The Fourth Hand (15 page)

Otto stared into the open glove compartment. There was his cel phone—also there, in the far right corner, was his snub-nosed .38 revolver, a Smith & Wesson, which he kept ful y loaded with the barrel pointed in the general direction of the truck’s right front tire.

Otto must have propped himself up on his right elbow, or else he came nearly to a sitting position, before he heard the sound of the teenagers breaking into the back of his truck. They were just kids, but they were a little older than the neighborhood boys to whom Otto Clausen gave the beer coasters, stickers, and posters—and these teenagers were up to no good. One of them had positioned himself near the entrance to the sports bar; if a patron had emerged and made his (or her) way to the parking lot, the lookout could have warned the two boys breaking into the back of the truck.

Otto Clausen didn’t carry a loaded .38 in his glove compartment
because
he was a beer-truck driver and beer trucks were commonly broken into. Otto wouldn’t have dreamed of shooting anyone, not even in defense of beer.

But Otto was a gun guy, as many of the good people of Wisconsin are. He liked al kinds of guns. He was also a deer hunter and a duck hunter. He was even a bow hunter, in the bow season for deer, and although he’d never kil ed a deer with a bow and arrow, he had kil ed many deer with a rifle—most of them in the vicinity of the Clausens’ cottage.

Otto was a fisherman, too—he was an al -around outdoorsman. And while it was il egal for him to keep a loaded .38 in his glove compartment, not a single beertruck driver would have faulted him for this; in al probability, the brewery he worked for would have applauded his spirit, at least privately. Otto would have needed to take the gun from the glove compartment with his right hand—because he couldn’t have reached into the compartment, from behind the steering wheel, with his left—and, because he was left-handed, he almost certainly would have transferred the weapon from his right to his left hand before investigating the burglary-in-progress at the rear of his truck. Otto was stil very drunk, and the subfreezing coldness of the Smith & Wesson might have made the gun a little unfamiliar to his touch. (And he’d been startled out of a dream as disturbing as death itself—his wife having sex with disaster man, who’d been touching her with Otto’s left hand!) Whether he cocked the revolver with his right hand before attempting to transfer it to his left, or whether he’d cocked the weapon inadvertently when he removed it from the glove compartment, we’l never know.

The gun fired—we know that much—and the bul et entered Otto’s throat an inch under his chin. It fol owed an undeviating path, exiting the good man’s head at the crown of his skul , taking with it flecks of blood and bone and a briefly blinding bit of brain matter, the evidence of which would be found on the upholstered ceiling of the truck’s cab. The bul et itself also exited the roof. Otto was dead in an instant.

The gunshot scared the bejesus out of the young thieves at the back of the truck. A patron leaving the sports bar heard the gunshot and the plaintive appeals for mercy by the frightened teenagers, even the clang of the crowbar they dropped in the parking lot as they raced into the night. The police would soon find them, and they would confess everything—their entire life stories, up to the moment of that earsplitting gunshot. Upon their capture, they didn’t know where the shot had come from or that anyone had actual y been shot.

While the alarmed patron returned to the sports bar, and the bartender cal ed the police—reporting only that there’d been a gunshot, and someone had seen teenagers running away—the taxi driver arrived in the parking lot. He had no difficulty spotting the beer truck, but when he approached the cab, knocked on the driver’s-side window, and opened the door, there was Otto Clausen slumped against the steering wheel, the .38 in his lap.

Even before the police notified Mrs. Clausen, who was sound asleep when they cal ed, they already felt sure that Otto’s death wasn’t a suicide—at least it wasn’t what the cops cal ed a “planned suicide.” Clearly, to the police, the beer-truck driver hadn’t meant to kil himself.

“He wasn’t that kind of guy,” the bartender said.

Granted, the bartender had no idea that Otto Clausen had been trying to get his wife pregnant for more than a decade; the bartender didn’t know diddly-squat about Otto’s wife wanting Otto to bequeath his left hand to Patrick Wal ingford, the lion guy, either. The bartender only knew that Otto Clausen would never have kil ed himself because the Packers lost the Super Bowl.

It’s anybody’s guess how Mrs. Clausen was composed enough to make the cal to Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates that same Super Bowl Sunday night. The answering service reported her cal to Dr. Zajac, who happened to be at home.

Zajac was a Broncos fan. Just to clarify that: Dr. Zajac was a New England Patriots fan, God help him, but he’d been rooting for the Broncos in the Super Bowl because Denver was in the same conference as New England. In fact, at the time of the phone cal from his answering service, Zajac had been trying to explain the tortured logic of why he’d wanted the Broncos to win to his six-year-old son. In Rudy’s opinion, if the Patriots weren’t in the Super Bowl, and they weren’t, what did it matter who won?

They’d had a reasonably healthy snack during the game—

chil ed celery stalks and carrot sticks, dipped in peanut butter. Irma had suggested to Dr. Zajac that he try the

“peanut-butter trick,” as she cal ed it, to get Rudy to eat more raw vegetables. Zajac was making a mental note to thank Irma for her suggestion when the phone rang.

The phone startled Medea, who was in the kitchen. The dog had just eaten a rol of duct tape. She was not yet feeling sick, but she was feeling guilty, and the phone cal must have convinced her that she’d been caught in the act of eating the duct tape, although Rudy and his father wouldn’t know she’d eaten it until she threw it up on Rudy’s bed after everyone had gone to sleep.

The duct tape had been left behind by the man who’d come to instal the new DogWatch system, an underground electric barrier designed to keep Medea in her yard. The invisible electric fence meant that Zajac (or Rudy or Irma) didn’t have to be outside with the dog. But
because
no one had been outside with her, Medea had found and eaten the duct tape.

Medea now wore a new col ar with two metal prods turned inward against her throat. (There was a battery in the col ar.) If the dog strayed across the invisible electric barrier in her yard, these prods would zap her a good one. But before Medea could get shocked, she would be warned; when she got too close to the unseen fence, her col ar made a sound.

“What does it sound like?” Rudy had asked.

“We can’t hear it,” Dr. Zajac explained. “Only dogs can.”

“What does the zap feel like?”

“Oh, nothing much—it doesn’t real y hurt Medea,” the hand surgeon lied.

“Would it hurt
me,
if I put the col ar around my neck and walked out of the yard?”

“Don’t you
ever
do that, Rudy! Do you understand?” Dr.

Zajac asked a little too aggressively, as was his fashion.

“So it hurts,” the boy said.

“It doesn’t hurt
Medea,
” the doctor insisted.

“Have you tried it around
your
neck?”

“Rudy, the col ar isn’t for people—it’s for dogs!”

Then their conversation turned to the Super Bowl, and why Zajac had wanted Denver to win.

When the phone rang, Medea scurried under the kitchen table, but the message from Dr. Zajac’s answering service

—“Mrs. Clausen cal ed from Wisconsin”—caused Zajac to forget al about the stupid dog. The eager surgeon cal ed the new widow back immediately. Mrs. Clausen wasn’t yet sure of the condition of the donor hand, but Dr. Zajac was nonetheless impressed by her composure.

Mrs. Clausen had been a little less composed in her dealings with the Green Bay police and the examining physician. While she seemed to grasp the particulars of her husband’s “presumably accidental death by gunshot,” there was almost immediately the expression of a new doubt upon her tear-streaked face.

“He’s real y dead?” she asked. Her strangely futuristic look was nothing the police or the examining physician had ever seen before. Upon establishing that her husband was

“real y dead,” Mrs. Clausen paused only briefly before inquiring,

“But how is Otto’s
hand
? The left one.”

The Strings Attached

I
N BOTH THE
Green Bay Press-Gazette
and
The Green
Bay

News-Chronicle,
Otto Clausen’s postgame, self-inflicted shooting was relegated to the trivial end of Super Bowl coverage. One Wisconsin sportscaster was gauche enough to say,

“Hey, there are a lot of Packer fans who probably considered shooting themselves after Sunday’s Super Bowl, but Otto Clausen of Green Bay actual y pul ed the trigger.” Yet even the most tactless, insensitive reporting of Otto’s death did not seriously label it a suicide.

When Patrick Wal ingford first heard about Otto Clausen—

he saw the minute-anda-half story on his very own international channel in his hotel room in Mexico City—he vaguely wondered why that dick Dick hadn’t sent him to interview the widow. It was the kind of story he was usual y assigned.

But the al -news network had sent Stubby Farrel , their old sports hack, who’d been at the Super Bowl in San Diego, to cover the event. Stubby had been in Green Bay many times before, and Patrick Wal ingford had never even watched a Super Bowl on TV.

When Wal ingford saw the news that Monday morning, he was already rushing to leave his hotel to catch his flight to New York. He scarcely noticed that the beertruck driver had a widow. “Mrs. Clausen couldn’t be reached for comment,”

the ancient sports hack reported.

Dick would have made
me
reach her, Wal ingford thought, as he bolted his coffee; yet his mind registered the ten-second image of the beer truck in the near-empty parking lot, the light snow covering the abandoned vehicle like a gauzy shroud.

“Where the party ended, for this Packer fan,” Stubby intoned. Cheesy, Patrick Wal ingford thought. (No pun intended—he as yet had no idea what a cheesehead was.) Patrick was almost out the door when the phone rang in his hotel room; he very nearly let it ring, worried as he was about catching his plane. It was Dr. Zajac, al the way from Massachusetts. “Mr. Wal ingford, this is your lucky day,” the hand surgeon began.

As he awaited his subsequent flight to Boston, Wal ingford watched himself on the twenty-four-hour news; he saw what remained of the story he’d been sent to Mexico City to cover. On Super Bowl Sunday, not everyone in Mexico had been watching the Super Bowl.

The family and friends of renowned sword-swal ower José Guerrero were gathered at Mary of Magdala Hospital to pray for his recovery; during a performance at a tourist hotel in Acapulco, Guerrero had tripped and fal en onstage, lancing his liver. They’d risked flying him from Acapulco to Mexico City, where he was now in the hands of a specialist

—liver stab wounds bleed very slowly. More than a hundred friends and family members had assembled at the tiny private hospital, which was surrounded by hundreds more wel -wishers. Wal ingford felt as if he’d interviewed them al .

But now, about to leave for Boston to meet his new left hand, Patrick was glad that his three-minute report had been edited to a minute and a half. He was impatient to see the rerun of Stubby Farrel ’s story; he would pay closer attention this time.

Dr. Zajac had told him that Otto Clausen was left-handed, but what did that mean, exactly? Wal ingford was right-handed. Until the lion, he’d always held the microphone in his left hand so that he would be free to shake hands with his right. Now that he had only one hand in which to hold the microphone, Wal ingford had largely dispensed with shaking hands.

What would it be like to be right-handed and then get a left-handed man’s left hand? Hadn’t the left-handedness been a function of Clausen’s brain? Surely the predetermination to left-handedness was not in the hand. Patrick kept thinking of a hundred such questions he wanted to ask Dr.

Zajac.

On the telephone, al the doctor had said was that the medical authorities in Wisconsin had acted quickly enough to preserve the hand because of the “prompt consideration of Mrs. Clausen.” Dr. Zajac had been mumbling. Normal y he didn’t mumble, but the doctor had been up most of the night, administering to the vomiting dog, and then—with Rudy’s overzealous assistance—he had attempted to analyze the peculiar-looking substance (in her vomit) that had made Medea sick. Rudy’s opinion was that the partial y digested duct tape looked like the remains of a seagul . If so, Zajac thought to himself, the bird had been long dead and sticky when the dog ate it. But the analytical y minded father and son wouldn’t real y get to the bottom of what Medea had eaten until the DogWatch man cal ed on Monday morning to inquire how the invisible barrier was working, and to apologize for leaving behind his rol of duct tape.

“You were my last job on Friday,” the DogWatch man said, as if he were a detective. “I must have left my duct tape at your place. I don’t suppose you’ve seen it around.”

“In a manner of speaking, yes—we have,” was al Dr. Zajac could manage to say. The doctor was stil recovering from the sight of Irma, fresh from her morning shower. The girl had been naked and toweling dry her hair in the kitchen.