The Fala Factor

11

The 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.”

“Not so,” said Shelly, actually crossing his heart. “Ask Mr. Peters. Did the office look like this the last time you were here?”

I nodded my head in agreement, trying to get my stiff jaws working again.

In my office, the little dog was whining and scratching at the door. The woman wandered about the room touching, examining, and the man kept jotting notes.

“What are you writing there, what?” Shelly said, unable to restrain himself.

“Notes,” said Porter Hall.

“I know notes,” sighed Shelly, “but what kind of notes? Are you writing bad things or good things?”

“Just notes,” the man said cryptically.

“I think we have seen quite enough, Dr. Minck,” came the voice of the woman, who was returning to our line of vision. The flowers were in bloom on her dress, and her smile was without committment.

“So,” said Shelly too eagerly, “do I pass?”

“Dr. Minck,” the man said, following the woman to the door, “this is not a grade school mathematics test. This is a professional assessment.”

“You got the autograph,” Shelly reminded the woman, pushing his glasses back on his nose.

“That’s not really relevant to your competency,” she said.

“I know, I know,” said Shelly, “but it was a nice thing, wasn’t it?”

She didn’t answer, but the man put his notebook away and held out his hand to Shelly, who shook it.

“You’ll be hearing from our office soon,” the man said with a polite little grin. “Good-bye, doctor, and to you, Captain.”

“Good-bye,” I said, reaching back to remove the sheet pinned around my neck as the two inspectors went out into the reception room. We waited till they were in the hall, then Shelly turned to me.

“He shook my hand,” he said, walking over to me cradling his face in his hands. “He wouldn’t do that if they were planning to impale me, would he?”

“Probably not,” I said, pushing out of the chair and trying to get a decent breath, no easy task with sore ribs and in the aftermath of Shelly’s work.

Shelly got into the chair I had just vacated, fished a cigar out of his pants pocket, and lit it pensively.

“I did a good job on your teeth,” he puffed. “I’m only gonna charge you half price out of gratitude for helping me out.”

“You’re going to charge me nothing,” I said, stepping toward him with heartfelt malice.

“A joke,” he said. “A joke. I’m trying to relieve the tension here. I’ve been under a lot of tension here.”

The dog was scratching away, and we didn’t hear the hall door open. Our first sense of it was the voice of Marjorie Main saying, “You should be hearing from us by the end of the week. I wouldn’t worry about it if I were you.” And she was off.

I turned back to Shelly, who gave me a look of agony instead of relief. He had almost swallowed his cigar in an attempt to hide it in his mouth. He spat out the butt in his sink and choked away while I got him a glass of water, which he downed in one long gulp.

“The pressures of this job,” he gasped. “You wouldn’t know. You’ve got all the fun and what do I get?”

“Older,” I answered. “Remember to make those name changes on the door.”

Shelly’s fit of choking was passing. He leaned back in the dental chair and closed his eyes, the calm after battle. “We’ll see,” he said.

“We’ll see it the way we agreed,” I went on, moving to my office door, “or I call Miss Ferzetti at the State Dental Office and tell her I am not Captain Midnight and that you are a menace to home-front hygiene.”

“Where has compassion gone?” Shelly sobbed, his eyes still closed. “Where is friendship?”

“It sat down in that chair of yours and let itself get drilled and filled,” I said. “Now I’ve got some work to do.”

“Almost forgot,” Shelly said, opening his eyes without sitting up. “You had a guy looking for you.”

“A guy?”

“Right.”

“Did he leave his name? Number?”

“No,” said Shelly sheepishly. “He didn’t have to. He looked kind of sick when he came in. I sent him into your office and then the inspectors came.”

“You mean I’ve got a client in my office right now?”

“I forgot,” Shelly said with a shrug.

“You always forget,” I said, opening my office door. Fala came running out.

“That dog doesn’t stay around here,” Shelly said with all the authority he could put into it. “I’m in a good mood and everything, but I can’t have a dog here.”

I coaxed Fala to me, but he didn’t seem to want to meet my visitor. He whimpered as I picked him up, put him under my arm, and opened the door.

When I closed the door to my cubbyhole, I spotted Martin Lyle seated in the chair in the corner. He was looking out the window at a darkening sky.

This wasn’t quite the way I had planned to settle the whole thing, but I was willing to wrap it up any way I could.

I put the whining dog on the floor, went around my desk, sat down with satisfaction, and said, “Okay, Lyle, we talk, but we don’t leave this office till I have a murderer to hand over to the cops. Do we understand each other?”

It was at that point that I realized Martin Lyle was beyond understanding. His dead stare behind his Ben Franklin glasses went right through me and beyond. No more New Whigs, memories of Henry Clay, and wacky speeches about the future. There was no more future on earth for Martin Lyle.

I sat looking at him for a minute or two and watched him looking at me. The hole in his chest had stopped bleeding long before I arrived. There was no final pulsing of the thin chest under his white shirt. I looked at him and silently asked him some questions I had to answer myself.

He couldn’t have traveled far with a bullet in his chest, which meant that he had probably been shot in the building, on his way to see me. While it didn’t rule him out as the killer of Olson or his wife, it did eliminate him as a suspect for one murder, his own. Since Bass was firmly tied to Jeremy’s chair and probably listening to Byron’s poetry, he was safe on this one.

“So who punctuated you?” I asked Lyle.

Since he had no answers, I got up, walked over to him, and closed his eyes.

I folded my hands, exercised my jaw, unfolded my hands, and went through my mail. There was nothing much in it. I looked at Lyle again and made my decision.

I would feed the dog, make my phone calls, and come back to wait it out with Lyle’s corpse. I could see that the dog didn’t think very much of the plan. He went to the door and looked back at me, tail wagging in hope.

I went over to him, let us out, locked the office door behind me, and turned to Shelly.

“Mr. Lyle is going to wait for me,” I said. “We’ve got a lot of work to do. Big case. I’ll be back in a little while.”

Shelly nodded. “How’s the tooth?” he asked.

“Okay,” I admitted.

“Professionalism,” he sighed. “It’ll show everytime.”

There is not much you can do with a dog outdoors in Los Angeles after you’ve fed him a decent taco lunch and walked him in the park; but we had some hours to kill and no place to go. I drove up Wilshire to Westlake Park, parked near the eastern Wilshire Boulevard entrance, and got out to let the dog sniff around the eight-foot-high black cement nude of Prometheus holding a torch and a globe. Jeremy had once told me that if Los Angeles had a patron saint, it was Prometheus. Jeremy’s favorite Prometheus was in a painting up at Pomona College in Claremont by a Mexican named Orozco. He had driven me out to see it a year earlier, and the damned thing depressed me. Prometheus had looked miserable, a big naked giant trying to keep the roof from falling on the heads of a whole bunch of bald guys who looked like zombies.

Jeremy also called me the poor man’s Prometheus when he was feeling particularly fatherly. He had even given me a book of Greek myths to read, but I had put it aside before getting to Prometheus because a walnut farmer from the San Jose Valley hired me to find his son who had run away with the daughter of one of his walnut sorters. I found the two kids in Fresno, married and working in an Arthur Murray dance studio as instructors. The kid was eighteen but looked a lot older. The girl was twenty and looked a lot younger. They both smiled a lot and I told the walnut grower I couldn’t find them. Someday I’ll get back to reading about Prometheus.

We spent an hour on and near a park bench watching some kids in the playground and talking to an old guy in a gray cardigan sweater who seemed to live on the bench. He knew a lot about dogs and was willing to tell me. I knew nothing about dogs and wasn’t very interested, but I had nothing better to do so I watched the kids, heard about short-hairs, and kept asking him for the time.

“Good dog you got there,” the old guy said, pointing the stem of his pipe.

“Man’s best friend,” I agreed, while the dog lay on the bench next to us, following the conversation.

“Like hell,” said the old man, leaning toward me. “People always say that. Dogs are something special in God’s world. That’s a fact, but they are dumb sons of bitches, and I mean that literally. They do what you teach them and if you treat them good they lick your hand and stay out of trouble if something doesn’t itch away at them. But you ask me, I’d rather have a friend who can talk back and have his own ideas. Dogs are just yes-men or no-men. You want a friend who just licks your mitt and tells you you’re right all the time? Hell, that’s no friend, that’s a dumb dog.”

The old guy spat, nodded his head, and put his pipe back in his mouth as he crossed his legs and looked out at the kids in the playground. “And,” he added, remembering an important point, “you’ve got to walk them, clean them, and feed them.”

“A lot of trouble,” I agreed, reaching down to pet the dog looking up at me.

“And there’s worse,” the old man said, looking away from me. “They don’t live long. Slobber all over you, trick you into investing some feeling in them, and their goddamn life span catches up with them.”

“You’ve had a dog or two,” I said.

“A few,” he said, still not turning to me. “A few.”

He told me some interesting things about the dog I was petting and I got up.

The dog and I said good-bye to the old guy and he waved, puffed on his pipe, and didn’t turn to watch us as we made our way back to Wilshire.

I found a small hot dog stand shaped like a hot dog bun with a fake hot dog coming out of each end and bought a sack with fries and a pair of Pepsis. On the way back to the Farraday, the dog kept sniffing at the bag and I had to protect it with my right hand while driving with my left. I had to ease my defense when I shifted gears, but I managed to keep the pooch at bay.

It was a few minutes after five when I hit Hoover. Traffic was leaving downtown and not coming in. I found a parking space on the street without too much trouble, locked up, and made my way through the going-home crowd with the sack under one arm and the dog under the other.

A chunky woman in a gray coat was coming out of the Farraday and held the door open for me.

“Thanks,” I said, easing past.

“You’re Peters,” she said.

“Right.” I looked at her dark, heavily made-up face and didn’t place her for a second.

“You’re the new mind reader,” I said.

“Tante Kuble,” she said. “Moved in last week. On the third right below you.”

“Right,” I said, shifting my load. “Didn’t recognize you without the gypsy suit. How’s it going?”

“Could be better, could be worse,” she said. “Mostly I’m getting the kids-soldiers, sailors-wanting to know what’s going to happen to them.”

“What do you tell them?”

“I tell them they’re all going to be all right, that they’re going to live forever or close to it,” she said, looking hard into my eyes. “Some of them I can see things I don’t want to tell them.”

“See you around,” I said, feeling uncomfortable under her hard look.

“Peters,” she said as I turned my back. “Don’t eat with the dead and get the dog to the one who wants it as fast as you can. You know what I’m talking about?”

“I know,” I said, walking into the dark echo of the Farraday. “Good talking to you.”

“See you around,” she shouted. “Damn it looks like rain.”

Then she was gone.

Some days are definitely not the ones you want to remember when you take a hot bath and plan your future. This one had found me in Shelly’s dental chair for the first time and brought me face to face with an old man in the park who lost his dogs and a fortune teller who saw death. I let the dog down, and he trotted up the stairs behind me, his stubby claws scratching against the marble and metal.

My big fear was that Shelly might still be in the office, but the door was locked. No one had put my name back on it yet in the terms that Shelly and I had agreed on, but I’d given him a week to get it done. I opened the door and left it open as I went in. There was enough light coming through the windows so that I didn’t have to use any electricity.

I unlocked the door to my inner office, but I didn’t go in. Tante Koble might have hit on something. Instead, I tore open the sack, took out a couple of hot dogs for the dog, put them on a towel on the floor, and poured him a cup of Pepsi. He went to work on them in a manner unbecoming to the dog of a president. I should have cut the hot dogs up but it was too late now. If I tried anything I might lose a finger or two.

Climbing into Shelly’s dental chair, I took my time eating and reached over to flip on Shelly’s radio. Captain Midnight was on. I didn’t sound anything like him-or the guy who played Ichabod Mudd or the guy who played Ivan Shark, for that matter.

After our dinner I cleaned up and went into my office. Martin Lyle was sitting there as I had left him, eyes closed, a lot more pale than he had been before. I wanted to turn on the lights because the sun was dropping down fast and the sky was cloudy, but I resisted.

So in I went and got behind my desk, checked my.38 and waited, and that, my friends, brought me to the moment at which I started this story, just before the killer walked in and I promised to tell a tale.