Dancing in the Dark Read online

  “I doubt it,” I said as a shriek of agony froze my spine. “Doesn’t that bother you, Violet?”

  “No,” she said pertly. “My father was a light heavyweight. I love the fights. That’s how I met my husband. I’m used to pain and brutality.”

  “I’m a fight fan too,” I said.

  “Maybe we could go together sometime,” she said brightly.

  “I don’t think that would be a good idea.”

  She shrugged.

  “Who do you figure in the Ortiz-Salica fight tomorrow?” I asked. Mexican Manuel Ortiz and Lou Salica of Brooklyn were battling for the bantamweight championship in Oakland.

  “Ortiz,” Violet said. “It won’t go the distance.”

  “Salica’s got heart,” I said.

  “Ortiz has a right hand and fast feet,” she said, searching her desk drawer for something.

  “Bet you lunch at Manny’s,” I said.

  She found the pencil she was looking for, shrugged, and said, “Okay.”

  “You like the job so far?” I said, reluctant to open the inner door and face whatever mayhem Sheldon was doling out to what may or may not have been an innocent patient.

  “Not too many patients, not too many calls. Plenty of time to read and learn.” She opened a drawer in the little desk and in the small space behind the drawer wiggled out two books. “Dental hygiene and Spanish. Dr. Minck thinks there’s a whole new market of Mexicans out there,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Somewhere. Oh, God. I almost forgot. You’ve got someone in your office waiting for you. It couldn’t be, but I think it’s a movie star. You know the goofy one with the fat partner?”

  It sounded like a description of me and Shelly.

  “Laurel. Stan Laurel,” she said.

  “Waiting in my office?”

  “He didn’t give his name.”

  I went through the inner door, closed it behind me, and found myself face to face with the rotund rear of Sheldon Minck draped in soiled white dental smock, as he huddled over someone.

  “Almost. Almost. Almost,” Shelly chanted.

  A pair of legs, female, squirmed, and their possessor whimpered in defeat.

  “There. Hah. There,” Shelly said with a deep sigh, turning to look in my direction. In his right hand was a narrow pliers. Clutched in the mouth of the pliers was a bloody tooth. There were spatters of red on the front of Shelly’s smock and a look of triumph on his round, perspiring face. His thick glasses had slipped to the end of his nose and the few wisps of hair that still clung to the top of his head danced crazily.

  He displayed the bloody tooth to the woman in the chair, who seemed to have passed out.

  Shelly didn’t appear to notice. He dropped pliers and tooth on the little porcelain-top table next to the dental chair. He picked up the stump of a cigar from the table and placed it triumphantly and as yet unlit in the corner of his mouth.

  “You should have seen it, Toby,” he said, fishing under his smock for matches. “Molar, almost impacted. Bad shape. Could have crumbled. And you know what that means?”

  He found a match and lit the cigar.

  “She fainted, Shel,” I said.

  Shelly turned to the patient, squinted through his thick glasses.

  “She’s breathing fine,” he said, turning back to me. “How do you like the office?”

  I looked around. Violet had begun a major campaign against a decade’s worth of filth. There were no coffee mugs or dishes piled in the sink. There was nothing at all in the sink, in fact, it was clean. The trash can was not overflowing and had a cover on it. Magazines were no longer strewn over cabinets and counters. The yellow linoleum floor was spotless, except for the few splotches of blood from Shelly’s very recent triumph.

  Violet had also put a painting on the wall to cover a bulging crack. The painting showed Napoleon, a sword in his right hand, on top of a white horse that was rearing back with his two front legs high in the air. Behind Napoleon were a bunch of soldiers in uncomfortable-looking uniforms, following him into battle.

  “You’ve got a visitor,” Shelly whispered slyly.

  “Stan Laurel,” I said.

  “Violet told you,” he said. “Tell him I give a major discount to your clients.”

  “No,” I said. “I don’t want you to talk to my clients, let alone work on their teeth.”

  “I’m good, Toby. You know I’m good.”

  “You’re fine, Shelly. I just don’t think it’s right to mix business with torture. I think you should do something about your patient. She’s a funny shade of orange.”

  With that I turned to my office, a space just a little bit larger than Violet’s reception room. I tried not to see clients in the office. Most of my jobs were set up by phone calls. Not too many people stumbled on my office in the dark halls of the sixth floor of the Farraday while they were on the way to a music lesson and said to themselves, “Hey, a private detective. Wife’s been gone for a month. That is just what I need.”

  Even if such an event did take place, few people would be filled with confidence by a private investigator who could only be reached by going through a dental office.

  I opened my office door, and Fred Astaire turned in his chair. I closed the door behind me.

  “They said …” I began. shaking his hand as he stood.

  “That I was Stan Laurel. I heard. Not all that unusual a mistake. I’ve got to confess that sometimes when I look in the mirror I could swear Laurel was on the other side.”

  “Cup of coffee?” I asked, moving behind my desk and clearing away three days of mail to make room for the sheet from Violet’s pad with Anne’s number on it.

  “No, thanks,” said Astaire.

  There was one window in the room. Right behind the desk. Perfect view of the alley six flights below. If I leaned out, I could see my Crosley parked between the garbage cans. I opened the window, sat, and faced Astaire, who was wearing a perfectly tailored blue suit, an off-blue shirt, and a tie the color of the suit. He looked a little skinnier than he did in the movies, no more than one-forty, and he was about my height, maybe five-nine. I figured him for about forty, maybe a little older. He had less hair than I remembered, and the memory wasn’t that old. I’d taken Carmen, the cashier at Levy’s on Spring, to see You Were Never Lovelier about a month ago.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Yes?” I repeated.

  “The hair, or lack of it,” Astaire said. “You were looking at my head. In the movies, I wear a wig. I hate the damn thing. In public, I wear a hat.”

  He held up a hat he had apparently placed on the floor.

  “While I’d say I’m a reasonably presentable example of the human male,” he went on, “were I not a movie actor, I doubt if women would notice me on the street.”

  I assumed we were getting somewhere, so I shut up. He continued: “You were recommended to me as someone who could be … discreet.”

  “I can be discreet,” I assured him.

  He nodded and looked around the room.

  “I know the style’s not right,” he said, looking at the painting on the wall to his right. “Too naturalistic. But I’d almost swear it was a Dali.”

  “It is,” I said. “Payment for a job I did for him.”

  The painting showed a woman with a warm, loving face holding two little naked boy babies, one in each arm.

  “Amazing,” said Astaire. “Aren’t you afraid … I mean, someone could …”

  “Mr. Astaire …”

  “Fred.”

  “Fred, if you were a robber and you made your way through Dr. Minck’s office back here with a flashlight in your hand, do you think you’d recognize the painting as anything worth stealing?”

  “Probably not,” he said.

  “Besides, it’s too big to sneak out.”

  “They could wrap it up, throw it out the window, and then go down the stairs and pick it up.”

  “You spend a lot of time hanging around criminals?” I said.

&
nbsp; “Well, as a matter of fact, I do, which is part of the reason I’m here,” he said softly. “I’m a bit of a police buff. No, I’m more than a bit. I’m fascinated by the police and the criminal world. I’ve gone out on patrols in almost every major city in the United States, and I go rather frequently out in police cars and to lineups. Phyllis sometimes joins me.”

  “Phyllis?”

  “My wife. The people in the photograph …” he said, turning to look up past my investigator’s license at the fading photo of a weathered man with two young boys at his side and a German shepherd at his feet.

  “My father,” I said. “Younger kid is me. Older one is my brother, Phil. The dog is Kaiser Wilhelm. My father and the dog are dead.”

  “The photograph rather echoes the Dali painting,” he said. “A parent, two boys.”

  “Never thought of it,” I said.

  “I never had much to do with my father,” Astaire said. “My sister and my mother and I were out on the road by the time I was five. My father stayed in Omaha. Saw him once in a while but …”

  The pause was long and he sighed.

  “I’m stalling.”

  “I noticed,” I said. “I’m in no hurry.”

  “There is a woman,” he said, looking at the Dali painting. “She wanted dancing lessons from me. She approached me through a phone call from her ‘friend,’ an Arthur Forbes. You may know the name.”

  “I know the name,” I said. “Also known as Fingers Intaglia, from Detroit. Son-in-law of Guiseppi Cortona, who runs mob business in Minneapolis.”

  “Mr. Forbes was rather insistent that I teach his friend,” Astaire went on. “Indicated that she wanted no other teacher, would accept no other teacher. He also said that his friend had, until recently, been a ballroom dance teacher, but she needed to move on to the heights of professionalism. I could name my own price but, as he put it, he would be ‘very disappointed’ if I refused. Mr. Peters … Toby, I have a wife and three children—the youngest, Ava, just had her first birthday. A father’s nightmare is that something might happen to his family. A dancer’s nightmare is that something might happen to his body. My knowledge of Mr. Forbes’s history suggests that both nightmares might come true. I agreed to a limited number of lessons. Forbes set up a schedule with me at the Monticello Hotel.”

  “On Sunset.”

  “On Sunset,” he confirmed. “I picked the times and brought my own accompanist. This is difficult. The young woman’s name is Luna Martin. She is pretty. She is smart. She is not graceful, but she is determined. As I said, she also claims to have been a dance instructor. One can only guess at the number of lead-footed zombies she unleashed on the dance floors of America. At the end of the second lesson last Thursday, when the piano player was taking a break, Miss Martin unbuttoned her silk blouse, displayed her considerable breasts, and declared that she wanted me and was determined to have me.”

  I nodded.

  Music was now coming from Shelly’s office. It sounded like the Modernaires.

  “I’ve been in vaudeville, musical comedy, and movies all my life,” said Astaire. “I’ve seen bare-breasted women and have been approached by a variety of females who have made it clear that they were available. I am quite happily married and inclined neither to couple with Luna Martin nor be deformed by her boyfriend. In short …”

  “You want me to find a way to get her off your back.”

  “And every other part of my anatomy,” he amended. “Miss Martin expects her next lesson Thursday morning at ten. I can make an excuse and skip this one. Maybe I can even make a reasonable excuse and miss two sessions. Three would sorely challenge my limited verbal skill, and four would be impossible.”

  “I get rid of Luna Martin and Forbes, and I provide you with protection. That it?” I said, taking notes on the back of one of the many envelopes on my desk.

  “At least till the situation is reasonably safe,” he said. “Is this a reasonable request?”

  “Twenty-five a day for me, plus expenses. Twenty per man for protection. I think we’re talking about two or three men for a few weeks at least. Or you can go one hundred a day and I cover the cost of additional help. Of course, you get a detailed accounting.”

  “It could run into money,” Astaire said, rubbing his chin thoughtfully.

  “It could,” I agreed.

  “Considering the amount I’ve lost on the horses,” he said, standing, “I think it’s a wise investment. One condition. No police. No publicity.”

  “No police. No publicity. No guarantee, but I’ll do my best.”

  I held out my hand and he took it.

  “I need one more thing from you,” I said.

  “An advance,” he said, reaching for his wallet.

  “That would be nice,” I said. “But what I really need is one quick dance lesson so I can take your place at the Monticello Thursday.”

  “Can you dance at all?”

  “Not a step,” I said.

  He sighed deeply, took out his wallet, and gave me two hundred dollars in cash, saying he didn’t want to use checks for this. He also gave me a private phone number where I could reach him and told me to meet him at R.K.O. the next morning, Wednesday, for an emergency dance lesson.

  “I’ve heard I can rely on you,” Astaire said, taking the doorknob in hand.

  I nodded with a knowing smile and more confidence than I felt, and Fred Astaire opened the door, letting in the voices of the Modernaires before he left.

  In the dental office, I could hear Shelly speaking quickly to Astaire. I couldn’t make out the words. The door to the reception room opened and closed and I knew that Astaire had made his escape.

  As soon as I knew he was safe, I flattened out the sheet of paper Violet had given me and put in a call to Anne.

  Anne and I had been divorced for more than six years. She had stayed with me when I was a cop in Glendale and a security guard at Warner Brothers. When I got fired from Warners by Jack Warner himself, for breaking the nose of a cowboy star who wouldn’t keep his hands off a girl in the accounting office, Anne had said I would never grow up. She was right, I guess. I loved her. She left me. From time to time, when my hard head could help her out of a tight spot, she gave me a call.

  I didn’t recognize the number. I reached for the phone, gave the operator the number. A woman, not Anne, answered after the first ring.

  “Rappeneau and Darin,” she said.

  “Anne Mitzenmacher,” I said.

  “I’m sorry, sir, but we have no Anne Mitzenmaker.”

  “Mitzenmacher,” I corrected.

  “No one with a name anything like that,” she said.

  “Do you have an Anne anything?”

  “Anne Peters,” she said.

  “That’s the one,” I said.

  She couldn’t help saying, “Peters doesn’t sound anything like … I’ll connect you.”

  Another ring and Anne picked up the phone, saying, “Anne Peters, can I help you?”

  Anne had a deep, lush voice that brought memories of her soft, dark hair, her large lips, her large everything.

  “You’re using my name,” I said lightly.

  “My options are limited,” she said. “It’s easier for the clients to remember, and I doubt if the receptionist could even say Mitzenmacher.”

  “She can’t. I tried her. What are you selling, Anne?”

  “Houses,” she said. “This is a real-estate company. We’re on Washington, just off Highland.”

  After Anne divorced me she had married Ralph, an airline executive. Life was good. Home on Malibu Beach. Then Ralph made some mistakes with the wrong people and wound up dead and broke.

  “You called to beg my forgiveness and tell me you can’t live without me,” I said.

  “No jokes, Toby, please.”

  “I was hoping, Anne.”

  “You never remember the bad times.”

  “That’s one of my strengths,” I said.

  “And I’m doomed to remembe
r them all,” she said. “One of my weaknesses. I’d like your help.”

  “You’ve got it.”

  “Don’t you want to hear what it is first?”

  “No,” I said.

  “Can you meet me for lunch? Noon, there’s a restaurant called Roth’s on Fifth near Olive …”

  “By the Biltmore Hotel. I know it. I’ll be there.”

  “You’re not working, or? …”

  “As a matter of fact, I’m working for Fred Astaire. He’s giving me a dance lesson tomorrow.”

  “You don’t change, Toby,” Anne said with a sigh. “I’ve got to go. There’s another call. Noon at Roth’s.”

  I tucked the two fifties and five twenties into my wallet. With the two hundred I had hidden in an envelope behind the Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall of my room at Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse, I now had a little over four hundred dollars and all my bills paid.

  It was Tuesday morning. Life was still just fine.

  If I hurried I could just make it to Roth’s by noon with a few minutes to spare. I left my office and attempted a quick retreat across the no-man’s-land of Sheldon Minck’s office.

  “Did you talk to him?” Shelly said, stopping me just short of the door. “About my working on his teeth?”

  “I told you I wouldn’t, Shel,” I said, turning to face him and the woman in the chair, who appeared to be just coming out of shock. Her eyes were blinking and she was looking around, trying to remember where she was.

  “Not fair, Toby. I tell all my patients who need a private detective that help is right across the office.”

  “You’ve never sent me a client, Shel.”

  “I’ve had very few patients who needed a detective,” he said, removing his cigar so he could examine it for signs of possible betrayal before he lit it. “Mr. Laurel needs dental work.”

  “That wasn’t Stan Laurel,” I said. “It was Fred Astaire.”

  Shelly returned the cigar to his mouth, wiped his hands on his smock, and blew smoke in the direction of his bewildered patient.

  “Vera, Mrs. Davis, was the man who just walked through here Fred Astaire?”

  Mrs. Davis looked around for someone who might resemble Fred Astaire. All she could see were me and Shelly. She tried to sit up, a look of pain double-crossed her face, and she let out a fresh groan.