Stuart Kaminsky: High Midnight

I was wrong. Cooper answered. “Thought you might be calling,” he said. “Can I meet you someplace?”

“I can come over there,” I said, “but if you feel like a Sunday out, you can come to my office. I’ve had a little scratch.”

I gave him directions to the Farraday and told him to follow the sound of the drunk singing “Side by Side.” Hell, since I was pushing, I asked him to bring me a sandwich and a Pepsi. He gave me a clipped yes and hung up.

Maybe the pills got to me or the pain or the image of Hanohyez lying on the pier, but I found myself passing the time by arguing with a Sunday-morning radio Evangelist who kept telling me where my soul was going if I didn’t straighten up. I stopped talking when I heard the outer door open and Cooper’s voice.

“Peters?” he said.

“In here,” I answered, and he followed my voice into the small office. He had a bag in hand and a Coke. I was sure I had said Pepsi, but this was no time for a culinary argument.

Cooper looked ready to meet royalty. He wore a dark suit with wide lapels and dark stripes. A little handkerchief peeked out of his left breast pocket.

“Have a seat,” I said, holding the package up to remove a sandwich.

He sat and put his hands on his knees. “What happened to you?” he said.

I told him as I ate, and then I countered, “Why didn’t you let the cops hold Fargo and Gelhorn?”

Cooper shrugged. “Why? It’s all over, isn’t it? Besides, Fargo and Gelhorn know about Luis. Papa and I decided to call it square. Big cop with gray hair and mean eyes said he’d talk to them and show them the error of their ways.”

I handed Cooper my bill, and he dug into his pocket, pulled out a wallet and counted off four one-hundred-dollar bills.

“You did swell,” he said. “I wish I could have helped you more.”

“My job,” I said. “You stick to acting and I’ll stick to getting my head pummeled.”

“It’s a deal,” he smiled. He wanted to go, and I guess I wanted him to go, but we didn’t know quite how to end it. I asked him a question about his suit, and he told me tales of learning how to dress from some countess in Europe.

“I think Papa’s sorry about you and him not hitting it off,” Cooper said, standing.

“I never met your old man,” I said, trying not to count the money again in front of him.

“No,” he laughed, “Hemingway-friends call him Papa. I think there’s too much of what he admires in you. It challenged him. Next step is for him to declare undying friendship.”

“You are a philosopher, Coop,” I said, getting up and putting out my hand. He took it firmly.

“You know,” he said, “that High Midnight script isn’t bad at all.” He pointed at the script on my desk. “Title’s good. Too bad.”

We walked to the door and into the hall, where he told me I didn’t have to go down with him.

“See you around,” he said, waving at me.

“See you around,” I said, waving back. All he needed was a horse and some reasonable background music, but there was no horse, only the drunk who had gone from “Side by Side” to “We’re in the Money.”

I closed up, packed my money and went home. Gunther was there, and I invited him out for Sunday dinner. It took Gunther twenty minutes to dress, though he had already looked ready for a banquet when I walked in.

Over egg foo yung and pressed duck at Jee Gong Law’s on Alameda, Gunther displayed his knowledge of Chinese and I ate, stiff-necked and with wild abandon. We toasted Gary Cooper, Luis Felipe Castelli, Ernest Hemingway and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Something had ended, and I had that nagging fear that nothing else was ready to begin. I washed away visions of filling in for Jack Ellis at the Ocean Palms with tea, beer and talk.

“I think it is now time to go home,” Gunther said finally.

I was about to argue with him, but realized he was right. I called for the check, overtipped and wondered on the way home if Mrs. Plaut would take kindly to my having a dog-maybe a dog who looked like my old beagle Kaiser Wilhelm.

Monday morning made me no great promises. In fact, it said, “This is the way the world ends. Take it or leave it.” My neck was feeling better, though I had no plans for getting rid of the bandage till I’d milked a few more hours of sympathy from the wound. The Sunday Los Angeles Times sat unread on my table. The headlines were enough to keep me from trespassing on the possible horrors inside. If the Times was right, the war must be about over and we were about to lose.

Even with more than four hundred dollars in my pocket, I would have felt better with some hope that a job might be waiting for me. The only thing going for me was the fact that I had gone through a case without a major back problem. I could have felt sorry for myself and slept if the sun weren’t so bright. I had no curtains and a low tolerance for the light of the sun.

I treated myself to three cereals mixed together in my salad bowl: Wheaties, Puffed Rice and Bran Flakes. I put too much sugar on the pile and a little milk. The hell with it.

Mrs. Plaut wasn’t prowling around when I went out, but she had left more chapters of her family history for me. With her treasures removed from my room and no corpses in evidence, she was ready to deal with me again as a literary critic and household-pest exterminator. By my conservative estimate, Mrs. Plaut’s book now totaled over two thousand pages, neatly hand-printed.

Things were no better when I got to the Buick. It had heard the war news and was feeling sorry for itself. All the way downtown the car screamed sadly. By the time I drove it in to No-neck Arnie the mechanic, the car was crying like an abandoned cat.

Arnie gave it a stern look and ignored me. He took the keys and told me he’d call when he had anything to call about, providing I left him with a deposit. I forked over twenty bucks, which disappeared into his overalls, and left.

No one was waiting to kill me or beat me to a pulp in the lobby of the Farraday Building. On the second-floor landing I found Jeremy Butler running his fingers along the outside of the door to a baby photographer’s office.

“Maybe termites,” he said with concern, and then turned to look at me.

I told my tale, thanked him for his help and accepted sympathy for the wounds taken in the line of duty.

“Sometimes I think if I were twenty, thirty years younger,” he said, “I’d join the army and go out and wring some Nazi necks. Then sometimes I think I’m lucky I’m not twenty, thirty years younger, and that makes me feel ashamed. You know?”

“Right,” I agreed. It was a morning for agreeing with people who felt sorry for themselves.

“So,” sighed Jeremy, taking a last look at the door before going down the stairs, “I’ll just write a poem about it and that will make me feel guilty. I wish there were a bum or two to throw out.”

He went down the stairs and got lost below me. I hoped he found a bum or two. If I had the time, and I probably did, I could go pay a few bucks to have some rummy infest the Farraday to keep Jeremy’s mind off the war.

Shelly was sitting in the dental chair when I came in. The script to High Midnight was open in his lap and his eyes, behind thick lenses, were inches from the page. He turned a page near the end and looked up. “Be with you in a minute,” he said.

“It’s me, Shel, Toby.”

“What’re you wearing a scarf for?” he asked, returning to the manuscript. “It’s up to 70 degrees out there. Don’t you know it’s anti-California to wear a scarf? It’s never cold enough here to wear a scarf even when it’s cold enough here to wear a scarf.”