A Few Minutes Past Midnight Page 2

  “Will cash do?” Chaplin said, shifting his racket and reaching into his back pocket for his wallet.

  “It will.”

  He counted off two hundred dollars in twenties and handed them to me. I pocketed them without a second count.

  “I’ll get back to you every day. My man, the one who’ll be watching you, will introduce himself, stay out of your way, and keep his eyes open.”

  “That will be satisfactory. And now, Mr. Peters, I still have a friend or two and a brave face to show the world. And I have a tennis engagement.”

  I started across the room toward the front door.

  “While I was counting,” he said behind me softly. “I was reminded of the zeppelin sequence in Hells Angels. You know it?”

  “Great movie,” I said, turning back to him.

  “Gripping sequence,” Chaplin said. “First the Germans, hurrying to get away from the British planes, cut the line of the man in the observation car. Then, to lighten to load further in an attempt to outrun the British, the Germans unload most of their equipment. When that isn’t enough, the enlisted men are ordered to jump out of the vessel to their death. Watching them step into the dark hole is unforgettable. And then one of the British flyers sacrifices himself by diving into the zeppelin. I identify with every one of those victims of war. I am haunted by that sequence. The brave and the innocent are the true victims of war.”

  “Pilots died making that movie,” I said.

  “I know,” he said. “Making movies can be almost as dangerous as war.”

  He was lost in thought now. He gave me a private telephone number where I could reach him or leave a message. I wrote it in my book. I heard someone coming down the stairs when I went out the front door and crossed the driveway to my car. I had two hundred dollars to work with and too many leads. I’d need some help. I knew where to get it.

  I hit the radio button. The Crosley backfired. It had been doing a lot of things it shouldn’t have been doing for a few months now and it hated to come to life in the morning. It reminded me of me. I’d have to take it to No-Neck Arnie, the mechanic.

  On the way back to my office going down Hollywood Boulevard, I listened to the end of Big Sister and caught the news. It was December 10, 1943. The announcer with the deep voice said that the war news was good. The nine-day “Battle of the Clouds” over Germany marked a major victory for United States and Canadian pilots. The Fifth Army was moving on Via Casilini. Bulgaria was getting ready to bail out on the Nazis. In the Pacific, Allied forces led by the Australians were clearing the Huan peninsula. MacArthur was seventy miles away across the Vitiaz Straits ready to come in and land. Meanwhile, U.S. planes had dropped 1,300 tons of bombs on New Britain in two weeks.

  I caught the first two minutes of Ma Perkins as I pulled into No-Neck Arnie’s, two blocks from the Farraday Building where I had my office.

  CHAPTER

  2

  NO-NECK ARNIE, the mechanic was wiping his hands on a greasy rag when I drove into his garage. Four other cars were there with their hoods open like baby birds waiting for a worm, a bug, or a spark plug.

  A radio in the background was playing the Harry James version of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

  Arnie wore his gray, dirty mechanic’s uniform and a look on his face that, as he watched me, said clearly, “You think you’ve got problems.”

  Arnie was around sixty, solid with a little belly, blue eyes, and short steel-gray hair. He had no neck or almost none. It would take a trained medical professional to find one if it existed.

  Before I got out of the Crosley, Arnie said, “Valves.”

  Arnie always said, “valves.” He seemed to believe faulty, leaky, malicious valves were responsible for all of man’s automotive problems. I think if I had asked him what Hitler’s problem was, Arnie would have said “valves.” He may have been right.

  I climbed out and stood next to Arnie as he continued to wipe his hands and look at the car he had sold me about a year earlier, telling me it was a reliable machine that he could keep running.

  “It runs on washing machine and refrigerator parts,” he had said.

  “Does it make ice and clean underwear?” I had asked.

  Arnie had grunted and told me the price of the car.

  Now he stood before it, walked around it, shook his head.

  “Looks bad,” he said.

  “Don’t you want to know what the problem is?” I asked.

  Harry James hit a high note on his trumpet. Arnie paused to listen and then said, “Valves.”

  “I get backfire. The car stalls. I think it’s sick.”

  “Leave it,” he said reaching out for the keys. I took the car key from the ring and dropped it in his hand. “Give me an hour. Make that two. Scovill is ahead of you. He’s got a big problem.”

  “Valves?” I guessed.

  “No, gall bladder. Nice guy.”

  Harry James held the last note for about eight seconds and I walked out into the morning.

  The walk to the Farraday Building took about ten minutes. It was late in the morning as I passed Manny’s Taco Palace and looked inside for a familiar face. Manny was the only one I recognized. He looked up from his newspaper behind the counter and nodded. I nodded back and considered a morning taco. I decided to do some work first before rewarding myself with indigestion.

  The Farraday Building is on Hoover near Ninth. I don’t know who Farraday was, but the building bearing his name deserved to be condemned in 1930 or restored as an historic relic. The owner of the building, Jeremy Butler, poet, ex-wrestler, and friend, lived in the Farraday with his wife, Alice, and their baby, Natasha. Jeremy fought the daily attack on his property with elbow grease, Lysol, and determination.

  The Farraday is a refuge for alcoholic doctors, broken-down baby photographers, has-been and never-was movie agents and producers, a fortune-teller named Juanita, a music teacher, and one third-rate dentist named Sheldon Minck whose chamber of horrors was on the sixth floor. I sublet a near closet-sized cubbyhole off of Shelly’s chamber.

  My footsteps echoed on the fake marble in the dark lobby of the Farraday. There were voices, off-key music, and sounds of machines and typewriters joining the odd beat of my feet. The lobby was wide and six stories high. At each level a black-painted iron railing stood a dozen feet from the office doors. An ancient elevator of the same black-painted iron creaked when I stepped in and whirred slowly upward as I looked down into the lobby. There, Jeremy Butler stepped out of the shadows holding a mop, a bucket, and a bottle of Lysol.

  “Toby,” he called, growing smaller, which was no mean trick considering Jeremy’s bulk. His bald head caught a beam of light from some unseen source. “Thomas Wright Waller died.”

  “Come again?” I said through the bars as the elevator inched upward.

  “Fats Waller,” Jeremy said sadly.

  “How?” I said, hearing the word echo.

  “I don’t know,” he said. “Died on an eastbound train in Santa Fe. I think he’d left from here. It was probably his heart. According to the radio, he weighed two hundred and seventy eight pounds, but I’ve seen him. He was bigger, much bigger.”

  “I’m sorry,” I said.

  “I’m writing a poem to his memory,” Jeremy said. It was hard to hear him now. I was three floors up and a musical instrument that might have been a trombone hit an ugly note in a nearby office. “It’s all I can do.”

  “Can you stop by?” I called.

  “What?”

  “Come by my office,” I shouted as the elevator vibrated past the fourth floor.

  He nodded.

  “How are you?” I called, aware of the sorrow in his voice.

  “Ain’t misbehaving,” he said, or at least that’s what I thought he said. Jeremy’s grammar was always perfect except when he took poetic license.

  I finally hit the sixth floor. The door opened and there stood Juanita the fortune-teller. Juanita’s real name wasn’t Juanita. She came from a
good New York Jewish family. She had married a wholesale tie salesman when she was young. He died and she married a mildly successful shirt manufacturer and raised a family. Then husband number two died. Till she was a widow for the second time, Juanita had hidden the fact that she had what she called “the visions.” She could tell things about people from touching them or just thinking about them. Sometimes the visions just came unbidden.

  Her kids were grown. Her last husband was dead and Juanita had been reborn, so to speak. She had an office in the Farraday and a reasonably healthy business. Most of her clients were Mexicans, with a scattering of Greeks and a dash of Dutch and refugees from the Balkans.

  I was convinced Juanita had a real gift, but it carried with it a curse I had experienced on more than one occasion. Whenever Juanita predicted my future, it turned out to be right—but her predictions couldn’t be figured out till after the future had come and gone. Jeremy found this particularly interesting. I didn’t. Jeremy and Juanita’s clients had a better tolerance for her obscure gifts than I did. Usually, I tried to avoid Juanita.

  This time I couldn’t. She helped me open the elevator door, her beads jangling, her dark long dress dangling. She played the role.

  “I had a vision about Harold Stassen,” she said.

  Stassen, the governor of Minnesota, was a serious contender for the next Republican nomination for president.

  “Saw him, clear as I see you now,” she said. “In the living room of that mobile home he lives in. His wife was there, one of his kids. He was reading a newspaper. You know what the headline said?”

  “No,” I answered.

  “Stassen will never be president,” she said.

  “You planning to relay this information to him?”

  “Not my business. I’m going down for something to eat,” she said. “You want me to bring you something?”

  I held the door open for her.

  “A couple of tacos from Manny’s,” I said, reaching into my pocket for my wallet.

  “On me,” she said. “I’m feeling generous. I just got a big tip from Al Kazinzas.”

  “Fish Market Al?”

  “That’s the one,” she said with a smile. “I told him he was going to die.”

  “And he gave you a big tip?” I asked, stepping out of the elevator and letting the door close.

  “I said he was going to die at the age of ninety-six in a gondola,” she said as the elevator started down. “He said he would stay away from gondolas. But, Toby, if you’re meant to go down in a gondola, there’s not a goddamn thing you can do about it.”

  “I’ll remember that,” I said to her upturned face as she reached the fifth floor.

  “Oh God,” she said, suddenly remembering something. “Had a vision about you.”

  “I don’t want to hear it, Juanita,” I said.

  “I’m buying you tacos. You can hear my vision. Okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “You’ve got ten reasons,” she said. “They’re all wrong, but you’ve got to go through them. Like the trials of that Greek.”

  “Kazinzas?”

  “Hercules.”

  “Hercules with a bad back.”

  She was almost out of sight below me, but her voice came back.

  “The truth will be at the grave.”

  “Whose?” I called.

  “Ich veis, who knows?” she said. “I just see this stuff. I don’t know what it means. Oh, one more thing. You’ll slip on a dead woman.”

  “What woman? What name? Where?” I asked.

  But she was gone.

  The sign on the door to our outer office had been changed again. Shelly was forever changing it in the hope of impressing potential and already trapped patients.

  This time it read, in gold letters, “Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., V.G.D., Sp.D.I.”

  Below it in small black letters, a determined client who knew the room number might be able to make out, “Toby Peters, Private Investigator.”

  When I opened the door a pained voice and a terrible twanging greeted me. My first impression was that it was another of Shelly’s victims.

  “What are the new initials?” I asked Violet Gonsenelli, who sat behind a tiny desk in the tiny waiting and reception room that had room for only two chairs besides hers.

  Violet was dark, young, pretty, and waiting for her husband, a very promising middleweight, to return from the war.

  Violet was making a face. The squeal continued.

  “The V.G.D. stands for Very Good Dentist. The Sp.D.I. means Specialist in Dental Inventions,” she said. “I got a letter.”

  “Rocky?” I asked, reluctant to open the inner door and see who was in Shelly’s dental chair. Rocky was Angelo “Rocky” Gonsenelli, Violet’s husband. Violet and Rocky had married four days before Rocky shipped out.

  “Yeah, I think he’s in the Pacific,” she said. “On the Hornet. The letter smells like salt water. He says he’s fine. Not much else. Says he gets to read the comics. Wash Tubbs is his favorite now. Captain Easy is in Germany helping the resistance.”

  “I have confidence in Captain Easy and Wash,” I said, moving toward the inner door.

  “Al Reasoner’s fighting Freddie Dawson in Chicago in a couple of days. I’ll give you four to one and take Dawson.”

  I shook my head “no.” I had learned my lesson. Don’t bet against Violet when it comes to boxing, baseball, or basketball. You had a chance at her in football, but only a slim one.

  When I opened the inner door, I was greeted by a sight that would have turned lesser or even greater men to grape juice. Sheldon Minck sat alone in the room in his own dental chair. Short, plump, bald, sweating, and hopelessly myopic, Shelly sat, his ever-present cigar in the corner of his mouth, an intense look on his face. He held a ukulele in his hand and was plucking at the strings and making a sound he mistook for music.

  “What are you doing?” I asked before I could stop myself.

  “Learning to play the uke,” he said. “New idea. Music before drilling and filling. Soothe the patient. Calm my nerves. I’m a passable crooner. No Crosby, or Russ Colombo, Gene Austin, or Rudy Vallee, but not bad.”

  That was one dentist’s prejudiced opinion.

  “Can you hold it down for a while?” I asked. “I’ve got work to do.”

  “I’ve got a patient due in a few minutes,” he said, getting out of the chair and placing his ukulele on the sink in the corner. “I’ve almost got ‘Hindustan’ down.”

  Down and pleading for mercy, I thought, but I didn’t say anything.

  “I’m working on a great idea,” he said before I could escape. “Articles in The Journal of the American Dental Association, Oral Hygiene, and Dental Survey say Fleers Double Bubble Chewing Gum is good for your teeth, massages the gums, strengthens the teeth.”

  “Interesting,” I said.

  “Yeah, strong teeth with cavities from the sugar. But who am I to complain? You know what I mean?”

  “I know what you mean,” I said.

  “So, I come up with a bubblegum with no sugar,” he said eagerly. “I sell the idea to Fleers.”

  “And cut down the number of people who need fillings,” I said.

  “But what the hell would I care. I’d have a big pile in the bank. I’m working on it. My mind is always working, Toby.”

  He pointed to the place on his head where he assumed his mind was hidden.

  I opened the door to my tiny office, went in, and closed the door behind my desk. Shelly was singing “Ain’t She Sweet?” I didn’t turn on the lights. The sun was coming in through my single window. I opened the window, turned on my recently purchased secondhand rotating desktop fan, and sat behind my desk.

  There were two chairs on the other side of the desk next to the door. On one wall was a photograph of me, my brother Phil, my father in his grocer’s apron, and our German shepherd dog, Kaiser Wilhelm. I was about ten. Phil was about fourteen. My father had two more years to live after that picture was taken. My
mother had died when I was born, which accounted in part for the permanent scowl on my brother’s face.

  On the other wall was a large painting of a woman holding a baby in each arm. The woman looked lovingly at one of the babies. There was nothing strange or unusual about the painting and only a few people knew it had been a gift from Salvador Dalí. Two boys in the photo. Two in the painting. A mother in the painting. A father in the photograph. That was the first moment I had noticed the similarities and considered them and the differences.

  I pushed my mail to the side after determining that none held the possibility of a check and all held the certainty of a bill. Then I took out my notebook and looked at the numbered items I had written in Chaplin’s living room.

  The fan hummed. Someone entered Shelly’s office. He stopped singing. I could hear him talking now and humming, but I couldn’t make out the words.

  The unopened mail glared at me. I opened the envelope on top. It was a bill from the telephone company. I put it back on the pile and began to copy my notes. In twenty minutes and an equal number of whimpers from Shelly’s patient, I determined that more than half the population of the United States probably didn’t care much for Charlie Chaplin. They loved the Tramp, but they hated the man behind him.

  My suspects included all anti-Communists, Jews who thought Chaplin had abandoned his roots in a time of Nazi atrocities, Nazi sympathizers and anti-Semites who decided he was a Jew, along with at least eight young women whom he had seduced and abandoned, at least one writer convinced Chaplin had stolen from him, and a bunch of overly zealous Americans who were angry as hell that he hadn’t become a citizen. Not to mention Englishmen who thought he had abandoned his native soil, Westbrook Pegler, fans of Eugene O’Neill, and a very wet guy with a very long knife.

  “Fiona Sullivan,” I said, tapping my dull pencil point on the name that the man at Chaplin’s door had spoken. He had given her name and told Chaplin to stay away from her. He had also told Chaplin to abandon his Lady Killer project. Why?

  There was a knock at my door. I said, “Come in” and Jeremy Butler entered filling the doorway. He had abandoned his mop and Lysol for the visit.