Fala Factor (5 page)

“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.

A
collie with a bad cough, a white Persian cat with a missing ear, a whimpering spaniel, and a white parrot in a cage with what looked like a bandage on his right leg, were ahead of me in Dr. Olson's waiting room. The people who had accompanied the patients were a silent lot: a thin, chain-smoking woman in a cloth coat had the collie, a teenage girl wearing a jacket with the letter L on it comforted the spaniel, an old couple holding hands guarded the Persian in the woman's lap, and a birdlike man with a straight back wearing glasses, a small smile, and a white suit rested his hand protectively on the cage of the white parrot at his side.

Dr. Olson's Sherman Oaks Hospital for Pets was on a cul-de-sac one block off Sherman Avenue. It was a new one-story brick building. The street itself had a number of driveways with houses set back beyond the trees. The only building near the street was Dr. Olson's place. There was no parking lot, but finding a place on the street had been no trouble.

My trouble came when a door opened off the waiting room and the sound of barking and whining accompanied the appearance of a white-coated giant who looked like a block of ice. His face was bland and dreamy under straight blond hair that tumbled across his eyes. The white coat was generously dappled with blood, some of it still moist.

“Mrs. Retsch,” he announced in a surprisingly high voice. The woman with the collie stood up nervously, looked for someplace to put her cigarette, found an ashtray, and, head down, moved past the huge blond man and through the door, her collie coughing docilely at her side.

“You,” the man said looking at me. “You got no animal.”

He was observant.

“That's what I want to see the doctor about,” I said. “I'm looking for a pet. My name's Rosenfeldt. I made an appointment.”

“But you got no pet,” he repeated.

“Mr …?”

“I'm Bass,” he said. “You've got an appointment and no pet.”

“That's about it,” I agreed.