High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) (5 page)

I walked over to him and he turned his myopic eyes in my direction, took the wet cigar out of his mouth, wiped his sweating bald head and smiled a sickly grin. “Toby, hey.”

“Yeah, Shelly, hey,” I said. Then I saw the patient in the chair, an old birdlike guy named Stange who had wrecked the office last year in a pathetic attempt at robbery.

“What’s he doing here?” I asked, leaning over Shelly’s shoulder.

Stange smiled through his stubbly face, showing his single tooth.

“The challenge was too great, too great,” sighed Shelly, seriously pausing to clean the sharp instrument in his hand on his dirty, once-white smock. “This mouth is a challenge I can’t refuse. I can build on that tooth, Toby. I know I can. I can construct a mouthful of teeth. I can experiment with new techniques, planting teeth, wires, stuff like that. Mr. Stange and I have an understanding. No more troubles. Right, Karl?”

Karl beamed, and Shelly patted him on the shoulder—a very grubby shoulder.

“I think you should start by putting a wire in his gums, right over there,” I said, pointing to a spot in Stange’s mouth but being careful not to touch him.

Shelly shrugged and shook his head to show I didn’t know what I was talking about. “No anchorage. None. I plan to drill a hole right there.” He touched Stange’s red-white gums with the sharp instrument, and the old bird jumped four inches.

“Sorry, Shel,” I said. “You’ll have to put the wire on top.”

Shelly turned to me, all five and a half feet filled with indignation.

“Say, who’s the dentist around here, you or me?”

“I don’t know,” I said with a smile. “Who’s the detective around here, you or me?”

Shelly turned from me and stuck his head in the Stange-bird beak. “I’m busy,” he said.

“Gary Cooper,” I said.

“No time for new patients.” He waved over his shoulder with his cigar. “I’ve got all I can handle now.” Shelly was nervously jabbing balls of cotton into Stange’s mouth. Some of it looked used.

“You’re going to choke him,” I said, craning my neck to watch Stange’s face turn purple. Shelly grunted.

“Shelly,” I insisted.

“I gotta work fast,” he said. “The First District of the Los Angeles Dental Society is meeting today from four-thirty to ten-thirty at the Hollywood Roosevelt on how dentists can cooperate with doctors in emergencies. Maybe I can pick up some first-aid ideas and expand the business.”

I waited for a few seconds while Shelly went after the world’s mouth-packing title. Glancing around the office, I saw it hadn’t changed. Piles of dental magazines and crossword-puzzle books. Uncleaned instruments in the sink, where the water dripped steadily. Coffee on the hot plate.

“My present plan is to break the coffee pot over your head,” I said.

“You’ve got a message,” Shelly responded urgently.

“Maybe I’ll break a chair over your head instead. Or maybe I’ll break Mister Stange over your head.”

Mr. Stange made a flaying effort to rise, but Shelly shoved him back.

“Instrument case in the drawer under the coffee,” Shelly mumbled, pointing vaguely.

I shuffled through the pile of napkins, rusty instruments and old campaign literature for Al Smith in the drawer and found the instrument case. Inside it was an envelope marked “TP,” and inside the envelope was $267 and three dimes.

“I was holding it for you,” Shelly said, his back still to me.

“There should be three hundred or more from Cooper,” I said, pocketing the envelope.

“Expenses,” he explained. “You know you can’t conduct an investigation for nothing. I got a pair of binoculars and …”

“Shelly, what the hell did you do it for?”

“Not now, I’ve got a patient,” Shelly stage-whispered.

“Your patient can wait,” I said, removing the empty pot on the hot plate. Shelly had drunk all the coffee, and the pot was filling with steam. At least once a year the coffee pot exploded. Once it went out the reception-room window like a cannonball, nearly decapitating Shelly’s wife Mildred as she came in.

“Okay, okay,” Shelly said with an enormous sigh. He turned and faced me, removing his glasses so he wouldn’t have to see how I’d take his explanation. “I wanted to help.”

I shook my head no but realized that he couldn’t see me, so I said, “No. Try again.”

“All right. I wanted to see if I could do it, to meet a movie star. You get to meet movie stars, famous people, and I spend my life in people’s mouths and the quality of mouth in this neighborhood could stand upgrading. I mean I love my job, but …”

“What about Cary Grant?” I said. “You worked on his mouth, didn’t you?”

“That was a lie,” Shelly said. I moved across the room, but Shelly continued to talk to the coffee pot, refusing to put his glasses back on.

“So you wanted to meet Gary Cooper and play detective,” I said. At the sound of my voice from another part of the room, Shelly put on his glasses and found me. Mr. Stange was gagging behind him.

“I didn’t do a bad job,” Shelly said.

“Just tell me what you did and what you found out. Tell me fast.”

“There’s a notebook in your bottom drawer,” said Shelly, looking at the stub of his cigar. “I made a report. I think I was getting somewhere, Toby. I really think that a dentist’s point of view brings a new perspective to the detective business. I really do.”

“Shel, you pull this again and I’ll turn dentist and pull all your teeth.” I gave him a big smile and went into my office, slamming the door behind me.

Shelly mumbled something about gratitude before he went back to Mr. Strange’s foul mouth.

The report was there, in a 1935 ledger book. It was surprisingly good. The words were printed in tiny letters. He had interviewed four people who were interested in getting Cooper to do the film he didn’t want to do. The picture was called
High Midnight
, and its producer was Max Gelhorn. Shelly had his address written neatly: an office building on Sunset, the far side of Sunset where you could have the Sunset address but be in a neighborhood few respectable tourists visit. According to Shelly, everyone he talked to cooperated when he put a little pressure on them. Actually there wasn’t much information. There was a trade-journal clipping on Gelhorn, indicating that his prime had been reached in the late 1920s, when he had produced a series of two-reel Westerns starring someone named Tall Mickey Fargo.

The next name on Shelly’s list was Lola Farmer, an actress with no major credits, who was to star with Cooper in
High Midnight.
I wondered if this might be the Lola whom Cooper said he had dallied with and who had gone back to Lombardi. Things were already getting complicated. Lola’s address was the Big Bear Bar in Burbank. Name number three was none other than Tall Mickey Fargo, who was set to play the villain in
High Midnight.

A clipping from a shopping-center newsletter which Shelly had plucked had an interview with Fargo that mentioned his forthcoming co-starring role with Cooper. There was a photograph of Fargo in the clipping; and I recognized the thin, dark man with the pencil mustache and the almost-comical oversize cowboy hat. I’d seen him in movies when I was a kid. He had always been one of the gang who got killed in the first shootout with the hero. The last name on the list was Curtis Bowie, who had written the screenplay for
High Midnight.
It was certainly a quartet who needed Cooper for the project. The Los Angeles addresses for both Bowie and Fargo made it clear that they weren’t rolling in the wealth of Hollywood.

I copied the addresses, took the clippings and shoved them in my pocket. Then I returned the one call that had come in my three-week absence. It was from a woman named Carol Slingo in San Pedro. Her parrot had been murdered by an intruder, stabbed with a scissors. There was an empty bottle of nassal spray near the cage, indicating that the murderer had first tried to spray the parrot to death. Mrs. Slingo was angry because the police had refused to pursue the matter with “sufficient concern.” Her theory was that the parrot had been killed to silence him, to keep him from identifying the intruder. I asked if the parrot could do such a thing and she admitted he couldn’t, but the intruder might not know that, especially when he heard the parrot talking. I told her I’d get back to her or have my assistant Mr. Minck look into it as soon as we had time.

While I talked to Mrs. Slingo from San Pedro, I reexamined my office, especially the framed copy of my private investigator’s certificate on the wall next to the photograph. I don’t keep photographs except for this one. In it my older brother Phil has his arm around me, and I’m holding the collar of our dog Murphy. Murphy was a Beagle I renamed Kaiser Wilhelm when Phil returned wounded from his couple of months in World War I. Our old man is standing next to us, his eyes turned proudly on his sons. Both Phil at fourteen and my old man at fifty were tall and heavy, and I was a scrawny ten-year-old. The main puzzle of the photograph for me is whether my nose had already been broken once by then. I can’t tell. I’ve asked people, even my brother, who was the first to break the nose. Phil doesn’t care or remember. He has broken too many noses since then to recall the date of such a minor event.

I left the office with a glance at Shelly’s back. He was hunched over Mr. Stange, cooing, “Just a little wider, a little wider, uh, hu, just a ….”

The groaner was gone from the third floor, and the Farraday was coming to something resembling life. Life at the Farraday began sluggishly a little before noon and never got into high gear. In the lobby I encountered Jeremy Butler, massive hands on massive hips, looking critically at the dark tile floor.

“Toby,” he said, “you think it needs a scrubbing today? I did it yesterday, but …”

“It looks fine, Jeremy, fine. How’s the poetry business?”

“It’s not a business. It’s an act of expression.
North States Review
is publishing my poem on the war. It’s a damn war, Toby.”

“That it is,” I agreed.

“U-boats near the Panama Canal,” he sighed, kneeling to examine a scuff mark. “You know they’re considering martial law in southern California to control enemy aliens and American-born Japanese? The
Times
says there are 100,000. You think they’ll put Hal Yamashura in jail? They might if this gets crazy enough.”

“I don’t know, Jeremy,” I said.

Jeremy raised his huge, well-balanced bulk and turned toward me. “Man was looking for you yesterday. A guy with violence steaming in him. I could feel it.”

“Solid guy, looked like a big brick?” I tried.

“That’s him,” he said. “You need some help?”

“I don’t think so. If I do, I know where to find you.”

I went out into the cold, buttoned my coat, pulled down my hat and went for my Buick. I had a pocketful of dollars, a case to work on and a dead parrot for backup. That was enough to keep my mind off the war for a few hours.

My first stop was Max Gelhorn’s office on Sunset. It was a thin, undernourished office building huddled between a one-story short-order diner with a 25-cent breakfast special and a bar with brown windows that advertised Eastside Beer and Ale.

Gelhorn’s office was an elevator ride to the third floor and a walk down an uncarpeted corridor. A chunky girl with a cold sat behind the reception desk. She wore a blue suit. Behind her I could see Gelhorn’s open office. The operation was as small as it could be. Gelhorn Productions was not in the bucks.

“I’m here to see Max Gelhorn,” I said, looking around with as much superiority as I could master.

“He is on location,” she sniffled.

“Location?”

“He is shooting a Western movie,” she explained. “For PRC.”

“And where might this location be?” I asked.

She groped for a fresh Kleenex just in time to keep from offending me. “Not at liberty to say,” she said.

“My name is Fligdish, from the Fourth Commercial Bank of New York City,” I said sweetly. “If Mr. Gelhorn wants to talk about refinancing
High Midnight
, it will be today or not at all. I have other appointments and a plane to catch this evening.” I looked at my father’s watch with impatience. It told me it was half past five. I moved it slightly and I saw that the no-longer-attached hour hand spun around when I jiggled it.

“Burbank,” she said, scribbling a street-corner address on a pad and tearing the paper off to hand to me.

“Thank you,” I said. “Take care of that cold.”

“How?” she said miserably as I left the office.

The odds were pretty good that one of the four people Shelly had interviewed was behind the man-who-looked-like-a-brick. They were the people who knew he/I/someone was on the case. I had nothing else to go on, anyway. My engine was making a slight pinging sound that had in the past gradually become a forty-three-dollar symphony. Maybe I could finish this case before putting the car in dry dock.

I turned on the radio long enough to find that Dolph Camilli, the National League’s Most Valuable Player with 34 home runs and 120 runs batted in, had signed again with the Brooklyn Dodgers for $20,000. I was too old to become a baseball player and too homely to be a movie star.

The street corner in Burbank was behind a factory. The street corner was actually a huge vacant lot leading up to a hill with a few trees on it. The hill went up sharply to about the height of a three-story building. Plunked in the middle of this vacant lot were four horses, a half-dozen guys with cowboy outfits, a man with a camera and an assortment of other people shivering in a small circle next to a wooden shack, which was being moved around by a thin girl and two guys in sweaters.