A Fatal Glass of Beer

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  I took the phone. “My name is Peters,” I said. “I work for Mr. Fields.”

  “Detective Belcher,” he said. He had a high voice and seemed to be in a hurry. “We checked your address and your Hipnoodle. No clothes, no bags, no food. Landlady says he called and reminded her that he’s paid up till the end of April and she should leave the place alone. If he comes back, she says she’ll call me. I doubt it. Sorry.”

  “Thanks, Belcher,” I said.

  “Belcher?” Fields asked. “Ask him his first name.”

  “Mr. Fields wants to know your first name.”

  “Gus,” he said. “Augustus.”

  I repeated the name. Fields beamed, took out a notebook, and dropped some bills in the process. He made a note in the book, probably Augustus Belcher’s name, put it back in his pocket, and picked up the fallen bills.

  “Let me know if we can help,” Belcher said.

  I thanked Belcher and hung up.

  “You always carry pocketsful of money?” I asked.

  “Always,” he confided. “Even in my pajamas. Somewhere in the neighborhood of ten thousand dollars. Never know when I might have to go out the back door fast and flee the state or the country.”

  I didn’t pursue it.

  “We’d better go to Philadelphia,” I said.

  “I’ll have my secretary take care of the airline,” he said. “Already checked. Plane going out in the right direction tonight. Questions?”

  “How do I get back to my office?”

  “My driver’ll take you. Leave him the address of your residence and we’ll pick you up at nine and head for the airport.”

  Fields leaned over to his microphone, flipped a switch, and said loudly, “My man, stop searching the upholstery for silver dollars and come back here to drive Mr. Peters to his office. Then leave the vehicle where he tells you and return by trolley.”

  “Okay, Mr. Fields,” a voice crackled sullenly over the speaker.

  “Modern technology,” he said, turning off the system. “I remember when Philadelphia went from gaslight to electricity. I was a small child. My father in his ever-infinite wisdom proclaimed with the remnant of his Cockney accent that the whole thing wouldn’t work and the city would be wise to leave the gas vents where they were. Met Edison once. Deaf son of a bitch almost drove me nuts. All he wanted to talk about was strip mining and the weather in Florida. You’ll get us a driver who can drive the Cadillac across the country and meet us in Philadelphia?”

  “Got just the operative,” I said.

  “I’ll pick you up at nine in the Lincoln,” he said. “Your address?”

  I gave it to him and he wrote it and my home phone number on his pad.

  “Nine,” he repeated, pouring himself a glass of clear liquid from a thermos on his desk.

  “Nine,” I agreed. “By then your car should already be on the way to Philadelphia.”

  The Cadillac was waiting at the end of the tiled path outside. The Chimp looked like a sulking primate in the front seat. I didn’t say anything to him on the ride to the Faraday.

  Twenty minutes later I was in my Crosley, waving good-bye to the latest alley resident behind the Faraday after having given him a dollar to watch the Caddy and promising another when I saw him next. I had called No-Neck Arnie the mechanic, told him where to pick up the Caddy and what to do with it.

  In the lobby of the Faraday I ran into Jeremy Butler, landlord, poet, former wrestler—close to three hundred pounds of bald power who always spoke softly and a little sadly, resigned to the inevitable decline of humanity. His tone, however, changed when he talked about his wife, Alice Pallis Butler, who almost matched him in size and strength, and his baby daughter, Natasha, dark-haired, smiling, delicate, and beautiful.

  Jeremy was wearing a black turtleneck sweater. He told me he was working on a poem about the aromas of the Faraday. I told him it sounded like a great idea. I told him I didn’t know when I’d be back, but it probably wouldn’t be more than a week or two. We shook hands and I was on my way to Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse on Heliotrope.

  Chapter Three

  Never show up for a job interview in bare feet.

  Talking Gunther into driving to Philadelphia was no problem. I knew he was looking for an excuse to go somewhere, anywhere, to get away from the aggressive female publicity agent at R.K.O. who was coming close to smothering him. His full-sized girlfriend was going to move to Vermont. She had told Gunther that she was seeing a sociology professor socially.

  Gunther had not complained. Instead, he had plunged into his translating work. I told him No-Neck Arnie was already putting the blocks on the pedals and filling the gas tank.

  “You were confident of my doing this,” he said as we stood in his room at Mrs. Plaut’s.

  “Reasonably,” I said.

  “You were right,” he said. “I shall pack instantly, inform some people I am working for, and Mrs. Plaut, naturally. How shall I find you in Philadelphia?”

  “Call a Detective Gus Belcher,” I said, writing Belcher’s number on a note pad on Gunther’s desk. “I’ll check in with him.”

  I went to my room, next to Gunther’s. Somehow I had gotten by Mrs. Plaut, who usually caught me before I reached the stairway.

  Dash, the big orange cat who sort of lived with me, was sitting near the refrigerator in my room, waiting. He blinked once as I turned on the lights. The room was the same as always except at night, when I’d move the mattress to the floor where I slept because of my bad back. I threw my jacket on the small sofa against the wall with the hand-stitched pillow saying, “God Bless Our Happy Home,” lying against one arm. Near Dash, by the window, was my table and two chairs.

  I checked the time on my Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall. I had plenty of time. I fed Dash some milk and a can of tuna. I told him I’d leave the window open. Dash could fend for himself. He had sometimes disappeared into the night or day and not returned for a week or more. I didn’t figure I owned him. We just roomed together.

  I joined Dash for lunch, eating a bowl of Wheaties with what was left of the milk. Then I packed. Took me five minutes. I don’t have much and my suitcase is small. It had seen better years. The suitcase had belonged to my father who, as far as I could tell, had never used it. I had banged it up a few times, but it was in pretty good shape and genuine leather.

  I used the pay phone on the landing to call Anita Maloney at Mack’s Diner and told her I’d be gone for a while and where I was going. She had worked and owned the place on her own since Mack Chirikides, her second husband, had died. Her first had been a hunk named Ozzie, who she had divorced. Then after a few years at Scripps College for Women, she got the acting fever and did her best to avoid casting couches while she lived with a guy named Harold who she caught necking in a car with her mother. Then she met Mack. He wasn’t young, but he had been honest and faithful till he died.

  Anita had been my date at the senior prom. Those were better days. Almost thirty years later I had met her again at Mack’s Diner, and now we were in our second month of what might turn out to be something. It was already good. I hadn’t quite forgotten Anne, but Anita, who had been through a bad marriage of her own, was just making it a lot easier.

  “Busy?” I asked.

  “A few regulars and a drunk who wandered in,” she said. “I’ll give him some coffee and head him down the street. So you’re going to Philadelphia with W. C. Fields?”

  “Yup,” I said.

  “If he’s anything like he is in the movies, he’d drive me bughouse in less than a day,” she said.

  “He is,” I said. “I’ll try not to go bughouse.”

  “Call me as soon as you get back?” she asked.

  “Before I unpack my bags,” I promised.

  We said good-bye and I turned on the radio, watched Dash clean himself, and heard a man’s deep voice tell me that Old Gold cigarettes were now protected by Mellow Apple Honey. Then I listened to Jessica Dragonette sing a Victor Herbert medley. It
was interrupted by the entrance of Mrs. Plaut. She never knocked. Her motto was clear. People shouldn’t be ashamed of what they were doing in their rooms in her house, nor should they engage in acts for which they should be ashamed. The bathroom was the proper place for dressing and undressing.

  She stood in the doorway. Dash made a low growling sound and disappeared through the window. Mrs. Plaut was about a foot taller than Gunther, who claimed three feet. She was thin as a chicken’s leg and deafer than Edison, but she had the heart and determination of a worthy heavyweight contender, even if she didn’t always grasp the situation the way others did.

  “Things to discuss,” she said.

  In one hand was more of her dreaded manuscript, the endless book she was writing about the history of her family. Lined sheets with neatly printed words. She handed the pages to me. I took them. For some reason she had decided, in the wisdom of her eighty-plus years, that I was both a book editor and an exterminator, these being the reasons that the police and other unsavory individuals were frequently looking for me.

  “I’m going out of town for a week or two,” I shouted, seeing that she wasn’t wearing the hearing aid Gunther and I had given her. “So is Mr. Wherthman.”

  “You’re both paid up,” she said, folding her arms. “If you’re going on vacation, I suggest the Carlsbad Caves. That’s where the departed Mister and I honeymooned.”

  “I’ll take the pages with me and read them at night,” I shouted, putting the sheets on the table.

  She nodded. I had given her the answer she wanted, but she didn’t budge.

  “Stamps,” she said.

  I went into my top drawer and pulled out the quota of ration stamps I had picked up two days earlier: red stamps for meat, canned fish, butter, and cheese; blue stamps for canned goods and processed foods. She pocketed the stamps and remained rooted.

  “Next, the cat,” she said.

  “You said he could come and go as long as he didn’t go into any other part of the house,” I reminded her.

  “I still think he tried to eat Simon, gave him a nervous breakdown.”

  She had a pet bird in a cage in her rooms on the first floor. The bird was something that resembled a canary. The name she gave the fowl was constantly changing.

  “It wasn’t Dash,” I said.

  “Cat doesn’t like me. I don’t like the cat,” she said. “Plain and simple.”

  “I’ll see to it that he doesn’t get out of the room,” I said.

  “And doesn’t poo or pee on the furniture,” she said.

  “He does that outside,” I shouted.

  “He should do that outside,” she said. “One more thing.”

  “Yes,” I said, resigned to my lot until Gunther or Fields arrived to save me.

  “You have a phone call.”

  She stepped out of the way and I hurried down the hall to the dangling phone. Whoever called had probably hung up, but … “Peters,” I said.

  “Don’t go,” came a voice that sounded as if it were being filtered through a bag of seashells.

  “Go?”

  “With Fields,” the voice said. “You go, you die. Both of you.”

  “Hipnoodle?” I asked.

  There was no answer.

  “I saw the letter you sent Fields,” I said. “I thought you wanted him to come after you.”

  “Come to Philadelphia and you both die.”

  He hung up and so did I, as the doorbell rang. Mrs. Plaut ambled down the stairs and opened the door. Fields stood in the doorway wearing his straw hat. He doffed it to Mrs. Plaut and said, “Good evening, madam.”

  “Fields,” she said. “Mister and I saw you on the stage in Marietta, Georgia, back in ’09.”

  Fields smiled and looked up at me on the landing. He stepped in and Mrs. Plaut closed the door.

  “You juggled,” she said. “Lots of stuff, boxes, hats, Indian clubs. Ad said you were the world’s greatest juggler. You were.”

  “Still am,” he said with pride. “Though there is little call for or appreciation of that skill in the modern world.”

  “I agree,” she said. “Don’t care much for seeing young girls with almost nothing on.”

  Fields looked up at me, perplexed.

  “I’ll be right down,” I called and headed for my room. “You’d better shout if you expect Mrs. Plaut to come close to understanding what you’re saying.”

  I checked the bed, picked up my suitcase, turned off the light, and went to Gunther’s room to leave a note telling him that I had left. Then I went downstairs and found Mrs. Plaut and W. C. Fields seated in the living room. None of the other boarders were there. She had poured him and herself a glass of her famous elderberry saft.

  “A dose of gin might give it an extra tang,” he shouted.

  “Fine by me,” Mrs. Plaut said.

  Fields took a flask from his back pocket and poured a generous amount into his glass, and Mrs. Plaut’s.

  I stood in the doorway, waiting. They drank.

  “Exhilarating,” she said with a smile, and emptied the glass.

  “Not bad,” Fields agreed.

  “I’ll give you a bottle to take with you,” she said, getting up and moving past me.

  “Admirable female,” Fields said, finishing his drink. “Little twig of a thing should be staggering around the room, unable to locate a saft bottle or firm furniture.”

  “She comes from hardy stock,” I said as Mrs. Plaut returned with an unopened bottle of saft and handed it to Fields, who had risen.

  He took the bottle, stood back a few feet, threw the bottle in the air and, as it came down, took off his hat and threw that in the air.

  “Good high ceiling,” he said, juggling the hat, bottle, and the empty glass from which Mrs. Plaut had downed her saft and gin.

  “Time was,” he mumbled as the bottle went back in the air, “I could keep five separate items afloat and every so often pretend one of them was getting away from me. Now …”

  He gathered the bottle, glass, and hat in, placed the hat on his head and the bottle and glass on the table, and bowed to Mrs. Plaut, who clapped.

  “I take it then,” he shouted, “that you have continued to be a loyal fan.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Plaut. “I don’t go to your movies. I don’t see anything funny about them. You should go back to juggling.”

  Fields’s smile froze as he strode past Mrs. Plaut and motioned for me to follow him. I did. When we got out on the porch, I told him the car was taken care of and would meet us in Philadelphia. Fields turned toward the door.

  “Should have bashed the old bat with this bottle of elderberry saft,” he growled.

  “I just got a call,” I said.

  “Strangling her might be called for,” he mumbled.

  “Caller said he’d kill us if we went after Hipnoodle,” I said.

  “Probably thinks Chaplin’s funny,” he said.

  “Did you hear me?” I said. “Someone just called me and threatened to kill us if we go after Hipnoodle.”

  Fields went down the stairs. I followed, my, fathers suitcase in hand.

  “If I counted all the times I’ve been threatened with murderous mayhem,” he said, “I’d need all my fingers and thumbs and most of yours. Let’s go, Peters. The game’s afoot.”

  The Chimp drove the car to the airport, looking at us sullenly in the rearview mirror.

  “He wants to drive the Caddy to Philadelphia,” Fields explained. “I barely trust him to ferry me within the confines of Los Angeles County.”

  The plane ride to Philadelphia, with a changeover in Chicago, was reasonably uneventful—as uneventful, I discovered, as any trip with Fields. I sat by the window. He sat next to me on the aisle. I don’t like airplanes. They crash and kill people. I like trains, buses, and cars. They crash and kill people too, but I feel some sense of control and connection to the earth. A crash on the ground is fast. Split second. No time to think. You lose control or get blind-sided and you’re dead
or in the hospital. In a plane you have all the time it takes from the moment you know you’re going to crash till you hit the ground. I was miserable, but I kept my mouth shut and looked out of the window when Fields wasn’t talking.

  He had brought a huge thermos with him. “Filled with pineapple juice,” he confided. “Only thing I drink when I’m making a movie or chasing thieves.”

  The thermos was filled with martinis. I knew it and everyone on the plane who knew who he was probably strongly suspected it. People came for autographs, which Fields generously gave, juggling a cup of his “pineapple juice” in one hand as he signed everything from autograph books to airline-ticket envelopes. One man in a business suit, at whom the great man beamed with pleasure as the plane suddenly and loudly dropped a few feet and I closed my eyes, actually had a copy of Fields’s Fields for President. Fields signed with a flourish and the man went back to his seat, examining the signature.

  “Book sold like hotcakes,” Fields confided in me as we hit another small pocket of turbulence and I wished I had gone with Gunther.

  We hit frequent turbulence. None of it seemed to register on Fields, who never fastened his seat belt.

  “No one buys hotcakes,” Fields said almost to himself. “People buy cars, cans of tuna, millions of bottles of beer and scotch, hats, bacon and eggs, but not hotcakes. You can get them free at Shrine breakfasts and Sundays at church socials. You can make them at home for practically nothing. No one buys hotcakes and no one bought my book. Damned funny book too. You should read it.”

  “I will,” I said, feeling decidedly queasy.

  “A small libation will help your distress,” Fields said.

  What the hell. I took the cup, sipped at the gin. He urged me on. I finished the drink and handed him the cup.

  “There,” he said with a satisfied smile. “Feel better?”

  I felt worse, but I said, “much better” and closed my eyes.

  Fields had brought a copy of Dickens’s Great Expectations and as I sat back in fear, he chuckled.

  “Read this book maybe six times,” he said. “Scene of Pip describing his home life is one of the great comic monologues of all time. ‘Connubial missile.’ Says his parents used him as a ‘connubial missile,’ throwing him at each other. Strikes me as a proper use of a child.”