A Fatal Glass of Beer (6 page)

Fields went down the stairs. I followed, my, fathers suitcase in hand.

“If I counted all the times I’ve been threatened with murderous mayhem,” he said, “I’d need all my fingers and thumbs and most of yours. Let’s go, Peters. The game’s afoot.”

The Chimp drove the car to the airport, looking at us sullenly in the rearview mirror.

“He wants to drive the Caddy to Philadelphia,” Fields explained. “I barely trust him to ferry me within the confines of Los Angeles County.”

The plane ride to Philadelphia, with a changeover in Chicago, was reasonably uneventful—as uneventful, I discovered, as any trip with Fields. I sat by the window. He sat next to me on the aisle. I don’t like airplanes. They crash and kill people. I like trains, buses, and cars. They crash and kill people too, but I feel some sense of control and connection to the earth. A crash on the ground is fast. Split second. No time to think. You lose control or get blind-sided and you’re dead or in the hospital. In a plane you have all the time it takes from the moment you know you’re going to crash till you hit the ground. I was miserable, but I kept my mouth shut and looked out of the window when Fields wasn’t talking.

He had brought a huge thermos with him. “Filled with pineapple juice,” he confided. “Only thing I drink when I’m making a movie or chasing thieves.”

The thermos was filled with martinis. I knew it and everyone on the plane who knew who he was probably strongly suspected it. People came for autographs, which Fields generously gave, juggling a cup of his “pineapple juice” in one hand as he signed everything from autograph books to airline-ticket envelopes. One man in a business suit, at whom the great man beamed with pleasure as the plane suddenly and loudly dropped a few feet and I closed my eyes, actually had a copy of Fields’s
Fields for President.
Fields signed with a flourish and the man went back to his seat, examining the signature.

“Book sold like hotcakes,” Fields confided in me as we hit another small pocket of turbulence and I wished I had gone with Gunther.

We hit frequent turbulence. None of it seemed to register on Fields, who never fastened his seat belt.

“No one buys hotcakes,” Fields said almost to himself. “People buy cars, cans of tuna, millions of bottles of beer and scotch, hats, bacon and eggs, but not hotcakes. You can get them free at Shrine breakfasts and Sundays at church socials. You can make them at home for practically nothing. No one buys hotcakes and no one bought my book. Damned funny book too. You should read it.”

“I will,” I said, feeling decidedly queasy.

“A small libation will help your distress,” Fields said.

What the hell. I took the cup, sipped at the gin. He urged me on. I finished the drink and handed him the cup.

“There,” he said with a satisfied smile. “Feel better?”

I felt worse, but I said, “much better” and closed my eyes.

Fields had brought a copy of Dickens’s
Great Expectations
and as I sat back in fear, he chuckled.

“Read this book maybe six times,” he said. “Scene of Pip describing his home life is one of the great comic monologues of all time. ‘Connubial missile.’ Says his parents used him as a ‘connubial missile,’ throwing him at each other. Strikes me as a proper use of a child.”

I grunted.

In the waiting area of Midway Airport in Chicago I felt sick. The martini had definitely not had a curative effect on my stomach. I left Fields to fend for himself, talk to passersby who recognized him, sign his name, and generally pontificate. After a few minutes in the men’s room, I felt a little better and returned to Fields well before our plane was due to leave. He had purchased a newspaper, the
Chicago Sun
, and was reading the sports page.

“Says here,” he said as I sat next to him, “Phil Rizzuto, the Yankee shortstop, is going in the navy. Plan is to replace him with George “Snuffy” Sternweis. Snuffy Sternweis, great name. Doomed to success.”

“You’re a baseball fan?” I asked, not really wanting to talk or look over at him and his thermos.

“A fan of the odd,” he said. “Sports figures, particularly baseball players, have great names. Dizzy and Daffy Dean. Grover Cleveland Alexander. Boxers don’t come close. They’re always called ‘Killer’ or ‘Battler’ or ‘Hurricane.’ An occasional gem will emerge from one of the minor sports like football or tennis. Bronco Nagurski, Jinx Falkenberg.”

I nodded. We got back on the plane in the middle of a Fields monologue about a kumquat farm he once owned in Florida.

“Not far from Homosassa,” he said. “Crop flourished, then in one night, every damn kumquat was eaten by the alligators. I fenced it in and turned it into an alligator farm. Once had to wrestle one of the filthy beasts. I considered it a draw. We both lived. Couldn’t get the smell of alligator out of my clothes for a week. Sold the ugly lizards to a shoe company, a luggage company, and a woman’s handbag company. Made a tidy profit. Donated some of it to an organization dedicated to the eradication of all animals known to have and capable of killing human beings. Would have given them more if they could have taught the beasts to confine their attacks to Methodists.”

Fields slept all the rest of the way to Philadelphia, clutching his thermos to his breast, snoring loudly. He had put a white salve on his nose and declared that he almost felt as if he were in a barber chair before he closed his eyes and was asleep instantly.

When we landed I was hazy from lack of sleep. Fields woke with a smile, stretched, wiped the salve off with his handkerchief, and declared that he was hungry “as an alligator deprived of kumquats or human appendages.”

“Philadelphia,” he declared as we went down the steps which had been rolled over to the plane. “City of my youth. Birth site of me and the nation. Home of the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall and Murphy’s Saloon. Never thought I’d be back here again.”

We ate breakfast at a counter in the airport terminal. I had tea to settle my stomach, scrambled eggs, and toast. Fields asked if they had shrimp or crabmeat salad. The uniformed woman behind the counter said, “No, what we got, we got on the menu. That’s it.”

Fields ordered two pieces of toast with no butter or margarine and two strips of bacon. He shook his thermos and told me that we needed a liquor store almost immediately. I nodded, ate, and said we’d stop if one was open this early.

“Drat,” he said. “For an ecstatic moment, I forgot we were in Philadelphia. You know my entire family is buried here?”

“Mine’s in Glendale,” I said.

“Difficult choice,” Fields said, pouring what must have been close to the last of his martini supply.

He ate one piece of toast. Took a bite of the other. He ate one strip of bacon and left the other. I felt better after we had eaten. I made a call. Detective Gus Belcher was in his station house. I got him on the phone and he told me to come over with Fields. I took the address, retrieved my employer, and found a taxi whose driver knew where we could find a liquor store open in the morning. We stopped, got what Fields needed, and proceeded to the station, paper bag of bottles and olives in his lap.

“Give the driver a generous tip,” he said.

“Easier if you paid him,” I said. “Then I don’t have to bill you for the taxi.”

“True, but I’m sure you would be more generous than I,” Fields said.

I knew he had stuffed all of his pockets with cash. On the plane and in the Chicago airport, I had seen the bulges and the tips of crumpled bills. He was a flashing target for pickpockets, but I was sure that, even dead drunk, Fields could sense the presence of anyone who might dare approach his cash.

Fields glared glumly at his hometown as we drove.

“Damned place never changes,” he said. “Cities are supposed to change. Get modern. Tear down buildings, put other ones up, engage in progress.”

When we got to the station, the driver removed my suitcase and Fields’s traveling bag from the trunk. Fields had a couple of suitcases in the trunk of the car Gunther was driving. Gunther was small, but his foot was heavy. I figured him well past Arizona by now.

The station house looked like it had been built by veterans of the Revolutionary War. It was two stories, made of red brick carrying about a hundred and fifty years of dirt.

“Life is a mockery,” Fields declared as we looked at the building. “More than several are the times in my early youth when I was accused, brought to, and lectured by blue-uniformed officers in this very building. Entering, which we must, will be hell.”

Inside we faced a corridor. On our right was an open door. The sign on the door said: Complaints and Inquiries.

We entered. Several people were sitting in a tired daze on the bench that ran along the wall of the stone-floored room. A uniformed cop, too old for military service, sat behind a high desk, writing a report and singing.

“I’ll be walking with my baby down honeymoon lane. Soon, soon, soon. By the moon, moon, moon.”

I asked for Gus Belcher and the cop stopped singing, nodded, and picked up his phone. He looked a little like Andy Devine and even sounded like him, especially when he sang.

“Third door on your left,” he said after making the call. “Aren’t you W. C. Fields?”

“Thurston W. Ptomaine,” said Fields. “I’ve been told the resemblance to Fields is almost uncanny. Alas, I’m a music critic for the
Tuscaloosa Times-Herald-Tribune-Star.
”

The cop shrugged, went back to his report, and began humming.

We headed for Gus Belcher’s office.

“The one thing that convinces me of the existence of the devil,” said Fields, “is his whispering to Eve that she and her hubby might enjoy singing a ditty or two. The unholy practice has been passed down to us for more than five thousand years. I’ve thrown the Chinaman out for singing. And the devil has tricked me into renting a house next to Deanna Durbin. No amount of threats or shouts will get the vapid creature to stop caterwauling on her veranda.”

Gus Belcher shared a small office with three other detectives, each of whom had a desk with a chair in front of it. On the wall was a reproduction of a painting showing the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Behind each desk, notes, posters, and photographs were tacked to the wall. The other three detectives were out. Belcher rose, held out his hand, introduced himself, and we shook all around after we put down our suitcases.

Belcher was around forty, cop physical-profile number two, like my brother, Phil, L.A.P.D. lieutenant. Built like a medium-sized tank, his hair was dark and curly and looked as if he had just been to a barber. Nose almost as flat as mine. Dark face reminding me of a bulldog that had once chased me across the lawn and over the wall around the estate of a gangster. Belcher’s trousers and sports jacket were clean, dark, and they matched. His shirt was starched and his tie was wide, dark-blue and red stripes.

“Not gonna find much here,” he said, sitting down and pointing to the chairs in front of us. We sat. “Hipnoodle—for chrissake, I feel like an idiot even repeating the name. The suspect, as I told you, is gone. No trace. Nothing. See that
in
box?”

Fields and I looked at the wooden box at the corner of his desk. It was piled high with folders, reports, letters, and notes.

“I’ve got no time to give you any more help unless the suspect returns home and the landlady calls me,” said Belcher. “You want to look for him, be my guest. Go talk to the landlady, look at the apartment, talk to the neighbors, storekeepers. I don’t have the time. Come back to me or Mickey Knox, my partner, if this Hipnoodle actually gets his hands on your money or if he kills somebody or commits a felony in Philadelphia. You get the picture?”

“Yes,” I said.

Fields had said nothing. He sat stiffly, his eyes on the painting of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

“One more thing,” I said. “We’re going to be at a hotel, the …”

“Continental, if it still exists and has a vestige of gentility,” Fields said.

“It does,” said Belcher.

“A Gunther Wherthman, Mr. Fields’s driver, will be arriving in a couple of days. I gave him your number and said you’d tell him where to find us.”

“No problem,” said Belcher, glancing at the pile in his
in
box and putting on a pair of half glasses he pulled from his inside pocket. When he made the move, I saw the holster and gun under the jacket. We shook hands again and Fields and I took off.

Fields looked at everyone in the corridor as we walked, a look of anxiety on his face which turned to near panic when we passed a uniformed officer or someone who looked like a detective.

“What’s wrong?” I asked as we reached the front door.

“Thought I might run into one of the constabulary that had arrested me as a boy,” he explained. “Probably still warrants out for me for stealing fruit and sweaters.”

The sky rumbled with the threat of rain.

“The police who arrested you are all retired,” I said. “They have to be in their eighties.”

I flagged a cab and Fields got in hurriedly, still clutching his suitcase and the paper bag into which he had stuffed his thermos and fresh bottles. Twenty minutes later we were at the Continental, registered in my name. Fields had conspicuously pulled his hat forward on his head in a vain attempt to hide his face. A few people looked at him. The desk clerk, a thin, suited man with a skinny mustache and a European accent, politely ignored Fields.

We got a suite. Two rooms. Fields got the bedroom. It had two beds. I planned to sleep in the other room on the couch, away from his threats of twisting, snorting, snoring, turning, and insomnia.

We cleaned up and went out again in search of a cab, which we got, in spite of the rain now coming down heavily with distant crashes of thunder.

When we got to the six-flat apartment building, Fields paid the cabby and we got out. There was a sign on the building, saying: Furnished Apartments for Rent. The rain continued as we ran into the lobby.

Fields was decidedly pale. “This place was here when I was a boy,” he said. “Passed it frequently. Stole coal from the shuttle that dropped it in back.”