Tomorrow Is Another Day

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I could see Phil’s fists clenching just below bar level.

  “What?” I asked.

  “Total prohibition again,” the bartender said. “Through the war and after.”

  “Never happen,” Wally said.

  “Listen,” the bartender said, pulling a folded newspaper clipping from the pocket of his plaid shirt.

  “You,” Phil said, putting his hands palm-down on the bar, a very, very bad sign.

  “Just take a second,” the bartender said, ignoring Phil and unfolding the clipping to read. “This was what the president of the W.C.T.U. said. Her name’s Ida B. Wise Smith. Listen. ‘There is hardly an activity of the home front of more importance to the American cause. Liquor is our most widespread and dangerous saboteur, and it is our patriotic duty to halt its ravaging of manpower, material, resources and physical stamina.’”

  The bartender looked at us as he stuffed the clipping back in his pocket. “Nothing in there,” he said, “about the time and work wasted, or the trains and buses and cars wasting gas and tires to get to Alabama.”

  “Trains don’t have tires,” Wally said.

  “I was just lumping,” the bartender said with a shrug. “It’s the point, not the details, if you know what I mean.”

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “Get the man his drink,” Phil said, doing his best to contain himself.

  The bartender gave Phil a sneer, turned, and went for the bottle.

  Music suddenly drummed through the floor. A woman of the afternoon in a red dress and a bad mood was giving us an I-dare-you look and swaying to the opening notes of “Tangerine.”

  “What was in the report, Wally?” I asked as the bartender came back with my beer.

  “Turn off the jukebox,” Phil said, rubbing his gray hair with the palm of his hand. A very bad sign.

  “Lady’s got a right,” the bartender said with a shrug.

  “Then turn it down,” Phil said as the bartender turned away.

  The bartender just walked and the music rose. It seemed to be pushing Wally into alcoholics’ dreamland. Phil got off his stool and strode toward the lady in red, who gave him a knowing smile and held up her arms, waiting to dance. Phil walked past her and kicked the jukebox right in the speaker. It groaned and shut up.

  “What the?…” the woman screamed.

  “Hey, asshole,” the lanky bartender shouted, coming over the bar with a sawed-off bat in his hand.

  “It was on fire,” Phil said. “I just saved your bar. You owe me one.”

  The bartender was moving on Phil, who started back toward his stool next to us.

  “Stop there,” Phil said, holding up a hand. “I’m a police officer and I’m in one lousy mood. You want your nose smashed as flat as my brother’s over there, just keep coming.”

  The bartender threw the bat in the general direction of my brother, but it was so wide and to the right that it had to be a pickoff play or a wild pitch to save face.

  “He really a cop?” the woman in red screamed at me.

  “Yep,” I said.

  “Let’s get out of here,” Phil said. “Before I do something I won’t regret.”

  I dropped another one of Clark Gable’s five-spots. When the bartender glared at me, I dropped another five to ease his pain.

  “Get out of here,” the bartender said softly through clenched teeth, in a not-bad Gary Cooper.

  Normally, that would have been enough to insure Phil’s staying around to do some real personal and property damage. But I was off the stool now and ushering Wally toward the door. The lady in red went into the sunlight just ahead of us as we passed in front of Phil, now glowering at the barkeep.

  “I don’t want him in here for a month,” the bartender said, pointing at Wally. “A month. He’s trouble and you’re it.”

  Phil shook his head and joined me and Wally as we went through the Melody Lounge door and onto Main Street. A rain was coming and the lady in red was disappearing into a bar across the street. Nobody paid much attention to us, either because they had seen falling-down drunks before or they had enough instinct to recognize that the hefty guy with the marine haircut was waiting for an excuse.

  “What was that?” I asked, leading Wally toward Phil’s car.

  “Soliciting to commit prostitution. Creating a public nuisance. Catching me when I’m in a bad mood. Hospodar,” he said as I set Wally gently down on the fender, “what was in that damn report? Have we got conspiracy to cover a possible murder or what?”

  Wally’s clothes, now that I could see them in the sunlight, were clean and neat. He was shaved and his hair cut. He was holding onto something he had been, but his grip was loose.

  “Made a mistake,” Wally mumbled. “One day a decision had to be made and I’d long lost the ability or desire to decide. I didn’t step in when two execs were fighting about something, and one of them broke the other guy’s face when I was two feet away. Guy with the broken face was a cousin of Louis B.’s wife. End of career.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “And I’m running out of patience,” Phil said.

  Wally took a deep breath, let it out, and shook like a dog coming out of water.

  “No cover-up,” he said. “Went through Culver City Police. County attorney’s office said it was probably an accident. Dead guy with the sword in his chest was one S. P. Ling …”

  “Spelling,” I said.

  “… who had outstanding warrants in three states,” Wally went on. “Pennsylvania, Ohio, and New York. Two were felonies, one for attempted murder. He did time on an armed robbery when he was a kid. Got the acting bug in prison. S. P. Ling, Actor Ling. Aliases included Sid Spelling and … I forget.”

  Wally was reaching for something in his empty shirt pocket. He managed to get two fingers in the pocket and came up empty.

  “And the records were burned?” I asked.

  “Fried,” said Wally. “Fire of suspicious origin. Lots of people out there with grudges.”

  “Maybe someone who wanted the Ling file burned,” I said.

  “What the hell for?” Phil came in impatiently.

  “I had some thoughts on that one,” said Wally. “Kept ’em to myself though.”

  “Get in the car,” Phil said. “We’ll sober you up and talk about it when you get out of the drunk tank tomorrow.”

  “He’s doing fine, Phil,” I said.

  “I’m not doing fine,” Phil said, thumbing himself on the chest. “Get him in the car. Now.”

  We were wedged against the curb, so we walked into the street and I opened the rear door as Phil climbed into the driver’s seat. Cars were passing going both ways, so I didn’t hold the door open all the way. I wouldn’t have looked up at all if the car that was coming at us hadn’t burned rubber with a screeching start, definitely an unpatriotic move during a rubber shortage. I still wouldn’t have paid much attention if I hadn’t looked up to see the car roaring toward us and Spelling, Jr., in the driver’s seat. I pushed the dazed Wally into the back seat and tried to dive onto the top of Phil’s car. I almost made it. Spelling missed me by a deep sigh and plowed into the open door. The door and Spelling exploded down Main Street. I turned my head and watched the car door spinning in the air. It missed the head of a mailman by about a foot and crashed through the window of a tailor shop, sending glass raining into the street, where people covered their heads and screamed.

  “You all right?” Phil said as I slid back to the street on shaking legs.

  “Yeah, I think so,” I said.

  “Then get your ass in here,” shouted Phil. “I’m gonna catch that son of a bitch.”

  I threw myself into the car as Phil pulled onto Main, scraping the rear fender of the Ford sedan in front of us and almost hitting a green Tudor Chevy that hit its brakes just in time.

  “Wally?” I said, but Wally had passed out.

  We were going fast on a busy city street. I didn’t want to know how fast. Phil wasn’t talking. H
e turned on the radio and Claude Thornhill’s record of “Where Oh Where Has My Little Dog Gone?” blared out. Five minutes earlier, music had driven him over the edge. Now he was fueled by it. All bad signs. I shut up and sat on Wally Hospodar on the floor of the back seat.

  “That was Spelling,” I said over the music.

  Phil didn’t answer.

  “I think he’s the son of the guy who died,” I went on. “I wonder why he wanted to kill Wally?”

  Phil laughed.

  “I saw him coming in the rearview,” shouted Phil. “You dumb shit. He was after you.”

  “Right,” I said. “Can’t you go any faster?”

  He tried. Through lights and past scurrying pedestrians. Across a sidewalk or two and through narrow alleys. Phil could have called for help on his radio, but he sang along with the music and hit the floorboard, which would have troubled me less if my brother hadn’t been singing between his teeth in German.

  “Zu Lauterbach hab ich mein Strump verloren,” Phil sang. “That’s the way the huns sang it.”

  Spelling went out of control near the park. His car went into a spin, bounced off a lamp post, and almost rolled over. Phil hit the brake and skidded to a stop next to a fire hydrant upon which a man in a Panama hat was tying his shoe. When we came out of the three-door car, the man in the Panama was shaking and Spelling was out of his car and on his way. He could run. I couldn’t and neither could Phil. Not like that. Even when we were kids.

  “Get back in the car,” Phil shouted.

  I got back in, knowing we weren’t going to catch him now. We’d circle the park, but Spelling would go out wherever he wanted, maybe even double back. Phil knew it too, but he wouldn’t admit it even to himself.

  We went around the park, watching for a sign of Spelling. Nothing. We went around again and then tried streets off of the park. Some of them three times.

  Suddenly, Phil turned off the radio and parked next to the Tail of the Pup hot-dog stand. Normally, Phil was a sucker for their kosher dogs. He pounded on the steering wheel with his fists for about a minute and then said, “You want a burger?”

  “Hot dog, if it’s a kosher,” I said.

  Nobody moved. Not Phil, who shut his eyes. Not me. Definitely not Wally Hospodar, who, for all I knew, was dead.

  “What are we doing, Phil?” I finally asked.

  “I’m meditating,” he said calmly. “It doesn’t do any goddamn good, but I’m meditating.”

  After three or four minutes, Phil took a deep breath, opened his eyes, and used his car radio to call for someone to come for Spelling’s wrecked car.

  “And I want Loring to go over it. No one else. Loring. You get that? Anyone touches anything on the car but Loring gets his lower lip ripped off.”

  Phil signed off, hung up the radio, and stared out of the front window.

  I had some ideas, but I knew better than to say anything. A good sigh later, Phil said, “I’ll put a man on Hospodar and one on Varney,” he said. “You?”

  “Let’s just catch him,” I said.

  “Just get me a double burger,” Phil said, climbing out of the car.

  “You want mustard, onion, and pickles?” I said, stepping out of the hole where there had recently been a door.

  Phil nodded and reached for his wallet as we walked toward the Pup.

  I stopped him with, “This one’s on Clark Gable.”

  We had finished our sandwiches—mine was a Colossal dog with coleslaw instead of kraut—before we discovered that Wally Hospodar was dead.

  Actually, I discovered that Wally was dead when I offered him the regular dog with chili and he fell on his face. There was a hole in his back, a thin hole. My guess was that he was passed out when he died. Phil was sitting in the driver’s seat when I told him Wally was dead. Phil snatched the chili dog out of my hand and downed it in three angry bites.

  “How could Spelling get back to the car before us when we were on his damn ass?” Phil sputtered through a mouthful of mustard and bun.

  “I don’t know, Phil,” I said, still standing outside the car next to him and watching the traffic flow by.

  “And how the hell do I explain stopping for lunch with a corpse in the back seat, a dead man killed in my own car?”

  “I don’t know, Phil.”

  “Damn,” Phil said, hitting the steering wheel. “Get in.”

  “I think I’ll …”

  “Get the hell in the car,” Phil said, tearing at his tie.

  I got in.

  Chapter 10

  I had a headache. Mrs. Plaut fixed a bag of her Aunt Ginger’s Yellow Indian Poultice, which she instructed me to apply to the cut on my forehead. Mrs. Plaut also gave me a Boxie Scotch Bromide, yellow crystals dissolved in water, which I was instructed to “drink down without pause or risk dyspepsia.”

  The price I had to pay for poultice and bromide, which had not yet kicked in, was to read another chapter of Mrs. P’s never-ending history of her family.

  It all began when Mrs. Plaut first rented a room to me, a little over two years ago. For reasons still unclear to me, which Gunther suggested I not explore, Mrs. Plaut believed I was either an exterminator or a book editor, possibly both. So far she hadn’t asked me to get rid of the ants, crickets, or funny-looking green things with wings that sometimes got in the house. These she disposed of with her own remedies and frequent applications. No, she turned to me for help with the history of the family Plaut.

  I had read more than a thousand pages, written in Mrs. Plaut’s neat block letters on lined sheets. The new batch, which she handed me with the poultice and the bromide concoction and more information on changes in the ration-book regulations, was mercifully short.

  I couldn’t complain. Mrs. Plaut had agreed to let me hold a meeting in the all-day-and-early-evening room, a big fire-placed room with a faded Navajo rug which was reserved for “quiet” moments and “music listening” time for the roomers. The room was seldom used by anyone but Mr. Hill the mailman, who sometimes paused to take off his shoes and rest his feet before pulling himself up the stairs. Mr. Hill, in full gray uniform, was known to doze off snoring, clutching his empty leather mailbag to his chest. Once in a while, Mrs. Plaut would come in serious or beaming to wind the Victrola and play such favorites as “Hindustan,” “Indian Love Call,” “Juntos en El Rincon,” and “After You’ve Gone.” Most of the records were so old they were recorded on one side only. Most were by Isham Jones and his band, though there were a few Ted Lewis and King Olivers in the scratchy pile.

  My headache, the yellow poultice, and I lay on the mattress on the floor going through the pages Mrs. Plaut had handed me. I read:

  My brother Bill and his friends Murryhill and Weston were to have charged up San Juan Hill astride their horses right behind Teddy Roosevelt himself. Weston later claimed that Blackjack Pershing was also among their elite company, but Brother was certain that Pershing’s brother was back at camp tending the backup horses.

  Well, anyway, Brother, Murryhill, and Weston assembled on horseback and followed a contingent they thought was the first wave of cavalry. It turned out, as you may have surmised from small hints I have given you, that they were incorrect. Brother Bill always contended, to the day he died in Mineola, that Colonel Roosevelt had not been entirely clear on time or location of assembly.

  There is, however, no point in contemplating what can not have been.

  Bill Murryhill, who was quite bald and had been since early childhood from what was reputed to be a misapplication to the scalp of Mrs. Tessmacher’s Panacea in a Bottle, and Weston lost no time in urging their steeds to the fore and upon seeing a lone rider charge at a gallop up a ridge, Brother opined that it was Teddy and he urged Murryhill and Weston, who had but one eye due to an ice cream machine accident in Toledo, to gallop on to glory with the first wave Rough Riders in their moment of triumph.

  When they reached the crest of the hill with no resistance from the enemy who they were convinced had fled at the fe
arsome sight of determined American cavalry, they looked around for Teddy and back for the rest of the Riders. Of Riders there appeared to be none. Of Teddy, they had been mistaken. The man on the horse, who was no longer on the horse, was sitting with legs crossed on the grass and holding his head. His name was Tom Mix. He had a winning smile and an enormous nose and would go on to greater fame as a movie star and circus curiosity.

  Tom Mix had been carried away by the horse he had been breaking, a Roan of ill disposition who now stood munching grass and looking at the small group. Tom Mix had sustained a bump on his head.

  At that moment, so Brother recalled, there was a tremendous whooping and hollering from the hill to their right veiled by thick trees. As they discovered subsequently, it was the Battle of San Juan Hill.

  The contingent, Tom Mix, Murryhill, and Weston, led by Brother Bill went down the far side of the hill leading their exhausted horses and found themselves in a small town called Rosalinda where the populace greeted them without enthusiasm as liberators from the Spanish yoke. Though Tom Mix claimed to speak fluent Spanish, it turned out that he knew only enough words to get himself in trouble. Remember, however, that he was a young lad at the time and full of suds.

  Weston, however, knew enough to announce a fiesta of victory over Spain and a great party was held that evening albeit there was little to eat and drink. Murryhill did not return with Brother, Tom Mix, and Weston the next morning. He fell in with a family named Calles taking up with either the daughter or aunt of the family, Weston’s Spanish being too poor to determine which.

  Brother Bill reported that Murryhill had died in the charge and he was backed up in this deceit by Tom Mix and Weston. Murryhill became a hero of the charge on San Juan Hill and a statue was erected in his memory in downtown Enid, Oklahoma where he was from. Subsequently, Tom Mix visited Enid and made a fine speech about his partner Murryhill. A children’s park in Enid was named in honor of Murryhill. I know not if it still stands but I understand on good authority that it contained the first twenty-foot children’s slide in either Oklahoma or Texas.