"I think your blood pressure is going up, Phil," I said softly, wondering if I should make a break for the door.
"Where does it say it, Toby?" he said evenly.
"Law of the Jungle. Code of the West. A Man's Gotta Do. Come on, Phil. What have I got to sell but a hard head and a closed mouth? My client didn't kill anybody. You know I didn't kill anybody."
"The chief of police of Glendale wants you on a possible homicide or withholding evidence," said Phil, standing up and turning his back on me.
Phil's hands were knotted behind his back.
"Between you and me, strictly off the record?" I asked.
"I can't do that," Phil said, with a distinct pause between each word.
"You can, Phil. You just don't want to."
He turned suddenly like a wild bear, face red, teeth clenched. I jumped out of my chair and moved back toward the door. Phil closed his eyes, took a deep breath. His face returned to its normal color.
"Off the record," Phil said.
"Clark Gable."
I was standing behind the chair now.
"Clark Gable?"
"Yes."
"Gable's in England," said Phil, loosening his tie even more and glaring at me.
"No, he's back for a few days. No one knows. He's at his house in Encino. Jeremy Butler's with him. I've got the number. I think someone may want to kill him. Spelling, the guy who shot Gouda."
"Why?" Phil asked. "Why does this guy Spelling want to kill Clark Gable?"
"I don't know," I said. "Give me a few days and maybe I'll find out."
"And maybe more people will be murdered."
"Can you protect everyone who worked on Gone With the WindT' "Friday," said Phil, sitting at his desk. "You got till Friday."
"Thanks, Phil," I said.
His eyes were closed now.
"Phil?"
"I'm meditating," he said.
"Medi-?"
"Just close the goddamn door and get the hell out of here. Friday you come with answers or I find you, manacle you, and personally drag you to Glendale."
I didn't say thanks. I didn't say anything. I opened the door and left. I took a cab back to Gouda's lamp store. A crew of men and women in overalls were sweeping up glass and boarding up windows.
Tools Nathanson was standing in front on the sidewalk, a blank look on his face, a hammer in his hand, watching the crew sweep away his partner's passion.
I got in my Crosley and headed for the Farraday Building.
Chapter 8
The Carolina Hotel was top dollar. A girl in a cute red-and-gold short-skirted uniform, one of those little bellboy caps tied around her chin, took the keys to my Crosley and gave me a grin. I gave her a buck for not noticing I wasn't driving a Lincoln.
An old man in a red-and-gold uniform, long pants, opened the hotel door for me and I walked into one of the great lobbies of America. Mosaic-tile floors with flower pattern, gold walls, and plump furniture in little nooks made private by tall ferns and plants. Parrots gurgled in a dozen cages. People bustled in and out, talking business, making deals, trying not to notice if they were being noticed.
I walked the half mile across the lobby and informed the tuxedoed clerk that Mr. Varney was expecting me. The clerk, who looked as if he never needed a shave, did something with his head that might have been a nod, or maybe he just closed his eyes for an instant in acknowledgment.
I was wearing a zippered tan Windbreaker, dark slacks, a white shirt fraying only slightly at the collar, and a tie that came close to matching the dark of my trousers. In New York, I'd definitely be sent to the service entrance. In Los Angeles, hundred thousand-dollar-a-year executives dressed the way I was dressed, even for business meetings. Working-man casual was in. Only actors dressed in suits.
The clerk stepped discreetly back out of my hearing and picked up a house phone. He was replaced by a near-duplicate ready to greet the next inquiry. Nobody inquired. Clerk Two didn't smile. Clerk One returned and said, "Room 304. Mr. Varney is expecting you."
Which was what I had said.
I said thanks and turned in search of the elevator. I found it in a niche beyond where three men and a woman were sitting forward and whispering at the top of their voices.
The Carolina had an elevator operator with a smile of perfect teeth, who wore an appropriate gold-and-red uniform and looked a little like Jane Powell. She took me up to the third floor and opened the door for me.
The Carolina was Hollywood class.
The red-and-gold carpeting was thick and clean-smelling. The walls were lined with paintings and watercol-ors of California mountains, beaches, and forests. No movie stars. No reproductions of famous paintings by long-dead Dutchmen.
The door to 304 was open.
"Peters, come in," Varney called, and I came in and closed the door behind me.
The room was big. More carpets. A sofa. A pair of matching stuffed chairs with a glass-top coffee table between them. An open bar against one wall and balcony looking out on the swimming pool and Beverly Hills.
Varney was at the bar, fresh white shut open at the collar, sleeves rolled up, slacks creased, and shoes shined. A well-trimmed wave of graying hair sat on a pleasantly Indian-looMag tan face. He didn 't look anything like the dusty bitter Confederate soldier I'd met five years earlier.
"Drink?" he asked, holding up a glass of dark liquid over ice to show me he was having one.
"Pepsi, if you've got it," I said, moving to the window to get a better look at two tan girls taking lessons from a man in white.
"Meet it. Don't beat it," the tennis pro said in a booming voice three floors below.
I could hear the girls giggle. I could hear ice tinkle behind me.
"Pepsi, on the rocks," Varney said, handing me the glass.
"Thanks."
He looked down at the pro and the girls and sighed.
"Things change," he said.
"Some things," I said.
I turned and Varney pointed to one of the chairs with his free hand. I sat.
"Last time you saw me I was feeling more than a bit sorry for myself and wondering if I should spend my last few dollars and head back to selling women's shoes hi Mo-line."
He sat and looked around.
"And now," he continued. "There's a bedroom through there and a bathroom as big as a small destroyer beyond it."
"What's your story?" I asked.
"Went to New York," he said, after a long sip of golden liquid. "Did well on the radio. Tried the theater. Lucky. I came when the leading men were shipping out and the choice just off Broadway was babies or old farts for leading men. Two years earlier and I would have hit the skids and headed for Moline. Never to be heard from or cared about. I was an only kid. Mother and father dead. Relatives are all in Finland. Never married. Studio's going to have to be creative in making a biography that will get a line or two with Hedda."
"I gather you've got a movie contract," I said.
"Three pictures. Universal. All Bs, but I'm the star. God, I was lucky. Associate producer named Cantor caught me in something called Is This Seat Taken? I had a death scene and I was feeling perfect that night. I…"
He was looking at me when he stopped and he must have seen something that told him I hadn't come to admire his triumphant return.
"What is it?" he said, putting down his drink.
"The night I met you. Burning of Atlanta. Man got killed."
"I remember," he said. "Crazy accident."
"One for Ripley," I agreed. "You scare easy?"
"Normal," he said, cautiously watching my eyes.
"Looks like someone's killing off all of you," I said.
"All of?…"
"The extras playing Confederate soldiers. The ones who were there when that guy got killed."
I fished out the photograph and handed it to him. He held it in both hands for a few seconds before saying, "That's me. And this one, right here,'' he said, turning the photograph to me. "He's the one wh
o died. Lord God, I had all but forgotten that night. Do the police know? What are they doing?"
I took the photograph back and said, The police know. They're doing what they can do. Remember his name? The man who got killed?"
"No. Wait. Maybe it was Lang, or Long. I don't… someone is killing us? Why?"
I had finished my Pepsi but I didn't feel like asking for another.
"You heard something. Saw something. Said something. Did something. Best guess is that the guy who got killed was murdered and the killer's spent five years worrying that he might have been seen, or said something to give him away."
"Five years?" Varney said.
"Doesn't make a hell of a lot of sense," I agreed. "But when you're crazy, you don't have to make sense. One of the good things about being crazy."
Varney got up now and was pacing the room. I listened to the ice click in his glass and watched him think.
"I've only been back in town for two weeks," he said. "The studio hasn't done any publicity. How could this person know I was even here?"
"Crazy doesn't mean stupid," I said.
Lionel Varney snorted, shook his head, and looked at his melting ice.
"The goddamn irony," he said. "I work a lifetime for a break and some lunatic wants to kill me. Wants to kill me and I don't even know why."
"You want advice?" I asked.
Varney stopped pacing and looked down at me in the chair.
"Get a room under another name. Don't tell anyone where you are but me. I'll stay in touch and tell you when it's safe."
He was shaking his head even before I had finished.
"Can't," he said. "I'm riding some good reviews and reports and spending goodwill fast. I can't tell Universal I have to hide for who knows how long. And Saturday. Saturday I've been invited to sit at Universal's table for the Academy Awards dinner with Walter Wanger, Jon Hall, Turhan Bey, and Maria Montez. Then there's a publicity reunion at Selznick, in front of Tara. Reporters, cameras, big names. UniversaPs planning the official announcement of my contract and my first starring role. I'm not risking that, Peters. I'd rather get some protection and take my chances."
"Suit yourself," I said, standing up and handing him my glass. He had one in each hand now.
"I can't believe this," he said.
"Believe it, Lionel," I said. "Keep your door locked and pay someone big with a gun to stand outside it. And try to be calm."
I moved to the door.
"Be calm," he said with a sarcastic laugh. "That's easy for you to say. You're not on this madman's list."
"I think I am, Lionel. I think I am. I'll call you when I have something, or more questions."
Varney didn't show me out. I made my own way down the stairs. I couldn't face Jane Powell's big white teeth and smile. I wove my way through the lush jungle of the Carolina Hotel lobby, heard a parrot squawk behind me, and got onto the driveway.
"Car?" asked a young man in the familiar uniform.
"Crosley," I said. "Sort of brown."
"We only have one Crosley on the lot," he said politely and hurried off.
I could hear tennis balls hitting and echoing as I waited. I could hear the hum of traffic on Sunset I could hear my heart beating. I had a sudden urge to visit my niece and nephews or find Dash and see if he'd sit on my lap a while. I had a strong wish to go home, but I had a long day in front of me and Clark Gable's money to spend.
I parked behind the Farraday and gave Big Elmo two bits to watch the Crosley. Big Elmo was the latest in a string of derelicts who lived in the alley behind the building. There have been poets, fools, crazies, grumblers, dreamers, the dazed. One guy had returned for two seasons. Most hung around a few months, sleeping in rusted-out abandoned cars. All were willing to take a quarter or two to watch the Crosley and keep it safe from each other.
Big Elmo wasn't big. He was a straw in an oversized yellow dress shirt cut short at the sleeves. The shirt was dirty. Elmo was dirty. His wisps of hair were unruly, but his manners were the best.
"Think I need a shave?" he asked, pocketing my coins.
"Wouldn't hurt," I said.
Elmo looked around his alley domain. Cars beeped and chugged on Main Street beyond the Farraday. Elmo seemed to listen and then touch his face.
"Just need another tomorrow," he said. "And who'm I trying to impress, I ask you."
"You've got a point," I said. "But if you put the shave together with a bath, some clean clothes from Hy's or Chi Chi's Slightly Worn on Hoover, you might be able to line up a job."
"Had one once," Elmo said with a smile. "Makes me itch. Got no patience. Most guys out here…" He looked around, but there weren't any guys. "Most guys have a story. What they were. What they walked away from. You know?"
"I know," I said.
Elmo jangled the coins in his pocket.
"I got no story. No ambition. What the hell. You're born one day. Sixty, seventy years later you're dead. You know?"
"I know," I said.
Elmo shook his head.
"So," he went on, "the way I figure it, why waste the sixty, seventy with work, trying to get something you can't keep anyway. I'm not starvin'. I'm not cold or wet most days. I get plenty of time to read over at the library or wherever."
"I get your point, Elmo."
"You think I could really get a job?" he asked, looking away from me. "I mean if I cleaned up okay?"
"Lot of jobs, Elmo. The gravy's in the navy."
"Cash money and room with a door," he said, more to himself than me. "Might be I'd want to try it. Never tried it."
"You know Manny's around the corner on Main," I said. "He's looking for a dishwasher. There's a sign in his window. I'll put in a word for you."
"Maybe," said Elmo.
I went to the Crosley, opened the door with my key, and reached into the cramped back seat. My gym bag was there. I pulled it out while Elmo watched me find a rolied-up pullover shirt and safety razor already loaded with a fresh Chancellor single-edged blade. I handed shirt and razor to Elmo, who took them with dignity.
"You don't like it, you can always quit," I said.
"What about your car?"
"I'll take a chance," I said.
I left Elmo standing in the rubble behind the Farraday, deciding if he had the heart to take a step into the 1940s. I wanted to feel good. I wanted to feel as if I was saving a lost soul, but I wasn't sure. I also wanted to take the edge off of what I was feeling, a combination of excitement, fear, and anger. They were still with me when I went through the back entrance to the Farraday and closed the door behind me.
When you step into the Farraday from the back door, you're plunged into a darkness without shadows. I've tripped over sleeping bums and debris. I've stepped into slick splots of who-knows what. Jeremy and Alice worked with buckets, brawn, and chemicals to stay ahead of the jungle, but it was a never-ending job, and time off for the baby or poetry only meant the streets would slouch under the door or through a window for a new assault.
I moved around a corner and made my way to the lobby door, marked with a red bulb. I pushed into the lobby and felt the same tug I always feel. Something a little sad, something I knew someday I would miss. The open tile space with a wide stairway and dark-metal railings climbing floor by floor to the sixth floor and the dirty skylight. The iron elevator next to the stairway, clanging gently from a sourceless breeze. Voices one-two-five-six flights up through the doors marked as the homes of one-man and one-woman businesses that couldn't make it in the nicer buildings a few blocks north.
Something moved above me as I headed for the stairway. I looked up and saw Alice Pallis at the first-floor railing, holding Natasha in her arms. The baby was patting her mother's head with a pudgy palm.
"Jeremy told me to look for you," Alice said. "He wants you to call him in Encino."
"Thanks, Alice," I said.
"Toby, I asked you and you said you'd leave Jeremy out of your work."
"I'm sorry," I said, starting up the s
tairs. "I don't think there's any…"
"… and we figured out your puzzle," she said.
I kept coming up the stairs. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I'd figured it out too, at least most of it.
"Great," I said as she moved toward the stairway landing.
"If it's not French," a man's voice shouted from above us, "I can't sell it. You get me French, I'll get you cash."
I got to the first floor, not even panting. Natasha reached for me and Alice handed her over. She smelled like innocence and baby powder.
"The initials of each victim," Alice said. "Charles Larkin, Al Ramone, Karl Gouda, C.L.A.R.K, G. And in his last note, he says he 'began lame but I'll end able.' ABLE. Clark Gable."
Natasha was pulling at my ear. She wasn't more than four months old, but she had inherited her father and mother's strength. Alice reached over, removed her hand from my ear, kissed Natasha's palm, and took her back. She immediately began to pat her mother's head again and gurgle.
"Your killer is issuing a warning to Clark Gable, taunting him," Alice said. "Maybe wanting him to feel responsible for the deaths of these men for no other reason than to spell the name of a movie star."
"I don't like crazies," I said.
"Who does unless they're funny?" she said.
A grinding machine sound began a floor or two above us. We had to raise our voices.
" 'I'll be there e'er the Ides and right those wrongs and claim his prize,'" Alice went on. "Jeremy thinks he wrote that to let you know that he plans to do something before the fifteenth, the ides. Jeremy had me read Julius Caesar. Caesar is warned about the ides, but he ignores the warning, and then he's murdered on the ides, stabbed by former friends."
"The king," I said. "Gable's called the king."
"So, it could be that he plans to murder Clark Gable before the fifteenth," said Alice. " 'My father wept to be so cut from fortune, fame deserved.' Suggestion, Toby. We think his father didn't get something that could have made him rich and famous, something about Clark Gable. And he plans to get his revenge before the fifteenth. Jeremy thinks your killer's father had something to do with Gone With the Wind. All three victims had something to do with the film."
Tomorrow Is Another day tp-18 Page 9
