Never Cross a Vampire (8 page)

“You've been very helpful,” I said, closing her door behind me just as her head went down.

The sun was almost out when I limped outside, and it was a little warmer but not warm enough to resell my coat to Hy O'Brien. Things were starting to pile up, and the heap they formed might mean something, especially if I got it burning.

My next stop was the apartment of Jerry Vernoff off La Brea in Inglewood. It was a one-story courtyard job with a small pool in the middle and some stunted yearning palms cutting off the sun. I knocked on his door and knew from my experience in such places that everyone who was home heard the knock vibrating through his walls.

“Yeah,” came a voice.

“Peters,” I said.

“Right,” said the voice. I waited a few seconds, and the door came open on a slightly soft but reasonably good-looking big guy with straight blond hair and a smile. His teeth were white. His skin was tan and his shirt was open.

“Come on in,” he said. “Find a place to sit. I've got to clean my hands. Messed up a can of chili.”

He disappeared, and I looked for a place to sit. There was a sofa and two chairs. There was also a card table set up as a desk with a chair. On each of these pieces of furniture there were piles of paper and index cards full of writing.

“Just pick up a pile and shift it,” he shouted. “But try to keep it in order.”

I opted for one of the chairs. I moved two piles of typed notes onto the floor and sat down.

“Can I get you a drink?” Vernoff shouted over running water. “A beer or a Coke?”

“Coke is fine,” I said.

He came back with a bottle for me and one for himself.

“I can't even cook a can of chili,” he said with a grin.

“I know the feeling.”

“Shoot,” he said, draining a third of his Coke.

“You work with Faulkner?” I said.

“Well, I do on this job. I'm a free-lance story man,” he explained. “See all this,” he said with a sweep of his left hand to take in the pages and the wall of books. “Cabinet in the corner is filled with plot cards. I've got hundreds of them. Hell, I've got thousands. If you count the possibilities for mixing and matching, I probably have a million plots in this room. Producers and writers hire me to get them going, give them a start, some ideas. I shoot plots and variations at them to see if they can get something going in their imaginations. The pay is reasonably good. The work has been pretty steady for the last few years.”

“And you like it?”

He shrugged and gulped down another third of the bottle before he grinned in my direction.

“It's all right until I can sell one of my own screenplays. Hey, about Friday, I told the cops Faulkner and I were in his hotel room.”

“But you said he went out around nine.”

“Right,” said Vernoff, “but that was to throw down a few drinks. Faulkner has been known to tie one on from time to time. That's what did him in the last time he worked out here.”

“Why didn't you go with him?”

Vernoff laughed, and I made a dent in my Coke.

“He didn't invite me. Our Mr. Faulkner is a rather private man, and to tell the truth I don't think he liked working with me. I move too fast, think too fast. I made him nervous, but hell, that's what I was getting paid to do, to stimulate him, get him moving and thinking.”

“You like him?” I asked.

“Not much,” he admitted, “do you?”

“I don't think so,” I admitted. “But I don't think he killed Shatzkin.”

“I don't even know he knew Shatzkin,” sighed Vernoff. “Shatzkin's my agent, or was. Can't say he did a hell of a lot of good for me, but he was a good man. The whole thing doesn't make sense. I'm not even going to do a plot card on it.”

“Maybe you can work out a plot to tell me who killed Shatzkin and why,” I said, finishing my Coke and standing up.

“Sure,” he said, joining me. “I could think of a lot of them. It's all there.” He pointed at the file cabinet. “Numbered and ready if you know what to look for. Say, it's lunch time. You want to share a can of chili and a hunk of lettuce?”

I agreed, and we moved into his kitchen, which was an extension of his living room, full of papers, newspaper clippings, books and notes. He cleared two places at the table and served the chili in two bowls directly from a messy pot that I could see was burned at the bottom. Vernoff told me about his adventures with various writers, including a stint with F. Scott Fitzgerald, who had come to the apartment, looked at the mess, and departed on a one-week binge. In turn, I told Vernoff about some of my more celebrated cases, concluding with the Bela Lugosi problem.

“I've got about two hundred cards on vampire plot variations,” he said dripping chili on a copy of
American Mercury
. “I could do a vampire script in five days … no, three days, but nobody wants vampire scripts. They want war stories. That's what I was trying to feed Faulkner, but he kept getting melancholy about the war and some brother who died in an airplane. Say, I earned my money working with him.”

I finished up, we shook hands, and he asked whether he could get in touch with me some time to work up some plot cards from my cases. I told him it was fine with me and left him to clean up the dishes and find the typewriter he had temporarily misplaced.

I headed home because it was easier to park there than my office, and I wanted to catch Gunther. I passed Mrs. Plaut on the way in and said, “Good afternoon.”

She smiled back and said with as much relevance as was her wont, “You didn't bother yourself.”

Gunther was in his room, which looked like the model for a
Good Housekeeping
ad. Everything was always in place and clean. His books on the shelf were all lined up evenly, and there was seldom more than a book or two on his desk and a manuscript.

“Well, Gunther,” I said. “How did it go?”

He took out his notebook and read:

“Shatzkin made no reservation nor did Faulkner when they ate at Bernstein's. If they were there, they simply took their chances. No one recognized them or remembers them. Both lobster
naturale
and the shrimp salad are, of course, on the menu.”

He put the notebook away and looked at me. After borrowing a couple of nickels from Gunther, I went down the hall to the pay phone and got through to the Wilshire station. I asked for my brother.

“Pevsner,” he growled.

“Brother of Pevsner, Son of Pevsner. Grandson of Pevsner,” I answered.

“What the hell do you want? Hold it.” Then, to someone in his office, “So don't book him. Just take him upstairs and question him a little before you let him go.… Okay, Toby, what do you want?”

“Listen,” I said, “I've got some questions on the Shatzkin murder you guys may want to follow up.”

“Take it up with Cawelti,” he said.

“Can you just listen?” I shouted. “You've got me hobbling around this damn city. The least you can do is listen.”

“Talk fast,” he said. Age or war scare was creeping up on Phil. He actually responded to an emotional plea. I didn't like it.

“I saw Mrs. Shatzkin. She's pretending to be broken up, but she's not. She never saw Faulkner in her …”

“Besides the time he came through the door and shot her husband,” Phil put in.

“But how did she know it was Faulkner? When I showed her a picture of Harry James, she swore it was Faulkner.”

“She's a confused woman with a lot on her mind,” Phil said impatiently.

“She's a confused woman who has devoted some of her first morning of widow's grief to getting rid of photographs of her husband. Now why would she do that?”

“She doesn't want to be reminded of her grief,” he said. “Is this all you've got?”

“Why did Shatzkin take Faulkner to Sixth Street to eat? It's nowhere near his office, and he didn't like seafood. It looks like he wanted to go somewhere where he wouldn't be recognized.”

“It looks that way to you,” said Phil. “To a jury and me it looks like he went to Bernstein's. What has this got to do with anything?”

“Faulkner says Shatzkin called him to set up the meeting,” I went on. “Shatzkin's secretary says it was Faulkner's idea.”

“We didn't book Faulkner for a lapse of memory or for lying about his business deals,” Phil returned to his growl.

“Okay,” I gave it another try. “Faulkner says Shatzkin was a loud-mouthed, fast-talking pusher at lunch. Shatzkin's secretary says the dead man was a pussycat.”

“So where are you taking this?” Phil demanded. “We've still got the dead man's statement. I've got it right here,” I heard him shuffle some papers and then read. “Officer Bowles: ‘Take it easy, sir.' Shatzkin: ‘Faulkner shot me. William Faulkner. Why did he do that?' Officer Bowles: ‘Take it easy, Mr. Shatzkin.' Mrs. Shatzkin: ‘Officer, it was Faulkner. He came right in and shot Jacques for no reason, no reason.' We also found the gun. in Faulkner's hotel room.”

“Someone's trying to frame him,” I said.

“A unique argument,” rasped Phil.

“And no motive,” I said.

“Take your tale to Dick Tracy,” he said and hung up the phone.

I invested another nickel and called Vernoff.

“I forgot to ask you something,” I said. “Why did Faulkner leave just before nine last night? Why not earlier or later? Just coincidence?”

“I don't remember,” said Vernoff. “I think he just said he needed a break and would be back in an hour.”

“Thanks,” I said and hung up. I needed another talk with Faulkner, and I owed Bela Lugosi a day's work. A few more of Shelly's pain pills got me back to the station. This time I was led down to the lock-up where Faulkner was sitting in a cell.

“Mr. Leib believes there is a chance bail can be set for me in spite of the charge,” he said, putting aside the book he was reading. The turnkey hovered impatiently at my side.

“This'll take a second or two,” I said. “I need some answers. Whose idea was it to eat at Bernstein's?”

“I told you it was Shatzkin's,” he said impatiently.

“Why didn't you go up to Shatzkin's office?”

“Because he was walking down the stairs when I arrived. He recognized me and we simply turned around and walked out. I fail to see the relevance of these questions.”

“I'm not sure I do either,” I said. And it was clear that the fat blue-uniformed turnkey didn't see the point.

“Shatzkin called you to set up the meeting.”

“That is right.”

“On Friday night when you were working with Vernoff, whose idea was it to take a break just before nine?”

“I think it was mine. I found the man barely tolerable and had quite as much as I could absorb. Working with him was not my idea but a condition of the studio. He actually told me that he could reduce
As I Lay Dying
to one hundred fifty plot cards. The man is a menace to creativity.”

I bid Faulkner goodbye, resisted the temptation to chuck the turnkey under his five chins, and limped outside with the feeling that I had something in all this, but I didn't know what the hell I had.

CHAPTER FIVE

O
n the way back to Hollywood, I stopped at a fifteen-minute car wash, watched some guys in blue overalls fail to turn my speckled Buick into a pumpkin, paid my forty-nine cents and decided to stick with the Faulkner case. I'd give Lugosi a rebate or something for each day I didn't work. I needed the money, but there wasn't much of me to go around and what there was was fragile.

I was heading up Van Ness when I spotted my tail, a dark Ford two-door about a block behind. The sky had clouded fast and promised rain to give my car an extra wash it could now do without. The sudden darkness made it tough to see who was driving the Ford. I turned right on Santa Monica and then left on Western, moving slowly. Sure enough, the Ford appeared a block behind, taking cover behind a Rainer Beer truck. I went down on Fountain and made a circle around the block, turning on two wheels and hoping no patriot had spotted me burning rubber. U.S. Rubber was running full-page ads in magazines and the papers telling us that for the duration of the war “every ounce of rubber is a sacred trust.” I even had a copy of their free thirty-two-page booklet, “Four Vital Spots,” on how to make tires last longer, but I considered this a potential emergency. Arnie, my no-necked mechanic on Eleventh, could get me retreads if things got bad.