Before I’d recovered, a woman in a hand-me-down blue hat with cherries put a tract in my hand. “Peace, brother,” she said, “Read this and awaken.” The tract had a big heading: the truth shall make you free. Deciding I’d read it the next time I had a free moment, I put it in my pocket. In the next block an uninhibited youth with rosy cheeks blew past me singing Italian opera, half in a lusty baritone and half in a very lovely soprano, all for his own amazement. Either way, he sounded better than my bathroom rendition of Chloe.
Brooding about this, i didn’t pay much attention to the wiry little man who was planted in my path with a large camera. He leered at me. “Ya just been screen-tested, buddy.”
The yellow card he pushed into my hand informed me that for fifty cents I could have an unposed candid photograph of myself, postcard size. The scarcity of film had kept the streets clear of this particular pest during the war, but now they were crawling out of their hollow logs. I dropped the card carefully into the gutter. I thought I could live without an unposed candid photograph of myself.
A little further on I saw a girl standing in a safety zone waiting for a street car. She wore very brief shorts and a peasant blouse that had slipped down off one shoulder. She was reading a magazine, oblivious to the traffic that swished past on both sides of her. For one reason or another, most of the drivers were missing the traffic lights at that corner and there were a lot of squealing tires. She wasn’t anything you’d look at three times — on the beach.
I took one look at her legs and remembered I was on my way to the lobby of the Hollywood-Roosevelt to pick up Margaret O’Leary for lunch. It was nearly twelve-thirty then, so I gave up counting screwballs for the time being. At the corner before Highland Avenue I crossed to the south side of the Boulevard where there was a shoeshine stand in the vestibule of a building. I thought that Maggie, who was out of a job at the moment anyway, wouldn’t mind waiting another five minutes in the interests of good grooming. I’d recently blossomed out as a well-dressed young man, including a pair of thirty-dollar shoes, due to a case which had paid off better than a thousand bucks.
A colored boy pointed me to the last seat away from the street. This stand was against the right-hand wall of the vestibule, facing a long mirror on the opposite side. The angle of vision was such that I could see diagonally across the intersection of Hollywood and Highland. Without the mirror I couldn’t have seen around the corner of the vestibule. Without the mirror I wouldn’t have discovered I was being tailed!
There wasn’t any doubt about it. That face had been in the background just a little too casually and a little too often during the last two or three days. I’d noted it unconsciously and then dismissed it. But this time there was nothing casual about it. My tail was peering intently across the intersection and nervously smoking a cigarette while waiting for me to appear.
Maybe it isn’t such an unusual switch for a private detective to find himself being shadowed. I’ve had it happen to me before, once or twice. But never like this. This was one more screwball for my list. My shadow was about as gorgeous a blonde as you’ll find, even on Hollywood Boulevard!
I thought it over while the boy put a high sheen on my new shoes, and decided I’d better look into this. There was something decidedly unfriendly about it, although I wasn’t working at the moment. In fact my only prospect was a letter that’d come this morning from a doctor in East Peoria — and he hadn’t said a word about luscious blondes. I wondered if somebody was fixing to get even with me for something in the past, but I couldn’t think who or what. I’d just have to ask her.
When I emerged into the bright glare of the street I didn’t look toward the blonde. I moved on to the corner and waited till the traffic light let me cross Highland. Now we were parallel, with the Boulevard between us, and, sure enough, the blonde began drifting along with me.
But I fooled her. I turned abruptly into the drugstore on the corner. Now I could see her through the glass door, out in the bright sunshine, while she couldn’t see me in the comparative gloom of the store. She reversed herself, came back to the corner, then started across. She wasn’t losing any time either, in case I was trying to shake her. Little did she know.
When she was almost to the curb, I slipped quietly out the side entrance onto Highland.
That had her completely befuddled. When I walked in the front door again, she was standing about halfway back to the phone booths with a blank expression on her beautiful pan. She was trying to figure out where I’d vanished to. I came up close behind her and said brightly: “Here I am!”
She whirled around so suddenly she walked all over my brand new shoe-shine. “Oh!” she gasped. “Where... I thought—” Then she caught up with herself. “What in the world are you talking about?”
“It’s been fun,” I said. “Really it has. I always did enjoy this particular game but, honest, I’m in a hurry right now. Why in blazes are you following me around?”
“Following — you?” She laughed with a great and phony delight. She was a big girl, nicely proportioned, with large blue eyes in a face that had to be compared to an unusually beautiful cow. Bovine was the word, in the very nicest sense. “Why in the world would I be following you?”
“Now, that’s just what I’ve been asking myself. But you were. You were in the lobby of my office building yesterday and I think the day before that when I came out at noon. You ate lunch at the same place — two different restaurants,” I added quickly, to squelch any rebuttal on that point. “And you followed me back to the office both times. Today you’ve been sniffing my footprints all the way down Hollywood Boulevard. Sister, I give up, what is it that you want from me?”
She made a few dramatic gestures, strictly from Stanislavsky, to register complete exasperation, and looked around for someone to give her strength. But the only person paying any attention was a soda jerk, handsome enough to be a leading man. His interest was sincere, but academic.
“I’m sure,” the blonde stated frigidly, “I don’t know what you can be talking about. And I wish you would cease annoying me.”
“All right,” I said, “I’ll cease. But let’s find a cop and get this straightened out. I’ve got a jealous girl friend who takes a very dim view of my having blondes tail me around. Personally, I like it, but she’s narrow minded. So let’s get it settled right now.”
I was bluffing with a busted flush, because no cop in the world would be silly enough to take my word against this doll’s, and anyhow what did I have to complain about? But I just wanted to see how she would react to the mention of police. I found out. She shoved past me, in a slightly undignified rush, for the exit, stepping on one of my shoes again. And did I mention she was a large girl? The last I saw of her she was going out the front door, her blonde hair bobbing on her shoulders.
The handsome soda jerk clucked commiseratingly, “That’s the way it goes, pal. Some days you just can’t lay up a cent!”
“Ain’t it the truth!” I agreed. I started to tell him I had something even nicer waiting for me in the lobby of the Hollywood-Roosevelt, but I saw it was now five to one, and I wasn’t sure Maggie would be waiting.
Now that she was unemployed and couldn’t afford to be independent about things like a free lunch, she had, of course, become very independent. I hurried outside and did the last couple of blocks to the Hollywood-Roosevelt at a modified dogtrot, causing two mid-western school teachers to stare down their noses at me and murmur something about, “These Hollywood screwballs!”