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underneath some coffee cups in a corner. Then he went to work on the old man. Above the sound of the drill he said, ‘I worked on a midget once. Little tiny teeth, but the roots on ’em. That little cocker had roots like steel. Two extractions on that midget were harder than a mouthful of root canals. Try to hold still, Mr. Strange. This will only take twenty or thirty minutes.”
    Having failed to impress what passed for my only friend, I went into my office. I’d save the story of encounters with the great and near great for my date next week with Carmen.
    My office had once been a dental room. It was just big enough for my battered desk and a couple of chairs. The walls were bare except for a framed copy of my private investigator’s certificate and a photograph of my father, my brother Phil and our beagle dog Kaiser Wilhelm. The ten-year-old kid in the picture didn’t look like me. His nose was straight. He was smiling and holding onto the dog’s collar. The fourteen-year-old looked like Phil, with the dark scowl, the tension. The tall, heavy man in the picture had one hand on each kid’s shoulder.
    There wasn’t much mail on the desk. Someone in Leavenworth, Kansas wanted to send me a catalogue of tricks and novelties for a dollar. A client named Merle Levine who had lost her cat wanted me to return the ten dollar advance she had given me. The case was two years old. I hadn’t found the cat. I hadn’t really looked. Two brothers named Santini on Sepulveda wanted to paint my home or office for a ridiculously low price.
    I wrote a note to Mrs. Levine and put three bucks in it telling her that it was an out-of-court settlement. Then I leaned back to listen to Shelly’s drill as he hummed “Ramona.” Through the window I could see Los Angeles white, flat and spread out. The skyline from my window wasn’t much. Since 1906, a municipal ordinance had limited buildings to 13 stories. Someone at City Hall hadn’t heard about the law and the City Hall Building was 32 stories high, but most of the buildings in the city were low. The skyline was a series of long, low lines like other American cities threatened by earthquakes and a lack of solid rock under them.
    The phone rang. It was almost two o’clock. Shelly answered it and said it was for me. I picked it up, while I fished through my drawers for a stamp to mail the letter to Mrs. Levine. The caller was Warren Hoff. He had news.
    The police had a suspect, a midget who had been in The Wizard of Oz. The midget’s name was Gunther Wherthman. He had been known to fight with the dead Munchkin, who was now identified as James Cash. In fact, the two little men had been arrested during the shooting of Oz in 1939 when they had a knife fight in their hotel. Wherthman had been cut by Cash, and the police had records showing that Wherthman had threatened to kill Cash. The police had also found three witnesses who had seen two midgets arguing violently before the murder outside the stage where Cash’s body was found. The witnessess all described one of the midgets as wearing a Munchkin soldier’s uniform. The other midget was described as wearing a Munchkin lollipop kid costume. Wherthman had, according to Hoff, played one of the lollipop kids in the movie. Hoff’s report was good.
    â€œI used to be a reporter before I got into this,” he explained.
    â€œMaybe you’ll go back to it,” I said.
    â€œIt’s late,” he said. ‘Once you commit yourself to a bigger income and lifestyle you’re hooked.”
    It wasn’t a problem I’d ever had to deal with.
    â€œThen that’s it,” I sighed thinking about the easy fifty in my pocket and slightly regretting the other fifties I might have had.
    â€œNot quite,” said Hoff. “We want you to talk to Wherthman, find out if he’s guilty, keep trying to hold back on the publicity. If Wherthman did kill Cash on