Stuart Kaminsky - The Howard Hughes Affair

NBC looked clean, neat and sterile enough to have been decorated by my former wife. Even the girl at the reception desk looked too clean to be real.

“Clarise,” I said, leaning over confidentially to read her name tag, “my name is Peters. Mr. Rathbone is expecting me.”

Clarise examined a skewered spindle of papers in front of her, searching for a note, a hint, a hope, an affirmation. I stood impatiently looking at my watch. My watch told me it was 2:10 in the afternoon or 2:10 in the morning. Neither was within seven hours of the truth. I wound the watch but it didn’t help. Time stood still but Clarise didn’t.

“For Mr. Rathbone?” she said.

I looked at the grey-haired guard behind her in exasperation.

“Look, young lady,” I sighed. “I have about one hour between planes. Mr. Rathbone wanted to see me about production of the play. I did not want to see him. Our backers in New York don’t think his name will mean that much to us, and we have an adaptation of The Keys of the Kingdom as a major possibility. Why don’t you just tell Mr. Rathbone that I came by, you did your job and kept me from him, and he can contact me some time about the play. Just tell him it was Mr. Peters from the Schubert’s in New York.”

I turned to leave. I could have sat down and done some message sending. I could have waited outside for Rathbone to make an appearance. But I hadn’t been able to resist the urge to con my way into NBC. Professional pride.

“I’ll give Mr. Rathbone your message,” she said.

I turned to give her a withering stare and a closer examination. She was thin, vacantly pretty with frizzy auburn hair and in some other orbit. I tried another ploy.

“Where is the regular girl on this desk?”

Now how a man from Schubert’s in New York would know she wasn’t a regular would have been a reasonable question, but I had gauged Clarise’s vacant look properly.

“She’s on a dinner break. I’m just taking over for half an hour.”

I pointed my finger at her and talked through my teeth. Maybe I could reduce her to tears and get back at Annie through womankind in the pathetic form of Clarise.

“What’s your last name, Clarise?” I said.

“Clarise Peary. I usually work the telephones on…”

I wrote Clarise Peary’s name in my expense book right under the nickel I had spent on the call to Rathbone’s house. Clarise squirmed inside her dark blue NBC jacket. I had discovered back in my cop days that people didn’t like having their names written down.

“Well,” she hesitated, “if Mr. Rathbone is expecting you…”

“He is not expecting me,” I said, leaning forward, not very proud of myself for intimidating a part-time clerk, “he is anxious to see me while I am not in the least anxious to see him. My time,” I said, noticing again from my watch that time had stopped at two-ten, “is valuable.”

“Paddy will take you to the studio,” she sighed, looking anxiously at a couple who had come through the main door and were heading for her desk. She clearly feared having to handle two questions at the same time.

“Thank you,” I said officiously. She smiled, showing a crack in her face powder. The guard with the grey hair nodded and started down the hall toward a door. I followed him. He opened the door and I stepped through.

“You know,” he said with a faint Scottish accent, “that talk wouldn’t have fooled the regular girl for a second. Schubert’s, hell.” He chuckled.

“Then why aren’t you tossing me out?” I said, hurrying to keep up with him as we went past glassed-in rooms of equipment and jacketless men with earphones.

“My name’s Whannel,” he said. “Worked at Warner’s till last year. Got fired for drinking on a job-a job you got me sent on.”

“I remember,” I said. “Flynn. You and another security guy named Ellis were supposed to watch Errol Flynn. He got you drunk.”

“And we got canned,” he said, pointing to a thick wooden door. Above the door was a sign reading “On the Air.” The sign was lighted.

“Then why didn’t you turn me back at the desk out there?”

“Getting fired from Warner’s was the best thing ever happened to Jack and me. NBC has better pay and hours, and I don’t have to walk all over that damn lot. Be quiet when you go in there. They’re not on the air, just rehearsing. Take it easy.”

“You too,” I said, and he left me. I walked into the studio as quietly as I could. It was a bigger room than I expected, with a stage and a small darkened space for about 30 chairs. I took a seat in one of the chairs. A handful of people were listening to the rehearsal.

On the stage was a slightly raised platform with a microphone and two men standing at it with scripts in their hands. To their left was an organ, but no one was there. To their right was a small flight of four steps leading to a contraption that looked like a glassless window. On the platform behind the steps was a wheel mounted on a table with a handle in the center of the wheel so it would be turned. Another contraption on wheels next to it held small wooden doors, one on each side, and next to the steps was a wooden box filled with sand. A man was standing in the box, with a script in his hand.

Behind the two men at the microphone was a glass partition with three men seated behind it all wearing earphones.

“Take it from the top of four, Nigel,” came a voice. “One more time and then all the way through.”

A portly man with a grey mustache wearing a dark suit and vest nodded. I recognized him from dozens of movies as Nigel Bruce. At his side stood Basil Rathbone in a tweed jacket and sweater. Rathbone looked out into the audience and directly at me, as if he knew me, and then turned back to the script.

Bruce let his face become perplexed so he could fall into character and said something like, “Rain had always depressed him when he wasn’t working on a case,” and the man in the box shuffled his feet, ran up the four stairs and opened one of the doors.

Rathbone said something like “Aha, we have a visitor,” and the show went on with Rathbone as Holmes discovering a mad old killer named Amberly, who has gassed his wife and her doctor to death in a sealed room. Up to the last minute, I suspected Professor Moriarty, even though he had nothing to do with the episode.

After the announcer stepped forward and reminded the dozen people in the audience that “A little cold may be the start of a serious illness,” I vowed to take his advice and buy some Bromo Quinine Cold Tablets. The show came to an end, and the director’s voice came across tinny and cracked, saying, “That’s good enough for day. Thanks Basil, Nigel.”

Rathbone smiled and waved toward the glass partition, and Bruce nodded. A guy in the audience ran up on the platform to help the sound-effects man wheel away his props, and a woman with a script in her hand started to talk to Bruce. Looking less thin than he did in the movies, Rathbone walked directly toward me with his hand outstretched. I would have guessed he was a few years older than I was. His grip was firm and up close he gave the impression of being both agile and solid.

“You must be the man who so urgently has to see me,” Rathbone said as precisely as he spoke on the radio, though a bit faster. “Let me guess what it’s all about. You are a representative of Howard Hughes, conducting some kind of investigation about our dinner last week. Your investigation concerns something violent or potentially dangerous. It does not involve any danger to my person, but it does involve something to do with national security, or at least Mr. Hughes thinks it does.”

Rathbone took out a silver cigarette case, offered me one, which I refused, lit his own and looked at me with some amusement.