“Juanita trapped me in front of the building a little while ago,” I said. “Said something about a third dancer and a woman from the past.”
“Juanita is in tune with the universal oneness,” Jeremy said, weaving through traffic. “Her curse is that she is inevitably right but so obscure that one cannot heed her advice and warnings. A modern Cassandra.”
We used my ration card to fill the tank at a Sinclair station on Melrose and then we stopped for a quick dinner at a restaurant Jeremy knew. We ate things that were green and brown and good for you and tasted terrible. And then we were on our way.
I asked Jeremy if it was all right if I played the radio. It was his car. He said yes. We listened to the last fifteen minutes of “Stage Door Canteen.” Bert Lytell and George Jessel were trying to explain the rationing system to Billie Burke, who was as bewildered as Gracie Allen. After they failed, Lawrence Tibbett sang an aria from La Traviata.
For the rest of the trip we listened to a classical music station that kept fading out until it was a distant scratch.
Before the war there were less than three thousand people in Huntington Beach and an oil derrick or two, but the handful of bleak derricks had been joined by dozens and dozens of others as the wartime need for fuel had increased. People to work the rigs and tend them and the people who sold things to the people who worked the rigs moved in. Huntington Beach was a boom town.
The tidelands of Huntington Beach were state property, but oil operators had found a new technique of drilling to bypass the state’s rights. From the town lots they had quietly and cheaply purchased, they drilled on a bias to tap the oil pools under the tidelands. In 1929 Governor Culbert L. Olson had tried to put through a bill to permit the state of California to control the oil operators and tap the oil pools for state profit. The oil lobby beat the governor in court and the whole thing was pushed aside by the rush of fear that followed Pearl Harbor.
And so Huntington Beach became a mess of pumping dark steel, and the sun-worshippers and tourists moved on to Newport Beach and Long Beach.
We found Arthur Forbes’s house just before the sun went down. It was on a street of big old wooden houses on a hill overlooking the sea and the derricks. It had once been a hell of a view. We parked in the driveway behind another car, one I recognized. Forbes’s car was probably tucked in the garage. It was a modest driveway but an impressive house with polished marble steps leading up to the door. There were lights on and the distant sound of music inside. I pushed the door bell and heard a chime inside the house.
I looked at Jeremy. He stood with his hands at his sides, showing nothing on his face. On the beach below us, the oil derricks chugged noisily.
The door opened.
A woman wearing black tights opened the door and said, “What the hell do you want?”
“We have business with your husband.”
She put her hands on her hips and considered us for a beat or two. Then she slammed the door in our faces.
Chapter Nine: Say, Have You Seen the Carioca?
Jeremy and I looked at each other for a second or two and then I pushed the button again and listened to the chime.
When the door opened this time, Kudlap Singh filled it, blocking out the hallway light. He ignored me and looked at Jeremy as impassively as Jeremy looked at him.
“Mr. Forbes is busy,” he said.
“Singh,” Jeremy said.
I had to stop myself from putting my hands behind me to protect my rapidly improving rump.
“Mr. Forbes is busy,” Singh repeated, looking at me.
“A man that abandons a friend who has learned with him no longer has a share in speech,” Jeremy said. “What he does hear he hears in vain, for he does not know the path of good action.”
Singh didn’t turn his head but his eyes shifted to Jeremy, who looked back at him and continued, “Unkindly I desert him who was kind to me, as I go from my own friends to a foreign tribe.”
“A moment, Jeremy Butler,” Singh said softly, and the door closed on us again.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Quotations from the Rig Veda, an ancient Hindu collection of over a thousand hymns. I’ve read only a weak British translation from the Sanskrit, but when we were traveling the circuit Singh translated passages for me. The Veda has been a great influence on my poetry and my life.”
The derricks pounded on their steel stalks. We waited. The door opened again. Again Kudlap Singh blocked the light.
“Come in,” he said, stepping back so we could enter.
We went in. The house was a lot more modest than Fingers Intaglia’s wealth and reputation would suggest. Kudlap Singh led the way down a carpeted hallway with paintings of the same man in a powdered wig. I looked at Jeremy, who said, “Thomas Jefferson.”
It made a crazy kind of sense. Singh stopped in front of two big wooden doors and knocked.
“Come in,” Forbes called.
Singh opened the doors and we stepped in with him. We were in what must have been a big dining room or a library, but it wasn’t anymore. One wall was mirrored top to bottom and all the way across. The floors were polished wood. In one corner was a small upright piano. Against one wall were four blue upholstered chairs and a pair of tables, on one of which sat a phonograph. Arthur Forbes in a gray sweat suit was sitting in one of the chairs, wiping himself with a towel. In front of the mirror, her back turned to us, was Carlotta Forbes. She glanced at us in the mirror and then did a series of knee bends.
Standing next to the phonograph was Fred Astaire, sleeves rolled up, red handkerchief around his neck.
“What do you want and who’s that?” Forbes asked, continuing to dry himself.
“Yo soy Jeremy Butler, un amigo de Senor Peters,” said Jeremy.
“Esta bien, pero por que vienen a mi casa ahora?” Forbes replied. “How did you know I speak Spanish?”
“Thomas Jefferson, whom apparently we both admire, spoke fluent Spanish and believed that all Americans should.”
“ ‘I hope to see a cordial fraternization among all the American nations-’ ” Forbes said with a challenge in his voice.
“ ‘-and their coalescing in an American system of policy,’ ” Jeremy finished.
“You a history professor?” Forbes asked.
“A poet,” answered Jeremy.
“A poet,” Forbes said with a smile, looking at his wife who ignored him and continued to do knee bends, and then at Fred Astaire who sighed, folded his arms, and leaned against the wall. “You’re Battering Butler, the Human Cannonball. I saw you wrestle six, seven times, once against Kudlap Singh here.”
“That was long ago,” said Jeremy.
“I’d like to see a rematch,” Forbes said with a grin.
“In 1808, Thomas Jefferson refused a third term and retired forever from politics to Monticello,” said Jeremy. “He knew when to move to new endeavors. Much like you and me.”
“Whatever,” Forbes said, rising and draping the towel around his neck. “Now, what do you want?”
I turned to Astaire and said, “Did you tell him?”
Astaire shook his head.
“A man named Willie Talbott was murdered today,” I said. “Luna Martin worked for him as a dance instructor before-”
Mrs. Forbes had stopped her knee bends and was facing us with her hands on her hips.
“Go on,” said Forbes, “Carlotta knows all about Luna. We’re working it out. Just have a point when you get to the end.”
I looked at Carlotta Forbes. Judging from the look she gave her husband, if they were working it out, they had a lot of work left to do.
“Talbott had some information that might have helped us and the cops find her murderer,” I said.
“Information?”
“Talbott was blackmailing her. I think it had something to do with one of Luna’s clients when she was teaching at the On Your Toes ballroom. I went with Talbott to his apartment to get Luna’s client list. Talbott tried to run with it. Someone put a hole in his chest and took the book.”