Fala Factor (26 page)

“Toby,” whispered Gunther. He was in total disarray, at least for Gunther he was. He wore pants, shirt, tie, vest, but no jacket. “I heard you coming up and then going down.”

“I had to walk the dog,” I explained, whispering back.

He looked at the dog and the dog looked at him curiously. On his hind legs, the dog would have been about Gunther's size. We could have saddled the animal for him.

“This, then, is the dog of the president of the United States?” he whispered.

“Looks that way,” I said.

“Why are you bringing him here instead of to the police or the president?” he asked reasonably.

I came up on the porch and sat on the bottom step. Gunther moved closer. We were about eye level.

“I think the people who took the dog have a woman named Jane Poslik,” I explained. “I might have to make a trade or something. I'll just have to wait till they contact me and try to stay out of the way of the police, who I promised to give the killer to.”

I sat on the porch talking and the animal kept his eyes riveted on Gunther. Gunther stood erect the entire time while I went over the events of the past two days. Gunther touched a spot just under his lip, a sure sign that he had an idea.

“In my mind,” he said, “I have gone over the listing of suspects, events. Perhaps it is a problem in logical or even literary formalism.”

“Maybe,” I said with no great hope as I reached over to pet the dog. “I've got a plan.”

“What might that be?” asked Gunther seriously. A slight night breeze ruffled his neat hair and a tiny hand went up immediately to put it back in place.

“I'll find Lyle and threaten to kick his face in if he doesn't confess and tell me where Jane Poslik is,” I explained. “It's direct, simple, and inexpensive.”

“And not likely to yield results,” he said pensively. “May I suggest an alternative procedure?”

“If it's not one that requires a lot of thought on my part,” I said wearily. “I've had a long hard day. Hell, a long hard lifetime.”

Thunder rumbled somewhere far over the hills near Santa Monica as Gunther went through his chain of logic. It made sense to me but it would take time to set up. It also involved the possibility that I had made a big mistake.

When he was done talking and I agreed, as much out of pain and tiredness as out of conviction. I picked up the dog. did an awkward dance as I put my belt back on, and followed Gunther into the house and up the stairs.

When we got in front of my room, I whispered to Gunther, “I'll set it up for tomorrow night, in my office.”

“That,” said Gunther, “will be sufficient.”

When I got into my room, I considered removing the itching tape on my chest, but that would have proven foolish. Instead, I took off my clothes, put on fresh underwear, took one of the pills Doc Hodgdon had given me, and shared the last of a bottle of milk with the dog.

“You want Wheaties?” I asked. He looked like the answer was yes. so I gave him a bowl of Wheaties, which he ate dry.

Sleeping was a little problem. I'm not used to a warm body near mine through the night. Even if it's a dog, it brings back memories, but I finally fell asleep on my mattress on the floor. Once during the night I started to turn over The pain woke me, and the dog, in the moonlight, wept for me. I gave him a pat and went back to a careful sleep.

“Mr. Peelers,” came the distinct, thin, and insistent morning voice of Mrs. Plaut.

“Huh?” I answered alertly, glancing around the room for something I couldn't remember but knew would be familiar when it came before my eyes. The dog was sitting on the sofa looking at me, his pink tongue out. I rolled over, felt the pain in my chest, and let myself fall back on the mattress on the floor as Mrs. Plaut stepped in.

“Come in,” I said with what I thought was good-natured sarcasm.

“I'm already in,” she replied, hands on her hips She didn't seem to notice a dog panting and looking at her from the depths of the sofa.

“What can I do for you, Mrs. Plaut?” I asked, forcing myself up on one elbow.

“Pensecola cookies,” she replied.

My first thought was that this was one of the colorful near-curses of her family. I immediately learned the truth.

“I would like to make my recipe for Pensecola cookies,” she explained. “But I can't.”

I looked at her and she looked back at me.

“Go on,” she finally said.

“Where am I going?” I asked, coming to a sitting position and rubbing the stubble on my chin.

“Aren't you going to ask me why I can't make Pensecola cookies?” she said with exasperation.

“Why can't you make Pensecola cookies?” I asked, feeling something like George Burns.

“No sugar—or not enough sugar—calls for a lot of sugar,” she said, looking around the room to see if there was some doily or knick-knack she could straighten. “The recipe was developed in the old country by my Uncle Fabian's wife.”

“The old country?” I asked, knowing from Mrs. Plaut's massive family biography that the Plaut's, Cornell's, Lamphrets, and all the other ilk of my landlady had been in on the first invasions of the American shores. Some of them had predated the Indians.

“Ohio,” Mrs. Plaut explained. “We can pick up sugar rationing books at the elementary school. As a resident of this home, I think you should allow me some of your sugar ration in exchange for which I will give you a generous dose of Pensecola cookies.”

I wrapped the blanket around my waist and stood up.

“I'll pick my sugar stamps up this afternoon,” I promised, reaching for my pants, which were on the sofa and covered with a fine layer of dark dog hair.

“This morning will be essential,” she said. “I'm working on the cookies this morning.”

“I've got a killer to catch,” I appealed to her.

“Your train can wait,” she replied firmly. “Do you know what Uncle Fabian's wife went through to perfect this recipe?”

I neither knew nor cared, but I could think of only one way to stop from being told.

“I'll do it,” I said awkwardly, scrambling into my pants under the blanket. Mrs. Plaut looked satisfied.

“We will drive in your automobile,” she said. “I don't think you can walk the three streets over with that injury.” She pointed to my chest, which I was trying to cover with a semi-soiled white shirt from the closet. “Have you killed someone again?”

She looked around the room suspiciously for a possible body and then turned to me. I hadn't bothered to answer her question. Satisfied that I had stashed no corpses in the quite visible corners, Mrs. Plaut instructed me to meet her downstairs in five minutes, and parted with: “Shave your scratchy face, Mr. Peelers, and bring the president's dog with you.”

I left the dog in my room wagging his tail and scratching at the door while I hurried down the hall to shave as quickly as my chest tape would allow. I was dropping a nickel into the hall phone when Mrs. Plaut called up for me to hurry.

There were four or five calls I had to make, but at the moment I only had time for one, to the number Eleanor Roosevelt had given me. She was in and came to the phone.

“I've got the dog,” I said.

“Mr. Peters, you have my gratitude. I'll pick him up personally,” she answered.

“I'd like to hold on to him today,” I said, and then I explained why. She listened quietly, politely, and asked me a few questions.

“And you believe this scheme will work?” she said finally. “You believe it is worth risking both your life and that of Fala?”

There was something about Fala that I didn't want to tell her, but I held back and assured her that I thought it was worth it. We didn't have a long discussion of my assessment of the value of my own life. Many was the night I spent lying on the floor on my mattress when Time and I had discussions in which I tried to argue that my life was of cosmic import; but Time just wouldn't buy it and kept proving from the history of my own behavior that I didn't buy it either.

“It's a shot,” I finally said.

“Mr. Peters, please be careful. It is important that Franklin have the comfort of his dog. The war news has not been good today. Corregidor has fallen. But I think a human life is worth more than the risk involved.”

“Mr. Peelers,” Mrs. Plaut shouted from the bottom of the stairs.

“I've got to go now,” I said. “I've got to pick up some sugar for Pensecola cookies.”

“My aunt's maid baked them when I was a child in New York,” Eleanor Roosevelt said.

“I'll save some for you.”

Before she hung up she told me that she could stay till the night with some stalling, but she would have to travel all night on the plane to get back to Washington for the reception.

I went back to my room, removed the hunk of rope I was using to hold together one of my four wooden kitchen chairs, and tied it around the dog for a leash. Downstairs Mrs. Plaut was waiting impatiently, a little black hat on her little white-haired head, with a black coat and black purse.

“And remember,” she said as the dog pulled me through the front door, “let no one push you around in the line. It's—”

“I remember,” I said as the dog pulled me down the wooden steps and made for the curb. “It's a doggie dog world out there.”

As it turned out, Mrs. Plaut was right. The elementary school was filled with people making deals, pushing, pleading, lying about the size of their family to get more sugar than they were allotted.

A small man wearing a wool cap down to his ears, his teeth clenched, hit me in the sore ribs with an elbow, claiming I was trying to get in front of him A crony of Mrs. Plaut named Evelyn Barkmer informed us that there was a man of unsavory demeanor in a De Soto behind the school who was buying and selling ration books. A harrassed man who sounded like Raymond on the “Inner Sanctum,” and possibly was, stood up from behind the desk where he was helping to issue ration books to shout, “Ladies and gentlemen, you do not have to pick up a ration book if you don't want or need one. If you don't want or need one, you can simply go home. Go home.”

“You mean,” came a woman's shout, “if I don't want no sugar stamps, I don't have to stay here?”

“That's what I said,” shouted the man.

“Why didn't someone say so?” The woman sighed and turned for the door. She didn't get far, however. She was surrounded almost instantly in an Apache-style attack by a party of people who had offers for her unwanted ration.

One woman who reminded me of my mother's sister Bess told me that my dog looked like Fala but that she, herself, preferred a dog with size and meat on its bones.

I kept enough stamps for my coffee and cereal and turned the rest over to the waiting Mrs. Plaut, who did a recount to be sure that the guy who sounded like Raymond and I hadn't short-changed her. Satisfied, she stuffed the coupon book into her black purse, snapped it closed, and looked around to see if anyone was going to challenge her for them.

“Like
One Million B.C
.,” I said. “Cave men protecting their food from each other.”

“How would you know what it was like way back then?” she said, leading the way through the crowd with me and the dog following.

“I meant the movie, I explained. “You know Victor Mature, Carole Landis.”

“Next time we come earlier,” Mrs. Plaut said and went directly to my car. Having already gone through an explanation of the broken car door to her on the way to the school, I said nothing and watched her slide in the driver's side and over, and then slowly followed her, putting the dog in the small back seat.

Dropping Mrs. Plaut off, I headed for the Farraday. Mrs. Roosevelt would, I was sure, pay her bill fast and probably in cash to keep any records from turning up in the future. So I drove to No-Neck Arnie's and told him to fix the car door.

“Nice dog,” Arnie said. He had a black dot of grease on his nose like a clown and was wearing his gray overalls.

“Right,” I agreed.

“Make a deal,” Arnie said, putting an arm on my shoulder and breathing a dreaded combination into my face. “You give me the dog. I fix the door for ten bucks.”

“Not my dog,” I said.

Arnie shrugged, touched his nose to make the spot worse, fished in the pocket of his overalls for a used cigar, and said, “That's a genuine Scottie! Like FDR's.”

“That a fact?” I said, leading the dog to the door.

“A fact,” said Arnie, following my progress by turning his entire body.

The dog's legs moved double-time to keep up with me. In spite of the tightness in my chest, I had things to wrap up. My stomach rumbled when I hit Ninth and I considered stopping in one of the restaurants for a quick bite, but I didn't think any of them would welcome the dog, any except one and that one was Manny's Tacos.

Since it was before eleven, there weren't many people in Manny's. I got up on one of the red leather swivel stools at the counter and helped the dog up onto the one next to me. A man made out of old leather a few stools down took the cigarette out of his mouth and turned to look at us, but we weren't all that interesting to him.

“What'll it be, the usual?” asked Manny. Manny was Emanuel Perez, dark, tired, thirty, and hard-working.

“The usual,” I said. “Same for the dog. Bring a bowl for the dog.”

Manny didn't blink an eye, just nodded and said, “Check,” and went off to bring us each a taco and a Pepsi.

“Chili be better for a dog,” said the leather man at the end of the counter in a raspy voice.

“If he survives the taco,” I said amiably, “he can order the chili.”

“I know dogs,” the leather man said with a shrug.

The dog liked the tacos though I can't say he was the neatest eater I had dined with, but then again I had been told that my own eating habits left a little to be desired. After he noisily lapped the Pepsi up, I refilled his bowl. He still looked hungry but not chili hungry.