A Fatal Glass of Beer Read Free Page B

and Henry Armstrong Thursday.”
    In the six months Violet had been working for us, I had made five bets with her. She had won them all and had destroyed my opinion of myself as a boxing expert.
    “Henry Armstrong,” I said. “No contest.”
    “I’ll take Beau Jack, even,” she said. “Ten dollars.”
    I shrugged an okay. I had money in the bank from a job I’d just completed for Fred Astaire and I could handle the loss of a ten spot. I don’t know how many more losses to twenty-two-year-old Violet my almost-fifty-year-old ego would take. But the Armstrong bet had to be safe. Beau Jack was a California fighter, the champ—Violet’s husband wanted a crack at him when the war was over. But Armstrong was nonstop energy with a great punch. He never seemed to get tired and he never stopped coming at you. He was the most fascinating fighter I had ever seen. All out from the first second to the last. Few could withstand his almost insane attack.
    Violet and I went into Shelly’s operating room and I closed the office door behind me. The place was fairly tidy, thanks to Violet. The first thing I saw was Shelly straddling someone in his dental chair. A woman’s legs were wrapped around him. I couldn’t see her but she was groaning.
    “Almost,” Shelly was saying to her. “Almost got it.”
    A nicely chewed cigar had been set carefully on the porcelain worktable for the duration of the procedure. His bald head was beaded with sweat and his ample rear writhed under his stained white laboratory coat.
    The second thing I saw was a man standing in the corner near the reception room. There was no mistaking him. He wore a matching jacket and slacks, casual shoes, a blue shirt, and no tie. A straw hat rested on his head. I’m around five-foot-nine; Fields was a little shorter. He carried a cane in his hand, which I later discovered was more a prop than a walking aid. At one point during our later flight, he would confide that he had begun smoking at the age of nine and had taken to carrying the cane when he was about fourteen. When in doubt, he would perform some balancing trick with a cigar or his stick or do his trick of putting the cane on his shoulder and then placing his hat on the cane instead of his head. I had seen him do at least five variations on this trick in movies, including a feigned confusion over the loss of the hat and a few seconds of fruitless attempts to retrieve the hat from the elusive end of the cane.
    But now the comedian stood entranced by the sight of Shelly and his patient. I moved to his side and whispered, “Mr. Fields, I’m Toby Peters.”
    “Fine, fine,” he said without looking away from Shelly and the struggling woman. “A confident sense of one’s identity is the cornerstone of sanity.”
    Everyone from General Patton to Marlene Dietrich did an imitation of Fields. It was a mainstay impersonation, like doing Cagney or Walter Winchell. But they were all exaggerations. His voice was not as harsh as the mimics made it, his movements not as frantic. He moved with the grace of the great juggler he had been, the great comic juggler I had seen at the Grace Theater when I was a kid.
    “Man’s a genius,” Fields whispered.
    Violet shook her head and went through the door back to the reception room.
    “And the secretary is as fine an example of youthful pulchritude as I’ve witnessed in a decade,” he added.
    “Husband’s in the army. Ranked middleweight. I hear he has a temper.”
    “Most of the husbands I have encountered would merit a similar description,” he said, his eyes still on Shelly, who shifted as the woman’s legs tightened around him.
    “Had almost the exact scene in a short I did, The Dentist ,” Fields confided, pointing at Shelly and his patient. “Studio cut it out. Censored. Said it looked like a sexual act with the woman’s legs around me and me astride her on the dental chair as she gurgled in pain. I never forgave the studio and I never forgot the