Dancing in the Dark Read online

  “I said you talk too much, piano man.”

  Lou shrugged and said, “You can’t threaten me. I’m too old to care. But you’re right. I talk too much. Someone fixing that piano and a few successful minutes in the bathroom can greatly improve my disposition.”

  Forbes was defeated. He snorted quietly and raised his left hand. The mountain in the doorway moved and Lou shuffled toward the John.

  “What was just going on?” Forbes said.

  “A dance lesson. Miss Martin is a very promising student.”

  Forbes looked at me with contempt.

  “I’ve danced with her,” he whispered. “Don’t lie to me. I’ve got a built-in lie detector, a short attention span, and Kudlap over there, who has no sense of humor.”

  “Kudlap Singh?” I asked. “The Beast of Bombay?”

  Forbes nodded and looked at his watch. I had seen Singh wrestle when I was a kid. My father took me and my brother, Phil, to boxing matches about three or four times a year. Once in a while, if Man Mountain Dean or the Beast of Bombay were on the card, we would go to the Garden for a night of choreographed groaning and blood.

  “He must be sixty, maybe seventy,” I said.

  “You want to go shake hands with him?” Forbes said.

  I looked at the Beast of Bombay and decided against trying to strike up a friendship.

  “Arthur,” Luna said impatiently. “Can we go?”

  “You touch her again,” he said, putting a finger very close to my left nostril, “and it’s a toss-up whether you’re playing piano with your knuckles or Kudlap rips your nose off.”

  “I don’t play the piano,” I said.

  “Now’s not a good time to take it up,” Forbes said raising an eyebrow.

  “Arthur,” Luna said with the impatient sigh of someone trying to train a cat, “you have to touch if you are going to dance. Besides, I want Fred Astaire back. You promised, and where is he?”

  “Practicing for a defense-bond show Saturday and getting ready for a war-bond drive,” I repeated. “Hell be gone a long time, a month, maybe two. And when he comes back, he has a movie and …”

  “We’ve got tickets for the show,” Forbes said. “Wiltern Theater. When does he start giving Luna lessons again?”

  It was my turn to sigh.

  “Never,” I said. “He asked me to tell you that he was considering opening a Fred Astaire Dance Studio, that Miss Martin would be given a full course at no charge.” The dance studio idea had just come to me in a stroke of desperation.

  “I want Fred Astaire,” she said.

  “She wants Astaire,” Forbes said, closing the discussion.

  “Right,” I said. “She wants him in a bed.”

  Forbes’s fists clenched and his face went red.

  “He’s lying, Arthur,” Luna said calmly. “Astaire just doesn’t want to teach me.”

  “You know who I am?” Forbes said.

  “Arthur Forbes, businessman.”

  Forbes shook his head. This was going to be harder than he thought, and it might even ruin his morning.

  “Dancer,” he said, putting his hand on my right shoulder. “Do you know who I am?”

  “Fingers Intaglia,” I said.

  “Do you know what I can do to Fred Astaire, and you?”

  “I have an active imagination. And, by the way, I’m not a dancer. I’m a private investigator. My agency’s been hired to see to it that Mr. Astaire doesn’t have to give dance lessons to Miss Martin or anyone else.”

  “Private inv … you made all that up,” screamed Luna. “You made me look like a … Arthur!”

  “I’ve got to tell you, I don’t like when Luna gets upset,” Forbes said, squeezing my shoulder, his thumb expertly finding a nerve just below my collarbone. “When she is upset, she is not responsive. I want Luna happy. I want Luna responsive.”

  “Sounds good to me,” I said, “but no more lessons with Fred Astaire. Let’s make it easy, shake hands, walk away, and let Mr. Astaire find Miss Martin a terrific teacher. Look at it this way, she’s had two lessons with Fred Astaire. Not many people can say that. It’s a great start and …”

  “I want Astaire,” Luna said evenly.

  “She wants Astaire,” Forbes repeated.

  “I’m sorry,” I said. “Would you mind taking your hand off my shoulder?”

  He squeezed a little harder.

  “Right here, tomorrow, same time. Astaire is here. Show or no show. Bond drive. No bond drive.”

  “The hell with it,” Lou said, inching past Kudlap in the doorway.

  “Be quiet, old man,” Forbes said without looking back at Lou.

  “Be quiet?” said Lou, moving toward us. “My disposition has not been improved by my experience in the lavatory.”

  “Kudlap,” Forbes called, and the Beast of Bombay, three hundred pounds, six-four or five and a stomach as flat as Death Valley, glided toward us like a cat.

  “Old man,” said Forbes as the Beast hovered over me. “I think you better leave or forget what you’re gonna see next.”

  “My memory of yesterday is gone,” Lou said with a sigh, “but ask me who played bass with King Oliver in ’02 and I’ll tell you his shoe size and how he liked his okra cooked for supper. I remember one night in Detroit when I was playing with Cookie Carmichael’s band and someone who looked more than a little like you was having an argument with Kid Santini and …”

  “Shut up, old man,” Forbes said.

  “Kid Santini turned up …” Lou tried, but Forbes said, “I said shut up.”

  Fingers Intaglia had a moment of doubt. He had come into the ballroom of his own hotel, expecting to pick up his girl. Instead he was facing a more than slightly wacky private detective and a what-the-hell-can-you-do-to-me old piano player. He took his hand from my shoulder. I wanted to rub where he had pressed, but I didn’t.

  “Tomorrow, right here. Astaire.”

  Forbes had taken a step back. He was bouncing slowly on his heels, considering his next move, when I said, “Mr. Astaire won’t …”

  “Don’t say it again,” Forbes cut in. “Something very bad will happen if you say it again. I strive for the patience of Thomas Jefferson, but I live with the temper of my sainted father, who ducked five manslaughter charges.”

  I shut up.

  “Can we go now?” said Lou. “I’m working tonight at the Mozambique.”

  “Shut the old fool up, Arthur,” Luna said, moving to Forbes’s side and taking his arm.

  “Give this message to Astaire,” Forbes said, ignoring Lou and Luna both.

  I looked at Luna. She was enjoying the moment. I almost missed Forbes’s nod. I tightened up and started to turn. I was too late and the Beast of Bombay was too fast. I expected the blow to come to the kidney. Instead there was a zap, a feeling of being hit by a jolt of electricity and then pain that almost sent me to the floor.

  Forbes was a professional. I had to give him that. The Beast had done something my old man had never even considered. He had spanked me. One whip of his giant hand. A second or two of humiliation followed by who knows how many hours or days of searing pain.

  Luna tittered and I did my best not to fall. I started to go down anyway. Kudlap Singh held me up.

  “I’ve seen this stuff before,” Lou said with a bored voice of an ancient mariner who has seen and done everything.

  “Got the message, Peters?” Forbes said.

  I wasn’t sure I could speak. I nodded.

  “Good,” he said. “You’re gonna be sitting on pillows and taking warm baths for a while. Accidents like this happen. Astaire could be dancing in concrete shoes. Tomorrow, right here.”

  Forbes walked toward the door with the air of a man who had put things in order for everyone. The Beast of Bombay looked down at me and nodded before he followed his boss out of the ballroom. Luna, still holding Forbes’s arm, smiled, patted her behind, puckered her lips, and made a kissing sound. She clicked toward the door with Forbes, swinging her red purse.<
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  When the three of them were clearly and certainly out of the room, Lou came to me and said, “For twenty-five bucks, who needs this?”

  I exhaled and decided to try talking. “I thought you weren’t afraid,” I said, trying to ignore the pain.

  “I lied,” Lou said. “Almost made in my pants. How are you doin’?”

  “Could have been a lot worse if you weren’t here. Thanks.”

  “A bonus is in order here,” he said, helping me to the table Luna had abandoned.

  I leaned against the table while Lou poured me an ice water. He filled the glass. I drank it all.

  “Twenty-five bucks,” I said.

  “I’m satisfied,” said Lou. “Now, how about a ride to Glendale?”

  “I’ve got someone you should meet,” I said, moving slowly toward the door. “I think you and my landlady might hit it off.”

  Lou shrugged. “I’m in the market,” he said.

  We made it out of the Monticello and to my khaki Crosley in the Monticello parking lot. When I had driven into the lot earlier, the attendant, a young guy about twenty-five with a decided limp, had looked at me as if my car was carrying a highly communicable automobile disease. Lou and I had watched him park it deep in the back of the lot, quarantined along with a slightly battered Hudson where the two cars were unlikely to infect the huddled Packards, Cadillacs, Lincolns, Chryslers, and a sleek black Graham parked up front where people would see them.

  “How much?” I asked the kid. He was square-faced, in a clean blue uniform, and couldn’t keep his hair out of his eyes.

  “You a veteran?” he asked.

  “No, but I feel like one. I’ve got a bad back, a sore ass, I’m pushing fifty, and I’ve got somewhere to go.”

  Lou ignored the two of us and headed for the car.

  “He can’t do that,” the attendant said. “I get the cars.”

  “He’s old and he’s hard to stop.”

  “He a W-W-One veteran?”

  “More likely the war with Spain,” I said.

  “All right, then,” the attendant said. “Since he’s a veteran, you get the discount.”

  “Thanks.”

  “Forty cents,” he said, holding out his hand.

  I fished out a buck, put it in his palm, and said, “Keep the change. You a veteran?”

  “I was on the Yorktown when it got hit by the Japs. Never forget the day. Two in the afternoon. I was on deck. Fires all over the place from the thirty, maybe forty Jap dive bombers, torpedo planes from the Hiryu.”

  The kid’s eyes were glazed and far away, off the coast of Midway on a June afternoon a little less than a year ago.

  “Caught flying metal in the leg,” the attendant said, touching his right leg. “And my head. Mom’s got the shrapnel from my leg and my medal on the fireplace right under Jesus. I’m still lugging iron up here.”

  He tapped on his head.

  “Glad you’re okay now—?”

  “Cotton,” he said, holding out his hand. “Cotton Wright.”

  “Toby Peters.”

  He nodded as if he expected me to be named Toby Peters and then he limped off to get my Crosley.

  It was Thursday, March 11, 1943. The Japanese were bombing Guadalcanal. Our planes had hit the Japs at Balle in the Shortland Islands. General Sir Bernard L. Montgomery said Rommel was desperate in Tunisia, and the Royal Air Force had hit Munich hard with five-hundred-ton blockbuster bombs. Roosevelt had just proposed a birth-to-grave Social Security that included medical care and payments for college education.

  The war was getting long and I was getting twenty-five dollars a day plus expenses to convince a daffy woman and a semiretired gangster to leave Fred Astaire alone.

  Cotton Wright pulled the Crosley next to me and crawled out of the door, which wasn’t easy. The Crosley could hold a driver and a passenger if they didn’t mind bending over like clowns packing into one of those circus cars.

  “Thanks, Cotton,” I said, trying to ease into the driver’s seat.

  The burning from Kudlap Singh’s whack grew close to unbearable as my rear end hit the seat. I eased down, gritting my teeth, and closed the door. I was sweating and starting to imagine the rare and exotic pain that I could bring to Fingers Intaglia.

  I waved to Cotton as we pulled into the traffic on Sunset.

  “Glendale,” Lou said.

  “Glendale,” I agreed.

  Chapter Two

  I Wanna Be a Dancing Man

  The whole thing had started two days earlier, a little before eleven in the morning, when I went to my office. The Farraday is downtown on Hoover, just off Ninth. I was in a good mood. I’d just finished two tacos, a couple of cups of coffee, and a sinker at Manny’s on the corner. That was my early lunch. I could afford it. I had a little over two hundred dollars left of a fee from Clark Gable.

  I had paid off my fifteen-dollar rent for March and the advance on April to my landlady. Mrs. Plaut had tucked it into her dress next to her unample bosom. I had also paid two months’ advance rent on the closet I used for an office and sublet from Sheldon Minck, D.D.S. I had a cupboard full of Wheaties and no overly demanding aches or pains.

  Life was good. I entered the Lysol-smelling outer lobby of the Farraday and checked the board to be sure I was still listed. There I was, in neatly typed letters, Toby Peters, Private Investigator, Room 602. Above me on the board was Anthony Pelligrino, Matters of the Heart and Certified Public Accountant. I had never met Anthony. Below me on the board was Quick Work Loans, whose motto, I had discovered from a one-sheet flyer shoved under our office door, was, “You Need It, We Give It, You Pay Back in Small Installments.” The flyer had also assured me that Barbara and Daniel Sullivan would give me “sympathy and fast results.” The rest of the board was a full spectrum of the down-and-out and vaguely sinister. One-room talent agencies, fortunetellers, baby photographers, publishers of questionable literature, a vocal teacher, a music teacher (Professor Aumont of the Paris International Academy of Music), who guaranteed to teach you any instrument in one month, and Good Jewelry, so named not because of the quality of the merchandise but the name of the seldom-seen proprietor, Herschel Good. This was not Sunset Boulevard. I went through the door leading to the semidarkness of the inner lobby. The inner chamber of the building was vast, the offices on each floor opening out onto a landing. A few steps out your door and you were at the iron railing from which you could look up or down into the echoing and sometimes noisy heart of the Farraday.

  I looked up as I headed for the staircase. If my back wasn’t bothering me I avoided the ancient, groaning elevator in the darkest corner next to the stairs. Through its prisonlike bars, the elevator provided a good view of each floor as it slowly rose. The key word here is slowly.

  Somewhere on two a woman was either being murdered or trying to sing. On three there was laughter, very insincere male laughter, lots of it. But mostly there was the wall-dulled sound of people’s voices. You couldn’t hear the words, but you could hear begging, pleading, lying, hope, and sometimes pain. The sound of pain grew louder as I got to the sixth floor and headed for my office. On the pebbled glass was:

  Sheldon Minck, D.D.S., S.D.

  Dentist

  Toby Peters

  Private Investigator

  Behind the door someone was moaning, the gender of the source unclear. I stepped in. The little waiting room—and calling it little is giving it the benefit of the doubt—had been converted into a reception area with two small chairs and a desk that barely deserved the name. On the desk was a telephone and a pad of paper. Behind the desk was Violet Gonsenelli, the receptionist Shelly had hired in spite of my warnings. The problem wasn’t Violet. Violet was fun to look at, about twenty-five, pretty, with a pale face and dark hair piled perfect and high on her head. She wore a white nursing uniform and an instant smile when the door was opened. Violet’s husband was a rising middleweight. He had moved as high as number six in the Ring Magazine ratings before he got drafted. Bo
th Violet and a shot at the title would have to wait till the war was over. The other problem was Mildred Minck, wife of Sheldon Minck, a woman of little tolerance and even less charm. Mildred rarely came to the office. She didn’t like the smell of alcohol and wintergreen and she didn’t like me. And she didn’t think all that much of Sheldon.

  Somehow Shelly had convinced Mildred that he needed a receptionist/assistant, and Mildred had agreed. That should have made Shelly Minck suspicious. It made me suspicious, but that, when I am working, is part of my job.

  “Mr. Peters,” Violet said, all business, picking up her pad. “You have calls. A Mrs. Eastwood …”

  “Former landlady, claims I owe her for damage to the room I rented,” I explained. “That was four, five years ago. Bad news.”

  “Anne,” she went on. “She said you’d know who she was.”

  “Good news, maybe. Former wife. That was more than four or five years ago. You remind me a little of Anne when she was your age. But Anne had a lot more …”

  Violet tore off the top sheet of her pad and handed it to me. I folded it once neatly.

  The groan from beyond the inner door tore through me.

  “Dr. Minck has a patient,” Violet whispered as if we were in a sick room or the Burbank Library. “Very sensitive.”

  “Sounds it,” I said. “I have two questions, Violet.”

  She folded her hands in front of her, and her red lips pouted seriously.

  “First, how do you get through that narrow space to your desk, and second, what happened to the two chairs that Shelly moved into the hall for waiting patients to sit on?”

  The idea was that Violet would have enough room to move her arms and other parts of her anatomy if patients waited outside.

  “Chairs were stolen,” she said sadly. “And I can scrunch myself all together and just make it, but I can’t wear stockings. They’d snag. Not that I have the nylons to spare. But Doctor Minck says he knows where to get real silk stockings. He said he’d like to see me wearing silk stockings to work. It relaxes the patients.”