High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) Read Free Page B

was a client I supposedly had named Cooper. I turned on the car radio and listened to the war news for a few seconds and then turned to KFI to catch Don Winslow, who was winning the war even if we weren’t.
    What did I have? A client named Cooper, who had something to do with movies. Lombardi, who had recently moved to the Coast from the East and wanted to remain a noncelebrity. How many Coopers were there? Gladys Cooper, Jackie Cooper, Meriam C. Cooper, Gary Cooper. Something pinged in my head. Something about Gary Cooper. I urged it to come out. Don Winslow urged a spy to come out of a submarine, but both remained inside.
    The sky was clearing but the day was still damned cold when I pulled in front of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house on Heliotrope, where I lived. Mrs. Plaut greeted me on the porch. She was somewhere in the vicinity of eighty years old, with more determination than the Russians holding Leningrad and as much hearing as a light pole. She was under the impression that I was an exterminator with connections in the movie industry. With my help, she was writing a history of her family.
    “Mr. Peelers, you are home early,” she said.
    “Yes,” I said. “I …”
    “Yes, problems,” she sighed as I came on the porch. “My father used to say this is a doggie dog world.”
    “Right,” I said, trying to skip past her.
    “I’ll have another chapter by Saturday,” she said, putting her bony arm out, an arm that had uncanny strength.
    “Right,” I said, easing past her with my brown bag held out to keep from further ruining my suit.
    I did not bound up the stairs, but I went as quickly as I could. I passed my own door and knocked at Gunther’s. Gunther Wherthman was my next-door neighbor and probably my best friend. Gunther, all three foot nine of him, answered immediately. He was, as always, dressed in a three-piece suit, though he worked at home translating books from German, French, Italian, Spanish, Polish and Danish into English. Gunther was Swiss. We had met on a case of mine.
    “Ah, Toby,” he said with reserved enthusiasm. “I have a query for you.”
    “Join me in my room for an early dinner,” I said. “Cold cuts.” I showed him the bag.
    “Yes,” he said. “Let me clean up first.”
    Gunther dirty was more clean than I would be after going through a car wash without a car. I went to my room. I had learned to appreciate the room, which was nothing like me. There was one old sofa with doilies on the arms, which I was afraid to touch, a table with three chairs, a hot plate in the corner, a sink, a small refrigerator, a few dishes and a bed with a purple blanket on which “God Bless Us Every One” had been stitched in pink by Mrs. Plaut, a painting of Abraham Lincoln and a Beech-nut gum clock on my wall received in payment from a pawnshop owner for finding his runaway grandmother. Every night I took the mattress from the bed and put it on the floor. I slept there because of a delicate back crunched in 1938 by a gentleman of the Negro persuasion, who took exception to my trying to keep him away from Mickey Rooney when I was picking up a few dollars as a guard at a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese.
    I took off my jacket, shoes and tie and dumped the cold cuts into a bowl. I pulled out some leftover hard rolls and a bottle of ketchup and was trying to get a dark spot off of one of my plates when Gunther came in carrying a bottle of Cresta Blanca wine and two glasses.
    He put the wine on the table, examined the cold cuts, trying to hide a critical look, and made a sandwich. We drank wine and ate.
    I told Gunther my adventure and asked what he thought of the food.
    “While I appreciate your hospitality, Toby, I think Mr. Lombardi’s cuisine could be improved.”
    We ate for a while longer—at least I did. Gunther finished only half a sandwich and then told me his own problem.
    “I am translating what I take to be a humorous American story for an overseas broadcast. And in that story is a