“Look, Forbes,” Astaire said angrily, not noticing that Kudlap Singh had stepped away from the door and toward us.
“Maybe we should-” I began, but Forbes went on, pushing: “Your shirts, underwear, pajamas, and dressing gowns are monogrammed and you have a hell of a time each morning deciding what tie to wear. You and your wife sleep in separate beds. You wear silk, usually blue, pajamas, and you wiggle your toes in your sleep. Your wife’s name is Phyllis and your kids-”
“You son of a bitch,” Astaire said, frail body shaking, hands in a fist.
Forbes seemed amused.
“You want a career, feet, a family,” he said, pointing at Astaire, “see to it that he finds who killed Luna because I’m gonna tell you something personal about me. I loved Luna and I don’t like it that someone killed her. I don’t like it at all. I want the bastard caught and brought to me. I don’t care who finds him. That’s what I want.”
“You two-bit Capone,” Astaire said as I stepped between him and Forbes, who didn’t even get up.
“Capone, between you and me, was a publicity-seeking blowhard who didn’t control half of what we had in Detroit.” Now Forbes rose, let out a sigh, and straightened the creases in his trousers. “Sit down, calm down, and think things over,” he said, moving past me and Astaire and toward the door with the Indian. “You’ll hear from me.”
And then they were gone.
“He threatened me, my wife, and my children,” Astaire said, his face a distinct shade of red. “That fart-faced-”
“He’s on his way to owning half of Los Angeles,” I said.
“And I know the people who own the other half,” Astaire countered hotly, now pacing the room. “And I think I’ll have a talk with some of them.”
“I think we should consider carefully before we say anything more,” I said, pointing to the metal box on the table in the corner.
Astaire kept pacing and glancing at the box.
“That’s not a listening device,” he said. “It’s a wire recorder. It has a microphone inside the box so you can record on spools of wire.”
“You know how it works?” I asked, moving to the machine.
“Yes,” he said, striding impatiently to my side, unhooking a clasp on the side of the box and lifting the lid.
There was a microphone inside with a wire wound round it and a spindle with a spool the size of a salt box fitted over it. Gray metal, most of it with thin lines across it, covered the spool.
“Would you say Luna recorded something on this wire?” I asked, looking at the thing.
“Somebody recorded something,” Astaire said. “I’d guess Luna was copying songs from the radio.”
“Or. .” I said.
“Can’t hurt,” he said, and turned the machine on.
The quality wasn’t bad.
There were two songs at the start of the recording. Astaire asked me if I knew what steps they were. I didn’t. He told me they were a fox-trot and a rumba. After the second song, I said, “Let’s go.”
“We’re here,” he said. “We’ve got nothing better to do but find a killer and talk to the police. The least we could do is hear the lady out.”
I shrugged and moved back to lean against the wall as an announcer said, “Hello, we’ve been waiting for you. It’s time to play ‘Truth or Consequences.’ ”
This was followed by the bleating of Beulah the Buzzer and Ralph Edwards saying, “Aren’t we devils.”
I reached over to turn it off but Astaire stopped me. We kept listening. A woman and her husband were asked if a hen sits or sets when she lays an egg. Before the couple could answer and collect their fifteen dollars, Beulah squawked her into submission and a “consequence.” Edwards then sent the wife off and had the husband dressed as a woman. The husband was placed behind a cashier’s window, pretending he was the woman who was going to pay off the wife when she came back on stage. When the wife was brought back, Ralph Edwards offered her sixty dollars if she could find her husband, who was in plain sight in the small studio. The woman lost one dollar for every second she didn’t find him.
“I don’t think-” Astaire said, and then a phone rang, a phone on the tape.
The audience was giggling and then the muffled sound of Luna answering the phone. It was hard to make out her words as the woman on the wire recording got more frantic, the audience laughed, and Edwards egged her on, but Luna’s side of the conversation sounded like, “No. . I’mmot. . look Immot gnn peck to thad. . no. . no fke Tuesdip in any Hollywood stirfunt. . [Laughter and Ralph Edwards too loud to hear this part, and then]. . Yucatan tk yur post age sighs eggs ques fura bllrum and. . don thread on me. Cumner me anfingersll tarut yurhert. . [Phone is hung up].”
“Truth or Consequences” went on with the wife on the radio crying frantically, “Where are you?”
Luna, now closer to the microphone, said something fast and turned off the machine.
The silver spool continued to run with a hum. Astaire reached over and rewound it.
He listened to Luna’s side of the phone conversation once more and turned off the machine.
“Did you understand what she said?” he asked.
“Not much.”
“It’s like doing a bad loop in a cheap studio. She said, ‘Look, I am not going back to that. No fake two-step in any Hollywood storefront. . You can take your postage-size excuse for a ballroom. . Do not threaten me. . Come near me, and Fingers will tear out your heart.’”
“Then she went to the machine,” I continued. “And in answer to the contestant’s question, ‘Where are you?’ answered ‘Where you’ll never have the nerve to find me, Willie.’ ”
“So. .” Astaire began, his hand to his chin.
“Willie may have had the nerve to find Luna,” I said. “Find her and kill her.”
“We’re not sure what he threatened her with or about,” said Astaire.
“And it probably has nothing to do with her murder,” I went on.
“But then again. .” Astaire said.
“I go looking for a Willie connected to a storefront ballroom.”
“We go looking, and my guess is we’re talking about a storefront dance studio, not a real ballroom. Probably the one where she supposedly taught.”
“I don’t want to argue but. .”
“Look, Peters,” he said, a hand to his chest and the other pointing at me. “I’ve been a police follower all my life, city to city, since I was a kid. Crime is more than a hobby with me. It’s a passion. I’m going to help. It’s my case too, remember.”
“I thought you had a show and a bond tour.”
“I’ve got a few days. When is ‘Truth or Consequences’ on?”
“Sunday, eight-thirty,” I said.
“So Willie called her Sunday at about ten minutes after eight. That means. .”
The door flew open and a woman stormed in, dark and on fire.
“Where is he?” she asked.
She was little, no more than four-ten, pretty, long dark hair brushed straight and to her neck with evenly trimmed bangs across her forehead. She had on too much makeup and too few clothes. What she wore looked like a sarong held up by a pair of very full breasts.
“Who?” I asked as she started across toward the bedroom, suddenly stopped and turned around, red mouth open.
“Fred Astaire,” she said.
“Caught,” Astaire said with a winning smile.
The woman came back toward us.
“I’ve seen all your movies, even the one you did with Joan Crawford. .”
“Dancing Lady,” Astaire said. “Let me guess. You’re Mrs. Forbes and you are looking for your husband.”
“Yes,” she said with a very forced smile. “The police have been asking me stupid, stupid questions for the last who-knows-how-long. And then, finally, they tell me that someone killed the little. . Who are you? What are you both doing in this room?”