High Midnight tp-6 Read online

  “You?”

  “Yes,” he said with a shrug. “It’s hard to believe, but it’s true, and sometimes I get crazy ideas.” His free hand went up to his head to show me that the ideas came from there and not from a lower region. “Like I wonder what hot dogs would taste like if they were mixed with meat and bones from the right hand of a private detective. You ever wonder things like that?”

  I couldn’t get any words out, but I shook my head slowly to indicate that my curiosity never went in that direction.

  “Well,” Lombardi continued, “you go have a talk with Mr. Cooper …”

  “Cooper?” I said.

  “Cooper,” he repeated as if I were feebleminded.

  “Are you sure you have the right private detective?” I tried.

  “Your name is Toby Peters. Office on Hoover?”

  “Right.”

  “You’re the right one.”

  “Right. I’m to talk to Cooper. Tell him there is nothing I can find. Tell him he should do what the producer wants.”

  “You’ve got it,” said Lombardi, “and be sure my name and our little visit don’t come up in the conversation.”

  We had marched around the big room with our conversation punctuated by thunder, rain and one loud, nervous taco burp from Marco. We were back where we started, with the guys in white on one side and Marco and Costello behind me.

  “Mind telling me which Cooper?” I said.

  “You are joking,” said Lombardi. “I can appreciate a sense of humor. Our friends from Chicago, they don’t have much sense of humor, and they’re going to be keeping an eye on you for a while, just to be sure you understand our deal. Here, I got a little something to remember me by.”

  The other guy in white stepped forward, his hands behind his back. I tightened my stomach muscles and pursed my lips to protect my teeth from whatever he was going to hit me with. His right hand came out with a brown paper bag.

  Lombardi took the bag and handed it to me. “Assortment of cold cuts. Take them. Enjoy them. And do what we agreed. Remember my crazy ideas.”

  “Hot dogs,” I said.

  “You got it,” he grinned, releasing my shoulder. “I hope I don’t see you again, Mr. Peters.”

  What do you say to that kind of parting line? I turned, brown paper bag in my hand. Marco and Costello took their places at my side and walked me toward the door. Behind us I could hear Lombardi’s voice getting back to business, talking kosher-style bologna and expansion into the West Coast lox box market.

  The rain had stopped. It was still dark, but the black clouds were drifting inland fast.

  “Did you hear what he said?” Marco groaned. “He wants us to stay around here and sell salami.”

  “Salami, beer,” Costello said with a shrug to show it was all the same to him, all the while prodding me into the backseat of the car. Marco got into the driver’s seat, grumbling.

  “Where you want us to take you?” Costello said. His gun remained in his shoulder holster. For him, the whole thing was over. He had only a few more lines to deliver.

  I told them to take me back to the Ocean Palms. This time I gave directions right away, and we were back there in twenty minutes.

  As I got out, still clutching my now grease stained brown bag, Costello delivered his line. “You want to keep breathing this wet air, you do what you were told. We’re gonna keep an eye on you. Right, Marco?”

  Marco neither turned nor responded. His mind was filled with images of Japanese soldiers on banzai charges down La Cienega or cracks suddenly opening in the ground on Sunset. I went into the Ocean Palms and was greeted by the manager, James R. Schwoch, a thin guy with bug eyes, nervous hands and a frequent glance over his shoulder for eavesdroppers. He wore the same brown suit and tie he had worn since I met him.

  “Where have you been?” he demanded.

  “I was kidnapped by the new cold cut king of Santa Monica,” I explained.

  Schwoch sneered.

  “Get up to 212. Someone tried to commit suicide.”

  The someone was an eighteen-year-old girl from Eau Claire, Wisconsin, whose money had run out with her new boyfriend. She didn’t want any of my pastrami, but I got her to accept twenty bucks, almost a week’s pay, for a bus ticket back home. She thanked me and I told her that no one had ever really killed herself on eighteen aspirin. She said that was all she could afford. She had considered cutting her wrists or jumping out the window, but her imagination was too good. When I got her packed, I used the phone in her room to call Jack Ellis.

  “How’s the leg?” I asked.

  “Cast up to my ass, but I can walk,” he said. “Goddamn thing is driving me nuts. I can’t read, can’t listen to the radio. All I can do is think about how much it itches.”

  “Can you come back to work?”

  “I don’t know,” he said slowly. “It’d take my mind off the itching. What’s up?”

  I sketched it out and told him it would only take me a few days, but if he couldn’t make it back I’d get someone else to fil in.

  “No,” Ellis said. “Maybe I can get a chance to kick a few sailors with this cast.”

  “That’s unpatriotic. There’s a war going on.”

  “Right,” he said. “Between me and the US armed forces. I’ll get my wife to drive me down. You can take off.”

  I tried to get the twenty bucks back from Schwoch but he wasn’t having any. It had been my idea to give the girl the money, not his. I told him Ellis was coming back, and he liked the idea. I wondered if he would give Ellis the hotel manager’s equivalent of the purple heart, but I didn’t wait around to see. I didn’t know how long my brown paper bag would hold up, and I had some thinking to do.

  My ’34 Buick had recently been painted a straight dark blue by No-neck Arnie, the mechanic on Eleventh. The paint was already bubbling. I had sixty bucks and a problem. The immediate problem was the stain on the seat next to me being made by the Lombardi kosher-style cold cuts. The next problem was a client I supposedly had named Cooper. I turned on the car radio and listened to the war news for a few seconds and then turned to KFI to catch Don Winslow, who was winning the war even if we weren’t.

  What did I have? A client named Cooper, who had something to do with movies. Lombardi, who had recently moved to the Coast from the East and wanted to remain a noncelebrity. How many Coopers were there? Gladys Cooper, Jackie Cooper, Meriam C. Cooper, Gary Cooper. Something pinged in my head. Something about Gary Cooper. I urged it to come out. Don Winslow urged a spy to come out of a submarine, but both remained inside.

  The sky was clearing but the day was still damned cold when I pulled in front of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house on Heliotrope, where I lived. Mrs. Plaut greeted me on the porch. She was somewhere in the vicinity of eighty years old, with more determination than the Russians holding Leningrad and as much hearing as a light pole. She was under the impression that I was an exterminator with connections in the movie industry. With my help, she was writing a history of her family.

  “Mr. Peelers, you are home early,” she said.

  “Yes,” I said. “I …”

  “Yes, problems,” she sighed as I came on the porch. “My father used to say this is a doggie dog world.”

  “Right,” I said, trying to skip past her.

  “I’ll have another chapter by Saturday,” she said, putting her bony arm out, an arm that had uncanny strength.

  “Right,” I said, easing past her with my brown bag held out to keep from further ruining my suit.

  I did not bound up the stairs, but I went as quickly as I could. I passed my own door and knocked at Gunther’s. Gunther Wherthman was my next-door neighbor and probably my best friend. Gunther, all three foot nine of him, answered immediately. He was, as always, dressed in a three-piece suit, though he worked at home translating books from German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Danish into English. Gunther was Swiss. We had met on a case of mine.

  “Ah, Toby,” he said with reserved enthus
iasm. “I have a query for you.”

  “Join me in my room for an early dinner,” I said. “Cold cuts.” I showed him the bag.

  “Yes,” he said. “Let me clean up first.”

  Gunther dirty was more clean than I would be after going through a car wash without a car. I went to my room. I had learned to appreciate the room, which was nothing like me. There was one old sofa with doilies on the arms, which I was afraid to touch, a table with three chairs, a hot plate in the corner, a sink, a small refrigerator, a few dishes and a bed with a purple blanket on which “God Bless Us Every One” had been stitched in pink by Mrs. Plaut, a painting of Abraham Lincoln and a Beech-nut gum clock on my wall received in payment from a pawnshop owner for finding his runaway grandmother. Every night I took the mattress from the bed and put it on the floor. I slept there because of a delicate back crunched in 1938 by a gentleman of the Negro persuasion, who took exception to my trying to keep him away from Mickey Rooney when I was picking up a few dollars as a guard at a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese.

  I took off my jacket, shoes and tie and dumped the cold cuts into a bowl. I pulled out some leftover hard rolls and a bottle of ketchup and was trying to get a dark spot off of one of my plates when Gunther came in carrying a bottle of Cresta Blanca wine and two glasses.

  He put the wine on the table, examined the cold cuts, trying to hide a critical look, and made a sandwich. We drank wine and ate.

  I told Gunther my adventure and asked what he thought of the food.

  “While I appreciate your hospitality, Toby, I think Mr. Lombardi’s cuisine could be improved.”

  We ate for a while longer-at least I did. Gunther finished only half a sandwich and then told me his own problem.

  “I am translating what I take to be a humorous American story for an overseas broadcast. And in that story is a comic demolition company named Edifice Wrecks. I assume that is a waggish reference to Oedipus Rex. However, the joke does not translate well into Polish, and I am not adept at humor.”

  I could confirm that. Gunther had sat in polite amusement on several nights while I giggled at Al Pearce or Burns and Allen. I couldn’t help Gunther with his problem, and he couldn’t help me with mine.

  “It’s Gary Cooper,” I said, finishing my third sandwich and downing the last of the small bottle of wine. “I know it. Something … Hold it. About a month ago I had a message to call Gary Cooper. Then the next day a call came canceling the message. I thought it was a joke. What if …”

  “Someone got to Cooper saying he was you and then called telling you to cancel your call,” Gunther finished.

  “Right,” I said. “Someone beat me out of the job.”

  “There could be many other explanations,” said Gunther reasonably.

  “Sure, but remember it’s a doggie dog world out there,” I said.

  Gunther looked puzzled.

  “I think I’ll get on it right away.”

  Gunther volunteered to clean up. I had learned to let him. He didn’t like the way I cleaned up. I didn’t either.

  If someone was playing Toby Peters, he had started something that could lose me a right hand. I had to deal myself in or sit around waiting for Lombardi to come and deal me out.

  The first step was to find Cooper. I pulled some nickels out of my pocket and went to the pay phone in the hall. Below me I could hear Mrs. Plaut singing “I Got It Bad and That Ain’t Good.” She had all the words screwed up, but the melody was close.

  A guy I know, a writer at Variety who used to do publicity at Warner Brothers, told me that Cooper was making a baseball picture for Goldwyn. He didn’t know how far they were on shooting. He also said in passing that Cooper was a shoo-in for the Academy Award for Sergeant York. I hadn’t asked him. After saying good-bye to Gunther, using the washroom down the hall and readjusting my tie, I went out in search of Gary Cooper.

  CHAPTER TWO

  Finding Cooper wasn’t hard. Getting to him was the problem. I went to Goldwyn Studios, where I had no contacts. After I said I had an appointment with Cooper, I was told that he was on location. The guy at the gate made a phone call to the location, gave my name and after five minutes got the go-ahead from Cooper for me to come. The gate guard gave me an address in Los Angeles, and I headed for it.

  Kate Smith had gotten through “Rose O’Day” on the radio when I turned the corner and parked next to an old ball park. I remembered going to a boxing match in the place when I was a kid. My old man, who never punched anyone in his life, dearly loved watching grown men go after each other in a fifteen-foot square.

  I could hear voices inside the park; not the voices of crowds, but the tired voices of men at the end of a workday. A guard at the gate asked who I was and let me through. The sun was about to give up and call it a day after elbowing at the clouds without much success. The rain had stopped, but the air had a cold bite.

  I walked into the stadium and saw two men out on the baseball field near first base. One was tall and lanky; the other looked chunky and older. Both of them wore baseball uniforms. I took a step toward them from behind the backstop, and a figure blocked my way.

  “Where you headin’, son?” came a voice I recognized but couldn’t place.

  “I’ve got an appointment with Mr. Cooper,” I explained, looking up at the man before me. For a second I had the feeling that I was dreaming. I had to be. Dressed in full Yankee uniform and barring my way was Babe Ruth. The face was a little weathered and sagging, the belly a little lower than in the newsreels, the legs a bit thinner, but Babe Ruth. My mouth must have flapped open.

  It stayed open when three more Yankees appeared behind Ruth. I recognized Bill Dickey by his face and Bob Meusel and Mark Koenig by their numbers.

  “Why do you want to see Coop?” Dickey asked.

  “I’m working for him,” I explained.

  Ruth nodded, and Koenig walked toward the lanky and squat guys on first base.

  “Have a seat,” Ruth commanded, and I sat in the first row of wooden benches. Ruth eased himself next to me, and Dickey sat on the other side. Meusel stood back a few feet, looking at me.

  The question must have been on my face.

  “We’re making a movie,” Ruth explained. “The life of Lou Gehrig. Coop is Gehrig. Lot of people been trying to get in here. They find out, pester, you know.” I nodded, showing that I knew. “Some of them get unpleasant. You’re not going to get unpleasant?”

  “I’m not planning to be unpleasant,” I said. Koenig was about fifty feet off, talking to Cooper and pointing in my direction.

  “We’re not shooting anything today, just getting some publicity shots and helping Lefty teach Coop how to throw a baseball,” explained Dickey.

  “How to throw a baseball?” I asked.

  “He can’t throw,” said Ruth. “Arm’s been busted up from falls when he was a stunt man. Never played ball when he was a kid anyway.” Ruth looked around the park and down at me. His broad face and pushed-back nose were tired reminders of what he had been.

  “A few years ago after a day in the ball park I’d go out and lay one on,” Ruth sighed. “Chicago, Boston, they have the best joints, even better than New York. Remember, Bill?”

  “That was your game, Babe,” Dickey said with a smile. His round, strong face and short blond hair under his Yankee cap made him look ready to run out on the field.

  “Stomach,” explained Ruth, pointing to his sagging paunch under the Yankee stripes. “Gone bad on me after all I did for it, all the good times I gave it, all the gals who admired it. Is that fair, I ask you?” Ruth winked at Dickey, who smiled politely. Koenig meanwhile was walking slowly back to us. He moved past Meusel and stood over me. I tried to rise, but he put a hand on my shoulder.

  “Coop says this isn’t Peters,” he said.

  I was about to be murdered by Murderer’s Row.

  “It’s a mistake,” I said, trying to stand again. Dickey caught my arm and pulled me down.

  “Yours,” said Ruth, who grip
ped my arm, but there was nothing much in the grip. “You think we can throw him over the fence? Can’t be more than fifteen feet high. Hell, five years back I could have done it on my own.”

  “A mistake,” I croaked as the quartet lifted me up.

  They carried me toward the entrance, and I shouted over my shoulder toward Cooper. “Mr. Cooper-the threats-I know what’s going on.”

  I didn’t know what was going on, but I wanted to make some contact with Cooper, to explain and get some answers. I dragged my feet, but the former Yankees had no trouble with me. Then, just as we hit the turnstyle, a voice behind us said, “Hold on a second.”

  We stopped, and I planted my feet and turned around to face Cooper and the squat man. Cooper was as big as I expected, but the touch of youthful enthusiasm he had on the screen was absent from the man. He definitely looked too old to be wearing the uniform.

  “You say you were Peters or from Peters?” Cooper asked, pointing a long finger at me. His light eyes were unblinking.

  “You’ve been conned, Mr. Cooper,” I said rapidly. “I’m the real Peters, and I can prove it. Someone has been pretending to be me, but I know about the case. Give me a minute to prove it.”

  Cooper looked at me uncertainly and bit his lower lip. He looked at the Yankees for advice, but they had none to give. Ruth’s stomach grumbled next to me, and everyone waited for Cooper to decide.

  “Let him go, fellas, I’ll give him a minute.”

  They let me go, and Ruth said, “You sure? You want us to stick around?”

  “No,” grinned Cooper, “Lefty and I can handle things here, can’t we?”

  “Right,” said Lefty sourly.

  “Keep what’s left of your nose clean,” Ruth told me.

  “Hold it a second,” I told him.

  Ruth stopped, surprised.

  “Can I get autographs?” I pulled a pencil and my ratty notebook out of my pocket and thrust it at him.

  Ruth took them and laughed.

  “You got a nerve, kid,” he said and passed around the notebook for the other Yankees. I got the notebook back, and Ruth touched his cap in farewell to Cooper. I watched the four Yankees disappear under the stands, Ruth walking a little slower than the rest.