Stuart Kaminsky - The Fala Factor

“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.