Murder Takes a Break (31 page)

I was trying to calm him down.
 
"Mr. Gober, I can't understand a word you're saying.
 
Maybe if you'd stop yelling."

"Goddammit, Ferrel, I'm not yelling!
 
You want yelling?
 
I'll give you yelling!"

He turned things up a notch or two.
 
He sounded like a buffalo with a bullhorn.
 
I decided there was no need trying to make sense out of things until he ran down.

It took about five minutes by my watch.
 
When I was sure he was finished, I said, "Go over the part about the parrot again."

"Goddammit, Ferrel, have you been listening to a word I've said?"

"Yelled.
 
A word you
yelled
."

That set him off again.
 
He pays me pretty well, so I guess he's got a right to yell if he wants to.
 
He's the head of Gober Studios, and in 1948 his pictures grossed nearly as much as those of any studio in Hollywood.
 
As best I could tell Gober was hoping to do even better in '49, but apparently something had happened to the parrot.

I didn't know what a parrot had to do with Gober's box office, and I didn't want to fool with one, but I'm on retainer to the studio.
 
Usually that involves keeping some star's name out of the paper for having gotten boozed up and assaulted a cop or maybe having knocked up someone's underage daughter.
 
I could handle that kind of stuff, but a parrot?
 
I wasn't sure about a parrot.

And then I thought I heard something about a cat.

"Hold on there a minute, Mr. Gober," I said, trying to interrupt his semi-coherent soliloquy.
 
"Did you say something about a cat?"

"Goddammit, Ferrel!"

He always seems to start off that way.
 
Sometimes I think I should just go ahead and have my name legally changed to Goddammit Ferrel and let it go at that.

"Goddammit, Ferrel, haven't you been listening to me at all?
 
This is not just
a
cat we're talking about here.
 
This is
the
cat.
 
This is
Gus
."

"Oh.
 
Gus."

"That's right.
 
Gus.
 
And the parrot is Cap'n Bob.
 
Cap'n Bob and Gus.
 
They made us a hell of a lot of money last year, and now Cap'n Bob is missing!"

Well, it had finally happened.
 
I'd always thought Gober was more stable than most of the studio heads I'd met, but now I knew I'd been wrong.
 
He'd flipped his lid, blown his wig, and twirled his toupee.

Cap'n Bob and Gus were cartoon characters.
 
So how the hell could one of them go missing?

As it turned out, it was easy.

The way Gober explained it; Cap'n Bob and Gus were not merely cartoon characters.
 
They were real.
 
Gus was owned by one of the layout men, Lyman Birch, who'd brought him to work one day and showed him off to the other men in the cartoon studio.
 
Not to be outdone, a backgrounder, Herm Voucher, drove home and got his parrot.
 
It seems that kind of behavior wasn't unusual among the cartoon crowd.

Gober said that when the animals got a glimpse of one another, it was hate at first sight.
 
The parrot flew off Voucher's shoulder and went for the cat like a P-38 after a Messerschmitt.
 
The cat howled and took off through the studio, mostly across the tops of drawing boards and people's heads.
 
There were animation cells, paper, and drawing pens flying everywhere, and one bald guy got severely scratched on the noggin.

The rumpus might have continued for hours if someone hadn't held a drawing board up in front of the parrot when it was coming out of a turn.
 
The bird smacked into the board and hit the floor and Birch grabbed it.
 
Took them another hour to find the cat, who was cowering in a supply room.

Inspired to near genius by that little fracas the artists and writers created the first Cap'n Bob and Gus cartoon, giving the parrot an eye-patch and a tendency to mutter sayings like "A-r-r-r-rh" and "Avast, ye swabbies."
  
Matters progressed from there, with several Gus and Bob adventures following in rapid succession.
 
"The Berber of Seville," with the Cap'n as an opera singing Arab who does Rossini as he's never been done before or since, won an Oscar.

The story about the cat and combative parrot was funny to me but not to Gober, who also couldn't understand his artists' and writers' continuing need for stimulation and motivation.
 
They insisted that they couldn't write, much less draw, if the parrot and the cat weren't on permanent display in the studio.
 
When inspiration flagged, someone would let the animals out of their cages, and things would get lively almost immediately.
 
The artistic result would be something like "Cat-mandu," with Gus on the trail of the Abominable Snowman, who turned out to be an awful lot like the Cap'n.
 
Or "Cat-O'-Nine-Tales," in which the cat played Scheherazade to the bird's smarmy King of India.

Gober might not have understood anything else, but he understood the result.

"And that's why you have to find that parrot!" Gober finished up.

What could I say?
 
He was paying me, even if he wasn't paying me very much, so I told him I'd be at the studio in half an hour.
 
Then I hung up the phone and got my hat.

I
pointed my old hoopie, a 1940 model Chevrolet with a smooth vacuum shift, down Wilshire and turned right when I got to Vine.
 
Eventually I got to Cahuenga and turned left.
 
Gober Studios was located not far from Universal, though the layout wasn't as fancy.
 
A guy I knew named Harry was on the gate, and he waved me on through without looking up from his copy of
Unknown Worlds
.

I drove right up to Gober's office.
 
It was the nicest building on the lot, of course, and there were a couple of post-war Buicks, both of them big black Roadmasters, parked right in front.
 
One of the cars belonged to Gober.
 
I didn't know who the other belonged to.
 
Maybe his secretary, who was undoubtedly paid a lot better than I was.

She was also a lot better-looking:
 
blonde, six feet tall and built like the proverbial brick sanitary facility.
 
She also had a voice like Veronica Lake, so I figured she was worth every cent Gober paid her.

She was efficient, too.
 
She ushered me into Gober's office almost before I got my hat hung up.
 
Then she quietly faded away.
 
I stood there ankle deep in carpet and looked at Gober.

Gober got up from his desk, which was polished walnut and about the size of a football field, and by the time the door had closed behind me he was heading my way.

"Goddammit, Ferrel, what took you so long?
 
Let's get going."

He was about five-three with wide shoulders and hair that was slicked down on his head.
 
If he used Brylcreem, he'd used about a dab and a half.
 
He was wearing a suit that hadn't come from Robert Hall, and there was fire in his beady eyes.
 
I could see that he was ready to get to the bottom of this parrot business.

I didn't move.
 
"Get going where?"

He didn't even slow down.
 
"The cartoon studio."
 
He passed right by me, opened the door, and headed out.
 
He looked back over his shoulder without stopping.
 
"You coming, or not?"

I followed him and grabbed my hat off the rack.
 
He was already down the steps and striding across the street.
 
He didn't even look up at the two elephants that nearly stomped him.

I waited until the elephants passed and stretched my legs to catch up.
 
"What picture are those from?"

"The elephants?
 
Some goddamn jungle epic, one where Rick Torrance gets to run around for seventy-five minutes with his shirt off."

I'd seen one of the Torrance showcases.
 
The guy looked a hell of a lot better with his shirt off than I did.

We went around Studio A, a cavernous aircraft hangar of a building, and I was having to struggle to keep up with Gober.
 
For a guy with legs not much longer than most people's fingers, he could really move.
 
It was a hot day, with plenty of that California sun, and I didn't feel like running.
 
The pace didn't bother Gober, though.
 
He did everything fast.

The cartoon unit was housed in a building in back of Studio A, and frankly the building didn't look like much.
 
There was a lot of wood, a shingled roof, and a bad paint job.
 
Drop it in the middle of an Army base and it might pass for a barracks except for the sign on the door:
 
"HOLLYWOOD HOME FOR THE CRIMINALLY COMIC."

Gober didn't seem to notice the sign.
 
He bounced up the steps and threw open the door.
 
Before it slammed into the wall, it was caught by a tall guy with thinning hair.
 
After making sure it wouldn't slam, he let it go and put an arm over Gober's shoulders.

"Welcome to the asylum, boss," he said.
 
"It's damn good to see you!"

When he took his arm away, I could see that he'd taped a piece of paper to the back of Gober's sharkskin.
 
"KICK ME," it said in big red letters.

"Never mind the glad-handing, Birch," Gober said.
 
"I've got a guy here who's going to find that damn parrot of Voucher's."

Another man came running up to join us.
 
He was round and red-faced and even shorter than Gober.
 
He would have been perfect for one of the seven dwarfs if Disney ever wanted to do a live action version.

"Cal Franks," Gober said to me.

"There's no need for anyone to look for the parrot," Franks squeaked, waving his arms.
 
"We've got something better!"

"Get out of my face, Franks," Gober said.

"You might want to listen to him," Birch said.
 
"He might have a point.
 
We're used to having the Cap'n around to stimulate our brains, and now that he's gone, we're not getting much done.
 
We need
something
, even if it's a cockatoo."

"A cockatoo is a much better bird than a parrot," Franks insisted, heartened by the show of support by Birch.
 
"More colorful, more -- "

A chorus of voices interrupted him.
 
"No cockatoos!
 
No cockatoos!
 
No cockatoos!"

The voices stretched out the
O
sound in the first word so that it sounded like "No-o-o-o-o-o."

I looked over Gober's head and past the two men standing in front of him.
 
There were fifteen or so other guys gathered in the room, all of them chanting monotonously.
 
"No cockatoos!
 
No cockatoos!"

"Shut up, you goddamn clowns!" Gober bellowed.

He had a real talent for it.
 
They shut up and stood looking at him expectantly.
 
He grabbed my arm and pulled me forward for the introductions.

"This is Bill Ferrel.
 
He's a private dick, and he's going to find that parrot.
 
I want you all to cooperate with him and do what he says.
 
He's the boss here now."

You could tell by looking that at least half those jokers were just itching to make some kind of half-witty remark that had to do with
dick
and
privates
, but they restrained themselves.

They were a strange-looking bunch, too.
 
One of them was wearing an aviator's cap with the earflaps dangling down.
 
If he was the bald guy who got scratched, maybe he was wearing it for protection.
 
Another beauty was wearing a suit coat over a dirty undershirt.
 
A couple of other swells were smoking cigarettes normally, but one had his stuck in his ear.
 
Every now and then he'd suck in his cheeks and then exhale some smoke.
 
Don't ask me how he did it.

One guy separated himself from the group and came toward us.

 
"Herm Voucher," Gober said out of the corner of his mouth.

Voucher was so skinny he'd have to be careful not to slip down the straw when he was drinking a malted, but he had an Adam's apple that would keep him from going all the way down.
 
It was big as a softball, and it bobbed up and down when he talked.