The Fala Factor: A Toby Peters Mystery

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  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.

  “Manny,” I said, “you got some crackers I can give him?”

  “Check,” called Manny and brought some little oyster crackers which I added to the bowl of Pepsi.

  “Crackers is for pollies, not dogs,” said the leather man.

  “He likes them,” I countered.

  “He ain’t no gor-met,” said the leather man, wisely returning to his own bowl of Carumba super hot chili.

  Fed and fat, I led the dog to the Farraday and made my way slowly up the stairs to Jeremy’s office. Jeremy was sitting opposite Bass and reading a book. Bass gave me and the dog, in that order, dirty looks, but there wasn’t much he could do beyond that. He was firmly tied where he sat.

  “Toby,” said Jeremy, rising from his chair, inserting a blue felt bookmark in his book of Frost poems and putting it neatly on the small table nearby. “I have been endeavoring to convince our guest that he should tell us the location of Miss Poslik and the identity of his accomplice or accomplices, but
he remains mute. His arm seems, at this point, to be uninfected, but his soul, his very essence, is so corrupted that I doubt if much can be done.”

  Bass looked up at Jeremy with a hatred that outdid the blast he had fired at me and the dog.

  “When I get out,” Bass said, “I’ll do you.”

  “Bass, you are not getting out,” I explained while the dog sniffed at his right foot and just managed to escape the kick Bass threw. “You killed Mrs. Olson, kidnapped the dog and Jane Poslik, and, in general I’m sure, have been less than charming. You are going to trial and jail, maybe to the chair. Can you follow all that?”

  Bass shook his head and looked bored. “He won’t let that happen,” he said. “He’s got connections, big connections. When things change in this country, I’m gonna be running the jails.”

  “That’s a comforting vision of the future,” I said. “I’ll pass it on to my friends. Should give them added reason for surviving the war.”

  “You can laugh,” Bass said. “People laugh at me sometimes when I can’t touch them, but they can’t stay away forever.”

  “I can’t laugh,” I said. “You bruised a few of my ribs, but we’ll let bygones be bygones. Maybe I’ll even vote Whig in the next election in Oz if you—”

  “No,” Bass said.

  I looked at Jeremy, who closed his eyes and opened them slowly to show that communication with Bass was hopeless.

  “I got loyalty,” Bass said, his fingers turning white as he gripped the wooden arms of the chair to which he was strapped. “I know I’ve got loyalty. Even when I was wrestling and all those people were out there eating those hot dogs and booing me. I knew people who were my friends could count on me. My word means something.”

  He was sounding too much like me, and I didn’t like that at all, so I told Jeremy to keep him tied till tonight. Jeremy followed me to the door and I whispered the plan to him while Bass pretended to be looking at a row of books but strained without success to hear.

  “Toby,” Jeremy said alter I had explained things to him, “please do not be offended by this, but your plans in such situations tend to be precarious and fraught with danger for you.”

  “I’ve noticed that,” I agreed.

  “Ulysses,” said Jeremy

  “I cannot rest from travel; I will drink

  Life to the lees all times I have enjoyed

  Greatly, have suffered greatly, both with those

  That loved ‘me, and alone, on shores, and when

  Through scudding drifts the rainy Haydes

  Vexed the dim sea: I am become a name;

  For always roaming with a hungry heart

  Much have I seen and know.”

  “If you say so, Jeremy,” I whispered, touched his solid arm, and went into the hall with the dog waddling behind me.

  The late-morning sounds of the Farraday accompanied me back to and up the stairs. Arguments coming through closed office doors, a machine whirring, a shout of laughter, some male voice echoing from below, “Then you just come back tomorrow at the same time, and we’ll see what can be done about it.”

  I had some time to kill, and possibly to be killed, and some phone calls to make. The game was set for eight that night. It had to be to get it all wrapped up so Eleanor Roosevelt could head back to Washington with her mystery solved and, hopefully, a bill for services, and I could pick Carmen up and get to the Armstrong fight.

  My wardrobe was down to rock-bottom pitiful. The windbreaker I was wearing didn’t even have a zipper. Fortune may have been laughing at me but I had a joke or two ready myself.

  As it turned out, my phone calls were delayed. When I opened the door of the outer office of Minck and Peters, specialists in finding lost grandfathers and filling teeth, I heard voices—three voices, one female, two male—in Shelly’s office. I considered turning around and heading the dog back to the street. We could find a park and take in the threatening rainstorm.

  Instead I made the move, opened the inner door, and stepped into Shelly’s office.

  The scene: Shelly’s spick and span, squeaky clean, falsely antiseptic office. In it, behind the dental chair that occupies the position of power in the room—the electric chair, the throne—stands Shelly in a clean white dental smock buttoned at the collar, cigar nowhere in evidence. Next to Shelly, flanking him, are a man and a woman. The woman, about sixty, is dressed in a dark blue dress with big white flowers on it. She looks like Marjorie Main wrapped in wallpaper designed for the women’s room of a Dolly Dainty restaurant. The man is small, mustached, with a determined little chin, and losing his hair. He is like Porter Hall, the actor who snivels and makes a living by betraying Gary Cooper.

  All three of them look at me and the dog, who wags his tail. Shelly looks bewildered, confused, and then an idea comes into his eyes. I can see it from where I stand and decide to break for my door, but the demon has taken over and the drama begins.

  “Mr. Peters,” Shelly said, holding out an arm and grinning. The sweat was trickling down his nose and giving him a hell of a time keeping his glasses from falling to the floor. “You are a bit late for your appointment.”

  “Wait a minute,” I said, holding up my own hand as Shelly advanced.

  “Sorry,” Shelly chuckled, taking my arm. “But I’m afraid you’ll have to use the washroom later, Mr. Peters. Drs. Ferzetti and Vaughan are from the Dental Association and they would like to observe me with a patient.”

  “Look,” I said, but Shelly whispered quickly, his back to the stony inspectors: “You can’t go in your office and give it away. You can’t, for chrissake, bring a dog in here. You can’t let me down on this, Toby.”

  I grinned over Shelly’s shoulder at the two dentists, who did not grin back, and I talked to Shelly through my teeth like a third-rate ventriloquist.

  “You are not getting me in that chair,” I said. “You are not working on my mouth, Minck. I’ve seen too many disasters crawl out of this office never to be heard from again, at least among the living.”

  “Be with you in just a moment,” Shelly said to the two dentists. “Mr. Peters is just a bit shy about having people observe.” And then, whispering back to me, “That’s just what I’m telling you. They have complaints, for God’s sake. You know what kind of trouble I can be in if I don’t prove something here?”

  “No more than you deserve to be in,” I said, tugging at the rope around the dog’s collar to keep him from sniffing Marjorie Main.

  “My career,” Shelly said, putting a fat hand to his heart. “My life.” He was close enough for me to smell his cigar breath and sweat. The tears in his eyes were fogging his glasses.

  “Our names go on the door the same size,” I said.

  “Never,” said Shelly.

  “Dr. Minck,” Porter Hall said, looking at his watch impatiently.

  “Same size,” Shelly whispered to me.

  “And—” I began.

  “No ands, no ands here, Toby, this is blackmail,” Shelly said, almost weeping.

  “You think I don’t know blackmail when I’m engaged in it?” I said. “I’m a detective. And … you keep the sink clean.”

  “Dr. Minck,” the man said again. “We really must …”

  “Here we come,” said Shelly, taking my arm and hissing to me. “All right.”

  I should have asked for more. I knew it when I sat in the chair and watched Shelly lead the dog to my office door, open it, close the dog inside, and turn to me with a grin like Karloff as Fu Manchu.

  “Now just what kind of dental work does this man need?” said Marjorie Main, looking down at me as if I were a fraud.

  Shelly was pinning a clean sheet around my neck. I felt as if I were in a barber shop with W. C. Fields about to drop a scalding towel on my face to keep his own hands from burning.

  “A great deal,” said Shelly, touching his chin and selecting an instrument to begin with.

  “Doctor,” I said ominously.

  “But,” Shelly went on, “today w
e are simply going to begin. We’ve got to take the X rays first.”

  Before I could protest, Shelly had rolled out his X ray machine and placed a black metal cone from it against my cheek, then turned out the lights and filled my mouth with film. I tried with little success to breathe while three of us watched Shelly put on his dark goggles and heavy lead coat and unreel the extra long electrical cord.

  “We’ll go behind the barricade in the corner,” he told the other doctors and headed over, looking like a field colonel directing his adjutants to safety during an attack.

  “Hold it.” I said, pulling the boards out of my mouth. Shelly flicked the lights back on.

  “Mr. Peters,” he said, removing his goggles. “You’ve exposed the goddamn film.”

  “Better the film than me, Minck,” I said threateningly.

  “Dr. Minck,” Marjorie Main stepped in. “We haven’t time to wait while you get the X rays developed. Can’t you simply do a visual examination now and some preliminary work so we can observe your procedures?”

  “Dr. Ferzetti is right,” said the man. “We have other stops to make.”

  Reluctantly, Shelly took off the lead coat and hung it, along with the goggles, in the closet. Then he turned to me.

  “Open wide. Mr Peters,” he said leaning over, a recently cleaned mirror in his hand. He was breathng heavily as he put his weight on my chest and explored my mouth with a series of “Ah-ha’s” and “Well, well, wells.”

  When he stepped back, he had a satisfied look on his face. Shelly cleaned the mirror on his smock, put it down on the clean white towel on his work tray, and asked me, “Do you brush your teeth regularly, Mr. Peters?”

  “Regularly,” I said. “With Teel, or Dr. Lyon’s.”

  “You’ve got some cavities,” Shelly said, picking up something with a sharp point and tapping it against his palm. “Let’s take care of one or two of them now.”

  “Let’s,” sighed Porter Hall with more than a touch of impatience.

  As soon as he had my mouth propped open and little blocks put in, Shelly turned to the two inspectors and said, “Mr. Peters is a well-known radio personality, aren’t you, Mr. Peters?”