Never Cross A Vampire

CHAPTER FIVE

On the way back to Hollywood, I stopped at a fifteen-minute car wash, watched some guys in blue overalls fail to turn my speckled Buick into a pumpkin, paid my forty-nine cents and decided to stick with the Faulkner case. I’d give Lugosi a rebate or something for each day I didn’t work. I needed the money, but there wasn’t much of me to go around and what there was was fragile.

I was heading up Van Ness when I spotted my tail, a dark Ford two-door about a block behind. The sky had clouded fast and promised rain to give my car an extra wash it could now do without. The sudden darkness made it tough to see who was driving the Ford. I turned right on Santa Monica and then left on Western, moving slowly. Sure enough, the Ford appeared a block behind, taking cover behind a Rainer Beer truck. I went down on Fountain and made a circle around the block, turning on two wheels and hoping no patriot had spotted me burning rubber. U.S. Rubber was running full-page ads in magazines and the papers telling us that for the duration of the war “every ounce of rubber is a sacred trust.” I even had a copy of their free thirty-two-page booklet, “Four Vital Spots,” on how to make tires last longer, but I considered this a potential emergency. Arnie, my no-necked mechanic on Eleventh, could get me retreads if things got bad.

With my right fender rattling enough to frighten an old man walking his dog, I made it around the block in about ten seconds. Figuring the speed my tail was going, I should have wound up right behind him, but I didn’t. He was gone. I prowled the neighborhood for a few minutes and headed home to the boarding house on Heliotrope.

Assuming the dark Ford was not a ghost out of my past, and that was not an entirely reasonable assumption, then the likelihood was that it had something to do with the Faulkner case. Somewhere in this busy Saturday, I had touched a nerve. But why follow me? To see where I was going? Whom I was talking to? Probably. At this point, it wasn’t likely that I was on a potential victims list, but you never knew. When I parked a block away from the boarding house, I took my.38 from the glove compartment, convinced myself that it still worked, pocketed it, and got out. The rain caught me ten feet from the car. It was a cold rain that poked through my coat and made it heavy. My knee told me not to run so I plodded along, abandoning renewed plans for an assault on Carmen that night.

When I got to the porch, I looked like an enormous sponge. Mrs. Plaut was there, beaming down as I lumbered up the stairs and leaned against the wall.

“They bring May flowers” she said brightly.

“It’s January,” I said, “not April.”

I shed my coat to ease my burden up the stairs.

“You had another call, Mr. Peelers.”

“Charlie McCarthy again?” I asked.

“No, Baylah Lougoshe,” she said precisely, pronouncing it correctly. “She had a very strange accent.”

“He, Mrs. P.,” I corrected, “it’s a man.”

“I think she was Norwegian,” she guessed.

“Do Norwegians have different accents from Swedes?” I said before I could stop myself.

“Definitely Norwegian,” she said, turning to smile out at the rain.

The stairs were lonely, high, and steep, but I had promises to keep, so up I went, coat in hand, heart in mouth, brain in gear.

I fished Lugosi’s home phone number out of my sopping wallet and called on the hall phone. A child answered.

“Is Mister Lugosi there?” I asked.

“Hello,” he repeated brightly.

“Is he there?” I tried. “Or anyone more than three feet tall?”

“He’s working a movie. He’s a doctor.”

Someone took the phone away from the boy.

“Hello,” I shouted.

“Mr. Peters,” came a woman’s voice.

“Right,” I said.

“Mister Lugosi is at the studio, Monogram, shooting. He wanted to know if you could meet him there. He said it was rather important.”

“What was it about?” I asked, taking off my wet jacket and watching the trickling trail from my clothes creep down the stairs behind me. “He didn’t say,” the woman said. Her voice was pleasant, efficient, and strong, and she was ignoring the boy in the background demanding something that sounded like “Skpupsh.” She told me where Monogram was, but I didn’t need the information. I needed another bath and a large towel. I thanked her, hung up, and made it to my room, where I left a trail of discarded wet clothes on the way to my mattress on the floor. Two days earlier I had been thinking of picking up a few dollars by pumping gas. Now I was floating in clients and water.

Ten minutes later, I forced myself up, rebandaged my leg, gulped a few more of Shelly’s pain pills, and put on my second suit, which was too light for the weather and too dirty for society. I tried not to think about the rain that was telling my bad back to beware. Maybe I succeeded. Maybe my old theory that the body can tolerate only one major pain at a time was true. Come to think of it, it wasn’t my theory. I got it on a Shadow radio show from a mad scientist who was torturing a girl he wanted to turn into a gorilla. I’d have to tell Phil my pain theory the next time he tried to hit me with a desk.

And still I waited, looking out at the falling rain, knowing I had a block to go to my car, knowing my coat would be of no use. A large bowl of Grape Nuts mixed with puffed rice and too much sugar helped. I felt better, but wasn’t thinking any better. The rain looked as if it was stopping or at least taking a dinner break. Giving myself a pep talk about responsibility and financial security, I braved the elements, scanning the street for the dark Ford. There were a few parked on the street, but they had been there when I came in. Almost all the cars in the world were a solid dark color, except mine. A lot of those cars were Fords.

I stopped for some gas at a station downtown on North Broadway and drove past the Los Angeles River viaduct. I remembered from somewhere in high school history back in Glendale that this had once been the center of an Indian village, home of the Gabrielino Indians. They had been a branch of the great Uto-Aztecan family, which spread across North America from Idaho south to Central America. At one time twenty-eight Indian villages existed in what was now Los Angeles County.

The Indians, according to what I had been told, were among the most peaceful in North America. They seldom warred. Robbery was unknown, and murder and incest were punishable by death. They believed in one deity, Qua-o-ar, whose name never passed their lips except during important ceremonies, and then only in a whisper. The men seldom wore clothes and the women wore only deerskins around their waists. When the weather got rough, the Indians wrapped themselves in sea otter fur. Their homes were woven mats that looked like beehives. They had no agriculture, and they didn’t know how to domesticate animals. They lived on roots, acorns, wild sage, and berries and-when they could catch them-snakes, rodents, and grasshoppers. Their weapons were sticks and clubs. They didn’t know how to make bows. Los Angeles had come a long way in a few hundred years.

Monogram in 1942 was a thriving, catch-as-catch-can operation with some studio space, but not much, and a lot of shooting in the park to save a few dollars. There was no big, fancy gate and regiment of uniformed guards, but they did their best to keep up appearances. An old guy in a gray jacket and cap, who looked as if he had been riding horses for a century, hurried out to my car when I pulled up.

“Yeah?” he said. “Right,” I came back. “I’m here to see Bela Lugosi. I’m doing a job for him.”

“Peters?”

“Right.”

“He said you might be coming. I thought he might be pulling my leg. He’s got one screwy sense of what’s funny sometimes.” The old guy waved me in and put his hands on his hips. He smiled after me. There wasn’t any need to tell me where to find Lugosi. The place wasn’t that big. I just followed the sounds past low buildings to a sound stage about half the size of anything at Warner Brothers. In a space marked for Sam Katzman, I parked behind a truck with a rusting rear door and moved as quickly as I could on my aching leg to the entrance. My attempt at speed was prompted by a desire to keep warm without a coat and not by any particular zeal for the job at hand.

The light over the door was off, indicating that no shooting was going on. Two guys, one Oriental, the other huge, were talking in front of the door about the Chicago Bears-Pro All-Stars game the next day. The Oriental guy was saying something about Sammy Baugh when I went through the door.

The stage was well lighted. The set in front of me was a phony jungle with a little hut. Three guys were huddled around a camera and from their anxiety I guessed they were having trouble with it. Lugosi, wearing a dark suit and thick makeup, was seated on a crate outside the range of lights smoking his cigar. He spotted me, stood up, and advanced on me into the shadows away from the others.

“Ah, Mr. Peters, good of you to come,” he said. “I could not reach you, and I did not want to leave a message at home for reasons you will no doubt understand.”

He was nervous and it was affecting his accent, which became more pronounced. Doubt had come out “dutt,” but there was no trouble understanding his concern.

“Before I left for the studio this morning,” he said, removing his cigar, “I got a phone call, a man, a voice I did not know, with an accent, if you will believe, stronger than my own. This man said, ‘We are going to get you now. You have only days to live.’ Then he said I knew who he was.”

“Either we have a new player,” I said, “which isn’t likely, or our friend has gone another step and changed his pattern: a direct threat on the telephone.” “Shall I call the police, ask for protection?” he asked.

“You can try, but I don’t think you’d get it, and the police can’t watch you forever. I can’t even do that. The trick is to find our friend as fast as possible. I’ll get on it.”

“Thank you,” Lugosi said seriously, pumping my hand.

“Ready in a few minutes, Bela,” a voice came from the group gathered around the camera. Lugosi waved to the men to let them know he was ready, and a young woman with a script in her hand ran to the stage door and called in the two men outside.

“Excuse me,” Lugosi said. “We have to work quickly. Time is money. I am the most expensive part of this film and it is a modest expense.”

I walked with him toward the set while the Oriental who had mentioned Sammy Baugh moved in front of the lights, waiting for Lugosi.

“What’s the picture?” I asked.

Lugosi shook his head and smiled sadly.

“A very timely epic written last week and not yet finished. It’s called The Black Dragon. I play a plastic surgeon who transforms Japanese into Occidentals so they can spy on America. In the end, I am to receive ironic justice for this misdeed. It goes on. I look in the mirror in the morning and I say to myself, ‘Can it be that you once played Cyrano and Romeo?’ Always it is the same. When a film company is in the red, they come to me and say, ‘Okay, so we make a horror film.’ And so that is what we do, what I always do. And I do my best. That is the trick.” He adjusted his tie, took a last puff on his cigar. “Always play it seriously no matter what the material. And always talk slowly so you will have more screen time.”

Lugosi stood erect, convinced his face into an evil smile, and stepped into the lights.

“I’ll be in touch as soon as I have anything,” I said. He nodded in acknowledgment. “And I’ll have someone watching your home just in case.”

With this he turned, dropped the film smile, and gave me a real one, which I returned. Then a voice shouted, “Quiet on the set,” and I went out the door.

I found a taco place, sat in a corner near a window where I could watch the dark Ford that had picked me up again, and thought about things. I thought that I was eating too much and always did when I was on a job. With two jobs I was eating even more. I thought that the guy in the dark car might not be from the Faulkner case. There was a good chance that he was Lugosi’s pen pal. I thought that Los Angeles was a strange place to work and that people here found the strangest way to die. I thought of Billie Ritchie, the Charlie Chaplin imitator, who had died of internal injuries after being attacked by ostriches while making a movie. I thought until the thinking hurt as much as my knee, and I knew I was ready. I was ready for one more Pepsi and a final taco before I played another round of tag with the Ford.

It was just about dark when I lost him. He was easy to lose because he didn’t want to get too close. I made some plans for getting a good look at him the next day if he kept up the game. It might be the best lead I had in one of my cases.

Back home I avoided Mrs. Plaut and borrowed a handful of nickels from Gunther. The next day was Sunday. Gunther volunteered to drive up to Bel Air and keep an eye on Camile Shatzkin, follow her if she left. I didn’t expect much to happen, but at least I’d be on the job through Gunther. Gunther’s car was a ’38 Oldsmobile with a built-up seat and special elongated pedals put on by Arnie the garageman for a reasonable price. The car was inconspicuous enough, but a midget was not the ideal person for a tailing job. I had no choice. I called my poetic office landlord, Jeremy Butler, and asked him to spend Sunday keeping an eye on the Lugosi house just in case the threat was real. Butler heard my story and said he would park discreetly with a book and keep an eye on the house. A near giant is no less conspicuous than a midget, but as I said, my options were limited, and as a bodyguard Jeremy Butler had no peers. I couldn’t say the same for his poetry. My last set of nickels went for a phone call to North Hollywood, where my sister-in-law Ruth answered the phone.

“Ruth, Toby. Hey, I thought I’d take the boys to a show to see Dumbo tomorrow if they’re not doing anything.”

“I’m sure they’d love it, Toby. What time will you pick them up?”

“About noon. I’ll take them for lunch first.”

“I’ll have them ready,” she said and hung up.

Below me the weekly Saturday night roomers’ poker game was starting, presided over by Mrs. Plaut with a retired postman as the perennial big winner. I had sat in once and likened the experience to Alice’s at the tea party. My knee was feeling a little better. I turned off the lights, got into bed, and listened to the reborn rain on the roof and my radio. I caught the guy on the news saying. “General Douglas MacArthur’s Philippine defenders are carrying on a grim and gallant battle against tremendous odds on the island fortress of Corregidor at the entrance of Manila Bay. They have successfully driven off the third bombing attack on the island.”

The Chinese high command reported that 52,000 Japanese had fallen, but the Japanese had taken Changsha. The Russians were still giving the Nazis hell, but the British were taking losses 280 miles from Singapore.

I turned off the radio and went to sleep, wondering whether there were some place on the earth not at war. I had a trio of dreams. One took place in Cincinnati. A vampire was flying through the streets dropping little pellets. Anyone who touched one or was touched by one turned to stone. The second dream had something to do with airplanes in a small room, and the third dream struck me as brilliant, something I’d have to remember in the morning so I could tell Jerry Vernoff the next time I saw him, if ever. It would make a perfect plot card. It involved a murder in a locked room. The victim was bludgeoned to death but there was no weapon. Just the victim and the murderer. In the dream I figured out that the killer, who looked something like my brother Phil, had frozen a huge banana, used it as a weapon, and then eaten it peel and all. The victim looked something like me.

When I woke up, I reached for my pants and notebook to write down the dream and then thought better of it. It didn’t seem so clever on a Sunday morning with the light through the windows and a layer of fuzz on my tongue.

My knee was stiff but not terribly painful as long as I didn’t bend it. I dressed and ate a big bowl of Kix while I read the Sunday funnies in the Times. I skipped the news. Red Ryder and Little Beaver had returned to Painted Valley. A “Sinister Sheik” was about to slash Tarzan. Dixie Dugan was trying to get her father out of his easy chair, and Fritzie Ritz and Phil were taking a walk. Joe Palooka was in the Army, and Tiny Tim was getting thrown into a Mason jar by Hoppy. The comic book insert-Brenda Starr, Kit Cabot, Spooky, and Texas Slim-inside the funnies kept me busy through another bowl of Kix.

By the time I got to my brother’s small house on Bluebelle in North Hollywood it was almost noon. The baby was toddling around the living room with a padlock in her hand and a four-toothed grin for me. Nate and Dave came out ready to go. Nate was twelve and Dave nine. I tried not to compare them to me and Phil. Dave had just recovered from a car accident, which had added to the Pevsner financial burden.

“Did you kill anybody yesterday, Uncle Toby?” Dave asked brightly.

“You’re a zertz,” Nate broke in. “He doesn’t kill people every day. He hardly ever kills people.”

“I hardly ever kill people,” I agreed.

I picked up the baby, who hit me with the small but heavy padlock and grinned. I was grinning back when Ruth came in the room, looking like Ruth: skinny, tired, with tinted blonde hair that wouldn’t stay up and a gentle smile. I took a step forward and saw Phil at the kitchen table with his head in the funnies trying to avoid me.

“What happened to your leg, Toby?” Ruth said, with some concern.

“Shot,” said Dave. “Probably Nazis.”

“Nazis,” I agreed, loud enough to be sure Phil heard. “They attacked me when I wasn’t looking for putting my feet on their secret spy desk.”

Ruth shook her head, thinking I was making a fool joke and being willing to tolerate me. I handed Ruth the baby, who gave me a final blow with the padlock, and I promised to have the boys back by five.

“Give my best to Phil,” I said as we went out the door.

“Your car is nifty-looking,” Dave said.

“Thanks,” I said, letting them in. When we were on our way, I cleared my throat and said, “You want to see Dumbo or some scary movies?”

“Scary movies,” the boys said in unison.

“Right,” I agreed, “but you have to tell your mother and father you saw Dumbo. It’s part of a case I’m on. Okay?”

They agreed, and I headed for Sam Billings’s adobe theater. We ate at the taco place across the street, and Nate complained about a sore stomach while we waited in line. The line consisted mainly of kids of all sizes with a few adults and a hell of a lot of noise. When we got to the box office, I asked the girl where I could find Billings, and she said he had an emergency dental appointment.

“Boys,” I said. “Here’s a quarter for candy. Watch two of the movies and meet me out on the sidewalk in front of the theater when they’re over. What movies are you going to see?”

“Revolt of the Zombies,” grinned Dave.

“Dumbo,” overrode Nate wisely.

I made it to the Farraday Building in fifteen minutes and took the elevator up because of my leg. That took another ten minutes. The building echoed empty on a Sunday morning, and I knew not even Jeremy Butler roamed the halls. He was watching the Lugosi house and probably worrying about someone defacing the sacred walls around me.

Billings was, indeed, cringing in the chair with Shelly hovering over him when I entered.

“Toby?” Shelly said, turning his glasses in my direction.

“Right,” I said. Billings looked in my direction. His eyes showed recognition.

“Got the book I was telling you about,” Shelly went on cleaning a silver mirror by blowing on it before inserting it in Billings’s mouth.

“Right over there. Civil Air Defense by Lieutenant Colonel A. M. Prentiss. Every type of bomb and every means of defense.” “Terrific,” I said, moving closer. “How’s Mr. Billings’s mouth?”

“Emergency,” Shelly said in a whisper that not only Billings but also anyone in the corridor could hear. “Lots of work. Bad situation. Never saw anything quite like it. Wears false fangs. Throws his bite off. Can you imagine?”

“Yes,” I said. “I’m the one who sent him to you, remember?”

“Right,” Shelly agreed, searching for his stub of a cigar somewhere among the magazines and instruments.

“Can I ask Mr. Billings a few questions? Quick ones?” I said, deferring to Shelly’s professional position.

“Ask, ask,” Shelly sang in delight while he continued his search.

“Mr. Billings, I need your help,” I said. Billings tried to sit up, but the chair was tilted, and Shelly reached out to push him firmly back. He didn’t want this one to escape.

“Mr. Billings,” I said, leaning close. “I need the names and addresses of all the members of the Dark Knights of Transylvania. I need the real names and real addresses, and I need them fast.” “Mr. Peters,” he said with a determined protest, “that can’t be done. The Dark Knights of Transylvania isn’t a club, it is a sacred commitment. Our membership consists only of those who believe in vampires and who are determined that the image of vampirism be respected. The world has always been full of those who do not want to know the truth. We must remain secret until the world is ready to accept the truth.”

“This is an emergency,” I said, moving my face close to his and showing my clenched teeth.

Billings looked determined, so I went on before he made it too difficult to give in, which I wasn’t going to let happen even if I had to torture the names out of him, which I didn’t think would be difficult or necessary.

“Mr. Billings,” I said. “Someone has been trying to frighten Bela Lugosi, and I have reason to believe it is one of your Dark Knights. Yesterday Lugosi got a phone call threatening his life. This is a serious business.”

Billings’s eyes had gone wide and his face pale when I mentioned the phone call. I wasn’t sure what there was about that part of my story that got to him, but it did. “I don’t understand,” he sputtered.

“I don’t either, but I’m going to find out. Now you either give me the names and addresses out of concern for the good name of your organization, sense of decency, and concern for Lugosi, or I smash your nose into a duplicate of mine.”

“And he could do it,” Shelly agreed over his shoulder, continuing to hum a tune.

Billings gave me the names and addresses, and I wrote them in my notebook.

“Thanks,” I said, patting him on the shoulder. “Shelly will give you his preferred patients discount, won’t you, Shel?”

“Right,” agreed Shelly, anxious to get to work on Billings’s distorted mouth. “The usual. I’ll definitely get an article out of this. A nut whose mouth has been distorted by vampire fangs. I’ll call it the vampire syndrome, a first in dentistry.”

“Has a nice ring,” I said, heading for the door. “You’re in good hands, Mr. Billings.”

Billings’s pudgy hand rose in response to my goodbye wave, and I headed for the door. Before I got there, Shelly told me I had a call from Jerry Vernoff. I went back to my office and called him. He answered after almost a dozen rings.

“Vernoff,” he said in a deep businesslike voice I didn’t recognize.

“Peters,” I said.

“Oh,” he answered, his voice returning to normal. “I thought it was Zugsmith, the producer. I hear he has a spy serial he needs plot work on. I have a call in to him. I’ve been clipping newspaper articles on spies for the last year, a diamond mine of plots, enough to keep five series going.” His voice was filled with excitement.

“Sounds terrific,” I said. “You called me?”

“Right,” he said. “I thought I’d try to help on the Faulkner business. If I hadn’t driven him up the wall he wouldn’t have gone out the door, and either he’d have an alibi or he wouldn’t have done Shatzkin in.”

“I prefer the alibi option,” I said.

“I tried to find a bartender who remembered seeing him,” Vernoff said. “No luck. Tried for a housemaid or something in the hotel, but nothing doing. There’s an elevator operator who thinks he saw Faulkner around nine, but he can’t be sure. I’ll keep at him, and maybe he’ll get more sure unless you want to talk to him.”

“No,” I said, testing my knee to be sure I was able to move with some show of normal animal ability. “You keep at it.” It didn’t sound like much of a lead. Even if the elevator operator started to grow more sure, he’d be cut down in a trial if it ever came to one.

“Great plot material,” Vernoff said. “Hey, I don’t want to be morbid or anything, but a man can’t help thinking professionally. You know what I mean?”

I knew what he meant. Most people had long since stopped being people to me. They were potential victims or victimizers. That’s all there was in the world except for the bedazzled and bemused semiguilty who wandered through life. The world wasn’t a place with a few dark corners, but a place with countless numbers of places to hide.

“I know,” I said. “Give me a call if you find anything. I appreciate any help I can get, and I’ll let Faulkner know.”

“Right,” he said. “And if you come up with anything, I’d really appreciate talking. I can’t help feeling a little guilty about what happened to Faulkner.”

“I know,” I said.

“I better get off the phone now,” Vernoff laughed. “Zugsmith may be trying to get through.”

I hung up so Vernoff could spend a few minutes or hours or forever waiting for that call. Vernoff had probably spent years of his life waiting for that phone to ring so he could pitch plots.