To Catch a Spy (2 page)

I had been lying on the mattress on the floor, wearing my boxer shorts and a bleary, unshaven look of semi-confusion on my battered face. I’m no beauty. My nose is almost flat, my hair is dark but showing more than a little gray. I’m compact, meaning I’m somewhere between five-eight and five-ten depending on where I measure myself. I look like a washed-up boxer who had ten too many fights. In my profession, private investigator, the look was perfect.

I had dressed quickly, rolled the mattress back on the bed, put on clean if slightly creased pants, and hurried to the only washroom on the floor to wash and shave. The other residents of Mrs. Plaut’s were already downstairs, awaiting breakfast and me. Mrs. Plaut always waited until we were all seated in her small dining room before serving.

At breakfast that morning, Mrs. Plaut had handed out invitations like summonses. The first went to my closest friend, Gunther Wherthman, the less-than-four-foot-tall Swiss little person, who had once been in the circus and had appeared in
The Wizard of Oz.
Gunther made his living by translating documents, books, and articles from more than a dozen languages for publishers and the U.S. government. He took the invitation with a nod of his head and an adjustment of his perfectly pressed three-piece suit. Gunther wore a suit and tie and carefully polished shoes every day even though he worked at the desk in his room.

Other invitations were handed to Emma Simcox, a good-looking, lean woman in her forties, who worked in the office at the May Company. According to Mrs. Plaut, Miss Simcox was her grandniece. Mrs. Plaut’s pallor was the color of mountain snow. Emma Simcox was definitely a light-skinned Negro. There was no sign of family resemblance, but Miss Simcox did call Mrs. Plaut “Aunt Irene.”

Ben Bidwell, who smiled when he took the invitation, was a car salesman at Mad Jack’s in Venice. He was about fifty, skinny, dark-haired, and one-armed. The lost arm went missing somewhere at Verdun. Emma Simcox was quiet and shy. Bidwell was either bouncy and full of bad jokes or so depressed that he couldn’t talk.

We already had the beginning of a great New Year’s Eve party.

Breakfast, as I recall, had consisted of coffee, orange juice, Eggs Garfield Surprise, and Spam covered with a pasty, gray layer of sauce. No one asked what was in the Eggs Garfield Surprise. No one wanted to know. It didn’t taste bad.

Throughout our discussion of pork stamps, Mrs. Plaut’s bird had squawked, making conversation just a little bit more difficult. Mrs. Plaut had not heard the bird, whose wide variety of screeches and sounds that resembled words could be heard throughout the house when she left her door open. She changed its name regularly, not because she kept forgetting but because, as she said so pithily, “Variety is the spite of life.”

The bird’s current name was Pistolero.

I had delivered the invitations dutifully to everyone, including my brother, Phil, and his family; my office landlord and friend, the poet Jeremy Butler and his wife, Alice Pallice Butler; my mechanic, No-Neck Arnie; Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., inside of whose office at the Farraday Building I had my closet-with-a-window that served as my working address; Violet Gonsenelli, Shelly’s secretary-receptionist; and Juanita, the bespangled sixty-plus-year-old soothsayer with a never-to-be-lost Bronx accent.

It promised to be quite a party.

For the next two weeks I went to my office, listened to Shelly tell me about his new plan to use high-speed water jets to clean teeth “just like fire hoses,” and avoided making bets on any fights with Violet, whose husband, Rocky, was a promising middleweight whose career had been interrupted by the war. Rocky was serving somewhere in the Pacific. I had some minor work done on my Crosley by No-Neck Arnie, whose son was in uniform somewhere in Italy.

I had lunch almost every day at Manny’s Tacos on the corner, listening to poetry Jeremy had written and doing my best to avoid Juanita, who always had something important to tell me about my future. Juanita was usually right, but what she told me never made much sense until after it happened.

As for work, I had one job for a week filling in at night for the house detective at the Roosevelt Hotel, and I did four days at Hy’s For Him clothing store on Melrose. Someone had been getting away with suits again. I basically sat in my Crosley for hours outside of Hy’s and tailed whoever came out looking bulky or carrying something that could hold a passable gabardine jacket. It took three days. The thief was one of Hy’s new salesmen, a wounded war vet named Sidney, who walked with a limp and was reselling Hy’s inventory to pay for a morphine habit he had picked up in the army.

Then came the day before the new year began. I had been at my office with nothing much to do except listen to the arguments of a trio of panhandlers who did something like living in the small, square, cluttered concrete lot five stories down below my open window. I looked at the photograph on the wall across from my desk. It wasn’t far away. There was just enough room in the former storage room for my desk and two chairs for drop-ins or the occasional clients I was forced to meet here instead of someplace more impressive.

The photo on the wall was of me, my father in the middle, and my brother, Phil. Phil looked older than his fourteen years. I looked like a kid with a goofy smile who was not destined to grow up beautiful. At our feet was our German shepherd, Kaiser Wilhelm. My father, in his grocer’s apron, wore a sad smile as he clutched his sons to him. My mother wasn’t in the picture. She had died giving birth to me, which caused a lifelong resentment from my brother, who was now a Los Angeles police lieutenant.

On the wall to my left was a large painting, a woman holding two babies and looking down lovingly at them. The traditional-looking painting had been a gift from Salvador Dalí, a former client. I seldom told people the painting was by Dalí, and I only told those who asked and who I knew wouldn’t believe me when I told them.

The
Los Angeles Times
lay open in front of me. Army bombers were hitting Jap bases in the Marshall Islands, particularly Kwaja. In Italy, the Fifth Army was on the Casino Road and battling in San Vittorio. They were on the way to Rome. Inevitably, but at a price, they would get there in a few weeks.

Mrs. Plaut had told me to dress “nicely” for the party, which was why, although I needed the money, I took my pay from Hy in the form of a lightweight gray seersucker. I called Anita to tell her I’d be picking her up at seven-thirty and told her about my new suit.

“What color?” she asked.

“Gray, seersucker.”

“Let Gunther pick out your tie,” she said.

I was going to anyway, but I said, “Okay.”

I had known Anita since high school, had taken her to the prom, and had lost track of her for more than two decades, a marriage and divorce for each of us, a daughter for her. I had run into her at the Regal drugstore, where she worked behind the counter. We were comfortable together right away.

Anita was nothing like my ex-wife, Anne, who had left me because she wanted a husband not a kid who kept aging. Anne was a few years younger than me, with a beautiful dark face and full body and more style than I had ever deserved. She was married now to a B-movie star. I actually liked him. Anita was thin, blonde, and good-looking, particularly when she tried and wasn’t worn out from a day of dishing out burgers, Cokes, and coleslaw.

I decided to reread the funnies and was just moving from “Brick Bradford” to “The Little King” when the phone call came through.

“There’s a guy on the phone,” Violet said. “Says he has to talk to you. Didn’t give his name but did a rotten imitation of Cary Grant. Almost as bad as Dr. Minck’s.”

I picked up the phone.

“Toby Peters,” I said.

“Cary Grant,” he said. “A former client of yours, Peter Lorre, told me you’d be the right person to handle a delicate job.”

“Peter Lorre,” I said.

“Yes, I did
Arsenic and Old Lace
with him about a year ago. He mentioned your name. I asked some questions and here I am.”

“And you’re Cary Grant?”

“Born Archibald Alexander Leach in Bristol, England. Became a U.S. citizen two years ago and am now officially Cary Grant and in need of some very confidential help from a reliable investigator.”

“Okay,” I said. “Let’s meet.”

“How about tomorrow?” he said. “My wife’s throwing a New Year’s party tonight. I think it would be better if I came to your office. I don’t want Barbara, my wife, knowing about this.”

“Name the time,” I said.

“How does eleven in the morning suit you?” he asked. “It will give us both plenty of time to sleep. I know I’ll need it. My wife’s parties go on most of the night.”

“You have my address?” I asked.

“Yes.”

“My office is modest,” I said.

“That sounds like what I need. See you tomorrow.”

He hung up. That was how it started.

CHAPTER

2

I was alone in my office off of Shelly Minck’s dental chamber of mayhem. I had left the lights on and the doors open for Grant. There wasn’t much going on in the Farraday on New Year’s Day. I had taken the straining elevator up the five flights, listening to its echo below. The building lights weren’t on, but there was enough light coming through the skylights in the ceiling to cast impressive late morning shadows.

The Farraday was, thanks to Jeremy Butler, always clean and smelling of Lysol, one of my favorite scents. The turn-of-the-century ironwork of the railings, stairwell, and painfully slow elevator created dark, intricate patterns that kaleidoscoped as I moved upward.

Jeremy and his family lived in converted offices on the seventh floor of the Farraday. It wasn’t that they couldn’t afford more. Jeremy had property on both sides of the hills: two one-story courtyard apartments, a small office building in North Hollywood, and others he didn’t talk about much.

I had pushed open the doors of the elevator, listening first to the creaking echo and then to my footsteps as I moved toward my office. I heard something and looked down over the railing.

“Toby?” came a voice from below.

“Jeremy?” I answered. Our voices echoed.

Below me, Jeremy Butler came out of the shadows. He carried a familiar mop and bucket.

Jeremy and his wife, Alice, had left Mrs. Plaut’s party early, just minutes after midnight. Jeremy had carried their sleeping two-year-old, Natasha, a cherubic kid with dark curly ringlets who looked nothing like either of her parents.

“They got in,” Jeremy called.

I knew who “they” were—the homeless, the wandering alcoholics, the people who cruised Main and Hoover occasionally asking for a handout, usually on their way to or from one of the small parks near downtown.

“How bad?” I asked.

“Not too bad,” Jeremy said.

He was big enough and strong enough even at age of sixty-one to heave a dozen intruders into the New Year with one hand. But that wasn’t Jeremy.

“We endure,” he said, looking around so that I saw the sun glinting off the top of his bald head. “Your client will be here soon?”

I had told Jeremy the night before that I had a client coming and had asked him to leave the front door open.

“Soon,” I said.

“After Alice and Natasha went to bed this morning, I wrote a new poem.”

“I’d like to hear it,” I said.

“I’ll be up in a few minutes,” he said before I could ask him to wait until Cary Grant had come and gone. But when the muse hit Jeremy, he wanted to share his creations with Alice and me. My knowledge and appreciation of poetry was slender, but I was a good audience. A significant part of my business was knowing how to be a good audience.

I turned and went to the pebbled glass door on which was lettered in gold: “Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., S.V.U., L.U., Dentist.” In smaller letters below this was “Toby Peters, Confidential Investigations.” The “Confidential Investigations” had been Violet Gonsenelli’s idea.

“Class,” she said. “Distinguishes you from the crowd.”

I went into the small waiting-reception room, turned on the lights, and went into Shelly’s office. When I hit the switch there, I was greeted by a surprise. The room, tools, dental chair, and metal table were sparkling clean. There were no dirty dishes and discarded instruments of torment piled in the sink against the wall. The garbage can was empty, not a single two-day-old wad of bloody cotton.

This should have been a warning. Instead I felt a tinge of relief. Cary Grant wouldn’t be walking into the Spanish Inquisitor’s dungeon.

My office was open. I went to the window, raised it, then turned on the fan on my desk and sat. I didn’t bother to look at my father’s watch. I had a wind-up clock on my desk, but it had run down and I liked it better that way. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to know the time. What I didn’t want was to listen to each second of time ticking away. I preferred to check other people’s clocks and watches.

I knew it was about eleven o’clock. I had looked at the clock in the window of Vitterman’s jewelry store on Hoover after I had parked the Crosley.

The New Year’s party had been less than riotous. My sister-in-law, Ruth, had been too sick to come. She had been getting worse over the last few months. So, my brother, Phil, hadn’t shown up. Shelly had come alone, still pining for his wife, Mildred, who had left him, taking everything that wasn’t welded to the floor. Actually, she had taken very little. Shelly had been booted out of their house. In his place there was a gaffer from RKO. The gaffer was big, brawny, and ugly. Mildred was no prize in looks or personality either. Yet Shelly still longed for her and the bad old days. Shelly had gotten mildly drunk on Mrs. Plaut’s special brew of unidentified alcohol-and-fruit punch.

Gunther had drunk one cup of the brew and eaten one of Mrs. P’s famous Zanzibar cookies made with coffee, flour, sugar, and whatever nuts or pieces of fruit might be handy. Niece Emma Simcox and tenant Ben Bidwell were there. Bidwell and Emma had danced to Mrs. Plaut’s records of Gene Austin, Russ Colombo, and Bing Crosby. Surprisingly, for a man with only one arm, Bidwell was a damn good dancer, inventive.