“Yeah?” he said. “Right,” I came back. “I’m here to see Bela Lugosi. I’m doing a job for him.”
“Peters?”
“Right.”
“He said you might be coming. I thought he might be pulling my leg. He’s got one screwy sense of what’s funny sometimes.” The old guy waved me in and put his hands on his hips. He smiled after me. There wasn’t any need to tell me where to find Lugosi. The place wasn’t that big. I just followed the sounds past low buildings to a sound stage about half the size of anything at Warner Brothers. In a space marked for Sam Katzman, I parked behind a truck with a rusting rear door and moved as quickly as I could on my aching leg to the entrance. My attempt at speed was prompted by a desire to keep warm without a coat and not by any particular zeal for the job at hand.
The light over the door was off, indicating that no shooting was going on. Two guys, one Oriental, the other huge, were talking in front of the door about the Chicago Bears-Pro All-Stars game the next day. The Oriental guy was saying something about Sammy Baugh when I went through the door.
The stage was well lighted. The set in front of me was a phony jungle with a little hut. Three guys were huddled around a camera and from their anxiety I guessed they were having trouble with it. Lugosi, wearing a dark suit and thick makeup, was seated on a crate outside the range of lights smoking his cigar. He spotted me, stood up, and advanced on me into the shadows away from the others.
“Ah, Mr. Peters, good of you to come,” he said. “I could not reach you, and I did not want to leave a message at home for reasons you will no doubt understand.”
He was nervous and it was affecting his accent, which became more pronounced. Doubt had come out “dutt,” but there was no trouble understanding his concern.
“Before I left for the studio this morning,” he said, removing his cigar, “I got a phone call, a man, a voice I did not know, with an accent, if you will believe, stronger than my own. This man said, ‘We are going to get you now. You have only days to live.’ Then he said I knew who he was.”
“Either we have a new player,” I said, “which isn’t likely, or our friend has gone another step and changed his pattern: a direct threat on the telephone.” “Shall I call the police, ask for protection?” he asked.
“You can try, but I don’t think you’d get it, and the police can’t watch you forever. I can’t even do that. The trick is to find our friend as fast as possible. I’ll get on it.”
“Thank you,” Lugosi said seriously, pumping my hand.
“Ready in a few minutes, Bela,” a voice came from the group gathered around the camera. Lugosi waved to the men to let them know he was ready, and a young woman with a script in her hand ran to the stage door and called in the two men outside.
“Excuse me,” Lugosi said. “We have to work quickly. Time is money. I am the most expensive part of this film and it is a modest expense.”
I walked with him toward the set while the Oriental who had mentioned Sammy Baugh moved in front of the lights, waiting for Lugosi.
“What’s the picture?” I asked.
Lugosi shook his head and smiled sadly.
“A very timely epic written last week and not yet finished. It’s called The Black Dragon. I play a plastic surgeon who transforms Japanese into Occidentals so they can spy on America. In the end, I am to receive ironic justice for this misdeed. It goes on. I look in the mirror in the morning and I say to myself, ‘Can it be that you once played Cyrano and Romeo?’ Always it is the same. When a film company is in the red, they come to me and say, ‘Okay, so we make a horror film.’ And so that is what we do, what I always do. And I do my best. That is the trick.” He adjusted his tie, took a last puff on his cigar. “Always play it seriously no matter what the material. And always talk slowly so you will have more screen time.”
Lugosi stood erect, convinced his face into an evil smile, and stepped into the lights.
“I’ll be in touch as soon as I have anything,” I said. He nodded in acknowledgment. “And I’ll have someone watching your home just in case.”
With this he turned, dropped the film smile, and gave me a real one, which I returned. Then a voice shouted, “Quiet on the set,” and I went out the door.
I found a taco place, sat in a corner near a window where I could watch the dark Ford that had picked me up again, and thought about things. I thought that I was eating too much and always did when I was on a job. With two jobs I was eating even more. I thought that the guy in the dark car might not be from the Faulkner case. There was a good chance that he was Lugosi’s pen pal. I thought that Los Angeles was a strange place to work and that people here found the strangest way to die. I thought of Billie Ritchie, the Charlie Chaplin imitator, who had died of internal injuries after being attacked by ostriches while making a movie. I thought until the thinking hurt as much as my knee, and I knew I was ready. I was ready for one more Pepsi and a final taco before I played another round of tag with the Ford.
It was just about dark when I lost him. He was easy to lose because he didn’t want to get too close. I made some plans for getting a good look at him the next day if he kept up the game. It might be the best lead I had in one of my cases.
Back home I avoided Mrs. Plaut and borrowed a handful of nickels from Gunther. The next day was Sunday. Gunther volunteered to drive up to Bel Air and keep an eye on Camile Shatzkin, follow her if she left. I didn’t expect much to happen, but at least I’d be on the job through Gunther. Gunther’s car was a ’38 Oldsmobile with a built-up seat and special elongated pedals put on by Arnie the garageman for a reasonable price. The car was inconspicuous enough, but a midget was not the ideal person for a tailing job. I had no choice. I called my poetic office landlord, Jeremy Butler, and asked him to spend Sunday keeping an eye on the Lugosi house just in case the threat was real. Butler heard my story and said he would park discreetly with a book and keep an eye on the house. A near giant is no less conspicuous than a midget, but as I said, my options were limited, and as a bodyguard Jeremy Butler had no peers. I couldn’t say the same for his poetry. My last set of nickels went for a phone call to North Hollywood, where my sister-in-law Ruth answered the phone.
“Ruth, Toby. Hey, I thought I’d take the boys to a show to see Dumbo tomorrow if they’re not doing anything.”
“I’m sure they’d love it, Toby. What time will you pick them up?”
“About noon. I’ll take them for lunch first.”
“I’ll have them ready,” she said and hung up.
Below me the weekly Saturday night roomers’ poker game was starting, presided over by Mrs. Plaut with a retired postman as the perennial big winner. I had sat in once and likened the experience to Alice’s at the tea party. My knee was feeling a little better. I turned off the lights, got into bed, and listened to the reborn rain on the roof and my radio. I caught the guy on the news saying. “General Douglas MacArthur’s Philippine defenders are carrying on a grim and gallant battle against tremendous odds on the island fortress of Corregidor at the entrance of Manila Bay. They have successfully driven off the third bombing attack on the island.”
The Chinese high command reported that 52,000 Japanese had fallen, but the Japanese had taken Changsha. The Russians were still giving the Nazis hell, but the British were taking losses 280 miles from Singapore.
I turned off the radio and went to sleep, wondering whether there were some place on the earth not at war. I had a trio of dreams. One took place in Cincinnati. A vampire was flying through the streets dropping little pellets. Anyone who touched one or was touched by one turned to stone. The second dream had something to do with airplanes in a small room, and the third dream struck me as brilliant, something I’d have to remember in the morning so I could tell Jerry Vernoff the next time I saw him, if ever. It would make a perfect plot card. It involved a murder in a locked room. The victim was bludgeoned to death but there was no weapon. Just the victim and the murderer. In the dream I figured out that the killer, who looked something like my brother Phil, had frozen a huge banana, used it as a weapon, and then eaten it peel and all. The victim looked something like me.