Why didn’t I move? Answer: The rent was low. My best friend, Gunther Wherthman, a Swiss midget who made a living as a translator, was a tenant at Mrs. Plaut’s, and, with the war, housing had almost disappeared in Los Angeles. Rents were flying as high as Doolittle, a sign of the times that, fortunately, had not entered Mrs. Plaut’s interest or awareness.
She appeared through the door below me, wiping her bony hands on her apron, which was muslin and carried a stenciled message in black: PROPERTY OF THE U.S. ARMY AIR FORCE. She adjusted her glasses with a clean finger.
“I’m very tired, Mrs. Plaut,” I said wearily.
“You look very tired,” Mrs. Plaut said, looking me over, her head cocked to one side critically.
“What can I do for you, Mrs. Plaut?” I said with a smile.
“I have a list of items to relate,” she said, fishing into a pocket in her apron and pulling out a small notebook, which she opened. “First, have you finished reading my chapter about Aunt Gumm and Mexico?”
She looked up at me patiently, waiting for an answer.
“I have finished,” I said, speaking slowly, clearly, and loud enough to awaken whoever might still be sleeping in the boarding house. They would be sloshing down soon for Mrs. Plaut’s breakfast, those who were willing to pay the price in conversation. “But I don’t understand why your Aunt Gumm thought she owned Guadalajara You never make it clear why-”
“You know Aunt Gumm owned Guadalajara,” she beamed, interrupting me.
“I’d heard something about it,” I said, leaning on the wall.
The chapter, which lay on my table upstairs, was even less coherent than most of the previous ones Mrs. Plaut had been giving me. I really didn’t mind reading the manuscript. I just couldn’t take discussing it with Mrs. Plaut.
“How did your Aunt Gumm meet the bandit,” I tried.
“You are in need of a shave,” she said critically. “Though your new suit is an improvement over what you have worn previously.”
“I got it from a dead man,” I said, grinning evilly.
“I see,” she answered with a grin. “That is no concern of mine. I am quite aware of your line of business, as you know. Let us return to Aunt Gumm.”
“Let us,” I said, and then desperately, “Your buns are burning.”
Mrs. Plaut gave me a tolerant look and clasped her hands together.
“Buns,” I repeated.
“Uncle Parsner was the one for puns and such like,” she said gently. “Aunt Gumm was devoid of a sense of humor. You must keep my relations in order if you are to help, Mr. Peelers.”
“I’ll try,” I said in weary surrender. “Aunt Gumm is wonderful, a critical member of the family. The chapter should be longer, more about the bandit.”
“The bandit,” she said, glancing at the open door from which the smell of buns came, “was a distant friend of Joaquin Murietta, who kept his toenails in a jar. Aunt Gumm’s bandit did no such of a silly thing though he was, I am told, given to telling dialect jokes, mostly at the expense of those less fortunate than himself, though who that might be remains a mystery not only to me but to Uncle Jerry and other branches of the family. My buns are done.”
“Good,” I said, turning to go up stairs. I had made it up four steps when she stopped me.
“There are other items to relate,” she said. I turned and watched her tiny figure as she glanced at her notebook. “Calls galore. The policeman brother of yours called.”
“He found me,” I said.
“And,” she concluded with a flourish by slamming closed the notebook, “you are now involved in the politics.”
“I am?”
“One of the many Roosevelts who run this country called you,” she said with disapproval. “I do not recall if it was Anna. I rather hope it was since I voted for her father. Teddy Roosevelt was the last good president we had. Before him all was abyss except for Jackson and Polk”
“Did you vote for them?” I said softly, my eyes closing as I rubbed the stubble on my chin.
“Rude disrespect will not get you into heaven,” she said, pointing a flour-covered finger at me. I wasn’t sure if she had miraculously heard what I had said or had come up with an even more unpleasant invention.
“I’m sorry, Mrs. Plaut. I really am. I’m tired and-”
“She should not have married him,” she went on.
“Who?” I tried, feeling the tears of sleep.
“Franklin and Eleanor are cousins,” she explained patiently as if I were a backward second-grader. “That is incest.”
“Let’s hope so,” I said. “If I don’t get upstairs and into bed, I’m going to tumble down these stairs and make it difficult for Mr. Hill and the others to climb over my body.”
“We’ll talk again again when you are in a less jovial frame of mind,” she said, disappearing into her rooms before I could find out when Eleanor Roosevelt had called. My goal was a few hours of sleep followed by a call to Eleanor Roosevelt and a search for Jeremy Butler, who might be able to tell me something about Bass, the former wrestler who seemed to be the only suspect I had in Olson’s murder. That would be followed by a search for the missing Anne Olson.
I didn’t have to fumble for the key to my room. The rooms in Mrs. Plaut’s boarding house had no locks. Mrs. Plaut’s philosophy was that adults should change clothes in the bathroom down the hall and decent people should have nothing to hide beyond their own crude nakedness. She respected closed doors only for the time it took her to knock once and enter. If one wanted privacy in this barracks of the outcast and elderly, one resorted to a chair under the doorknob. Even this had been known to do no more than slow down the determined landlady.
I liked my room. It was nothing like me. There was one old sofa with doilies on the arms which I was afraid to touch, a table with three wooden chairs, a hot plate in the corner, a sink, a small refrigerator, a few dishes, a bed with a purple blanket on which God Bless Us Every One had been stitched in pink by Mrs. Plaut, a painting of someone who looked like Abraham Lincoln, and a Beech-Nut gum clock on my wall, received in payment from a pawnshop owner for finding his runaway grandmother. Every night I took the mattress from the bed and put it on the floor. This morning I repeated the rite. I slept on the floor because of a delicate back crunched in 1938 by a massive Negro gentleman who took exception to my trying to keep him from asking Mickey Rooney a few questions at a premiere at Grauman’s Chinese.
I removed Olson’s suit, dropped it on the sofa, ran my tongue over my furry teeth, decided I was too tired to eat and too sensitive to examine my bruises, and fell like an uprooted radiator on the mattress. My Beech-Nut clock said it was 6:34. My father’s watch said it was noon or midnight. I fell asleep clutching my second pillow to keep from rolling over on my stomach and ruining my back.
There were dreams, but I didn’t remember them well. A city, probably Cincinnati, about which I dream frequently though I’ve never been there, a plump young woman with glasses saying something to me, a tree and a stag whose branches and antlers had grown together so that they couldn’t be separated. I woke up to someone knocking at my door. The clock on the wall told me it was eleven.
“What, what, what?” I grouched.
“Toby?” came Gunther’s high precise voice, complete with Swiss accent. “Are you well?”
“Come in, Gunther,” I said, sitting up.
He pushed at the door and stepped in, all three feet nine of him in his usual sartorial splendor. He wore a light brown, three-piece suit with key chain, tie, and tie pin. Gunther was somewhere in his late thirties. We had met two years earlier, when he was my client, and had been friends since then. If given one wish, Gunther would have made me a reasonably clean human with minimal taste.