at the bar. Matt had laid some bills on it. Gannett was matching them as he watched us.
“They’re betting on whether I’m going to have to shoot you,” I said.
Andy turned his head away as if I were boring him, and I lost eye contact. A very bad sign.
“I’ve never shot anybody, Andy,” I said softly. “Don’t want to. Look, I don’t know you. You don’t know me. Fella you’re standing on is probably a son of a bitch who deserves a good beating. He’s got that. You wind up on trial for murder and you both get more than you deserve.”
Andy was either listening or tiring. He stopped rocking on the fallen guy’s stomach and almost fell. Someone behind me, probably Gannett, gasped, his bet in jeopardy.
“Aw, the hell with this,” said Matt, who’d come up behind me. He pushed past, kicking the remains of a chair out of the way. Matt stepped up to Andy, who with the added ten inches of the fallen guy’s body was about twenty feet tall. Matt hit the big guy full and hard in the face with his night stick.
The bonk of oak against bone echoed through the painted jungle of the Mozambique and Andy toppled backward onto the stage, his nose split. Sidney the cockatoo screamed “Wow.”
“Bet’s off,” shouted Gannett. “You knocked him off.”
Matt stepped over the little guy on the floor and onto the bandstand, where he gave the motionless Andy a second bonk on the head. I kneeled over the little guy and put my ear to his chest. Something was rattling in there besides broken ribs.
“Resisting arrest,” Matt had wheezed, trying to turn Andy over. “Give me a hand turning this fat Jap over so I can cuff him.”
“He’s Samoan,” I said, and turned to Gannett to shout, “Call an ambulance.”
“Wow,” Sidney screamed again.
“It’s no fun anymore, Tobias,” Matt said as we turned Andy over on his stomach.
“I know what you mean,” I’d said.
Six months later I had traded my Glendale blues for Warner Brothers greens. Now I was back in Glendale, back at the Mozambique, and looking for my client.
I was fresh off a job with a few dollars left. I’d cleared enough to pay Mrs. Plaut a month’s rent, get my clothes repaired and buy a new Windbreaker at Hy’s for Him, and have No-Neck Arnie bring my Crosley back to life, including a new door and a patchwork transmission. I’d also cleared enough to take Carmen, the ample cashier at Levy’s on Spring Street, to two dinners, a Jimmy Wakely triple-feature, and an all-night Wrestle-Rama at the Garden. In gratitude for this lavishness I had received two generous wet kisses, a momentary left hand between my legs while I was driving her home, and an invitation to a taco dinner at the apartment she shared with her eleven-year-old son who in his kinder moments called me Wolfman.
I needed work and a fresh start.
I needed the new client in the shadows of the red-leatherette booth, who had told me to meet him at the Mozambique.
“Guy in the booth,” I said to Gannett without turning my head from my drink. “How long’s he been here?”
“Ten, fifteen minutes maybe,” Gannett answered. “He’s four ahead of you. He your old partner?”
“Why?” I asked.
“Looks familiar,” said Gannett. “And looks like he’s spoiling for something. So if you boys are bringing trouble, I’ll ask you to find another bar. No skin off my ass either way. Know what I mean?”
“Seems clear enough to me,” I said, getting off the stool.
“That’s my motto,” Gannett said, moving down to the army air-corps kid who was buying Herbert Tarryton’s and paying for cheap bourbon for himself and the paint
ed girl. She was holding up a hell of a lot better than he was.
“Can you move it, pops?” the tipsy air-corps kid said, waving a five-dollar bill toward Gannett. “Lady’s thirsty.”
“She can hold her liquor,” I said.
“Seems that way,” Gannett said, meeting my eyes.
“I’d say she was maybe fifteen, sixteen tops,” I whispered.
“Just turned sixteen,” Gannett whispered back.
“Pops,” the young man rasped and then seemed to forget what he was going to say.
“She’s cute,” I said to Gannett behind the bar.
“Me and her mom think so,” said Gannett.
I nodded. “Your kid?”
“Family business,” he said. “Lillian, that’s the wife, is too old for it. Bad legs, those veins you know. Varicose. Hard for her to stand and, let’s face it, the looks go.”
“Family business,” I echoed.
“Jeannie’s drinkin’ tea from a bourbon bottle,” he whispered, nodding at his daughter and ignoring the boy in the air-corps uniform. “She only works two, three nights a week. She’s a good kid, she is. Good student. Glendale High. Sophomore. Thinking of going to Stanford if the grades hold up.”
“You must be proud of her,” I said.
“I am,” said Gannett, the barkeep smile gone. “If you’re really undercover, you’ve got nothing here.”
“No skin off my ass either way,” I said.
“Hey, pops,” the young airman shouted over the piano, “you gonna wait on us or do we walk?”
“You want another beer on the house?” Gannett said to me as he held up a hand to quiet the kid.
“No, thanks,” I said, turning toward the booths along the wall.
“Talent’s all gone downtown,” Gannett said behind me. “The fleet’s always in. The troops are always shipping out. Girls go where the money is. Family man has to make a living.”
The piano man was dourly humming “I Want To Be Happy” to the keys of his piano as I inched past the two couples at the table.
One of the men, a guy with short gray hair, said, “… and Abie says … he says …” The guy was choking with tears of laughter as he said in what he thought sounded like the voice of an old Jew, “So vot vould you vant from me, I should pay him cash?”
The other man and the two women at the table broke up. One of them slapped the table.
“Pay him ca …” one of the women gasped. “Oh, Frank.”
One of the young sailors at the next table had picked up the tail end of the joke. He didn’t find it funny. I would have given my old partner seven to four that the young sailor was named something like Bernstein and that he was now waiting for an anti-Semitic punch line. The automatic sensor on the back of my neck was ready to distance me and my potential client from a scene that might make Andy the Samoan’s body-rolling act four years ago look like amateur night at St. Anne’s Church.
I slid into the dark booth across from the man, who took a drag on his cigarette. The glow showed a familiar but slightly heavier and much more serious face than the one I had expected.
“Peters?” he said.
“Peters,” I confirmed, holding out my hand. He took it.
Clark Gable was dressed in a long-sleeved black pullover shirt. His hair, graying at more than the temples, was cut military short.
“Where’ve we met before?” he asked in a manner that could only be viewed as hostile.
“Four years ago. Hearst Castle. I interviewed you about a case I was working.”
“Yes, I remember now.”
“And before that,” I said. “First day of shooting on Gone With the Wind. I was working security. An extra got killed, fell on his sword. You were there.”
“Yeah,” said Gable. “I remember that night. I stayed out of the way, talked to a few people on the crew, some extras. Then that guy got killed. Don’t remember you, though.”
“I’ve got one of those faces.”
“Okay, enough small talk. What are you pulling here?” Gable asked as I settled back in the booth.
“Pulling?”
“I don’t respond to blackmail or threats,” Gable said, trying to control himself. “And I don’t have much left in the way of patience or understanding.”
“I’m missing something here,” I said.
The piano player rolled “Anything Goes” to a gentle flourish and applause from Lester’s daughter.
“Wow,” Sidney cried from the bar.
“Thank you, lady and bird,” the piano player said wearily as Gable handed me a folded piece of paper. I spread it and read the typed poem:
They die until you understand,
They die by weapons in my hand.
My father wept to be so cut
From fortune, fame deservéd, but
I’ll avenge the wrongs and slight
To be there e’er the Ides and right
Those wrongs and claim his prize
And give to you a great surprise.
First there was Charles Larkin
And next Al Ramone. Do harken
For on it goes and blood be thine
Unless you learn to read my s.i.g.n.
When I’d finished, I looked up at Gable, whose hands were folded on the table in front of him.
“Turn it over,” he said.
I turned it over. My name and address were printed in the same ink and same handwriting as the poem. I looked up at Gable, as the piano player said without enthusiasm: “And now, direct from appearances on the ‘Voice of Firestone’ and major roles in such movies as They Got Me Covered and Gone With the Wind …”
“You don’t get it, do you?” Gable said, his eyes narrow, unblinking.
I started to speak but Gable nodded toward the bandstand. I looked toward the piano player, who was saying, “… San Fernando Valley’s answer to Bing Crosby, Nelson Eddy, and Russ Columbo all rolled into baritone—Alan Ramone.”
More applause from Lester’s kid, Jeanne. Frank at the next table, who had just launched into another Jewish joke, lowered his voice.
Alan Ramone, wrinkled suit, carrying about thirty pounds more than his fighting weight, wearing one of the worst hairpieces outside of Hollywood, walked onto the stage. His face was powdered. His teeth were even and false. He nodded in appreciation of his fabulous introduction and the nonexistent applause.
As the singer moved to the unnecessary microphone at the edge of the band-stand, Gable produced a newspaper clipping and slid it toward me. I laid it on top of the poem. It was from the Los Angeles Times, dated February 21, a week ago. The piano player ruffled the keys and Alan Ramone’s less-than-solid flesh and more-than-faltering voice launched into a medley of tunes from Show Boat.
The article was simple, an announcement of the death of one Charles Larkin in a freak accident, a fall in his Culver City apartment. There were no details. Larkin was forty-three. He was an actor and May Company salesman who had been seen in such films as Bittersweet, Dames, and Gone With the Wind.
“I’m in the States for a week,” said Gable evenly, as Alan Ramone forgot the words to “Old Man River” and hummed through till he came to a place he vaguely remembered.
“Consulting with some people in town on the recruiting film I’m working on,” Gable went on. Ramone raised his volume to gravel out, “He just keeps rolling along.”
Since Lester’s kid was deep in animated conversation with the soldier, and Sidney was deep into his birdseed, the sailors felt it their patriotic duty to applaud and keep up the morale of a guy who was doing his best to entertain the troops.
“Only a few people I trust knew I was coming back to the States for a few days, but when I get home, this is waiting for me.”
“I don’t get it,” I said.
“I was hoping you did,” Gable answered.
Frank’s voice rose at the next table. As the applause and Alan Ramone’s bow ended, he finished his joke: “Who said kike? I said Spike.”
One of the women
and the other man at the table laughed. The remaining woman giggled and said, “Oh, Frank,” to show how naughty he was being.
“How about shutting up?” the young sailor at the next table said.
Gable shook his head and unfolded his hands.
“Yeah,” said Frank, looking up at Alan Ramone with more than a touch of eighty proof in his voice. “You should shut up. You’re singin’ so loud my friends can’t hear each other.”
Fresh whoops of laughter.
Alan Ramone did his best to ignore the show below him and nodded at the piano player, who gave him an intro to “Tea for Two.”
“I used to think jokes like that were funny,” Gable said.
Frank was glancing around to see if anyone besides his pals appreciated his humor.
“What do you make of this?” I said, tapping the clipping and the poem.
“I don’t know,” said Gable, reaching for his nearly finished drink. “I told you. I was hoping you did. I do know that poor excuse for a baritone we’re trying not to listen to may be in danger.”
“Why?” I asked.
Gable shook his head as Ramone belted, “… to see us or hear us.”
“I haven’t the slightest idea,” said Gable.
“We will raise a family,” Ramone rasped.
Gable turned to listen.
“A boy for you. A girl for me.”
Gable’s eyes were moist.
“Can’t you see how happy we will be,” Ramone concluded.
I’d done my homework on Gable before this meeting. Yes, I’d met him once before. But that was a different Clark Gable, a smiling, handsome Gable in a bathing suit, with a look of amusement on his face. The Clark Gable across from me—a year after the death of his wife, his mother-in-law, and his best friend in a plane crash in Nevada—was about twenty years older and not amused. Gable and Carole Lombard had been married for a little over two years when she was killed coming back from a trip to the east to sell war bonds. Word had it that Gable had pushed Lombard to go on the war-bond tours, that Lombard was afraid of flying. Word had it that Gable felt more than a little responsible for his wife’s death, which maybe explained why Gable had joined the army air corps as a private and had moved up quickly to captain, flying combat missions as a machine gunner and trying to get himself killed. All this was according to a publicity gal named Mame Stoltz, who had been with Selznick and was now at M-G-M.
Tomorrow Is Another Day Page 2