“Then I’ll be qualified to become a cop,” I said. I knew I shouldn’t have said it, but I couldn’t resist the opening. Phil came at me around the bed, but he didn’t make it. The door opened as Jeremy Butler and Shelly Minck came in. Even Phil thought twice about assaulting a patient in his bed in front of two witnesses.
Phil turned his back on me and pushed past my two visitors.
“My brother,” I said.
Butler nodded knowingly, and Shelly paid no attention. Under his jacket Shelly wore his once-white smock. His cigar was out, and I asked him to please leave it that way.
“Shelly,” I said, looking as ill as I could, “I’m sorry I didn’t return your car yesterday, but things got out of hand.” I gestured to the room in explanation, but Shelly had seen the room before, and he wasn’t impressed.
“Slept in the office,” he said. “It’s all right. I brought your car. The cops told me I could pick it up and bring it to you, Here’s the key.” I took the key and told him to get his out of my pants’ pocket.
“Thanks for coming to see me, Jeremy,” I said.
He shifted uncomfortably. The shift was massive. Something was troubling him, but I didn’t want to push him.
“Mr. Peters.” He always called me “Mr. Peters.” “I have some sad news for you. Your bungalow is being demolished today. The city condemned the property. All the houses in the court will be flattened.”
“Can they do that to you?” I asked.
He said they could, but they also had to pay for it, and they were paying a lot more than the property would be worth for at least twenty years. They were talking about putting up a fire station on the site. Butler didn’t care.
“All your stuff is in your car,” Shelly said. “Someone broke your windows. So I jammed it all in the trunk.”
Somehow that sobered me for a second. I remembered that everything I owned could fit in the trunk of a ’34 Buick.
“We’ll help you find another place,” Butler said. “I’ve got a friend with a place a few blocks from downtown, not far from the office.”
“I’ll look at it,” I said. “Thanks.”
Butler probably didn’t know I was turning him down. He hadn’t been dealing with me for over forty years the way Phil had. Some time in the few seconds since Butler had told me my place was being flattened, I had decided to gain a little respectability, find a reasonably decent apartment, maybe acquire a little property. My mind didn’t tell me how I was going to do this with my income, but it made me feel noble to believe I was going to try.
Doc Parry came in while Shelly was telling us that Mr. Strange’s single tooth was a marvel and that he was considering bridgework to go around it. Strange would have a mouthful of teeth anchored to Shelly’s monument. The whole job would be worth a few hundred bucks, which Shelly would have to put up himself. It wasn’t kindness towards the bristled bum that prompted Shelly. It was pride. He’d make up the few hundred by shoddy work on other patients.
Parry listened to him for a few minutes with a sour face of disgust. He shook hands with Butler and turned his back on Shelly, who didn’t seem to notice. Butler and Shelly left after telling me where my car was, and I said I’d give them a call.
Parry ran his left hand through his thin blonde hair. He was in his twenties and would be bald in five years. He took my pulse, listened to my heart, examined my head, told me I was a fool-which I already knew-and said I could go home. I didn’t have a home, but I didn’t tell him that.
“Remember what I said about that head,” he said at the door. “It can’t take too much more of this.”
I got dressed slowly, picked up my hospital bill, and went to my car. My face bristled with beard, and my mouth was dry. I opened the trunk of the car. It wasn’t even jammed. Under the cardboard suitcases I found my. 38. No one had even noticed it.
Before going to the office, I stopped for something to eat at a drive-in that offered three jumbo fried shrimp for a quarter. I drank a Pepsi, ate a taco, looked at the sun, and listened to the people in the next car talk about the election. They knew all the time that Roosevelt would win again.
Breakfast over, I went back to the office. Butler waved and dragged a bum toward the alley. The hall still smelled of Lysol, and our waiting room still hadn’t been cleaned. Shelly had a patient waiting, an incredibly skinny young woman carrying a baby. She didn’t look like big money. The patient in Shelly’s chair didn’t look like big money, either. It was another bum.
“Phone call for you,” said Shelly over his shoulder, shifting his cigar.
The call was from Warren Hoff.
“Warren,” I said when I reached him. “It’s all over.”
He said he knew.
“Thanks for keeping me out of it,” he said. “I destroyed the print, but there may be other prints around.”
“There may be,” I said. “I’ll bring you a bill for my services later.” I was tempted to give him more advice about going back to a newspaper, but who was I to give advice? I’d just turned down equally good advice from my brother. Maybe Warren Hoff was smarter than I was, but I doubted it. Our experience with Cassie James was evidence.
“Could you come in this afternoon, Toby?” he said. “Mr. Mayer would like to see you.”
I said I would and that I’d drop off my bill with him.
In the next hour I shaved and worked on the bill and came up with this:
Fee: $50 per day for five days (minus $50 advance)
$200
New windows for 1934 Buick
40*
Payment for information
10
Hospital room and expenses
37
Replacement of ruined suit
25*
Telephone
3.50
Motor court, one night
7
Holy Name Church of God’s Friends
1
Food
11
Parking. 50
Gas
8
–
Total
$343.00
*Estimated expenses
I had a feeling I had missed something, but I wanted the whole thing over with. I clipped on the hospital bill, a parking stub, and a receipt from the Happy Byways Motor Court, and put the bundle in an envelope. The only envelope I could find had Shelly’s name on it, complete with the D.D.S. and the S.D. The S.D. didn’t mean anything. It was something he had made up to look impressive. At least the return address was right, and it was the only one I had.
I was getting up to leave when Gunther Wherthman came through the door. His mustache was gone, and he wore a smile.
We shook hands, and he found a way to get on my chair with dignity. He politely did not look at the office, nor comment on it.
“I should like to thank you for what you have done, Mr. Peters,” he said. His suit was neatly pressed, and the bruise from my brother was fading.
“That’s all right,” I said.
“I should like to pay you for your services. For your time and trouble. What is your normal fee?”
“M.G.M. is paying me, Mr. Wherthman,” I explained.
“Nonetheless,” he said, reaching for his wallet, “I wish no charity from M.G.M.”
Even I could recognize dignity when I saw it, though I hadn’t seen much of it around Los Angeles. I knew Wherthman was just getting by and anything he gave me would cut into his rent or lunch, but I wasn’t going to deprive him of what he wanted.
“Ten bucks,” I said.
“That is very little for what you have done,” he said, counting ten singles out, “but I must admit if it were much more I should have to owe it to you.” He got down from the chair, and we shook hands.
“Can I buy you dinner tonight, Mr. Wherthman?” I asked. He said he would be delighted, and I said I’d pick him up at his place around seven.
“I’ve got to make a stop at M.G.M. and then look around for a place to live,” I explained. “I just lost my last place.”
“There is, I believe, an opening in the house in which I am living,” he said. “If you would be interested. It is clean, quiet, and on a nice street. The landlady is pleasant, and the rent is reasonable.”