Fala Factor (10 page)

“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.