Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) Read Online Free PDF Page B

Ellis, a hotel dick I sometimes filled in for, had told me about it, knew the guy who was hiring. But that was last-ditch stuff. At Grumman I’d have to wear a uniform. I had an allergy to uniforms. I’d worn one as a Glendale cop and as a security guard at Warner Brothers. It was no longer part of my life style. That’s what I told myself when I had a hundred bucks in my frayed wallet, a few clean shirts in my closet, and a full refrigerator.
    The lobby of the Farraday Building on Hoover near Ninth was, as always, clean and smelled of Lysol, which my landlord, the former wrestler and now poet Jeremy Butler, used generously, which was fine with me. I liked most strong smells: Lysol, gasoline, rubbing alcohol. They were the only ones that could get past the mashed wreckage of the cartilage in my nose.
    The white tiles on the floor were worn down, a few of them showing inevitable cracks. I listened to the echo of my footsteps as I started up the fake marble stairs. There was an elevator in the Farraday, but it moved slower than a panhandler giving you change. I walked up past the floors of offices closeting bookies, disbarred lawyers, alcoholic doctors, insolvent baby photographers, some tenants whose business I didn’t want to think about, at least one psychic I tried to avoid because she scared the hell out of me, and one publisher of semi-pornography named Alice Pallice. Alice was a particular friend of Jeremy Butler. She almost matched the bald giant in size and strength. She had been known to shoulder her printing press and get down the fire escape in less than a minute when the call came that vice cops were on the way. Lately, she had begun publishing children’s books and poetry with Jeremy as author. A match made in Oz.
    On the fourth and final floor of the Farraday, I made my way to the door of the offices I shared with Sheldon Minck. Someone down the hall was singing an operatic aria. I couldn’t tell if it was a man or woman. On the pebbled-glass door in front of me was written, in gold letters:
    DR. SHELDON MINCK, DENTIST, D.D.S., S.D.
PAINLESS DENTISTRY PRACTICE SINCE 1916
TOBY PETERS
DISCREET INVESTIGATIONS
    Shelly changed the sign every month or two in the hope of increasing business, but few of the people on the way to Axel the bookie down the hall were struck by whatever Shelly put on the door.
    I went through the door and into the small waiting room with its two wooden chairs, a small table with a neat pile of old Collier’s , and an ashtray. The place had been cleaned up by Shelly because of a recent investigation by the County Dental Association following a complaint about Shelly’s less than sanitary technique. When I stepped through the next door I could see that the brief period of near-sterility was already passing. Dishes, cups, and instruments were beginning to peep over the rim of the sink near the door to my slightly-more-than-closet-size office. I could live with that, had lived with it for half a dozen years, but then I saw something that really got to me.
    “Stop,” I shouted.
    Shelly turned his face toward me and away from the patient in the chair. It took Shelly a second or two to find me through his thick glasses. He was dressed in an almost white dental jacket and he held a sharp metal instrument in his pudgy right hand. With his left hand, he pushed back his slipping glasses. A small bead of sweat meandered down his forehead searching for his nose.
    “Toby,” he said. “What the hell—”
    “I think you should get out of the chair,” I said, trying to control my voice.
    Joe Louis looked at me in some confusion and started to remove the towel from his neck. Shelly turned to stop him, but not even Shelly’s determination had any effect. Louis removed the towel and stood up.
    “What is this anyway?” Shelly said, looking around for something and then seeing it. He put down the sharp instrument and replaced it with a cigar he had left smouldering on the porcelain work table.