Fala Factor (24 page)

I put my hand on a nearby chair to steady myself.

“By noon tomorrow, I will have died of wounds,” I continued, not wanting to end our pleasant repartee. “Maybe he has time to give me a Vitalis sixty-second workout.”

“Mocking the war is not in good taste,” she said. “You will just have to—”

“What is all the noise about?” said Hodgdon, sticking his head out of his office door. His sleeves were rolled up and he held something that looked like a roll of tape in his hand. He was gray, almost sixty-six, and hard as a tree stump. He was also the man I had never beaten at handball. He spotted me and shook his head. Everyone seemed to be shaking their heads at me this week, a pitiful specimen who should have been pickled and put on exhibition with a little sign underneath saying, “Here but for the grace of God, go you.”

“Come in, come in,” he said, holding the door open to his office. Then to his secretary-receptionist, “And you go home, Myra.”

“Office hours are over,” she said, giving me a dirty look as I eased my way across the room and into his office.

“Mr. Peters is not a patient,” he said, making way for me. “He is a curio, a specimen, a phenomenon always worth another look.”

With that he closed the door and helped me to his examining table.

“The back,” he said.

“Ribs too,” I added.

He helped me get my shirt off, touched the back, and felt the ribs. None of it made me grin.

“Nothing's broken this time,” he said. “Now I'm going to tape you up and give you something for the pain.”

“I've got something good,” I said.

“What I give you will be less likely to destroy your organs,” he said, selecting the proper tape. “Then, when I finish taping, I'm going to tell you to go home, get in bed, do nothing for three or four days, and come back to see me. Knowing you, you will neither go to bed nor come back to see me unless the pain becomes unbearable or you have some other task you feel has to be performed.”

“I'm trying to save the president's dog,” I explained as he plastered a thick slab of tape around my chest.

“Noble,” he muttered, working away and clearly not believing me. “If you'd take better care of yourself, we'd be playing more handball. Someday my bones are not going to be able to support my musculature. I'll start the process of rapid aging, brittleness. Might even have further eye trouble. Then you might stand a chance of winning a game if you're still capble of normal speech and movement. It is, by the way, difficult though not impossible to apply this tape around a pistol.”

I apologized and took off the gun, and he went on working.

“There,” he said, standing back to examine me and rolling up his sleeves.

“Thanks,” I said, putting my shirt back on. The soreness was there, but it wasn't bad and I knew I could move. Hodgdon went to his glass cabinet, opened it, found a bottle and took some pills from it and put them into a smaller bottle, which he handed to me.

“Take one now and then every four hours,” he said. “Since you are not going to go home, but will be out looking for stray dogs, how'd you like to share dinner with me? I've got a leftover meatloaf and a bottle of Burgundy.”

“Any beer?” I said.

“There is beer,” he said.

We ate a meatloaf dinner with a sliced tomato and a lot of Italian bread washed down by a couple of cans of Falstaff. I found out for the first time that Hodgdon had a son who was a doctor back in Indianapolis and a daughter who had married an insurance salesman in Chicago. I already knew that Hodgdon's wife had died almost ten years earlier.

“Toby,” he said after dinner, “no joke this time. Your body can't hold up under all the abuse you give it.”

“Doc,” I said, “I've tried to stop, but there's a not too bright rabbit inside me who won't stay still.”

“And he can wind up getting you crippled, or worse; let him out,” said Hodgdon, starting to pile the nonmatching china dishes in the sink. The kitchen, like the house and the man, was getting old.

“Time to go,” I said. “Thanks for dinner. Have Edna Mae Oliver send me the bill.”

The sun was down by the time I left Doc Hodgdon's house. We had talked longer than I had planned, but the tape, food, pills, and beer had taken away the pain, at least enough for me to get back in the Ford and head for Olson's clinic.

I got there three hours early, parked two blocks away, and went in through the same window I'd gone in before. Then I made a phone call and settled down, not in the animal room, but in Olson's operating room, the one where Anne Lyle and I had operated two days earlier.

After checking my .38, I sat down on the single straight-back chair, listened to the animals sending out bleats, barks, shrieks, and murmurs of fear, and wondered who had been taking care of them.

W
hen I turned off the water after taking the second pill Doc Hodgdon had given me, I heard the metal sound. It was, I was sure, a key in a door. After some fumbling, the door, probably the front door of the clinic, opened. I was tempted to walk to the window to look at my watch to see what time it was, but my watch wouldn't really be of much help. There was a clock on Olson's desk. I turned it to the window to catch the faint night light of a clouded moon.

Footsteps were coming down the hall, heavy and slow. I gave the clock a pull to bring it closer to the window and it popped out of the wall socket. The cord scurried across the floor like an electric snake. It was ten o'clock. The dognapper had decided to come an hour early, which was probably why he or she was not particularly concerned about making noise. I, on the other hand, was definitely concerned. I stood holding the stopped clock, and the footsteps stopped too.

The animals had begun rumbling when the dognapper opened the door, and that was probably enough to cover the sound of the dangling cord. Maybe he or she had stopped for something else. Then the footsteps began again and went past the door of the room I was standing in.

The early arrival created a problem. I could wait till the right time and walk in. The surprise might then be on me. The logical thing for him to do, if I had the money, would like to blow my head off, blow the dog's head off, take the money and walk. Logic, as I have learned through painful experience, does not always govern our actions. I've known people the size of gorillas who took a slap in the face and let it pass because the slapper looked like their second-grade arithmetic teacher. I did, however, have two things that might overcome logic. First, I had the possibility of surprise if I moved soon. Second, I had a .38 automatic.

I gave the visitor about three or four minutes to get settled in the animal room and for the disturbed menagerie to get their emotions down to a rolling, frightened, and angry purr. Then I moved to the door. The tension in my chest was making it hard to breathe. It was about one-third fear, one-third excitement, and one-third pain from Hodgdon's tape. The door didn't creak much when I opened it very, very slowly.

There was no light in the hall except for that of the dim moon through the partially opened door through which I stepped. I closed the door so that I wouldn't make a tempting target and then began to inch my way along the wall toward the rear of the clinic. I tried not to, but couldn't help imagining my outstretched fingers touching flesh. That didn't stop me from moving. If anything, the fear of contact made me move more quickly.

When I reached the end of the hallway, I put out a hand, seeking the door. It was closed. Since I wanted some shot at surprise, I took my time finding the knob and then took as long to position myself in front of the door for a quick turn of the knob, flick of the switch, and confrontation with the surprised dognapper. The light switch, if I remembered correctly, was just to the left of the door. I dried my hands on my jacket, took out my .38, grabbed the knob, took a breath, and turned.

There was good news and bad news. The good news was that I got the door open in a single turn and push, and that my hand hit the switch, filling the room with light. My gun was out, level, and pointed into the room. The bad news was that the dognapper wasn't standing in the middle of the room or in a far corner. He was to my right and by the time I saw him, the animals were going nuts and I had cracked my hand against the nearest cage. My gun fell to the floor and I yelled something. My yell, the lights, and the clatter of the gun were enough to throw him off. He let out a return yell and almost dropped the dog in his arm.

It was a dead heat. He came out with his gun at the same moment I recovered mine from the floor. The trouble was, I was sitting there looking up with the one-eared shepherd doing his damndest to get at me through the bars of his cage. From the corner of my eye I could see that someone had neatly bandaged the dog's ear stump.

“Don't shoot,” I shouted, leveling my gun at Bass.

“Don't you shoot,” he said, trying to get a firmer grip on the black furry bundle under his left arm. Somewhere in the corner a dog began to howl like a coyote in a Republic Western.

“I'm not shooting,” I assured him, getting to my knees.

“I'm not shooting,” Bass said, taking a step forward.

“And you're not coming any closer, either,” I said.

“I'm not coming any closer,” he said. “You got the money?”

“How do I know that's the right dog?” I said, avoiding the question.

“It's the right dog,” Bass said, glancing down at the dog in case someone had switched dogs on him in the last few seconds. “You can believe me.”

“Thanks,” I said, getting up without touching any of the nearby cages, which might have given me stability but resulted in the loss of a finger or three.

“The money,” he repeated.

“The dog first,” I said.

The howling dog in the corner paused. The shepherd showed his teeth and an orange cat in a cage behind Bass circled and circled and circled. The little black dog under Bass's arm looked at me with his mouth open.

“He said I had to see the money first,” Bass said, holding the gun up about level with my neck.

“He?” I said.

“The money,” he shouted. “I'm getting mad here.”

“Bass,” I said. “Someone has set you up. You're the one who can be identified, the one who has the dog. He's likely to deflate your head and walk away free with the bundle.”

“He wouldn't do that,” Bass said, tossing his head to clear the blond strands of hair dangling across his eyes. “Look, I don't want to hold this dog any more. I'm afraid he'll want to poopie or something.”

“Poopie?” I said. “Figures. You'd be holding the dog and the crap.”

“The money,” he said again, shifting the dog higher under his arm.

“I didn't bring it,” I said, holding my .38 level and hoping he didn't start shooting. I should have leveled the gun at his head and fired. It was a risk. I was about ten feet from him and might have hit the dog or the wall or just about anything. The pistol is not my best weapon. I'm not sure what my best weapon is, probably the ability to tire out an arm-weary opponent. “I've got it out in my car and I don't tell you where my car is until I have the dog. You might just take the money and shoot me.”

“I wouldn't do that,” Bass said, a tiny trickle of sweat dribbling down his smooth forehead. “I want to get you in my hands. You know the Australian clutch? I tore Butch Feifer s right arm almost off with it in '37. That's what I want to do to you. You made me look dumb with that guy in the warehouse.”

“That was Buster Keaton, and he made you look like a cross-eyed nun. We can't stand here all night. One of us will get cramps and start shooting and you can't keep holding that dog.”

“I could hold the dog all night,” he said with pride. “I could hold the dog and the gun and never blink my eyes, not once. I could stand here till you get tired and blink, and then I could get you.”

“Well, pal,” I said. “I'd like to keep this conversation going for a while. I really would. It's not often I get a chance to talk to someone like you or Clifton Fadiman, but that's not going to get things taken care of. Can I make a suggestion?”

“No,” he said. I thought I could sense or see his finger tightening on the trigger.

“You win,” I said. “I'll tell you where the car is. We can go together, down the street, guns on each other, dog under your arm, and make some excuse to the crowds who gather on Sherman Way to watch us.”

“I'm not good at excuses,” Bass said reasonably “I'm not good at anything but hurting”

“And that's something to be proud of,” I said, watching more beads of sweat come down his brow. “And stop inching forward or I'll shoot a hole through your shoes.”

He stopped but I could see that his attention span was not long, and rather than struggle to keep up the conversation, he would probably start shooting even if it meant the death of both of us.