Smart Moves (8 page)

“He’s coming,” I said.

She pulled away from me into the corner of her seat and looked at the stage. From the reaction in the crowd one might have expected the second coming of the Messiah. The girls stood up, hundreds of them, but Povey didn’t. I lost sight of him in the mob. In the noise he could have shot me with a machine gun and no one would have noticed or cared. I turned around, slouching to protect my back but not my head, and listened to Frank Sinatra sing “You’ll Never Know.” The kid next to me was crying. It was a religious experience. When a group in front of me parted for a second like the Red Sea, I caught a glimpse of Sinatra. He was wearing a grey suit with big shoulders. He looked skinny and the big bow tie on his neck made him look even skinnier. He held on to the microphone and sang, his eyes darting around at the wave of fluffy-sweatered response to each line. He looked as puzzled by the crowd as I was. Then the sea closed. I crouched and made my way down to the aisle, excusing himself as I went, catching knees in the face, clunks on the head, and comments like “Dirty old …,” “Some kind of …,” “Masher.” The girl who said “Masher” actually screamed it, but no one could hear her over the roar of applause and other shrieks as Frankie ended his song and said “Thank you.”

When I made it to the aisle, I stayed low. A few girls glanced at me but they weren’t going to miss a second of Frankie, who launched into “The Continental.” I scuttled to the back of the theater and stood up looking for the seat where Povey was sitting. In this game, I wanted to be behind him and I wanted him to know it. The problem was that I didn’t have a gun and I was sure that he did. I spotted his head of white hair when Sinatra finished his fifth song, thanked us all, and left the stage. The crowd called for him, screamed for him, wept for him, but Tommy Dorsey adjusted his glasses, cradled his trombone, and tried to explain that they had a schedule and two more shows to do that day. The girls were not sympathetic, but after a while they calmed down to whimpers. When Dorsey began to play, Povey turned and looked directly at me, no hesitation. I would have felt better if he had smiled. I would have felt angry, but he didn’t smile. He just stared at me unblinking. It scared hell out of me, but I smiled at him, turned, and went through the exit door as Buddy Rich went mad on the drums and distracted the female teen army.

It was raining on Times Square, raining and dark. Thunder clapped and I went over my choices. I could try to follow Povey, but he would be ready for that, probably even wanted it. I could get away from him if he was going to keep following me, that wouldn’t be a problem. Or I could hide in some doorway or alley and jump out at him and have it out in front of two or three thousand people running past in the downpour. None of the possibilities appealed to me. I decided to go get that shoulder holster and then have the meeting with Povey. I turned left instead of right in case Povey was not alone. Left took me away from the direction of the Taft. I ran down a street, I think it was Forty-fourth, and looked back over my shoulder. No one was following me. The rain had cleared the street of most pedestrians, though there were a few with umbrellas. No one was running behind me. I kept running and made another turn. The sky went mad and I ducked, soaking, into a small delicatessen.

The place was packed with people nibbling the minimum and waiting for the rain to let up. I spotted a stool open at the counter and went for it, just beating out a mailman who muttered something under his breath. I pretended not to hear him and straddled a stool that faced the door. There was no wall behind me but I wasn’t Wild Bill Hickok either.

“Shoot,” came a woman’s voice. I looked up at the scrawny waitress, who had her pencil and pad poised as she waited. I grabbed the menu and ordered the chopped liver on rye and a Pepsi.

“Check,” she said and shuffled away.

I watched the door, smelled the food and bodies seeping from the rain, and felt sleepy, but I had miles to go before I slept and a promise to keep. Besides, I was starting to get angry, damned angry. I was angry at the FBI for not helping me. I was angry at the Nazis for everything, and I was angry at myself for that moment of fear back at the Paramount. I wrapped it all together in my gut and got it ready as a present for Gurko Povey. When the sandwich came, I bolted it down fast, keeping my elbow in to avoid knocking over an asthmatic woman on my right and a short guy on my left who grunted every time he took a bite. The chopped liver was terrific. I ate it, my pickle, and all the fries, finished my Pepsi, burped appreciatively, and sloshed my way back to the street after paying my bill.

The rain had let up but somewhere over Jersey the thunder roared. The sky was still dark, maybe even darker. I trotted up Fifth Avenue and turned west again on Fiftieth. Thunder had decided on a return visit to Manhattan when I ducked under the Taft’s canopy and ran up the steps and into the lobby. I was breathing hard as I looked around for Povey. He wasn’t there. I went to the desk to check for messages. Sudsburry was on duty. We acted as if we didn’t know each other as he checked my box and handed me an envelope.

“Life gets tedious, don’t it,” I said.

“I wouldn’t know,” he said and turned to another customer.

I tore open the envelope and read:
TRY TO FORGIVE ME. PAULINE.
I stuffed the letter into my damp pocket and went for the elevator. I had a gun to get, an actor to meet, and a scientist to save. I felt like telling somebody but there wasn’t anybody to tell except the little woman operating the elevator. What the hell. Maybe this was a lifelong resident of the big city who would be happy to cluck a little sympathy for a visitor. The elevator came to a stop and the doors opened.

“You want to hear something?” I said to the woman as I stepped forward into the corridor.

“Sure,” she said, looking up at the flashing lights of her elevator panel, her yellow hair piled high and stiff, her dreams someplace else. “How about a few bars of something from
Die Fledermaus
?”

The doors closed and I was alone in the hall with the last echo of New York sarcasm to keep me company. I left a trail of wet prints on the way to my room. Thunder shook the building as I opened the door and stepped into the darkness. A crack of lightning turned the hotel across the street white for an instant, and I thought I saw or felt something in the room. The room went dark. I was a target against the hall light. I kicked the door shut and tried not to breathe. I thought I heard someone else breathing. It might have been someone in the next room or my own breath echoing from some corner. But it wasn’t, and I knew I didn’t have a chance in China of getting to the .38 in the ceiling light before Povey took target practice on my bouncing body. I sensed a figure on the bed. I didn’t have time to wait for my eyes to adjust. I took a chance—a step forward and a leap onto the bed. I felt flesh and smelled something like a men’s locker room.

The guy beneath me let out a yowl of pain and twisted to his right, breathing cigar-stale breath in my face. His elbow caught my jaw and I rolled onto the floor. He gurgled and went off the bed, but didn’t get more than a step away toward the door when I scrambled over the bed and caught him from behind. I had my right arm around his neck and a look of pure delight on my face, which I was happy no one could see. A look like that can get ten years at the coo-coo farm.

“No, no,” he cried, and recognition pulsed through me. I let him go and reached for the light switch. It clicked on.

“Shelly,” I said, looking at the crumpled, chubby figure on the floor. “What the hell are you doing here?”

“Being assaulted, assaulted,” he told the wall as he adjusted his thick glasses, realized he was looking the wrong way, and found me. “Assaulted,” he repeated, reaching up with a pudgy right hand to straighten the hair he did not have on top of his head. I’d seen him do that before, which had led me to the conclusion that Shelly had once not been bald. There he sat, panting and patting. He wore a dark suit, properly rumpled, and a tie coming loose at the collar. He waved my hand away and tried to get up by himself. He grunted, failed and reluctantly let me help him. Shelly Minck belonged back in Los Angeles with his dental office in the Farraday Building. I rented a small room off of Shelley’s office and maintained a cooperative arrangement. He messed up messages to me and I complained about the unsanitary conditions of his dental practice.

I leaned back against the wall and watched Shelly stagger to the one small upholstered chair in the room. He sat with a thud and pointed to his neck. “You did this.”

“Heredity and overeating did that,” I said.

“I mean the marks,” he cried, pointing furiously. “You tried to strangle me.”

“What are you doing here, Shell?”

“I could be marked for life,” he rambled on. “Have to wear a scarf like … like …”

“Captain Midnight?” I asked.

“Captain Midnight’s on the radio,” Shelly said in exasperation. “Who the hell knows if he wears a scarf?”

“He’s a pilot. Pilots like to have a scarf billowing out when they ride in an open-cockpit plane,” I said. “What are you doing here, Shell?”

“Water,” he gasped. “I need water.”

I got him a glass of water, which he took and greedily gulped down.

“More,” he said.

I got him another glass.

“More,” he said again.

“No more, Shell. What are you doing here?”

“I was taking a nap, an innocent nap. I just flew in. I’m tired. I came to see a friend, take a nap and what does he do? He assaults me. Isadora Duncan, she was the one with a scarf. It got tangled up in something.”

“How did you get in my room? And how did you know I was at this hotel, in New York?”

He reached into his pocket for an answer and came up with one of his cigars and a wooden match instead. He coughed a few times, lit it, and belched out a plume of grey smoke. It made him feel much better. “I called when I got to the airport,” he explained. “Asked what room you were in. When I got here, I went to the desk, said I was you, told the guy the room number and said I lost the key. He gave me a spare. I tried to call you first but you weren’t here.”

He sucked at the cigar, an overgrown baby with a brown pacifier. The room was beginning to smell like his office.

“What are you doing here? I keep asking the same question in something like English and I get …”

“Meeting,” he said. “Well, sort of a convention of dentists. New techniques in dental treatment. Over at the Savoy-Plaza on Fifth Avenue.”

I kicked off my shoes and climbed on the bed. Shelly smoked and watched and I asked a reasonable question. “And Mildred didn’t mind? Just said, ‘Sheldon, take two or three hundred bucks, get on a plane, go to New York and have a good time’?”

“It was Mildred’s idea,” Shelly said pointing his cigar at me. I responded by getting my .38 down and pointing it at him. “That’s not funny, Toby.”

My detective experience told me that if Mildred Minck was not only letting her husband go to New York alone, but giving him money for the trip, her motive was not one of good will. I considered that Mildred might be having an affair with the plumber or milkman, but I knew Mildred too well to imagine her approaching or being approached by any man I had ever seen. It would bear further thought, but first I had to deal with my chubby and unwelcome guest.

“The war,” Shelly said, “is great, marvelous.”

“We’re all enjoying it,” I said, sitting on the bed and checking the pistol.

“I don’t mean that. I don’t mean that,” he said. “The war is terrible, terrible, but war dentists are bringing back new experience, new gadgets are being invented that we can use on the home front.”

“War dentists?” I said, putting down my weapon and removing my jacket to strap on my shoulder holster.

“You know, Toby, you know. Damn, my neck still hurts. You should be more careful,” he said, searching his pink neck for sore spots.

“Well, Shell,” I said, adjusting my holster and inserting my pistol, “it’s been great talking to you. Have a nice time at the dental disaster meeting and I’ll see you back in L.A.”

“What? What?” Shelly got himself out of the chair after three times. “I’ve got some time. I can help with whatever you’re working on. I’ve helped before, remember?”

I took the dentist’s arm and guided him toward the door. “Remember our agreement,” I reminded him. “I don’t pull teeth and you don’t shoot people.”

“You’re going to shoot somebody?” he asked around the cigar he had stuck back in his mouth. “I knew it. The holster, the gun. You’ve got a case here.”

“No, I’m on vacation.” I shoved him to the door and got it open.

“Not for one minute do I think you’re on vacation here,” he said. “Not one minute. Not even a second.”

“Goodbye, Sheldon,” I said, ushering him into the hall.

“Not even a lunch together? A breakfast? A show? We could have great times here, Toby. I know New York, I went to school here once.”

He looked pathetic, a round lump in the hall all dressed up with no place to go but a dental convention. I almost felt sorry for him, but I remembered the times he had almost got me killed and my sympathy faded. Then I got an idea. “Where are you staying, Shell?”

“Me?”

“No,” I sighed. “Paul Muni.”

He looked around for Paul Muni but there was no one in the hall but him and me.

“I’m not staying anywhere yet,” he bleated. “My suitcase is in your room.”

“How about we share a room right here in the Taft?” I asked, putting on my best smile and holding the door open for him to return. Carmichael had given me till midnight, but I needed more time than that to work on Albanese.

Shelly took a tentative step back toward me, his cigar held out like a protective sword. “Share?”

“Right. You go down, get a double room in your name, and we share. I’ll even pay for the room.”

Shelly adjusted his glasses and stepped forward to squint at me. “You are not an easy person to understand, Toby. Do you know that? Are you aware of that?”

“It’s part of my attraction,” I said. “Let’s get your suitcase. I’ll pack. If you have trouble getting a room, tell them you’re FDR’s dentist and he’s planning to stop by and see you.”