Smart Moves (12 page)

“Don’t suppose I’m going to die or anything like that,” he said.

“Not a chance,” I assured him. “Doctors say you’re going to be fine.”

His head shook no and he smiled knowingly. “You don’t survive a bullet in the brain,” he said wisely.

“You weren’t shot in the brain. You were shot in the heart.”

“The Tin Man didn’t have a heart and he lived,” Albanese said knowingly as he started to fade out.

“The Wizard gave him one,” I reminded him.

“And then he wept and felt pain. Is that a blessing?”

“I don’t know. Alex, where was that warehouse where you did the movie,
Axes to the Axis
, Columbia? Povey directed. It’s time. I’ve got lives to save. Describe the men who worked with him. Give me something.”

“Pink gardenias under us,” he said, grinning and looking at the painting on the wall across from him. The flowers weren’t pink and they weren’t gardenias. “We walked on pink gardenias,” he muttered on. “Augustus Mutt and Jeff and Povey and I and we made a movie. Not a masterpiece, mind you, but a start. I’d really like to see that movie. But more than that, I’d like a drink of …”

And then he fell asleep. The door behind me started to open and I grabbed the towel from the table.

“What are you doing in here?” said a woman behind me.

“Laundry service,” I said, pulling my notebook out, looking at the towel, and making a squiggle of gibberish in the spiral-bound ragged-edged notebook that had only a dozen pages left. “Lots of complaints from day shift about the condition of towels, bedding, you name it.” I turned to face the woman. She was a nurse, blonde, hair up, all in white, young, pretty, and disbelieving.

“Laundry,” she said. “What laundry?”

“Hospital laundry,” I said, holding up the towel. “Look at this. Holes, fringes that look like Christmas scarves. No wonder the day shift complained, but look at it from our side. Materials hard to get with everything going to the military. Good help hard to get. Trucks break down and are there parts, even service personnel?”

The nurse walked past me to Albanese, leaned over him, checked his pulse, felt his head, listened to his heart with a stethoscope, and turned to me. “I don’t know how you got in here but this man is very ill. He just came up from surgery,” she said, taking my arm and leading me to the door, towel still in my hand.

“I didn’t know,” I said. “Doctor Hodgdson said it would be all right to do my survey quietly.”

We moved into the hall and she looked in both directions for help. She wasn’t buying my laundry tale. I tried another one. I dropped my voice and reached into my pocket for my wallet, letting my holster show.

“Nurse, you’re drawing attention to us and I’d rather you not do that. I’m Agent Archer of the Federal Bureau of Investigation. The man in there, Mr. Albanese, has been shot, possibly by a representative of the German government. My job is to keep a discreet eye on him.” I flashed my Dick Tracy badge, the one my nephew Nate had given me and which I kept pinned inside my limp wallet. I didn’t let her get a good look at it before I stuffed it back in my pocket and looked both ways to emphasize the importance of secrecy and my mission.

“Just come with me,” she said.

Normally, I would have been happy to. Her skin was clear, her eyes a deep, dark brown, and the scent of something sweet fought to overcome hospital antiseptic and iodine.

“I’d rather not …” I began, and then was saved by a quivering voice from a nearby room, the door of which was partly open.

“Bedpan,” the voice, male or female, I couldn’t tell which, croaked out in urgency. “Quick. Bedpan,” the voice repeated.

“Bedpan,” I said. “I’ll wait here.”

The unnamed nurse with the strong grip and smooth skin let me go and hurried toward the open door. As soon as she entered, I tore down the hall to the first door marked
EXIT.
I was back on the street a few minutes later, massaging my neck, which was getting more sore by the minute, reminding me of Povey. I hailed a cab in front of the hospital and got in. “Taft Hotel,” I said, “and I’ve got two questions.”

The cabbie pulled into traffic. But it was late and there wasn’t much in the way of traffic

“Ask away,” the cabbie said, tilting his cap back, ready to give out with New York wisdom.

“What time is it?” I asked.

“Ten to ten. Next question.”

“What do you think of pink gardenias?”

“They look terrific with burgundy roses. Who’re you kidding here, Jack? There ain’t any such a thing as pink gardenias. I ought to know, I’m from Brooklyn.”

Since the matter was now settled, I sat back and watched as another New York cabbie made a valiant attempt to kill himself and me and failed. When we got to the Taft, I gave him a fifty-cent tip for his noble effort. This time Carmichael was in the lobby, but he didn’t see me before I spotted him. Using a convoy of businessmen, a flotilla of retired couples out on the town, and a squad of assorted drunks arguing about who would treat whom to drinks, I made it to the elevator and plastered myself against the rear wall, willing the doors to close. “I’m in a hurry,” I told the operator. She turned and looked at me as if I were a modern painting. “Nausea,” I said.

She closed the elevator doors just as Carmichael, the house dick, decided to scan the neighborhood. His eyes fell on me as the doors closed. My last glimpse was of him striding toward me with a smile I didn’t like.

“Floor?” she asked, looking back at me over her glasses.

“Fourteen,” I said.

She sped up to fourteen and I got out. She was closing the doors even before I cleared them. I went for the exit and down the stairs fast to the twelfth floor. If Carmichael checked with the elevator operator, she’d tell him I got off at fourteen. Carmichael might believe I was stupid and somewhere on fourteen. Or he might be stupid and think I was on fourteen. More likely he would think I got off on fourteen and went up and down within three floors. He’d peg me between eleven and sixteen, which would be right but wouldn’t help him much in finding me. This was the fun part. I knocked at the door to 1234 and got no answer. I used my key and went in. The room was dark. I closed the door behind me and went for the table lamp. Before I turned it on I knew someone was in the bed. This time it wasn’t Shelly.

“Pauline.”

“In the flesh,” she said. And she was.

Half an hour later we were lying in bed and she started to tell me her life story. It was the price I was expected to pay.

“I was born in Queens,” she began, propped up on one elbow and watching my face to be sure I didn’t doze off. “My father worked for the dairy.” Twenty minutes later she was at the point in her tale when Mary Louise was nineteen and got her first job at a plier factory. I was denied the dramatic conclusion of her tale by the turning of a key in the door and the sudden appearance of Sheldon Minck, Doctor of Dental Surgery, carrying a huge and apparently heavy paper bag.

“Don’t explain,” he said, putting the bag down on the dresser and adjusting his glasses. “You couldn’t get back for dinner. It happens. You could have picked up the phone, but what the hell, you were busy, right? Spies, murders. I’ve got a generous heart, Toby. You know that. I can prove it.”

He reached into the bag and pulled out a bottle. “Trommer’s White Label Malt beer,” he said triumphantly. “No deposit bottles. Can you imagine that? Just throw them away. You’d think shortages of everything, they’d want bottles back.”

Shelly glanced at me, adjusted his glasses, and waddled into the bathroom in search of glasses. Out of sight he let out a gurgle and rushed back into the room.

“Toby,” he said, pointing at Pauline. “There’s a woman in the bed.”

“A woman?” I said, looking around and pulling the blanket up to cover my hairy chest. “Where?”

“Cut it out,” he said. “What’s going on here? What are you two doing?”

“Shell,” I said, “I know life is not always intimate between you and Mildred, but you must have some idea of what we’re doing.”

Pauline let out a nervous giggle next to me and said, “I’m so embarrassed.”

“Bare-assed is right,” Shelly fumed, adjusting and readjusting his glasses. He put the beer bottle down, picked it up again. “You might have told me.”

“I’m sorry, Shell,” I said. “This is Pauline, a hotel switchboard operator.”

Shelly’s mouth fell open. “You mean all you have to do is pick up the phone and you get the operator …”

“No,” Pauline shrieked, and giggled again. “This is embarrassing.”

“I’ll tell you what,” I said. “We’ll all get dressed and have a beer or two and talk, get to be real friends.”

“I’m already dressed,” Shelly said, looking at himself to be sure, then checking the mirror to be doubly sure. “I’m dressed.”

“Good,” I said. “Then why don’t you take the newspaper into the bathroom till we get dressed?”

He grabbed the newspaper and a beer and went into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. Pauline and I dressed to the accompaniment of Shelly’s grumbling. Her dress was a dark thing with flowers on it.

“Pink gardenias,” I said, remembering Alex’s words. “You ever heard of pink gardenias?”

“No,” Pauline said, checking her hair and makeup in the mirror. “Just one Pink Gardenia.”

I had one button done on my shirt when she said it. I stopped. “What Pink Gardenia?”

“Somewhere on Second Avenue,” she said. “A nightclub. My mother and I went there when Angela Falzano, one of the operators, got engaged last year.”

I tool the three steps to her, turned her around, and gave her a big, moist kiss. The bathroom door opened and Shelly emerged, holding the
Times
open to the crossword puzzle. “What’s the liquid part of fat? Five letters.”

I moved away from Pauline with a grin.

“Let’s all have a beer,” I said. “No deposit. We can break the bottles in the fireplace when we’re done.”

“There isn’t any fireplace,” Shelly said, looking around.

“Then we’ll break them in the bathtub,” I said.

“Like hell you will,” screamed Shelly. “Like hell he will,” he told Pauline. “I’m not picking glass slivers out of my … Like hell.”

We each had a couple of beers and Pauline kept threatening to tell her life story to both of us, but she had not reckoned with Dentist Sheldon Minck, who, when fortified with three beers, waxed eloquent on the joys of reconstructing a ravaged mouth and the possibilities of money to be made in artificial teeth. Fascinated as she was, Pauline glanced at her watch and said she had to get back to work. “Almost forgot,” she said, snapping her fingers. “That man you were looking for, the one with the short white hair, foreign accent. He’s in nine-oh-nine. I asked around.”

I almost said, “I love you,” when she threw me a kiss and went through the door, but I didn’t love her and she didn’t love me. We were good for maybe one or two more times together before we started to know each other, and things turned personal and started going sour. It was me, I knew. It happened every time, though there hadn’t been that many times. The worst and longest was with my ex-wife Anne. Then, once, there had been a 21 roller named Merle in Chicago. That had ended before we could get into trouble.

“We’ve got business, Shell,” I said. “Get your coat on.”

“Great,” he yelped. “Albanese?”

“No, he’s in the hospital, shot. Almost killed. We’re going after the guy who did it.”

“I’ve had a big day,” Shelly said suddenly. “I think I’ll just …”

“Sheldon, adventure awaits,” I said, lifting him from the bed on which he had plopped.

Three minutes later we were going down the service elevator to the ninth floor, in search of Gurko Povey.

9

Sheldon Minck was dancing backward down the ninth-floor corridor, adjusting his glasses, starting to sweat, and whispering louder than most humans shout. He slid in front of me but I kept walking. Shelly groaned and whispered, “Let’s call the police, the FBI, the house detective. Toby, this is not reasonable. Its not … not safe. We … you said this guy’s a killer.”

“Gun and all,” I agreed, looking for 909.

“Do you know what a bullet can do to teeth? I’ve seen it.”

“Maybe he won’t shoot you in the face,” I pointed out, turning a corner as Shelly almost plopped.

“Teeth are the symbol of life,” Shelly hissed urgently, gamboling in reverse like an overripe casaba melon. “Teeth are the symbol of each of our beings, a microcosm, rough and white on the outside, sensitive on the inside. Vulnerable, Toby. If you don’t take care of them, they wear away. If you shoot them, they die. I have a fear of someone shooting me in the teeth, you know that?”

“If I didn’t know it before, I’ve got it now,” I said. “Don’t let Povey know. He might aim for your dentures, just to have a little fun.”

A door opened behind Shelly and a couple of women stepped out. Shelly, walking backward, collided with one of them, shrieked, and fell. The woman hopped out of the way. The women looked like ancient twins from Iowa. They were both small, thin, and wore identical black hats. “What are you doing?” scolded the one who hadn’t encountered Shelly’s rear. “Are you drunk?”

“He’s a dentist,” I explained softly, looking down the hall toward where I imagined 909 must be.

“That explains nothing,” said the woman.

Shelly picked himself up, using the wall for support, and smiled limply. “I’m sorry,” he said. “We were discussing survival and I didn’t …”

The women wanted no more of New York revelers. They strode with dignity down the hall, arm in arm, back to Dubuque or Muscatine or over to the Alvin Theater to see Gertrude Lawrence in
Lady in the Dark
. I pointed over Shelly’s shoulder and he turned with a gasp, expecting to see a white-haired Hungarian aiming at his teeth.

“What? What?” he cried.

“Nine-oh-nine,” I whispered.

“You’re crazy,” he bleated.

“No, that’s nine-oh-nine,” I said.

“I mean you’re crazy to do this. I’m leaving. I’ve got my practice, Mildred …”

“Mildred ran away with the milkman,” I said.

“Stop that!” Shelly nearly wept. “I …”

Before he could say anything more, I had my .38 out and my finger to my lips to signal the trembling dentist to be quiet. He wasn’t quite quiet, but the weak whimper was close enough. I knocked at the door to 909. No answer.