Never Cross A Vampire

CHAPTER TWO

Gunther Wherthman was a little over three feet tall, a genuine midget. At eight in the morning on January 3, 1942 he sat across from me slowly eating a poached egg. I could tell the time not from my watch, which was always an hour or two off, but from the Beech-Nut gum clock on my wall. I had received the clock in payment for returning a runaway grandmother to a guy who owned a pawn shop on Main Street. The job took ten minutes. Grandma was hiding in her closet.

Gunther wore a dark blue suit with not a wrinkle showing and a dark blue tie with some discreet light blue stripes running at a slight angle. He smelled of toilet water and looked ready to go to work, which he was. Work, however, was in the boardinghouse room he lived in next to mine. There was little chance that Gunther, who made a modest living as a translator of German, French, Dutch, Flemish, Spanish, and Basque, would meet anyone during the day except for me and our landlady, who would neither care nor notice what he wore.

Gunther had talked me into the rooming house on Heliotrope in Hollywood after I had gotten him off a murder charge about a year earlier. The murder had been of a guy who played a Munchkin in The Wizard of Oz. Gunther, like most people under four feet tall in the Western world, had been in the movie. In fact, he had picked up a few dollars from time to time doing bit parts in movies that needed little people.

One of his favorite movie jobs had been to simply walk back and forth at the end of a long corridor past another midget. The director’s idea was that no one would notice that the two men were midgets at that distance, and the corridor would look twice as long. Gunther had never bothered to see the movie.

It was Saturday morning and I planned to work, but first I gobbled an oversize bowl of Kix with brown sugar and drank a couple of cups of freshly brewed Schilling coffee I had picked up at Ralph’s for twenty-nine cents a pound.

I discovered that Roosevelt was pushing for war plants to be moved away from the coast because they were vulnerable and that the Russians were holding the Germans sixty-five miles from Moscow in a place called Maloyaroslavets. Corregidor was preparing for a full-scale Japanese attack. Tony Martin had joined the Navy and Hank Greenberg had reenlisted. I found a photograph of Warner Brothers staging an air raid rehearsal. A bunch of sandbags surrounded Mike Curtiz, Dennis Morgan, Bette Davis, “George the Grip,” Irene Manning, and Chet, a worker I recognized from my days at the studio. I showed the photograph to Gunther, who put down his spoon, examined it politely, and nodded.

“And this case is an important one?” Gunther said precisely, when his mouth was empty.

“Well,” I answered, “it’ll pay a few bills, but I think it’s small time, which is just what I’ll be happy with. Dime-a-dozen case of a nut writing a few letters, pulling a few tricks. I’ll probably track him down in a few days, throw a scare, and earn my money.”

Gunther didn’t ask for details. He wiped his mouth with a napkin and climbed down to clean up the meal while I helped myself to another bowl of Kix and made a mental note to pick up a few boxes of Wheaties, which were on sale for ten cents. Life, I thought, could be so simple.

My back hadn’t given me any trouble for weeks. My Sinuses were backed up as they had been for years by my crushed nose, but aside from a few headaches there was no trouble. The bone chip in the little finger of my left hand had shifted, but a few aspirin had helped me to forget it. I had had no migraine since November. The world was full of promise and hope, if you discounted the war.

I had eaten breakfast in my undershirt, not from any desire to offend Gunther, but to preserve the thin veneer of respectability that clung to my shirt, tie, and jacket. With a tight budget, I couldn’t afford cleaning, and I sure as hell couldn’t borrow a shirt from Gunther.

I kicked the mattress I slept on into the corner, got dressed, promised Gunther I’d pick up some Rinso and Horlick’s malted milk, and went out the door and down the stairs as quietly as I could to avoid our deaf landlady, Mrs. Plaut, whose conversations would reduce an FBI agent to creamed spinach.

The newspapers had stopped printing the weather in case it might help the Japanese invasion plans. I had guessed that the day wouldn’t be much warmer than the one before, and I had been right. Being right had simply meant bringing my coat with me. I had only a lighter-weight suit to change into, and that was even dirtier than the one I was wearing.

With twenty bucks of Lugosi’s thirty left after groceries, gas, and an Old Nick candy bar, I drove downtown trying to decide whether to call Carmen and ask her to go to the Pantages with me that night after her shift behind the cash register at Levy’s Grill. The Pantages was running a complete showing of Ball of Fire at 1:30 for defense workers and insomniacs. I was still considering the possibility when I got to the Farraday Building and parked in a spot I know in an alley behind a garbage can. There was always a chance that someone might mistake my heap for discarded scrap, but I risked it.

The lobby of the Farraday was deserted except for Jeremy Butler, the former wrestler, present poet, and landlord, who was using his considerable muscle and a can of Old Dutch cleanser to get some scribbling off the gray wall next to the building directory. The scribbling was vaguely obscene, but some people thought the directory was even worse. We had a bookie posing as a smoke shop, a half-mad doctor who specialized in treating cases he didn’t report, a baby photographer who was even uglier than me and who never carried a camera, a con man named Albertini who changed the name of his company every week (this week it was Federal Newsprint, Ltd.), and a variety of others including Sheldon Minck, DDS, and Toby Peters, the far side of the detective business.

“How’s business, Toby?” Butler said. His sleeves were rolled up for the task, and his arms bulged under fields of black hair.

“Got a client,” I said pausing to try to read what he was erasing but having no luck. “Bela Lugosi. Say, you’re a poet. You know a poem that starts ‘But first on earth as Vampyre sent?”

“It’s not the beginning,” Butler said, attacking what looked like the remnants of an anatomical drawing. “It’s by Lord Byron. He was screwy about vampires. A lot of poets like that stuff. I even wrote a vampire poem.” He stepped back to examine his efforts, didn’t like what he saw, and went back to the wall with cold determination.

“It was published in Little Bay Review last year,” he said.

“Terrific,” I answered and started to move into the darkness and toward the stairs, but his voice, grunting with each scrub, came at me with the poem. I stopped politely to listen.

“Whatever happened to yellow?

Did it bleed to green and mellow to almost white from the gentle bite of a grass-leaf vampire?

Yellow is seen as the lack of green by those who have never known the dying moan of a fire engine or a grasshopper’s life fluid.

“Yellow spins in men, void not null weightless though heavy.

I play myself in string quartets; But I can hear only two instruments of fear in the present tense echoing yellow.”

And then, without a pause, “If I get my hands on the son-of-a-bitch who did this to my wall,” he said evenly, “I’ll make him pay.”

“I’m sure you will,” I said and headed for the familiar Lysol-smelling stairwell. Jeremy devoted his life to poetry and staying just ahead of the filth that would inevitably inherit the Farraday Building. Only a poet or a monster would have taken it on, and Jeremy was both. I didn’t understand a word of his poem, and I didn’t worry about it. The whole case had become too literary for me.

I was sure when I got to my office door that Shelly Minck was inside and that there was little chance he’d know a poem about vampires.

I eased through the tiny waiting room, trying not to disturb the dust, and made my way into Shelly’s office. He was working on a fat woman who gave out low “argghh’s” the entire time she was in the chair whether Shelly was working on her or not. His chubby fingers danced over the instruments, and he cleaned each one on his dirty once-white smock before he plunged it into the woman’s mouth. Sweat poured from the fat at Shelly’s neck, as it always did when he worked, and he paused between searches, probes, and seizures to take a puff at the cigar that he kept perched on his instrument tray.

“Hi, Shelly,” I said, looking over his shoulder at the fat woman’s decaying mouth. Her frightened eyes caught mine, and I tried not to grimace.

“Toby,” he said, “I was hoping you’d come in today. You want to go in with me on a London-type bomb shelter? I can get it for two hundred eighty-five dollars, install it in my yard.”

He pulled something small and bloody out of the fat woman’s mouth and her “argghh” went up a few decibels.

“You’re all right, Mrs. Lee,” he said, examining the object curiously. “It was just a… a piece of something.”

“What good would a bomb shelter do me in your yard?” I said. “I don’t think the Japanese are going to give us enough warning to get me from Hollywood to Van Nuys if they attack.” “Mrs. Lee,” he said, turning his eyes, myopic behind thick lenses, on his patient. “Do you think you and Mr. Lee, if there is a Mr. Lee, would be interested in half-interest in a bomb shelter? A heavy bomb could destroy all the work I’ve been doing on your mouth.”

“Arrgghh,” said Mrs. Lee, with terror in her massive eyes.

“She said yes,” Shelly said, looking for an elusive instrument as he pulled at his cigar.

“I think she said no,” I said.

Shelly shrugged, found a sharp instrument, tested it on his finger, and turned to Mrs. Lee, who drew back as deeply into the chair as she could.

“Relax,” grunted Shelly, “it’s clean.”

I didn’t want to watch. I went into my office and closed the door. The sound of Mrs. Lee’s “argghh” shook my hinges, and I tried to ignore her by looking at the picture on the wall of my dad, my brother, me, and Kaiser Wilhelm, our dog. It was a photograph out of antiquity and it always soothed me and inspired me to new heights of provocation against the brother with whom I had been battling since the day I was born.

My mail didn’t have much to offer besides an ad that said I could have dinner and hear Paul Whiteman at the Florentine Gardens for $1.75. That would be four bucks plus gas and a tip if I took Carmen. The Pantages was fifty cents, and we could pick up a couple of tacos for another dime each. If Lugosi paid me for another day, we could even have a couple of beers. Such were the plans of your well-known man-about-town.

There was an interesting message on the spindle on my desk. Shelly’s hand was unmistakable and the number illegible, but I thought I recognized the name.

“Shelly,” I yelled through the door when there was a lull in Mrs. Lee’s agony, “is this message from Martin Leib?”

“Right,” he shouted back.

Leib was a starched-collar, no-nonsense, old-timer lawyer with consulting contracts at the major studios. I’d worked with him once and knew if he was calling me it wasn’t sentimental or to have a drink and tell tall stories. I found his number in the directory and called. He answered on the second ring.

“Peters,” he said softly. “Your call came just as I was going to call someone else to handle this. I have a job for you, similar to the last one. Client accused of murder. Warners would like to keep things quiet until everything is clear. On my end, I can contain publicity for a few days at most. I need an investigation quickly and some solid information about what the police have and are doing. Can you handle it?”

If I told Leib I had a job and a client, he would say “Fine” and hang up. Besides, why couldn’t a detective have two clients at a time? True, it had never happened to me before, but it came at a point when I could use all the help from capitalistic sources I could muster. Bela Lugosi’s crank was intriguing, but a murder case for Warner Brothers was possibly big money.

“Fifty a day and expenses,” I said. “Two days in advance.”

“Thirty-five,” said Leib. “This is for Jack Warner, not Louis Mayer. I’ll have the money waiting for you at the Wilshire station where our client is being held. I think it best if you get to him immediately. I’ve already begun from my end.”

“And?” I said, half thinking about the Florentine Gardens.

“And it doesn’t look promising,” he said. That was all we had to go with, so I finished the business at hand.

“Client’s name?”

“Faulkner, William Faulkner.”

“The writer?” “The alleged murderer,” said Leib and hung up.

Business was booming. A full year like this and I’d be challenging Pinkerton. I picked up my coat and went back into Shelly’s office. He was demonstrating to Mrs. Lee how to rinse her mouth. She had lost all semblance of control and dumbly mocked Shelly’s actions. Her “arrgghh” was down to a slow, low gurgle.

“I’m going on another case,” I said to Shelly’s back. He waved his cigar to let me know he had heard.

“Almost forgot,” I added, heading for the door. “Guy named Billings might be getting in touch with you. He has an overbite problem from fangs.”

That got Shelly, who turned around and squinted in my general direction through the bulletproof lenses of his glasses.

“He’s a vampire,” I explained.

Mrs. Lee seemed to hear the word vampire through her confused stupor and looked vaguely in my direction.

“Vampires are a dental impossibility,” Shelly announced firmly. “At least vampires with fangs. There’s no way the human jaw could support fangs.” He put his finger into Mrs. Lee’s mouth to demonstrate as he spoke. “Throw the whole mouth off. The guy’d look like Andy Gump or Mortimer Snerd, and his jaw… he wouldn’t get a decent night’s sleep or be able to eat.”

“But vampires don’t eat and they sleep like the dead during the day,” I said.

Mrs. Lee nodded in agreement, and Shelly frowned at her.

“Mrs. Van Helsing here,” he said derisively, pointing his thumb at the woman.

“Not a real vampire,” I explained, opening the door. “Just a guy who wears fake fangs and likes dressing up. A little higher class than some of your patients.”

“If he calls, I’ll look at him,” Shelly said professionally, turning to Mrs. Lee. His glasses slipped down on his nose and his free thumb came up just in time to keep them from tumbling into Mrs. Lee’s lap.

The Farraday Building had an elevator, and Jeremy Butler saw to it that the elevator went up and down, but there was nothing he could do to make it go up and down at a rate that most mortals found reasonable. I ran down the stairs, putting on my coat as I went and listening to the echo of my footsteps around me. On the floor below ours, the bookie was fumbling at the lock on his door. The phone was ringing on the other side and he was trying to get in before he missed a bet, but his eyes were bleary and the harder he tried, the more the lock resisted. I didn’t bother to greet him.

Butler was still going at the wall with his second can of Old Dutch.

“Perhaps I should just paint the whole wall?” he asked.

“I think it looks fine,” I said. Interior decoration wasn’t my line, but the irregular patch of white he had worn into the gray wall made the lobby look like the set for a German horror movie.

A neighborhood derelict was pressing his nose to the window of my car when I hurried into the alley. He pulled his gray-stubble face away when he heard me and plunged his hands deep into his pockets, pretending to admire the scenery of the alley, the piles of garbage, the empty cartons. He tried to look as if he were waiting for a streetcar and succeeded in looking as if he had been caught with his claw in the bird cage.

I handed the guy a quarter, told him it was a nice day, and pulled out, heading the car up Hoover and across on Wilshire. Leib’s office was in Westwood, even closer to the station than mine. There was a chance the advance would beat me to the door. In my greed, I had neglected to find out who Faulkner had murdered and why.

As I passed the shivering palms and the occasional people who had come to Los Angeles looking for what they couldn’t find further east and finding what they hadn’t looked for, I thought of the two times I had seen Faulkner. He had been laboring away at some project at Warners a few years earlier when I spotted him through the office window of a producer I was on a job for. Faulkner had looked sad and serious. His typewriter was giving him no fun. He was probably having even less fun today.

I found a space a few blocks from the station and jogged over. A young balding uniformed cop I knew named Rashkow almost knocked me back down the stone stairs.

“Hello,” he said seriously.

“Hi, my brother in today?”

“He’s in,” Rashkow said, pulling his coat closed. “Just saw him. This is my last day.”

“Vacation?” I asked.

“Army,” he said. “I joined a week ago. The papers say things are going good, but I don’t know.” “I don’t know either,” I said. “Good luck. Win the war fast.”

“I’ll try,” said Rashkow, adjusting his blue cap as he lumbered down the stairs.

The damned war kept intruding on my life and profession. It was hard to concentrate on your career when all about you were losing their heads and blaming it on others.

The desk sergeant, an old timer named Coronet, motioned me over and handed me an envelope.

“Just came for you,” he said, without taking his eyes off two silent Japanese kids about twenty who were handcuffed together on the bench in a corner.

“What’d they do?” I asked Coronet, whose hostility to the two took the form of a jutting lower lip and clenched fists.

“Woman sitting behind them at the Loew’s heard them applauding Pearl Harbor during the newsreel and hissing Roosevelt,” Coronet explained.

The two young men, both skinny and not sure whether to be scared or defiant, looked at Coronet and then at me.

“That’s a crime?” I said.

“Sure it’s a crime,” Coronet said without taking his accusing eyes from the pair. “We’re at war.”

That didn’t answer my question, but I knew I would get nothing more sensible from Coronet, and I had my envelope of money from Leib, so I went up the twenty creaking brown stairs and through the often-kicked wooden door at the top and into the squad room. The room smelled, as it always did, as all squad rooms always do, of food-old food, new food, hot food, cold food. The smell of food even overpowered the smell of humanity and stale smoke.

It was a slow day, but detectives were seated at some of the desks. A few were on telephones. One fat detective named Veldu was sitting on the corner of the desk of a new guy I didn’t recognize. Veldu had a sandwich in one hand, coffee in the other, and a mouthful of philosophy for the new guy, whose hair was black and plastered down and parted in the middle as if he were about to try out for a barbershop quartet.

“So they rank Lem Franklin number two,” Veldu was saying. “Number two. Can you imagine that? Buddy Baer, that schlob could crack him in a minute. There’s maybe six guys who could take Franklin on a bad day.” He chomped on his sandwich and put down his coffee so he could raise his fingers to indicate the six guys. “Bob Pastor, Melio Bettina, Abe Simon, Lou Nova, Roscoe Toles, even Tamy Mauriello. In fact, Pastor should be number one and Conn should be down at the bottom. He’s got no punch. Louis hasn’t got feelings. He’s got to be clubbed to death.” With this, Veldu demonstrated with his fist against the desk how one would have to club Joe Louis. The desk shook and the coffee spilled.

“Shit,” bellowed Veldu around a bite of sandwich. “I’ll have to get another coffee.” He lumbered away, leaving the mess for the new guy, who reached into a drawer for some Kleenex and tried to keep the stain from joining all the other stains. The new guy spotted me.

“What can I do for you?” he said impatiently, which was a bad sign in a new detective, at least bad for me and any potential criminals he might meet.

“My name’s Peters,” I said, reaching out a hand. “I’m a private investigator doing some legwork for a lawyer named Leib on a client you have locked up here, Faulkner. I’d like to see our client.”

The new guy looked at my hand and went on cleaning his desk. I put my hand back at my side. The new guy didn’t say anything. He just kept scrubbing. I looked over at a woman two desks away talking to another detective. She was well groomed, wearing a little hat with a tall feather and a two-piece suit with the skirt to the knees. Her shoulders were slightly padded, and she looked as if she had just been outfitted at I. Magnin.

“… my ears,” I heard her say and tried to listen to more, but the new guy was looking up at me with less than friendship and a pile of soggy Kleenex he didn’t know what to do with.

“I’ll see,” he said, walking toward the office cubbyhole of Lieutenant Philip Pevsner in the corner. He dropped the Kleenex in a wastebasket, and a black kid about fifteen who was waiting to be interrogated inched away from him.

I tried to pick up more of the well-groomed woman’s conversation. I thought I caught her saying “Sally Rand” to the cop, who listened patiently, but I wasn’t sure. I didn’t have time to hear more. The new cop motioned to me from Pevsner’s doorway, and I moved through the random array of desks and bodies, stepping over feet and past secrets.

The new guy stood back with a sour look, and I went into the office giving him a raw “Thanks” over my shoulder.

“Friendly guy,” I told Pevsner as the door closed.

“His name’s Cawelti,” Pevsner said without looking up from the file on the desk. “He did five years uniformed in Venice. He had troubles but he did the job. I like people who get the job done.” Then he looked up at me. I knew the look of mild contempt I would get, but it was mixed with a recent touch of tolerance that was at best a sign of temporary peace. Phil was a little taller than me, a little broader, a few years older, and a lot heavier. His close-cut steely hair was a magnet for his thick, strong fingers. He scratched constantly, whether from dandruff, habit, or perplexity I was never sure, and I had seen him doing this for more than thirty years. He was my brother.

He sighed. That was the friendliest he could be to me. I responded by making no bad jokes. The war had brought us to a truce. I had even lost the chance to give my running rub of asking about his wife Ruth and the kids. I lost it by actually visiting them on December 7 and doing a rotten job of hiding the soft touch I was for his new baby, Lucy, who reduced me to stupid grins. Phil was almost fifty, too old for kids, like Lugosi, but since I didn’t have any, I kept my mouth shut.

Phil wasn’t too great at dealing with adults. His impulse was usually to use his fists. I had learned that as a kid and bore the nose to prove it. As a cop he had grown no more mellow. Crime was personal with him. Criminals ate into his free time, committed crimes just to make his life difficult, murdered, raped, and went on rampages just to keep him angry and busy. Being a cop wasn’t just a job for Phil; it was a vendetta, a vendetta he could never win. There were a lot more of them than there were of him, and he usually associated me with the criminals, with working for potential and accused criminals. Even if my clients proved to be innocent part of the time, according to Phil it wasn’t worth the effort.

“You’re working the Faulkner case?” he asked, looking back at his file.

“Right,” I said.

“There’s no case to work,” he said, standing up and loosening his already loose tie. He tapped the thin file on the desk. “He did it. Two eyewitnesses, the victim’s wife and the victim himself before he died.”

“William Faulkner murdered someone?” “I just said that,” continued Phil, looking at me with growing impatience.

“Do you know who he is?” I asked.

Phil’s face turned red, starting at his neck and going up.

“I’m busy, but I’m not illiterate,” he said. “I don’t give a crap and a holler if he’s the pope.” Phil pointed at me. “He did in a citizen and he’s going up for it. Leib can pull his strings downtown, and you can pull your tricks, and this whole thing can stay tight for a few days, but it’s going to blow and he is going over.”

The rage that festered beneath Phil’s uncalm exterior sometimes boiled into the air and threatened the closest person, who was frequently me.

“Hold it, Phil,” I said soothingly. “I’m just doing a job.”

“Read the report,” he said with a grunt, “but don’t sit behind my desk. I’m going out for a coffee. Cawelti will bring Faulkner up here.”

“Thanks,” I said to the closing door. It had been the most civil conversation I had had with my brother in years.

I picked up the file and pulled the report. The file had a few statements by witnesses and the coroner and a report by the detective in charge, Cawelti. I sat in the chair opposite Phil’s desk and started to put my feet up, then remembered what had happened the last time Phil had caught me with my feet on his desk. I almost wound up two inches shorter, which I could ill afford. The report was good and Faulkner was surely in trouble.

“Report-Detective Officer John Cawelti, Wilshire.

“At 9:20 p.m. on January 3, 1942 I was called to 3443 Benedict Canyon in Beverly Hills. I arrived just after the ambulance. Doctor, Bengt Lidstrom of County, said victim, Jacques Shatzkin of that address, was dead. Three bullets in chest. Officer Steven Bowles was on site and said he had been called. Bowles (report attached) arrived before Shatzkin died. Shatzkin identified William Faulkner, writer, as his assailant. Camile Shatzkin, deceased’s wife, also identified Faulkner. Jacques Shatzkin’s identification was positive. Shatzkin was author’s representative and had met previously with Faulkner. Faulkner had been invited for dinner to talk business. He arrived late, according to deceased and his widow, fired point-blank at Shatzkin, and then left. Though victim was unable to do more than identify assailant, the wife said that she knew of no quarrel between the two, though husband had described Faulkner as moody during their one lunch meeting. Faulkner was picked up at the Hollywood Hotel at 10:10 p.m. He denied knowledge of Shatzkin murder or dinner invitation and was singularly uncooperative. He admitted having had lunch with Shatzkin two days earlier (Wednesday). Check with Shatzkin’s office confirmed luncheon meeting on Wednesday with Faulkner. Search of Faulkner’s hotel room, conducted 4:30 a.m. Saturday, January 4, with Sergeant Veldu present and two security officers from Warners, Lovell and Hillier, led to discovery of.38 caliber revolver, recently fired. Ballistics run indicates this was weapon used to kill Shatzkin. Faulkner charged with murder 7 a.m. Saturday, January 4, 1942. Asked to call lawyer, Martin R. Leib of Westwood. Made no further statement.”

I had just finished the report when the door opened and Cawelti of the sleek dark hair ushered William Faulkner into the small office.