A Fatal Glass of Beer

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  Fields, in the act of mixing a drink, looked over at me. “Not alone,” he said. “I figured that out. Whoever shot Jack’s prankster and pulled off the fingerin-the-cast routine required more gray matter than the Chimp possesses.”

  “No,” I said. “He was in my room last night.” I told Fields what Albert Woloski had told me. He listened carefully and nodded his head.

  “Then,” he said, “it will make the pursuit of my missing savings a bit more difficult, though the Chimp has, if his story is true, seen the thief and killer and can identify him.”

  “I think it’s true,” I said.

  We were on the open road now, just a mile or so outside of town, heading for Los Angeles, when Gunther slid back the window and said, “There is a car in the ditch ahead.”

  I looked out the window. The car was on its side and a figure was in the front passenger seat. The figure didn’t seem to be moving. The car looked as if it had tumbled over at least once.

  “Pull over,” I said.

  “It may be a trap,” said Fields.

  “How could the killer know we’d be the ones to find the car?” I asked.

  “A hunch, the knowledge that we’d leave when we got the money, the … stop the car.”

  Gunther pulled over in front of the downed automobile. It was a prewar Oldsmobile. Through the cracked windshield we could see someone crunched against the passenger door. As we moved forward, I unzipped my jacket so I could reach my .38 and probably manage to shoot all of us if anything happened.

  At first we couldn’t tell who the man was. His face was covered with blood, but his body was the first giveaway and then his voice, soft, tired, through the open driver’s-side window.

  “It’s the Chimp,” said Fields.

  “Shot me,” said Albert Woloski. “Through the window.”

  “We can see,” I said.

  “Hurts,” he said.

  “I’ll get help,” said Gunther, turning to hurry back to the car.

  “No,” said the Chimp as loud as he could. “Lots of shots. Broken. Get the police.”

  I was leaning close to Woloski now. “First we’ll get you to a hospital, and then we’ll get the police,” I said.

  He reached up and grabbed my jacket with his bloody hand. Even with at least four bullet holes in him and who knows how many broken bones and punctured organs, he was strong enough to pull me toward him and barely gasp, “Get the police. The police.”

  “Fear not,” said Fields. “We’ll get medical and constabulary assistance. I was wrong about you, Albert. I should have nicknamed you Gunga Din.”

  I don’t know if it was a smile or a grimace of pain, but it appeared on Woloski’s bloody face and he released my jacket and slumped back. I pushed broken glass out of the way and reached in to touch his bloody neck. No pulse. His heavy breathing had stopped. I forced myself to lift one of his eyelids. There was nothing but death in them.

  “Gone,” I said.

  The three of us looked down at the corpse.

  “What now?” asked Fields.

  “We can go home, call it a loss, and whoever did this will stop killing people and live a life of ease off your money,” I said.

  “Are you quitting?” he asked.

  “I’m considering it,” I said and then looked down at the body and the blood on my jacket. “I’ve considered. If you want me, I’m still on.”

  “Good,” said Fields. “To Los Angeles to pursue a strategy to recover my money and put the culprit in jail for the rest of his life. He has now murdered two of the few apparently honorable men on this spinning orb.”

  We got back in the car and headed for Los Angeles. Gunther stopped at the next town, and I called in the murder and its location to the Utah State Police without giving my name.

  Chapter Twelve

  I advocate extreme self-control. Never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.

  “Where’s the butler?” asked Fields as the door to his house opened. He had been unable to find his keys and was showing definite signs of irritation toward the woman who opened the door.

  “Quit,” said Fields’s secretary, Miss Michaels, dressed for business and awaiting the return of her boss, who had called her from a dusty phone booth just across the California border.

  The Cadillac grumbled away with Gunther behind the wheel. Miss Michaels barely gave the battered, disappearing car a look. She was used to such things, I suppose. I was carrying Fields’s two suitcases and my own. Gunther was going to drive the Caddy to No-Neck Arnie’s garage for a body job, and then get back to work. Gunther had told me at one of our rest stops that if I required his services for another odyssey with Mr. Fields he would prefer not to be a part of it, though he would do so if I asked him. I promised not to ask him.

  “Is he here?” asked Fields, bustling past her.

  “He is,” she said. “In your office. I reached him immediately after you called.”

  “My office?” said Fields. “I don’t want that chiseler going through my personal effects.”

  I put Fields’s suitcases down inside the door and kept my own in hand.

  “He’s checking the remaining bankbooks,” said Miss Michaels, now behind Fields as he examined each room and noted, with some satisfaction, that the ceiling in the living room seemed to be sagging a bit more. There was a low balcony overlooking the living room, where a maid was working.

  “What the hell is she cleaning?” Fields demanded.

  “It gets dusty,” said Miss Michaels calmly as he moved through the room and up the stairs.

  Fields, Miss Michaels, and I entered his office. Seated at the table near Fields’s desk was an overweight, white-haired man in a pair of brown slacks, a tan shirt, and an open sports jacket that matched his slacks. The man had a long pad of paper and a pile of different-color and different-size bankbooks in front of him. He did not look up when Fields entered the room.

  “Miss Michaels,” Fields announced. “I am going to shower, shave, put on comfortable accoutrement, deal with that thief who claims to be an accountant and is going through my private financial papers sans permission, dictate several letters to you, and then meet with Mr. Peters here to plan our future strategy. I’ll inform you when I am ready for you. Meanwhile, Mr. Peters may want to freshen up.”

  The accountant, who was introduced to me as John Neuenfeldt by Miss Michaels, lifted a hand—the one without the Parker pen in it—to acknowledge the introduction.

  “I’ll be charming later,” Neuenfeldt said.

  Miss Michaels led me to a bathroom on the first floor, showed me where the towels were, and disappeared. I put my suitcase down on a laundry hamper, surprised that the room was pink, the towels white, and the shower curtains pink with white polka dots. There was a fresh bar of green Palmolive soap and even an unopened bottle of Prell shampoo. The room didn’t have a touch of the Fields eccentricity. Even the oil painting on the wall—of a seaside picnic—was out of keeping with the lunacy of Fields’s house.

  I got out the last of my fresh underwear and socks and a clean blue short-sleeved cotton shirt that didn’t go too badly with my dark slacks. I got undressed, looked at myself in the mirror, and wondered how that man could be me. In almost half a century of life, I was still a little surprised by the tough, broken-nosed, ruffle-haired man in front of me. Part of it was the stubble on my chin, neck, and cheeks, but most of it was me.

  I turned on the hot water in the shower, ignored the pink scale in the corner that would tell me what I already knew. I had eaten too much, exercised not at all, and put on a few pounds in the last week.

  The water felt good, hot, and relaxing while I washed, shaved, and shampooed. I let the hot water beat down on my aching lower back three or four minutes. I just stood there with my eyes closed and began to sing my usual medley of shower jingles:

  “Don’t despair, use your head, save your hair with Fitch shampoo.… Rinso white, Rinso white, happy little washday song.… Oh, the big red letters stan
d for the Jell-O family.… Buy Eversharp, try Eversharp for writing pleasure …”

  A voice crackled into the room.

  “No singing in my abode,” came Fields’s voice. “I consider it a far greater sin than blasphemy in a Catholic church. Peters, get dressed and get back up here.”

  The crackling stopped. I got out, dried myself, found the hidden speaker and microphone in a vent in the ceiling, and got dressed, taking an extra few seconds to comb my hair. With my bag repacked and my zipper jacket back on, my .38 under it tucked neatly in my holster, I made my way back up to Fields’s office and knocked.

  “It’s open,” Fields shouted.

  I went in. Fields was behind his desk, wearing an ornate dark kimono with dragons on it. It looked to be silk. So did the sash around his ample middle. He held a drink in his hand and his nose was covered with white cream. Miss Michaels was seated across the desk from him. His chair was decidedly higher than hers. In fact, her chair looked like one Gunther might be comfortable in. She had a pad out and a pencil in hand.

  John Neuenfeldt, the accountant, was still hunched over his pad and the bankbooks.

  “Have a seat, Peters,” Fields said, swiveling so he could take a look at his war map on the wall. “I’m just concluding a few essential missives.”

  I put my bag down and took a seat, a solid walnut chair with curved arms.

  “Read that back to me, my dear,” he said. “I’ve momentarily lost myself in the solar system of my unconscious.”

  “Dear Chinaman,” Miss Michaels read. “All is well here except for the nightly attacks by the Kickapoos. I too was under the impression that they were a peaceful tribe and had all been slaughtered by land-grabbing Comanches, but history as written is a sham.”

  “Ah, yes,” said Fields, taking a sip. “Let us continue. ‘We are having no trouble fighting off the attacks with my shotgun. I’m down to two drinks before breakfast, am exercising regularly, and weighing movie offers which keep coming in as I endeavor to finish my script about the man who inherits a zoo. I’ll see you next week. Don’t bring me a new tie. I miss you.’”

  “Signed?” Miss Michaels asked.

  “Woody,” Fields said, looking at me and Neuenfeldt to see if we were going to react. We didn’t. He went on. “Letters to the presidents of all the banks on the list you prepared, the ones we went to, with the exception of the last two. ‘Dear Sir or Madam, a lawsuit will be forthcoming and you know why.’ Sign it ‘W. C. Fields, unwitting dupe who should have been protected by an institution that should have shown greater perspicacity.’”

  Miss Michaels looked up as John Neuenfeldt let out a small sigh and straightened, no longer writing, his eyes on the notes he had made on the pad in front of him.

  “To the president of the Borden Dairy Company,” Fields went on as Miss Michaels began to transcribe. “‘A traitor on my staff, who has yet to be identified with certainty, put several spoons of your Hemo concoction in a medicinal beverage in the hope, I expect, of sneaking some of the vitamins and claimed nutrients into my finely tuned internal organs. I have my suspicions about who it was, but I’ll keep them to myself until I have compiled sufficient evidence.’”

  He paused to glance at Miss Michaels, who sat placidly waiting for him to continue.

  “‘However,’” he went on, ‘“it may delight you to know that the resultant liquid concoction was surprisingly palatable. So, here is my recipe, which I offer to you for use in your advertisements featuring the grinning cow, providing I am given appropriate credit, a letter of gratitude, and a gratuity of no less than five thousand dollars. Mix a martini and add three teaspoons of Hemo. Stir thoroughly. Drink quickly and follow up with a Hemo-less martini. I hope you fully appreciate this suggestion, which should net you at least half a million new buyers of your product. Yours cordially, W. C. Fields.’ Another letter to Ken Murray …”

  “I’m finished,” Neuenfeldt interrupted in a weary tenor.

  Fields turned to face the accountant as if he had forgotten the man existed. “The result?”

  “I’ll recheck my figures,” Neuenfeldt said, “but I’d say, within two thousand dollars, that a total of over three hundred thousand, seven hundred and forty dollars was stolen from your accounts. The two-thousand-dollar leeway is necessary only because the rate of interest may have varied since the time you made your deposits.”

  Fields waved Miss Michaels from the room, saying, “We’ll continue our epistolary ventures later. I’ll call.”

  She got up and left, closing the door quietly behind her.

  “If you called me in before the bankbooks were taken,” said Neuenfeldt, rubbing the bridge of his nose, “we could have saved it all with phone calls. Told each bank you were withdrawing your money and that we were sending appropriate documentation, which I could have prepared. Checks would have come right back to you.”

  “How much didn’t they get?” Fields said, pointing to the remaining bankbooks.

  “Whoever took your bankbooks,” said Neuenfeldt, pad in his lap, turning now to fully face Fields, “just grabbed a big pile, didn’t check the balances, which wouldn’t have been accurate anyway, since they didn’t include interest.”

  “How much do I have left in those accounts?” Fields said, waving at the pile of books.

  “Again,” said Neuenfeldt, “I’m within a few thousand dollars, but I’d say somewhere over five hundred and fifty-six thousand dollars.”

  “Plan,” said Fields, turning to me, apparently having no idea, or not caring, how bizarre he looked in his silk kimono and his white nose. “I hide those savings-account books. Big John prepares the documentation and I sign the right letters after Miss Michaels prepares them.”

  Neuenfeldt got up slowly, tucked his pad into his briefcase on the desk, and said, “I’ll prepare a report this afternoon on how we can quickly put a hold on the untouched accounts and on how to get your money out of each account. I’ll bill you for my services later.”

  “How much?” said Fields when Neuenfeldt, moving lightly on his feet for a heavy man, had almost reached the door.

  “Five hundred dollars,” said the accountant.

  “Five hund—” Fields began. “I’ll take you to court. You don’t get a penny over one hundred. Any judge will be in tears once he hears I’ve lost more than a quarter of a million smackers.”

  Neuenfeldt was unshaken. He sighed deeply and turned to Fields. “Five hundred or no report, no instructions on how to proceed. Just fifty dollars for my visit today and a recommendation, if you want it, on several other accountants you can call in. I doubt if they’ll charge you less, and it’ll take them valuable time to figure out this whole mess.”

  “Five hundred dollars,” Fields said after a brief hesitation. “Send your bill.”

  Neuenfeldt nodded and left the room. I was alone with Fields.

  “I’ll hide the bankbooks,” said Fields, looking at me. “You start working on finding my stolen lucre and who killed Burton and the Chimp.”

  “Same pay,” I said.

  “Same pay,” he said.

  “If I don’t come up with leads in a week,” I said, “the deal’s off and we let the police follow up. Beyond that, you’d be wasting your money.”

  There was a knock on the door as I reached for my suitcase and prepared to leave.

  “Come in,” shouted Fields. “Man can’t get a moment’s solitude to compose himself in this Gothic manse.”

  Miss Michaels appeared at the door. There was a man behind her. She left him standing, hat in hand, as she crossed the room and handed Fields a card. Fields looked at it and indicated that she should give it to me. The card was white with a black seal in the middle. It had the name Walter McEvoy in the left-hand corner in dark ink. Under his name was simply the word “Agent,” and in the lower right-hand corner was inscribed, “Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

  I put the card in my jacket pocket as McEvoy stepped in. Miss Michaels closed the door as she left and we look
ed at the FBI agent. Around forty, well built, neatly pressed dark suit, white shirt, and dark tie. He had a good-looking round face and neatly barbered yellow curly hair.

  “And what service can I perform for the Federal Bureau of Investigation,” said Fields. “My discord with the Internal Revenue Service is between me and them. I will continue to deduct the cost of billiard balls, regardless of whether armed federal officers attempt to intimidate me.”

  “Mr. Fields,” said McEvoy calmly, hat in hand, almost at attention. “The Philadelphia police informed us of the murders and the thefts. Had you come to us before you—”

  “I don’t need any more advice on what I should have done,” said Fields, taking another sip. “What are you going to do now?”

  “Get a complete statement from you,” he said. “And the men who accompanied you. We’ve already checked on Lester Burton’s story. It appears to be true. Since Albert Woloski was an ex-convict, we’re checking out known criminals with whom he might have been affiliated. We’ll get descriptions. We’re already trying to find fingerprints and any other evidence we can work from.”

  “This is the famed criminologist, Toby Peters,” Fields said, pointing to me.

  McEvoy nodded in my direction.

  “Mr. Peters and a Swiss midget accompanied me on my failed voyage,” said Fields.

  “May I sit?” asked McEvoy.

  Fields pointed to Miss Michael’s small chair. McEvoy took the one Neuenfeldt had vacated instead and turned it to face us.

  “I’d like your statements individually,” he said, placing his hat on the desk next to the pile of bankbooks. “And without the other person present.”

  It was reasonable police procedure. I nodded to Fields, who said to me, “Peters, why don’t you go dally at the billiard table? I’ll call you when we’re done here.”

  I picked up my bag, went out, closed the door, and did as Fields suggested. I can play pool better than I can shoot a gun, but not much better. My brother once suggested that I have my eyes examined. Maybe he was right. I found a cue and fooled around. It wasn’t more than fifteen minutes before I heard Fields’s voice from somewhere in the room.