High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online

was looking for you yesterday. A guy with violence steaming in him. I could feel it.”
    “Solid guy, looked like a big brick?” I tried.
    “That’s him,” he said. “You need some help?”
    “I don’t think so. If I do, I know where to find you.”
    I went out into the cold, buttoned my coat, pulled down my hat and went for my Buick. I had a pocketful of dollars, a case to work on and a dead parrot for backup. That was enough to keep my mind off the war for a few hours.
    My first stop was Max Gelhorn’s office on Sunset. It was a thin, undernourished office building huddled between a one-story short-order diner with a 25-cent breakfast special and a bar with brown windows that advertised Eastside Beer and Ale.
    Gelhorn’s office was an elevator ride to the third floor and a walk down an uncarpeted corridor. A chunky girl with a cold sat behind the reception desk. She wore a blue suit. Behind her I could see Gelhorn’s open office. The operation was as small as it could be. Gelhorn Productions was not in the bucks.
    “I’m here to see Max Gelhorn,” I said, looking around with as much superiority as I could master.
    “He is on location,” she sniffled.
    “Location?”
    “He is shooting a Western movie,” she explained. “For PRC.”
    “And where might this location be?” I asked.
    She groped for a fresh Kleenex just in time to keep from offending me. “Not at liberty to say,” she said.
    “My name is Fligdish, from the Fourth Commercial Bank of New York City,” I said sweetly. “If Mr. Gelhorn wants to talk about refinancing High Midnight , it will be today or not at all. I have other appointments and a plane to catch this evening.” I looked at my father’s watch with impatience. It told me it was half past five. I moved it slightly and I saw that the no-longer-attached hour hand spun around when I jiggled it.
    “Burbank,” she said, scribbling a street-corner address on a pad and tearing the paper off to hand to me.
    “Thank you,” I said. “Take care of that cold.”
    “How?” she said miserably as I left the office.
    The odds were pretty good that one of the four people Shelly had interviewed was behind the man-who-looked-like-a-brick. They were the people who knew he/I/someone was on the case. I had nothing else to go on, anyway. My engine was making a slight pinging sound that had in the past gradually become a forty-three-dollar symphony. Maybe I could finish this case before putting the car in dry dock.
    I turned on the radio long enough to find that Dolph Camilli, the National League’s Most Valuable Player with 34 home runs and 120 runs batted in, had signed again with the Brooklyn Dodgers for $20,000. I was too old to become a baseball player and too homely to be a movie star.
    The street corner in Burbank was behind a factory. The street corner was actually a huge vacant lot leading up to a hill with a few trees on it. The hill went up sharply to about the height of a three-story building. Plunked in the middle of this vacant lot were four horses, a half-dozen guys with cowboy outfits, a man with a camera and an assortment of other people shivering in a small circle next to a wooden shack, which was being moved around by a thin girl and two guys in sweaters.
    When I parked and moved toward them, one man separated himself from the pack and strode toward me with a smile. Behind his back he whispered, “Set it up fast, Herman.” The wind had been blowing my way or I wouldn’t have heard him. He was a little taller, a little younger and seemed to be a lot more enthusiastic than I was about life, but then again he was clearly faking.
    “I,” he said, holding out a hand, “am Max Gelhorn. Can I be of some service to you?”
    Behind him the sweatered crew tied horses to a quickly constructed rail in front of the shack, cowboys checked their guns and the camera was lugged back to take it all in.
    “You have a permit to shoot here?” I asked sternly.
    “Permit?” Gelhorn looked