The Metaphysical Ukulele (8 page)

He was at a loss. Should he keep kissing her teeth? Could he stop? Erik dangled over the precipice of panic for
one second, then another until, luckily, the sound of a man clearing his throat drifted through the open window. Erik released Flannery. They both turned to see the man who had wandered up behind the parked car. He was a lean white man in his late fifties. He pushed back a black felt hat ringed with sweat. “Y'all doing okay?” he asked. “Ain't got a flat tire or nothing, do you?”

“No,” Erik said. “Everything is just fine.”

“Well, okay, then.” The old man nodded and started again on his way down the road.

Flannery, for her part, could not stop giggling. Clearly, she was just plain tickled by the whole affair.

Unfortunately, Flannery was so flustered when Erik dropped her back off at Andalusia that she forgot her ukulele in his car. The next she heard from him, he'd taken a six-month leave of absence from work and returned to Denmark. Whether or not he took her ukulele with him is not clear. Either way, both were gone.

The autumn turned to winter and the subsequent spring limped in without the usual sense of rebirth. Flannery's doctor took her off the adrenocorticotropic hormone and put her on an experimental drug called Meticorton. Flannery's thirtieth birthday came with a cane that she would need to get around that summer. One year after the kiss, Flannery purchased the pair of aluminum crutches that she'd ride for the rest of her life. These crutches helped her out to the mailbox, where she found her final letter from Erik: the one
in which he announced his engagement.

Flannery stuffed the letter in the pocket of her wool coat and hobbled through the magnolias and red oaks, the chrysanthemums back in bloom and the sweetgums carpeting pathways with their fallen leaves until she made it well into the back forty of Andalusia, to a shack that an old black man had built, that Regina knew nothing about and everyone else ignored. The man's name was Coleman. Flannery liked him because he had skin that wrapped around a bag of bones in the same ill-fated manner as Flannery's. She caught sight of then turned a blind eye to the moonshine still he used to make his money. She tapped on his door with the rubber end of her crutch. Coleman groaned and cursed his popping knee joints and kicked over a tin plate that never should have been left on the floor to begin with and eventually opened the door. Of course, he would've known from the knock that it was Flannery and of course he would've known what she was there for. He invited her in. He lit the fire in his little chimney and set a kettle on to boil. He asked, “Would you like some coffee, Miss Flannery?”

“Yes, please, Coleman.” She lowered herself into an old cane chair next to Coleman's one table. She hesitated to ask. Surely, Coleman would get to the matter in his own time. She leaned the crutches against the back of her chair and folded her hands in her lap. She could still feel the crumpled letter in her coat.

Coleman watched the kettle come to a boil, then set two mugs of coffee on a slow drip. He smiled wide enough for
Flannery to catch a glimpse of his foremost tooth: the lower right canine. He reached from behind a chest of drawers and pulled out his latest work of art: a cigar box ukulele made for his favorite dying girl. He handed it over.

Flannery grazed her fingers across the frets, tapped the soundboard of old, dry redwood, and tuned the strings. It wasn't quite the masterpiece of dark mahogany and tortoiseshell binding that she'd left in Erik's car, but it was beautiful in all the ways it seemed so fallen and lacking. Flannery worried that, if she looked up to smile at Coleman, she'd cry. Coleman said, “Play us a song for our suffering, Flannery.”

Flannery plucked through the scale of C, eight simple notes, then let her fingers leap and dance across the fret board. It was a song from a place of sickness. A place where there is no company. Where nobody can follow.

The Bottom-Shelf Muse

I was nothing more than watching the paint peel off the walls in my down-at-the-heels brain emporium when the buzzer rang. January winds had been rattling the wood in my window frames all day. They beat an unsteady rhythm. The buzzer fell right into place, like a low-level percussion from the
Gas Company Evening Concert
. My last nickel was lonely for another nickel it could rub together with, so I went into the waiting room to see who was buzzing there.

A young man stood between the window and an old red davenport, frozen between sitting to wait for me and mustering up the courage to knock on my office door. He wore a tailored, bluish-gray suit with flannel thinning around the knees and the elbows. It was the kind of suit that wore out before a kid like this could finish paying the mortgage on it. His eyes still darted from davenport to office door, but he added a glance at me into the cycle. With what sounded like his last breath, he croaked out, “Hello.”

I set my office door into a wide swing and pointed inside. “Don't just stand there drying out your tongue, Cream Puff,” I said. “Come inside and let's jaw.”

The man skittered around me and into my office. He
took a seat on the wooden chair in front of my desk. I moseyed around to my desk chair and planted myself. The low-rent dandy needed some time to sit there looking stupid, so I filled my pipe, put a flame to the leaves, and took a couple of puffs. The wooden window frame beat a minuet. The man swallowed hard and came out with it.

“Name's Candy,” he said. “I'm here on behalf of my employer.” He presented me a card the way the maitre d' at the Cocoanut Grove offers a bottle of Beaujolais. I snatched the card. Candy's employer's name meant nothing to me. Just another Joe making pictures. His title was supposed to send me over the moon. Studio Executive. Big deal. I'd been around this town long enough to be disillusioned about what a lot of golfing money can do to the personality. The organ grinder's monkey was even less impressive. I tossed the card into my ashtray. Candy went on.

The studio he worked for was in a bind, he said. Their lead actor, a fellow by the name of Alan Ladd, had been drafted into the war effort. He was shipping out in a couple of months. They were racing to make one more picture with him before he left. They'd had to open a Los Angeles branch of the US mint to print enough money to pay the writer to type up the script for the Ladd movie. They'd been filming scenes faster than the writer wrote. Now they were running out of pages to film, and the writer had to come up with most of the third act. An ending. No one could figure out who the murderer was. The writer wasn't talking. He claimed to have some kind of writer's block. Candy's boss had even
offered the writer a portrait of Madison—a five thousand dollar bill—to finish the script. It was all for nothing.

I tapped the ashes of my pipe onto the business card in my ashtray. “What are you asking me to do?” I asked. “Be the murderer or read the script and solve the crime?”

Candy pulled a passport wallet from inside his suit. He opened it carefully and produced a photograph. He passed the photograph across my desk. I expected to see a picture of the writer. Instead, it was a picture of some kind of miniature banjo surrounded by the soft light of a photographer's studio. I set the photo on my blotter and said, “Is this a joke?”

“It's a ukulele. A banjo ukulele. The writer got it as a gift from George Formby. You know George Formby?” I shook my head. Candy said, “He's the biggest star of the pictures in England right now.”

“I haven't been to the Odeon in Leicester Square in some time,” I spat. “London's a far drive in these days of gas rationing. All those V-2s falling around town aren't very pleasant, either.”

Candy regarded me with his monkey eyes, like suddenly I was making the music from the organ, only I was grinding it backwards. He shook his head enough to rattle his brains back into gear. “It seems that this banjo ukulele has gone missing. The writer can't write without it. This is yours if you can find it and get the writer writing.” He handed me an envelope full of bills.

“When do you need it?” I asked.

Candy placed his manicured hands on the threadbare knees of his slacks and pushed himself into an upright position. “Yesterday,” he said.

I thumbed through the envelope. Double sawbucks nestled together cozy as mice. There must have been a couple of dozen of them in there. About five hundred large. Good money for a funny-looking ukulele.

I took two of the Jacksons for expenses and slid the envelope back to Candy. “You pay me when the job is done.”

No matter how smart you think you are, you have to have a place to start. All I had was the picture of the ukulele and the name of the writer: Chandler. If I went around showing people a picture of a ukulele and asking them if they'd seen it, the State of California would catch wind of it. In no time, they'd start fitting me for a camisole up at Camarillo. Talking to Chandler wouldn't get me anywhere. A guy who could send everyone at Paramount Studios into a panic over a banjo ukulele wasn't going to do me or anyone any good. But talking to a writer made a certain amount of sense. All those scribblers down at the studios were chummy. As far as I could tell, they spent most of their days drinking champagne in the breakroom, and most of their evenings drinking scotch in a bar. Talent for these guys amounted to having a good secretary. The studio secretaries would come up with characters, plot, and dialogue by the reams. The writers were at their best when they scratched their names on the backs of paychecks and constructed elaborate laments about their
talents drying up in the hot January winds of Hollywood.

The writers were easy to find. All I had to do was catch a red car west on Hollywood Boulevard and sidle up to the bar at Musso and Frank's. You couldn't spit at Musso and Frank's without hitting a screenwriter.

It was my favorite thing about spitting there.

Writers at Musso are easy to spot. Look for slicked, graying hair badly in need of an oil change and dented with the ring of a dusty fedora. Look for the gabardine suits with the cheap cut of a Boyle Heights tailor. Look for the ash stains on their slacks and the ink stains on their middle fingers. Look for their eyes drooping from days spent drinking in the breakroom. Look for that air of disheveled dignity that comes from years of wearing a mask of talent with no face below it. Look for all these things and you'll find a gaggle of them perched around the corner of the bar.

I took a stool on the short end of the bar and ordered a scotch, neat. The bartender never had the bottle far away from this corner. He poured me three fingers in a dirty glass. I threw down two bits for the drink and asked the writer closest to me if he knew this Chandler. “Know him?” The writer looked at me as if I'd just asked if he'd heard of Culbert Olson. “Why, of course. Everyone knows old Ray.”

A few more of the gaggle nodded along. They all knew old Ray.

I asked my questions with a little more volume in my voice. One writer talking was as good as any other. Whoever
wanted to chirp up could. “This Ray, he's a pal of yours?”

“Sure.” He was chummy with all the writers.

“A fine fellow, that Ray? A real square gee?”

“Did more entertaining in the writers' room than on the page. Always had a story at the ready.”

“A real yarn-spinner, is he?”

“Yes he is.”

“And what are these yarns about?”

Depends on the day. Sometimes, he spoke of the booming Southern California oil fields before the Depression settled in. Sometimes about the first of these world wars, about his time wearing a kilt for a Canadian division, leading his men into a slaughterhouse, though the writers disagreed as to where this slaughterhouse was—France? Germany? Didn't matter—and limping out of there with a bullet lodged in his thigh. Sometimes he told stories of booze and broads and the
Black Mask
, scribbling stories that left him so broke he breakfasted on shoe leather.

“So he's a sad sort with these stories, is he? Nothing but corruption and war and poverty?”

“Why, no,” the writer nearest told me. “He always manages to put a nice twist on the yarns. You walk away laughing, more than not.”

I saw an angle and pursued it. “So he's the comical sort? Maybe tells his tales with ukulele accompaniment?”

A writer in the middle of the cluster stood from his bar stool. He was squinty-eyed and puffy from middle age. His nose advertised far too many veins for a man on his side of
fifty. “Say,” he said. “What's this about, Mister?”

I shrugged and let my glance linger beyond his soft shoulder. There at the table behind him sat a broad who looked perhaps too interested in our conversation. She ran an emerald-polished fingernail around the rim of a rocks glass filled with a pale green liquid that could only be a gimlet. I knew enough to know that this was the dame I needed to speak with.

Now, in Chandler's fictional world, there are blondes and there are blondes. There are tall blondes dressed better than the Duchess of Windsor who sway elegantly across rooms. There are blondes too tall to be cute, wearing street dresses of pale blue wool and small cockeyed hats that hang on their ears like butterflies. There are two-hundred-forty-pound blondes who run the show and wavy-haired blondes who carry little Colts and laugh a laugh strained and taut as a mandolin wire. There are blondes who sit in the driver's seat in a mink and make the Rolls Royce around them look like just another automobile. There are blondes with faces so pretty you have to wear brass knuckles every time you take them out. There are blondes who fall in love with you and still love you after you kill their husband. There are blondes who will meet you in a supermarket and stroll among the strained peas in baby jars and plot murder for a ten-thousand-dollar insurance policy. There's a small and delicately-put-together blonde who fills the room with a perfume called Trouble, who can lower her lashes until they almost cuddle her cheeks and send you into a world of wealth and
corruption, along mean streets nearly powerful enough to make you mean yourself, and she'll give you little more than a kind word and a faith in your own hard-earned honor to guide you through.

This beauty here at Musso and Frank's, though, was a brunette. She wore a white day dress with green flowers and a green bow tied around the waste. Her shoes were the fashionable Tippecanoe, which looked like green moccasins coming and going, but looked like sandals when she stopped and gave you a gander of the middle. She crossed her legs and let one Tippecanoe dangle loose off her heel. She was the kind of woman who learned to hold her own anywhere she walked, be it a San Pedro public school or a typing pool or a Paramount screening room. She had the look of a secretary who can only exist in that flawed-fantasy-come-true which is Hollywood, where a lack of imagination projected onto a giant screen can create an industry with enough wealth to put an illuminated pool in every backyard. I carried my scotch to her table and sat opposite her.

“If I don't miss my guess,” I said, “you're one of those Paramount secretaries who does all the real writing on pictures.”

A bar light ping-ed off her cobalt eyes as she locked them onto mine. “And who would you be?”

“Just a match someone struck to light a fire under a writer. A guy named Chandler. Know him?”

The secretary exhaled heavy and hard like a slashed tire. She glanced at the scalloped shoulder of her day dress.
“Know him? I still have his handprints all over me.”

“You worked for him, then, did you?”

She took a slow drag on her cigarette, then popped the smoke out in one quick puff. “I guess that depends on how you define work.”

“How did the studio define it?”

“Apparently for them, ‘work' meant taking dictation on all the passes Ray made after me. He spent his days telling me about his old wife and her illnesses and his involuntary abstinence. Does that sound like work to you?”

“It sounds to me like listening to a man who doesn't know anything about women.”

The secretary lifted her gimlet to her lips. They were painted a dark red, the color blood gets long after homicide has closed the investigation and the crime is remembered only by a stain on the sidewalk. “Exactly,” she said. “Does a woman want to hear about an old man and his older old lady and their sad life? Does a woman want to be wooed with lines about how little sex he's having and about how she'll do? I don't think so. A man could notice a dress once in a while. He could ask about me now and then. Or at least once.” She ran her finger through her soft brown hair. “He could notice these curls that take a night in hot rollers to get.”

“They are lovely,” I said.

She unlocked her eyes from mine and glanced down at the scarred mahogany of the table in front of us. “Well,” she said. Her coloring seemed to change as the dim light of dusk
crept across the bar. I didn't flatter myself to see a blush in there anywhere.

“In these woeful attempts to woo,” I asked. “Did he ever play a ukulele?”

“A what?” Her gaze darted back up to meet mine. “A ukulele?”

I nodded, slightly as possible.

“Sure, Mister,” she said. “He keeps it in the rubber room right down the hall from the one you live in.”

I drained my scotch and picked up my hat. Everything in this watering hole seemed to dry into dust.

The light of the next morning brought me no more wisdom. I still had a nutty case and a writer blocked. I was two days late solving a mystery I'd learned about one day before, and I didn't have much to go on. I knew the scribbler drank too much, which is about as much of a surprise as knowing a millionaire is part criminal. I knew he couldn't write at the studios, but who could? I'd seen plenty of movies, but never one that looked like it had been written on purpose. I knew he pawed at his secretary just like every man who has a secretary to paw at does. I knew he had a wife considerably older than him. That might mean something. And I knew he liked to tell stories around the writing room, so my best bet would be to sit in that writing room and listen. I called Candy and asked him for a studio pass. He told me the executive's card he gave me would work. I salvaged the card from my ash tray, wiped it gray with my handkerchief,
and took the red car down Melrose.