Stuart Kaminsky - Tomorrow Is Another day

Phil had folded his hands and put his thick white knuckles to his lips. I sat quietly waiting, fighting the almost irresistible urge to prod him with the right word.

"Let's go," he finally said, standing up.

And we went.

Now we were in the Melody Lounge in search of what had once been Wally Hospodar. We found him on the last bar stool in the comer, biting his lower lip and looking off into mirrors inside of mirrors, trying to remember something or someone. Phil and I sat on either side of him. He looked at us in the mirror and we looked at him. He was ruddy-faced and long past jowly.

"That clarinet," Wally said. "Barney Bigard. Ellington's a goddamn genius. G-C, sol-do, variations. That trombone, right there? Tricky Sam Nanton. You missed Ray Nance's opening violin solo."

"You know a lot about music," I said.

"I know a lot about sitting here," Wally said, looking up at us in the mirror behind the bar.

"The brothers Pevsner," he went on, finishing a whiskey and reaching for a bottle of beer. "You each take a round if I perform magic and tell you why you're here?"

"I'll take two rounds, Wally," I said, waving to the bartender, who was rinsing out some mugs for me and Phil. We looked like the beer type.

"Fine," said Wally. "You want to know about the guy who died that night in '38 at Selznick."

"You got it," Phil said impatiently.

Wally smiled at his empty and sucked his teeth.

"Knew it. Angelina said some guy called, fishing around about me, the night the guy got killed."

"He say anything else to Angelina?" Phil asked, waving away the barkeep and refusing a drink after Wally had his refill.

"Not so's she'd tell me. I met Angelina in Fort Worth."

"That a fact?" Phil said.

"I'll have a beer, draft, whatever you've got," I said to the waiting bartender, who clopped away.

Wally was looking into an eternity of mirrors, moving away from the Melody Lounge, from here and now. He was well on his way to being lost in dreams of Fort Worth.

The song on the jukebox ended.

"Angelina says she loves you and doesn't want you to come home."

"I'll drink to that," he said, draining his glass and pointing to his empty as the bartender, a lanky cowboy in boots, clopped back in our direction. "And plenty more where that came from."

"Maybe not," the barkeep said, glumly picking up Wally's glass. "You know the War Production Board just made eighty alcohol plants switch from the drinking stuff to industrial?"

"I knew that," I said, turning to Wally, but the bartender, who needed some Sen-Sen, a shave, and a better sense of timing, went on.

"And the Woman's Christian Temperance Union met a month or so back in Birmingham, more than a thousand of them. And you know what they want?"

I could see Phil's fists clenching just below bar level.

"What?" I asked.

"Total prohibition again," the bartender said. "Through the war and after."

"Never happen," Wally said.

"Listen," the bartender said, pulling a folded newspaper clipping from the pocket of his plaid shirt.

"You," Phil said, putting his hands palm-down on the bar, a very, very bad sign.

"Just take a second," the bartender said, ignoring Phil and unfolding the clipping to read. "This was what the president of the W.C.T.U. said. Her name's Ida B. Wise Smith. Listen. 'There is hardly an activity of the home front of more importance to the American cause. Liquor is our most widespread and dangerous saboteur, and it is our patriotic duty to halt its ravaging of manpower, material, resources and physical stamina.'"

The bartender looked at us as he stuffed the clipping back in his pocket. "Nothing in there," he said, "about the time and work wasted, or the trains and buses and cars wasting gas and tires to get to Alabama."

"Trains don't have tires," Wally said.

"I was just lumping," the bartender said with a shrug. "It's the pouit, not the details, if you know what I mean."

"I know what you mean," I said.

"Get the man his drink," Phil said, doing his best to contain himself.

The bartender gave Phil a sneer, turned, and went for the bottle.

Music suddenly drummed through the floor. A woman of the afternoon in a red dress and a bad mood was giving us an I-dare-you look and swaying to the opening notes of "Tangerine."

"What was in the report, Wally?" I asked as the bartender came back with my beer.

"Turn off the jukebox," Phil said, rubbing his gray hair with the palm of his hand. A very bad sign.

"Lady's got a right," the bartender said with a shrug.

"Then turn it down," Phil said as the bartender turned away.

The bartender just walked and the music rose. It seemed to be pushing Wally into alcoholics' dreamland. Phil got off his stool and strode toward the lady in red, who gave him a knowing smile and held up her arms, waiting to dance. Phil walked past her and kicked the jukebox right in the speaker. It groaned and shut up.

"What the?…" the woman screamed.

"Hey, asshole," the lanky bartender shouted, coming over the bar with a sawed-off bat hi his hand.

"It was on fire," Phil said. "I just saved your bar. You owe me one."

The bartender was moving on Phil, who started back toward his stool next to us.

"Stop there," Phil said, holding up a hand. "I'm a police officer and I'm in one lousy mood. You want your nose smashed as flat as my brother's over there, just keep coming."

The bartender threw the bat in the general direction of my brother, but it was so wide and to the right that it had to be a pickoff play or a wild pitch to save face.

"He really a cop?" the woman in red screamed at me.

"Yep," I said.

"Let's get out of here," Phil said. "Before I do something I won't regret."

I dropped another one of Clark Gable's five-spots. When the bartender glared at me, I dropped another five to ease his pain.

"Get out of here," the bartender said softly through clenched teeth, in a not-bad Gary Cooper.

Normally, that would have been enough to insure Phil's staying around to do some real personal and property damage. But I was off the stool now and ushering Wally toward the door. The lady in red went into the sunlight just ahead of us as we passed in front of Phil, now glowering at the barkeep.

"I don't want him in here for a month," the bartender said, pointing at Wally. "A month. He's trouble and you're it."

Phil shook his head and joined me and Wally as we went through the Melody Lounge door and onto Main Street. A rain was coming and the lady in red was disappearing into a bar across the street. Nobody paid much attention to us, either because they had seen falling-down drunks before or they had enough instinct to recognize that the hefty guy with the marine haircut was waiting for an excuse.

"What was that?" I asked, leading Wally toward Phil's car.

"Soliciting to commit prostitution. Creating a public nuisance. Catching me when I'm in a bad mood. Hospodar," he said as I set Wally gently down on the fender, "what was in that damn report? Have we got conspiracy to cover a possible murder or what?"

Wally's clothes, now that I could see them in the sunlight, were clean and neat. He was shaved and his hair cut. He was holding onto something he had been, but his grip was loose.

"Made a mistake," Wally mumbled. "One day a decision had to be made and I'd long lost the ability or desire to decide. I didn't step in when two execs were fighting about something, and one of them broke the other guy's face when I was two feet away. Guy with the broken face was a cousin of Louis B.'s wife. End of career."

"I'm sorry," I said.

"And I'm running out of patience," Phil said.

Wally took a deep breath, let it out, and shook like a dog coming out of water.

"No cover-up," he said. "Went through Culver City Police. County attorney's office said it was probably an accident. Dead guy with the sword in his chest was one S. P. Ling…"