A Few Minutes Past Midnight (2 page)

The words “journalistic restraint” were emphasized for the sake of irony.

“My career has been threatened,” he said. “My convictions are unaltered. It is likely that if my career in this country is to continue I will have to fund my own projects. I have the funds though my resources have been strained. Before the war I could count on my production costs being covered by Japanese sales alone. Now, with much of the world market closed, to increase my working capital, I have considered accepting the lead in
The Flying Yorkshireman
, which Frank Capra has offered to me though I don’t think I can work with any director but myself. I’m also trying to put together capitalization for a film version of
Shadow and Substance
, but I doubt if that will come about. There are people in the industry who want me to fail.”

“Enough to kill you?”

“Enough to try to frighten me into oblivion or exile,” Chaplin said, putting down finger eight. “The man with the blade at my door put on an arresting performance. Many of my Hollywood friends, including Harry Crocker and King Vidor, have abandoned me,” he said with a deep sigh. “Regrettable. Inevitable as I can see now. But I can live with that. No, number nine comes from some statements I have made over the years concerning the use of the Negro as a source of easy humor in movies. I never laugh at such humor. They have suffered too much to ever be funny to me.

“Several times early in my career, and much to my regret, there were background players in blackface, particularly in several of the films I did at Essanay. And so there are people, bigots, who would gladly lynch me for my views on race. But then again those of the KKK ilk have a very long list.”

The ninth finger came down. There was only one left, the pinky on Chaplin’s left hand.

“I am working now on a film which I plan to call
Lady Killer
,” he said. “It was suggested to me by Orson Welles. The Tramp will be gone. I will speak. The film will deal with the plight of a working man who turns to murder to feed his family. He marries women and murders them for their money. A Landru, or Bluebeard tale.”

“A comedy,” I said.

“Of course,” he said closing his eyes and bowing. “Which brings us back to the curious visitation I had last night. The wet man with the knife said that I should cease working on the film. He said that if I continued to develop it, he would return and kill me. His precise and colorful words were, as I recall, ‘I will skewer you.’ And then he said something quite curious.”

“What?”

“That I should stay away from Fiona Sullivan,” said Chaplin, putting down his pinky, the game over.

“Who is Fiona Sullivan?” I asked.

He shook his head and said, “I haven’t the faintest idea.”

“Fiona Sullivan,” I repeated.

“He pronounced the name quite distinctly,” said Chaplin. “Repeated it, in fact.”

“Long list of possible suspects,” I said.

“Had I more fingers …” Chaplin said with a smile. “I did know a stunt man named Webster Skeetchman who had six fingers on one hand. And Harold Lloyd, as the result of an accident while filming, has fewer than ten. I can’t remember exactly how many. But then Harold seems to have no enemies.”

“And you called the police?”

“Moments after the apparition disappeared,” said Chaplin, unclenching his fists and playing with his racket again. “They seemed monumentally disinterested and the shabbily dressed detective who came to the door indicated that he considered the possibility that I was lying the most likely of options open to him. His imagination seemed remarkably limited. I had the impression that he considered the possibilities that I had been drinking or was using drugs or that I was in search of sympathetic publicity. He was the same officer who had come when Miss Barry entered my house unbidden on those two separate occasions.”

“Anything else?” I asked.

Chaplin considered and shook his head.

“I will think about it,” he said. “Do you have enough to begin your search for this man?”

“I think so,” I said, rising. “There are a few other possibilities. He could be an actor trying to impress you or just a nut who doesn’t like your movies.”

“Possibilities,” Chaplin agreed.

“I’ll keep the options open,” I said standing. “One last thing.”

“Remuneration,” Chaplin said.

“Right.”

“Your fee?”

“Twenty-five a day, expenses and, in this case, another twenty a day for someone to watch you and your wife if she gets back before I find this guy.”

“Yes, I see. I would prefer if that aspect of this business be done with discretion.”

“It will be,” I said, as Chaplin extended his hand.

“I assume you would like an advance,” he said.

“Yes,” I said.

An advance would be nice. Then I could eat, get gas for my Crosley, pick up a new windbreaker, and pay my landlady. An advance would be very nice.

“Will cash do?” Chaplin said, shifting his racket and reaching into his back pocket for his wallet.

“It will.”

He counted off two hundred dollars in twenties and handed them to me. I pocketed them without a second count.

“I’ll get back to you every day. My man, the one who’ll be watching you, will introduce himself, stay out of your way, and keep his eyes open.”

“That will be satisfactory. And now, Mr. Peters, I still have a friend or two and a brave face to show the world. And I have a tennis engagement.”

I started across the room toward the front door.

“While I was counting,” he said behind me softly. “I was reminded of the zeppelin sequence in
Hells Angels.
You know it?”

“Great movie,” I said, turning back to him.

“Gripping sequence,” Chaplin said. “First the Germans, hurrying to get away from the British planes, cut the line of the man in the observation car. Then, to lighten to load further in an attempt to outrun the British, the Germans unload most of their equipment. When that isn’t enough, the enlisted men are ordered to jump out of the vessel to their death. Watching them step into the dark hole is unforgettable. And then one of the British flyers sacrifices himself by diving into the zeppelin. I identify with every one of those victims of war. I am haunted by that sequence. The brave and the innocent are the true victims of war.”

“Pilots died making that movie,” I said.

“I know,” he said. “Making movies can be almost as dangerous as war.”

He was lost in thought now. He gave me a private telephone number where I could reach him or leave a message. I wrote it in my book. I heard someone coming down the stairs when I went out the front door and crossed the driveway to my car. I had two hundred dollars to work with and too many leads. I’d need some help. I knew where to get it.

I hit the radio button. The Crosley backfired. It had been doing a lot of things it shouldn’t have been doing for a few months now and it hated to come to life in the morning. It reminded me of me. I’d have to take it to No-Neck Arnie, the mechanic.

On the way back to my office going down Hollywood Boulevard, I listened to the end of
Big Sister
and caught the news. It was December 10, 1943. The announcer with the deep voice said that the war news was good. The nine-day “Battle of the Clouds” over Germany marked a major victory for United States and Canadian pilots. The Fifth Army was moving on Via Casilini. Bulgaria was getting ready to bail out on the Nazis. In the Pacific, Allied forces led by the Australians were clearing the Huan peninsula. MacArthur was seventy miles away across the Vitiaz Straits ready to come in and land. Meanwhile, U.S. planes had dropped 1,300 tons of bombs on New Britain in two weeks.

I caught the first two minutes of
Ma Perkins
as I pulled into No-Neck Arnie’s, two blocks from the Farraday Building where I had my office.

CHAPTER

2

N
O
-N
ECK
A
RNIE
,
the mechanic was wiping his hands on a greasy rag when I drove into his garage. Four other cars were there with their hoods open like baby birds waiting for a worm, a bug, or a spark plug.

A radio in the background was playing the Harry James version of “Don’t Get Around Much Anymore.”

Arnie wore his gray, dirty mechanic’s uniform and a look on his face that, as he watched me, said clearly, “You think you’ve got problems.”

Arnie was around sixty, solid with a little belly, blue eyes, and short steel-gray hair. He had no neck or almost none. It would take a trained medical professional to find one if it existed.

Before I got out of the Crosley, Arnie said, “Valves.”

Arnie always said, “valves.” He seemed to believe faulty, leaky, malicious valves were responsible for all of man’s automotive problems. I think if I had asked him what Hitler’s problem was, Arnie would have said “valves.” He may have been right.

I climbed out and stood next to Arnie as he continued to wipe his hands and look at the car he had sold me about a year earlier, telling me it was a reliable machine that he could keep running.

“It runs on washing machine and refrigerator parts,” he had said.

“Does it make ice and clean underwear?” I had asked.

Arnie had grunted and told me the price of the car.

Now he stood before it, walked around it, shook his head.

“Looks bad,” he said.

“Don’t you want to know what the problem is?” I asked.

Harry James hit a high note on his trumpet. Arnie paused to listen and then said, “Valves.”

“I get backfire. The car stalls. I think it’s sick.”

“Leave it,” he said reaching out for the keys. I took the car key from the ring and dropped it in his hand. “Give me an hour. Make that two. Scovill is ahead of you. He’s got a big problem.”

“Valves?” I guessed.

“No, gall bladder. Nice guy.”

Harry James held the last note for about eight seconds and I walked out into the morning.

The walk to the Farraday Building took about ten minutes. It was late in the morning as I passed Manny’s Taco Palace and looked inside for a familiar face. Manny was the only one I recognized. He looked up from his newspaper behind the counter and nodded. I nodded back and considered a morning taco. I decided to do some work first before rewarding myself with indigestion.

The Farraday Building is on Hoover near Ninth. I don’t know who Farraday was, but the building bearing his name deserved to be condemned in 1930 or restored as an historic relic. The owner of the building, Jeremy Butler, poet, ex-wrestler, and friend, lived in the Farraday with his wife, Alice, and their baby, Natasha. Jeremy fought the daily attack on his property with elbow grease, Lysol, and determination.

The Farraday is a refuge for alcoholic doctors, broken-down baby photographers, has-been and never-was movie agents and producers, a fortune-teller named Juanita, a music teacher, and one third-rate dentist named Sheldon Minck whose chamber of horrors was on the sixth floor. I sublet a near closet-sized cubbyhole off of Shelly’s chamber.

My footsteps echoed on the fake marble in the dark lobby of the Farraday. There were voices, off-key music, and sounds of machines and typewriters joining the odd beat of my feet. The lobby was wide and six stories high. At each level a black-painted iron railing stood a dozen feet from the office doors. An ancient elevator of the same black-painted iron creaked when I stepped in and whirred slowly upward as I looked down into the lobby. There, Jeremy Butler stepped out of the shadows holding a mop, a bucket, and a bottle of Lysol.

“Toby,” he called, growing smaller, which was no mean trick considering Jeremy’s bulk. His bald head caught a beam of light from some unseen source. “Thomas Wright Waller died.”

“Come again?” I said through the bars as the elevator inched upward.

“Fats Waller,” Jeremy said sadly.

“How?” I said, hearing the word echo.

“I don’t know,” he said. “Died on an eastbound train in Santa Fe. I think he’d left from here. It was probably his heart. According to the radio, he weighed two hundred and seventy eight pounds, but I’ve seen him. He was bigger, much bigger.”

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“I’m writing a poem to his memory,” Jeremy said. It was hard to hear him now. I was three floors up and a musical instrument that might have been a trombone hit an ugly note in a nearby office. “It’s all I can do.”

“Can you stop by?” I called.

“What?”

“Come by my office,” I shouted as the elevator vibrated past the fourth floor.

He nodded.

“How are you?” I called, aware of the sorrow in his voice.

“Ain’t misbehaving,” he said, or at least that’s what I thought he said. Jeremy’s grammar was always perfect except when he took poetic license.

I finally hit the sixth floor. The door opened and there stood Juanita the fortune-teller. Juanita’s real name wasn’t Juanita. She came from a good New York Jewish family. She had married a wholesale tie salesman when she was young. He died and she married a mildly successful shirt manufacturer and raised a family. Then husband number two died. Till she was a widow for the second time, Juanita had hidden the fact that she had what she called “the visions.” She could tell things about people from touching them or just thinking about them. Sometimes the visions just came unbidden.

Her kids were grown. Her last husband was dead and Juanita had been reborn, so to speak. She had an office in the Farraday and a reasonably healthy business. Most of her clients were Mexicans, with a scattering of Greeks and a dash of Dutch and refugees from the Balkans.

I was convinced Juanita had a real gift, but it carried with it a curse I had experienced on more than one occasion. Whenever Juanita predicted my future, it turned out to be right—but her predictions couldn’t be figured out till after the future had come and gone. Jeremy found this particularly interesting. I didn’t. Jeremy and Juanita’s clients had a better tolerance for her obscure gifts than I did. Usually, I tried to avoid Juanita.