High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) Read Online Free PDF Page A

with his left hand. So some guy at Goldwyn got the idea of reversing the film so it looks as if he’s throwing with the left when he’s throwing with the right. That’s why the letters have to be reversed. He’s got uniforms both ways. He works out in them to get the feel.”
    “So in the movie he’ll be standing at third base instead of first?”
    “How the hell do I know?” Lefty growled. “The whole thing’s a mistake. Cooper’s a mess. He has a bad back and broken bones all over the place. He couldn’t get through two innings of a real game even if he knew how to play. Gehrig played 2,130 straight games. Nobody’s ever going to do that again. Hell, Cooper doesn’t even look like Gehrig.”
    “People who go to movies don’t care,” I said.
    “I care,” said Lefty, pointing to himself. “Say, listen, Cooper is a good guy. He’s trying, but this is baseball we’re talking.”
    Five minutes later Cooper was back, but it was a different Cooper. He was wearing a body-tailored pinstripe suit, a spotlessly clean camel’s hair coat and a white fedora.
    “If you can give me a ride, Mr. Peters, we can talk on my way home,” he said. “I’ll see you tomorrow, Lefty.”
    Lefty said good-bye and ambled away, and I agreed to drive Cooper home.
    “I didn’t want to do this baseball picture,” Cooper explained, getting into the Buick. I managed to slide a few napkins from my pocket under him before his camel’s hair coat hit the grease spot where the cold-cut bag had been.
    I pulled into the street, and he kept talking.
    “Baseball’s my father’s game, not mine,” he said softly. “About a month ago the Judge, my father, was hit by a car. He’s 76.”
    “Sorry,” I said.
    “It was the Judge’s idea for me to play Gehrig. My games are fast cars and good hunting, and my weakness is young ladies.”
    “I see,” I said.
    “No, you don’t,” he said, still softly. “When you mentioned Mr. Lombardi’s name back there,” he said, pointing his thumb behind us, “it reminded me of a certain young lady. She was, she said, a fan. This was back about six, seven years ago, maybe longer—a pretty blonde thing, a little on the thin side. The ones who want to get into the movies usually are. We were friendly for a few months, and then I found out she had been a friend of Lombardi’s and that he was looking for her. She packed up and went, and that was the end of it.”
    “And now?” I urged him on.
    “Now I’m interested in keeping my wife and daughter safe and getting on with my work.”
    “What’s stopping you?”
    “About a month ago, just before I called you,” he said, looking out the window, “a man came up to me, tough-looking gent about your size, built like a giant brick. He gave me a list of reasons why I should make a movie for a third-rate producer-director named Max Gelhorn. That list included a reminder of Lola …”
    “The thin blonde …”
    “Right,” said Cooper, “and a few other things which seemed much more substantial and which I’d rather not go into with you if I don’t have to.”
    “You might have to at some point,” I said.
    “If it comes to that, I’ll decide. Now I’d like to say I punched out that man and laid him flat like one of the characters I play, but to tell it straight, Mr. Peters …”
    “Toby …”
    “Toby,” he went on, “I’m no fighter. I’m an actor. I’ve been mended and patched up, but I have more wounds than a war veteran. My pelvis was broken when I was a kid. It never mended. I can’t sit on a horse straight. I have about half my hearing. A bomb went off too close to my ear one day about ten years back when I was doing a war picture with Fay Wray. My stomach is bad, my arms are weak from too many movie falls and to put it straight, I don’t think I could give your sister a good tussle.”
    “I don’t have a sister,” I said.
    “Wishful thinking,” said Cooper with a big grin. “What else do you need from