operation was as small as it could be. Gelhorn Productions was not in the bucks.
“I’m here to see Max Gelhorn,” I said, looking around with as much superiority as I could master.
“He is on location,” she sniffled.
“Location?”
“He is shooting a Western movie,” she explained. “For PRC.”
“And where might this location be?” I asked.
She groped for a fresh Kleenex just in time to keep from offending me. “Not at liberty to say,” she said.
“My name is Fligdish, from the Fourth Commercial Bank of New York City,” I said sweetly. “If Mr. Gelhorn wants to talk about refinancing
“Burbank,” she said, scribbling a street-corner address on a pad and tearing the paper off to hand to me.
“Thank you,” I said. “Take care of that cold.”
“How?” she said miserably as I left the office.
The odds were pretty good that one of the four people Shelly had interviewed was behind the man-who- looked-like-a-brick. They were the people who knew he/I/someone was on the case. I had nothing else to go on, anyway. My engine was making a slight pinging sound that had in the past gradually become a forty-three-dollar symphony. Maybe I could finish this case before putting the car in dry dock.
I turned on the radio long enough to find that Dolph Camilli, the National League’s Most Valuable Player with 34 home runs and 120 runs batted in, had signed again with the Brooklyn Dodgers for $20,000. I was too old to become a baseball player and too homely to be a movie star.
The street corner in Burbank was behind a factory. The street corner was actually a huge vacant lot leading up to a hill with a few trees on it. The hill went up sharply to about the height of a three-story building. Plunked in the middle of this vacant lot were four horses, a half-dozen guys with cowboy outfits, a man with a camera and an assortment of other people shivering in a small circle next to a wooden shack, which was being moved around by a thin girl and two guys in sweaters.
When I parked and moved toward them, one man separated himself from the pack and strode toward me with a smile. Behind his back he whispered, “Set it up fast, Herman.” The wind had been blowing my way or I wouldn’t have heard him. He was a little taller, a little younger and seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic than I was about life, but then again he was clearly faking.
“I,” he said, holding out a hand, “am Max Gelhorn. Can I be of some service to you?”
Behind him the sweatered crew tied horses to a quickly constructed rail in front of the shack, cowboys checked their guns and the camera was lugged back to take it all in.
“You have a permit to shoot here?” I asked sternly.
“Permit?” Gelhorn looked puzzled. He was wearing a coat over his heavy woolen sweater. His yellow-gray hair was massive and blowing wild. “I checked with Mr. Payson and he said-”
“Payson?” I said suspiciously. “There is no Mr. Payson.”
“Maybe I got the name wrong,” Gelhorn mused, glancing over his shoulder to see how quickly things were being set up.
“You don’t have permission to shoot here, do you?” I said through clenched teeth.
“Well, not exactly,” said Gelhorn, “but well be out of here in an hour at the most and…. Say, how would you like to be in this picture? You’d be perfect Not much, just a small part in this shot holding a horse. Doris,” he shouted, and the girl in the sweater came running. She was a pale, panting, pinched creature with rimless glasses and pigtails. Her age was something between eighteen and thirty. “Doris,” Gelhorn repeated with mock enthusiasm, “I think this gentleman would be perfect as the bandit holding the horses. What do you think?”
“Perfect,” agreed Doris, picking up her cue.
“Well, Mr….” Gelhorn began.
“Peters,” I said. The name killed a birdie in his head but he chalked it up to minor coincidence. I forced the issue. “Toby Peters,” I said.
“Who are you?” Gelhorn demanded, dropping the hand-wringing act and taking on steam without heat.
“Toby Peters, private investigator.”
“You’ve changed in a week,” sneered Gelhorn. “You used to be short, fat, obnoxious and stupid. You are no longer fat.”
“That was my junior partner, using my name while I was on vacation,” I explained. “I’d be careful how you talk about him in his presence. He’s a jujitsu expert.”
“Really,” said Gelhorn. “Well, it has been unpleasant talking to you, but I’ve got to get back to my film.” He turned, and Doris followed, looking back at me with curiosity.
“I had a talk with Mr. Lombardi yesterday,” I said. That stopped Gelhorn so dead in his tracks that he almost toppled over. He turned to me with a quizzical look. “Lombardi? I don’t know any-”
“Of course not,” I said. “You want to talk before I report back to Mr. Cooper that I found you most uncooperative? You don’t want to kill your chances of getting Cooper for
Gelhorn hurried back to me and panted, “Then he
I shrugged. “Depends on what I tell him.”
“I made a straight offer,” said Gelhorn as blandly as he could.
“What made you think the highest-salaried actor in Hollywood, the actor who is probably going to win his second Academy Award, is going to make a low-budget Western with you? What’s in it for him?”
“That,” said Gelhorn, “is between Mr. Cooper and me.”
“It can’t be that you got the idea of putting pressure on Cooper to come into this?”
From a hot-dog stand on the corner, the sound of music cut through the wind.
“I don’t need Gary Cooper,” Max Gelhorn said, plunging his hands into his pockets.
“Of course not,” I agreed. “I can see that. I’ve seen that plush office of yours, and I can see the epic you’re shooting in an empty lot.”
A whistle blew behind us and drowned out his answer. Seconds later workers from the factory were streaming out and heading for the hot-dog stand for lunch. Some of them glanced at the movie crew and hurried to get their sandwiches so they could spend their break watching.
“Perhaps we could talk after I get this scene,” Gelhorn said, looking anxiously at the workers and probably fearing that a factory foreman would appear to boot him off the vacant lot.
“Okay,” I said.
“We’ll have a cup of coffee,” he said amiably, backing away. “Uh, and how about holding the horse in this shot. We’re a bit short-handed, and you look perfect.”
“Why not,” I said with a grin that never looked like a grin.
Doris fished out a cowboy hat and vest and took my coat and jacket Gelhorn told me to stand on the far side of the horses so my pants and shoes wouldn’t show on camera. Then Gelhorn went mad with activity. The cameraman, a little guy with a heavy German accent began arguing with him about how little space there was to shoot.
“You want the cowboys should ride behind a hot-dog stand?” he squeaked. “Or up the hill to that garage?”
“I know it’s tight, Hugo, but that’s what we’ve got. Just do it. I’ll buy you a cup of coffee after.”
An overweight actor in a cowboy suit lumbered up to Gelhorn, waving a script “Max,” he cried, “how the hell am I supposed to do this? You said you’d get a stunt man. I can’t-”
“Mickey,” whispered Gelhorn, “a stunt man is at least twenty bucks, even a lousy stuntman. You’ve done harder than this before. I’ll give you an extra te … five.”
I adjusted my cowboy hat and stepped out from behind the horses to get a better look at Tall Mickey Fargo. It was the same man whose picture I had in my pocket, but someone had put a balloon inside him and blown it up. He was a bloated caricature. I couldn’t imagine him getting on a horse, let alone doing a stunt, but the five dollars proved too much for him, and he agreed.
