“Okay,” I sighed, “I’ll take you up on the offer. I’ll give you the address of a veterinary clinic in Sherman Oaks. I want you to go there, wait for a blond hulk. His name is Bass. Follow him but don’t let him see you. That shouldn’t be too hard. There aren’t too many smarts rattling inside him.”
Gunther nodded knowingly, and I explained the whole thing, including Olson’s murder, the missing dog, everything.
“I’m relieved,” he said with a small grin. “I was afraid you had chosen that suit. While properly conservative, it does not accommodate your personality.”
“It’ll have to do,” I said, thinking that Gunther would also have to do. Normally, it is not a wise thing to send a midget out to tail a suspect. There is no such thing as an inconspicuous midget or little person, but then again there are few people as dense as Bass seemed to be.
Gunther hurried to his room to get on with his assignment, and I decided to do the dishes some other time. In the hallway I flexed my muscles, decided that they still functioned, and moved to the phone on the wall to make a few calls.
Eleanor Roosevelt did not answer at the number she gave me, but a woman with what sounded like an English accent did. I gave her my name and she told me to wait. Gunther passed me, still suited, nodded seriously, and went down the stairs. The phone rang.
“Mr. Peters?” came Eleanor Roosevelt’s voice.
“Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said. “Things are getting a bit complicated.”
“I have been informed about Doctor Olson,” she said. “Do you think it has something to do with Fala? I should hate to think that a man actually died because of some intrigue over a dog, but then regard for human life has not been this low since the reign of the Teutons.”
“I guess,” I said. “But this might be getting beyond the stage where I can handle it. You might want to call in the heavier guns, the FBI, whoever.”
There was a pause while she considered what to say next.
“Mr. Peters, it is quite evident to both of us that you wish to continue this inquiry. You have my trust, and I feel confident that you will not betray it. Beyond loyalty, there is little else that can be asked or received.”
“Intelligence would be nice,” I said.
She laughed gently. “You do not strike me as an unintelligent man,” she said. “There are those who pose as men in the heart of our own government, even those who have been elected, whose intellect does not surpass that of a small terrier and whose loyalty lags far behind. The canine reminder is, by the way, quite intentional.”
“I’ll get back to work and get to you as soon as I can,” I said.
“Remember,” she said, “I have only a few days. I must be back in Washington for the Peruvian dinner, and Mr. Molotov is coming.”
“Sounds like a fun-packed few months,” I sympathized.
“Mr. Molotov is, in fact, quite nice,” she said. “His English is good, his sense of humor mischievous, and his manner poor. He actually brings his own food and carries a loaded gun in his suitcase.”
There I stood chatting with the First Lady in the hallway of Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house when Mrs. Plaut herself appeared at the bottom of the stairs, saw me, and began her resolute way up.
“I’ll have to go now, Mrs. Roosevelt,” I said. “Something important just came up. I’ll report as soon as I can.”
“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
