Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery (17 page)

“You cannot go through a day such as you had yesterday without enough stick-to-the-ribs sustenance,” she said. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes. You have left your bib and tucker in a heap.”

She pointed at my tux on the floor near the door and started to turn.

“Was your husband really a magician?”

She either had her hearing aid turned off or chose not to answer. She turned right and walked away, leaving the door open. Leaving the door open guaranteed that I would have to get up to at least close it.

My shoulder where the pellet had hit felt fine. Well, “fine” was a little optimistic. In addition, my tongue told me that I hadn’t lost any more of the tooth. The tooth told me that it would behave. I did not trust the tooth. I used the oil of cloves, got up, put on a reasonably clean pair of underpants and trousers and hurried to the bathroom to shower and shave before one of the other tenants beat me to it. I was sure Gunther had long since cleansed himself from toenails to the ends of the hairs on his head. It was Bidwell I tried to beat. He took about fifteen minutes in the bathroom, probably because he had only one hand to work with, though he seemed to be doing reasonably well with that one hand where Emma Simcox was concerned.

I was the first one at Mrs. Plaut’s table, having passed the screeching bird whose name I no longer knew nor cared about. I had dropped my tux in a neat bundle near the front door.

“I have to hurry,” I said as Mrs. Plaut came in with the coffee.

“We all have to hurry,” she said. “It is the lot of man, the human condition. Breakfast today is Spam and egg casserole with loganberries.”

“Sounds great,” I said, picking up the coffee.

“I’ll bring it out when all are assembled,” she said.

“I’m really in a hurry.”

“You’ll not live a moment longer nor accomplish anything of true pith and moment by hurrying,” she said, daintily picking up her coffee cup.

“Alright,” I returned. “Was your husband really a magician and were you the famous Irene?”

She put down her cup, turned it so the handle pointed away, pursed her lips and said,

“Mr. Blackstone is illusional.”

“Delusional,” I corrected.

“That, too,” she said. “I’ll get the casserole.”

Up she rose and ambled into the kitchen. Gunther arrived, and I told him where I was going before our morning meeting with Marty Leib. Gunther asked if I would like his company and I said I would.

Mrs. Plaut arrived with a steaming Pyrex container, which she held with two potholders. Gunther moved to place the bamboo mat on the table closer to her.

“There,” she said, putting down the dish and standing back to admire her work as Bidwell and Emma came in and sat next to each other.

“Smells good,” said Bidwell with his car salesman smile. If he had two hands, this is the moment he would have rubbed them together.

“The zesty, crusty topping has been recommended personally by Betty Crocker,” said Mrs. Plaut.

I considered telling Mrs. Plaut that there was no Betty Crocker. I considered asking Mrs. Plaut again about her rumored career as a magician’s wife. I considered finishing my coffee, motioning to Gunther and leaving without the pleasure of the savory casserole. The latter was not a serious consideration, not if I intended to remain a boarder in Mrs. Plaut’s house of a thousand pleasures.

The casserole was good, strange but good. That was Mrs. Plaut’s specialty: strange but good cooking, with an emphasis on the former. Bidwell always shook his head and ate with gusto, frequently adding comments on the brilliance of Mrs. Plaut’s culinary skills. I think he meant it. The man survived on enthusiasm. I could take just so much of it. I ate, chewing only on the left side of my mouth.

I had seconds and then waited while Gunther finished. He did not eat quickly. When he finally placed his knife and fork neatly on his plate, I stood and said, “Sorry, we’ve got to run.”

“With caution,” said Mrs. Plaut. “Always with caution. The mister always said, ‘If you don’t look where you are stepping, someday, somewhere you will step into something that will be hard to clean off.”

“Sage advice,” I said, and we were off.

Gunther had brought his tux downstairs before he came to breakfast. His was on a hanger and didn’t look as if it had been worn. We gathered our uniforms and headed for my Crosley. On the way to Columbia, we dropped the clothes off at Pearson’s Cleaners on Pico, which opened at dawn. They would have to be cleaned before I returned them to Hy’s.

Ten minutes later, we were pulling into the parking lot at Columbia Pictures, where a uniformed attendant recognized me.

“Toby? Son-of-a-bitch,” said Dave Crouch as I rolled down my window. “Last time I saw you was …”

“Burke Reilly’s retirement party,” I said.

“Five years?”

“Six or seven,” I said.

Dave was a heavy man in his midfifties with clickety-clack false teeth and a constant smile. We had both been guards at Warner Brothers. Harry Warner personally had fired me when I’d taken a short right jab at a second-rate cowboy star after he’d tried to saddle a would-be kid starlet who wasn’t interested. It wasn’t so much that I had punched the cowboy, but that I had broken his nose, which set the picture he was working on off its shooting schedule for more than a week. Dave Crouch had simply traded the Warner brothers for Harry Conn and a few dollars more per week.

“You here looking for a job?” asked Dave, glancing at Gunther.

“Looking for a movie star,” I said.

“Who?”

“Cornel Wilde. I hear he’s shooting
A Thousand and One Nights
.”

“That he is,” said Dave. “Stage Two. He expecting you?”

“Would I be here at eight in the morning if he weren’t?”

“Yes,” said Dave. “You would, but who gives a damn, you know? I’ve had it up to here with Cohn and company. I’m thinking of moving down to San Diego, buying into my brother-in-law Sam’s bar. Right near a shipyard. Goddamn gold mine. Sam’s got a liver thing, and my sister likes cooking for me. Seen Ann?”

“No, not for a while,” I said. “Rose?”

“No,” he said. “Go on in. If someone asks me, I’ll say you showed me a pass. You got a pass right?”

“Right here in my pocket,” I said.

“Good enough for me,” said Dave.

I drove past the gate and headed for Stage Two.

“Rose is his former wife, I take it?” asked Gunther.

“She took it,” I said. “Dave once had a house in Santa Monica.”

Stage Two didn’t look any different from the other sound stages on all the lots of all the studios. Maybe it was a little smaller. Maybe the outside brick walls weren’t as clean, but a sound stage is a sound stage from the outside. On the inside, it can be anything from a crater on Mars to a battlefield in Germany to a Sultan’s palace in fairy tale, which was what Stage Two was when Gunther and I went through the door. The green light was on, indicating that they were not shooting at the moment.

It was the Hollywood I had learned to love and distrust. Around the walls were ladders, lights, piles of electrical equipment, chunks of scenery leaning against other chunks of scenery. In the middle of the sound stage was what looked like the garden of a palace with a little fountain in a pool. Girls in colorful billowing costumes with veils pulled back were chatting in little groups, some of them smoking, some of them sipping coffee.

The garden was painted in bright colors, reds, blues, greens, golds, yellows, in contrast to the black and gray beyond what the camera would see.

In the middle of the garden stood two men. One man wore dark trousers and a white shirt with the sleeves pulled up. He was holding a script. His companion, in billowing purple pants and a white shirt with puffy sleeves, was looking at the script, nodding his head and saying something. The man in the costume, Cornel Wilde, was tall, handsome with dark curly hair and serious dark eyes.

Gunther and I started toward Wilde when a bald young man, wearing glasses that didn’t quite go with his Scheherazade costume, said, “You guys lookin’ for me?”

He had a cup of coffee in his hand.

“No,” I said.

“No?” he asked. “You sure. Phil Silvers? You from Manny? I’m supposed to place a bet on the Fifth at Aqueduct. Dangerous Antics on the nose? Sure you’re not from Manny? You look like you’d be from Manny.”

“No,” said Gunther.

Silvers pulled up his sleeve and looked at his watch.

“You’re not bookies?” he asked.

“No,” said Gunther.

“You wouldn’t want to make a bet? A small wager on the race? Dangerous Antics is seven to one. I’ll take six to one.”

“We are not …”

“Five to one,” said Silvers, shaking his head as if he were making a terrible mistake. “I’m a crazy man, but what can I do? I’m addicted. Four to one. Last offer. I’m breaking my heart here.”

“You don’t…” Gunther tried.

“He’s joking Gunther,” I said.

“Peters,” Silvers said, taking my hand. “You could have given me a few more seconds of shtick. I had the little guy goin’.”

“Very amusing,” Gunther said soberly.

“Take a joke,” Silvers said to Gunther, extending his hand. “It’s free. Toby and I go way back. The Green Pussycat in, what was it, thirty-eight, thirty-nine?”

“Green Door, downtown,” I said. “Thirty-seven.”

“Right, right,” said Silvers. “Guy gets a little snickered while I’m doing my act, see. Starts heckling. Big mistake. You heckle crooners. You heckle ventriloquists. You heckle magicians. You don’t heckle comics. I was on that night. Right?”

Silvers beamed.

“You were on,” I agreed.

“Made the guy look like the shmuck he was. Am I right?”

“You’re right,” I said.

“Big guy. Charges the stage.”

Silvers demonstrated, taking a few lumbering steps toward Gunther with his shoulders down.

“Toby here is working nights at the Green Pussycat, see?”

“Green Door,” I corrected.

“Yeah,” said Silvers. “Whatever. Well he gets between the drunken bull and me. Bull rams Toby with his head. Toby rams Bull with his right or left. Down goes Bull. Audience applauds. I grin like this and go on with the act. I took two curtain calls and I wasn’t even the headliner. That was Kenny Baker.”

“And I took seven stitches,” I said.

“Who’s counting?” said Silvers with a shrug. “I’m not counting. You?”

“No,” said Gunther, at whom the question was directed.

“I like this guy,” said Silvers, looking at Gunther and grinning.

Gunther is not easy to confuse, but Phil Silvers was doing a good job.

“Phil …,” I began.

“You can call me Abdullah,” he said. “That’s my name in the picture. Classy, huh?” He winked at Gunther.

“Has anyone been around here this morning looking for Wilde?” I asked.

I didn’t expect a “yes.” I was sure the person who was supposed to meet Wilde was Robert Cunningham, who was stone cold dead.

“Yeah,” said Silvers. “Blond guy. A few minutes ago. Couldn’t hear what they were saying, but he was in Cornel’s face. Not a good idea. Mr. Cornel Wilde is built better than Billy Conn on whom I lost … it doesn’t matter.”

Silvers looked around for the blond guy and didn’t see him.

The man with the script backed away from Wilde, who waved to a man in black tights and a black shirt. The man had a sword in his right hand.

“Watch this,” said Silvers, holding out his right arm to keep us back.

The crew stopped moving. The girls in costume stopped talking as the man in tights stepped onto the set. A young man stepped into the light and handed Wilde a sword.

Wilde and the man in black began to slowly duel with Wilde circling right and then left, up three stairs, and then a leap over the sword of the other man.

“Like that?” Wilde asked, looking at the man with the script.

“Perfect. Just speed it up a little.”

Wilde nodded.

“Swords,” said Silvers in a confidential whisper. “Wilde was a college champ. Olympic team. Good huh?”

“Very much so,” said Gunther.

“You got class,” said Silvers.

“Thank you,” said Gunther.

“Gotta run,” said Silvers again, using his confidential whisper. “A harem girl wants to share a ham sandwich with me behind the sultan’s tent. See ya.”

Silvers hurried away and Gunther said soberly,

“He is strangely amusing.”

“That’s a good way of putting it,” I said, moving toward Wilde who was holding his sword out at arm’s length.

“Mr. Wilde,” I said.

He turned his head and looked first at me and then at Gunther.

“You won’t remember me,” I said. “I used to be a guard at Warner’s. I met you one day on the set of
High Sierra
.”

“I remember,” he said with a smile. “You were talking to Humphrey Bogart.”

“Right, I was a private investigator by then. You’ve got quite a memory.”

“A gift and a curse,” he said, tucking the sword under his arm.

“A little while ago,” I said. “A man was here. You had words.”

“Yes,” said Wilde very seriously.

“Mind telling me what he wanted?”

“Five minutes,” someone called from behind me.

Wilde nodded. Bright lights came on.

“He had made an appointment to see me this morning,” Wilde said. “Said it would take no more than a minute or two and involved an old friend from college who was in trouble. He gave me the name of the friend. I agreed to see him.”

“What did he want?”

“To blackmail me,” he said. “He showed me photographs, all fakes, of me doing things I’ve never done with people I’ve never met.”

“And?”

“I asked him if he could imagine what it felt like to have a very sharp blade pierce his stomach and come out through his back. He repeated his threat, said he could handle a saber. I told him that they were frauds, that he was a blackmailer and that I was going to call the police.”

“He backed off?”

Wilde furrowed his forehead and said,

“Yes, but he gave up much too easily.”

“Did he say anything else?”

“That he could always get back to me. His exact words were, ‘I’ve got a much better fish to catch and a bigger hook.’”

“And he was gone?”