A Few Minutes Past Midnight Read online

  “Johnny Mack Brown’s at the Roxy,” I said looking up at the Royal Crown Cola poster behind her. Johnny Mack Brown was wearing a big white cowboy hat, and the quote next to his head said, “I like the best tasting cola of them all.” “The Texas Kid.”

  “First, The Fallen Sparrow,” she said.

  “Tomorrow,” I said. “Maybe the day after. Then how about The Texas Kid?”

  “And then Claudia,” she said.

  “Fallen Sparrow. Tomorrow night.”

  “Date,” she said, patting my hand. “I’m off early. Pick me up at home?”

  “At home,” I said.

  Something in the way I said it gave me away.

  “Ann,” she said. “You were thinking about Ann.”

  I didn’t lie.

  “I guess,” I said.

  Ann was my former wife, a contrast to Anita in almost every way. Ann was a full, dark beauty who had lost weight and lost a husband after she left me. Maybe I should explain “lost.” Her second husband was dead. Now she was married to a movie actor named Preston Stewart who was still handsome and, after twenty years, still in demand but no longer an A-list leading man. He starred in B programmers with an occasional supporting role at M.G.M. He would pop up in the credits once in a while to remind me of his existence. I had been at their wedding and had to reluctantly admit to myself that I liked the guy.

  Anita looked nothing like Ann. She was lean, blonde, and good-looking, but not a beauty. However, I wasn’t looking for beauty, and anyone interested in me wasn’t either. We had been doing fine together since I found her here behind Mack’s counter less than a year ago.

  “Nothing wrong with thinking about her,” she said. “God knows I think about my ex more than once in a while. See you tomorrow.”

  She gave me a smile and a wink and moved to serve two women who had just come in with shopping bags and taken seats at the end of the counter.

  Bag of potatoes in my hand, I got out of my car about fifteen minutes later in front of Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse on Heliotrope. I was home. I walked up the narrow walkway to the porch and went inside. I could smell something inside. It smelled warm, sweet, and a little odd.

  “Mrs. Plaut,” I called, moving to the open door of her apartment on the first floor.

  I could hear her humming inside, deep inside. There was no way she could hear me, but I made the effort louder this time, much louder.

  “Mrs. Plaut,” I called.

  Her bird went crazy, flapping wings and losing feathers inside its cage. Mrs. Plaut kept humming. I took a chance and entered moving toward her kitchen.

  I found her wiping her hands on her apron. She sensed that someone was there and turned, a thin ancient figure with a crop of curly white hair.

  “Mr. Peelers,” she said. “You should knock.”

  “I did,” I shouted.

  “Nonetheless,” she said. “You should knock. You have …”

  “Potatoes,” I said, handing her the bag.

  She took the gift, looked inside, and said, “Potatoes. Good. I’m canning. I’m pickling and canning.”

  An even dozen jars with “Kerr” written on them stood on the counter near the sink.

  “I see,” I said.

  “Watermelon pickles, fig pickles, chop suey pickles,” she said, pointing to one jar filled with a brown substance.

  “Chop suey pickles?” I said.

  “Cucumbers, onions, green peppers, red peppers, salt, vinegar, water, sugar, celery salt, curry powder. Chop suey pickles. There’s a war on, you know.”

  “I know,” I said.

  She began putting lids and screw bands on the jars.

  “Can’t get caps. There’s a war on, you know,” she repeated.

  “It hasn’t escaped my attention,” I said, knowing she couldn’t hear me.

  “I have pages for you,” she said as she worked. “I’d like you to read them tonight.”

  She turned to me for confirmation.

  I nodded and said, “Tonight.”

  “You and Mr. Gunther should come for dinner,” she said. “Potato surprise. Five o’clock. Miss Simcox and Mr. Bidwell will be joining us.”

  Simcox and Bidwell were new boarders. Two of the old boarders had married each other and moved out about a month ago. I’d seen little of the new boarders. Simcox was a good-looking, lean woman in her forties who worked in the office at Macy’s. According to Mrs. Plaut, Emma Simcox was her grandniece. Mrs. Plaut’s natural pallor was morning newspaper white. Miss Simcox was definitely a light-skinned Negro. There was no family resemblance, but Emma Simcox did call Mrs. Plaut “Aunt Irene.” Ben Bidwell, on the other hand, was a car salesman at Mad Jack’s in Venice. Mr. Bidwell was about fifty, skinny, dark-haired, and one-armed. He had lost the arm at Verdun. Emma Simcox was quiet and shy. Ben Bidwell was either full of optimism and energy, or so depressed he couldn’t talk. It promised to be an entertaining dinner.

  I checked my watch. I always checked my watch even though it made no sense. It had been my father’s. It ran, but what it told me had only a chance relationship to whatever the time might be. I did have a Beech-Nut Gum wall clock in my room that was reasonably accurate.

  “We’ll be here,” I said.

  “Vitamin pie for dessert,” she said.

  I knew I shouldn’t ask but I did.

  “Vitamin pie?”

  “Sent to the Florida Citrus Commission for the recipe. Filled with vitamin C. In the top of a double boiler you mix six tablespoons of cornstarch, four tablespoons of sugar, three-quarters of a cup of corn syrup, a little salt, and you add boiling water, then cook for fifteen minutes. Next you stir it till it thickens and add three beaten egg yolks, cook for another minute and add three-quarters of a cup of canned grapefruit juice and a Number Two can of grapefruit sections. After you pour it in a pastry shell you add more grapefruit sections and cover it with meringue.”

  “Fascinating,” I said. “You’ll have to write it out for me.”

  “It’s not for you,” she said sternly. “You couldn’t cook a can of mush. It’s for that sister-in-law of yours. I’ll write it all out.”

  “Thanks,” I said. “I’m sure she’ll appreciate it.”

  In the other room, the bird began to screech hysterically.

  “The bird,” she said. “I have come to the sad conclusion that a strain of idiocy runs in him. I have changed his name.”

  She had run through five birds since I had been living in her boardinghouse. She changed their names on an almost weekly basis.

  “I call him Westinghouse now,” she said firmly.

  I knew better than to ask why. I simply left the room, got out of her apartment, and climbed the stairs. A small box stood in front of the hall pay phone. It was the box Gunther used to stand on when he made calls. Gunther wasn’t in sight. I went to his room. A woman was singing inside in what sounded like German. Her voice was raspy, challenging, and she proudly belted out what sounded like “Mine Berlin.” Mining Berlin sounded like a good idea to me.

  I knocked.

  The woman suddenly stopped singing.

  “Come in,” Gunther said.

  Gunther was seated in the swivel chair at his desk, busily looking at the open phone book and writing something on a pad of paper in front of him.

  “One moment,” he said, with only the slightest trace of an accent.

  I looked around Gunther’s neat and comfortable room. A regular-size bed with a dark comforter and big green pillows stood in the corner. There was a low dresser, a small kitchen table covered with a neat, green cloth near the window, a comfortable overstuffed green chair with a reading light and table next to it, and a two-passenger matching love seat across from it. The walls were covered by bookcases that were packed, but neat.

  “There,” he said with a sigh and turned, pad in his hand.

  “I have called the number of forty-seven Sullivans and reached thirty-one of them. None had a Fiona in the household or knew of any Fiona Sullivan wi
th the exception of one Daniel Sullivan who believed he had an old aunt in Cork named Fiona. I shall continue after we dine.”

  I looked at the clock on his desk where a line of reference books and dictionaries stood against the wall, held in place by matching brass bookends that looked like curious owls.

  Gunther reached over to his record player and carefully removed a record. He put it carefully back into the album cover on his desk and looked at me.

  “Claire Waldoff,” he said, looking at the photograph of the woman on the album cover. “I was playing it a bit too loud perhaps.”

  “No,” I said.

  “I confess to having a passion for certain German popular music that predates the current Nazi regime. It is the music of my early youth. Claire Waldoff, Rudi Schuricke, Marlene Dietrich, Zarah Leander, Willi Fritich. I find it best in these times to keep my taste in music to myself.”

  “I understand. We’re expected for dinner with Mrs. Plaut in five minutes,” I said.

  He looked at the clock.

  “Then I shall have to change,” he said. “If you will excuse me.”

  He was dressed in a perfectly matched dark blue suit with a thin red-and-white-striped tie. His white shirt looked as if it had just been ironed, and his shoe shine would have been the envy of General Patton.

  “Heard from Gwen?” I asked as he climbed down from the chair.

  Gwen was the University of San Francisco graduate student in music whom Gunther had met when we had been on a job more than a year earlier. He had twice mentioned the possibility of marriage. Gwen was pretty, dark, wore glasses, was about fifteen years younger, and a foot and a half taller than my friend. That didn’t seem to make any difference to either of them, though the four hundred miles between them did tend to get in the way. Gunther made monthly weekend pilgrimages to San Francisco and everything seemed to be going well. At least, I thought so.

  “I have,” he said moving to his closet. “She is giving serious consideration to accepting a position with the Boston Symphony.”

  “Is that good news or bad news?”

  “For her, good. For me, bad,” he said. “I have been giving serious consideration to moving to Boston.”

  He looked through his neat row of suits hanging on the low bar in his closet. I didn’t want Gunther to move, but I wanted him to be happy.

  “I do not think, however, that I will move to Boston,” he said, selecting a suit that didn’t look particularly different from the one he was wearing. “I will give the situation much thought. Now, if you will excuse me.”

  He held the hanger with his clean suit in his hand. I nodded, left, and went to my room next door.

  Dash, the cat who sometimes hung out with me, had come in through the window I always left open for him. He was blinking up at me from the flowery ancient sofa against the wall, his paws in front of him on the purple pillow on which Mrs. Plaut had stitched, “God Bless Us, Every One.” There had been a bed in the room, but I had persuaded Mrs. Plaut to let me store it in her vast garage at the back of the house. The garage smelled of long-ago livestock and so did everything stored in it, but I never planned to use the bed again.

  I have a bad back. Actually, it is an evil back that chooses to rebel when I most need it. I could live with the other injuries I had gathered in almost half a century, but I was a slave to my back. I kept a thin, hard mattress rolled up behind the sofa. At night I spread the mattress on the floor and slept on my back. Sometimes Dash joined me.

  If Dash didn’t wake me in the morning, I could always count on Mrs. Plaut at the stroke of eight. There are no locks in Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse. She doesn’t believe in privacy. There wasn’t even an inside lock on the bathroom at the end of the hall. You were expected to listen for signs of humanity—running water, singing, gargling, toilet flushing—and then you were supposed to knock and enter after a decent pause.

  There was a small table near the window to my right. The two wooden chairs at the table matched, sort of. There was also a small refrigerator, toward which I moved in search of something for Dash.

  I glanced back at my Beech-Nut wall clock. I had almost four minutes.

  There was a leftover burger. I took it out, put it on a plate, and set it on the floor. Dash looked at me from the sofa, then looked at the burger, and turned to stare at something that didn’t exist in the corner.

  There was no stove in the room. There wasn’t enough room even had Mrs. Plaut allowed one, which she didn’t. I could have had a hot plate, but I never remembered to pick one up. I took off my jacket, felt my face to see if I needed a shave. I probably did, but I didn’t feel up to it.

  I thought of Ann and Preston Stewart. As I said, he seemed like a decent guy for an actor though I heard he had a small drinking problem. That meant nothing much. It went with the job.

  Gunther knocked at my door. The knock animated Dash who ambled over to the burger I had put out for him, smelled it, and leapt out of the window in search of his own dinner.

  Emma Simcox and Ben Bidwell were already at the table when we said hello and sat down to wait for Mrs. Plaut’s arrival. Two pitchers of ice water sat in the center of the table on a white doily.

  “He’s off again,” said Bidwell.

  “Who?” I asked.

  “F.D.R., war conferences. Twenty thousand miles. You know the total miles traveled since he came aboard as skipper in 1933?”

  None of us answered.

  “More than 233,400 miles,” Bidwell supplied. “And they say the man is sick. Ba-loney.”

  “No,” said Mrs. Plaut, entering with a heavy platter. “Cabbage leaves stuffed with meat-and-vegetable hash.”

  She placed the platter of fat, rolled-up cabbage leaves in the center of the table and tucked her pink pot holders under her arms.

  “I’ll get the potato surprise,” she said and departed.

  Bidwell had leaned over to say something to Emma Simcox.

  “I will get back to the phone after dinner,” Gunther offered softly.

  “I don’t think we’re going to find her in the phone book,” I said.

  “But we are not certain,” Gunther said.

  The cabbage leaves and hash smelled good, and the huge platter of potato surprise was steaming as Mrs. Plaut carried it in. It had little chunks of something dark in the mountain of mashed potatoes.

  “What are those?” Bidwell asked, pointing at the potatoes.

  “The surprise,” Mrs. Plaut said with a smile. “Dig in and remember the starving Armenians.”

  Mrs. Plaut sat at her regular spot at the end of the table and handed Emma a large serving spoon.

  “Our search for Fiona Sullivan is not over,” Gunther said, boldly reaching for the potato surprise.

  “I hear she is getting married,” said Mrs. Plaut, watching the platter of cabbage rolls go round the table and Gunther spoon a modest serving of potato surprise onto his plate.

  “Who?” asked Emma.

  “Fiona Sullivan,” said Mrs. Plaut.

  I was holding the platter of cabbage leaves in my hand. Gunther had his first forkful of potato surprise almost to his lips. We looked at each other and then at Mrs. Plaut.

  “The surprise is Spam,” she said, opening her napkin and putting it in her lap. “Sugar-browned Spam.”

  CHAPTER

  4

  “FIONA SULLIVAN?” I repeated.

  “Getting married is what I heard,” Mrs. Plaut said, holding out two hands to take the platter of cabbage leaves.

  “You know her?”

  “Who?” asked Bidwell.

  “Fiona Sullivan,” Mrs. Plaut repeated. “Takes in boarders, too. Used to be in the RKO makeup department, and other places too. Not friendly, but decent enough in appearance.”

  “Where?” I asked.

  “Her face, her posture. Some say she’s attractive.”

  “No, where’s her boardinghouse?”

  “Fourteenth,” she said. “Fourteenth Place, not Street.”


  “You have her address?” Gunther asked.

  “Of course,” said Mrs. Plaut. “You like the surprise?”

  “What?”

  “Potato surprise,” she said.

  “Delicious,” said Bidwell, who managed amazingly well with one arm.

  “Very satisfying,” I said.

  Mrs. Plaut looked pleased, got up while we ate, disappeared into the other room where Westinghouse went crazy, and returned with a pile of papers, which she plopped next to my plate.

  I knew what it was.

  “Just leave it in my room. I’ll read it tonight,” I said.

  “Now, I’ll bring everyone a cup of cocoa and vitamin pie,” Mrs. Plaut answered, pointing to the top of the pile of papers. Written in a neat, penciled script was the name, “Fiona Sullivan,” and an address.

  For dessert we had the vitamin pie. It wasn’t bad. It wasn’t good either, but Gunther and I ate it.

  “I’ll make Cousin Cassie’s oatmeal prune cake tomorrow,” Mrs. Plaut said. “Your favorite, Mr. Gunther.”

  Gunther nodded and smiled.

  When we were finished, Gunther and I thanked Mrs. Plaut, said good night to Simcox and Bidwell, and hurried off. The manuscript pages and Fiona Sullivan’s address and phone number were tucked under my arm.

  “Cousin Cassie’s oatmeal prune cake?” I whispered to Gunther as we climbed the stairs. “Your favorite.”

  “I have never heard of this cake before,” he said.

  Emma Simcox followed right behind us and started past us up the stairs.

  “Miss Simcox,” I said, “is Mrs. Plaut really your aunt?”

  Miss Simcox paused and looked at me.

  “Yes,” she said. “By marriage. Aunt Irene has told me that she plans to write about our side of the family in her memoirs.”

  She looked pointedly at the papers under my arm.

  “I await that part of her history with great interest,” I said.

  She moved ahead of us.

  It was a little after six. After I dropped the manuscript pages on the table in my room and put the sugar bowl on top of them so Dash wouldn’t knock them over, Gunther and I headed for Fourteenth Place. I turned on the radio. It crackled to music and settled into “There’s a Small Hotel.” When it finished, a baritone voice announced that we were listening to “Claude Thornhill’s All Navy Show.” Before we reached Fiona Sullivan’s we heard Thornhill’s renditions of “Portrait of a Guinea Farm” and a jazzy “Buster’s Last Stand.”