Dancing in the Dark

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. Both 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.”

“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.

“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 remember 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.

“See,” said Shelly triumphantly. “She’s fine.”

“I’ve got to go, Shel,” I said.

“Tell Violet I need her in here.”

In the reception room of Minck and Peters, I told Violet that the good dentist needed her in surgery. Violet inched her way from behind her desk and through the narrow space between it and the wall.

“I’ll call later,” I said.

She popped out from the side of the desk and said, “Ortiz, and it won’t go the distance.”

I was out the door and into the hallway outside our office. Still plenty of time, though I couldn’t check it on a reliable watch. Six floors below, the voices of two men were echoing loud and dirty. I moved along the railing toward the stairs and looked down. The bald head and the burly body told me that one of the three men below was the Farraday’s owner, Jeremy Butler. I didn’t recognize the two men with him, at least not from this angle, but they were big and standing close to Jeremy.

I started down the stairs, unable to sort the words of anger from their echo.

Jeremy is pushing sixty-five, or maybe pulling it. He’s an ex-wrestler who saved his money and wound up with a second-rate office building and some scattered third-rate apartment buildings. He was now a landlord with time to devote to his passion-poetry-and to his family, which included his wife, the former Alice Pallis, who nearly matched Jeremy in size and strength, and their one-year-old daughter, Natasha, a curly-haired beauty who bore no resemblance to either of her parents.

By the time I made it down to the lobby, I could see the two men shouting in Jeremy’s face. One was young, no more than thirty. Giving him the benefit of the doubt he looked a little like a crazed John Garfield. The other was in his forties and looked a little like a pig. The pig held something in his right hand, something metal.

“You’ll pay,” the older one was saying. “You hear me?”

Jeremy didn’t answer. He looked from one to the other with his hands at his sides.

“Everybody’s paying, up and down the street,” the younger one shouted.

“I will advise them not to do so,” Jeremy said softly.

“There are bad people around the city,” the older one said. “Vandals. People who destroy other people’s property for no reason. They break windows and. . I’ve told you this already. You’re not listening.”

I paused at the bottom step, fairly sure they couldn’t see me. Then I saw that the object in the older guy’s hand was a small crowbar. I took a step out of the shadows. The younger one spotted me and nudged his partner, who looked toward me.

“You a cop?” he asked cautiously.

“No,” I said.

“Then stay out of this,” he warned, holding up the crowbar. “This is a business discussion with the old man.”

“I was just going to ask for the time,” I said.

“It’s eleven-twenty, Toby,” Jeremy said.

The crowbar came up in a streak. So did Jeremy’s left hand. He grabbed the older guy’s wrist and twisted. The one who looked like John Garfield started to throw a punch. Jeremy swooped the arm he was holding right at the younger guy, and the crowbar, still in the hand of the pig, hit John Garfield in the face. The younger guy staggered back with a yell, his hands covering his eyes. Jeremy let go of the wrist of the other man, who went down on his knees in agony. The crowbar clattered to the floor and the man’s wrist hung limp and possibly broken.

I watched while Jeremy advanced on the man who had taken the crowbar across his face, now backed up against the wall. He took his hands down, blood streaming from his nose, a look of panic in his eyes.

“Don’t touch your nose,” Jeremy said, reaching up for the man’s face. “This will hurt but the bone will be back in place, and if you don’t touch it, it will heal and look quite natural.”

Before the man could mount a protest, Jeremy put his left hand behind the man’s head and pinched his nose between the thumb and fingers of his right hand. The man squirmed, let out an anguished “Ahhhhhh,” and sank to the floor.

Jeremy turned to the man with the injured wrist, who was trying to stand.

“Hey, enough,” the man said. “Me and Twines are just trying to make a living here.”

Jeremy moved toward him.

“The truth is nobody on the block gave us money,” the man said. “The truth is we’re no damn good at this and getting pretty goddamn frustrated. Twines is my sister’s kid. How am I gonna explain his broken nose?”

Jeremy didn’t answer. He grabbed the man’s shoulder and held up the damaged arm. The man tried to pull away.

“It’s not broken,” Jeremy said. “Sprained wrist. Go.”

“I want my crowbar.”

“I suggest you listen to the man,” I said.

The man with the sprained wrist winced his way to his nephew, who was trying to get up from his knees. He put his good arm around Twines and said, “This is a goddamn hard life, let me tell you.”

“Go, now,” Jeremy said gently.

The two men slouched to the door, went into the outer lobby, and out onto Hoover in search of a new line of work.

“This is no longer a safe neighborhood,” Jeremy said as he bent to pick up the crowbar.

“It’s not a safe world,” I added.

“I have a wife and child,” he said, looking around the vast lobby of his office building and up toward the offices on the eighth floor he had converted to a rambling apartment for his family.

“Might be a good idea to. . I’m on my way to a realestate dealer I know. You want me to?. .”

“No, thank you, Toby,” he said, surveying the trail of blood from Twines’s nose. “I have other property.”

“I’m late, Jeremy,” I said.

“If you have some time later, I have a new poem.”

“Later, promise,” I said, en route to the door.

It was still a good day.

I went out the rear exit of the Farraday and headed for my car. The open lot was covered with gravel; trash, which Jeremy cleaned up once a week, thrown from the windows of the Farraday; and the wreckage of two abandoned cars in which, depending on the season, a homeless alcoholic or two resided. This season’s resident of the alley was Vince. Vince was standing in front of my Crosley. I had paid Vince a quarter, the going rate, for watching my car. The possible dangers to my car were theft, stolen tires or hubcaps, broken windows, and Vince.

Vince looked somewhere near sixty but was probably closer to forty-five. He had a reasonably clean-shaven face with a few nicks and healing cuts. I had given him a Gillette razor, a pack of Blue blades, two of my old shirts, an antique pair of pants I found in the back of my closet, and a pair of university oxfords that had always pinched my toes. I had also suggested to him that he put on the clothes, shave, and make the rounds of the local restaurants in search of a pearldiving job.

It had worked for the last keeper of the alley.

Vince had solemnly promised he would make the rounds, but when it came to actually going into a diner and asking to see the boss, it was too much for him, or so he had told me with a shrug.

“A man’s nature is a man’s nature,” Vince had said with a sigh.

Vince said he had been a history teacher in a high school in Chicago until he fell or was pushed down a school stairway between classes. The world had gone blurry, and only a drink or twenty could make it seem clear again. He had been fired in the middle of a semester and, since he had no family, Vince had packed his bag, got into his car, and driven out in search of a cave or hole to hide in. That, Vince said, was “five or six or eight years ago, certainly long before this war and long after the last one.”

I handed Vince two quarters and said thanks.

He looked at the two quarters and handed one back to me.

“My fee was a quarter,” he said. “This is business, not charity.”

“You might want to raise your rates a little,” I suggested, opening the Crosley’s door. “Prices are going up everywhere. I think your customers would understand.”

“You are my only customer,” Vince said, pocketing the quarter in what used to be my pants. “Now, if you want to put me on an exclusive retainer and continue to pay at the current rate. .”

I turned awkwardly in my seat, fished a dollar bill from my wallet, and handed it to him. It followed the quarter into his pocket.

“We should have a written contract,” Vince said.

“Write it up. I’ll sign it.”

I closed the door, waved good-bye, turned on the radio, and drove out of the alley. I took Main the few blocks to Washington, where I made a right turn and went straight to Highland.

Morton Downey sang me down the street with Raymond Paige’s Orchestra backing him up. Downey finished a tearful chorus of “Danny Boy” and then tried to sell me some Coca-Cola. Pepsi’s my drink and, once in a while, a beer or two or three, but I’d almost cried at the end of “Danny Boy,” so I promised Morton I’d have a Coke with lunch.

I had no trouble finding a parking space on Fifth and I walked into Roth’s with about two minutes to spare, according to the clock on the wall. It was lunchtime for the insurance companies, lawyers’ firms, shopkeepers, and clerks in the neighborhood. The place was noisy, crowded, and smelled of hot pastrami.

Anne sat at a small table near the kitchen door. Her hands were folded in front of her. Her eyes met mine. No smile. All business. Not what I wanted to see. I weaved my way through the tables, pulled out a chair across from Anne, and sat. She was wearing a brown twill suit, and she had lost some weight. She was dark and more beautiful and serious than I had remembered.

“Thanks for coming, Toby,” she said.

A fizzing glass of dark liquid sat in front of me, a cup of coffee in front of Anne.

“My pleasure,” I said, meaning it.

“I ordered you a Pepsi,” she said, gesturing at the drink before me.

“Thanks,” I said, making a note to keep my Coke pledge to Morton Downey in the very near future.

“I ordered you a pastrami on rye with ketchup,” she said. “If you. .”

“Sounds perfect,” I said over the clatter of trays and dishes and the ramble of voices around us.

“First,” Anne said, looking at me with her warm brown eyes, “I want to thank you for keeping your promise.”

I shrugged and drank my Pepsi.

About six months ago, give or take an hour, I had promised Anne I would stop dropping in at her apartment at all hours of the day or night, would not call her unless I had a real emergency, and would stop sending her poetry which, she said, was “obviously not written by you.” I had, with the agony of a four-year-old who can’t sit still for dinner, stayed away.

“You’re looking good, Toby.”

“You’re looking beautiful, Anne.”

“Thank you.”

A skinny waitress in a wilting Betty Crocker of a uniform plunked our lunches in front of us and hurried away. Anne had vegetable soup and a salad. My hot pastrami came with a stack of fries. I should have been happy, but I knew something was about to be served that I wouldn’t like. I took a bite of the sandwich. It was hot and piled high with thin slices of spiced meat. It didn’t taste half bad for Los Angeles pastrami.

“How are Phil and. .” Anne said after a nibble of lettuce.

“My brother is fine,” I interrupted. “His wife and kids are fine. Sheldon Minck is fine. I’ve got about four hundred dollars. My back is holding up well. I’m seeing the cashier at Levy’s. Her name is Carmen. She reminds me of you, without the smarts. I’m still in the boardinghouse. I still go to the fights when I can and. .”

It was her turn to interrupt.

“Enough,” Anne said, putting down her fork and meeting my eyes.

I took a determined third bite of my sandwich and washed it down with Pepsi.

“I’m going to get married,” she said.

“Congratulations,” I said. “Anyone I know?”

“You’ve seen him,” she said, watching me eat. “I sold him a house. He made me laugh.”

That hurt more than the news that Anne was getting married. I had made her smile a few dozen times when we were married, but no laughs. And I was sure there had been no laughs with her second husband, Ralph.

“Open the envelope and read the winner’s name,” I said between furious attacks on phase two of the sandwich.

“Preston Stewart,” she said.

I didn’t feel like eating any more. Preston Stewart was a contract player at M-G-M. Preston Stewart had been in about two-dozen movies and had starred in two low-budget ones, one a Western, the other a melodrama. He was blond, good-looking with lots of teeth, and, worst of all, he had to be a good ten years younger than Anne.

“Toby? Say something.”

“I heard on the radio that the Chinese have begun translating the Encyclopedia Britannica. News came straight from Chungking. Middle of a war with Japs running all over their country and they’re translating an encyclopedia. You can’t beat people like that. You can only kill them.”

“Toby, please,” she said, gently but firmly.

“What am I supposed to say? I said congratulations. I love you. I want you back. I’m never going to get you. You’re marrying a kid movie actor with. . with teeth, lots of teeth, big white ones. And he can make you laugh.”

“I’m sorry,” she said, pushing her salad around with her fork, not eating.

“And that’s why you called me?”

“I thought I should tell you face to face,” she said.

The skinny waitress was back.

“Everything okay?” she asked, not much caring and reaching for my empty plate. The fries were gone. I had eaten them without knowing it.

“Fine,” I said.

“Coffee?”

“Another Pepsi,” I said.

“Just ran out of Pepsi. Coke or Royal Crown.”

“Coke,” I said.

“Coffee,” Anne said, looking at her watch. “Black.”

The waitress nodded and headed through the door to the kitchen.

“Would you like to know about Preston? It might make it easier if you knew what a. .”

“No,” I said, holding up a hand. “I don’t want to know how kind, loving, rich, and funny he is. Call me a sore loser. Call me childish, which you’ve been known to do. My guess is I’ll avoid Preston Stewart movies for a year and then I’ll start going to all of them, looking for signs of decay or melting, wondering how you two hit it off in bed and if he’s still keeping you laughing down on the beach in your tans.”

“I didn’t think you’d be this bitter,” Anne said.

“You caught me by surprise. I didn’t have time to fake it or tell a bad joke or two. The truth just came out.”

The waitress was back with my Coke and Anne’s coffee. She put the check in front of me. Anne reached over the table for it.

“I invited you to lunch,” she said.

“Do me a favor,” I said. “Let me come out of this with a little dignity. The bill’s only two bucks and change.”

Anne sat back, looked at her coffee, tucked away a wisp of hair behind her left ear, and looked back at me.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “You deserve a break. I hope Preston Stewart is it.”

“Thanks, Toby,” she said.

“When’s the wedding?”

“Soon. When. . if you ever feel better about this, I’d like you to meet Press.”

“One condition,” I said. “I don’t have to call him Press.”

Anne almost smiled.

“His real name is Asher Cahn.”

I nodded and finished my Coke. Anne hadn’t touched her coffee.

“Thanks for caring enough to tell me face to face,” I said, picking up the check.

“I don’t think it would be a good idea to invite you to the wedding, Toby.”

“It would be a very bad idea.”

Anne dabbed at the corners of her mouth with her napkin and rose. So did I.

“I’m a little late,” she said. “I’ve got to hurry.”

I nodded and got up.

Anne came around the table, touched my hand, and kissed my cheek. I think she was crying. At least I like to think there was a tear or two. Then she was gone.

I left a big tip and was turning toward the cash register when the skinny waitress appeared, picked up the tip, and said, “She dump ya?”

“Yeah.”

“Figures. She didn’t eat and you leave a big tip.”

“You should be a detective,” I said.

“Helps to have a little knowledge of human nature in this job,” she said. “Go get a little drunk. I do when I get dumped.”

“I don’t drink,” I said.

She shrugged and answered the upheld hand of a distant customer.

Less than twenty minutes later I was at the Y.M.C.A. downtown on Hope Street. I looked for Doc Hodgdon or someone else for a handball game. No luck. So I got my stiff light gloves from my locker, loosened them up, and attacked the heavy punching bag in the corner of the gym, near an old guy with dyed red hair who was steadily shooting free throws.

After twenty minutes of punching and a shower, I felt tired and a little better. There was a Loew’s theater a few blocks from the Y. I walked over and saw a March of Time about the New Canada and They Got Me Covered with Bob Hope. It was only a little after four when I got out and closed my eyes against the afternoon sun.

I got in my car and drove to the Roxy, where I saw He’s My Guy with Joan Davis, Dick Foran, and the Mills Brothers. There was also a musical short with Borrah Minevitch’s Original Harmonica Rascals. I remember the little guy, Johnny Puleo, wearing cowboy chaps and trying to muscle his way into the act. That’s all I remember of what I had seen in the dark that day. Joan Davis and Bob Hope had gotten a few smiles out of me but that was it.

The sun was still up but not as bright and there was a chill in the air. I headed home. It was about dinnertime, but I wasn’t hungry.

I found a space on Heliotrope about half a block down from Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse, walked down the street and up the three steps of the white wooden porch.

Mrs. Plaut was just inside the screen door waiting for me, arms folded across her tiny twig of a body, clutching what looked like a tattered ream of paper to her slender bosom. Mrs. Plaut was somewhere between seventy-five and ninety, with the constitution of Primo Carnera and the energy of Ray Bolger. Her hearing had long ago begun to fail her, but she more than made up for it with eyesight and determination.

“Mr. Peelers, I have a list,” she shouted.

“Mrs. Plaut,” I answered loudly, seeing that she wasn’t wearing her hearing aid. “This day has turned from a toe-tapping joy to thoughts, if not of suicide, at least of a dark room, a few hours of radio, and lots of dreamless sleep.”

“Sometimes I fail to understand you, Mr. Peelers,” she said with a shake of her head. “If your toes are cramped, don’t climb in bed feeling sorry for yourself. Do what the Mister always did, stomp around the floor barefoot. And don’t breathe in that Flit stuff.”

Mrs. Plaut, when it fit her agenda, thought I was an exterminator or an editor for a small but prestigious publisher. I do not know where she got these ideas. Attempts to find out had proved both fruitless and maddening.

“I’ll stomp around, Mrs. Plaut,” I said.

“There is a potato shortage, you know,” she said moving from small talk to Item One on her agenda.

“I’ve heard.”

“There is a black market in potatoes.”

“Ah,” I said knowingly, looking longingly at the stairs behind her that led to my room.

“I should like you to use your resources to obtain as many pounds of baking potatoes as you can.”

“Tomorrow,” I said. “I’ll think about it tomorrow. I promise.”

“Promises are daisies. Delivering the goods is orchids. The Mister said that.”

The Mister was long, long gone. I had never had the pleasure of meeting him. But he was a legend in the House of Plaut.

“And,” she went on, “more meat rationing is coming April eleventh.”

“I’ll give you my meat-ration stamps,” I said. “Now, if I can. .”

She handed me the papers in her hand, lined sheets covered with Mrs. Plaut’s precisely written pen-and-ink words. It was the latest chapter in the endless saga of her family. I was expected to edit-minimally-and comment-favorably-on each chapter handed to me. I was expected to do this quickly and to be ready for an interrogation to prove I had read her latest offering carefully.

“At breakfast tomorrow morning, you can critique,” she said. “We’re having Waterbury crescent scones crafted with mince, orange peel, and a dash of nutmeg.”

“I’ll have to make it a quick breakfast, Mrs. P.,” I said, trying to inch past her, letting my slightly outstretched arms clutching her manuscript run interference.

But Mrs. Plaut was not to be denied. She cut me off.

“Where is it you have to run? Call, make it later. You have the chapter about Aunt Bess and Cousin Leo’s fateful encounter with Pancho Villa.”

“I have a dance lesson with Fred Astaire,” I countered.

“The movie Fred Astaire?”

“Not the streetcar conductor,” I said.

“He is trying to teach you to dance?”

“Yes,” I said. “That’s why I’m having a lesson.”

“He will fail miserably,” she said with a shake of her head.

“I appreciate your confidence and support,” I said. “I’ll read this tonight.”

“Potatoes,” she said, finally standing aside to let me pass.

I paused on the steps and turned to her with, “Have you ever seen Preston Stewart?”

“In the flesh, no. In the movies, yes.”

“What do you think?”

“About Preston Stewart? If I were fifty years younger, I’d hide in his bedroom closet and jump on his bones when he came home.”

“Thanks,” I said, starting up the stairs. Behind me Mrs. Plaut said, “That’s what my niece Rhoda did with Valentino. And she said it worked.”

The only person I could or would talk to about me and Anne was Gunther Wherthman, who was my best friend, Swiss, and about the same size as Johnny Puleo of the Harmonica Rascals. He was either a midget or a little person, depending on who you were talking to. I wanted to talk to Gunther, who had gotten me the room in Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse three years earlier when Mrs. Eastwood had thrown me out of my apartment. Gunther was always proper. Gunther was always perfectly dressed, down to his tiny three-piece suits and a fob with a regular-size watch attached. Gunther spent his days translating books into English from about a dozen languages. He had more work than he could handle with government contracts, industrial and popular publishers. But Gunther was out of town with the normal-sized young woman he was dating and considering marrying, a graduate student in music history at the University of San Francisco.

I didn’t want to think about anybody marrying anybody.

I went into my room and was greeted by a loud series of demanding “meows” from Dash. The sun was almost down but not quite. I hit the light switch and surveyed my domicile, Mrs. Plaut’s manuscript pages in my hand.

A flowery ancient sofa to my left had a purple pillow resting on it. Stitched onto the pillow by Mrs. Plaut was “God Bless Us Every One.” There had been a bed, but since I didn’t use it I finally convinced Mrs. Plaut that the room was too crowded and the frame and spring should be stored in the vast and overflowing garage in back of the house. The garage used to be a barn and still had the smell of long-ago livestock.

My bad back was a gift from a large Negro gentleman who had wanted to approach Mickey Rooney at a premiere. It had been my job to protect the Mick from overeager fans. I was all that stood between Rooney and the large gentleman. Rooney didn’t even know what was going on. The big man had given me a bear hug and dropped me on the ground amid the crowd of fans. By then Rooney was safely inside his car and on his way. I, on the other hand, was crawling for open air and feeling a pain in my back that would haunt me on and off from then on.

I slept on a thin, hard mattress on the floor. I cleaned my room every morning and made the bed. Mrs. Plaut had frequent and unannounced inspections. The rooms of her boardinghouse had no locks, not even in the shared bathroom. Mrs. Plaut didn’t believe in privacy. People only did things they shouldn’t when they knew they could lock their doors.

I moved to the small table near the window to my right. The table had two chairs. There was a small refrigerator and a small built-in cupboard behind the table. Mrs. Plaut forbade stoves in the room, but we could have hot plates. One of her relatives, an uncle, I think, had been burned to death in his house on the Nebraska plains. It wasn’t clear from her memoirs whether the deed had been done by Indians, bandits, or her aunt.

I got two cans of tuna from the shelf, opened them, gave Dash some fresh water and one can while I ate the other. I had a glass of milk and a couple of graham crackers decently dunked, took off my clothes and got under the blanket on my mattress, ill-prepared to deal with Mrs. Plaut’s Aunt Rhoda, Cousin Leo, and Pancho Villa. Dash and whatever gods may be are my witnesses that I tried.

As soon as Pancho Villa appeared on page 1,122, my imagination cast Preston Stewart in the role. I couldn’t shake the mental picture of all those teeth beneath the sombrero. I put the manuscript down and fell asleep to the sound of Dash lapping his water, planning a night on the neighborhood through the open window.