Fala Factor (27 page)

“Manny,” I said, “you got some crackers I can give him?”

“Check,” called Manny and brought some little oyster crackers which I added to the bowl of Pepsi.

“Crackers is for pollies, not dogs,” said the leather man.

“He likes them,” I countered.

“He ain't no gor-met,” said the leather man, wisely returning to his own bowl of Carumba super hot chili.

Fed and fat, I led the dog to the Farraday and made my way slowly up the stairs to Jeremy's office. Jeremy was sitting opposite Bass and reading a book. Bass gave me and the dog, in that order, dirty looks, but there wasn't much he could do beyond that. He was firmly tied where he sat.

“Toby,” said Jeremy, rising from his chair, inserting a blue felt bookmark in his book of Frost poems and putting it neatly on the small table nearby. “I have been endeavoring to convince our guest that he should tell us the location of Miss Poslik and the identity of his accomplice or accomplices, but he remains mute. His arm seems, at this point, to be uninfected, but his soul, his very essence, is so corrupted that I doubt if much can be done.”

Bass looked up at Jeremy with a hatred that outdid the blast he had fired at me and the dog.

“When I get out,” Bass said, “I'll do you.”

“Bass, you are not getting out,” I explained while the dog sniffed at his right foot and just managed to escape the kick Bass threw. “You killed Mrs. Olson, kidnapped the dog and Jane Poslik, and, in general I'm sure, have been less than charming. You are going to trial and jail, maybe to the chair. Can you follow all that?”

Bass shook his head and looked bored. “He won't let that happen,” he said. “He's got connections, big connections. When things change in this country, I'm gonna be running the jails.”

“That's a comforting vision of the future,” I said. “I'll pass it on to my friends. Should give them added reason for surviving the war.”

“You can laugh,” Bass said. “People laugh at me sometimes when I can't touch them, but they can't stay away forever.”

“I can't laugh,” I said. “You bruised a few of my ribs, but we'll let bygones be bygones. Maybe I'll even vote Whig in the next election in Oz if you—”

“No,” Bass said.

I looked at Jeremy, who closed his eyes and opened them slowly to show that communication with Bass was hopeless.

“I got loyalty,” Bass said, his fingers turning white as he gripped the wooden arms of the chair to which he was strapped. “I know I've got loyalty. Even when I was wrestling and all those people were out there eating those hot dogs and booing me. I knew people who were my friends could count on me. My word means something.”

He was sounding too much like me, and I didn't like that at all, so I told Jeremy to keep him tied till tonight. Jeremy followed me to the door and I whispered the plan to him while Bass pretended to be looking at a row of books but strained without success to hear.

“Toby,” Jeremy said alter I had explained things to him, “please do not be offended by this, but your plans in such situations tend to be precarious and fraught with danger for you.”

“I've noticed that,” I agreed.

“
Ulysses
,” said Jeremy

“
I cannot rest from travel; I will drink
Life to the lees all times I have enjoyed
Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those
That loved ‘me, and alone, on shores, and when
Through scudding drifts the rainy Haydes
Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;
For always roaming with a hungry heart
Much have I seen and know
.”

“If you say so, Jeremy,” I whispered, touched his solid arm, and went into the hall with the dog waddling behind me.

The late-morning sounds of the Farraday accompanied me back to and up the stairs. Arguments coming through closed office doors, a machine whirring, a shout of laughter, some male voice echoing from below, “Then you just come back tomorrow at the same time, and we'll see what can be done about it.”

I had some time to kill, and possibly to be killed, and some phone calls to make. The game was set for eight that night. It had to be to get it all wrapped up so Eleanor Roosevelt could head back to Washington with her mystery solved and, hopefully, a bill for services, and I could pick Carmen up and get to the Armstrong fight.

My wardrobe was down to rock-bottom pitiful. The windbreaker I was wearing didn't even have a zipper. Fortune may have been laughing at me but I had a joke or two ready myself.

As it turned out, my phone calls were delayed. When I opened the door of the outer office of Minck and Peters, specialists in finding lost grandfathers and filling teeth, I heard voices—three voices, one female, two male—in Shelly's office. I considered turning around and heading the dog back to the street. We could find a park and take in the threatening rainstorm.

Instead I made the move, opened the inner door, and stepped into Shelly's office.

T
he scene: Shelly's spick and span, squeaky clean, falsely antiseptic office. In it, behind the dental chair that occupies the position of power in the room—the electric chair, the throne—stands Shelly in a clean white dental smock buttoned at the collar, cigar nowhere in evidence. Next to Shelly, flanking him, are a man and a woman. The woman, about sixty, is dressed in a dark blue dress with big white flowers on it. She looks like Marjorie Main wrapped in wallpaper designed for the women's room of a Dolly Dainty restaurant. The man is small, mustached, with a determined little chin, and losing his hair. He is like Porter Hall, the actor who snivels and makes a living by betraying Gary Cooper.

All three of them look at me and the dog, who wags his tail. Shelly looks bewildered, confused, and then an idea comes into his eyes. I can see it from where I stand and decide to break for my door, but the demon has taken over and the drama begins.

“Mr. Peters,” Shelly said, holding out an arm and grinning. The sweat was trickling down his nose and giving him a hell of a time keeping his glasses from falling to the floor. “You are a bit late for your appointment.”

“Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my own hand as Shelly advanced.

“Sorry,” Shelly chuckled, taking my arm. “But I'm afraid you'll have to use the washroom later, Mr. Peters. Drs. Ferzetti and Vaughan are from the Dental Association and they would like to observe me with a patient.”

“Look,” I said, but Shelly whispered quickly, his back to the stony inspectors: “You can't go in your office and give it away. You can't, for chrissake, bring a dog in here. You can't let me down on this, Toby.”

I grinned over Shelly's shoulder at the two dentists, who did not grin back, and I talked to Shelly through my teeth like a third-rate ventriloquist.

“You are not getting me in that chair,” I said. “You are not working on my mouth, Minck. I've seen too many disasters crawl out of this office never to be heard from again, at least among the living.”

“Be with you in just a moment,” Shelly said to the two dentists. “Mr. Peters is just a bit shy about having people observe.” And then, whispering back to me, “That's just what I'm telling you. They have complaints, for God's sake. You know what kind of trouble I can be in if I don't prove something here?”

“No more than you deserve to be in,” I said, tugging at the rope around the dog's collar to keep him from sniffing Marjorie Main.

“My career,” Shelly said, putting a fat hand to his heart. “My life.” He was close enough for me to smell his cigar breath and sweat. The tears in his eyes were fogging his glasses.

“Our names go on the door the same size,” I said.

“Never,” said Shelly.

“Dr. Minck,” Porter Hall said, looking at his watch impatiently.

“Same size,” Shelly whispered to me.

“And—” I began.

“No ands, no ands here, Toby, this is blackmail,” Shelly said, almost weeping.

“You think I don't know blackmail when I'm engaged in it?” I said. “I'm a detective. And … you keep the sink clean.”

“Dr. Minck,” the man said again. “We really must …”

“Here we come,” said Shelly, taking my arm and hissing to me. “All right.”

I should have asked for more. I knew it when I sat in the chair and watched Shelly lead the dog to my office door, open it, close the dog inside, and turn to me with a grin like Karloff as Fu Manchu.

“Now just what kind of dental work does this man need?” said Marjorie Main, looking down at me as if I were a fraud.

Shelly was pinning a clean sheet around my neck. I felt as if I were in a barber shop with W. C. Fields about to drop a scalding towel on my face to keep his own hands from burning.

“A great deal,” said Shelly, touching his chin and selecting an instrument to begin with.

“Doctor,” I said ominously.

“But,” Shelly went on, “today we are simply going to begin. We've got to take the X rays first.”

Before I could protest, Shelly had rolled out his X ray machine and placed a black metal cone from it against my cheek, then turned out the lights and filled my mouth with film. I tried with little success to breathe while three of us watched Shelly put on his dark goggles and heavy lead coat and unreel the extra long electrical cord.

“We'll go behind the barricade in the corner,” he told the other doctors and headed over, looking like a field colonel directing his adjutants to safety during an attack.

“Hold it.” I said, pulling the boards out of my mouth. Shelly flicked the lights back on.

“Mr. Peters,” he said, removing his goggles. “You've exposed the goddamn film.”

“Better the film than me, Minck,” I said threateningly.

“Dr. Minck,” Marjorie Main stepped in. “We haven't time to wait while you get the X rays developed. Can't you simply do a visual examination now and some preliminary work so we can observe your procedures?”

“Dr. Ferzetti is right,” said the man. “We have other stops to make.”

Reluctantly, Shelly took off the lead coat and hung it, along with the goggles, in the closet. Then he turned to me.

“Open wide. Mr Peters,” he said leaning over, a recently cleaned mirror in his hand. He was breathng heavily as he put his weight on my chest and explored my mouth with a series of “Ah-ha's” and “Well, well, wells.”

When he stepped back, he had a satisfied look on his face. Shelly cleaned the mirror on his smock, put it down on the clean white towel on his work tray, and asked me, “Do you brush your teeth regularly, Mr. Peters?”

“Regularly,” I said. “With Teel, or Dr. Lyon's.”

“You've got some cavities,” Shelly said, picking up something with a sharp point and tapping it against his palm. “Let's take care of one or two of them now.”

“Let's,” sighed Porter Hall with more than a touch of impatience.

As soon as he had my mouth propped open and little blocks put in, Shelly turned to the two inspectors and said, “Mr. Peters is a well-known radio personality, aren't you, Mr. Peters?”

I gargled and almost choked.

“Yes?” said the woman with some incredulity.

“Mr. Peters is the voice of Captain Midnight,” Shelly said, leaning over on the drill, which began to spin evilly just beyond the range of my right eye, which was straining toward it.

Shelly worked quickly, dripping sweat on me and singing a medley of Cole Porter tunes. He paused during “Anything Goes” to smile grimly and shrug. “Stubborn little yentz, but we'll get him.”

Pain and I are not strangers, but even so, Shelly redefined it for me. It wasn't the intensity but the duration. Shelly had the touch of a blind hippo and a tastefully matching manner and odor. But he was on his best behavior, which resulted in his failing to maim or kill me in the chair.

“That should do it,” he said, packing the silver filling into the two holes he had excavated in my teeth. “Have a look, colleagues.”

Shelly stepped back, and the two unfamiliar faces leaned forward to examine my mouth.

“Captain Midnight,” the woman said, after pursing her lips with doubt. “Can I have your autograph for my grandson?”

Shelly stuck a piece of paper and a pencil in my hand. I felt my tingling teeth with my torpid tongue and signed Tobias Leo Pevsner, parent-given name, adding, “With good wishes from your pal, Captain Midnight.”

“Okay, so what do you think?” Shelly said, turning to the two inspectors, his hands wringing.

“Well,” said the man. “You seem minimally competent.”

“Your office is clean if not modern,” the woman added.

“Your technique is very old-fashioned,” the man went on, taking out a notebook to write something. Shelly craned his neck to try to see what the man was carefully noting, but had no success.

“Frankly, Dr. Minck,” the woman said, looking at me and back at Shelly, “our primary complaints seem at odds with what we have seen here, though I have the impression that you've cleaned this office up very recently.”