Puzzle of the Happy Hooligan (16 page)

He looked amazed. “But, lady, I was driving you out to Peppino’s. This ain’t no spaghetti joint. You don’t want—”

“But I do.”

Before the inspector could register a practical protest he found himself dragged willy-nilly through the gauntlet where Miss Withers had the surprising experience of being mistaken for Edna May Oliver and asked for an autograph.

“I think Shapiro’s is going to be very interesting tonight,” the schoolteacher told Oscar Piper, and drew him firmly inside.

Jill Madison, an unripe orchid pinned in her hair because her silver gown had no shoulders, was dancing with Buster. They danced very close, moving as one person, not only because they were both young and felt the music all the way down to their toes but also because the dance floor at Shapiro’s is always so crowded that all dancing is cheek to cheek. Almost any cheek.

“That’s all, Buster,” Jill said, and dropped her arms.

He held her resentfully. “You don’t like the way I rhumba?”

“That wasn’t a rhumba; it was a conga. And I haven’t forgotten that I’m here with somebody else.”

“With that Virgil Dobie!”

“That’s right,” she told him sweetly. “Now, don’t be difficult. I’m trying to tell you to run along and peddle your papers.”

“But, Jill—”

She stopped on the edge of the floor and for one moment she seemed to be relenting. But she wasn’t—not Jill. “Now listen, sophomore,” she said severely, “just because I run into you in the bar I dance with you. Can’t you understand why? You’re an awfully nice boy, and I’m sure that some awfully nice girl would just love to have you fall in love with her….”

Buster’s neat dinner coat suddenly seemed to shorten at the sleeves and hunch up at the back of the neck. “If you’d only—”

“I
won’t
only! Please go away and stay away. I’ve got to get back to Virgil or—”

“So it’s ‘Virgil’ now, is it?”

“Yes,” Jill said. “I danced with you because I wanted to be nice. Our last dance together—like in Browning’s poem.”

“It was the last ride, not the last dance. ‘We ride, and I see her bosom heave, There’s many a crown for who can reach …’”

“Well!” exploded Jill, reddening under her make-up. She turned swiftly and marched toward the table where, under Virgil Dobie’s approving stare, a waiter was spinning a bottle of Krug ’28 in its silver bucket.

Buster shrugged and made his way back into the bar. People were lined up behind the brass rail like bettors outside the two-dollar win windows at Santa Anita, but he elbowed his way forward and eventually found himself standing beside a large, sultry girl in red and gold.

“Have a drink,” he muttered, and then saw that it was Lillian from the studio. “Well,
do
have a drink.”

“Oh, hello, Buster,” she greeted him, a shade more warmly than usual. “I don’t mind if I have a drink. I don’t mind if I have six drinks. Stingers.”

They began on the six stingers. Buster tried talking but he discovered that Lillian was not listening to him. He would have moved away, but she held him, putting her hand appealingly on his shoulder. “Stay with me for a while,” she begged him. “I’ll—I’ll go Dutch on the drinks.”

Somewhat puzzled. Buster wanted to know why. “You’re not stagging it, too, are you?”

“No, I made old Josef bring me. He had two double martinis and folded up right in the middle of telling me a limerick about the young man from Khartoum….”

Buster brightened, waiting.

“He’s at the table in there,” Lillian said. “If you want to hear the rest of it wake him up.”

“Why not call a taxi and go home if he’s that dull?”

Lillian drained her glass with a brisk intentness. “Oh no. I’m not going to walk out on my new boss. Wilfred Josef would never forgive that. Besides”—here she stopped and looked carefully around before continuing—“I came here to do something. Buster, tell me, how many drinks does it take to make you brave?”

“A good many, I should think. It might vary with the individual.”

She nodded. “Then I’m going to stay right here and drink until I’m brave as anything.”

The young man loosened his necktie. “I’m with you,” he agreed. “At least until I fall off the stool.”

He was nowhere near falling off the stool some time later when Thorwald L. Nincom arrived with a party of seven. There was Melicent Manning, Mona and Frankie Firsk, Harry Wagman the agent, a lovely hyperthyroid redhead whom Wagman hoped to sell for the part of Lizzie Borden, Willy Abend, wearing an American flag for a boutonniere, and Douglas August with his right hand in a vast white bandage.

“Nincom and his poops,” Buster observed as the party swept past toward where a headwaiter guarded the door of the dining room. “I bet they have no reservation and I bet they get a table.”

Buster was right. Mr Nincom and his party were awarded the signal privilege of having a table set up for them on the edge of the dance floor, but in spite of this they all seemed moderately unhappy.

Melicent Manning tried to make conversation, steering carefully away from topics which might upset Mr Nincom’s digestion. “Do tell us about how you injured your hand, Douglas,” she begged of Doug August. “I just know it was something romantic. You devil-may-care young men!”

“If you must know,” August said, “it happened out on the polo field this morning Oh, not in the game,” he hastily added, realizing that Nincom was glaring at him. “I know I promised not to play while I’m on assignment. I was just practicing some stick and ball.”

“Polo!” breathed Melicent Manning.

“But it
was
romantic,” August continued. “You see, I dropped my mallet and got off my horse to pick it up, and the horse stepped on my hand.”

There was a lull. “I knew a man once a horse
sat
on—” began Mona Firsk, and then her husband shushed her. Mr Nincom was about to speak. Or else choke to death with half a stalk of celery in his mouth. He was pointing over their heads, pointing toward the doorway, and emitting small gargling sounds.

“Look!” he finally got out.

Willy Abend peered. “Oh, it’s Miss Withers, the lady who got killed….” His voice trailed away into silence, and they all forgot to breathe for some seconds.

Back in the bar Buster Haight fell off his stool, but not from stingers.

It was no optical illusion. Miss Hildegarde Withers, in a neat dotted swiss, was arguing with the headwaiter. Beside her the inspector fidgeted, aware of how his trousers bagged.

“I am very sorry, madame, but without the reservation—”

“Speaking of reservations,” Miss Withers plunged in, “can you tell me if Mr Derek Laval has a table for this evening?”

The dapper little man winced. “I am sorry, madame—”

“Flash it, Oscar,” she suggested. The inspector flashed his badge, cupping it in the palm of his hand.

“Oh, I see,” said the headwaiter. “No, I am glad to say, Mr Laval will not be among our guests. There is the matter of the checks, madame and monsieur, that he wrote last time. The bouncing checks.”

That established, Miss Withers finally prevailed upon the man to give them a table, using all her persuasion and that of the inspectors badge and one of his five-dollar bills. This table, too, was set up on the edge of the rapidly diminishing dance floor.

Thus it was that the schoolteacher made her dramatic return from the wrong side of the river Styx into the middle of Shapiro’s ballroom on a gala Sunday night, surrounded by the stars, starlets, executives and creators of Never-Never Land.

As they sat down she nodded and smiled at Mr Nincom and his guests who returned greetings as blank as those of a tableful of Humpty Dumpty toys.

And at a cozy table against the farther wall Jill Madison had to speak sharply to Virgil Dobie who kept on pouring priceless Krug ’28 into her already brimming glass. On every side Miss Withers was making exactly the splash that she intended. It was a lovely idea, and one which she was to regret sincerely all the rest of her life.

But for a time all went serenely, with the vast roomful of diners hurrying through the fourteen courses of the table d’hôte—on which the inspector discovered spaghetti Caruso tucked in between the soup and the fish.

He also discovered, as have so many other tourists in Hollywood, that in real life Miss Irene Dunne looks smaller than on the screen, while Miss Myrna Loy looks larger, that Miss Greer Garson’s beauty cries out for the color camera, that Mickey Rooney and Jackie Cooper are grown up now in some ways, especially as regards blondes, and that John Barrymore wears built-up heels and still looks considerably shorter than his current wife.

While the inspector was making these firsthand notes Miss Hildegarde Withers waited hopefully for the pay-off that she had been so sure of.

“I don’t see why you think so,” Piper objected when he learned her thoughts. “Suppose everybody else is here—the one man you want isn’t around. Certainly the headwaiter would know—and he has reason for looking out for Derek Laval.”

“Never mind Derek Laval,” the schoolteacher said. “Watch.”

The orchestra had left the stand, and now a committee of waiters were rearranging things so that a big square screen hung on the platform. When it was set in place they disappeared, and the band leader returned, held up his hand for attention.

“Ladies and gentlemen,” he began, “you all know why we’re here and you know that half of the cover charge and
take
tonight goes to a very worthy cause. And now for the special event on the program.”

“If it’s a torch singer I’m going,” Piper whispered.

“By special arrangement with the newsreel companies and with the gracious permission of the Racing Commission for the sovereign state of California, we present a rerunning of the greatest horse race of all time, the Santa Anita Handicap!”

“That’s Hollywood for you,” Miss Withers whispered to the inspector as the lights slowly started to go dim. “Ninety per cent of the people in this room work in pictures all day. They have projection machines in their own homes, most of them. And for a special treat when they go to a night club they look at more motion pictures.”

“Shhh!” grunted the inspector.

At the bar Lillian Gissing turned in dignified slow motion to her companion. “I think I’m pretty brave now,” she announced heavily. “I think I’m as brave as I can get. If I have any more drinks …” She burped.

“You’re sick,” Buster said, mildly disinterested.

“I
am.
I’m pretty near as sick as I am brave. Maybe sicker….”

“It’s up there,” Buster helpfully advised her, pointing. “At the head of the stairs and to the left along the balcony. Where it says ‘Mesdames.’”

Lillian started away, careening slightly in the current. Then she rang for full speed astern and came back to pick up her handbag which she had left on the bar. She opened it, with a thickly suspicious glance at Buster, and made sure of something deep inside. Young Haight said later that he thought it was a piece of paper—maybe a card or an address, he couldn’t tell.

Anyway, Lillian folded something into the palm of her hand, put the bag back on the bar to hold her place and went tacking off toward the stairs. The bar lights were very dim now, and Buster whirled on his stool to watch the screen in the larger room….

The voice continued: “Not
just one
race, mind you, but each running of the Hundred-Thousand-Dollar Handicap, the richest race in the world, caught imperishably upon the silver screen as a record of thoroughbred stamina and—and—Well, anyway, we’ve got the films up in the projection booth, and they’ll be run off in sequence. Take it away….”

The room was dark now except for the pale red exit lamps, and time suddenly turned backward to a day in March 1935 when sixty thousand people filled the new grandstand at Arcadia and watched a field of thorough­breds thunder down across what was once the peaceful pasture of Lucky Baldwin’s breeding ranch. Head Play and Twenty Grand and Mate….

Again on the screen the greatest horses in America fought for racing’s richest prize, and again a rank outsider, a reformed jumper of no repute, came tearing out in front to stay in front. That was Azucar’s year.

Virgil Dobie looked at Jill. “That was the day I had a hundred and eight dollars in the world, and the hundred was on Twenty Grand to win.” He shuddered. “I think I’ll feel my way out to the bar and see a man about a brandy and soda.”

On the big screen in the ballroom it was 1936 now, with a landscaped infield at Santa Anita, more grandstand, more people and more sunshine. Discovery and Time Supply and old Azucar again….

And the recorded voice of Joe Hernandez booming out his unforgettable “Ther-r-r-r-r-re they go!” with the crowd roaring, the thunder of hoofs as the field came into the homestretch….

Again on the screen the front-running son of Peanuts was pulled to the rail to foul three challengers and win a hollow victory, with Time Supply, a faster horse, running up his heels. That was the year that Top Row stole the “hundred grand.”

At Mr Nincom’s table the great man spoke into the darkness. “I have an idea,” he cried. “It’s about time for another race-track epic. We’ll call it—we’ll call it ‘Kentucky.’ No, not ‘Kentucky.’ Why plug those Eastern states? We’ll call it ‘Santa Anita’!”

“Marvelous!” came Frankie Firsk’s voice. “A
real
honey….”

“Swell,” chimed in Doug August. “Only I thought you said that race-track pictures always lose money because the women don’t like era?”

Nincom coughed. “Did I? Well—” He brightened.

“We’ll build the story around a woman handicapper—get the woman’s angle that way. She has a running battle with a gyp owner and trainer, a hard-boiled Gable type. She loves horses; he thinks of them as meal tickets only. But when he tries to pull a sneak and win the Handicap with a horse he flies in from south of the border …”

The people at the side tables and in the benches along the wall were crowding forward now, taking up positions on the dance floor and steps for a better view. A few moved back and forth from the murky bar. Another year, another field of horses—and gallant Rosemont slipping past in the last eighth of a mile to grab the race from little Seabiscuit.