Dancing in the Dark Read online

  Buxbaum just sat playing with a rubber band. No one paid any attention to the Mexican kid. I gave my statement to Seidman, who typed it up as I stood there.

  “Phil tell you Cawelti’s on top?”

  “He told me.”

  “Politics,” Seidman said, hitting the keys of the Remington.

  The kid was yelling louder now. The squad room doors opened and Cawelti stepped in in a new blue suit.

  “Shut him up,” Cawelti shouted, pointing at the kid.

  The room went silent except for the kid, who was now talking Spanish. Buxbaum nodded, put down his rubber band, and stood up with a grunt. The kid kept screaming; he turned to Cawelti and called him a series of colorful names. Cawelti’s pocked face turned nearly as red as his hair.

  “Bring this piece of crap to my office, Buxbaum. Fast.”

  Buxbaum grabbed the kid’s left arm. The kid pulled away. Cawelti shot forward, punched the kid in the stomach, kneed him in the groin, and hit him square on the nose with his right elbow. The kid went down and said no more.

  “Add resisting arrest to whatever else you’ve got on him,” Cawelti said, adjusting his jacket and taking a step toward the door.

  Then, sensing additional prey, he turned and scanned the room, almost missing me in the corner. Our eyes met and Cawelti gave me a smile I did not like. I returned the smile and he strode across the room toward me. The room was still silent.

  Cawelti and I were face to face.

  “If you’re not a witness or, better yet, a suspect, get your ass out of here,” he said. “I don’t want to see you in here.”

  “Witness,” Seidman said, pointing at his report.

  Cawelti’s face and mine were no more than six inches apart now.

  “To what?”

  “Murder,” Seidman said.

  Cawelti’s smile broadened. It really was one awful-looking smile. I dug in my pocket and came up with a packet of Sen-Sen. I handed it to him. He threw it on the wooden floor.

  “I want that report on my desk in the next fifteen minutes.”

  Seidman nodded.

  “Congratulations on your promotion,” I said. “I’m sure you and the local merchants will get along just fine.”

  “Soon,” Cawelti said, pointing a finger at my nose. “We’ll meet soon.”

  He turned, crossed the squad room, nodded at Buxbaum to bring the bleeding and bent-over kid, and went out. The noise level began to climb.

  “Can I go, Steve?”

  “Go,” Seidman said. “We’ll get back to you if we need you.”

  I moved past Buxbaum, who was keeping the kid from falling over.

  “What’d I do?” the kid said through the blood leaking from his nose. “What’d I do?”

  “Exercised your right to free speech,” Buxbaum said.

  I escaped into the corridor, went quickly past Cawelti’s office, the office that used to be my brother’s, and got down to my Crosley. I eased into my seat on top of Mrs. Plaut’s pillow.

  My guess was that it was close to five. I turned on the radio as I drove, waiting for the time. The news guy told me that Trygvie Lie, the foreign minister of the Norwegian Government in Exile, was sure the Norwegians would welcome an Allied invasion of Norway. I then found out that Anthony Eden was in Washington to talk about postwar issues and J. P. Morgan had died at the age of seventy-five of a heart attack. At the end of the news, a happy woman sang, “It’s five o’clock. Gruen watch time. Ticktock.”

  I headed for the Monticello Hotel. I had things to discuss with Arthur Forbes.

  Chapter Eight

  First You Put Your Two Knees

  Close Up Tight

  When I got to the Monticello, I realized I should have called first. The desk clerk, a thin guy with a funeral-director smile and a blue-serge suit, told me he was sorry but Mr. Forbes and Mrs. Forbes were not in the hotel. He assumed, but he wasn’t sure, that they had gone home.

  “I thought he lived here,” I said. “When do you expect him back?”

  “Who knows? Mr. Forbes has many business enterprises and social obligations,” the clerk said, leaning over to copy something from one open book to another.

  “Where might Mr. Forbes live?” I asked, flashing my own unwinning grin.

  “I do not know Mr. Forbes’s address, and if I did know I’m afraid I wouldn’t be at liberty to give you the information. You might try the telephone directory,” he said, still leaning over his busy work. “But …”

  “Unlisted.”

  “Unlisted. You could leave a message.”

  A nervous blond young man in tan slacks, his white shirt open at the collar, jangled across the lobby with his hands in his pockets.

  “Change for a hundred,” he said, reaching into his pocket and pulling out a crinkled bill.

  The clerk nodded, opened the cash drawer, and took the bill. The nervous guy eyed me and turned to get his money. He counted it and moved away.

  “I work for Mr. Forbes,” I said to the clerk.

  “Who doesn’t?” answered the clerk, closing two books in front of him and looking up at me.

  “You’ve got a point. Listen, I need a break here,” I whispered, reaching for my wallet. “I’m a private detective. I’ve been hired to investigate the murder of Luna Martin.”

  The clerk waved my hand away before I even got the wallet out of my back pocket.

  “You have nothing in that billfold that would overcome my fear of what Mr. Forbes might say or do to me were he to find out I gave you his address.”

  “Then you do know it,” I said.

  The clerk sighed, pursed his lips, and looked across the lobby at the hotel doors, which had just opened to an arguing couple. The man looked like he was in his late forties. The woman was under thirty and properly round.

  “Good evening, Mr. Hooper,” the clerk said.

  Mr. Hooper, in a white suit and a bad mood, waved and kept walking.

  “Claims to be a movie producer,” the clerk confided, leaning toward me. “Car dealer from Chicago. That’s his secretary. Wife’s back home fighting the wind and watching the kids.”

  “You’re sharing this information with me for a reason or you just want to be pals?”

  “I’m a born gossip,” the clerk said. “Probably why I’m still a desk clerk and not on my way up the ladder at Paramount. I liked Miss Martin. She was tough, knew what she wanted, and always had a good word and a few minutes for me and the bellhops. You hang around Mr. Forbes and his friends and bad things are bound to happen.”

  “Ever trade gossip with Luna Martin?”

  “That,” he said with a smile, “I can sell.”

  My wallet came out again. I pulled out two tens and handed them to the clerk, who glanced around to be sure no one was watching. He handed one back to me and stuffed the other into his pocket.

  “Too much,” he said. “I don’t have that much to sell. Luna thought Mrs. Forbes was well aware of her existence and her relationship to Mrs. Forbes’s husband.”

  “Was she?”

  “Is Lincoln dead? Luna was putting pressure on Mr. Forbes to divorce the missus and marry her,” the clerk said.

  “She confided all this to you?” I asked.

  “I’m easy to talk to,” the clerk said. “You want to listen or you want to talk?”

  “I’ll listen,” I said.

  “I think Luna gave him a time limit, but I don’t know what it was. Anyway, I’m sure Mr. Forbes had no intention of divorcing his wife and marrying Luna. Mrs. Forbes is the daughter of Guiseppi Cortona. Mr. Cortona is very much alive, very fond of his daughter, and very much in charge of Minneapolis.”

  “She told you this?”

  “I stand behind here playing with keys, sorting mail, writing in ledgers, and listening to people who stand five feet away from this desk and talk softly in the mistaken belief that the desk makes them invisible and me deaf.”

  “Got you,” I said. “Anything else?”

  He shook his head.


  “Slow night,” I said, surveying the empty lobby.

  “Tomorrow morning will be hell and a half,” he said, looking around as if he were seeing the hordes of dawn. “When the newspapers hit the streets tonight, the ghouls will suddenly decide that a weekend at the Monticello might be fun. You know, a peek at the ballroom and the lobby, maybe a glimpse of Mr. Forbes. Mostly would-be writers who see a quick script. You know.”

  “It’s happened before?”

  The clerk shrugged. “A former business associate of Mr. Forbes’s from Detroit was the unfortunate victim of a robbery in the elevator the week Mr. Forbes took possession of the then St. Lawrence. The former associate was a Mr. Seymour Bratz, also known as Rat-tat-tat Bratz. The elevator came down.” He nodded at the elevator. “The door opened and Mr. Bratz was sitting inside alone and very dead.”

  “You saw it?”

  “Though I didn’t note at the time that the robber had taken the time between the eighth and ground floors to remove two of Mr. Bratz’s fingers. These two.”

  The clerk put up his right hand and held up the pinkie and the finger next to it.

  “The ghouls came?”

  “Descended,” the clerk said with a nod.

  “So it doesn’t get boring behind the Monticello desk.”

  “It beats being shot at by the Japs,” he said. “My two younger brothers are both having that pleasant experience. My older brother was killed on Guadalcanal.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Well, I got the waiver. Mother insisted. I was considered to be the weak one and a bit …”

  “Sensitive.”

  “Let’s call it ‘fey,’” he said.

  “You tell your life story to everyone?”

  “Just the ones who pay ten bucks for it. You’ve got a phone call.”

  “What?”

  “The lobby phone. Over there.”

  There were two phones sitting on a table with a dark marble top. The table was about a dozen feet away against a wall. The phones weren’t ringing and the clerk hadn’t spoken to anyone.

  “I don’t …”

  “I do,” he said, cocking his head to one side while I took a beat to figure out the situation. I moved to the phones and picked one up. Nothing. I picked up the other one.

  “Mr. Peters?”

  I looked back at the desk. The clerk wasn’t there.

  “Yes.”

  “Forty-seven Mountain Top Road, Huntington Beach.”

  The line went dead. I hung up the phone and looked over at the desk, where the clerk was just moving back behind it, a stack of papers in his hands. I nodded to him, but he didn’t look up.

  I went through the front doors and into a threat of rain.

  Cotton Wright, the parking-lot attendant, was seated on a low wooden stool, trying to make sense out of a crumpled issue of the L.A. Times.

  “Yes,” he said, looking up at me.

  “My car.”

  “Your …”

  “This is the parking lot,” I said. “And that little Crosley back in the corner is mine.”

  “I know,” said Cotton, standing up and touching his scalp through his thin hair.

  “Your head humming?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “Did I tell you about that?”

  I nodded.

  “Sometimes I get the wars confused,” he said, heading for the Crosley past a wide array of vehicles that made my car look like a tiny battered rolling refrigerator, which it was.

  Whatever else was Cotton’s problem, he could drive. He eased the Crosley out of a tight space that wasn’t really a space, and pulled the car smoothly to my side.

  “Little,” he said, getting out.

  “Cheap,” I said, handing him four quarters and getting into the car and on top of my borrowed pillow.

  “Someone asked me once if I could hear the radio through the plate in my head,” he said, leaning down to talk to me through the open window.

  “Can you?”

  “No,” he said. “That don’t make any sense. My plate hums.”

  “Proud of that plate, aren’t you, Cotton?” I asked with a smile.

  “Earned it,” he said, seriously.

  The Farraday was about ten minutes from the Monticello and on the way to Huntington Beach, if you’ve got an active imagination and a very sore ass. It was almost six. Main Street was just waking up from its afternoon nap. There were a few parking spaces.

  Knowing where to park in Los Angeles was about as tough as figuring out food-ration stamps. Mrs. Plaut was the food-ration expert. I knew parking. No parking along red or yellow curb. Three-minute limit at white curb. Fifteen-minute limit at a green curb, otherwise forty-five-minute parking in the Central Traffic District from 7:00 A.M. to 4:30 P.M. No parking from 4:30 to 6:00 P.M. And unlimited parking from 6:00 P.M. to 2:00 A.M., thirty-minute parking from 2:00 A.M. to 4:00 A.M., and unlimited parking from 4:00 to 7:00 A.M.

  I parked about half a block from the Farraday, eased out of the Crosley, and headed down the street past trios and quartets of uniformed soldiers and sailors, some of them with smiling young and not-so-young women. A pair of Latin zoot-suiters were leaning against the wall to the right of the entrance to the Farraday. They were talking earnestly to Juanita the seer, who had an office on the fifth floor just below mine and Shelly’s.

  Juanita is a bejangled psychic with a few years behind her. She wore clothes that Carmen Miranda would find too flamboyant, but she disdained turbans. Juanita had lost a husband back in New Jersey. I think he died. Or, she might simply have misplaced him on the subway. “Alex could still be riding up and down to Coney for all I know,” Juanita had once said to me, fingering a silver earring the size and shape of Baja California.

  Juanita had discovered her powers early and given in to them only after two husbands and a quarter of a century as a housewife. Juanita was good at reading tea leaves, coffee grounds, toenails, the palm of your hand, and the top of your head. “All show,” she had confided to me once in a whisper. “It either comes to me in a flash, like that, or nothing. But clients like a show. This is Los Angeles, right?”

  Since it was, I had nodded.

  The problem with Juanita’s insights was that you couldn’t really figure out what they meant till it was too late.

  I tried to step past Juanita and the two Mexicans.

  “Pain,” she suddenly said, turning to me. “You’re in pain.”

  “How you doing, Juanita?” I said.

  Juanita was painted for Indian wars or serious seeing into the future. Her mouth was as red as a stoplight and her eyebrows as dark as tomorrow. Her perfume was as sweet and heavy as a Chunky candy bar. I glanced at the zoot suits. They looked me up and down and weren’t impressed.

  “I’m doin’ great, Tobe, but you’ve got a pain. Not the knees.”

  “His ass,” one of the zoot-suiters said.

  “He a seer too?” I asked.

  “No, man,” the zoot-suiter said. “I just see the way you walking. Like when I was a kid and my old man whooped me with a stick.”

  “Your ass hurts, Toby?” Juanita said softly, with some concern.

  “You asking or telling?”

  “Both,” she said. “This is Vic and José. They’re brothers. They come to me. I tell them stuff. They give me stuff. Barter. It’s coming back as a means of exchange.”

  “We got to get going,” one of the brothers said impatiently.

  “Then you should have come on time,” said Juanita, her back to him. “Besides, you don’t have any place to go. Your evening and the night are uncharted, though there is a woman named, I think …”

  “Forget it,” the Mexican said nervously. “We’re goin’. We’ll see you soon, Juanita.”

  The brothers adjusted their wide-brimmed hats, looked at my less-than—Cary Grant clothes, and departed. Juanita didn’t turn to watch them go.

  “I’ve got to get going,” I said.

  She took my right hand and looked in
to my eyes. “You’ve been dancin’?” she asked.

  “Question?”

  “No,” she said. “You’ve been dancin’. I used to dance when I was married to Alex. Nothing fancy. A few steps. I liked it. Alex was a good dancer, if you can imagine that.”

  Not having known Alex, I could not imagine it.

  “More death, Tobe,” she said, squeezing my hand and shaking her head. “Dancers are dead. That make sense to you?”

  “Yeah,” I said. “I’ve really got to go, Juanita.”

  “Watch the fourth dancer,” she said. “The third dancer is fire and death. Victim and killer. The fourth dancer is the one you’re looking for.”

  “Juanita, I don’t want to know any more.”

  “I can’t stop,” she said as a couple passed us. The young man was in civilian clothes. The woman was a WAC. They tried not to look at us in the doorway of the Farraday but we were a compelling sight.

  “My curse,” Juanita said. “Can’t stop telling people their future. You should know that by now. How’d you break your car window?”

  “It’s not broken,” I said.

  “Forget it,” she said, giving me a smile and a playful punch in the arm. “I think I’ve got something you’ll like. A woman from your past will come to you, a woman of beauty. There was a rejection in the past but she will bring hope to the future.”

  “Anne?” I said.

  “Anne?”

  “My former wife. She’s supposed to marry Preston Stewart.”

  “The actor?” Juanita said.

  “How many Preston Stewarts can there be?”

  “In Hollywood, dozens,” she said.

  “So, they won’t get married?” I asked, feeling like an idiot.

  “How should I know?” she said with a jangling shrug.

  “How should … forget it. I’ve got to get going.”

  “Suit yourself,” Juanita said, letting my hand go. “See Jeremy.”

  “I was going to.”

  “Good,” she said, looking down the street. “I’m going. Cass Daley’s on the ‘Bing Crosby Music Hall’ tonight. John Scott Trotter and his orchestra are going to do a patriotic medley. I’m a sucker for that kind of stuff.”

  And she was gone.

  The inner lobby door of the Farraday was locked. A sign over the panel of office names said, “After 6:00 P.M. please call the person you are here to see on the phone. They will come down and let you in.”