“Good to see you again, Toby,” he called, lifting his ham hand and flashing oversize teeth.
“My best to Jack Warner,” I shouted back.
I drove past the golf course across from Warners, where Jack Warner, Sid Adelman and half of the talent at the studio weren’t permitted because they were Jewish.
It was four in the afternoon. I dropped my car off in a garage near my apartment on Eleventh Street, gave Arnie, the no-necked mechanic eight bucks in advance and told him I’d be back in two hours. He smiled around a stubby cigar, and I went home and changed clothes.
Twenty minutes later I was at the Y on Hope Street where I paid the last three bucks on my year’s membership and spent fifteen minutes on the track and ten on the small punching bag. Then I got up a handball game with a lean banker named Dana Hodgdon. He was 62 and beat hell out of me every time we played.
By eight I had my car and ate my first steak in months at Levy’s Grill, downtown on Sprina. Carmen the cashier, a dark and recent widow, gave me a smile when I paid. Everyone was smiling at me. I felt great and invited her to a late movie. Her wide mouth over her ample everything asked for a raincheck, and I said O.K.
I went back to my apartment, turned on the fan, listened to Gracie Allen tell George Burns about her brother for half an hour, and set the alarm. I stretched out on my unmade bed and dreamed I was Robin Hood. I swung on a chandelier, waving a sword, and speared a photograph out of Basil Rathbone’s hand. I turned my back and was about to get clubbed by a combination of Claude Rains and Sid Adelman when Alan Hale saved my life. I looked down at the photograph and saw that it was me in a compromising position with Carmen the cashier. She was wearing a child’s dress. I woke up. The alarm was ringing.
I put on my pants, shirt and holster, complete with 38 automatic. In the ten years I had owned the gun, I had never fired it at anyone or wanted to. I seldom loaded it. Some clients expected a private investigator to have a gun and felt disappointed if they didn’t spot one under his jacket. This time I loaded the gun. I didn’t expect trouble. The only thing I had that the blackmailers wanted was an envelope of money, and I fully intended to give it to them. But you never knew what a nervous or stupid criminal might do. Sid Adelman was paying me $400 to be less nervous and a little smarter than the blackmailer.
The streets were almost deserted. They usually are in Los Angeles. Thousands of people move to the city every week, but it has a lot of space to fill. I went down University and headed toward Figueroa. I pulled up in front of the address Sid had given me. It was one of a series of spread out, not very big one-story bungalows with small front yards. It was two minutes to two. I checked my flashlight and envelope and let the inside of my arm touch the firmness of my holster through my jacket. It was reassuring.
There was a “For Sale” sign on the lawn, just barely visible by the street light. The house was dark and silent. All the houses on both sides of the street were dark and silent. I knocked gently. Nothing. I knocked again and this time heard someone move quickly across the room behind the door. The door opened suddenly and a beam of light hit me in the face. I flashed my light back on a dark hood with two round eyes.
The hooded being, dressed entirely in black, held a gun in one hand and an envelope in the other.
“Nice night,” I said, reaching slowly in my pocket for the envelope of money. I wanted to hear his voice. He was about my height, maybe a little taller, and not as broad in the shoulders. He said nothing. I shrugged, pulling out the envelope. “Just trying to ease the tension.”
He carefully took my thick envelope and handed me his thin one. I opened his, put the flashlight under my arm and looked at the photograph and negative. It was Flynn’s face. The girl was on her stomach. He was behind and on top of her. They were both baby naked, and she was looking directly at the camera with a dreamy, distant smile. She looked even younger than I expected, and I could see why Sid was nervous.
The black hood shuffled. He looked up at me with sudden fear in his eyes and began to raise his gun toward me.
“Now wait a minute,” I said, taking a step backward. With that step I realized the fear wasn’t directed at me, but the person whose foot I stepped on. Before I could turn, I was pushed forward into the hooded man. We fell in darkness and something hit the back of my head. I tried to hang on to consciousness and the photograph, but both were going fast.
There was a distant tug at the picture in my hand. I pulled back, but something hit me again, and I started to go out. From far away I thought I heard a shot. Alan Hale, I thought, where are you now that I need you?
I opened my eyes to almost total darkness. I didn’t know if I were lying or sitting and didn’t much care. The hell with it. Existing was getting damn difficult. I tried to move and felt as if someone had punished me for the effort by driving a rusty spike between my eyes. I could taste the spike. My hand shot up to my head and came back wet with my own blood. My only decent suit and shirt were a mess.
I figured out that the floor was under my chest. I pushed, but fell over, a balloon swelling in my head. Sitting up was the hardest thing I had done since I told my old man I was quitting college. I tried to think, but someone was groaning so loud and breathing so heavily that I couldn’t. I knew the groaning breather was me.
My eyes slowly focused for the dim light from the street, and I crawled in the direction where I thought my flashlight had flown. It took me about three weeks to find the flashlight with every effort expanding the balloon in my head. I started to groan again but realized there was no one to feel sorry for me. The flashlight was still working. The beam had no trouble finding the hooded corpse in the middle of the room.
I reached for my gun. It was gone. My watch said 2:05. A lot had happened in five minutes. My best bet would be to get the hell out of there, but my legs told me it would be slow going. I crawled to the body. He was in a fetal position. I was sure he was dead even before I turned him over and saw that someone had dotted his right eye with a bullet. I pulled the hood off. His eyes were open, and he looked frightened and surprised.
So was I. The man was Cunningham, Sid Adelman’s assistant, minus his Harold Lloyd glasses and his life. I was a lousy judge of character. He would never make it in the Warner organization.
Somewhere inside my painful head I knew that the little hole in Cunningham’s head was made by my 38. His gun was still in his hand. I smelled it. It hadn’t been fired. The shot had made noise, and there was a better than even bet that the L.A. police would be coming through the door any second.
I wiped blood from my eyes and searched the body and around it. No identification. No money. No negative. No photograph. I looked down at my red hand and realized that my fist was closed and I was holding something.
Toby, I told myself, be a good guy and open your hand. Let’s see what you’ve got.
It took a few seconds for the request to make it from my brain to the hand, but it opened, and I looked down at the face and vacant eyes of the girl in the picture. I had held on to it when I was hit, and the corner with her face had come off in my hand. I stuffed the fragment of photograph in my pocket and tried to stand. The door was kicked open. If the killer had come back to finish me, he was going to have no trouble.
Light hit me in the face, and I winced with pain.
“Don’t move mister,” said a young voice.
“I can’t move,” I tried to say, but it must have come out sounding like a ten-month old eating cereal.
Another beam of light searched the room, and I tilted my light up. There were two young Los Angeles cops with flashlights and guns. Their dark ties were neat, and their shields gleamed over their left pockets.
“I think this one’s dead,” said the young-voiced cop.
“And I think this one’s drunk,” said the other one helping me up. He was big and had no trouble lifting me with one arm. “He’s hurt too.”
His hand touched my holster. He reached under my jacket to check.
“You’ve got troubles mister,” he whispered almost sympathetically.
You don’t know half of it, I thought.
One hour later, after a quick trip to Los Angeles County General Hospital where a nervous medical student sewed up my head, I was feeling again. Not really better, but feeling and starting to think. I was sitting with the big cop in a police station, a wide, dirty room. The smell of stale tobacco and human sweat hung over the few desks. An ancient NRA eagle poster peeled off of one dirty wall. The cop looked at me with curiosity and took off his hat to rub his head. For a young man, he had very little hair.
I said I was sorry for getting blood on his uniform, and he said it was all right.
A coffee cup was hot in my hand. I sipped, but each sip hurt. Everything hurt.
“The sergeant says you can make one call before he talks to you, but we’ve got to listen to what you say.”
“Shouldn’t you be out in your car or on your beat?” I asked.
