“That you, Howard?”
Howard Hughes sighed. “What happened to ‘Security, may I help you’?”
“You’re the only one calls this early, Boss.”
“And you’re alone?”
“Right. Per your instructions to call you Mr. Hughes in the presence of others. What’s up?”
“Breakfast is up. Meet me at the corner of Melrose and La Brea in half an hour.”
“Right, Boss.”
“Two or three, Buzz? I’m hungry and having four.”
Howard was on his all chili dog diet; Pink’s Dogs at Melrose and La Brea was his current in-spot. I knew for a fact that their chili was made from horse-meat air freighted up daily from Tijuana. “One kraut, no chili.”
“Heathen. Pink’s chili is better than Chasen’s.”
“I had a pony when I was a boy.”
“So? I had a governess. You think I wouldn’t eat–”
I said, “Half an hour,” and hung up. I figured if I got there five minutes late I wouldn’t have to watch the fourth richest man in America eat.
* * *
Howard was picking strands of sauerkraut off his chin when I climbed in the backseat of his limousine. He said, “You didn’t really want it, did you?”
I pressed the button that sent up the screen that shielded us from the driver. “No, coffee and doughnuts are more my style.”
Howard gave me a long, slow eyeballing–a bit ill at ease because sitting down we were the same height, while standing I came up to his shoulders. “Do you need money, Buzz?”
I thought of Leotis Dineen. “Can niggers dance?”
“They certainly can. But call them colored, you never know when one might be listening.”
Larry the chauffeur was Chinese; Howard’s comment made me wonder if his last plane crash had dented his cabeza. I tried my standard opening line. “Getting any, Boss?”
Hughes smiled and burped; horse grease wafted through the backseat. He dug into a pile of papers beside him–blueprints, graphs, and scraps covered with airplane doodles, pulling out a snapshot of a blonde girl naked from the waist up. He handed it to me and said, “Gretchen Rae Shoftel, age nineteen. Born in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, July 26, 1929. She was staying at the place on South Lucerne–the screening house. This is the woman, Buzz. I think I want to marry her. And she’s gone–she flew the coop on the contract, me, all of it.”
I examined the picture. Gretchen Rae Shoftel was prodigiously lunged–no surprise–with a blonde pageboy and smarts in her eyes, like she knew Mr. Hughes’s two-second screen test was strictly an audition for the sack and an occasional one-liner in some RKO turkey. “Who found her for you, Boss? It wasn’t me– I’d have remembered.”
Howard belched again–my hijacked sauerkraut this time. “I got the picture in the mail at the studio, along with an offer–a thousand dollars cash to a P0 box in exchange for the girl’s address. I did it, and met Gretchen Rae at her hotel downtown. She told me she posed for some dirty old man back in Milwaukee, that he must have pulled the routine for the thousand. Gretchen Rae and I got to be friends, and, well. . .
“And you’ll give me a bonus to find her?”
“A thousand, Buzz. Cash, off the payroll.”
My debt to Leotis Dineen was eight hundred and change; I could get clean and get even on minor league baseball–the San Diego Seals were starting their pre-season games next week. “It’s a deal. What else have you got on the girl?”
“She was car hopping at Scrivner’s Drive-In. I know that.”
“Friends, known associates, relatives here in LA?”
“Not to my knowledge.”
I took a deep breath to let Howard know a tricky question was coming. “Boss, you think maybe this girl is working an angle on you? I mean, the picture out of nowhere, the thousand to a P0 box?”
Howard Hughes harumphed. “It had to be that piece in _Confidential_, the one that alleged my talent scouts take topless photographs and that I like my women endowed.”
“_Alleged_, Boss?”
“I’m practicing coming off as irate in case I sue _Confidential_ somewhere down the line. You’ll get on this right away?”
“Rapidamente.”