CHAPTER 2
The upside-down name card on his tweed sport coat said he was Alvin Aardvark. He stood about six feet tall, weighed a little too much, had thin, washed-out red hair, and a grin full of oversize teeth.
“My name’s Randisi, Lou Randisi,” he said, taking my hand and pumping it twice. “This is just a joke.” He looked down at his name card and let out about an inch more of smile.
“Funny,” I said.
He shrugged and looked around the room, probably searching for a lampshade to stick on his head or a small palm tree to dump on the host.
“You’re a private detective,” he told me.
“Right.” I nodded as if he had done a brilliant piece of detection and took a gulp of my Pepsi.
Aardvark said it was to be his pleasant duty to introduce me, and for that he needed a little information. Since I was after some information myself, I thought this might turn into a fair trade.
About a dozen people were in the small dining room at the Natick Hotel in downtown Los Angeles five blocks from my office on Hoover and Ninth.
The Natick was once the most fashionable hotel in the city. The eroded marquee over the First Street entrance, the thin arched windows, and the base of the hardwood staircase with little globe-light standards represented Victorian elegance. A grilled iron elevator cage rose from the center of the large lobby.
The mile stretch of Main Street outside the hotel to Sixth, known as Calle Principal even in the Mexican days, now consisted of a line of bars, honky-tonks, barber colleges, tattoo shops, pitchmen, pawnshops, flophouses, and all-night dime movies serving as dorms for audiences of bums who slept through movie after movie ignoring the sound.
The decay of most of the street’s buildings was accented by their withering Victorian ornamentation. Things were getting better, the war was bringing money that translated into a few improvements, but you could still count on the barrooms sporting yellowed lithographs of Custer’s Last Stand on their spotted walls.
It was the monthly meeting of the Engineer’s Thumbs, the Sherlock Holmes group, and I was the guest speaker, a real-life detective. Most of the dozen members were women beyond my forty-five years. A few were men. Both men and women glanced at me cautiously but didn’t come over to talk. I watched the door to check when each new member arrived; I didn’t want to miss my lunatic. It was hard to do that and pay attention to Alvin Aardvark, who was gulping down Dewar’s and bubbling with enthusiasm.
“Have you always been a private detective?” he asked, holding his drink away from his jacket while he groped with his free hand in his pockets for something, maybe a pencil and paper, which he never found.
“I was not, like the Dalai Lama, born into my profession,” I said politely. “First I was a kid, little and then bigger, followed by a few years as a Glendale cop, followed by a few years as a studio security guard at Warner Brothers, followed by a few years of poverty and creditors. I figured it was time for me to start following something.”
Aardvark took a gulp of scotch, lost an ice cube, and watched it slide toward a corner of the room under the feet of a startled old woman in a black suit.
“I’m a teacher,” he volunteered, his eyes looking for the cube. I looked for it too. Maybe we could spend a few happy minutes watching it melt.
“A teacher,” I repeated, looking back at the door as a small bald man who looked like Donald Meek came in, accompanied by a good-looking, no-nonsense dark woman. The man was carrying a shopping bag from the May Company.
“Too old for the army,” Aardvark said, finishing his drink and touching my arm with a grin. “But I’d join like that, if they’d take me.” Like that was a failed finger snap.
“Not me,” I said, watching Donald Meek agonize over where to put his shopping bag, until his companion directed him to the small main dining table.
“Me either,” agreed Aardvark. “I lied. I lie a lot. Don’t mean to. Just comes out that way.”
“You’ve got to practice,” I advised him, watching two more old ladies come in. “Takes a lot of practice to be a good liar. May be the most important thing a detective can learn.”
“I thought about being a writer once,” Aardvark chuckled. I didn’t see anything funny in wanting to be a writer. He started to say something else, but a wave of noise from the next room drowned him out. When the sound passed, Aardvark nodded toward the other room. “Political stuff, I think. Bunch of guys with straw hats and pictures on donkeys and elephants. In the middle of a war, still thinking about politics.” He shook his head. I shook mine and chewed on an ice cube.
“Can I get you a real drink?” he asked, looking at his empty glass.
“Another Pepsi will be fine,” said I. “It’s full of calories, like the ads say. One hundred and eighty-five calories of pure energy. More than a lamb chop.”
Aardvark looked at my battered face, trying to decide if I was joking.
People a lot sharper than the Aardvark had tried to read my kisser and got nowhere. Mine is a dark face with a flat nose topped with a full head of dark hair generously sprinkled with gray. I stand about five nine and do my best to give the impression that I can take on tigers. It’s part of the job. The truth is that my nose has been smashed three times in losing causes. Once by my brother Phil’s fist, once by a flight through the windshield of a 1931 Oldsmobile, and once by a baseball thrown by my brother. I sweat too easily, dress too shabbily, and usually can’t resist the urge to open my mouth when I should keep it shut.
I smiled at an old lady in a little black hat who had looked my way. My smile scared her, and she turned to the other old lady she was with, but I wasn’t to be alone for long. Donald Meek advanced shyly and forced himself to meet my eye. Over his shoulder a possible suspect came in, a block-shaped guy about thirty-five wearing a dark suit, a black cape, a floppy white hat, and carrying a cane. He raised his chin and glanced around the room. He saw me but paused only for the space between two adjacent shots in a film and then moved on. He was a real possible.
“I’m Howard Lachtman,” the Donald Meek look-alike said, unsure of whether to hold out his hand for a handshake. Instead, he let it rise slightly. I grabbed it and said I was pleased to meet him. I’d talked to him on the phone the day before, asked him about his group, and received the invitation to come to this meeting and be the speaker.
“We’ve never had a detective talk to us,” he had said. “We have no program set yet outside of Jeff and Angela Pierce showing their prewar slides of London and Dick Campbell giving a report on …” His voice had trailed off, unable to remember what Campbell was going to report on.
“Sure,” I had agreed. “I’ll be glad to.”
And now Lachtman stood before me, coming about to my shoulders and clearly uneasy.
“We’ve never had a real detective talk to us before,” he repeated.
“I know,” I said keeping up my end of the lively art of conversation, which had all the signs of turning into the scene from To Be or Not to Be with Jack Benny and Stanley Ridges and Sig Ruman repeating the So-they-call-me-concentration-camp-Erhardt line.
“Why do you call yourselves the ‘Engineer’s Thumbs,’” I asked, not giving a damn and trying not to lose sight of the caped character who flitted from small group to small group, arching his eyebrows into each conversation.
“Because,” Lachtman said, “‘The Adventure of the Engineer’s Thumb’ is the only Sherlock tale in which the great detective didn’t catch the criminal.”
I looked around for Aardvark and a fresh Pepsi but couldn’t find him.
“Why would you want to name your group after Holmes’s only failure?” I asked playing with my now-empty glass.
The question seemed to puzzle Lachtman, who resisted a powerful urge to scratch his hairless head.
“I’m not quite sure. It wasn’t my idea. I’ll have to ask my wife, Margaritte.”
The caped character finally swooped to our duo and, having overheard the last of Lachtman’s wo
rds, beamed maliciously, put his hand on the small man’s shoulder, and uttered in a powerful phony Shakespearean English favored by American drama students, “Is that Officer Margaritte who helps old ladies cross the street?”
Lachtman didn’t know how to respond. He grinned weakly and looked in the direction of the woman with whom he had entered, who was busily putting papers on the main table.
“I think I’d better help Margaritte set things up. Dinner will be served soon.”
Lachtman eased himself out from under the grasp of the caped man, who allowed his arm to rise majestically. His glance turned to me, and the silver knob of his cane rose to his chin. It looked like a John Barrymore imitation.
“You are the detective.”
“That’s what the license says,” I answered.
He cocked his head dramatically to one side, threw back his cape, and eyed me.
“Do I get the part?” I asked.
“You don’t look like a detective,” he said grandly and loud enough to take in a few of the old ladies not too far away from us.
“I’m in disguise,” I whispered. “Like Holmes. I’m really much taller, far more elegant, and with a voice that’s the envy of Harry Marble on the Columbia network news.”
“You jest,” he said.
“When I can.” If he wasn’t my madman, he was somebody’s.
“We shall see,” he said, throwing his cape over his shoulder and turning his back. “We shall see.”
It was a great second act closing line for a revival of an old melodrama, but I wasn’t sure whether he was referring to my ability to tell a decent joke or to be a detective.
A shout from the politicians next door broke through the walls, and little Howard Lachtman seemed to be getting up enough courage to call our coven to order. I moved toward the door, scaring at least one little old lady Sherlockian, who thought I was coming at her. She gasped and stepped back, proving I hadn’t completely lost my charm.
The toilet was behind a pair of wilted palms, and I found myself standing next to a reeling guy wearing a straw hat on a head of corn silk hair. He was grinning and shaking his head as we urinated side by side, the event that has brought men together in philosophical thought since the days of Socrates.
“Political rally?” I asked.
“Salesmen,” he answered. “Middle of the worst war in history. Jap troops are at the outskirts of Mandalay. The Russian front is in trouble. The Japs are after Australia, and they announced today that they’re drafting 1Bs. I’m 1B, flat feet, bad eyes. And my boss decides it would be a morale builder for the salesmen to have a mock political rally.”
He zipped his pants solemnly, steadied himself against the white tile wall, straightened his straw hat, and asked what group I was with.
“Engineer’s Thumbs,” I said.
“Engineers,” he said.
“Right,” I agreed, not wanting to make his world any more complicated than it already was.
By the time I got back everyone was seated and waiting for me. There were about twenty of them. Lachtman let out a small sigh when he spotted me and motioned with his hand to the empty seat on his left. I strolled over while the group watched me, and I had the sudden fear that I had forgotten to zip up in the washroom. I settled myself in next to Lachtman, who introduced me to Officer Margaritte.
Lachtman rose and in a far-from-steady voice said that the dinner was about to be served and that the speaker for tonight was Tony Pastor, a real detective who would be introduced more fully later by Lou Randisi. The caped crusader who sat opposite me at one of four round tableclothed tables let his eyes roll upward in anticipation.
Randisi, alias Alvin the Aardvark, sat on my left, hurrying down a scotch.
“Teaching high school is like walking in MacArthur Park. It’s nice to look at the animals, but while you’re doing it you always step in their crap.”
That was the extent of his conversation with me during the meal.
Lachtman kept his head down and attended to eating. Randisi kept his snout in his drink and his mind on his students. It was Friday, May 1, May Day 1942. He had the weekend to look forward to and summer vacation was coming, but it didn’t seem to cheer him up through the roast chicken, salad, and orange sherbet.
Lachtman got up to apologize for the lack of sugar for the coffee. The sale of sugar had stopped three days before and wouldn’t begin again till people picked up their sugar ration books on Monday.
“A lot of things are going to be rationed,” bellowed the man in the cape, “before this war is over.” He looked at Lachtman piercingly, as if the sugar shortage were his fault. Then he said, “Cyril Overton.”
I wasn’t sure whether that was his name, the person responsible for the shortage, a black-market sugar dealer we could all go to, or someone he was turning the floor over to.
As he sat down, Lachtman said, “‘The Adventure of the Missing Three-Quarter.’”
Mrs. Lachtman leaned back to speak over her husband’s thin shoulders.
“It’s part of our procedure,” she explained. “One can throw a challenge from the Canon of Holmes tales and the challenged party must identify the story in which the item appears.”
She had good brown eyes and dark hair that reminded me of Anne, my former wife, who was scheduled to marry an airline executive. I smiled at her. She smiled back a bit too officially and returned to her sugarless coffee.
I said something to Aardvark, but he only grunted morosely, staring into his sherbet. He seemed to have a fondness for concentrating on melting things.
When dinner was over, Lachtman pulled some notes from his May Company shopping bag. I could also see a Holmes deerstalker cap in the bag and watched Lachtman’s right hand waver over it, almost touch it and pull away. He looked up at his wife, who gave him no sign either way.
“‘Darkness,’” she said softly.
“The title of chapter four of ‘The Valley of Fear,’” Lachtman answered, but couldn’t bring himself to whip out the hat and plunk it on his head. Throughout the rest of the next hour of the meeting I caught him reaching into that bag six times. He never did get up enough nerve to touch it, let alone put it on his head. I was tempted to do it for him, like my sister-in-law Ruth plunking a leather aviator’s cap on one of my nephews, Nat or Dave.
The preliminaries were painful and unswift. The Pierces had small photographs of London taken in 1937. They were passed around photo by photo while the Pierces alternated in telling how they thought each photo showed some location from a Holmes story.
The next order of business was the mysterious Campbell report. Lachtman gave the floor over to Richard Campbell, who turned out to be the man with the cape. He rose with a flourish, threw back his cape, stroked his thin moustache, and strode to the front table past a beagle-faced waiter, who had already started to clear off plates. Campbell gave the waiter a deadly glare, which did no good, and spoke.
“My report,” he began, the time between the two words equaling the duration of the Battle of Midway, “is not fully prepared. But it soon will be. Mark my word. It soon will be.”
With that he returned to his seat and folded his arms, waiting for someone to dare criticize him.
“Cynthia Brewer,” mumbled Aardvark.
The superior sneer left Campbell’s face. His eyes darted back and forth as if reading frantically through his memory of all the tales of Conan Doyle in a mad frenzy to recover the forgotten name.
“Challenge,” he shouted at Aardvark, who didn’t look up.
“He challenged,” I said to Randisi, whose eyes were cast forlornly on the disappearing sherbet.
“What?” said Aardvark, brushing a wisp of orange hair from his forehead.
“He challenged Cynthia Brewer,” came a voice, an old lady voice.
Aardvark’s confusion was evident.
“He challenged Cynthia Brewer?”
“He did,” I said. “Who is she?”
“She’s a sophomore in my early America
n history class,” he said. “How does he know her? I was just thinking …”
“And now,” said Lachtman the meek and bald, rising with a prod from Officer Margaritte before he could make another swipe at the deerstalker challenging him in his shopping bag, “Lou will introduce our speaker for the night.”
He sat down and all eyes turned to Randisi, whose head was down completely, lost in the scotch memory of Cynthia Brewer.
We waited for several moments for Randisi to stir, but the best he could do was reach up and remove his name card. We all watched in fascination as he turned it right-side up, considered putting it back on, and let it fall to the table. I introduced myself.
“What part,” asked an ancient woman with incongruously blond hair, “does deduction play in your solving cases?”
“Almost none,” I said.
“Then how do you help your clients, catch criminals, restore order?” demanded Campbell.
“I’m stubborn,” I said, looking around the room for my suspect. “I take whatever passes for a lead, and I keep after it. Sometimes I go after ten leads before I get anywhere, and sometimes I go after twenty leads and never get anywhere. My trick is to never give up.”
“Do the police ever seek your help on baffling cases?” came another female question.
The question had a sting to it. She was thinking Holmes. I was thinking that my being in this very room was the result of the only time in my life that a cop had asked me for help. I skipped that exception and gave the rule: that cops thought I was a pest, which I was, that they caught far more con men, thieves, and killers than I did and did it a lot more efficiently.
More questions came, and I kept giving answers, but not the ones they wanted to hear. The only one that seemed to please them was that I liked my work.
When I sat down Lachtman got up, thanked me, and everyone clapped politely. The meeting ended with Lachtman asking for suggestions about the next meeting. One little old lady, filled with enthusiasm, said aloud, “I’ve got it. Let’s put on a play.”
While this never failed to get a rise from Judy Garland when Mickey Rooney said it, no one in the group even gave an indication that the woman had spoken.
He Done Her Wrong tp-8 Page 3
