Now You See It by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 2004)

 

June 25, 1944

The Pantages Theater wasn't on fire, but Blackstone definitely had a problem. My brother Phil and I had been hired to take care of the problem before it killed the World’s Greatest Living Magician.

Inside the Pantages, Phil was sitting in the front row with his sons Dave and Nate. Dave, at fourteen, was two years older than his brother and trying his best to hide his awe. It was what fourteen-year-olds did.

Mildred Pierced by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 2003)

 

Until Wednesday afternoon January 5, 1944, there had been no deaths, intentional or accidental, caused by the firing of a crossbow in the recorded history of Los Angeles County.

On that day, while the German army of Field Marshal Fritz von Manstein was retreating into the Pripet marshes in Poland and the U.S. Marines were driving the Japanese back at Cape Gloucester in New Britain in the Pacific, Mildred Binder Minck made history.

The day after Mildred’s historic demise, I sat across from her grieving widower, Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., in a room in the Los Angeles County Jail.

The Los Angeles County Hall of Justice on Temple Street between Broadway and Spring takes up a city block. It’s fourteen stories of limestone and granite, an Italian Renaissance style building with rusticated stonework, heavy cornices, and a two-story colonnade at the top.

The L.A. County Jail occupies the five top stories. Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., was occupying only one chair on the fourth floor of the jail. He faced me through a wall of thick wire mesh.

“Toby, I didn’t do it,” he said.

Shelly Minck is not a thing of beauty to behold when he’s at his best, happily drilling into or removing the tooth of a trapped patient. Seated on the other side of the wire, he was not at his best.

“I mean, I don’t think I did it,” he added.

Shelly wore a pair of dark slacks and a long-sleeved wrinkled gray shirt. His thick glasses rested, as they usually did, at the end of his ample nose. Beads of sweat danced on his bald head and his large stomach heaved with frequent sighs.

“They won’t let me have a cigar,” he complained. “Is that fair?” 

To Catch a Spy by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 2002)

 

When there were no other visitors around, I talked to the gorillas or the chimps. The gorillas paid more attention. I leaned on the railing and looked through the bars.

“I’ve had a hell of a day,” I told the big gorilla.

He kept eating, but he looked at me intelligently. I took it as a sign that he didn’t mind if I continued.

“Someone tried to kill me,” I said. “Someone is threatening to kill a couple of my friends. A Nazi. I mean the guy holding them who tried to kill me is a Nazi.”

“That’s how you got all scratched up?” came a raspy voice at my side.

“Yeah.”

The gorilla found a banana and delicately peeled it, still looking at me.

“You think you had a bad day,” came a raspy voice again.

A thin woman in a cloth coat too warm for the afternoon had moved up to the railing without my seeing her. Her hair was white and wild. She had clear light blue eyes and a smooth face. I couldn’t tell how old she was. She clutched a big blue purse to her chest.

“I slept in the park, a little shed behind the Greek Theater,” she said.

I wasn’t sure what to say, so I just nodded and went back to looking at the gorilla. He was now staring at the thin woman.

“Look at them,” she said. “Place to sleep every night. Someone feeds ’em. Don’t have to work, worry about where the next meal is coming, where to bed down.”

“They give up their freedom for that,” I said.

She cackled.

“Put me in a cage with a place to sleep and three squares and you can come and talk to me whenever you like about Nazis trying to kill you.”

“I was talking to the gorilla. I mean, about the Nazis.”

She shrugged and leaned her chin on the purse.

“Go on,” she said. “I talk to ’em too. Say, if a cop comes by, don’t tell him I tried to put the bite on you.”

“You didn’t,” I said.

“I’m working up to it,” she said. “Cop comes and real polite ushers me out of the zoo if I’m puttin’ on the bite.”

“We’re just fellow animal lovers,” I said.

“And both maybe a little nuts,” she said. “Nazis trying to kill you. You come back from the war shell-shocked, something?"

“Too old for the war,” I said.

“So was Milton,” she said, “but he volunteered and they took him. Want to know why?”

“Why?” I asked, and the gorilla and I waited for an answer.

“Because he had a special skill, my Milton, which is something I don’t got. Milton knew barometers, thermometers, all kinds of meters. Worked for the city. Not this one, Newark, New Jersey. Then he got himself killed on a ship somewhere and left me bubkas.”

She looked at me.

“Is that a sad story?”

“Very,” I said.

“Sad enough to make you kick in a few bucks?” she asked.

“Sad enough,” I said, pulling out my wallet and fishing out two singles.

She took them and plunked them into her purse.

“That’s one of my better stories,” she said. “Depends on the customer which story I use. True story is even too sad for me to tell myself. Won’t tell that one for five, even ten bucks. Rather starve. This is the point where you tell me you gotta go. You’re late for something.”

“I’m not late for anything,” I said.

She was looking at the gorilla again.

“Got any kids?” she asked softly.

“No.”

“Good,” she said. “You lose ’em, you lose your heart. Know what I mean?”

“I think so,” I said.

“Gorillas,” she said, looking back at the two animals. “They look so smart. Like they’re thinking, working out some big problem. You think?”

“Maybe.”

“Maybe,” she repeated and ran a hand through her wild hair. “Listen, I gotta go get something to eat. It’s been good talkin’ to you.”

“Same here,” I said.

“And stay away from those Nazis. They’re bad news.”

She walked away, a slight limp. I watched her head down the hill, her eyes toward the ground. I looked at the gorilla. He was watching her too.

“You could have offered her a carrot,” I said.”

A Fatal Glass of Beer by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1997)

 

Pleasure to meet you,” Fields said.

“I’ll write to my husband and tell him I met you,” she said. “He thinks you’re funny.”

“Armstrong takes Beau Jack, ten bucks straight up,” I reminded her.

Violet nodded solemnly; Fields and I left.

“Note,” he said as we closed the door and stood on the railed landing of the sixth floor of the Faraday Building, “she said her husband likes me. It has been a source of irritation that women, as a gender, are not particularly responsive to my wit. They prefer a popinjay ballet dancer like Chaplin to honest misogyny.”

“Hard to understand,” I said, remembering that my former wife, Anne, had refused to see Fields movies with me, claiming that they made no sense, weren’t amusing, were nasty to women and small children. I had agreed with her, but I still thought he was funny.

Dancing in the Dark by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1996)

 

Would you like to know about Preston? It might make it easier if you knew what a …”

“No,” I said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to know how kind, loving, rich, and funny he is. Call me a sore loser. Call me childish, which you’ve been known to do. My guess is I’ll avoid Preston Stewart movies for a year and then I’ll start going to all of them, looking for signs of decay or melting, wondering how you two hit it off in bed and if he’s still keeping you laughing down on the beach in your tans.”

“I didn’t think you’d be this bitter,” Anne said.

“You caught me by surprise. I didn’t have time to fake it or tell a bad joke or two. The truth just came out.”

Tomorrow Is Another Day by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1995)

Elmo looked around his alley domain. Cars beeped and chugged on Main Street beyond the Farraday. Elmo seemed to listen and then touch his face.

“Just need another tomorrow,” he said. “And who’m I trying to impress, I ask you.”

“You’ve got a point,” I said. “But if you put the shave together with a bath, some clean clothes from Hy’s or Chi Chi’s Slightly Worn on Hoover, you might be able to line up a job.”

“Had one once,” Elmo said with a smile. “Makes me itch. Got no patience. Most guys out here …” He looked around, but there weren’t any guys. “Most guys have a story. What they were. What they walked away from. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

Elmo jangled the coins in his pocket. 

"I got no story. No ambition. What the hell. You’re born one day. Sixty, seventy years later you’re dead. You know?”

“I know,” I said.

Elmo shook his head.

“So,” he went on, “the way I figure it, why waste the sixty, seventy with work, trying to get something you can’t keep anyway. I’m not starvin’. I’m not cold or wet most days. I get plenty of time to read over at the library or wherever.”

“I get your point, Elmo.”

“You think I could really get a job?” he asked, looking away from me. “I mean if I cleaned up okay?”

“Lot of jobs, Elmo. The gravy’s in the navy.”

The Devil Met a Lady by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1993)

“If I remain in this room for five more minutes, I will surely go mad, mad, mad,” Bette Davis said, grabbing the sleeve of my jacket as I reached for the door.

She looked into my eyes. Hers were large and determined. Mine were red and beady.

I couldn’t blame her. She’d been holed up in a small room in the Great Palms Hotel on Main for almost twenty-four hours with nothing to eat but room-service ham-and-cheese on white and nothing to drink but water and Ruppert Mellow Light Beer. She had the bed. I had the undersized sofa.”

The Great Palms Hotel was a good place to get lost—not in the top twenty-five percent and not in the bottom ten, usually hovering not far from respectable mediocrity.

The Melting Clock by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1991)

“Grasshoppers,” Salvador Dali whispered, shrinking back as I opened the door. He didn’t say “grasshoppers” exactly, it was more like “grah-zoppairs,” but I understood the word as he repeated it, his eyes open wide, his long, dark waxed mustaches curled upward at the end like sharp-pointed black surgical needles.

“A giant monk with an ax is coming through that door behind you in about ten seconds,” I said.

The door I was pointing to shuddered.

“Make that five, Sal. What’ll it be, a couple of grasshoppers outside or a split personality?”

Dali, dressed in a white rabbit suit, removed the deerstalker hat perched on his head and pointed at the splintering door with one hand. Then he did a little dance from foot to foot as if he had to find a toilet.

Poor Butterfly by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1990)

The overture ended. Stokowski sighed, shook his head, and said, “Oboe. You, oboe.”

The oboe player, a very old man, looked up, ready to accept the ax.

“When I coax you with my hand like this,” said Stokowski, demonstrating the hand movement “I want you to play, to help. The flutes were lost. They have improved in quality in the last ten minutes but lost in volume.”

“But,” said the bewildered oboe player, his instrument cradled lovingly in his arms, “there was no music when you “pointed at me to play.”

“I am the conductor,” said Stokowski. “If I point at you, coax you, it is because I need you, and you will play even if there is no part for you.”

“You want me to improvise on Puccini?” asked the stunned old man, looking in the general direction of the string section.

“Yes,” said Stokowski. “Yes. Yes if I need it.”

“You want me to play … jazz?”

“I don’t care what you call it,” said Stokowski. “Just do it. Can you do it?”

“Yes,” said the old man.

“Good,” said Stokowski. “Practice.”

“Practice what?” asked the old man.

“Creative flexibility.”

Buried Caesars by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1989)

And we went. Seidman trusted me enough to let me drive my Crosley ahead of him. We got to the Wilshire Station in fifteen minutes, bucking the traffic. The Wilshire had been the hotbed of police activity back in 1923 when my brother Phil joined the force. Phil had come in during Prohibition when the department was at its most corrupt. He became a cop the same month the city fathers appointed August Vollmer, the father of police science, to a one-year term to clean up the L.A.P.D. Vollmer, a clean-living police chief from Berkeley, got nowhere, and when his term was about to expire in September of 1924, billboards began to appear all over the city, saying: “THE FIRST OF SEPTEMBER WILL BE THE LAST OF AUGUST.” And it was. I remember seeing the signs and asking Phil what they meant. I remember he rapped me in the head and told me to shut up.

Think Fast, Mr. Peters by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1987)

Jeremy, who had placed himself between Lorre and the glass doors, nodded and said, “I suggest we move away from these glass doors into a more protected area. It is one thing to accept our fate and quite another to tempt it.”

“But,” said Lorre, surreptitiously pulling out a silver case and removing a cigarette, “if our fate is written then we cannot tempt it, only fruitlessly seek to avoid it, in which case we become a source of amusement for the gods.”

“But,” Jeremy said solemnly, “as Schopenhauer said, ‘We must live and act as if we have a choice, a control over our futures, or we will simply sit in the corner and wait for death.’”

“Or,” said Lorre blowing out a puff of smoke, “enter into a state of meditation like certain Buddhist priests who attain the blissful state of Nirvana.”

“Hey, guys,” I said. “This is great, fascinating, but until that great come-and-get-it day, I’d like to keep my client alive, save a dentist, and eat regular. Let’s get this going.”

“As you wish,” said Lorre.”

Smart Moves by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1986)

The bathroom was small, a towel on the floor, the medicine cabinet partly opened. I opened it all the way and found an old straight razor, with a pearl handle and something written on it in German. I lathered, shaved without cutting my throat, looked at myself in the mirror, wiped the drops of soap from my shirt and grinned a horrible lopsided grin at the pug in the mirror who looked as if he were having a good time. It was then I decided for the two-hundredth time that the guy in the mirror was some kind of looney. My ex-wife Anne had seen it in my face long before I did, that young-old face with dancing brown eyes and a smashed nose, smiling when things were complicated and people with assorted weapons were trying to take him apart for scrap.

“This is what it’s all about,” I told the grinning fool in the mirror, not knowing what I was talking about but knowing I meant it and it was the truth. I waited for an echo to answer “Fraud,” or “Nevermore,” but there was no echo and no answer.

The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance by Stuart M. Kaminsky (1986)

When I opened my eyes, I saw John Wayne pointing a .38 at my chest. It was my .38. I closed my eyes.

The inside of my head seemed to be filled with strawberry cotton candy with little unnamed things crawling through its sickly melting strands. Nausea forced my eyes open again. John Wayne was still there. He was wearing trousers, a white shirt, and a lightweight tan windbreaker. He was lean, dark, and puzzled.

“Don’t close your eyes again, Pilgrim,” he said.

I didn’t close them. He was standing over me and I was slumped in a badly sprung, cheap, understuffed hotel chair. I tried to sit up and speak but my tongue was an inflated, dry pebbly football.

He Done Her Wrong by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1983)

“A few members of the staff now believe that the constant reign of terror to your anatomy is causing a building up of resistance by your body. Not that you are immune to damage but that your body has somehow said, ‘What the hell, I can take anything.’ Your skull no longer deserves the anatomical right to be referred to as a skull. We are not quite sure what to call it.”

I tried to sit up and made it to one elbow. I was in a hospital gown.

“The closest thing I have seen to what we are laughingly calling your cranium belonged to a punch-drunk fighter named Ramirez who, when his career was finished, made an occasional fifty cents by battering down doors with his head. Mr. Ramirez was incapable of coherent speech by that time and seemed to think he was a robot. Are you following the allegorical level of my tale, Mr. Peters?”

“If I continue to get hit in the head, my brain will turn to Junket pudding,” I said.

“Your brain is almost certainly pudding by now,” said Dr. Melanks. “I simply want you to sign it over to me on your death. I am sixty-seven and suffering from arthritis, a weak heart, mild sclerosis, and a very poor hereditary profile, but I should outlive you by a comfortable margin.”

Catch a Falling Clown by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1981)

The gorilla was sleeping.

When he woke up he’d find a clown in his cage. There would be no reasoning with Gargantua. He was not a reasonable gorilla. Maybe there are no reasonable gorillas. This was the only nonhuman one I had ever met, and if fate didn’t step very gently in and let me out, it was the only gorilla I would ever meet.

His keeper had told me that Gargantua was so mean that they had to throw live snakes into his cage just to get him to move out so they could clean the floors.

“But gorillas, they don’t eat people,” said the keeper, a knotty twig named Henry Yew. “That is a misnomer. They rends ’em apart or chomps ’em sometimes, but they don’t eat ’em.”

So when Gargantua woke up looking for some succulent head of cabbage to bend or chomp, he would find instead a private detective named Toby Peters. With the war in the Pacific going badly and reports of the Japanese bombing Los Angeles and Seattle, I’d just make a curiosity item in the entertainment section of the Los Angeles Times: FAMOUS CIRCUS GORILLA RIPS PRIVATE DETECTIVE. “Maybe the Times would wonder why I had been in his cage dressed as a clown. Maybe not.

High Midnight by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1981)

Both the sun and Mrs. Plaut were in my room when I woke up. The sun was full of energy and pride, having broken through a week of stubborn, cold clouds. Mrs. Plaut’s energy “was no less determined. She stood on a wooden chair and was either adjusting or removing the portrait of Abraham Lincoln from my wall.

“What are you doing?” I asked. Fortunately she didn’t hear me. As it was, she nearly toppled from the chair.

“What are you doing?” I shouted when she made it safely to the floor, portrait in hand. She heard that and turned to me with her lips in a straight, resolute line.

“I am removing the portrait of Uncle Ripley,” she said. “I am also removing the bedspread and the doilies from the sofa. These are precious items for me, and it is not safe for them in this room, especially if you plan to continue to stab people and do who knows what else.”

She scooped up the doilies and the bedspread. I was happy to see them go.

“And another thing,” she said, marching to the door. “You will have to buy your own knives.”

Never Cross a Vampire by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1980)

When we were in the car with Seidman driving and Phil next to me in the back seat, Phil put down the report and said, “Now talk. No jokes, no lies, no errors and you’ll have a no-hitter.”

I talked as we shot through the early morning darkness, headed I didn’t know where. I told him the truth from start to finish including the Shatzkin and Lugosi material.

“So,” said Phil, “what do you make of it?”

“I don’t know,” I said. “There’s no link between the two cases. It’s crazy.”

“There’s a link,” said Seidman from the front seat. I could see his sunken-eyed skull of a face in the rearview mirror.

“Yeah,” I said. “Me. I’m the missing link.”

“And …?” said Phil.

“I’ll work on it,” I said.

“How’s your knee?” Phil said, turning his head away from me out the window.

That was the blow I almost couldn’t handle. My mind went blank, and I reviewed more than four decades of life with Phil. There had never been anything like this.

“Ruth told me,” he explained.

“Told you?”

“The money,” he said.

Seidman pretended to hear nothing.

“I thought you’d break my head if you found out,” I said.

Phil’s hands were in his lap. They wanted to do something, but his mind was stopping him.

“I don’t like it,” he said, “but I need it.”

The Howard Hughes Affair by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1979)

“Don’t you want to hear what Hughes wants?” I said.

“I want to hear,” she said softly, “but I don’t want to pay the price for it. Your price is always too high, Toby. You can make a person live a century in fifteen minutes.”

“And you used to love it,” I tried.

She shook her head.

“I never loved it. I accepted it. We’ve been all through it, Toby. I’m almost 40 years old. I have no family, no kids. I’ve got a career and some hope. You don’t cheer me up when you come around. You just remind me of everything I’ve missed.”

“You sent me a perfumed letter,” I said, getting up and moving toward her.

“I pay my gas bill with perfumed letters,” she said. “I buy it by the box. Come on, Toby, I’ve had a bad day. My feet hurt and I have to look in the mirror soon.”

“You’re beautiful, Annie.”

She shook her head and smiled sadly.

“I’m holding on, Toby,” she said. “I heard someone in the office describe me as a handsome woman today. That depressed me almost as much as this visit is. Please take your needs someplace else. I’m not an emotional gas station that can keep pumping it out.”

You Bet Your Life by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1978)

Chico and Harpo were playing gin rummy, smacking the cardboard rectangles on the table. Chico beamed through the game, uttering uhs and delighted ahs while we waited for a phone call.

Groucho lay on the bed reading the newspaper. He looked at me and shook his head.

“We’re an anachronism, a relic of the past, a clown for people who’ve never been to the circus, a dialect comic for people who don’t remember vaudeville, a fast-talking, baggy-pants comic with a leer for those who were afraid to go to burlesque. We’re a trio of dinosaurs, an endangered species lying around a hotel in Chicago waiting for someone to come through the door and shoot us.”

“No one’s going to shoot you, Grouch,” Chico said, without looking up from his cards. “They’re going to shoot me.”

“That’s consoling. If I’m lucky, and they don’t miss, all I’ll lose is my brother instead of my life. I may be tired of playing that character in our movies, but I’m not tired of playing.” He raised his eyebrows suggestively.

Murder on the Yellow Brick Road by Stuart M. Kaminsky (Mysterious Press 1977)

Someone had murdered a Munchkin. The little man was lying on his back in the middle of the yellow brick road with his startled wide eyes looking into the overhead lights of an M.G.M. sound stage. He wore a kind of comic soldier’s uniform with a yellow coat and puffy sleeves and a big fez-like blue and yellow hat with a feather on top. His yellow hair and beard were the phony straw color of Hollywood. He might have looked kind of cute in a tinsel-town way if it hadn’t been for the knife sticking out of his chest. The knife was a brown-handled kitchen thing. Only the handle was visible.