Smart Moves (18 page)

“It was him,” Shelly shouted, his glasses dangling dangerously from one ear. He was squinting blindly in my direction and pointing at me.

“Shell,” I said gently. “We’re alone. You’re safe. You don’t have to go Quisling on me.”

Shelly groped wildly for his glasses, eventually found them on his ear, and put them in front of his eyes where they might do him some good.

“God
damn
, Toby. God
damn
,” he said, almost focusing on me as I folded my arms and leaned back against the dresser. “I can’t forgive you.”

“For what?” I asked.

“For … he asks me ‘For what?’” Shelly said, shaking his head. “You almost got me killed last night. I’m here for a dental meeting. I’m a dentist.”

“There are those who would dispute that claim,” I said soberly.

“There are, are there?” Shelly said, struggling to roll over. “I’ve got some evidence here, right here.” He scooped up some brochures from my bed and shook them in my direction like legal documents. “I haven’t been wasting my time here. I haven’t been wasting my money.”

“Mildred’s money.”

“Mildred’s and my money,” he said, his fingers clutching the pamphlets to his chest. The slick sheet visible to me carried a picture of a giant tooth, a giant blue tooth. “Listen,” he went on, searching furiously through the literature for some proof of his professional skill. “Why do teeth have to be white?”

“Most of them aren’t,” I said. “Most of the people I know have no teeth, yellow teeth, or false teeth.”

Shelly wasn’t looking at me or even listening. He threw paper around, searching for written support. “Gold teeth, silver teeth,” he said. “Dr. McGraw-Osborn of Denver says that teeth can be healthy and any color. Women paint their eyes, their nails, color their hair. Why not their teeth? Do you know what it would mean if people began coloring their teeth with McGraw-Osborn’s new process?”

“It would solve most of the world’s problems and end the war?” I guessed.

“No, no, no, no,” Shelly said, shaking his head. “It would make me rich. I’d have the exclusive rights to the process for California, Oregon, and the state of Washington. I’d even get Guatemala free.”

“Shell, Povey tried to shoot me today. He almost tore my arm off and Einstein cracked his skull with an anchor,” I said wearily.

“Yourself,” Shelly said, throwing down his papers in disgust and adjusting his glasses. ‘You only think about yourself. I’m talking about a great new scientific discovery that could make me rich, change the way people look.”

“I’ll tell Einstein about it,” I said. “People with rainbow smiles.”

“No,” Shelly said in disgust. “This is no joke. It would just be a few teeth here and there, a single color, like beauty marks. You’ve got to have imagination, Toby.”

“And enough bucks to pay Dr. Dan McGraw for the right to peddle green mouths in California,” I said.

“Dr. McGraw-Osborn,” he corrected me.

“I wish you luck, Shell. Right now I’ve got to wash up, change clothes, and find Paul Robeson.”

“You’re going to a play?” Shelly said. “Why didn’t you say so? I could use a play. How about that Danny Kaye …”

“Robeson,” I said. “
Othello
.” I pulled a pair of almost clean underwear from my suitcase, selected a shirt I had only worn once and which had enough of a button left on the left sleeve to fake respectability, and moved to the bathroom.

“George Bernard Shaw,” Shelly guessed.

“Shakespeare,” I corrected.

“Right, Shakespeare,” Shelly said with a laugh. “I knew that. Just slipped my mind. You want to see Shakespeare?”

“Right,” I said, going into the bathroom and closing the door on him.

“Shakespeare isn’t in English,” he shouted. “Let’s just get a couple of beers and see Danny Kaye or something with girls in it.”

“I think there’s a dentist in
Othello
,” I said, turning on the bath full force. Shelly said something, I don’t know what. I thought the words “pastel dentures” were part of it. I didn’t care. He’d be there when I got out. We’d get a Pepsi or a beer and have a pastrami sandwich, and then before the night was over I’d arrange another chance to get us killed and we’d find ourselves a dead body. But I didn’t know that at the moment. I climbed into the tub and felt the heat, the steam, and the beat. I sang what I thought was Glen Miller’s arrangement of “Little Brown Jug” and closed my eyes.

12

Before we left the room I tried out my Lionel Barrymore voice. I thought it was passable. Shelly thought I sounded like Horace Horsecollar in the Disney cartoons. I needed a voice, because I wanted to use the phone and I didn’t want Pauline to trap me in conversation if she happened to be on duty. With my Barrymore rejected, I could have gone with Mickey Mouse, but I’m not sure Mickey Mouse would have gotten the information I needed. I let Shelly call Bellevue Hospital and ask: (a) “What is the condition of a patient named Alex Albanese?” and (b) “Could I speak to the man guarding Albanese’s door?”

The answer to the first question was “satisfactory.” The answer to the second question was, “There’s nobody guarding the door. Should there be?”

Shelly hung up and I considered the possibilities. First, there was someone on the door but the nursing station had been told to say there wasn’t. Second, there was someone watching the room at the hospital but they were doing it secretly, using Albanese as bait. Third, there wasn’t anyone guarding Albanese. I shared my thoughts and concerns with Shelly, who wanted to know where we were eating. I told him we’d see when we got there and led the way out of the room, after checking the telephone book for the address of the nearest costume rental shop.

“Vibration alignment,” Shelly said as we rode down the elevator. “When you think of the future of oral health, of a decent appearance for the mouths of millions of slightly deformed Americans, you have to consider the possibility of vibration alignment.”

The woman operating the elevator, and the old man who was the only other passenger, looked at the rotund dentist in momentary panic to see if he was talking about some malfunction in the elevator.

“It’s a new process,” Shelly went on whispering to me, loudly enough to be picked up by German submarines within fifty miles of the Atlantic shoreline. “I saw a demonstration of it this afternoon at the convention. A doctor named Max Collins from Iowa figured it out from the latest experiments in military medicine. You put this kind of thing …” Shelly pushed his glasses back and manipulated his hands to give me the general outline of the “thing,” which must have looked something like a giant piece of popcorn. “You put this kind of thing on the patient’s teeth, attach it to this electric-machine thing, and press the button. The machine vibrates the teeth into proper alignment.”

“Isn’t it a little dangerous, Shell?” I asked. The old man shook his head in agreement over my concern.

“Sure, a little,” agreed Shelly, “but the dentist wears special gloves and gets the hell out of the room when the vibrator is on.”

“So the dentist is safe,” I said.

“Right,” Shelly beamed.

“And you saw this thing straighten someone’s teeth?” the elevator operator said, turning to us with disbelief.

“A demonstration,” Shelly said. “On a dummy. The teeth were every which way and then the vibrator was turned on and they went straight.”

“I’m convinced,” I said.

The elevator door opened on the first floor and Shelly followed me out, saying, “Good. You have that space between your teeth that …”

Two things stopped the conversation. First, I handed Shelly the check Einstein had given me, complete with my endorsement, and told him to go cash it at the hotel desk since he was registered and I wasn’t. He went, vowing to return to the subject of vibration alignment, which I liked even less than rainbow teeth. Second, Carmichael spotted me and approached on little flat feet.

“We had an agreement, me friend,” he said with a big fake smile.

“Your Irish accent is back,” I noted.

“People might be listening to us,” he said, smile frozen, looking around at the people who passed us and paid no attention.

“Carmichael, you issued an order. I am not registered in the hotel. I’m here to meet a friend who’s here for a dental convention. We’re going to have dinner, take in a show.”

“A friend?” Carmichael asked. “And where might this friend be at the moment?”

At that moment Shelly returned, examined Carmichael through his thick lenses, and handed me a hundred dollars in fives and tens.

“Dr. Minck, this is Mr. Carmichael,” I said.

Neither man put out a hand.

“You’re really a doctor?” Carmichael asked.

“Are you really from Ireland?” I asked.

“I’ll not be grinning from ear to ear in a second if you keep up this banter,” whispered Carmichael. Then to Shelly, “Your friend here says you’re here for a convention. You mind telling me a bit about the convention?”

“Mind?” I said. “It’s what keeps him alive.”

Shelly launched into the alignment vibrator, the chocolate teeth, and a few other crackpot gimmicks he had been saving for dinner. It took about three minutes for Carmichael to declare defeat and make an excuse to flee.

“Very interesting, Doc,” he said, “but I’ve got me rounds to make. I’d appreciate it if you kept your friend as far from me hotel as you can. Have a good visit to our fair city.” And Carmichael beat a retreat as Shelly, mouth open, told me that the man was “rude.”

“I wasn’t finished telling him about the multi-extractor,” Shelly said. “Why did he ask if he wasn’t interested? And how could anyone help but be interested once they heard about these things? I tell you, Toby, we are on the edge of an oral revolution.”

“Let’s try not to fall in,” I said and hustled him out into the street.

The night was clear and a little cool. No sign of rain. We walked and Shelly talked. The only thing worthwhile he told me was that there had been an announcement at his meeting that the government was changing its mind about requiring people to turn in used toothpaste tubes before they could get new full ones. They were, however, considering putting a two-cent deposit on the tubes.

“I’m glad to hear that, Shell. Now you don’t have to stock up on black-market toothpaste for Mildred.”

“No,” he beamed. “I’ve already bought some special New York presents for Mildred. She’ll love ’em. I got here a set of those new plastic ice cubes trays. A buck ninety-five each.”

“Sounds like the perfect gift,” I said, stopping to look in the window of a tie store. Shelly came to my side and looked at the red piece of cloth in the window.

“What’re you looking at?” he said. “That tie?”

“No,” I said calmly. “I’m looking at the reflection in the window of the guy who’s been following us since we left the hotel.”

Shelly started to turn his head, as I knew he would, but I was ready for him. I reached out, found his neck with my fingers, and directed his gaze into the window.

“There, next to the tie, to the left,” I said.

The follower wore a hat that covered his eyes and a coat much too heavy for the weather.

“Toby, I just want dinner and a show,” Shelly said as I steered him into a nearby store. “No more guns, no more shooting, no more crazy people.”

Leone’s Costume Rentals was a long, lean, unimpressive store from the outside. Just a door, a small window, and chipped gold lettering on the window. We were the only customers, at least the only ones I could see. The shop stretched back into darkness. I looked out the window for the guy in the coat and hat but didn’t spot him.

“What’re we doing here?” Shelly asked. “I thought we were getting something to eat and going to a show.”

“How’d you like to meet Albert Einstein?” I asked. “How’d you like to see him give a concert?”

“Concert? He does science stuff,” said Shelly, shaking his head and curling his lower lip up as he bent to examine the assortment of fake mustaches in a glass case in front of him.

“He plays a violin, too,” I said. “You want to meet him or not?”

“Sure,” Shelly said, touching his upper lip where a mustache that would make him look like a cartoon walrus could go. “If it doesn’t get me killed.”

“Then we need tuxedos. The concert’s tomorrow. Einstein’s paying.”

Shelly shrugged and reached over the counter to find some way of getting at the mustaches.

“You want to get your wrist wrung?” came a voice from the darkness at the rear of the store.

Shelly’s hand shot back as we watched a woman step out into the shade. The only light inside the shop came from the single murky window and a pair of low-watt bulbs high above us. From twenty feet away the woman looked like Barbara Stanwyck. Up close, her grey-black hair and sagging dress suggested Florence Bates.

“Nice costumes,” Shelly said, nervous about being caught with his hand almost in the mustache jar.

“Which one?” she asked.

“Which one? The one you’re …” he began.

“We need tuxedos,” I cut in. “One for him, one for me. Both by tomorrow morning. Can you do it?”

The woman brushed back her mop of hair, which flopped forward again, and looked out the window for some source of energy to sustain her against the out-of-town likes of someone like me. “Barrymore once gave me three hours to find an alligator suit,” she said, turning back to me.

“John or Lionel?” I asked.

“Ethel,” the woman said. “Two hours to come up with six cyclops masks for Belasco. And Helen Hayes one time had less than twenty minutes to replace a Civil War nurse’s uniform that had been stolen. I satisfied Barrymore, Belasco, and Hayes. I can certainly come up with two tuxes in twenty-four hours, even if one is odd size.”

The “odd size” comment was for Shelly. He adjusted his glasses and said nothing.

“It won’t be cheap,” she said, trying again to keep her hair from blinding her. “Twenty bucks for the two of you. All of it in advance.”

I took out my wallet, handed her two tens, and waited while she scrawled a receipt.

“You want to get our measurements?” I asked, pocketing the receipt.

She laughed and shook her head at my foolishness. “You know how long I’ve been doing this kind of work?” she asked. “Do you know who my first customer was?”