Elementary, My Dear Groucho

by Ron Goulart

  The guy howled, doubled up, and hopped a couple of times.

  Outside Jane was starting to come back to see what had become of me. “You okay?”

  “Run,” I advised, taking hold of her hand.

  Groucho was standing a few yards down the sidewalk. When he saw me emerge, he spun and started double-timing toward the place we’d left his Cadillac.

  From the doorway of the club somebody shouted, “Stay away, you lousy Hebes!”

  I glanced back as we ran. Four or five husky lads were crowding the exit, but nobody was giving chase. I decided against thumbing my nose at them.

  “Not the most graceful exit I’ve ever made,” commented Groucho when we caught up with him. “But, I must say, Primo, you were handy with your fists.”

  “You ought to see the way he works out with his punching bag,” said Jane. “He’s a regular Joe Palooka.”

  We reached the car and while Groucho shoved in behind the wheel, I got Jane and myself into the backseat. “This would be a good time to beat a hasty retreat, Groucho.”

  He started the engine, released the brake, and executed a U-turn. “I have to admit, children, that dropping in on Siegfried’s Rathskeller this evening was a tactical error.”

  “Probably, yeah,” I agreed. “My fault as much as yours for thinking we could get in and out without any trouble.”

  Groucho said, “I didn’t expect it would get that rough. Or that O’Banyon would be having a Silver Shirt jamboree on the premises.”

  Jane put an arm around me, leaning her head against my chest. “You didn’t sustain any serious damage, did you?”

  “No, I’m fine,” I told her. “Thanks for helping out with that chair.”

  “Saw Clyde Beatty do that in the circus once,” she said. “Not with a Nazi but with a lion. The basic steps are the same, though.”

  From the front seat Groucho asked, “Where do we go from here? Since we never got to have our chat with Von Esh, we—”

  “The message,” I remembered. I took the note out of my pocket and unfolded it. Reaching up, I clicked on the overhead light.

  In neat handwriting the note said: “Too dangerous here. Meet me at the Ebbtide Café, Venice, 11:30 tonight. VE.”

  Twenty-four

  The Ebbtide Café sat alone near a stretch of beach on the outskirts of the town of Venice. Night fog came drifting in, swirling around us as Groucho and I walked across the white gravel of the small parking lot. Unseen foghorns were hooting far off.

  “All newlyweds have squabbles,” Groucho was pointing out. “My wife and I had such lively ones that the Gillette Razor Company offered to sponsor them on the radio.”

  “This meeting with Von Esh could turn out to be dangerous, so it makes sense to—”

  “It could be dangerous?” He stopped, putting a hand on my arm. “Maybe you should’ve dropped me off at Jane’s old art school chum’s house, too.”

  We resumed walking toward the café, which gave the impression of having been built primarily out of bits of lumber that had washed up on the beach.

  Much against her will, I’d left Jane to wait for us at the home of a married girlfriend in Bayside. The fact that I didn’t want her risking her life hadn’t impressed Jane much.

  “She’s a very independent woman,” I said, pushing open the lopsided door of the little café.

  “And quite original and inventive when it comes to derogatory terms to apply to you,” he added. “As a former New England choirboy, I was quite shocked at what I heard. One doesn’t often hear such slurs as ‘ninny’ and ‘stubborn baboon’ uttered in polite society. Or, for that matter, in the sort of society I frequent.”

  Von Esh wasn’t inside the place. There were only four booths and a counter. A girl with Jean Harlow hair was the only customer and she was sitting at the rearmost booth. When we came in, she looked up from the copy of Photoplay she was reading, then checked her wristwatch, frowned, and returned to the movie magazine. Behind the counter a plump, dark-haired young man in khaki trousers and a white sweatshirt was seated at a small butcher-block table and typing on an old portable with his forefingers.

  Groucho and I settled at the counter.

  He typed another line, then hopped up and came over to ask, “What’ll you fellows have?”

  “I suppose you’re all out of cream puffs and lady fingers?” said Groucho.

  “How about a jelly doughnut?”

  “That’s an intriguing question,” observed Groucho. “If our panel of experts can’t answer it in the allotted time, we’ll be sending you a dozen mismatched volumes of the Encyclopedia Britannica and a really big box of chocolate-covered matzos.”

  “Groucho Marx,” realized the counterman, straightening up and smiling.

  “No, I’m sorry, that’s not the correct answer. So now, while the orchestra plays a medley of tunes from the popular folk opera about life on a pig farm, Porky and Bess, you’ll be sewn up in a snug burlap sack and dumped into the sea.”

  “It must be, you know, fate that brought you in here tonight, Mr. Marx.” The young man pointed at his typewriter.

  Groucho snapped his fingers. “Don’t tell me. You’ve written a play.”

  “A motion picture script,” he said. “I was just finishing up the final scene when you walked in.”

  “It has been the policy of the Marx clan, ever since we arrived on these sun-drenched shores from bonny Scotland, by way of a short detour through Bonnie Parker, never to look at anybody’s movie scripts, my lad,” Groucho informed him. “Might my amanuensis and I have some coffee?”

  “I can see your point of view,” the chubby counterman conceded. “Could I, you know, just tell you the basic notion—so as to get a professional opinion?”

  Groucho narrowed his left eye, looked up at the low, grease-speckled ceiling. “Only if you can keep the whole wretched thing down to twenty-five words or less.”

  The young man grinned. “Let me think now,” he said as he poured two mugs of coffee. “Okay, it goes like this. A pretty young girl inherits a bus line from an eccentric uncle she never met and she has to come to California from the Midwest to run it. She has all sorts of amusing adventures, falls in love with the guy who runs the rival bus line, outwits some crooks who want to use her buses for smuggling, and ends up rich and married. I call it Love on a Bus.”

  Groucho, very slowly, cleared his throat. “Ah, that’s too bad. Another one of these inheriting-a-bus-line comedies, eh?” He gave a sad, sympathetic shake of his head. “I hate to tell you this, my boy, but there are already a half dozen very similar stories in production even as we speak. Isn’t that true, Rollo?”

  I nodded. “MGM is making a musical wherein Jeanette MacDonald inherits the Greyhound Bus Company and gets into a love-hate relationship with a handsome bus driver played by Nelson Eddy.”

  “Exactly. Rudolph Friml wrote the score for that one,” said Groucho. “Over at Warners the Lane Sisters are gearing up to star in Four Bus Drivers and Edgar Bergen has just signed at Twentieth to star with Alice Faye in a screwball comedy about a ventriloquist’s dummy who inherits a gondola. Not a bus in that case, but close. And, of course, Colonel Tim McCoy is already in production with one about a young miss who inherits a stagecoach line.”

  “Darn, it looks like I did it again,” said the discouraged counterman. “Couple years back I had a swell idea about a rich playboy who pretended to be a butler and—”

  “Ah,” said Groucho as the door opened and Von Esh, bundled up in a long black overcoat and wearing a black beret, came stomping in out of the fog.

  He tossed us a very brief nod before sitting in one of the booths.

  Groucho said to the counterman, “Were I you, I’d change my story and have the young miss inherit a railroad.”

  “Hey, that’s a terrific idea, Mr. Marx. Thanks.”

  “It is, yes.” He gathered up his coffee mug and went over to join our informant.

  I followed and we both sat facing Von Esh.

>   “This is very dangerous for me,” he said.

  “Wait’ll you taste the coffee,” said Groucho. “You’ll really be frightened.”

  “I have to have fifty bucks to tell you where Henkel is hiding,” he demanded in a low voice.

  “Twenty was the price we agreed to,” I reminded him.

  “That was before all that violence at the rathskeller.”

  “Oh, that was merely a simple brawl, something you fun-loving Aryans enjoy,” Groucho told him.

  “Thirty,” I said.

  “Forty.” He leaned forward, shoulders hunched.

  “Thirty-five.”

  Von Esh made a resigned noise. “Very well. I don’t want to hang around here arguing with you.” He slid his hand, palm up, across the table.

  Groucho nudged me. “Pay this lad out of petty cash, Rollo.”

  I had forty-one dollars in my wallet. “Where’s Henkel?” I asked as I gave thirty-five of them to Von Esh.

  Taking the money, he folded it and thrust it deep into a pocket of his overcoat. Then he pulled a paper napkin out of the dispenser and scrawled a few lines on it with his fountain pen.

  Saying nothing more, he pushed the napkin across to me and eased free of the booth.

  There was a Venice street address scrawled on the napkin.

  Von Esh turned up his overcoat collar and hurried out of the Ebbtide.

  Picking up the napkin, Groucho studied the address. “This isn’t far from here,” he said.

  “More coffee?” called the counterman.

  “No, thanks. We think one cup will be sufficient to kill all the cockroaches underfoot,” said Groucho.

  Beyond the streetcar tracks in Venice is the section of town that they tried, back some years ago, to make look like Venice, Italy. Canals about ten or fifteen yards wide and three yards deep had been dredged in from the ocean. Arched bridges spanned the canals and houses and cottages were built facing the water. They never quite succeeded in capturing the essence of the original Venice and the canals were now full of stagnant water and whatever else floated in or was tossed in. Many of the houses had arrived at a ramshackle state and the land all around was marshy and overgrown.

  The house where Henkel was supposed to be lying low sat on a weedy lot just a hundred feet or so in from the foggy Pacific. There were no lights showing, no cars parked anywhere near it.

  Groucho left his Cadillac half a block away on the narrow street that ran along behind the dark cottage. “I do hope this isn’t a trap,” he said. “It’d be embarrassing to come to grief in such a shabby setting.”

  Opening the glove compartment, I took out a flashlight. “Tough to tell in this fog, but there doesn’t seem to be anybody lurking around.”

  “One of the essential qualifications for lurking is to be unobtrusive.”

  “True,” I agreed. “Suppose we sneak up on this place, being unobtrusive ourselves?”

  “You think that’ll work better than running straight at the joint with loud cries of ‘Up the rebels!’ do you?”

  “Probably, yeah.” I eased my door open and stepped out into the surrounding mist.

  Groucho got out on his side. When I joined him, he complained, “Golly, I didn’t realize it would be so difficult to tiptoe across this quicksand.”

  The weedy ground was pretty mushy. We worked our way across it, staying close to the low fence on the far right of the forty-foot lot.

  We crouched next to the two battered galvanized garbage cans that sat five feet from the back door and listened.

  We heard foghorns calling and far down the street a couple of cats were involved in either fighting or romance. But from the house we didn’t hear anything.

  “Shall we venture inside and see if the elusive gaffer is slumbering therein?” suggested Groucho in a whisper.

  Nodding, I padded up to the back door. The lock was a simple one and wouldn’t be too difficult to pick. When I took hold of the knob to give it a cautious twist, it turned.

  I pushed gingerly and, with a faint creak of hinges, the door swung open.

  “That’s a bad sign,” whispered Groucho at my side. “Traditionally an unlocked portal means the intrepid investigators are going to find a bloody corpse or six sinister foreigners who’re going to net them and sell them to a harem.”

  Ducked low, I crossed the dark threshold. I stood in the hallway for a few seconds, listening. I didn’t hear anything, but the smells of stale beer and cooking fat were strong in the air.

  After a few more silent seconds I risked clicking on the flash, keeping the beam pointed at the floor.

  Groucho nudged me gently in the back. “Forward into the fray, Rollo,” he urged quietly.

  I followed the oval of light the flashlight made on the linoleum-covered floor into the front room of the cottage.

  “Somebody on the floor,” said Groucho, “over to the right there.”

  He swung the light. “Nope, it’s only a bundle of clothes.”

  Neatly folded on the thin rug were a pair of dark trousers, a blue work shirt, socks, an undershirt, and a pair of striped shorts. A pair of large work boots stood next to the clothes.

  Pinned to the shirt was a note.

  Genuflecting, I read it.

  I am unable to live with my terrible guilt. I have decided to take my life. By the time you read this, I will have walked into the ocean to swim out until I become exhausted and drown. I killed Felix Denker, may God forgive me. Franz Henkel.

  “Convenient.” Groucho wandered over and sat on the sofa.

  The springs gave a mournful thunk.

  “Yep, solves the Denker murder, eliminates the need to hunt for Henkel.” I got out my handkerchief, used it to unpin and pick up the suicide note. “Same lettering style as all the other notes in our collection.” I folded it away, carefully, in the pocket of my coat.

  “Shouldn’t we, Inspector Wade, leave the note? It is, after all, what one might call ‘evidence.’”

  “That would make it too easy for Erika Klein and her crew,” I said. “Without the note all anybody else is going to find here is a bundle of laundry.”

  “Too bad those boots aren’t my size, or we could swipe them, too.” He stood up. “For the sake of thoroughness, Rollo, we’d best search the whole joint.”

  “Sure, even though we probably aren’t going to find anything,” I said. “I doubt whether Henkel ever actually hid out here.”

  We devoted nearly an hour to going over the cottage and didn’t find anything else.

  Twenty-five

  Groucho yawned. “If I fall asleep at the wheel,” he requested, “cover me with that quilt in the backseat.” He rolled his window down a few inches and chill night fog came spilling in. “Ah, a few lungfuls of poisonous sea mist will buck me up, matey.”

  I yawned. “I’ve been thinking about that guy who was behind the counter at the Ebbtide,” I said.

  “Wholesome thoughts, I trust.”

  Foghorns were calling on our left.

  “We tried to convince him to abandon his screenplay idea—and he probably will—but his basic notion was damned close to ours for Cinderella on Wheels.”

  “Basic ideas are a dime a dozen,” said Groucho. “No, wait. I was reading in the Wall Street Journal only last week that the price has shot up to two bits a dozen. But even so, Mr. Maugham, it’s how we flesh out the idea that counts.”

  “But maybe the whole idea is trite and—”

  “We’re dwelling smack-dab in the middle of the triteness capital of the world,” he reminded me.

  I shrugged. “Could be I’m losing my confidence,” I admitted. “Especially after our meeting with Lew Marker at Mammoth the other day.”

  “What you need, young feller, is a copy of my forthcoming book, How to Win Friends and Influence Morons,” Groucho said, closing his window. “Lew Number Two is, and I say this at the risk of offending all the decent, God-fearing halfwits in Southern California, a halfwit.”

  “Yeah, but a halfw
it who can okay our script.”

  Groucho asked, “Might I give you a little fatherly advice?”

  “Shoot.”

  “All right, do your homework every night, mow the lawn once a week, and quit worrying because you’re earning less than your wife right now.”

  “That does bother me some, yeah.”

  “I sensed that,” he said. “Chiefly I sensed it because you babble about the fact from dawn to dusk and overtime on Saturdays.”

  “Okay, I’ll continue to have faith in Cinderella on Wheels.”

  After a moment Groucho said, “And keep in mind that I already have a hit movie comedy script to my credit. I refer, of course, to that cinema classic of 1937, The King and the Chorus Girl.”

  “I keep getting those titles mixed up. Is that the one about the giant gorilla?”

  “No, you’re thinking of King Lear.”

  I said, “On The King and the Chorus Girl script you had Norman Krasna for a partner.”

  “Exactly, but even with a handicap like that, I turned out a socko movie.”

  “Krasna’s got a hell of a lot more experience as a screenwriter than I do.”

  “Listen, Rollo, I happen to be an expert on latent talent—as well as blatant talent and latex talent—and, believe you me, you’ve got all three.”

  I asked, “Was that movie a hit?”

  “More or less.”

  “I didn’t much like the guy they got to star in it. Fernand Gravet, wasn’t it?”

  “A French import. I believe Warners got him along with a shipment of cheese they’d ordered for the commissary,” he said. “I advised them to Americanize his name and call him Fred Gravy, but that was met with opposition. Joan Blondell was sure cute in that movie, though.”

  “She was,” I agreed.

  “And even when she wears lingerie, she manages to give the impression she isn’t,” he said. “That’s what great acting is all about.”

  After a moment I said, “Do you think maybe we ought to do more work on our scenario and—”

  “Not at all, my boy. In its present state, it is a gem of purest ray serene. I haven’t the vaguest notion what that means, but I don’t think we should mess with it.”