Two for One Read online

  At the moment the later afternoon sunlight gave it a rather dimensional 20th Century Fox logotype look, on account of the office door was ajar.

  Slipping my trusty vintage Smith & Wesson .38 five shot from its shoulder holster, I motioned the others to stand aside. Though why an intruder thoughtless enough to leave the door open would want to shoot a dog, let alone an invisible man, wasn’t quite clear to me.

  I sidled around the door frame in the approved shamus manner and found myself facing a heavy set young man in a gleaming white silk suit, perched precariously on my sole visitor’s chair.

  It’s not what you might call a welcoming chair at the best of times, I freely admit. I picked it up when the two lesbian lawyers next door split up and split and somehow I’ve never quite got around to fixing the gammy leg.

  Nonetheless, my visitor was exacerbating the situation somewhat. He was trying to save his virgin suit by spreading his handkerchief on the seat and then hovering over it, like a maiden lady in a public lavatory, touching it at as few points as possible. It was neither a comfortable or comforting sight.

  I probably made it even less so by stretching out my hand—the one without the Smith & Wesson in it—in greeting. White Suit stood up gratefully, inspected my mitt briefly—presumably for additional dust—then shook it.

  You can tell a lot about a man from his handshake—I’m sure Holmes has written a short monograph on the subject—and I could tell this man was nervous and that his nervousness extended beyond the size of his dry cleaner’s bill.

  Some of it I put down to the fact that Mike was now nosing his crotch, which I find scarcely ever puts strangers at their social ease. But it was more than that. This man did not relish his mission here today.

  I motioned to Holmes to stand close to him and monitor his reactions, then turned the head gesture into a momentary discomfort with my bandages. It doesn’t inspire confidence in the average client to see you addressing thin air.

  “The door was open,” said White Suit—which didn’t surprise me owing to the tinny nature of the lock—“and the cleaning lady said to make myself at home.”

  Which didn’t surprise me, either. Mrs. C. seemed to see The Century as her personal salon. I’d once addressed her as “our own Madame de Stael” but it hadn’t really registered, I felt.

  “Care for a drink?” I asked, pulling the office bottle of scotch with its mandatory two fingers of liquor from my bottom drawer, where it nestled next to nothing. I always keep it at the two finger lever, even it means adding water during lean times. I fished out two shot glasses from another drawer to keep it company and wiped them clean of fingerprints.

  White Suit took a quick look at the glasses and shook his head.

  “Not when I’m on duty, thanks.”

  I tried to turn the cap with my teeth, before realizing it would be a whole lot easier to pour if I were to put the gun down first. So I did and propped my feet on the desk instead. Now I was ready for business.

  I took a slug of scotch-tainted water.

  “So what can I do for you?” I asked. Then, with a sneaky look at Holmes, I added— “I beg you omit no detail, however apparently trivial it may appear.”

  I thought Holmes nodded his approval.

  White Suit moved nervously over to the window and made as if to pull back the curtain. He thought better of it and wiped his hands on his handkerchief instead. Then he leaned over my desk and spoke so quietly that only I could hear. He was probably right. Mike has a loose lip.

  “Mr. Watson, I’m here on a matter of great sensitivity that involves my employer.”

  “And your employer is…?”

  “Mr. Osgood Kane, the noted philanthropist and recluse. He has lost something of great value to him and he wishes you to retrieve it.”

  “A pearl of great price, I presume?” I mused. Now, be fair, how many private eyes throw in biblical quotations with a cut price daily rate?

  “Not a pearl, Mr. Watson, but certainly an object of great price. By the way, may I introduce myself? My name is Perlman—Brent Perlman—and I am Mr. Kane’s personal assistant.”

  Kane’s name rang a loud bell right away. At one time he was a man who bestrode the Hollywood scene like a—whatever it is that bestrides things. His name was spoken in the same breath as those of William Randolph Hearst or Howard Hughes and with about as much affection. Fear was what Kane generated—fear and money.

  He’d appeared out of nowhere—in the late 1940s, it would have been. Word had it that he’d made his money back east but nobody on this side of the land mass knew or cared what happened back east. Most of them would have a hard time finding it on a map. All they knew was Kane was soon a meal ticket, if you didn’t mind eating his kind of food. And there were always a lot of hungry mouths in Tinsel Town.

  He dabbled in independent productions for a while—C-picture Westerns and the kind of thrillers where the wall of the set shakes when somebody closes a door. Having cut his baby teeth on that, then he really splashed out. Bought one of the smaller studios, revamped it, then traded it in for a major, then two. Money was no object. And in any case, these were the golden years in Hollywood for the studio system. Movies poured off the production line like sausages and baloney was as good a description as any for most of them. Anything that could put sixty to ninety minutes between the title sequence and The End’ made money.

  Kane made money and he made stars—literally. Remember how he took Phyllis Guggenhaft, a waitress from the Bronx, raised her hairline, re-shaped her boobs and chiseled her nose a tad and gave the world Alana Kidd? There were half a dozen more and most of them apparently ended up in his bed—though only the girls, as far as we knew. He supposedly even married one or two of them, if only for the look of the thing.

  He saw television coming when everyone else was pooh-poohing it as a toy. Made several more fortunes from that and still was—without lifting a muscle. By now there probably weren’t many muscles Osgood Kane could lift, for the man must be in is mid to late eighties. Nonetheless, the money was still there and the aura of power was still there. You didn’t screw with Kane, unless you wanted to risk getting terminally screwed yourself. That was the man who wanted to see me.

  Was the challenge of the chase coursing through my veins? Not unless it felt like cold running water in a walk-up. Did we need the money? That was an easier one to answer.

  “I’ll be happy to help Mr. Kane,” I said in my smoothest Nick Charles manner. If I’d had a small, neat William Powell moustache, I’d have stroked it. “My fee is a hundred …” I saw Holmes wag an admonitory finger— “and fifty a day plus expenses.” Holmes seemed to expect something more. “My fee is unvarying, except when I choose to waive it altogether. And on this occasion,” I added swiftly, “I do not choose to waive it.” Holmes almost smiled.

  I realized that much of my performance—which was impressing the hell out of me and even seemed to satisfy Holmes—was lost on White Suit, since he was busily writing out a check on his knee. He tore it out, waved it dry, then let it float down on to my desk.

  “Here is one thousand dollars as a down payment, Mr. Watson. You will find my employer not ungenerous, as long as you perform your duties to his satisfaction. Here is our address …” He flipped a card from an inside pocket, like a magician producing a dove, and it landed on top of the check.

  “Shall we say tomorrow morning at ten?”

  “By all means. I’ll say it right now. ‘Tomorrow morning at ten.’”

  “Good evening, Mr. Watson. Let us hope this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship. A demain, as our French friends say.”

  He looked comfortable for the first time since I had entered the room—most certainly because he was leaving it.

  “A little bird tells me it may well be,” I replied for some reason.

  He turned at the door and the comfort had all drained away.
He seemed about to say something, then thought better of it.

  The door closed behind him and this time the lock held.

  I was about to put my feet back on my desk when Holmes hissed—

  “Watson, how many times must I tell you that the interview is not over merely because the client has left the room? The window, man—the window!”

  I got there just in time to see Perlman approach an open top Porsche parked just outside the building. He vaulted—rather self-consciously, I thought—into the driver’s seat, looking at his passenger for a reaction.

  All I could see from above was a large white straw hat and the long sleeved arm of a white chiffony dress draped over the back of the driver’s seat. Around the wrist was a gold bracelet of some intricate intertwined design.

  Then she must have said something to Perlman, for his rather simpering expression vanished and he turned the key in the ignition. A moment later the car roared away, burning rubber and spraying dust all over Mrs. Clack’s newly-washed lobby. But then, what’s the point of driving a Porsche, if you don’t burn rubber and spray dust?

  I turned to find Holmes peering over my shoulder. It’s unnerving to have an insubstantial presence anywhere in your line of vision but particularly so when you’re nose to nose.

  “Nice wheels,” I offered. “Cool chick,” I added.

  “If you mean the motor vehicle the young man was driving, I defer to your judgment, Watson. I am no authority on these matters. And if you are using contemporary vernacular to refer to his lady companion, I defer even more. The fair sex—as I have often remarked—is your department. Unless I miss my guess, the motor car is her property—and so is he. I must say, I would not be happy to entrust so obviously expensive an item to one in his condition …”

  “In what condition?”

  “Come, old fellow. Surely you saw the fellow’s contracted pupils, noticed the way he continually wiped his nose, although he was clearly not suffering from a cold? No, he is obviously an habitue of some substance, almost certainly cocaine. A six and a half or possibly a seven per cent solution, at a guess. Or more likely inhaled. You of all people should know that I have a certain—shall we say—expertise in these matters.

  “He indubitably came here to deliver his master’s invitation but the lady is most definitely part of the plot.

  “And now, Watson, let me be your medical advisor for once. Time for you to take a rest after your eventful day. An early night will work wonders but first a little something nourishing. I only wish I could join you but something tells me that may be beyond even my powers. However, I shall join you vicariously. In spirit, as it were. Our old watering hole, Simpsons-in-the-Strand, alas, does not appear to be an option but I did notice one establishment on our way here that seemed to be drawing the passing trade. The Cheeky Chicken, I believe it was called. Or perhaps you would prefer ‘chick’. Ah, I see friend Mike approves of the choice. I suggest we take ourselves there forthwith …

  “Incidentally, I’m sorry to see you have given up your old service revolver. That Webley No. 2 saw us through many a scrape and I fancy we may miss its comforting presence. But we shall see. We shall see.”

  Three

  You have heard me say, Watson—to the point of tedium, I do not doubt—that when you have eliminated the impossible, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truth. The dilemma that faces us in this instance, old friend, is that it appears to be impossible to eliminate the impossible.

  “Logic tells us that I should not be here and yet, patently I am—at least in part. And that part I, for one, find most welcome. It is good to see you again, Watson and, who knows, perhaps those powers that command our fates have one more case for us to solve before they intervene once more.”

  “Amen to that good wish, Holmes,” I rejoined. Jesus, he’d got me talking like him now!

  It was just before ten the following morning and we were sailing smoothly through the Hollywood Hills. The sun was giving us a full frontal smile that would put Carol Channing to shame and even the old Corvette was chugging along, as if she’d had a double dose of Geritol. Maybe Holmes had put a hex on it.

  I reflected on the previous day. After the Cheeky Chicken had done its worst—or, in Mike’s case, its best, since he finished up eating most of it, including the wrappings—we’d returned to Fort Watson, pausing only briefly to make macaw noises when Mr. Gryppe popped his head out.

  Frankly, the day had taken it out of me in more ways than one. A bop on the bean and a ghostly room mate are more than par for my particular course. I was only too happy to flop into my favorite armchair, compete with the assertive springs for my personal space and close my eyes for a few minutes.

  Those few minutes turned into a good eight hours and when I came to I saw the morning sun back-lighting a snoring Mike on the settee opposite, giving him a totally unearned halo. It was only when I turned my head and saw Holmes hunched in theather armchair, his thin arms wrapped around his bony knees, that everything came flooding back.

  Without quite opening my eyes, so that he wouldn’t know I was awake yet, I studied him. For some reason I had the strangest sense of déjà-vu. I couldn’t have been here before—and yet I had been here before, sitting companionably like this in silence, while Holmes pursued some abstruse mental problem through the reaches of the night.

  “A three pipe problem, Holmes?” I heard myself say. For, indeed, he was smoking that battered briar, its smoke wreathing his head and yet, for some reason, I couldn’t smell it.

  “No, only two, old fellow. I am almost ashamed to say that I was revisiting those four cases that defeated me—three men and one woman. I have now seen the error of my methods as far as the men were concerned but I confess I remain baffled as to what I might have done differently about Irene Adler …”

  “The woman?”

  “The woman, as you say. But come, Watson, there is new work to be done and, if I may make a suggestion, we are likely to make more progress, if you will exchange your swaddling clothes for something less eye-catching. I think you will find a simple plaster will now suffice.”

  And, indeed, when I had unwound the bandage, a surprisingly small, though engagingly technicolored bruise met my eye and a manly Band-Aid—suggestive of a tavern brawl in defense of a lady’s honor—did the job.

  Pausing only to shower, change and refuel Mike, we were on our way to our date with destiny—and Osgood Kane.

  We drove for a while in silence, as I pondered what Holmes had just said.

  What seemed to be happening did defy logic but then, where had logic ever got me? A job that for some reason I enjoyed, even though it didn’t pay well, when it paid at all, an apartment my late lamented mother would have considered one step down from a slum, a love life that came and went and that currently showed no sign of returning any time soon … and that was about the sum total of it.

  On the other hand—as of right now—I had a partner I didn’t have to pay that Philip Marlowe, Lew Archer and any other private eye you care to name would envy and a dog that was smarter than most people (and infinitely more supple in the hygiene department).

  Looked at with that perspective, the streets we were passing through didn’t look so mean after all. On top of that the sun was shining and we were off on the Yellow Brick Road to see the Wizard, the Wonderful Wizard of Osgood …

  Kane Towers looked as if a baby giant had modeled Hearst Castle in playdough, then squashed it to fit a smaller space. Nobody—not even Osgood Kane—could buy the kind of acreage in the tone-y part of L.A. that William Randolph Hearst had sequestered for himself further up the coast at San Simeon back in the twenties. Kane had had to content himself with a drive that wound back on itself like a snake trying to scratch an itch.

  “A long run for a short slide,” I said, as we finally reached the front portico but only Mike seemed to appreciate the reference. Did
they even have baseball in Holmes’s time?

  That giant kid had certainly liked turrets. They flourished like fungus on any surface that would hold them and pointed every which way. I’d have hated to have to clean that many windows—unless, of course, I was a professional window cleaner, which, from time to time I’ve considered as a more secure career path.

  The place clearly made the same impression on Holmes. With the whisper of a smile he murmured— “This makes Baskerville Hall look like a Limehouse tenement, Watson. Furthermore, it might be said to give the phrase ‘conspicuous wealth’ a bad name. Shall we open the toy box?”

  And, indeed, Holmes’s imagery proved to be predictive, for when I gave the bellpull a tentative tug, we could hear a sequence of musical notes resound through the house.

  “Ah,” said Holmes, “‘The Ride of the Valkyrie’. So Mr. Kane is a fellow Wagner enthusiast. This encounter may prove interesting.”

  As the last notes died away and as if on cue, the great front door swung open to reveal a neat little oriental gentleman wearing servant’s livery—black trousers, highly polished shoes and an immaculate white jacket. White seemed to be the color of choice in the Kane entourage.

  In perfect unaccented English, which made me wonder whether it was time for me to sign on with Berlitz, he said— “Mr. Watson, I presume? The Master is expecting you. Please come this way. And do not worry about your companion—I will take good care of him.”

  It took me a moment to realize that he was referring to Mike and not Holmes. He said something to Mike in what I presumed was Chinese and I’ll be damned if that mutt—who, as far as I know, has never been nearer to China than the bins outside a Chinese restaurant—didn’t ‘sit and stay’ by the door with a pathetically goofy smile on his face and watch as his master and reasonably reliable meal ticket receded down the marble hall.

  I’ve always liked the word ‘eclectic’ and I was using it for years before I looked up the meaning of it. Outside Kane Towers was simply late Gothic-Horrific. Inside it was Eclectic City. Suits of armor jostled with Impressionist paintings, Chinoiserie rubbed shoulders with Henry Moore on the one side and Tutankamen’s spare mummy case on the other. The whole thing deafened the eye and the one clear impression I was taking away was that there was a whole lot of moola lying around to be dusted in one shape or another. Once again, I found myself wondering whether Kane hadn’t picked up the job lot at one of Hearst’s tag sales.