A Fatal Glass of Beer Read online

We left him at the door and the three of us crossed the street, Fields mumbling to himself. We could all see it as we moved toward the car, a shirt board in the front passenger-side window. We stopped; there was a single word neatly printed on it: Altoona.

  Chapter Two

  Never trust a man who puts cash on the table, or one that doesn’t.

  Five days earlier, I had come back to my office in the Faraday Building to find a message from W. C. Fields. The note on my desk told me to come to his house immediately.

  Violet Gonsenelli stood across from me as I sat looking down at the message she had taken. Violet was dark, young, a beauty with a husband who had been working his way slowly but steadily up the middleweight rankings when the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor. For at least the duration of the war, Violet planned to continue working as receptionist for both Sheldon Minck, DDS, and Toby Peters, Private Investigator.

  Violet’s desk was in the reception area, where patients unaware of the danger they were letting themselves in for with Minck the Merciless, and people in need of a cheap, honest, and tenacious detective who could keep his mouth shut, could tell her their immediate needs. There was barely enough room in the reception area for Violet to inch her away around her small desk with the telephone on top of it, but she seemed content.

  The only problem with the arrangement was that Shelly’s wife, the Wicked Witch of the Southwest, was suspicious about what might develop between her short, fat, myopic, and bald husband and the beautiful receptionist. Shelly assured me he was working on that.

  My office was a bit larger than a broom closet. It had once been a small storage room with a window. To get into it, a client had to go through Sheldon Minck’s dental chamber of horror, which was why I did my best to meet potential clients at a restaurant or bar.

  Not that my office was completely without charm. I had a desk and chair. If I looked out the window behind my chair I got a beautiful view of the alley six floors down, where my Crosley was parked and being guarded for two bits by the latest in the series of homeless and often alcoholic or semi-mad wanderers who camped for days, weeks, or months in the shells of an abandoned truck and two abandoned cars.

  There was barely room enough on the other side of my desk for two wooden chairs. Past the wall behind the chairs lay Shelly’s domain. On the same wall, where I could look across at them from my desk, were two items hanging from nails. The first was my license to practice. The second was a photograph of a man, two boys, and a dog. The man was my father. The older boy with the big shoulders and sullen frown was my brother, Phil. The other boy, thinner, his nose already broken once, was me, wearing something that looked like a smile. Our father’s head was tilted slightly to one side, toward Phil, and he had his arms around our shoulders. The picture was taken in front of my father’s grocery store in Glendale. This was our family. My mother had died giving birth to me. Jeremy Butler, my landlord at the Faraday—who had once been a professional wrestler and was now a self-published poet who bought up shabby houses on the fringes of the city and personally renovated them—felt that Phil blamed me for my mother’s death. Our father worked sixteen hours a day and died doing inventory at the age of sixty-four.

  I had changed my name from Tobias Pevsner to Toby Peters and dropped out of the college where I had almost finished two years, earning grades that approached the fine edge of despair. Two more reasons for my ill-tempered brother to be upset with me. By then he was an L.A. cop and not yet married. He had come back from the war we hadn’t won filled with anger over anything that resembled a threat to the laws of the nation in general and Los Angeles County in particular. His rise in the ranks over the years had come in spite of his frequent abuse of suspects. His marriage and two children had tempered him, but only at home. There were two Phils. One of them had paid my way through those two years of college. To try to make it up to him, I had joined the Glendale Police Department. After a couple of years of being blind-sided by drunks, covering for a drunken partner, I had taken a job on the security staff of Warner Brothers and been fired after a few years by Jack Warner himself after I flattened a famous cowboy star who was doing his best to molest a pre-starlet. I had enough of uniforms and became a private investigator. That was about the time my wife, Anne, left me and got a quick divorce.

  “You are a child,” she had said. “You’ve always been one. You’re irresponsible and you’ll be that way till the day you die. And the problem is that you like being a child. You’re never going to grow up and I don’t want to be your mother.”

  She was right. I loved Anne. Still do, though she was about to take her third husband, a rising movie star named Preston Stewart, who was ten years younger than she was. The wedding was in six days. I had been invited to the reception; I don’t know why. Probably a mistake, but I was thinking seriously about going, at least to get a good off-screen look at Preston Stewart.

  “He’s out there,” Violet said, jerking a thumb back at the door as I scrutinized the message in front of me.

  I looked up at her and glanced over at the painting of the woman with two small boys in her arms. The painting filled the wall to my left. It was a genuine Dali, a gift of the artist. Madonna and two children. Dali and his dead brother on one wall, me and Phil on the other.

  “Who’s out there?”

  “Fields,” she said. “Says he has to see you now.”

  I opened my top drawer, swept old letters, flyers, thumbtacks, notes, and this morning’s L.A. Times into it before I got up. Violet was reaching for the knob when she paused and said, “Beau Jack and Henry Armstrong Thursday.”

  In the six months Violet had been working for us, I had made five bets with her. She had won them all and had destroyed my opinion of myself as a boxing expert.

  “Henry Armstrong,” I said. “No contest.”

  “I’ll take Beau Jack, even,” she said. “Ten dollars.”

  I shrugged an okay. I had money in the bank from a job I’d just completed for Fred Astaire and I could handle the loss of a ten spot. I don’t know how many more losses to twenty-two-year-old Violet my almost-fifty-year-old ego would take. But the Armstrong bet had to be safe. Beau Jack was a California fighter, the champ—Violet’s husband wanted a crack at him when the war was over. But Armstrong was nonstop energy with a great punch. He never seemed to get tired and he never stopped coming at you. He was the most fascinating fighter I had ever seen. All out from the first second to the last. Few could withstand his almost insane attack.

  Violet and I went into Shelly’s operating room and I closed the office door behind me. The place was fairly tidy, thanks to Violet. The first thing I saw was Shelly straddling someone in his dental chair. A woman’s legs were wrapped around him. I couldn’t see her but she was groaning.

  “Almost,” Shelly was saying to her. “Almost got it.”

  A nicely chewed cigar had been set carefully on the porcelain worktable for the duration of the procedure. His bald head was beaded with sweat and his ample rear writhed under his stained white laboratory coat.

  The second thing I saw was a man standing in the corner near the reception room. There was no mistaking him. He wore a matching jacket and slacks, casual shoes, a blue shirt, and no tie. A straw hat rested on his head. I’m around five-foot-nine; Fields was a little shorter. He carried a cane in his hand, which I later discovered was more a prop than a walking aid. At one point during our later flight, he would confide that he had begun smoking at the age of nine and had taken to carrying the cane when he was about fourteen. When in doubt, he would perform some balancing trick with a cigar or his stick or do his trick of putting the cane on his shoulder and then placing his hat on the cane instead of his head. I had seen him do at least five variations on this trick in movies, including a feigned confusion over the loss of the hat and a few seconds of fruitless attempts to retrieve the hat from the elusive end of the cane.

  But now the comedian stood entranced by the sight of Shelly and his patient. I moved to his side and whispe
red, “Mr. Fields, I’m Toby Peters.”

  “Fine, fine,” he said without looking away from Shelly and the struggling woman. “A confident sense of one’s identity is the cornerstone of sanity.”

  Everyone from General Patton to Marlene Dietrich did an imitation of Fields. It was a mainstay impersonation, like doing Cagney or Walter Winchell. But they were all exaggerations. His voice was not as harsh as the mimics made it, his movements not as frantic. He moved with the grace of the great juggler he had been, the great comic juggler I had seen at the Grace Theater when I was a kid.

  “Man’s a genius,” Fields whispered.

  Violet shook her head and went through the door back to the reception room.

  “And the secretary is as fine an example of youthful pulchritude as I’ve witnessed in a decade,” he added.

  “Husband’s in the army. Ranked middleweight. I hear he has a temper.”

  “Most of the husbands I have encountered would merit a similar description,” he said, his eyes still on Shelly, who shifted as the woman’s legs tightened around him.

  “Had almost the exact scene in a short I did, The Dentist,” Fields confided, pointing at Shelly and his patient. “Studio cut it out. Censored. Said it looked like a sexual act with the woman’s legs around me and me astride her on the dental chair as she gurgled in pain. I never forgave the studio and I never forgot the woman.”

  “There,” Shelly roared, with a yank of his right hand.

  The woman released Shelly, her legs going limp in the chair. He stepped back and held up a small dental tong clinging to a small bloody tooth. He brandished the specimen at the woman in the chair in a show of triumph. Her eyes were closed and she was doing her best to breathe.

  Shelly pushed his thick glasses back on his perspiring nose, placed tongs and tooth on his white table, and returned the cigar to his mouth. He was smiling broadly when he finally noticed me and my client.

  “You look almost like W. C. Fields,” he said.

  “I have the distinct though dubious honor of being William Claude Dukinfield, long known professionally as W. C. Fields,” said Fields, extending his hand as Shelly moved forward to shake.

  “My patients say I do a perfect imitation of you,” said Shelly.

  “Shel,” I warned, but the rotund dentist in the now-blood-stained smock ignored me.

  “Sir,” said Fields, “I am not a friend of the dental profession. Too many times have its barbaric practitioners charged me outrageously for piddling procedures. Even took one to court. Lost the case, though I kept my dignity. But I have been watching you and admiring your dedication to the fine art of excruciating extraction.”

  “Well,” said Shelly, going into his W. C. Fields imitation, which I had heard several times before, each time telling Shelly that it was terrible, “I may have received my lugubrious training in the fine art of oral hygiene in Philadelphia, but I have learned to overcome that obstacle and, with the help of candlelight as I read many a tome of dental history and care, became what I am today.”

  Fields looked at Shelly, showing no expression.

  “Pretty good, huh?” asked Shelly, returning to his own voice.

  “Pretty good?” Fields said. “I thought I was listening to my own mirror.”

  “We have to go to my office, Shel,” I said, touching Fields’s arm and motioning toward my door.

  “Besides,” said Fields, “I fear the poor woman in your chair has passed out or is dead. If she’s dead, I know a good lawyer. Or, I should say, I know a skilled and crafty lawyer. There are no good lawyers, only evil ones, the more evil the better. That is what draws them to their profession.”

  We moved toward my office and I heard Fields mutter to himself, “Just as the desire to inflict pain drew you to dentistry.”

  When we squeezed into my office, I caught a glimpse of Shelly smiling and relighting his cigar. The woman in the chair made a convulsive twitch, opened her eyes in panic, and then lay back.

  Fields looked around my office and took a seat across from me, glancing back over his shoulder at the photograph of me, my brother, my dad, and the German shepherd.

  “Dogs are not partial to me,” he said. “They are ungrateful and stupid beasts who have never responded to my gestures of armistice.”

  “His name was Kaiser Wilhelm,” I said. “He was really my brother’s dog.”

  “Should have called him Bismarck,” Fields said, putting his hat and cane on the chair next to him. “I’m a great admirer of old Otto.”

  “Aren’t we all,” I said.

  “I have a series of questions to ask you,” he said, pulling a crumpled sheet of paper from his pocket and laying it flat on the desktop. I leaned back. “First,” he said, “are you a man who takes pleasure in the occasional or even frequent imbibing of alcohol?”

  “I like a beer once in a while,” I said.

  “What kind?” he shot back, leaning forward.

  “Not particular,” I answered with a shrug. “Edelbrew.”

  “What is your critical assessment of the martini?” he asked seriously.

  “Sorry,” I said. “Just an occasional beer. Most of the time I’m fine with a cold Pepsi.”

  Fields frowned and made a notation with a short yellow pencil.

  “This is not going well,” he said softly.

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “Mae West recommended you,” he said. “Damned fine writer. Little thing. Only woman besides Fanny Brice who ever successfully upstaged me. Pretends she’s a man-eater. Probably still a virgin. I mean West. You agree?”

  “I don’t list my clients and I don’t talk about them,” I said.

  “Good answer,” he said, making another mark. “She says you’re an honest man?”

  “Is this the office of a dishonest man?” I asked.

  He looked around, his eyes pausing on the Dali, and turned back to me. “An unsuccessful dishonest man, mayhaps.”

  “Mayhaps,” I agreed.

  “What do you think about marriage?” he asked.

  “I tried it once. My wife left me and married a rich man. He died and she’s about to marry another one.”

  “Good,” he said, making a check mark. “I too was once married. Still am, though I haven’t seen her in years. I believe I drove the woman mad, though we managed to bear a son. Do you have children?”

  “No,” I said.

  “What are your fees?”

  “Thirty dollars a day plus expenses,” I said.

  “Expenses?”

  “Food, water, gas, bribes, parking fees, travel, hotels or motels if necessary,” I said.

  “You get paid twenty-five cash each day as a fee, and expense money as we go,” he said, pulling a handful of bills from his pocket. “Here is one day or more in advance.”

  He handed me a fifty-dollar bill.

  I thought I saw a bulge in his other pocket and the hint of the appearance of more bills. I didn’t argue. Twenty-five dollars a day was my bottom-line fee. And, besides, this was going to be in cash.

  “The case?”

  He reached into another pocket and pulled out a letter. He handed it to me. It was postmarked Philadelphia. No return address. I opened it and took out the single sheet. It was typed and read:

  Dear Bulbnose:

  Humiliation is one thing a man cannot endure and call himself a man. You have humiliated me. I have spent years considering some form of humiliation for you but have come to the conclusion that you are beyond humiliation. However, you are not beyond pain, especially the pain of monetary loss. It is I who have taken your bankbooks. It is I who will take back some of my pride by taking as much of your money as I can. You can try to stop me, you sick old sot, but I’ll prove the better man. The task begins in Philadelphia and will not end until I have at least a million dollars.

  Lester O. Hipnoodle

  “Who’s Hipnoodle?”

  “Never heard of him,” said Fields.

  “Sounds like a fake name.”
>
  “I am a collector of the odd, unusual, and creative name,” said Fields. “No name surprises me. Many delight me. This nom de plume, if it is one, is not of the caliber that merits serious artistic consideration. Be that as it may, I have been, over the course of my long and honored career, stashing money in banks across the country, going back to the days when I joined the Keith circuit. I have kept the bankbooks on a table in my office at home. My secretary has of late attempted to put the books in order. In the midst of so doing, we both noted one morning that the stacks which overflowed elegantly like small works of art had significantly dwindled. There were only about half of them left. And then this letter.”

  I looked at the letter again and reached for the phone.

  “We’ll go to your house and take a look,” I said. “After a couple of calls.”

  “Certainly,” he replied, turning his hat in his lap and reexamining the Dali painting.

  While I was putting my call through, Fields outlined his plan, said I should find a driver to take his car to Philadelphia while he and I flew, and that he trusted none of his servants.

  “At least three of them are Nazi spies,” he muttered. “And one is definitely a Jap, though he claims to be Chinese.”

  “Operator,” I said into the phone. “I need a number in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.… Thanks.”

  I held on while I waited.

  “Why didn’t I think of that?” Fields said. “Too much time in the damned sanitarium. I’ve got a slight case of mogo-on-the-gogo.”

  “Yes, operator. Do you have a listing for a Lester O. Hipnoodle?”

  I waited while she checked and then I nodded to Fields. We had a bingo. I wrote down the phone number and then asked, “May I have the address?”

  She gave it to me and I wrote it on the same envelope.

  “Thanks,” I said and hung up. And then to Fields: “New number. New address.”

  I told him the address and the number and, for one of the few times I was to know him over the next week, he sat completely silent and, for an instant, serious.

  “That is precisely one block from the home I left when I was a boy,” he said. “Hipnoodle is a fiend. He’s not only going to get me back to Philadelphia but into the part of my life spent as a vagabond child, the most illustrious in that city since Benjamin Franklin, and the most unpleasant.”