A Dog's Ransom (4 page)

“Okay, okay!” said the check-out operator, because Ed was a few seconds slow in starting to unload his carrier on to the belt, which at once began to move. He looked around for Greta, and was relieved to see her approaching, carrying a pineapple in her hands, a smile on her face as she looked at him, as if to say, “An extravagance, I know, but I want it.” She squeezed in behind Ed, unperturbed by a woman behind her who was annoyed by their maneuvers.

At 5 p.m., Ed telephoned the police station. They had sent the letters to Centre Street, but as yet no report, the man said.

“Is this Captain MacGregor?”

“No, he’s not on duty now.”

“When will they know anything?”

The man sighed audibly. “That I can’t tell you, sir.”

“Can I call Centre Street?”

“Well, no, they don’t like that.—You wouldn’t know who to talk to. Even I don’t.”

“When can I know something? Tomorrow?”

Ed was given to understand there was less staff on Centre Street on Sundays, or something like that. Especially painful to Ed was the idea of waiting till Monday for information.

“It’s not just the letters, you know. My dog has been stolen. I explained all that to Captain MacGregor and—an officer named Santini.”

“Oh. Yeah,” said the voice without a hint of remembrance or concern.

“So I’m in a hurry. I don’t want my dog to die. The letter-writer’s got my dog. I don’t give a damn who he
is
, really I just want my dog back, you see.”

“Yeah, I see but—”

“Can you possibly find out something
tonight
?” Ed asked politely but with determination. “Can I call you back around ten, say?” Ed wished he could offer them money to speed things up, but one didn’t do that, he supposed. “Could
you
possibly ring up Centre Street now and ask what they’ve found out?”

“Yeah.” But the tone was not reassuring.

“All right, then I’ll ring you back later.”

Ed and Greta were going to the 6:30 performance of
Catamaran
on West 57th Street. An adventure story—Pacific seas, danger, exotic islands, a triumph of heroism against elements and odds. For long intervals Ed was distracted from his own thoughts, from his life. Perhaps Greta was too. After the film, they had excellent hamburgers and red wine at a nearby steakhouse, and came home a little before ten.

Ed rang the precinct station, and said he was supposed to telephone this evening in regard to his missing dog and some anonymous letters. Once more he had a strange voice at the other end, and had to repeat the facts.

“There’s no report come in from Centre Street . . .”

Ed could have banged the telephone down, but he hung on politely during a few more inconsequential exchanges. He was sorry, in a way, that he’d given them the damned letters. The letters had been something to hang on to, somehow. Or was he losing his mind?

“So?” Greta asked.

“So, nothing. I’ll try them again tomorrow. I’d better get back to that biography.”

“Are you going to read late? Want some coffee?”

Ed hesitated between coffee and a drink. He preferred coffee. Or maybe both. Or would coffee keep him awake tonight? “Do you want coffee?”

Greta usually wanted coffee. She liked it strong, and it almost never interfered with her sleep. It was miraculous, or her nerves were. “I do, because I am going to sew a little bit.”

“Fine, Coffee.” Ed smiled, sank into the sofa, and pulled the paperbound manuscript off the coffee-table on to his lap.

The biography was of John Phelps Henry, an obscure English sea-captain of the mid-eighteenth century who had become an optician in his forties, after quitting the sea. So far, halfway into the book, Ed was not enthusiastic about its publication. It was a recent idea of Bruthers, one of the chairmen of Cross and Dickinson and a Senior Editor more senior than Ed, that C. & D. ought to bring out a series of biographies of little-known people of the past. It reminded Ed of “minor poets,” who were minor, Ed thought, for the good reason that their talents were minor. Not even the prose of this biography was noteworthy, not even ex-Captain Henry’s sex life was lively. Who on earth would buy it, Ed wondered. But he plowed on dutifully. He wanted to be able to say to Bruthers, honestly, that he had read it.

Greta’s coffee arrived.

Then he heard the cozy, intermittent hum of her sewing-machine from the room that had been Margaret’s.

Ed continued to read, or at least his eyes moved over the interminable pages. A hundred and seventy-odd more to go. It would be ridiculous to go back to York Avenue and 61st Street tonight, he supposed. He was glad Greta hadn’t mentioned it, hadn’t said it might be a good idea, because then he would have gone. If Anon was serious about returning the dog, Anon could telephone.

The telephone rang—just before midnight—and Ed jumped with a happy premonition. This was going to be
something
, some bit of news—probably from the police, but maybe from Anon.

“Hello. Is this Mr. Reynolds?”

“Yes.”

“This is Patrolman Duhamell, Clarence Duhamell. You came to the precinct house this morning.”

“Yes?” Ed gripped the telephone.

“I was in the room when you were speaking with Captain MacGregor. I—”

“You have some news?”

Greta had come to the hall door and was listening.

“No, I’m sorry I haven’t. But I’d like to see you. If I may. The point is—I happen to know the men are very busy at the precinct house just now. There’ve been a lot of house robberies, whereas—I have the night patrol post starting tomorrow. I think it’s a good idea to look in the neighborhood.”

“Yes.” Ed was disappointed at the absence of news, but grateful for this interest in his problem.

“Could I come to see you tomorrow morning?” the young voice asked on a more definite note.

“Yes, of course. You’ve got the address?”

“Oh, yes. I took it down. Tomorrow morning around eleven?”

“Very good.”

“Who was that?” Greta asked.

“A policeman from the station house where I went today. He wants to come to see us tomorrow morning at eleven.”

“He’s got some news?”

“No, he said he hadn’t. Sounds as if he’s coming on his own.” Ed shrugged. “But it’s something. At least they’re making an effort.”

4

Patrolman Clarence Pope Duhamell was twenty-four years old, a graduate of Cornell University where he had majored in psychology, though with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with it when he left university. Military service had followed, and he had sat for two years in four camps in the United States as a Placement Counselor for draftees. Then honorably discharged, and having escaped Vietnam much to the relief of his parents, Clarence had taken a job in the personnel department of a large New York bank which had some eighty branches throughout the city. Clarence after six months had found the work surprisingly dull. The Preferential Hiring Law of the Human Rights Commission forced him to recommend people of “minority races” whatever their lack of qualifications, and he and the higher-up hiring officers had been blamed when accounts later got fouled up in the bank. It was good for a laugh, perhaps, and Clarence could still remember Bernie Alpert in the office saying: “Don’t take it so
personally
, Clare, you’re just out of the army and you’re just obeying orders, no?” Thus the bank personnel job had been not only unsatisfying to Clarence, but it had seemed an impasse: he was not even permitted to choose the best, the right person, and that was presumably what he had been trained to do. Casting about with a completely open mind—Clarence tried to keep an open mind about everything—he had read about police recruitment. Into the office at the Merchant and Bankers Trust Company’s personnel headquarters itself, in fact, had come some brochures in regard to joining the police force, which might have been dropped there by some hand of Providence, Clarence had felt, for bewildered people like himself. The variety of police work, the benefits, the pensions, the challenges had been set forth in a most attractive way. These brochures emphasized the service a young man could render his city and mankind, and stated that a policeman today was in a unique position to make contact with his fellow men, and to steer wavering individuals and families back into a happier path. To Clarence Duhamell had come the realization that a policeman need not be a dim-wit flatfoot, or a Mafia member, but might be a college graduate like himself, a man who knew his Krafft-Ebing and Freud as well as his Dostoyevsky and Proust. So Clarence had joined up with New York’s finest.

Clarence had been brought up in Astoria, Long Island, where his parents still lived. On his mother’s side, Clarence was Anglo-Irish, and on his father’s remotely French and the rest German-English. After a year with the New York Police, Clarence was reasonably satisfied. He had been disillusioned in some ways: there had been enough contact with individuals (delinquents or criminals of whatever age), and a stretch with a downtown East Side precinct house had brought such violent incidents that Clarence (with a walkie-talkie) had had to run for cover and telephone for the squad cars several times. It had been his orders from the precinct captain to keep himself in fit condition for action, and to summon assistance at once in all circumstances in which he thought a gun might be used. Well and good, but Clarence had finally asked to be transferred, not out of fear, but because he felt about as useful as a streetlamp on that patrol beat. The Upper West Side precinct where he was now based was little better, but for different reasons: the fellows were not so friendly, nor were the superior officers. Clarence was no longer a rookie. At the same time he was still young and idealistic enough not to accept kickbacks, even the two-dollar-a-week kickbacks some stores offered cops in order not to be fined for, or to correct, petty infractions. Some cops got a lot more, Clarence knew, some up to eight hundred or a thousand dollars a month from pay-offs. Clarence had always known pay-offs existed in the force, and he wasn’t trying to reform anyone or to inform on anyone, but it became known that he didn’t take kickbacks and so the cops who did—the majority—tended to avoid Clarence. He wasn’t fraternity material. Clarence was consistently polite (no harm in that) but he was afraid to be chummy unless the other cop was chummy first. The cops in Riverside Drive precinct house were not a chummy lot. Clarence did not want to ask for another transfer. A man had to make his own opportunities. To stay in a rut was easy for everyone, Clarence thought, and the majority lived out their lives in a secure groove, not venturing anything. If he didn’t like the force in another year, Clarence intended to quit.

Because he mistrusted routine—ruts could never reveal an individual’s destiny—he had telephoned Edward Reynolds, who had seemed to him a decent man with an interesting problem which his precinct wasn’t going to pay much attention to. Such people as Edward Reynolds didn’t turn up every day. In fact the main reason for Clarence’s boredom was the similarity of the crimes and the criminals, the petty house robberies, the car thefts, the handbag snatches, the complaints of shoplifting, the muggers who were never caught—and neither were most of the shoplifters caught, even if they were seen by a dozen people running down the street with their loot.

When Clarence had taken the personnel job at the bank, he had leased an apartment on East 19th Street, a walk-up on the fourth floor. This one-room, kitchenette and bath he still had, and the rent was cheap, a hundred and thirty-seven dollars per month. Clarence kept most of his clothes here, but for the past three or four months he had been spending most nights with his girlfriend Marylyn Coomes, who had an apartment on Macdougal Street in the Village. Marylyn was twenty-two, had dropped out of NYU, and was a freelance secretary-typist, though she took a regular job often enough to augment her income considerably by claiming unemployment after she quit it. “Soak the Government, they’re loaded,” said Marylyn. She got away with murder. Marylyn plainly lied, and Clarence did not admire her ethics, and tried to put them out of his mind. Marylyn was very left, much more so than Clarence, and he considered himself left. Marylyn believed in destroying everything and starting everything afresh. Clarence thought that things could be improved, using the structures that already existed. This was the great difference between them. But far more important, Clarence was in love with Marylyn, and she had accepted him as her lover. Clarence was the only one, of that he was ninety-nine percent sure, and he often thought the one percent doubt was only his imagination. Clarence had had two affairs before, neither worth mentioning by comparison with the apricot-haired Marylyn. The other girls—one had been young, timid, acting as if she were ashamed of him, and the second had been a bit tough and casual, and Clarence had known he wasn’t the only man in her life, which had been an impossible situation for him. He put both those affairs down to experience. Marylyn was different. He had quarreled with Marylyn at least four times, and yet he had gone back to her after staying away perhaps five days. At least four times he had asked Marylyn to marry him, but she didn’t want to marry just yet. “Maybe never, who knows? Marriage is an outmoded institution, don’t you know that?” She was hopeless with money. If she had twenty-eight dollars from a typing job, she would blow it the same day she got it—on a groovy coat from a thrift shop, a potted plant, or a couple of books. She seemed to pay her rent all right. Her money was her money, and Clarence didn’t mind how she spent it, but once he had seen a couple of dollar bills actually
falling
out of her raincoat pocket as she went down the stairs in front of him. She didn’t like billfolds. Now he slept more often at Marylyn’s apartment than on East 19th Street. This was not kosher by Police Department rules, Clarence supposed, but on the rare occasions when he might be summoned by an emergency call, he had taken the trouble to sleep in his own apartment. The emergency calls had never come, but one never knew.

On the Sunday morning that Clarence was supposed to call on Edward Reynolds, he awakened in Marylyn’s bed on Macdougal Street. He had told her about his appointment with the man whose dog had been stolen. Clarence made a coffee and orange juice from a frozen tin, and brought it on a tray to Marylyn who was still in bed.

“Working on Sunday,” Marylyn said in a sleep-husky voice, and yawned with a lazy hand over her mouth. Her long reddish-blond hair was all over the pillow like a halo. She had a few freckles on her nose.

“Not working, darling. No one’s ordering me to see Mr. Reynolds.” As Clarence adjusted the tray so it wouldn’t tip on the bed, he caught a delicious hint of her perfume, of the warmth of the sheets that he had left a few minutes ago, and he would happily have plunged back into bed, and it even crossed his mind to do so, after ringing Mr. Reynolds and asking if he could come at noon instead of eleven. However, best to start off on the right foot. “I’ll be back before one, I’m sure.”

“You’re free this afternoon—and tonight?”

Clarence hesitated, briefly. “I’m on tonight at eight. New shift.” The shifts changed every three weeks. Clarence disliked the 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, because it kept him from seeing Marylyn in the evenings. It was the third time he had had such a shift. Clarence sipped his coffee. Marylyn had given a slight groan at his news. She wasn’t fully awake yet. Clarence glanced at his wrist-watch, then at the straight chair in front of Marylyn’s dressing-table, half expecting to see his trousers and jacket there, but he had hung them up last evening, and over the chair-back now was a black bra, and on the seat of the chair a public library book open and face down. Marylyn was not very neat. But it could be worse, Clarence thought, she could be sharing the apartment with another girl, and then things would have been hell.

Clarence took a shower in the small bathroom, shaved with the razor he kept there, and dressed in his ordinary clothes—a dark-blue suit, white shirt, a discreet tie, oxblood shoes of which he was especially fond and which he now wiped vigorously with a rag he found under the kitchen sink. Then Clarence combed his hair in Marylyn’s bathroom mirror. He had blue eyes that were a little pale. He kept his light-brown hair as unshort as possible, though the force was surprisingly lenient about that. His upper lip was almost as full as his lower—a pleasant, tolerant mouth, he liked to think. Seldom grim, anyway.

“Want me to buy something for lunch, or want to go out?” Clarence seated himself, gently, on the edge of the bed.

Marylyn had put the tray aside, on Clarence’s side of the bed, and had turned over face down. She liked to lie in bed a half-hour or so after her coffee—thinking, she said. “I told you I had that chicken,” Marylyn mumbled into the pillow. “Come back and come to bed and then I’ll cook it.”

His heart gave a leap and he smiled. He stretched out beside her, kissed the side of her head, but was careful not to stay long enough to wrinkle his shirt front. “Bye, darling.”

He arrived at the Reynoldses’ apartment house at one minute to eleven, and asked the doorman to ring up Mr. Edward Reynolds, who was expecting him—Clarence Duhamell. After an affirmative work from the doorman with the telephone, Clarence took an elevator to the eighth floor.

Mr. Reynolds had the door open for him, and looked surprised to see him in civilian clothes.

“Good morning. Clarence Duhamell,” Clarence said.

“Morning. Come in.”

Clarence walked into a large living-room where there was a piano, paintings on the wall, and lots of books. Clarence at first did not notice the woman sitting in a corner of the big sofa.

“My wife, Greta,” Mr. Reynolds said.

“How do you do?” said Clarence.

“How do you do?” She had a slight accent.

“Won’t you sit down? Anywhere you like,” Mr. Reynolds said casually. He was wearing a dark-blue sportshirt and unpressed flannel trousers.

Clarence sat down on a straight chair which had arms. “I’m not sure I can help with your problem,” Clarence began, “but I’d like to try. I heard you say at the precinct house that you had four letters.”

“Yes. I left them at your precinct house. And evidently the writer of the letters has our dog.”

“Just how was the dog stolen?”

Ed explained. “I didn’t hear any noise, any barking. It was pretty dark. But I can’t imagine how anyone got hold of the dog.”

“A French poodle,” Clarence said.

“Black. About so high.” Mr. Reynolds held out a hand less than two feet from the floor, palm down. “Her name’s Lisa. Not the kind to go off with strangers. She’s four years old.”

Clarence took this in carefully. Mr. Reynolds was pessimistic about him, Clarence sensed. Clarence felt that Mr. Reynolds was a rather sad man, and he wondered why. He had dark eyes, a firm mouth that had the capacity for smiling, for laughter, but the mouth was sad now. He would be a reasonable and patient man, Clarence thought. “And you paid the thousand dollars.” Clarence had overheard it in the Desk Officer’s room.

“Yes. Obviously a mistake. I got a letter asking for it, you see. The dog was to be returned an hour later after the money was collected—on York Avenue and Sixty-first Street—Would you like a cup of coffee?”

Mrs. Reynolds got up. “I’ll heat the coffee. It’s quite fresh, because we got up late,” she said to Clarence with a smile.

“Thank you,” said Clarence. “Have you got any enemies—someone you might suspect, Mr. Reynolds?”

Mr. Reynolds laughed. “Maybe enemies—non-friends—but not like this. This fellow’s cracked, I think. You saw the letters?”

“I’m sorry, I didn’t.” Clarence felt at once stupid and at a disadvantage. He should have asked to see the precinct’s photostats. Clarence had been shy about asking to see them, and now he reproached himself. “I can look at the photostats tonight. I go on duty at eight tonight. My shift just changed.”

Mr. Reynolds was silent.

“Is there any person in the neighborhood you’ve noticed,” Clarence asked, “watching you?”

“No. Sorry. I’ve tried to think.”

Mr. Reynolds had a large head with thick, straight black hair that had a few fine lines of gray in it. It was coarse, unruly hair that did not want to lie down, though there was a side parting in it. His nose was strong and straight, not handsome, though his dark eyes and his mouth were handsome, in Clarence’s opinion. He made Clarence think of a Roman general—maybe Mark Antony.