The Devil Met a Lady by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online Page A

perform, Nelson suddenly said, “Turn it off. Stop recording. Leave the record here and go. Now. You’ll have my check in the morning.”
    “Right,” Pinketts had said, hitting a switch and taking off his earphones.
    Nelson dashed out of the shed and Pinketts put his earphones back on. He put in a fresh disc and started a new recording.
    “Pinketts,” I had said, “the man told us to—”
    “You want to get paid,” he said. “Shut up.”
    I shut up and listened.
    Ham Nelson stormed through the house and burst into the bedroom. About ten seconds later, Pinketts and I knew that the guy in the bedroom with the problem was Howard Hughes. Twenty seconds beyond that we learned that Ham Nelson wanted fifty thousand dollars cash to turn the record over to Hughes. Hughes immediately agreed, and Nelson promised to hand him the record in the morning when Hughes gave him the cash.
    That’s when Pinketts had said, “Let’s go.”
    He stopped the machine, took out the disc he had just recorded, the one with Ham Nelson blackmailing Davis and Hughes, and shoved it in his briefcase. He left the first record, the one Nelson had told us to leave, on the table. Then we left.
    In a bar three blocks away Pinketts paid me in cash, lit one of his trademark thin cigars, and sauntered into the night.
    I hadn’t heard from Pinketts again.
    I did read in Variety that Davis and Nelson had been divorced a little later.
    When I’d worked at Warners a few years earlier, I had run into Bette Davis more than a few times. We had exchanged nods, words, maybe a “good morning” or “good night,” no more than she did with any other uniformed studio guard, but she had been friendly enough.
    The word on the lot had been that she was a decent sort, feet on the ground, who got a bad deal from the Brothers Warner. She’d tried to break her contract, get more money, do less than three or four pictures a year, and get some say-so in picking them. She’d gone to court in England and lost. Though the trades wondered what she was complaining about, the people who worked on the lot knew that she was getting paid far less than any of the male leads, including Cagney, Flynn, Raft, Bogart, or even Edward G. Robinson, all of whom had the right to turn down projects. And this was after she had won an Oscar and was reported to be one of the top three box-office draws in the world.
    The money Pinketts had paid me went into one of Shelly Minck’s schemes, pastel-colored false teeth. He had assured me that it was more than a fad, that pink teeth were going over big on the Riviera. I lost every cent and I was glad I did.
    Now that record was back to haunt me.
    Andy’s wasn’t anything special, but I’m not exactly the gourmet editor of the L. A. Times . It was a mid-block coffee house for below-the-line assistants at Paramount. Grips, gaffers, gofers, and extras hung around places like Andy’s making contacts, killing time, making it clear where they could be found. But there was no crowd that Monday when I stepped in, and even if there had been, the place was small and Pinketts easy to spot.
    He hadn’t changed.
    He was about five-ten or -eleven, lean, dark, with a full head of black curly hair, an aura of perpetual weariness, and that omnipresent thin cigar in his mouth or hand. He wore dark suits and liked to drape a scarf around his neck. Few had seen his dark eyes behind the sunglasses he seldom removed. People who passed him on the street or saw him walking down Sunset or Hollywood would ask him for his autograph, which he always graciously gave. The people then went home to decipher the scrawl and figure out who this movie star might be. Most of them guessed he was Gilbert Roland or Cesar Romero, and that was close enough for Pinketts, whose parents had both been Rumanian farmers.
    “Toby,” he said from a booth in the rear, lifting a weary arm in greeting. “It is so good to see you again, my old friend.”
    “Andrea,” I said, moving toward