you hide from everyone and everything. If you confront danger and your fears, you either overcome them and respect yourself or you are destroyed and die with dignity.”
I didn’t buy it but I knew I’d feel more comfortable with Jeremy at my side if Forbes decided to have the Beast of Bombay rip off one of my legs or a few of my fingers.
“I’m not asking you, Jeremy,” I said. ”If you tell Alice about this. .”
“I tell Alice of all my significant actions and thoughts.”
“She is very likely to throw me over the railing out there,” I said, pointing to the door. “I’ll make a splash that Lysol will never get rid of.”
“Is it a cool night?” he asked.
“Getting there,” I said. “Looks like rain.”
He went into the bedroom and returned with a light jacket, also black.
We stopped at my office and found a note from Violet hanging from a thumbtack on my door. It said I had received two calls from an Anita Maloney. Anita had left her number. The message concluded with, “Bivins won a split over Mauriello, in case you missed it. Heard it on the radio. Barney Ross was there. Announcer said his hair was gray and he was limping. Hope my husband doesn’t come back like that. You can pay me in the morning.”
I folded Violet’s message and put it in my shirt pocket.
There was no way, outside of major tutoring from Emmett Kelly, that Jeremy Butler could fit in my Crosley. We took his car, a five-year-old dark Buick.
“Juanita trapped me in front of the building a little while ago,” I said. “Said something about a third dancer and a woman from the past.”
“Juanita is in tune with the universal oneness,” Jeremy said, weaving through traffic. “Her curse is that she is inevitably right but so obscure that one cannot heed her advice and warnings. A modern Cassandra.”
We used my ration card to fill the tank at a Sinclair station on Melrose and then we stopped for a quick dinner at a restaurant Jeremy knew. We ate things that were green and brown and good for you and tasted terrible. And then we were on our way.
I asked Jeremy if it was all right if I played the radio. It was his car. He said yes. We listened to the last fifteen minutes of “Stage Door Canteen.” Bert Lytell and George Jessel were trying to explain the rationing system to Billie Burke, who was as bewildered as Gracie Allen. After they failed, Lawrence Tibbett sang an aria from
For the rest of the trip we listened to a classical music station that kept fading out until it was a distant scratch.
Before the war there were less than three thousand people in Huntington Beach and an oil derrick or two, but the handful of bleak derricks had been joined by dozens and dozens of others as the wartime need for fuel had increased. People to work the rigs and tend them and the people who sold things to the people who worked the rigs moved in. Huntington Beach was a boom town.
The tidelands of Huntington Beach were state property, but oil operators had found a new technique of drilling to bypass the state’s rights. From the town lots they had quietly and cheaply purchased, they drilled on a bias to tap the oil pools under the tidelands. In 1929 Governor Culbert L. Olson had tried to put through a bill to permit the state of California to control the oil operators and tap the oil pools for state profit. The oil lobby beat the governor in court and the whole thing was pushed aside by the rush of fear that followed Pearl Harbor.
And so Huntington Beach became a mess of pumping dark steel, and the sun-worshippers and tourists moved on to Newport Beach and Long Beach.
We found Arthur Forbes’s house just before the sun went down. It was on a street of big old wooden houses on a hill overlooking the sea and the derricks. It had once been a hell of a view. We parked in the driveway behind another car, one I recognized. Forbes’s car was probably tucked in the garage. It was a modest driveway but an impressive house with polished marble steps leading up to the door. There were lights on and the distant sound of music inside. I pushed the door bell and heard a chime inside the house.
I looked at Jeremy. He stood with his hands at his sides, showing nothing on his face. On the beach below us, the oil derricks chugged noisily.
The door opened.
A woman wearing black tights opened the door and said, “What the hell do you want?”
“We have business with your husband.”
She put her hands on her hips and considered us for a beat or two. Then she slammed the door in our faces.
Chapter Nine: Say, Have You Seen the Carioca?
Jeremy and I looked at each other for a second or two and then I pushed the button again and listened to the chime.
When the door opened this time, Kudlap Singh filled it, blocking out the hallway light. He ignored me and looked at Jeremy as impassively as Jeremy looked at him.
“Mr. Forbes is busy,” he said.
“Singh,” Jeremy said.
I had to stop myself from putting my hands behind me to protect my rapidly improving rump.
“Mr. Forbes is busy,” Singh repeated, looking at me.
“A man that abandons a friend who has learned with him no longer has a share in speech,” Jeremy said. “What he does hear he hears in vain, for he does not know the path of good action.”
Singh didn’t turn his head but his eyes shifted to Jeremy, who looked back at him and continued, “Unkindly I desert him who was kind to me, as I go from my own friends to a foreign tribe.”
“A moment, Jeremy Butler,” Singh said softly, and the door closed on us again.
“What the hell was that?” I asked.
“Quotations from the
The derricks pounded on their steel stalks. We waited. The door opened again. Again Kudlap Singh blocked the light.
“Come in,” he said, stepping back so we could enter.
We went in. The house was a lot more modest than Fingers Intaglia’s wealth and reputation would suggest. Kudlap Singh led the way down a carpeted hallway with paintings of the same man in a powdered wig. I looked at Jeremy, who said, “Thomas Jefferson.”
It made a crazy kind of sense. Singh stopped in front of two big wooden doors and knocked.
“Come in,” Forbes called.
Singh opened the doors and we stepped in with him. We were in what must have been a big dining room or a library, but it wasn’t anymore. One wall was mirrored top to bottom and all the way across. The floors were polished wood. In one corner was a small upright piano. Against one wall were four blue upholstered chairs and a pair of tables, on one of which sat a phonograph. Arthur Forbes in a gray sweat suit was sitting in one of the chairs, wiping himself with a towel. In front of the mirror, her back turned to us, was Carlotta Forbes. She glanced at us in the mirror and then did a series of knee bends.
Standing next to the phonograph was Fred Astaire, sleeves rolled up, red handkerchief around his neck.
“What do you want and who’s that?” Forbes asked, continuing to dry himself.
“Thomas Jefferson, whom apparently we both admire, spoke fluent Spanish and believed that all Americans should.”
“ ‘I hope to see a cordial fraternization among all the American nations-’ ” Forbes said with a challenge in his voice.
