When the three of them were clearly and certainly out of the room, Lou came to me and said, “For twenty-five bucks, who needs this?”
I exhaled and decided to try talking. “I thought you weren’t afraid,” I said, trying to ignore the pain.
“I lied,” Lou said. “Almost made in my pants. How are you doin’?”
“Could have been a lot worse if you weren’t here. Thanks.”
“A bonus is in order here,” he said, helping me to the table Luna had abandoned.
I leaned against the table while Lou poured me an ice water. He filled the glass. I drank it all.
“Twenty-five bucks,” I said.
“I’m satisfied,” said Lou. “Now, how about a ride to Glendale?”
“I’ve got someone you should meet,” I said, moving slowly toward the door. “I think you and my landlady might hit it off.”
Lou shrugged. “I’m in the market,” he said.
We made it out of the Monticello and to my khaki Crosley in the Monticello parking lot. When I had driven into the lot earlier, the attendant, a young guy about twenty-five with a decided limp, had looked at me as if my car was carrying a highly communicable automobile disease. Lou and I had watched him park it deep in the back of the lot, quarantined along with a slightly battered Hudson where the two cars were unlikely to infect the huddled Packards, Cadillacs, Lincolns, Chryslers, and a sleek black Graham parked up front where people would see them.
“How much?” I asked the kid. He was square-faced, in a clean blue uniform, and couldn’t keep his hair out of his eyes.
“You a veteran?” he asked.
“No, but I feel like one. I’ve got a bad back, a sore ass, I’m pushing fifty, and I’ve got somewhere to go.”
Lou ignored the two of us and headed for the car.
“He can’t do that,” the attendant said. “I get the cars.”
“He’s old and he’s hard to stop.”
“He a W-W-One veteran?”
“More likely the war with Spain,” I said.
“All right, then,” the attendant said. “Since he’s a veteran, you get the discount.”
“Thanks.”
“Forty cents,” he said, holding out his hand.
I fished out a buck, put it in his palm, and said, “Keep the change. You a veteran?”
“I was on the Yorktown when it got hit by the Japs. Never forget the day. Two in the afternoon. I was on deck. Fires all over the place from the thirty, maybe forty Jap dive bombers, torpedo planes from the Hiryu.”
The kid’s eyes were glazed and far away, off the coast of Midway on a June afternoon a little less than a year ago.
“Caught flying metal in the leg,” the attendant said, touching his right leg. “And my head. Mom’s got the shrapnel from my leg and my medal on the fireplace right under Jesus. I’m still lugging iron up here.”
He tapped on his head.
“Glad you’re okay now-?”
“Cotton,” he said, holding out his hand. “Cotton Wright.”
“Toby Peters.”
He nodded as if he expected me to be named Toby Peters and then he limped off to get my Crosley.
It was Thursday, March 11, 1943. The Japanese were bombing Guadalcanal. Our planes had hit the Japs at Balle in the Shortland Islands. General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery said Rommel was desperate in Tunisia, and the Royal Air Force had hit Munich hard with five-hundred-ton blockbuster bombs. Roosevelt had just proposed a birth-to-grave Social Security that included medical care and payments for college education.
The war was getting long and I was getting twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses to convince a daffy woman and a semiretired gangster to leave Fred Astaire alone.
Cotton Wright pulled the Crosley next to me and crawled out of the door, which wasn’t easy. The Crosley could hold a driver and a passenger if they didn’t mind bending over like clowns packing into one of those circus cars.
“Thanks, Cotton,” I said, trying to ease into the driver’s seat.
The burning from Kudlap Singh’s whack grew close to unbearable as my rear end hit the seat. I eased down, gritting my teeth, and closed the door. I was sweating and starting to imagine the rare and exotic pain that I could bring to Fingers Intaglia.
I waved to Cotton as we pulled into the traffic on Sunset.
“Glendale,” Lou said.
“Glendale,” I agreed.
Chapter Two: I Wanna Be a Dancing Man
The whole thing had started two days earlier, a little before eleven in the morning, when I went to my office. The Farraday is downtown on Hoover, just off Ninth. I was in a good mood. I’d just finished two tacos, a couple of cups of coffee, and a sinker at Manny’s on the corner. That was my early lunch. I could afford it. I had a little over two hundred dollars left of a fee from Clark Gable.
I had paid off my fifteen-dollar rent for March and the advance on April to my landlady. Mrs. Plaut had tucked it into her dress next to her unample bosom. I had also paid two months’ advance rent on the closet I used for an office and sublet from Sheldon Minck, D.D.S. I had a cupboard full of Wheaties and no overly demanding aches or pains.
Life was good. I entered the Lysol-smelling outer lobby of the Farraday and checked the board to be sure I was still listed. There I was, in neatly typed letters, Toby Peters, Private Investigator, Room 602. Above me on the board was Anthony Pelligrino, Matters of the Heart and Certified Public Accountant. I had never met Anthony. Below me on the board was Quick Work Loans, whose motto, I had discovered from a one-sheet flyer shoved under our office door, was, “You Need It, We Give It, You Pay Back in Small Installments.” The flyer had also assured me that Barbara and Daniel Sullivan would give me “sympathy and fast results.” The rest of the board was a full spectrum of the down-and-out and vaguely sinister. One-room talent agencies, fortunetellers, baby photographers, publishers of questionable literature, a vocal teacher, a music teacher (Professor Aumont of the Paris International Academy of Music), who guaranteed to teach you any instrument in one month, and Good Jewelry, so named not because of the quality of the merchandise but the name of the seldom-seen proprietor, Herschel Good. This was not Sunset Boulevard. I went through the door leading to the semidarkness of the inner lobby. The inner chamber of the building was vast, the offices on each floor opening out onto a landing. A few steps out your door and you were at the iron railing from which you could look up or down into the echoing and sometimes noisy heart of the Farraday.
I looked up as I headed for the staircase. If my back wasn’t bothering me I avoided the ancient, groaning elevator in the darkest corner next to the stairs. Through its prisonlike bars, the elevator provided a good view of each floor as it slowly rose. The key word here is slowly.
Somewhere on two a woman was either being murdered or trying to sing. On three there was laughter, very insincere male laughter, lots of it. But mostly there was the wall-dulled sound of people’s voices. You couldn’t hear the words, but you could hear begging, pleading, lying, hope, and sometimes pain. The sound of pain grew louder as I got to the sixth floor and headed for my office. On the pebbled glass was:
Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., S.D.
Dentist
Toby Peters
Private Investigator
Behind the door someone was moaning, the gender of the source unclear. I stepped in. The little waiting room-and calling it little is giving it the benefit of the doubt-had been converted into a reception area with two small chairs and a desk that barely deserved the name. On the desk was a telephone and a pad of paper. Behind the desk was Violet Gonsenelli, the receptionist Shelly had hired in spite of my warnings. The problem wasn’t Violet. Violet was fun to look at, about twenty-five, pretty, with a pale face and dark hair piled perfect and high on her head. She wore a white nursing uniform and an instant smile when the door was opened. Violet’s husband was a rising middleweight. He had moved as high as number six in the Ring Magazine ratings before he got drafted. Both Violet and a shot at the title would have to wait till the war was over. The other problem was Mildred Minck, wife of Sheldon Minck, a woman of little tolerance and even less charm. Mildred rarely came to the office. She didn’t like the smell of alcohol and wintergreen and she didn’t like me. And she didn’t think all that much of Sheldon.