Mildred Pierced: A Toby Peters Mystery

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Twenty-five cents for the pamphlet.”

  I dug out a quarter and handed it to him. He grinned.

  “There’s hope for you yet,” he said. “You’ve just taken the first small step. It starts with curiosity and ends with commitment.”

  Pathfinder Helter held the door open for me, and I went out of the house of the mad tea party into the sunlight. The quartet ushered me up to the gate and watched as I got into the Crosley.

  “I’ll call before I come next time,” I said through the open window.

  “We don’t have a phone,” Timerjack said.

  “Of course,” I said and drove away, not looking back at them.

  CHAPTER 4

  DANGEROUS THOUGH THE journey was through streets that might suddenly be filled with war-painted, hatchet-wielding Hurons, I decided to go to my office to read the pamphlet. I also wanted to do some checking on Timerjack and talk to our receptionist, Violet Gonsenelli.

  The trip was also dangerous because I had to get up to my office on the sixth floor of the Farraday Building without being drawn into Manny’s Tacos on the corner, get through the lobby to the elevator or stairs without running into my landlord, Jeremy Butler and, most important, avoid an encounter with Juanita the Seer from New York City.

  Parking was easy. A spot was open on Hoover, a few doors down from the building entrance. It was too small a spot for anything but a Crosley.

  Traffic wasn’t bad for a weekday afternoon, partly because of the gas shortage.

  It took me about ten seconds to fail to get past the first obstacle in my path to my office.

  I was hungry. I smelled tacos. Through the window of Manny’s, I saw a businessman in a neat suit with a briefcase on the counter eating a taco special. I went in. The businessman was the only customer. The businessman ate solemnly, taking small businesslike bites.

  Manny stood behind the counter, his potbelly covered by a white apron. Manny was smoking a cigarette and reading the newspaper. His son was fighting Nazis somewhere in Europe, and Manny had become an expert on the war thanks to the L.A. Times and the radio updates by Drew Pearson, William Shirer, and H. V. Kaltenborn.

  The radio was on, a swing version of “Is You Is or Is You Ain’t My Baby?”

  I sat a few stools down from the businessman, and Manny looked over his newspaper at me.

  “Two and a Pepsi,” I said.

  “Right,” Manny answered, folding the newspaper and putting it neatly down on the counter.

  “Big battle in the Pacific,” he said from the grill. “Seventeen Jap planes, two freighters, one cruiser blown to hell.”

  “We lose any?” I asked.

  “Four planes. Boyington’s missing.”

  Major Gregory “Pappy” Boyington was the 31-year-old ace credited with shooting down twenty-six Japanese planes. The young man from Okanogan, Washington, headed the Black Sheep Squadron. His twenty-six enemy planes tied him with Major Joe Foss and World War One’s Captain Eddie Rickenbacker.

  “Got a bad feeling about it,” said Manny, placing a plate with two hot tacos in front of me.

  “We should have used gas on Tarawa,” Manny said. “The New York Times says so. The Washington Times-Herald says so, and I say so. Lot of American kids got killed there. International law says it’s okay to use gas. The Hague back in 1899, Geneva in 1925. Saves lives.”

  “Maybe,” I said.

  “Maybe, hell,” Manny said. “You know how many casualties we have in this war?”

  He picked up the paper and started reading aloud. The businessman turned his head toward him.

  “Dead Americans, 29,650. Wounded, 41,050. Missing, 32,072. Prisoners of war, 28,732. That comes to 131,504. And when we invade Japan, those numbers are gonna look like peanuts. I say we gas the Jap army.”

  “And they gas us back?”

  “We’ve got more gas.” Manny was confident.

  I had already taken my second bite of taco when Manny brought my Pepsi in a bottle.

  The businessman finished his taco and reached for his wallet. He put down a dollar and some change and said to Manny and me, “Do either of you know a dentist in the office building a few doors down? A Dr. Sheldon Minck?”

  Manny looked at me and I looked back. The businessman went on, “I was just at his office. There was no one there. Couldn’t find the building manager’s office.”

  “I know him,” Manny said, picking up his paper.

  “Have any idea who I could talk to about getting in touch with Dr. Minck? It’s important.”

  “I think I could find him,” I said calmly, finishing off the first taco.

  The man moved to the stool next to me and held out his right hand. I wiped my hand on a napkin and we shook.

  “My name is Verte, Desmond Verte,” he said. “I’m a lawyer.”

  “He has a lawyer,” I said.

  “No,” said Verte. “I don’t want to represent him. I have something to deliver to him, and I need a signature.”

  “He’s indisposed,” I said. “I could get it to him. I share office space with Dr. Minck.”

  “Sorry.” The man put his hand flat on the briefcase in case I tried to pick it up and run out the door.

  “Well, in case I talk to him, what do you want me to tell him?”

  The man fished out a business card and handed it to me.

  “My name and phone number,” he said. “Have him call. Tell him the Greenbaum and Gorman Company in Des Moines is very interested in discussing and entering into negotiations with him about the patent he holds for an anti-snoring appliance.”

  Shelly had patented about forty of what he called “major advances in dental technology” over the past decade. Almost all of them were either too painful or too wacky to draw any interest, though Shelly was always certain the next invention would lead to fame and wealth.

  “I’ll have him get in touch with you,” I said.

  Verte shook my hand, picked up his briefcase, said, “Thanks” and added that he would only be in Los Angeles for another four or five days and could be reached at the Roosevelt Hotel.

  When he left, Manny lowered the newspaper and said, “Charles H. Warner died yesterday over in San Marino. He was seventy-one.”

  “Charles H. Warner?”

  “Co-inventor of the automobile speedometer,” said Manny. “Made him rich. Maybe Minck has something this time.”

  “Maybe,” I said, finishing my second taco and downing what was left of my Pepsi. “He may become the richest prisoner in the state.”

  “Ironic,” said Manny flatly.

  “Ironic,” I agreed.

  “That’s life. What the hell,” Manny said, turning the page on his newspaper while “I’m Getting Sentimental over You” came on with the radio announced by Tommy Dorsey’s trombone. “Heard on the radio that they played that song at the Paramount Theater on Broadway in New York yesterday. Gene Krupa’s first appearance since his parole from San Quentin on those drug charges. Got a standing ovation. Krupa cried. Now they’re playing it all day. My niece says Krupa is the grooviest hipcat.”

  “Hepcat,” I corrected.

  “You figure it out.” He shook his head. “Guy takes drugs and everybody loves him.”

  I thought of suggesting that we gas San Quentin, but I didn’t think Manny would be amused. And since I ate there a couple of times a week, it probably wasn’t a good idea to test the cook’s sense of humor.

  I left a buck on the counter, fingered Verte’s card in my pocket, and went out into the afternoon, heading for the office.

  I made it, through the dark entryway and into the eight-story-high atrium lobby with its familiar iron railings around each floor, its rickety iron-barred elevator and its familiar smell of Lysol.

  A serious-looking pretty young blonde with what appeared to be a script in her hand hurried past me. The usual symphony of creaks accompanied me when I started the elevator. As I rode upward, laughter and shouting echoed off each floor, and there were sounds of music
from a few of the offices where lessons were given.

  I made it to the office of Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., S.F.C., L.M.O., on the sixth floor. Most of the initials under Shelly’s name on the pebbled glass of the office door had no meaning. My name was in much smaller letters: Toby Peters, Confidential Investigations. I changed the wording from time to time, but not as often as Shelly changed the initials.

  I expected, based on Verte’s story, to find the door locked. But it wasn’t, and the lights were on. Violet was sitting behind her little desk in the tiny reception/waiting room.

  She was pretty, in her early twenties. She was also waiting for her husband Rocky to get back from the war. He had been a promising middleweight. I wondered if he’d have any fight left in him when he got back.

  Violet looked worried.

  “A man was here,” she said.

  “I know.”

  “I had the door locked,” she said. “I didn’t let him in. Then I thought, hey, I can’t just hide in here forever so I opened the door, but he was gone. How’s Dr. Minck doing? You see him? He all right?”

  “He’s all right,” I said. “I’ll be in my office.”

  “La Motta’s fighting Fritzie Zivic.” She looked down at a sheet of paper on her desk, pencil in her right hand.

  “I’m not betting,” I said.

  Violet had completely destroyed my confidence as a boxing expert. She was a dark-haired temptress who rivaled those mermaids who lured sailors to their death. I didn’t want to listen to her.

  “Suit yourself.”

  “Okay,” I said. “What’s on the table?”

  “I take La Motta. You take Zivic. La Motta wins in five or less or you win the bet,” she said.

  “Zivic’s going to get knocked out in five or less?”

  “Five or less,” she said, still not looking up. “Even money. Five dollars.”

  I had Joan Crawford’s money. I couldn’t resist. Zivic could easily go more than five rounds. He even had a good shot at winning. The odds were seven to five for La Motta.

  “Five dollars,” I agreed.

  She looked up, smiled, and held out her right hand to shake. I took her hand. She had a firm grip.

  I reached for the inner door.

  “Jeremy’s waiting for you in your office,” she said.

  “How long?”

  “About ten minutes. He was here earlier, too.”

  I nodded and went into the big room that was Shelly’s office. The lights were out. The place looked clean and ready to rent. A dental chair and stainless-steel table stood in the middle of the room. An X-ray machine with a flexible arm and a cone with a glass in the middle that made it look like a hostile Martian took up space, too. There were metal cabinets against the wall to the right, and a double sink to the left, by the door to my office.

  The place lacked something. It lacked the presence and racing emotions of Shelly Minck. I went to my door and opened it. The light wasn’t on, but there was plenty of light from the single window. The former storage closet was just big enough for my small desk and chair and two extra chairs. The walls were decorated with a large painting of a woman with an infant in either arm and a photograph of me and my brother when we were kids with our father between us, an arm around each of our shoulders. At my brother’s feet was Kaiser Wilhelm, Phil’s German shepherd.

  In one of the chairs, more than filling it, sat Jeremy Butler. He was the owner of the Farraday, a former professional wrestler turned poet who lived with his wife, the former Alice Pallice and their two-year-old daughter, Natasha, in an apartment on the eighth floor.

  At sixty-five, Jeremy was a mountain, a solid bald mountain with a calm but battle-bruised face.

  “How you doing, Jeremy?” I asked, moving behind my desk.

  “Well,” he said. “You’ve seen Sheldon?”

  “I’ve seen him.” I settled into my chair, dropping the pamphlet Timerjack had given me on the desk and facing him. “He says he didn’t kill her. I believe him. He doesn’t lie well.”

  “Is there anything I can do to help?” he asked.

  “Not right now unless you know something about these people.” I held up the pamphlet.

  Jeremy reached into his pocket and came out with his glasses. When they were settled on his nose, he reached for the pamphlet and I handed it to him.

  “I’ve heard of them,” he said.

  “From Shelly?”

  “And Professor Geiger. I think it was Professor Geiger who told Sheldon about Survivors for the Future.”

  Professor Alan Geiger had an office two doors down from ours. He sold and gave lessons on the Aeolian trafingle. From time to time when I was on the hall landing outside the office I could hear the weird sounds of the machine. The Aeolian trafingle was played not by blowing into it, banging on it, or passing one’s hands over it like a theremin. The trafingle produced music when a hand gently brushed one of a dozen bright aluminum rods sticking up from a square metal box. I had never yet recognized any melody that issued from Geiger’s office.

  “I’ll talk to him,” I said. “Is he in?”

  “Yes,” said Jeremy, returning the pamphlet. He also handed me a sheet of paper, neatly typed.

  “It may have something to do with Dr. Minck,” he said. “I dreamt last night this building crumbled and fell and that somehow the fault was mine.”

  He got up and added, “Anything I can do, remember?”

  “I’ll remember, Jeremy,” I said.

  When he closed the door, I looked down at the poem he had handed me. It was titled “Disappearing Houses.”

  In English cities and small towns, weather,

  factories and the tread of man have worked

  To wear away the homes of peasants and kings.

  Yet there and where unbombed in Europe

  Are still homes of high and low, lived in,

  their wood worn, stones smoothed

  by four or five hundred years of man and God.

  Brick, wood, stones, some rescued from Roman ruins

  with telephones and radios and temporary furniture

  leaving the essence of what once still stood.

  Why so different here where a century of standing

  is deemed a miracle and little plaques are placed

  on solid California homes whose sole distinction

  is that they have survived for a single century?

  And we are loath to have our personal history

  Endure for more than three generations?

  We live where nothing’s meant to survive,

  Not our homes, cars, the tools with which we work,

  Friendships, loyalties, dedication, principles.

  Today’s history is tomorrow’s nostalgia.

  Today’s friend is a remnant of only yesterday.

  And so I attend to friends, homes and work places

  keeping them alive as tribute to what can

  endure rather than that we will not have stand.

  The next time I saw Jeremy I’d tell him I found the poem moving and deep. Actually, I liked the ones that rhymed better.

  I got up, turned off the light, went out the door, through Shelly’s office and into the reception room. Violet was on the telephone saying, “Dr. Minck had an emergency.… No, he’s not out of town, but it might keep him locked in for a while. I can pencil you in for an appointment in a few weeks and let you know if he’s back.”

  While she talked, I took a pencil from her desk and wrote on the back of an envelope that I was going down the hall to see Professor Geiger. Violet turned the envelope around, read my message, and nodded, saying to the person on the other end of the line, “Yes, if you really can’t wait, I can recommend my dentist.… No, Dr. Minck is not my dentist.”

  I left the office and closed the door. Two doors down was the office of Alan Geiger, professor of the Aeolian trafingle. I heard something inside, a twanging and a falsetto voice singing “Honolulu Baby.” I knocked.

  “Come in.” />
  I opened the door. The professor was seated on a chair by the window of his large studio-office. He had a ukulele in his hands. There were chairs around the room, and in the center stood the bright metal box with rods reaching for the ceiling.

  “Therapy, respite,” Geiger said, looking down at the ukulele with a smile.

  It was hard to take Geiger seriously, not because he was dedicated to his musical creation, the trafingle, but because he looked so much like Larry Fine, the one of the Three Stooges with the bald head on top and the curly fringes that stuck out on each side. The professor’s hair was more or less tame, but it was still hard to shake the image.

  He was dressed in a suit and string tie.

  “I know you.” He pointed the uke at me. “You have that little office inside Sheldon Minck’s. You’re … don’t tell me … Tony … No, it’s right on the door. I pass it every day. Tony Peterson.”

  “Toby Peters,” I said.

  “Right.”

  He put down the uke and crossed his legs. He continued to smile.

  “You’re interested in learning the Aeolian trafingle?”

  “No,” I said. “I’m interested in Lawrence Timerjack and the Survivors for the Future.”

  Geiger was not smiling any more.

  “Why?”

  “Because you told Shelly about Timerjack and he joined them. Now he’s in trouble. The police think he killed his wife with a crossbow in Lincoln Park.”

  The professor uncrossed his legs and stood up, moving in front of the metal box in the middle of the room. He flipped a switch and there was a quick piercing electric buzz, replaced immediately by a low hum.

  “I warned him,” Geiger said. “I told him I had been a member of the Survivors for a few months. They taught me how to eat roots and build and use a blowgun. I quit after I almost swallowed a dart. Horrible experience. While I was choking, I could hear Timerjack talking to that woman about how they would hide my body. I coughed out the dart and walked out the door.”

  “Why would that story make Shelly want to join them?”

  “I don’t know,” Geiger said with a shake of the head and a tentative touch of one of the rods of the machine in front of him. There was a humming sound. He ran his hand along the rod and the humming sound rose and fell. Then he began to adjust the dials. “Has to be perfect or it won’t be under control.”