“I’ve got about two hundred cards on vampire plot variations,” he said dripping chili on a copy of American Mercury. “I could do a vampire script in five days … no, three days, but nobody wants vampire scripts. They want war stories. That’s what I was trying to feed Faulkner, but he kept getting melancholy about the war and some brother who died in an airplane. Say, I earned my money working with him.”
I finished up, we shook hands, and he asked whether he could get in touch with me some time to work up some plot cards from my cases. I told him it was fine with me and left him to clean up the dishes and find the typewriter he had temporarily misplaced.
I headed home because it was easier to park there than my office, and I wanted to catch Gunther. I passed Mrs. Plaut on the way in and said, “Good afternoon.”
She smiled back and said with as much relevance as was her wont, “You didn’t bother yourself.”
Gunther was in his room, which looked like the model for a Good Housekeeping ad. Everything was always in place and clean. His books on the shelf were all lined up evenly, and there was seldom more than a book or two on his desk and a manuscript.
“Well, Gunther,” I said. “How did it go?”
He took out his notebook and read:
“Shatzkin made no reservation nor did Faulkner when they ate at Bernstein’s. If they were there, they simply took their chances. No one recognized them or remembers them. Both lobster naturale and the shrimp salad are, of course, on the menu.”
He put the notebook away and looked at me. After borrowing a couple of nickels from Gunther, I went down the hall to the pay phone and got through to the Wilshire station. I asked for my brother.
“Pevsner,” he growled.
“Brother of Pevsner, Son of Pevsner. Grandson of Pevsner,” I answered.
“What the hell do you want? Hold it.” Then, to someone in his office, “So don’t book him. Just take him upstairs and question him a little before you let him go.… Okay, Toby, what do you want?”
“Listen,” I said, “I’ve got some questions on the Shatzkin murder you guys may want to follow up.”
“Take it up with Cawelti,” he said.
“Can you just listen?” I shouted. “You’ve got me hobbling around this damn city. The least you can do is listen.”
“Talk fast,” he said. Age or war scare was creeping up on Phil. He actually responded to an emotional plea. I didn’t like it.
“I saw Mrs. Shatzkin. She’s pretending to be broken up, but she’s not. She never saw Faulkner in her …”
“Besides the time he came through the door and shot her husband,” Phil put in.
“But how did she know it was Faulkner? When I showed her a picture of Harry James, she swore it was Faulkner.”
“She’s a confused woman with a lot on her mind,” Phil said impatiently.
“She’s a confused woman who has devoted some of her first morning of widow’s grief to getting rid of photographs of her husband. Now why would she do that?”
“She doesn’t want to be reminded of her grief,” he said. “Is this all you’ve got?”
“Why did Shatzkin take Faulkner to Sixth Street to eat? It’s nowhere near his office, and he didn’t like seafood. It looks like he wanted to go somewhere where he wouldn’t be recognized.”
“It looks that way to you,” said Phil. “To a jury and me it looks like he went to Bernstein’s. What has this got to do with anything?”
“Faulkner says Shatzkin called him to set up the meeting,” I went on. “Shatzkin’s secretary says it was Faulkner’s idea.”
“We didn’t book Faulkner for a lapse of memory or for lying about his business deals,” Phil returned to his growl.
“Okay,” I gave it another try. “Faulkner says Shatzkin was a loud-mouthed, fast-talking pusher at lunch. Shatzkin’s secretary says the dead man was a pussycat.”
“So where are you taking this?” Phil demanded. “We’ve still got the dead man’s statement. I’ve got it right here,” I heard him shuffle some papers and then read. “Officer Bowles: ‘Take it easy, sir.’ Shatzkin: ‘Faulkner shot me. William Faulkner. Why did he do that?’ Officer Bowles: ‘Take it easy, Mr. Shatzkin.’ Mrs. Shatzkin: ‘Officer, it was Faulkner. He came right in and shot Jacques for no reason, no reason.’ We also found the gun. in Faulkner’s hotel room.”
“Someone’s trying to frame him,” I said.
“A unique argument,” rasped Phil.
“And no motive,” I said.
“Take your tale to Dick Tracy,” he said and hung up the phone.
I invested another nickel and called Vernoff.
“I forgot to ask you something,” I said. “Why did Faulkner leave just before nine last night? Why not earlier or later? Just coincidence?”
“I don’t remember,” said Vernoff. “I think he just said he needed a break and would be back in an hour.”
“Thanks,” I said and hung up. I needed another talk with Faulkner, and I owed Bela Lugosi a day’s work. A few more of Shelly’s pain pills got me back to the station. This time I was led down to the lock-up where Faulkner was sitting in a cell.
“Mr. Leib believes there is a chance bail can be set for me in spite of the charge,” he said, putting aside the book he was reading. The turnkey hovered impatiently at my side.
“This’ll take a second or two,” I said. “I need some answers. Whose idea was it to eat at Bernstein’s?”
“I told you it was Shatzkin’s,” he said impatiently.
“Why didn’t you go up to Shatzkin’s office?”
“Because he was walking down the stairs when I arrived. He recognized me and we simply turned around and walked out. I fail to see the relevance of these questions.”
“I’m not sure I do either,” I said. And it was clear that the fat blue-uniformed turnkey didn’t see the point.
“Shatzkin called you to set up the meeting.”
“That is right.”
“On Friday night when you were working with Vernoff, whose idea was it to take a break just before nine?”
“I think it was mine. I found the man barely tolerable and had quite as much as I could absorb. Working with him was not my idea but a condition of the studio. He actually told me that he could reduce As I Lay Dying to one hundred fifty plot cards. The man is a menace to creativity.”
I bid Faulkner goodbye, resisted the temptation to chuck the turnkey under his five chins, and limped outside with the feeling that I had something in all this, but I didn’t know what the hell I had.
CHAPTER FIVE
On the way back to Hollywood, I stopped at a fifteen-minute car wash, watched some guys in blue overalls fail to turn my speckled Buick into a pumpkin, paid my forty-nine cents and decided to stick with the Faulkner case. I’d give Lugosi a rebate or something for each day I didn’t work. I needed the money, but there wasn’t much of me to go around and what there was was fragile.
I was heading up Van Ness when I spotted my tail, a dark Ford two-door about a block behind. The sky had clouded fast and promised rain to give my car an extra wash it could now do without. The sudden darkness made it tough to see who was driving the Ford. I turned right on Santa Monica and then left on Western, moving slowly. Sure enough, the Ford appeared a block behind, taking cover behind a Rainer Beer truck. I went down on Fountain and made a circle around the block, turning on two wheels and hoping no patriot had spotted me burning rubber. U.S. Rubber was running full-page ads in magazines and the papers telling us that for the duration of the war “every ounce of rubber is a sacred trust.” I even had a copy of their free thirty-two-page booklet, “Four Vital Spots,” on how to make tires last longer, but I considered this a potential emergency. Arnie, my no-necked mechanic on Eleventh, could get me retreads if things got bad.
With my right fender rattling enough to frighten an old man walking his dog, I made it around the block in about ten seconds. Figuring the speed my tail was going, I should have wound up right behind him, but I didn�
��t. He was gone. I prowled the neighborhood for a few minutes and headed home to the boarding house on Heliotrope.
Assuming the dark Ford was not a ghost out of my past, and that was not an entirely reasonable assumption, then the likelihood was that it had something to do with the Faulkner case. Somewhere in this busy Saturday, I had touched a nerve. But why follow me? To see where I was going? Whom I was talking to? Probably. At this point, it wasn’t likely that I was on a potential victims list, but you never knew. When I parked a block away from the boarding house, I took my .38 from the glove compartment, convinced myself that it still worked, pocketed it, and got out. The rain caught me ten feet from the car. It was a cold rain that poked through my coat and made it heavy. My knee told me not to run so I plodded along, abandoning renewed plans for an assault on Carmen that night.
When I got to the porch, I looked like an enormous sponge. Mrs. Plaut was there, beaming down as I lumbered up the stairs and leaned against the wall.
“They bring May flowers,” she said brightly.
“It’s January,” I said, “not April.”
I shed my coat to ease my burden up the stairs.
“You had another call, Mr. Peelers.”
“Charlie McCarthy again?” I asked.
“No, Baylah Lougoshe,” she said precisely, pronouncing it correctly. “She had a very strange accent.”
“He, Mrs. P.,” I corrected, “it’s a man.”
“I think she was Norwegian,” she guessed.
“Do Norwegians have different accents from Swedes?” I said before I could stop myself.
“Definitely Norwegian,” she said, turning to smile out at the rain.
The stairs were lonely, high, and steep, but I had promises to keep, so up I went, coat in hand, heart in mouth, brain in gear.
I fished Lugosi’s home phone number out of my sopping wallet and called on the hall phone. A child answered.
“Is Mister Lugosi there?” I asked.
“Hello,” he repeated brightly.
“Is he there?” I tried. “Or anyone more than three feet tall?”
“He’s working a movie. He’s a doctor.”
Someone took the phone away from the boy.
“Hello,” I shouted.
“Mr. Peters,” came a woman’s voice.
“Right,” I said.
“Mister Lugosi is at the studio, Monogram, shooting. He wanted to know if you could meet him there. He said it was rather important.”
“What was it about?” I asked, taking off my wet jacket and watching the trickling trail from my clothes creep down the stairs behind me.
“He didn’t say,” the woman said. Her voice was pleasant, efficient, and strong, and she was ignoring the boy in the background demanding something that sounded like “Skpupsh.” She told me where Monogram was, but I didn’t need the information. I needed another bath and a large towel. I thanked her, hung up, and made it to my room, where I left a trail of discarded wet clothes on the way to my mattress on the floor. Two days earlier I had been thinking of picking up a few dollars by pumping gas. Now I was floating in clients and water.
Ten minutes later, I forced myself up, rebandaged my leg, gulped a few more of Shelly’s pain pills, and put on my second suit, which was too light for the weather and too dirty for society. I tried not to think about the rain that was telling my bad back to beware. Maybe I succeeded. Maybe my old theory that the body can tolerate only one major pain at a time was true. Come to think of it, it wasn’t my theory. I got it on a Shadow radio show from a mad scientist who was torturing a girl he wanted to turn into a gorilla. I’d have to tell Phil my pain theory the next time he tried to hit me with a desk.
And still I waited, looking out at the falling rain, knowing I had a block to go to my car, knowing my coat would be of no use. A large bowl of Grape Nuts mixed with puffed rice and too much sugar helped. I felt better, but wasn’t thinking any better. The rain looked as if it was stopping or at least taking a dinner break. Giving myself a pep talk about responsibility and financial security, I braved the elements, scanning the street for the dark Ford. There were a few parked on the street, but they had been there when I came in. Almost all the cars in the world were a solid dark color, except mine. A lot of those cars were Fords.
I stopped for some gas at a station downtown on North Broadway and drove past the Los Angeles River viaduct. I remembered from somewhere in high school history back in Glendale that this had once been the center of an Indian village, home of the Gabrielino Indians. They had been a branch of the great Uto-Aztecan family, which spread across North America from Idaho south to Central America. At one time twenty-eight Indian villages existed in what was now Los Angeles County.
The Indians, according to what I had been told, were among the most peaceful in North America. They seldom warred. Robbery was unknown, and murder and incest were punishable by death. They believed in one deity, Qua-o-ar, whose name never passed their lips except during important ceremonies, and then only in a whisper. The men seldom wore clothes and the women wore only deerskins around their waists. When the weather got rough, the Indians wrapped themselves in sea otter fur. Their homes were woven mats that looked like beehives. They had no agriculture, and they didn’t know how to domesticate animals. They lived on roots, acorns, wild sage, and berries and—when they could catch them—snakes, rodents, and grasshoppers. Their weapons were sticks and clubs. They didn’t know how to make bows. Los Angeles had come a long way in a few hundred years.
Monogram in 1942 was a thriving, catch-as-catch-can operation with some studio space, but not much, and a lot of shooting in the park to save a few dollars. There was no big, fancy gate and regiment of uniformed guards, but they did their best to keep up appearances. An old guy in a gray jacket and cap, who looked as if he had been riding horses for a century, hurried out to my car when I pulled up.
“Yeah?” he said.
“Right,” I came back. “I’m here to see Bela Lugosi. I’m doing a job for him.”
“Peters?”
“Right.”
“He said you might be coming. I thought he might be pulling my leg. He’s got one screwy sense of what’s funny sometimes.” The old guy waved me in and put his hands on his hips. He smiled after me. There wasn’t any need to tell me where to find Lugosi. The place wasn’t that big. I just followed the sounds past low buildings to a sound stage about half the size of anything at Warner Brothers. In a space marked for Sam Katzman, I parked behind a truck with a rusting rear door and moved as quickly as I could on my aching leg to the entrance. My attempt at speed was prompted by a desire to keep warm without a coat and not by any particular zeal for the job at hand.
The light over the door was off, indicating that no shooting was going on. Two guys, one Oriental, the other huge, were talking in front of the door about the Chicago Bears—Pro All-Stars game the next day. The Oriental guy was saying something about Sammy Baugh when I went through the door.
The stage was well lighted. The set in front of me was a phony jungle with a little hut. Three guys were huddled around a camera and from their anxiety I guessed they were having trouble with it. Lugosi, wearing a dark suit and thick makeup, was seated on a crate outside the range of lights smoking his cigar. He spotted me, stood up, and advanced on me into the shadows away from the others.
“Ah, Mr. Peters, good of you to come,” he said. “I could not reach you, and I did not want to leave a message at home for reasons you will no doubt understand.”
He was nervous and it was affecting his accent, which became more pronounced. Doubt had come out “dutt,” but there was no trouble understanding his concern.
“Before I left for the studio this morning,” he said, removing his cigar, “I got a phone call, a man, a voice I did not know, with an accent, if you will believe, stronger than my own. This man said, ‘We are going to get you now. You have only days to live.’ Then he said I knew who he was.”
“Either we have a new player,” I sai
d, “which isn’t likely, or our friend has gone another step and changed his pattern: a direct threat on the telephone.”
“Shall I call the police, ask for protection?” he asked.
“You can try, but I don’t think you’d get it, and the police can’t watch you forever. I can’t even do that. The trick is to find our friend as fast as possible. I’ll get on it.”
“Thank you,” Lugosi said seriously, pumping my hand.
“Ready in a few minutes, Bela,” a voice came from the group gathered around the camera. Lugosi waved to the men to let them know he was ready, and a young woman with a script in her hand ran to the stage door and called in the two men outside.
“Excuse me,” Lugosi said. “We have to work quickly. Time is money. I am the most expensive part of this film and it is a modest expense.”
I walked with him toward the set while the Oriental who had mentioned Sammy Baugh moved in front of the lights, waiting for Lugosi.
“What’s the picture?” I asked.
Lugosi shook his head and smiled sadly.
“A very timely epic written last week and not yet finished. “It’s called The Black Dragon. I play a plastic surgeon who transforms Japanese into Occidentals so they can spy on America. In the end, I am to receive ironic justice for this misdeed. It goes on. I look in the mirror in the morning and I say to myself, ‘Can it be that you once played Cyrano and Romeo?’ Always it is the same. When a film company is in the red, they come to me and say, ‘Okay, so we make a horror film.’ And so that is what we do, what I always do. And I do my best. That is the trick.” He adjusted his tie, took a last puff on his cigar. “Always play it seriously no matter what the material. And always talk slowly so you will have more screen time.”
Lugosi stood erect, convinced his face into an evil smile, and stepped into the lights.
“I’ll be in touch as soon as I have anything,” I said. He nodded in acknowledgment. “And I’ll have someone watching your home just in case.”
With this he turned, dropped the film smile, and gave me a real one, which I returned. Then a voice shouted, “Quiet on the set,” and I went out the door.
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