“It was just a routine checkup,” he said. “How was I to know …“Toby, I’ll give you te-five bucks to protect me from sore losers for the next week till the ad dies.”
“Cash in advance,” I beamed. He went into his pocket, fished out a five, handed it to me, and looked at the door, which was opening.
A reasonably well-dressed couple in their early sixties stepped in. The woman was in front. The man behind was holding his swollen jaw.
“Dr. Minch?” she said, looking at me and Shelly, who was hiding behind me grasping his coffee cup in two hands.
“Minck,” I corrected. “That’s him.”
“We read your ad in the paper. Joseph has a terrible toothache.”
Shelly handed me the coffee cup as he pushed past me and hurried forward to lead Joseph to the dental chair.
“You are fortunate indeed,” he said. “I’ve just had a cancellation.”
I poured the coffee into the sink, deposited the cup, and went into my office and called Levy’s to see if Carmen had checked in yet. She hadn’t. I said I’d call back. I had five bucks. Maybe I could talk Carmen into a couple of late-night tacos and a swing-shift movie. Laurence Olivier was playing in The Invaders.
That reminded me. I had planned to take my nephews to another show when I had the cash, if my sister-in-law Ruth would let me.
I called, looking out the window to see if my car was safe. It was. Ruth answered on the second ring. I could hear two-year-old Lucy in the background saying, “Why? Why? Why? Why?”
“Ruth, it’s me, Toby.”
“I know. How are you?”
“I’m O.K.,” I said. “I thought I’d take the boys to a movie Saturday night. No horror movies. I promise.”
“It’s all right with me,” she said. “How did the Mae West business come out?”
I didn’t know what, if anything, Phil had said about Mae West, and I didn’t want to put my mouth where it didn’t belong.
“Mae West?” I asked.
“Toby,” she said, with Lucy still yelling in the background. “I can’t ask him. He doesn’t even know I know, but I know. I knew about it when it happened before we were married. Phil doesn’t know I know.”
I wished I hadn’t called.
“It came out fine,” I said. “Phil’s-”
“I know,” she said. “He is a good man, and he works too hard and cares too much and weighs too much and will have a heart attack just like your father if he’s not careful, and he’s not going to be careful.”
“That’s about it,” I agreed.
“Come over for dinner first on Saturday and then you can take the boys,” she said. “Try to be here by five.”
She hung up and I went through the mail. Five letters. Two were junk mail, one selling magic supplies and the other subscriptions to cartoon magazines. The third was from the Internal Revenue Service. I put it in the top drawer with the forms I still hadn’t filled out. The fourth letter was a hand-written thank-you note from Cecil B. De Mille. It was nice and simple, just “Thank you. C.B.”
The last letter was the mystery. I turned it over two or three times and looked at the return address in the corner. There was no doubt. The address was not off some copying machine. It was marked personal and for me. I pulled out my Tahitian letter opener and carefully slit the top, wondering who was writing to me from the White House in Washington.