Stuart Kaminsky - High Midnight

Marco squirmed in the front seat and nearly whimpered, “What do I tell my wife? He is supposed to be breaking me into the business and he gets killed. How do you think she’ll feel after what happened to her brother?”

“Bad?” I guessed.

“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.

The 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.