“I’m not sure what brought you here,” I said, sipping coffee and stopping myself from straightening my tie, “but you must have the wrong Toby Peters.”
Her mouth twitched slightly and her right cheek puffed out. A sound of air slipped between her lips as behind us Shelly launched into “Josephine Please Don’t Lean on the Bell,” complete with his famous Eddie Cantor imitation.
“You want me to try to shut him up?” I said, nodding toward the door.
“He sounds irrepressible to me,” she said.
“He is,” I agreed, guessing she meant that nothing short of mayhem would stop Shelly.
“You had a dog when you were a boy,” she said, looking into my eyes for an answer that suddenly seemed very important. For a moment I speculated that Eleanor Roosevelt had wandered away from her keepers, who were frantically searching the streets for her. I had, perhaps, stumbled onto a great White House mystery: The First Lady was nuts.
“I had a dog,” I agreed, putting down my Juarez cup and adjusting my tie.
“The one in the picture on the wall behind me?” she said without turning to the photograph.
“Right,” I agreed. “But that was a long time ago. He’s dead now.”
“Almost everyone is,” she agreed brightly. “Who are the others in the picture?”
“The younger kid is me before my nose got flattened for the first time,” I explained, looking up at the picture over her shoulder. There was a crack in the glass that I should have fixed at some point, but that had never really bothered me till I knew that Eleanor Roosevelt had been looking at it. “The older kid is my brother Phil-”
“Who is a police officer,” she added.
“Right,” I said. “Do you know how he voted in the last election?”
“Democrat,” she said without a smile. “He is a registered Democrat and no doubt voted for Franklin. I have no idea of how you voted.”
“I voted for Willkie,” I said, meeting her eyes.
“May I ask why?” she said.
“Is it important?” I shot back.
She brought her clasped hands up to her mouth and touched her larger lower lip with her knuckles. “It may be, Mr. Peters. Your political feelings may affect the matter we may soon be discussing.”
Shelly shouted, “When you neck please no breaka da bell,” and I held back the violent urge to go out and strangle him.
“I thought Roo … your husband looked tired,” I said. “I thought he looked like a man who’d had enough, been through enough, a man who deserved a rest. And besides, I liked Willkie.”
“So,” she said, “did I and so did Franklin. After the election Mr. Willkie came to the White House to visit. I had an appointment, but I cancelled it just to get a look at the man. I think he would have made a good president, not as good as Franklin, but quite good. And Franklin was quite prepared to lose and take that rest. And what do you think about your choice now?”
“I’m glad your husband is president,” I said. “Mostly because of the war, but I want to get this straight right now, I’m not much on politics. I read the bad headlines and go for the sports section. Once in a while I read your column, but only once in a while because I’m an L.A. Times reader.”
I was having a nice friendly chat with an apparently insane Eleanor Roosevelt. Shelly had paused and Seidman was choking. I thought of the possibility of Secret Service men bursting through the door with guns drawn and putting a few holes through me on the chance that I had kidnapped the First Lady.
“The man,” Mrs. Roosevelt said, returning her hands to her lap.
“Man?”
“The one in the photograph on the wall,” she explained.
“My father,” I said, looking up at him standing between me and Phil. “He died when I was a kid.”
“As did my father,” she said. “And like yours, my mother died even before him.”
“You know a lot about me.”
“And the dog’s name?” she said gently.
“Murphy, when that picture was taken,” I humored her. “Later, when Phil was in the army during the last war, I renamed him Kaiser Wilhelm … a kind of family joke.”
“I see,” she said. “My sources say that you are a man who can be relied upon for discretion. Is that true?”
“It has made my fortune,” I said with a sad grin, looking around the small office and up at the ceiling where a fascinating crack looked like a wacky river across a dry desert.
“You have a fondness for dogs,” she went on. “I mean by that, you can understand the sentiment of one who invests a great deal of affection in an animal.
I nodded.
“Have you looked at the newspaper or heard the news this morning?” she went on. “What do you remember of it?”
Behind her Shelly had turned off the drill and was humming something I hoped he created.
“Dolph Camilli hit two home runs, one in the ninth, to give Brooklyn an eleven-eight win over Cinci,” I recalled. “Sugar rationing books can be picked up at elementary schools. There’s a big sale of Lucky Lager beer, and twenty-nine of the toughest inmates on Alcatraz were taken from the island in a secret evacuation because they can’t black out the island and the warden was afraid of a break if the island had to be blacked out during a Jap raid. I was interested in that because at least one of that twenty-nine is probably a guy I helped send there and would not like to see-”
“And you didn’t read the war news?” she jumped in, her head on the side like a scolding teacher.
“I read it,” I said with a shrug.
“You needn’t work so hard to convince me of the narrowness of your interest,” said Mrs. Roosevelt.
“Sorry,” I said.
“That is all right,” she forgave me, and went on. “The Japanese, as I believe you know, are on the Burma Road. The war in Europe is going a bit better but not appreciably. In his May Day address, Premier Joseph Stalin pledged that Russia has no territorial ambitions upon foreign countries and declared that the Soviets’ sole aim is to liberate its lands from the, and I quote, ‘German Fascist blackguards.’ Franklin and others are concerned about Mr. Stalin’s true intention. In short, Mr. Peters, the pressures on my husband are as great as they have been on any man in history.”
“I’m sorry,” I said, “but what-”
“I have good reason to believe that the president’s dog has been taken,” she said softly, her eyes on mine. “I am not sure of the word in this context. For a child it is kidnapping. I suppose we could say Fala has been dognapped.”
“I’m listening,” I said, leaning forward and pulling out the small, spiral-bound notebook I carried in my pocket. Spiral-bound notebooks were the ancient enemies, like organized society. Within seconds after I purchased one it would creep out a tiny metal finger from the spiral and go to work tearing the lining of my jacket or my pants. The current one was no different. I found a pencil piece that I had to scrape with my thumbnail to get at the lead, and tried to ignore Mrs. Roosevelt’s eyes.
She told her story quickly and more efficiently than a twenty-year homicide squad veteran who wants to get home for a couple of beers and an Italian beef sandwich.
The dog’s full name was Murray the Outlaw of Fala Hill. He had been given to FDR by Margaret Suckley in 1940. Margaret was a close friend of the family. The family had many dogs, including a German shepherd who had recently taken a chunk out of the prime minister of Canada, but Fala was the president’s dog and had proven to be the only dog in the family that really liked the White House. That Roosevelt loved the dog was without question. It was also evident that the dog returned the affection. Things, she said, could be pretty tense at the White House. Public visits had stopped, everyone who entered had to be fingerprinted and issued a pass, and, most unsettling, gun crews were now posted in the wings of the residence. There was, in fact, a dog-supposedly Fala-in the White House at the moment. The president had noticed a number of changes in the dog, but meetings and war planning had kept him from questioning its identity. Mrs. Roosevelt had gradually become convinced that the dog was not Fala at all but a strikingly similar animal with a radically different temperament. She had kept her observations to herself for several reasons. First, she did not want to upset the president, and second, she didn’t want to appear demented. The press, she said, took every opportunity to attack her and she did not wish to be an embarrassment to the president. Meanwhile, she had been occupied with moving their New York address from East Sixty-fifth to a seven-room apartment in Washington Square. So, aside from a few inquiries, she had not pushed her suspicion further. The slightest suggestion of her concern, she said, might be used by the press, the Republicans, the Japanese, or the Germans against the president.