Tomorrow Is Another Day Read online

  He didn’t answer.

  “I’ll call in or be back.”

  “Right,” he said over his shoulder. “Where you goin’?”

  “To see the king,” I said.

  Chapter 5

  Sunset to Beverly Glen and west along 101 following the Los Angeles River into the wilderness of Encino. It took almost an hour and I got a headache from the hot wind blowing from the east through the open window and the bad news on the radio from Raymond Gram Swing. The Japanese Army was digging into the Pacific Islands, burrowing tunnels, making the troops pay with ten lives an acre for places called Rabaul, Mindanao, Leyte, and Guam, places we didn’t want in the first place. We were winning land and the war and losing lives.

  I found a gas station, Jimmy Kelly’s Gas and Sundries, specializing in Sinclair products and customer disdain. I used up my ration stamps for the week and bought a Pepsi and a small bottle of Bayer aspirin. I threw a handful of aspirin in my mouth and washed it down with Pepsi while the kid attendant shook his head and avoided my eyes.

  When I left the station, I wasn’t sure if I was on my way to losing the headache or was so full of aspirin that the question wasn’t relevant.

  Gable’s directions to the ranch were fine and I pulled up in front of the modest white-brick two-story house just before noon. I got out of the Crosley and rang the front door bell. No answer. Something hummed far away behind the house. I rang again and then knocked. Nothing.

  I looked through the curtained downstairs windows but the sun didn’t help the view. So, I walked behind the house and found myself on a stone patio, looking down a slope toward a copse of grapefruit trees on the left and a white wooden stable on the right. The stable looked empty and the trees looked heavy with overripe fruit.

  There didn’t seem to be a swimming pool.

  I knocked at the back door. No answer.

  The metallic rumble beyond the stable grew louder. I turned and watched as a motorcycle burst through the trees along a dirt path and shot toward me.

  I stood motionless as it buzz-sawed forward at about sixty miles an hour, shot over a small ridge and took off into the air, hit the grass, and screeched to a halt about ten feet in front of me. Gable, dressed in dark slacks and a short-sleeved yellow pullover shirt, his hair wild, turned off the engine, kicked down the stand, got off the bike, and pulled a small rifle from the tooled-leather holster tied to the bike.

  “Don’t move,” said Gable, cocking the rifle and aiming it at me.

  “Look,” I began, and took a step forward.

  Gable raised his rifle and fired. The bullet whined past my left leg and I hopped away from it.

  “Hey,” I shouted. “It’s me, Peters. I work for you, remember?”

  Gable dropped the barrel of the rifle and smiled.

  “That’s one reason I want you alive,” he said. “Look.”

  I looked where he was pointing, just behind me. On the stone patio, about three feet away, a headless rattlesnake was writhing.

  “Hot weather brings ’em out,” said Gable, rubbing his unruly hair back. “Sun themselves on the stone. You almost stepped on him.”

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “Let’s go inside,” he said, walking past me. “I’ll get rid of our friend later.”

  He went to the back door, opened it with a key on a small ring, and went inside. I followed into a huge kitchen.

  “Sandwiches in the refrigerator. Made them this morning. Beer, whatever. Help yourself.”

  He pointed toward a steel door in the corner.

  “Be right back,” he said. “Set up whatever you find in the dining room, through that door.”

  I crossed the kitchen and opened the door to a walk-in refrigerator. I found a plate of sandwiches, cucumber, onion, ham with butter. White bread. There was plenty of beer. I went for a row of Pepsis at the rear of a shelf about eye level. I juggled the food past a kitchen table covered with a white oilcloth decorated with little red flowers, pushed through a double door, and placed the food on the dining-room table. I opened the Pepsi with an opener on my pocket knife and looked around.

  The room was dark and big, with an open bar on one wall and a whitewashed brick fireplace on another. The walls were dark wood, as was the polished floor. There was an oval rug under the wooden table and another smaller rug under a round game table in the corner. The chairs were wood, no cushions. This was a man’s room except for the built-in cabinets on the walls filled with pink plates. A chandelier over the large table was made of old oil lamps.

  “Find what you need?” asked Gable, coming in with the rifle under one arm and a dark wooden box under the other.

  I pointed at the food and he sat down across from me, laid down the rifle, and opened the box.

  Over the sandwiches I told him what had happened the night before, after he had left the Mozambique. I also told him about Gunther and Mame.

  “I know her,” he said. “Skinny. Tough. Holds her own.”

  “That’s Mame,” I said. “We just wait here and …”

  “I want you to tell the police that I hired you,” he said, chewing on a mouthful of ham sandwich.

  “If I have to,” I said.

  “You won’t do me a hell of a lot of good in jail,” Gable said.

  “Thanks.”

  “So,” he said, “we just sit here and wait till your friend and Mame find Cay-gee and Varney, if they do, and hope your poet pal figures out what the lunatic notes from a murderer might mean?”

  “We can take a quick tour of the house,” I said.

  He cocked his head to one side and gave me a lopsided grin.

  “You curious, or …”

  “This is an easy house to get into,” I said. “Maybe I’m a little curious.”

  “Suit yourself,” Gable said, standing and picking up his rifle.

  We moved to the south wall and he opened sliding doors and led me into the living room.

  In contrast to the Irish-tavern feel of the dining room, the living room was warm and sunny, with wall-to-wall yellow-wool carpeting. Two big yellow sofas faced each other, with two green chairs flanking them, and a pair of identical upholstered red armchairs looking on. There were tables along the wall—wood, dark. The drapes were white and green with red flowers. Four large windows let in the light and looked out onto the front lawn. Across from the windows was an old cabinet, filled with a collection of china pitchers.

  “This way,” Gable said, moving past a high-mantled fireplace to a door he pushed open.

  We stepped into Gable’s gun room; one wall, maybe thirty feet long, was lined with rifles.

  “Expecting an attack on Encino?” I asked.

  “Not if I can help it,” he said soberly, putting the rifle he had been holding into a rack.

  There were lounge chairs and built-in couches in the room but no signs of unwelcome guests.

  We marched through a powder room, a maid’s room, and an office with yellow walls before making our way upstairs. Two bedrooms, no guest room.

  “My suite,” he said, pointing through an open door.

  The carpet was clean and white.

  The first room was brown and beige; the centerpiece was a double bed with a brown-leather headboard. The second room was a kind of study with a small bar and built-in bookcases.

  “Desks against the wall,” he said, pointing. “Antique, pine, a gift from Selznick, prop from Gone With the Wind.”

  The beige-marble bathroom was pretty fancy but it had no tub, just a shower in one corner.

  We left the suite and when we stepped into the corridor, he pointed to a door and said with a sigh “Ma’s suite.”

  He opened the door for me but didn’t follow me inside Carole Lombard’s bedroom. The room looked as if it had just been cleaned. It had the same carpeting as that in Gable’s suite, but that’s where the similarity ended. Her bed was a four-poster with a billowy cover. There were white throw rugs on the floor, and near the window stood a full-sized harp. The bathr
oom and mirrored dressing room were white marble with white fur on the floor and a crystal chandelier on the ceiling.

  “House looks clean,” I said, coming back into the corridor. Gable nodded and started down the stairs.

  He led me back to the gun room, where he picked up the rifle he had recently fired, found some oil and rags and a cleaning box, and sat.

  “Used to be filled with life,” he said. “Stray cats, dogs. People. You’re sitting in Fred MacMurray’s favorite chair. Man knew how to laugh. I wonder if he still does.”

  I kept my mouth shut.

  “What now?” he said.

  “We could listen to the radio,” I suggested, nodding at a tabletop Philco.

  He got up, turned it on, and we listened to “Big Sister” and “The Goldbergs.” Solomon Goldberg was planning to join the army and Molly was taking the news with pathos and patriotism.

  Gable didn’t seem to listen. He was lost in getting the rifle as shiny as his spit-polished shoes.

  “You married, Peters?” Gable asked finally as he closed his cleaning box.

  “Not now,” I said.

  He nodded knowingly.

  “Your fault? Hers? Nobody’s?”

  “Mine,” I said. “Anne wanted me to grow up. I didn’t want to.”

  “What happened to her?”

  “Married again. Lost her husband. I keep trying to convince her that I can act my age, but she won’t buy it.”

  “Should she?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Had one happy year here, Peters,” Gable said, looking around the gun room. “And then …”

  The phone rang.

  It was in the corner on an area table near the door. Gable walked over and picked it up on the third ring.

  “Yes … who is this?… no, we haven’t figured … how did you get this number?”

  I was out of my chair and standing in front of Gable, whose eyes met mine.

  “Him?” I mouthed.

  Gable confirmed with a nod as he listened. I held out my hand for the phone. Gable handed it to me.

  “… your idea that she fly, your idea that she go across the country selling stamps and bonds. You killed your own wife as surely as you killed … are you listening, hero?”

  “I’m listening,” I said.

  “Peters. I want Gable back.”

  Gable stood, hands at his sides, serious eyes searching my face.

  “Why?”

  “Because I want him to suffer the way he made my father suffer before he died.”

  “I hate to repeat myself here but why do you want him to suffer? What do you think he did?”

  “Killed my father,” the man said. “Took away his only chance at recognition. He’ll pay, Peters. And so will you and everyone who was there when …”

  “When?…”

  “What you want to know doesn’t mean crap to me, Peters. Since you’re out in Encino, I guess you haven’t figured out my directions to the next victim.”

  “I’m working on it,” I said.

  “I’m going to hang up now, and go kill K.G. You aren’t too bright, Peters.”

  “No,” I admitted. “But I don’t give up. I never give up. So, hang up, don’t hang up, call again, or keep your mouth shut. Sometime I’ll tap you on the shoulder and make a hole in your face when you turn around.”

  “Good-bye, Peters,” he said and broke the connection.

  I handed the phone to Gable, who hung it up.

  “You know what I think,” said Gable, folding his arms. “I think he’s a fan of my dead wife, that he blames me for her death and …”

  “He said you killed his father,” I interrupted.

  “His father? Who the hell is his father?”

  I shrugged and the phone rang again. This time I picked it up.

  “Yes,” I said.

  “Toby,” said Gunther. “There are seven people with the initials K.G. who worked on Gone With the Wind in some capacity. Miss Stoltz has been very helpful in tracking them down quickly. Two of the people are now in the armed services, stationed in the South Pacific. Three are definitely out of the state of California. One is working in a play now in Cleveland. Another is in New York City. The fifth is a Negro woman named Kate Greenway who seems to be impossible to find, though word has it that she has returned to her family in Mississippi. This leaves Karen Gilmore, an extra, and Karl Albert Gouda, also an extra.”

  “You know where these people are, Gilmore and Gouda?”

  “I have addresses and phone numbers for both,” Gunther said.

  I pulled out my notebook and took the information.

  “On the other question, I am afraid I have found little. Lionel Varney was on the payroll. No home address. Access to security files for Selznick International was made possible by Miss Stoltz. But there appears to be no record of the mishap in 1938. It seems there was a fire …”

  “And security records were destroyed. Good work, Gunther,” I said.

  “Miss Stoltz is a remarkable woman,” Gunther said.

  “You can go home now, Gunther. Thanks.”

  “I made a complimentary remark concerning Miss Stoltz,” Gunther said.

  “I heard.”

  “I would like to take the liberty of inviting Miss Stoltz to dinner,” he said.

  “Invite away,” I said as Gable grew clearly impatient.

  “I have a sense, however, that she harbors certain feelings, expectations related to you,” he said.

  “Steal her from me, Gunther. With my blessing.”

  “You don’t think it would be disloyal to Gwen if I simply …”

  “No,” I said. “I’ve got to try to prevent a murder, Gunther.”

  “I’m sorry,” he said sincerely.

  I said good-bye and hung up.

  “Two possibles,” I said to Gable, placing another call as I laid my open notebook in front of me on the table.

  “I’ll take one of them,” Gable said, holding out his hand. “You can’t be in two places at once.”

  I held up a finger as Alice Pallis answered on the second ring.

  “Toby,” I said. “Is Jeremy there?”

  “It’s creation time,” Alice said seriously.

  Creation time took place in the afternoon. Jeremy sat quietly for about two hours waiting to be kicked in the imagination by a muse. She showed up about once a week to torture him.

  “Okay,” I said. “When creation time is over, will you ask him to come to this address.”

  I gave her Gable’s address in Encino.

  “And what does he do when he gets there?” Alice asked.

  “He keeps Clark Gable from getting hurt,” I said.

  There was a long silence on Alice’s end. In the background I could hear Natasha, her baby, cooing at something.

  “He is not a young man, Toby. We’ve talked about this.”

  “Last time, Alice. I promise.”

  “I don’t believe you, Toby,” she said. “But … it’s really Clark Gable?”

  I held out the phone for Gable.

  “I don’t need a bodyguard,” he said. “I don’t want a bodyguard. I won’t have a bodyguard.”

  “The man needs a sense of self-worth,” I said. “He’s a fan. Humor me.”

  Gable shrugged and took the phone.

  “Madame,” he said. “This is Clark Gable. I would very much appreciate your husband’s help for a brief period. I’m confident that there is no danger here.”

  Gable was silent for an instant and then closed his eyes.

  “I love you Scarlett and by heaven you’re going to learn to love me,” he said and then listened to Alice for an instant before adding, “You’re welcome. Good-bye.”

  He hung up the phone and looked at it for a beat or two before turning to me again.

  “I hope you know what you’re doing,” he said.

  “Trust me,” I said, and then I called the Wilshire police station in Los Angeles and talked to Captain Phil Pevsner, my brother.
After that I called Selznick International and asked for Wally Hospodar. Wally, I was told, had retired and lived in Calabasas. The man who took my call gave me Wally’s phone number when I convinced him Wally and I were old friends. I hung up and tried Wally’s number. A woman answered after five rings. I told her I was looking for Wally. She said she’d get the message to him if he called and he’d probably call back.

  When I finished the call, Gable showed me the way out of the house. “I don’t like just sitting here, Peters,” he said, opening the front door for me.

  “I’ll call,” I said. “I promise. Second I know anything. I’ll call.”

  “Oh, the hell with it,” he said with a sigh and closed the door on my back.

  By breaking speed laws in Van Nuys and Beverly Hills, I got to the address I had for Karl Albert Gouda in thirty-two minutes. It was a store, a lamp store on Olympic, not far from the Santa Monica airport.

  I was drenched in sweat when I found a parking spot almost half a block away and ran back. The door to the lamp shop was locked and a sign in the window read: “Away for a few minutes. Back soon.”

  I stood waiting, pulling my shirt from my skin, looking both ways down the street for a madman with a gun or spear. Soon was definitely not ten minutes. I have a reasonably good sense of the passage of time, no thanks to my watch. No business had been lost by Karl Albert Gouda in his absence. I was the only potential customer.

  I knocked at the door. It rattled. No answer. Something or someone moved deep inside the cavern of a store. I knocked again. Through the window I watched a man in a baggy suit stride from the shadows, past the lamps, and to the door. He was a squat man with bad skin. He had a head of white hair and a look of annoyance on his face.

  “What you wan’?” he asked. “We’re closed. Can’t you read or something?”

  “Karl Albert Gouda,” I said loudly. “I’ve got to see him.”

  “Why?”

  “You Gouda?”

  “No,” the squat man said. “Go away.”

  “Someone’s going to try to kill him in a minute or two.”

  This got his attention.

  “What are you talkin’?”

  “He was in Gone With the Wind,” I tried.

  “So?”

  “So, someone is killing people who worked on Gone With the Wind.”