Fala Factor (3 page)

“I had a dog,” I agreed, putting down my Juarez cup and adjusting my tie.

“The one in the picture on the wall behind me?” she said without turning to the photograph.

“Right,” I agreed. “But that was a long time ago. He's dead now.”

“Almost everyone is,” she agreed brightly. “Who are the others in the picture?”

“The younger kid is me before my nose got flattened for the first time,” I explained, looking up at the picture over her shoulder. There was a crack in the glass that I should have fixed at some point, but that had never really bothered me till I knew that Eleanor Roosevelt had been looking at it. “The older kid is my brother Phil—”

“Who is a police officer,” she added.

“Right,” I said. “Do you know how he voted in the last election?”

“Democrat,” she said without a smile. “He is a registered Democrat and no doubt voted for Franklin. I have no idea of how you voted.”

“I voted for Willkie,” I said, meeting her eyes.

“May I ask why?” she said.

“Is it important?” I shot back.

She brought her clasped hands up to her mouth and touched her larger lower lip with her knuckles. “It may be, Mr. Peters. Your political feelings may affect the matter we may soon be discussing.”

Shelly shouted, “When you neck please no breaka da bell,” and I held back the violent urge to go out and strangle him.

“I thought Roo … your husband looked tired,” I said. “I thought he looked like a man who'd had enough, been through enough, a man who deserved a rest. And besides, I liked Willkie.”

“So,” she said, “did I and so did Franklin. After the election Mr. Willkie came to the White House to visit. I had an appointment, but I cancelled it just to get a look at the man. I think he would have made a good president, not as good as Franklin, but quite good. And Franklin was quite prepared to lose and take that rest. And what do you think about your choice now?”

“I'm glad your husband is president,” I said. “Mostly because of the war, but I want to get this straight right now, I'm not much on politics. I read the bad headlines and go for the sports section. Once in a while I read your column, but only once in a while because I'm an L.A.
Times
reader.”

I was having a nice friendly chat with an apparently insane Eleanor Roosevelt. Shelly had paused and Seidman was choking. I thought of the possibility of Secret Service men bursting through the door with guns drawn and putting a few holes through me on the chance that I had kidnapped the First Lady.

“The man,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, returning her hands to her lap.

“Man?”

“The one in the photograph on the wall,” she explained.

“My father,” I said, looking up at him standing between me and Phil. “He died when I was a kid.”

“As did my father,” she said. “And like yours, my mother died even before him.”

“You know a lot about me.”

“And the dog's name?” she said gently.

“Murphy, when that picture was taken,” I humored her. “Later, when Phil was in the army during the last war, I renamed him Kaiser Wilhelm … a kind of family joke.”

“I see,” she said. “My sources say that you are a man who can be relied upon for discretion. Is that true?”

“It has made my fortune,” I said with a sad grin, looking around the small office and up at the ceiling where a fascinating crack looked like a wacky river across a dry desert.

“You have a fondness for dogs,” she went on. “I mean by that, you can understand the sentiment of one who invests a great deal of affection in an animal.

I nodded.

“Have you looked at the newspaper or heard the news this morning?” she went on. “What do you remember of it?”

Behind her Shelly had turned off the drill and was humming something I hoped he created.

“Dolph Camilli hit two home runs, one in the ninth, to give Brooklyn an eleven-eight win over Cinci,” I recalled. “Sugar rationing books can be picked up at elementary schools. There's a big sale of Lucky Lager beer, and twenty-nine of the toughest inmates on Alcatraz were taken from the island in a secret evacuation because they can't black out the island and the warden was afraid of a break if the island had to be blacked out during a Jap raid. I was interested in that because at least one of that twenty-nine is probably a guy I helped send there and would not like to see—”

“And you didn't read the war news?” she jumped in, her head on the side like a scolding teacher.

“I read it,” I said with a shrug.

“You needn't work so hard to convince me of the narrowness of your interest,” said Mrs. Roosevelt.

“Sorry,” I said.

“That is all right,” she forgave me, and went on. “The Japanese, as I believe you know, are on the Burma Road. The war in Europe is going a bit better but not appreciably. In his May Day address, Premier Joseph Stalin pledged that Russia has no territorial ambitions upon foreign countries and declared that the Soviets' sole aim is to liberate its lands from the, and I quote, ‘German Fascist blackguards.' Franklin and others are concerned about Mr. Stalin's true intention. In short, Mr. Peters, the pressures on my husband are as great as they have been on any man in history.”

“I'm sorry,” I said, “but what—”

“I have good reason to believe that the president's dog has been taken,” she said softly, her eyes on mine. “I am not sure of the word in this context. For a child it is kidnapping. I suppose we could say Fala has been dognapped.”

“I'm listening,” I said, leaning forward and pulling out the small, spiral-bound notebook I carried in my pocket. Spiral-bound notebooks were the ancient enemies, like organized society. Within seconds after I purchased one it would creep out a tiny metal finger from the spiral and go to work tearing the lining of my jacket or my pants. The current one was no different. I found a pencil piece that I had to scrape with my thumbnail to get at the lead, and tried to ignore Mrs. Roosevelt's eyes.

She told her story quickly and more efficiently than a twenty-year homicide squad veteran who wants to get home for a couple of beers and an Italian beef sandwich.

The dog's full name was Murray the Outlaw of Fala Hill. He had been given to FDR by Margaret Suckley in 1940. Margaret was a close friend of the family. The family had many dogs, including a German shepherd who had recently taken a chunk out of the prime minister of Canada, but Fala was the president's dog and had proven to be the only dog in the family that really liked the White House. That Roosevelt loved the dog was without question. It was also evident that the dog returned the affection. Things, she said, could be pretty tense at the White House. Public visits had stopped, everyone who entered had to be fingerprinted and issued a pass, and, most unsettling, gun crews were now posted in the wings of the residence. There was, in fact, a dog—supposedly Fala—in the White House at the moment. The president had noticed a number of changes in the dog, but meetings and war planning had kept him from questioning its identity. Mrs. Roosevelt had gradually become convinced that the dog was not Fala at all but a strikingly similar animal with a radically different temperament. She had kept her observations to herself for several reasons. First, she did not want to upset the president, and second, she didn't want to appear demented. The press, she said, took every opportunity to attack her and she did not wish to be an embarrassment to the president. Meanwhile, she had been occupied with moving their New York address from East Sixty-fifth to a seven-room apartment in Washington Square. So, aside from a few inquiries, she had not pushed her suspicion further. The slightest suggestion of her concern, she said, might be used by the press, the Republicans, the Japanese, or the Germans against the president.

There were two things that made Mrs. Roosevelt believe that the kidnapped dog was in Los Angeles. First, a veterinarian, Roy Olson, who had treated Fala, had suddenly packed up and moved from Washington to Los Angeles. Mrs. Roosevelt had initiated a discreet inquiry in Los Angeles through a sympathetic Secret Service operative. The inquiry had turned up nothing but some eccentric characters. However, after the inquiry, among the many crank letters that came to the White House each day, there began to appear ones specifically mentioning the loss of Fala. The Secret Service, as it did with all threats, checked the signed letter from Los Angeles and concluded that the writer, a Jane Poslik who had worked for Roy Olson and had been contacted during the inquiry, was mentally disturbed and that her letter had not been a threat at all but the voicing of a paranoid fear suggested by the investigation. My job, if I took it, was to find enough information, if it existed, to make a formal investigation reasonable.

“One week from today,” she concluded, standing up, “on the eighth of May, I must be back in Washington for our first state dinner since Pearl Harbor. We will be entertaining the president of Peru. For a week I will remain in the Los Angeles area, where I do have some things to do, including gathering material for my column, and though I have resigned from the Office of Civil Defense, I have agreed to prepare a discreet report on California defense. May I assume you will accept the task?”

I stood up with her, thinking for the first time since I had seen her in my office that this would give me a week or two before I had to go back to checking out the Grumman job. Besides, it was my patriotic duty. I was thinking about how to bring up the question of money when I took the hand she offered me.

When she released my hand, she went into her shopping bag and pulled out an envelope, which she handed me.

“There is three hundred dollars in the envelope,” she said, pulling her coat around her shoulders and picking up the shopping bag. “It is my own personal money and I will provide more if it is needed. I cannot give you a check because I do not want my name on any document associated with this. I will, however, expect an itemization of your expenditures. My secretary knows your name and will take a message if I am not there when you call. Have you any questions?”

“None,” I said. “I'll get right on it.”

Eleanor Roosevelt turned to look at the photograph of my father, Phil, me, and the dog. She paused for a second, looked at the picture, and then looked back at me and said, “Be careful Tobias, and keep me informed.”

With that, she was gone. I opened the envelope, found the pile of twenties, which I folded into my well-worn
hecho-a-mano
Mexican wallet, and memorized the phone number. I repeated it twenty times, imagined it written on the wall, and then tore it into small pieces, which I dropped into my empty wastebasket. Jeremy kept the floors clean and the wastebaskets empty.

There wasn't much question about where I would begin. Finding Jane Poslik and Roy Olson didn't even require my going to the phone book. Mrs. Roosevelt had provided both of their addresses. The only choice was which one to start with and that was easy, the woman who had written the letters.

I swept off the top of my desk, shoved the notebook and pencil into my pocket, took the final handful of All-Bran, washed it down with the cool remnants of Juarez coffee, and went into Shelly's office. Seidman was gone, and I made a note to get in touch with my brother Phil before the day ended. I didn't want him coming for me. It was never pleasant when Phil wound up coming for me, even when he started off reasonably friendly.

Shelly was sitting in his dental chair squinting at a pad of paper on his lap. He puffed away at his cigar and tapped his pencil on the pad. He heard me come back into the room and looked up.

“I'm working on an ad,” he explained. “How about ‘Good tooth care is vital for victory'?”

“Catchy,” I said.

“Sorta like the Rinso Jingle,” he mused. “You know, ‘Rinso White, Rinso White, happy little washday song.' That's the kind of thing I'm looking for, you know what I mean?”

“Sort of,” I said. “Look, I've got to go out. I've got a client. Will you—”

“You mean the one with the shopping bags?” he said, returning to his pad. “You should have her see me about those teeth. I can do all sorts of things with them.”

“I'm sure you could, Shel, but she's from out of town, and I'm sure she's got her own dentist,” I said.

“He isn't doing much for her,” he went on, tapping his pencil. “You know she reminds me of someone. I just figured out who. You know that little lady in
The Lady Vanishes
, The English cookie, what's her name, Lady something or Dame something.”

“I know who you mean,” I said. “I'll check back in later.”

“Sure, sure,” Shelly told his pad. “Toby, I could use your advice before you go.”

“Go ahead,” I said. In situations like this I had for some time said “Shoot,” but since someone had taken me literally in Chicago a few years before and shot me, I had gone for the simple though less colorful “Go ahead.”

“Promised Mildred we'd go out this weekend,” Shelly said, taking his cigar from his mouth and dropping a fat ash on his smock, where he failed to notice it. “I could suggest Volez and Yolanda at the Philharmonic Hall.
Life
magazine says they're the world's greatest dancing couple. That might cost as much as four bucks for the good seats. Or we could go to the Musart and see
She Lost It at Campeche
. Even the best seats are only a buck each. The show's been going on for almost a year and the ad in the paper says it's ‘hot as a firebomb.' What do you think?”

“Shel,” I said, reaching for the door. “Go for the culture even if it costs a few bucks extra. Mildred will appreciate it.”

I was through the door and standing in the anteroom when I heard Shelly say to himself, “Hot as a fire bomb,” and I knew where Mildred Minck would be on Saturday night.

I made my way back to No-Neck Arnie's garage and told him to fill up the Ford with gas. He tilted his body to the side to look at me, and I proved my good faith and financial standing by showing him a twenty-dollar bill. Arnie filled her up.