Dancing in the Dark

board was Anthony Pelligrino, Matters of the Heart and Certified Public Accountant. I had never met Anthony. Below me on the board was Quick Work Loans, whose motto, I had discovered from a one-sheet flyer shoved under our office door, was, “You Need It, We Give It, You Pay Back in Small Installments.” The flyer had also assured me that Barbara and Daniel Sullivan would give me “sympathy and fast results.” The rest of the board was a full spectrum of the down-and-out and vaguely sinister. One-room talent agencies, fortunetellers, baby photographers, publishers of questionable literature, a vocal teacher, a music teacher (Professor Aumont of the Paris International Academy of Music), who guaranteed to teach you any instrument in one month, and Good Jewelry, so named not because of the quality of the merchandise but the name of the seldom-seen proprietor, Herschel Good. This was not Sunset Boulevard. I went through the door leading to the semidarkness of the inner lobby. The inner chamber of the building was vast, the offices on each floor opening out onto a landing. A few steps out your door and you were at the iron railing from which you could look up or down into the echoing and sometimes noisy heart of the Farraday.

I looked up as I headed for the staircase. If my back wasn’t bothering me I avoided the ancient, groaning elevator in the darkest corner next to the stairs. Through its prisonlike bars, the elevator provided a good view of each floor as it slowly rose. The key word here is slowly.

Somewhere on two a woman was either being murdered or trying to sing. On three there was laughter, very insincere male laughter, lots of it. But mostly there was the wall-dulled sound of people’s voices. You couldn’t hear the words, but you could hear begging, pleading, lying, hope, and sometimes pain. The sound of pain grew louder as I got to the sixth floor and headed for my office. On the pebbled glass was:

Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., S.D.

Dentist

Toby Peters

Private Investigator

Behind the door someone was moaning, the gender of the source unclear. I stepped in. The little waiting room-and calling it little is giving it the benefit of the doubt-had been converted into a reception area with two small chairs and a desk that barely deserved the name. On the desk was a telephone and a pad of paper. Behind the desk was Violet Gonsenelli, the receptionist Shelly had hired in spite of my warnings. The problem wasn’t Violet. Violet was fun to look at, about twenty-five, pretty, with a pale face and dark hair piled perfect and high on her head. She wore a white nursing uniform and an instant smile when the door was opened. Violet’s husband was a rising middleweight. He had moved as high as number six in the Ring Magazine ratings before he got drafted. Both Violet and a shot at the title would have to wait till the war was over. The other problem was Mildred Minck, wife of Sheldon Minck, a woman of little tolerance and even less charm. Mildred rarely came to the office. She didn’t like the smell of alcohol and wintergreen and she didn’t like me. And she didn’t think all that much of Sheldon.

Somehow Shelly had convinced Mildred that he needed a receptionist/assistant, and Mildred had agreed. That should have made Shelly Minck suspicious. It made me suspicious, but that, when I am working, is part of my job.

“Mr. Peters,” Violet said, all business, picking up her pad. “You have calls. A Mrs. Eastwood. .”

“Former landlady, claims I owe her for damage to the room I rented,” I explained. “That was four, five years ago. Bad news.”

“Anne,” she went on. “She said you’d know who she was.”

“Good news, maybe. Former wife. That was more than four or five years ago. You remind me a little of Anne when she was your age. But Anne had a lot more. .”

Violet tore off the top sheet of her pad and handed it to me. I folded it once neatly.

The groan from beyond the inner door tore through me.

“Dr. Minck has a patient,” Violet whispered as if we were in a sick room or the Burbank Library. “Very sensitive.”

“Sounds it,” I said. “I have two questions, Violet.”

She folded her hands in front of her, and her red lips pouted seriously.

“First, how do you get through that narrow space to your desk, and second, what happened to the two chairs that Shelly moved into the hall for waiting patients to sit on?”

The idea was that Violet would have enough room to move her arms and other parts of her anatomy if patients waited outside.

“Chairs were stolen,” she said sadly. “And I can scrunch myself all together and just make it, but I can’t wear stockings. They’d snag. Not that I have the nylons to spare. But Doctor Minck says he knows where to get real silk stockings. He said he’d like to see me wearing silk stockings to work. It relaxes the patients.”

“I doubt it,” I said as a shriek of agony froze my spine. “Doesn’t that bother you, Violet?”

“No,” she said pertly. “My father was a light heavyweight. I love the fights. That’s how I met my husband. I’m used to pain and brutality.”

“I’m a fight fan too,” I said.

“Maybe we could go together sometime,” she said brightly.

“I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

She shrugged.

“Who do you figure in the Ortiz-Salica fight tomorrow?” I asked. Mexican Manuel Ortiz and Lou Salica of Brooklyn were battling for the bantamweight championship in Oakland.

“Ortiz,” Violet said. “It won’t go the distance.”

“Salica’s got heart,” I said.

“Ortiz has a right hand and fast feet,” she said, searching her desk drawer for something.

“Bet you lunch at Manny’s,” I said.

She found the pencil she was looking for, shrugged, and said, “Okay.”

“You like the job so far?” I said, reluctant to open the inner door and face whatever mayhem Sheldon was doling out to what may or may not have been an innocent patient.

“Not too many patients, not too many calls. Plenty of time to read and learn.” She opened a drawer in the little desk and in the small space behind the drawer wiggled out two books. “Dental hygiene and Spanish. Dr. Minck thinks there’s a whole new market of Mexicans out there,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Somewhere. Oh, God. I almost forgot. You’ve got someone in your office waiting for you. It couldn’t be, but I think it’s a movie star. You know the goofy one with the fat partner?”

It sounded like a description of me and Shelly.

“Laurel. Stan Laurel,” she said.

“Waiting in my office?”

“He didn’t give his name.”

I went through the inner door, closed it behind me, and found myself face to face with the rotund rear of Sheldon Minck draped in soiled white dental smock, as he huddled over someone.

“Almost. Almost. Almost,” Shelly chanted.

A pair of legs, female, squirmed, and their possessor whimpered in defeat.

“There. Hah. There,” Shelly said with a deep sigh, turning to look in my direction. In his right hand was a narrow pliers. Clutched in the mouth of the pliers was a bloody tooth. There were spatters of red on the front of Shelly’s smock and a look of triumph on his round, perspiring face. His thick glasses had slipped to the end of his nose and the few wisps of hair that still clung to the top of his head danced crazily.

He displayed the bloody tooth to the woman in the chair, who seemed to have passed out.

Shelly didn’t appear to notice. He dropped pliers and tooth on the little porcelain-top table next to the dental chair. He picked up the stump of a cigar from the table and placed it triumphantly and as yet unlit in the corner of his mouth.

“You should have seen it, Toby,” he said, fishing under his smock for matches. “Molar, almost impacted. Bad shape. Could have crumbled. And you know what that means?”

He found a match and lit the cigar.

“She fainted, Shel,” I said.