“Keaton.”
“Buster Keaton,” I explained. “They could always steal it again when they needed it. They spotted you and decided the plan wouldn’t work.
“I’m sorry, Toby,” he said, getting off the porch swing.
“For what? I’ll invite you to the next party I throw for Bass.”
“
“I think William Blake knew our friend Bass.”
With that Jeremy declined my offer of a ride and I declined his offer to help me upstairs. With hands plunged into oversized windbreaker pockets, he went down the stairs, and I watched the muscle folds on the rear of his neck as he moved down the walk.
I was an easy target for Mrs. Plaut, a slow-moving target, but she wasn’t in the house. It took me a long time to get up the stairs, but I wasn’t in a hurry. It took me even longer to get to my room and get my clothes off, but I had stopped to turn on the hot water in the bathtub and I knew there was no hurry.
I soaked in the warm tub for half an hour after taking one of the pills Shelly had given me for pain resulting from a series of encounters over the years. The pills were designed for sore teeth but they did a hell of a temporary job on an aching back.
A new tenant in the boarding house, a Mr. Waltrup, knocked at the door in the middle of my bath to announce the urgent need for a toilet. I bid him enter, which he did with apologies, and we carried on a brief discussion about Mr. Waltrup’s profession, tree trimming.
I learned all I wanted to know about tree trimming in the next five or six minutes.
“There really isn’t much privacy here is there?” Waltrup said, buttoning himself. He was a solid young man with a nice blue eye and a false brown one that didn’t match.
“Not much,” I agreed, sinking back into the water and turning the hot tap on with my toes.
Shriveled and soaked, I felt much better and made my way back to my room with a towel around my waist. Mrs. Plaut’s head was peeking up at the top of the stairs.
“This isn’t a good time, is it Mr. Peelers?” she said.
“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.”
9
“By 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.
