The Howard Hughes Affair

CHAPTER TWO

It had all started six days earlier. Actually, where it started is a question of what you’re interested in. It started for me in about March of 1897 when my father and mother decided to have a second offspring and God provided a convenient rainstorm one afternoon, so they could close their grocery and work on it. Nine months later on November 14, Tobias Leo Pevsner, who was to become Toby Peters, detective and shoeless victim, was born. Jump 44 years, a broken nose, a broken marriage, and as many broken promises as there are abandoned wrecks along the Pacific Coast Highway and you find yourself in my rooming house, on a Monday, one week before my showdown at NBC.

On the Friday before, I had called a number given to me by my ex-wife Anne, who worked for Transcontinental and World Airlines. According to Anne, her boss’s boss, Howard Hughes, wanted a good, honest detective. I qualified for at least the second half of that requirement. I had called the number and spent the weekend at the library getting information on Hughes. He had broken all sorts of long distance flying records, owned Hughes Aircraft in Culver City, Hughes Tool Company, a good chunk of Transcontinental, the Caddo Corporation for making movies, a brewery in Texas and large parts of six states. I was impressed, primarily because I figured it would be reasonable to ask a guy like Hughes for $50 a day, which was so far out of line that anyone but a millionaire would have laughed at it.

On Monday morning, I was sitting in my room eating a very large bowl of Kellogg’s All-Bran, the natural laxative cereal. I had been living in a rooming house in Hollywood for almost three months at $15 a month.

I had no faith in the rooming house lasting a long time. My last place was being levelled by a bulldozer to make way for a supermarket. I had been thrown out of the apartment I had lived in before that when a guy shot it up and took an unintended dive out of my window. The rooming house was a change of pace in a quiet neighborhood. It had been an impulsive move toward domestic tranquility, but the quiet street and deaf landlady were already driving me away from what little sanity I had.

The deaf landlady, Mrs. Plaut, kept the room clean, which relieved me of the small, infrequent guilt I had always felt about the other places I had lived in and let rot around me. I had a hot plate in a corner, a sink, a small refrigerator, some dishes, a table and three chairs, a rug, a bed with a purple blanket made by Mrs. Plaut that said “God Bless Us Every One” in pink stitching, and a sofa with little doilies on the arms that I was afraid to touch.

The six people who lived in the place generally minded their own business. I wasn’t even sure who they all were, since my hours were unusual and I didn’t socialize much in the hall or join in the weekly poker game Mrs. Plaut held in the living room downstairs. Eventually, I would have to accept her invitation since she assured me the stakes were “moderate.” I had trouble picturing her wrapped in her old shawl crocheting doilies as she “raised a sawbuck” over the eleven-cent bet of Mr. Hill, the nearsighted accountant.

The phone in the hall rang and I could hear Mrs. Plaut cackling to someone. Then I heard the slap of her slippered feet come down the hall. I could almost smell the faded flowers on her print dress when she knocked on my door.

“Tony,” she whispered. I had spent the better part of the first evening I moved in trying to tell her my name was Toby, but she had smiled knowingly and kept calling me Tony Peelers. I had enough names and could have done without it, but some things aren’t worth the effort.

“O.K.,” I shouted, shoveling down All-Bran so it wouldn’t get soggy while I went to the phone.

“Tony,” she went on. “Are you there? You have a telephone call.”

“I’m here. I’ll be right there.”

Her feet padded away, and I hurried to the door, pulling on my pants. I hobbled down the corridor to hear Mrs. Plaut saying into the phone, “I’m sorry, but Tony is not home. Would you care to leave a message?”

I managed to pull my belt tight and wave to Mrs. Plaut, who ignored me. We wrestled for the phone for a few seconds. Since I was thirty years younger than she was and fifty pounds heavier, I almost succeeded in getting the phone from her fingers. I finally forced my face in front of her, and recognition dawned. She let me have the phone and I panted into it.

“Peters here.”

“Mr. Hughes would like to see you today,” a male voice said.

“All right, where?”

“Be at 7000 Romaine at 11. That gives you one hour.”

“One hour,” I said. “What’s it about?”

The guy on the other end hung up and so did I.

I finished my cereal, had another bowl with sugar and milk and found out from the L.A. Times that the Russians had launched a strong counteroffensive against the Nazis at Rostov, that Rommel was holding the British in Libya, and that F.D.R. saw a crisis in Asia while he waited for the Japanese reply to his principles for peace. “War Clouds Loom in the Pacific,” said the headlines. I turned to the sports section and found that Hugh Gallarnea, the former Stanford runner, had led the World Championship Chicago Bears to a 49–14 win over the Philadelphia Eagles with three touchdowns. Green Bay was still a game ahead of Chicago in the Western Division with a 10-1 record compared to Chicago’s 9–1. I had developed a strong curiousity about Chicago since a recent visit there, and I wondered how anyone could play, or want to play football in a Chicago winter.

I also discovered from the “Private Lives” cartoon that “Berlin’s most luxurious boudoir belongs, not to a movie star, but to Reinhard Heydrich the cold-blooded killer who governs what was once Czecho-Slovakia.”

Armed with all this information, I shaved, finished dressing, rinsed out my bowl, pretended I didn’t notice my unmade bed and went into the rain ignoring the twinge in my bad back that promised trouble if the rain kept up.

Three little girls about eight years old were skipping rope on the porch. I watched them for awhile, waiting for a break in the rain so I could dash to the Buick, tilt my hat back and feel like a detective.

The girl who was jumping had three teeth missing on top, and her mouth was wide open. The two rope-turners chanted:

Fudge, fudge, tell the judge

Mother has a newborn baby;

It isn’t a girl and it isn’t a boy;

It’s just a fair young lady.

Wrap it up in tissue paper

And send it up the elevator;

First floor, miss;

Second floor, miss;

Third floor, miss;

Fourth floor,

Kick it out the elevator door.

Since that was about all I could take from the youth of America on two bowls of All-Bran, I dashed for the car and made it without too much rain damage to my suit.

Seven thousand Romaine was a big office building, and they were expecting me. A young man who looked like an ex-seminary student with his blond hair parted almost down the middle identified himself as Dean and escorted me up the elevator, commenting on the weather, the misfortunes of war, and our mutual hope for prosperity. I said he was right and followed him past a maze of rooms. Everyone seemed to have been set down in isolated cubbyholes.

Dean read my mind and kept walking.

“Mr. Hughes prefers to keep the employees separated so they won’t gossip and they won’t know what each is doing. He believes in keeping company secrets.”

We went into a large office with a thick, blue carpet and pictures of birds on the wall. There was a bar, table, radio, desk and a hell of a good view. But it looked unused.

The young guy read my mind again, which was probably what he got paid for.

“This office is for Mr. Hughes, but he never comes here.”

“Today is special.”

He nodded his head negatively.

“No, today is not special. You are to wait here for a call from Mr. Hughes.”

“Life’s been threatened and he’s being careful,” I guessed, taking a walk to the window.

“No,” said the man, his mouth playing with the idea of being amused. “This is Mr. Hughes’ normal procedure.”

“I see,” I said knowingly.

Dean checked the unused desk to be sure it was neat. “I don’t know why he does two-thirds of what he does. And I don’t know why he wants to see you.”

“Terrific,” I said, turning to smile at him, knowing that my smile made me look like an enraptured gargoyle.

We stared at each other for half an hour and looked at the phone. At noon, a tray of food came in. According to Dean, Hughes himself had ordered my lunch, which turned out to be a salad, a bacon and avocado sandwich on white bread and a big glass of milk. Dean had the same. We ate in silence at a small table, and I felt my mind toying with catatonia.

“Can I get you anything more?” he said when he finished and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “More food? Something to drink or read?”

“How about another avocado sandwich to go?” I tried. He didn’t look angry or amused. We waited some more and I looked at my watch. It told me it was 12:45, which might be true or might be hours off.

I turned on the radio without permission, tuned in KFI and listened to Vic and Sade. Uncle Fletcher and Sade spent the show talking about how they were going to have lunch together. When it was over, a buzzer on the desk jerked young Dean forward. He grabbed the phone, said “yes,” and hung up.

“There’s a private airport in Burbank on …” Dean started.

“I know where it is,” I cut in.

“Good. You’re to go there immediately.”

“What if I don’t go there immediately? What if I don’t like being treated like a vacuum-cleaner salesman?”

“Sorry?” said Dean as if he hadn’t heard me.

“What if I don’t feel like going to Burbank? What if I decide instead to invest 30 cents and see Citizen Kane at the Hawaiian instead, and maybe another 40 cents on a couple of tacos?”

“It would probably cost me my job,” he said.

“It doesn’t seem like much of a goddamn job to me, Dean,” I said, making for the door.

“Mr. Dean, Walter Dean,” he corrected. “It pays well,” he said with a sign of life, “and you get to meet all kinds of strange people.”

“Like Howard Hughes?”

“Believe it or not, Mr. Peters, you and I have already had a longer conversation than any I have had with Mr. Hughes. I hope you enjoy Citizen Kane.”

I looked at him and couldn’t tell if he meant it or the whole response was some kind of con to keep me in a good mood. If he was a fake, he was a good one.

“Burbank?” I said.

He nodded and I left, hurrying down the silent, carpeted corridors and out of the damn building as fast as I could. My footsteps didn’t even echo to keep me company. The building had no echo. And there were no people walking down the halls chatting and no people at the water coolers. There were no water coolers.

I was already in love with Howard Hughes as I drove to Burbank in the rain listening to Young Widder Brown. I stopped at a drug store for a Coke after the radio told me, “A little minute for a big rest means more and better work.” It was sound advice, and though I was normally addicted to Pepsi, I proved my flexibility. I also bought a tube of Musterole salve to use on my back when I got home. If it was good enough for the Dionne Quintuplets, and the radio said it was, then it was good enough for Toby Peters. I tried to think of a scheme for getting Carmen, the widow cashier at Levy’s Grill, to invite me to her place for a Musterole treatment. I’d even invest 30 cents and take her with me to the Hawaiian. With more than 300 dollars in the bank and a potential millionaire client coming up, I could afford a few luxuries, maybe even a full tank of gas.

The rain had turned to steady sheets of thin, sticky glue by the time I hit the airport. I parked in a small lot and ran for the nearest building. Two guys stopped me before I hit the safety of the tin overhang. Both were well dressed, unsmiling and dry. They were also big. At least one of them should have been ugly, but they weren’t. They looked like everyone’s image of the FBI.

“I’m supposed to meet Hughes here,” I said, holding my hand over my head to keep a small patch of my scalp dry.

They parted to let me by.

“Thanks,” I said, dripping between them and through a white, wooden door. They followed me in, looking confident. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like meeting a potential client wearing a seersucker sponge.

“You should have asked me for my name,” I said, looking around the small, empty office.

One of the grey pair of movie doubles stepped forward and I turned, expecting trouble and maybe wanting it. The wait in Hughes’ office and the game in the rain had made me tough and stupid. The grey double handed me a card. On the card was my photograph. I nodded, handed it back, and sat down at a bench across from an old desk covered with bills and paper. The rain pinged in boredom on the tin roof as one of the two went back outside and the other stayed to keep his eyes on me.

“What now?” I asked. “Do I get blindfolded and transported to Northern Canada?”

“Mr. Hughes will be right down,” he said. He and Walter Dean back on Romaine had gone to the same school. I could hear the buzzing of a small airplane outside and turned to look across the field. A dot appeared in the distance out of the waves of dark rain and grew larger as it headed toward us and touched down on the ground with a slight bump and whirr. The plane, a two-engine silver thing, kept getting bigger and moving slower till it came to a stop about thirty yards from us. Two men climbed out, one well built and wearing a light-colored suit, the other tall and thin with slacks and an old zipper jacket. The one in the suit ran ahead while the thin guy ambled, ignoring the rain and deep in thought. The guy in the suit burst through the door, panting. He was about fifty with thick glasses. He looked at me, took off his jacket, snapped it once to get the top layer of moisture off and looked at the door. The second man came in. He pushed back his wet, dark hair and clenched his teeth without looking at anyone and unzipped his battered jacket, revealing a clean white shirt and no tie. Something was on his mind. He was in his mid-thirties, about six-foot four and had a slight mustache, which couldn’t make up its mind whether to be something admirable or something inconspicuous. From the way the business-suited duo looked at him trying not to look at him, I assumed he was Hughes.

“Noah, tell Rod to back it another eighth of a revolution. No, make it a seventh. I’ll take it up as soon as it’s done.” The guy who had been in the plane with Hughes nodded, put his wet jacket back on and went into the rain without a word. Hughes sat at the edge of the desk, looking out of the window at the resting plane. He touched his lower lip, looked through me, and closed his eyes. Inspiration hit, and he turned to pick up the phone.

“Did Noah get there yet, Rod?” he shouted, as if unsure of the power of the phone to carry his voice. “Right, well in addition to the seventh, check the rear flaps again. I know you did.” Hughes hung up and crossed his arms. I gave him about three more minutes while I tried to gain sympathy from the guy who looked like the FBI, but he wasn’t having any.

Finally, I said, “Mr. Hughes.”

Hughes didn’t answer, and I got up. This time I was a little louder.

“Mr. Hughes.”

Nothing.

The third time, I gave it something close to a shout. Hughes looked up.

He turned his eyes on me and slowly focused into the room.

“You’re…”

“Peters, Toby Peters. I eat avocado and bacon sandwiches, wait around in blue offices for hours, take long rides in the rain, and occasionally do a confidential investivation.”

Hughes looked at me with serious interest for the first time.

“You’re five-foot nine, 44 years old. Your brother is an LAPD police lieutenant in the Wilshire District. You have an office in the Farraday Building, exactly $323 in the bank and a bad back which must be causing you some pain now because it flares up in humid weather.”

“What kind of gun do I have?”

He paused for a second, chewed on his mustache with his lower teeth, cocked his head as if he hadn’t heard. Apparently he was a little hard of hearing and didn ‘t feel like admitting it, so I asked the question louder.

“You own a.38 automatic, but you’ve never fired it at anyone and you don’t like to carry it. You have a good record with a reputation for knowing how to keep secrets. That’s important to me.”

“Thanks,” I said.

“You also have a reputation for doing foolish things.”

He did something that looked as if it might someday develop into a smile. Then his head twitched slightly in the direction of the door. It was enough of a message to send his well-dressed muscle man back out into the rain, closing the door behind him.

Hughes, his arms still folded across his chest and his rear against the desk, turned his eyes upward, looking at the ceiling and listening to the rain hit the roof.

“This country is going to be at war in a few weeks,” he said.

It seemed both reasonable and inevitable to me, and I had nothing to add. In a few minutes, he went on.

“Hughes Aircraft has designed some important equipment to help us win that war. We have finished plans for the D-2 bomber, the fastest, most accurate bomber plane in the world. We have also completed designs for a long-range, high-speed, giant wooden transport for carrying troops to Europe over the Atlantic or Pacific to bypass the threat of submarines.”

“Sounds great,” I said, waiting for him to tell me if I was going to pilot the bomber or the transport.

“I have reason to believe the Japanese have either stolen my plans or have tried to steal them.” He turned his eyes on me. They didn’t blink. I looked back at him, wondering what the hell my reaction was supposed to be. I nodded slowly, sadly, knowingly. It was a good choice. He went on.

“In 1934, we built the H-l, the Hughes One, a prototype for the world’s fastest landplane. It had a radial engine with two banks of cylinders and a 1,000-horsepower Pratt and Whitney twin Wasp engine.”

I raised my eyebrows in further appreciation though I didn’t know a Pratt and Whitney from a gumball machine. Hughes was looking straight at me and talking.

“We built that to run fast, even specified flathead screws countersunk and rivets installed flush with the metal to minimize wind resistance. We set a world speed record in that plane in 1935 in Santa Anna. Now the Japanese have a fighter plane they’re using in China, based on the H-l, and the United States is a good five years behind them.”

“Mr. Hughes,” I said, getting up and trying not to reach for my aching back, “I don’t know a damn thing about airplanes.”

“But you know a lot about thieves,” he said.

“I’ve caught them, lost them, played poker with them and been laid up by them. They come in all sizes and ages: old ladies in grocery stores who drop cans of soup in their knitting bags; fourteen-year-olds who break pawnshop windows to grab watches they can’t sell; guys with guns and no brains and guys with enough brains to be making ten times as much in something straight. I even know guys who own big companies who might qualify, and I don’t mean you. I want a hot bath and you want the cops or the FBI, not me.”

Hughes moved away from the desk toward me. A bead of water dripped down his forehead, and he looked tired as he stepped forward.

“The FBI doesn’t believe me, and the police who have jurisdiction can’t handle it.”

“Right,” I said, looking at him after a step toward the door. “What could I do? Play spy? Break codes?”

“You could listen,” he said, showing a distinct spark of irritation. He tried to cover it like an exposed sore, and the look in his eyes was embarrassment.

“I don’t get together with people very much,” he said carefully. “But last Monday I had a small dinner for some people who I thought might be of value when the war came. My plan was to organize a kind of lobby to support the projects I think are vital if we are to win that war. We’re already gearing up to munitions work and…” he trailed off, making it clear there were things I didn’t have to know. I agreed with him. There was a lot I didn’t have to know. My specialty was guarding bodies and hotel lobbies, finding runaway wives, husbands, parents and kids, lovers and deadbeats-not spies.

“Hear me out, Peters,” he said with a tone of anger, as my face showed my decision. He was about to say something else when the telephone rang. We looked into each others’ eyes while he talked loudly on the phone, “Right, yes, I’ll be right there. No, I’ll do it.” He hung up and gritted his teeth.

“Peters, I want you to quietly investigate the list of people I am going to give you. They were dinner guests last week at the house I’m using in Mirador down near Laguna. I also have the names of the three servants who were there. I’m sure someone on the night of that dinner went into the study and looked at my plans for the bomber and the transport. My papers were moved. I want you to find out who looked at those papers and if they actually got to copy them.”

I shook my head sadly. He looked at his watch.

“Look,” I said, “You can get a whole agency to work on this. Besides, I don’t think I can come up with anything based on what you’ve got. You’ve got maybes and you want miracles.”

Hughes moved toward the door and past me.

“You were recommended by one of our employees. You check out. No one can buy you off and no one can make you talk. I’ll give you $48 a day plus expenses. Walter Dean at the Romaine Office will be your contact and give you anything you need. Now, it’s either yes or no. I’ve got to get back on the field.”

If he was waiting for me to ask how he came up with a figure like $48, he was going to be disappointed, but he was also a man who knew the price of another man.

“No guarantees and $100 in advance,” I said.

“Ninety-six dollars in advance, two days,” he said.

I laughed and he considered the matter ended because he pulled a neatly folded sheet of paper from his pocket and handed it to me.

On the sheet were typed the names, phone numbers, home and business addresses of nine people, along with the reasons for their being invited to the Hughes dinner.

I started to say something, but Hughes shook his head no.

“You don’t like me, do you, Peters?” he said with his hand on the doorknob.

“-I like your money,” I said.

“My father died when I was a kid,” Hughes said. “He was a tough man, but a man everybody liked. My father knew how to laugh. He was a terrifically loved man. I am not. I don’t have the ability to win people the way he did. I have no interest in studying people. I should be more interested in people, but I can’t. I am interested in science, in nature, the earth. I can work with that. That’s why I need people like you, people who are used to working with emotions and lies. If you have to reach me, reach me through Dean.” He turned and left.

The man called Noah came in almost passing Hughes at the door. Without a word, Noah took out a thick wallet, handed me $96 in various bills and made out a receipt for me to sign.

“We’ll want an itemized bill,” he said.

“That’s what I always give,” I said.

“We know,” he said. “I think he respects you, Peters.”

I shrugged.

“I’m grateful,” I said, counting the money and putting it into my own nearly empty wallet.

“He doesn’t want gratitude,” Noah said, moving to the window to watch Hughes take off into the rain. “I don’t know what the hell he wants. Do you know how many times he’s had that plane up today in this rain? Thirty-five times. He’s convinced there’s something wrong with it that no one else can find. He’s been up for three straight days and nights working on it and he’ll be up and in the air till he’s satisfied.”

“A perfectionist,” I sighed, starting to shiver from being wet.

“No,” sighed Noah. “It’s more like a disease. It itches at him, drives him mad like a song you can’t remember or a name on the tip of your tongue.”

“You’re a philosopher, like Irving Berlin,” I said, moving to the door.

“No,” he said, “a wet, glorified bookkeeper.”

On the way out, I nodded to bodyguards one and two and dashed through the rain to my Buick. Hughes had taken off over me and was disappearing into a bank of dark clouds.

In the Buick, I let out my first groan of the last hour and rubbed the spot far back above my kidney where the pain was worst. Experience told me if I didn’t get out of these wet clothes and stand up or lie flat on the floor within the next half hour, I might not be able to walk for days, but I couldn’t resist a quick look at the list Hughes had given me. I wiped the pain from my brow and pulled the sheet out. The neat list included Basil Rathbone, actor; Anton Gurstwald, chairman of Farbentek of America; his wife, Trudi Gurstwald; Ernest Barton, Major, Army Air Corps.; Norma Forney, writer; Benjamin Siegel, businessman; Toshiro Homoto, houseboy — chauffeur; Martin Schell, cook; William Nuss, butler. All telephone-listed, all addressed, all ready to be investigated, though I didn’t expect to come up with anything except an improved bank account.