The Howard Hughes Affair: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Four) (2 page)

On Monday morning, I was sitting in my room eating a very large bowl of Kellogg’s All-Bran, the natural laxative cereal. I had been living in a rooming house in Hollywood for almost three months at $15 a month.

I had no faith in the rooming house lasting a long time. My last place was being levelled by a bulldozer to make way for a supermarket. I had been thrown out of the apartment I had lived in before that when a guy shot it up and took an unintended dive out of my window. The rooming house was a change of pace in a quiet neighborhood. It had been an impulsive move toward domestic tranquility, but the quiet street and deaf landlady were already driving me away from what little sanity I had.

The deaf landlady, Mrs. Plaut, kept the room clean, which relieved me of the small, infrequent guilt I had always felt about the other places I had lived in and let rot around me. I had a hot plate in a corner, a sink, a small refrigerator, some dishes, a table and three chairs, a rug, a bed with a purple blanket made by Mrs. Plaut that said “God Bless Us Every One” in pink stitching, and a sofa with little doilies on the arms that I was afraid to touch.

The six people who lived in the place generally minded their own business. I wasn’t even sure who they all were, since my hours were unusual and I didn’t socialize much in the hall or join in the weekly poker game Mrs. Plaut held in the living room downstairs. Eventually, I would have to accept her invitation since she assured me the stakes were “moderate.” I had trouble picturing her wrapped in her old shawl crocheting doilies as she “raised a sawbuck” over the eleven-cent bet of Mr. Hill, the nearsighted accountant.

The phone in the hall rang and I could hear Mrs. Plaut cackling to someone. Then I heard the slap of her slippered feet come down the hall. I could almost smell the faded flowers on her print dress when she knocked on my door.

“Tony,” she whispered. I had spent the better part of the first evening I moved in trying to tell her my name was Toby, but she had smiled knowingly and kept calling me Tony Peelers. I had enough names and could have done without it, but some things aren’t worth the effort.

“O.K.,” I shouted, shoveling down All-Bran so it wouldn’t get soggy while I went to the phone.

“Tony,” she went on. “Are you there? You have a telephone call.”

“I’m here. I’ll be right there.”

Her feet padded away, and I hurried to the door, pulling on my pants. I hobbled down the corridor to hear Mrs. Plaut saying into the phone, “I’m sorry, but Tony is not home. Would you care to leave a message?”

I managed to pull my belt tight and wave to Mrs. Plaut, who ignored me. We wrestled for the phone for a few seconds. Since I was thirty years younger than she was and fifty pounds heavier, I almost succeeded in getting the phone from her fingers. I finally forced my face in front of her, and recognition dawned. She let me have the phone and I panted into it.

“Peters here.”

“Mr. Hughes would like to see you today,” a male voice said.

“All right, where?”

“Be at 7000 Romaine at 11. That gives you one hour.”

“One hour,” I said. “What’s it about?”

The guy on the other end hung up and so did I.

I finished my cereal, had another bowl with sugar and milk and found out from the L.A.
Times
that the Russians had launched a strong counteroffensive against the Nazis at Rostov, that Rommel was holding the British in Libya, and that F.D.R. saw a crisis in Asia while he waited for the Japanese reply to his principles for peace. “War Clouds Loom in the Pacific,” said the headlines. I turned to the sports section and found that Hugh Gallarnea, the former Stanford runner, had led the World Championship Chicago Bears to a 49–14 win over the Philadelphia Eagles with three touchdowns. Green Bay was still a game ahead of Chicago in the Western Division with a 10–1 record compared to Chicago’s 9–1. I had developed a strong curiousity about Chicago since a recent visit there, and I wondered how anyone could play, or want to play football in a Chicago winter.

I also discovered from the “Private Lives” cartoon that “Berlin’s most luxurious boudoir belongs, not to a movie star, but to Reinhard Heydrich the cold-blooded killer who governs what was once Czecho-Slovakia.”

Armed with all this information, I shaved, finished dressing, rinsed out my bowl, pretended I didn’t notice my unmade bed and went into the rain ignoring the twinge in my bad back that promised trouble if the rain kept up.

Three little girls about eight years old were skipping rope on the porch. I watched them for awhile, waiting for a break in the rain so I could dash to the Buick, tilt my hat back and feel like a detective.

The girl who was jumping had three teeth missing on top, and her mouth was wide open. The two rope-turners chanted:

Fudge, fudge, tell the judge

Mother has a newborn baby;

It isn’t a girl and it isn’t a boy;

It’s just a fair young lady.

Wrap it up in tissue paper

And send it up the elevator;

First floor, miss;

Second floor, miss;

Third floor, miss;

Fourth floor,

Kick it out the elevator door.

Since that was about all I could take from the youth of America on two bowls of All-Bran, I dashed for the car and made it without too much rain damage to my suit.

Seven thousand Romaine was a big office building, and they were expecting me. A young man who looked like an ex-seminary student with his blond hair parted almost down the middle identified himself as Dean and escorted me up the elevator, commenting on the weather, the misfortunes of war, and our mutual hope for prosperity. I said he was right and followed him past a maze of rooms. Everyone seemed to have been set down in isolated cubbyholes.

Dean read my mind and kept walking.

“Mr. Hughes prefers to keep the employees separated so they won’t gossip and they won’t know what each is doing. He believes in keeping company secrets.”

We went into a large office with a thick, blue carpet and pictures of birds on the wall. There was a bar, table, radio, desk and a hell of a good view. But it looked unused.

The young guy read my mind again, which was probably what he got paid for.

“This office is for Mr. Hughes, but he never comes here.”

“Today is special.”

He nodded his head negatively.

“No, today is not special. You are to wait here for a call from Mr. Hughes.”

“Life’s been threatened and he’s being careful,” I guessed, taking a walk to the window.

“No,” said the man, his mouth playing with the idea of being amused. “This is Mr. Hughes’ normal procedure.”

“I see,” I said knowingly.

Dean checked the unused desk to be sure it was neat. “I don’t know why he does two-thirds of what he does. And I don’t know why he wants to see you.”

“Terrific,” I said, turning to smile at him, knowing that my smile made me look like an enraptured gargoyle.

We stared at each other for half an hour and looked at the phone. At noon, a tray of food came in. According to Dean, Hughes himself had ordered my lunch, which turned out to be a salad, a bacon and avocado sandwich on white bread and a big glass of milk. Dean had the same. We ate in silence at a small table, and I felt my mind toying with catatonia.

“Can I get you anything more?” he said when he finished and wiped his mouth with a napkin. “More food? Something to drink or read?”

“How about another avocado sandwich to go?” I tried. He didn’t look angry or amused. We waited some more and I looked at my watch. It told me it was 12:45, which might be true or might be hours off.

I turned on the radio without permission, tuned in KFI and listened to
Vic and Sade
. Uncle Fletcher and Sade spent the show talking about how they were going to have lunch together. When it was over, a buzzer on the desk jerked young Dean forward. He grabbed the phone, said “yes,” and hung up.

“There’s a private airport in Burbank on …” Dean started.

“I know where it is,” I cut in.

“Good. You’re to go there immediately.”

“What if I don’t go there immediately? What if I don’t like being treated like a vacuum-cleaner salesman?”

“Sorry?” said Dean as if he hadn’t heard me.

“What if I don’t feel like going to Burbank? What if I decide instead to invest 30 cents and see
Citizen Kane
at the Hawaiian instead, and maybe another 40 cents on a couple of tacos?”

“It would probably cost me my job,” he said.

“It doesn’t seem like much of a goddamn job to me, Dean,” I said, making for the door.

“Mr. Dean, Walter Dean,” he corrected. “It pays well,” he said with a sign of life, “and you get to meet all kinds of strange people.”

“Like Howard Hughes?”

“Believe it or not, Mr. Peters, you and I have already had a longer conversation than any I have had with Mr. Hughes. I hope you enjoy
Citizen Kane
.”

I looked at him and couldn’t tell if he meant it or the whole response was some kind of con to keep me in a good mood. If he was a fake, he was a good one.

“Burbank?” I said.

He nodded and I left, hurrying down the silent, carpeted corridors and out of the damn building as fast as I could. My footsteps didn’t even echo to keep me company. The building had no echo. And there were no people walking down the halls chatting and no people at the water coolers. There were no water coolers.

I was already in love with Howard Hughes as I drove to Burbank in the rain listening to
Young Widder Brown
. I stopped at a drug store for a Coke after the radio told me, “A little minute for a big rest means more and better work.” It was sound advice, and though I was normally addicted to Pepsi, I proved my flexibility. I also bought a tube of Musterole salve to use on my back when I got home. If it was good enough for the Dionne Quintuplets, and the radio said it was, then it was good enough for Toby Peters. I tried to think of a scheme for getting Carmen, the widow cashier at Levy’s Grill, to invite me to her place for a Musterole treatment. I’d even invest 30 cents and take her with me to the Hawaiian. With more than 300 dollars in the bank and a potential millionaire client coming up, I could afford a few luxuries, maybe even a full tank of gas.

The rain had turned to steady sheets of thin, sticky glue by the time I hit the airport. I parked in a small lot and ran for the nearest building. Two guys stopped me before I hit the safety of the tin overhang. Both were well dressed, unsmiling and dry. They were also big. At least one of them should have been ugly, but they weren’t. They looked like everyone’s image of the FBI.

“I’m supposed to meet Hughes here,” I said, holding my hand over my head to keep a small patch of my scalp dry.

They parted to let me by.

“Thanks,” I said, dripping between them and through a white, wooden door. They followed me in, looking confident. I didn’t like it, and I didn’t like meeting a potential client wearing a seersucker sponge.

“You should have asked me for my name,” I said, looking around the small, empty office.

One of the grey pair of movie doubles stepped forward and I turned, expecting trouble and maybe wanting it. The wait in Hughes’ office and the game in the rain had made me tough and stupid. The grey double handed me a card. On the card was my photograph. I nodded, handed it back, and sat down at a bench across from an old desk covered with bills and paper. The rain pinged in boredom on the tin roof as one of the two went back outside and the other stayed to keep his eyes on me.

“What now?” I asked. “Do I get blindfolded and transported to Northern Canada?”

“Mr. Hughes will be right down,” he said. He and Walter Dean back on Romaine had gone to the same school. I could hear the buzzing of a small airplane outside and turned to look across the field. A dot appeared in the distance out of the waves of dark rain and grew larger as it headed toward us and touched down on the ground with a slight bump and whirr. The plane, a two-engine silver thing, kept getting bigger and moving slower till it came to a stop about thirty yards from us. Two men climbed out, one well built and wearing a light-colored suit, the other tall and thin with slacks and an old zipper jacket. The one in the suit ran ahead while the thin guy ambled, ignoring the rain and deep in thought. The guy in the suit burst through the door, panting. He was about fifty with thick glasses. He looked at me, took off his jacket, snapped it once to get the top layer of moisture off and looked at the door. The second man came in. He pushed back his wet, dark hair and clenched his teeth without looking at anyone and unzipped his battered jacket, revealing a clean white shirt and no tie. Something was on his mind. He was in his mid-thirties, about six-foot four and had a slight mustache, which couldn’t make up its mind whether to be something admirable or something inconspicuous. From the way the business-suited duo looked at him trying not to look at him, I assumed he was Hughes.

“Noah, tell Rod to back it another eighth of a revolution. No, make it a seventh. I’ll take it up as soon as it’s done.” The guy who had been in the plane with Hughes nodded, put his wet jacket back on and went into the rain without a word. Hughes sat at the edge of the desk, looking out of the window at the resting plane. He touched his lower lip, looked through me, and closed his eyes. Inspiration hit, and he turned to pick up the phone.