The Trouble With Harry P. - With Fritz Lang’s Blue Gardenia In Mind  

By Zack James

 

Harry Peddle, was a real piece of work. Harry P. is what everybody called him, what every girl who got ensnared by his so-called charms called him, called him when she wasn’t thinking, and not thinking very quickly and frantically about what he was peddling, what disgusting thing he wanted her to do to play out the end of the evening with his “come on” etchings scam that guys have been doing since Adam grabbed Eve, maybe before. Yeah, Harry with his eternally proffered filled up wine glass and averted eye as he undressed every woman under sixty and maybe some older too after all Hollywood the Mecca of ageless youth, his bailiwick, could work miracles under soft lights even for those beyond their bloom.

Yeah Harry P. was one of a kind in his own way. I should know because I knew him as well as anybody and if there ever was a snake-in-the-grass about women it was Harry, yeah, Harry P.  Harry showed up one morning dead, very dead with a very big bloody crack in his head, broken wine glasses all over their contents creating big stain blotched all over his Persian rugs, broken fireplace mirror from some nefarious thrown object, assorted women’s accessories (meaning shoes and handkerchiefs not bras and panties for the perverts out there listening to Harry’s sing-song and what he got away with), and his patented blue gardenia from the café of that same name where he liked to take his girls, in his bungalow studio off of Vine. Nobody, least of all me, was surprised.

Vine a place back in the 1950s when that locale had some cache (and was an automatic magnet for young women on the way up, on the way up some thought to a bigtime acting career in the bright lights of Hollywood just like Ava, Liz and Lauren from Omaha and Davenport before they got wised up on one too many casting couch). But despite his faults, his big “love ‘em and leave ‘em” sometimes two or three in one night faults, Harry was a friend and so I took it upon myself to see who the hell, meaning what woman scorned of his took that bloody fireplace poker and sent old Harry P. to his final hellish resting place.

Let me explain, first of all my name is Phil, Phil Larkin. In those days of my youth, the silent slumming late 1940s after I got out the Army when  the Pacific Wars were done in WWII I decided California was as good a place to start life as going back to Riverdale in haughty Massachusetts. When I met Harry I had just blown off “the cops” in the City of Angels, in what they now call La La Land but then back in the 1950s before all the freeways and all the desperate people from Omaha and Davenport came looking, well, looking for something it wasn’t a bad town to live in, nice weather, the beach filled with plenty of young women looking to be something and not choosey about how they got there-once they figured out the score. Or got the word from the older wiser girls. That “blowing off the cops” thing was that I could not take any more guff about graft, anymore bullshit about not stepping on this guy’s toes or ignoring that guy’s indiscretions, you know the big shot payoff that maybe was overrated in Omaha and Davenport but was real in enough in movie-power mad Hollywood.

What broke the camel’s back was one night a famous producer, a big shot whose name if I told who it was would make you shudder, had been drunk, had been drunk with a woman not his wife of which he had had several and slipped off the  Pacific Coast Highway near Laguna and the girl got killed. He walked away clean and without anything being done. Nothing, not even pay-off dough to the girl’s parents when they came in from Fargo to make a stink and got booted out of town for their troubles, that and their daughter got called nothing but a two-bit hooker by the Hollywood blats which that big-name producer had bought and paid for with his big budget weekly ads in the Movie sections of their crummy newspapers. Jesus. They wanted me to cover up, cover up big time, and say that the place where that big-time producer paid the girl’s rent off of Wiltshire was nothing but a whore’s apartment complete with boxes of condoms, Vaseline by the jars and every kind of sex toy. Damn. I just walked away.

That’s when I got into the private detection business and how I wound up meeting Harry P. See he and I had offices of sorts on the same floor in the Taylor Building off the not plush, then, high numbers on Wiltshire and I would notice that he had plenty of good-looking and busty young women walking in and out of his “office” all the time. I checked it out one day by just walking in the foyer to his office and found that Harry P. was the famous Harry Peddle who did pin-up girl calendars, you know the ones that you would see back then in Army barracks lockers, auto garages and in men’s rooms at low-end bars showing very provocative for the time good-looking busty women exploding out of their bathing suits or tight sweaters showing plenty of cleavage and –desire- but not much else. Harry was smart that way, leaving much to the imagination at least for those guys taking a leak or washing their hands in some smelly greasy men’s room.

Of course that was just the public stuff back then, the stuff the Vice Squad could give a fuck about, what made Harry his dough and got him plenty of “hot” numbers in his little black book was the stuff he sold to “discriminating collectors” as he called them. See his “racket” was to go to let’s say for example some big insurance company steno pool, maybe hit the colleges where plenty of girls were enrolling what with the Korean War taking all the young men away and they needed to fill those joints up, say UCLA or USC, maybe hang out in some drugstore on Hollywood and Vine and start sketching some doll, maybe a plain jane with no tits, maybe some Jane Russell it didn’t matter because 99 times out of a one hundred he made the doll look like a sex goddess and that was his entre. Later in his “studio” in the Taylor Building or at his loft over off of Vine where he was found in that bloody condition one very bleak morning after plying the doll with booze or drugs he would nudge her into some nude pose. Most of them didn’t, or couldn’t, squawk because what would mother, her friends or the town if it was small enough say back in Grand Island or Saint Paul when he sold the material.  Wouldn’t or couldn’t squawk if they did object because he would claim they had forced themselves on him-and show some made-up nasty poses of them doing strange sexual things. Nice grift if you can live with yourself after each caper which seemed to get nastier as he got more successful with his damn grift. Harry could, loved the thrill of degrading a woman. Half the time I think he really hated women, was as the expression went then “light on his feet,” a fag is what we called guys with limp hands like that in the old working class neighborhood around Riverdale in Massachusetts where I grew, what they call today gay. You know the story of guys taking advantage of women whether liked them or liked to degrade then, it has been going on since before Adam and Eve got tangled up with some strong applejack. Harry was just a little rawer about it.      

That stuff Harry was peddling before Hugh Hefner and Playboy real high grade color nude photographs exploded on the scene and such drawings, even the nasty ones, were considered quaint and old-fashioned in the super-heated sex –charged atmosphere when the old values broke down. When a young woman, plain jane or Jane Russell would be knocking down the doors of porno magazines to get in the girlie magazines. Nowadays you can’t even Google the letters “s” and “x” without being inundated by every kind of sex act done by male and female alike looking like they were actually enjoying what they were doing. So maybe somebody did old Harry a favor by wasting him with that poker but back then I wanted answers.  I never got them as you could figure out from what I just said about somebody, some party unknown, doing old Harry in but it wasn’t for lack of trying. See Harry would sometime give me one of his “rejects” some woman he was tired of or just because right then he had too many in his little black book. What drove me, made me afraid really, was that one of the “rejects” might take umbrage at me for Harry’s indifference and I might wind up like poor old Harry with my own bloody skull cracked.           

The place to start was the “little black book” as the blats and the cops called it which contained not just those “lost soul” girls from Steubenville or Richmond but some starlets and up and coming actresses. Most of the more famous ones, the ones not permanently consigned to the casting couch or who never got that far, were “protected” by some producer like that guy whose antics made me call the public cops quits and I could never get close to. They didn’t figure anyway since Harry’s day was beginning to pass as I said when Hugh Hefner changed the mores on girlie magazines and any kinky past probably played to their vanities.   

The steno pools proved to be more useful, and I thought I had a solid lead when the roommate, Clara, of this girl Harry had gone out with had told me that Iris had come in on the night of Harry’s murder with no shoes on and her dress all messed up and wet. It had been serious California raining the night Harry died. She was also inebriated. So drunk that she dived right into bed and slept half the next day. This Iris was a looker no question from the photograph that Clara showed me. Just the meat for Harry. The back story as far as I got it was that Iris had met Harry in the cafeteria of the Fidelity Insurance Company when he was “sketching” some other girl and she had walked up to him and “dared” him to sketch her. Just what Doctor Harry had ordered.  He did have a very quick hand with the pencil or anything else from what I could gather and she was impressed with the sketch that made her look like Veronica Lake. Catnip for Harry.

So they had gone out according to Clara a number of times, sometimes to his place on Vine sometimes when Clara had come home from a date she would hear them in the love swoon in Iris’ room. Then he stopped coming back. And Iris became more depressed, and more angry and augmentative with Clara. Clara though Iris had begun to put on weight, telltale weight but by the time I got to Clara Iris had blown town with all her belongings. Including shoes from which I could have deducted her shoe size in comparison to the ones found in Harry’s living room. Sometimes a case goes cold, this one went cold just like Harry.

The only good thing that came out of investigating Harry’s death was a few very intimate dates with Clara-and her showing me the naughty sketches Harry had made of her when she asked me up to her place to see her etchings. Such is life.