the morning run, which Cousin Arthur Gamble undertook.”
“And this took place in …?” asked Dali.
“Black Hills,” said Mrs. Plaut, closing her manuscript.
“Senora Plaut, you are a true Surrealist,” Dali declared, clasping his hands together as if in prayer.
“I am a Methodist,” she answered, placing the manuscript to the side and reaching for the Apples Eisenhower.
“Amen,” I said. “Sal, I think you should dress in something a little less gaudy. We’re trying to keep a killer from finding you.”
“The gaudier the crook, the cheaper the patter,” said Mrs. Plaut, a spoonful of cream and apple near her mouth.
“This,” said Dali, “is the most sedate costume that I possess.”
“And the mustache,” I went on. “It has to go.”
“
“Well,” I said cheerfully, “that may be one of your options.”
“It’s like family,” said Mrs. Plaut, beaming. “My neighbor’s brother back in Sioux Falls had a brother Beemer who had a mustache like Mr. Fala here. Beemer fancied himself a Mexican bandit, which was foolish since he looked not dissimilar from Grover Cleveland. Would anyone like some coffee?”
“Fala,” said Gunther earnestly, “is the dog of the President of the United States.”
I got up while I was still sane. “Sal, we’ve got to go.”
Dali rose, took Mrs. Plaut’s hand, and kissed it grandly. “You shall appear in my next painting.”
Gunther got down from his chair, turned to me, and asked, “What do you wish me to do?”
“Nothing now, Gunther. I’ll give you a call when I need you. Thanks.”
As Dali moved toward the kitchen door and I followed him with the briefcase, Mrs. Plaut whispered loud enough to be heard across the Nevada state line, “If Mr. Fala is an exterminator, too, when does he have time to paint pictures?”
We didn’t hear Gunther’s answer. I got in front of Dali and went to the front door. I checked the street through the window and then through the screen door. I didn’t see any loony auto mechanics with rifles, but there were a lot of places to hide.
“Stay inside. I’m parked a few blocks away. When I pull up, come out and get into the car.”
“I did not see all the grass when we arrived in the dark,” he said as I opened the door.
“Well-trimmed,” I said.
“Things lurk in the grass,” he said softly.
“Stay on the sidewalk,” I suggested, and went out on the porch and down the stairs.
When I got the Crosley turned around and back in front of Mrs. Plaut’s, Dali made a velvet dash down the center of the sidewalk and into the street, where I had left the passenger-side door open. He jumped in, closed the door, and panted, holding his chest.
“It is bad. But not as bad at the Metro in Paris,” he remarked.
I didn’t follow up on that one.
We were downtown in ten minutes. On a good day when I was full of energy and had the time, I could walk from Mrs. Plaut’s to my office. Since there had never been a good day that coincided with my being full of energy, I’d never walked to the Farraday Building. Normally, I parked at No-Neck Arnie’s and filled the tank, if I had gas ration stamps, but it was a two-block walk from Arnie’s and Dali stood out like a sore Surrealist. So I pulled into the alley behind the Farraday and parked in the Graveyard, a dirt plot where the bodies of three dead and rusted wrecks sheltered wandering winos.
I pulled in next to a frame that might once have been a DeSoto. Dali opened the door and stepped out I slid over to the passenger seat with the briefcase and got out next to him.
“You live in a nightmare world,” Dali said, looking around as a bum, who reminded me of a rotting pumpkin complete with an orange shirt, got out of the possible DeSoto and tried to focus on us. The bright sun didn’t help much. Dali watched the man lurch toward us, pulling a pair of sunglasses from his pocket and perching them on his bulbous nose.
“What?” gargled the pumpkin.
“Two bits to watch my car,” I said. “See nothing happens to it. No one touches it.”
“Two bits?” the pumpkin asked Dali.
“No,” said Dali, reaching into his pocket and coming out with crumpled bills. “Three dollars.”
He held out the three bucks to the orange bum, who lifted his sunglasses and took the money.
“Anyone touches the car, he dies,” the bum graveled. His gravel was even worse than his gargle.
“Come on, Sal,” I said, moving to the rear door of the Farraday.
Dali followed, looking around the festering alley as if it were Oz. “It can get no better,” he said.
“It can get a lot worse,” I said. “My car could be gone by the time we come out. Our pal with the sunglasses isn’t hanging around to watch my Crosley. As soon as we get inside the door, he’ll take off for Erik’s Bar. He’s got enough money to keep him in Petrie wine for three weeks.”
“Wrong,” corrected Dali. “He will not depart when we go inside. He has already departed.”
I looked back at Dali. He was triumphant.
“One can always count on man to find the deepest darkness of his soul.”
“Comforting thought,” I muttered, opening the back door of the Farraday with my key.
Dali went in ahead of me. “That smell,” he said, his voice echoing in the demi-darkness. “Perfume of nightmares.”
“Lysol,” I said, crossing the lobby.
“I have much to tell Gala,” he said. “She will be in Carmel with your bald giant. I must call her.”
“From my office,” I said.
Dali admired the marble stairs and looked up the stairwell to the roof of the Farraday seven stories above. Voices came from behind doors. Off-key music. Some kind of machine. Something, maybe a baby, crying.
“Dante,” he said.
“Let’s go.”
Dali got into the elevator and I turned on the third stair.
“You walk,” he said. “Dali will ride upward into the Inferno.”
“Sixth floor,” I said and started up the stairs as Dali closed the cage door of the elevator and hit the button. I beat him to the sixth floor by about a week, even though the elevator hadn’t stopped to pick anyone up or let them off.
“Magnificent nightmare,” Dali said, joy in his voice.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” I said, standing in front of the door to the offices of Minck and Peters. “Abandon hope all who enter here.”
We went through the little waiting room and into Shelly’s office. The great man himself was destroying the mouth of a man who lay still with his eyes closed. For his sake, I hoped he was dead. Shelly was probing with a corroded metal probe and singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin When the Yanks Go Marching In.”
“Any calls, Shel?” I asked.
Shelly turned, shifted the cigar to the right side of his mouth, and replaced his thick glasses on the top of his nose by pushing the center of the right lens.
“No. Who’s this?”
“Salvador Dali,” I said.
“No shit?” Shelly turned to the dead man on the chair: “Mr. Shayne, this is Salvador Dali. He looks just like himself.”
“Your studio is magnificent,” complimented Dali, looking around at the sink full of instruments and coffee cups, the pile of bloody towels overflowing the basket in the corner, the cabinets covered with piles of dental magazines of a decade ago.
“I call it a surgery,” said Shelly.
“You are an artist,” said Dali. “America is mad.”
