Shredded Wheat, and tried to decide what to do next.
The waitress, who recognized me from previous visits and probably thought I was a cop from down the street, served me quietly, but her radio blasted the news behind her. Corregidor was beating back the Japanese, and the Nazi drive into Russia was being stalled by bad weather and angry Russians. Dorothy Thompson was getting a divorce from Sinclair Lewis, and the Joe Louis/Buddy Baer rematch was definitely going to be covered on the radio. It was too hard to think, and I had too many things to think about. I needed a new notebook and some toothpaste. I picked up a can of Pepsodent tooth powder for thirty-nine cents and for another ten cents got Bob Hope’s book They Got Me Covered as a premium. I figured I’d go home, soak my knee in the bath, and let Hope cheer me up while I decided what to do next.
I got into my specked Buick, ground it into gear, and made for Wilshire, dropping the idea of Carmen and the Florentine Room. My intentions shifted. The next day was Sunday. Maybe I’d take my two nephews Nate and Davey to see Dumbo. At least that’s what I’d tell Phil and Ruth. I would really take them back to Billings’s adobe theater for Host to a Ghost and Revolt of the Zombies. I knew I could trust the boys to tell a lie for their dear old Uncle Toby.
On the way home the knee almost decided to stop peddling gas, so I detoured slightly to County Hospital and groaned into the emergency room, past the numb row of urban walking wounded to a woman in white inside a window-frame reception area. Only her head was showing. She was simply short but looked decapitated.
“I want to see Doctor Parry,” I told the disembodied head with its shock of stiff red hair. “He’s my nephew.”
“He is no longer at County,” she said. I hoped her hands would come up to get rid of the headless image, but they didn’t. “Joined the Army.”
Parry was not my nephew. He was a young resident whom I had attached myself to as my personal medic. I felt depressed as hell and in real need of that hot bath and Bob Hope. “If you’ll have a seat,” said the head, “someone else can take care of you.”
I looked around and estimated the wait before I received medical attention as four weeks to a decade. I could have bullied and tricked my way in, but I was too depressed.
“What is your emergency?” tried the head flatly.
“Mortality,” I said, dragging my foot behind me toward the door like the Universal Mummy.
Back at the boarding house, I pulled myself up the stairs trying to avoid Mrs. Plaut, who caught me before I made it to the top. She was as close to deaf as a human can be and still function, but she had heard me clumping.
“You had a call, Mr. Peelers,” she said. “Don’t remember who it was. I think he said Charlie McCarthy. Couldn’t be.” Her almost-eighty-year-old frame turned away. “And there’s no hot water. I forgot to pay the gas bill again. I’ll take care of it first thing Monday.”
“Thanks,” I said, completing my journey up the fourteen stairs, clutching my Walgreen’s bag to my bosom.
Gunther came into the hall and looked with some concern at my leg. “Phil,” I explained.
Gunther had encountered Phil before and needed no further explanation.
“No hot water,” he said.
“I know,” I said back.
“I’ll boil some on your hot plate,” he volunteered and disappeared into my room. I followed him, threw my coat on the one semicomfortable chair in the room, and took off my clothes. Gunther went back to his room for a huge pot. I stripped to my underwear and watched him struggle with the pot that weighed about as much as he did, but I didn’t offer to help. Pride should be respected.
I made it to the bathroom, found it unoccupied, and went inside. I brushed my teeth and let some cold water into the tub.
I got through a few lines of the Hope book: “There was a great excitement at the little house next door to the Barretts of Wimpole Street. My best friend was having a baby. Me.”
That was as far as I got. Gunther, like a diminutive Gunga Din, lugged the boiling water in and dumped it into the tub. I climbed in and let out a groan. Gunther climbed up on the toilet seat and waited patiently. “You wish company or not?” he asked.
I explained the Faulkner case and asked Gunther to try to track down someone at Bernstein’s Fish Grotto who might have seen or remembered Faulkner or Shatzkin and find out whether Shatzkin had made a reservation the day he met Faulkner. I would try for Mrs. Shatzkin and Vernoff the writer. I also had some guilt pangs about Lugosi and again considered picking up Dave and Nate later in the afternoon and taking them to the show where I could spend a few minutes with Billings.
“Life gets ted-jus, don’t it,” I said.
“That is an idiom?” Gunther said seriously, perched upon the toilet seat.
“Line from a song by a guy named Bert Williams,” I said, pulling myself out of the tub. “And now to work.”
CHAPTER FOUR
With Gunther’s help, I got my knee bandaged tightly. With a couple of pain pills Shelly Minck had given me months earlier for my back, I was ready to work, provided I didn’t have to run and no one kicked me in the kneecap. I made some phone calls. I got the home address of Jerry Vernoff, the writer who had worked with Faulkner the night before, from the telephone directory. Using Martin Leib’s name got me Shatzkin’s home address in Bel Air from Warner Brothers. Shatzkin’s office was listed in the phone book.
A call to Vernoff told him who I was and told me he would be home to see me in a few hours. A call to Shatzkin’s office let me know that his secretary was there helping the junior members of the firm keep their world in order. Her name was Miss Summerland, and she wearily expected to be in the office for many hours. I didn’t call Mrs. Shatzkin. She might not want to see me. I simply got in my pigeon-egg-green car and headed for Bel Air, admiring the frost on the few people in the streets. Even Westwood was nearly empty of UCLA students.
Bel Air is as exclusive as you can get and still be within bragging distance of the movie studios. It has its own police and its own privacy. I talked my way past the guard at the entrance by telling him I was from the funeral parlor handling “things” for the Shatzkin family. He was properly professional and sympathetic, which means he made it clear he didn’t much care. My car made him a bit suspicious, but I told him it was a loaner while my Rolls was being repaired. The story was idiotic, but the business card I handed him reading “Simon Jennings, Brentwood Funeral Services” was real enough. I had a whole stack of assorted cards given to me as payment by a job printer whose sister-in-law had stolen his 1932 Ford.
I found the house on Chalon Road, a big two-story brick building set back in a wooded area on a hill. It was impressive. A chauffeur was washing a real Rolls in the open garage and trying not to freeze. I knocked at the door, and it was opened almost immediately by a Mexican girl in black who looked so somber that I wasn’t sure whether to believe her.
“Peters,” I said seriously, opening my wallet to show her my identification and knowing she wouldn’t take a close look. “I’m investigating the crime. I’d like to talk to Mrs. Shatzkin.”
The maid stood back, I moved forward, and she said she’d get Mrs. Shatzkin.
I held my hat in my hand and kept my coat on, looking as serious and official as I could. I examined the hall mirror with suspicion and continued to do so when I heard the footsteps behind me and saw Camile Shatzkin in the mirror. I turned to face her.
“Officer?” she started. She was a good-looking woman, dark, dressed in black, with her hair worn up in one of those complicated hairdos. She was a little plump, but certainly not little. She reminded me in some ways of my former wife Anne, but in some ways she didn’t. Camile Shatzkin’s furrowed brow and wringing hands complete with handkerchief evoked Kay Francis in a melodrama, and Kay Francis was always up to something.
“Peters,” I said and then before she could think of questions, “Officer Cawelti talked to you, but a few things have come up since last night that I need confirmation on.”
“I’m not sure…” she began, looking back into the house for someone who didn’t come. “It’s been a very…
