Stuart Kaminsky: Tomorrow Is Another day

"Officer… don't tell me. Let me remember."

"Peters," I said, adjusting my tie in the bar mirror and surveying the room.

"Peters? No, that's not it," said Gannett.

"Pevsner," I said. "I changed it to Peters."

"Right," said Gannett. "Pevsner. I got a memory or what?"

"I get a prize for remembering my own name?"

"Sure thing," said Gannett with a grin. "Name it."

"Beer," I said.

"Suit yourself," he said with a shrug, letting me know that money was no object when it came to someone as important as an ex-cop who could remember his own name. "Been a while."

"About ten years," I said. "I'm not a cop anymore."

Gannett, reaching over to hit the tap handle and fill a mug with beer, kept grinning and pouring.

"That a fact?" he said.

"A fact," I said, watching the foam spill over the side of the mug he placed in front of me on a cardboard coaster. "Want to take the beer back?"

"To your good health," he said with a shrug.

"And yours," I agreed, toasting him and taking a drink.

"So, what you been up to?" he said, figuring maybe that I hadn't just dropped into the Mozambique for old time's sake.

"Worked security at Warner Brothers. Been doing private investigations for a while," I said, downing more beer.

"Tagged you for the army," Gannett said, leaning over and cleaning up the beer spill on his slick bar.

Gannett hadn't tagged me for anything, hadn't even thought about me since Babe Ruth retired from the Boston Braves.

"I'm pushing fifty, Lester," I said.

"No shit," he said, shaking his head. "I'd have said you were thirty-five tops. I'm fifty-two and look it, but you…"

I looked at myself in the mirror behind the bar. The face belonged to a middleweight who had gone too many losing rounds at least two decades earlier.

"I'll bet you tell that to all the customers," I said, downing the rest of the beer and eyeing the empty mug.

"Most," Gannett agreed. "Most. Want another?"

This time I shrugged.

"It's on you, Peters," he said. "Old times is old times, but…"

I fished out a quarter and plucked it on the bar.

The piano guy who looked like Clifton Webb finished his song and two people applauded politely, the kid with the infant hooker and the old sailor. The piano player nodded and launched into "Moonlight and Roses."

One night back when I was a Glendale cop, my partner Matt and I took a call about a fight in the Mozambique. Matt was a wheezer thinking about retiring to a small orange grove near Lompoc. I was a guy with a wife and gun.

The fight was over when we got mere. A guy as big as a red Los Angeles trolley with an unsmiling flat face was standing on the stomach of a decidedly smaller guy who wasn't moving and may not have been breathing. They were right in front of the bandstand. Tables and chairs were overturned and any customers who might have been around five minutes earlier were all on their way home to listen to Stoopnagle and Bud.

"He's a Samoan," Lester Gannett had whispered to us from behind the bar.

"The big guy or the one on the floor?" I asked.

"Big guy," he said. "Other one's Charlie Westfarland or something like that. Welsh, Irish. Something. Who knows?"

"Helpful information," I said, while my partner tipped his blue cap back and sat at the bar, facing the path of destruction to the bandstand.

"Little guy, Charlie, thought Andy was a Jap," Lester explained. "Said something. You know. Harmless. And Andy goes stark nuts."

"Big guy?" I asked.

"Big guy," Gannett confirmed. "Been coming in for a week. On a construction job, something over near the cemetery. Who knows? Will you just get him the hell out of here? Night crowd'll be coming soon and I got a singer. It's Friday, you know. I got a singer, Fridays."

"Give you seven to four the Samoan falls off the other guy inside a minute," said my partner.

I looked at the two men among the mess of broken chairs and scattered tables. The big Samoan, a dreamy look in his eyes, was riding the unconscious guy as if he were a log.

"Matt," I said. "Little guy might be dead."

Matt touched his chin, thought for a beat, and said, "Even money. Take dead or alive. Your pick."

I'd left him sitting there trying to make the same bet with Gannett, who seemed to be considering it seriously.

"Andy," I had said, my hands folded in front of me as I approached the Samoan, my best Officer Gently smile on my face. "What've we got here?"

Andy returned from Oz and looked at me with no expression. He just kept rocking on little Charlie's bigoted chest.

"Well," I said. "I'd say we've got a situation."

Andy reached up and scratched his thick neck.

"I'd say you'd better step off the very quiet gentleman so I can see if he's alive."

Andy stopped scratching and continued to eye me, as if I were about to do something that might interest him. I looked back at the bar. Matt had laid some bills on it. Gannett was matching them as he watched us.

"They're betting on whether I'm going to have to shoot you," I said.

Andy turned his head away as if I were boring him, and I lost eye contact. A very bad sign.

"I've never shot anybody, Andy," I said softly. "Don't want to. Look, I don't know you. You don't know me. Fella you're standing on is probably a son of a bitch who deserves a good beating. He's got that. You wind up on trial for murder and you both get more than you deserve."

Andy was either listening or tiring. He stopped rocking on the fallen guy's stomach and almost fell. Someone behind me, probably Gannett, gasped, his bet in jeopardy.

"Aw, the hell with this," said Matt, who'd come up behind me. He pushed past, kicking the remains of a chair out of the way. Matt stepped up to Andy, who with the added ten inches of the fallen guy's body was about twenty feet tall. Matt hit the big guy full and hard in the face with his night stick.

The bonk of oak against bone echoed through the painted jungle of the Mozambique and Andy toppled backward onto the stage, his nose split. Sidney the cockatoo screamed "Wow."

"Bet's off," shouted Gannett. "You knocked him off."

Matt stepped over the little guy on the floor and onto the bandstand, where he gave the motionless Andy a second bonk on the head. I kneeled over the little guy and put my ear to his chest. Something was rattling in there besides broken ribs.

"Resisting arrest," Matt had wheezed, trying to turn Andy over. "Give me a hand turning this fat Jap over so I can cuff him."

"He's Samoan," I said, and turned to Gannett to shout, "Call an ambulance."

"Wow," Sidney screamed again.

"It's no fun anymore, Tobias," Matt said as we turned Andy over on his stomach.

"I know what you mean," I'd said.

Six months later I had traded my Glendale blues for Warner Brothers greens. Now I was back in Glendale, back at the Mozambique, and looking for my client.

I was fresh off a job with a few dollars left. I'd cleared enough to pay Mrs. Plaut a month's rent, get my clothes repaired and buy a new Windbreaker at Hy's for Him, and have No-Neck Arnie bring my Crosley back to life, including a new door and a patchwork transmission. I'd also cleared enough to take Carmen, the ample cashier at Levy's on Spring Street, to two dinners, a Jimmy Wakely triple-feature, and an all-night Wrestle-Rama at the Garden. In gratitude for this lavishness I had received two generous wet kisses, a momentary left hand between my legs while I was driving her home, and an invitation to a taco dinner at the apartment she shared with her eleven-year-old son who in his kinder moments called me Wolfman.

I needed work and a fresh start.

I needed the new client in the shadows of the red-leatherette booth, who had told me to meet him at the Mozambique.

"Guy in the booth," I said to Gannett without turning my head from my drink. "How long's he been here?"