Now You See It

Chapter 10

It was lunch time at Max’s Drug Store on Melrose, but there was only one red-leather swivel stool open in the middle of the lunch counter. The others were occupied by women shoppers drinking coffee and yakking, salesmen on their lunch hour wolfing down egg salad sandwiches, and a sailor reading the newspaper.

Anita Maloney was alone behind the counter keeping up with orders, serving, preparing, brushing away dangling hairs with the back of her hand. She was a one-woman show: with one hand juggling orders, keeping coffee mugs full, slinging burgers, popping toast and scooping quarter tips into the front pocket of her peach-colored uniform while she piled the dirty cups and plates with the other.

Anita was the reason I was here. We had been seeing each other for about four months. It had started when I stopped in at Max’s for a coffee and recognized the woman behind the counter was the girl I had taken to the senior prom at Glendale High more than thirty years before.

We had lost touch with each other. I had gone through a marriage and lost my wife Ann who wanted a husband and not a battered kid in his forties. Anita had also been through a divorce, one she didn’t want to talk about it. Anita had a daughter, grown, living on her own in L.A. I had a cat named Dash living on his own in Hollywood backyards.

Anita saw me, gave me a small smile. Good teeth. White. Even. Anita was lean, energetic, and a little washed out when she was behind the counter, definitely pretty when she cleaned up after work. She wasn’t a beauty like Ann, but we were more than just comfortable with each other.

She didn’t ask me for my order, simply bringing me a Pepsi on ice and a slice of apple pie.

“End of the counter,” she said, without moving her head. “He’s been sitting there for the past twenty minutes watching the door. When you came in, he stopped watching and buried his head in the Times.”

She handed me a fork and went down the line to a woman with a cracking voice who called, “Miss!”

I glanced up at the shining aluminum rectangle over the grill. The reflection was wavy like an image behind the August heat of a steamy street. But it was enough. At the far end of the counter, not far from the restrooms and the telephone on the wall sat a man in a purple shirt and a red scarf flung over his neck. Less than two hours earlier, I had seen someone like that attempt to beat the California taco eating record in my office.

Pancho Vanderhoff did not lift his head. I couldn’t see him clearly, but I had the feeling his eyes were rolled upward watching me work on my pie.

The pie was good. Anita wouldn’t steer me wrong. The good thing was that I felt no pain in my left shoulder. I was aware of where the pellet had gone in and then pulled out, but I couldn’t call it pain. What I could call pain was the small, sharp jab in my chipped tooth. I stopped eating.

“Not going to finish?” Anita asked.

“Frank in?” I asked.

“Always,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Be right back,” I said, getting off the stool.

Pancho glanced at me, trying not to let it show. He was bad at not letting it show. When it was clear that I wasn’t headed for the door or the restroom but toward the pharmacy counter, Pancho went back to pretending to read the paper.

Frank stood reaching up to get a bottle on a high shelf behind the counter. The white pharmacist’s jacket he wore strained as he stretched. His fingers managed to pull the glass bottle forward. It fell and he caught it deftly with a grin of relief.

“Haven’t lost the touch,” I said.

He put the bottle of white tablets on the counter, looked at his hands and said, “Once a catcher, always a catcher.”

“Catcher?”

“Glendale High,” he said.

Phil and I had gone to Glendale, but Frank the Pharmacist was definitely a decade younger than me, and, by the time he was in high school, Phil and I were long on our way-he to the war to end all wars and me to a life of poverty, confusion, heartbreak, a reasonable amount of fun and satisfaction. Not to mention the occasional pain, leading me to ask now, “What have you got for a toothache?”

“Advice,” he said, picking up the pill bottle again. The pills rattled.

“Go see a dentist. You know a dentist?”

“Not one I’d want in my mouth,” I said.

“My brother’s a dentist,” he said. “You want his number? Use my name. He’ll take care of you. Wait.”

He put down the pill bottle, reached for the pad of paper on the counter, pulled a push-pull click-click pen out of his pocket and wrote his brother’s name and phone number. He handed the sheet of paper to me and picked up the bottle again. I pocketed the paper.

“Anything I can use till I see him?”

“Let’s see the tooth.”

I leaned over, pulled my upper lip back and he leaned forward.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said, wrinkling his nose.

“That’s comforting.”

“Oil of cloves,” he said. “It’s what dentists use.”

He handed me the bottle of pills and ducked behind the counter. I put the pills down as he came up with a bottle of green liquid with a screw top. He handed the bottle to me and said, “Just dab it on with your finger. A buck ten.”

I fished out the money and handed it to him.

“See Fred,” he said.

“Who?”

“My brother Fred, the dentist.”

“I will,” I said.

I could hear the pills rattling behind me as I headed back to the counter, pausing to open the screw-top bottle and use my finger to dab some oil of cloves on what remained of my tooth. The slight pain went away, replaced by the smell of something I recognized from a recent semimeat dish Mrs. Plaut had prepared a few days earlier.

“You okay?” Anita asked.

“Peachy,” I said, sitting again.

She poured me more coffee. I drank it, avoiding the side of my mouth with the sore tooth. I’d respect it, if it would respect me, at least for a few days.

People left. Others came. Anita scrambled. She put in ten-hour shifts four days a week and sometimes she worked an extra day.

A contrast: If I said to Anita that we had to go on a high-speed chase in ten minutes in order to catch up with a guy who’d kidnapped Paul Muni, she’d say, “Sure.” And she would mean it. If I had said the same thing to my ex-wife Ann, she would have said nothing, but she would have looked at me with a shake of her head, earrings dancing, breasts heaving, and turned away to deal with something serious.

I guess I still loved Ann. I know I liked Anita more than I liked my ex-wife. Anita knew how I felt about Ann. It didn’t bother her. She wasn’t looking for another husband.

At one, the lunch counter was almost empty. People had gone back to their buying or selling. The only ones left were me and Pancho who still pretended to read the Times.

Anita was cleaning up. Armed with my cup of coffee, I moved to the stool next to Vanderhoff.

“Henriot is dead,” I said.

“Huh?” asked Pancho, looking up from his newspaper.

“Front page, bottom, right where you were looking. French patriots killed the Vichy Minister of Information and Propaganda, Phillippe Henriot, in his bed in Paris.”

“Oh,” he said, his right cheek twitching just a bit. “Yes, I see.”

“And if you turn the page,” I said, reaching over to do it for him as Anita placed a fresh piece of pie in front of me, “you’ll see that Joe E. Brown presented a flag to the new Don E. Brown World War II American Legion Post 593. You know Brown’s son was a captain, killed in a plane crash near Palm Springs a couple of years ago.”

“I didn’t know that,” Pancho Vanderhoff said, turning pages.

I held out my hand to stop him.

“You want to talk?” I asked.

“I … well,” he muttered, adjusting his red scarf.

“Question one,” I said. “How did you know I would be coming here?”

“Miss Gonsenelli,” he said.

“Mrs.,” I corrected.

“She said you might be coming here. I told her I needed to talk to you about the script I’m working on for Dr. Minck.”

“Okay, so you just answered my second question, why are you here? I’d like another answer. Would you like a slice of apple pie. On me. It’s good. They don’t have tacos.”

“Well,” said Pancho. “I wouldn’t refuse.”

I asked Anita for a slice of pie for my buddy Pancho, who looked decidedly older than he had in our office. His skin was still unlined but tight like a tom-tom. His hair was black, too black, with spots of the liquid that had made it so speckling his neck.

“I’m a bit of a fraud,” he said with a sigh, finally looking straight at me. “I’ve never written a screenplay. I was a studio gopher for Edwin S. Porter. I brought him coffee and carried his bags. I met D. W Griffith when Mr. Porter was shooting Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. I was in the picture. One of the townspeople who look up and see the eagle carrying the toddler away. Mr. Griffith was the star. Then I went, to work for Mr. Griffith.”

“Gopher?”

He nodded.

“The truth is, Mr. Peters, I have no talent. I’m an old man living in the back bedroom of my granddaughter’s apartment. Closest I got to really being part of the movies was when I played a mute sinister butler in a Republic serial in 1937. Kane Richmond was the star. I was in four episodes. Dr. Minck is a godsend.”

“And?”

“And you are his friend and a detective,” he said with a sigh, digging into the pie. “This is good. I … I was afraid you’d find out that I’m a …”

“Fraud,” I finished.

He shook his head “yes” again and took on a forkful of pie so big that it stood a good chance of choking him.

Anita was halfway down the counter cleaning the grill, looking over her shoulder at us. I knew she could hear.

“Can you write a script?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Probably a very bad one, but I certainly know the format.”

“Then do it,” I said. “Shelly can afford it.”

He smiled at me gratefully, his left cheek full of pie. Then the smile faded.

“There’s one more thing,” he said. “When we finished our meeting in your office, I went back to my office to work. A man came in. He said he knew I had been at a meeting with you and the others and that it had something to do with the dinner tonight for Blackstone.”

“The man have a name?” I asked.

“Everyone has a name,” he said. “In Los Angeles, it is usually one that bears little resemblance to his or her given name. He didn’t give me his.”

“What did he look like?”

Pancho described Calvin Ott.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted me to tell him what went on in our meeting this morning,” said Vanderhoff. “He had seen me come out of your door.”

“And you told him?”

The thin old man looked at the ceiling. I could see then why he wore the scarf. The wrinkles on his neck made me add ten years to the seventy I had already credited him with.

“How much?”

“I sold my honor for a mere fifteen dollars,” he said, pulling three fives from his pocket and placing two of them on the counter. “Filthy lucre, but I truly need it. I spent some of it on a cab to get here.”

“Keep it,” I said.

“I had to tell you,” he said.

His pie was gone. I asked if he wanted another slice. He considered it and shook his head.

“You did the right thing,” I said.

“And you won’t tell Dr. Minck?”

“Write his screenplay,” I said.

“I don’t think he has a realistic idea about it,” Vanderhoff said. “He’s planning to produce this himself if he can’t get studio backing. And he wants to approach Clark Gable to play him. Dr. Minck claims to be friends with people like Gary Grant, Gable, Joan Crawford, and Fred Astaire.”

“He has met them,” I said. “The word ‘friends’ is definitely pushing reality.”

“I feel better,” he said, standing and rewrapping his scarf. “Confession. Very cleansing.”

“Hold on and I’ll give you a ride back to the Farraday,” I said.

“I almost forgot,” Vanderhoff said. “The man who gave me the fifteen dollars said something peculiar just before he left. He told me not to tell it to anyone else. He told me to watch closely tonight at the dinner because the dead would rise.”

That was pretty much what Juanita had told me. I didn’t understand it any better coming from Pancho. I would, eventually-but “eventually” still was quite a few surprises away.

I placed a dollar on the counter and told Anita I would call her later. She gave Pancho a smile. He twitched one back at her.

I dropped off Pancho at the Farraday and headed for the Pan-tages where Blackstone had told me they would be rehearsing and making some changes to the show because of Gwen’s absence and the damage to the buzz saw.

The old man at the stage door recognized me and waved me in with his pipe. I could hear voices coming from the stage beyond the heavy curtains, just out of sight.

“Catch him?” the old man said.

“Not yet.”

He adjusted his suspenders with his thumbs, looked at his pipe over the top of his rimless glasses and then looked at me as if he were going to honor me with sage advice.

“Meat loaf sandwich for lunch,” he said, touching his stomach. “Didn’t agree with me.”

“Sorry to hear it,” I said. “Look …”

“Raymond,” he said. “Raymond Ramutka.”

He paused, his eyes wide, expecting a reaction. When I didn’t respond, he rubbed his left hand on his thick wild mane of white hair.

“Before your time,” he said with a sigh, looking toward the stage. “I was in the St. Louis and Chicago productions of The Girl of the Golden West. Played Jack. Had a voice. But you must hear stories like that all the time in your line of work.”

“Some,” said. “I know the police asked you, but can you tell me what you saw last night?”

“Saw? Let me think.”

He rubbed his hair some more. It was now almost comically wild.

“Saw,” he repeated. “Like what went on here?”

“Yes.”

“Not things I saw earlier, on the way here after breakfast.”

“No, before the shooting,” I said.

“Let’s see. People moving around in those costumes, moving that stuff, animals in cages. Everyone trying to be quiet ‘cause the show was going on you know.”

“I know.”

He looked at his pipe again.

“Thinking back,” he said. “Did see that one who got himself shot and killed. Talked to him. He was a talker. Asked questions. I had answers, but I don’t think they were the ones he wanted. He went upstairs. Think maybe I saw him going into one of the doors up there, dressing rooms.”

“You didn’t hear the shot?”

“Who says?”

“I thought …”

“No, I didn’t hear the shot. Nothing wrong with my hearing. I’ve got perfect pitch. Always did. Born with it. ‘God’s gift,’ my mother used to say. ‘God’s curse,’ my father said, because it got me into musical comedy, opera.”

He was lost in reverie. I pulled him back.

“Gunshot.”

“Never heard it. Buzz saw was going,” he said. “Looked up some point. Not too many people backstage then. Saw the one, what’s her name, long legs, little tiger costume.”

“Gwen,” I said.

“That’s the one,” he said with a nod. “She was about at the top of the stairs. Someone came out of the dressing room behind her. She turned and ran down the stairs, right past me, out that door there.”

“The other person, the one who came out of the dressing room?”

“Nice suit, beard, one of those turban things on his head.”

“What did he do?” I asked.

Raymond Ramutka was in no hurry. He played with the tobacco in his pipe with a stained thumb and hummed something.

“What did he do,” he repeated. “Don’t know. Don’t think he came down the stairs. Don’t know. I watched her go through the door.”

“Thanks,” I said.

About a minute later I saw Jimmy Clark, the freckled kid, carrying a wooden cage big enough for a cougar. There was a handle on top, and it took both his hands to carry it.

“Want a hand?” I asked.

“No place to grab except the handle,” he said. “But thanks.”

He put it down and looked at a spot behind the curtains, probably gauging how much further he had to go.

“The other night,” I said. “What did you see?”

“Police asked me this,” he said. “I’ll tell you the same. I was standing about here. Even with the buzz saw, I heard the shot. I knew it was a shot. I’ve heard lots of shots.”

“Army?” I asked.

“Yeah, a grunt. Infantry. Got this,” he said, touching his leg, “getting off a landing barge on a little island near Guam. Didn’t even make it out of the water. Jap shell hit about then yards away from me, went in, blew. Never got to the island.”

He didn’t look a minute older than eighteen.

“The shot,” I reminded him.

“Oh yea. I heard it. “I was standing there with Meagan and Joyce. I looked up, saw Gwen running down. Saw this guy up there. Turban, beard. I think he had a gun in his hand.”

“A pellet gun?” I asked.

“Don’t think so,” he said. “Looked bigger, heavier. Anyway, he came running down the stairs behind Gwen. I knew something bad had happened. Just had the feeling. Her tiger tail was wagging. You know?”

“I know.”

“The man?”

“Stage right and gone,” he said. “If I could run, I would have gone for him.”

“He had a gun,” I said.

“Yeah, right. Well maybe I wouldn’t have gone for him but I like to think I would have.”

“Did the guy with the beard look familiar?”

“Well maybe, yeah, sort of,” he said plunging his hands into his pockets. But I can’t place him.”

“Keep trying,” I said.

“I will,” he said.

He rubbed his hands together, took in a breath and picked up the box again.

I found Pete Bouton standing in the wings to the right of the stage. His arms were folded and he was watching his brother slowly go over a number in the act, one that involved swords and a colorful big box that was about the size and shape of an outhouse.

“High,” Pete said. “Anything?”

“Not yet,” I said.

He looked out on the stage.

“Want to know the real trick?’ he asked. The real skill?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Timing, practice, confidence, making it look easy. Don’t let them see you sweat. We used to work together on stage, but I’m more comfortable making things work, watching from the wings.”

“You were in the wings when Cunnningham died?”

“I was. I didn’t hear the shot, but I did hear people talking behind me. I turned. There were four or five people. Joyce, Meagan, Al Grinker, looking toward the stairs leading up to the dressing room. They tell me Gwen ran down. They tell me a man in a beard and a turban came out of the dressing room with a gun.”

“But you didn’t see this?”

“Not from here,” he said. “Just the people looking up.”

I looked back. I could see the bottom of the steps but nothing of the upper landing where the dressing rooms were.

I looked at Bouton who was definitely worried.

“I don’t like this dinner thing tonight,” he said. “When Ott showed up here after the shooting, he was wild, threatened Harry. But my brother doesn’t back away from a challenge.”

“Ott’s got some kind of surprise,” I said.

“So has Harry,” he said.

I talked to everyone I could find who had been there when Cunningham was shot. They all told pretty much the same story. The only difference, and it was a big one, was that some of them said they thought they saw the man with the beard and gun come down the stairs and either go into the shadows stage right, through the door to the outside, or saw him move the other way outside the dressing room. Some said he was holding a gun. Some said he wasn’t.

I went up the stairs, passing a girl in blue tights. Her hair was pulled back and tied in a kind of tail. She reminded me of Ann Miller, which reminded me of Ann Preston who used to be Ann Peters.

“You looked cute in that costume the other night,” she said as she passed.

“Cute is what I aim for,” I said.

There were two doors beyond the dressing room where Cunningham had been killed. One was a closet with no windows. The other was a storage room with no windows. Around the corner was a dead-end alcove. The alcove was small. Over the railing were rungs fitted into the wall, a ladder down to the stage level and up to the roof.

I didn’t bother to climb down. It would just take me where I had been. I went up, pushed the trapdoor open, climbed out, and looked around. Nothing much to see. I walked around the roof to see if there was some way onto it. There was-a fire escape. So, the guy in the turban could have climbed up the fire escape and through the trapdoor. I checked my watch. Useless. It had been my father’s. It kept its own time. I had another stop I wanted to make but I wasn’t sure I had time. I had a tuxedo to put on, shoes to polish, maybe a murder to stop.

I went back down the stairs, waved at Raymond Ramutka who leaned against the wall near the rear door, probably remembering the score of Tosca.

I decided to make a quick stop.

I checked the phone booth and found a listing for The Pelle-grino Agency, Robert Cunningham, confidential investigations. The address was on San Vicente. When I got there, I walked into The Pellegrino Bar.

The Pellegrino Bar wasn’t exactly a dump. The neighborhood was just good enough to keep it from getting a label like that. It was small, dark, clean, and smelled of beer, even when no one was drinking it. The dark windows were glowing with neon beer signs, one of which for Falstaff flickered in the first stages of death.

Early afternoon. One customer at the bar. None in the four booths to the right. Customer and barkeep looked over at me when I came in. The customer, short, round, and needing a shave, was about sixty. He was wearing a gray cap worn off to the side. He wasn’t trying to be rakish. He looked as if he were about to burp. Both of his plump hands went to the glass of beer in front of him as if he were afraid I was going to snatch it from him.

The bartender was a woman. She was huge, sad of face, and did not look particularly happy to see another customer come in. A voice on the radio said the British had crossed the Odon River after beating back nine Nazi attacks. The bartender changed the station. The Dorsey brothers’ band was halfway through I Should Care.

I went to the bar. The bartender moved slowly in front of me, hands on the bar. She was supposed to say, “What’ll it be?”

But she didn’t. She didn’t say anything. Just glowered at me.

“Pepsi, ice,” I said.

“And?” she asked.

“What makes you think there’s an ‘and’?”

“Three in the afternoon, weekday, you order a Pepsi,” she said.

“Maybe I just came for the quiet surroundings and friendly atmosphere,” I said. “Maybe I’m just thirsty.”

“And maybe I’m standing back here waiting for Hal Wallis to come in and discover me,” she said.

“Cunningham,” I said. “Telephone book says this is his office.”

“Back booth over there,” she said. “Paid five bucks a month to sit there a few hours a week and for me to take messages. I answer the phone ‘Pellegrino.’” If they asked for Cunningham, I let him know or took a message.”

“You’re using the past tense,” I said.

“Because he’s dead,” she said.

“Cops have been here, right?” I asked.

She just looked at me. “One nasty son-of-a-bitch,” was all she said.

“Red hair, bad skin,” I guessed.

“That’s the one.”

“What did you tell him?”

“Okay,” she said, leaning toward me over the bar. “Now I know what game we’re playing. I’ll get your Pepsi. You decide on the going rate for answers.”

She moved down the bar. The pudgy drunk held up his hand for service. She ignored him. He burped loudly. He almost lost his cap.

“You’re not a cop,” she said.

“I’m not a cop,” I agreed, reaching for the Pepsi. In spite of two cubes of ice, it was still warm.

“He left two wooden fruit crates full of stuff,” she said.

“Did the cop look through them?”

“He did.”

“He take them?”

“Nope.”

“I’d like to look through them.”

“Not a problem,” she said, smiling a smile I did not like, a smile that was about to cost Harry Blackstone some money.

“Ten bucks.”

“Forty,” she said.

“Thirty,” I countered.

“I’ve got no time for games,” she said.

I looked at the drunk who was about to fall off his stool. I could see that she had a lot to do. I opened my wallet and counted out forty dollars, all tens. She took them, tucked them into a pocket and said, “The Pepsi’s on me. Come on.”

She went to the end of the bar and pointed at the rear booth, Cunningham’s office. I sat in it with my Pepsi and faced the front door. The dark wooden table was a jumble of rings left by countless glasses and the burn marks of enough cigarettes to kill the population of Moscow, Idaho.

In less than a minute, she came from behind the bar with a crate in her hands. She placed it on the table in front of me and then went back for a second crate. Then she moved behind the bar again, leaving me looking at a full-color picture on the end of the crate of a smiling blonde with frizzy short hair and impossibly white teeth. The blonde was holding a glass of orange juice and above her head were the words, “Sun Drenched Direct From Florida.”

I spent the next hour drinking warm Pepsi, watching the drunk, exchanging glances of less-than-love with the bartender, and discovering something interesting among the letters, notes, candy wrappers, and bills that were the legacy of Robert Cunningham.

I discovered that Cunningham had lots of bills that didn’t look as if they had been paid. I also learned that he couldn’t spell. Examples included: instatution, sirvalence, proseed, cab fair, and naturul.

If there was anything worth taking, Cawelti had probably taken it. But I kept looking. I almost missed it. A scrap of paper torn out of a notebook. It was unwrinkled and might have fallen to the bottom of the pile when Cawelti was going through the contents of the boxes. Cunningham’s handwriting was as bad as his spelling, but I could make it out:

A Thousand and One Nights, Wild, Thursday at eight. Culumbia.

Cunningham had said “Wild on Thursday” to Gwen before he died. Tomorrow was Thursday. I had a pretty good idea of what it meant, but I didn’t have time now to check. I folded the sheet, put it in my wallet, finished my third Pepsi, made a trip to the gents’ and waved good-bye to the barkeep and the drunk, who smiled.

I had a tuxedo to put on, a party to go to, and a magician to protect.