High Midnight: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Six) (24 page)

“See you around,” he said, waving at me.

“See you around,” I said, waving back. All he needed was a horse and some reasonable background music, but there was no horse, only the drunk who had gone from “Side by Side” to “We’re in the Money.”

I closed up, packed my money and went home. Gunther was there, and I invited him out for Sunday dinner. It took Gunther twenty minutes to dress, though he had already looked ready for a banquet when I walked in.

Over egg foo yung and pressed duck at Jee Gong Law’s on Alameda, Gunther displayed his knowledge of Chinese and I ate, stiff-necked and with wild abandon. We toasted Gary Cooper, Luís Felípe Castelli, Ernest Hemingway and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Something had ended, and I had that nagging fear that nothing else was ready to begin. I washed away visions of filling in for Jack Ellis at the Ocean Palms with tea, beer and talk.

“I think it is now time to go home,” Gunther said finally.

I was about to argue with him, but realized he was right. I called for the check, overtipped and wondered on the way home if Mrs. Plaut would take kindly to my having a dog—maybe a dog who looked like my old beagle Kaiser Wilhelm.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

M
onday morning made me no great promises. In fact, it said, “This is the way the world ends. Take it or leave it.” My neck was feeling better, though I had no plans for getting rid of the bandage till I’d milked a few more hours of sympathy from the wound. The Sunday
Los Angeles Times
sat unread on my table. The headlines were enough to keep me from trespassing on the possible horrors inside. If the
Times
was right, the war must be about over and we were about to lose.

Even with more than four hundred dollars in my pocket, I would have felt better with some hope that a job might be waiting for me. The only thing going for me was the fact that I had gone through a case without a major back problem. I could have felt sorry for myself and slept if the sun weren’t so bright. I had no curtains and a low tolerance for the light of the sun.

I treated myself to three cereals mixed together in my salad bowl: Wheaties, Puffed Rice and Bran Flakes. I put too much sugar on the pile and a little milk. The hell with it.

Mrs. Plaut wasn’t prowling around when I went out, but she had left more chapters of her family history for me. With her treasures removed from my room and no corpses in evidence, she was ready to deal with me again as a literary critic and household-pest exterminator. By my conservative estimate, Mrs. Plaut’s book now totaled over two thousand pages, neatly hand-printed.

Things were no better when I got to the Buick. It had heard the war news and was feeling sorry for itself. All the way downtown the car screamed sadly. By the time I drove it in to No-neck Arnie the mechanic, the car was crying like an abandoned cat.

Arnie gave it a stern look and ignored me. He took the keys and told me he’d call when he had anything to call about, providing I left him with a deposit. I forked over twenty bucks, which disappeared into his overalls, and left.

No one was waiting to kill me or beat me to a pulp in the lobby of the Farraday Building. On the second-floor landing I found Jeremy Butler running his fingers along the outside of the door to a baby photographer’s office.

“Maybe termites,” he said with concern, and then turned to look at me.

I told my tale, thanked him for his help and accepted sympathy for the wounds taken in the line of duty.

“Sometimes I think if I were twenty, thirty years younger,” he said, “I’d join the army and go out and wring some Nazi necks. Then sometimes I think I’m lucky I’m not twenty, thirty years younger, and that makes me feel ashamed. You know?”

“Right,” I agreed. It was a morning for agreeing with people who felt sorry for themselves.

“So,” sighed Jeremy, taking a last look at the door before going down the stairs, “I’ll just write a poem about it and that will make me feel guilty. I wish there were a bum or two to throw out.”

He went down the stairs and got lost below me. I hoped he found a bum or two. If I had the time, and I probably did, I could go pay a few bucks to have some rummy infest the Farraday to keep Jeremy’s mind off the war.

Shelly was sitting in the dental chair when I came in. The script to
High Midnight
was open in his lap and his eyes, behind thick lenses, were inches from the page. He turned a page near the end and looked up. “Be with you in a minute,” he said.

“It’s me, Shel, Toby.”

“What’re you wearing a scarf for?” he asked, returning to the manuscript. “It’s up to 70 degrees out there. Don’t you know it’s anti-California to wear a scarf? It’s never cold enough here to wear a scarf even when it’s cold enough here to wear a scarf.”

“I’m not wearing a scarf,” I said. “I was shot in the neck Saturday night.”

Without taking his eyes from the page, Shelly went on. “Take my advice and stay home on Saturday nights. Wild people, wild crowds out there. War scare. It’s hurting business, too. People don’t want to take care of their teeth if they think they won’t have their heads in a few months. At least some people. On the other hand, some people want to look their best if they know they’re going. However, the ones who don’t care …”

“Forget it, Shel,” I said.

He shrugged and turned the last page of the script.

“Well?” I asked, going for the coffee. “How do you like it?”

“Ah,” he said, tapping the script with his hand and sitting up in the chair. “Not bad, but it could be better. Some good ideas.”

He accepted a cup of black liquid, touched his stubbly chin, shifted his cigar and said, “First of all, it should be a lot simpler. The way I see it, the old sheriff isn’t a killer. He’s tired, and he’s all set to retire, leave town with his pal the dentist.”

“Dentist?” I said, trying to drink the coffee.

“Doc Holliday was a dentist,” said Shelly with pride. “Sheriff and the dentist are going to leave town, retire together. Town gives them a big sendoff. Then they find that a gang of guys the sheriff put in jail are free and coming to shoot it out that very day. Sheriff tries to gather the townspeople to help him. They all give excuses, except the dentist. Together the sheriff and the dentist face the gang, and in the last scene they leave town, and the sheriff, who’s been wounded in the neck, throws down his badge. Huh, how about that for a story?”

“No good,” I said. “Americans don’t want to see stories during the war about people not wanting to help each other to fight off the bad guys.”

“Maybe you’re right,” said Shelly. “Maybe I’m a man ahead of his time.”

“You are indeed a man of many parts, Shel,” I agreed, coming down to something solid at the bottom of my cup.

“The title has to go,” said Shelly. “
High Midnight
sounds like a Boris Karloff. I think they should call it
High—
”

“Forget it, Shel,” I said, looking down into the cup. “What the hell is this?”

“Frog,” said Sheldon Minck, leaning back to dream about his script. “Porcelain. Used to do that back in the colonial days. You know, have frogs, other stuff at the bottom. Dentist wrote an article about making them as novelties when business is slow. Good gag, huh?”

A patient walked in, the reluctant Mr. Stange, who took one step back for every one he took forward.

“Wasn’t going to come back,” he said, “but it hurts like chicken hell.”

“A powerful image,” said Shelly, getting out of the chair and pointing to it to show Mr. Stange the way. “Enter and be sanctified.”

Mr. Stange went to the chair and got in, ready for another fearful trip. I had no intention of watching.

“Any calls?” I said as Shelly began to hum and rub his hands together as he looked for a tool or two in the rubble. He scratched his little finger pensively as he mumbled, “Calls, calls. Yes, you had a call, but it was nothing, just some clown playing a joke. You’ve picked up a lot of cuckoos in your line, let me tell you. Mildred thinks—”

“I know,” I said. “What was the message?”

“On your desk.” With that Shel shrugged and gave up his search for the elusive proper tool. He settled for second or third best, a long thing with a pincer at the end, which he cleaned by blowing on it and rubbing it against his soiled smock.

“When duty calls, a Minck will always respond.”

I left and closed my office door behind me, hoping it would drown out some of the more terrible sounds from Mr. Stange and some of the more gleeful ones of Sheldon P. Minck. It was somewhat effective, but it could have been better.

Among the pile of bills, mailers for a few dozen products to make me a more patriotic citizen and a handbill telling me to save all my chicken fat so it could be turned into explosives by my local butcher, I found the scrawled message Shelly had taken:

Guy called. Sounded funny. Said someone had electrocuted an elephant. I told him someone else had fried an eel. Guy on the phone said, someone had killed the elephant and I think we’re in danger. Guy said his name was Emmett Kelly, and you should come to San Diego right away and meet him with the Ringling Brothers Circus. I told him you’d be there in a few hours riding on your pet lion. Ha. Ha.

I put the note in my coat pocket, shoveled the mail and bills into my bulging top drawers and went into the outer office.

“I may not be back for a few days,” I told Shelly and Mr. Stange. I was feeling pretty good. In fact, I was feeling damned good. It sounded strange, but it didn’t have the ring of a gag. I could smell a gag as far away as I could smell Shelly Minck.

“Where are you going?” asked Shelly, his eyes in Mr. Stange’s gummy mouth.

“San Diego, to see who killed an elephant,” I said with a foolish grin.

“Waste of time,” said Shelly. “I tell you, it’s just some clown.”

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copyright © 1981 by Stuart M. Kaminksy

cover design by Mumtaz Mustafa

This edition published in 2011 by
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