"Had one once," Elmo said with a smile. "Makes me itch. Got no patience. Most guys out here…" He looked around, but there weren't any guys. "Most guys have a story. What they were. What they walked away from. You know?"
"I know," I said.
Elmo jangled the coins in his pocket.
"I got no story. No ambition. What the hell. You're born one day. Sixty, seventy years later you're dead. You know?"
"I know," I said.
Elmo shook his head.
"So," he went on, "the way I figure it, why waste the sixty, seventy with work, trying to get something you can't keep anyway. I'm not starvin'. I'm not cold or wet most days. I get plenty of time to read over at the library or wherever."
"I get your point, Elmo."
"You think I could really get a job?" he asked, looking away from me. "I mean if I cleaned up okay?"
"Lot of jobs, Elmo. The gravy's in the navy."
"Cash money and room with a door," he said, more to himself than me. "Might be I'd want to try it. Never tried it."
"You know Manny's around the corner on Main," I said. "He's looking for a dishwasher. There's a sign in his window. I'll put in a word for you."
"Maybe," said Elmo.
I went to the Crosley, opened the door with my key, and reached into the cramped back seat. My gym bag was there. I pulled it out while Elmo watched me find a rolied-up pullover shirt and safety razor already loaded with a fresh Chancellor single-edged blade. I handed shirt and razor to Elmo, who took them with dignity.
"You don't like it, you can always quit," I said.
"What about your car?"
"I'll take a chance," I said.
I left Elmo standing in the rubble behind the Farraday, deciding if he had the heart to take a step into the 1940s. I wanted to feel good. I wanted to feel as if I was saving a lost soul, but I wasn't sure. I also wanted to take the edge off of what I was feeling, a combination of excitement, fear, and anger. They were still with me when I went through the back entrance to the Farraday and closed the door behind me.
When you step into the Farraday from the back door, you're plunged into a darkness without shadows. I've tripped over sleeping bums and debris. I've stepped into slick splots of who-knows what. Jeremy and Alice worked with buckets, brawn, and chemicals to stay ahead of the jungle, but it was a never-ending job, and time off for the baby or poetry only meant the streets would slouch under the door or through a window for a new assault.
I moved around a corner and made my way to the lobby door, marked with a red bulb. I pushed into the lobby and felt the same tug I always feel. Something a little sad, something I knew someday I would miss. The open tile space with a wide stairway and dark-metal railings climbing floor by floor to the sixth floor and the dirty skylight. The iron elevator next to the stairway, clanging gently from a sourceless breeze. Voices one-two-five-six flights up through the doors marked as the homes of one-man and one-woman businesses that couldn't make it in the nicer buildings a few blocks north.
Something moved above me as I headed for the stairway. I looked up and saw Alice Pallis at the first-floor railing, holding Natasha in her arms. The baby was patting her mother's head with a pudgy palm.
"Jeremy told me to look for you," Alice said. "He wants you to call him in Encino."
"Thanks, Alice," I said.
"Toby, I asked you and you said you'd leave Jeremy out of your work."
"I'm sorry," I said, starting up the stairs. "I don't think there's any…"
"… and we figured out your puzzle," she said.
I kept coming up the stairs. I didn't have the heart to tell her that I'd figured it out too, at least most of it.
"Great," I said as she moved toward the stairway landing.
"If it's not French," a man's voice shouted from above us, "I can't sell it. You get me French, I'll get you cash."
I got to the first floor, not even panting. Natasha reached for me and Alice handed her over. She smelled like innocence and baby powder.
"The initials of each victim," Alice said. "Charles Larkin, Al Ramone, Karl Gouda, C.L.A.R.K, G. And in his last note, he says he 'began lame but I'll end able.' ABLE. Clark Gable."
Natasha was pulling at my ear. She wasn't more than four months old, but she had inherited her father and mother's strength. Alice reached over, removed her hand from my ear, kissed Natasha's palm, and took her back. She immediately began to pat her mother's head again and gurgle.
"Your killer is issuing a warning to Clark Gable, taunting him," Alice said. "Maybe wanting him to feel responsible for the deaths of these men for no other reason than to spell the name of a movie star."
"I don't like crazies," I said.
"Who does unless they're funny?" she said.
A grinding machine sound began a floor or two above us. We had to raise our voices.
" 'I'll be there e'er the Ides and right those wrongs and claim his prize,'" Alice went on. "Jeremy thinks he wrote that to let you know that he plans to do something before the fifteenth, the ides. Jeremy had me read Julius Caesar. Caesar is warned about the ides, but he ignores the warning, and then he's murdered on the ides, stabbed by former friends."
"The king," I said. "Gable's called the king."
"So, it could be that he plans to murder Clark Gable before the fifteenth," said Alice. " 'My father wept to be so cut from fortune, fame deserved.' Suggestion, Toby. We think his father didn't get something that could have made him rich and famous, something about Clark Gable. And he plans to get his revenge before the fifteenth. Jeremy thinks your killer's father had something to do with Gone With the Wind. All three victims had something to do with the film."
All this I knew, but I didn't have the heart to tell Alice. Natasha was solemnly exploring her mother's nostrils. Alice paid no attention.
"We're still puzzled by some of his comments," Alice said. "Who am I? Just ask what I am d.o.i.n.g."
"Spelling," I said. "He's Spelling. His name is Spelling."
"How can anyone be expected to figure that out?" Alice said, nestling her nose into Natasha's stomach. The baby giggled.
"Maybe we're not supposed to figure it out till it's too late," I said.
"Then why play the game?" Alice asked.
"To show he's smarter than me, smarter than Gable," I said. "To make us feel that we should have figured it out, when it's too late."
Alice gently put Natasha's head against her neck and patted her back softly to calm the giggling baby.
"He's sick, Toby," Alice said. "I've got to go change Natasha and give her a nap."
"He's sick, Alice," I agreed.
Alice started to walk away and then turned to me, her homely face serious.
"I don't want Jeremy near him," she said.
"I'll…"
"Listen," she said, shifting the baby slightly so she could hold her with one hand while she plucked a sheet of paper from the pocket of her dress. Natasha stirred and did a baby sigh and went quiet again. Alice shook open the sheet and read,
"Blake thought he found God hi the wake of a tiger, the burst of sun, the flower, Shakespeare in the wit of words the recognition of the power of well-put passion.
Pound pounds his Nazi chains against the steel drum of fear while I take issue, take pains to find the postured dignity that holds my hand through doubt and lets me reach back with earthy strength to those I love and say, 'Take my hand for I will hold you fast through time to come and which has past.
We are not first but we'll not be last.'"
"Well?" Alice challenged, folding the sheet with one hand and dropping it back in her pocket.
"Impressive," I said.
"If Jeremy gets hurt, Toby, I'll crush your head with my bare hands. I will."
"I know, Alice."
There was nothing more to say. She and the still-giggling baby vanished into the shadows, and I went back to the stairway and made my way up to the office of Sheldon Minck and Toby Peters.