The Devil Met a Lady Read Free Page B

Davis uttered, “Is there no end to the humiliation I must endure?”
    I didn’t answer but I felt like saying that humiliation was not in the same class with what I was sure Jeffers planned for me when he got us somewhere away from Joan Crawford’s admiring fans.

C HAPTER T WO
     
    L et’s go back a little. Not long and not far, only three days and a few blocks from the Great Palms Hotel. On Monday, February 1, 1943, I was sitting in my office on the fourth floor of the Farraday Building on Hoover and Ninth, a few doors down from Manny’s Tacos.
    My office is my private domain, monk’s cell, my refuge or, as Bette Davis might observe, a dump. Few ever enter the office of Toby Peters, Private Investigator, especially clients. Aside from me, only a cat named Dash, a fat orange lump who belongs to no one but lives with me, spends a lot of time there. Sheldon Minck, the dentist with whom I share the suite, is permitted to bring me announcements of visitors; Jeremy Butler, who owns the Farraday and is an enormous ex-wrestler who lives on the floor above us with his wife and new daughter, can enter whenever he wishes.
    There are those who might say that I keep clients away from my office because it is little more than a closet inside the less-than-clean disaster of a dental surgery where Shelly practices incompetent alchemy and benevolent sadism. There are those who might say that my office, which smells like a fat orange cat, is unimpressive: a small cluttered and battered desk; a single window five stories above an alley where a bum who keeps changing his name resides in the rusting shell of a Buick; a cracked ceiling; barely enough room for two wooden chairs beside my own; a bleary blown-up photograph on the wall of me, my brother Phil, our father wearing his grocer’s apron, and our dog Kaiser Wilhelm.
    And there are those who might wonder at the strange painting that covers one entire wall, the painting of a woman lovingly cradling two small naked boy babies. Someone might think the woman was my mother, and the boy babies me and my brother Phil. In fact, they were Salvador Dali, his dead brother, and his mother, who was still alive as far as I knew. Dali had given me the painting as payment for a job I had done for him.
    There are those who might say many things about the office of Toby Peters, Private Investigator, if they had the interest or opportunity.
    On Monday, I was blissfully, ignorantly, and unaccountably content. Nothing in my life, outside of having enough money to pay my overdue bills, accounted for this feeling.
    Sure, the war news was good. The Los Angeles Times front page told me that Nazi Stalingrad Chief Field Marshal General Friedrich von Paulus and sixteen other generals had been captured by the Russians, and that the Germans had suffered their worst defeat of the war, one hundred thousand men killed. And there, right in front of me, was the announcement that Secretary of the Navy Frank Knox had just returned from a two-week tour of the Pacific, saying the Japanese resistance on Guadalcanal would end in thirty days.
    I had forty dollars in my wallet and another three hundred in my only other pair of shoes, in a closet at Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house, where I lived. The money was in payment for a case I handled for Greta Garbo in one day. The fee was only two hundred bucks. The extra hundred and forty was a bonus to insure my promise that I wouldn’t tell anyone what had happened, ever. I had told her the bonus wasn’t necessary. She had insisted. I had held out for five whole seconds.
    Those who seek my services through former clients, friends, acquaintances, and ex-wives have learned that I don’t sell brilliant deductions and a vast network of contacts in high places. What I do sell is dogged persistence, confidentiality, and a face that had once been described by Peter Lorre as “classic expressionism.”
    As a result, I’m frequently looking for part-time jobs, hanging around Levy’s