A Fatal Glass of Beer (2 page)

“I’m a bit confused,” said the man, looking around in embarrassment.

“A bit?” said Fields. “I’d say you show every sign of either being sober or having a recurring bout of tremors from the bite of a dreaded tsetse fly.”

“Mr. Fields,” I said, touching his arm.

He brushed me away, and I gave up and went in search of Gunther. One of the tellers, an older woman who was watching Fields across the room through the bars of her cage, had no customers. I moved to her and asked if she’d seen a midget come in.

“Yes,” she said, not taking her eyes off Fields and Trebblecock. “Followed an Amish gentleman back to the rest rooms.”

She pointed to the rear of the bank where there was a door for ladies and another for gentlemen. I ran to the men’s room. The door was locked. I knocked.

“Gunther?” I whispered.

No answer. I called again, louder. “Gunther.”

This time I thought I heard a groan. I hurried back to the teller. “You have a key for the men’s room?”

“Certainly not,” she said. “It locks from the inside for privacy but not the outside.”

“Is there a window in there?”

“Yes,” she said.

I glanced across the room. Fields was whispering loud enough for everyone in the bank to hear.

“I want this kept secret,” he said. “Spies everywhere. One lives across the street from me. Walks around at night in a Nazi helmet and claims to be Cecil B. DeMille, Air Raid Warden. The Amish man who claimed to be me, which I assume he did, was he a Jap?”

Fields was right in Titus Trebblecock’s face now, demanding satisfaction. I ran out the front door and made a dash around the corner onto another street. Behind the bank was a wide alley. I found the bathroom window. The window was open but too high for me to look inside. I found a trash can and moved it under the open window. The can felt empty and I wobbled. I almost crashed to the pavement as I climbed up on it and looked into the men’s room. The can began to give way under me. I went through the window headfirst and landed on Gunther, who sat on the closed toilet seat. We tumbled to the floor. My head missed the sink by a few inches.

Gunther didn’t look his best. His suit was disheveled and there was a dazed look in his eyes as if he were just waking up from a confusing dream.

“I’m sorry I fell on you,” I said.

Gunther said something in a language I didn’t understand.

“English, Gunther,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” he said, sitting up and holding the back of his head with his right hand. “He struck me on the head with something. The Amish. Mr. Fields was right. The Amish made a withdrawal, a big one. I got close enough to see that his beard wasn’t real. It was good, but I’ve been in show business long enough to know. He put the money in a small black bag and went into the men’s room. I attempted to follow him. He was waiting for me inside and hit me on the head, perhaps with the bag. That’s all I am able to remember. I think I heard the door lock and then you fell on top of me.”

“You need a doctor,” I said.

“Not necessary,” Gunther answered, standing and examining himself in the mirror. He adjusted his jacket and vest, produced a small comb from his pocket and used it. I could see the rise of a bump under his dark hair, but it wasn’t bleeding.

“Come out of there,” Fields suddenly shouted from outside the door. “I know you’re in there and I intend to beat you into a state of permanent discombobulation.”

I started to pick myself up and made an unpleasant discovery: my chronic backache had returned. I had earned it years earlier when a large Negro fan had tried to get too close to Mickey Rooney at a movie premiere. I was supposed to be protecting Rooney. I suppose I did, but the bear hug I got from the big Negro had done something to my back that sent me to bed for a week and came back every time I did dumb things like falling through windows. I managed to get up and open the door. Fields, Trebblecock, and another older man in a suit and pince-nez glasses stood looking at us.

“Son of a bitch got my money,” said Fields.

“He had a bankbook,” said the man in the glasses apologetically.

“So does Hitler,” Fields responded.

“And he signed his name. The match is nearly exact.”

“Worthless,” said Fields. “Any man who can’t forge the signature of another has had a misspent youth.” He pointed to the open window with his cane and went on. “What kind of a bank is this? Windows without bars.”

“We have an alarm system that goes on at night,” said the confused Trebblecock.

Fields twitched his fake mustache and shook his head.

“But in the light of day a fraud, a miscreant, a double-dealer, a cad and a thief can simply take my money and escape through a toilet window.”

“I don’t know what to say,” said the man with the pince-nez. “Trebblecock, call the police.”

“You don’t have a bank dick?” asked Fields.

“Yes,” said the man softly, “but Mr. Demeringthal phoned in ill this morning, and I can’t see that his presence would have had any effect in this situation.”

“Easy for you to say. It’s not your money.” Fields looked down at Gunther. “Bopped you one, did he?”

“I was taken by surprise,” said Gunther. “It will not occur again.”

“I admire your zeal if not your pugilistic prowess, but the fault was mine,” said Fields. “Never send in a midget to do the job of a sumo wrestler. Unfortunately, we don’t have a sumo wrestler, and they’re all Japs anyway. Well, Peters, what now? Leap through the window? Run thither and yon in search of the thief? He can’t have gotten far.”

I looked at Fields, who unclipped his mustache and put it in his pocket. My back throbbed, but I did my best to hide it. I had some pills from Doc Hodgdon in my suitcase. The suitcase was in the trunk of the car alongside Fields’s two suitcases and a supply of gin that would be enough to get the entire First Army drunk.

What now, I thought. I was in no shape to chase anyone, and by this time he could be anywhere in Lancaster County. Would I even know him if I saw him? He was tall. Not heavy. That was about it. He had probably dumped his Amish beard and suit by now and was on his way to the next bank. Nothing came to mind. But that had never stopped me before.

“Back to the car,” I said.

Fields shook his head in frustration and I helped Gunther to his feet, though it didn’t do much for my back. We headed through the bank, followed by the confused Trebblecock.

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.

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.