TOMORROW IS ANOTHER DAY

``I like my jobs straight and simple,'' laments Hollywood shamus Toby Peters (The Devil Met a Lady, 1994, etc.) shortly after getting sucked into still another case that is, as usual, anything but. This time somebody has waited five years after the burning of David Selznick's Atlanta to start killing off near- witnesses to the accidental death of an extra on Gone With the Wind—and to start sending newly widowed Clark Gable doggerel notes taunting him with the killer's cleverness and warning him that his turn is coming. Since he's not even supposed to be stateside (he's in the army air corps, and the nation is at war), Gable's reaction, as you'd expect, is to turn the whole mess over to our hero and then take himself out of the action. It's a good move, since it cuts down on the Hollywood name-dropping—at least until a climactic murder at the 1943 Academy Awards banquet—and lets Toby do what he does best: clown around with the usual non- suspects—his cop brother, Phil Pevsner; his officemate, Shelly Minck, D.D.S.; his mammoth, poetic landlord, Jeremy Butler; the vertically challenged former Munchkin Gunther Wherthman—while he ducks bullets from an unusually outspoken avenger and tries to figure out just what all this has to do with Clark Gable anyway. Together with Hard Currency (see above), this tale provides dramatic evidence of Kaminsky's versatility—and a bright spot in the spottiest of his three detective series.