The Man Who Shot Lewis Vance (9 page)

“We’d like a room,” a voice from behind me said. Mrs. Larchmont couldn’t take her eyes from mine. Sweat had formed on her upper lip.

“A room,” Mrs. Larchmont repeated.

“Right, this is a hotel ain’t it? You have rooms,” the voice repeated.

“Give us a minute,” I said, keeping my eyes on Mrs. Larchmont. I didn’t want the spell I had cast broken, but it wasn’t to be. The voice repeated, “A room. We haven’t got forever.”

I turned, ready to do some insisting, but my eyes were level with a thick neck. The owner was about six-four, wearing an army uniform and carrying a lot of weight, and he was no kid. The woman at his side matched him year for year and looked just as tough. They had no luggage and I wanted to stay alive.

“Sorry,” I said with a grin, and stepped back to give them room. By the time Mrs. Larchmont had checked the two war lovers into their room, I knew I had lost her.

“I’m afraid you will have to leave,” she said. “I can help you no further. My attorney will have to be contacted before my husband or I will deal with the police further.” Her handkerchief was a mess.

“I want Teddy’s address,” I said. “Where does he live?”

“I don’t—”

“He worked for you. The law says you have to keep tax records, personnel records. You want to obstruct justice, I can call in building inspectors. If we have a violation here, I—”

She reached under the counter and came out with a little box filled with index cards. Her lips were drawn thin and her hands trembling. “I don’t like working here, not even for a few hours,” she said. Then her fingers touched a card and paused. “He lives at—”

I reached over and took the card from her hand. Teddy’s address was on Witmer.

“Did you give this address to Sergeant Cawelti?”

“He didn’t ask for it,” she said primly.

“Ten thousand dollars,” I said with an evil grin. She didn’t comment but her eyes danced. Something was going on and Teddy’s apartment might tell me what it was.

Witmer wasn’t far. I listened to a few minutes of “Young Widder Brown” and caught a few seconds of Hollywood news, enough to learn that Myrna Loy had gotten married and Alice Faye and Phil Harris’s two-week-old baby, Alice Junior, was doing just fine.

Teddy “Spaghetti” Longretti’s room was not doing nearly as well as Myrna Loy’s love life and Alice’s baby. Teddy’s room was in a six-flat building. The downstairs door was probably supposed to be locked but the lock had long since given up trying to keep anyone out. The halls were colorfully decorated with obscenities and incoherent war slogans. Teddy’s name had been scrawled on the downstairs mailbox with the number of his apartment. I had no trouble finding it on the second floor. I knocked but didn’t expect an answer.

The door wasn’t open but it wasn’t ready to protect the domicile either. I hit it with my shoulder and popped in, accompanied by splinters of wood. No one stirred in the apartment across the way as I stood and listened. So I closed the door and turned to look around.

In the next half hour I discovered where the publicity officers for the major and minor movie studios in Los Angeles dumped their garbage. There were one-sheets from Monogram Westerns, photographs of actors and actresses whose names were lost in the antiquity of Hollywood’s rapid history. Press books, lead pencils with Richard Arlen’s name on them, and even a napkin autographed by both Douglas Fairbanks and Don Ameche.

My trip down memory lane revealed no money and a lot of memories. I was considering giving up when I came on what seemed to be more memorabilia in a desk drawer. This stuff was different. It was in a nice clean envelope and the papers were letters, signed letters, one by Charlie Chaplin. Then a second by Chaplin and a third.

Most of the letters in the file were from Chaplin to Sydney Larchmont. They moved chronologically from September 1941 to March 1942. The letters started cordially, inquiries about “the donation.” By the end of 1941, the letters were no longer so cordial, and by March, Charles Spencer Chaplin was definitely not enamored of Sydney Larchmont. In fact, the Little Fellow was threatening legal action if there was no answer to his inquiries.

I took the file and letters and continued my search for ten more minutes, finding nothing of interest besides a closet with some clothes, $28 in a sock, and the sorriest-looking collection of food in the refrigerator and small cupboard in the corner.

It didn’t look as if Teddy had come back home after his scrape with Straight-Ahead at the Alhambra. It also didn’t look as if either Vance’s body or my .38 were on the premises.

Instead of answers, I had more questions. What were the Larchmonts up to? Where was Vance’s body? What did Charlie Chaplin have to do with all this, if anything? How much money would John Wayne send me in the mail? Did I have time to stop for a hot dog at Maury’s on Sepulveda?

I thought of these questions as I drove through a sudden drizzle back downtown. I would have thought of more questions and maybe even a few answers if I hadn’t found Lewis Vance’s body when I got back to the Farraday. He was sitting in the waiting room outside Shelly’s office.

5
      

I
left Vance sitting there wondering where he might wander to next and opened the door to Shelly’s office. Something smelled all wrong and it wasn’t just Vance’s two-day-old body.

“Shel,” I said, watching him hunched over a victim in the chair.

“Busy,” he said. “Busy now.”

The patient in the chair was wearing cowboy boots, but I couldn’t tell if it was a man or a woman. Shelly’s body obliterated gender and sensibility.

“You’ve got a patient out there waiting and he’s getting a bit fragrant,” I said.

“Almost, almost,” Shelly answered, his right arm moving back and forth, a metal tool plunged into his patient’s mouth. The patient gave off a constant, gurgling, sexless
urghhh.

“Shel,” I repeated.

“Now,” he groaned, and his arm pulled back holding a plierlike tool, which in turn held a tooth. “Damn,” Shelly said, beaming as he turned to show me the tooth. Sweat beads vibrated on his red face. He turned to show his catch to the creature in the chair but the creature, a man whom I didn’t know but could now see clearly, didn’t seem to care. His mouth remained open, his eyes blank.

Shelly moved over to me and whispered, still clutching the tool and tooth.

“Damn thing wouldn’t come out but it didn’t have a chance against me.”

“You and the tooth were enemies,” I said, hoping to get him over this professional outburst so I could deal with our dead visitor.

“Enemies, yes,” he said, adjusting his slipping glasses and relighting his cigar after plunging the tooth in the dirty pocket of his once-white smock. “Oral hygiene takes a backseat to no rotted tooth.”

“Get rid of him, Shel,” I whispered. “We have another patient to take care of in the waiting room.”

“The three guys?” he said, blowing a puff of smoke into the stale air of his office and glancing at the still unmoving man in the chair.

“Three?”

“The two guys with the yellow shirts and the sick one,” he said. “I told them I’d be with them in a few minutes.”

“There’s only one guy out there now, Shel,” I whispered. “And he’s dead.”

Shelly looked at me over his glasses. It gave him an air of intensity, but I knew it eliminated his minimal sight. “I haven’t worked on him,” he said, his hand moving to his heart.

“No one’s accusing you of killing him,” I said. “Just get rid of Buffalo Bill quick.”

I gave Shelly a little push to urge him on, but he almost slipped as he approached his patient.

“Mr. Guerero,” he said. “Mr. Guerero?”

“Urghhh,” said Mr. Guerero, a common response from a patient on a first visit to Dr. Sheldon Minck.

“Mr. Guerero, the tooth is out.” Shelly patted his pocket. A spot of blood from the extracted souvenir had seaped through.

“I don’t give a shit,” moaned Mr. Guerero, trying to sit up. “That hurt, you know. That hurt like—”

“A little pain—” Shelly began.

“I’m not talking ‘a little pain’ here,” Guerero said, standing on uncertain legs. “You said ‘painless.’ That means ‘no pain.’”

Shelly nodded his head sagely and looked at me knowingly, as if to say the poor man simply did not understand the subtle lies of the dental profession. I pointed to the waiting room.

“Pain tolerance varies,” Shelly said. “That will be five dollars.”

“I paid when I came in,” Guerero said. He was no longer leaden-legged behind Shelly. He was lanky, solid, somewhere in his thirties, with straight black hair and a nose like the American eagle. He wore chinos and a denim vest.

“You paid for routine work,” Shelly said slowly and distinctly, as if to a child. “There were complications.”

I leaned against the wall and checked my watch. It told me nothing of value.

“I’m not paying you another cent,” Guerero said, leaning toward Shelly.

Shelly removed his cigar from his face and pulled out his pliers for self-defense. “My associate will have something to say about that,” Shelly warned. “Won’t you, Mr. Peters.”

Guerero paused and looked in my direction. Pain ticked in his jaw, anger in his black eyes.

“Yeah,” I said, pushing away from the wall. “I wouldn’t pay another cent either. I’d get the hell out and go to another dentist, one with respect for human suffering.”

Guerero shook his head, thinking it was a good idea, and Shelly looked in my general direction with sincere disappointment in his chubby face.

Guerero walked past me to the door and Shelly said, “Tell the next patient to come in as you—”

Guerero slammed the door of the alcove and less than a beat later slammed the outer door.

“Betrayal, Toby,” Shelly said.

“You shouldn’t have called me in on it, Shel. I’ve warned you. We’ll talk about it later. We’ve got to get that body …”

Shelly took out the recently extracted tooth, sighed, and put it on the cluttered table near the chair. Then he walked past me to the door to the alcove, opened it, and stepped out. About five seconds later he stepped back in, his face white and dry, his cigar out.

“There’s a dead man out there,” he said.

“I already told you that,” I said. “He was shot with my gun. My gun is missing. I think someone planted him out there. They probably called the police, who will probably be here any second.”

“Get him out. Get him out,” Shelly screamed. “For God’s sake, get him out.”

“Calm down, Shel,” I said calmly. “My guess is the police have my gun or it’s somewhere around here.”

“Shit and hell,” Shelly said. “Damn and crap. Why did you have to kill him in the waiting room? Why did you have to kill one of my patients?”

“He wasn’t one of your patients and I didn’t kill him in the waiting room,” I explained. “I didn’t kill him at all.”

Shelly pointed at the door.

“He should have been one of my patients. He has a pair of cavities in the lower bicuspid that are as bad as any I’ve seen in months. Well, Mr. Stange has a comparable—”

I put a hand on Shelly’s shoulder to shut him up, but that was no easy task.

“Shel,” I said calmly. “If they find him here it won’t do your business a hell of a lot of good. They might even think you were part of it, an accessory, an accomplice, a—”

Far off, the Farraday elevator ground into action, a sure sign that the rider was unfamiliar with the ins and outs of the Farraday. No regular would ride the cage, not if they wanted to be anywhere within the decade. I went out the door, noticed that Vance had slumped over, and hurried into the hall to look over the railing at the elevator. From this angle I could see the distinct center part in the hair of Sergeant John Cawelti of the Los Angeles Police Department.

I got back into the waiting room, surveyed Vance, and called for Shelly. About a minute later John Cawelti, who had gotten off at the second floor and walked up, stepped into the room.

He saw me drinking a cup of solid Shelly coffee and saying, “So I bought the coat … Sergeant Cawelti, I didn’t know you were one of Shelly’s patients. You couldn’t have come to a better dentist.”

“Just have a seat in the waiting room,” Shelly called over his shoulder. “I’ll be finished with Mr. Kerensky in about twenty minutes.”

“I didn’t come here to see the fat dentist,” Cawelti said, adjusting his tie. “A gun, your gun, was dropped off at the station about an hour ago, with a note saying you had shot someone and the body was here now.”

I pretended to savor the coffee and shrugged. “No body here, at least not till Shelly gets finished with Mr. Kerensky. You see a body here, Shel?”

“No,” Shelly said.

“Mr. Kerensky?” he asked.

Shelly hovered over the corpse of Vance, who was covered in a white cloth, and answered, “He can’t talk. He’s got cotton in his mouth.”

Shelly reached over for his drill, flipped the switch, and started enough noise to give me an excuse to lead Cawelti into my office. The drill was buzzing away when we closed the door and sat down, me behind the desk, Cawelti in front of it. He was smiling as if he had a great secret he didn’t plan to let me in on. He made a house of his fingers and bounced them together.

“Now,” I said, casually opening a letter from a detective school in Van Nuys, “what’s this about my gun? Remember, I reported it missing. When can I get it back?”

“When we find the body and match the hole in it with your thirty-eight is when,” Cawelti said, bouncing his fingers.

“I’m still on the John Wayne case,” I said, glancing down at the letter promising to turn me into a sleuth in three weeks for $40.

“And I’m still on your case,” Cawelti said. “I think your John Wayne story was turkey fart.”

I decided not to go to detective school as we sat looking at each other for a few seconds and listening to Shelly drill away at Vance’s corpse.

“I can’t help you, Big John,” I said with a heavy sigh. “I’ve got no body for you and not much time either. If I shoot anyone, I’ll let you know, but at the moment I don’t have a gun. Someone gave you a story, John, and you came running here hoping I had a—”

He stood up and pointed his chimney finger at me. “I’m going to check every office on this floor and I’m going to check your car.”