I went through the inner door and found Sheldon Minck sleeping in his dental chair, his arms folded over one of his magazines, his stained white smock bunched under his neck. His thick glasses had slipped perilously toward the end of his nose and his cigar looked like a dark springboard, bouncing with each breath. Shelly must have sensed my presence. He dropped the magazine and swatted the top of his head.
“Ugg,” he cried, staggering forward out of the chair, opening his eyes, swinging at some real or imagined insect with his fluttering magazine. He tottered back into my arms.
“You were dreaming, Shel,” I said, straightening him up.
“Wha?”
“Dreaming,” I repeated, turning him around to face me.
I straightened his smock, marveling at his ability to keep his glasses on his nose and cigar in his teeth while in full flight from a nightmare.
“Toby,” he said.
“Yes, Shel.”
He took the cigar from his mouth and said, “Publishing.”
“Publishing, Shel?”
“Came to me in the dream,” he said, slapping the magazine and moving to the sink, where he turned on the cold-water tap, cupped his hand, and took a drink.
“A dream?”
“Yeah,” he said, turning back to me, a trickle of water on his chin, his cigar back in his mouth. “Tooth Talk, a magazine, and here’s the beauty part, for patients, people who have something wrong with their teeth. Everybody’s got something wrong with their teeth. We’ll have articles on celebrities with great teeth. Who’s got great teeth?”
“Lassie,” I said.
“Joking,” he said, returning to his dental chair, “but why not? Keeping the teeth of movie animals clean and cavity-free. Great article. Short stories about teeth. Poetry about teeth. Ads, we’ll fill it with ads.”
Shelly’s eyes, huge behind the thick glasses, got even wider in anticipation of the ad revenue.
“Coloring your teeth, a new beauty concept,” he said, looking up at the ceiling. “Remember my idea about that?”
“Vividly,” I said.
“Dentists who wanted to write would have a place to send their ideas, their creative work. Even, why not, drawings, paintings. By dentists, for dentists.”
Shelly was out of his chair now, shaking his head as new ideas sprang from whatever he had eaten for breakfast.
“Sounds like a good idea to me, Shel,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said with a grin. “How about this? Special section at the end of each issue for kids. Cartoon. Jimmy Chew versus Sammy Grinder. Jimmy’s a handsome white incisor who takes care of himself. Sammy Grinder is covered in buildup, maybe even has a kind of five-o’clock shadow. Ideas like this. Start small. Work it up. Maybe get a few of those movie clients of yours to invest.”
“Worth a try,” I said.
“Yeah,” he said, dreamily rubbing his palms together as if he were trying to start a fire.
Then he stopped suddenly and a new look appeared as he turned his head to me.
“You’ve never agreed with any idea I’ve ever had.”
“This is an exception,” I answered. “It’s so …”
“You want something,” he said, advancing on me, a roly-poly ball of white-smocked suspicion. “What?”
“Small favor,” I admitted.
“Small?” He was a foot away now, a good eighteen inches closer than I wanted him. “Ah,” he said.
“You hired me on a contingency basis to collect a bill for dental work from a guy named Al Ramone,” I said, walking to the sink, turning on the water, and ignoring the pile of grimy coffee cups and dental-surgery instruments. I washed my face, my back to Sheldon Minck, and shook myself almost dry.
“I did not,” Shelly said.
I turned to face him. He was watching my eyes to see where all this was going and how much he could get out of it.
“You did. Mr. Ramone has met an untimely death,” I explained.
“Tell me a timely one,” Shelly fought back.
“I’d rather not. I need a favor, Shel,” I continued. “Someone asks you, you hired me to get your payment. Al Ramone. Okay?”
“Can’t be done,” Shelly said, removing the cigar from his face and looking down at it as if it were some vile wet thing, which it was.
“I think your dental magazine is a great idea,” I tried.
“No, you don’t, Toby,” he said.
“I think it’s one of your best ideas,” I said.
He looked at me again. “Can’t be done,” he repeated.
“What, the dental magazine or the favor?”
“Favor,” he said. “Guy named Price already called. Asked if you were working for me, asked if I was interested in becoming a Glendale policeman.”
“And you told him?…”
“You weren’t doing any work for me. I’m a dentist and not interested in a career change.”
I started toward my office.
“You’re in trouble?”
I shrugged. He followed me.
“You shouldn’t tell lies,” he said behind me.
“Shelly, you tell more lies than Tojo.”
“Well, yes, maybe, but that doesn’t make it right.”
I went into my office, a cubbyhole with a door, a box big enough for a small desk with a chair behind it, two small chairs in front of it. Behind the desk chair was a window, six floors above the alley. On the wall across from the desk, next to the door, was a framed photograph of my father, me, my brother Phil, and our dog Kaiser Wilhelm. I was about ten when the picture was taken. Phil was fourteen or fifteen. Our father was wearing his grocer’s apron and the look of a man smiling through pain. Kaiser Wilhelm was expressionless. On the wall to our right as we came in was a painting that covered the entire available space, the painting of a woman cradling two identical children on her lap. The painting had been done by Salvador Dali.
“You should have called,” Shelly said, closing the door behind him as I moved behind the desk and sat.
“I did,” I said, looking at the top envelope of my morning mail. “You weren’t here.”
“How was I to know?”
“You weren’t,” I said. “Now, if you’ll leave me alone, I’ve got a suicide note to write.”
Shelly leaned over the desk at me.
“I’m for chrissake sorry, Toby,” he said.
“You’re for chrissake forgiven, Sheldon,” I said.
“Does this mean you think my magazine idea stinks?”
“No,” I said. “It’s better than your Bernie the Bicuspid children’s book.”
“Tony the Tooth. Tony the Tooth,” he corrected, shaking his head. “That was a good idea, Toby. A great idea whose time hasn’t come. That’s why I want to ease it into the new magazine. The grinder and incisor.”
The outer door to the dental office opened and closed behind Shelly. He turned as someone walked in.
“New patient,” he whispered, turning back. “Ten o’clock. Almost forgot.”
He walked out, closing the door behind him.
I worked on a new lie while I opened my mail.
The first letter was from the Barbizon-Plaza Hotel in New York City. I’d stayed there on a case. The Barbizon told me it was famous for its continental breakfast, which came with rooms as low as three bucks a day. All rooms with private baths and radios.
I could tell Price that Shelly was lying. That he was afraid of bad publicity.
The second letter was from the San Diego Book Club, promising me a choice of I Saw the Fall of the Philippines, by Carlos P. Romulo, or Congo Song, by Stuart Cloete, for a nickel.
I could deny I had told Price anything. I’d never be able to return to Glendale, but there are worse exiles.
The last of my mail was a postcard with a map on the front that told me how to get to the Old Hickory Barbecue off of Echo Park Avenue. Two free parking lots. Open all night. Two minutes from downtown. There wasn’t much room for the message on the front because the
preprinted P.S. filled the bottom half with a message that the Old Hickory was the most unusual eating place in America.
“The first dead soldier is now really dead,” the note said. “And the cage-e one is next. I began lame but I’ll end able. Who am I? Just ask what I am d.o.i.n.g.” It wasn’t signed.
There was no stamp on the postcard. It hadn’t come through the mail. I took the poem and the bloody note from my pocket, cleared a space on the table, and laid them crumpled and flat in front of me. They made no more sense than they had last night.
I got up, went to the door, opened it, and watched Shelly flashing a silver pocket flashlight into the mouth of a young man covered with a gray-white sheet. Sheldon Minck was singing “Straighten Up and Fly Right.”
“Shel,” I said. “When did you get the mail?”
“Usual time,” Sheldon said, pausing in his song but not his work. “About eight.”
“Downstairs?” I said, looking at the young man in the chair.
“Hold still, Mr. Spelling,” Shelly said to his patient. “The best is yet to be. Downstairs.”
“Thank you.”
“Cool down, papa, don’t you blow your top,” Shelly sang, poking Mr. Spelling’s teeth with something that looked like a chopstick with a needle at its tip.
Mr. Spelling grunted in what might have been pain or an urgent desire to plead for mercy.
“Won’t take long. Won’t take long,” Shelly said, probing. “You want ’em clean, I’ve got to dig. Law of the dental jungle. Safari into the darkest cavities.”
Mr. Spelling grunted and I returned to my desk and the poems as Shelly began to question his patient about his potential interest in a magazine devoted to teeth.
They die until you understand
They die by weapons in my hand.
My father wept to be so cut
From fortune, fame deservéd, but
I’ll avenge the wrongs and slight
To be there e’er the Ides and right
Those wrongs and claim his prize
And give to you a great surprise.
First there was Charles Larkin
And next Al Ramone. Do harken
For on it goes and blood be thine
Unless you learn to read my s.i.g.n.
It made no more sense this time than it had the night before. I looked at the note that had been pinned to Al Ramone:
“Welcome to the game. No time for a proper poem, but cage-e is next. There is more than one way to spell t.h.a.t. And then Lionel Varney.”
I turned the notes and the postcard over, held them up to the window, wondered if I was hungry enough to take a break after a full five minutes of work. I didn’t have to decide. My office door opened and Jeremy Butler entered when I called “Come in.”
Six-three and three hundred pounds of Jeremy filled my office door. He was wearing dark slacks and a blue pullover sweater with long sleeves and a turtleneck collar. He looked more like the wrestler he had been than the sixty-three-year-old landlord who writes poetry.
“Just the man I want to see,” I said, getting up.
“Two policemen were here early this morning looking for you,” Jeremy said. “They asked me to tell you to see your brother as soon as you got in.”
“They said my brother?”
“They said Captain Pevsner and left no address. I assumed they knew he was your brother.”
“Why?”
“Why did I assume?” Jeremy raised his voice over the sound of Shelly’s dental machine, set to chip away plaque and enamel. “Because they did not wait for you, though I said you would probably be in shortly.”
“Thanks,” I said. “Do me a favor, Jeremy. Look at these.”
I turned the poem, card, and message toward him.
“May I sit?” he asked.
“Please.”
He sat, removed a pair of half glasses from his pocket, put them on, and read.
“She’s making lots of dough, working for Kokomo,” Shelly belted out beyond the closed door.
Jeremy read slowly and then read a second time.
“The ides is the fifteenth of the month,” said Jeremy, looking up and removing his glasses. “The ides of March was the day that Julius Caesar was assassinated. He was told to beware the ides of March, but he did not heed the warning.”
“What about the ides of February?”
“No significance that I am aware of,” he said. “Who are Charles Larkin and Al Ramone? And Lionel Varney?”
“The first two are dead. Murdered by our poet. I don’t know about Varney. I think they were all extras in Gone With the Wind,” I said. And then I told Jeremy what had happened last night, including my meeting with Clark Gable and Captain Price.
“I see,” said Jeremy, putting his glasses back on and looking again.
“I’ve got a nut here, Jeremy,” I said, trying to ignore Shelly’s attempt to simulate the sound of a riveting machine as he sang “Rosie the Riveter.”
“A nut who likes to play with words,” he said. “I like to play with words. If I may copy …”
“Take them, keep them safe, work on them,” I said. “With my gratitude and blessing.”
Jeremy took the material and placed it gently into his pocket. He nodded. “You see that each of his messages ends with a word broken into letters. S.i.g.n. T.h.a.t. D.o.i.n.g.”
“I see,” I said, seeing but not understanding.
“He wants to be caught, Toby,” Jeremy said. “He leaves puzzles. Tells too much. Taunts. Challenges. This is a man to be wary of. Urges you to follow, leaving small crumbs on the trail. At the end of the trail, you may well find that he has lured you deeply into the woods.”
“I’ll be careful, Jeremy. Thanks.”
Jeremy rose and so did I. I had done a good ten-minute office day and I had work to do. I’d see Captain Phil Pevsner after I’d gotten more answers from my client.
“One more thing,” Jeremy said, pausing in the door. “Your murderer is willing to make too many sacrifices. Meter, rhyme, and the proper word give way to his passion to perpetrate the puzzle, to perplex. He has no real interest in poetry.”
“Sorry to hear that, Jeremy,” I said as Jeremy stepped into Shelly’s office. I followed, closing the door behind me.
“Almost done,” Shelly said to his patient. “Keep the mouth open wide.”
He stepped back, retrieved his cigar from the nearby stand, put it in his mouth, and examined his handiwork. The young man in the chair had closed his eyes. His mouth was dutifully wide.
“I’ll show these to Alice,” Jeremy said, tapping the clues in his pocket. “She has a beautiful sensitivity to the written word.”
Alice Pallis had been a pornography publisher in the Farraday before she heard the muse and married Jeremy. Alice’s primary qualification as a pornography publisher had been her ability to pick up the two-hundred-pound printing press and escape with it out the window when the cops came. For almost two years now, Alice had turned her interests to her husband, child, and the publishing of poetry.
“Thanks, Jeremy,” I said.
He left and I turned to Sheldon, who was back in his patient’s mouth.
“Good teeth,” he was telling the victim. “An energetic cleaning was all you needed.”
I went back into my office and made two phone calls. The first was to Mame Stoltz at M-G-M. She answered after the fifth ring with “Stoltz, Publicity.”
“Peters, Trouble,” I said.
“I’m busy, Peters Trouble,” she said in her hoarse efficient voice.
“I’ll make it fast.”
“We’ve got interviews lined up on Madame Curie,” she said, sighing. “I’m not gonna tell you how much we’re sinking into publicity on this one, but I’ll give you a hint. You could probably find a cure for measles with what we’ve got budgeted.”
“You know Gunther Wherthman?” I asked.
“Composer, R.K.O.?” she asked, and I could tell that she was leaning back to light a Ca
mel.
“No, munchkin from The Wizard of Oz. Friend of mine. Working with me on a case. Mind if he comes over and looks through the Gone With the Wind records?”
“That’s Selznick stuff,” she said. “We store some of it over in—”
“I’m talking about payroll lists. And a security report. Night of Saturday, December 10, 1938. Maybe accidental death of an extra.”
“Atlanta burning,” she said immediately. “We’ve got payroll and I’ll see what I can do about security records, but I don’t remember anybody getting killed that night … what’s going on?”
“Dinner on me. Saturday. Sunday. Even Friday.”
I’m no beauty, but I knew that Mame had a hard spot in her anatomy for mush-nosed cops, present and former. She had gone with a sergeant named Rashkow out of the Wilshire before he got drafted. Mame was no beauty, but she had something that could pass for class. She was too skinny for my taste, an efficiency copy of Ida Lupino with too much makeup. She did have a pouty mouth like Lupino, but there was nothing soft about Mame. I like soft. I also like doing what I get paid for, and Mame knew more about M-G-M and Selznick International than Mayer himself.
“I’ll make dinner,” she said. “Saturday. You know how to get to my place?”
“I remember,” I said, recalling clearly my escape from Mame’s little cottage in Culver City a year or so ago.
“Send the little man,” she said. “I’ll see what I can do.”
I outlined what I needed for her and she listened, probably taking notes.
“When you have something, call me at this number,” I said, giving her Clark Gable’s phone.
“I know that number, Toby,” she said. “I’ve called it hundreds of times. What are you up to?”
“Making a living,” I said. “Mame, go along with me on this, please.”
“You’ve been keeping up at the Y.M.C.A.?” she asked in a whisper.
“When I can,” I said.
“We’ll see Saturday,” Mame said.
And she hung up. I called Gunther and asked him to get over to M-G-M to see Mame as fast as he could, to get his hands on whatever he could find about the dead extra, and to track down Lionel Varney. He agreed and I hung up.
“I’m leaving, Shel,” I said, going back into the outer office.
Tomorrow Is Another Day Page 6