To Catch a Spy, page 14
The window was about chest high and locked. The room inside was dark. With my pocket knife I had no trouble popping the latch and opening the window. I clambered in and Grant nimbly jumped in behind me. I closed the window and pulled down the shade before turning on my flashlight.
We were standing in a small, neat office. Polished dark wood desk with nothing on top of it. Matching chair. A trio of simple wooden chairs with arms. A bookcase on one wall running from floor to ceiling. A pair of file cabinets on the other wall and framed Audubon prints of water birds.
I went to the desk drawer, pulled it open, and found a small box of calling cards that told me we were in the office of Lawrence Toddhunter, Dean of the School of Performance. There were no photographs on the dean’s desk.
We checked the file cabinets and the desk for class lists but didn’t find any, so we moved to the door. I unlocked it, and we stepped into the reception area. There was light coming from the corridor outside the room, but not much. “Flashlight off,” I whispered.
Then, “Over there,” to Grant to let him know where I’d had seen file cabinets when I had last been in this room.
We went to the cabinets, where I clicked my flashlight back on and we began to look for the class list. The problem wasn’t a lack of lists. There were hundreds of them. In the third drawer down, we found the class list for the night school’s advanced performance class.
“Recognize any of the names?” I whispered.
“No,” said Grant. “But if we are talking about a group of spies, they probably wouldn’t use their own names. I’ve got to take a longer look at them.”
We moved to the door to the corridor. I unlocked it and opened it slowly. There was no one out there. We turned in the direction of the theater I had been in and stopped.
Voices were coming from inside the room. People were talking quickly, and the distinctive voice of Gunther Wherthman was responding. They were speaking German. I looked at Grant, who shrugged to let me know he couldn’t understand, either.
He motioned for me to follow him, and we walked farther down the corridor to a room labeled “Backstage and Storeroom.” We went in. It was dark, and we needed the flashlight as we moved down the long narrow passage, made more narrow by boards and backdrops and assorted props leaning against the wall.
On the other side of the thin wall, we could hear the sound of German. At the end of the passage were three stairs going up. We tiptoed up and found another door on our left. The sound of voices was louder now.
I opened the door, and through the crack we could see the small stage on which Gunther stood looking out at six men and three women, one of whom was Jacklyn Wright. All were casually dressed. Four of the men were wearing shirts chosen to show their muscles.
“I said to speak English,” Jacklyn Wright said. “If someone should hear.…”
“Very well,” said Gunther. “I will say it once more.”
“You will say it as many times as we wish it said,” replied one of the bodybuilders.
“I have been sent by Reichfuhrer Grembauer to warn you that your security has been compromised. One among you is a traitor,” said Gunther.
This was not the scenario we had worked on. Gunther was improvising, and it looked as if his audience wasn’t buying his act.
“Why not use the usual channels?” asked another man.
“Because,” Gunther answered. “He is not certain of the loyalty of his messengers.”
“But he trusts you?” another bodybuilder asked with a smirk.
“Implicitly,” said Gunther.
“There are no midgets in the Third Reich,” the man challenged.
“I am not a midget,” Gunther said. “I am a dwarf and I am also a special envoy. If I were not, how could I know you were here? If I were not, why would I come alone and not simply go to the FBI or the police?”
“Call him,” demanded one of the women.
“It will take him at least half an hour to get here,” Jacklyn Wright said.
“Good,” said Gunther. “Call him, tell him to come here. We will wait. Meanwhile, I suggest that no one leave this room alone. Anyone could be the traitor.”
I closed the door and whispered to Grant.
“You recognize any of them?”
“Three of them, two of the men and one woman,” he said. “I don’t know their names, but one’s a secretary at RKO and the others are actors. What now?”
“We call the FBI and get them over here fast,” I said, “but we tell them to wait till whoever those people in there are going to call gets here.”
“Sounds like a good plan,” said Grant.
We went back down the passageway. When I tried the door, it wouldn’t open.
“Locked from the outside,” I said.
“We can break it down,” Grant said.
“Too much noise. They’d be all over us.”
“Then?”
“Only one way to go.”
We went back down the passage to the stage door.
When I opened it again, one of the women and two of the men were coming in the doors to the theater. They were in a hurry.
“We reached him,” one of the men said. “He knows no Reichfuhrer Grembauer. This is some kind of trick or trap. We are to eliminate him and disperse immediately.”
“Stop,” Gunther said with confidence. “It is clear. He is the traitor.”
“Who?” asked Jacklyn Wright.
“The very person you just called,” Gunther said.
“And what is that person’s name?” an older man with rimless spectacles asked.
He had Gunther with that one.
“I know only his true name, not his false identity,” said Gunther.
“Kill him,” said the man with glasses.
“I’m going to distract them,” Grant said. “Try to sneak around them to get some help.”
I started to protest, but Grant was already past me and onto the stage standing next to Gunther.
“All right,” Grant announced with confidence. “You’re all under arrest.”
With my back to the wall, I edged out into the shadows and started down toward the left wall of the small theater. The nine people looking at the stage all recognized Grant. They stood in stunned silence for a few seconds. I kept inching along the wall.
“Just line up in the aisle,” Grant said, motioning toward the aisle. “Women first and then men by height, smallest in the front.”
I was halfway to the back of the theater when Jacklyn Wright said, “Get them.”
One of the men started toward the stage. The other men and women seemed confused by what was happening. One of the women spotted me, pointed and shouted, “They’re here.”
The group was within feet of the auditorium exit when the doors suddenly opened inward. Blocking the doorway were Jeremy Butler and Mountain. The group panicked. Four of the men made the mistake of running at Jeremy and Mountain. All four were on the floor seconds later.
The bodybuilder who had been rushing toward Grant and Gunther suddenly changed his mind and headed for the door to the passageway Grant and I had come through. Grant got to him before the man could open the door.
The man turned, throwing a wide right at Grant’s head. Grant ducked well below the swing and jabbed a fast left into the man’s stomach. The man went down.
“What are you doing?” Jacklyn Wright said, facing me. “We were trying to hold our regular acting class and you and your friends have trespassed and beaten us. I’m calling the police.”
“Let’s go together,” I said.
I left with Jeremy and Mountain herding the group into the first two rows of the auditorium.
“I’m coming with you,” Grant said, jumping from the stage and following us. “I’ve got a call to make too.”
“You are Cary Grant, aren’t you?” Jacklyn said.
Grant nodded.
“What are you doing here?” she asked. “The college lawyers will make you pay for this.”
“We’ll see,” said Grant.
We went into the office Grant and I had recently been in, and I ushered Jacklyn toward the phone. Grant headed for the dean’s office in search, I assumed, of another phone.
Jacklyn reached for the phone.
“Sure you want the police?” I asked.
She put the phone to her ear.
“Suit yourself,” I said with a shrug. “They’re going to want to know who everyone in your class is, their real names, backgrounds.”
“What do you want?” she asked.
“The real names and the name of your leader,” I said.
“What leader?”
“The one your friend called for instructions,” I said.
“No,” she said. “I’ll take my chances with the police. It will ruin your friend Cary Grant’s career, breaking into an acting class, assaulting a student. And you, what will you and your friends say? You, too, broke in on an acting class. You have no evidence of anything. Well?”
“No,” I said. “I can’t let a pack of Nazis loose. And when we all accuse you of being a German spy, the newspapers and the college administration will be all over you.”
“Stalemate?” she asked, hands on hips.
“No,” I said.
Grant came back into the room.
“All taken care of,” he said, rubbing his hands together and smiling.
“The lady says your career will be ruined if the police come in,” I said.
“We’ll just have to wait and see, won’t we?” he said with confidence.
I called the police, and we escorted Jacklyn back to the auditorium, where she sat on one of the aisle seats in the third row. Jeremy and Mountain stood guard, while Gunther sat in the last row by himself. I joined him.
“That wasn’t the plan,” I said.
“I took it upon myself to call Jeremy from Mrs. Plaut’s,” Gunther said. “I thought it might be prudent.”
“That’s not what I mean,” I said. “That was a good idea. But the Nazi act.…”
“They were not going to let me in,” he said. “I even threatened to sue them for keeping a qualified citizen from attending a public class for which he was well qualified.”
“And …?”
“It came to me,” he said. “I started to speak to them in German, hoping I could convince them or at least keep their attention till you accomplished your mission or arrived.”
“You succeeded,” I said.
Six policemen in uniform and two in plain clothes were there within ten minutes, guns drawn, striding down the aisle.
Grant leaned back against the stage with his arms folded. The older of the two uniformed cops looked at him and nodded toward the entrance to the theater. On his way past me toward the door, Grant whispered, “Sorry. I’ll give you a call tomorrow.”
I watched him leave and turned back to the cops.
“We’ll start with …” the older plainclothes cop said.
“Me,” said Jacklyn Wright. “These men broke in, disrupted my class, and beat my students.”
“Why?” asked the cop.
She hadn’t considered this question.
“I assume they are drunk,” she said.
The younger plainclothesman smelled my breath, Gunther’s, Jeremy’s, and Mountain’s.
“Seem sober to me,” he said.
“They did disrupt my class,” she insisted.
“Why?” The question from the older cop was aimed at me.
“They’re all Nazis,” I said. “They’re using this class to cover their meetings. You check their backgrounds and …”
“They’re all Nazis?” the older cop repeated. “How do you know?”
I stopped myself before mentioning the murders of Volkman and Cookinham. I didn’t want that door opened.
“Check on them,” I repeated.
“And why did you let Cary Grant go?” Jacklyn demanded.
“Cary Grant?” asked the older cop, looking at the younger one. “Cary Grant was in here?”
“You know he was,” she shouted.
“Just saw a janitor,” the cop said. “I’d have recognized Cary Grant. You, Mel?”
“I’d have recognized him,” said the younger cop.
“Any of you?” the older cop asked the uniforms.
They all shook their heads “no.” They knew when they were being led to water.
“I think we’ll just take the whole class over to the station and give the FBI a call,” the older cop said. “Not that I think they’ll find anything, but these are dangerous times and I’ve got a son who lost an arm in France last year. You’ll have to humor me.”
“I … we want a lawyer,” she said, glaring at me.
“We’ll talk to our captain about that at the station,” the cop said. Then he looked at me and added, “The two big ones? They with you?”
“Yes,” I said.
“And the little one?”
“Yes.”
“You’ve got one strange army,” he said, turning to the uniformed cops and adding, “Anderson, call for a paddy wagon.”
One of the uniformed cops put his gun away and headed for the door.
This was all going too easily. I decided not to wait until the cop decided what to do with us.
“If you don’t need me and my friends anymore …” I began.
“You’re coming with us too,” he said. “We’ve got lots of room, lots of coffee for all of you and your lawyers, plus the FBI. We’ll have a party.”
One of the bodybuilders suddenly leaped from the first row to the stage and headed for the door to the passageway. Within four feet of the door, Gunther had clambered onto the stage and rammed his head between the man’s legs. The big man crumpled with a groan. Gunther smoothed his hair and adjusted his suit.
Less than twenty minutes later we were all seated in a large room in the Burbank police station. I was familiar with the room. I was also familiar with the way cops usually handled roundups like this one. I kept my mouth shut other than to say that we didn’t need a lawyer, not yet.
One by one, Jacklyn and her class were taken into a small interrogation room. No one stayed in there more than five minutes. When it was my turn, I went through the door and closed it behind me. The older cop and his partner sat behind a table. There was a chair across from them. The young one named Mel gestured toward it and I sat.
“My name’s Alvarez,” the older cop said. “Remember me?”
I looked at him again and then remembered. I hadn’t seen him in ten years. We had served at the same time when I was a Burbank cop. He looked thirty years older. My recollection was that he was about my age.
“Dennis,” I said.
He nodded.
“I’d like to know what’s going on,” he said.
I opened my mouth and held up a hand.
“I’d like to know, but I’ve been told not to ask,” he said. “I think you screwed up an FBI operation.”
It was a distinct possibility.
“Something wrong with your neck?” Alvarez asked.
“Accident,” I said.
“If I remember right, you have lots of accidents,” he said.
“You remember right.”
“You ever balance it out?” he said. “How much you think you average taking in cash for each accident?”
“I try not to think of it that way,” I said.
Alvarez shook his head and looked at Mel.
“Chief of police got a call,” said Alvarez. “He called my captain. My captain called me and told us what to do. We’re doing it. When we’re done doing it, we’re letting everyone go. We’ve got their fingerprints. I’ve been ordered to turn them over to the FBI, which I will do. I’ve also been ordered to apologize. That I will not do.”
“What about Cary Grant?” I asked.
“We were specifically told that we were not going to find Cary Grant at Caroll College,” said Alvarez. “If we saw someone who looked amazingly like him, we were to let him walk. We saw someone.”
“We don’t like this, Peters,” Mel said.
“The FBI wants to talk to you,” Dennis said. “They said they’d be coming to see you.”
It was my turn to nod.
“Are those people really Nazis?” Dennis asked.
“Yeah, I’m sure,” I said.
“Nail the bastards to the wall with railroad spikes,” he said.
CHAPTER
12
On the drive back to Los Angeles in the Crosley, Gunther asked, “Are you displeased with my behavior?”
“No,” I said. “You, Grant, and I would probably be wallpaper if you hadn’t called Jeremy.”
“I mean about my pretending to be a Nazi envoy,” he said with dignity, looking straight forward, barely able to see over the dashboard.
“It was creative,” I said. “And it bought us some time. I’m not mad. I asked you to help. You took a chance. I appreciate it.”
“I am relieved,” Gunther said.
Gunther asked me if he could listen to Great Moments in Music on the radio.
“They are doing selections from Puccini’s La Boheme with Jean Tennyson and Jan Pierce.”
“Sounds like fun,” I said.
I would have preferred Mayor of the Town with Lionel Barrymore and Agnes Moorehead or the Jack Carson show, but overruling Gunther might have seemed like I was trying to punish him. So we listened, or rather, Gunther listened and I kept driving.
“Listen,” Gunther said at one point.
I looked at him. His eyes were closed.
“She is dying,” he said. “Mimi. He doesn’t know. Plaintive, haunting.”
“Yeah,” I said.
It was around eleven p.m. by the time we got back to Mrs. Plaut’s. I was tired. I wanted to get to a hot shower and let the water hit my shoulder and head for ten minutes while I stood with my eyes closed and tried not to think. That’s what I wanted but not what I got.
Mrs. Plaut was standing on the porch as we walked up, her arms folded across her chest.
“There are two men waiting for you in the parlor, Mr. Peelers,” she said sternly. “I asked them to return in the A.M. They said it was urgent. I asked them who they were and they told me they were with the Federal Bureau of Fumigation. I informed them that we had no bugs, but perhaps they wish your services in your capacity as an exterminator. Either which way, I cannot see why they couldn’t wait till the morning. And with that I say good night and ask you to lock the door behind you.”
