Dancing in the Dark tp-19

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “It’s me, Jeremy,” I said, continuing to climb and wondering whether I should have taken a chance on the elevator from hell. Stairs were not a good idea for my sensitive rear.

  “I heard the door open,” he said.

  “I was coming to see you,” I said, pulling myself up by the railing.

  “You are hurt?”

  “You’ve got it,” I said, halfway up the second floor. “Remember that stuff you used on my back, the stuff you used when you were wrestling?”

  “Of course.”

  “Think that’ll help a sore rear end?”

  “Yes,” Jeremy said. “Take the elevator.”

  I took his advice and pressed the elevator button on the second floor. Two decades later the elevator arrived. I pulled back the grille and took the scenic century-long ride up to the eighth floor. From the elevator I could see as we passed the sixth floor that the lights to Shelly’s and my office were out.

  When I finally reached the eighth floor and opened the grille, Jeremy had gone back into his apartment. His door was ajar. I followed the light and knocked.

  “Come in,” Jeremy said. “Alice took Natasha to her cousin’s in Monterey for a few days.”

  Jeremy stood massive, bald, and wearing black slacks, shoes, and a turtleneck sweater. In his hand was a large green bottle of a clear liquid. The room, which had once been the office of a doctor named Hamarion, who proved to have no license, was big and served as living room and office for Jeremy. He had put a door in the walls on either side and used the adjoining offices for a kitchen-dining room and a pair of bedrooms. It was well-ordered, comfortable. In a big open box near the window, Natasha’s toys overflowed.

  “Take off your pants and lean over,” he said.

  I closed the door behind me and moved to Jeremy’s desk near the window. I dropped my pants and underpants and leaned over.

  “This was done by Kudlap Singh?” he asked.

  “The Beast of Bombay,” I confirmed.

  Then a cold liquid sensation washed through me, from my sore behind to the tips of my fingers. It didn’t hurt exactly, but I couldn’t say that it felt great.

  “Give it a moment before you put your pants back on,” he said. “And don’t sit yet.”

  I turned, still tingling, and faced Jeremy.

  “There is a poetic irony here,” Jeremy said, putting the cap back on the bottle. “I learned of this treatment from Kudlap Singh. The year was 1930. The Memorial Auditorium in Sacramento a few years after it opened. We were the main event. It was his turn to win. I suffered a sprain in my right thigh when I did an airplane spin.”

  “You hoisted Kudlap Singh over your head?”

  Jeremy nodded.

  “And he used this on me and told me how to get more from an Indian apothecary in Kansas City.”

  “Can I pull my pants up now?”

  “Yes.”

  I pulled my underpants up slowly. I can’t say the pain was completely gone, but it was certainly almost asleep.

  “I think it worked,” I said as Jeremy put the bottle on his desk.

  “It has remarkable anesthetic qualities,” he said. “Take the bottle. Return it when you’ve recovered. It should only be a day or so.”

  I pulled my pants up, took the bottle, and thanked him.

  I tested my new freedom from agony by sitting in Jeremy’s wooden desk chair. It wasn’t bad.

  “I was just writing a poem,” Jeremy said, reaching behind me and picking up a pad of paper. “Would you be interested in hearing it?”

  “Yes, I would.”

  “Stephen Vincent Benet died in New York early today,” Jeremy said. “He was only forty-four.”

  “Sorry,” I said.

  “You know who he was?”

  “Poet,” I said.

  “When I was still perspiring in wrestling rings from Seattle to Miami, that twenty-nine-year-old genius had written ‘John Brown’s Body,’ more than one hundred thousand words in a single poem, and he had won the Pulitzer Prize.”

  Such enthusiasm was rare in Jeremy so I kept my mouth shut and listened.

  “Have you read ‘The Devil and Daniel Webster’?” he asked.

  “Don’t think so,” I said.

  “I’ve got copies in two anthologies. I’ll let you read it and ‘John Brown’s Body.’ ”

  “Thanks,” I said, savoring my relative freedom from pain.

  “The poem,” Jeremy said, looking down at the pad in his hand as he stood in front of me.

  John Brown’s body lies a moldering in the grave

  joined by poet, freeman and ghostly slave.

  What can one say

  of Stephen Vincent Benet?

  He came, was struck by fevered urge

  to pen his genius in a massive dirge.

  Meteor burned young on entering the uncertain air

  of earth, burned and took his talent rare

  to the far reaches of time

  where he will soar and rhyme

  and carry on conversations that through Heaven resound

  with Daniel Webster and old John Brown.

  Jeremy looked down at me over the top of his pad.

  “Resound and Brown do not rhyme,” he said. “I’m not sure whether I should find something to rhyme with Webster and switch the names or live with the closing with a slant rhyme. Your feelings?”

  “Sounds great to me the way it is,” I said. “What rhymes with Webster?”

  “I’m inclined to leave it as it is,” Jeremy said, reaching past me to lay his pad on the desk.

  I got up, tested my tingle, and pronounced myself almost cured.

  “More irony for you, Jeremy,” I said. “I’m probably going to see your old friend Kudlap Singh in less than an hour.”

  “Is the situation such that he might inflict further pain on you?”

  “It is a distinct possibility,” I said, testing my powers by walking across the Persian rug covering most of the wooden floor.

  “My poem is finished. I think I’d like to accompany you, if you have no objection.”

  “It could be uncomfortable,” I said. “I’m going to see Kudlap’s boss, who has been known to remove the fingers of those who he finds annoying.”

  “An odd and phallic fetish,” Jeremy said.

  “You’re telling me,” I said. “I promised Alice I wouldn’t put you in danger again.”

  Jeremy folded his arms and looked at me without a smile. Jeremy had no smiles except for his wife and daughter and no frowns except for the endless parade of men without a place to sleep who sought out the corners of the Farraday.

  “If you hide from every possible danger,” he said, “you find yourself discovering more and more dangers until you hide from everyone and everything. If you confront danger and your fears, you either overcome them and respect yourself or you are destroyed and die with dignity.”

  I didn’t buy it but I knew I’d feel more comfortable with Jeremy at my side if Forbes decided to have the Beast of Bombay rip off one of my legs or a few of my fingers.

  “I’m not asking you, Jeremy,” I said. ”If you tell Alice about this. .”

  “I tell Alice of all my significant actions and thoughts.”

  “She is very likely to throw me over the railing out there,” I said, pointing to the door. “I’ll make a splash that Lysol will never get rid of.”

  “Is it a cool night?” he asked.

  “Getting there,” I said. “Looks like rain.”

  He went into the bedroom and returned with a light jacket, also black.

  We stopped at my office and found a note from Violet hanging from a thumbtack on my door. It said I had received two calls from an Anita Maloney. Anita had left her number. The message concluded with, “Bivins won a split over Mauriello, in case you missed it. Heard it on the radio. Barney Ross was there. Announcer said his hair was gray and he was limping. Hope my husband doesn’t come back like that. You can pay me in the morning.”

  I folded Vi
olet’s message and put it in my shirt pocket.

  There was no way, outside of major tutoring from Emmett Kelly, that Jeremy Butler could fit in my Crosley. We took his car, a five-year-old dark Buick.

  “Juanita trapped me in front of the building a little while ago,” I said. “Said something about a third dancer and a woman from the past.”

  “Juanita is in tune with the universal oneness,” Jeremy said, weaving through traffic. “Her curse is that she is inevitably right but so obscure that one cannot heed her advice and warnings. A modern Cassandra.”

  We used my ration card to fill the tank at a Sinclair station on Melrose and then we stopped for a quick dinner at a restaurant Jeremy knew. We ate things that were green and brown and good for you and tasted terrible. And then we were on our way.

  I asked Jeremy if it was all right if I played the radio. It was his car. He said yes. We listened to the last fifteen minutes of “Stage Door Canteen.” Bert Lytell and George Jessel were trying to explain the rationing system to Billie Burke, who was as bewildered as Gracie Allen. After they failed, Lawrence Tibbett sang an aria from La Traviata.

  For the rest of the trip we listened to a classical music station that kept fading out until it was a distant scratch.

  Before the war there were less than three thousand people in Huntington Beach and an oil derrick or two, but the handful of bleak derricks had been joined by dozens and dozens of others as the wartime need for fuel had increased. People to work the rigs and tend them and the people who sold things to the people who worked the rigs moved in. Huntington Beach was a boom town.

  The tidelands of Huntington Beach were state property, but oil operators had found a new technique of drilling to bypass the state’s rights. From the town lots they had quietly and cheaply purchased, they drilled on a bias to tap the oil pools under the tidelands. In 1929 Governor Culbert L. Olson had tried to put through a bill to permit the state of California to control the oil operators and tap the oil pools for state profit. The oil lobby beat the governor in court and the whole thing was pushed aside by the rush of fear that followed Pearl Harbor.

  And so Huntington Beach became a mess of pumping dark steel, and the sun-worshippers and tourists moved on to Newport Beach and Long Beach.

  We found Arthur Forbes’s house just before the sun went down. It was on a street of big old wooden houses on a hill overlooking the sea and the derricks. It had once been a hell of a view. We parked in the driveway behind another car, one I recognized. Forbes’s car was probably tucked in the garage. It was a modest driveway but an impressive house with polished marble steps leading up to the door. There were lights on and the distant sound of music inside. I pushed the door bell and heard a chime inside the house.

  I looked at Jeremy. He stood with his hands at his sides, showing nothing on his face. On the beach below us, the oil derricks chugged noisily.

  The door opened.

  A woman wearing black tights opened the door and said, “What the hell do you want?”

  “We have business with your husband.”

  She put her hands on her hips and considered us for a beat or two. Then she slammed the door in our faces.

  Chapter Nine: Say, Have You Seen the Carioca?

  Jeremy and I looked at each other for a second or two and then I pushed the button again and listened to the chime.

  When the door opened this time, Kudlap Singh filled it, blocking out the hallway light. He ignored me and looked at Jeremy as impassively as Jeremy looked at him.

  “Mr. Forbes is busy,” he said.

  “Singh,” Jeremy said.

  I had to stop myself from putting my hands behind me to protect my rapidly improving rump.

  “Mr. Forbes is busy,” Singh repeated, looking at me.

  “A man that abandons a friend who has learned with him no longer has a share in speech,” Jeremy said. “What he does hear he hears in vain, for he does not know the path of good action.”

  Singh didn’t turn his head but his eyes shifted to Jeremy, who looked back at him and continued, “Unkindly I desert him who was kind to me, as I go from my own friends to a foreign tribe.”

  “A moment, Jeremy Butler,” Singh said softly, and the door closed on us again.

  “What the hell was that?” I asked.

  “Quotations from the Rig Veda, an ancient Hindu collection of over a thousand hymns. I’ve read only a weak British translation from the Sanskrit, but when we were traveling the circuit Singh translated passages for me. The Veda has been a great influence on my poetry and my life.”

  The derricks pounded on their steel stalks. We waited. The door opened again. Again Kudlap Singh blocked the light.

  “Come in,” he said, stepping back so we could enter.

  We went in. The house was a lot more modest than Fingers Intaglia’s wealth and reputation would suggest. Kudlap Singh led the way down a carpeted hallway with paintings of the same man in a powdered wig. I looked at Jeremy, who said, “Thomas Jefferson.”

  It made a crazy kind of sense. Singh stopped in front of two big wooden doors and knocked.

  “Come in,” Forbes called.

  Singh opened the doors and we stepped in with him. We were in what must have been a big dining room or a library, but it wasn’t anymore. One wall was mirrored top to bottom and all the way across. The floors were polished wood. In one corner was a small upright piano. Against one wall were four blue upholstered chairs and a pair of tables, on one of which sat a phonograph. Arthur Forbes in a gray sweat suit was sitting in one of the chairs, wiping himself with a towel. In front of the mirror, her back turned to us, was Carlotta Forbes. She glanced at us in the mirror and then did a series of knee bends.

  Standing next to the phonograph was Fred Astaire, sleeves rolled up, red handkerchief around his neck.

  “What do you want and who’s that?” Forbes asked, continuing to dry himself.

  “Yo soy Jeremy Butler, un amigo de Senor Peters,” said Jeremy.

  “Esta bien, pero por que vienen a mi casa ahora?” Forbes replied. “How did you know I speak Spanish?”

  “Thomas Jefferson, whom apparently we both admire, spoke fluent Spanish and believed that all Americans should.”

  “ ‘I hope to see a cordial fraternization among all the American nations-’ ” Forbes said with a challenge in his voice.

  “ ‘-and their coalescing in an American system of policy,’ ” Jeremy finished.

  “You a history professor?” Forbes asked.

  “A poet,” answered Jeremy.

  “A poet,” Forbes said with a smile, looking at his wife who ignored him and continued to do knee bends, and then at Fred Astaire who sighed, folded his arms, and leaned against the wall. “You’re Battering Butler, the Human Cannonball. I saw you wrestle six, seven times, once against Kudlap Singh here.”

  “That was long ago,” said Jeremy.

  “I’d like to see a rematch,” Forbes said with a grin.

  “In 1808, Thomas Jefferson refused a third term and retired forever from politics to Monticello,” said Jeremy. “He knew when to move to new endeavors. Much like you and me.”

  “Whatever,” Forbes said, rising and draping the towel around his neck. “Now, what do you want?”

  I turned to Astaire and said, “Did you tell him?”

  Astaire shook his head.

  “A man named Willie Talbott was murdered today,” I said. “Luna Martin worked for him as a dance instructor before-”

  Mrs. Forbes had stopped her knee bends and was facing us with her hands on her hips.

  “Go on,” said Forbes, “Carlotta knows all about Luna. We’re working it out. Just have a point when you get to the end.”

  I looked at Carlotta Forbes. Judging from the look she gave her husband, if they were working it out, they had a lot of work left to do.

  “Talbott had some information that might have helped us and the cops find her murderer,” I said.

  “Information?”

  “Talb
ott was blackmailing her. I think it had something to do with one of Luna’s clients when she was teaching at the On Your Toes ballroom. I went with Talbott to his apartment to get Luna’s client list. Talbott tried to run with it. Someone put a hole in his chest and took the book.”

  “Sounds like a valuable book,” Forbes said.

  “You wouldn’t have any idea where we might find it?” I asked.

  Forbes suddenly did not look happy. “What are you sayin’?”

  “I’m trying to find out who killed Luna Martin,” I said. “That’s what you said you wanted me to do.”

  Forbes strode toward me, throwing the towel in the general direction of the chair. When his nose was inches from mine, he whispered, “You want to watch us dance?”

  “Sure,” I said.

  “You sit there and watch and in ten minutes you say, ‘Good night, Mr. Forbes, Good night, Mrs. Forbes, Good night, Mr. Astaire,’ and then you and your friend leave. You want to ask me questions, you call the hotel and leave a message and I’ll get back to you. You understand?”

  “Well-” I started, but Astaire was out of the corner and between us.

  “Mr. Forbes and I have worked out a deal,” Astaire said. “I give him and Mrs. Forbes five hours of lessons free of charge and my obligation to him is finished.”

  “What obligation?” I asked.

  “Let’s say it’s in honor of the memory of Luna Martin,” said Astaire.

  “Arthur,” Carlotta Forbes called. “Let’s go. Who cares if some hoofer from the On Your Toes Dance Studio got tattooed with lead?”

  “The glow of one warm thought is worth more to me than money,” said Jeremy at my side.

  “Jefferson?” I asked.

  “Jefferson,” Forbes said, moving away from me and across the room to his impatiently waiting wife.

  “Toby, go,” Astaire ordered. “I’ll call you in the morning.”

  Astaire nodded to Kudlap Singh, who went to the phonograph and put on a scratchy version of a Horace Heidt fox-trot-at least I think it was a fox-trot.

  I went to the chair Forbes had vacated and sat. Jeremy followed me, sat stiffly. Astaire walked to the waiting couple.

  “Thomas Jefferson?” I whispered.