“Supposed to go down to zero tonight,” said Narducy, taking my suitcase and helping me into the front seat of the cab. He put my bag in the back seat.
“Streets’ll be an ice pond from Summit to Evanston,” he said, getting in and looking at me. “Geez, you look like Halloween.”
I looked in his rear view mirror. I reminded me of a skeleton mask I had worn when I was a kid.
Narducy drove me to Midway airport and helped me in. He didn’t do any imitations. He bought me a seat to L.A. with a stopover in Denver for fueling. I had seven bucks left after I paid Narducy. I bought him a sandwich while we waited and invited him to visit me in Los Angeles. I didn’t know where I’d put him or what I’d do with him, but it seemed like the right thing to say. He said he’d think about it. He shoved his glasses back, downed an egg sandwich in three bites and his Coke in four gulps.
“Carramba,” he said, wiping an imaginary mustache. “That was good.”
His timing was bad. There were no Mexicans around.
There was a stand-up bar in a corner and I bought a glass of wine. I went back to the sandwich counter where I had left Narducy and paid extra for a glass of orange juice and a raw egg. That left me with three bucks.
I took the Fleming cold remedy over to Chaney, who was sitting at a bench with Costello, watching us. They weren’t trying to hide. I handed the drinks to Chaney, who was blowing his nose.
“On me,” I said. “It’s good for a cold.”
“Thanks,” he said and downed the drinks. ‘Doesn’t taste bad.”
I didn’t say goodbye.
The plane took off just before noon. From the window, I watched Chaney, Costello and Narducy get smaller and disappear in seconds. The rain was still coming down. Just before we hit the clouds, I took a last look at Chicago. It looked green.
A stewardess with a blue uniform and blue cap brought me sandwiches and asked if everything was all right.
A chubby guy with a big mouth and a briefcase sat next to me at the window. He had a Southern accent and talked about how much flying he did. When we were about half an hour out, he turned pale and said the engines had stopped. I couldn’t turn any more pale than I was. The engine hadn’t stopped, but what was left of my heart did.
About six hours later, I got off the plane in Los Angeles. The sky was filled with smog and the sun was grey and warm.
15
With the few bucks I had left, I took a cab to my office and left a light tip. By the time I made it through the downstairs door into the lobby darkness of cool tile, the smell of Lysol, and the bums, I was down to my last twenty cents.
I almost never used the building elevator, but I made an exception in this case. My side was stiff and sore and in need of a change of venue. I clanked upward, working out supplementary expenses in my mind in case Mayer asked for a detailed breakdown.
The office door was just as dingy and the pebble glass just as dirty as I had left them less than two weeks earlier. There was one difference. Just below “Sheldon Minck, D.D.S.,” there was a thin crack that curved down through my own name. Someone had used four pieces of adhesive tape to keep it from getting worse. I opened the door gently and tiptoed through our minute waiting room piled high with old magazines, uncleaned ash trays, and forgotten junk mail.
Through the second door, I found Shelly Minck-short, myopic, cigar in mouth, and sitting in his worn dental chair reading a professional supply catalog.
He looked at me over the magazine.
“Where you been?” he asked casually. “You’ve been gone a couple of days. I was beginning to worry about you.”
“I’ve been gone almost two weeks, Shelly,” I said, searching for a semiclean cup so I could pour myself some of the rancid mud Shelly kept going as a service to favored patients.
“What happened to the door?” I said.
“That’s a tale,” he said, shaking his head and covering his upper lip with his lower. “Remember Mr. Stange?”
“Old guy with one tooth left you were trying to save?”
“That’s the one,” he said. “As soon as I finished the work and started to fit the bridge, he tried to hold me up. Used one of my own instruments-sharp little thing I’ve never known what to do with.”
“O.K.,” I said, finding a cup and rinsing it in the jet of water near his dental chair. “What happened?”
“I gave him six bucks,” Shelly said, warming to the tale and removing his cigar so he could gesture. “Just as he went for the door, Jeremy Butler came in.”
Butler was our landlord, a former pro wrestler who now managed his property and wrote poetry.
“Well,” continued Shelly, “I told Butler what was happening and he grabbed Stange. Stange stabbed him in the arm, but Butler paid no attention. Just lifted him up by the neck and took the weapon and the money from him. The window broke when he threw the old guy at the door. That’s why I’m reading this book.”
“O.K.,” I said. “Why are you reading the catalog?”
“To find out what that goddamn instrument was for. So how was your trip?”
“Not as exciting as your week here,” I said. “Just four bodies. And I got shot.”
“Too bad,” he said, without really hearing. His head was back in the catalog.
I went into my office. It was stale. I opened the window and sat in my chair, looking out over the low buildings. I felt better. I examined the cracks on the wall as I drank the coffee and looked at the picture of my brother, my dad, me, and our dog Kaiser Wilhelm. Then I looked at the pile of mail in front of me. There were seven or eight letters and a few messages scrawled by Shelly.
The most important piece of mail seemed to be the one at the top-an envelope from MGM complete with a little lion in the corner. There was no stamp, which meant it had been delivered by a messenger. I tore it open and found the check. I thought I could breathe easier with almost a thousand bucks. I tried. The pain in my side told me to be careful breathing.
There was a message to call my brother. I called him.
“Lieutenant Pevsner,” I said in my best smartass tone, “to what do I owe the pleasure?”
“You owe the pleasure to a hearing on your license,” he snapped.
“What the hell for?” I cried, causing myself further pain and dropping tar-thick coffee on my hand.
“For all that crap in Chicago,” he said. “The Chicago police called for your records and listed you as wanted in connection with three murders.”
“Four,” I said. “That’s all been cleared up. The Chicago cops cleared me.”
“Maybe they’re more forgiving than the license review board.”
“Oh come on, Phil,” I tried. “There is no license review board. Just an Irish lawyer in the mayor’s office who does what you guys tell him.”
“Maybe,” he said in something approaching glee — a state he seldom achieved unless he had his hands on me. “You write up a report on the whole thing,” he said. “I’ll ask Donovan to review it if I’m convinced.”
“You have a great heart, Phil.”
“You’ve got a big mouth, Toby. I heard you got shot. How are you?”
“A little itchy, but all right.”
“Too bad,” he said. “Goodbye.”
“Hey,” I said, catching him before he hung up. “How are Ruth and the kids?”
He called me a name and hung up. Asking him about his wife and kids always drove him halfway up the wall. I wasn’t sure why. I always figured it was because I spent so little time with them, and I was his only brother. It got him raging mad, but it had also become a little ritual with us-something we both expected and couldn’t stop. I considered calling him back and saying something. He was my only brother, and I had seen a lot of other people’s brothers in the last week or so. I considered it, but I didn’t really. There was nothing I could say to Phil. It was too late for us to do anything but for me to shoot wisecracks at him while he shot punches at me.