'The guy at the bar,' I reminded him.
'Who knows? Mexican maybe. Or Rumanian. Young more than old. My eyes are good but they're the eyes of a man who has seen a lot. King Oliver said I could read music fifty feet away. With most of those bands, I was the only one could read music even if it was two feet away, if you know what I'm saying to you.'
'I know,' I said. 'About…'
'… the guy at the bar. Dark hair, I think, what was left of it. Getting bald in the front. Jacket like yours, only light-colored. Something written on the pocket. Right here. Something on the pocket. Couldn't read it. Twenty years back, even ten, maybe, I could have, but… anyway, Mexican or Rumanian guy, whatever, Al finishes his set, the guy disappears. Came back the next night. Same thing.'
'Maybe Lester remembers him,' I said.
'Lester,' he said with disgust. 'My sister's son. Decent guy but no imagination. He thinks I see things where there ain't things. Can I get to sleep now? They're coming in early to clean the place up and fix the furniture.'
'Sorry,' I said.
'Nothing,' he said with a wave, shuffling away, his slippers clapping against the wooden floor.
'You play a hot piano,' I said.
'Thanks,' he said, moving into darkness. 'A little applause never hurts. Turn off the toilet light when you leave. Don't worry. They took Al away about an hour ago.'
'Good night.'
He disappeared through the curtain leading to the bandstand without another word.
I went out through the window, walked around the corner to my Crosley, and took Canada to South and made my way over to Los Felix on side streets. I hit Highland in about thirty minutes and was up on the porch and inside Mrs. Plaut's boardinghouse on Heliotrope off of Hollywood Boulevard by two in the morning.
The porch light was off, as they were all up and down the street to thwart the Japanese who might launch kamikaze assaults on rundown Los Angeles neighborhoods in the middle of the night. No one was sure how the Japanese would get close enough to the coast to carry out such an attack, but they had managed a couple of failed attempts from aircraft carriers in the last few years. If the papers were right, the Japanese didn't have anything left to launch a paper plane from, but Lowell Thomas had said on the evening news that they were gathering what was left of their fleet for an attack somewhere. I thought about thousands of Japanese landing in Santa Monica on the beach during a women's volleyball tournament.
I got inside, closed the door gently, slowly behind me and locked it, standing for a beat or two to be sure my landlady, in her rooms to my left, hadn't detected my predawn return. Quiet. Mrs. Plaut had a bird whose name changed as the whim took its owner. But the bird was always covered at night, and while he or she could let out a screech that Butterfly McQueen would envy, he didn't have even a one-word vocabulary.
I took off my shoes and made my way up the stairs, letting experience and instinct guide me past the creaking steps and loose sections of the rickety bannister.
Upper landing and into the bathroom, closing the door behind me before I hit the light switch. Mrs. Plaut had placed heavy red curtains on the small bathroom window. She had sewn a patriotic warning in yellow onto the curtain, one you could not miss whether you were standing, bathing, showering, or sitting. It read: 'Flush only when you must. Save paper when e'er you can.'
I used the toilet, took off my jacket, and checked on the fifties Clark Gable had given me. Then I washed and shaved with the razor and remnants of a bar of Palmolive stashed in the corner of the medicine cabinet.
I was tired. Back in my room across the hall, Dash looked up at me from the sofa. He blinked once and closed his eyes.
'Hungry?' I said.
He opened his eyes again and considered purring. He was orange, fat, independent, and well fed. He closed his eyes again. I took that for a no. Besides, Dash knew better than to count on me. The window was open and he could do his own shopping. I owed him for saving my life a year earlier, but I didn't owe him enough to take away his independence, turn him into a pet, and make him pretend he liked me.
I took off my clothes, forced myself to hang my jacket and pants in the closet, dropped my socks and underwear on the small pile growing in a corner, and, envelope from Gable in hand, plopped back on the mattress on the floor. I have a bad back. I can't sleep on a bed. I can't sleep on my stomach. In addition to the watch, I inherited a championship snore from my father. I can't sleep in civilized company, but alone and unobserved I can forget murdered baritones and May Company salesmen, Clark Gable and poems written by a killer who may or may not be a Mexican or Rumanian.
I took one last look at the notes from Ramone's killer. They made no more sense to me now than the photograph. I put everything back in the envelope and shoved it under the edge of the mattress. I had forgotten to turn off the lights. I looked around the small room at the ancient overstuffed sofa with the embroidered pillow that read, 'God Bless Us Every One,' at the Beech-Nut Gum wall clock that told me it was almost three, at the small table near the window with the refrigerator behind it and the tiny sink nearby. It wasn't much, but it was paid for till the end of April. The shelves over the sink were filled with cereal boxes, cans of Spam, tuna, and sardines. The refrigerator contained bread, milk, a rusting twelve-ounce-size V-8 (with the suggestion on the label that V-8 would be delicious if poured over my breakfast eggs), a brick of Durkee's Vegetable Oleomargarine, and an assortment of ground A amp; P coffee. What more could I want?
The lights out.
I forced myself up, careful not to throw my back out, and reached for the switch. The door opened an instant after I hit the switch, and a soft high voice with a German-Swiss accent whispered, 'Toby, are you here?'
I turned the light back on and in my boxer shorts greeted Gunther Wherthman.
'Come in,' I said.
'No,' said Gunther, who wore a blue-velvet robe over pajamas whiter than good vanilla ice cream. 'I only wanted to reassure myself that you had returned and were safely ensconced.'
'I'm safely ensconced.'
Gunther, about a decade younger than me and a foot and a half shorter, plunged his hands into his pockets. His face was as clean shaven and smooth at three in the morning as it was at 8:00 A.M., noon, or midnight. His clear blue-green eyes looked at me and then away. Dash opened his eyes again, looked at Gunther, yawned, and went back to sleep.
'I don't wish to…' he began, but I stepped in with, 'What's up, Gunther?'
He closed the door and looked up at me.
'Gwen,' he said. 'She has returned to San Francisco. Sudden. Emergency. She had a call. An old… someone she knew before.'
It wasn't easy for Gunther, who must have been waiting in his room for hours till I tiptoed in. He had met the young, enthusiastic graduate music-history student when I was on a case in San Francisco. It had been love at second thought, and it had been hard on her. I'd seen them looked at, stared at. Gwen was no giant, but she wasn't a little person either and she was still a kid.
'She coming back?'
'I do not know,' he said. 'She will call in a day, perhaps two.'
'I'm sorry,' I said. I seemed to be saying that a lot tonight, but it had been a long night.
'I appreciate that,' he said. 'I have been unable to work since she left this morning.'
Gunther was a contract translator. He had been many things. A circus performer. An actor in The Wizard ofOz. One of my clients. We had become best friends and he had gotten me into Mrs. Plant's three years earlier. Business had been booming for Gunther since the war. Most of his work came on subcontracts from universities on government contracts to translate documents, newspapers, and magazines from Europe into English for analysis. The universities could handle German, Spanish, French, and Italian, but for Czech, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Albanian, Gunther was their little man. He worked in his room, which was right next door to mine and about the same size. He woke up every morning, had breakfast in a three-piece suit, and then went back upstairs where he climbed up on the chair in front of his desk to translate.
'I've disturbed you. I can see you are tired.'
'A little,' I agreed, knowing I couldn't hide it any more than the stomach I was scratching. I would have to hit the Y.M.C.A. over on Hope with more regularity.
He turned and opened the door.
