Murder on the Yellow Brick Road (4 page)

When Hoff and I got to the Oz set we walked in slowly like a camera dollying in to the center of a Busby Berkeley musical number. Three people stood looking down at the dead Munchkin, who had not moved nor been moved. Two of them, Seidman and my brother, wore badly rumpled suits. The third guy was a big, bald uniformed cop I recognized as Rashkow. Rashkow was only in his twenties, but heredity and my brother had robbed him of most of his hair. Seidman turned to me and Hoff with a sour look I recognized. Seidman was thin and white faced. He hated the sunlight. Phil just looked at the corpse with anger as if the little man had purposely conspired to ruin his day. For Phil, Los Angeles was strewn with corpses whose sole job was to complicate his life and make it miserable. He hated corpses. He'd even kicked one in anger once, according to Seidman. He hated murderers even more. The only thing he hated more than corpses and murderers was me.

Phil was a little taller than me, broader, older with close-cut steely hair and a hard cop's gut. His tie always dangled loosely around his neck, and his face frequently turned red with contained rage, especially when I was present. M.G.M. had certainly picked the right guy to calm him down. By the time Hoff and I were within five feet, Phil's lower lip was out and his head was gently shaking up and down like a bull building up for a charge.

Seidman pulled out a notebook. I nodded to him and to Rashkow, who was afraid to smile.

“Toby,” Phil began plunging his hands into his pants pockets to keep them calm, “I'm going to ask you questions, and you are going to answer without jokes. Then you are going to get your ass out of here. You understand?”

I understood and said so. I was determined to keep from irritating him.

“Who found the body?”

“I did,” I said. Hoff twitched next to me.

“Who's he?” Phil asked nodding at Hoff, “and what's up his ass?”

“His name is Hoff,” I said. “He's an assistant vice president for publicity. I was supposed to meet him here about working as a bodyguard for a premiere when I stumbled on the body.”

“I see,” said Phil starting to walk in a small circle on the yellow brick road. “You were meeting on this set instead of in his office because it's more comfortable and convenient here.”

“He wanted to keep our meeting secret,” I said slowly, “because the star I was assigned to doesn't like protection.”

“That right Hoff?” Phil said moving no more than two inches from Hoff. Sweat popped out of Hoff's pores.

“That's right,” said Hoff softly

“It's bullshit,” Phil shouted in Hoff's face. The shout had enough impact to send Hoff staggering back a few feet with numbed ear drums. “What's going on here? Who killed the little turd?”

“Phil, we don't know,” I said with my hands coming open and palms up. “I just stumbled on the body.”

“Who is he, the dead midget?”

“They like to be called little people,” I corrected.

“He doesn't give a shit what we call him,” Phil shouted. “Who is he?”

Everyone looked at Hoff.

“I don't know,” he said. “There were a few hundred little people on the picture. He might not even be one of them.”

“Well,” sighed Phil putting his hand on Hoff's shoulder, “do you think you could get someone in here to identify him? And then can you round up anyone who has been in this building in the last twenty four hours and will admit it?”

Hoff said he could, and Phil told Rashkow to call for someone from the Coroner's office. I thought of the Coroner from Munchkin City who had certified the death of the first wicked witch. He had stood right about where Phil was standing.

“What was the dead midget doing in here?” Phil asked Hoff. “And why is he wearing that costume?”

“We don't know what he was doing in here and why he was wearing his costume,” answered Hoff. Phil looked at Hoff as if he were useless, and Hoff reached for a Spud. Seidman got Hoff's office number and sent him on his way to get possible witnesses. Seidman and Rashkow began to look around the set and Phil turned his back on me and walked over to the waterless Munchkin City fountain where he sat looking dyspeptically at the corpse and the set. He took a white tablet out of his pocket and popped it into his mouth. He chewed it furiously. Little pieces of it spat out when I approached him and sat down.

“You're a goddamn liar,” he said chewing away.

I shrugged.

“Phil, can you think about keeping this quiet for a while?”

He stopped chewing and looked at me blankly. I waited for the blank look to turn to rage and expected his thick hand to catch me before I could move away, but the look turned to a smile and then a laugh. Both Seidman and Rashkow stopped to see what had happened. Phil almost choked with maniacal laughter. In the midst of his laughter, he grabbed my collar and stood up. Our noses were almost touching when he spoke.

“Toby, I've messed you before and I'll do it again. You're covering and you're trying to use me. You didn't have to call me for this. Don't use me, brother, I don't like it, and don't play me for a fool. Don't mistake a bad temper for stupidity. You've done that a few times in the past and what did it get you?”

“This nose,” I said. He liked the answer and let me go.

“You covering for somebody?” He said sitting again.

“No,” I said trying to unwrinkle my shirt. “But bad publicity on this thing could ruin the image of the picture, cause the studio trouble. No one's asking you not to investigate, not to do everything. You let this out and the newspapers will be driving you crazy too. They'll be on your back. You want that?”

“You're concerned about me,” he said. “I'm touched.”

I hadn't expected my argument to do any good. My next move was going to be to suggest he talk to Mayer. Maybe Mayer's double talk, power and sincerity would get to Phil, though I doubted it.

“I'll think about it,” he said.

I almost fell in the dry fountain in surprise. He looked away from me.

“You know you've got two nephews Toby,” he whispered angrily, “and one of them, Davey, the older boy.…”

“I know. Davey's your older boy,” I said. He gave me a look of contempt and I suddenly had the image of Davey and Nate, his kids, pounding on each other the way Phil and I had.

“Davey just got out of the hospital,” Phil went on. “It was close.”

I knew that too, and he knew I knew, but I kept my mouth shut. Phil's wife, Ruth, had told me once that Phil was a good father. I wasn't sure what that meant. He certainly wasn't like my father.

“In their room,” said Phil, “the kids have a poster from the movie. They saw it five times. I don't want to be the one who tears down that poster.”

“Thanks Phil. I.…”

He turned boiling slowly.

“I didn't say I wouldn't do it,” he explained. “I said I don't want to, and you have nothing to thank me for. I never wanted your thanks or asked for it.”

That was true. I shut up. It surprised me how closely Phil's and Mayer's philosophy were to each other. Phil said I could go after I gave a statement to Seidman, which I did. Seidman also gave me a statement. Phil owed a lot of money to the hospital. Ruth was blaming him for not being around enough. It was what cop's wives did. It was their duty to complain. Eventually, it was their duty to stop complaining or walk out. My wife walked out. I didn't think Ruth would, but you never know.

Hoff wasn't in his office when I got there, but I left a message with his secretary that it looked as if I could keep the lid on for a few days. I gave her my office number and listened to her worry about Hoff for a few minutes before I escaped.

I eased my Buick into gear coaxing the pistons with sweet thoughts and made my way past the Japanese gardener and around an elephant being led by a girl with very little on besides a few spangles. At the gate I waved goodby to Buck McCarthy, who had his thumbs in his pockets cowboy style. It was my turn to drive off into the sunset, but it was only a little after noon.

I stopped at a Mexican place for three tacos and a Pepsi and headed back to my office.

3

Within two hours I had met a dead Munchkin, consoled Judy Garland, argued with Louis B. Mayer and got a job with M.G.M. It was the kind of news you ran home with to your wife, your mother and father or your dog. I didn't have any of them, but I did have Shelly Minck.

Shelly and I shared space in the Farraday Building on Hoover near Ninth. The Farraday had the eternal smell of Lysol to cover up the essence of derelict in the cracked tile hall. Sometimes the neighborhood bums slept it off under the stairs until the landlord, a gentle gorilla of a man named Jeremy Butler, plucked them up and deposited them in the back of the building. Butler had been a professional wrestler. Since he retired after investing in real estate, he had devoted himself to plucking bums from his lobbies and writing poetry. Some of Butler's poems had actually been published in little magazines with names like Illiad Now and Big Bay Review.

Butler was in the lobby plucking a bum when I arrived. He nodded to me and headed to the rear of the building. His footsteps echoed away and I felt at home as I went up the stairs. There was an elevator, but a crippled spinster on relief could beat it to the fourth floor without even trying.

I hiked up the stairway past three floors of offices belonging to disbarred lawyers, bookies, second-rate doctors, pornographic book publishers and baby photographers. Far behind I could hear Gorilla Butler dumping the bum and closing the fire door.

Chipped letters on the pebbled glass door to my office read:

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

Dentist

Toby Peters

Private Investigator

I opened the door and carefully avoided the pile of outdated magazines on the table in the alcove we called a waiting room. The waiting room had two chairs that had come with the place before Shelly moved in. One of the chairs had once been covered with leather. Someone had knocked over the room's lone ash tray. The alcove wall was decorated with an ancient drawing from a dental supply company showing what various gum diseases look like.

I pushed open the inner door and entered the office of Dr. Minck. Clients for me had to pass through his office where he was often working on a neighborhood bum or a raggedy kid. I had rented the office space from Shelly after I did a small job for him. We got along, and he let me pay what I could afford, almost nothing.

Shelly had a stubbly faced bum in the chair. The bum looked like a startled old bird. No, he looked like Water Brennan imitating a startled bird.

Shelly – short, fat, in his fifties and desperately myopic – was humming and puffing on his everpresent cigar while he tried to read the label of a small bottle over the rim of his thick glasses. When he heard me, Shelly turned and nodded a greeting with his cigar. He was, as always, wearing a once white smock which had stains of both blood and jelly on it. Shelly didn't introduce me to his patient. Walter Brennan just popped his eyes open and darted them between me and his dentist. I couldn't see a tooth in the guy's head.

“Any calls?” I said.

“No calls, some mail,” replied Shelly satisfied with the label on the bottle. He turned to his patient and patted his head reassuringly with the same hand in which he held his cigar.

“Mr. Strange here and I are engaged in a mission of mercy,” Shelly said plunging a hypodermic into the bottle in his hand. Reddish liquid burbled into the syringe. Shelly pointed to the old man's mouth with the needle. “Mr. Strange has a toothache. We know exactly which tooth it is because Mr. Strange has only one tooth. That right Mr. Strange?”

Mr. Strange gave a birdlike nod of agreement. He was petrified with fear but Shelly didn't seem to notice.

“We are going to save that tooth, aren't we Mr. Strange? We are going to perform something called a root canal. We are going to do it because one tooth is better than no teeth and because I have not performed a root canal in some time, and I need the practice. Now open up Mr. Strange.”

Shelly shifted the cigar in his mouth and forced the old man's mouth open with his strong, sweaty fingers. The hypo plunged in and the old man gurgled.

“That'll kill the pain,” whispered Shelly. “Now we'll just let that go to work for a little while.”

While we were waiting for the shot to work on Walter Brennan, I told Shelly about my morning at Metro. He listened while he groped around for an instrument he wanted. He found it underneath some coffee cups in a corner. Then he went to work on the old man. Above the sound of the drill he said, ‘I worked on a midget once. Little tiny teeth, but the roots on 'em. That little cocker had roots like steel. Two extractions on that midget were harder than a mouthful of root canals. Try to hold still, Mr. Strange. This will only take twenty or thirty minutes.”

Having failed to impress what passed for my only friend, I went into my office. I'd save the story of encounters with the great and near great for my date next week with Carmen.

My office had once been a dental room. It was just big enough for my battered desk and a couple of chairs. The walls were bare except for a framed copy of my private investigator's certificate and a photograph of my father, my brother Phil and our beagle dog Kaiser Wilhelm. The ten-year-old kid in the picture didn't look like me. His nose was straight. He was smiling and holding onto the dog's collar. The fourteen-year-old looked like Phil, with the dark scowl, the tension. The tall, heavy man in the picture had one hand on each kid's shoulder.

There wasn't much mail on the desk. Someone in Leavenworth, Kansas wanted to send me a catalogue of tricks and novelties for a dollar. A client named Merle Levine who had lost her cat wanted me to return the ten dollar advance she had given me. The case was two years old. I hadn't found the cat. I hadn't really looked. Two brothers named Santini on Sepulveda wanted to paint my home or office for a ridiculously low price.