When I got inside I felt my way past the little dressing table and along the wall to the door. There wasn't much light from moon, stars, or the all-night ten-watt light bulb somewhere ahead of me through the open door.
I didn't bang my shins or walk into anything as I inched along the wall and smelled the night dust and alcohol. Across from the wall, I could make out a dark shadowed area where the rest room should be. Something? A creak? Sidney? Maybe Lester let Sidney fly around the Mozambique at night, a guard cockatoo with beak and claw and limited vocabulary.
Quiet.
I pulled the door of the broom closet open, groped till I found the bucket, turned it over, balanced myself on it, holding onto the lower shelf. Then I searched for and found the envelope with Gable's four fifty-dollar bills, his card, the killer's poem and notes, and the photograph I'd plucked from Ramone's mirror. I pulled the envelope down and tucked it into my Windbreaker pocket as I got off the bucket.
I was back in the little alcove, getting used to the ten-watt light, and was almost inside of Al Ramone's dressing room when the toilet flushed. I pushed my back against the wall, trying to cover myself with shadow, knowing I should just make a break for the window when the rest-room door came open and the light behind the man in the doorway lit me like Dame Myra Hess at the Hollywood Bowl.
Chapter 3
"You scared the shit out of me," the old piano player said, his hand on his heart.
"Sorry," I said, stepping away from the wall.
Lou Canton was wearing a ratty bathrobe two sizes too big for him and he was carrying a clear drinking glass with a toothbrush and a can of Dr. Lyon's Tooth Powder in it.
"I'm not a young man," he said. "And with poor Al…"
"Sorry," I repeated:
"It's done," he said with a wave of his hand. "Done is done. You came through the window?"
"Yes," I said.
"Told Lester to fix it a month, two months ago," the old man said. "But did he listen? No, he did not listen. Find what you were lookin' for?"
"I wasn't… yes," I said.
"Good."
He turned his back on me and headed toward the curtain that led to the bandstand.
"Hold it a second," I said.
Canton, his back to me, slumped and shook his head.
"What? I'm tired. This has been a hell of a day. I'm an old fart and I don't sleep so good at night. What? You don't look like a crazy. I look more like a crazy than you do. So, I don't think you're gonna kill me. Al… well, maybe that's another story and you had reasons, but me, I figure it was the other guy. Listen to me, I'm talkin' too much. Happens when you get my age. Nobody listens to you, so you talk to yourself. I don't even listen to me half the time."
"What other guy?" I asked.
"I told Lester," the old man said. "He didn't listen. I told the cops tonight. Did they listen? They didn't listen. Last night. Guy about your height. Thirty, thirty-five. Who knows? Sat at the bar nursing his drink and looking at Al like he was more interesting than Bing Crosby. I'm sorry what happened to Al, but the man had no talent. Couldn't carry a tune. Couldn't remember a bridge. I had to cover for hun every time. Ever carry an overweight baritone over a musical bridge? You drop him and you both look bad."
"This guy…" I prodded, but Canton, who was rubbing a finger of his free hand across his thin mustache, kept going.
"Guy we're talking about looks like a crazy, maybe. You don't look like a crazy."
"Thanks."
"Not a compliment. The truth. What kind of compliment is it to say a guy doesn't look crazy? How old you figure me for?"
He shook the glass in his hand, tinkling brush and can of tooth powder against the sides.
"Sixty-five, maybe a little more," I guessed.
"Eighty," he said. "I played with Isham Jones. Can you believe that? Did piano and even bass for George Metaxa and Paul Whiteman. Did a Caribbean cruise filling in for Claude Thornhill. No one noticed the difference. And now-" He looked around the alcove and shook his head.
"Now, you get old and you sleep on a cot in a bar and talk to a crazy bird."
"The guy at the bar," I reminded him.
"Who knows? Mexican maybe. Or Rumanian. Young more than old. My eyes are good but they're the eyes of a man who has seen a lot. King Oliver said I could read music fifty feet away. With most of those bands, I was the only one could read music even if it was two feet away, if you know what I'm saying to you."
"I know," I said. "About…"
"… the guy at the bar. Dark hair, I think, what was left of it. Getting bald in the front. Jacket like yours, only light-colored. Something written on the pocket. Right here. Something on the pocket. Couldn't read it. Twenty years back, even ten, maybe, I could have, but… anyway, Mexican or Rumanian guy, whatever, Al finishes his set, the guy disappears. Came back the next night. Same thing."
"Maybe Lester remembers him," I said.
"Lester," he said with disgust. "My sister's son. Decent guy but no imagination. He thinks I see things where there ain't things. Can I get to sleep now? They're coming in early to clean the place up and fix the furniture."
"Sorry," I said.
"Nothing," he said with a wave, shuffling away, his slippers clapping against the wooden floor.
"You play a hot piano," I said.
"Thanks," he said, moving into darkness. "A little applause never hurts. Turn off the toilet light when you leave. Don't worry. They took Al away about an hour ago."
"Good night."
He disappeared through the curtain leading to the bandstand without another word.
I went out through the window, walked around the corner to my Crosley, and took Canada to South and made my way over to Los Felix on side streets. I hit Highland in about thirty minutes and was up on the porch and inside Mrs. Plaut's boardinghouse on Heliotrope off of Hollywood Boulevard by two in the morning.
The porch light was off, as they were all up and down the street to thwart the Japanese who might launch kamikaze assaults on rundown Los Angeles neighborhoods in the middle of the night. No one was sure how the Japanese would get close enough to the coast to carry out such an attack, but they had managed a couple of failed attempts from aircraft carriers in the last few years. If the papers were right, the Japanese didn't have anything left to launch a paper plane from, but Lowell Thomas had said on the evening news that they were gathering what was left of their fleet for an attack somewhere. I thought about thousands of Japanese landing in Santa Monica on the beach during a women's volleyball tournament.
I got inside, closed the door gently, slowly behind me and locked it, standing for a beat or two to be sure my landlady, in her rooms to my left, hadn't detected my predawn return. Quiet. Mrs. Plaut had a bird whose name changed as the whim took its owner. But the bird was always covered at night, and while he or she could let out a screech that Butterfly McQueen would envy, he didn't have even a one-word vocabulary.
I took off my shoes and made my way up the stairs, letting experience and instinct guide me past the creaking steps and loose sections of the rickety bannister.
Upper landing and into the bathroom, closing the door behind me before I hit the light switch. Mrs. Plaut had placed heavy red curtains on the small bathroom window. She had sewn a patriotic warning in yellow onto the curtain, one you could not miss whether you were standing, bathing, showering, or sitting. It read: "Flush only when you must. Save paper when e'er you can."
I used the toilet, took off my jacket, and checked on the fifties Clark Gable had given me. Then I washed and shaved with the razor and remnants of a bar of Palmolive stashed in the corner of the medicine cabinet.