He looked back at me, puzzled.
“Little persons. They don’t like to be called dwarfs. My best friend is a little person.”
“That a fact?” said Price.
I nodded as he called out the door for Officer Cooper.
“Those sailors didn’t start that fight with our cops, and the guy in the booth didn’t either,” I said as he stepped away from the door, leaving it open. “Your boys started it.”
“Figures,” said Price, adjusting his suit jacket. “Damn thing is I can’t get rid of ’em. They’re tough, stupid, and 4-F, one for a trick shoulder and the other for flat feet. Best I can do. When Johnny comes marching home, Frank and Carmen can join the job market. Wait. Now things are coming back to me here. You used to live on …”
“Linden,” I said. “My dad had a grocery store on Canada.”
“You had a brother …” he said, squinting at me and trying to remember.
“Phil. He’s a cop. Wilshire District. Captain.”
“Change his name too?”
“No,” I said. “He’s still Pevsner.”
“Think he’d be interested in a return to his family roots?” asked Price hopefully.
“You can ask,” I said as Officer Cooper, lean, teen, and neatly pressed, came in with a notebook in hand.
“How do I look?” asked Price, tugging at his jacket.
“Elegant,” I said before Cooper could speak.
“Distinguished,” said Cooper seriously.
“Can’t trust either of you,” Price said. “Take his statement and send him home.”
Cooper nodded.
“My car’s still at the Mozambique,” I said as Price went out the door.
“Cooper,” called the chief.
“I’ll take him back,” said the young cop as the door slammed.
“Doesn’t care for his brother-in-law,” I said.
“Brother-in-law’s the county water commissioner,” Cooper was whispering, even though the chief’s freshly polished shoes were tapping well down the hallway.
I checked my watch. It told me it was eight-twenty. My watch was wrong as usual. It was the only thing my old man left me besides memories.
“It’s five after midnight,” Cooper said.
“Let’s get to it,” I said, sitting again.
Cooper didn’t take the chief’s chair. He sat opposite me in a chair in front of the desk, balancing the notebook in his lap.
“You know there’s more than one way to spell cageyy,” I said.
“Never thought much about it,” Cooper said, smoothing his pants and taking out his pencil.
It took about ten minutes to give my statement and another twenty for Cooper to type it up for my signature. I signed and he drove me back to my car in the parking lot of the Mozambique. There was one other car in the lot, an old Ford that glowed with wax or fresh paint by the night light of the Mozambique window.
“Ramone’s car?” I asked.
“Wouldn’t know,” said Cooper.
I got out and went to my Crosley. It wasn’t locked. I slid in and started the engine. Cooper just sat there watching me. I pulled out into the street and headed north. When I got to the first corner, I turned right, parked at the curb, turned off the lights, and turned my engine off.
I rolled my window open and thought I heard the sound of Cooper’s patrol car pulling out on the dead street behind me. I waited a few minutes, got out of the car, and headed for the Mozambique in the shadows.
The place was dark and the front door was locked. I knocked gently, hoping Lester had had enough for the night and had gone home instead of sitting in the dark on a tinder pile of broken chairs, tables, shot glasses, and beer mugs.
“Wow,” Sidney screamed inside.
I waited a few beats, ready with a lie for Lester, Officer Cooper, or an air-raid warden, but I didn’t need it. I went to the east side of the Mozambique along the pink adobe wall to the window of Al Ramone’s dressing room. It was closed now, but I doubted if anyone had fixed the latch in the last hour. It didn’t make much noise as I slid it up and carefully climbed inside.
When I got inside I felt my way past the little dressing table and along the wall to the door. There wasn’t much light from moon, stars, or the all-night ten-watt light bulb somewhere ahead of me through the open door.
I didn’t bang my shins or walk into anything as I inched along the wall and smelled the night dust and alcohol. Across from the wall, I could make out a dark shadowed area where the rest room should be. Something? A creak? Sidney? Maybe Lester let Sidney fly around the Mozambique at night, a guard cockatoo with beak and claw and limited vocabulary.
Quiet.
I pulled the door of the broom closet open, groped till I found the bucket, turned it over, balanced myself on it, holding onto the lower shelf. Then I searched for and found the envelope with Gable’s four fifty-dollar bills, his card, the killer’s poem and notes, and the photograph I’d plucked from Ramone’s mirror. I pulled the envelope down and tucked it into my Windbreaker pocket as I got off the bucket.
I was back in the little alcove, getting used to the ten-watt light, and was almost inside of Al Ramone’s dressing room when the toilet flushed. I pushed my back against the wall, trying to cover myself with shadow, knowing I should just make a break for the window when the rest-room door came open and the light behind the man in the doorway lit me like Dame Myra Hess at the Hollywood Bowl.
Chapter 3
“You scared the shit out of me,” the old piano player said, his hand on his heart.
“Sorry,” I said, stepping away from the wall.
Lou Canton was wearing a ratty bathrobe two sizes too big for him and he was carrying a clear drinking glass with a toothbrush and a can of Dr. Lyon’s Tooth Powder in it.
“I’m not a young man,” he said. “And with poor Al …”
“Sorry,” I repeated.
“It’s done,” he said with a wave of his hand. “Done is done. You came through the window?”
“Yes,” I said.
“Told Lester to fix it a month, two months ago,” the old man said. “But did he listen? No, he did not listen. Find what you were lookin’ for?”
“I wasn’t … yes,” I said.
“Good.”
He turned his back on me and headed toward the curtain that led to the bandstand.
“Hold it a second,” I said.
Canton, his back to me, slumped and shook his head.
“What? I’m tired. This has been a hell of a day. I’m an old fart and I don’t sleep so good at night. What? You don’t look like a crazy. I look more like a crazy than you do. So, I don’t think you’re gonna kill me. Al … well, maybe that’s another story and you had reasons, but me, I figure it was the other guy. Listen to me, I’m talkin’ too much. Happens when you get my age. Nobody listens to you, so you talk to yourself. I don’t even listen to me half the time.”
“What other guy?” I asked.
“I told Lester,” the old man said. “He didn’t listen. I told the cops tonight. Did they listen? They didn’t listen. Last night. Guy about your height. Thirty, thirty-five. Who knows? Sat at the bar nursing his drink and looking at Al like he was more interesting than Bing Crosby. I’m sorry what happened to Al, but the man had no talent. Couldn’t carry a tune. Couldn’t remember a bridge. I had to cover for him every time. Ever carry an overweight baritone over a musical bridge? You drop him and you both look bad.”
“This guy …” I prodded, but Canton, who was rubbing a finger of his free hand across his thin mustache, kept going.
“Guy we’re talking about looks like a crazy, maybe. You don’t look like a crazy.”
“Thanks.”
“Not a compliment. The truth. What kind of compliment is it to say a guy doesn’t look crazy? How old you figure me for?”
He shook the glass in his hand, tinkling brush and can of tooth powder against the sides.
“Sixty-five, maybe a little more,” I
guessed.
“Eighty,” he said. “I played with Isham Jones. Can you believe that? Did piano and even bass for George Metaxa and Paul Whiteman. Did a Caribbean cruise filling in for Claude Thornhill. No one noticed the difference. And now—” He looked around the alcove and shook his head. “Now, you get old and you sleep on a cot in a bar and talk to a crazy bird.”
“The guy at the bar,” I reminded him.
“Who knows? Mexican maybe. Or Rumanian. Young more than old. My eyes are good but they’re the eyes of a man who has seen a lot. King Oliver said I could read music fifty feet away. With most of those bands, I was the only one could read music even if it was two feet away, if you know what I’m saying to you.”
“I know,” I said. “About …”
“… the guy at the bar. Dark hair, I think, what was left of it. Getting bald in the front. Jacket like yours, only light-colored. Something written on the pocket. Right here. Something on the pocket. Couldn’t read it. Twenty years back, even ten, maybe, I could have, but … anyway, Mexican or Rumanian guy, whatever, Al finishes his set, the guy disappears. Came back the next night. Same thing.”
“Maybe Lester remembers him,” I said.
“Lester,” he said with disgust. “My sister’s son. Decent guy but no imagination. He thinks I see things where there ain’t things. Can I get to sleep now? They’re coming in early to clean the place up and fix the furniture.”
“Sorry,” I said.
“Nothing,” he said with a wave, shuffling away, his slippers clapping against the wooden floor.
“You play a hot piano,” I said.
“Thanks,” he said, moving into darkness. “A little applause never hurts. Turn off the toilet light when you leave. Don’t worry. They took Al away about an hour ago.”
“Good night.”
He disappeared through the curtain leading to the bandstand without another word.
I went out through the window, walked around the corner to my Crosley, and took Canada to South and made my way over to Los Felix on side streets. I hit Highland in about thirty minutes and was up on the porch and inside Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse on Heliotrope off of Hollywood Boulevard by two in the morning.
The porch light was off, as they were all up and down the street to thwart the Japanese who might launch kamikaze assaults on rundown Los Angeles neighborhoods in the middle of the night. No one was sure how the Japanese would get close enough to the coast to carry out such an attack, but they had managed a couple of failed attempts from aircraft carriers in the last few years. If the papers were right, the Japanese didn’t have anything left to launch a paper plane from, but Lowell Thomas had said on the evening news that they were gathering what was left of their fleet for an attack somewhere. I thought about thousands of Japanese landing in Santa Monica on the beach during a women’s volleyball tournament.
I got inside, closed the door gently, slowly behind me and locked it, standing for a beat or two to be sure my landlady, in her rooms to my left, hadn’t detected my predawn return. Quiet. Mrs. Plaut had a bird whose name changed as the whim took its owner. But the bird was always covered at night, and while he or she could let out a screech that Butterfly McQueen would envy, he didn’t have even a one-word vocabulary.
I took off my shoes and made my way up the stairs, letting experience and instinct guide me past the creaking steps and loose sections of the rickety bannister.
Upper landing and into the bathroom, closing the door behind me before I hit the light switch. Mrs. Plaut had placed heavy red curtains on the small bathroom window. She had sewn a patriotic warning in yellow onto the curtain, one you could not miss whether you were standing, bathing, showering, or sitting. It read: “Flush only when you must. Save paper when e’er you can.”
I used the toilet, took off my jacket, and checked on the fifties Clark Gable had given me. Then I washed and shaved with the razor and remnants of a bar of Palmolive stashed in the corner of the medicine cabinet.
I was tired. Back in my room across the hall, Dash looked up at me from the sofa. He blinked once and closed his eyes.
“Hungry?” I said.
He opened his eyes again and considered purring. He was orange, fat, independent, and well fed. He closed his eyes again. I took that for a no. Besides, Dash knew better than to count on me. The window was open and he could do his own shopping. I owed him for saving my life a year earlier, but I didn’t owe him enough to take away his independence, turn him into a pet, and make him pretend he liked me.
I took off my clothes, forced myself to hang my jacket and pants in the closet, dropped my socks and underwear on the small pile growing in a corner, and, envelope from Gable in hand, plopped back on the mattress on the floor. I have a bad back. I can’t sleep on a bed. I can’t sleep on my stomach. In addition to the watch, I inherited a championship snore from my father. I can’t sleep in civilized company, but alone and unobserved I can forget murdered baritones and May Company salesmen, Clark Gable and poems written by a killer who may or may not be a Mexican or Rumanian.
I took one last look at the notes from Ramone’s killer. They made no more sense to me now than the photograph. I put everything back in the envelope and shoved it under the edge of the mattress. I had forgotten to turn off the lights. I looked around the small room at the ancient overstuffed sofa with the embroidered pillow that read, “God Bless Us Every One,” at the Beech-Nut Gum wall clock that told me it was almost three, at the small table near the window with the refrigerator behind it and the tiny sink nearby. It wasn’t much, but it was paid for till the end of April. The shelves over the sink were filled with cereal boxes, cans of Spam, tuna, and sardines. The refrigerator contained bread, milk, a rusting twelve-ounce-size V-8 (with the suggestion on the label that V-8 would be delicious if poured over my breakfast eggs), a brick of Durkee’s Vegetable Oleomargarine, and an assortment of ground A & P coffee. What more could I want?
The lights out.
I forced myself up, careful not to throw my back out, and reached for the switch. The door opened an instant after I hit the switch, and a soft high voice with a German-Swiss accent whispered, “Toby, are you here?”
I turned the light back on and in my boxer shorts greeted Gunther Wherthman.
“Come in,” I said.
“No,” said Gunther, who wore a blue-velvet robe over pajamas whiter than good vanilla ice cream. “I only wanted to reassure myself that you had returned and were safely ensconced.”
“I’m safely ensconced.”
Gunther, about a decade younger than me and a foot and a half shorter, plunged his hands into his pockets. His face was as clean shaven and smooth at three in the morning as it was at 8:00 A.M., noon, or midnight. His clear blue-green eyes looked at me and then away. Dash opened his eyes again, looked at Gunther, yawned, and went back to sleep.
“I don’t wish to …” he began, but I stepped in with, “What’s up, Gunther?”
He closed the door and looked up at me.
“Gwen,” he said. “She has returned to San Francisco. Sudden. Emergency. She had a call. An old … someone she knew before.”
It wasn’t easy for Gunther, who must have been waiting in his room for hours till I tiptoed in. He had met the young, enthusiastic graduate music-history student when I was on a case in San Francisco. It had been love at second thought, and it had been hard on her. I’d seen them looked at, stared at. Gwen was no giant, but she wasn’t a little person either and she was still a kid.
“She coming back?”
“I do not know,” he said. “She will call in a day, perhaps two.”
“I’m sorry,” I said. I seemed to be saying that a lot tonight, but it had been a long night.
“I appreciate that,” he said. “I have been unable to work since she left this morning.”
Gunther was a contract translator. He had been many things. A circus performer. An actor in The Wizard of Oz. One of my clients. We had become best friends and he had gotten me into Mrs. Pla
ut’s three years earlier. Business had been booming for Gunther since the war. Most of his work came on subcontracts from universities on government contracts to translate documents, newspapers, and magazines from Europe into English for analysis. The universities could handle German, Spanish, French, and Italian, but for Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Albanian, Gunther was their little man. He worked in his room, which was right next door to mine and about the same size. He woke up every morning, had breakfast in a three-piece suit, and then went back upstairs where he climbed up on the chair in front of his desk to translate.
“I’ve disturbed you. I can see you are tired.”
“A little,” I agreed, knowing I couldn’t hide it any more than the stomach I was scratching. I would have to hit the Y.M.C.A. over on Hope with more regularity.
He turned and opened the door.
“Breakfast?” I asked. “I’ve got coffee and Little Colonel’s. We can talk then.”
“My concerns can wait, but I fear that Mrs. Plaut is expecting us downstairs for something she has prepared,” he said solemnly. “I am concerned that she has an agenda.”
“Wait,” I said, getting the envelope from under my mattress. I took out the poem and handed it, the clipping, the crumpled photograph of Al Ramone as a dead Confederate soldier, and the bloodstained piece of paper about spelling cage-e to Gunther, who took them solemnly. The four fifties and the card I shoved in the pocket of my Windbreaker in the closet.
“If you can’t sleep, see what you can make of them,” I said and then followed up with a thirty-second wrap-up of what had happened in the last seven hours.
When I finished, Gunther simply nodded.
“Good night, Toby,” he said.
“Good night, Gunther,” I answered.
He backed into the hall, closing the door, and I hit the light switch. Covered by darkness I crawled back onto my mattress on the floor, climbed under my blanket, put my head on the pillow, and went to sleep in no more than the time it took Joe Louis to put Schmeling away in the rematch.
I dreamt of my father holding his wrist up to his ear to listen to the ticking of his watch before he checked the time. My father, dressed in his grocer’s apron, smiled, took off the watch, and handed it to me.
Tomorrow Is Another Day Page 4