Stuart Kaminsky - High Midnight

I waited for a few seconds while Shelly went after the world’s mouth-packing title. Glancing around the office, I saw it hadn’t changed. Piles of dental magazines and crossword-puzzle books. Uncleaned instruments in the sink, where the water dripped steadily. Coffee on the hot plate.

“My present plan is to break the coffee pot over your head,” I said.

“You’ve got a message,” Shelly responded urgently.

“Maybe I’ll break a chair over your head instead. Or maybe I’ll break Mister Stange over your head.”

Mr. Stange made a flaying effort to rise, but Shelly shoved him back.

“Instrument case in the drawer under the coffee,” Shelly mumbled, pointing vaguely.

I shuffled through the pile of napkins, rusty instruments and old campaign literature for Al Smith in the drawer and found the instrument case. Inside it was an envelope marked “TP,” and inside the envelope was $267 and three dimes.

“I was holding it for you,” Shelly said, his back still to me.

“There should be three hundred or more from Cooper,” I said, pocketing the envelope.

“Expenses,” he explained. “You know you can’t conduct an investigation for nothing. I got a pair of binoculars and …”

“Shelly, what the hell did you do it for?”

“Not now, I’ve got a patient,” Shelly stage-whispered.

“Your patient can wait,” I said, removing the empty pot on the hot plate. Shelly had drunk all the coffee, and the pot was filling with steam. At least once a year the coffee pot exploded. Once it went out the reception-room window like a cannonball, nearly decapitating Shelly’s wife Mildred as she came in.

“Okay, okay,” Shelly said with an enormous sigh. He turned and faced me, removing his glasses so he wouldn’t have to see how I’d take his explanation. “I wanted to help.”

I shook my head no but realized that he couldn’t see me, so I said, “No. Try again.”

“All right. I wanted to see if I could do it, to meet a movie star. You get to meet movie stars, famous people, and I spend my life in people’s mouths and the quality of mouth in this neighborhood could stand upgrading. I mean I love my job, but …”

“What about Cary Grant?” I said. “You worked on his mouth, didn’t you?”

“That was a lie,” Shelly said. I moved across the room, but Shelly continued to talk to the coffee pot, refusing to put his glasses back on.

“So you wanted to meet Gary Cooper and play detective,” I said. At the sound of my voice from another part of the room, Shelly put on his glasses and found me. Mr. Stange was gagging behind him.

“I didn’t do a bad job,” Shelly said.

“Just tell me what you did and what you found out. Tell me fast.”

“There’s a notebook in your bottom drawer,” said Shelly, looking at the stub of his cigar. “I made a report. I think I was getting somewhere, Toby. I really think that a dentist’s point of view brings a new perspective to the detective business. I really do.”

“Shel, you pull this again and I’ll turn dentist and pull all your teeth.” I gave him a big smile and went into my office, slamming the door behind me.

Shelly mumbled something about gratitude before he went back to Mr. Strange’s foul mouth.

The report was there, in a 1935 ledger book. It was surprisingly good. The words were printed in tiny letters. He had interviewed four people who were interested in getting Cooper to do the film he didn’t want to do. The picture was called High Midnight , and its producer was Max Gelhorn. Shelly had his address written neatly: an office building on Sunset, the far side of Sunset where you could have the Sunset address but be in a neighborhood few respectable tourists visit. According to Shelly, everyone he talked to cooperated when he put a little pressure on them. Actually there wasn’t much information. There was a trade-journal clipping on Gelhorn, indicating that his prime had been reached in the late 1920s, when he had produced a series of two-reel Westerns starring someone named Tall Mickey Fargo.

The next name on Shelly’s list was Lola Farmer, an actress with no major credits, who was to star with Cooper in High Midnight. I wondered if this might be the Lola whom Cooper said he had dallied with and who had gone back to Lombardi. Things were already getting complicated. Lola’s address was the Big Bear Bar in Burbank. Name number three was none other than Tall Mickey Fargo, who was set to play the villain in High Midnight.

A clipping from a shopping-center newsletter which Shelly had plucked had an interview with Fargo that mentioned his forthcoming co-starring role with Cooper. There was a photograph of Fargo in the clipping; and I recognized the thin, dark man with the pencil mustache and the almost-comical oversize cowboy hat. I’d seen him in movies when I was a kid. He had always been one of the gang who got killed in the first shootout with the hero. The last name on the list was Curtis Bowie, who had written the screenplay for High Midnight. It was certainly a quartet who needed Cooper for the project. The Los Angeles addresses for both Bowie and Fargo made it clear that they weren’t rolling in the wealth of Hollywood.

I copied the addresses, took the clippings and shoved them in my pocket. Then I returned the one call that had come in my three-week absence. It was from a woman named Carol Slingo in San Pedro. Her parrot had been murdered by an intruder, stabbed with a scissors. There was an empty bottle of nassal spray near the cage, indicating that the murderer had first tried to spray the parrot to death. Mrs. Slingo was angry because the police had refused to pursue the matter with “sufficient concern.” Her theory was that the parrot had been killed to silence him, to keep him from identifying the intruder. I asked if the parrot could do such a thing and she admitted he couldn’t, but the intruder might not know that, especially when he heard the parrot talking. I told her I’d get back to her or have my assistant Mr. Minck look into it as soon as we had time.

While I talked to Mrs. Slingo from San Pedro, I reexamined my office, especially the framed copy of my private investigator’s certificate on the wall next to the photograph. I don’t keep photographs except for this one. In it my older brother Phil has his arm around me, and I’m holding the collar of our dog Murphy. Murphy was a Beagle I renamed Kaiser Wilhelm when Phil returned wounded from his couple of months in World War I. Our old man is standing next to us, his eyes turned proudly on his sons. Both Phil at fourteen and my old man at fifty were tall and heavy, and I was a scrawny ten-year-old. The main puzzle of the photograph for me is whether my nose had already been broken once by then. I can’t tell. I’ve asked people, even my brother, who was the first to break the nose. Phil doesn’t care or remember. He has broken too many noses since then to recall the date of such a minor event.

I left the office with a glance at Shelly’s back. He was hunched over Mr. Stange, cooing, “Just a little wider, a little wider, uh, hu, just a ….”

The groaner was gone from the third floor, and the Farraday was coming to something resembling life. Life at the Farraday began sluggishly a little before noon and never got into high gear. In the lobby I encountered Jeremy Butler, massive hands on massive hips, looking critically at the dark tile floor.

“Toby,” he said, “you think it needs a scrubbing today? I did it yesterday, but …”

“It looks fine, Jeremy, fine. How’s the poetry business?”

“It’s not a business. It’s an act of expression. North States Review is publishing my poem on the war. It’s a damn war, Toby.”

“That it is,” I agreed.