“That is right.”
“On Friday night when you were working with Vernoff, whose idea was it to take a break just before nine?”
“I think it was mine. I found the man barely tolerable and had quite as much as I could absorb. Working with him was not my idea but a condition of the studio. He actually told me that he could reduce As I Lay Dying to one hundred fifty plot cards. The man is a menace to creativity.”
I bid Faulkner goodbye, resisted the temptation to chuck the turnkey under his five chins, and limped outside with the feeling that I had something in all this, but I didn’t know what the hell I had.
CHAPTER FIVE
On the way back to Hollywood, I stopped at a fifteen-minute car wash, watched some guys in blue overalls fail to turn my speckled Buick into a pumpkin, paid my forty-nine cents and decided to stick with the Faulkner case. I’d give Lugosi a rebate or something for each day I didn’t work. I needed the money, but there wasn’t much of me to go around and what there was was fragile.
I was heading up Van Ness when I spotted my tail, a dark Ford two-door about a block behind. The sky had clouded fast and promised rain to give my car an extra wash it could now do without. The sudden darkness made it tough to see who was driving the Ford. I turned right on Santa Monica and then left on Western, moving slowly. Sure enough, the Ford appeared a block behind, taking cover behind a Rainer Beer truck. I went down on Fountain and made a circle around the block, turning on two wheels and hoping no patriot had spotted me burning rubber. U.S. Rubber was running full-page ads in magazines and the papers telling us that for the duration of the war “every ounce of rubber is a sacred trust.” I even had a copy of their free thirty-two-page booklet, “Four Vital Spots,” on how to make tires last longer, but I considered this a potential emergency. Arnie, my no-necked mechanic on Eleventh, could get me retreads if things got bad.
With my right fender rattling enough to frighten an old man walking his dog, I made it around the block in about ten seconds. Figuring the speed my tail was going, I should have wound up right behind him, but I didn’t. He was gone. I prowled the neighborhood for a few minutes and headed home to the boarding house on Heliotrope.
Assuming the dark Ford was not a ghost out of my past, and that was not an entirely reasonable assumption, then the likelihood was that it had something to do with the Faulkner case. Somewhere in this busy Saturday, I had touched a nerve. But why follow me? To see where I was going? Whom I was talking to? Probably. At this point, it wasn’t likely that I was on a potential victims list, but you never knew. When I parked a block away from the boarding house, I took my.38 from the glove compartment, convinced myself that it still worked, pocketed it, and got out. The rain caught me ten feet from the car. It was a cold rain that poked through my coat and made it heavy. My knee told me not to run so I plodded along, abandoning renewed plans for an assault on Carmen that night.
When I got to the porch, I looked like an enormous sponge. Mrs. Plaut was there, beaming down as I lumbered up the stairs and leaned against the wall.
“They bring May flowers” she said brightly.
“It’s January,” I said, “not April.”
I shed my coat to ease my burden up the stairs.
“You had another call, Mr. Peelers.”
“Charlie McCarthy again?” I asked.
“No, Baylah Lougoshe,” she said precisely, pronouncing it correctly. “She had a very strange accent.”
“He, Mrs. P.,” I corrected, “it’s a man.”
“I think she was Norwegian,” she guessed.
“Do Norwegians have different accents from Swedes?” I said before I could stop myself.
“Definitely Norwegian,” she said, turning to smile out at the rain.
The stairs were lonely, high, and steep, but I had promises to keep, so up I went, coat in hand, heart in mouth, brain in gear.
I fished Lugosi’s home phone number out of my sopping wallet and called on the hall phone. A child answered.
“Is Mister Lugosi there?” I asked.
“Hello,” he repeated brightly.
“Is he there?” I tried. “Or anyone more than three feet tall?”
“He’s working a movie. He’s a doctor.”
Someone took the phone away from the boy.
“Hello,” I shouted.
“Mr. Peters,” came a woman’s voice.
“Right,” I said.
“Mister Lugosi is at the studio, Monogram, shooting. He wanted to know if you could meet him there. He said it was rather important.”
“What was it about?” I asked, taking off my wet jacket and watching the trickling trail from my clothes creep down the stairs behind me. “He didn’t say,” the woman said. Her voice was pleasant, efficient, and strong, and she was ignoring the boy in the background demanding something that sounded like “Skpupsh.” She told me where Monogram was, but I didn’t need the information. I needed another bath and a large towel. I thanked her, hung up, and made it to my room, where I left a trail of discarded wet clothes on the way to my mattress on the floor. Two days earlier I had been thinking of picking up a few dollars by pumping gas. Now I was floating in clients and water.
Ten minutes later, I forced myself up, rebandaged my leg, gulped a few more of Shelly’s pain pills, and put on my second suit, which was too light for the weather and too dirty for society. I tried not to think about the rain that was telling my bad back to beware. Maybe I succeeded. Maybe my old theory that the body can tolerate only one major pain at a time was true. Come to think of it, it wasn’t my theory. I got it on a Shadow radio show from a mad scientist who was torturing a girl he wanted to turn into a gorilla. I’d have to tell Phil my pain theory the next time he tried to hit me with a desk.
And still I waited, looking out at the falling rain, knowing I had a block to go to my car, knowing my coat would be of no use. A large bowl of Grape Nuts mixed with puffed rice and too much sugar helped. I felt better, but wasn’t thinking any better. The rain looked as if it was stopping or at least taking a dinner break. Giving myself a pep talk about responsibility and financial security, I braved the elements, scanning the street for the dark Ford. There were a few parked on the street, but they had been there when I came in. Almost all the cars in the world were a solid dark color, except mine. A lot of those cars were Fords.
I stopped for some gas at a station downtown on North Broadway and drove past the Los Angeles River viaduct. I remembered from somewhere in high school history back in Glendale that this had once been the center of an Indian village, home of the Gabrielino Indians. They had been a branch of the great Uto-Aztecan family, which spread across North America from Idaho south to Central America. At one time twenty-eight Indian villages existed in what was now Los Angeles County.
The Indians, according to what I had been told, were among the most peaceful in North America. They seldom warred. Robbery was unknown, and murder and incest were punishable by death. They believed in one deity, Qua-o-ar, whose name never passed their lips except during important ceremonies, and then only in a whisper. The men seldom wore clothes and the women wore only deerskins around their waists. When the weather got rough, the Indians wrapped themselves in sea otter fur. Their homes were woven mats that looked like beehives. They had no agriculture, and they didn’t know how to domesticate animals. They lived on roots, acorns, wild sage, and berries and-when they could catch them-snakes, rodents, and grasshoppers. Their weapons were sticks and clubs. They didn’t know how to make bows. Los Angeles had come a long way in a few hundred years.
Monogram in 1942 was a thriving, catch-as-catch-can operation with some studio space, but not much, and a lot of shooting in the park to save a few dollars. There was no big, fancy gate and regiment of uniformed guards, but they did their best to keep up appearances. An old guy in a gray jacket and cap, who looked as if he had been riding horses for a century, hurried out to my car when I pulled up.