“I’m also working for another resident,” I pointed out. “Howard Hughes.”
“Right enough,” said Nelson, “but a man has to make decisions, a sheriff has to make decisions and sometimes they aren’t easy ones. Now Mr. Hughes is really just renting his privacy and he doesn’t pay those few extra dollars to insure it.”
“He just pays his rent and his taxes,” I said, “and those are supposed to give you some rights without kickback.”
Nelson shook his head sadly.
“I believe you are becoming slightly abusive,” he said. “I was hoping we could handle this without abuse. I’m going to have to insist that you leave Mirador and never return.”
I looked deeply into his very moist grey eyes, and he looked back steadily. I had to give him that. He could hold a gaze with the best.
“And suppose I don’t give a shit what you insist?” I whispered.
“Ah, well then, let’s pretend I told you a joke. Here’s the punch line.”
And I got the punch line from Alex, who has stepped silently behind me. He hit me in the right kidney and sent dry ice up my spine. My bladder, filled with three beers, almost let go, but I held on and slipped to my knees.
“I got it,” I gasped.
“Good,” sighed Nelson. “I hoped you would. Please help the man up, Alex.”
Alex helped me up and handed me my hat. I staggered, considered hitting Alex with something, ideally with Sheriff Nelson, and changed my mind.
“Well, it has been nice meeting you, Mr. Peters. Maybe we’ll run into each other in the city some time.”
“I’d like that,” I said.
Alex opened the door of my Buick and helped me inside. Nelson squinted up at the sun and moved to the open window.
“By the way,” he whispered again, “Alex and I noticed that your car had a little accident, front bumper’s been ripped off by a vandal. Alex stuck it in your back seat.”
“Thanks,” I said, making a mental note to charge it to Hughes and give him a full account of what happened. “Anything else that might affect my transportation?”
“No, no,” he grinned, stepping back so I could drive away, “we wouldn’t let anything happen that might prolong your stay in Mirador. Now you know the way out of town, but just in case, we’ll follow behind as an escort.”
“I appreciate that,” I said, trying not to wince from the pain above my kidney. I needed a toilet or a clump of trees fast, but I wasn’t going to find a hospitable place in Mirador.
The drive back to and through Mirador was uneventful. The kid wasn’t on the curb and the cat was gone, but the car door was still there. There were two more cars parked in front of Hijo’s, but I didn’t pay any attention. I just watched Alex and Nelson in my rear view mirror. They stopped when the street turned to road, and Nelson stuck his hand out the window to wave goodbye.
I didn’t wave back.
CHAPTER FIVE
I found a Sinclair station on the highway, told the guy to fill it up and made a Groucho dash to the men’s room. The dash resulted in pain and relief, along with a feeling of satisfaction. I had some decent leads paid for with a firm belt in the kidney. Maybe that evened the score with Fate and the Gods. They let me have a little information and I paid for it in pain. It was a deal the Gods and I had had for almost thirty years, and we both understood it. I would have felt uneasy if things came without a price. I think I inherited that from my father. It was probably the only thing I inherited from the poor guy besides a watch that wouldn’t tell time.
I paid the gas station attendant who looked like Andy Devine, asked him the time and drove back toward Los Angeles humming “Chatanooga Choo-Choo.” My back was being reasonable.
I drove to Arnie’s garage on Eleventh Street and told no-neck Arnie, whose face was so thick with grease that he looked like something from the road show of The Jazz Singer, that he should get my bumper back on as soon as possible. Arnie shifted his stub of a cigar and grunted. He never asked how bullet holes, blood and ripped bumpers appeared. He just fixed and charged.
I legged it over to my office, trying to ignore the memory of Alex’s kidney attack and stand up straight as I walked. I made it to Ninth, passing Montoya the Dropper, a neighborhood character who would walk about thirty feet, only to repeat the thing over again. Montoya refused to acknowledge that he kept falling and became indignant if anyone confronted him with it. This affliction caused Montoya some professional difficulty since he made his meager living as a pickpocket. He was certainly the world’s most conspicuous pickpocket. I also passed Old Sol. Old Sol walked around with a whistle in his mouth and a book in front of his eyes. He blew the whistle whenever he came to a streetcorner and traffic stopped, green light or not. Since Old Sol was about seventy and he was still healthy, he was apparently doing something right.
They were two of the more savory characters of the neighborhood I met as I turned down Hoover to the Farraday Building, the four-story refuge for second-rate dentists, alcoholic doctors and baby photographers where I had my office.
As usual, the dark hall smelled of Lysol. Jeremy Butler, the former wrestler and present poet and landlord, spent a good chunk of each day fighting a losing battle to keep the building clean by carting squatting bums out the back door and slopping on pails of Lysol. He also changed the light bulbs regularly, but they were constantly being stolen or substituted for lower wattage by the tenants.
The Farraday Building had an elevator, but only the uninitiated took it. Few people could afford the time the trip took. I echoed up the steps and down the hall to my office. The window on the outer door had been cracked and replaced where my landlord had thrown a troublemaker through it, a troublemaker who tried to rob Sheldon Minck.
The neat black letters on the glass read:
SHELDON MINCK, D.D.S., S.D.
Dentist
TOBY PETERS
Private Investigator
The door was new, but the reception room had been embalmed years ago. There was enough space for two wooden chairs, one once-leather-covered chair, a small table with an overflowing ash tray and a heap of ancient copies of Colliers. There was a whitish-grey square on one greyish white wall, where a dental supply company chart showing gum disease had recently fallen after a decade of doing its duty and warning the populace.
I hurried along through the alcove into Shelly’s dental office, a single chair surrounded by old dental journals, coffee cups that should have been cleaned and piles of tools in various states of rust. Shelly’s radio was playing Smiling Jack Smith. Shelly himself, in a once-white smock and thick glasses slipping off his moist nose, was working on someone in the chair. Shelly shifted his cigar and turned his fat, bald head in my direction.
“Toby, you got a call. I don’t remember who.”
“Thanks Shelly,” I said and moved across the office toward my own office, which had once been a small false-teeth lab.
“Hughes” said a voice from the dental chair. It was Jeremy Butler. “The call was from someone named Hughes.”
“Right,” agreed Shelly, pushing his glasses back and humming with Jack Smith as he looked for some instrument among last week’s newspapers.
“Jeremy,” I said. “Since when do you let Shelly work on your teeth?”
Butler shrugged his enormous shoulders and leaned back, resigned.
“I was reading in the paper today,” Shelly observed pulling out a mean looking tool, “and I saw this big ad for that dentist, Doctor Painless Parker with offices all over the coast, and I said that’s what I’d do. I’d advertise. Where the hell are those pliers?”
“What else d’you read in the papers?” I said, being friendly.
“Dick Tracy’s caught in a snowstorm.”
“Terrific,” I said.
“You working?” Butler asked softly. Usually, Butler spoke barely above a whisper, but people listened. People usually do when you weigh 300 pounds and most of it is muscle.