Stuart Kaminsky: Murder on a Yellow Brick Road

“I didn’t say I wouldn’t do it,” he explained. “I said I don’t want to, and you have nothing to thank me for. I never wanted your thanks or asked for it.”

That was true. I shut up. It surprised me how closely Phil’s and Mayer’s philosophy were to each other. Phil said I could go after I gave a statement to Seidman, which I did. Seidman also gave me a statement. Phil owed a lot of money to the hospital. Ruth was blaming him for not being around enough. It was what cop’s wives did. It was their duty to complain. Eventually, it was their duty to stop complaining or walk out. My wife walked out. I didn’t think Ruth would, but you never know.

Hoff wasn’t in his office when I got there, but I left a message with his secretary that it looked as if I could keep the lid on for a few days. I gave her my office number and listened to her worry about Hoff for a few minutes before I escaped.

I eased my Buick into gear, coaxing the pistons with sweet thoughts, and made my way past the Japanese gardener and around an elephant being led by a girl with very little on besides a few spangles. At the gate I waved good-bye to Buck McCarthy, who had his thumbs in his pockets, cowboy style. It was my turn to drive off into the sunset, but it was only a little after noon.

I stopped at a Mexican place for three tacos and a Pepsi and headed back to my office.

Within two hours I had met a dead Munchkin, consoled Judy Garland, argued with Louis B. Mayer, and got a job with M.G.M. It was the kind of news you ran home with to your wife, your mother and father, or your dog. I didn’t have any of them, but I did have Shelly Minck.

Shelly and I shared space in the Farraday Building on Hoover near Ninth. The Farraday had the eternal smell of Lysol to cover up the essence of derelict in the cracked tile hall. Sometimes the neighborhood bums slept it off under the stairs until the landlord, a gentle gorilla of a man named Jeremy Butler, plucked them up and deposited them in back of the building. Butler had been a professional wrestler. Since he retired after investing in real estate, he had devoted himself to plucking bums from his lobbies and writing poetry. Some of Butler’s poems had actually been published in little magazines with names like Illiad Now and Big Bay Review.

Butler was in the lobby plucking a bum when I arrived. He nodded to me and headed to the rear of the building. His footsteps echoed away, and I felt at home as I went up the stairs. There was an elevator, but a crippled spinster on relief could beat it to the fourth floor without even trying.

I hiked up the stairway past three floors of offices belonging to disbarred lawyers, bookies, second-rate doctors, pornographic book publishers, and baby photographers. Far behind, I could hear Gorilla Butler dumping the bum and closing the fire door.

Chipped letters on the pebbled glass door to my office read:

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

DENTIST

TOBY PETERS

PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR

I opened the door and carefully avoided the pile of outdated magazines on the table in the alcove we called a waiting room. The waiting room had two chairs that had come with the place before Shelly moved in. One of the chairs had once been covered with leather. Someone had knocked over the room’s lone ash tray. The alcove wall was decorated with an ancient drawing from a dental supply company showing what various gum diseases look like.

I pushed open the inner door and entered the office of Dr. Minck. Clients for me had to pass through his office where he was often working on a neighborhood bum or a raggedy kid. I had rented the office space from Shelly after I did a small job for him. We got along, and he let me pay what I could afford, almost nothing.

Shelly had a stubbly-faced bum in the chair. The bum looked like a startled old bird. No, he looked like Walter Brennan imitating a startled bird.

Shelly-short, fat, in his fifties, and desperately myopic-was humming and puffing on his ever present cigar while he tried to read the label of a small bottle over the rim of his thick glasses. When he heard me, Shelly turned and nodded a greeting with his cigar. He was, as always, wearing a once white smock which had stains of both blood and jelly on it. Shelly didn’t introduce me to his patient. Walter Brennan just popped his eyes open and darted them between me and his dentist. I couldn’t see a tooth in the guy’s head.

“Any calls?” I said.

“No calls, some mail,” replied Shelly, satisfied with the label on the bottle. He turned to his patient and patted his head reassuringly with the same hand in which he held his cigar.

“Mr. Strange here and I are engaged in a mission of mercy,” Shelly said, plunging a hypodermic into the bottle in his hand. Reddish liquid burbled into the syringe. Shelly pointed to the old man’s mouth with the needle. “Mr. Strange has a toothache. We know exactly which tooth it is because Mr. Strange has only one tooth. That right, Mr. Strange?”

Mr. Strange gave a birdlike nod of agreement. He was petrified with fear, but Shelly didn’t seem to notice.

“We are going to save that tooth, aren’t we, Mr. Strange? We are going to perform something called a root canal. We are going to do it because one tooth is better than no teeth, and because I have not performed a root canal in some time, and I need the practice. Now open up, Mr. Strange.”

Shelly shifted the cigar in his mouth and forced the old man’s mouth open with his strong, sweaty fingers. The hypo plunged in and the old man gurgled.

“That’ll kill the pain,” whispered Shelly. “Now we’ll just let that go to work for a little while.”

While we were waiting for the shot to work on Walter Brennan, I told Shelly about my morning at Metro. He listened while he groped around for an instrument he wanted. He found it underneath some coffee cups in a corner. Then he went to work on the old man. Above the sound of the drill he said, “I worked on a midget once. Little tiny teeth, but the roots on ’em. That little cocker had roots like steel. Two extractions on that midget were harder than a mouthful of root canals. Try to hold still, Mr. Strange. This will only take twenty or thirty minutes.”

Having failed to impress what passed for my only friend, I went into my office. I’d save the story of encounters with the great and near great for my date next week with Carmen.

My office had once been a dental room. It was just big enough for my battered desk and a couple of chairs. The walls were bare, except for a framed copy of my private investigator’s certificate, and a photograph of my father, my brother Phil, and our beagle dog Kaiser Wilhelm. The ten-year-old kid in the picture didn’t look like me. His nose was straight. He was smiling and holding onto the dog’s collar. The fourteen-year-old looked like Phil, with the dark scowl, the tension. The tall, heavy man in the picture had one hand on each kid’s shoulder.

There wasn’t much mail on the desk. Someone in Leavenworth, Kansas wanted to send me a catalogue of tricks and novelties for a dollar. A client named Merle Levine who had lost her cat wanted me to return the ten dollar advance she had given me. The case was two years old. I hadn’t found the cat. I hadn’t really looked. Two brothers named Santini on Sepulveda wanted to paint my home or office for a ridiculously low price.

I wrote a note to Mrs. Levine and put three bucks in it, telling her that it was an out-of-court settlement. Then I leaned back to listen to Shelly’s drill as he hummed “Ramona.” Through the window I could see Los Angeles-white, flat, and spread out. The skyline from my window wasn’t much. Since 1906, a municipal ordinance had limited buildings to 13 stories. Someone at City Hall hadn’t heard about the law and the City Hall Building was 32 stories high, but most of the buildings in the city were low. The skyline was a series of long, low lines like other American cities threatened by earthquakes and a lack of solid rock under them.