“Why not?” said Briggs. “I’ll have the blotter report on your brother’s desk when he comes in. He likes a good read with his first cup.”
“Thanks, Briggs,” I said and hung up.
My guess was that the.38 I’d thrown on Adam Place’s bed was already on the desk of a cop in Culver City. I had the Wheatena and talked to the counter woman, whose name was Rose. I’d read her wrong. She wasn’t simple and she wasn’t waiting for Jesus. She was waiting for Miles Anthony McCullough, waiting for someone to show photographs of her grandchildren to. I ate my Wheatena and looked at the kids. They were all cute and they all looked like Rose McCullough.
8
The coffee kept me awake till I hit Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house. I had trouble parking on Heliotrope, even with a car the size of my Crosley, but I managed to squeak into a space about two blocks away. The night light was on. I made it up to my room, kicked off my shoes, unzipped my windbreaker and placed it on one of my two kitchen chairs. My pants went on the other. My shirt had been through a tough day so, reluctant as I was, I retired it till I could find the time to wash it. My retired shirts made a small pile in the closet.
I checked the time on my Beech-Nut Gum wall clock and lay down on the mattress on the floor. I’d shave in the morning. I’d brush my teeth in the morning. I’d change my underwear in the morning. I’d become a better person in the morning. Right now I’d just lie there with the lights on and wait for Gunther to get back with Dali. That was my plan.
What was it the insurance man had said in Jeremy’s poem? “It’s nothing, just a shooting star.” I closed my eyes and saw the shooting star. Was I an insurance salesman or a poet at the window? I was asleep before I could think of an answer.
I dreamed of stone women crumbling in the sand, of mustaches without faces, of derby hats floating, eggs opening with something coming out that I didn’t want to see, of Gala’s clocks melting on Rose McCullough’s grill at the Victory Drugstore. Koko the Clown kept popping up from behind rocks and through holes in screaming birds. He grinned but refused to play a major role in the dreams.
When I opened my eyes, Dash the cat was sitting on my chest and Gunther Wherthman, hair neatly trimmed, in three-piece suit complete with pocket watch and chain and black shoes polished to look like glass, was sitting on the sofa. He had a fat leather briefcase in his lap.
“You were asleep when we came in,” he said.
I scratched Dash’s head, eased him away, sat up and tried to rejoin the ranks of the living. It was no use. I lay back down and took a shot at focusing on Mrs. Plaut’s pillow on the sofa, the pillow that had “God Bless Us Every One,” neatly embroidered on it in red.
“I have fed the cat,” Gunther said, handing me the briefcase and an envelope. I put the briefcase on the floor next to the bed, and tore off the end of the envelope. Five hundred-dollar bills drifted into my lap.
This held little interest for Gunther.
“Dali brought with him a rolled-up painting he says someone killed. It’s in my room. Toby, I spoke to him in both French and Spanish and find difficulty understanding him in either.”
“Where is he, Dali?” I asked.
“Downstairs, talking to Mrs. Plaut.”
“Shit,” I said, forcing myself up. “Where did he sleep?”
“He did not sleep. He says he takes little naps during the day. It gives him more dreams to work from.”
“He can have some of mine,” I said, looking around for my pants and, after several false starts, remembering they were draped over one of my two kitchen chairs. I shoved the five hundreds into a front pocket and struggled into the pants, while Gunther told me that Mrs. Plaut had invited us all to breakfast.
“That is why I had to wake you,” Gunther explained. “She insisted that you be down for breakfast quickly.”
I grabbed one of my not-too-frayed shirts from the closet and blundered my way out of the room and toward the bathroom, listening for voices and hearing none outside one inside my head I didn’t want to hear.
“I’ll be right down, Gunther,” I said. “And thanks for-”
“No,” he said as I leaned against the bathroom door. “I owe you much more than I am able to give. I am pleased that you continue to feel that you can both call upon and rely upon me in moments of crisis.”
And that I could. Gunther went down the stairs and I moved to the mirror. I had saved Gunther’s life once, a couple of years back. He’d been accused of murder and was close to going up for it. I had blundered into the real killer the way I’d just blundered into the bathroom, and Gunther and I had been friends and next door neighbors ever since. He had gotten me the room in Mrs. Plaut’s and for that I was forever perplexed.
I shaved without committing suicide, brushed my teeth by borrowing some of Mr. Hill’s Dr. Lyon’s Tooth Powder, ran my fingers through my hair and put on my shirt. The face in the mirror looked presentable: nose flat, face baked by the sun, black-graying hair with gray sideburns a little long and in need of a cut. The movies didn’t want me to star, but people sometimes needed someone who looked like me, sold his loyalty at a reasonable price, was willing to take a fall or two, could keep secrets large and small, and didn’t give up on a client-although Dali had sorely tried me on that one. I went back to my room, grabbed the briefcase, checked the bills in my pocket, and hurried downstairs to find my client.
I got down to Mrs. Plaut’s kitchen, just off of her sitting room. Gunther, Mrs. Plaut, and Dali looked up at me from the table. Mrs. Plaut was reading from her memoirs, which were stacked in front of her. Dali was dressed in a purple velvet suit and a black bow tie. Gunther looked happy to see me. In the sitting room, Mrs. Plaut’s bird chirped insanely.
“Apples Eisenhower,” said Mrs. Plaut, pointing to the dish of brown something in the middle of the table. “Since they were made with ingredients purchased with the aid of some of your ration coupons, I decided to overlook the fact that you did not return yesterday as you declared that you would.”
“I was busy finding corpses,” I said.
“It is delicious,” said Dali seriously, wiping his mustaches.
I sat in the fourth chair and helped myself to a bowl of Apples Eisenhower and a cup of coffee. The Apples Eisenhower weren’t bad, especially with cream supplied by Mrs. Plaut in a little blue porcelain pitcher.
Mrs. Plaut read from her memoirs, looking up from time to time for reaction from her honored guest. Dali listened intently and, when she caught his eyes, responded with an appreciative nod or an appropriate sound of approval.
Gunther and I ate and drank.
“Surrounded,” read Mrs. Plaut. “No moon. No swords. No guns other than Uncle Wiley’s Remington and the hand pistol Cousin Artemis had confiscated from the rebel soldier with the noticeable squint at Shiloh.”
“Surrounded,” Dali echoed. “Surrounded.”
He liked the word.
“Surrounded,” Mrs. Plaut agreed. “War cries and strange language came from the darkness. Aunt Althea began to pray and so did the woman named Mary Joan, who had joined them unbidden in St. Louis and who went on years later to marry a Sioux Indian named Victor or some such.”
“Victor,” said Dali, “an Indian named Victor?”
“Some such,” said Mrs. Plaut, looking back at her manuscript.
I ate another bowl of Apples Eisenhower.
“Well,” Mrs. Plaut went on. “It chanced that they were surrounded not by hostile Indians, but by some drunken members of the Pony Express who had wandered several hundred yards from their way station and were engaged in a jest. There was not much to do in way stations but drink, lie, and pester trekkers and Indians. The riders of the Pony Express were not the highest order of humanity, according to Uncle Wiley. One of them, not on the night of which I write, but on another much earlier, mistook or claimed to mistake Cousin Arthur Gamble for a buxom female and attempted to take liberties.”
“Delightful,” said Dali, beaming.
“Cousin Arthur Gamble on that occasion shot the Pony Express rider and was recruited to take his place on
