Stuart Kaminsky - Now You See It

And I might have to see a dentist named Fred, I thought. My tooth definitely wanted me to know it was there and not happy. I reached into my pocket for the bottle of oil of cloves. It wasn’t there. I had left it in my room.

Jeremy headed for the entrance of the hotel.

“Where is he going?” Phil asked.

“To rescue the bird,” said Gunther.

“Susteance,”came Mrs. Plaut’s voice from the darkness.

I sat up on my mattress on the floor and blinked at the broom-thin shadow in the doorway. The overhead light came on and I looked into the face of Irene Plaut.

“You cannot go through a day such as you had yesterday without enough stick-to-the-ribs sustenance,” she said. “Breakfast in fifteen minutes. You have left your bib and tucker in a heap.”

She pointed at my tux on the floor near the door and started to turn.

“Was your husband really a magician?”

She either had her hearing aid turned off or chose not to answer. She turned right and walked away, leaving the door open. Leaving the door open guaranteed that I would have to get up to at least close it.

My shoulder where the pellet had hit felt fine. Well, “fine” was a little optimistic. In addition, my tongue told me that I hadn’t lost any more of the tooth. The tooth told me that it would behave. I did not trust the tooth. I used the oil of cloves, got up, put on a reasonably clean pair of underpants and trousers and hurried to the bathroom to shower and shave before one of the other tenants beat me to it. I was sure Gunther had long since cleansed himself from toenails to the ends of the hairs on his head. It was Bidwell I tried to beat. He took about fifteen minutes in the bathroom, probably because he had only one hand to work with, though he seemed to be doing reasonably well with that one hand where Emma Simcox was concerned.

I was the first one at Mrs. Plaut’s table, having passed the screeching bird whose name I no longer knew nor cared about. I had dropped my tux in a neat bundle near the front door.

“I have to hurry,” I said as Mrs. Plaut came in with the coffee.

“We all have to hurry,” she said. “It is the lot of man, the human condition. Breakfast today is Spam and egg casserole with loganberries.”

“Sounds great,” I said, picking up the coffee.

“I’ll bring it out when all are assembled,” she said.

“I’m really in a hurry.”

“You’ll not live a moment longer nor accomplish anything of true pith and moment by hurrying,” she said, daintily picking up her coffee cup.

“Alright,” I returned. “Was your husband really a magician and were you the famous Irene?”

She put down her cup, turned it so the handle pointed away, pursed her lips and said,

“Mr. Blackstone is illusional.”

“Delusional,” I corrected.

“That, too,” she said. “I’ll get the casserole.”

Up she rose and ambled into the kitchen. Gunther arrived, and I told him where I was going before our morning meeting with Marty Leib. Gunther asked if I would like his company and I said I would.

Mrs. Plaut arrived with a steaming Pyrex container, which she held with two potholders. Gunther moved to place the bamboo mat on the table closer to her.

“There,” she said, putting down the dish and standing back to admire her work as Bidwell and Emma came in and sat next to each other.

“Smells good,” said Bidwell with his car salesman smile. If he had two hands, this is the moment he would have rubbed them together.

“The zesty, crusty topping has been recommended personally by Betty Crocker,” said Mrs. Plaut.

I considered telling Mrs. Plaut that there was no Betty Crocker. I considered asking Mrs. Plaut again about her rumored career as a magician’s wife. I considered finishing my coffee, motioning to Gunther and leaving without the pleasure of the savory casserole. The latter was not a serious consideration, not if I intended to remain a boarder in Mrs. Plaut’s house of a thousand pleasures.

The casserole was good, strange but good. That was Mrs. Plaut’s specialty: strange but good cooking, with an emphasis on the former. Bidwell always shook his head and ate with gusto, frequently adding comments on the brilliance of Mrs. Plaut’s culinary skills. I think he meant it. The man survived on enthusiasm. I could take just so much of it. I ate, chewing only on the left side of my mouth.

I had seconds and then waited while Gunther finished. He did not eat quickly. When he finally placed his knife and fork neatly on his plate, I stood and said, “Sorry, we’ve got to run.”

“With caution,” said Mrs. Plaut. “Always with caution. The mister always said, ‘If you don’t look where you are stepping, someday, somewhere you will step into something that will be hard to clean off.”

“Sage advice,” I said, and we were off.

Gunther had brought his tux downstairs before he came to breakfast. His was on a hanger and didn’t look as if it had been worn. We gathered our uniforms and headed for my Crosley. On the way to Columbia, we dropped the clothes off at Pearson’s Cleaners on Pico, which opened at dawn. They would have to be cleaned before I returned them to Hy’s.

Ten minutes later, we were pulling into the parking lot at Columbia Pictures, where a uniformed attendant recognized me.

“Toby? Son-of-a-bitch,” said Dave Crouch as I rolled down my window. “Last time I saw you was …”

“Burke Reilly’s retirement party,” I said.

“Five years?”

“Six or seven,” I said.

Dave was a heavy man in his midfifties with clickety-clack false teeth and a constant smile. We had both been guards at Warner Brothers. Harry Warner personally had fired me when I’d taken a short right jab at a second-rate cowboy star after he’d tried to saddle a would-be kid starlet who wasn’t interested. It wasn’t so much that I had punched the cowboy, but that I had broken his nose, which set the picture he was working on off its shooting schedule for more than a week. Dave Crouch had simply traded the Warner brothers for Harry Conn and a few dollars more per week.

“You here looking for a job?” asked Dave, glancing at Gunther.

“Looking for a movie star,” I said.

“Who?”

“Cornel Wilde. I hear he’s shooting A Thousand and One Nights .”

“That he is,” said Dave. “Stage Two. He expecting you?”

“Would I be here at eight in the morning if he weren’t?”

“Yes,” said Dave. “You would, but who gives a damn, you know? I’ve had it up to here with Cohn and company. I’m thinking of moving down to San Diego, buying into my brother-in-law Sam’s bar. Right near a shipyard. Goddamn gold mine. Sam’s got a liver thing, and my sister likes cooking for me. Seen Ann?”

“No, not for a while,” I said. “Rose?”

“No,” he said. “Go on in. If someone asks me, I’ll say you showed me a pass. You got a pass right?”

“Right here in my pocket,” I said.

“Good enough for me,” said Dave.

I drove past the gate and headed for Stage Two.

“Rose is his former wife, I take it?” asked Gunther.

“She took it,” I said. “Dave once had a house in Santa Monica.”

Stage Two didn’t look any different from the other sound stages on all the lots of all the studios. Maybe it was a little smaller. Maybe the outside brick walls weren’t as clean, but a sound stage is a sound stage from the outside. On the inside, it can be anything from a crater on Mars to a battlefield in Germany to a Sultan’s palace in fairy tale, which was what Stage Two was when Gunther and I went through the door. The green light was on, indicating that they were not shooting at the moment.