The Fala Factor

3

The second-floor squadroom of the Wilshire District police station was unusually quiet for a Friday afternoon. On the way there I had stopped for a Taco and Pepsi Victory Special at Paco’s On Pico. Sergeant Veldu, the old guy on the front desk, had waved me in with a beefy hand and told me to look out for Cawelti, who was in and in a bad mood. I had known Sergeant John Cawelti for two years, since he first came to the Wilshire with his hair parted down the middle like a bar-keep and his fists permanently clenched. We had not hit it off well. A clash of personalities. Two spirits destined to ignite. I had once suggested, in his presence, that the Los Angeles police trade him to the Germans for an old pair of Goering’s underwear. It had not pleased my enemy.

So I pushed open the door of the squadroom on the second floor feeling the itch of a good insult creeping into my mind. I approached the desk where Cawelti was hissing through his teeth at a Mexican guy covered with dark hair and two days of beard. The Mexican guy was nodding yes to everything. He was so skinny that each nod of his head threatened to knock him off balance. I considered pausing to warn him about the floor of the squadroom. One could get lost on that floor in the generations of accumulated food, tobacco, and human body fluids ranging from blood to urine. Some of the former was mine. Cleaning up amounted to nothing more than keeping the dirt-black wooden floor from becoming unpassable.

“Top of the morning, John,” I heard myself say as I passed Cawelti’s desk.

Cawelti’s answer was a low grunt and the sudden swing of the bound notebook in his hand, which banged against the cheek of the Mexican, who crumpled in front of me on the filthy floor.

“Hey,” I said, jumping out of the way. “I can make a citizen’s arrest on this one. Littering, illegal use of a concealed Mexican junkie, assault with a deadly alien.”

Cawelti stood up, his suit dark and neat, his face turning a pocked red. There were a few other detectives and one uniformed guy making coffee in the corner. They didn’t bother to watch our little drama. Neither did the Negro kid handcuffed to the waiting bench about ten feet away from us. He was doing his best to pretend that he hadn’t seen the whole thing and hoping that he wasn’t going to be questioned by Cawelti.

I faced Cawelti as I knelt down to help the Mexican guy up. The Mexican smelled like vomit, and Cawelti was grinning.

“Gracias,” the Mexican said dizzily.

“I’d stay down there if I were you,” I said, grinning back at Cawelti. “He’s only going to do it again when I leave.”

“Peters, Peters,” said Cawelti, “we’re coming to that time. Things are changing around here, and you and me are going to dance in the moonlight,” The last had been punctuated with a finger jabbed at me for “you” and a thumb at himself for “me.”

“Poetry will get you nowhere, John-John,” I said, propping the Mexican back up in the chair while trying not to let any of him rub off on me.

“Hey,” a voice, deep and dark, called across the babble of the room. I turned, and beyond the bulk of a mountainous sergeant drinking a cup of coffee, I saw Steve Seidman waving at me. Without another word to Cawelti, I skipped past an overturned basket that had something wet and red in it, hopped over the Negro kid on the bench, who pulled back into a protective ball, and weaved around the mountain of a cop whose name was Slaughter and whose disposition was known to match his name. He almost spilled his coffee as he made way for me to get past him. I gave a half-second prayer that the coffee didn’t spill and put Slaughter into a worse-than-normal mood.

“Been making friends in the squadroom again?” Seidman said, sitting back against the edge of his desk in a corner. There were two small fruit crates on top of the desk. One had once been filled with Napa Sweetheart artichokes and was now piled high with papers, notes, and assorted junk.

“Early spring cleaning?” I asked, nodding at the desk.

“Moving day,” he answered, pushing away from the desk and starting forward. I followed him.

“How’s the tooth?” I said as we angled past the semiclear space near the filthy windows that tried but failed to keep out all of the sunlight. Seidman’s right cheek was definitely puffy.

“The man,” Seidman said over his shoulder, “is a butcher, an incompetent unclean quack.”

“And those are Shelly’s good traits,” I said as he opened the door marked LT. PHILIP PEVSNER.

“You’re a class act, Toby,” Seidman said emotionlessly as I moved past him. Then he whispered, “Be careful, Phil’s in a good mood.”

I stepped in and Seidman stepped out, closing the door behind me but not before I caught a glimpse of his hand reaching for his cheek. Phil was standing behind his small desk in the office, which was about the same size as my own. His bulky back was to me. He was in his rumpled gray suit looking out the grim window at the blank wall. A cup of coffee was in his hand. He didn’t turn when the door closed but I caught a movement of the shoulders that led me to believe that he wasn’t lost in some form of meditation.

“Happy birthday,” I said, resisting the temptation to sit in the chair across from his desk. I’d been trapped in that chair more than once and wound up with books in my face, a kick in the leg that led to orthopedic therapy, and a variety of lesser but equally interesting injuries, each of which was good enough for at least a fifteen-yard penalty.

Phil grunted and took another sip of coffee. He was just too fascinated by that brick wall to turn around. I couldn’t blame him. More than ten years of looking at it could not dim the fascination of its potential mysteries.

“What are you looking at?” I heard myself say, knowing that it was exactly what I shouldn’t say, at least what I shouldn’t say unless I wanted my brother to turn in murderous rage, which is probably what I did want. Old habits die hard. I had once said that to my friend Jeremy Butler. He had said, “Old habits never die. They are only repressed and come back to haunt us in disguise.” So, I had decided it was better to make friends with my bad habits than to hide them away. The result had been a lost marriage, a bad back, no money in the bank, a diet that would destroy the average Russian soldier, a brother whose fists clenched when I was within smelling range, and a few interesting encounters.

Phil did not turn around murderously. He didn’t turn around at all but answered calmly, “You know how old I’ll be at the end of this week?”

“Fifty,” I said, leaning back against the wall as far from him as I could get.

“Fifty,” he agreed, taking another sip. “Half a century. And you’re only a few years behind.”

“Physically,” I agreed.

“Physically you’re over the century mark,” he grunted. “How many times you been shot?”

“Three,” I said. “And you?”

“Four, counting the war,” he answered.

“Well,” I sighed, “it’s been nice talking about the good old days, but I’ve got a client, and some groceries to pick up. I’ll needle you once or twice about Ruth and the boys. You throw something at me, tell me what you want, and I’ll be going.”

That should have gotten him, but it didn’t. What was worse was that he turned around with a sad near-smile on his face and his scarred sausage fingers engulfing his cup. His hair was steel gray and cut short as always. His cop gut hung over his belt and his tie was loose around the collar of his size-sixteen-and-a-half neck.

“I got the word Monday,” Phil said, looking down at the dregs in his cup and shaking it around a little. “I made captain. I’m moving down the hall this afternoon.”

Four wisecracks came like shadows into my mind but I let them keep going and said, “That’s great Phil. You deserve it.”

Phil nodded in agreement. “I paid for it,” he said. “I paid.”

And so, I thought, did a stadium-load of criminals and people who just got in Phil’s way. For the first ten years of being a cop, Phil had tried to single-handedly and double-footedly smash every lawbreaker unlucky enough to come within his smell. He kicked, bent, broke, twisted bodies and the law, and gained a reputation for violence I could have told Jimmy Fiddler about when I was ten. The second ten years, after he made lieutenant, had been like the first decade but sour. Crime hadn’t stopped. It had gotten bigger and worse. If Phil had paid attention to the books our old man had given him from time to time, he would have known all this from Jaubert or the cop in Crime and Punishment, but Phil was a dreamer with a pencil-thin, overworked wife, three kids, one of whom was sick most of the time, and a mortgage.

“Seidman’s moving in here,” he went on. “He’s up for lieutenant next month. Your pal Cawelti might move up too.”

“That will make me feel safer at nights,” I said.

“Enough shit,” Phil said, putting down his coffee cup and pulling his tie off. “I’m never going higher than captain. There’s no place higher for me to go. So, no more damned ties. No more fooling around.”

“You’ve been fooling around all these years?” I said, looking into a grin I didn’t like, a grin that made me feel a twinge of sympathy for the unknown offender who next came within the grasp of my brother.

“Eleanor Roosevelt,” he said, throwing the tie on the desk. I think it was a tie I had once given him, picked up as a partial payment from Hy of Hy’s Clothes For Him for finding Hy’s nephew, who had departed with Hy’s weekly cashbox and was spending it freely in a San Bernardino bar when I found him. Hy had a bad habit of losing his relatives and a worse habit of paying me off in unwanted clothes when I found them.

“Eleanor Roosevelt,” I repeated sagely.

“That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Phil said, leaning forward, his fists on the desk. The pose was decidedly simian, I noted, an observation I managed to keep from sharing with him.

“Seidman was following her this morning,” he went on. “That’s what he was doing in that nearsighted geek’s office.”

“I’ll tell Shelly you send him your best,” I said sincerely.

Phil didn’t answer. He just stared at me with brown, wet eyes, his lower lip pushing out.

“The Secret Service doesn’t tell us anything. The FBI doesn’t tell us anything,” he continued. “It came to us from the mayor’s office, straight in here. I’m responsible. I’m on the line. I don’t think they can take captain away from me, but they can make me the captain of canned shit if this gets screwed up.”

“Well put,” I said.

“So,” he said, evenly bouncing his fists on the desk, “I’m going to ask you some questions. You are going to answer the questions. You are not going to play games because you know what I can do to people who play games. You remember Italian Mack?”

I didn’t want to remember what Phil had done to Italian Mack. What he had done to Italian Mack had probably kept him a lieutenant for an extra three years.

“Ask,” I said, back to the wall.

“What the hell is the president’s wife doing coming to your office?”

I couldn’t stop it. It came out of the little kid who lives inside me and doesn’t give a final damn about my bruised and broken body. “Looking for campaign contributions from leading citizens,” I said. But I overcame the kid and before Phil could get out from behind the desk. I soothed, “Wait, wait, hold on. She had a job for me.”

He stopped halfway around the desk. From beyond his door, a single voice shrieked out in Spanish, “No lo hice, por Dios.” Phil didn’t seem to notice.

“What kind of job could you do for her that the FBI, the Secret Service, and the L.A. police couldn’t do?” he asked. It was a reasonable question.

“Find a dog,” I said. “I swear, find a dog. A friend of hers in Los Angeles, Jack Warner’s wife, lost her dog. Mrs. Roosevelt promised to help her find it but she can’t go to you or the FBI on a personal thing like this. She’s had enough crap in the papers and on the radio without having people say she’s using the government’s time and money to find lost pets for big campaign donors.”

It sounded kind of reasonable and was a little bit true at the same time. I don’t know where it came from, but I heard it coming out of me when I needed it. It was usually like that. I was one hell of an on-the-spot liar. It was what every good private detective had to be in a world of liars. Phil, on the other hand, was a lousy liar. He didn’t have to lie. He had a cop’s badge and the gun that went with it.

“Why you?” he asked, pausing, his head cocked to the side.

“You know I used to work for Warner’s. They throw me business once in a while.”

“Warner would have had the gulls going for your liver if he had his way,” Phil said. “He hates your face.”

“We have an understanding,” I lied. “I did some work for him a few years back and-”

“Toby, how much of this is horseshit?” His hand slammed down on the desk sending a spray of pencils flying from the clay cup his son Nate had made for him five years ago. Beyond the closed door the Mexican guy seemed to be whimpering in sympathy for me.

“About half,” I said honestly, which was a lie. “Phil, it’s nothing, a missing dog, a two-bit case. No scandal, no politics, no danger for the First Lady, just a lost dog. I said I’d keep it quiet, but, okay, call Mrs. Warner, check it out. I promised I wouldn’t tell, but the hell with it. Check it out. I need the few bucks. It’s either look for a lost pooch or do the night guard shift at a defense plant, and you know how I hate uniforms.”

Phil pulled his pouting lip back in and looked at me for about half a minute while I tried on the wide-open, sincere, and slightly pathetic face I had come near perfecting by looking into the mirror on humid summer nights.

Finally he sighed, a sigh to take in all of his troubles and those of the Allies. “Get out,” he said, turning his back again. This time he put his hands behind him. “If anything happens on this, anything, I’ll come for you, Toby. I’ll come and all the bad times in the past will be Mother Goose compared to it.”

“Thanks Phil,” I said, inching for the door. “Give my best to Ruth and the kids.”

“Ruth wants you to come for dinner, Sunday,” he said gruffly.

“I’ll be there,” I said, my hand on the door knob. “And Phil, you deserve to make captain.”

Something like a laugh came from him. I couldn’t see the face that matched it, but the voice had a touch of gravel in it. “The war got me this promotion,” he said softly. “Younger guys are gone, younger lieutenants. Tojo and Hitler got this promotion for me. Without them I’d go out a lieutenant. Funny, huh?”

“You’re selling yourself short, brother,” I said.

“I’m selling myself at street prices,” he said. “I can live with that. What’s your price?”

I left without telling him I had no minimum. What I did have was a pocketful of Eleanor Roosevelt’s cash. Seidman didn’t see me leave. Across the room I saw his thin frame leaning over to finish filling his artichoke crate. Caweiti was out of sight, probably discussing current events or Goethe with the Mexican in one of the interrogation rooms down the hall. Slaughter and a uniformed kid were in earnest, head-to-head conversation with the Negro kid still handcuffed to the bench. He was nodding his head in full agreement to everything they whispered to him, probably confessing to crimes committed a century before he was born.

I almost collided with a well-dressed woman wearing a tiny black hat with a large black feather. She was about forty, maybe a little older, good-looking in a way that reminded me of my ex-wife, and perfumed heavily enough to break through the squadroom smell, at least at close range.

“Excuse me,” she said, looking around the room with obvious distaste, “can you tell me where I might find the detective in charge of providing security for bridge parties?”

“Bridge parties?” I said.

“We are going to have a bridge party to raise funds for the USO and we would like a detective present to keep unwanted people out, if you understand,” she said with a smile reserved for people like me, who could not possibly understand people like her.

“Sergeant Cawelti,” I said. “That’s his desk right there. You just have a seat. He’ll be right back. Tell him Captain Peters said he should take care of you.”

“Thank you,” she said, taking off her glove and offering me her hand. I took it. It felt soft. “Thank you, Captain Peters. It’s difficult to know what the right thing to do is at times like this.”

“You’re doing the right thing,” I assured her, taking her hand in both of mine. Behind us, Slaughter grumbled, “No, no, no,” to the Negro kid, who had apparently given a wrong answer. The woman drew her hand away.

“My son’s in the army,” she said, trying to keep her eyes away from the scene on the bench. “It’s hard to know what to do.”

“Leave it to Sergeant Cawelti,” I said, feeling guilty but not knowing how to get out of it. “Good luck.”

“Thank you, Captain,” she said as I walked out the door and left her perfumed presence to be engulfed by hell.

Veldu called, “Take care, Toby,” as I walked past him and into the light of Wilshire Boulevard. A lone cloud crossed in front of the sun, and I looked down at the watch I had inherited from my father. It was his only legacy to me, besides a tendency to feel sorry for most of the people who staggered into my life. The watch could never be relied upon for the right time. Now it told me that it was six, but it couldn’t have been later than two.

My car radio, after “Wendy Warren and the News,” told me that it was two-fifteen. A stop at a drugstore got me a Pepsi and a phone book that let me know that I was a twenty-minute drive away from Dr. Olson’s office in Sherman Oaks. I called the number in the phone book and a man answered, “Dr. Olson’s office.”

“I’d like to see the doctor,” I said. “This afternoon. It’s an emergency.”

“What kind of pet do you have?” he said. “And what is the problem?”

“Little black Scotch terrier,” I said, a sob in my voice. “He just seems different, like a different dog. You know what I mean?”

“I’ll tell Doctor,” he said with dull efficiency. “You can bring your dog in at four. The dog’s name?”

“Fala,” I said. “We named him after the president’s dog. My wife thought it was kind of a cute idea. What do you think?”

“We see lots of Scotch terriers named Fala,” he said. A phone was ringing behind him. “Sorry, Mr …?”

“Rosenfeldt,” I said. “Myron Rosenfeldt. That’s why my wife, Lottie, thought it would be cute to name the dog Fala.”

The man grunted and the phone continued to ring behind him. “Four o’clock,” he said and hung up.

Having given Dr. Olson something to think about in case he might be guilty of dognapping, I made another call to a second doctor, Doc Hodgdon, who agreed to cancel his two-thirty patient and meet me at the YMCA on Hope Street. Doc was thin, white-haired, and well over sixty. My hope was that he would slow down enough soon so that I could finally beat him at least once at handball. I sometimes wondered why he wanted to continue to play with me. “Sadist and masochist,” Jeremy had suggested. “He likes beating you and you like being beaten. A symbiotic relationship.”

I didn’t like thinking about that so I turned on the radio when I got back in the car and headed for Hope. One hour later, after having lost three straight games to Hodgdon, I was showered, resuited, and heading for Sherman Oaks singing “I Came Here To Talk For Joe.”

I was refreshed, unshaved, and unworried as the gas gauge in front of me bounced happily from full to empty. I was ready to do my part for victory by confronting what might be the most important dognapper in history.