The Devil Met a Lady (14 page)

Jeffers’s face was inches from mine and he was regarding me with a very small, satisfied smile.

We were heading west on Olympic toward Santa Monica, and Frank Gallop’s deep voice was coming over the car radio, telling us that this was the Mutual Network and we were about to hear the “Cresta Blanca Carnival.”

“C-R-E-S-T-A B-L-A-N-C-A,” Gallop chanted. “Cresta.” Violins. “Blanca.” More violins.

The show was fine. George S. Kaufman and Oscar Levant told some jokes about the Japanese. Stu Erwin did a comic sketch about a defense-plant worker. Eileen Farrell sang an aria from
The Barber of Seville
, and Morton Gould conducted Gershwin’s
Concerto in F
. We were having a swell time till we pulled onto a dark road and started up a long driveway.

The house at the end of the driveway was big, white, wooden. It looked as if it had been transported from another time and another coast.

“Nice,” I said.

“Yes,” said Wiklund. “Owner travels a bit, American Export Lines. Shall we go inside and make you uncomfortable?”

He got out and closed his door. Jeffers stepped out and motioned for me to follow him. Inez stepped out too. She didn’t have the keys in her hand. Wiklund had his hand on the door next to Bette Davis.

“Lock that door,” I whispered to Davis as I started to slide toward Jeffers who, gun in hand, was waiting for me to get out.

I didn’t get out. I reached forward, slammed the door shut, pushed down the lock button, and reached over the front seat to lock the driver’s door. I thought I caught a glimpse of the key in the ignition on my right and a look of horror on Inez’s face out the window on my left, but I didn’t have time to think about it.

“Drive,” I shouted to Davis—I twisted back and locked the rear door as Wiklund reached for it.

Wiklund’s face was against the window. He was no longer amused by me.

They were screaming at each other outside the car, and Jeffers did what to me seemed reasonable. He shot a hole through the rear window of the car and almost killed me. The bullet squealed and hit metal. The car lurched forward as Bette Davis hit the gas. I went down on the floor and a second shot took out the front window.

With the windows now open, I could hear their voices as a third shot thudded through the trunk of the Graham. I sat up and looked back. Davis had put some distance between the three of them and us, but we were continuing
down
the driveway toward a garage.

Help was on the way. Not for us. For the bad guys. The front door of the house opened and Hans and Fritz, who had obviously heard the noise, stepped out, armed.

The Graham stopped.

“There’s no place to go,” shouted Davis.

“Then back up,” I said.

She threw the car in reverse and did a pretty good job of keeping it on the driveway, if you didn’t place too high a value on the flowers and bushes she crushed. Wiklund and his group jumped out of the way as Bette Davis roared the Graham back up the drive.

Jeffers got off another shot, but it didn’t even hit the car. Davis stopped again.

“I think I can turn around here,” she said. “But that bird-bath …”

She was right. There was a stone birdbath on the grass in front of the house and right in our way. She could try backing down the long twisting driveway in the dark, but we both figured that Hans, Fritz, and Jeffers had a good chance of getting to us if we tried it. There wasn’t time for discussion. She gunned the Graham in first gear, slammed by the group, hit the birdbath, and lurched over it with the right- front tire. The axle groaned as we ground forward. Hans was next to the car now, reaching in for my neck. I slid back away from him as Davis changed gears again and we shot down the driveway.

I looked back through the rear window, wondering if they had another car. Maybe the Graham had emptied the communal pocketbook. All five of them were on the driveway, glaring at us and gesticulating, getting smaller as we drove. Jeffers began running after us. He had no chance of catching up, but he was giving it his best.

We hit the street and Davis skidded to avoid an oncoming car. When we were reasonably safe a few blocks away, she pulled to the side and turned to look back at me.

“Are you all right?”

“I’m alive,” I said. “You?”

“Frightened, angry, tired, perspiring. What do we do now?”

“Lot of choices,” I said. “We can go to the police.”

“Who won’t believe us,” she said.

“Wiklund gave your husband a day,” I said. “If he hasn’t got you to bargain with and he hasn’t got the record to trade, he misses his deadline. So, we call your husband, tell him you’re all right and not to worry about any threats to release that record. Then we find the record before Wiklund does and, meanwhile …”

“… we hide,” she concluded.

She put the Graham in gear. The front axle was bent and we limped along, but even limping the Graham was twice the car of anything we met heading back toward Olympic.

Juanita had said I’d be kidnapped three times, and Davis twice. By my count, we both had one to go, and I didn’t think Wiklund would make any mistakes the next time.

C
HAPTER
S
EVEN

W
e headed for a phone at a drugstore after parking the Graham at a closed gas station on Olympic. While Bette Davis waited outside in a doorway, I called Gunther at Mrs. Plaut’s, told him to forget about finding Wiklund, and to track down Pinketts. I told him I’d get back to him in the morning.

Then I bought a cheap suitcase, a pair of pajamas, a couple of toothbrushes, a big tube of Kolynos toothpaste, two coffees, an
Atlantic Monthly
, and some stale donuts to go.

We ate the donuts, drank the coffee, and caught a cab, leaving the wounded Graham for the guy who owned the gas station.

All we had to do now was hide.

It was then that I got the less-than-brilliant idea of hiding at the Great Palms Hotel on Main Street. Back in 1938 I had hidden a grifter named Albie Buttons in the Great Palms for almost a week. It was from the hotel, with Bette Davis listening, that I had called Gunther the next day and was told that he had found Pinketts.

“Pick me up in front of the Great Palms at nine,” I had told him.

That had been fine with Gunther. We hung up.

“Gunther found Pinketts,” I explained to Bette Davis as I waited for the operator so I could make another call.

“Then let’s go get the record,” she said, reaching for her handbag.

The hotel operator came on and I placed my next call, to Jeremy Butler. When I finished, I turned to Bette Davis and said, “You can’t be seen.”

“I’ll wear a disguise,” she said with exasperation. “I’ll be a plump, frightened little thing with my hair pulled back and no makeup.”

“
Now, Voyager
,” I said, making yet another call. “Someone will spot you.”

“But—” she began.

I held up my hand to stop her when my brother picked up the phone at his house in North Hollywood and said, “Yeah.”

“How is Ruth, Phil?” I asked.

“Still alive,” he said, his voice flat, the voice of a man thinking about something he may have left off a grocery list. “Still alive. She lost another half pound. You believe that? She couldn’t have weighed more than ninety yesterday, day before.”

“Who’s taking care of the kids?”

“I told you. Ruth’s mom’s here again,” he said. “She hardly had time to get back to Iowa before she had to turn around and come back. Next time, who knows?”

“But Ruth’s alive,” I repeated.

“So far. As of seven-ten tonight,” he said. “They won’t give me odds on tomorrow or even later tonight. I just came home to lie to Ruth’s mother and the kids that Ruth is doing well.”

“A nurse at the hospital said she thought Ruth would make it,” I said.

“Depends on which nurse you ask.”

“I’m sorry, Phil,” I said. “If you want me …”

“John Cawelti’s looking for you. He missed you at the hospital.”

“Phil, if you could tell him …”

“Toby, I don’t give a shit who killed Grover Niles or why. You know why I don’t give a shit?”

“Yeah,” I said, watching Bette Davis pace the floor with a fresh cigarette, never taking her eyes off of me.

“Then get off the phone so I can finish here and get back to the hospital,” said Phil.

I didn’t say anything. He grunted and hung up.

“I’m going,” I said, putting the receiver back on the cradle. “Gunther’ll be downstairs in a few minutes.”

She stopped pacing, folded her arms, and looked hard at me. She was wearing the dark blouse and skirt from the night before.

“I’m calling Arthur,” she said, moving to the phone. “If you can do it without being listened to by the hotel operator, I—”

“She listened,” I said, heading for the door. “She just doesn’t understand what it means. You get on that phone and you’ll have operators, clerks, morning maids, and guys from room service up here looking for your autograph.”

She picked up the receiver and gave me a look of lip-twisting contempt. Then she gave a number to the hotel operator, using a vaguely Eastern European accent. It didn’t sound anything like Bette Davis.

“You may leave, Mr. Peters,” she said in the same accent, turning her back to me.

I hung around without bothering to pretend I had forgotten something. I just stood and listened.

“Is this there Arthur?” she said, her accent thickening.

I don’t know what he said, but her side of the conversation did not make enormous sense.

“It is me,” she said gleefully, her patois intact. “Elizabeth Ruth,” she said. “Your vife.”

Pause.

“I am just fine. And Mr. Giddins is fine also. He expect to purchase a most valuable record.”

Pause, while she listened and avoided looking at me.

“If there is more than vun copy, I am sure Mr. Giddins he vill locate it.”

She was looking at me with that one. I decided to make my exit.

“Fine,” she said to Farnsworth. “And if Mr. Warner’s assistant calls again, tell him I had to go to hotel and think some. Yah.
Gute Nacht
.”

She hung up. I was at the door again.

“Do you approve of my performance?” she asked.

“Great,” I said. “Now the hotel operator thinks you’re a Nazi spy.”

“I shall call room service and tell them I’m Rumanian,” she said.

“And how are you going to work that into the conversation?”

“Stay and listen,” she said.

“Lock the door behind me,” I said, and went out to meet Gunther.

He was early. In fact, he was waiting for me when I stepped out in front of the hotel. It wasn’t exactly raining. More like a Los Angeles damp-rag drizzle, the kind that oozes into your clothes and weighs them down. Just enough to keep people off the streets.

Gunther drove a big black Daimler with built-up pedals. I got in and said, “Hi.”

“Your face is lacerated,” he said.

“I know.”

“I assumed that you knew,” said Gunther. “My observation was one of concern, not information.”

“I’m sorry, Gunther. Let’s go. I’ll tell you the whole bloody tale.”

“If you wish, only the salient points,” he said, driving into the downtown night.

“The good parts,” I said.

“Precisely.”

So I told him. The drizzle turned to rain as we headed toward and eventually reached Inglewood. Gunther made a right off of Hawthorne Boulevard onto Hardy and we were in a land I didn’t know.

“How the hell did you find him here?” I asked as Gunther slowed down, looking for the right house.

“As you suggested, Pinketts is not a common name. I found two of them in all of Los Angeles County. One was a Negro gentleman, Simon Pinketts. Extraordinary individual. I wish you could hear him, Toby. His Creole was precise, clear, grammatical. Of course, I do not comprehend the nuances of Creole.”

“He wasn’t the right one,” I said.

“I’m sorry,” Gunther said soberly. “I have digressed while your story was precise.”

“Let’s call it even, Gunther. The second Pinketts.”

“… was a relative of Andrea Pinketts. There. There is the house.”

“Keep going,” I said.

Gunther understood. He kept driving while I squinted through the darkness and rain at an old two-story frame house which may have once been white. Gunther found a parking space near the next corner, though we had passed several that might have been seen from the once-white house.

“To conclude,” said Gunther, adjusting his glasses, “I prevailed upon the relative, a gentleman named Paul, to probe his memory for locations at which one might reasonably locate his cousin.”

“Pinketts,” I said, looking through the back window at the house.

“Pinketts, Andrea.”

“How much did you have to give him?” I asked.

“Forty-two dollars and thirty cents,” said Gunther. “He designated a bar near where he resided in Culver City.”

“Nice round figure,” I said.

“The amount Andrea Pinketts, his cousin, owes him.”

I reached into my back pocket for my wallet and pulled it out.

“I would prefer not to be repaid for this, Toby,” he said, putting his hand on the wallet.

“Client has money, Gunther.”

“Your client is Bette Davis,” he said.

“In a way.”

“Then,” he said. “It is preferable to me to do this service. I do not wish it erased.”

“I never thought of you as a romantic, Gunther.”

“We all change,” he said.

“Gwen.”

He nodded and then said, “You do not wish to go into that house?”

“I’m considering my choices here, Gunther.”

“I’ll be happy to accompany you.”

I opened the door. The rain that had spattered on the Daimler’s roof now slapped at the sidewalk.

“Let’s give it fifteen minutes, Gunther,” I said. “Then use your judgment.”

Gunther nodded, and I got out and ran for the white house.

I was sure of three things. First, I was going to get very wet. Second, my back and cheek hurt and I belonged in a nice white hospital bed. Third, I was being very stupid. There had to be at least eight better ways of handling this.