Fala Factor (21 page)

“Not a good time at all,” I said.

She turned and went back down the stairs and I entered my room, groaned my way into a pair of undershorts, managed to down a partly used bottle of Pepsi in the refrigerator, and then eased myself onto the mattress on the floor. I clutched the extra pillow and found it impossible to imagine getting up and making another run at finding the dog and Doc Olson's killer.

I didn't sleep. I just lay there for an hour watching the Beech-Nut clock and trying to put something together to tell Eleanor Roosevelt. Nothing came by three in the afternoon but a knock at the door.

I sat up in my shorts and watched Eleanor Roosevelt enter my room. She stopped for a beat, looked down at me without embarrassment, and said, “I'll give you a few moments to dress.”

“I'm sorry,” I said.

“I have sons and have seen a male body before,” she said, with a little smile and a lot of teeth. “I'll wait in the hallway.”

Struggling to my feet wasn't half as bad as knowing that I really didn't have much to get dressed in. I put on some wrinkled trousers and a pull-over shirt and looked at my room through different eyes. It wasn't much. I pushed the mattress back on the bed, threw the handmade spread over it, gathered my sopping suit, threw it in the closet, and went to the door to let her in.

“Sorry about the place,” I said, stepping back. “But this is how the other two-thirds live.”

She was wearing a thin, black coat and carrying a black oversized purse.

“Mr. Peters,” she said. “I have seen squalor in New York that you can imagine only faintly. You live on a safe street, in a clean home. There is nothing to be ashamed of in that.”

I offered her a cup of coffee, which she accepted. She sat at my little table. Me and the wife of the president of the United States. I should have had Mrs. Plaut come upstairs with her little camera and take my picture to prove it was true.

“I had the dog,” I said, looking down at my coffee cup. “And I lost him.”

“I'm aware of that,” she said, sipping her coffee. “I had a message by phone less than an hour ago. I have been informed that I can have Franklin's dog back for fifty thousand dollars.”

A knock at the door gave me a second to take in the new information. I wasn't sure what it meant.

“Come in,” I said, knowing from the light rapping that it was Gunther.

Gunther, his suit gray and well pressed, entered clutching a sheet of paper, glanced at my visitor, and went pale. He said something to himself in German and Mrs. Roosevelt answered him, also in German. They went on, with Gunther regaining some of his usual composure, until I said, “Let's try it in English.”

“I'm so sorry, Toby,” Gunther said, without removing his eyes from Eleanor Roosevelt, who smiled and drank some more coffee. “I did not mean to interrupt.”

“I'm pleased that you did drop in, Mr …?”

“Wherthman,” Gunther said with a slight bow. “Gunther Wherthman. I'm—”

“Swiss,” Mrs. Roosevelt finished for him. Gunther was beaming.

“Most people make the mistake of thinking me German,” Gunther said. “That inaccuracy can, in these times, be an unnecessary embarrassment.”

“I do not see how anyone with more than a superficial knowledge of language and culture could make such an error,” she said, looking at both of us.

I nodded in complete agreement, trying to forget that I had been sure Gunther was German when I first met him.

Gunther began to say something, but it quickly turned to German and Mrs. Roosevelt answered him in his own language while I put cups away, avoided scratching my stomach, and gave Mrs. Roosevelt some more coffee. After about three or four minutes of this, Gunther was lost in conversation, but he must have caught something in my overly patient attitude and said, in English, “I'm sorry. I'll leave you to your business. It has been a great, great honor.”

“The honor has been mine,” said Eleanor Roosevelt.

Gunther backed out beaming, having forgotten what his original mission had been, and closed the door.

“That,” she said to me,” is a gentleman.”

“B
y tomorrow evening, as I told you, I must be back in Washington for a state dinner in honor of the president of Peru,” Mrs. Roosevelt explained after offering to clean her own cup—an offer I declined. “It will be the first state dinner since Pearl Harbor, and it is essential that I be there. I must leave by tonight.”

I accompanied her down the stairs and to the front porch, where Mrs. Plaut was standing with her 1918 Kodak Brownie box camera.

“When these first came out,” she said pleasantly to Mrs. Roosevelt, “we used to send the whole box in and they'd make the picture and send the box back loaded.”

“I remember,” said Mrs. Roosevelt politely. “It was much easier then. I sometimes think that everything was easier then.”

Mrs. Plaut smiled and took our picture, and Mrs. Roosevelt walked down the path to the dark-windowed automobile that was waiting for her at the curb.

“I shall tell my niece Chloe,” Mrs. Plaut said, beaming. “Just think, Marie Dressier was in my home and I've got a picture of her. You do your best for her, Mr. Peelers. What is her problem, termites?”

“Roaches,” I said, returning to my room.

Mrs. Roosevelt's message had been clear. The caller, a man, had said that she was to give me the fifty thousand dollars and I was to deliver it to the place where Henry the Eighth died precisely at eleven that night. I was to come alone or else. The problem was, simply, that Mrs. Roosevelt had no intention of paying fifty thousand dollars for the dog.

“This has gone much further than I ever anticipated,” she had said during her second cup of coffee. “The political implications of this intrigue are, while not endless, certainly myriad. To pay ransom for Fala, regardless of Franklin's affection for the animal, might be ruinous. Imagine the consequences and the questions if the tale were made public. Are the interests of the United States in wartime not sufficient to occupy the time and attention of the president's wife? Is a pet more important than the tragedies taking place in the world? No, Mr. Peters, though I do not like the idea of deceiving Franklin, even if he has on occasion felt no comparable sentiment, I am quite willing to continue the charade that the dog in the White House is, indeed, his Fala.”

So, my mission was clear. I was to try for another few hours to find the dog. Failing that, I was to do whatever I thought necessary to catch the dognappers. If Fala could be saved while doing it, she would be most grateful.

“The important thing,” she had said, “is that they be caught If, at this point, you wish me to call in the FBI, I shall, but I must, in all honesty, tell you that once that is done, even if there is no leak of information to the press, there will be memos, comments, notes, and at some date in the future this incident will all come out. Franklin and I might be long gone, but there will be others and the Democratic Party to consider.”

“There's not much chance of my getting the dog back in the next few hours,” I had said. “Los Angeles is a big, dark closet with no clear walls. It's like searching for a lost cuff link in the Hollywood Bowl at midnight with a candle.”

“A candle in the dark,” she had said with a smile. “An appropriate metaphor, but if that is all we can do then it is better than not lighting the candle.”

All right, Toby, I told myself. Think it through. I sat in my room adjusting my dad's old watch and nibbling Quaker Puffed Wheat right from the box. Who knew where the parrot had been killed? The fake Mrs. Olson who had killed him, Martin Lyle and Bass, who I had told, and anyone they had told, or anyone who had been in Olson's clinic since yesterday. But anyone who had been in the clinic wouldn't know that I had been there when the King Henry parrot lost its head.

Logic was simple. Lyle had the dog, or Bass was trying to be independent with someone's help. Lyle didn't need the money. If he was in on this, it was for some other reason.

I took a quick look at the newspaper and discovered that:

German Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels had begun a politeness campaign. Berliners were being asked to submit the names of the forty most polite people in Berlin. The first-prize winner would get a radio. Second prize would be theater tickets.

Another 2,370 Japanese in the Los Angeles area were being sent to the Los Angeles County Fair Grounds in Pomona for internment.

The R.A.F. had bombed Stuttgart and Le Havre.

But it was an item on the sports page that sent me running to the telephone in the hall. Carmen wasn't at Levy's Grill this early, I discovered, so I left a message with Sol, the waiter. Henry Armstrong was making a comeback, the only fighter in history to hold three crowns at the same time. Armstrong was going to do a four-round exhibition against two opponents at the Ocean Park Arena. It was a Red Cross benefit. Would Carmen be willing to go to that instead of the wrestling matches?

“You got that, Sol?”

“I got it,” he said. “Listen, she don't wanna go, I will.”

“I'll keep it in mind,” I said and hung up.

Lyle's name wasn't listed in the phone book, but I knew the New Whig Party office on Broadway was. I called and the secretary answered.

“Mr. Lyle, please,” I said, deepening my voice. “This is Colonel Strayer, Arnold Strayer. I'm General Patton's aide-de-camp. The general would like to speak to Mr. Lyle immediately.”

“Colonel,” she said, hyperventillating, “Mr. Lyle isn't in right now, but—”

“The general will not be reachable for some time,” I said. “I'd explain why, but it does have military consequences. I'm afraid—”

“Wait,” she said. “I'll give you his home phone number.”

“And his address,” I said quickly, “in case the general wants to contact him confidentially.”

The request made little sense, but the woman was carried away with historical momentum. She gave me an address on Walden Drive in Beverly Hills just south of Sunset Boulevard, and a phone number.

“You have the general's thanks,” I said and hung up.

I was headed for the address in five minutes wearing my semi-wrinkled trousers, the dark blue pull-over shirt, and a brown wind-breaker with a small oil stain under the right armpit.

Beverly Hills was occupied more than a century ago by the giant Rancho Rodeo de las Aguas. In the mid-1800s the ranch was sold to two Americans named Wilson and Hancock, who already owned the adjacent Rancho La Brea. They tried to found a settlement in the late 1860s and again in the late 1880s, but it was no dice till 1906 when the Rodeo Land and Water Company laid out a subdivision between Wilshire and Santa Monica Boulevard and called it Beverly. The idea caught on and the next year Beverly Hills was laid out just northwest of it. The Beverly Hills Hotel went up in a bean field in 1912. By 1920 there were still only 674 people living in Beverly Hills, but Douglas Fairbanks, Sr., and Mary Pickford changed all that when they built Pickfair on top of one of the hills in the early 1920s. Celebrities began to pour in, trying and failing to outdo Pickfair.

John Barrymore built a mansion that he called the Chinese Tenement. When he tried to auction it off for half a million dollars, he had no takers and said, “Frankly, it was a kind of nightmare, but it might appeal to somebody, maybe some actor. Three pools. Incredible. In one of them I used to keep rainbow trout.”

Before he died in 1935, Will Rogers was Beverly Hills's honorary mayor.

When the boom started in Beverly Hills in the 1920s, Rogers wrote in his column, “Lots are sold so quickly and often here that they are put through escrow made out to the twelfth owner. They couldn't possibly make a separate deed for each purchaser; besides he wouldn't have time to read it in the ten minutes' time he owned the lot. Your having no money don't worry the agents, if they can just get a couple of dollars down, or an old overcoat or shotgun, or anything to act as down payment. Second-hand Fords are considered A-l collateral.”

I knew the town, knew the houses where Freeman Gosdon, Grantland Rice, Elsie Janis, Sigmund Romberg, and the automobile wizards E.L. Cord and C.W. Nash lived, but I didn't know Lyle's house until I pulled up to the driveway. The place was typical of the area: elaborate metal gate, eight-foot-high stone walls. Down a driveway lined with whitewashed bricks stood a sprawling adobe hacienda.

I had some choices. I could press the button next to the gate and try to talk my way in. I could climb the fence and brass it out. Each option had a drawback. Lyle would probably recognize my voice, even if his secretary hadn't. He had penetrated my Texas drawl with no problem. Climbing the fence might be possible, but my back told me it would be one hell of an effort and leave me in no shape for whatever I might find on the other side. Besides, that would be trespassing and Bass might well be in there. On the other hand, the dog might well be in there.