A Fatal Glass of Beer (7 page)

On the wall, next to the bells, I found a neatly printed card that read: Carol Monahan, Proprietor.

All the cards were in the same neat hand, including that of Lester O. Hipnoodle, Apartment 3.

I rang Carol Monahan’s bell and we waited, but not long. The inner door opened and a woman in her fifties, in a bright-yellow dress, looked at us with an expectant smile. Her hair was dyed black and her teeth too good to be real.

“Mrs. Monahan?” I asked.

“Yes,” she said, still beaming as she looked at Fields and added, “I know you.”

“I will make full restitution in cash for the coal,” he said.

Mrs. Monahan looked reasonably puzzled.

“A joke,” I said.

Mrs. Monahan nodded, and I told her that Detective Gus Belcher had sent us and that we’d like to see Mr. Hipnoodle’s room.

“I’m a private investigator,” I said. “We’re here from Los Angeles. We have reason to believe that Mr. Hipnoodle plans to steal a great deal of money from my client.”

She nodded in understanding.

“Okay,” she said, her eyes still on Fields as she stepped back to let us enter.

“What do you know about Hipnoodle?” I asked as we went up a short flight of dark stairs made even darker by the rain-black sky outside.

“Tall, thin, about forty, good teeth, pimple on his cheek, right here.” She paused and pointed to her cheek.

“Tall?”

“At least six feet,” she said. “Probably more. Talked kind of refined, but it sounded a little phony. Don’t know why.”

“Hair?”

“Dark, short. Don’t remember the color of his eyes. The other detective asked me all this,” she said, stopping in front of a door on the first landing. There was a white number three painted in the center of the door. She opened it with a key from a chain she pulled from the pocket of her yellow dress.

“I’ve got breakfast on the stove,” she said. “I’m going back down. Lock the door when you leave.”

And she was gone. I closed the door and Fields let out a sigh of relief. “Thought I was a goner,” he said.

“She was a baby or not even born yet when you took the coal,” I said, looking around the living room we were standing in. “And even if she wasn’t and she recognized you, though I doubt if you look anything like you did when you were a kid, you could give her a couple of dollars. No one’s going to arrest W. C. Fields for stealing some coal when he was a kid.”

“I can see,” said Fields, “that you have never been in Philadelphia.”

“Let’s look around,” I said.

Fields moved toward the bedroom. I stayed in the living room.

The furniture was old and dark but looked sturdy enough and reasonably clean. A sofa, an armchair. A table with a radio. A telephone. The reproductions of paintings on the wall were definitely of the same vintage as the furniture. Meant to brighten the place, the landscapes and still lifes looked faded and weary. There was one window in the living room, behind the sofa. It faced a brick wall about six feet away.

I began to search, not knowing what for. I heard Fields rumbling in the bedroom. After five minutes of looking behind pictures, under the once-orange faded rug on the wooden floor, under the cushions of the sofa and couch—which netted me forty-eight cents, a button, and half a pencil—I picked up the phone book on the table next to the telephone. I flipped through it slowly, looking for notes or marks or underlines, knowing that even if I found any they might belong to the last person who had rented the place. I found nothing.

As I put down the book, the phone rang. I picked it up after one ring and looked at the bedroom door. Fields was standing there, listening.

“Yes?” I said.

“No,” came the answer. It was the same muffled voice that had told me to stay away from Hipnoodle.

“This is Lester Hipnoodle,” I said. “Who are you?”

“Peters,” said the voice. “You and the old man still have time to walk away alive.”

“We appreciate that,” I said.

He hung up. I looked over at Fields.

“I think it was our friend Hipnoodle. He warned us to stop looking for him.”

“But the damned letter he sent said he knew we’d come after him,” said Fields. “The man can’t make up his mind. Sounds like a movie producer.”

“Anything in the bedroom?” I asked.

Lightning cracked. The windows streamed with rain.

“Last three issues of
Collier’s
, two used razor blades in the bathroom garbage, and an almost unused bar of Palmolive soap. Very green.”

I moved to the kitchen with Fields and checked the refrigerator, which was empty except for three Hershey chocolate bars, a depleted bottle of milk, and a shriveled green pepper.

Nothing on the small table. The countertop near the sink was clear. I lifted the lid of the garbage can. There were two Hershey bar wrappers and a crumpled sheet of paper in the garbage.

I picked up the sheet of paper and flattened it on the table. The writing was clear. “Lancaster. Eleven in the morning. April Fools’ Day.”

“He wanted us to find it,” Fields said.

“Counted on it,” I answered, folding the note neatly and putting it in my pocket.

“Lancaster, Pennsylvania,” said Fields. “I have an account there. When do you think my car will arrive?”

“Two days,” I said.

“Man must drive like a maniac,” said Fields.

“Yeah,” I agreed. “We can go to Lancaster now, try to get your money out before he gets there.”

“I want to catch the bastard,” said Fields, moving to the sink and looking out at the rain through a small window. “We go to Lancaster. He goes somewhere else. You know how many bowling pins I dropped on my head and toes learning to juggle? I couldn’t afford Indian clubs. Had to steal bowling pins. I nearly collapsed staying up till three in the morning, teaching myself to juggle, developing an act. I was the tramp juggler. You know why? Because I juggled in the only clothes I owned, wearing a fake mustache I made myself. I worked for that money. I’m not losing a penny of it.”

“Your call,” I said.

“Not one red Indian penny or one copper profile of the Great Emancipator,” he went on. “Hipnoodle has declared war, and war is what Hipnoodle shall have. Let’s go back to the hotel. I’m getting just a bit tired and in need of libation.”

I once lost a bald canary in Altoona.

“Lost a bald canary in Altoona once,” Fields said, carefully examining the glass in his hand as we sat in the rear of his car, heading west, with Gunther remaining well above the speed limit on the two-lane highways across Pennsylvania.

We swayed, bounced. Fields managed not to spill a drop of his drink.

“Bird belonged to a midget,” said Fields. “Much the same size as our diminutive driver but with none of his aplomb. While I was on the circuit, it was my accursed luck to keep running across the Lilliputian demon on the same bill. The chap had a bad disposition and thought himself humorous. Carried around a small bird cage with a canary that chirped merrily inside.”

Gunther was listening to the radio quietly in the front seat, the window between him and the passenger compartment closed. I was leaning forward in the backseat every few minutes, checking the mirror to see if we were being followed.

“Well, to make a short story a bit longer than necessary, the little man kept interrupting my act, mugging behind my back when I juggled, made faces, audiences thought it was part of the show. I warned him. He decided the laughs were worth more than the promise of distress. One evening when I was juggling Indian clubs, hats, and assorted items supplied by the audience—the smallest being a railroad watch and the largest a cane—the tiny twerp came up behind me with his canary. I bopped him on the noggin—the twerp, not the canary. He fell and, without my missing a beat or dropping anything I was juggling, I grabbed the small canary cage and added the chirper to the items flying overhead. Audience roared with delight. Midget was out cold. I returned the various items, dragged the midget off with one hand, held the canary cage with the other, and left my remaining paraphernalia for the stage hands to gather. It was then I noticed that the trauma of being juggled had given the canary a complete nervous breakdown. Feathers had almost all fallen out. He was completely bald and didn’t feel much like singing. I went out on a triumphant bender—at that time I confined my activity to reasonable quantities of beer—and when I returned, the canary’s cage door was open and the bird was missing.

“The midget, looking more than a bit fearful but consumed by litigious anger, demanded the return of his bird. I assured him that I knew nothing of the strange disappearance and that he should ask Thurston the Magician, who was also on the bill.”

Fields took a sip and looked out the window thoughtfully. I did as little moving as possible in the hope that my back would feel better. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been, but I knew it was in no mood for further violent activity and I was running low on pain pills from Doc Hodgdon.

“I was always of the opinion that a merciful showgirl, in search of W. C. Fields to congratulate him appropriately, had come across the once-yellow-feathered creature and let it free, far from a blessing for the bird, given its condition and the fact that I know of no way a canary, even if he weren’t bald, could survive in Altoona. Turn up the radio.”

Gunther obliged. We picked up “The Ransom Sherman Show,” with Charles Ruggles as guest, and listened for about ten minutes.

“Jack Benny is the only really funny man on the radio besides me,” said Fields. “But Ruggles should have his own show. Charlie Butterworth too, underrated. Turn it off. Find anything but music.”

Gunther found “The Bing Crosby Show.” Victor Borge was his guest and announced that he was also appearing at the Capitol Theater in New York.

“Kid’s funny,” said Fields. “But I can tell from that accent that he’s not Danish, probably a German spy like the fella back home who says he’s DeMille.”

I didn’t say anything. A car had been creeping up on us along with the twilight. It was a small Ford, dark. Evening sun was hitting his front window, so I couldn’t tell in the rearview mirror who was inside.

“I think we need a little speed, Gunther,” I said, sliding open the glass partition.

“I see him,” said Gunther calmly, pushing up to eighty-five miles an hour.

Fields twisted in his seat to look back at the pursuing vehicle and saw what I saw. The road was clear except for the two of us. The driver’s left arm came out of the window holding a gun; he’d decided that his Ford was no match for the souped-up Caddy.

He was probably right-handed. The first shot missed by a country mile. The second skipped and whined over the top of the car. We were almost out of his range when the third shot clanged off the rear bumper.

Then our pursuer was lost in the distant background.

“Shall I slow down?” Gunther asked.

“Not unless you want to lose two or three inches, which you can ill afford,” said Fields, leaning back. “I need a drink to steady the nerves. Suppose it could be that midget with the canary? Hanging around Altoona, driven mad by the blow of my Indian club, waiting to extract revenge should ever I chance to return?”

“I doubt it,” I said. “I’ve had two telephone warnings now for us to stay out of this pursuit of Hipnoodle. I think this was warning number three.”

“Number four,” said Fields. “While you were packing and picking up our diminutive Barney Oldfield, a call came to me promising my demise if we should pursue this adventure.”

“You could have told me sooner,” I said, looking back to be sure the Ford wasn’t gaining.

“Didn’t know he’d called you,” said Fields, his voice going low, speaking almost to himself. “Cured myself of tuberculosis. Carried on long persuasive conversations with my liver, but it was made of greater resolve than my lungs. Next time I go to that sanitarium, or the time after, will be my last. This, Peters, will probably be my last adventure. Besides, no son of a bitch is going to steal the money I’ve worked my ass off for all these years. What I can’t figure out is why Hipnoodle leaves us clues so we can keep following him while at the same time warning us not to follow him or he’ll cause our immediate departure from this vale of tears.”

“I don’t know,” I said.

“I think, if I may say so,” said Gunther, loud enough to be heard over the engine, which didn’t require too much of a shout since the car was finely tuned, “I think we may be dealing with two criminals. One we are pursuing and one who is pursuing us so that he or they can procure Mr. Fields’s fortune from Hipnoodle when he has amassed it, a task which will be much easier if we give up or are dead.”

“Makes sense to me,” I said.

“Hipnoodles, unknown pursuers with guns,” Fields said. “There’s a movie in this somewhere. I’ll call La Cava when we get back to Los Angeles.”

Gunther and I wanted lunch but Fields didn’t want to stop on the road. He wasn’t hungry. I discovered he was never hungry. Neither did he want our pursuer to catch up with us and shoot us to death as we emerged from Ma’s Eats. He had a good point.

So we went into Altoona. There was no problem finding rooms for the night at the Altoona Majestic Hotel downtown, the war boom had not really caught up with the town. Its chief contribution, the ancient and philosophical desk clerk told us, was to supply cannon fodder, including two of his grandsons. Its chief import was the return of the dead young men.

The lobby was small and empty, with pots of flowers and straight-back chairs and a couple of octagonal-shaped wooden tables.

“Now,” said the clerk as I signed us all in, “they’re raising the draft age to forty-five, or at least talking about it. My son would go. They say the war’s almost over. We’ll see.”

“Rest assured, old fellow,” said Fields. “I have followed this conflagration closely, charted its course and lack of discourse, and come to the conclusion that it will end soon.”

“Soon?” said the thin old man, fingering his blue-knit cardigan.

“No more than a year,” said Fields with confidence.

“Lot of people could die in a year,” said the old man, brushing back wisps of white hair and revealing a forehead freckled with age and experience.