High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) (11 page)

“We all regret this shocking tragedy,” said Lombardi. “Now, you must first convince us that you are not responsible. Our colleague is killed in your room with your knife. He was following you.”

“How do you know about the knife?”

“I have a headache,” Lombardi said. “Talk very quietly, very quietly. I have a friend in the police department. Actually, it is the friend of a friend. That’s all you have to know. On the other hand, there is so much a person in my position has to know. Being a businessman is not as easy as many people think. One has responsibilities.”

“I didn’t kill him,” I said softly. “Look, someone is still trying to get rid of me. Someone who took a couple of shots at me today. He’s the guy we should all be looking for. Him and whoever hired him.”

“I must be quite disoriented from my headache,” Lombardi said, “because what you are saying makes sense. I think you should find this person or persons and quietly stop them.”

“Wait,” growled Marco.

“And,” Lombardi continued, “if you come up with the name of someone who should be made quiet especially the someone who did this terrible thing to our friend from Chicago, then you will tell me and the bereaved brother-in-law will speak to them. You of course understand. I haven’t time to be more subtle. Here,” he called to Marco.

Marco turned his huge face to us. “You mean we just let him go?”

“Yes,” said Lombardi, “for now. Now go, Mr. Peters.”

I got out, and the car pulled away. I was still about two miles from my room, but I had things to think about. I found an all-night grill I knew and ate a couple of bowls of Wheaties with a cup of coffee.

The grill always had a rear table full of guys who looked like truck drivers, but I had never seen any trucks parked on the street. Their conversation was usually about the war, food and the movie industry.

While I downed the dregs of my bowl and considered ordering another, a guy who looked and sounded like Lionel Stander shouted angrily at another mug, “What are you talking about? Bette Davis can act rings around her, rings around her. Joan Crawford got no range, no reserves of emotion to draw on, you moron.”

The Joan Crawford advocate rose to the occasion and clenched his fists, countering, “Is that so? Crawford in
Rain
was superb, projected brass and pathos at the same time.”

The two critics snarled at each other, and I got out before a brawl developed. My vote was for Olivia DeHavilland, but her name hadn’t entered the conversation.

CHAPTER SIX

T
he body was gone when I got back to my room. I saw a few bloodstains, but I was too tired to tidy up. Mrs. Plaut had trapped me briefly. She wanted to know if I needed a new knife. I told her I would make do with my remaining sharp one.

I didn’t bother to look in the mirror. I could feel the stubble on my chin and I knew it would be gray-brown and that I’d look like an overdone makeup job for a Warner Brothers gangster. I threw my coat on the sofa, kicked off my shoes, took off my shirt, wiggled my toes and plopped on the mattress.

When I woke up, I tried to hold onto a piece of dream, to pull it by the tail so I could see the whole thing. It had something to do with baseballs, and I think there were horses in it, but I couldn’t rope it and it rode or flew away. It was nearly noon. My tabletop Arvin told me Japan had almost won in Java and Burma, but that we had retaliated by having the FBI arrest three Japanese in Sacramento. Supposedly the three Japanese had weapons and uniforms and were ready to attack the state capitol. John Barrymore had just turned sixty, and Ava Gardner was in Hollywood Hospital for an emergency appendectomy, with husband Mickey Rooney at her side.

I called the number Cooper had given me and got a woman who didn’t identify herself. Cooper was out, and she didn’t want to tell me where he was. I said it was a matter of life and death, mine and possibly his. I suggested she call him, get his okay and let me call her back.

Fifteen minutes later, after discovering that Gunther had gone out to visit a publisher, I washed, shaved, dressed, and consumed a Spam sandwich, and then I called them back. The woman told me Cooper was at Don the Beachcomber’s in Hollywood, having lunch with his mother.

Ten minutes later I was in the semi-darkness of Don the Beachcomber’s, which had opened in 1933 and seemed to be decorated for a Paramount South Sea Island picture. I told the waiter who I was and whom I was looking for and was escorted through the crowd. Cornel Wilde was talking intensely to a thin, dark man who had paused with his fork up to listen. I caught Wilde’s voice saying, “So what choice do we have?” and was led beyond to a dark corner booth.

“Mr. Peters,” Cooper said, gulping down a glob of lobster and half-rising, with his huge right hand out. I took his hand, and he said, “This is my mother.”

“Mrs. Cooper,” I said politely, taking the seat offered to me.

“Alice,” she said. “Are you joining us for lunch, Mr. Petersr?”

There was a touch of English accent in Alice Cooper and more than a touch of maternal watchfulness. For the first time since I had met him, the shy screen Cooper appeared with an almost bashful look at his mother and at me. She was in her sixties and bore little resemblance to her famous son, but son he was, and forty or not, she watched him eat as if she were ready to tell him to switch the fork to the other hand or chew more slowly.

“Well talk business a little later,” Cooper said to me with a slight raising of his right eyebrow, meant, I assumed, to tell me that his mother was to know nothing of what was going on.

“How about a drink?” Cooper said. “I suggest the Missionary’s Downfall or the Pearl Diver.” He kept on eating his double order of lobster as he talked. “The recipes for drinks here are kept secret. The bottles have numbers instead of labels so rivals can’t copy them. Even the bartenders know the recipes by numbers. You know, half a jigger of 12, a little 7.”

“Fascinating,” I smiled, wanting to get on with business instead of watching Cooper eat.

“He got his appetite when he was sixteen,” explained Alice Cooper proudly without taking her eyes from her son, who smiled with a cheekful. “My older boy Arthur joined the army in 1917, and my husband was busy at the capitol. All the Indian workers at the ranch went to war. Frank and I had to take care of five hundred head of cattle.”

“Frank?”

Cooper raised his fork to indicate that he was Frank.

“My older brother went to war in 1917 too and left me with my father in a grocery store,” I said, but Alice Cooper cared nothing for my war stories. She went on.

“We’re from Montana, you know,” she said. I nodded, accepting a cup of coffee from the waiter to keep my hands busy.

“I remember you that year, swinging an ax in twenty-below weather to break frozen hay bales,” Cooper said with a grin, “and the two of us working our way through six-foot snow drifts to feed the cattle.”

“When the year was over and Arthur came back,” Alice Cooper went on, “Frank had grown thirteen inches and was six-foot-four.”

“Six-three,” corrected Cooper. “Paramount added that inch.”

“Anyway, he came out of that year with a healthy appetite.”

It was clear that she had long ago finished whatever her lunch had been and was sitting around admiring her son. Then she stood.

“It’s almost one,” she said as if an important decision had been made. “I’ve got to get back to the Judge.”

“Tell Dad I’ll see him before I leave,” Cooper said, pausing in his consumption of the food reserves of the West Coast “I told the driver where to take you.”

Son dutifully kissed mother on the cheek, and mother shook my hand, saying it was nice to meet me and asking me to let her know what I thought could be done. I said I would and sat down as she left.

“Quite a woman,” Cooper said, his sappy smile leaving him. He pointed at her and then himself. “She still thinks of me as a kid.”

“What am I supposed to report to her about?” I said, looking around to see if Cornel Wilde was still there. He wasn’t.

“I told her you were a surgeon,” Cooper explained, buttering a roll and consuming it in polite pieces. “When I was in college, I had a pal named Harvey Markham. Harvey had polio as a kid and couldn’t move his legs. His old man had altered a Model T for Harve. We drove around together. On one of our trips, Harve’s hand brake failed at the top of a hill. I remember as if it were yesterday. The impact, the rolling over.” Cooper’s massive right hand rolled over to demonstrate.

“I got up and walked to the curb,” he went on, looking around for something else to eat. “I wasn’t dizzy or weak. My senses were sharpened. And then my left side failed me. It hung like a heavy dead thing and everything went blue. Harve was fine, but I woke up in a hospital. They said I had a broken leg and complications. I had to spend two years at Sunnyside—our ranch—where I did a lot of drawing and a lot of riding. I found out years later that the riding was the worst thing I could have done. I had a pelvic separation, and the riding made it worse. It’s caused me misery ever since, and my mother keeps thinking she should have caught it back then. Every once in a while I tell her I’m seeing a new doctor to take care of it. So, what’s on your mind?”

I told him in detail about Bowie, Gelhorn, Lola and the death of Costello. I told him about the man who had pounded me on the street and about Lombardi.

“I don’t want to do the picture,” said Cooper, downing a coffee. “
High Midnight’s
not a bad script. There’d have to be changes. I couldn’t play the older sheriff—he’s a killer—and the new sheriff’s part isn’t big enough. I can’t break my contract, and I don’t want to work with Gelhorn. But most of all,” he said, tapping his finger on the table, “I don’t want to be told what to do. I don’t want to get you killed, and I don’t want to get me killed, but …”

“There are some things a man can’t walk away from,” I finished.

Cooper grinned and said, “Something like that. What’s your next move?”

“I think I have to go back to Lombardi,” I said without joy.

Cooper looked around the room and sucked in his lower lip. He was wearing what looked like a brand new tweed jacket and striped tie with a gold stickpin.

“I’m supposed to go on a hunting trip with a friend up in Utah this afternoon, but I’ve got a few hours now. I’ll go with you.” He waved for the waiter.

“You don’t have to,” I said.

“I don’t want to,” Cooper said, signing the check, “but I see my father up there over my shoulder.” He pointed up to his right shoulder. “And the Judge is telling me to go with you.”

Cooper got up, and I joined him. Heads turned to look at him as we left, and the sky greeted him outside by showing a touch of sun. By the time we got to my car, the sun had gone and the chill was back.

Lombardi’s new sausage factory was on Washington Avenue, not far from Fourth. On a clear, quiet day I was sure you could hear the noise of Ocean Park a few miles away. The Coney Island of the West was quiet today.

Cooper and I parked in the same lot I had been driven to by the now-departed Costello and his word-logged brother-in-law. Construction workers were finishing off a wall outside and machines were being assembled inside when we went through the double doors. One of the guys installing a white slicing machine spotted Cooper and nudged his co-worker, who looked over at us. I moved deeper into the place with Cooper at my side, taking one long step for every two of mine.

In the storefront with its long counter, scale and display cases, we found Lombardi with his two helpers in white, making the place kosher-style. The one called Steve was the first to spot us. He nudged Lombardi, who turned around. I didn’t like the look of anger that touched his face. I liked the smile that replaced it even less. He smoothed his hair with his left hand and offered his right to Cooper. Cooper took it.

“An honor to meet you,” said Lombardi. Cooper said nothing. He had put on a steel look from some role in the past. “What can I do for you?”

“Mr. Cooper is not going to do
High Midnight
,” I said.

“I see,” said Lombardi. “That’s too bad. Too bad for maybe you and Mr. Cooper. There are certain influential people involved in this movie who will be very unhappy to hear that, very unhappy.”

Lombardi looked at me for the first time. His smile grew on his marked face. “And you—you know that big mouth of yours is going to get you into a lot of trouble. I can think of lots of things to do with tongues that wag.”

“Pickle them and sell them for thirty cents a pound sliced?” I tried.

“Something like that,” he said. Then he turned to Cooper. “You know we have a mutual friend, Lola Farmer.”

Now it was Cooper’s turn to smile. “I’ve talked to Miss Farmer. If you’re planning to let the newspapers know what happened back in 1933, go ahead. They’ve torn me up about Clara Bow and Lupe Velez and the Countess DeFrasso. You’re talking about a long time ago.”

“I understand there are other things besides our mutual friend that might make you consider this offer,” Lombardi said, taking a step closer to Cooper. Cooper didn’t back off. He met Lombardi’s smile with his own through clenched teeth.

“Not … a … chance,” Cooper said.

“We’ll see, Mr. Big Brave Cowboy Star,” hissed Lombardi.