“You okay?” Anita asked.
“Peachy,” I said, sitting again.
She poured me more coffee. I drank it, avoiding the side of my mouth with the sore tooth. I’d respect it, if it would respect me, at least for a few days.
People left. Others came. Anita scrambled. She put in ten-hour shifts four days a week and sometimes she worked an extra day.
A contrast: If I said to Anita that we had to go on a high-speed chase in ten minutes in order to catch up with a guy who’d kidnapped Paul Muni, she’d say, “Sure.” And she would mean it. If I had said the same thing to my ex-wife Ann, she would have said nothing, but she would have looked at me with a shake of her head, earrings dancing, breasts heaving, and turned away to deal with something serious.
I guess I still loved Ann. I know I liked Anita more than I liked my ex-wife. Anita knew how I felt about Ann. It didn’t bother her. She wasn’t looking for another husband.
At one, the lunch counter was almost empty. People had gone back to their buying or selling. The only ones left were me and Pancho who still pretended to read the Times.
Anita was cleaning up. Armed with my cup of coffee, I moved to the stool next to Vanderhoff.
“Henriot is dead,” I said.
“Huh?” asked Pancho, looking up from his newspaper.
“Front page, bottom, right where you were looking. French patriots killed the Vichy Minister of Information and Propaganda, Phillippe Henriot, in his bed in Paris.”
“Oh,” he said, his right cheek twitching just a bit. “Yes, I see.”
“And if you turn the page,” I said, reaching over to do it for him as Anita placed a fresh piece of pie in front of me, “you’ll see that Joe E. Brown presented a flag to the new Don E. Brown World War II American Legion Post 593. You know Brown’s son was a captain, killed in a plane crash near Palm Springs a couple of years ago.”
“I didn’t know that,” Pancho Vanderhoff said, turning pages.
I held out my hand to stop him.
“You want to talk?” I asked.
“I … well,” he muttered, adjusting his red scarf.
“Question one,” I said. “How did you know I would be coming here?”
“Miss Gonsenelli,” he said.
“Mrs.,” I corrected.
“She said you might be coming here. I told her I needed to talk to you about the script I’m working on for Dr. Minck.”
“Okay, so you just answered my second question, why are you here? I’d like another answer. Would you like a slice of apple pie. On me. It’s good. They don’t have tacos.”
“Well,” said Pancho. “I wouldn’t refuse.”
I asked Anita for a slice of pie for my buddy Pancho, who looked decidedly older than he had in our office. His skin was still unlined but tight like a tom-tom. His hair was black, too black, with spots of the liquid that had made it so speckling his neck.
“I’m a bit of a fraud,” he said with a sigh, finally looking straight at me. “I’ve never written a screenplay. I was a studio gopher for Edwin S. Porter. I brought him coffee and carried his bags. I met D. W Griffith when Mr. Porter was shooting Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest. I was in the picture. One of the townspeople who look up and see the eagle carrying the toddler away. Mr. Griffith was the star. Then I went, to work for Mr. Griffith.”
“Gopher?”
He nodded.
“The truth is, Mr. Peters, I have no talent. I’m an old man living in the back bedroom of my granddaughter’s apartment. Closest I got to really being part of the movies was when I played a mute sinister butler in a Republic serial in 1937. Kane Richmond was the star. I was in four episodes. Dr. Minck is a godsend.”
“And?”
“And you are his friend and a detective,” he said with a sigh, digging into the pie. “This is good. I … I was afraid you’d find out that I’m a …”
“Fraud,” I finished.
He shook his head “yes” again and took on a forkful of pie so big that it stood a good chance of choking him.
Anita was halfway down the counter cleaning the grill, looking over her shoulder at us. I knew she could hear.
“Can you write a script?” I asked.
“Of course,” he said. “Probably a very bad one, but I certainly know the format.”
“Then do it,” I said. “Shelly can afford it.”
He smiled at me gratefully, his left cheek full of pie. Then the smile faded.
“There’s one more thing,” he said. “When we finished our meeting in your office, I went back to my office to work. A man came in. He said he knew I had been at a meeting with you and the others and that it had something to do with the dinner tonight for Blackstone.”
“The man have a name?” I asked.
“Everyone has a name,” he said. “In Los Angeles, it is usually one that bears little resemblance to his or her given name. He didn’t give me his.”
“What did he look like?”
Pancho described Calvin Ott.
“What did he want?”
“He wanted me to tell him what went on in our meeting this morning,” said Vanderhoff. “He had seen me come out of your door.”
“And you told him?”
The thin old man looked at the ceiling. I could see then why he wore the scarf. The wrinkles on his neck made me add ten years to the seventy I had already credited him with.
“How much?”
“I sold my honor for a mere fifteen dollars,” he said, pulling three fives from his pocket and placing two of them on the counter. “Filthy lucre, but I truly need it. I spent some of it on a cab to get here.”
“Keep it,” I said.
“I had to tell you,” he said.
His pie was gone. I asked if he wanted another slice. He considered it and shook his head.
“You did the right thing,” I said.
“And you won’t tell Dr. Minck?”
“Write his screenplay,” I said.
“I don’t think he has a realistic idea about it,” Vanderhoff said. “He’s planning to produce this himself if he can’t get studio backing. And he wants to approach Clark Gable to play him. Dr. Minck claims to be friends with people like Gary Grant, Gable, Joan Crawford, and Fred Astaire.”
“He has met them,” I said. “The word ‘friends’ is definitely pushing reality.”
“I feel better,” he said, standing and rewrapping his scarf. “Confession. Very cleansing.”
“Hold on and I’ll give you a ride back to the Farraday,” I said.
“I almost forgot,” Vanderhoff said. “The man who gave me the fifteen dollars said something peculiar just before he left. He told me not to tell it to anyone else. He told me to watch closely tonight at the dinner because the dead would rise.”
That was pretty much what Juanita had told me. I didn’t understand it any better coming from Pancho. I would, eventually-but “eventually” still was quite a few surprises away.
I placed a dollar on the counter and told Anita I would call her later. She gave Pancho a smile. He twitched one back at her.
I dropped off Pancho at the Farraday and headed for the Pan-tages where Blackstone had told me they would be rehearsing and making some changes to the show because of Gwen’s absence and the damage to the buzz saw.
The old man at the stage door recognized me and waved me in with his pipe. I could hear voices coming from the stage beyond the heavy curtains, just out of sight.
“Catch him?” the old man said.
“Not yet.”
He adjusted his suspenders with his thumbs, looked at his pipe over the top of his rimless glasses and then looked at me as if he were going to honor me with sage advice.
“Meat loaf sandwich for lunch,” he said, touching his stomach. “Didn’t agree with me.”
“Sorry to hear it,” I said. “Look …”
“Raymond,” he said. “Raymond Ramutka.”
He paused, his eyes wide, expecting a reaction. When I didn’t respond, he rubbed his left hand on his thick wild mane of white hair.