Murder on a Yellow Brick Road

4

The radio was purring music softly in my ear, and a band of light was dancing across my face from a slit in the shade of the single window in my living room/bedroom. I felt like turning over for a few more hours, but I had a busy day planned and fifty bucks to earn, probably the hard way.

I turned off the radio and padded my way to the bathroom carrying my. 38. I kept the gun on the toilet seat while I brushed my teeth and shaved with a Gilette Blue Blade, the sharpest edge ever honed. I cut myself twice. After coffee and a mixed bowl of puffed rice and shredded wheat, I looked up an address in the phone book, got dressed, plunked my. 38 in the holster inside my jacket, pushed my hat back at what I considered a rakish angle, and went out into the sun.

My hillbilly neighbors had stopped feuding, and the day was clear. There wasn’t enough time to get my windows fixed, so I left them rolled down and headed for the office of Barney Grundy, the photographer who had witnessed the fight between the two midgets at Metro the morning before. I got to the corner of Melrose and Highland without anyone trying to kill me and found a parking spot a block from where I was going.

Grundy’s address was on a doorway between an auto parts store and a travel bureau. His place was up the stairs behind a door markedB. NIMBLE GRUNDY, PICTURES STILL AND MOVING. The lettering was in pink against a yellow square. I knocked, prepared for almost anything, but I wasn’t prepared for what opened the door. He was about six-foot-three, with bleached, yellow hair that would have been called white on an older man. He wore a blue tee shirt and black slacks, and was drying his hands with a small towel. He was deeply tanned and remarkable. He looked like a caricature of Tarzan. His muscles were enormous and bulging with veins. His tee shirt could hardly contain him, which was probably why he wore it. I thought of asking if there was a man inside the mannikin before me, but I wasn’t sure if he would take it as a joke, and I didn’t want to get started on the wrong foot.

“Barney Grundy?” I asked.

He put out his hand and grinned. It was an infectious boyish grin, and his grasp was firm but not bone-breaking. I had a feeling that he was holding back out of politeness. A second look told me he wasn’t as young as he first appeared. I would have taken him for mid-twenties with a first look. I added ten years to the estimate on second look.

“You must be Peters,” he said, standing back to let me in. “Mr. Hoff told me you might want to talk. Come on in.”

I came on in. There were photographs on the wall in the wide room. The wall was filled with them. Most of them were women, big prints, framed and mounted. I recognized a few of the women as movie stars and almost stars. There was no carpet on the finely polished wooden floor, and the furniture was minimal. The room was clean and bright. Three stairs led up to another level that looked like a combination living room/bedroom, and kitchen. There were a couple of doors beyond it where I guessed he did his work.

“Hey, listen,” Grundy said in a soft tenor. “I was on the way out to get some breakfast. You want to come with me?”

I said yes, and he put his towel carefully over a chair and led the way out.

“You’re in good shape,” I said as we went down the stairs.

“I work out every day for an hour or two with weights in a place down in Santa Monica,” he explained, leading the way out. “There are about a dozen of us. It’s a kind of competition to see who can develop the best muscle tone.”

We walked down Melrose to LaBrea and I asked, “Don’t you get musclebound?”

“No,” he grinned. “That’s something made up by people who don’t know what they’re talking about. I can run a six minute mile, touch my nose with my big toe, and please ladies. You look like you’re in fair shape yourself.”

“Y.M.C.A.,” I said. “I run a little and play handball.”

I didn’t add that my total miles per week had dropped to five and my handball partner was a sixty-year-old doctor who was well ahead of me in games, but a damn good player.

Grundy led me into a coffee shop on La Brea, and we sat in a booth. The waitress recognized him, and he flashed her a smile. She was an overworked, washedout creature with frizzy hair. The smile from Grundy made her day.

We ordered, and I asked, “Why do you do it?”

“Body build?” he said, “Compensation in a way, Mr. Peters. It started when I realized that I wasn’t going to make it as a camera operator or cinematographer with a studio. That was what I wanted. I was born a few miles from here. I’ve passed those studios all my life. I wanted to be behind a camera, even prepared by becoming a still photographer, taking movie courses. But it never happened. I never got the break. I guess I started the weights when I knew it wasn’t going to happen. No one has said I’m not good enough. Maybe I’m just the right guy in the wrong place.”

“So,” I continued, “you make up for it by doing stills for studios when you can get the work and building your body.”

“That’s about it,” he agreed, welcoming his plate of four fried eggs and half pound of bacon from the waitress who smiled at him while she served. She had forgotten my coffee, but went back for it quickly.

“Most of my work is baby pictures and some industrial stuff,” he explained between bites. “Once in a while I get to do spillover work for a studio or a small industrial movie, nothing much; but I live cheap and do all right.”

He was telling me more about himself than I needed to know, but I’ve run into a lot of people like that. They’ll give you their life stories and a cup of Hill’s Brothers if you’ll just sit and listen. I’m a good listener. It may be the thing I’m best at.

“About yesterday, the morning?” I asked.

“Right,” he said, finishing a glass of milk in a long gulp. “I was in the studio to deliver some pictures I’d taken and walked past these two midgets arguing.”

“How close were you?” I asked. The coffee was bitter, but I kept drinking.

“About ten feet,” he said. “Walked right past them. I told the cops. I heard them arguing, and one of them had an accent, a German accent. The other one, the one in the soldier suit, called him ‘Gunther.’ That’s all I heard.”

“Could you identify either of the midgets again?” I tried.

“No,” he said, finishing his toast and looking around for something else to eat. I thought he’d give the plate a try, but instead he motioned to the waitress who knew what he wanted and brought more milk, toast and jam. “Both the little guys were wearing makeup and costumes, and I didn’t really look at them. I was tempted to break them up, but they weren’t actually fighting and it was none of my business.”

“Weren’t you surprised to see them in Oz costumes?”

“No,” he said with a shake of his head. “I know they still do occasional publicity shots with the midgets. I’ve even taken a few myself for Mr. Hoff. The midgets get a day’s fee for posing and so do I for a few quick prints.”

“Did you see anyone else when you passed the arguing midgets?” I’d finished my coffee and had a refill before I could stop the waitress, who was happy for any excuse to come back to our booth and gawk at Grundy.

“No, no one else was in sight,” he said. His fresh order of toast was gone and he wiped his mouth with a napkin.

“Last question,” I said reaching in my pocket for money. “What time did this happen?”

“A little after eight, maybe a quarter after at the latest. Hey, I’ll take the check.”

He reached for the check but I pulled it out of his reach. He had reached fast. He may have had muscles like blocks of wood, but they didn’t slow him down.

‘I’m on an expense account,” I explained. “Breakfast is on Louis B. Mayer.”

He knew how to accept a free breakfast graciously. I paid the moonstruck waitress and walked back down Melrose with Grundy.

“My car’s down here,” I said. We shook hands. “If there’s anything else I can do, let me know,” he said. “And if you ever need any photo work in your business, here’s my card. I’ll work cheap.”

The card read exactly like his door: B. NIMBLEGRUNDY, PICTURES STILL AND MOVING. It also had his address. I thanked him and watched him jog toward his office-home.

It was Saturday and Grundy looked like a man who owned Saturdays. The day wasn’t quite mine, though. Either Grundy was lying, which wasn’t likely, or the midget who killed Cash had faked a German accent. In which case, why had Cash called him “Gunter”? The other possibility was that Gunther was guilty. Or maybe Gunther had fought with Cash but not killed him. In which case he had simply lied to me, for which I couldn’t much blame him.

My leads had almost run out. All I had left was Gable and the hope that Wherthman would remember the name of the other midget who had worked and fought with Cash. Both were slim. Something had to make sense, and I was heading in the right direction or there wouldn’t be two bullet holes in my Buick.

Judy Garland had told me production was starting on Ziegfield Girl today so I headed for the studio. It wasn’t far from Grundy’s place. I took another look at his card and put it away, reminding myself to ask if Nimble was his real middle name if I should ever see him again.

It was a little after ten when I arrived at the studio. Buck McCarthy was on the gate and he sauntered over to me, chewing a wad of gum and pretending it was a plug. He leaned into the window.

“Miss Garland said to hurry you in if you showed up,” he said. “You know the way?”

“Yep, you want to drive?”

He declined this time, and I drove slowly to her dressing room. I didn’t see any stars, but a group of carpenters working on the fake front of what looked like the Taj Mahal. The fake front was leaning against a real building.

Judy Garland wasn’t in her dressing room, but Cassie James was, which suited me fine. Today she was dressed entirely in pink with a red patent leather belt. She smelled like July in the mountains. When I knocked and came in she was pouring herself a cup of coffee from the pot brewing in the corner.

She gave me a small smile and handed me the cup. Something was wrong. She sat in a straightbacked chair and crossed her legs.

“Someone tried to kill Judy,” she said.

For a second or two I didn’t absorb the words. Maybe I even thought I imagined them, but I hadn’t.

“Tried to poison her,” Cassie continued.

“How? When?” I sat with my coffee on a chair a few feet from Cassie.

“When we came in the morning, there was a pitcher of ice water on the table. Judy was a little nervous about starting the picture today and her throat was dry. I poured her a drink and started to hand it to her, but it looked a little discolored. I smelled it, and it smelled strange. So she didn’t drink it.”

“Then how do you know it was poisoned?” I asked.

“We called the doctor. There’s one on hand whenever shooting is going on. He said it was filled with arsenic. A mouthful would very likely have killed Judy.”

Cassie was certainly nervous, but not in panic.

“It’s lucky you noticed,” I said reassuringly. “Where’s Judy now?”

“She’s shooting. I told her to take the day off and wait till we talked to you, but she wouldn’t do it. She got sick once during the shooting of Oz and held up shooting for a while. She doesn’t want to do it again.”

Cassie gave me more information. The dressing room door hadn’t been locked so anyone on the lot could have come in with the water. The poison water had been dumped out after the doctor confirmed the presence of poison. It wasn’t clear whose idea the dumping was, but no one had questioned it. The pitcher was glass, but with everyone handling it there probably wouldn’t have been worthwhile prints anyway.

“O.K.,” I said, standing up and putting down the cup. “I think we should call the police. Someone tried to kill me yesterday, too.”

She got up suddenly and looked shocked. I was touched.

“What happened?” she asked, stepping toward me.

“Someone took a couple of shots at me and obviously missed.” She took my hand. It was time to work up more sympathy.

“They may try again,” I said.

“Did you see who did it?” She was looking into my eyes, clearly concerned and interested.

“No, but I’d like it to stop. So I’m going to try to get some police protection for Judy and do my damndest to find out who killed Cash and is trying to make Judy and me a duo of death.”

I’d heard that “duo of death” phrase in a Captain Midnight show and always wanted to work it into a conversation. This was the first chance I had. I pushed my hat back further on my head and took Cassie’s hand in mind. I was glad she wasn’t wearing her tape measure.

“I’ll call the police and tell them what’s happened. It might give them second thoughts about Wherthman being the killer. Then I’d better track down Clark Gable and check his version of what happened her yesterday morning.”

“Is there anything I can do?” she asked. We were close enough together to exchange comments on our mouthwash, except I didn’t use any. I hoped my dental sample smile lingered till noon. Hers did.

“Yes, there is,” I said softly. “Find Hoff. Tell him that Cash was chummy with another midget, maybe even went into business with him. See if he can find out who it is. Wherthman is filling his time trying to come up with the name too. It may not be a lead, but it’s worth a try.”

She agreed and volunteered to do some checking on her own. She had worked on Oz for a short time and knew the names of a few of the midgets. I said thanks and lingered. She kissed me. It was a little more than motherly, but not enough to make anything out of.

“Be careful,” she said, and I promised I would be.

She went off to look for Hoff and I picked up the phone. I didn’t need to talk to Hoff right now, but I needed information and action. I called Andy Markopulis, the guy I knew who worked for M.G.M. security. He was at home building a patio with his kids. It was so wholesome I couldn’t even make a joke about it. I explained the whole set-up to him and asked him to assign a couple of people to take off their uniforms and keep an eye on Judy Garland for a while. He said he’d assign two good men named Woodman and Fearaven. I didn’t know them, but Andy knew his business.

Then I called my brother.

“Well?” he asked. “And if you ask me how Ruth and the kids are, I’ll find you and punch your heart out.”

“Someone tried to kill me and Judy Garland,” I said.

“Bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit,” I said. “I’ve got bullet holes in my car windows.”

“Bullshit,” he repeated.

“For Chrissake, Phil, why would I lie?”

“It’s an asshole stunt to get that little Nazi turd you’re working for off the hook. Someone’s trying to kill you and Garland. Wherthman’s in the can, so it can’t be him. That’s the picture.”

“So I shot bullet holes in my car windows?”

“Why not? That hunk of junk isn’t worth ten dollars. It’s about time you shot it and put it out of its misery. It reminds me of…”

“One of dad’s old heaps,” I finished. “Maybe that’s why I like it.”

He was quiet for a few seconds.

“How did they try to kill Garland?” he asked, but his voice showed he was humoring me.

“Poison,” I said. “Someone left a water pitcher full of poison in her dressing room at the studio this morning. Someone noticed that it smelled funny.”

“Where’s the poison now?” he asked.

“They poured it out.”

“That’s a hell of a story, Tobias. Even if there was a pitcher of poison, which I doubt, you could have put it there, made sure she didn’t drink it and then arranged for it to be conveniently dumped out before the police arrived. You’ve done worse.”

He was right. I had done worse and was kind of proud of it, but this wasn’t one of the times. I decided not to tell him about the phone calls to Garland and me from the unaccented man with the high voice. He wouldn’t believe me.

“You’re wrong, Phil.”

“I’ve got a wave of ax murders waiting and no time for you. Now hang up and get a job as a night watchman.”

“You’re a whale, Phil,” I sighed. “A goddamn whale with an eye on each side of your head. You try to juggle two separate images and miss what’s right in front of you. Someday you’re going to swim into an iceberg.”

I hung up. Then I talked to the long distance operator and asked her to connect me to the William Randolph Hearst Ranch in San Simeon. I didn’t have the number. I began to think I’d have to track down Hoff and get the number when I was connected to someone. It was a man who said, “Can I help you?”

I said he could if this was Bill Hearst’s place, but I didn’t say Bill and I didn’t say place. I told him Clark Gable was expecting a call from me. He told me to wait, and there was some buzzing and clicking on the line. This time a woman’s voice came on, and I repeated my message.

She said Mr. Gable and some other guests were on a picnic and wouldn’t be back for three or four hours. I asked if someone could bring him a message and she said he was about ten miles away. Then she told me to wait. I waited, considering my next move. In a few minutes she came on.

“Mr. Gable left a message for you,” she said. “If it’s not inconvenient, you can come up here and see him this evening or call him tonight.”

For a few good reasons, I decided to take the trip to San Simeon. First, I liked to be face to face with someone I’m talking to on a case. A facial expression or a move of the body might lead me somewhere. In addition, telephones demand action and business and hate silence. They don’t give you much time to think, and I needed time to think. Going to San Simeon would give me some time and I had no other leads to follow. Getting out of town would also put distance between me and the guy who took the shots at me.

I drove off the lot, waving to Buck as I left, and checked my watch. It was almost noon. I beat the crowd to the Gotham Cafe on Hollywood and had an order of their special potato pancakes and sour cream to fortify myself for the trip. Then I was on my way.

In half an hour with the pistons churning, I shot past Calabassas to the coast highway, and in a few minutes I was on El Camino Real, the Royal Highway. According to my Glendale high school days, the road along the ocean that stretched from San Diego to San Francisco was staked out in the 1780s or so by the Spanish. The Spanish were afraid the French or Russians would claim the land along the coast first. France had picked up a big chunk of land between the Mississippi and the Rocky Mountains. Russia was coming south across the Berring Sea and down the coast from what would eventually be Alaska.

The first big push to stake out the royal road stopped at what became Los Angeles. The whole point of the road was to set up a link between the Franciscan missions in California. The last long trek between Los Angeles and Monterey was done by a force of sixty-seven men under a Captain Portola and a Franciscan priest named Father Crespi.

I drove over the road at about 55 or 60, which was all out for the Buick, and wondered what Crespi and Portola would have thought about the gas stations, beaneries, writing on the rocks, and garbage. The missions were now tourist stops and the road paved with good intentions.

A long, dark cloud going as far as I could see along the coast and into the horizon kept me company for over 100 miles.

The car radio kept me company, too. I heard the news two or three times. The presidential campaign was over and everyone thought Willkie had taken the lead. Roosevelt said he was running because he could keep us out of the war. A writer named H. G. Wells had given a talk at the Ambassador Hotel in L.A. He wanted Americans to support Britain’s war effort against the Germans.

From 1:30 to 3:30 in the afternoon I watched the scenery and listened to the Radio Parade for Roosevelt. Eleanor Roosevelt, Joseph P. Kennedy, Henry Fonda, Groucho Marx, Walter Huston, Katherine Hepburn, Lucille Ball, and Humphrey Bogart all told me why I should vote for F.D.R. Since I knew Bogart slightly, I was impressed, but I didn’t think I was even registered to vote. I couldn’t remember the last time I had voted. I was one hell of a good citizen.

I also found out that U.C.L.A. had been beaten by Stanford 20 to 14, and Minnesota had beaten North-western University 13 to 12. I didn’t even know where Northwestern was.

It was dark when I hit San Simeon. I didn’t see anything that looked like a big ranch or a road to it. I stopped at a gas station, filled up the Buick, and had a Pepsi. The guy at the station gave me directions to the Hearst place. I thanked him, took a bag of potato chips, and munched as I made my way, slowly looking for landmarks.

I pulled into what I thought was the right road, but I didn’t see anything that looked like a ranch, just a little white house a few hundred yards up the road. A man stepped out of the little white house and held up his hand. He looked serious but not unfriendly. I could see another man through the window of the house watching me. Both men wore dark suits and black ties.

The man in the road walked over to the window of my car. I didn’t have to roll down the window to talk because they were already down. I had driven drafty to hide the bullet holes. I could see that the guy, who looked something like a serious version of Buck Rogers, didn’t think much of my transportation. I gave him a smile and offered him some potato chips. When he leaned over I could see that he was armed.

“Your name, sir?” he said politely.

“Toby Peters,” I answered. He hadn’t taken the chips so I put them back next to me.

He shouted to the other man in the house, giving my name, and the other guy shouted that I was expected.

I could see that the guy standing next to my car couldn’t understand my invitation but he hid it well.

“O.K., sir, if you’ll just follow this road slowly, you’ll come to a place to park right near the big house,” he said, pointing down the road.

“I don’t see any house,” I said.

“It’s about five miles,” he explained.

“You mean Hearst owns all this?” I asked.

“Just about as far as the eye can see in any direction on a clear day from the house. And the house is a few hundred feet up.”

I was impressed.

“Now, sir,” he went on, repeating something he had clearly gone through many times, “drive slowly with your lights on and give the right of way to any animals you meet.”

“Animals?”

“Mr. Hearst has many wild animals on the property, including buffalo and zebras. The zebras are especially curious.”

“I’ll be careful,” I said. I adjusted my tie and brushed potato chip crumbs from my lapels.

“One more thing,” he added. “Please don’t pick the fruit. You’ll find orange and apple trees near the house. They are never eaten.”

I said I wouldn’t eat the trees or kill the gorillas, and he held out his hand. It seemed silly to tip or shake, so I waited for an explanation.

“The hardware,” he said.

I handed him the. 38.

“We’ll give it back when you leave. Be careful on the road. It twists upward. We’ll give you twenty minutes to make it to the top. They’ll let us know when you arrive. Don’t stop, and don’t get out of the car.”

I went up the road with my lights on past the white house, where the other man watched me. The guy I had talked to stood in the road following my progress until I went out of sight around a curve more than 100 yards away.

A faint light glittered high above me out of the front of my window. It was to the right, and it looked very far. It might be the Hearst ranch.

I saw some kind of animal after two miles, but I couldn’t make it out clearly. It was big and near the road. Bullet holes or not I rolled up the windows. My fears of a wild death were increasing. Now I could be eaten by an ape in Southern California.

When I got to the house, someone was there to meet me. He was built and dressed like the guys at the gate. They seemed to be a fraternity of former heavyweight champions. He motioned me to park and led me up a flight of stone steps and past nude statues. At the top of the steps we took a right and stopped in front of a huge house.

“Big place,” I said.

“This is one of the guest houses,” my guide said.

He knocked and went in. A group of people were sitting around a blazing fire in a big central room. One of them, a beautiful blonde who I should have recognized from some picture, said Gable was either in the big house or at the pool.

My guide led me out. We went into a courtyard and faced a building that looked like my dreams of a Gothic castle.

We went in, stepping over an inlaid tile floor and into a room as high as a cathedral. No one was in the room, which held tapestries on each wall. The tapestries, six of them, were more than twenty feet high and a few feet more than that across. There were lounges around the room and a lot of chairs, but no people.

A woman in a dark uniform appeared from nowhere, and my guide whispered to her and disappeared the way he had come. The woman motioned to me, and I followed her to a dark wood paneled wall which concealed a door.

“Is Baron Frankenstein home?” I asked her softly.

She didn’t even acknowledge that I had spoken. We stepped into a high ceilinged room with cathedral-like windows and wooden church seats around the walls. A bunch of flags stuck out of the wall above. There was a long table stretching across the room with about thirty big, dark and ancient wooden chairs. We had walked out of Castle Frankenstein into a banquet set for The Crusades. Only one thing ruined the impression.

An old man in a dark suit sat at the center of the table. He had a hamburger in front of him and he was pouring a glob of Heinz ketchup on it. He didn’t look up as we passed.

“Servants get to use the main room before supper?” I whispered to the hurrying lady in front of me.

“That,” she said, “was Mr. Hearst. He’s having a snack before the main meal.”

I tried to turn back and get a look at the old man, but the woman was hurrying along in front of me. I never got a look at her face. We went outside, down a path, and then into a building.

It was the fanciest damn indoor pool I’ve ever seen. It must have been forty yards long and tiled from ceiling to pool bottom. The place radiated blue and was pleasantly warm. A few people were in the water. One of them inched his way toward me and pulled himself out of the pool.

It was Clark Gable. He picked up a towel and dried his hands as he stepped forward and smiled. He took my hand.

“Toby Peters, isn’t it? Good to meet you.”

“Good to meet you,” I said. He went to a bench against the wall, and I followed him as he continued to dry himself.

“Want to take a swim before we talk?” he asked. I said I didn’t swim.

“I don’t either,” he said, running the towel over his hair. “Not more than a few strokes. And this damn pool is over my head. There’s no shallow end. There’s an outdoor pool with a shallow end on the other side of the house, but it’s too cold tonight to go out.”

I tried to look sympathetic, and he gave me a wry smile I recognized. It was his Academy Award smile.

“You don’t think much of all this, do you, Peters?” he said, indicating that he meant the whole Hearst setup.

“Does it matter?” I said.

“Sure,” he said, working on his feet.

“I’m impressed,” I said. “I’m a two-buck private investigator with two suits and a one-room shack in Los Angeles. This man could buy a whole damn city.”

“Maybe more,” Gable added. “This is probably the most expensive toy anyone ever had. It’s filled with enough to stock ten museums. Hearst is a collector, of things and people.”

“And you’re one of them?” I asked.

“No,” he laughed. “Mostly, I’m a friend of a friend of Mr. Hearst. I’ve done some work with Marion Davies. She invited me up for the weekend. As rich as Mr. Hearst is, I don’t think he could afford me. He could have a few years ago, though. Now, would you like a drink, or do you want to talk here? I’m through here, and I’ll be getting dressed for dinner in a little while.”

I said I’d talk here. I tried not to watch the people diving in the pool from what looked like a marble balcony.

“Shoot,” said Gable with a wave of his hand.

“You saw two midgets arguing at the studio?”

“Right.” He said looking at me the way he looked at Thomas Mitchell in Gone With the Wind. “One of them is dead-murdered, I hear.”

“Yes. Did the police talk to you about that?”

“For a few minutes on the phone. I was on my way up here. They said they could get the details from Vic Fleming and another witness.”

“Did you see that other witness?” I asked. “A big, muscular guy?”

“Nope,” said Gable. “Just the two little fellas going at it. Vic wanted to hurry on so we didn’t see very much.”

“Describe what you did see.”

He described the costumes of the two little men and added that he and Fleming had been too far away to hear their words or tell me if either of them had an accent. “I do remember that the shorter of the two seemed to be getting the worst of it from the one in the uniform,” said Gable.

Gunther Wherthman had said one of the reasons Cash had hated him was that he was bigger than Cash. Now Gable was telling me that Cash was taller than the man he was arguing with.

“Wait, are you sure the Munchkin in uniform-the one with the feather in his hat and the yellow beard-was taller than the other one?” I asked slowly. “You said you weren’t very close.”

“He was taller,” said Gable confidently. “I may not be a great judge of character, but I’ll put money on my judgment of perspective.”

“You’d testify to that?” I asked.

“If it came to it,” he said. “Is it important?”

“You may have just saved the life of one tiny Swiss translator.”

“Glad to do it,” he beamed. “Say, how’d you like to stay for dinner and the movie? There’s a movie here every night in the theater.”

“He has a theater, too?” My eyes wandered around the pool house again, and to the beautiful swimmers in the water. I was definitely out of my league. “Thanks just the same,” I said, standing up, “but I’ve got to head back to L.A.”

He stood with me, shook my hand, and patted me on the back.

“Happy I could help, Peters,” he said. The towel was around his neck and he was gripping it in both hands. His dark hair fell over his brow. All he needed was Victor Fleming and a camera crew.

The uniformed woman without a face led me around the house instead of through it and back to the man who had met me at my car. She turned and walked away.

“Nice meeting you!” I shouted. The man in the dark suit took me right to my car door and tucked me in. He made no comment on the bullet holes. I said good-bye and drove down the road. It was dark and the sky was star-filled when I reached the gate and the two men who manned it. One stepped out and handed me my. 38. I said thanks and he said, “You’re welcome, sir.”

I headed back south for an hour or so and decided to stop at a diner. After I ate the spaghetti special, coffee and pie, I drove to a motor court to register. It reminded me of a clean version of my own place. It was called Happy Byways Motor Court, and Mrs. Happy Byways took my two bucks, gave me a receipt, and handed me the key to Bungalow Six, recently painted white. She was too fat to move and was covered with what looked like a blanket. I thanked her and went to Six after she sold me the Sunday L.A. Times.

The radio in the room didn’t work so I read the paper. King Doob was missing and Buck Rogers had to find him. Something was missing for me, too, but I didn’t know what it was. I decided to sleep on it. I had no razor or toothpaste so I just showered and went to bed. Happy Byways seemed safe enough, but I put my gun under my pillow just in case and propped a chair in front of the door. I felt confident enough to leave the light out in the bathroom. I think that confidence saved my life.

Before I went to sleep I felt my stomach to see if it was losing tone. I hadn’t hit the Y for days. My stomach seemed all right, so I closed my eyes and was out.

I dreamed of midgets crawling in under the cracks and through the drains. They oozed through a chimney and went for me with long, thin knives. I fought to wake up and heard a sound at the door, but I was too befuddled to respond. The chair in front of the door slowed my guest down, but just a little. The door broke, the chair flew, and he stood framed against the faint light. The form in the door was no midget. The bed wasn’t in line with the door so I was in darkness. With the bathroom light off he had to take a guess. The guess was good. He hit the bed and one bullet thudded into the wall over my head. I fumbled for my. 38 and fired. I wasn’t even worried about hitting him. I just wanted him to know I was armed. For all I know, my bullet hit the ceiling.

The figure in the doorway backed out fast, and I got out of bed in shorts and ran after him. I fell over the chair that had been propped in front of the door. By the time I got outside, I could see a car pulling into the highway, but I couldn’t be sure of the color, and I couldn’t make out anything on the license.

It was a big, newish car, and I had no chance of catching him. Even if I did want to take a chance, I was standing in my shorts, holding a gun, and people were popping their heads out of the windows of the court around me.

“It’s all right!” I shouted. “I’m the police.”

I walked back into my room slowly and closed the door. My explanation would hold them for about five minutes. I dressed in two and went to the Happy Byways office. The fat woman wasn’t there, but the light was on. The clock on the wall said 2A. M. I reached for the registration book as I heard her grunting to her feet in the next room. I tore out the page with my name on it, jammed it in my pocket, and went out the door before she took a step. I didn’t want to do any explaining.

I drove for about fifty miles, trying to think straight. The impression had been brief, but I had seen a big figure in that door. When I was certain that no one was in sight, I pulled behind a hill on my right and turned off my lights. I had an old picnic blanket in the trunk. I got it out and climbed in the back seat after reloading the. 38. I fell asleep in a few minutes, clutching my gun like a cold teddy bear.