than to tie off, garrotte,
my tender white throat.
And so the next time
a tune leaps to your mind
cut it off in mid-note
and commit this to rote:
If the queen can hang
for a song she sang,
then might not the noose, come
for a tune that you hum?’
Brought on by hysteria,
the queen then sang an aria
but a black-hooded fella
cut short her a capella,
as a voice from the crowd
shouted angry and loud.
‘Not a moment too soon,
she can’t carry a tune.’”
The turkey neck looked puzzled while another guy in the crowd applauded and a voice from the back said critically, “It got no goddam onomatopoeia for chrissake. A poem gotta have onomatopoeia.”
I backed away from the coming debate, wondering what a kid would make of Jeremy’s creation and if he and Alice were planning to illustrate their book. I also filed in the back of my mind the possibility of bringing Mrs. Plaut and publisher Alice Palice together. Object: publication, and my own curiosity.
On the way back to Burbank for another try at Jane Poslik, I turned on the news and found that it was Saturday, which I already knew. What I didn’t know was that the sugar shortage had gotten worse. Hoarding syrup was now a crime and ice-cream manufacturers were being limited to twenty flavors of ice cream and two of sherbet. Beyond that, Laraine Day was engaged to army aviator Ray Hendricks, who used to sing with Ted Fio Rito. Shut Out had won the Kentucky Derby, and a Japanese transport and six fighter planes had been destroyed in an attack on enemy bases in New Guinea.
I had time for about ten minutes of Scattergood Baines before I pulled up in front of Jane Poslik’s apartment in Burbank. My workday had begun in earnest.
Jane Poslik was home. She didn’t want to open the door at first, but I dropped some names like Olson, Roosevelt, and Fala, and she let me in. Her apartment was small and neat and so was she. There were sketches on the wall in cheap, simple frames, more than a dozen sketches of women in a variety of costumes. My favorite was a pencil sketch of someone who looked like Lucille Ball in a fancy French dress all puffed out, white and soft.
“Looks like Lucille Ball,” I said, nodding at the drawing.
“It is,” she said, watching me carefully with puckered lips.
Jane Poslik was somewhere in her late thirties, hair cut short. She wore a brown dress with a faint pattern. She was not pretty and not ugly. If her nose had been less chiseled, her chin a little stronger, she might have come out all right, but if she was one of the Pekin, Illinois, beauty pageant runners-up or an actress who had played the second female lead in a Dayton theater company production of Street Scene, she wasn’t going to be any competition for the hundreds who tripped over each other coming to Los Angeles every week.
“You an actress?” I said, taking the scat in the small kitchen she pointed to.
“Designer,” she answered, filling a pot with water. “Coffee or tea?”
“Coffee,” I said. “You work for a studio?”
“No,” she said, hugging herself as if she were cold and turning to look at me. “Not yet. So far I’ve managed to design for a theater company in Santa Monica. I’ve had to take a variety of jobs.”
“Like working for Dr. Olson,” I said.
“Like working for Dr. Olson,” she agreed, fishing a package of Nabisco graham crackers out of a cabinet and placing them on the small table in front of me. “Right now I’m doing part-time work for Gladding, McBean, and Company in Glendale. I’m designing some mosaic tiles. If it goes well, I’ll be put on full time.”
“Sounus good,” I said.
“It’s good,” she agreed, standing near the coffee pot. “But, it’s not designing.”
“Olson,” I said.
“Olson,” she sighed. “You work for …”
“A private party close to someone quite high in the government,” I said, nibbling a graham.
She looked at me for a long time trying to decide whether to trust me or not.
“I know about the letters you wrote to the White House,” I said. “I know that the FBI talked to you.”
“All right, Mr. Peters,” she said, deciding to take a chance. “What do you want to know?”
“What made you think something was going on with Dr. Olson and the president’s dog?”
The coffee was perking now. She checked the pot, made another decision, and said, “I’ll answer your question when you answer one for me.”
“Go ahead.”
“Why are you wearing Dr. Olson’s suit?”
The explanation took about five minutes, with me leaving out a few things and pausing for her to react when I told her that Olson was dead. She reacted with a quick intake of air and silence.
“Killing people over a dog,” she said, pouring the coffee. Her hand was shaking so I helped her.
“I don’t know why they killed him. You have some ideas?”
She sat sipping coffee and told her story, making sketches on the table with her finger. Her mind was creating another century, another life for Joan Crawford or Olivia DeHavilland, while she gave me her suspicions. Her memory was good and she didn’t waste time or words. According to Mrs. Roosevelt, Jane Poslik was reported to be mentally unreliable. She was, as far as I was concerned, the sanest person I had met in weeks outside of Eleanor Roosevelt.
She had begun working for Olson soon after he moved to Los Angeles. Back in Dayton, where she said she was from, her family had bred dogs, so she was familiar with them. Olson, apparently, had been easy to work with though he had made a few clumsy music-accompanied passes at her in the operating room. She had handled him with no great trouble. The revelation seemed a bit strange since Anne Olson was a Lana Turner to Jane Poslik’s Ann Revere, but Olson was probably one of those guys with active glands from too much contact with goats. Olson had, from the start, been nervous, but Jane had chalked that up to normal behavior. He had brought several dogs with him from Washington, which he kept in a special section of the clinic and wouldn’t allow anyone else to handle. One was, indeed, a small black Scottie. Once Jane had walked in on a telephone conversation between Olson and someone named Martin. The word “Roosevelt” had been part of the conversation, which ended abruptly when Olson spotted Jane in the room. For the next few weeks, other bits and pieces began adding up to the conclusion that Olson and someone named Martin were involved in some way with President Roosevelt and his dog. She also concluded that Olson had left Washington because of the dog business and that Martin had, somehow, found him. Then one morning Bass came to work. Jane had the distinct impression that Olson had not hired Bass, that he had been sent to watch Olson, possibly protect him from questions and doubts.
“I’m not sure,” she concluded, pouring herself and me another coffee, “but I had the impression that Martin or someone would come to the clinic to give Dr. Olson instructions, pep talks, or a good scare.”
“What makes you think that?”
“Well,” she said, making circles on the table with her finger, “there were afternoons when after a normal series of examinations or procedures, and no phone calls, he would be pale and shaken. More than one poor animal suffered in surgery those evenings. In any case, I must have given some indication of my suspicions because Bass began to ask me questions. What do you know about the dogs Dr. Olson brought from Washington? What do you know about Dr. Olson’s friends? That sort of thing. Bass is far from subtle. I became more suspicious, obviously. Within a week I had sufficient evidence from phone calls, conversations overheard between Bass and Dr. Olson and Mrs. Olson, to lead me to the conclusion that Olson had taken the president’s dog. I can’t imagine why he would do it.”