Stuart Kaminsky - Dancing in the Dark

There was a moral here but I wasn’t getting it.

“You are polishing my floor. I am sitting around waiting. You have the dirty job. I dance.”

“I also get paid,” I reminded him.

“So do I,” he said. “Which makes it much easier to watch young men endlessly polish the floor. Good luck, Toby. You have my number. Call me at home.”

We shook hands and he escorted me to the stage door.

“I think I’ll stay here for a while,” he said. “A few steps I want to try. Besides, I want to be sure I can still find the beat.”

The next day was Thursday, the day I met Luna Martin, Fingers Intaglia, and the Beast of Bombay, whose hand print was probably indelibly welted to my ass. Driving Lou Canton back to Glendale in agony and listening to him complain didn’t help my disposition.

I spent most of the rest of the day finding backup. I’d been told gently by Jeremy’s wife, Alice, that I was not to call on him for help again. Or, as she put it in a calming voice as we stood on the stairway of the Farraday Building while she gently rocked Baby Natasha, “If you so much as suggest that you might need his help for one of your dangerous, silly cases, I’ll personally tear off three of your toes.”

It was an effective warning. Alice, at nearly three hundred pounds, could do the job. But what made it effective was the specific number, three, the choice of an inspired imagination or someone who had thought long and hard about what might be effectively said and done.

Gunther Wherthman was my second choice. Tiny, easy to spot, maybe, but smart and loyal. Except Gunther was up north. That left Shelly, a less than formidable body, but a body.

I stopped at a diner called Mack’s on Melrose, ordered a tuna on white toast with a pickle and fries from an ancient waitress in a uniform left over from the Dr. Kildare series. Near the cash register was a display of emergency first-aid supplies-aspirin, Band-aids, Ex-Lax, and an ugly-looking pain salve in a purple jar. I picked up the jar. Then I called the office.

Violet answered, “Dr. Sheldon Minck’s office.”

“This is the office of Minck and Peters,” I corrected. “Can I help you?”

“Is this a joke?” she asked.

“Mrs. Gonsenelli, this is Mr. Peters. I thought we agreed that you would answer the phone with ‘Minck and Peters, can I help you?’ ”

“Dr. Minck changed that,” she said. “He says he pays the phone bill and you should. .”

“Put him on,” I said.

“He’s with a patient.”

“Let the patient bleed to death,” I said pleasantly. “It’ll be more humane than what Shelly must be putting him through.”

“I’ll tell him,” she said, and the phone clicked against the top of her little table.

I imagined her drawing up tight and wedging through the thin space between the desk and wall. Voices and then, “I’ve got a patient, Toby,” he said. “A new thing I’m trying. Killing the nerves. I’ve got to get back to him.”

Beyond and behind Shelly came the moan of the Lusitania as it finally sank into the Atlantic.

“Minck and Peters,” I said.

“It’s not good for business.”

“Yours or mine?”

“Mine,” he said. “You should have your own line.”

“Hard to get with a war on.”

“Then you pay half the phone bill,” he said, obviously playing to the alert Violet Gonsenelli.

“It’s built into my rent.”

“Built into. . who said that? When? How? Why? You make things up. I’m a victim here.”

More moans from the patient beneath the sea.

“One dollar a month more,” I said.

“One dollar? You must be. .”

“. . making my final offer,” I said.

“One dollar,” Shelly agreed.

“Don’t hang up. I may need your help, Shel.”

“Help?”

“I may need some people to protect a client.”

“Astaire?”

“Yes.”

“Fred Astaire? You want me to become a private investigator for a while and protect Fred Astaire?”

“Did Violet catch all of that? Is she impressed?”

“I think so,” said Shelly as his patient let out an “agggggghhhhhhh.” “I don’t care if it’s dangerous. When do you need me?”

“Nine tomorrow morning,” I said. “Ballroom of the Monticello Hotel on Sunset.”

“I’ll cancel my morning patients. Should I bring my gun?”

“You don’t have a gun, Shel.”

“I understand,” Sheldon said seriously. “I’ll be there. Violet wants to talk to you.”

He handed her the phone and walked away, calling to the moaning patient, “Jesus Christ, can’t you take a little pain without acting like a baby?”

“Mr. Peters?”

“Yes, Violet.”

“Jimmy Bivins is five-to-six to beat Tami Mauriello Friday. I’ll take Bivins and give you four-to-six on six dollars with an extra two dollars that say the fight goes the distance.”

“Our Ortiz-Salica bet still on?”

“I’ve got Ortiz, two dollars.”

“You’re on on the Bivins fight,” I said and hung up.

I lined up Pook Hurawitz and Jerry Rogasinian, both bit actors and part-time stunt men who could be counted on for a good show if you paid them. They both looked like what they frequently played, gangsters who helped fill out the gang and never uttered a word. I was type-casting them.

Pook asked who we were working for. He upped his price to twenty bucks a day from the fifteen I offered him. I could have gotten Rogasinian for fifteen but I was sure they’d talk about what I was paying them so I just offered the twenty. Jerry was grateful.

“Jerry, you ever work on a film with Preston Stewart?” I asked after we had agreed to terms.

“Twice,” he said. “On Hell in Himalaya I was one of the Sherpa carriers. And on Night of Destiny I played a cab driver. Had one word. Preston comes to me on the curb and says, ‘You free?’ and I answered, ‘Sure.’ ”

“What’s Preston Stewart like?”

“Good guy,” Jerry said. “No star crap. Drank coffee with the rest of us. Joked around. Polite to the women. Good guy. Why?”

“I think he’s going to marry my ex-wife.”

“I take it back,” Jerry said. “Stewart was an asshole.”

“Too late, Jerry. I’ll see you tomorrow.”

I hung up the phone and went back to the counter to eat my sandwich and drink a Pepsi.

“Toast is cold,” the waitress said, hands on hips, challenging me to blame her or deny it. “Why don’t you sit down?”

“Cold toast is fine,” I said. “Can’t sit. I was spanked by a giant from India.”

“Want me to do it again?”

“Nope. I’m in enough pain already.”

“No,” she said. “I meant, do you want me to give you fresh toast?”

“I’m all right. I could use a little ketchup.”

She nodded. “You’re Tobias Pevsner, aren’t you?” she said, handing me the bottle of Heinz.

“Right,” I said, pouring ketchup and looking a little more closely at her.

A distant aunt? A former client? She sagged under an oversized white starched uniform; tight curls of white hair crept out from under her Nurse Duncan cap. Her skin was pale and her lips colorless.

“Anita Maloney,” she said.

“Anita?”

“Tobias,” she said. “You took me to the senior prom. You tried to get under my pink crinoline dress and into my cotton panties.”

There was one other customer at the counter, a round man wearing a delivery cap. He had three folds of skin on the back of his neck. He ate slowly, mechanically, from a bowl that looked as if it contained the same swill that the Count of Monte Christo was forced to gulp down in the Chateau Des Ifs. He tried not to look at me and Anita. I forced myself to look at Anita. She was a year, maybe two years younger than me and she looked like someone’s angry grandmother.