The Fala Factor

6

Mrs. Plaut was singing her Fanny Brice rendition of “I’m Cooking Breakfast for the One I Love,” complete with Yiddish accent, when I pushed open the door of her boarding house on Heliotrope. My plan was simple, to get to my room and fall asleep, but to accomplish that I had to make it past Mrs. Plaut.

She didn’t hear me come in. There wasn’t much that Mrs. Plaut could hear, but she made up in determination what she lacked in hearing. She stood about four and a half feet high and was somewhere in the range of eighty years old. Her age, sex, and hearing impairment deprived the U.S. Army of the services of the most able assistant General Patton could have hoped for.

The door to her rooms on the main floor were open. I moved past slowly and quietly, noticing that she was back in the kitchen and the smell of something good was wafting into the hall. I got to the first step when her voice stopped me.

“Mr. Peelers,” she shouted. “Mr. Peelers. You must wait for comments and messages.”

I put one hand on the wall and turned to face the inevitable. Not only did Mrs. Plaut not know my name, but she had latched onto the delusion that I was a pest exterminator who was somehow involved in the publishing industry. My periodic efforts to explain something approaching the truth to her only managed to tire me out and thrust the woman deeper into delusion. The situation was complicated by the fact that Mrs. Plaut was, with great and typical determination, writing the definitive history of her family. She had completed over fifteen hundred pages, neatly printed. It was my task to edit and comment on the chapters as she finished them.

Why didn’t I move? Answer: The rent was low. My best friend, Gunther Wherthman, a Swiss midget who made a living as a translator, was a tenant at Mrs. Plaut’s, and, with the war, housing had almost disappeared in Los Angeles. Rents were flying as high as Doolittle, a sign of the times that, fortunately, had not entered Mrs. Plaut’s interest or awareness.

She appeared through the door below me, wiping her bony hands on her apron, which was muslin and carried a stenciled message in black: PROPERTY OF THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE. She adjusted her glasses with a clean finger.

“I’m very tired, Mrs. Plaut,” I said wearily.

“You look very tired,” Mrs. Plaut said, looking me over, her head cocked to one side critically.

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Plaut?” I said with a smile.

“I have a list of items to relate,” she said, fishing into a pocket in her apron and pulling out a small notebook, which she opened. “First, have you finished reading my chapter about Aunt Gumm and Mexico?”

She looked up at me patiently, waiting for an answer.

“I have finished,” I said, speaking slowly, clearly, and loud enough to awaken whoever might still be sleeping in the boarding house. They would be sloshing down soon for Mrs. Plaut’s breakfast, those who were willing to pay the price in conversation. “But I don’t understand why your Aunt Gumm thought she owned Guadalajara You never make it clear why-”

“You know Aunt Gumm owned Guadalajara,” she beamed, interrupting me.

“I’d heard something about it,” I said, leaning on the wall.

The chapter, which lay on my table upstairs, was even less coherent than most of the previous ones Mrs. Plaut had been giving me. I really didn’t mind reading the manuscript. I just couldn’t take discussing it with Mrs. Plaut.

“How did your Aunt Gumm meet the bandit,” I tried.

“You are in need of a shave,” she said critically. “Though your new suit is an improvement over what you have worn previously.”

“I got it from a dead man,” I said, grinning evilly.

“I see,” she answered with a grin. “That is no concern of mine. I am quite aware of your line of business, as you know. Let us return to Aunt Gumm.”

“Let us,” I said, and then desperately, “Your buns are burning.”

Mrs. Plaut gave me a tolerant look and clasped her hands together.

“Buns,” I repeated.

“Uncle Parsner was the one for puns and such like,” she said gently. “Aunt Gumm was devoid of a sense of humor. You must keep my relations in order if you are to help, Mr. Peelers.”

“I’ll try,” I said in weary surrender. “Aunt Gumm is wonderful, a critical member of the family. The chapter should be longer, more about the bandit.”

“The bandit,” she said, glancing at the open door from which the smell of buns came, “was a distant friend of Joaquin Murietta, who kept his toenails in a jar. Aunt Gumm’s bandit did no such of a silly thing though he was, I am told, given to telling dialect jokes, mostly at the expense of those less fortunate than himself, though who that might be remains a mystery not only to me but to Uncle Jerry and other branches of the family. My buns are done.”

“Good,” I said, turning to go up stairs. I had made it up four steps when she stopped me.

“There are other items to relate,” she said. I turned and watched her tiny figure as she glanced at her notebook. “Calls galore. The policeman brother of yours called.”

“He found me,” I said.

“And,” she concluded with a flourish by slamming closed the notebook, “you are now involved in the politics.”

“I am?”

“One of the many Roosevelts who run this country called you,” she said with disapproval. “I do not recall if it was Anna. I rather hope it was since I voted for her father. Teddy Roosevelt was the last good president we had. Before him all was abyss except for Jackson and Polk”

“Did you vote for them?” I said softly, my eyes closing as I rubbed the stubble on my chin.

“Rude disrespect will not get you into heaven,” she said, pointing a flour-covered finger at me. I wasn’t sure if she had miraculously heard what I had said or had come up with an even more unpleasant invention.

“I’m sorry, Mrs. Plaut. I really am. I’m tired and-”

“She should not have married him,” she went on.

“Who?” I tried, feeling the tears of sleep.

“Franklin and Eleanor are cousins,” she explained patiently as if I were a backward second-grader. “That is incest.”

“Let’s hope so,” I said. “If I don’t get upstairs and into bed, I’m going to tumble down these stairs and make it difficult for Mr. Hill and the others to climb over my body.”

“We’ll talk again again when you are in a less jovial frame of mind,” she said, disappearing into her rooms before I could find out when Eleanor Roosevelt had called. My goal was a few hours of sleep followed by a call to Eleanor Roosevelt and a search for Jeremy Butler, who might be able to tell me something about Bass, the former wrestler who seemed to be the only suspect I had in Olson’s murder. That would be followed by a search for the missing Anne Olson.

I didn’t have to fumble for the key to my room. The rooms in Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house had no locks. Mrs. Plaut’s philosophy was that adults should change clothes in the bathroom down the hall and decent people should have nothing to hide beyond their own crude nakedness. She respected closed doors only for the time it took her to knock once and enter. If one wanted privacy in this barracks of the outcast and elderly, one resorted to a chair under the doorknob. Even this had been known to do no more than slow down the determined landlady.

I liked my room. It was nothing like me. There was one old sofa with doilies on the arms which I was afraid to touch, a table with three wooden chairs, a hot plate in the corner, a sink, a small refrigerator, a few dishes, a bed with a purple blanket on which God Bless Us Every One had been stitched in pink by Mrs. Plaut, a painting of someone who looked like Abraham Lincoln, and a Beech-Nut gum clock on my wall, received in payment from a pawnshop owner for finding his runaway grandmother. Every night I took the mattress from the bed and put it on the floor. This morning I repeated the rite. I slept on the floor because of a delicate back crunched in 1938 by a massive Negro gentleman who took exception to my trying to keep him from asking Mickey Rooney a few questions at a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese.

I removed Olson’s suit, dropped it on the sofa, ran my tongue over my furry teeth, decided I was too tired to eat and too sensitive to examine my bruises, and fell like an uprooted radiator on the mattress. My Beech-Nut clock said it was 6:34. My father’s watch said it was noon or midnight. I fell asleep clutching my second pillow to keep from rolling over on my stomach and ruining my back.

There were dreams, but I didn’t remember them well. A city, probably Cincinnati, about which I dream frequently though I’ve never been there, a plump young woman with glasses saying something to me, a tree and a stag whose branches and antlers had grown together so that they couldn’t be separated. I woke up to someone knocking at my door. The clock on the wall told me it was eleven.

“What, what, what?” I grouched.

“Toby?” came Gunther’s high precise voice, complete with Swiss accent. “Are you well?”

“Come in, Gunther,” I said, sitting up.

He pushed at the door and stepped in, all three feet nine of him in his usual sartorial splendor. He wore a light brown, three-piece suit with key chain, tie, and tie pin. Gunther was somewhere in his late thirties. We had met two years earlier, when he was my client, and had been friends since then. If given one wish, Gunther would have made me a reasonably clean human with minimal taste.

“You did not come home last night,” he said evenly, indicating concern without interference.

Sitting up on the floor, I was almost at eye level with him.

“Case,” I said, tasting my tongue. “Secret, big.”

“Mrs. Roosevelt,” he said.

“My secret mission seems to be this morning’s news,” I said, getting up and groping for my-Olson’s-pants.

“Mrs. Plaut and I exchanged information while attempting to take a coherent message,” he explained. “I assumed from your converse just now …”

“You assumed right,” I said, unable to resist the urge to scratch my stomach. “Listen Gunther, I’ve got to shave my teeth and brush my beard. You want to put some coffee on? I’ll be right back.”

Gunther nodded politely and moved to the corner of my room, which served as my kitchen and which Gunther always approached as if on a mission to deal with an attacking horde of army ants.

No one was in the bathroom so I managed to finish my shaving and brushing with a new bottle of Teel in less than ten minutes. I put Olson’s shirt and tie back on, slipped on my second pair of socks, the ones with only one hole, and went back to my room. The coffee was poured, and a bowl of Wheaties stood waiting for me with a nearly empty bottle of milk next to it. Gunther sat sipping his coffee with great gentility and dignity, his feet not quite touching the floor.

Gunther had a book in front of him and was deep in thought over something in it.

“What’s the problem?” I said helpfully, now that I was awake and capable of thought and movement.

“Passage that requires a translation,” he said, tapping the tome in front of him. “What does it mean, ‘Take a deep breath, and call lung distance? Should that not be ‘long distance’? And even so, I believe there is intended some crude form of wit in this.”

I was well into my second bowl of Wheaties and had used the last of the milk on it when I concluded my explanation. Gunther had sipped coffee silently, nodding occasionally to show that he followed my explanation.

“Would you say it is a good joke?” he asked seriously. “I mean in English.”

“It sounds like Lum and Abner,” I said, finishing my coffee.

“Then I’d best find some means of rendering it in French,” he said seriously. Then he changed the subject, coming to something that I could see had been on his mind.

“What is it, Gunther?”

“If you are engaged in something that will even in a small way help in the war effort, I should like to offer my assistance, even in a small way.”

With anyone else I would have been unable to resist the opening and get in three or four small jokes.

“I have great loyalty to this nation,” he said, back erect, “as you know. Many of my people, most of my people, my own relations in Berne, assure me of their similar feelings though to be neutral is of a necessity.”

“You don’t have to explain to me, Gunther,” I said, getting up and gathering the dishes. Gunther must, indeed, have been grappling with weighty thoughts because he didn’t stop me. Usually, the thought of my cleaning anything up was repulsive enough for Gunther to not only volunteer, but to insist that he take over. He wiped the corners of his mouth neatly with a paper napkin and hopped with dignity from his chair.

“I have offered my services,” he said. “They are sincere.”

“Okay,” I sighed, “I’ll take you up on the offer. I’ll give you the address of a veterinary clinic in Sherman Oaks. I want you to go there, wait for a blond hulk. His name is Bass. Follow him but don’t let him see you. That shouldn’t be too hard. There aren’t too many smarts rattling inside him.”

Gunther nodded knowingly, and I explained the whole thing, including Olson’s murder, the missing dog, everything.

“I’m relieved,” he said with a small grin. “I was afraid you had chosen that suit. While properly conservative, it does not accommodate your personality.”

“It’ll have to do,” I said, thinking that Gunther would also have to do. Normally, it is not a wise thing to send a midget out to tail a suspect. There is no such thing as an inconspicuous midget or little person, but then again there are few people as dense as Bass seemed to be.

Gunther hurried to his room to get on with his assignment, and I decided to do the dishes some other time. In the hallway I flexed my muscles, decided that they still functioned, and moved to the phone on the wall to make a few calls.

Eleanor Roosevelt did not answer at the number she gave me, but a woman with what sounded like an English accent did. I gave her my name and she told me to wait. Gunther passed me, still suited, nodded seriously, and went down the stairs. The phone rang.

“Mr. Peters?” came Eleanor Roosevelt’s voice.

“Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said. “Things are getting a bit complicated.”

“I have been informed about Doctor Olson,” she said. “Do you think it has something to do with Fala? I should hate to think that a man actually died because of some intrigue over a dog, but then regard for human life has not been this low since the reign of the Teutons.”

“I guess,” I said. “But this might be getting beyond the stage where I can handle it. You might want to call in the heavier guns, the FBI, whoever.”

There was a pause while she considered what to say next.

“Mr. Peters, it is quite evident to both of us that you wish to continue this inquiry. You have my trust, and I feel confident that you will not betray it. Beyond loyalty, there is little else that can be asked or received.”

“Intelligence would be nice,” I said.

She laughed gently. “You do not strike me as an unintelligent man,” she said. “There are those who pose as men in the heart of our own government, even those who have been elected, whose intellect does not surpass that of a small terrier and whose loyalty lags far behind. The canine reminder is, by the way, quite intentional.”

“I’ll get back to work and get to you as soon as I can,” I said.

“Remember,” she said, “I have only a few days. I must be back in Washington for the Peruvian dinner, and Mr. Molotov is coming.”

“Sounds like a fun-packed few months,” I sympathized.

“Mr. Molotov is, in fact, quite nice,” she said. “His English is good, his sense of humor mischievous, and his manner poor. He actually brings his own food and carries a loaded gun in his suitcase.”

There I stood chatting with the First Lady in the hallway of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house when Mrs. Plaut herself appeared at the bottom of the stairs, saw me, and began her resolute way up.

“I’ll have to go now, Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said. “Something important just came up. I’ll report as soon as I can.”

“Be careful Mr. Peters,” she concluded. “The dog is important, but it is, after all, a dog.”

“I’ll remember that,” I said, hanging up and wondering if I could make it back to my room before Mrs. Plaut caught up with me. But she was too fast.

“Mr. Peelers,” she said, cutting off my retreat with her wiry body. “Now, I think, would be a good time to discuss Aunt Gumm.”

“Mrs. Plaut,” I began, “I’ve got … forget it. It’s a fine time to discuss Aunt Gumm and Mexico.

“The Mexicans,” she said knowingly, “pronounce it Me-he-co.”

By noon I had developed a headache from shouting, but managed to break away from Mrs. Plaut. I didn’t use the phone in the hallway for fear that she would want to talk further about her proposed next chapter dealing with her mother’s encounter with the Mormons.

I darted down the stairs, out the door into the sunshine, and made it to my car in near record time. I found a Rexall drugstore and called Jeremy Butler’s office/home number at the Farraday. He didn’t answer but Alice Palice did. Alice and Jeremy had become “good friends.” It was a union that did not bear too much fantasy. Alice more than occupied space on the third floor of the Farraday. She ran Artistic Books, Inc., an economical operation, consisting of one small printing press that weighed two hundred and fifty pounds. Alice, who looked something like a printing press herself, could easily hoist the press on her shoulder and move it to another office when the going got rough.

“Jeremy’s in the park,” she said. I thanked her and hung up.

It was one o’clock, so I switched on the radio. It was too early for the baseball game so I found KFI and listened to “Mary Noble, Backstage Wife.” Soap operas always gave me a lift. It was nice to find people, even pretend ones, who were having a harder time than I was.

I drove past the office on Hoover and down Hill past Angel’s Flight, the block-long railroad that carried passengers up the steep slope of Bunker Hill between Hill and Olive. When I was a kid, my old man once took me and my brother to the observation tower at the top of the hill that rises about a hundred feet over the mouth of the Third Street Tunnel. I remember seeing the San Gabriel Mountains and wanting to tell Phil that it was beautiful, but Phil had always been Phil. Back then it had been a tourist attraction with about twelve thousand passengers a day going up the railway and to the top of the tower.

I turned off of Hill at Fifth and found a parking spot near Philharmonic Auditorium. The sign outside the hall told me Volez and Yolanda were, indeed, playing there and I could get tickets for as little as fifty-five cents. I stopped at the box office and splurged on two one-buck tickets, then nodded to the statue of Beethoven on Fifth, and moved into Pershing Square. When I was a kid it had been Central Park, but had been renamed in 1918 in honor of old Black Jack. I passed by the banana trees and bamboo clumps that surrounded the square, and in the shade of the Biltmore Hotel I squinted around searching for Jeremy. I took a few steps down the broad brick walk that forms an X across the square and looked at the fountain in the center of the X. The place was full of men, almost no women, most of them wearing suits, most of them with ties. Arguments were going on all over the place. Near the fountain a guy with glasses was pointing off in the distance and showing a handful of papers to another guy without a hat who had his hands on his hips. Another group was gathered around a bench on which was standing an ancient man who looked a little like John Nance Garner. John Nance was shouting at a small Negro man wearing a fedora and a mustache. I weaved my way through the knots of men arguing. One guy conversing with some students from the Bible Institute down the street was going at it about where God was now that men were being killed by heathens. A pair of cops weaved in and out, keeping things from getting out of hand, which they often did. Then I spotted Jeremy. He was hard to miss since he stands about six two and weighs slightly over two-fifty. He was under the Spanish War Memorial in the northeast corner of the park. Under the shade of the twenty-foot statue of a Spanish War veteran, Jeremy had his right hand on the shoulder of a white-whiskered, barefoot messiah, and was gesturing with open palm at the bronze cannon a few feet away.

The war had brought out a battalion of prophets who wandered through downtown Los Angeles strongly suggesting that the end of the world was well under way. This did not strike most Los Angelenos as news.

I listened politely to Jeremy telling the bearded man that hope and not fear should be the basis of progress, but the bearded guy was not about to turn in his staff and head for the barber. He just stroked his beard and nodded sagely. Jeremy spotted me out of the corner of his eye and excused himself from the man.

“He doesn’t lack intelligence,” Jeremy said, “but there is nothing more difficult than to get a man to give up an obsession in which he has invested his faith, no matter how unreasoning that obsession may be.”

“You’ve got that right,” I agreed. I always agreed with Jeremy because he was wiser than I was and could break my neck by breathing on me if he felt the need, which he never did.

“What can I do for you, Toby?” he said seriously, stepping out of the way of a pair of old men, one with a newspaper under his arm, who barreled past us.

“I’m looking for information on a former wrestler. A guy named Bass. Big guy, bigger than you, maybe thirty-five or younger,” I explained.

“He may look that young, but he is almost your age,” Jeremy said, looking around for the messiah who had disappeared in the crowd. Jeremy rubbed his shaven head and returned his attention to me. “A close look will show that Elmo Bass’s youthful face is that of a man who has not been furrowed by experience and life. It is an unformed face, not a young face. It is a face that has experienced no depth. It is a face unlike yours or mine.”

“Got you,” I said. “What about him?”

Jeremy shrugged and unzipped his gray windbreaker to give his massive chest some room to breathe.

“Very dense,” said Jeremy sadly. “Very little sense of the moral. Never having truly suffered, he has no sense of what suffering means. A dangerous man, Toby. One to stay away from. I fought him three times. He beat me but one of them, the last one at the Stadium in, let me see, 1935 or ‘36. He was removed from the sport that same year. No control, no sense of the game, the art of enactment. He did not know how to act. He could only fight. Consequently, no one but me wanted to enter the ring with him, though he did end his career against the Strangler, and Pepe the Giant.”

“So you think he could kill?” I said.

“With little excuse and no remorse,” Jeremy said.

“Where does he hang out?”

Jeremy shrugged and said, “We have not kept in touch, though I have heard less than kind things said about him, particularly from Pepe with whom I still play chess from time to time. It would be best to stay away from Bass. You know what his nickname for himself was? Le Mort, Death. Pepe called him Badass Bass. If you must encounter him, I strongly suggest that I accompany you.”

“I’ll keep that in mind Jeremy, thanks.”

“Alice and I,” he said seriously, changing the subject, “have a new enterprise. She has agreed, at least for the time, to put aside the pornography, and publish a series of books of children’s poetry that I am writing. While I have no great quarrel with pornography, I think it tends to simply reproduce itself and make the pornographer carry guilt instead of pride. Would you like to hear one of the poems I have written for our initial book?”

“Sure,” I said, noticing that a scrawny man in a sweater and jacket was listening to our conversation. A cigarette dangled from his lips, and the skin on his neck hung down like that of a forgotten turkey.

“Ah,” Jeremy said, suddenly remembering, “Academy Dolmitz. Academy hired Bass for debt collecting a few years ago. I thought I heard that he still did some part-time work for Academy.”

“Thanks, Jeremy,” I said. Academy Dolmitz had a used bookstore on Broadway. The bookstore was a front for a bookie operation.

“The poem,” Jeremy reminded me, a gentle but massive hand on my arm. I stood politely with the turkey man and others as Jeremy recited his poem to a growing crowd, which numbered about ten by the time he finished.

“The wife of the king

continued to sing

though his majesty said

he would render her dead

if the queen did not cease

and give him some peace.

‘If my song was too loud,’

said the queen to the crowd

which had gathered to see

a monarch hang from a tree

‘then a strong admonition

might have changed my position,

but the king would not dream

of a choice less extreme

than to tie off, garrotte,

my tender white throat.

And so the next time

a tune leaps to your mind

cut it off in mid-note

and commit this to rote:

If the queen can hang

for a song she sang,

then might not the noose, come

for a tune that you hum?’

Brought on by hysteria,

the queen then sang an aria

but a black-hooded fella

cut short her a capella,

as a voice from the crowd

shouted angry and loud.

‘Not a moment too soon,

she can’t carry a tune.’”

The turkey neck looked puzzled while another guy in the crowd applauded and a voice from the back said critically, “It got no goddam onomatopoeia for chrissake. A poem gotta have onomatopoeia.”

I backed away from the coming debate, wondering what a kid would make of Jeremy’s creation and if he and Alice were planning to illustrate their book. I also filed in the back of my mind the possibility of bringing Mrs. Plaut and publisher Alice Palice together. Object: publication, and my own curiosity.

On the way back to Burbank for another try at Jane Poslik, I turned on the news and found that it was Saturday, which I already knew. What I didn’t know was that the sugar shortage had gotten worse. Hoarding syrup was now a crime and ice-cream manufacturers were being limited to twenty flavors of ice cream and two of sherbet. Beyond that, Laraine Day was engaged to army aviator Ray Hendricks, who used to sing with Ted Fio Rito. Shut Out had won the Kentucky Derby, and a Japanese transport and six fighter planes had been destroyed in an attack on enemy bases in New Guinea.

I had time for about ten minutes of Scattergood Baines before I pulled up in front of Jane Poslik’s apartment in Burbank. My workday had begun in earnest.

Jane Poslik was home. She didn’t want to open the door at first, but I dropped some names like Olson, Roosevelt, and Fala, and she let me in. Her apartment was small and neat and so was she. There were sketches on the wall in cheap, simple frames, more than a dozen sketches of women in a variety of costumes. My favorite was a pencil sketch of someone who looked like Lucille Ball in a fancy French dress all puffed out, white and soft.

“Looks like Lucille Ball,” I said, nodding at the drawing.

“It is,” she said, watching me carefully with puckered lips.

Jane Poslik was somewhere in her late thirties, hair cut short. She wore a brown dress with a faint pattern. She was not pretty and not ugly. If her nose had been less chiseled, her chin a little stronger, she might have come out all right, but if she was one of the Pekin, Illinois, beauty pageant runners-up or an actress who had played the second female lead in a Dayton theater company production of Street Scene, she wasn’t going to be any competition for the hundreds who tripped over each other coming to Los Angeles every week.

“You an actress?” I said, taking the scat in the small kitchen she pointed to.

“Designer,” she answered, filling a pot with water. “Coffee or tea?”

“Coffee,” I said. “You work for a studio?”

“No,” she said, hugging herself as if she were cold and turning to look at me. “Not yet. So far I’ve managed to design for a theater company in Santa Monica. I’ve had to take a variety of jobs.”

“Like working for Dr. Olson,” I said.

“Like working for Dr. Olson,” she agreed, fishing a package of Nabisco graham crackers out of a cabinet and placing them on the small table in front of me. “Right now I’m doing part-time work for Gladding, McBean, and Company in Glendale. I’m designing some mosaic tiles. If it goes well, I’ll be put on full time.”

“Sounus good,” I said.

“It’s good,” she agreed, standing near the coffee pot. “But, it’s not designing.”

“Olson,” I said.

“Olson,” she sighed. “You work for …”

“A private party close to someone quite high in the government,” I said, nibbling a graham.

She looked at me for a long time trying to decide whether to trust me or not.

“I know about the letters you wrote to the White House,” I said. “I know that the FBI talked to you.”

“All right, Mr. Peters,” she said, deciding to take a chance. “What do you want to know?”

“What made you think something was going on with Dr. Olson and the president’s dog?”

The coffee was perking now. She checked the pot, made another decision, and said, “I’ll answer your question when you answer one for me.”

“Go ahead.”

“Why are you wearing Dr. Olson’s suit?”

The explanation took about five minutes, with me leaving out a few things and pausing for her to react when I told her that Olson was dead. She reacted with a quick intake of air and silence.

“Killing people over a dog,” she said, pouring the coffee. Her hand was shaking so I helped her.

“I don’t know why they killed him. You have some ideas?”

She sat sipping coffee and told her story, making sketches on the table with her finger. Her mind was creating another century, another life for Joan Crawford or Olivia DeHavilland, while she gave me her suspicions. Her memory was good and she didn’t waste time or words. According to Mrs. Roosevelt, Jane Poslik was reported to be mentally unreliable. She was, as far as I was concerned, the sanest person I had met in weeks outside of Eleanor Roosevelt.

She had begun working for Olson soon after he moved to Los Angeles. Back in Dayton, where she said she was from, her family had bred dogs, so she was familiar with them. Olson, apparently, had been easy to work with though he had made a few clumsy music-accompanied passes at her in the operating room. She had handled him with no great trouble. The revelation seemed a bit strange since Anne Olson was a Lana Turner to Jane Poslik’s Ann Revere, but Olson was probably one of those guys with active glands from too much contact with goats. Olson had, from the start, been nervous, but Jane had chalked that up to normal behavior. He had brought several dogs with him from Washington, which he kept in a special section of the clinic and wouldn’t allow anyone else to handle. One was, indeed, a small black Scottie. Once Jane had walked in on a telephone conversation between Olson and someone named Martin. The word “Roosevelt” had been part of the conversation, which ended abruptly when Olson spotted Jane in the room. For the next few weeks, other bits and pieces began adding up to the conclusion that Olson and someone named Martin were involved in some way with President Roosevelt and his dog. She also concluded that Olson had left Washington because of the dog business and that Martin had, somehow, found him. Then one morning Bass came to work. Jane had the distinct impression that Olson had not hired Bass, that he had been sent to watch Olson, possibly protect him from questions and doubts.

“I’m not sure,” she concluded, pouring herself and me another coffee, “but I had the impression that Martin or someone would come to the clinic to give Dr. Olson instructions, pep talks, or a good scare.”

“What makes you think that?”

“Well,” she said, making circles on the table with her finger, “there were afternoons when after a normal series of examinations or procedures, and no phone calls, he would be pale and shaken. More than one poor animal suffered in surgery those evenings. In any case, I must have given some indication of my suspicions because Bass began to ask me questions. What do you know about the dogs Dr. Olson brought from Washington? What do you know about Dr. Olson’s friends? That sort of thing. Bass is far from subtle. I became more suspicious, obviously. Within a week I had sufficient evidence from phone calls, conversations overheard between Bass and Dr. Olson and Mrs. Olson, to lead me to the conclusion that Olson had taken the president’s dog. I can’t imagine why he would do it.”

The major emotional change in her telling had come when she mentioned Mrs. Olson, so I pushed that after getting down another graham cracker. I wanted to dip it in my coffee but kept myself from doing so.

“Anne Olson,” I said.

“Mrs. Olson’s name is Laura,” Jane Poslik answered, looking up at me from her imaginary drawing.

Anne or Laura Olson had had a few belts when I met her so she might have been playing non-sober name games with me. I let the puzzle pass for the moment and went on.

“Was she, is she, part of the business with the dog?”

She shrugged. “It’s possible, but I’m a prejudiced source. I didn’t like Laura Olson. She was on a free ride. While Olson was not my favorite human, he was a troubled man who needed support. She gave him quite the reverse.”

“Was she fooling around with Bass?” I tried.

“Possibly, but I doubt if you could call anything Bass does fooling. More coffee?”

“No thanks. Go on.”

“I once walked in on her nose to nose with a man who had brought in a sick cat for treatment. She didn’t take long.”

That I could confirm from my own experience.

“That’s it?” I said.

“That’s it,” she agreed, standing up. “That’s what I wrote in my letters after the FBI came asking questions last month and I started to put things together as I told you. I know it isn’t courtroom evidence, but it was enough to make me think it was worth reporting. I don’t know how, but I thought it might have something to do with the war. Mr. Peters, my parents are both dead. There’s just me and my brother. Charlie’s in the navy somewhere in the Pacific. Am I making sense?”

“You’re making a lot of sense,” I said, heading for the front door. “And I like that dress on Lucille Ball.”

“Thanks,” she said, offering me her hand. “Let me know if-”

Whatever it was she wanted to know remained unsaid. There was an insistent knock at the door a few feet away from us.

“Yes,” she said.

“Police,” came a voice I recognized.

She looked at me, took a few steps, and opened the door to John Cawelti, who didn’t look in the least surprised to see me. He gave both of us a knowing smirk and stepped in.

“Listening at the door, John?” I said with a smile.

“Call me John again and I ram you through the wall.” He grinned back.

“John and I are old friends,” I said to Jane Poslik, spreading my legs slightly in case he decided to pay off his threat. He took a mean step toward me and she stepped between us, facing him.

“This is my home,” she said softly. “And you’ll touch no one in it. What do you want?”

“I’m investigating the murder last night of a Dr. Roy Olson,” Cawelti said, looking at me and not her. “You used to work for him, and I understand you didn’t get along, that you quit a few weeks back. You want to tell me about it and let me know what you told my friend Peters?”

“Miss Poslik and I were just leaving,” I said, showing my most false smile.

“No, Mr. Peters,” she said, “you go ahead. I’ll talk to Officer-”

“Sergeant Cawelti,” he said.

“Suit yourself,” I said, brushing by Cawelti. “I’ll be seeing you, John. You won’t be able to miss me. I’ll be the guy a step ahead.”

I stepped quickly past the door of the as yet unseen Molly Garnett and headed for my car parked across the street. It was early in the afternoon. The sun was shining, and a couple of small birds swooped by playing tag as the black Chevy that screeched away from the curb rushed out to kiss the side of my Ford. I would have been caught in the middle of the kiss if I had not heard an unexpected but familiar voice call out, “Toby.”

I managed to sense the Chevy, rolled forward on the hood of my car with my feet in the air, and tumbled over on the sidewalk to the sound of metal scraping metal. When I looked up, the Chevy was weaving down the street wasting precious rubber.

“Toby,” came Gunther’s voice.

I looked back to see his small form hurrying toward me.

“I’m okay, Gunther,” I said. “Was that …?”

“Bass,” he finished, coming to help me up. Gunther was strong for his size. He had done some circus work back when he had to, but he wasn’t quite what I needed. It was extra work getting up and pretending that he was helping me, but I managed it.

“I followed him as you said,” Gunther explained. “He came here, started to get out from the car, saw you, got back into the car, and then tried to compress you. Shall I pursue him?”

“Not now,” I said. “You saved my life again, Gunther.”

“I was fortunate to be in vicinity,” he answered, embarrassed. “I’ll continue my pursuit tomorrow then?”

“Tomorrow will be fine.”

We shook hands after agreeing to meet back at the boarding house that night, and I inspected the side of my car. The paint was streaked with metal showing through as if some massive bird had scratched its claws along it. The door was dented slightly, but there seemed to be nothing else wrong other than that I couldn’t open the passenger door. I’d worry about that later.

I got in and drove downtown.

Jeremy was seated in his room on the second floor of the Farraday when I got there. I had once referred to Jeremy’s room as an office, but he had politely corrected me. “It is the room in which I often work, but I work in other rooms, other spaces, while I walk, sleep, dream,” he had explained. There was no desk in the room and no name on the door. If you didn’t know he was in 212, you’d never find him. The room itself contained an oversized leather chair near the window and a couch of matching black leather. A low table in the middle of the room was surrounded by four stools. On the table were neat stacks of lined paper, some with poems and notes written in Jeremy’s even hand. Others were blank. The walls were lined with books from floor to ceiling. There wasn’t a speck of bare wall in view. I knew that beyond another door in the corner was a room I had never seen, in which I guessed Jeremy slept.

When I entered the office, Jeremy was seated in the leather chair. The two reading lamps in the room were off and he was backlit at the window with a book in his lap.

“Jeremy,” I said, “I’m sorry to bother you but I need some help.”

He was looking at me without expression, the book held open in front of him. I went on. “A woman named Jane Poslik in Burbank may be getting a visit from Bass. I don’t think he plans to be friendly when he visits. I’m going to try to put a penny in his fuse, but for a day or two someone should keep an eye on her. I know you have your book to-”

“The address, Toby,” he said, finding a bookmark and placing it carefully in the page he was holding open with his huge thumb. “The day is clear. I can sit in my car and meditate. Look for the secret moment of the day.

“There is a Moment in each Day that Satan cannot find

Nor can his Watch Fiends find it, but the Industrious find

This Moment and it multiply and when it once is found

It renovates every Moment of the Day if rightly placed.”

“Byron,” I guessed, going with one of Jeremy’s favorites.

“Blake,” he corrected, getting up. “The last victory went to Bass in the American Legion Stadium before four thousand. It would be interesting to meet him with only a passing bird, the bending grass, and the sun upon our heads.”

“Sounds fine to me,” I agreed.

“Do I have time to do a quick cleaning of the lobby?” he said, putting the book neatly back in a space on the shelf near him.

“I don’t know, Jeremy.”

Leaving Jeremy’s office, I knew there had been another choice. I could have gone back to Jane Poslik, tried to talk her into moving out of her apartment till I got the whole thing settled, but that would have meant giving her a hell of a scare, which she didn’t need. Besides, she might have turned me down. No, my best bet was to track down Bass, try to find the dog, locate the guy Jane had mentioned-the guy named Martin-and hope for the best.

Back on the fourth floor, I could hear Shelly humming over the sound of Emmett Quigley in the office next to ours. Emmett had been in the Farraday for two weeks. He was either giving voice lessons to the deaf, writing modern versions of Gregorian chants, or engaged in some elaborate self-torture. Why he needed an office was a question that merited about five minutes of discussion each morning between infrequent patients for Shelly and even less frequent clients for me.

“Any calls?” I asked as I stepped into the office to a startling sight.

“No calls, nothing,” said Shelly, who was on his knees cleaning the floor. His glasses had slipped to the end of his nose and he was twitching madly to keep them up. His hands were covered with soapy suds. The dishes and instruments in the sink had been cleaned and the sink itself scoured. The coffee pot was gone and something about the wall was somewhat strange. Then I realized that the coffee stain near my door had been scrubbed away.

“What’s going on Shel, Mildred moving in?”

He puffed to his knees, wiped his hands on his filthy white coat, and found his soapy cigar.

“Inspection,” he explained. “County Dental Association inspections. They got complaints. Can you imagine? Complaints about me.”

“I can’t imagine that Shel,” I said with sympathy.

“Of course you can’t,” he agreed. “It’s unimaginable. There’s nothing wrong with this office. I use the most modern techniques, equipment.”

“Then why are you cleaning up?”

Shelly got up, removed the soapy cigar butt from his mouth, gave it an evil look, and threw it in the bucket of water near his feet. “So they won’t have anything, not a thing to point to, to say Sheldon Minck is not sanitary, not ethical. I am both sanitary and ethical.”

“While you’re at it,” I added, “you should lead a safari into the waiting room. I think some of the bugs out there have tusks worth showing to a dental inspector.”

“I’m doing the waiting room next,” Shelly sighed, pushing his glasses back on his nose and leaving a sudsy white mass over the left lens. “And you should clean up your office. In fact, you should clean it up and move out till the inspection is over. I don’t know what the ethics are about having sub-tenants.”

“Speaking of that, don’t you think you’d better scratch out some of those degress you have listed on the outer door?”

“Right,” he said, trying to snap his wet fingers. “I’ll get right to that. You wouldn’t want to give me a hand here?”

I didn’t answer.

“I didn’t think so,” he hissed. “Gratitude stops at the dental chair. I learned that in dental school. How can they do this to me? Why me? You know who taught me techniques of basic oral surgery? I never told you this. It was Maling, Maling, damn it. You think Dr. Arthur Maling has to be inspected? He’d turn over in his grave if he knew I was being inspected, me his star pupil.”

“Hold it, Shel,” I said. “I can’t tell from what you just went through if Maling is alive or dead.”

Shelly’s eyes went to the ceiling at my stupidity. Suds trickled down his left lens and dropped like a snowy tear.

“Does it make a difference?” he asked. “Does it really make a difference?”

“Happy cleaning,” I said, and went into my office where I discovered where Shelly had put the hot plate, coffee pot, and some of the more uncleanable and rust-infected instruments that had turned to antiques at the bottom of his sink.

“Shel,” I screamed, stepping back into his office.

“Hold your fillings,” he said, backing away “I’ll clean it out by tonight.”

“I’m coming back in the morning,” I said. “If it isn’t all out of my office, I’m going to dump it on your nice clean floor.”

“You are a tenant,” he reminded me, stepping forward again and almost slipping on a moist spot.

“I’ll be back in the morning,” I whispered, looking at him and then stepping into the waiting room and out into the hall. Emmet Quigley was still gargling as I stomped past and went down the stairs. I was shaking my head on Hoover when a bum came up to me.

“You work in there?” he asked.

“Right.”

“You ain’t no cop?”

“I ain’t no cop,” I agreed.

“They’re giving out sugar ration books come Monday,” he said, breathing muscatel into my ear. “I got one coming. I’ll sell it for a price. I can get plenty more from guys, you know?”

“Not interested,” I said, walking down the street. He followed me.

“You know a guy who might?” he said. He was wearing a long coat under which I guessed there might be nothing.

“Dentist back in the Farraday,” I said. “His name is Minck. You and your friends might go see him.”

I moved faster and left the bum behind muttering his thanks.

My life is and was a series of lows, lows, lows, and highs. There weren’t many highs, but those that came were right up there with going a full round with Henry Armstong. The trouble was the lows. I legged it to Arnie’s and ignored his warnings about the scratches on the side of my car.

“The whole damn chassis is going to rust out in maybe a month, two,” he said, pronouncing chassis as chas-siss. “You better let me fix it up.”

“We’ll talk about it Arnie,” I said, moving past him. “I turn most of the little I earn over to you as it is and what do I have to show for it?”

“Transportation,” he said emotionlessly.

“A zombie line of wrecks without fenders, paint, working gas gauges,” I went on.

“Having a bad day, huh?” he said, spitting into a corner.

“You could call it that,” I agreed.

I had three boxes of cereal stashed back at Mrs. Plaut’s but I wasn’t about to go there. Instead, I stopped at a restaurant off of Melrose called Herrera’s, ordered two tacos, a bowl of shredded wheat, and a Pepsi. Herrera didn’t blink his lazy eyes. He brought the order and I downed it. Back when I was first married, Anne had spent two years coaxing, threatening, challenging, and tricking in the hope of getting me to change my diet. For the last two years of the marriage, she hadn’t cared much, though she had occasionally brought it up in her quite reasonable catalogue of my faults.

“You eat like a nine year old whose parents don’t give a damn,” she had once said. Since she was probably right, I hadn’t answered. I get along fine with nine year olds.

My stomach filled, I paid the buck I owed, including a dime tip, waved to Herrera and the belching guy who had taken up the stool next to mine, and set off to do what my brother had warned me not to do. My answers, if there were any, were back at Olson’s clinic or house.