Dancing in the Dark

Shelly turned to the patient, squinted through his thick glasses.

“She’s breathing fine,” he said, turning back to me. “How do you like the office?”

I looked around. Violet had begun a major campaign against a decade’s worth of filth. There were no coffee mugs or dishes piled in the sink. There was nothing at all in the sink, in fact, it was clean. The trash can was not overflowing and had a cover on it. Magazines were no longer strewn over cabinets and counters. The yellow linoleum floor was spotless, except for the few splotches of blood from Shelly’s very recent triumph.

Violet had also put a painting on the wall to cover a bulging crack. The painting showed Napoleon, a sword in his right hand, on top of a white horse that was rearing back with his two front legs high in the air. Behind Napoleon were a bunch of soldiers in uncomfortable-looking uniforms, following him into battle.

“You’ve got a visitor,” Shelly whispered slyly.

“Stan Laurel,” I said.

“Violet told you,” he said. “Tell him I give a major discount to your clients.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t want you to talk to my clients, let alone work on their teeth.”

“I’m good, Toby. You know I’m good.”

“You’re fine, Shelly. I just don’t think it’s right to mix business with torture. I think you should do something about your patient. She’s a funny shade of orange.”

With that I turned to my office, a space just a little bit larger than Violet’s reception room. I tried not to see clients in the office. Most of my jobs were set up by phone calls. Not too many people stumbled on my office in the dark halls of the sixth floor of the Farraday while they were on the way to a music lesson and said to themselves, “Hey, a private detective. Wife’s been gone for a month. That is just what I need.”

Even if such an event did take place, few people would be filled with confidence by a private investigator who could only be reached by going through a dental office.

I opened my office door, and Fred Astaire turned in his chair. I closed the door behind me.

“They said. .” I began, shaking his hand as he stood.

“That I was Stan Laurel. I heard. Not all that unusual a mistake. I’ve got to confess that sometimes when I look in the mirror I could swear Laurel was on the other side.”

“Cup of coffee?” I asked, moving behind my desk and clearing away three days of mail to make room for the sheet from Violet’s pad with Anne’s number on it.

“No, thanks,” said Astaire.

There was one window in the room. Right behind the desk. Perfect view of the alley six flights below. If I leaned out, I could see my Crosley parked between the garbage cans. I opened the window, sat, and faced Astaire, who was wearing a perfectly tailored blue suit, an off-blue shirt, and a tie the color of the suit. He looked a little skinnier than he did in the movies, no more than one-forty, and he was about my height, maybe five-nine. I figured him for about forty, maybe a little older. He had less hair than I remembered, and the memory wasn’t that old. I’d taken Carmen, the cashier at Levy’s on Spring, to see You Were Never Lovelier about a month ago.

“Yes,” he said.

“Yes?” I repeated.

“The hair, or lack of it,” Astaire said. “You were looking at my head. In the movies, I wear a wig. I hate the damn thing. In public, I wear a hat.”

He held up a hat he had apparently placed on the floor.

“While I’d say I’m a reasonably presentable example of the human male,” he went on, “were I not a movie actor, I doubt if women would notice me on the street.”

I assumed we were getting somewhere, so I shut up. He continued: “You were recommended to me as someone who could be. . discreet.”

“I can be discreet,” I assured him.

He nodded and looked around the room.

“I know the style’s not right,” he said, looking at the painting on the wall to his right. “Too naturalistic. But I’d almost swear it was a Dali.”

“It is,” I said. “Payment for a job I did for him.”

The painting showed a woman with a warm, loving face holding two little naked boy babies, one in each arm.

“Amazing,” said Astaire. “Aren’t you afraid. . I mean, someone could. .”

“Mr. Astaire. .”

“Fred.”

“Fred, if you were a robber and you made your way through Dr. Minck’s office back here with a flashlight in your hand, do you think you’d recognize the painting as anything worth stealing?”

“Probably not,” he said.

“Besides, it’s too big to sneak out.”

“They could wrap it up, throw it out the window, and then go down the stairs and pick it up.”

“You spend a lot of time hanging around criminals?” I said.

“Well, as a matter of fact, I do, which is part of the reason I’m here,” he said softly. “I’m a bit of a police buff. No, I’m more than a bit. I’m fascinated by the police and the criminal world. I’ve gone out on patrols in almost every major city in the United States, and I go rather frequently out in police cars and to lineups. Phyllis sometimes joins me.”

“Phyllis?”

“My wife. The people in the photograph. .” he said, turning to look up past my investigator’s license at the fading photo of a weathered man with two young boys at his side and a German shepherd at his feet.

“My father,” I said. “Younger kid is me. Older one is my brother, Phil. The dog is Kaiser Wilhelm. My father and the dog are dead.”

“The photograph rather echoes the Dali painting,” he said. “A parent, two boys.”

“Never thought of it,” I said.

“I never had much to do with my father,” Astaire said. “My sister and my mother and I were out on the road by the time I was five. My father stayed in Omaha. Saw him once in a while but. .”

The pause was long and he sighed.

“I’m stalling.”

“I noticed,” I said. “I’m in no hurry.”

“There is a woman,” he said, looking at the Dali painting. “She wanted dancing lessons from me. She approached me through a phone call from her ‘friend,’ an Arthur Forbes. You may know the name.”

“I know the name,” I said. “Also known as Fingers Intaglia, from Detroit. Son-in-law of Guiseppi Cortona, who runs mob business in Minneapolis.”

“Mr. Forbes was rather insistent that I teach his friend,” Astaire went on. “Indicated that she wanted no other teacher, would accept no other teacher. He also said that his friend had, until recently, been a ballroom dance teacher, but she needed to move on to the heights of professionalism. I could name my own price but, as he put it, he would be ‘very disappointed’ if I refused. Mr. Peters. . Toby, I have a wife and three children-the youngest, Ava, just had her first birthday. A father’s nightmare is that something might happen to his family. A dancer’s nightmare is that something might happen to his body. My knowledge of Mr. Forbes’s history suggests that both nightmares might come true. I agreed to a limited number of lessons. Forbes set up a schedule with me at the Monticello Hotel.”

“On Sunset.”

“On Sunset,” he confirmed. “I picked the times and brought my own accompanist. This is difficult. The young woman’s name is Luna Martin. She is pretty. She is smart. She is not graceful, but she is determined. As I said, she also claims to have been a dance instructor. One can only guess at the number of lead-footed zombies she unleashed on the dance floors of America. At the end of the second lesson last Thursday, when the piano player was taking a break, Miss Martin unbuttoned her silk blouse, displayed her considerable breasts, and declared that she wanted me and was determined to have me.”

I nodded.

Music was now coming from Shelly’s office. It sounded like the Modernaires.

“I’ve been in vaudeville, musical comedy, and movies all my life,” said Astaire. “I’ve seen bare-breasted