The Fala Factor: A Toby Peters Mystery Read online

  “I’ll drop by,” I told Seidman, but I didn’t think he heard me over the drill. So I shouted to Shelly, “Any messages, Shel? Anything new?”

  “Sugar rationing books are ready,” he shouted back around his cigar as Seidman’s tooth gave way.

  “That’s not what I had in mind,” I shouted. “Have I had any calls?”

  “No calls,” bleated Shelly.

  “Thanks,” I said, reaching for the coffee and trying to catch sight of Seidman’s face. I had never seen any expression on Seidman’s pale face, but I was sure that if anything could bring some life to it, it would be Shelly at work. Seidman seemed to be as calm as usual. He was the perfect partner for my brother, whose emotions tingled on the surface of his face and in his fists like one of No-Neck Arnie’s overheated batteries.

  The coffee was hot and awful, just the way Shelly liked it. I had my own cup, a ceramic job that had WELCOME TO JUAREZ hand painted on it along with a little picture of a sombrero. No one was supposed to touch the cup but me, though I suspected Shelly sometimes went for it when nothing clean was left.

  Cup in hand, I reached for the knob to my office door.

  “Almost forgot,” Shelly said, looking at me over his shoulder. “Lady came in about ten minutes ago, just before Sergeant Seidman. She’s in your office waiting for you. Between you and me and the OPA, she could use some dental work on that overbite. You might suggest she stop and see me.”

  Since my office is not soundproof or Shellyproof, there was no doubt the woman inside had heard him, especially since at that point I had the door partly open.

  In the hope of finding a new client who could save me from the darkness of hotel corridors or worse, I regretted that I hadn’t tightened my tie, set my face in a serious frown, and stepped into my office … where I found myself face to face with Eleanor Roosevelt.

  “You’re Eleanor Roosevelt,” I said.

  “I know,” she answered, looking over her glasses with an amused smile. “I’m afraid you will have to do a bit better than that if you are to convince me of your skills.”

  I closed the door to cut out some of Shelly’s humming and drilling, and stood there looking at her. She had cocked her head back to examine me from the single chair in front of my desk. Her hair, cut short, was dark with gray creeping in. She looked her age, which was fifty-eight, but there was something there that I had never seen in photographs. Sure, she was homely, not much in the way of a chin, an overbite, though not nearly as much as people joked about, and a body without moments. She wore a black dress with little flowers on it and a thin dark coat. But it was her eyes that made the difference, that gave something a newspaper or newsreel picture couldn’t catch. They were dark and deep and always looking right at you. From that moment on, every time I talked to her, she gave me all of her attention. She sat now with her hands neatly folded in her lap like an obedient schoolgirl.

  “Would you like some coffee?” I said, holding out my Juarez cup to show her what coffee was.

  She examined the cup seriously and then said, “No thank you,” as she removed her glasses and put them in a dark case that she pulled out of the May Company shopping bag at her side.

  “Is it all right if I sit down?” I said.

  “It is your office,” she answered, the smile back, her voice slightly high-pitched, with a back-East accent that reminded me of tea parties and bad jokes about the rich, the kind they have in The New Yorker.

  I sat and looked at her to the somewhat muffled sound of the drill and of Shelly now singing “Ain’t We Got Fun.”

  “Did you get my letter?” she asked, leaning forward slightly.

  “Letter,” I repeated, cleverly wondering if I should open my top drawer and sweep into it the garbage on my desk, which included the remnants of two day-old tacos from Manny’s down the street, a handball, and an almost empty emergency box of Kellogg’s All-Bran.

  “Right,” I said, trying to wake up. “I got a letter a few weeks back from the White House, a note from some woman named Francis something, said somebody would be in touch with me about a personal matter and … that was you?”

  She nodded and opened her eyes wider. “What did you think it was?”

  “I don’t know,” I said with a shrug. “I thought it was something millions of people were getting. Maybe I wasn’t going to get a sugar or gas ration book. Maybe a new law was going into effect to draft fifty year olds.”

  She reached into her shopping bag and came out with a small notebook, which she opened after putting on her glasses again. She glanced down at it and returned the notebook to the bag. I wondered what she had bought at the May Company and how they had reacted at the dinnerware counter when Eleanor Roosevelt asked for two hundred juice glasses on sale for the White House.

  “You are,” she said, “forty-seven years old, not fifty, and even if the draft age were raised substantially, I doubt that with your back you would be considered an asset to our war effort.”

  “I’m not sure what brought you here,” I said, sipping coffee and stopping myself from straightening my tie, “but you must have the wrong Toby Peters.”

  Her mouth twitched slightly and her right cheek puffed out. A sound of air slipped between her lips as behind us Shelly launched into “Josephine Please Don’t Lean on the Bell,” complete with his famous Eddie Cantor imitation.

  “You want me to try to shut him up?” I said, nodding toward the door.

  “He sounds irrepressible to me,” she said.

  “He is,” I agreed, guessing she meant that nothing short of mayhem would stop Shelly.

  “You had a dog when you were a boy,” she said, looking into my eyes for an answer that suddenly seemed very important. For a moment I speculated that Eleanor Roosevelt had wandered away from her keepers, who were frantically searching the streets for her. I had, perhaps, stumbled onto a great White House mystery: The First Lady was nuts.

  “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, b
ut 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 i
t.”

  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’?”