Now You See It: A Toby Peters Mystery (13 page)

—
From the
Blackstone, The Magic Detective
radio show

I
T WAS LUNCH TIME AT
M
AX
’
S
Drug Store on Melrose, but there was only one red-leather swivel stool open in the middle of the lunch counter. The others were occupied by women shoppers drinking coffee and yakking, salesmen on their lunch hour wolfing down egg salad sandwiches, and a sailor reading the newspaper.

Anita Maloney was alone behind the counter keeping up with orders, serving, preparing, brushing away dangling hairs with the back of her hand. She was a one-woman show: with one hand juggling orders, keeping coffee mugs full, slinging burgers, popping toast and scooping quarter tips into the front pocket of her peach-colored uniform while she piled the dirty cups and plates with the other.

Anita was the reason I was here. We had been seeing each other for about four months. It had started when I stopped in at Max’s for a coffee and recognized the woman behind the counter was the girl I had taken to the senior prom at Glendale High more than thirty years before.

We had lost touch with each other. I had gone through a marriage and lost my wife Ann who wanted a husband and not a battered kid in his forties. Anita had also been through a divorce, one she didn’t want to talk about it. Anita had a daughter, grown, living on her own in L.A. I had a cat named Dash living on his own in Hollywood backyards.

Anita saw me, gave me a small smile. Good teeth. White. Even. Anita was lean, energetic, and a little washed out when she was behind the counter, definitely pretty when she cleaned up after work. She wasn’t a beauty like Ann, but we were more than just comfortable with each other.

She didn’t ask me for my order, simply bringing me a Pepsi on ice and a slice of apple pie.

“End of the counter,” she said, without moving her head. “He’s been sitting there for the past twenty minutes watching the door. When you came in, he stopped watching and buried his head in the
Times
.”

She handed me a fork and went down the line to a woman with a cracking voice who called, “Miss!”

I glanced up at the shining aluminum rectangle over the grill. The reflection was wavy like an image behind the August heat of a steamy street. But it was enough. At the far end of the counter, not far from the restrooms and the telephone on the wall sat a man in a purple shirt and a red scarf flung over his neck. Less than two hours earlier, I had seen someone like that attempt to beat the California taco eating record in my office.

Pancho Vanderhoff did not lift his head. I couldn’t see him clearly, but I had the feeling his eyes were rolled upward watching me work on my pie.

The pie was good. Anita wouldn’t steer me wrong. The good thing was that I felt no pain in my left shoulder. I was aware of where the pellet had gone in and then pulled out, but I couldn’t call it pain. What I could call pain was the small, sharp jab in my chipped tooth. I stopped eating.

“Not going to finish?” Anita asked.

“Frank in?” I asked.

“Always,” she said. “What’s up?”

“Be right back,” I said, getting off the stool.

Pancho glanced at me, trying not to let it show. He was bad at not letting it show. When it was clear that I wasn’t headed for the door or the restroom but toward the pharmacy counter, Pancho went back to pretending to read the paper.

Frank stood reaching up to get a bottle on a high shelf behind the counter. The white pharmacist’s jacket he wore strained as he stretched. His fingers managed to pull the glass bottle forward. It fell and he caught it deftly with a grin of relief.

“Haven’t lost the touch,” I said.

He put the bottle of white tablets on the counter, looked at his hands and said, “Once a catcher, always a catcher.”

“Catcher?”

“Glendale High,” he said.

Phil and I had gone to Glendale, but Frank the Pharmacist was definitely a decade younger than me, and, by the time he was in high school, Phil and I were long on our way—he to the war to end all wars and me to a life of poverty, confusion, heartbreak, a reasonable amount of fun and satisfaction. Not to mention the occasional pain, leading me to ask now, “What have you got for a toothache?”

“Advice,” he said, picking up the pill bottle again. The pills rattled.

“Go see a dentist. You know a dentist?”

“Not one I’d want in my mouth,” I said.

“My brother’s a dentist,” he said. “You want his number? Use my name. He’ll take care of you. Wait.”

He put down the pill bottle, reached for the pad of paper on the counter, pulled a push-pull click-click pen out of his pocket and wrote his brother’s name and phone number. He handed the sheet of paper to me and picked up the bottle again. I pocketed the paper.

“Anything I can use till I see him?”

“Let’s see the tooth.”

I leaned over, pulled my upper lip back and he leaned forward.

“I’ve seen worse,” he said, wrinkling his nose.

“That’s comforting.”

“Oil of cloves,” he said. “It’s what dentists use.”

He handed me the bottle of pills and ducked behind the counter. I put the pills down as he came up with a bottle of green liquid with a screw top. He handed the bottle to me and said, “Just dab it on with your finger. A buck ten.”

I fished out the money and handed it to him.

“See Fred,” he said.

“Who?”

“My brother Fred, the dentist.”

“I will,” I said.

I could hear the pills rattling behind me as I headed back to the counter, pausing to open the screw-top bottle and use my finger to dab some oil of cloves on what remained of my tooth. The slight pain went away, replaced by the smell of something I recognized from a recent semimeat dish Mrs. Plaut had prepared a few days earlier.

“You okay?” Anita asked.

“Peachy,” I said, sitting again.

She poured me more coffee. I drank it, avoiding the side of my mouth with the sore tooth. I’d respect it, if it would respect me, at least for a few days.

People left. Others came. Anita scrambled. She put in ten-hour shifts four days a week and sometimes she worked an extra day.

A contrast: If I said to Anita that we had to go on a high-speed chase in ten minutes in order to catch up with a guy who’d kidnapped Paul Muni, she’d say, “Sure.” And she would mean it. If I had said the same thing to my ex-wife Ann, she would have said nothing, but she would have looked at me with a shake of her head, earrings dancing, breasts heaving, and turned away to deal with something serious.

I guess I still loved Ann. I know I liked Anita more than I liked my ex-wife. Anita knew how I felt about Ann. It didn’t bother her. She wasn’t looking for another husband.

At one, the lunch counter was almost empty. People had gone back to their buying or selling. The only ones left were me and Pancho who still pretended to read the
Times
.

Anita was cleaning up. Armed with my cup of coffee, I moved to the stool next to Vanderhoff.

“Henriot is dead,” I said.

“Huh?” asked Pancho, looking up from his newspaper.

“Front page, bottom, right where you were looking. French patriots killed the Vichy Minister of Information and Propaganda, Phillippe Henriot, in his bed in Paris.”

“Oh,” he said, his right cheek twitching just a bit. “Yes, I see.”

“And if you turn the page,” I said, reaching over to do it for him as Anita placed a fresh piece of pie in front of me, “you’ll see that Joe E. Brown presented a flag to the new Don E. Brown World War II American Legion Post 593. You know Brown’s son was a captain, killed in a plane crash near Palm Springs a couple of years ago.”

“I didn’t know that,” Pancho Vanderhoff said, turning pages.

I held out my hand to stop him.

“You want to talk?” I asked.

“I … well,” he muttered, adjusting his red scarf.

“Question one,” I said. “How did you know I would be coming here?”

“Miss Gonsenelli,” he said.

“Mrs.,” I corrected.

“She said you might be coming here. I told her I needed to talk to you about the script I’m working on for Dr. Minck.”

“Okay, so you just answered my second question, why are you here? I’d like another answer. Would you like a slice of apple pie. On me. It’s good. They don’t have tacos.”

“Well,” said Pancho. “I wouldn’t refuse.”

I asked Anita for a slice of pie for my buddy Pancho, who looked decidedly older than he had in our office. His skin was still unlined but tight like a tom-tom. His hair was black, too black, with spots of the liquid that had made it so speckling his neck.

“I’m a bit of a fraud,” he said with a sigh, finally looking straight at me. “I’ve never written a screenplay. I was a studio gopher for Edwin S. Porter. I brought him coffee and carried his bags. I met D. W Griffith when Mr. Porter was shooting
Rescued from an Eagle’s Nest
. I was in the picture. One of the townspeople who look up and see the eagle carrying the toddler away. Mr. Griffith was the star. Then I went, to work for Mr. Griffith.”

“Gopher?”

He nodded.

“The truth is, Mr. Peters, I have no talent. I’m an old man living in the back bedroom of my granddaughter’s apartment. Closest I got to really being part of the movies was when I played a mute sinister butler in a Republic serial in 1937. Kane Richmond was the star. I was in four episodes. Dr. Minck is a godsend.”

“And?”

“And you are his friend and a detective,” he said with a sigh, digging into the pie. “This is good. I … I was afraid you’d find out that I’m a …”

“Fraud,” I finished.

He shook his head “yes” again and took on a forkful of pie so big that it stood a good chance of choking him.

Anita was halfway down the counter cleaning the grill, looking over her shoulder at us. I knew she could hear.

“Can you write a script?” I asked.

“Of course,” he said. “Probably a very bad one, but I certainly know the format.”

“Then do it,” I said. “Shelly can afford it.”

He smiled at me gratefully, his left cheek full of pie. Then the smile faded.

“There’s one more thing,” he said. “When we finished our meeting in your office, I went back to my office to work. A man came in. He said he knew I had been at a meeting with you and the others and that it had something to do with the dinner tonight for Blackstone.”

“The man have a name?” I asked.

“Everyone has a name,” he said. “In Los Angeles, it is usually one that bears little resemblance to his or her given name. He didn’t give me his.”

“What did he look like?”

Pancho described Calvin Ott.

“What did he want?”

“He wanted me to tell him what went on in our meeting this morning,” said Vanderhoff. “He had seen me come out of your door.”

“And you told him?”

The thin old man looked at the ceiling. I could see then why he wore the scarf. The wrinkles on his neck made me add ten years to the seventy I had already credited him with.

“How much?”

“I sold my honor for a mere fifteen dollars,” he said, pulling three fives from his pocket and placing two of them on the counter. “Filthy lucre, but I truly need it. I spent some of it on a cab to get here.”

“Keep it,” I said.

“I had to tell you,” he said.

His pie was gone. I asked if he wanted another slice. He considered it and shook his head.

“You did the right thing,” I said.

“And you won’t tell Dr. Minck?”

“Write his screenplay,” I said.

“I don’t think he has a realistic idea about it,” Vanderhoff said. “He’s planning to produce this himself if he can’t get studio backing. And he wants to approach Clark Gable to play him. Dr. Minck claims to be friends with people like Gary Grant, Gable, Joan Crawford, and Fred Astaire.”

“He has met them,” I said. “The word ‘friends’ is definitely pushing reality.”

“I feel better,” he said, standing and rewrapping his scarf. “Confession. Very cleansing.”

“Hold on and I’ll give you a ride back to the Farraday,” I said.

“I almost forgot,” Vanderhoff said. “The man who gave me the fifteen dollars said something peculiar just before he left. He told me not to tell it to anyone else. He told me to watch closely tonight at the dinner because the dead would rise.”

That was pretty much what Juanita had told me. I didn’t understand it any better coming from Pancho. I would, eventually—but “eventually” still was quite a few surprises away.

I placed a dollar on the counter and told Anita I would call her later. She gave Pancho a smile. He twitched one back at her.

I dropped off Pancho at the Farraday and headed for the Pan-tages where Blackstone had told me they would be rehearsing and making some changes to the show because of Gwen’s absence and the damage to the buzz saw.

The old man at the stage door recognized me and waved me in with his pipe. I could hear voices coming from the stage beyond the heavy curtains, just out of sight.

“Catch him?” the old man said.

“Not yet.”

He adjusted his suspenders with his thumbs, looked at his pipe over the top of his rimless glasses and then looked at me as if he were going to honor me with sage advice.

“Meat loaf sandwich for lunch,” he said, touching his stomach. “Didn’t agree with me.”

“Sorry to hear it,” I said. “Look …”

“Raymond,” he said. “Raymond Ramutka.”

He paused, his eyes wide, expecting a reaction. When I didn’t respond, he rubbed his left hand on his thick wild mane of white hair.

“Before your time,” he said with a sigh, looking toward the stage. “I was in the St. Louis and Chicago productions of
The Girl of the Golden West
. Played Jack. Had a voice. But you must hear stories like that all the time in your line of work.”

“Some,” said. “I know the police asked you, but can you tell me what you saw last night?”

“Saw? Let me think.”

He rubbed his hair some more. It was now almost comically wild.

“Saw,” he repeated. “Like what went on here?”

“Yes.”

“Not things I saw earlier, on the way here after breakfast.”