The other boarders were probably at work. I woke to hear the patter of small feet outside my door. The door had no lock. Mrs. Plaut didn’t like them.
“Toby?” came a slightly high voice with a distinct accent.
“Come in Gunther,” I said, not trying to sit up.
Gunther came in. He is a little more than three feet tall, Swiss, and speaks a dozen or so languages. Always nattily attired, Gunther sits in his room translating foreign books into English for clients ranging from the government to publishing houses.
“You are injured again,” he observed, standing over me.
“I am injured, Gunther,” I agreed. “Beaten in a swimming pool by a guy dressed like Mae West.”
“I see,” he said. Gunther had no sense of humor. Some of our best conversations concerned my attempts to explain the humor of something he was trying to translate.
“I’ll make some coffee.”
While he bustled and put away the few groceries I had picked up, I tested my body. He took out the box of Shred-dies, a bowl, and the last of a bottle of milk. I love cereal. Picked it up from my old man who’d get up in the middle of the night for a bowl. Last time we got together before he died back in 1932, the old man and I talked over a bowl of Little Colonels. We talked about the supermarkets that had driven his small Glendale grocery out of business. We talked about my brother and about how I hadn’t become a lawyer.
“Ready,” announced Gunther. I got up slowly and walked with some strength to the table. I was wearing a pair of boxer shorts and no shirt. Gunther did a reasonably good job of hiding his disapproval, but not good enough. I tested my legs again, made it to the closet, put on a white shirt with only slightly frayed cuffs, and struggled into a pair of cotton pants.
“Gunther,” I said, walking to the table where I dropped three large spoons of sugar on my cereal. “The madman I met last night was talking nonsense or giving me a clue. He said something.”
Gunther nodded and carefully sipped his coffee without leaning over.
“Something,” he repeated.
“Said he was an engineer’s thumb.”
“Yes,” said Gunther, putting down his cup.
“Yes, what?” I asked, pouring the milk and digging in with a spoon. The milk was threatening to turn sour.
“I have translated a story of this name,” he said. “Into Polish for a publisher. It is a Sherlock Holmes story.”
“O.K. So how can someone be an engineer’s thumb?”
He touched his small lower lip and thought seriously while I finished off my cereal and coffee and had another round of both.
“I shall make some inquiry and attempt to answer that question,” he said, dabbing his unstained mouth with a paper napkin. He excused himself with dignity, indicating that he would be back to clean up for me.
I did the cleaning up while he was gone, though I knew he preferred to do it himself.
By the time I had dragged myself to the community bathroom down the hall, allowed fifteen minutes for the water to trickle in, bathed, and made it back to my room, Gunther was waiting for me. He was rewashing the dishes.
“Ah, Toby,” he said, turning the water off and facing me. “I have discovered your mystery. The Engineer’s Thumb is a Sherlock Holmes group that meets monthly at the Natick Hotel. The current president is a man named Lachtman, an insurance claims adjuster for First Federal of California. All this I learned from an editor who used to be a member of this group.”
We sat around talking about the world for an hour or so before Gunther excused himself to get back to work. I headed for the hall phone with the change I could muster to try to track down Lachtman and maybe move a few steps closer to the madman who had tried to kill me and whose list I was on.
CHAPTER 2
The upside-down name card on his tweed sport coat said he was Alvin Aardvark. He stood about six feet tall, weighed a little too much, had thin, washed-out red hair, and a grin full of oversize teeth.
“My name’s Randisi, Lou Randisi,” he said, taking my hand and pumping it twice. “This is just a joke.” He looked down at his name card and let out about an inch more of smile.
“Funny,” I said.
He shrugged and looked around the room, probably searching for a lampshade to stick on his head or a small palm tree to dump on the host.
“You’re a private detective,” he told me.
“Right.” I nodded as if he had done a brilliant piece of detection and took a gulp of my Pepsi.
Aardvark said it was to be his pleasant duty to introduce me, and for that he needed a little information. Since I was after some information myself, I thought this might turn into a fair trade.
About a dozen people were in the small dining room at the Natick Hotel in downtown Los Angeles five blocks from my office on Hoover and Ninth.
The Natick was once the most fashionable hotel in the city. The eroded marquee over the First Street entrance, the thin arched windows, and the base of the hardwood staircase with little globe-light standards represented Victorian elegance. A grilled iron elevator cage rose from the center of the large lobby.
The mile stretch of Main Street outside the hotel to Sixth, known as Calle Principal even in the Mexican days, now consisted of a line of bars, honky-tonks, barber colleges, tattoo shops, pitchmen, pawnshops, flophouses, and all-night dime movies serving as dorms for audiences of bums who slept through movie after movie ignoring the sound.
The decay of most of the street’s buildings was accented by their withering Victorian ornamentation. Things were getting better, the war was bringing money that translated into a few improvements, but you could still count on the barrooms sporting yellowed lithographs of Custer’s Last Stand on their spotted walls.
It was the monthly meeting of the Engineer’s Thumbs, the Sherlock Holmes group, and I was the guest speaker, a real-life detective. Most of the dozen members were women beyond my forty-five years. A few were men. Both men and women glanced at me cautiously but didn’t come over to talk. I watched the door to check when each new member arrived; I didn’t want to miss my lunatic. It was hard to do that and pay attention to Alvin Aardvark, who was gulping down Dewar’s and bubbling with enthusiasm.
“Have you always been a private detective?” he asked, holding his drink away from his jacket while he groped with his free hand in his pockets for something, maybe a pencil and paper, which he never found.
“I was not, like the Dalai Lama, born into my profession,” I said politely. “First I was a kid, little and then bigger, followed by a few years as a Glendale cop, followed by a few years as a studio security guard at Warner Brothers, followed by a few years of poverty and creditors. I figured it was time for me to start following something.”
Aardvark took a gulp of scotch, lost an ice cube, and watched it slide toward a corner of the room under the feet of a startled old woman in a black suit.
“I’m a teacher,” he volunteered, his eyes looking for the cube. I looked for it too. Maybe we could spend a few happy minutes watching it melt.
“A teacher,” I repeated, looking back at the door as a small bald man who looked like Donald Meek came in, accompanied by a good-looking, no-nonsense dark woman. The man was carrying a shopping bag from the May Company.
“Too old for the army,” Aardvark said, finishing his drink and touching my arm with a grin. “But I’d join like that, if they’d take me.” Like that was a failed finger snap.
“Not me,” I said, watching Donald Meek agonize over where to put his shopping bag, until his companion directed him to the small main dining table.
“Me either,” agreed Aardvark. “I lied. I lie a lot. Don’t mean to. Just comes out that way.”