“We’ll give it back when you leave. Be careful on the road. It twists upward. We’ll give you twenty minutes to make it to the top. They’ll let us know when you arrive. Don’t stop, and don’t get out of the car.”
I went up the road with my lights on past the white house, where the other man watched me. The guy I had talked to stood in the road following my progress until I went out of sight around a curve more than 100 yards away.
A faint light glittered high above me out of the front of my window. It was to the right, and it looked very far. It might be the Hearst ranch.
I saw some kind of animal after two miles, but I couldn’t make it out clearly. It was big and near the road. Bullet holes or not I rolled up the windows. My fears of a wild death were increasing. Now I could be eaten by an ape in Southern California.
When I got to the house, someone was there to meet me. He was built and dressed like the guys at the gate. They seemed to be a fraternity of former heavyweight champions. He motioned me to park and led me up a flight of stone steps and past nude statues. At the top of the steps we took a right and stopped in front of a huge house.
“Big place,” I said.
“This is one of the guest houses,” my guide said.
He knocked and went in. A group of people were sitting around a blazing fire in a big central room. One of them, a beautiful blonde who I should have recognized from some picture, said Gable was either in the big house or at the pool.
My guide led me out. We went into a courtyard and faced a building that looked like my dreams of a Gothic castle.
We went in, stepping over an inlaid tile floor and into a room as high as a cathedral. No one was in the room, which held tapestries on each wall. The tapestries, six of them, were more than twenty feet high and a few feet more than that across. There were lounges around the room and a lot of chairs, but no people.
A woman in a dark uniform appeared from nowhere, and my guide whispered to her and disappeared the way he had come. The woman motioned to me, and I followed her to a dark wood paneled wall which concealed a door.
“Is Baron Frankenstein home?” I asked her softly.
She didn’t even acknowledge that I had spoken. We stepped into a high ceilinged room with cathedral-like windows and wooden church seats around the walls. A bunch of flags stuck out of the wall above. There was a long table stretching across the room with about thirty big, dark and ancient wooden chairs. We had walked out of Castle Frankenstein into a banquet set for The Crusades. Only one thing ruined the impression.
An old man in a dark suit sat at the center of the table. He had a hamburger in front of him and he was pouring a glob of Heinz ketchup on it. He didn’t look up as we passed.
“Servants get to use the main room before supper?” I whispered to the hurrying lady in front of me.
“That,” she said, “was Mr. Hearst. He’s having a snack before the main meal.”
I tried to turn back and get a look at the old man, but the woman was hurrying along in front of me. I never got a look at her face. We went outside, down a path, and then into a building.
It was the fanciest damn indoor pool I’ve ever seen. It must have been forty yards long and tiled from ceiling to pool bottom. The place radiated blue and was pleasantly warm. A few people were in the water. One of them inched his way toward me and pulled himself out of the pool.
It was Clark Gable. He picked up a towel and dried his hands as he stepped forward and smiled. He took my hand.
“Toby Peters, isn’t it? Good to meet you.”
“Good to meet you,” I said. He went to a bench against the wall, and I followed him as he continued to dry himself.
“Want to take a swim before we talk?” he asked. I said I didn’t swim.
“I don’t either,” he said, running the towel over his hair. “Not more than a few strokes. And this damn pool is over my head. There’s no shallow end. There’s an outdoor pool with a shallow end on the other side of the house, but it’s too cold tonight to go out.”
I tried to look sympathetic, and he gave me a wry smile I recognized. It was his Academy Award smile.
“You don’t think much of all this, do you, Peters?” he said, indicating that he meant the whole Hearst setup.
“Does it matter?” I said.
“Sure,” he said, working on his feet.
“I’m impressed,” I said. “I’m a two-buck private investigator with two suits and a one-room shack in Los Angeles. This man could buy a whole damn city.”
“Maybe more,” Gable added. “This is probably the most expensive toy anyone ever had. It’s filled with enough to stock ten museums. Hearst is a collector, of things and people.”
“And you’re one of them?” I asked.
“No,” he laughed. “Mostly, I’m a friend of a friend of Mr. Hearst. I’ve done some work with Marion Davies. She invited me up for the weekend. As rich as Mr. Hearst is, I don’t think he could afford me. He could have a few years ago, though. Now, would you like a drink, or do you want to talk here? I’m through here, and I’ll be getting dressed for dinner in a little while.”
I said I’d talk here. I tried not to watch the people diving in the pool from what looked like a marble balcony.
“Shoot,” said Gable with a wave of his hand.
“You saw two midgets arguing at the studio?”
“Right.” He said looking at me the way he looked at Thomas Mitchell in Gone With the Wind. “One of them is dead-murdered, I hear.”
“Yes. Did the police talk to you about that?”
“For a few minutes on the phone. I was on my way up here. They said they could get the details from Vic Fleming and another witness.”
“Did you see that other witness?” I asked. “A big, muscular guy?”
“Nope,” said Gable. “Just the two little fellas going at it. Vic wanted to hurry on so we didn’t see very much.”
“Describe what you did see.”
He described the costumes of the two little men and added that he and Fleming had been too far away to hear their words or tell me if either of them had an accent. “I do remember that the shorter of the two seemed to be getting the worst of it from the one in the uniform,” said Gable.
Gunther Wherthman had said one of the reasons Cash had hated him was that he was bigger than Cash. Now Gable was telling me that Cash was taller than the man he was arguing with.
“Wait, are you sure the Munchkin in uniform-the one with the feather in his hat and the yellow beard-was taller than the other one?” I asked slowly. “You said you weren’t very close.”
“He was taller,” said Gable confidently. “I may not be a great judge of character, but I’ll put money on my judgment of perspective.”
“You’d testify to that?” I asked.
“If it came to it,” he said. “Is it important?”
“You may have just saved the life of one tiny Swiss translator.”
“Glad to do it,” he beamed. “Say, how’d you like to stay for dinner and the movie? There’s a movie here every night in the theater.”
“He has a theater, too?” My eyes wandered around the pool house again, and to the beautiful swimmers in the water. I was definitely out of my league. “Thanks just the same,” I said, standing up, “but I’ve got to head back to L.A.”
He stood with me, shook my hand, and patted me on the back.
“Happy I could help, Peters,” he said. The towel was around his neck and he was gripping it in both hands. His dark hair fell over his brow. All he needed was Victor Fleming and a camera crew.
The uniformed woman without a face led me around the house instead of through it and back to the man who had met me at my car. She turned and walked away.
