It all started on a Friday in mid-December 1942. A woman who identified herself as Lorna Bartholomew called. Behind her a dog was yapping. The woman said, “Miguelito, be quiet,” asked me if I was free to come to San Francisco immediately to take on an “assignment.” The dog kept yapping.
It was raining in Los Angeles when she called. I’d been sitting in my office in the Farraday Building, looking out the window, feeling sorry for myself. Before the war I used to sail paper airplanes out the window on rainy days and watch them fight the elements on their way to the alleyway six floors below. But paper was scarce now. Kids collected it, tied it in bundles, and brought it to school in their wagons to contribute to the war effort. SAVE WASTE PAPER a khaki-uniformed soldier on a billboard told us as we drove down Wilshire. The soldier on the billboard had his arm around a little boy whose wagon was piled high with old copies of Collier’s and the L.A. Times.
“Just one for old times,” I told Dash the cat, who sat on my desk licking the waxed paper of the dime taco from Manny’s we had just shared for early lunch. Dash was a big orange beast with a piece of his left ear missing and one eye that didn’t want to work with the other one. He’s been with me a few months now. I never thought of him as mine. I didn’t want to own a cat. I didn’t mind sharing my milk and Wheaties and cheap tacos with him, but I didn’t want responsibility for his happiness. I’ll give Dash credit. He didn’t push me. I’d met Dash on a case. He more or less saved my life.
“Watch,” I said, folding an ad I’d received the day before from a pair of optometrist brothers named Irick in Glendale who promised me better eyesight with their new lightweight glasses. I held up the work of aeronautic art for Dash’s opinion.
Dash stopped licking his paw and watched me open the window, letting in the sounds of rain and traffic on Hoover. He knew something big was up. As I sailed the plane into the rain, Dash leaped to the windowsill. His head moved and at least one of his eyes was fixed on the plane, which swayed, looped, and glided down. Dash purred and watched.
“Pretty good, huh?” I said.
The plane landed somewhere beyond the junked Chevy. An alcoholic named Pettigrew usually slept in the Chevy, but he had gone south to Mexico for the winter.
Anyway, that plane going out the window was the highlight of my week till the phone call came.
Sheldon Minck, who rented me the one-window broom closet I called an office, had stuck his head in to announce the call. Sheldon was working on a little boy when the call came. Sheldon is a dentist. If I were really the civic-minded knight I want people to think I am, I would have spent my days in front of the outer door of our offices warning away the unwary, telling them to flee with their hands held tightly over their mouths to preserve whatever remained of the enamel they prized. But the rent was low, and I couldn’t spend my life protecting an unwary public from the unsanitary creatures who lurked in thousands of offices throughout downtown Los Angeles with certificates on their walls claiming they were qualified to pull teeth, collect money from insurance companies, make you a star, tell your fortune, take your picture, find you an orange grove in Lompoc you could turn into a gold mine, or locate your lost grandmother.
Shelly, his bald head gleaming with sweat, his chubby cheeks bouncing, his Dr. Pepper-bottle-bottom glasses slipping on his nose, opened the door and pointed his cigar at me with one hand and reached over to hand me the phone with his other. We’d gotten rid of one phone in the office. Cutting overhead.
“For you,” he said. “Long distance. Frisco.”
“Thanks,” I said, taking the phone and waiting for him to back out of the room.
Shelly brushed an ash from his not very white smock and stood watching as I took the receiver.
“You have a patient, Shel,” I said, putting my hand over the mouthpiece.
“A kid,” said Sheldon, pursing his lips. “He can wait.”
Dash was still standing on the windowsill, hoping for another plane.
“I’d like some privacy, Shel,” I said.
“Privacy,” he said with a smirk to the cat, who ignored him. “Big deals going on here. Do I tell you not to come into my office when I’m working on a patient?”
“No,” I admitted.
“Okay,” he said. Behind him the kid in the chair shifted. Shelly turned, afraid that this one would get away. “I thought we were partners.”
“We’re not partners, Sheldon. I rent a closet from you.”
“Friends, then.” He pushed his glasses back and looked over his shoulder at the kid.
“Something like that,” I conceded.
Sheldon nodded, accepting the concession. “Can I tell you something? I don’t like the cat.”
“Sheldon, I’ve got a long-distance phone call,” I reminded him.
“I know,” he said. “I answered it. I don’t like any cats. I like dogs less. Can’t get their teeth clean no matter what …”
Something lit up within Sheldon Minck, D.D.S. “You know something. That gives me an idea.”
“I’m pleased, Shel,” I said. “Now can you …?”
“I can’t talk anymore, Toby. I’ve got a patient and an idea.” He departed, closing the door behind him.
“Mr. Peters?” the woman’s voice said. “Are you there?”
“Right,” I said, looking up at the cracked ceiling. “I’m sorry. Things are busy here today.”
Then she told me about the San Francisco job and asked if I could be there fast. Dash heard the dog barking and aimed a sincere hiss in the direction of the phone.
“I’ll check my calendar,” I said, and I did. I put the phone down and looked up at a three-year-old Sinclair Gas calendar my mechanic, No-Neck Arnie, had given me. It was turned to March 1939. Dash went for the downed phone and spat into it, at the dog. I pushed him away and picked up the phone again. “I can get away, but I’ll have to do some calls and postpone a few cases. You’ll have to cover all expenses and twenty-five dollars a day.”
“I …” she began.
“Make that twenty dollars a day,” I amended. “I’m giving pre-Christmas discounts, but I’ll need a fifty-dollar retainer.”
“That will be fine,” she said. “Would you like to know what this is about?”
It’s about twenty a day to a guy with fourteen bucks left, a guy who’s seriously been considering a security job at Lockheed, I thought.
“Of course,” I said.
“When can you get here?” she asked. “Pardon me.… Miguelito, be quiet.” Miguelito ignored her.
“Sunday morning,” I answered. “Where is ‘here’?”
“Oh,” she said, and put her hand over her mouthpiece. It was my turn to wait. The rain was still coming down hard and gray. This time I looked up at the photograph of me, my brother Phil, my father, and our dog, Kaiser Wilhelm. I was ten in that picture. Phil was fifteen. My mother was dead. My father soon would be. No one knows what happened to Kaiser Wilhelm.
“The San Francisco Metropolitan Opera Building,” she said. “Second floor. Main offices. Will ten o’clock be possible?”
“Inevitable,” I said.
“It involves a rather delicate matter,” she said softly. Someone interrupted her. There was a man’s voice in the background. I couldn’t make out the words. “Maestro Stokowski would like to provide the details himself when you arrive.”
“Maestro Stokowski,” I repeated. “Leopold Stokowski?”
“Yes.”
“Ten, Sunday morning,” I said. “I’ll be there. I’d like the advance in cash when I get there. Now, give me a phone number I can check to be sure this isn’t a bad joke. We get those in my business.”
“Yes, of course.” She gave me a number in San Francisco. I wrote it down. It’s hard to write on waxed paper, but I’ve had experience.
I hung up first and looked at Dash.
“Want to go to San Francisco?” I asked.
He ignored me. I took it as enthusiastic agreement. I told him it might be better if he stayed home and slept.
I was back in business. I made a call to my ex-wife, Anne, to let her know I would be out of town for a while. She wasn’t home. I called her at the travel agency in Beverly Hills where she’d recently gotten a job. Anne has been up and down with me, and then later with her second and now deceased husband, Ralph Howard. Howard had lived high and left her nothing much. At the age of forty Anne had pulled herself together, taken a couple of deep breaths, put on her makeup, and gone back to work. Her airline experience landed her the travel job. The woman who answered the phone said there was no Anne Peters working at the Intercontinental Travel Agency.
“How about Anne Howard?” I said.
“I think you may want Anne Mitzen,” the woman suggested.
“Her maiden name was Mitzenmacher,” I supplied.
“Really?” the woman said with no real interest.
“I used to be married to her,” I explained.
“Fascinating,” she said. “I’ll get her.”
Another pause. I heard the kid in Shelly’s chair let out a small squeal. I tried to ignore it. Anne came on the line.
“Toby. How did you find me?”
“I’m a detective.” I reminded her.
“Don’t call me here again.”
“You are voluptuous,” I said.
“Toby.” There was a warning in her voice.
Anne is a dark beauty, full bodied, with soft skin. She’d walked out on me a little over five years earlier when it was clear that I would never grow up and didn’t want to. We had no kids and lots of regrets.
“I’ve got a job in San Francisco,” I said. “Client’s Leopold Stokowski.”
Long pause while she decided whether to play along for a few more seconds, take me seriously, or just hang up.
“Leopold Stokowski,” she repeated.
“You know, the conductor. The one on NBC. Did the dinosaur bit in Fantasia? We saw him in that movie A Hundred Men and a Girl.”
“I know who he is, Toby,” she said. “You did not see that movie with me. We were divorced when that movie came out. It must have been someone else.”
“There is no one else.”
“Have a good trip,” she said. “Try not to call me when you get back.”
“I thought we were friends again,” I said. Dash meowed and licked his lips, then he pushed his nose under my hand to get at the waxed paper.
“Let’s put it this way,” she said. “When I need your company, I’ll call you.”
“You’re going with someone.”
“Detective,” she said.
“He’s a detective?”
“No,” she said with a sigh. “You’re the detective. You figured it out Congratulations. I’ve got to get back to work.”
“Who is he?”
“Good-bye, Toby. Take care of yourself.”
She hung up. I considered calling her back but patted Dash’s head instead and got up. I came around the desk with the phone in hand and Dash at my feet. When I opened the door to Shelly’s office, he was talking to the wide-eyed kid in the chair. The kid couldn’t have been more than nine or ten. In Shelly’s hand was a slightly rusted tool that looked like pliers with vampire teeth.
“Dogs,” Shelly was saying to the kid. “You got a dog?”
The kid didn’t have a dog. He had a cheek full of cotton and a frightened look in his eyes but no dog. He shook his head. No dog.
“Shel.” I tried to interrupt, but he was pursuing a different voice inside his head.
“Know anyone who has a dog?” he asked the kid.
The kid thought furiously. His eyes darted back and forth. He wanted to give this man with pain in his hand the answer he wanted.
“My Aund Saurah,” the kid mumbled. “She hah a gog. Barry.”
“How’s his breath?” asked Shelly, reaching over to open the boy’s mouth for a close look.
“Breaff?” the kid said with Shelly’s finger in his mouth.
“Smells like a sewer, right?” asked Shelly.
The kid shook his head in agreement.
“Thought so,” said Shelly, standing straight and tapping the pliers in his palm. “How much you think your Aunt Slush would pay for a pill, something she could put in Harry’s food to make his breath smell good.”
“Aunt Saurah and Barry,” the boy corrected cautiously through a mass of cotton.
“That’s a non sequitur,” said Shelly, pleased with himself. He looked at me for vocabulary credits. I smiled. I wanted something from Shelly.
“Barry bides,” the kid said.
“So, he bites,” responded Shelly, undeterred. “Is that any reason he should be allowed to smell like a cow’s ass?”
“Sounds like a great idea to me, Shel,” I said, trying to draw his attention. “I think you just got it from me.”
He woke from his dream of a multimillion-dollar dog breath fortune. “I’ve been thinking about this for years,” he insisted, pointing the pliers at me.
“Am I done?” asked the kid, pulling cotton from his mouth and throwing the bloody mess in the spit sink.
“Yeah, sure,” said Shelly absently.
The kid threw off the dirty towel around his neck, jumped from the chair, and ran out the door.
“I’m going to San Francisco, Shel,” I said. “Job for the Opera.”
“Mildred says she likes opera.” He looked past me at the door as if his wife, Mildred, would come bursting in, demanding that he clean up the mess. A few months earlier Mildred had run off with a Peter Lorre impersonator. I’d helped Shelly get her back and get her off a murder charge when the guy was killed. I thought Shelly was better off without her, but he still worshipped the ground she spat on.
“Maybe Mildred really likes opera,” I said.
Shelly grunted. “I’ve got this chemical somewhere,” he said, turning from me and walking to one of his grime-covered cabinets. “Salesman gave it to me. If it works on people, why not animals?”
“I need twenty bucks, Shel,” I said.
He stopped in front of the cabinet, adjusted his glasses and cigar, and looked at me again.
“Five minutes ago we were barely acquainted. Now you want twenty bucks and we’re friends.”
“I didn’t say we weren’t friends. I said we weren’t partners.”
“I like to think of us like … Cagney and Pat O’Brien in Crash Dive,” Shelly said.
“You’re a visionary, Shel. I’ll get an advance in San Francisco and send it back to you Monday.”
Dash had jumped into the warm spot of the chair the little boy had vacated.
“No you won’t. You’ll forget. Someone will try to kill you or something and you’ll forget.” He pouted. “Money doesn’t come that easily, Toby. Here’s what that kid just paid me for pulling a tooth.”
He dug into his pocket, came up with a crumpled piece of newspaper. He put his cigar in his mouth and placed the pliers on top of the cabinet where he’d be sure to forget he’d left them and opened the piece of newspaper to reveal two quarters.
“Shel, I know you’ve got money, remember.”
“Twenty,” he said, thinking about it “In return for which you promise to give up all claim on my dog breath idea.”
“You got it,” I said.
He reached into his back pocket under his smock and came up with a wallet. He turned his back so I couldn’t see, fished out a twenty, returned the wallet to his pocket, and turned to hold out a crumpled bill.
“Just a loan,” he said.
“A loan,” I agreed, taking the bill and putting it in my pocket. Shelly turned to his cabinet and opened it.
“I’ll call,” I said, moving to the door.
Shelly grunted.
Before I left the Farraday Building, I went to the office of Jeremy Butler, poet and former pro wrestler, who had for years fought the blight of bums and dirt that threatened to return the Farraday to the jungle.
Jeremy still put in his hours, but since his marriage to Alice Pallas, who almost matched him in size and strength, the Farraday had ceased to be his child. Alice was, in fact, pregnant, a phenomenon of some discussion in the Farraday since Jeremy was sixty-one years old and Alice, though she would not reveal her age, was certainly well over forty-five. I had attempted during one recent phone call to inspire Anne with Alice’s example. Anne had hung up on me. Neither Alice nor Jeremy were in their office-apartment. It was still raining, but not hard, when I stepped out on Hoover and headed for No-Neck Arnie’s garage on Ninth, where I parked my Crosley.
I made a deal with Arnie for a tankful and a ten-gallon can of gas for the trunk. It was black market, but this was an emergency. The gas would get me to San Francisco and back. Arnie opened the hood and gave the Crosley the okay for the trip. I gave him ten bucks. That left me twenty-four bucks.
The rain had stopped but the sky was still gray and grumbling when I left Dash in the car while I bought a wool sports jacket with zipper pockets at Hy’s for Him, the Beverly Boulevard branch, for $4.99 plus tax. I picked up a pair of hot dogs from a stand shaped like a hot dog, ate one-dripping a minimum of mustard on the seat-and gave the other to Oash, who tore into it.
Ten minutes later I was parked in front of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house on Heliotrope. I went up the steps to greet my diminutive ancient landlady, who sat on a wicker chair, pencil in hand, writing on a lined pad. I had no doubt that the tome on which she labored was the massive history of the Plaut clan. It had become my responsibility to read and critique the manuscript; Mrs. Plaut was under the impression that I was alternately an exterminator and an editor. It was easier to live with Mrs. Plaut’s delusions than to try to alter them. Mrs. Plaut had decided long before I met her not to accommodate herself to reality. All in all, she probably had the right idea. She looked up at me, down at Dash, and into the sky.
“Mr. Peelers,” she said. “Rain and cats.”
“Rain and cats,” I agreed, taking a few steps across the porch. My goal was simple. Get to my room. Pack my few belongings, say good-bye to Gunther Wherthman if he was home-or leave him a note-and then head for San Francisco with Dash.
“Inspiring,” she said with a deep sigh, tucking her pencil behind her ear, placing her pad of paper on the porch swing, and folding her hands on her flower-print dress. “I do not want your cat to eat my bird.”
“He won’t,” I said.
“If your cat eats my bird, or attempts an assault upon my bird, I shall be forced to take the Mister’s gun and demise him.” She looked down at Dash with a smile.
“We understand,” I said.
“No, Mr. Peelers,” she corrected. “You understand and it is your responsibility. The cat understands very little. The cat is only a bit less dim than the bird.”
“I’m going to San Francisco on business,” I said. “I’ll be gone for a while.”
She tilted her head toward me and adjusted her hearing aid.
“To San Francisco,” she repeated. “I was in San Francisco during the great earthquake. Mr. Spencer Tracy and Miss Jeanette MacDonald did not have the facts straight in their film. It was not Mrs. O’Leary’s cow that started the earthquake. Mrs. O’Leary’s cow started the fire in Chicago at an earlier time. But that is neither here nor there. Your Number Nine sugar stamp is good for three pounds till Tuesday. I assume you will have no use for it”
“I’ll give it to you,” I said, opening the door.
“I’ll take it,” she said. “And I will make Empire cookies or one of the cakes from Miss Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings’ new Cross Creek Cookery book, which Mr. Hill gave me for my birthday. Some people remember birthdays.”
“Mrs. Plaut” I said, letting Dash move in ahead of me. “Mister Wherthman and I gave you a new Aivin radio with headphones for your birthday.” Mrs. Plaut’s date of birth varied with her moods and memory. She had at least two birthdays each year, one in the spring and one at random times in the fall or winter. Her most recent birthday had been November 14, which, coincidentally, is my birthday.
“Be that as it may be. You will please take my recently finished chapter and place it in my hands upon your return with beneficial comments and criticism,” she said. “That will be your part of the bargain.”
I wasn’t sure what her part of the bargain was, but I nodded in agreement. I hurried up the stairs and moved past the room of Mr. Hill the postman, past my own room, to the room of Gunther Wherthman.
Gunther is a little person, three feet of Swiss dignity. He is my best friend. I knocked. No answer. Gunther usually worked in his room, translating a variety of languages into English. Dash and I went into my room. It wasn’t much but I liked it. I had a hot plate in the corner, a sink, a small refrigerator, some dishes, a table and three chairs, a rug, a bed with a purple blanket made by Mrs. Plaut that said GOD BLESS US EVERY ONE in pink stitching, and a sofa with little doilies on the arms that I was afraid to touch. On my wall was a Beech-Nut Gum wall clock that was never more than five minutes off.
I wrote a note to Gunther telling him I was going and asking him to take care of Dash and wind the clock. I knew Gunther wouldn’t mind. Dash reminded him of a cat he’d had as a kid in Bern.
I packed what I had clean, which wasn’t much. My one suit was slightly crumpled and not too dirty. I had a white shirt I’d only worn twice since the last washing, and three ties, all dark, one with a scorch mark on it that might be taken for a Scottish crest by a drunk.
I gave Dash some water. Gunther had told me not to give Dash milk. Milk, he said, was bad for cats. Gunther was usually right. I supposed it was some truth known only to Swiss midgets. I don’t know what milk does to people, but I had enough left in the refrigerator for a bowl of cereal. I pulled out what was left of my Kellogg’s Variety Package. It was a toss-up between Pep and Krumbles. I took the Krumbles.
I considered getting the mattress off the floor and back on the bed. I can’t sleep in a real bed. Too soft. Bad back. I asked Dash’s advice. He had none. I pulled the mattress up on the bed and checked the clock on the wall. It was getting late.
On my way out, I gave Mrs. Plaut my sugar stamps and she gave me her manuscript chapter, reminding me to guard it with my life.
“The chapter deals with my Cousin Pyle and his ilk,” she said. “Therefore, it is especially precious.”
She also warned me about loose women, cold weather, and something that sounded like “Crolly Beans.”
The sun came through the clouds low on the horizon as I hit Sunset and headed for the highway and San Francisco.