Читать книгу Double Take - Roy Huggins - Страница 9

THE switchboard was silent and Hazel was harassing her ancient typewriter and smoking a cigarette. There wasn’t anyone else in the place. I went over to my desk and sat down.

Hazel stopped hammering and smiled. “Hi! Where ya been?” She was thirty-one, and looked it in a nice lean way.

I said: “If I didn’t know your first love was that P.B.X. board, I’d swear you missed me.”

“I did, lug. Did you get the job?”

That was the nice thing about Hazel. Her heart was roomy enough for all fifty of her clients. Hazel had been a government stenographer with imagination and a few pennies in the bank. She rented two offices in the Pacific Building, knocked out the partitions, moved in five desks, six phones, a P.B.X. board, and a rack of pigeonholes and she was in business. For ten dollars a month I and about fifty other gentlemen from various walks of life—all legitimate, Helen insisted—got a mailing address, a telephone, with a competent voice to answer it, and the use of the office whenever we needed it. There was a small room in one corner for private conferences and for five dollars a month extra Hazel had let me bring in my broad-gauge files, two Mexican posters, and my own desk, set down by the east window overlooking Broadway and the distant, dusty hills of San Bernardino.

I told her yes. I had got the job, and asked for an outside line. The rest of the day I gave my left ear a workout calling theatrical agents and employers of second-rate talent in the area. None of them had ever heard of a Peg Bleeker. A few of them remembered Buster Buffin vaguely, and one had an idea he’d left show business and bought himself a meat market.

It sounded more like a gag than a lead, but I took my phone book out of its drawer, looked around to see if anyone was watching—no one was except a large fly perched on the end of my pen desk set—and looked under the B’s. After the Buffetts came one lonely Buffin. Buster Buffin’s Buffet, with an address in Venice.

The large fly sneered at me and said, “Bailey, you’re losing the simple touch.” Or maybe I said it to the fly.

…I was thinking about something else and I didn’t notice the green Dodge until I was out to where Wilshire passes the Los Angeles Country Club and the traffic had lost its Beverly Hills bulge. I let him tag along to Westwood Village.

At Warner I swung to the right and then pulled up and leaned out, waiting. He came wheeling into Warner in an agony of sound, straightened up and shot by me. As he went by, he saw me, and I caught a glimpse of a sallow face under a green felt hat, and a loose-lipped mouth hanging open in indecision and surprise. He drove up to Woodruff, turned left, and disappeared.

I started the car and drove up. A few feet down Woodruff, the Dodge was parked. I pulled up and got out. The car was empty. There was no registration showing, and the single plate was the deep chocolate brown issued by Michigan that year. Across the street a tall growth of oleander ran along the walk for half a block. I got back in my car and drove off. When I turned toward Wilshire, the green Dodge was still sitting at the curb, empty.

Buster Buffin’s Buffet was on the ocean front, a colorless, beaten little shack cuddled up next to the Paragon Ballroom like a barnacle clinging to a luxury yacht.

* * * *

INSIDE there was warmth and steam and the smell of fried onions and fat. There was a horseshoe counter in the center with a kitchen at the open end and booths along each side. Some stairs at the rear on the left side went up to a second floor. A sign over them said: “Private Dining Rooms.” There were some smaller signs on the back walls that made me pretty sure I had come to the right place: “Yes! We serve crabs. Have a seat.” “Stomach pumps provided with our blue plate special.” “Vy is der zo miny mor orzis azis den der iz orzis?” Several others suggested with the same pungent humor that asking for credit would be a mistake. There weren’t any customers.

A little fellow with quick eyes like a nervous robin and the same hungry grin I had first seen on the display board at Keller’s came out of the kitchen. He had aged some, and he managed to look unhealthy under a heavy coat of tan.

He had a rag in one hand and a cigarette in the other. “Bein’ as it’s meatless Tuesday,” he grinned, “what’ll you have?”

“You’re using last year’s calendar. This isn’t Tuesday.”

Buffin put the rag up to his nose, screwed up his face in a pained grimace and held the rag out stiffly behind him. “Brother,” he said, “at Buffin’s every day is Tuesday. You can have clam chowder—or clam chowder.”

“Chowder,” I said agreeably. “And a cup of coffee.”

He trotted back to the kitchen and came out after awhile with a paper napkin, a bowl, and a large spoon. He put them down in front of me.

“You’ll find the chowder warmer than an old’s maid’s feet,” he said, “but not half as clammy.”

I said: “You’ll have to watch that stuff. They’ll be making you charge an entertainment tax.”

Buster suddenly grabbed up the bowl in front of me and with a pseudo-horrified expression on his face said,

“You wouldn’t be a food inspector, would you?”

“No,” I laughed. “And anyway, I’m hungry—put it back.”

Buster put it down again and walked over to the coffee urn. I tried the clam chowder. It was tepid and thin and I didn’t find any clams in it, not even a dead one. Buster put the coffee in front of me in a cup that weighed a pound. He was grinning again. It was a nice grin, not really inane, just a little tired and a little sad, the remnant of an insatiable optimism.

“Cream?” he asked, “or do you take it like it is—mud gray?”

I reached for the sugar and said, “Get much business from the ballroom?”

“Yeah, except when the weather’s like it was last Monday. That kills business at the beach. Even at night. I guess it’s psychology.”

That looked like a fine opening. I said: “I liked that rain. Reminded me of home. I’m from Portland, where it really rains.”

“You don’t have to tell me,” he snorted. “I left there when my feet started to grow webs.”

“You know the old burg, huh?”

“Spent some time up there back in ’37 or ’38. Hoofin’.”

“Where? The Orpheum?”

“How’s the chowder?”

“Fine. Fine. So you know the old town?”

“Yeah.”

“The Orpheum, huh?”

“Nope. That’s straight vaudeville. Warm up your coffee?”

“No, it’s fine.”

He started back to the kitchen.

“Say, are you the owner—Buffin?”

“Yeah.”

“I think I remember you. Keller’s Hofbrau, wasn’t it?”

Buster’s face lit up and he said, “Brother, you’re kiddin’ me, but it’s soothin’, very soothin’.”

“No. I remember the name. I used to go down and buy my jug of beer every Friday night.”

“Yeah,” he said, and winked. “That was a cheap town if there ever was.”

I didn’t hear that. “Keller had a corner on the lovelies though. I can remember a couple I wouldn’t mind going back for.”

“Yeah,” he said. “How long you been in L. A.?”

“Five years.”

“You’re a native. It’s been good to me. I like L. A. Sure your coffee’s okay?”

“Yeah.”

* * * *

HE TURNED and went back to the kitchen and left me sitting there. I’m a good fisherman. I can play any kind of fish, if he isn’t a bright kind of fish, like a dog shaak. I drank some of the coffee and got up. Buster came back and stood by the cash register.

“Two bits,” he said.

I paid him and decided to stop wasting time.

“You didn’t know that blonde gal who sang for Keller, did you? Her name was Betty Bleeker.”

He jerked his head up and gave me a slow stare. His quick eyes were puzzled, almost worried. “You mean Peggy Bleeker,” he said slowly.

“Oh. Was that it?”

“That was it,” he said and gave me a slow smile that showed a line of even white teeth that looked as genuine as a sound-effect. “Did you go through this routine just to find out if I know Peg Bleeker?”

“Yeah,” I said. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”

“Copper?”

“No. I’m just looking for Peg Bleeker.”

“Why?”

“Okay,” I said. “You win. Her aunt died almost a year ago and left a piece of property out by one of the shipyards. We’ve tried to find Miss Bleeker through the police down here, but they don’t seem to be trying. The property is pretty valuable right now, and we can’t do anything without her. Keller told me she came down here with you.”

“But, chum, that was six years ago. What’s your angle on it?”

“I’m just working for the executor.”

“What’s the information worth?”

“It depends on the information.” I got out my wallet and laid a ten on the counter. “Let’s see how much that’ll buy.”

He looked at it and left it there. He said: “She came down here with me and I helped her land a job. Then when I tried to get a little she tossed me out and called me a cheap bum.” He said it casually enough, but color crawled up under his tan and burned in two points on his cheeks.

“What sort of a job?”

“Song spot. Down at King Henry’s Cellar on Fifth. But she didn’t like tea. She was strictly dynamite. I never did make her. And I don’t think anyone else ever did. But I came back for more. I got her a nice spot with the Revues and then she moved over to the Glendale in a strip routine. The Glendale was tops in burlesque then, but she was too genteel for the boys, and she wasn’t built right anyway. Strippers are slobs.”

I nodded.

“Well, that’s about it. I went back east, and when I got back I found out she’d got up a bubble dance routine and was hitting the night club circuit. I traced her to a couple of second-rate joints—one in Long Beach, and one in San Pedro. Then I lost her.”

He gave the counter a slow, eloquent swipe with the dish rag. He said: “I haven’t given that babe a dime’s worth of thought since.”

I said: “Was she using Peg Bleeker as her professional name?”

He looked up at me, almost shyly, and grinned. “I been waitin’ for you to ask that. That’s the sixty-four-dollar question.”

“It’s worth twenty, Buster. I could find out, you know.”

“Like hell you could, but I’ll sell it for fifty bucks. Take it or leave it.”

I took it. He gave me the addresses of the two night clubs in Long Beach and San Pedro free of charge. The name Peg Bleeker had taken, and was still using when Buster lost track of her some time in 1939, was Gloria Day.

I took out the Hofbrau version of Peg Bleeker and handed it to him.

I said: “Did she still look like that down here? The long bob and the ammonia rinse?”

He looked at the picture for a while without saying anything. Then: “Did Keller give you this?”

“Yeah.”

He handed it back to me. “She dyed her hair red after she got down here.” His face looked stiff and tight. He turned and walked back to the little kitchen.

…There’s a lot of traffic on Wilshire, but I got the idea a dark blue Chevrolet that stayed behind me all the way in wasn’t interested in getting ahead of me. I didn’t try to find out. I was going to my office, and my office is in the phone book.

I parked in the lot on the corner across from the Pacific Building. I walked by the little lunch room in the Hart Building and up to the cross walk, across the street and into the lobby.

I hadn’t noticed the Chevrolet, but I had seen something else more interesting: Mrs. Ralph Johnston, sitting in the window-booth of the lunch room, watching the entrance of the Pacific Building with the tense patience of a terrier watching a gopher hole.