Bass was now clearly distracted and challenged by this elusive gnat who he obviously didn’t recognize. My impulse was to try to help, but to do that I’d have to put the dog down, which might lead to losing him. Besides, Keaton was doing fine without my help. There wasn’t much room in the small lobby area, but it was too much for Bass to get his hands on Keaton. It was no match. Bass kept trying to cut off the space like a good clobbering puncher in the ring, but Keaton kept ducking right, left, or under his arms.
After two or three minutes, Bass was panting and damned mad and a voice behind me said, with exasperation, “Come on Buster, you can play with your friends later. We’ve got a crew waiting.”
The man called Jules stepped into the space, towel around his neck, and watched for a few seconds before turning to me to whisper, “Big guy’s not bad. Kind of scary. We could use him in the picture.”
“I don’t think he’s got the calling,” I said as Bass bellowed and took a massive plunge at Keaton, who seemed about to run into the front door, but made a sudden, impossible stop, pushed off the wall with his right foot and barely cleared Bass’s outstretched arm. Bass crashed heavily, headfirst into the wall, sagging apparently unconscious to the floor.
“Christ, Buster,” Jules grunted. “If you’ve hurt that guy, we can’t even pay the doctor bills.”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. “Just lock him in the cage back there and feed him once a week.”
Keaton brushed himself off and moved to my side to pat the panting dog once more. He wasn’t even breathing heavily.
“I’ll have April get the cab for you, and we’ll call the cops to take our friend away,” said Keaton.
Our backs were to Bass and Jules had shouted, “Let’s get back to work.”
Something hit me hard and low and Keaton bounced away from a whirring arm. I spun into a corner and found my hands reaching for something to keep me from falling, which was why I knew I was no longer holding the dog.
When I did hit the wall and slumped down, I could see Bass in the doorway holding the barking dog. Keaton took a step toward him, but Bass had had enough. He opened the door and disappeared into the rain.
“I’ll get him,” Keaton said.
“No,” I groaned. “He’s my responsibility.”
I did a poor imitation of a man running and followed Bass into the rain, but he was out of sight by the time I hit the street. A car, big and dark but not Lyle’s Chrysler, was kicking up mud from the parking lot. I ran toward it but it made a right and shot off along the railroad tracks.
Keaton was still in the warehouse lobby when I sogged back in.
“No luck,” he said.
“I’ll get your fifty,” I promised.
“I’d rather have the dog,” he said.
Keaton went back to the set and I waited, watching the rain and trying to reach back to rub the spot over my kidney where Bass had heaved me into the cartons. The rain was doing my back no good either, but I ignored it reasonably well by wondering what Bass had been doing there, where Lyle was, and where Jeremy was.
A Red Top cab pulled up in about ten minutes-which, considering the rain, was pretty good service. The woman driver reached back to open the back door and I made a dash for it. The rain was letting up a little as I filled the cab with water.
The cabbie wasn’t a talker, which suited me just fine. I watched the rain while she drove me back to Hollywood. By the time we got to Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house, the rain had stopped and I owed the cabbie a buck twenty.
“Pretty soon, there maybe ain’t gonna be no cabs,” she said, accepting a quarter tip. “No gas. No rubber. No parts. No cabs.”
“You have a good day,” I said, getting out and walking slowly to the porch.
I had been walking with my head down. My back hurt less that way, so I didn’t see Jeremy sitting in the swing till I actually took the first of three wooden steps.
“I lost them,” he said.
“That’s all right, Jeremy,” I said, making it up the last step.
“I managed to get close enough once to see that Bass wasn’t in the car,” he went on. “I don’t know where he went. I think they spotted me following them.”
“They did,” I said, reaching for the front door. “Bass came back for the dog Lyle probably figured it would be safe to hide the dog by selling it to Keaton.”
“Keaton.”
“Buster Keaton,” I explained. “They could always steal it again when they needed it. They spotted you and decided the plan wouldn’t work.
“I’m sorry, Toby,” he said, getting off the porch swing.
“For what? I’ll invite you to the next party I throw for Bass.”
“A shriek ran thro Eternity:
And a paralytic stroke;
At the birth of the human shadow.”
“I think William Blake knew our friend Bass.”
With that Jeremy declined my offer of a ride and I declined his offer to help me upstairs. With hands plunged into oversized windbreaker pockets, he went down the stairs, and I watched the muscle folds on the rear of his neck as he moved down the walk.
I was an easy target for Mrs. Plaut, a slow-moving target, but she wasn’t in the house. It took me a long time to get up the stairs, but I wasn’t in a hurry. It took me even longer to get to my room and get my clothes off, but I had stopped to turn on the hot water in the bathtub and I knew there was no hurry.
I soaked in the warm tub for half an hour after taking one of the pills Shelly had given me for pain resulting from a series of encounters over the years. The pills were designed for sore teeth but they did a hell of a temporary job on an aching back.
A new tenant in the boarding house, a Mr. Waltrup, knocked at the door in the middle of my bath to announce the urgent need for a toilet. I bid him enter, which he did with apologies, and we carried on a brief discussion about Mr. Waltrup’s profession, tree trimming.
I learned all I wanted to know about tree trimming in the next five or six minutes.
“There really isn’t much privacy here is there?” Waltrup said, buttoning himself. He was a solid young man with a nice blue eye and a false brown one that didn’t match.
“Not much,” I agreed, sinking back into the water and turning the hot tap on with my toes.
Shriveled and soaked, I felt much better and made my way back to my room with a towel around my waist. Mrs. Plaut’s head was peeking up at the top of the stairs.
“This isn’t a good time, is it Mr. Peelers?” she said.
“Not a good time at all,” I said.
She turned and went back down the stairs and I entered my room, groaned my way into a pair of undershorts, managed to down a partly used bottle of Pepsi in the refrigerator, and then eased myself onto the mattress on the floor. I clutched the extra pillow and found it impossible to imagine getting up and making another run at finding the dog and Doc Olson’s killer.
I didn’t sleep. I just lay there for an hour watching the Beech-Nut clock and trying to put something together to tell Eleanor Roosevelt. Nothing came by three in the afternoon but a knock at the door.
I sat up in my shorts and watched Eleanor Roosevelt enter my room. She stopped for a beat, looked down at me without embarrassment, and said, “I’ll give you a few moments to dress.”
“I’m sorry,” I said.
“I have sons and have seen a male body before,” she said, with a little smile and a lot of teeth. “I’ll wait in the hallway.”
Struggling to my feet wasn’t half as bad as knowing that I really didn’t have much to get dressed in. I put on some wrinkled trousers and a pull-over shirt and looked at my room through different eyes. It wasn’t much. I pushed the mattress back on the bed, threw the handmade spread over it, gathered my sopping suit, threw it in the closet, and went to the door to let her in.