I eased through the tiny waiting room, trying not to disturb the dust, and made my way into Shelly’s office. He was working on a fat woman who gave out low “argghh’s” the entire time she was in the chair whether Shelly was working on her or not. His chubby fingers danced over the instruments, and he cleaned each one on his dirty once-white smock before he plunged it into the woman’s mouth. Sweat poured from the fat at Shelly’s neck, as it always did when he worked, and he paused between searches, probes, and seizures to take a puff at the cigar that he kept perched on his instrument tray.
“Hi, Shelly,” I said, looking over his shoulder at the fat woman’s decaying mouth. Her frightened eyes caught mine, and I tried not to grimace.
“Toby,” he said, “I was hoping you’d come in today. You want to go in with me on a London-type bomb shelter? I can get it for two hundred eighty-five dollars, install it in my yard.”
He pulled something small and bloody out of the fat woman’s mouth and her “argghh” went up a few decibels.
“You’re all right, Mrs. Lee,” he said, examining the object curiously. “It was just a… a piece of something.”
“What good would a bomb shelter do me in your yard?” I said. “I don’t think the Japanese are going to give us enough warning to get me from Hollywood to Van Nuys if they attack.” “Mrs. Lee,” he said, turning his eyes, myopic behind thick lenses, on his patient. “Do you think you and Mr. Lee, if there is a Mr. Lee, would be interested in half-interest in a bomb shelter? A heavy bomb could destroy all the work I’ve been doing on your mouth.”
“Arrgghh,” said Mrs. Lee, with terror in her massive eyes.
“She said yes,” Shelly said, looking for an elusive instrument as he pulled at his cigar.
“I think she said no,” I said.
Shelly shrugged, found a sharp instrument, tested it on his finger, and turned to Mrs. Lee, who drew back as deeply into the chair as she could.
“Relax,” grunted Shelly, “it’s clean.”
I didn’t want to watch. I went into my office and closed the door. The sound of Mrs. Lee’s “argghh” shook my hinges, and I tried to ignore her by looking at the picture on the wall of my dad, my brother, me, and Kaiser Wilhelm, our dog. It was a photograph out of antiquity and it always soothed me and inspired me to new heights of provocation against the brother with whom I had been battling since the day I was born.
My mail didn’t have much to offer besides an ad that said I could have dinner and hear Paul Whiteman at the Florentine Gardens for $1.75. That would be four bucks plus gas and a tip if I took Carmen. The Pantages was fifty cents, and we could pick up a couple of tacos for another dime each. If Lugosi paid me for another day, we could even have a couple of beers. Such were the plans of your well-known man-about-town.
There was an interesting message on the spindle on my desk. Shelly’s hand was unmistakable and the number illegible, but I thought I recognized the name.
“Shelly,” I yelled through the door when there was a lull in Mrs. Lee’s agony, “is this message from Martin Leib?”
“Right,” he shouted back.
Leib was a starched-collar, no-nonsense, old-timer lawyer with consulting contracts at the major studios. I’d worked with him once and knew if he was calling me it wasn’t sentimental or to have a drink and tell tall stories. I found his number in the directory and called. He answered on the second ring.
“Peters,” he said softly. “Your call came just as I was going to call someone else to handle this. I have a job for you, similar to the last one. Client accused of murder. Warners would like to keep things quiet until everything is clear. On my end, I can contain publicity for a few days at most. I need an investigation quickly and some solid information about what the police have and are doing. Can you handle it?”
If I told Leib I had a job and a client, he would say “Fine” and hang up. Besides, why couldn’t a detective have two clients at a time? True, it had never happened to me before, but it came at a point when I could use all the help from capitalistic sources I could muster. Bela Lugosi’s crank was intriguing, but a murder case for Warner Brothers was possibly big money.
“Fifty a day and expenses,” I said. “Two days in advance.”
“Thirty-five,” said Leib. “This is for Jack Warner, not Louis Mayer. I’ll have the money waiting for you at the Wilshire station where our client is being held. I think it best if you get to him immediately. I’ve already begun from my end.”
“And?” I said, half thinking about the Florentine Gardens.
“And it doesn’t look promising,” he said. That was all we had to go with, so I finished the business at hand.
“Client’s name?”
“Faulkner, William Faulkner.”
“The writer?” “The alleged murderer,” said Leib and hung up.
Business was booming. A full year like this and I’d be challenging Pinkerton. I picked up my coat and went back into Shelly’s office. He was demonstrating to Mrs. Lee how to rinse her mouth. She had lost all semblance of control and dumbly mocked Shelly’s actions. Her “arrgghh” was down to a slow, low gurgle.
“I’m going on another case,” I said to Shelly’s back. He waved his cigar to let me know he had heard.
“Almost forgot,” I added, heading for the door. “Guy named Billings might be getting in touch with you. He has an overbite problem from fangs.”
That got Shelly, who turned around and squinted in my general direction through the bulletproof lenses of his glasses.
“He’s a vampire,” I explained.
Mrs. Lee seemed to hear the word vampire through her confused stupor and looked vaguely in my direction.
“Vampires are a dental impossibility,” Shelly announced firmly. “At least vampires with fangs. There’s no way the human jaw could support fangs.” He put his finger into Mrs. Lee’s mouth to demonstrate as he spoke. “Throw the whole mouth off. The guy’d look like Andy Gump or Mortimer Snerd, and his jaw… he wouldn’t get a decent night’s sleep or be able to eat.”
“But vampires don’t eat and they sleep like the dead during the day,” I said.
Mrs. Lee nodded in agreement, and Shelly frowned at her.
“Mrs. Van Helsing here,” he said derisively, pointing his thumb at the woman.
“Not a real vampire,” I explained, opening the door. “Just a guy who wears fake fangs and likes dressing up. A little higher class than some of your patients.”
“If he calls, I’ll look at him,” Shelly said professionally, turning to Mrs. Lee. His glasses slipped down on his nose and his free thumb came up just in time to keep them from tumbling into Mrs. Lee’s lap.
The Farraday Building had an elevator, and Jeremy Butler saw to it that the elevator went up and down, but there was nothing he could do to make it go up and down at a rate that most mortals found reasonable. I ran down the stairs, putting on my coat as I went and listening to the echo of my footsteps around me. On the floor below ours, the bookie was fumbling at the lock on his door. The phone was ringing on the other side and he was trying to get in before he missed a bet, but his eyes were bleary and the harder he tried, the more the lock resisted. I didn’t bother to greet him.
Butler was still going at the wall with his second can of Old Dutch.
“Perhaps I should just paint the whole wall?” he asked.
“I think it looks fine,” I said. Interior decoration wasn’t my line, but the irregular patch of white he had worn into the gray wall made the lobby look like the set for a German horror movie.
A neighborhood derelict was pressing his nose to the window of my car when I hurried into the alley. He pulled his gray-stubble face away when he heard me and plunged his hands deep into his pockets, pretending to admire the scenery of the alley, the piles of garbage, the empty cartons. He tried to look as if he were waiting for a streetcar and succeeded in looking as if he had been caught with his claw in the bird cage.