escort.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, trying not to wince from the pain above my kidney. I needed a toilet or a clump of trees fast, but I wasn’t going to find a hospitable place in Mirador.
The drive back to and through Mirador was uneventful. The kid wasn’t on the curb and the cat was gone, but the car door was still there. There were two more cars parked in front of Hijo’s, but I didn’t pay any attention. I just watched Alex and Nelson in my rear view mirror. They stopped when the street turned to road, and Nelson stuck his hand out the window to wave goodbye.
I didn’t wave back.
CHAPTER FIVE
I found a Sinclair station on the highway, told the guy to fill it up and made a Groucho dash to the men’s room. The dash resulted in pain and relief, along with a feeling of satisfaction. I had some decent leads paid for with a firm belt in the kidney. Maybe that evened the score with Fate and the Gods. They let me have a little information and I paid for it in pain. It was a deal the Gods and I had had for almost thirty years, and we both understood it. I would have felt uneasy if things came without a price. I think I inherited that from my father. It was probably the only thing I inherited from the poor guy besides a watch that wouldn’t tell time.
I paid the gas station attendant who looked like Andy Devine, asked him the time and drove back toward Los Angeles humming “Chatanooga Choo-Choo.” My back was being reasonable.
I drove to Arnie’s garage on Eleventh Street and told no-neck Arnie, whose face was so thick with grease that he looked like something from the road show of
I legged it over to my office, trying to ignore the memory of Alex’s kidney attack and stand up straight as I walked. I made it to Ninth, passing Montoya the Dropper, a neighborhood character who would walk about thirty feet, only to repeat the thing over again. Montoya refused to acknowledge that he kept falling and became indignant if anyone confronted him with it. This affliction caused Montoya some professional difficulty since he made his meager living as a pickpocket. He was certainly the world’s most conspicuous pickpocket. I also passed Old Sol. Old Sol walked around with a whistle in his mouth and a book in front of his eyes. He blew the whistle whenever he came to a streetcorner and traffic stopped, green light or not. Since Old Sol was about seventy and he was still healthy, he was apparently doing something right.
They were two of the more savory characters of the neighborhood I met as I turned down Hoover to the Farraday Building, the four-story refuge for second-rate dentists, alcoholic doctors and baby photographers where I had my office.
As usual, the dark hall smelled of Lysol. Jeremy Butler, the former wrestler and present poet and landlord, spent a good chunk of each day fighting a losing battle to keep the building clean by carting squatting bums out the back door and slopping on pails of Lysol. He also changed the light bulbs regularly, but they were constantly being stolen or substituted for lower wattage by the tenants.
The Farraday Building had an elevator, but only the uninitiated took it. Few people could afford the time the trip took. I echoed up the steps and down the hall to my office. The window on the outer door had been cracked and replaced where my landlord had thrown a troublemaker through it, a troublemaker who tried to rob Sheldon Minck.
The neat black letters on the glass read:
SHELDON MINCK, D.D.S., S.D.
Dentist
TOBY PETERS
Private Investigator
The door was new, but the reception room had been embalmed years ago. There was enough space for two wooden chairs, one once-leather-covered chair, a small table with an overflowing ash tray and a heap of ancient copies of
I hurried along through the alcove into Shelly’s dental office, a single chair surrounded by old dental journals, coffee cups that should have been cleaned and piles of tools in various states of rust. Shelly’s radio was playing Smiling Jack Smith. Shelly himself, in a once-white smock and thick glasses slipping off his moist nose, was working on someone in the chair. Shelly shifted his cigar and turned his fat, bald head in my direction.
“Toby, you got a call. I don’t remember who.”
“Thanks Shelly,” I said and moved across the office toward my own office, which had once been a small false-teeth lab.
“Hughes” said a voice from the dental chair. It was Jeremy Butler. “The call was from someone named Hughes.”
“Right,” agreed Shelly, pushing his glasses back and humming with Jack Smith as he looked for some instrument among last week’s newspapers.
“Jeremy,” I said. “Since when do you let Shelly work on your teeth?”
Butler shrugged his enormous shoulders and leaned back, resigned.
“I was reading in the paper today,” Shelly observed pulling out a mean looking tool, “and I saw this big ad for that dentist, Doctor Painless Parker with offices all over the coast, and I said that’s what I’d do. I’d advertise. Where the hell are those pliers?”
“What else d’you read in the papers?” I said, being friendly.
“Dick Tracy’s caught in a snowstorm.”
“Terrific,” I said.
“You working?” Butler asked softly. Usually, Butler spoke barely above a whisper, but people listened. People usually do when you weigh 300 pounds and most of it is muscle.
“Yeah,” I said, happy to have a sounding board. I pulled up a stool, removed the newspapers from it except for one little corner that stuck to something wet and sat down facing the dental chair. Shelly found his pliers and I gave a quick summary of the case, talking over Jack Smith warbling “Just One More Chance.”
I pulled out the list from Hughes. Butler examined it slowly and Shelly took a quick glance.
“It’s the Jap,” said Shelly, turning with his pliers to Butler. “If not the Jap then the Nazi dame Gurstwald.”
“Thanks for clearing it all up for me, Shelly. You are invaluable.”
He waved his pliers, indicating that it was nothing much and was about to attack Butler’s mouth when the big man rose.
“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, removing the dirty white cloth from his neck.
“We had a deal,” Shelly protested.
“You can still take five dollars from your rent,” said Butler. “It’s getting late and my sister’s boy is coming to spend the night with me.” Shelly sighed and put his pliers down.
I was curious about Jeremy’s nephew. I wondered if he resembled a bathtub like his uncle.
“How is the new place working out?” he said, meaning Mrs. Plaut’s rooming house. I had been renting a small motel-like bungalow from Butler before that.
“Fine,” I answered. Shelly climbed into his own dental chair with a newspaper.
“Take care of yourself, Toby,” Butler said and out he went.
“I’m closing down early,” Shelly said looking at his cigar. “Mildred and I are going to see that all-Negro musical at the Mayan,
Jack Smith paused so I could answer.
“No, I’m waiting for a call. Mind if I use your radio when you leave?”
He said he didn’t mind, and I went into my office to check on the mail, which didn’t exist, look at the framed
