Down for the Count: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Ten) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online

Peters,” he shouted.
    “Joe Louis,” I said. “There, you pulled it out of me. It was Joe Louis. The champ was jogging down the beach and stopped to lend a hand. I feel better now getting that off my chest. You ever thought of being a Catholic priest, Meara?”
    “I love jokers,” Meara said, trying to pull himself together again. “I like to bend and tear them and throw them away. We don’t need jokers in the deck, Peters. Nobody misses ’em.”
    “Depends on the game you’re playing, Sergeant. Now if you’ll excuse me, I’ve got a client.”
    “If you—” he started, and I hung up.
    Shelly was sitting in his dental chair reading an old professional journal when I came out. The phone rang in my office but I ignored it. Shelly shook the magazine, dropped some ashes on his jacket, and shifted his pudgy body to let me know he was sulking.
    “Change the sign on the door, Shel,” I said. “Get rid of the discreet.”
    “You’re not a friend,” he said. “That man needed dental work.”
    “Shel, someday you’ll think back on this and thank me,” I said, going to the office door. “That man was Joe Louis. Do you know what he might do to you if you destroyed his teeth?”
    “I know who it was,” Shelly shot back defiantly like a small child. “And I would have given him a mouth to be proud of, a mouth that would go around the world letting everyone know, the great and the humble, that Sheldon Minck had worked on a champion. You don’t get that kind of opportunity very often, Toby.”
    I reached into my wallet and pulled out a hundred. “You got fifty bucks, Shel?” I asked.
    He looked at me over the top of his glasses with curiosity. “What if I have?” he asked cautiously.
    “I’ll give you a very new C-note and pay back the money I owe you and three months rent.”
    He scrambled out of the chair, casting his dental journal in the general direction of San Diego. It took four grunts to get his wallet out and some frantic counting to find fifty dollars. We made the exchange.
    “Then I’m forgiven?” I said as he examined the bill.
    “Well,” he said, dragging the word out. “Yeah.”
    “Good, then get the sign changed while I’m gone.”
    And out the door I went.
    On the way down the stairs I met Jeremy and Alice Pallice carrying massive cartons upward from the second floor.
    “Toby,” Jeremy said pausing. On his right shoulder was one large carton. Another was cradled under his left. Alice’s burden was the same. “These are the covers of the book. Just delivered. Would you like to see them?”
    “Sure,” I said.
    Jeremy put down the two cartons and reached into one of them. Alice stood smiling and waiting with her burden of what must have been a hundred and fifty pounds. I took the slick sheet of thick paper Jeremy handed me. It was dark and shiny with the title in white.
    “ Doves of a Winter Night ,” I read. “Nice. I like the outline of the bird, too. How many books are you printing?”
    “Three thousand,” Alice said below us.
    “You can sell three thousand books of poetry for children?”
    Jeremy smiled and put his hand on my shoulder. If he had closed the hand, my shoulder would have been avocado pudding.
    “We do not plan to sell them, Toby,” he said. “We will give them away. These are dark times, Byronic times. Times swirling in the mists of world terror. I have no desire to profit from despair. These poems should, may help some children feel better about themselves and the possibility for the future.”
    “We have hope for the future,” Alice said, looking admiringly at Jeremy.
    “And what about your business?” I said to Alice.
    “Oh,” she said, beaming, “I’m still doing the dirty books. A woman’s got to make a living and we’ve got thousands of servicemen gobbling up pornography all over California. Money I make on my regular stock, part of it, can go into Doves of a Winter Night .”
    Somewhere below us in the lobby a drunk who had wandered in