“I wouldn’t miss it,” I grinned.
Faulkner got out quickly and hurried into the hotel without looking back. His gray jacket was badly wrinkled, and he looked a little frail as he moved, but his back was straight with a dignity I knew I could never pull off.
Time didn’t mean much anymore. I turned on the radio and was told again that a Japanese general said an invasion of California would be simple and that Pat Kelly had fought to a draw with heavyweight wrestling champ Jim Londos. While Jean Sablon sang “I Was Only Passing By,” I spotted an all-night eatery I had stumbled on before. It was small, just on the fringe that turned Sunset from class to working-class, and it always had a group of guys who looked like truck drivers sitting at the counter and tables chewing coffee and settling the world’s problems. I never saw any trucks on the street, so I didn’t know what these guys really were or did. Maybe they were movie producers traveling incognito looking for talent. I didn’t want to be discovered, so I didn’t bother to flash my glowing smile when I came in and found an open red-leather stool at the counter.
“What’ll it be?” said the guy behind the counter as he cleaned off a pile of crumbs in front of me. He was covered with hair, on his arms and neck, and looked as if he could hold Londos to a draw. I wondered whether Jeremy Butler had ever wrestled against Londos or Pat Kelly.
I ordered a cheese omelette, not well done, a bowl of cereal, and coffee. Three tons of fun in a corner table argued, but I couldn’t get interested. The omelette was good, the cereal was crisp, and the coffee strong. I was regaining the idea that I was a functioning human being. I could have stopped at County Hospital before I went home for an X ray of my back, just in case something was cracked or broken, but without young Doc Parry there, the place held no challenge.
I got home before dawn and found a parking space right in front of the boarding house on Heliotrope. No one bothered me when I went in and up. No one was in my room when I flipped the lights on and locked the door with the little hook and latch provided by Mrs. Plaut. My one-year-old niece Lucy could have pushed through the locked door without pausing.
My suit went on a chair, and I noticed the big pile of handwritten paper on my table. It looked like a few thousand pages. Maybe it was papers I had to fill out to get an apology from the Internal Revenue Service for being harassed by them when I had no income. It turned out to be Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript.
I looked at the first page of chapter fourteen on top, “What could Seymour do?” it began. “The Indian had destroyed the pianoforte and had turned on him and Sister. He dispatched the heathen with his weapon.” She didn’t mention what the weapon was. Maybe instead of billing Faulkner, I could send him Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript and ask him for comments I could feed her, but I decided against it. A simple bill would be less cruel.
My sleep was the sleep of the self-satisfied and unemployed. In a few hours I would get up, go to my office, make out my bills, and hope there was a job lead. There were no dreams of vampire women, haunted houses, the Old South, or Cincinnati. There was just sleep.
When I woke up my watch told me it was two o’clock, but I didn’t know which two o’clock it was. The Beech-Nut clock said it was three, and the sun said it was day. Considering my line of work, it would have been reasonable to invest in a new watch. Slavick Jewelry Company on Seventh had an Elgin eighteen-jewel for $33.75. I could get twelve months to pay it off, but I knew I’d consider that a betrayal of my old man’s gift.
Gunther wasn’t in so I left him a note on his desk explaining that the world had been put right again with thanks to his efforts in tracking down the Culver City hideaway. Then I grabbed a coffee, stopped at a stand for a pair of chili dogs, and headed for my office.
Jeremy Butler was escorting a drunk out the front door of the Farraday Building when I arrived. The place was a mecca for the unwashed and pickled of the neighborhood. It was as if drunks could breed. Jeremy held the man gently under one arm, and the thin guy took it philosophically and quietly.
“It’s over,” I told Butler. “Lugosi’s all right.”
“Good. I’ve been preparing a series of poems related to vampirism,” Butler said. The drunk looked interested.
“I’d like to read them when they’re ready,” I lied.
Jeremy nodded and took his bundle out the door.
Shelly was sitting in his single dental chair when I came in. Customerless, he was reading a dental journal.
“You know, Toby,” he said, pushing his glasses back on his nose, “I can’t make up my mind about who to submit the thing about vampire teeth to, a journal or Collier’s.”
“I don’t think Collier’s would be interested,” I said, moving toward my office.
“But they pay,” he said reasonably. “Dental journals don’t pay anything.”
“I thought you were interested in prestige?” I reminded him.
Shelly shrugged, wiped his moist forehead with his soiled white jacket, and said, “Maybe I can have both.” “Maybe,” I said, opening my door, “but you’ll have to go with what you have on it. I don’t think Sam Billings will be showing up here again. There’s a good chance he’ll be giving up fangs, too.”
“I thought I convinced him,” Shelly said, lighting a fresh cigar.
“You’re very persuasive, Shel,” I said, about to close myself into the windowed tomb that served as my office.
“Hey,” he shouted, flipping a few pages, “you had a call.”
“Who?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I didn’t take it. Jeremy wrote it on one of your envelopes.”
Looking through my mail, I found no messages, and I didn’t feel up to opening the mail. It looked like a pile of bills and no potential work. One of the bills was from Doc Hodgdon for my leg.
The task at hand was to make up my bills, but that didn’t fill me with enthusiasm. Faulkner had no money, and Lugosi was just coming out of a period in which he had been on welfare. I neatly printed letters to each of them stating that my expenses had been negligible and that they owed me a fee for three days’ work, since they had both given me two-day advances. Both the two-day advances were almost gone. My bill to Faulkner totaled a little over $100, and he wouldn’t be paying for some time. I billed Lugosi $30. There was a good chance I’d be making the rounds in a week or two, trying to pick up subcontracts for skip tracers and fill in vacations for hotel detectives I knew.
I shoved my mail into my jacket pocket just as I heard the outside door to the dental office open. When I turned off my light and got to the door, Mrs. Lee was back in the chair.
“You remember Mrs. Lee,” Shelly said to me.
Mrs. Lee’s frightened eyes had trouble focusing. She clutched a knitted purse to her many bosoms like a teddy bear.
“Today we have something special prepared for our favorite patient,” Shelly said in his most phony bedside manner as he patted the fat lady with his right hand and searched through the newspapers on his work stand with his left.
“Today,” he continued, “we are going to do something to Mrs. Lee’s bicuspids that would make the headlines tomorrow if it weren’t for the war, right, Mrs. Lee?” She moved her head in a variety of directions at the same time.
“Good afternoon, Shel,” I said. “See you, Mrs. Lee.”
Mrs. Lee was practicing her groaning sound when I closed the outer door and moved into the hall. My back was aching, but with an ache I recognized, which told me it would eventually go away. My knee was holding up with only a faint reminder of what had happened, and the pain in my head from Newcomb’s attack in the parking lot of the Chinese restaurant was now an undetectable part of the frenetic nightmare of my cranium. I was feeling fine.
When I got to the lobby, my disposition cooled. A figure I recognized was going over the listings in the lobby, which was tough since the lights were out and he had to use the trickle of sun filtering in from outside.
“I’ll save you the trouble,” I said. Cawelti the cop looked at me, and we both listened to my footsteps echo on the tile.
He stepped back with his hands in his coat pocket and a smirk on his face. He was trying to erase the humiliation I had witnessed when Phil almost strangled him. I could read it on his face. He could have taken some pointers from Faulkner and Lugosi on how to accept humiliation, but I had the feeling he wouldn’t accept advice from me.
I walked right up to him, violating his space as much as I could without having to actually smell his hair
