Dancing in the Dark Read online

  “Yes,” she said with a very forced smile. “The police have been asking me stupid, stupid questions for the last who-knows-how-long. And then, finally, they tell me that someone killed the little…. Who are you? What are you both doing in this room?”

  “You know Mr. Astaire,” I said. “I’m Toby Peters, private investigator. Your husband wants to hire me to find Miss Martin’s killer.”

  She shook her head and went for the bedroom door, throwing it open with a bang.

  “He’s not here,” she said after going in, checking, and coming out with a blue-silk robe. “But he was. This is his. I saw her three times. Cheap. Didn’t know how to use eyeliner.”

  She looked at Astaire again, who stood there bouncing on his heels, arms folded, looking pleased with the world.

  “What do you have to do with all this?” she asked Astaire.

  “I was giving Miss Martin dance lessons.”

  “That bastard,” Mrs. Fingers Forbes shouted, her red fingernails turning to curled, ready claws.

  She bounced to the door, turned, and said, “I’m really not like this. It’s just that …”

  “We understand,” said Astaire.

  “If you could teach her to dance, you could teach me.”

  “Well, I …”

  “I’ll talk to Arthur about it,” she said in a tone that made it clear that neither Arthur nor Astaire would have a choice in the matter.

  “I really can’t take …” Astaire began, but she was out and gone.

  “I suggest we lock the door,” I said. “We check the bedroom fast, take the recording, and get the hell out of here.”

  Five minutes later we were out the door and I had stolen a towel from the Monticello. The towel was loosely wrapped around the wire recording. Fred Astaire bounced along at my side. We met no one in the hall and no one in the nearly empty lobby.

  When we stepped out onto the street, we finally met somebody: the two uniformed cops who had come with Phil and Steve Seidman. They stepped in front of us, blocking our escape.

  “Mr. Astaire,” said the younger of the two—much, much younger, teeth still a bright, natural white. “I’m sorry, but I’ll have to ask Mr. Peters to come with us.”

  “I don’t see why you have to apologize to him,” I said, nodding at Astaire. “We’re not together. He was just walking out at the same time …”

  “Now, wait a minute,” Astaire said.

  The second cop was much older, much more experienced, and much more stupid than the young one.

  “Inside,” he said, taking my arm. “We were told to get you. Mr. Laurel, here, can leave.”

  “This’s Fred Astaire, Tim,” the younger cop whispered.

  “I don’t care if he’s King Kong. He can dance in the street for nickels and wait out here.”

  A crowd was gathering. Some of them clearly recognized Astaire.

  “I’ll call you later,” I said.

  Astaire nodded and went for a taxi at the curb.

  Steve Seidman, gaunt and weary, stood at the end of the lobby near the corridor leading to the ballroom. His hands were behind his back as the two cops ushered me toward him.

  “I’ll make a deal with you, Toby,” he said. “You give me the towel and whatever’s in it that you took from Luna Martin’s room, and I’ll give you something in return.”

  I handed him the towel and the wire recording. His hands came out from behind his back and he handed me some sheet music.

  “One of your extras posing as tough guys says you had an old piano player who may have left these here. They were on the piano.”

  I took them.

  “Thanks,” I said. “Lou’s old, forgets things.”

  Seidman nodded, not caring.

  “You can go,” he said, taking the spool out of the open towel.

  I eased past the two cops and left the Monticello. When I got outside I opened the envelope Forbes had pushed on me. It held five new hundred-dollar bills. I was in search of a storefront dance studio and a guy named Willie. I had often had less to work with, but this time I had a lot of incentive.

  Chapter Six

  Everybody Do the

  Varsity Drag

  There were fourteen places calling themselves dance studios or ballrooms in the L.A. phone book. I went to a candy store with a stack of nickels and started phoning around, leaving the big ones for last. While I called I munched on a mound of marble halvah and watched the traffic go by on Sunset.

  “Make Believe Ballroom,” came a world-weary woman’s voice on the first call.

  “I’d like to talk to Willie.”

  “We have no Willie,” she said.

  “How about William or Bill?”

  “No,” she said with a sigh. “Are you interested in dance lessons?”

  “No thanks,” I said. “I just had one with Fred Astaire.”

  “Give him my best,” she said and hung up.

  My rear end still smarting and my stomach aching from too much halvah and a desperate need for a Pepsi, I kept dialing—Mr. Lyon’s Studio of Dance, Terpsicorean Interludes, the Royal Ballroom, Corine’s House of Dance, the Talented Two-Step, Harold Augustine’s Dance Studio, the Viennese Ballroom.

  After seven tries, I’d found one Bill and a Willie. Bill turned out to be a Negro about seventy who cleaned up at the studio and other shops on the block. The conversation with Willie was even less promising. Willie was a woman. I struck Willie-gold on the eighth call.

  “On Your Toes Dance Studio and College,” the man answered sleepily.

  He sounded very much like the man on Luna’s wire recording.

  “I’d like to speak to Willie,” I said.

  “Concerning?”

  “Dance lessons.”

  “Who are you?”

  “My name is Toby Peters,” I said.

  “This is William Talbott,” he said.

  “I want to dance.”

  “We want to teach you,” said Willie. “Who gave you my name?”

  “Your name?”

  “You asked for ‘Willie.’”

  “A friend who’s familiar with your studio.”

  “Took lessons with us?”

  “Learned a great deal from you.”

  “And recommended us?”

  “You specifically,” I said lightly.

  “This person’s name might not be Stella?”

  “It might well be.”

  “That explains it,” he said. “I’m at your service, Mr …”

  “Peters, Toby Peters. When can we start?”

  “Anytime tomorrow,” he said. “From nine in the morning till nine at night.”

  “How about today?”

  “Today,” he said. “Let me look.”

  He shuffled some papers and I waited. I had a feeling his answer would be—

  “You’re in luck. We have a cancellation this afternoon at two.”

  “Can we make it one?” I asked.

  “Ah … that will be difficult, but I can make a few shifts and changes to accommodate a new student.”

  “Thank you.”

  “You know how to get here?”

  The address was on Western, not far from Melrose.

  “I’ll be there at one.”

  We hung up. It was eleven-thirty in the morning. If I hurried, I could get to the On Your Toes Dance Studio and College and catch Willie when he wasn’t on his toes.

  I called my office. Violet answered, “Sheldon Minck, Creative Dentistry without Pain.”

  “And Toby Peters, Private Investigator,” I said.

  “Dr. Minck said I shouldn’t give your name,” Violet said.

  “Put Dr. Minck on the phone.”

  “He doesn’t want to talk to you, Mr. Peters,” she whispered. “I wish you’d come here quick. He just sits in his dental chair looking at his fingers.”

  “I’ll get there as soon as I can, Violet. Anything else?”

  “You got a call from … a Miss Anita Maloney. She left a number.
You want it?”

  Maybe Anita wanted to go to another prom or she remembered I had borrowed two bucks from her on prom night. Violet gave me her number. I wrote it in my notebook even though I had it scrawled on a napkin somewhere in my pocket.

  “And a Mr. Forbes called saying you should give him a call as soon as you checked in.”

  I heard a distinct background groan from Shelly Minck. I took Forbes’s number.

  “That it?” I asked.

  “You owe me two dollars,” she said.

  “The fight,” I remembered.

  “Ortiz in a TKO over Salica in the eleventh. Double or nothing on the Bivins-Mauriello fight tomorrow?”

  “Odds today?”

  “Bivins is still five-to-six.”

  “You get Bivins. I get Mauriello. My ten to your two. You lose and we’re even.”

  “Okay,” she said brightly. “If Dr.—”

  She was cut off by the phone being wrenched from her hand. The frantic voice of Sheldon Minck came crackling.

  “My fingers are my life,” he said, nearly weeping. “I’m like a … like a harpist, or an exterminator.”

  “What is so special about an exterminator’s fingers?”

  “You try using a Flit can with paws,” Shelly said.

  “No one is going to cut off your fingers,” I said. “I talked to Forbes. All that was for show. He tried to hire me to find out who killed Luna.”

  “I didn’t do it,” Shelly cried.

  “Until you said that I didn’t suspect you.”

  “Said what?” Shelly screamed.

  “I’m kidding, Shel,” I said. “Your fingers are safe and I don’t suspect you.”

  “You’re lying to make me feel better.”

  “I’m not lying, Shel, but your fingers might be in trouble if you don’t tell Violet to say my name when she answers the phone. We have an agreement.”

  “I’ll tell her,” he said reluctantly. “You sure I’m—”

  “I’m sure, Shel.”

  “Then I can have Violet go down to Manny’s and pick up some tacos.”

  “What has one thing got to … right, Shel. You can have Violet pick up some tacos. Good-bye.”

  I hung up and retrieved my Crosley from Cotton Wright, the parking attendant at the Monticello, and gave him a buck tip, which I marked in my expense book along with the cost of parking.

  “You a veteran?” Cotton asked as I eased gently onto the pillow I had taken from my room at Mrs. Plaut’s boarding-house.

  “No, Cotton. You asked me that a few days ago.”

  “What did you answer?”

  “No. I wasn’t a veteran then and I’m still not.”

  “You know I’ve got a piece of metal in my head from the war?”

  “I know, Cotton,” I said, turning on the ignition.

  “Sometimes it hurts. Sometimes it hums. Sometimes I don’t even notice.”

  “What are the best times?” I asked.

  “When it hums,” he said.

  I pulled out of the lot with a wave at Cotton and headed down Sunset, bound for Western. I turned on the radio and through the static learned that the Japanese had captured Hinajong in Northern Hunan in their drive southward over the Yangtze. On the other hand, the Chinese were making gains in Burma. I also learned that more meat rationing was coming April 1. Mrs. Plaut would be on me for that. I wondered whether Anita Maloney could come up with ground beef as easily as she came up with potatoes.

  There was a small parking space only a car the size of a Crosley could love right near the corner of Western and Melrose. I backed into it, trying not to turn my body too painfully to look over my shoulder. When I was parked, I opened the door and eased out, my rear end a massive, low-level electric shock. But, all in all, it felt better than it had the day before.

  The On Your Toes Dance Studio and College was not a storefront. It was in a small office building. I found it listed in the directory in a dark, white-tiled lobby the size of a small rest room. The white tile was seriously cracked, and the black-on-white list of offices and renters was badly in need of some letters. Next to the building directory was a yellowing poster that read, “Save Cooking Fats and Grease.”

  I found the studio between Nona’s Hair and Fingernails and Quick Letter Copy Service. On Your Toes was on the ground floor. I groped my way past the narrow staircase and along an even narrower short corridor, at the end of which was a pebble-glass door with “On Your Toes Dance Studio” printed in gold letters. A simple line drawing of a dancing couple had been drawn on the glass. The man wore a tuxedo. The woman wore a billowy white dress. They were both smiling. I knocked at the door. No answer. I waited. Knocked again. Still no answer. I tried the door. It was open. I walked into a room almost as dark as the hallway. The lights were out and the Venetian blinds on the windows across the floor were closed. The only light that came into the room was through the spaces left by broken, bent, and missing slats on the blinds.

  I was in a wooden-floored room about the size of a handball court. The wall of mirrors to my right made it look a little bigger, but the cracks in the mirrors worked against any possible suggestion of class. On my left was a glassed-in dark cubicle that must have been the office. I walked over to it and opened the door.

  There was a crash from the end of the cubicle from somewhere just beyond the outline of a desk. I froze.

  “Don’t move,” came a man’s voice.

  I could see enough of the man who rose behind the desk to see that he carried what looked like a gun in his right hand.

  “I’m not moving,” I said.

  “Put your hands behind your head,” he said.

  I put my hands behind my head and a desk lamp snapped on, bouncing odd shadows.

  The big man with the gun was about forty with full, ruffled blond hair and a frightened look on his face. He wore dark wrinkled trousers and a mess of a long-sleeved white shirt unbuttoned to show his undershirt.

  “Who sent you?” he asked.

  “Stella,” I said.

  “She’s a whore,” he said, voice cracking. “I don’t owe her a goddamn nickel. Chavez sent you, or Albertini.”

  I kept my hands behind my head and watched him fumble through the mess on his desk until he found a pack of cigarettes. He managed to light one with trembling fingers and keep the gun aimed in the general direction of my chest.

  “I told them I’d pay them a little at a time,” Willie went on. “I’ve got a rich new student and I’ve been in touch with a friend with a lot of money.”

  “Luna Martin?” I guessed.

  That almost stunned the cigarette from his lips.

  “How did you … she owes me,” he said, trying to compose himself and glancing from time to time at the door to my right.

  “My name is Toby Peters,” I said.

  “Peters? You’re a …” he said, looking at the alarm clock on his desk. “You’re an hour early.”

  “Eager to dance,” I said. “Can I take my hands down?”

  “How did you know about Luna?” he asked suspiciously.

  “She’s a friend. She’s the one who sent me here.”

  “Luna sent you here for dance lessons?”

  “In a way,” I said. “Hands down?”

  “At your sides,” he said. “But don’t move. No offense, Peters, but I’ve got some people I owe a few dollars, and they won’t handle this in a civilized manner. You understand?”

  “Fully,” I said. “Think you could put the gun down now?”

  He looked at the gun in his hand and took the cigarette from his mouth. He placed the gun on the table in front of him.

  “Bad start,” he said with a smile as he brushed back his hair.

  “I wouldn’t say we hit it off on first sight,” I agreed.

  “Well,” he went on, buttoning his shirt. “I was just taking a little nap to get the creative juices evenly divided throughout my body. All body liquids flow to your toes when you’re standing unless your heart
and the other organs keep them flowing through the body. That puts a strain on your heart.”

  “And the other organs,” I added.

  “That’s right,” he said, tucking in his shirt.

  Someone or something groaned from behind the desk. Willie Talbott ignored the sound and said, “A dancer needs an even distribution of body liquids and an even disposition.”

  “And a gun,” I said, taking a step to my left where I could see around the side of the desk.

  A pair of bare feet, definitely female, were clearly visible.

  “Miss Perez is recirculating her body fluids,” Talbott said. “Clothes constrict the flow.”

  “Makes sense to me,” I said. “She seems to be asleep.”

  “She’s concentrating deeply,” Talbott explained, putting the cigarette back in his mouth and coming from behind the desk. I eased farther to the left in the hope of seeing more of the meditating Miss Perez.

  Talbott took my arm and guided me toward the door, removing the cigarette from his mouth again to tell me that I was in luck, On Your Toes was offering an introductory special, three lessons for five dollars. Each lesson was half an hour. Payment was required in advance. Results were guaranteed.

  We were back on the wooden floor and out of the office now.

  “In three lessons you’ll have me dancing?” I asked.

  “Guaranteed,” he said, trying not to glance at the entrance door through which collection goons might suddenly charge, and at his office through whose window we might see the unclad Miss Perez rise.

  Up close and with better light I revised my estimate of Willie Talbott. He was closer to my age and in need of a shave. His hair was definitely dyed. The gray stubble on his unshaven face was a giveaway.

  “I can’t hear the beat,” I said.

  “I could teach a deaf elephant,” he said with a smile, showing impossibly white teeth.

  “Fred Astaire gave up on me,” I said.

  “He doesn’t have my patience,” Talbott said with an amused smile.

  “Okay,” I said. “Then I have only one question.”

  “Payment in advance,” he said. “Five dollars for three lessons. Otherwise, the special offer doesn’t apply.”

  “No,” I said. “You called Luna Martin a few days ago. What did you want from her?”

  Talbott couldn’t help looking at his desk through the window. Somewhere on that desk was his gun.