I stopped at a Mexican place for three tacos and a Pepsi and headed back to my office.
3
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I opened the door and carefully avoided the pile of outdated magazines on the table in the alcove we called a waiting room.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.
The phone rang. It was almost two o’clock. Shelly answered it and said it was for me. I picked it up, while I fished through my drawers for a stamp to mail the letter to Mrs. Levine. The caller was Warren Hoff. He had news.
The police had a suspect, a midget who had been in The Wizard of Oz. The midget’s name was Gunther Wherthman. He had been known to fight with the dead Munchkin, who was now identified as James Cash. In fact, the two little men had been arrested during the shooting of Oz in 1939 when they had a knife fight in their hotel. Wherthman had been cut by Cash, and the police had records showing that Wherthman had threatened to kill Cash. The police had also found three witnesses who had seen two midgets arguing violently before the murder outside the stage where Cash’s body was found. The witnesses all described one of the midgets as wearing a Munchkin soldier’s uniform. The other midget was described as wearing a Munchkin lollipop kid costume. Wherthman had, according to Hoff, played one of the lollipop kids in the movie. Hoff’s report was good.
“I used to be a reporter before I got into this,” he explained.
“Maybe you’ll go back to it,” I said.
“It’s too late,” he said. “Once you commit yourself to a bigger income and lifestyle you’re hooked.”