A Fatal Glass of Beer (22 page)

I pushed the chair out from under my doorknob and went to Fields’s room, where I knocked.

“It is open,” he said. “And you are a tad tardy.”

I went in. Fields was packed and ready. He wore a fresh, seemingly pressed cream-colored suit and an even whiter shirt with a large black bow tie.

“Used to do a gag on stage at this point,” he said. “Drink in my hand, as you see me thus, I looked down at my watch to check the time. Drink, of course, tips into my lap. In fact, I had so mastered the trick that I could spill all of the drink onto the floor between my legs without getting a drop on me. Never used real alcohol. Waste. I’d get up. Dance around. Knock at the door on stage and in would come a lovely, scantily clad maiden who supposedly saw the wet spot in my crotch and said, ‘Mr. Fields, what happened?’

“Anticipation,’ I would reply. The audience would go wild. Never failed. Except for the prudes. Then the gag started to show up all over the place. I anticipate this morning.”

I decided to wait till we were comfortably settled in the car and headed back to Los Angeles before I told him about my visit from Albert Woloski.

Fields finished his drink and rose, cane in hand. I noticed he was wearing spats. His hair was slightly moist and brushed back. This was our last chance, the final stop of the line on Burton’s list.

“Then let’s go,” I said, taking his heavy suitcase in addition to mine while he picked up the picnic basket.

I was about to knock at Gunther’s door when Fields stopped my hand.

“Little fellow’s been up and about for hours. All packed. Car’s in front of the hotel. I’d say he’s in the lobby waiting.”

I knocked. No answer. Fields was right. Gunther was in the lobby, fully suited, seated in a wooden-armed chair, his feet about eight inches from the floor. He was reading a magazine.

When we approached him, he looked up at us and then back down, reading aloud.

The pulse that stirs in the mind
,

The mind that urges bone
,

Move to the same wind

That blows over stone.

He put down the magazine, April’s
Atlantic Monthly
, and said, “By Theodore Spencer. Bought it this morning to bring to Jeremy Butler on the chance that he might miss it.”

I doubted if Jeremy had missed a single issue of the magazine since he was twelve, but I just nodded.

“Might buy me a copy of that,” said Fields, turning to lead us out the hotel’s front door and into the sunlight. “By gad, you’ve got windows back in.”

Gunther, suitcase in hand, stood straight and nodded. “The radiator is also repaired with welding, as is the oil line. The knocking sound at high speed was a transmission problem which has been repaired by simply tightening screws and bolts by the garage man. About the body … again, there was no time.”

“How much you out of pocket?” asked Fields.

“Twenty-seven dollars,” said Gunther.

Fields extracted three tens, as if by feel, and handed them to Gunther.

“Use the difference for gas,” he said. “You deserve a battlefield commission and I hereby give you one. Captain Gunther Wherthman of the W. C. Fields coast-to-coast monetary expedition.”

Fields tapped the amused Gunther gently on each shoulder with his cane and then, picnic basket in hand, climbed into the rear of the car, leaving Gunther and me to pack his bag and ours into the trunk.

We were at the bank in three minutes. The street was just coming alive and not much at that. Gunther parked directly in front of the bank in a space specifically marked No Parking. “Park here, Captain,” Fields had ordered, and Gunther had obeyed.

“We’re forty-five minutes early,” I said, looking at the clock on the dashboard.

“Perfect,” said Fields with a smile.

“Time for Gunther and me to run over to that restaurant across the street for a fast coffee and breakfast,” I said.

“I have already eaten,” said Gunther.

“Up at the crack of dawn, well fed, ready for battle,” said Fields. “He’ll make major before this excursion has run its course.”

“I’m getting breakfast,” I said and got out of the car.

Less than fifteen minutes later, since I was the first customer of the morning, I had finished toast, eggs over easy, hash browns, and two cups of coffee. I sat at the counter where I could see the car and the bank. The Caddy didn’t move and the bank didn’t open.

I was just crossing the street when a man somewhere around fifty, wearing overalls, a red-flannel shirt, and a hunter’s cap, walked up to the bank door and started to open it.

Fields, Gunther, and I were at his side before the door was halfway open. The man looked more than tired and more than slightly hung over. “You’re Fields,” he said.

“Correct,” said Fields, offering his hand.

“I’m Doug Mutter,” he said. “Alex’ll be along later. His missus left a message with my missus that you were looking for us. Haven’t had time to change.”

He went to his left inside the bank and pulled open the curtains. The small bank needed no electric lights this morning.

“This way,” said Mutter, waving for us to follow him past teller cages, beyond a quartet of desks, and into an office with his name on the door. He motioned for each of us to take a seat while he opened blinds, revealing barred windows.

President Mutter sat down in his wooden swivel chair, closed his eyes, rubbed his forehead, and felt the gray stubble of his face before turning to us.

“The situation—” Fields began.

“No situation,” said Mutter, taking off his cap and placing it on the desk. His hair was a wild tangle of yellow with perhaps the first tinges of gray mixed in.

“Used to call you Whitey?” asked Fields.

“Some still do,” said Mutter.

“Me too,” said Fields.

Mutter pushed two sheets of paper across his desk toward Fields.

“The problem is this,” said Fields. “I seem to have forgotten what name …”

“Your own,” said Doug Mutter, rubbing the bridge of his nose. “You opened the account as W. C. Fields. Just sign. Show some identification.”

Fields raised an eyebrow, and pulled out his billfold. Mutter gave it a quick glance and waved it away, looked at Fields’s signature, and opened his desk drawer. There was a neatly wrapped pile of bills.

“Six thousand seven hundred and fifty, including interest,” said Mutter. “Alex and I stopped by just before sunup. Count it.”

“No need,” said Fields with a smile. “It is a pleasure and a surprise to meet such an honest and trusting bank official.”

Mutter put his head in his hand and gave us a gesture of dismissal.

“Occasional drinking has killed more than one honest man,” said Fields. “I suggest working your way up to a habit or never getting beyond the slight social tipple. What you and Alex have done is disastrous.”

Mutter didn’t move. We got up, left him alone, went out the door, and made our way back to the car.

“That’s it,” I said as Fields tucked the new stack of bills in his picnic basket alongside his thermos, his olive jar, and his bottles of gin and vermouth.

“Not by a long shot,” he said, sitting back. “Not by a ten under par with a couple of holes in one. We get back my money and we put the Chimp behind bars.”

“He didn’t do it,” I said as Gunther put the car in gear. The transmission sounded fine.

Fields, in the act of mixing a drink, looked over at me. “Not alone,” he said. “I figured that out. Whoever shot Jack’s prankster and pulled off the finger-in-the-cast routine required more gray matter than the Chimp possesses.”

“No,” I said. “He was in my room last night.” I told Fields what Albert Woloski had told me. He listened carefully and nodded his head.

“Then,” he said, “it will make the pursuit of my missing savings a bit more difficult, though the Chimp has, if his story is true, seen the thief and killer and can identify him.”

“I think it’s true,” I said.

We were on the open road now, just a mile or so outside of town, heading for Los Angeles, when Gunther slid back the window and said, “There is a car in the ditch ahead.”

I looked out the window. The car was on its side and a figure was in the front passenger seat. The figure didn’t seem to be moving. The car looked as if it had tumbled over at least once.

“Pull over,” I said.

“It may be a trap,” said Fields.

“How could the killer know we’d be the ones to find the car?” I asked.

“A hunch, the knowledge that we’d leave when we got the money, the … stop the car.”

Gunther pulled over in front of the downed automobile. It was a prewar Oldsmobile. Through the cracked windshield we could see someone crunched against the passenger door. As we moved forward, I unzipped my jacket so I could reach my .38 and probably manage to shoot all of us if anything happened.

At first we couldn’t tell who the man was. His face was covered with blood, but his body was the first giveaway and then his voice, soft, tired, through the open driver’s-side window.

“It’s the Chimp,” said Fields.

“Shot me,” said Albert Woloski. “Through the window.”

“We can see,” I said.

“Hurts,” he said.

“I’ll get help,” said Gunther, turning to hurry back to the car.

“No,” said the Chimp as loud as he could. “Lots of shots. Broken. Get the police.”

I was leaning close to Woloski now. “First we’ll get you to a hospital, and then we’ll get the police,” I said.

He reached up and grabbed my jacket with his bloody hand. Even with at least four bullet holes in him and who knows how many broken bones and punctured organs, he was strong enough to pull me toward him and barely gasp, “Get the police. The police.”

“Fear not,” said Fields. “We’ll get medical and constabulary assistance. I was wrong about you, Albert. I should have nicknamed you Gunga Din.”

I don’t know if it was a smile or a grimace of pain, but it appeared on Woloski’s bloody face and he released my jacket and slumped back. I pushed broken glass out of the way and reached in to touch his bloody neck. No pulse. His heavy breathing had stopped. I forced myself to lift one of his eyelids. There was nothing but death in them.

“Gone,” I said.

The three of us looked down at the corpse.

“What now?” asked Fields.

“We can go home, call it a loss, and whoever did this will stop killing people and live a life of ease off your money,” I said.

“Are you quitting?” he asked.

“I’m considering it,” I said and then looked down at the body and the blood on my jacket. “I’ve considered. If you want me, I’m still on.”

“Good,” said Fields. “To Los Angeles to pursue a strategy to recover my money and put the culprit in jail for the rest of his life. He has now murdered two of the few apparently honorable men on this spinning orb.”

We got back in the car and headed for Los Angeles. Gunther stopped at the next town, and I called in the murder and its location to the Utah State Police without giving my name.

I advocate extreme self-control. Never drink anything stronger than gin before breakfast.

“Where’s the butler?” asked Fields as the door to his house opened. He had been unable to find his keys and was showing definite signs of irritation toward the woman who opened the door.

“Quit,” said Fields’s secretary, Miss Michaels, dressed for business and awaiting the return of her boss, who had called her from a dusty phone booth just across the California border.

The Cadillac grumbled away with Gunther behind the wheel. Miss Michaels barely gave the battered, disappearing car a look. She was used to such things, I suppose. I was carrying Fields’s two suitcases and my own. Gunther was going to drive the Caddy to No-Neck Arnie’s garage for a body job, and then get back to work. Gunther had told me at one of our rest stops that if I required his services for another odyssey with Mr. Fields he would prefer not to be a part of it, though he would do so if I asked him. I promised not to ask him.

“Is he here?” asked Fields, bustling past her.

“He is,” she said. “In your office. I reached him immediately after you called.”

“My office?” said Fields. “I don’t want that chiseler going through my personal effects.”

I put Fields’s suitcases down inside the door and kept my own in hand.

“He’s checking the remaining bankbooks,” said Miss Michaels, now behind Fields as he examined each room and noted, with some satisfaction, that the ceiling in the living room seemed to be sagging a bit more. There was a low balcony overlooking the living room, where a maid was working.

“What the hell is she cleaning?” Fields demanded.

“It gets dusty,” said Miss Michaels calmly as he moved through the room and up the stairs.

Fields, Miss Michaels, and I entered his office. Seated at the table near Fields’s desk was an overweight, white-haired man in a pair of brown slacks, a tan shirt, and an open sports jacket that matched his slacks. The man had a long pad of paper and a pile of different-color and different-size bankbooks in front of him. He did not look up when Fields entered the room.

“Miss Michaels,” Fields announced. “I am going to shower, shave, put on comfortable accoutrement, deal with that thief who claims to be an accountant and is going through my private financial papers sans permission, dictate several letters to you, and then meet with Mr. Peters here to plan our future strategy. I’ll inform you when I am ready for you. Meanwhile, Mr. Peters may want to freshen up.”

The accountant, who was introduced to me as John Neuenfeldt by Miss Michaels, lifted a hand—the one without the Parker pen in it—to acknowledge the introduction.

“I’ll be charming later,” Neuenfeldt said.

Miss Michaels led me to a bathroom on the first floor, showed me where the towels were, and disappeared. I put my suitcase down on a laundry hamper, surprised that the room was pink, the towels white, and the shower curtains pink with white polka dots. There was a fresh bar of green Palmolive soap and even an unopened bottle of Prell shampoo. The room didn’t have a touch of the Fields eccentricity. Even the oil painting on the wall—of a seaside picnic—was out of keeping with the lunacy of Fields’s house.