Dog in the Manger: An Eli Paxton Mystery

by Mike Resnick

  “What was their reaction?”

  “They were very polite. . . .”

  “Everyone in Cincinnati is.”

  “. . . but I got the distinct impression that hunting for show dogs is pretty low on their list of priorities.”

  “How about hunting for kennel girls?” I asked.

  “We’re just across the river from Kentucky and maybe twenty miles from Indiana,” he said. “The second she crosses the border, with or without Baroness, she’s out of their jurisdiction. I got the impression they figured she was in some other state before I got home Sunday night. So they’re officially looking for her and for Baroness—but, damn it, I want someone who’s doing nothing but looking for them.”

  “How did you happen to choose me?” I asked. I didn’t much care, but it would be nice to hear that a few satisfied customers had taken a little time off their divorce proceedings to go around town saying nice things about me.

  “I picked your name out of the phone book.”

  “It would probably be politic of me to accept that answer, Mr. Lantz,” I replied, “but if I did, you might start wondering just what you were getting for your money. I’m the only detective in the book who doesn’t have some kind of ad. You can barely find my name stuck in there between Norman Security and Prestige Investigations. And they misprinted my address.” Probably, I added mentally, because I’m always six weeks late paying my bill. “So who put you onto me?”

  He looked uncomfortable. “Bill Striker.”

  “You went to the Striker Agency first?”

  “I handle a schnauzer for him. He told me he was too busy to take on another client just now.”

  “And he recommended me?”

  “He suggested that you might need the work.”

  Which was true, of course, but it sounded just a bit denigrating, and I decided that the next time Mrs. Martinelli called me at three in the morning to tell me that devil-worshipping godless communists were slithering down her chimney with the intention of raping her for the greater glory of Mother Russia, I would tell her that Soviet rapists were the special province of the Striker Agency.

  “Did he tell you my fee, too?” I asked.

  Lantz shook his head.

  “Four hundred a day plus expenses, and a bonus if I succeed. I’ll bill you every Friday, but I need a retainer in advance.” I was ready to clear my throat and say that I had really meant two hundred, but he didn’t even flinch, so I opened up a desk drawer and whipped out a pair of contracts with the grace and finesse of Michael Jordan driving toward the hoop, back before he gave it all up to hit .220 in the minors. “This is my standard contract. Sign both copies, and keep one of them for your files.”

  He did so without even bothering to read them, and pulled out his checkbook.

  “Will a week’s retainer be sufficient?”

  I nodded, and tried not to look too eager as he made it out and handed it over.

  “I’ll bring Alice’s photo by tomorrow morning,” he said, getting to his feet.

  “I’ll want her home address, too,” I said.

  “She lives with my wife and me.”

  “Her previous address, then, as well as her parents’. And you’d better give me the dog owner’s address and phone number, too.”

  “Nettles? What do you need his address for?” demanded Lantz.

  I shrugged. “If nothing else, to let him know you’ve hired a detective to track down the girl and the dog. That ought to convince him of your sincerity.”

  And of course, if Nettles felt like hiring a detective who was on the scene, I was sure we could work something out.

  “I don’t like it,” said Lantz, but he scribbled Nettles’s address and number on the back of my copy of the contract, then got to his feet. “I’ll drop the photo off in the morning.”

  “I’ll be here,” I said.

  He looked like he wanted to say something more, paused awkwardly, and then left the office. Two minutes later I was on the phone to my check guaranteeing service, reading them the account number from Lantz’s branch bank. It was, as the saying goes, good as gold. Two thousand, minus the four percent guarantee fee: nineteen hundred and twenty beautiful dollars.

  It was so good, in fact, that I skipped the chili, had a slab of ribs, and bought myself a box seat at Riverfront. Jose Rijo was throwing nothing but smoke, and Barry Larkin was wearing a big red S on his chest under his uniform, and the Reds whipped the tar out of the Dodgers, eight-to-one.

  I was on top of the world when I got home. The Reds were back in first place by half a game, I had a client in hand and money in the bank, and I was even thinking of paying my phone bill in the next week or so. I tossed my jacket onto the frayed, battered sofa, walked into the kitchen, pulled a beer out of the icebox (I know “refrigerator” is the proper word, but I’m old-fashioned—and besides, this particular machine had been built when iceboxes were all the rage), and walked back to the living room.

  I turned on the TV, hoping to catch a replay of Barry Larkin’s two home runs, and the picture, after the usual thirty seconds of static and light show, adjusted itself just in time for me to see a brief news item concerning an armed robbery in Newport, right across the river. This was followed by the birth of a trio of white tigers at the Cincinnati Zoo, and then a twenty-second spot showing the cops dredging a station wagon out of the Little Miami River.

  I was feeling so happy and so relaxed that I almost missed the driver’s name.

  It was Alice Dent.

  I bellowed a curse that must have awakened half the building. Now instead of having nineteen hundred and twenty dollars in the bank, I was eighty dollars in the hole. Lantz would certainly demand his money back, and I’d already gotten the damned check guaranteed.

  I pulled out his business card and dialed his number. He picked it up on the sixth ring. I could barely hear him over the barking, but I told him what had happened and unhappily informed him that he could pick up his money the next morning at the office.

  I put the beer aside and went to work on a bottle of Scotch instead. I seem to remember watching the beginning of an old Bogart movie, but I don’t recall any of the details.

  I must have stumbled off to bed somewhere in the middle, or else I just drank so much that I didn’t pay much attention to the denouement. At any rate, the next thing I remember was this high-pitched whining near my right ear. I turned and cursed and told it to shut up, but it wouldn’t stop, and finally I realized that my phone was ringing. I fumbled for it, finally got hold of it, and spent another few seconds trying to remember where my mouth and ear were.

  “Hello?” I croaked.

  “Mr. Paxton? This is Hubert Lantz.”

  “Phone company or electric company?”

  “I’m your goddamned client!”

  I sat upright in the bed. “What time is it?”

  “Five in the morning.”

  “Well, you can damned well wait until nine o’clock for your money!”

  “I don’t want my money.”

  “Repeat that?” I said, trying to clear my head.

  “You’re still working for me.”

  “But they found the girl. She drove her car into the river.”

  “I don’t care about the girl. I want the dog.”

  “It wasn’t in the car?”

  “No.”

  “Then it’s probably running around loose in the woods. What you need is a game warden.”

  “What I need is a detective!” he snapped. “If you don’t want my money, just say the word and I’ll find someone who does.”

  I assured him that his money was very near and dear to my heart, and asked where he was. It turned out that he was at the Clermont County Morgue, some fifteen miles east of the city. I took a cold shower, put on a fresh if somewhat rumpled blue suit, got into my ’88 LeBaron, and drove off to meet him.

  The sun was just rising as I left the highway and began winding my way down the little country roads, and a golden mist see
med to hang over the fields in the damp morning air.

  So what if it was six in the morning? I had money in the bank, the Reds were in first place like the Big Red Machine of old, and I was working again. It looked like the beginning of a pretty good day.

  I was wrong.

  Good days were about to become as scarce as twenty-five-thousand-dollar Weimaraners.

  2.

  A typical front-page story in Cincinnati will concern a viaduct that’s being repaired, or perhaps the condition of Jose Rijo’s elbow. A proposed renovation of Fountain Square is good for six columns and a banner headline. It’s a pleasant, peaceful, civilized little city where nothing nasty ever seems to happen. First Amendment rights get suppressed from time to time—it’s the only city ever to bust an art museum for obscenity, and nudity in print, in film, or in person sends you straight to hell or to jail, whichever comes first, without passing Go—but most of the inhabitants, who would never dream of exercising such rights in the first place, think it’s a pretty small price to pay for the resultant tranquility.

  So I wasn’t surprised to find reporters from both papers and all three TV stations at the Clermont County Morgue. Journalists were just as starved for action as detectives, and the fact that Clermont County is a good fifteen miles to the east of Cincinnati wasn’t going to stop them from getting a story. Except that there wasn’t any story to get: Alice Dent had evidently lost control of her car, skidded off the road, and plunged right into the Little Miami, where she died either of multiple internal injuries or drowning, whichever came first. Open and shut.

  I had driven through the sleepy little town of Milford, which seemed to specialize in undertakers and eight-chimney homes built during the Revolution, and had stopped off for coffee and a donut. It was just after daybreak when I arrived, and I pulled the LeBaron up next to one of the mobile news units and got most of the details from a disgruntled cameraman who kept complaining about driving all the way out here for a routine drowning story. I felt much the same way.

  Lantz met me at the front door, hopping around like a schoolboy trying to control his bladder until the bell rang.

  “You’re late,” he complained.

  “Nobody is ever late at six thirty in the morning,” I answered dryly. “Where’s the body?”

  “This way,” he said, taking me by the arm with a stronger grip than I would have given him credit for, and leading me down a sterile white corridor. A number of police were milling about, and I got the impression from what I could overhear that the previous night had been a bad one for car wrecks. I introduced myself to the coroner and showed him my ID, and he ushered Lantz and me into a cool room that smelled of formaldehyde.

  There were five bodies stretched out on metal tables, each with an impersonal little tag hanging from the big toe of the left foot. Three of them were messed up pretty badly, but we walked by them and stopped at the fourth. Alice Dent had been a pretty girl once, a little on the chubby side, but not exceptionally hard on the eyes. Now her skin was shriveled like a prune, and she had a couple of nasty gashes where her head had cracked into the steering wheel or perhaps the front window.

  I looked long enough to please Lantz and the coroner, but there was nothing to see. She was just another girl who had died too young.

  “What about her effects?” I asked at last.

  “That’s why I called you,” said Lantz, leading the way to another room. I went through the ID bit again, and then one of the cops pulled out a cardboard box marked “Dent, Alice” and removed a single plastic bag containing her purse.

  “Check her wallet,” said Lantz.

  I did so. It held a wet driver’s license and three soggy ten dollar bills.

  “That’s what you wanted me to see?” I said.

  “That and one more thing.”

  He took me by the arm again and led me around to a parking lot at the back of the building. A very muddy Ford wagon was still hooked up to a tow truck. The driver was sitting in the cab, drinking coffee from a thermos bottle and reading the Enquirer’s sports section.

  “Excuse me,” said Lantz, approaching him, “but would you please repeat to this gentleman what you told me before?”

  The driver looked confused.

  “About the crate,” Lantz prompted him.

  “Oh, yeah,” said the driver. He turned to me. “I’ve been with this wagon ever since we fished it out of the river, and nobody’s touched nothing but the body.”

  “Thank you,” said Lantz. The driver nodded and went back to his paper. “Look in the back,” Lantz told me. “I want you to see something.”

  “It looks like a wire cage of some kind.”

  “It is,” he said. “It’s a show crate.”

  “Then she didn’t ship the dog and it’s running around loose, just like I said on the phone,” I told him.

  He shook his head vigorously. “You don’t understand.”

  “Enlighten me.”

  “This crate is what we drive dogs to shows in,” he said. “If we ever have an accident, the crate will protect them so that we’re not scraping their remains off the windows for the next few weeks. Also, since we travel with an average of twenty dogs, this keeps them from fighting with each other.”

  “Educational,” I commented. “But so what?”

  “The airlines won’t accept wire crates like this one. Dogs sometimes get airsick, and they don’t want them vomiting all over the other cargo. We ship them in solid fiberglass crates.”

  “All right,” I said. “So she missed the flight and was coming back home when she ran off the road.”

  “Not a chance,” he said. “The door to the crate is still shut. It’s been shut all the time. That’s what I wanted the driver to verify.”

  I opened the tailgate, reached in, and gave the crate door a pull. Nothing happened.

  “They can withstand something like eight hundred pounds of pressure,” said Lantz. “The dog hasn’t been born that can break out of one of these things.”

  “Then maybe she let it out for a run and it didn’t come back, and she closed the crate and went looking for it.” Even to me, that sounded a little far-fetched.

  He shook his head again. “Alice may not have been the most conscientious kennel worker who ever lived, but she knew better than to let a Westminster winner loose in strange surroundings. Especially one that was in season.”

  “Interesting,” I said. “What about her wallet?”

  “We always ship dogs collect—it’s standard operating procedure in the handling trade—but we were all out of fiberglass crates last weekend, and the airlines insist on front money for them. They won’t bill the recipient; the shipper has to pay. So I left a check for the price of a shipping crate with Baroness’s bill of health and trophies and all the other stuff that was going home with her.”

  “And it’s missing,” I said.

  “Right. I can understand the trophies being gone if Alice was robbed, but why a check made out to an airline company? Why leave thirty dollars in her wallet and steal a useless check?”

  “I haven’t the slightest idea,” I admitted. “That’s what you’re paying me to find out.” I paused and loosened my tie. “I suppose I’d better take a run out to the airport. What airline had you planned to ship the dog on?”

  “Federated Cargo Lines.”

  “Never heard of it.”

  “Neither did I, until a few days ago,” he admitted.

  “Then why not fly on one of the major airlines?” I asked him.

  “Direct flight,” he said.

  “It makes a difference?”

  “It sure as hell does,” he said. “They may shift luggage from one plane to another in half an hour, but they allow five hours to move an animal. The only other airline that even goes to Casa Grande is Delta, and they would have had to transfer Baroness twice, in Dallas and Tucson.” He paused. “Do you know how hot Dallas and Tucson get in June, Mr. Paxton? I wasn’t going to let Baroness sit on some runway or
dock for God knows how many hours in hundred-degree-plus heat. So I hunted up a company that had a direct flight.”

  “I can’t imagine a plane being able to pay its bills just by zipping back and forth between here and Casa Grande,” I remarked.

  He smiled. “There’s a difference between a direct flight and a nonstop flight. This plane was making a milk run of sorts. It put down four or five times before getting to Casa Grande. But they keep the cargo hold air-conditioned, and that was all that concerned me.”

  I told him I’d check in with him later, got into the LeBaron, and began driving toward the Greater Cincinnati Airport, which for reasons known only to God and certain select politicians is located some fifteen miles into the state of Kentucky. I circled the terminal twice without seeing any signs for Federated so I stopped to ask one of the skycaps, who informed me that they were strictly a freight company and pointed toward a little side road that led off to the freight area a mile or so away.

  I pulled up next to a large American dock, left the car, climbed up the stairs to a shipping office, and asked where I could find the Federated dock. The clerk, a nice, balding fellow with thick glasses, scratched his head and admitted that he’d never heard of them. Delta didn’t know anything about Federated either, but a nice middle-aged woman at TWA suggested that I look over in the “minor league” area where Metro and North Central and a number of others shared a terminal. I did so, and someone finally directed me to a dilapidated door with “Federated Cargo Lines” emblazoned on its unwashed surface.

  I walked in and found a bored-looking young man with too much hair and not enough complexion chewing gum and thumbing through a stack of onionskin paper.

  “Good morning,” I said, walking up to the customer counter.

  He shrugged, and I gathered that the only thing good about it was that it was a few minutes closer to quitting time than when he’d arrived.

  “I need a little information,” I continued.

  “Yeah?” he said without looking up.

  “Yes. It concerns a flight of yours from Cincinnati to Casa Grande, Arizona.”

  “What do you want to ship?” he said, finally meeting my eyes while scratching a pimple on his chin.