“Wrong,” corrected Dali. “He will not depart when we go inside. He has already departed.”
I looked back at Dali. He was triumphant.
“One can always count on man to find the deepest darkness of his soul.”
“Comforting thought,” I muttered, opening the back door of the Farraday with my key.
Dali went in ahead of me. “That smell,” he said, his voice echoing in the demi-darkness. “Perfume of nightmares.”
“Lysol,” I said, crossing the lobby.
“I have much to tell Gala,” he said. “She will be in Carmel with your bald giant. I must call her.”
“From my office,” I said.
Dali admired the marble stairs and looked up the stairwell to the roof of the Farraday seven stories above. Voices came from behind doors. Off-key music. Some kind of machine. Something, maybe a baby, crying.
“Dante,” he said.
“Let’s go.”
Dali got into the elevator and I turned on the third stair.
“You walk,” he said. “Dali will ride upward into the Inferno.”
“Sixth floor,” I said and started up the stairs as Dali closed the cage door of the elevator and hit the button. I beat him to the sixth floor by about a week, even though the elevator hadn’t stopped to pick anyone up or let them off.
“Magnificent nightmare,” Dali said, joy in his voice.
“You ain’t seen nothin’ yet,” I said, standing in front of the door to the offices of Minck and Peters. “Abandon hope all who enter here.”
We went through the little waiting room and into Shelly’s office. The great man himself was destroying the mouth of a man who lay still with his eyes closed. For his sake, I hoped he was dead. Shelly was probing with a corroded metal probe and singing “There’ll Be a Hot Time in the Town of Berlin When the Yanks Go Marching In.”
“Any calls, Shel?” I asked.
Shelly turned, shifted the cigar to the right side of his mouth, and replaced his thick glasses on the top of his nose by pushing the center of the right lens.
“No. Who’s this?”
“Salvador Dali,” I said.
“No shit?” Shelly turned to the dead man on the chair: “Mr. Shayne, this is Salvador Dali. He looks just like himself.”
“Your studio is magnificent,” complimented Dali, looking around at the sink full of instruments and coffee cups, the pile of bloody towels overflowing the basket in the corner, the cabinets covered with piles of dental magazines of a decade ago.
“I call it a surgery,” said Shelly.
“You are an artist,” said Dali. “America is mad.”
Shelly beamed and nudged the dead man, who did not respond.
“I think you gave Mr. Shayne an overdose of gas,” I said.
Shelly leaned over and put his head against the chest of the man in his tilted chair.
“He’s alive. You trying to panic me, Toby?”
He moved away from Shayne and pointed his metal probe at the briefcase in my hand.
“What you got?”
“Twenty-five thousand dollars,” I said.
“I don’t need grief, Toby. I don’t need jokes. I don’t need grief. I need Mildred. Remember the receptionist I was going to hire?”
“I thought it was a dental assistant,” I said, inching toward my office door.
“Whatever. Mildred objects. Jealous.”
“I’m sorry, Shel.”
“I’ll live,” he said, beaming at Dali. “Mr. Dali, you want a teeth cleaning? It’s on the house. I’ll get Shayne out of here for a half hour and-”
“I am not a masoquista,” said Dali apologetically, “but I have friends in the motion picture business who would welcome your services. You have cards?”
Shelly stuck the probe in the pocket of his once-white smock and fished out a card. He handed it to Dali, who showed me the faint bloody thumbprint in the comer.
“Perfect,” he said and followed me into my office. I closed the door and went behind the desk.
For some reason, I hoped he hated the closet.
“A tomb,” he whispered, putting his right index finger to his lips and pointing with his left index finger at the photograph of my brother, my father, our dog Kaiser Wilhelm, and me when I was a kid.
“The dead,” I said, sitting behind my desk and plopping the briefcase in front of me. “Guy in the middle’s my old man. I know he’s dead. So’s the dog. My brother, the big one, is alive and a cop. You want some coffee?”
“I wish to call Gala,” he said, sitting down across from me.
I pushed the phone toward him and pulled out my notebook to remind myself to bill him for the call.
After the twenty-minute call, in frantic French with Dali bouncing up and down, we sat looking at each other for about ten minutes.
“You play cards?” I asked.
“You have Tarot cards?”
“No.”
“I do not play cards. You have paper, pencils?”
That I had. I fished into my top desk drawer, around frayed photographs of Phil’s kids and pieces of things best forgotten, to find some crumpled sheets of typing paper. I also found a few pencils. I handed the package to Dali, who cleared away a space on the desk, looked at the wall, and said.
“Do not speak to Dali until he speaks to you.”
“You got a deal. Mind if I use the phone?”
“Call-but do not, I say, do not talk to Dali.”
It was nearly ten. I didn’t want to tie up the phone too long in case Taylor wanted to make his move early, if he was going to make any move at all.
I called Ruth, reminded her that I would pick up the kids after school on Wednesday, and asked how she was doing. She told me that surgery had been rescheduled for Wednesday morning.
“I could get Mrs. Dudnick to stay with the kids,” she said. “And my sister would come from Chicago if I called her, but I’d rather wait till I was through the operation before I told my family. And Toby, the kids love you. They’ll … I hate to ask, but I’ll feel better if you’re here. And Mrs. Dudnick’s right next door.”
“I’ll be there, Ruth,” I said. “First thing Wednesday morning, as long as it takes.”
“Phil says you’d volunteer and then not show up. He says I should have Mrs. Dudnick ready.”
“This time Phil’s wrong about me. I’ll be there.”
“Thanks, Toby,” she said.
“I’ll talk to you, Ruth.”
And then I hung up.
“Illness,” Dali said without looking up from his drawing. “I can smell it, feel it in my fingers.”
“I thought I wasn’t supposed to talk to you.”
“You are not, but Dali can talk if he must.”
He stopped suddenly, put the pencil down and looked at me. There sat a man I had not seen before-his face aged, his mustaches wilted just a drop, and his voice down an octave as he spoke slowly.
“Mr. Peters, I am not jesting when I say the painting must be found, must be returned to me. Dali will be destroyed if the painting is seen by a critic, a gallery owner, a collector. Dali will be destroyed as surely as he will be destroyed if Taylor kills me as he has killed his accomplices.”
“I’ll find the painting,” I said. “And no one’s going to shoot you.”
Then, suddenly, the Salvador Dali mask-eyes wide, hands dancing-was back on. He leaned forward to draw and the phone rang.
“Toby Peters, Confidential Inquiries.”
“Peters?” asked Taylor.
“I just said that.”
“You have the money?”
“I have the money.”
Dali looked up when I mentioned the money. The tips of his mustaches tingled like the antennae of an ant trying to feel the wind.
“Cash?”
“No, war bonds. Taylor, name a place and a time.”
“I’m nervous, Peters,” he said. “Can you understand that?”
“You’re looking for sympathy from me?”
“I just want you to under-”
“I asked a question, Taylor. Last night when I asked you a question you tried to turn me into confetti. Let’s do business.”