William Powell yawned three times after another boring, late-night celebrity party. The third this week. Yet he felt the mischievous urge to reprise his role as private detective Nick Charles, but to solve a real case this time. Without Asta, the show would not go on. Who might want to sabotage their next Thin Man film? Such excitement gave him a second wind. A producer like Hunt Stromberg, who might have insurance in case they didn’t make the film? After all, it wasn’t so long ago since Wall Street crashed. Many were still trying to recover. Maybe One-Take Woody Van Dyke, the film’s director, had a better project in the offing.
“Head over to 334 South Bundy Drive,” Powell called out to his driver.
“Brentwood, sir?” asked the confused cabbie. “Not Whitley Heights?”
“Change of plans.” He folded his arms across his chest and smiled.
Powell shivered, in part from nerves. Misty ground clouds had also crept in from the Pacific with a crisp, unexpected coolness. An ivy-covered stone wall surrounded most of the film director’s property. If sober, Powell would’ve surprised himself if he scaled it without breaking a limb. Eliminating the gates, dense hedges, and a tree unsuitable for climbing, at last, he chose a patch of shrubbery, sparse enough that he might shimmy his way through.
After brushing off broken twigs and smelling like mulch, Powell smoothed back his hair and tiptoed along a row of stepping stones to get as close as he could to the Van Dykes’ house. His focus: an upstairs window, the only one with the lights on. From what he could see, One-Take’s wife, Ruth, opened a fancy gift box and revealed sexy lingerie.
One-Take put a long-play on his phonograph and opened a bottle of champagne. Ruth made a quick change and returned, wearing her fur-trimmed satin dressing gown. She swayed to the music and continued to seduce her hubby with her best impersonation of hoochie-coochie queen Gypsy Rose Lee. Kicking off her sandals. Peeling off her stockings. Losing pieces of clothing one by one, until she realized she hadn’t pulled their window shades down.
Powell sprang to his feet. He imagined from her point of view, he was a faceless, fleeting, and alarming shadow—a coyote, a prowler, or worse—a hot-in-the-zipper pervert. Unable to hear a thing from that distance, he watched her scream and point right at him. His cue to exit—fast.
By the time the police arrived, they had to disentangle Powell, who got caught in the bushes trying to escape.
“Never…could anything…more hellish be conceived than that dark form and savage face which broke upon us out of a wall of fog,” Mrs. Van Dyke told the cops.
Her husband apologized for her being so melodramatic and swore that sounded like a line from a Sherlock Holmes movie. He also made it clear if William Powell hadn’t been one of his biggest box office draws, he would’ve fired him on the spot.
It was off to the pokey for Powell. He was more of an amateur sleuth, and his acting skills didn’t transfer to real-life criminology. The police still insisted on booking him for illegal trespassing, intentions unknown.
Allowed one phone call, Powell persuaded Rathbone to bail him out. Basil arrived wearing his deerstalker. He looked his incarcerated companion straight in the eye and asked, “What passion of hatred can it be which leads a man to lurk in such a place at such a time?”
Powell massaged his throbbing head, the aftereffects of his hangover. He asked, “Where have I heard that before?”
“Watson’s comment from Hound,” Basil replied. “The detectives discovered a mysterious fellow lurking in the distant moors. The poor chap turned out to be the brother of one of the Baskervilles’ housekeepers and an escaped prisoner. In the end, the dreaded beast mauled him.”
“Woody’s wife is accusing me of being a degenerate.”
“William, I’d assume the same if I were a lady parading around in my unmentionables who discovered a strange man staring through my bedroom window. My wife would, too. Yours, as well.”
“How auspicious to have a spare Sherlock Holmes hat in your overcoat pocket,” said Powell.
“You’re lucky,” remarked Basil. “Either it’s an extra my wife is always buying, or people give them to me for Christmas and birthdays. We must have a dozen or more around the house in various tweeds and colors. Compared to Nick Charles, perhaps Holmes is the better detective.”
“I didn’t realize you were keeping score.” Powell sank down on a sagging cot.
“My usual complaint is how I’m so done in portraying Holmes. Now, the studio wants to cast me as the villain again in A Date With Destiny. They keep changing its title. I suspect it’ll wind up The Mad Doctor.”
“What’s the film about?” asked Powell.
“It’s a Svengali story about an evil doctor who murders his wives for their money. I’d rather be performing Shakespeare, but I guess it’s my duty to spring you out of here.”
Powell begged his friend to get him home in one piece and tell nobody else what happened.