the chowder?”
“Fine. Fine. So you know the old town?”
“Yeah.”
“The Orpheum, huh?”
“Nope. That’s straight vaudeville. Warm up your coffee?”
“No, it’s fine.”
He started back to the kitchen.
“Say, are you the owner—Buffin?”
“Yeah.”
“I think I remember you. Keller’s Hofbrau, wasn’t it?”
Buster’s face lit up and he said, “Brother, you’re kiddin’ me, but it’s soothin’, very soothin’.”
“No. I remember the name. I used to go down and buy my jug of beer every Friday night.”
“Yeah,” he said, and winked. “That was a cheap town if there ever was.”
I didn’t hear that. “Keller had a corner on the lovelies though. I can remember a couple I wouldn’t mind going back for.”
“Yeah,” he said. “How long you been in L. A.?”
“Five years.”
“You’re a native. It’s been good to me. I like L. A. Sure your coffee’s okay?”
“Yeah.”
* * * *
HE TURNED and went back to the kitchen and left me sitting there. I’m a good fisherman. I can play any kind of fish, if he isn’t a bright kind of fish, like a dog shaak. I drank some of the coffee and got up. Buster came back and stood by the cash register.
“Two bits,” he said.
I paid him and decided to stop wasting time.
“You didn’t know that blonde gal who sang for Keller, did you? Her name was Betty Bleeker.”
He jerked his head up and gave me a slow stare. His quick eyes were puzzled, almost worried. “You mean Peggy Bleeker,” he said slowly.
“Oh. Was that it?”
“That was it,” he said and gave me a slow smile that showed a line of even white teeth that looked as genuine as a sound-effect. “Did you go through this routine just to find out if I know Peg Bleeker?”
“Yeah,” I said. “Pathetic, isn’t it?”
“Copper?”
“No. I’m just looking for Peg Bleeker.”
“Why?”
“Okay,” I said. “You win. Her aunt died almost a year ago and left a piece of property out by one of the shipyards. We’ve tried to find Miss Bleeker through the police down here, but they don’t seem to be trying. The property is pretty valuable right now, and we can’t do anything without her. Keller told me she came down here with you.”
“But, chum, that was six years ago. What’s your angle on it?”
“I’m just working for the executor.”
“What’s the information worth?”
“It depends on the information.” I got out my wallet and laid a ten on the counter. “Let’s see how much that’ll buy.”
He looked at it and left it there. He said: “She came down here with me and I helped her land a job. Then when I tried to get a little she tossed me out and called me a cheap bum.” He said it casually enough, but color crawled up under his tan and burned in two points on his cheeks.
“What sort of a job?”
“Song spot. Down at King Henry’s Cellar on Fifth. But she didn’t like tea. She was strictly dynamite. I never did make her. And I don’t think anyone else ever did. But I came back for more. I got her a nice spot with the Revues and then she moved over to the Glendale in a strip routine. The Glendale was tops in burlesque then, but she was too genteel for the boys, and she wasn’t built right anyway. Strippers are slobs.”
I nodded.
“Well, that’s about it. I went back east, and when I got back I found out she’d got up a bubble dance routine and was hitting the night club circuit. I traced her to a couple of second-rate joints—one in Long Beach, and one in San Pedro. Then I lost her.”
He gave the counter a slow, eloquent swipe with the dish rag. He said: “I haven’t given that babe a dime’s worth of thought since.”
I said: “Was she using Peg Bleeker as her professional name?”
He looked up at me, almost shyly, and grinned. “I been waitin’ for you to ask that. That’s the sixty-four-dollar question.”
“It’s worth twenty, Buster. I could find out, you know.”
“Like hell you could, but I’ll sell it for fifty bucks. Take it or leave it.”
I took it. He gave me the addresses of the two night clubs in Long Beach and San Pedro free of charge. The name Peg Bleeker had taken, and was still using when Buster lost track of her some time in 1939, was Gloria Day.
I took out the Hofbrau version of Peg Bleeker and handed it to him.
I said: “Did she still look like that down here? The long bob and the ammonia rinse?”
He looked at the picture for a while without saying anything. Then: “Did Keller give you this?”
“Yeah.”
He handed it back to me. “She dyed her hair red after she got down here.” His face looked stiff and tight. He turned and walked back to the little kitchen.
…There’s a lot of traffic on Wilshire, but I got the idea a dark blue Chevrolet that stayed behind me all the way in wasn’t interested in getting ahead of me. I didn’t try to find out. I was going to my office, and my office is in the phone book.
I parked in the lot on the corner across from the Pacific Building. I walked by the little lunch room in the Hart Building and up to the cross walk, across the street and into the lobby.
I hadn’t noticed the Chevrolet, but I had seen something else more interesting: Mrs. Ralph Johnston, sitting in the window-booth of the lunch room, watching the entrance of the Pacific Building with the tense patience of a terrier watching a gopher hole.
CHAPTER VI
WHAT I did for the next four days I could have hired a high-grade moron for; but I didn’t have anything else to do, and besides, all the high-grade morons were working. I tramped around to agencies, burlesque houses, the two clubs in Long Beach and San Pedro, and made more phone calls than a Crossley inquirer. Ma Schaeffer, employment manager and house-mother-at-large for the Revues, remembered Gloria Day vaguely, but then she wouldn’t have told me anything anyway, I smelled like a cop. A throaty blonde of uncertain years and talents located at the San Pedro address remembered a bubble dancer named Gloria something-or-other. The name was in the records of a couple of theatrical agents, but nothing later than March of 1939. And at all the places I asked the same question: Had anyone else ever been around asking for her? The answer was always the same: No.
I was sitting at my desk gloomily mumbling puns on the theme of sic transit Gloria and not getting any fun out of it. It was a gray morning with a heavy wetness in the air, and I was all through. I had planted forty acres of cards in the best green room soil. Now I was letting the earth turn and awaiting the doubtful harvest.
I heard Hazel say: “Yes, he is. One moment.”
I looked up and she said: “For you” with her lips.
I picked up the phone. A voice said, “Hi ya, Sherlock.”
I gripped the receiver a little