“An interesting piece of datum,” I agreed, getting up and putting on my neatly pressed suit. The suit from Doc Olson was heaped in a corner. I’d worry about that, and about making the bed and changing my underwear, some other time.
“What is it that we now do, Toby?” Gunther said seriously.
“You stay here in case I get a call,” I said. “Jeremy’s guarding an important witness and Eleanor Roosevelt may be in touch.”
“I will listen attentively and keep Mrs. Plaut from chaotic intervention,” he said.
“Perfect,” I said, putting my shoes on. “I’ve got time for coffee and some cereal. Join me.”
“I have eaten,” he said, “but I will have some coffee if you permit me to rewash the cups.”
I permitted him and he drank while I downed two bowls of Little Kernels and we worked on a plan. It wasn’t much of a plan but it might do. I read the side of the cereal box to Gunther using my best Georgia accent.
“To me it sounds correct,” Gunther shrugged, “but having my own difficulty with exact pronounciation I am not able to know the subtleties of accent. I am sorry.”
It would have to do. In the hall, I looked up the number of the New Whigs, dropped in my nickel, gave the operator the number, and waited. It was a few minutes after nine. Lyle himself answered on the fourth ring. I recognized his voice from the warning call on Saturday. I felt like shouting “Bingo.”
“The New Whig Party,” he said. “Can I help you?”
Dropping my voice and plunging in, I croaked, “Mah name is O’Hara. Ah’ve heard good things, good things about you from a friend in Washington, a big fellah, good smile.”
“Allen Hall,” he supplied.
“Sounds about right,” I said. “Suggested I should get in touch with you should I get to this part of the country on business. That’s just what I’m doing.”
For some reason the image of Thomas Mitchell as O’Hara in
“Well, Mr. O’Hara,” Lyle oozed, “would your schedule permit a visit to our modest but adequate West Coast offices some time in the next few days?”
“Got a big meeting this afternoon with some folks at Pacific Electric Railway. Let’s see heh. Could make it this mornin’ if that’s okay on your side of the border?”
Lyle agreed and we set the time for ten, one hour away. I hung up and tried to recite some Mother Goose with a Southern accent.
I was well into “Taffy was a Welshman,” and almost to the bottom of the stairs, when Mrs. Plaut appeared, large wrench in hand.
“You are saying if all wrong, Mr. Peelers,” she corrected. “There is an impediment.”
“Thank you,” I shouted and then had an inspiration that would better have been forgotten. “You have an old Western hat in the garage. White hat, in the back seat of the car in the garage.”
Mrs. Plaut had a 1927 Ford in her garage. It had been there since 1928 when Mr. Plaut died. She had worked on it when the mood struck her but had never driven it. I had borrowed her tools a few times for minor surgery on the piles of scrap Arnie had sold me, and I remembered the hat.
“I’m sorry Mr. Peelers,” she said, holding the wrench in two hands. “I thought you said you wanted Myron’s hat from the car.”
“That’s just what I do want.” I nodded furiously. “I just want to borrow it.”
She stood blinking at me for a full ten seconds.
“Myron’s hat?”
“Myron’s hat,” I agreed.
She shrugged, turned, and led the way through the house, out the back door and down to the garage, where sat the old Ford with Myron’s hat in the backseat. I reached back, dusted off the hat, and tried it on. It was a bit small, but it would do. I looked at myself in the windshield, which Mrs. Plaut kept spotlessly clean. The effect was less than perfect.
“You look like Tom Mix,” said Mrs. Plaut, eyeing me critically. “Though Mix had a very large shnoz and you’ve got practically none. Though you are a match in the homely department.”
“Thanks for your honest appraisal, Mrs. P.,” I said.
The hood of the Ford was up and she inserted the wrench, turning her back on me.
“That hat,” her voice echoed from under the hood, “originally belonged to Uncle Cruikshank, the one in chapter four of the family book you will recall.”
“I recall,” I said, stepping toward the garage door.
“That’s Uncle Ned Cruikshank, the assistant sheriff in Alemeda, Kansas, before the gout epidemic of 1867.”
“I’m going now Mrs. Plaut,” I shouted.
“Uncle Cruikshank died in that hat,” she said. “A bully named Sousa or something like that blew him out from under it in the environs of Alemeda.”
“A comforting thought,” I said. “I must-”
“Myron was fond of that hat, Mr. Peelers. Try not to get it soiled or yourself blown out from under it.”
I pledged not to, to her deaf ears. In the sunlight, committed to the hat, I began to have second thoughts, but a man’s gotta do what a man’s gotta do. I strode off toward my faithless Ford, climbed into the saddle, and barely made it to Arnie’s garage as the gas tank went bone dry.
Arnie filled it up and gave me an estimate on fixing the door. The estimate from No-Neck was twenty bucks.
“I’ll make it fifteen if you throw in that hat,” he said as he pumped gas into the tank “lt’d be some good laughs around here.”
“I didn’t know you had a sense of humor, Arnie,” I said, adjusting the hat on my own head.
“I’m as sensitive as the next guy,” he said, pulling the gas nozzle out. “That’s two bucks for the gas and another fifteen cents for oil.”
I paid, took off my hat so I could get into the car without knocking it off, and drove away. A pair of boots would’ve helped, but I didn’t have the time. My disguise would have to do.
Parking on Broadway was tough. I pulled around a corner and drove into a parking lot. I got out, put on my hat, and gave the guy in overalls a broad grin and told him I expected to be back in an hour.
“You got it, Tex,” he said.
“How’d you all know I was from Texas?” I said.
He was climbing into my Ford and shaking his head. I figured him at about eighteen years old, maybe nineteen.
“It’s the hat, Tex,” he said with a wink. “Real authentic. You guys all have them authentic hats just like in the movies. You want a tip?”
“Sure enough, son,” I said.
“You’re layin it on too thick,” he whispered confidentially. “I’m from Lubbock. Anyone talk like that back home, we’d know he was a Yankee pissing around and we’d hog tie him and ship him north on a cattle car.”
He screeched rubber and headed toward the corner of the lot. What did he know? I left the lot and headed down Broadway past Little Joe’s to the building where Martin Lyle and his New Whigs had their office. It was a respectable building, if not in a high prestige neighborhood. It even had an elevator that worked at reasonable speed and carried me up to the eighth floor with no stops.
“Good weather you folks up heah are having,” I told the bespectacled, pudgy woman who operated the elevator. She turned, looked me up and down, shook her head, and went back to work. I was beginning to seriously doubt the credibility of my disguise, but it was too late. I got off the elevator, touched the brim of my hat to her and went down the hall to room 803, which had stenciled in gold on its door THE NEW WHIG PABTY HEADQUARTERS, and below that in smaller letters, MARTIN LYLE, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR. Below that there remained the outline of additional lettering that had been scratched away. I bent to look and was fairly sure that the removed letters read DR. ROY OLSON, PRESIDENT.
I was squinting at the door when it opened and a pale woman looked down at me. She was wearing a dark blue suit, her black hair back in a bun, and a serious look on her face.
