Stuart Kaminsky - The Howard Hughes Affair

As usual, the dark hall smelled of Lysol. Jeremy Butler, the former wrestler and present poet and landlord, spent a good chunk of each day fighting a losing battle to keep the building clean by carting squatting bums out the back door and slopping on pails of Lysol. He also changed the light bulbs regularly, but they were constantly being stolen or substituted for lower wattage by the tenants.

The Farraday Building had an elevator, but only the uninitiated took it. Few people could afford the time the trip took. I echoed up the steps and down the hall to my office. The window on the outer door had been cracked and replaced where my landlord had thrown a troublemaker through it, a troublemaker who tried to rob Sheldon Minck.

The neat black letters on the glass read:

SHELDON MINCK, D.D.S., S.D.

Dentist

TOBY PETERS

Private Investigator

The door was new, but the reception room had been embalmed years ago. There was enough space for two wooden chairs, one once-leather-covered chair, a small table with an overflowing ash tray and a heap of ancient copies of Colliers . There was a whitish-grey square on one greyish white wall, where a dental supply company chart showing gum disease had recently fallen after a decade of doing its duty and warning the populace.

I hurried along through the alcove into Shelly’s dental office, a single chair surrounded by old dental journals, coffee cups that should have been cleaned and piles of tools in various states of rust. Shelly’s radio was playing Smiling Jack Smith. Shelly himself, in a once-white smock and thick glasses slipping off his moist nose, was working on someone in the chair. Shelly shifted his cigar and turned his fat, bald head in my direction.

“Toby, you got a call. I don’t remember who.”

“Thanks Shelly,” I said and moved across the office toward my own office, which had once been a small false-teeth lab.

“Hughes” said a voice from the dental chair. It was Jeremy Butler. “The call was from someone named Hughes.”

“Right,” agreed Shelly, pushing his glasses back and humming with Jack Smith as he looked for some instrument among last week’s newspapers.

“Jeremy,” I said. “Since when do you let Shelly work on your teeth?”

Butler shrugged his enormous shoulders and leaned back, resigned.

“I was reading in the paper today,” Shelly observed pulling out a mean looking tool, “and I saw this big ad for that dentist, Doctor Painless Parker with offices all over the coast, and I said that’s what I’d do. I’d advertise. Where the hell are those pliers?”

“What else d’you read in the papers?” I said, being friendly.

“Dick Tracy’s caught in a snowstorm.”

“Terrific,” I said.

“You working?” Butler asked softly. Usually, Butler spoke barely above a whisper, but people listened. People usually do when you weigh 300 pounds and most of it is muscle.

“Yeah,” I said, happy to have a sounding board. I pulled up a stool, removed the newspapers from it except for one little corner that stuck to something wet and sat down facing the dental chair. Shelly found his pliers and I gave a quick summary of the case, talking over Jack Smith warbling “Just One More Chance.”

I pulled out the list from Hughes. Butler examined it slowly and Shelly took a quick glance.

“It’s the Jap,” said Shelly, turning with his pliers to Butler. “If not the Jap then the Nazi dame Gurstwald.”

“Thanks for clearing it all up for me, Shelly. You are invaluable.”

He waved his pliers, indicating that it was nothing much and was about to attack Butler’s mouth when the big man rose.

“I’ve changed my mind,” he said, removing the dirty white cloth from his neck.

“We had a deal,” Shelly protested.

“You can still take five dollars from your rent,” said Butler. “It’s getting late and my sister’s boy is coming to spend the night with me.” Shelly sighed and put his pliers down.

I was curious about Jeremy’s nephew. I wondered if he resembled a bathtub like his uncle.

“How is the new place working out?” he said, meaning Mrs. Plaut’s rooming house. I had been renting a small motel-like bungalow from Butler before that.

“Fine,” I answered. Shelly climbed into his own dental chair with a newspaper.

“Take care of yourself, Toby,” Butler said and out he went.

“I’m closing down early,” Shelly said looking at his cigar. “Mildred and I are going to see that all-Negro musical at the Mayan, VooDooed . You want to come?”

Jack Smith paused so I could answer.

“No, I’m waiting for a call. Mind if I use your radio when you leave?”

He said he didn’t mind, and I went into my office to check on the mail, which didn’t exist, look at the framed copy of my dusty private investigator’s license, examine the photograph of my father, my tall heavy brother and our beagle dog Kaiser Wilhelm. I hated and loved that photograph and the ten-year-old kid in it who had been Tobias Leo Pevsner. My brother Phil’s arm was around my shoulder in the photograph, my father looked proud. My nose was already smashed flat by Phil, and Kaiser Wilhelm looked sad as he always did.

Shelly left just before six and I went down for three burgers from the stand at the corner and brought them back to my desk with a Pepsi. I put in a call to Hughes through Dean at the Romaine office and sat eating as I waited for Hughes to call me back and Trudi Gurstwald to get in touch. I listened to Shelly’s Silvertone radio while I munched and turned to KFI for a jolly night of Bums and Allen, Fibber McGee and Molly, Bob Hope and Red Skelton. By the time Bob Hope came around, Hughes had still not called. In the middle of Red Skelton, I heard someone come into the outer office. I wasn’t expecting trouble, but I didn’t feel like taking chances. I had left the light on in Shelly’s office and my small light off. I snapped off the radio and tiptoed to the door to open it a crack and peeked out.

I saw Trudi Gurstwald, her little yellow curls bobbing, in a fresh dress looking clean and fluffy. It contrasted with her pink and anxious face. She looked around the room nervously and made a turn to leave. I stepped out.

“Mrs. Gurstwald,” I said, and she turned, startled.

“Mr. Peters,” she said, her accent strong. “I thought I had missed you. I have only half an hour or so. Anton thinks I am shopping and I must meet him at 8:30. I have a cab waiting downstairs.”

She paced the room and I took a seat in the dental chair. The surroundings didn’t seem to surprise or bother her. She had something else on her mind.

“I don’t know what Anton would do if he knew I had come here,” she said, looking at me earnestly.

“I don’t either,” I said. “Why don’t we put it from our minds while you tell me what you wanted to tell me about that night at Hughes’ house.”

She bit both of her lips and turned to me with moist eyes.

“I’m really afraid,” she said taking a step toward me.

“Well, lady,” I came back, “you may very well have reason to be afraid. You have my sympathy, but I can’t give you anything more till you tell me what you know.”

She took another step toward me, almost crying.

“You can’t know what it is like living there with Anton and those people,” she said softly, her eyes searching mine. “He has such fear of the Nazis, the Americans, so many people. He can think of nothing else. And he has no strength left for me. He had such strength, Mr. Peters.”

I nodded knowingly, deciding to let her talk it out in the hope that she’d get to the point herself. After all, she was the one who had the cab waiting.

“When you came this morning,” she said, “it was the first life in that house in months. You said things no one says to Anton and you did to Rudy what I’ve wanted to do for years.”