He Done Her Wrong: A Toby Peters Mystery (Book Eight) (Toby Peters Mysteries) by Stuart M. Kaminsky Read Free Book Online

the Bookends of Jesus were both 1Bs and could be stuffed flatfooted and nearsighted into uniforms and shipped off to General MacArthur to plug a leak in the Pacific.
    In front of my office door I paused and read the familiar sign in black letters on the pebbled glass:
    SHELDON P. MINCK, D.D.S., S.D.
    DENTIST                                         
    If you looked, you could see through the swatch of white paint that the words Oral Surgeon had been covered over. Shelly had reluctantly blotted them out after a visit from a not-very-friendly representative of the dental association.
    In much smaller letters below this was:
    TOBY PETERS                     
    PRIVATE INVESTIGATOR
    I went in. The small reception room was as it always had been: three wooden chairs, small table with an overflowing ashtray, copies of magazines going back to the Jazz Age, and a dusty pharmaceutical house drawing of a tooth. I went through the room to Shelly’s dental office, where he was singing “Bye Bye Blackbird” as he worked on a kid in uniform. The kid was sitting at attention.
    “Be with you in a min-oot,” bellowed Shelly, waving a bloody swab in my general direction.
    “It’s me,” I said, stepping up to look at the kid, whose eyes were glistening with tears of pain he just barely controlled. He was, I guessed, about ten years old. Almost all soldiers, sailors, and marines looked as if they were ten years old, but with 1Bs being called up, maybe that would change. The armed forces would look like a convention of pops and sons, hand in hand, skipping up on the Nazis and Japs.
    “Toby,” Shelly said, turning to me to squint through his ever-sagging thick glasses. He removed his cigar from his mouth, which let me think he had something serious to say, wiped the bloody swab on his once-white smock, and went on. “Been waiting for you.”
    “Thanks,” I said, heading for the coffeepot. There was enough in it for one last cup. I poured it into an almost-clean brown cup and waited. Log Cabin syrup in the little metal cabin poured faster.
    “Working on this boy for practically nothing,” Shelly said proudly, rubbing his sweaty bald head with his sleeve. “Mean breaks on the bicuspids.” Shelly reached for the kid’s mouth, and the kid shrank back, but there was no place to go. “Got in a fight. You know? Big night in the big city.”
    “I thought the army had its own dentists,” I said, trying to remove my sugar spoon from the coffee.
    “They do, they do,” Shelly agreed, putting a plump and not-too-clean hand on the boy’s shoulder, “But Private Bayer here didn’t want to get into any trouble.” Shelly shot us both a wink of dark conspiracy. “And I’m only too happy to help our boys in blue.”
    “He’s a soldier, not a sailor,” I said, chewing on a mouthful of coffee. I put the cup down in the sink, which was already filled with used dental tools and a plate smeared with something red, probably Shelly’s strawberry breakfast roll.
    The kid tried to swallow and smile back at Shelly, who looked down at him benevolently.
    “If that’s his pleasure,” I said, looking at the kid.
    “Sure it is,” grinned Shelly, searching for something in the stack of instruments on the little table. The kid’s eyes opened wide and carried the prayer that whatever Shelly came up with it wouldn’t be sharp and more than six inches long. Shelly didn’t find what he wanted, so he moved next to me and looked in the sink. Below a stainless-steel pan with egg stains on it he found what he was searching for. It was sharp, or had been once, and maybe less than six inches long. The kid groaned. Shelly washed the instrument under the cold water and leaned toward me, smelling of stale cigar and mint Life Savers.
    “Client,” he whispered.
    “You mean someone called?” I whispered back.
    The kid in the chair leaned forward, straining to hear us. Maybe we were consulting on his