Dancing in the Dark

Chapter Eight: First You Put Your Two Knees Close Up Tight

When I got to the Monticello, I realized I should have called first. The desk clerk, a thin guy with a funeral-director smile and a blue-serge suit, told me he was sorry but Mr. Forbes and Mrs. Forbes were not in the hotel. He assumed, but he wasn’t sure, that they had gone home.

“I thought he lived here,” I said. “When do you expect him back?”

“Who knows? Mr. Forbes has many business enterprises and social obligations,” the clerk said, leaning over to copy something from one open book to another.

“Where might Mr. Forbes live?” I asked, flashing my own unwinning grin.

“I do not know Mr. Forbes’s address, and if I did know I’m afraid I wouldn’t be at liberty to give you the information. You might try the telephone directory,” he said, still leaning over his busy work. “But. .”

“Unlisted.”

“Unlisted. You could leave a message.”

A nervous blond young man in tan slacks, his white shirt open at the collar, jangled across the lobby with his hands in his pockets.

“Change for a hundred,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a crinkled bill.

The clerk nodded, opened the cash drawer, and took the bill. The nervous guy eyed me and turned to get his money. He counted it and moved away.

“I work for Mr. Forbes,” I said to the clerk.

“Who doesn’t?” answered the clerk, closing two books in front of him and looking up at me.

“You’ve got a point. Listen, I need a break here,” I whispered, reaching for my wallet. “I’m a private detective. I’ve been hired to investigate the murder of Luna Martin.”

The clerk waved my hand away before I even got the wallet out of my back pocket.

“You have nothing in that billfold that would overcome my fear of what Mr. Forbes might say or do to me were he to find out I gave you his address.”

“Then you do know it,” I said.

The clerk sighed, pursed his lips, and looked across the lobby at the hotel doors, which had just opened to an arguing couple. The man looked like he was in his late forties. The woman was under thirty and properly round.

“Good evening, Mr. Hooper,” the clerk said.

Mr. Hooper, in a white suit and a bad mood, waved and kept walking.

“Claims to be a movie producer,” the clerk confided, leaning toward me. “Car dealer from Chicago. That’s his secretary. Wife’s back home fighting the wind and watching the kids.”

“You’re sharing this information with me for a reason or you just want to be pals?”

“I’m a born gossip,” the clerk said. “Probably why I’m still a desk clerk and not on my way up the ladder at Paramount. I liked Miss Martin. She was tough, knew what she wanted, and always had a good word and a few minutes for me and the bellhops. You hang around Mr. Forbes and his friends and bad things are bound to happen.”

“Ever trade gossip with Luna Martin?”

“That,” he said with a smile, “I can sell.”

My wallet came out again. I pulled out two tens and handed them to the clerk, who glanced around to be sure no one was watching. He handed one back to me and stuffed the other into his pocket.

“Too much,” he said. “I don’t have that much to sell. Luna thought Mrs. Forbes was well aware of her existence and her relationship to Mrs. Forbes’s husband.”

“Was she?”

“Is Lincoln dead? Luna was putting pressure on Mr. Forbes to divorce the missus and marry her,” the clerk said.

“She confided all this to you?” I asked.

“I’m easy to talk to,” the clerk said. “You want to listen or you want to talk?”

“I’ll listen,” I said.

“I think Luna gave him a time limit, but I don’t know what it was. Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Forbes had no intention of divorcing his wife and marrying Luna. Mrs. Forbes is the daughter of Guiseppi Cortona. Mr. Cortona is very much alive, very fond of his daughter, and very much in charge of Minneapolis.”

“She told you this?”

“I stand behind here playing with keys, sorting mail, writing in ledgers, and listening to people who stand five feet away from this desk and talk softly in the mistaken belief that the desk makes them invisible and me deaf.”

“Got you,” I said. “Anything else?”

He shook his head.

“Slow night,” I said, surveying the empty lobby.

“Tomorrow morning will be hell and a half,” he said, looking around as if he were seeing the hordes of dawn. “When the newspapers hit the streets tonight, the ghouls will suddenly decide that a weekend at the Monticello might be fun. You know, a peek at the ballroom and the lobby, maybe a glimpse of Mr. Forbes. Mostly would-be writers who see a quick script. You know.”

“It’s happened before?”

The clerk shrugged. “A former business associate of Mr. Forbes’s from Detroit was the unfortunate victim of a robbery in the elevator the week Mr. Forbes took possession of the then St. Lawrence. The former associate was a Mr. Seymour Bratz, also known as Rat-tat-tat Bratz. The elevator came down.” He nodded at the elevator. “The door opened and Mr. Bratz was sitting inside alone and very dead.”

“You saw it?”

“Though I didn’t note at the time that the robber had taken the time between the eighth and ground floors to remove two of Mr. Bratz’s fingers. These two.”

The clerk put up his right hand and held up the pinkie and the finger next to it.

“The ghouls came?”

“Descended,” the clerk said with a nod.

“So it doesn’t get boring behind the Monticello desk.”

“It beats being shot at by the Japs,” he said. “My two younger brothers are both having that pleasant experience. My older brother was killed on Guadalcanal.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“Well, I got the waiver. Mother insisted. I was considered to be the weak one and a bit. .”

“Sensitive.”

“Let’s call it ‘fey,’ ” he said.

“You tell your life story to everyone?”

“Just the ones who pay ten bucks for it. You’ve got a phone call.”

“What?”

“The lobby phone. Over there.”

There were two phones sitting on a table with a dark marble top. The table was about a dozen feet away against a wall. The phones weren’t ringing and the clerk hadn’t spoken to anyone.

“I don’t. .”

“I do,” he said, cocking his head to one side while I took a beat to figure out the situation. I moved to the phones and picked one up. Nothing. I picked up the other one.

“Mr. Peters?”

I looked back at the desk. The clerk wasn’t there.

“Yes.”

“Forty-seven Mountain Top Road, Huntington Beach.”

The line went dead. I hung up the phone and looked over at the desk, where the clerk was just moving back behind it, a stack of papers in his hands. I nodded to him, but he didn’t look up.

I went through the front doors and into a threat of rain.

Cotton Wright, the parking-lot attendant, was seated on a low wooden stool, trying to make sense out of a crumpled issue of the L.A. Times.

“Yes,” he said, looking up at me.

“My car.”

“Your. .”

“This is the parking lot,” I said. “And that little Crosley back in the corner is mine.”

“I know,” said Cotton, standing up and touching his scalp through his thin hair.

“Your head humming?”

“Yeah,” he said. “Did I tell you about that?”

I nodded.

“Sometimes I get the wars confused,” he said, heading for the Crosley past a wide array of vehicles that made my car look like a tiny battered rolling refrigerator, which it was.

Whatever else was Cotton’s problem, he could drive. He eased the Crosley out of a tight space that wasn’t really a space, and pulled the car smoothly to my side.

“Little,” he said, getting out.

“Cheap,” I said, handing him four quarters and getting into the car and on top of my borrowed pillow.

“Someone asked me once if I could hear the radio through the plate in my head,” he said, leaning down to talk to me through the open window.

“Can you?”

“No,” he said. “That don’t make any sense. My plate hums.”

“Proud of that plate, aren’t you, Cotton?” I asked with a smile.

“Earned it,” he said, seriously.

The Farraday was about ten minutes from the Monticello and on the way to Huntington Beach, if you’ve got an active imagination and a very sore ass. It was almost six. Main Street was just waking up from its afternoon nap. There were a few parking spaces.

Knowing where to park in Los Angeles was about as tough as figuring out food-ration stamps. Mrs. Plaut was the food-ration expert. I knew parking. No parking along red or yellow curb. Three-minute limit at white curb. Fifteen-minute limit at a green curb, otherwise forty-five-minute parking in the Central Traffic District from 7:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. No parking from 4:30 to 6:00 P.M. And unlimited parking from 6:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M., thirty-minute parking from 2:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M., and unlimited parking from 4:00 to 7:00 A.M.

I parked about half a block from the Farraday, eased out of the Crosley, and headed down the street past trios and quartets of uniformed soldiers and sailors, some of them with smiling young and not-so-young women. A pair of Latin zoot-suiters were leaning against the wall to the right of the entrance to the Farraday. They were talking earnestly to Juanita the seer, who had an office on the fifth floor just below mine and Shelly’s.

Juanita is a bejangled psychic with a few years behind her. She wore clothes that Carmen Miranda would find too flamboyant, but she disdained turbans. Juanita had lost a husband back in New Jersey. I think he died. Or, she might simply have misplaced him on the subway. “Alex could still be riding up and down to Coney for all I know,” Juanita had once said to me, fingering a silver earring the size and shape of Baja California.

Juanita had discovered her powers early and given in to them only after two husbands and a quarter of a century as a housewife. Juanita was good at reading tea leaves, coffee grounds, toenails, the palm of your hand, and the top of your head. “All show,” she had confided to me once in a whisper. “It either comes to me in a flash, like that, or nothing. But clients like a show. This is Los Angeles, right?”

Since it was, I had nodded.

The problem with Juanita’s insights was that you couldn’t really figure out what they meant till it was too late.

I tried to step past Juanita and the two Mexicans.

“Pain,” she suddenly said, turning to me. “You’re in pain.”

“How you doing, Juanita?” I said.

Juanita was painted for Indian wars or serious seeing into the future. Her mouth was as red as a stoplight and her eyebrows as dark as tomorrow. Her perfume was as sweet and heavy as a Chunky candy bar. I glanced at the zoot suits. They looked me up and down and weren’t impressed.

“I’m doin’ great, Tobe, but you’ve got a pain. Not the knees.”

“His ass,” one of the zoot-suiters said.

“He a seer too?” I asked.

“No, man,” the zoot-suiter said. “I just see the way you walking. Like when I was a kid and my old man whooped me with a stick.”

“Your ass hurts, Toby?” Juanita said softly, with some concern.

“You asking or telling?”

“Both,” she said. “This is Vic and Jose. They’re brothers. They come to me. I tell them stuff. They give me stuff. Barter. It’s coming back as a means of exchange.”

“We got to get going,” one of the brothers said impatiently.

“Then you should have come on time,” said Juanita, her back to him. “Besides, you don’t have any place to go. Your evening and the night are uncharted, though there is a woman named, I think. .”

“Forget it,” the Mexican said nervously. “We’re goin’. We’ll see you soon, Juanita.”

The brothers adjusted their wide-brimmed hats, looked at my less-than-Cary Grant clothes, and departed. Juanita didn’t turn to watch them go.

“I’ve got to get going,” I said.

She took my right hand and looked into my eyes. “You’ve been dancin’?” she asked.

“Question?”

“No,” she said. “You’ve been dancin’. I used to dance when I was married to Alex. Nothing fancy. A few steps. I liked it. Alex was a good dancer, if you can imagine that.”

Not having known Alex, I could not imagine it.

“More death, Tobe,” she said, squeezing my hand and shaking her head. “Dancers are dead. That make sense to you?”

“Yeah,” I said. “I’ve really got to go, Juanita.”

“Watch the fourth dancer,” she said. “The third dancer is fire and death. Victim and killer. The fourth dancer is the one you’re looking for.”

“Juanita, I don’t want to know any more.”

“I can’t stop,” she said as a couple passed us. The young man was in civilian clothes. The woman was a WAC. They tried not to look at us in the doorway of the Farraday but we were a compelling sight.

“My curse,” Juanita said. “Can’t stop telling people their future. You should know that by now. How’d you break your car window?”

“It’s not broken,” I said.

“Forget it,” she said, giving me a smile and a playful punch in the arm. “I think I’ve got something you’ll like. A woman from your past will come to you, a woman of beauty. There was a rejection in the past but she will bring hope to the future.”

“Anne?” I said.

“Anne?”

“My former wife. She’s supposed to marry Preston Stewart.”

“The actor?” Juanita said.

“How many Preston Stewarts can there be?”

“In Hollywood, dozens,” she said.

“So, they won’t get married?” I asked, feeling like an idiot.

“How should I know?” she said with a jangling shrug.

“How should. . forget it. I’ve got to get going.”

“Suit yourself,” Juanita said, letting my hand go. “See Jeremy.”

“I was going to.”

“Good,” she said, looking down the street. “I’m going. Cass Daley’s on the ‘Bing Crosby Music Hall’ tonight. John Scott Trotter and his orchestra are going to do a patriotic medley. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.”

And she was gone.

The inner lobby door of the Farraday was locked. A sign over the panel of office names said, “After 6:00 P.M. please call the person you are here to see on the phone. They will come down and let you in.”

The sign was part of Jeremy’s patient and never-ending struggle against the walking wounded and winos looking for a corner to curl up in for the night. It was tough to come running down five or six flights to let in a client, and some of the tenants who worked late had taken to taping the inner door open which, since the telephone was constantly being stolen, was probably not a bad idea.

Tonight, the inner door was locked.

I used my key, went in, and listened to my footsteps echo across the tiled inner lobby. I liked the sound and the lingering smell of Lysol. The Farraday was evening silent. The dim shadowy night-lights were on. The baby photographer had probably folded his tripod and headed to what he called home. The talent agent on three had dropped his stack of photos of the untalented and unwary into his ragged briefcase and headed across Main for a round or ten of drinks. If any of the tenants remained, I couldn’t hear them.

I moved past the iron bars of the unpredictable elevator and started to climb the stairs.

“Toby?”

I looked up seven flights. Jeremy Butler was standing at the railing in front of his apartment, the only apartment in the building.

“It’s me, Jeremy,” I said, continuing to climb and wondering whether I should have taken a chance on the elevator from hell. Stairs were not a good idea for my sensitive rear.

“I heard the door open,” he said.

“I was coming to see you,” I said, pulling myself up by the railing.

“You are hurt?”

“You’ve got it,” I said, halfway up the second floor. “Remember that stuff you used on my back, the stuff you used when you were wrestling?”

“Of course.”

“Think that’ll help a sore rear end?”

“Yes,” Jeremy said. “Take the elevator.”

I took his advice and pressed the elevator button on the second floor. Two decades later the elevator arrived. I pulled back the grille and took the scenic century-long ride up to the eighth floor. From the elevator I could see as we passed the sixth floor that the lights to Shelly’s and my office were out.

When I finally reached the eighth floor and opened the grille, Jeremy had gone back into his apartment. His door was ajar. I followed the light and knocked.

“Come in,” Jeremy said. “Alice took Natasha to her cousin’s in Monterey for a few days.”

Jeremy stood massive, bald, and wearing black slacks, shoes, and a turtleneck sweater. In his hand was a large green bottle of a clear liquid. The room, which had once been the office of a doctor named Hamarion, who proved to have no license, was big and served as living room and office for Jeremy. He had put a door in the walls on either side and used the adjoining offices for a kitchen-dining room and a pair of bedrooms. It was well-ordered, comfortable. In a big open box near the window, Natasha’s toys overflowed.

“Take off your pants and lean over,” he said.

I closed the door behind me and moved to Jeremy’s desk near the window. I dropped my pants and underpants and leaned over.

“This was done by Kudlap Singh?” he asked.

“The Beast of Bombay,” I confirmed.

Then a cold liquid sensation washed through me, from my sore behind to the tips of my fingers. It didn’t hurt exactly, but I couldn’t say that it felt great.

“Give it a moment before you put your pants back on,” he said. “And don’t sit yet.”

I turned, still tingling, and faced Jeremy.

“There is a poetic irony here,” Jeremy said, putting the cap back on the bottle. “I learned of this treatment from Kudlap Singh. The year was 1930. The Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento a few years after it opened. We were the main event. It was his turn to win. I suffered a sprain in my right thigh when I did an airplane spin.”

“You hoisted Kudlap Singh over your head?”

Jeremy nodded.

“And he used this on me and told me how to get more from an Indian apothecary in Kansas City.”

“Can I pull my pants up now?”

“Yes.”

I pulled my underpants up slowly. I can’t say the pain was completely gone, but it was certainly almost asleep.

“I think it worked,” I said as Jeremy put the bottle on his desk.

“It has remarkable anesthetic qualities,” he said. “Take the bottle. Return it when you’ve recovered. It should only be a day or so.”

I pulled my pants up, took the bottle, and thanked him.

I tested my new freedom from agony by sitting in Jeremy’s wooden desk chair. It wasn’t bad.

“I was just writing a poem,” Jeremy said, reaching behind me and picking up a pad of paper. “Would you be interested in hearing it?”

“Yes, I would.”

“Stephen Vincent Benet died in New York early today,” Jeremy said. “He was only forty-four.”

“Sorry,” I said.

“You know who he was?”

“Poet,” I said.

“When I was still perspiring in wrestling rings from Seattle to Miami, that twenty-nine-year-old genius had written ‘John Brown’s Body,’ more than one hundred thousand words in a single poem, and he had won the Pulitzer Prize.”

Such enthusiasm was rare in Jeremy so I kept my mouth shut and listened.

“Have you read ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’?” he asked.

“Don’t think so,” I said.

“I’ve got copies in two anthologies. I’ll let you read it and ‘John Brown’s Body.’ ”

“Thanks,” I said, savoring my relative freedom from pain.

“The poem,” Jeremy said, looking down at the pad in his hand as he stood in front of me.

John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave

joined by poet, freeman and ghostly slave.

What can one say

of Stephen Vincent Benet?

He came, was struck by fevered urge

to pen his genius in a massive dirge.

Meteor burned young on entering the uncertain air

of earth, burned and took his talent rare

to the far reaches of time

where he will soar and rhyme

and carry on conversations that through Heaven resound

with Daniel Webster and old John Brown.

Jeremy looked down at me over the top of his pad.

“Resound and Brown do not rhyme,” he said. “I’m not sure whether I should find something to rhyme with Webster and switch the names or live with the closing with a slant rhyme. Your feelings?”

“Sounds great to me the way it is,” I said. “What rhymes with Webster?”

“I’m inclined to leave it as it is,” Jeremy said, reaching past me to lay his pad on the desk.

I got up, tested my tingle, and pronounced myself almost cured.

“More irony for you, Jeremy,” I said. “I’m probably going to see your old friend Kudlap Singh in less than an hour.”

“Is the situation such that he might inflict further pain on you?”

“It is a distinct possibility,” I said, testing my powers by walking across the Persian rug covering most of the wooden floor.

“My poem is finished. I think I’d like to accompany you, if you have no objection.”

“It could be uncomfortable,” I said. “I’m going to see Kudlap’s boss, who has been known to remove the fingers of those who he finds annoying.”

“An odd and phallic fetish,” Jeremy said.

“You’re telling me,” I said. “I promised Alice I wouldn’t put you in danger again.”

Jeremy folded his arms and looked at me without a smile. Jeremy had no smiles except for his wife and daughter and no frowns except for the endless parade of men without a place to sleep who sought out the corners of the Farraday.

“If you hide from every possible danger,” he said, “you find yourself discovering more and more dangers until you hide from everyone and everything. If you confront danger and your fears, you either overcome them and respect yourself or you are destroyed and die with dignity.”

I didn’t buy it but I knew I’d feel more comfortable with Jeremy at my side if Forbes decided to have the Beast of Bombay rip off one of my legs or a few of my fingers.

“I’m not asking you, Jeremy,” I said. ”If you tell Alice about this. .”

“I tell Alice of all my significant actions and thoughts.”

“She is very likely to throw me over the railing out there,” I said, pointing to the door. “I’ll make a splash that Lysol will never get rid of.”

“Is it a cool night?” he asked.

“Getting there,” I said. “Looks like rain.”

He went into the bedroom and returned with a light jacket, also black.

We stopped at my office and found a note from Violet hanging from a thumbtack on my door. It said I had received two calls from an Anita Maloney. Anita had left her number. The message concluded with, “Bivins won a split over Mauriello, in case you missed it. Heard it on the radio. Barney Ross was there. Announcer said his hair was gray and he was limping. Hope my husband doesn’t come back like that. You can pay me in the morning.”

I folded Violet’s message and put it in my shirt pocket.

There was no way, outside of major tutoring from Emmett Kelly, that Jeremy Butler could fit in my Crosley. We took his car, a five-year-old dark Buick.

“Juanita trapped me in front of the building a little while ago,” I said. “Said something about a third dancer and a woman from the past.”

“Juanita is in tune with the universal oneness,” Jeremy said, weaving through traffic. “Her curse is that she is inevitably right but so obscure that one cannot heed her advice and warnings. A modern Cassandra.”

We used my ration card to fill the tank at a Sinclair station on Melrose and then we stopped for a quick dinner at a restaurant Jeremy knew. We ate things that were green and brown and good for you and tasted terrible. And then we were on our way.

I asked Jeremy if it was all right if I played the radio. It was his car. He said yes. We listened to the last fifteen minutes of “Stage Door Canteen.” Bert Lytell and George Jessel were trying to explain the rationing system to Billie Burke, who was as bewildered as Gracie Allen. After they failed, Lawrence Tibbett sang an aria from La Traviata.

For the rest of the trip we listened to a classical music station that kept fading out until it was a distant scratch.

Before the war there were less than three thousand people in Huntington Beach and an oil derrick or two, but the handful of bleak derricks had been joined by dozens and dozens of others as the wartime need for fuel had increased. People to work the rigs and tend them and the people who sold things to the people who worked the rigs moved in. Huntington Beach was a boom town.

The tidelands of Huntington Beach were state property, but oil operators had found a new technique of drilling to bypass the state’s rights. From the town lots they had quietly and cheaply purchased, they drilled on a bias to tap the oil pools under the tidelands. In 1929 Governor Culbert L. Olson had tried to put through a bill to permit the state of California to control the oil operators and tap the oil pools for state profit. The oil lobby beat the governor in court and the whole thing was pushed aside by the rush of fear that followed Pearl Harbor.

And so Huntington Beach became a mess of pumping dark steel, and the sun-worshippers and tourists moved on to Newport Beach and Long Beach.

We found Arthur Forbes’s house just before the sun went down. It was on a street of big old wooden houses on a hill overlooking the sea and the derricks. It had once been a hell of a view. We parked in the driveway behind another car, one I recognized. Forbes’s car was probably tucked in the garage. It was a modest driveway but an impressive house with polished marble steps leading up to the door. There were lights on and the distant sound of music inside. I pushed the door bell and heard a chime inside the house.

I looked at Jeremy. He stood with his hands at his sides, showing nothing on his face. On the beach below us, the oil derricks chugged noisily.

The door opened.

A woman wearing black tights opened the door and said, “What the hell do you want?”

“We have business with your husband.”

She put her hands on her hips and considered us for a beat or two. Then she slammed the door in our faces.