William Kitcher,
Farewell And Goodbye, My Maltese Sleep
excerpt
Farewell And Goodbye, My Maltese Sleep Publisher: independent Date: October 23, 2023 Length: 201 pages ISBN: 979-8853082199 |
1: She Walked Into My Office
She walked into my office like a character from a Raymond Chandler novel.
She was 250 pounds of 5’3” pasty-faced, over-made-up, brown-tweed-suited, middle-aged bleached blonde... But I already told you that.
She squinted at me. “I need you to find a gold coin, Mr. Marlowe,” she husked.
“My name is Wyznicki, Miss...?”
“It’s Mrs., Mr. Woznecki. Mrs. Alfred Lumboldt.”
“Well, Alfred, please take a seat.”
“My husband’s name is Alfred, Mr. Wusencki,” she said, as she manipulated her derriere into the rattan chair I had bought in a cheap flea market in Singapore.
“And your name is?”
“Bridget. Bridget Marlborough.”
“I thought you said your name was Lumboldt.”
“That’s my married name, Mr. Wilkowitz. I’m divorcing the rat.”
“What name should I put on the invoice, Miss Marlborough?”
“Ms. Marlborough, Mr. Wolochensky.”
Miz? I wondered what that meant. I started to roll a cigarette but stopped when I realized I had no rolling papers. I took a smoke out of the pack on my desk, and lit it with either a match or a lighter, I don’t remember. I leaned back in my chair, pushed my fedora to the back of my head, put my feet up on the desk, and toppled over backwards. Recovering, I perched on the edge of the desk.
“You’re lying to me, Ms. Marlborough. You’re not here about a gold coin at all.”
“Don’t be a monster, Mr. Wasowski. Why would you say such a thing?”
I slipped off the desk and made my way to the sofa where I sank in between the two cushions. Pulling myself up, I gazed into her sea-green eyes and said, “Because, Ms. Marlborough, Mrs. Lumboldt, or should I say ‘Miss Ella Houston’...”
She gasped, and that was accompanied by the ominous sound of an organ chord, probably from the music studio next door. She tried to straighten herself and fidgeted in her chair. “How did you know that, Mr. Wilson?”
“I get around, Miss Houston. There’s not a lot that escapes my attention.” My cigarette had burned all the way down and singed my fingers. I threw it into the wastebasket where it started a small fire which I put out with seltzer water.
She sighed. “Then I guess there’s no point in the disguise any longer.” She stood up, stripped off the brown-tweed-suit, the fat suit she was wearing underneath it, the bleached blonde wig, and the pasty-faced mask, and threw them into a corner, frightening the mice.
The true Ella Houston stood before me, 120 pounds of 5’9” Rita-Hayworth-auburn hair, golden-tanned, sea-green-eyed, silk-dressed, buxom dame with gams that went all the way up inside her dress. One knee bent slightly forward, giving her the appearance of a schoolgirl who’s just been caught but doesn’t care.
“What’s with the disguise and the gold coin story, Miss Houston?”
She sat back down on the rattan chair and this time it broke, depositing her on the floor. I helped her over to the sofa, where she disappeared between the cushions. I put her on one of the sofa cushions, then got my chair out from behind my desk and attempted to sit on it backwards, like I’d seen in the moving pictures. However, this wasn’t one of those chairs on which you could do that, so I sat normally.
“Well, Miss Houston, I’m waiting.”
She looked at me then broke down into sobs. Whether they were real or not I have no idea. I don’t understand dames.
“Mr. Wszola, I’m in serious trouble. It’s my ex-boyfriend.”
“It’s Wyznicki, Miss Houston.”
“No, that’s not his name,” she gurgled. “His name is Rusty Regan.”
“No, it’s not, Miss Houston.”
“You’re right. It’s not. It’s Jules Amthor.”
“No, it’s not.”
“Oh, you’ve caught me again. It’s really Terry Lennox.”
“No, it’s not, Miss Houston. You’re giving me names of characters from novels.”
She threw her head onto her forearm on the arm of the sofa and wept into it. “Oh, Mr. Williams--”
“Wyznicki.”
She turned to me, her eyes now red with honest tears, and her cheeks aglow. “What am I to do?” she pleaded.
I patted her shoulder and she didn’t seem to mind. “There, there. Now start at the beginning.”
She straightened. “I was born in Cleveland--”
“We don’t need to go that far back, Miss Houston.”
“If you’re to help me, Mr. Wyznicki--”
“Hey! You got it right!”
“--then you’ll need to know my history.”
“OK,” I said, and got up. “Then I’ll need a drink. Can I get you one?”
“A strawberry daiquiri would be nice. Or perhaps a gin and tonic. Or some white wine?”
“I’ve got bourbon.”
“Bourbon would be wonderful.”
“I hate bourbon but that’s all I have. Christmas present from last year.”
I poured our drinks and when I looked back at her, she had gotten up and was staring at an astronomical chart on my wall.
“Do you like stars, Mr. Wyznicki?”
“Oh, yes, I do, as a matter of fact. Fascinating. I don’t know much about them though.”
She peered more closely at the map and pointed at one of the stars. “This one is Sirius.”
“They’re all pretty serious, Miss Houston,” I said with a smirk.
She ignored me. “It’s the brightest star. It’s even the brightest star on this map.”
“Yes, I know,” I responded, starting to get irritated. I didn’t know where this was going. I handed her a drink, which she gulped down in one and passed back to me. “Again, if you wouldn’t mind.” She smiled suggestively at me.
I filled her glass again, and this time she held it in both hands and stared down at it.
I took a sip of mine and choked, then sat down again, resuming the seatedness of my previous position. “Why are you here, Miss Houston?”
She went through her story, something about her father murdering her mother, running off with the maid, leaving Ella and her little sister Leila with some cranky old aunt who was the head of a gambling syndicate in Ohio, and then Ella met up with a drug-runner from a little island off Venezuela who ditched her for Leila when they went to Hollywood to visit Leila who had wanted to become an actress but couldn’t get work despite her stunning red hair and became a cheap chorus girl in low-rent musicals and then an expensive prostitute down on Hollywood Boulevard and then disappeared on a trip to Mexico, and then Ella was hijacked by pirates from Macao who sold her to a Qatari sheik blah blah blah I don’t know, none of it seemed relevant to this hot tomato in my office so I threw back a couple of quick belts of bourbon before re-filling hers.
“So you see, Mr. Wyznicki, or may I call you Philip...” she purred.
“You could, but my name’s Dave.”
“So you see, Dave, that’s what I’ve come to you about.”
“I’m sorry. I wasn’t really listening. What do you need from me?”
“I want you to find my father, the maid, the Venezuelan drug-runner, my sister Leila, the Macaon pirate captain, and the Qatari sheik.”
“Miss Houston, I don’t believe a word of this.”
She stood up and gave me a smile I could feel in my front pocket. “Mr. Wyznicki... Dave... come here.”
I went over to her and she put her arms out. I moved closer and could focus only on her ruby-red lips.
As we kissed, the lights went out. Literally, the lights went out and this was a surprise to me as I didn’t remember ever turning the lights on in the first place as it was daytime.
As we kissed again, the lights went out again, and this time it was due to being hit on the back of my head by a sap. It felt like a sap, and I felt like a sap too.
2: Hollywood
I woke up and tried to get my bearings but quickly realized I had left my bearings in another suit. I wiped my eyes but the cobwebs wouldn’t go away. I understood quickly that this was because these weren’t real cobwebs; they were the kind of cobwebs you see in the moving pictures. I discovered I was lying on a bed, and I pulled myself up to sit on the edge of the bed. My head throbbed like a large throbbing thing and I wanted to just lie down again but knew that if I did that, then I would have to go through all this again when I woke up for the second time.
I staggered to my feet and kept my balance by leaning on the dresser. Why there was a man who dressed actors in the room with me was beyond me but then I put it together. Ella’s elaborate disguise, the cobwebs, the dresser. I was in a movie. No, that couldn’t be right. But I must have been on a movie set.
I lurched over to the door and, hoping it wasn’t locked, turned the doorknob. When you turn a doorknob, you can’t actually tell if a door is locked or not, so I pulled on the doorknob. The door opened, and I pulled it all the way back, far wider than I actually needed to walk through the open door.
It was a movie set, a sound studio, Studio 4 if I wasn’t mistaken given the sign on the wall that said “Studio 4”. Actors and singers were in rehearsal for a musical number, technicians were adjusting lights, best boys were doing what best boys normally did in Hollywood, and what looked like the director (because he was unshaven and not very handsome) and the director of photography (or, as they call them in Hollywood, the DP or the guy who aims the camera) were in conference.
The dresser helped me on with my jacket and I walked into the sound studio. No one seemed to pay any attention to me, as if it were the most normal thing in the world for a private dick like me to be there. I wandered over to where the director and DP were talking. The director looked at me and a happy amazed face took the place of his own scowl.
“Ah! You’re here! Excellent!” he said. “Do you have your gun?”
I checked in my jacket pocket and sure enough, I had it. No one had removed it before they brought me here. I took it out of my pocket, checked to see if it was loaded (it was), and showed it to the director.
“Excellent!” he said again, stroking the barrel before passing it back to me. “They’re making these things look more realistic all the time, aren’t they?”
“That’s because--” I started.
“That’s because our props people are the best props people in Hollywood!” he said.
“That’s one of the reasons,” I said.
The DP checked in his viewfinder, nodded to the camera operator and the focus puller, then turned back to the director and nodded again. As I discovered later, he had no tongue so couldn’t speak.
The director took me aside, put his arm around my shoulder conspiratorially, and spoke close to my ear so I could hear him. “So what I want you to do is wait behind the door stage right. When you hear the line ‘That’s not what the bishop is telling the press’, I want you to come through that door as quickly and as toughly and as manly as you can, and shoot the man in the hat. Got it?”
“Shoot him?” I queried.
“Yes, of course.”
“But this is a real gun.”
“Ah, you’re a method actor. Stanislavski and all that. Excellent! You just go ahead and keep believing that. That will make your performance even more believable.”
“But--” I tried to interject.
“No buts about it. Off you go.” And he patted me in the hindquarters, shoving me off to stage right. Just in case you’re wondering, “stage right” is the actor’s right, not the audience’s right so that cleared up something I’d been wondering about for years.
I stood behind the door, looked left and right but there was no one there to whom I could explain anything. I could hear actors moving around in front of the door. Then there was silence. After a few seconds, I heard from out front: “Speed. Camera. Lights. Sound. Raspberries. Action!”
I could hear the muffled dialogue of a woman and a man.
Something something... “but we can’t do that, John.”
“There’s nothing we can do to stop it, Margaret.” Muffle muffle. The sound of a glass being filled with liquid.
“John, this is unconscionable! They’re all lies! I’m not his mother!”
“That’s not what the bishop is telling the press.”
That was my cue! I was ready to go! I had to shoot someone! How was I going to get out of this?
I shoved the door open and stepped through. There, standing in front of me were Susan Hayward and Charlton Heston. Susan Hayward was the attractive one. I looked from one to the other and they both looked at me.
Charlton Heston, I thought, then grinned and shot him between the eyes. If you’re wondering why you’ve seen Charlton Heston in movies and in public since that time, it’s because Hollywood has many interchangeable Charlton Hestons ready to go at any time.
“Cut!” called the director. He came up on stage. “Well, this is no good at all. There’s far too much blood. The censors will never pass this.”
He was right. Heston’s brain had been splattered all over the wall like a Jackson Pollock painting, and his neck was oozing blood over the Persian carpet like a diarrhea-infected cat.
The director turned back to the DP. “You didn’t cut, did you?”
The DP shook his head and grinned and turned to the camera operator who explained, “Are you kidding? This will be great for the blooper reel at the after-party!”
The director nodded in agreement. “All right, everybody. Take five. Let’s clean this up. Get me another Heston. You,” he said, pointing to me, “and you,” he said, pointing to one of the fellows standing about. “Come over here.”
The two of us wandered over to the director, the other fellow far more sheepishly than I.
“That’s not the right gun,” said the other fellow quickly, “and this isn’t the actor either!”
The director turned to me. “Is this true?”
I bridled a little. “I’m not classically trained if that’s what you mean but I think I turned in a darn good performance there.”
There was a commotion going on in another part of the studio. People were gathered around a man who looked a lot like me, dressed like me, and had that handsome devil-may-care attitude that many people associate with me.
“We found Willie!” a gorgeous script assistant cried. “He was tied up in the store room. Someone substituted that man...” — and she pointed directly at me — “for Willie!”
The director turned to me. “You’re in a lot of trouble now, boyo. Do you realize what you’ve done??? This is awful. Simply awful! Do you understand what just happened here? You’re not a member of the Screen Actors Guild. We can’t use any of this footage.”
3: Encounter At The Albatross Club
Bernie Newes is a friend of mine, a 6’6” palooka with a flattened nose, bald head, piercing blue eyes and a constant five o’clock shadow, but he’s also a cop and when I get in trouble, Bernie forgets the friend part.
He sat on the edge of his desk, pulled closer to him the chair on which I was sitting and pointed one of his stubby fingers (he had only eight of them) right into my face.
“In a movie without a SAG card! What were you thinking, Wyznicki?”
“I’m sorry, Bernie. I wasn’t. It just happened.”
“We can’t always bend the rules for you but I’ll try again.”
“Thanks, Bernie.”
“What were you doing there anyway?”
And I told him the story about Ella Houston. He let me finish, then got up and strolled around his desk pointlessly, the way Lloyd Nolan used to do it. “Ella Houston, you say?” he said, scratching his chin.
“That’s right,” I said. “She was in my office not more than four or five hours ago.”
“We’ve been looking for her for a long time. Are you sure it was her?”
“Yeah, pretty sure. I’d remember her anywhere anytime.”
“Yeah,” said Bernie. “I guess you would. 120 pounds of 5’9” Rita-Hayworth-auburn hair, golden-tanned, sea-green-eyed, silk-dressed, buxom dame with gams that go all the way up inside her dress. One knee bent slightly forward, giving her the appearance of a schoolgirl who’s just been caught but doesn’t care.”
“That’s how I would describe her.”
“What was she doing in your office?”
“I don’t really know, Bernie. There was some cockamamie story about her father, their maid, a Venezuelan drug-runner, her sister Leila, a Macaon pirate captain, and a Qatari sheik.”
“That’s crazy,” said Bernie, taking out a smoke and lighting a match.
“And get this,” I said. “When she first came into my office, she said it was about a gold coin.”
Bernie turned slowly to me and froze. He stared at me. The match burned his fingers and he dropped it. He lit another one but didn’t put it to the smoke. I watched the match.
“A gold coin?” he said.
“Uh, Bernie--”
“A gold coin?” he repeated.
“Bernie, you’re going to--”
“Ow!” he cried, throwing the match to the floor. He put his fingers in his mouth and mumbled something.
“What was that, Bernie?”
He removed his fingers. “A gold coin,” he said.
“That’s right. Does that mean something?”
“You tell me.”
“I don’t know, Bernie. Does it?”
“I don’t know, Wyznicki. Does it?”
“Bernie, we can do this all day. What’s going on?”
Bernie scratched his bald head because scratching his chin obviously wasn’t helping him to figure anything out. “Why would she come to you, Wyznicki? Why would she come in disguise? Why would she tell you that elaborate story? Why did they sap you? Why would you get taken to that movie set and set up?”
“I see five or six questions there, Bernie.”
“There will probably be more. What do you remember about Ella Houston?”
What I knew about Ella couldn’t fill a small notebook even if you cut a page in half. Certainly I’d never heard anything about a father, their maid, a Venezuelan drug-runner, her sister Leila, a Macaon pirate captain, and a Qatari sheik. The first time I saw her was at the racetrack, hanging out with some shady gamblers, as if there were any other kind. She was the one hanging out with the shady gamblers, not me; I don’t hang out with shady anything anymore ever since I got stiffed in Tulsa by a cardsharp named Arnie Weiss when I was down on my luck. I was at the racetrack that day only to deliver a message to a tout named Albie Fenster who was looking to set up business all across the country. But I digress.
Ella looked like she didn’t fit in with them, didn’t want to be there, was too classy for them. The only reason I knew who she was back then is that there was a guy standing beside me who suddenly shouted out, “Look! There’s Ella Houston, the singer from the Albatross Club!” I turned to the guy, who was pointing, and my left eye went right into his finger. I turned my head and with the other eye saw Ella. As I said, she looked kind of uncomfortable, like a priest walking into a cathouse, and I made a mental note to go see her at the Albatross Club.
The next time I saw her was at the Albatross Club.
I was sitting at the bar, chewing the fat with my friend, Danny the bartender, a thirty-year-old with red hair like a fireball and a face that looked like it had fallen off the back of a radish truck, about current politics, when a punk I recognized as a mediocre celebrity piped up. “You shouldn’t criticize the President.”
I turned to him and said, “I’m not criticizing. I’m just saying.”
“He’s the President. You shouldn’t criticize the President.”
“Is he above criticism? We’re not living in Soviet Russia. Last I heard this was still America where you can say what you want, McCarthy notwithstanding. Move along, son.”
“You’d better keep your mouth shut. Right, Danny?”
“I don’t know about that, Frank. I think Dave’s got some valid points about the prez.”
“What are ya? Some kind of commie?”
“No, not at all.” Danny looked at me and rolled his eyes out of sight of Frank, then wandered down to the other end of the bar and started wiping glasses, the way bartenders do in motion pictures when they want to look like they’re busy.
“So just shut up,” said Frank.
“I don’t think so,” I said. “What are you gonna do about it?”
Suddenly appearing behind me were two goons who were obviously associates of Frank’s. One was a huge gorilla in a dark suit, with a day’s growth of beard. It wasn’t a guy in a gorilla suit. The other was a smaller nervous type, chewing on a toothpick like a cheap hood in a B-movie, which he probably had been at one point. I sized them up, and figured the little guy would be easier to handle, so I stood up on the footrest of my barstool and popped the gorilla in the nose with a right cross. As he staggered backwards, I threw a left hook at the toothpick guy and knocked him on his skinny behind. I jumped off my stool, turned back to the gorilla, and delivered a swift kick to his cojones. He bent over double and I smacked him with a right uppercut to his chin, and he hit the ground like a sack of wet wheat.
I looked at Frank, who had backed up a little by this point, and gave him a grin.
I felt a hand on my shoulder, turned around, and there was John Wayne.
“Ya shouldn’t be... starting ruckuses,” he said.
“Mind your own business there, pardner,” I expectorated. “Frank and his little girlfriends started the whole thing. Can’t a guy say what he wants these days without some trumped-up pop singer turning his hired help loose?”
“Listen, kid,” said Wayne. “Frank’s a big star and... what he says... goes around here. Ya got that?”
“Ya know, I always thought you were a lousy actor who couldn’t say lines properly and now I realize you can’t help it because you talk like that all the time. How did you ever become a movie actor, let alone a star? What producer did you sleep with?”
He didn’t like that, and started to seethe.
“By the way, I live in a world where ‘Duke’ means Ellington or Wellington, not a bad actor or a high-strung border collie.”
I could hear Danny chortling behind me. Wayne really didn’t like that either, and drew his fist back beside his ear. I gave him a quick left jab to his cheek and followed with a right cross that got him squarely in the mouth, splitting his bottom lip. He fell backwards knocking over a table. I stood over him, put my right thumb and forefinger into the shape of a gun, blew on the end of my finger, and put my gun back into its holster.
“Marion,” I said pointedly, “where did you learn to box? Never ever bring your fist back that far to throw a punch unless you have a lot of time. You leave yourself too open.”
“What do you think you’re doing?” said a familiar voice in an attempt to be threatening. I turned on my heel and there was Marlon Brando, standing like he was going to be next in line to take a whupping.
“Ah, jeesh,” I said. “Mr. Method Actor. Oh, look at me. I’m so sensitive. I feel everything. I’m an artiste. Method acting, my sweet fanny. You and Dean are just over-actors who’ve convinced an unsophisticated public that full-blown histrionics is a suitable way to portray realism. Streetcar! Stella! Stella! Who allowed you to do that, ya big whining baby? Or was it supposed to be a funny line? Why don’t you go watch a Newman movie to see how real acting is done? Or study Fredric March and Walter Huston. That’s solid, man.” I didn’t even wait for Brando to respond; I just punched him in the head.
He hit the ground at Wayne’s feet, who had gotten up by that point, and was standing there shaking, with a hint of urine dripping down his pant leg. Brando got up and he and Wayne backed up and remained spectators for the rest of the incident.
By this time, there was a bit of a crowd watching. I wasn’t sure whose side they were on so I figured I might as well just go whole hog. I turned back to Frank. “And you know, Frank, you should just shut up sometimes. You should stop mooning over Ava. She’s not gonna take you back. She’s a cool woman and, even though she drinks too much and gets angered too quickly, she’s still better than you are as a person. And why shouldn’t she be interested in other guys? What’s wrong with that? Women’s sexual freedom is coming, my friend, so why shouldn’t she do what you’re always doing? She’s sitting over there with a big grin on her face, in case you hadn’t noticed.”
Frank turned and saw Ava, who was smiling at Frank with a look of pure hate. She turned to me and cheered me with her martini glass. I nodded to her.
Frank looked back to me.
“Furthermore, ya has-been,” I continued. “Leave Betty alone as well. She’s not even over Bogie yet and you’re trying to get in there. She’s young and impressionable and you’re taking advantage of her grief. By the way, stop using the term ‘broad’. It’s really demeaning, women don’t like it, and it makes you look like an old fart. And mark my words, if you don’t clean up your act, you’re gonna end your career wearing a bad rug and singing paeans to over-rated cities and slightly incestuous duets with your daughter.”
The crowd laughed at that one and, for once, Frank had nothing to say. I turned and looked at all of them. No one moved. I looked at Danny. He winked at me.
I went over to Ava’s table, had a couple of drinks with her that Danny bought for us, and we left shortly after that.
Oh yeah, I forgot to mention. Ella Houston was the singer at the Albatross that night.
“Wyznicki, are you listening to me?” It was Bernie bringing me back to reality. “What do you remember about Ella Houston?”
“Ah damn, Bernie,” I said. “Was all that just an internal monologue?”
Copyright © 2024 by William Kitcher
