I grinned and gestured at the locked knob. She didn’t grin back. I pulled the bouquet of mixed flowers from behind my back and held it up to the door.
“Annie, Annie was the miller’s daughter,” I sang softly in a not-bad baritone. “Far she wandered from the singing water. Idle, idle Annie went a-maying. Up hill down hill went her flock a straying. Hear them. Hear them calling as they roam. Annie, Annie bring your white black sheep home.”
She mouthed something. I think it was “shit,” though Anne was always a lady. Then she came down and opened the door. I held out the flowers. She took them.
“Toby,” she said. “We had an agreement. You call if you have to see me.”
“And you say no,” I reminded her.
“My right,” she said.
“It’s Phil’s birthday,” I said.
“So?”
“Can I come in?”
“I’ve got company,” she said, blocking the way, posies in the port-arms position.
“I don’t think so,” I said.
“What makes you think I’m lying?”
“You’re not dressed for company. You’re dressed for a night in the bathtub, reading a book, listening to the radio, thinking about old times. Five minutes.”
“It’s never five minutes, Toby,” she said, still barring the entrance.
She was wearing makeup but not much, just what she must have had on during the day. Her hair was dark and billowy and soft, but combed for comfort, not to impress. Her blue blouse was clean but not new and she was wearing slacks.
“We talk here,” she said. “We talk fast.”
“You look great,” I said. “You smell great. I miss you. How about dinner, breakfast, lunch, a hot dog, an ice cream, a walk on the beach, a movie? That cover everything fast enough?”
“Stop, Toby,” she said.
“Did I say you smell great?”
“Yes.”
“Looks like we’re out of conversation.”
“Looks like,” she said, folding her arms, the flowers dangling. “Toby, please. I’ve got a new job, long hours, and I’m going to night school.”
“School?”
“Law school,” she said. “Ridgely Law in the valley.”
“Ridgely Law?”
“I’m a little older than the others but I’m told veterans will be coming back and …”
“How did you?…”
“Marty Lieb knows some people, the dean,” Anne said, shifting her eyes past me to the street behind my back.
“Marty? My lawyer?”
“I’ve gone to him for advice since Howard died and he’s been …”
“You’ve been seeing Marty Lieb?” I asked.
Anne didn’t answer.
“I need to make it on my own,” she said. “And I don’t need to go back to reminders of you or Howard. Now, I’ve got to go.”
“Is Marty up there?” I said, pointing to the stairway.
“I told you I have company,” she said. “What am I doing here? What am I hiding and apologizing for? Go, Toby. Say happy birthday to Phil for me. Take your flowers back.”
She held up her hand with a pushing motion to show that she wanted to close the door.
“I still love you, Anne,” I said.
“That was never the problem, Toby. The problem was and is that you are a klutzy Peter Pan, an adult who won’t grow up. A … oh, what is the use. We’ve been through this at least four hundred times. I’ve wasted too many days and nights in the forest about this. Good night.”
“Ice cream at Ferny’s,” I tried as she pushed the door and I backed away. “What can it hurt?”
“I’m too fat now,” she said.
“You are voluptuous,” I said, holding out the flowers as she continued to ease me through the door.
Before the door slammed shut, she took the flowers.
“I’ll call you,” I said as the door clicked shut.
She stood there for an instant, eyes moist, or was that my imagination? Then she shook her head, turned, and hurried up the stairs and around the bend.
“Marty Lieb,” I said aloud.
If I were a drinking man, I’d have gone out for a couple. If I had the heart for it, I would have called Carmen the cashier for a last-minute date for an Abbott and Costello and a late dinner, even if it meant bringing her son. Instead, I found a shop on Ventura where they sold radios and phonographs and albums. It was almost ten when I got to Ruth and Phil’s house in North Hollywood. Ruth answered the door, gave me a hug, and touched my cheek. I was always careful when I hugged my sister-in-law, even before she had gotten sick. There wasn’t much of her but heart.
“Kids are asleep,” she said. “Phil’s not home. Still at work. Some kind of problem.”
“You feeling all right, Ruth?”
“Not bad,” she said.
And she was right. More pale than usual. Thinner than I remembered. Three kids to take care of and my brother Phil for a husband.
“Come in for a coffee,” she said.
She was wearing a robe and was definitely ready for bed and needing it.
“No,” I said, handing her the package I was carrying, an Arvin portable in leatherette for Phil’s office, if he still had one after the investigation.
“He’ll be sorry he missed you,” Ruth said, taking the package.
“I’ll give you a call tomorrow,” I said, taking a step back. “Maybe we can all go out to Levy’s for dinner Monday or Tuesday. On me. Good night, Ruth.”
The phone was ringing when I returned to Jeremy’s model apartment. It was Clark Gable with the news that Jeremy, Shelly, Gunther, and I were to meet Mame Stoltz in front of the Coconut Grove at six-thirty.
“You’ll be there?” I asked.
“I will not be there,” Gable said. “But I won’t leave town till you let me know what happens.”
He wished us luck and I hung up, brushed my teeth with the spare toothbrush I carried in my glove compartment, and shaved with a Gillette razor I’d picked up on the way back.
And then I went to sleep. It had been a long day.
Chapter 12
Saturday, March 4, 1943, was the fifteenth and last time the Academy Awards were given at a more or less intimate banquet for about 200 people. It was also the last and only time someone was murdered at an Oscar-night celebration. The next year, the Academy would move to Grauman’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard. More than two thousand people would fill the theater. The next year, not only the best actor and actress would receive Oscars, but so would the best supporting actor and actress, who still had to be content with plaques this year.
Next year it wouldn’t be an insiders’ event anymore, but in 1943 it was still the way it used to be.
I woke up late, wondering what time it was, and realized I had a backache from sleeping in a bed instead of on the floor. I rolled off the side of the bed, sat up, considered cursing the massive Negro gentleman who had given me the bear hug that sent me sleeping on floors. The man who had given me the bear hug was a Mickey Rooney fan. My job had been to keep fans away from Mick at a premiere. I succeeded. It cost me a healthy back and I was paid twenty bucks for the night.
I crawled to the bathroom, wiggled out of my shorts, turned on the shower, hot and hard, and climbed up the wall. I didn’t feel much like singing the score of No, No Nanette, but I did manage a medley of “It Seems to Me I Heard That Song Before” and “Always in My Heart.”
There are four things I can do when my back goes out. Any one of them has a fifty-fifty chance of helping. I can take a handful of pills Shelly supplied me with about a year ago. But that makes me sleep. I can have Jeremy put his knee in my back. But that hurts. I can sit on the floor, close my eyes, and visualize my pain floating away. Gunther’s contribution. But that takes too long. Or I can go see Doc Hodgdon, the orthopedic surgeon who beat me almost every time we played handball at the Y on Hope Street. Doc is pushing seventy and he favors heat, massage, concentration, and pain p
ills. But Doc Hodgdon was visiting one of his sons back east.
One of the great and terrible things about living alone is that you can groan as much as you want in the shower without worrying about who it might worry. I tried to let that thought carry me past a sudden wave of Anne-itis, a wave that included a glimpse of Attorney Martin Lieb, who deserved to be disbarred for alienation of something.
After ten minutes, I turned off the shower and found that I could walk, not the way I had the night before, but movement was possible. I was struggling into my shorts when the doorbell rang. I considered ignoring it. It rang. And it kept ringing. I ached my way back to the bedroom, forced my legs into my wrinkled pants, and headed for the door, which was four or five miles away.
The doorbell stopped ringing, but I kept moving.
To the extent that I figured at all, I figured that it was Jeremy coming to show the apartment but unable to get in because I had the key. Or it was a would-be renter. Or it was a plumber, painter, steam fitter, carpet cleaner, carpenter, or lost woodpecker. I opened the door. Spelling was standing there in a blue mechanic’s uniform carrying a large gun in his right hand.
“I’m not dressed yet,” I said. “If you can come back in about ten minutes …”
Spelling looked over his shoulder into the courtyard. There was no one in sight. He motioned me back with his gun and I stepped back as he came in and kicked the door shut.
“How long have you been at this?” he asked.
“This?”
“The detective business,” he said. “Twenty years? More? And you can’t tell when someone is following you? You’re in the wrong career.”
“A little late for me to change,” I said. “Mind if I put my shirt on.”
“Go ahead,” he said, looking around the room.
I put on my shirt and considered my options. There weren’t many. My back was bad. My gun was in the glove compartment of the Crosley. I had to resort to persuasion.
“Have you figured anything cut yet?” he asked, sitting on the edge of the bed. “My clues weren’t very subtle.”
“We’ve got some ideas,” I said.
“You picked up three tuxedos at some place called Hy’s for Him. And you went to see a lady who didn’t want to see you. I’ll give you one thing. You didn’t look sorry for yourself.”
My shirt was a little fragrant from a day of wear and a night draped over a chair, but I didn’t think it mattered.
“It gets worse,” I said. “My back went out this morning.”
“Lower, upper?” Spelling asked.
“Lower.”
“Turn around. I know a way to end your pain.”
“I can live with it,” I said.
“Turn,” he ordered.
I turned.
“Take it easy,” he said softly. “Easy.”
I felt the steel of the gun against my shoulder and two hands digging into my shoulders. Then something drove into my lower back and I thought I’d been done in by a silencer. I doubled forward on the floor, feeling sick to my stomach.
“Don’t go into a ball,” Spelling ordered. “Stay loose.
“I’m loose,” I groaned. “I’m loose.”
“You and your friends are going formal tonight, right? Any place I might know?”
“No,” I said. “Birthday. My brother’s.”
“In soup and fish?”
“His fiftieth,” I said. “Big cele …”
“Shut up.”
I shut up and rolled to a semisitting position with my elbows on the floor.
“You can’t stop me, Peters,” he said, pointing the gun at my face. “They killed my father and then they went on with their lives, just did what they wanted. Until I showed up and killed them.”
“Not all of them,” I said.
“Not yet,” he said. “Stand up.”
I stood, using the bed for support.
“Now twist around on your waist. Don’t turn the shoulders.”
I did it.
“How’s it feel?” he asked.
“Not bad,” I said.
“Good,” said Spelling. “I want you alive and well when I kill you.”
“I appreciate that,” I said.
“I’m going now,” he said. “I just wanted you to know that you can’t hide from me. And I wanted you …”
“Hold it,” I said, reasonably sure that Spelling was not going to kill me now. “How much longer is this going to go on? You fixed my back, maybe. But you are one pompous son of a bastard, and gratitude will only go so far. So, hostage crisis or not, either shoot me or get the hell out of here.”
“You’re pretty goddamn impatient to die, Peters. I’m going to leave,” he said, backing through the bedroom to the front door.
I took a step toward him, half expecting him to begin firing. But he didn’t. When he cleared the door I hurried to the window. My back was pretty good, not a hundred percent, but good. I could get my .38 from the glove compartment and run after him, but I knew I couldn’t run and I knew I couldn’t shoot straight at more than ten feet. The time to use a gun is when you’re sure the other guy doesn’t have one.
I found my shoes and socks and put them on with new problems to think about. Why had Spelling come here? Why did he want me to figure out his poetic clues? And, most important, why the hell hadn’t he shot me?
I needed a bowl of Wheaties fast.
I had a day to kill or be killed in. I went back to Phil’s house. This time he was home. He opened the door, not happy to see me, and stepped back so I could enter. He looked awful. Red eyes, scrub forest of hair on his face. Walking around in his stocking feet.
I went in and I followed him through the small living room complete with photographs of his family on the fake fireplace, and matching sofa and chairs worn thin from jumping kids.
“Coffee?” he asked, sitting down at the kitchen table.
I nodded. Phil poured. Ruth was a good cook. Brisket. Pot roast. Turkey. Kreplach. Matzo-ball soup. Spaghetti and mean meatballs, but there was no heart in her coffee. But Phil was a quantity man; he was content if there was plenty of Maxwell House and it was hot and black.
We drank.
“Got any Wheaties?” I asked.
Phil didn’t answer. He simply rose, went to a cabinet, produced an orange Wheaties box, and went for a couple of bowls and the milk bottle.
We drank and ate for a while without talking. Then, “Spelling followed me to an apartment I was staying in,” I said. “Came to the door with a gun.”
“That a fact?” said Phil, without bothering to look at me.
“A fact. Don’t you want to know why I’m not dead?”
“Why aren’t you dead?” Phil asked indifferently, and took a sip of coffee.
“I don’t know,” I said. “I think he wants me at the Academy Awards dinner tonight. I think he plans to kill Varney in front of the stars and cameras. I think he wants the newspapers, Look, Life, and N.B.C. to cover it so he can tell the world how his father was destroyed by Hollywood.”
Phil was eating his Wheaties and shaking his head no.
“What do you mean, no? He could walk in there tonight with a Thompson and mow down Bob Hope, Rosalind Russell, Ronald Colman, Irving Berlin, and … and Turhan Bey.”
“No,” Phil said, finishing his Wheaties and working on the dregs with a tilted bowl. “At least, not because his father was done in by heartless Hollywood.” Phil put down his bowl. “We, the police department of Los Angeles, did some research. First, the guy who calls himself Spelling is not Spelling. Second, I know this because the Spelling who died with a sword in the middle of his gut on Gone With the Wind had no sons, no daughters, no nieces, and no nephews. Orphan. Never married.”
“That doesn’t make sense,” I said, pushing my empty bowl and half-full cup away.
“Doesn’t have to make sense, Tobias,” Phil said. “It’s true, but it doesn’t have to make sense.”
“So why is he telling everyone he’s Spell
ing’s son? Why is he killing these people? Why does he want to kill Varney? And maybe Gable? Why does he write poems and …”
“He’s a crazy,” said Phil. “We catch him. He maybe talks. Maybe doesn’t talk. Maybe makes some kind of weird sense. Maybe makes no sense. We’ve both seen them. They scare the hell out of you. They make me mad. With crazies you’ve got nothing to count on.”
“No,” I said. “I don’t buy that explanation while there’s still a copy of Casket and Sunny side on the shelf.”
Phil suddenly brought his hand down on the bowl. It shattered. I looked at his clenched fist. Somehow, his hand wasn’t bleeding.
“Phil?”
He looked across at me. “I’m on suspension,” he said, on the verge of more explosions. “Maybe pushed into retirement. There wouldn’t be a maybe about it if the war was over and the place was running with M.P.’s looking for work. You know what my record looks like, Toby?”
“You’ve worked the streets and you’re honest,” I said.
“I break heads and I’ve got a bad temper.”
“You?”
Phil scratched the back of his closed right fist. A very, very bad sign.
“I think I’ll be going now, Phil,” I said, getting up.
He looked at me but didn’t answer, and I got up.
“Tell Ruth and the kids I stopped by. Happy birthday.”
“Monday, Veblin’s office, Toby. You lie. You save my job. I’ve got nothing but that job.”
He advanced on me and we were face to face, inches apart. Déjà vu, a thousand times like this, maybe two thousand since I was four.
“I’m not putting on a security uniform and punching a warehouse time clock,” he said.
“I’ll lie,” I promised.
“Good night, Toby.”
“Good night, Phil.”
I left.
There had been much better days and this one could have been worse. It couldn’t have been much more confusing but it could have been worse, at least for me. I was still alive.
My things were in the Crosley. I wondered if Spelling had followed me to Phil’s. I looked around. Nothing, but then again I hadn’t spotted him before. But then again, I hadn’t been looking before.
Tomorrow Is Another Day Page 16