The Fala Factor: A Toby Peters Mystery

by Stuart M. Kaminsky

  “Catchy,” I said.

  “Sorta like the Rinso Jingle,” he mused. “You know, ‘Rinso White, Rinso White, happy little washday song.’ That’s the kind of thing I’m looking for, you know what I mean?”

  “Sort of,” I said. “Look, I’ve got to go out. I’ve got a client. Will you—”

  “You mean the one with the shopping bags?” he said, returning to his pad. “You should have her see me about those teeth. I can do all sorts of things with them.”

  “I’m sure you could, Shel, but she’s from out of town, and I’m sure she’s got her own dentist,” I said.

  “He isn’t doing much for her,” he went on, tapping his pencil. “You know she reminds me of someone. I just figured out who. You know that little lady in The Lady Vanishes, The English cookie, what’s her name, Lady something or Dame something.”

  “I know who you mean,” I said. “I’ll check back in later.”

  “Sure, sure,” Shelly told his pad. “Toby, I could use your advice before you go.”

  “Go ahead,” I said. In situations like this I had for some time said “Shoot,” but since someone had taken me literally in Chicago a few years before and shot me, I had gone for the simple though less colorful “Go ahead.”

  “Promised Mildred we’d go out this weekend,” Shelly said, taking his cigar from his mouth and dropping a fat ash on his smock, where he failed to notice it. “I could suggest Volez and Yolanda at the Philharmonic Hall. Life magazine says they’re the world’s greatest dancing couple. That might cost as much as four bucks for the good seats. Or we could go to the Musart and see She Lost It at Campeche. Even the best seats are only a buck each. The show’s been going on for almost a year and the ad in the paper says it’s ‘hot as a firebomb.’ What do you think?”

  “Shel,” I said, reaching for the door. “Go for the culture even if it costs a few bucks extra. Mildred will appreciate it.”

  I was through the door and standing in the anteroom when I heard Shelly say to himself, “Hot as a fire bomb,” and I knew where Mildred Minck would be on Saturday night.

  I made my way back to No-Neck Arnie’s garage and told him to fill up the Ford with gas. He tilted his body to the side to look at me, and I proved my good faith and financial standing by showing him a twenty-dollar bill. Arnie filled her up.

  “Took almost a full tank,” he said as we stood near the pump amidst the aroma of gasoline.

  “Great,” I said. The best way to handle things was to keep the tank full since the gas gauge didn’t work. It had broken within minutes of my buying the car from Arnie. Arnie had advised me not to have it fixed because it wasn’t worth the expense. Fundless, I had agreed. I had learned since then that you can get used to almost anything, a wife leaving you, a war, various beatings, back pain, but the tension of never knowing if your gas tank is full or empty is too much for a reasonable human to have to bear.

  “Arnie, I want the gauge fixed,” I said, getting into the car.

  “Suit yourself,” he said with a shrug as he rubbed his always greasy palms on his greasy overalls. “It’ll cost.”

  “How much?”

  “Maybe five, maybe more. Maybe even ten.”

  He leaned on the car, foot on the running board, and examined the vehicle as if he had never seen it before. “Maybe ten.”

  “Then let’s get it fixed,” I said, starting the engine.

  “Came into a bundle, huh?” he said with a grin of wonderfully uneven teeth.

  “Got a new client,” I explained. “Eleanor Roosevelt. I’m getting a nice fee for finding out who kidnapped the president’s dog.”

  Arnie gave me a sour look as I pulled slowly away. “Come on,” he said wearily. “Never kid a kidder. You know what I mean?”

  I knew what he meant, but I had never known Arnie to be a kidder. As far as I could see, he had no sense of humor except when it came to repairs, and then he was laughable. I stuck my head out of the window and called back, “I wouldn’t kid an old friend like you, Arn.”

  Then I shot forward into the street, almost hitting a Plymouth driven by a gray man who looked like a broom handle. I gave him my best grin, turned on the car radio for a little music, found Fred Waring and His Pennsylvanians, smiled up at the morning sun, and headed for Burbank and Jane Poslik.

  Fred Waring kept me company down Hollywood Boulevard, and through the hills. I listened to “Rosemary” and was about to get the news when I found the street where Jane Poslik lived. It was about two blocks off Burbank Boulevard on a residential street. Hers was one of the two-story brick apartment buildings nestled together for protection on a block of single-family frame houses. It was the kind of street where nothing happens during the day because everyone is working or the families are too old to have little kids.

  Jane Poslik lived in the second floor apartment, but she didn’t answer her bell or my knock. I tried to look through the thin curtain on the window near the door, but nothing seemed to be moving inside. So I went downstairs and knocked at the door of a Molly Garnett. There was no answer but I could hear something moving inside, so I ham-fisted the door.

  “Molly Garnett?” I shouted.

  “Shut up out there,” came a shrill woman’s voice. “Shut up. Shut up. I’m not opening up for you, Leonard.”

  “My name’s not Leonard,” I shouted. “It’s Peters. I’m looking for Jane Poslik. I’ve got to talk to her.”

  “You’re not Leonard?” came the shrill voice.

  “I’m not Leonard.”

  “You’re not from Leonard?” she tried.

  “I’m from Hollywood,” I said patiently. “I’m looking for Jane Poslik. She’s not home.”

  “You’re telling me?” cackled Molly Garnet.

  “Where is she?” I tried.

  “She’s a cuckoo,” came a cackle, which I think was a laugh.

  “I’m interested more in where she is than what she is,” I shouted.

  “She thinks someone is after her,” came the cackle voice. “You seen her? No one would be after crazy Jane, I can tell you. Men used to be after me though.”

  “I’m sure,” I said to the door. “You have any idea where I might find her?”

  “You sure you’re not Leonard?”

  “Cross my heart,” I said. “Jane Poslik, where might I find her?”

  Molly Garnett went silent and I turned from the door. Jane Poslik would wait. It was on to Dr. Olson, but first I’d make that trip to see Phil and find out what he wanted.

  The second-floor squadroom of the Wilshire District police station was unusually quiet for a Friday afternoon. On the way there I had stopped for a Taco and Pepsi Victory Special at Paco’s On Pico. Sergeant Veldu, the old guy on the front desk, had waved me in with a beefy hand and told me to look out for Cawelti, who was in and in a bad mood. I had known Sergeant John Cawelti for two years, since he first came to the Wilshire with his hair parted down the middle like a bar-keep and his fists permanently clenched. We had not hit it off well. A clash of personalities. Two spirits destined to ignite. I had once suggested, in his presence, that the Los Angeles police trade him to the Germans for an old pair of Goering’s underwear. It had not pleased my enemy.

  So I pushed open the door of the squadroom on the second floor feeling the itch of a good insult creeping into my mind. I approached the desk where Cawelti was hissing through his teeth at a Mexican guy covered with dark hair and two days of beard. The Mexican guy was nodding yes to everything. He was so skinny that each nod of his head threatened to knock him off balance. I considered pausing to warn him about the floor of the squadroom. One could get lost on that floor in the generations of accumulated food, tobacco, and human body fluids ranging from blood to urine. Some of the former was mine. Cleaning up amounted to nothing more than keeping the dirt-black wooden floor from becoming unpassable.

  “Top of the morning, John,” I heard myself say as I passed Cawelti’s desk.

  Cawelti’s answer was a low grunt and the sudden s
wing of the bound notebook in his hand, which banged against the cheek of the Mexican, who crumpled in front of me on the filthy floor.

  “Hey,” I said, jumping out of the way. “I can make a citizen’s arrest on this one. Littering, illegal use of a concealed Mexican junkie, assault with a deadly alien.”

  Cawelti stood up, his suit dark and neat, his face turning a pocked red. There were a few other detectives and one uniformed guy making coffee in the corner. They didn’t bother to watch our little drama. Neither did the Negro kid handcuffed to the waiting bench about ten feet away from us. He was doing his best to pretend that he hadn’t seen the whole thing and hoping that he wasn’t going to be questioned by Cawelti.

  I faced Cawelti as I knelt down to help the Mexican guy up. The Mexican smelled like vomit, and Cawelti was grinning.

  “Gracias,” the Mexican said dizzily.

  “I’d stay down there if I were you,” I said, grinning back at Cawelti. “He’s only going to do it again when I leave.”

  “Peters, Peters,” said Cawelti, “we’re coming to that time. Things are changing around here, and you and me are going to dance in the moonlight,” The last had been punctuated with a finger jabbed at me for “you” and a thumb at himself for “me.”

  “Poetry will get you nowhere, John-John,” I said, propping the Mexican back up in the chair while trying not to let any of him rub off on me.

  “Hey,” a voice, deep and dark, called across the babble of the room. I turned, and beyond the bulk of a mountainous sergeant drinking a cup of coffee, I saw Steve Seidman waving at me. Without another word to Cawelti, I skipped past an overturned basket that had something wet and red in it, hopped over the Negro kid on the bench, who pulled back into a protective ball, and weaved around the mountain of a cop whose name was Slaughter and whose disposition was known to match his name. He almost spilled his coffee as he made way for me to get past him. I gave a half-second prayer that the coffee didn’t spill and put Slaughter into a worse-than-normal mood.

  “Been making friends in the squadroom again?” Seidman said, sitting back against the edge of his desk in a corner. There were two small fruit crates on top of the desk. One had once been filled with Napa Sweetheart artichokes and was now piled high with papers, notes, and assorted junk.

  “Early spring cleaning?” I asked, nodding at the desk.

  “Moving day,” he answered, pushing away from the desk and starting forward. I followed him.

  “How’s the tooth?” I said as we angled past the semiclear space near the filthy windows that tried but failed to keep out all of the sunlight. Seidman’s right cheek was definitely puffy.

  “The man,” Seidman said over his shoulder, “is a butcher, an incompetent unclean quack.”

  “And those are Shelly’s good traits,” I said as he opened the door marked LT. PHILIP PEVSNER.

  “You’re a class act, Toby,” Seidman said emotionlessly as I moved past him. Then he whispered, “Be careful, Phil’s in a good mood.”

  I stepped in and Seidman stepped out, closing the door behind me but not before I caught a glimpse of his hand reaching for his cheek. Phil was standing behind his small desk in the office, which was about the same size as my own. His bulky back was to me. He was in his rumpled gray suit looking out the grim window at the blank wall. A cup of coffee was in his hand. He didn’t turn when the door closed but I caught a movement of the shoulders that led me to believe that he wasn’t lost in some form of meditation.

  “Happy birthday,” I said, resisting the temptation to sit in the chair across from his desk. I’d been trapped in that chair more than once and wound up with books in my face, a kick in the leg that led to orthopedic therapy, and a variety of lesser but equally interesting injuries, each of which was good enough for at least a fifteen-yard penalty.

  Phil grunted and took another sip of coffee. He was just too fascinated by that brick wall to turn around. I couldn’t blame him. More than ten years of looking at it could not dim the fascination of its potential mysteries.

  “What are you looking at?” I heard myself say, knowing that it was exactly what I shouldn’t say, at least what I shouldn’t say unless I wanted my brother to turn in murderous rage, which is probably what I did want. Old habits die hard. I had once said that to my friend Jeremy Butler. He had said, “Old habits never die. They are only repressed and come back to haunt us in disguise.” So, I had decided it was better to make friends with my bad habits than to hide them away. The result had been a lost marriage, a bad back, no money in the bank, a diet that would destroy the average Russian soldier, a brother whose fists clenched when I was within smelling range, and a few interesting encounters.

  Phil did not turn around murderously. He didn’t turn around at all but answered calmly, “You know how old I’ll be at the end of this week?”

  “Fifty,” I said, leaning back against the wall as far from him as I could get.

  “Fifty,” he agreed, taking another sip. “Half a century. And you’re only a few years behind.”

  “Physically,” I agreed.

  “Physically you’re over the century mark,” he grunted. “How many times you been shot?”

  “Three,” I said. “And you?”

  “Four, counting the war,” he answered.

  “Well,” I sighed, “it’s been nice talking about the good old days, but I’ve got a client, and some groceries to pick up. I’ll needle you once or twice about Ruth and the boys. You throw something at me, tell me what you want, and I’ll be going.”

  That should have gotten him, but it didn’t. What was worse was that he turned around with a sad near-smile on his face and his scarred sausage fingers engulfing his cup. His hair was steel gray and cut short as always. His cop gut hung over his belt and his tie was loose around the collar of his size-sixteen-and-a-half neck.

  “I got the word Monday,” Phil said, looking down at the dregs in his cup and shaking it around a little. “I made captain. I’m moving down the hall this afternoon.”

  Four wisecracks came like shadows into my mind but I let them keep going and said, “That’s great Phil. You deserve it.”

  Phil nodded in agreement. “I paid for it,” he said. “I paid.”

  And so, I thought, did a stadium-load of criminals and people who just got in Phil’s way. For the first ten years of being a cop, Phil had tried to single-handedly and double-footedly smash every lawbreaker unlucky enough to come within his smell. He kicked, bent, broke, twisted bodies and the law, and gained a reputation for violence I could have told Jimmy Fiddler about when I was ten. The second ten years, after he made lieutenant, had been like the first decade but sour. Crime hadn’t stopped. It had gotten bigger and worse. If Phil had paid attention to the books our old man had given him from time to time, he would have known all this from Jaubert or the cop in Crime and Punishment, but Phil was a dreamer with a pencil-thin, overworked wife, three kids, one of whom was sick most of the time, and a mortgage.

  “Seidman’s moving in here,” he went on. “He’s up for lieutenant next month. Your pal Cawelti might move up too.”

  “That will make me feel safer at nights,” I said.

  “Enough shit,” Phil said, putting down his coffee cup and pulling his tie off. “I’m never going higher than captain. There’s no place higher for me to go. So, no more damned ties. No more fooling around.”

  “You’ve been fooling around all these years?” I said, looking into a grin I didn’t like, a grin that made me feel a twinge of sympathy for the unknown offender who next came within the grasp of my brother.

  “Eleanor Roosevelt,” he said, throwing the tie on the desk. I think it was a tie I had once given him, picked up as a partial payment from Hy of Hy’s Clothes For Him for finding Hy’s nephew, who had departed with Hy’s weekly cashbox and was spending it freely in a San Bernardino bar when I found him. Hy had a bad habit of losing his relatives and a worse habit of paying me off in unwanted clothes when I found them.

  “El
eanor Roosevelt,” I repeated sagely.

  “That’s what I want to talk to you about,” Phil said, leaning forward, his fists on the desk. The pose was decidedly simian, I noted, an observation I managed to keep from sharing with him.

  “Seidman was following her this morning,” he went on. “That’s what he was doing in that nearsighted geek’s office.”

  “I’ll tell Shelly you send him your best,” I said sincerely.

  Phil didn’t answer. He just stared at me with brown, wet eyes, his lower lip pushing out.

  “The Secret Service doesn’t tell us anything. The FBI doesn’t tell us anything,” he continued. “It came to us from the mayor’s office, straight in here. I’m responsible. I’m on the line. I don’t think they can take captain away from me, but they can make me the captain of canned shit if this gets screwed up.”

  “Well put,” I said.

  “So,” he said, evenly bouncing his fists on the desk, “I’m going to ask you some questions. You are going to answer the questions. You are not going to play games because you know what I can do to people who play games. You remember Italian Mack?”

  I didn’t want to remember what Phil had done to Italian Mack. What he had done to Italian Mack had probably kept him a lieutenant for an extra three years.

  “Ask,” I said, back to the wall.

  “What the hell is the president’s wife doing coming to your office?”

  I couldn’t stop it. It came out of the little kid who lives inside me and doesn’t give a final damn about my bruised and broken body. “Looking for campaign contributions from leading citizens,” I said. But I overcame the kid and before Phil could get out from behind the desk. I soothed, “Wait, wait, hold on. She had a job for me.”

  He stopped halfway around the desk. From beyond his door, a single voice shrieked out in Spanish, “No lo hice, por Dios.” Phil didn’t seem to notice.

  “What kind of job could you do for her that the FBI, the Secret Service, and the L.A. police couldn’t do?” he asked. It was a reasonable question.

  “Find a dog,” I said. “I swear, find a dog. A friend of hers in Los Angeles, Jack Warner’s wife, lost her dog. Mrs. Roosevelt promised to help her find it but she can’t go to you or the FBI on a personal thing like this. She’s had enough crap in the papers and on the radio without having people say she’s using the government’s time and money to find lost pets for big campaign donors.”