Stuart Kaminsky - Dancing in the Dark

“Can you dance at all?”

“Not a step,” I said.

He sighed deeply, took out his wallet, and gave me two hundred dollars in cash, saying he didn’t want to use checks for this. He also gave me a private phone number where I could reach him and told me to meet him at R.K.O. the next morning, Wednesday, for an emergency dance lesson.

“I’ve heard I can rely on you,” Astaire said, taking the doorknob in hand.

I nodded with a knowing smile and more confidence than I felt, and Fred Astaire opened the door, letting in the voices of the Modernaires before he left.

In the dental office, I could hear Shelly speaking quickly to Astaire. I couldn’t make out the words. The door to the reception room opened and closed and I knew that Astaire had made his escape.

As soon as I knew he was safe, I flattened out the sheet of paper Violet had given me and put in a call to Anne.

Anne and I had been divorced for more than six years. She had stayed with me when I was a cop in Glendale and a security guard at Warner Brothers. When I got fired from Warners by Jack Warner himself, for breaking the nose of a cowboy star who wouldn’t keep his hands off a girl in the accounting office, Anne had said I would never grow up. She was right, I guess. I loved her. She left me. From time to time, when my hard head could help her out of a tight spot, she gave me a call.

I didn’t recognize the number. I reached for the phone, gave the operator the number. A woman, not Anne, answered after the first ring.

“Rappeneau and Darin,” she said.

“Anne Mitzenmacher,” I said.

“I’m sorry, sir, but we have no Anne Mitzenmaker.”

“Mitzen mach er,” I corrected.

“No one with a name anything like that,” she said.

“Do you have an Anne anything?”

“Anne Peters,” she said.

“That’s the one,” I said.

She couldn’t help saying, “Peters doesn’t sound anything like. . I’ll connect you.”

Another ring and Anne picked up the phone, saying, “Anne Peters, can I help you?”

Anne had a deep, lush voice that brought memories of her soft, dark hair, her large lips, her large everything.

“You’re using my name,” I said lightly.

“My options are limited,” she said. “It’s easier for the clients to remember, and I doubt if the receptionist could even say Mitzenmacher.”

“She can’t. I tried her. What are you selling, Anne?”

“Houses,” she said. “This is a real-estate company. We’re on Washington, just off Highland.”

After Anne divorced me she had married Ralph, an airline executive. Life was good. Home on Malibu Beach. Then Ralph made some mistakes with the wrong people and wound up dead and broke.

“You called to beg my forgiveness and tell me you can’t live without me,” I said.

“No jokes, Toby, please.”

“I was hoping, Anne.”

“You never remember the bad times.”

“That’s one of my strengths,” I said.

“And I’m doomed to remember them all,” she said. “One of my weaknesses. I’d like your help.”

“You’ve got it.”

“Don’t you want to hear what it is first?”

“No,” I said.

“Can you meet me for lunch? Noon, there’s a restaurant called Roth’s on Fifth near Olive. .”

“By the Biltmore Hotel. I know it. I’ll be there.”

“You’re not working, or?. .”

“As a matter of fact, I’m working for Fred Astaire. He’s giving me a dance lesson tomorrow.”

“You don’t change, Toby,” Anne said with a sigh. “I’ve got to go. There’s another call. Noon at Roth’s.”

I tucked the two fifties and five twenties into my wallet. With the two hundred I had hidden in an envelope behind the Beech-Nut Gum clock on the wall of my room at Mrs. Plaut’s boardinghouse, I now had a little over four hundred dollars and all my bills paid.

It was Tuesday morning. Life was still just fine.

If I hurried I could just make it to Roth’s by noon with a few minutes to spare. I left my office and attempted a quick retreat across the no-man’s-land of Sheldon Minck’s office.

“Did you talk to him?” Shelly said, stopping me just short of the door. “About my working on his teeth?”

“I told you I wouldn’t, Shel,” I said, turning to face him and the woman in the chair, who appeared to be just coming out of shock. Her eyes were blinking and she was looking around, trying to remember where she was.

“Not fair, Toby. I tell all my patients who need a private detective that help is right across the office.”

“You’ve never sent me a client, Shel.”

“I’ve had very few patients who needed a detective,” he said, removing his cigar so he could examine it for signs of possible betrayal before he lit it. “Mr. Laurel needs dental work.”

“That wasn’t Stan Laurel,” I said. “It was Fred Astaire.”

Shelly returned the cigar to his mouth, wiped his hands on his smock, and blew smoke in the direction of his bewildered patient.

“Vera, Mrs. Davis, was the man who just walked through here Fred Astaire?”

Mrs. Davis looked around for someone who might resemble Fred Astaire. All she could see were me and Shelly. She tried to sit up, a look of pain double-crossed her face, and she let out a fresh groan.

“See,” said Shelly triumphantly. “She’s fine.”

“I’ve got to go, Shel,” I said.

“Tell Violet I need her in here.”

In the reception room of Minck and Peters, I told Violet that the good dentist needed her in surgery. Violet inched her way from behind her desk and through the narrow space between it and the wall.

“I’ll call later,” I said.

She popped out from the side of the desk and said, “Ortiz, and it won’t go the distance.”

I was out the door and into the hallway outside our office. Still plenty of time, though I couldn’t check it on a reliable watch. Six floors below, the voices of two men were echoing loud and dirty. I moved along the railing toward the stairs and looked down. The bald head and the burly body told me that one of the three men below was the Farraday’s owner, Jeremy Butler. I didn’t recognize the two men with him, at least not from this angle, but they were big and standing close to Jeremy.

I started down the stairs, unable to sort the words of anger from their echo.

Jeremy is pushing sixty-five, or maybe pulling it. He’s an ex-wrestler who saved his money and wound up with a second-rate office building and some scattered third-rate apartment buildings. He was now a landlord with time to devote to his passion-poetry-and to his family, which included his wife, the former Alice Pallis, who nearly matched Jeremy in size and strength, and their one-year-old daughter, Natasha, a curly-haired beauty who bore no resemblance to either of her parents.

By the time I made it down to the lobby, I could see the two men shouting in Jeremy’s face. One was young, no more than thirty. Giving him the benefit of the doubt he looked a little like a crazed John Garfield. The other was in his forties and looked a little like a pig. The pig held something in his right hand, something metal.

“You’ll pay,” the older one was saying. “You hear me?”

Jeremy didn’t answer. He looked from one to the other with his hands at his sides.

“Everybody’s paying, up and down the street,” the younger one shouted.

“I will advise them not to do so,” Jeremy said softly.

“There are bad people around the city,” the older one said. “Vandals. People who destroy other people’s property for no reason. They break windows and. . I’ve told you this already. You’re not listening.”

I paused at the bottom step, fairly sure they couldn’t see me. Then I saw that the object in the older guy’s hand was a small crowbar. I took a step out of the shadows. The younger one spotted me and nudged his partner, who looked toward me.