by Mike Resnick
I shrugged and pulled out my ID. “I need to know if you sold a fiberglass shipping crate to an Alice Dent last Sunday. You can check with the Cincinnati police if there’s any problem with releasing the information.”
“Why should there be a problem?” he said, matching my shrug. He went to a file cabinet, pulled out a folder, and brought it over to the counter.
“See for yourself, ” he said.
I looked. There was no receipt of any kind.
“Could it have been misplaced?”
“Who knows?” he said. “This place ain’t exactly Delta, you know.”
“It’s very important that I find out,” I said.
“Why not leave me your card and I’ll call you if I find it?” he suggested.
I did so.
“Mind if I take a look at the loading dock?” I asked.
“That’s off limits, even if the cops give me an okay,” he said. “I can look for you, but I guarantee there ain’t any dog crates out there.”
“I just wanted to talk to the men who were working Sunday and see if they remember it.”
“I can call them in,” he said, walking to a duties chart that was hanging on the wall over his desk. He looked at it for a long moment, then came back to the counter. “Sorry, but I can’t help you out after all.”
“Why not?”
“Because we only had two guys here Sunday, Billy Jamison and Steve Raith. Jamison got transferred two days ago.”
“And the other one?”
“Raith? He piled up his car Tuesday morning. Died before they could get him to a hospital.”
Somehow I wasn’t surprised.
“I almost hesitate to ask,” I said, “but who was working the desk Sunday?”
He walked back to the chart, then returned. “Guy named Chuck Bowman.”
“Is he still in town?”
“Don’t know. I never heard of him. Let me make a call.” He walked over to his desk, dialed a three-digit number, spoke in low tones for a moment, then hung up and walked back over to me.
“Sunday was his first day on the job. Evidently he didn’t like it much, because he called in Monday to say he wasn’t coming back. Funny about all these people not being around, isn’t it?”
“Hilarious,” I answered. “I don’t suppose you can get me this Bowman’s address or phone number?”
“I don’t have it here. You’ll have to talk to Personnel.”
“A hole-in-the-wall outfit like this has got a personnel office?”
“Hey, we’re not so small as you think. We’re in about fifty cities, Mac. We’re just new to Cincinnati, is all.”
The personnel office was back across the river in Cincinnati, and the woman in charge of it was probably more of a bitch than Baroness ever aspired to be. Finally I convinced her to call the police department—she wouldn’t take my word for the number, but had to look it up in the phone book—and ask for Simmons. He gave her the okay, and she glared at me for a long minute or two before pulling out Bowman’s application.
The address was on Harrison Avenue on the west side of the city, and it took me about thirty minutes to determine that it was a phony. It turned out to be a grocery store run by an elderly Jewish couple named Saperstein, who’d never heard of anyone called Bowman and wanted to introduce me to their granddaughter. I tried his phone number and found myself talking to the Cincinnati Ballet’s ticket office.
Just on a wild hunch, I stopped by Simmons’s office and had him run a check on Hubert Lantz. I don’t know what I expected—maybe that he was smuggling diamonds in the dog’s intestines and shipping her to some confederates who had a scoop and a microscope—but he checked out absolutely clean. The man hadn’t even had a traffic ticket since 1973.
I called Striker and, feeling like a fool, I asked him if there was anything that could make a dog worth big money, Seattle Slew or Mr. Prospector-type money. He was curious about why I wanted to know, but assured me that I was on the wrong track, that Baroness was worth fifteen thousand, tops, and now that he thought about it he’d price her closer to ten.
Finally, just before noon, I went back to my office to see how Rose was coming along. She was engaged in an animated conversation with one of her kids, the thrust of which had to do with how to administer Kaopectate to another of them, when she saw me and hung up the phone after saying that she’d be checking up on him again in half an hour or so.
“Any luck?” I asked her.
“Yes,” she said, rummaging through a batch of notes that were scattered all over the desk. Finally she found what she was looking for and handed it to me.
“Beverly Danzig,” I read. “This is someone who saw Alice Dent at the airport?”
“That’s what she says,” replied Rose, pretending to be reading some other scribblings on the desk. “Is it important?”
I love subtlety in a secretary.
I explained to her again that I wasn’t after an ax-murderer or a child molester, that I just wanted to find a missing show dog. She gave me a look that clearly stated that we were on the same team now and I shouldn’t keep holding back all the gory and sexually explicit details.
I took the number from her, sat on the edge of the desk, and began dialing.
“Hello?” said a feminine voice that was almost drowned out by the yapping of what must have been forty or fifty feisty little dogs.
“Beverly Danzig?”
“Yes.”
“This is Elias Paxton. I’m a private investigator working for Hubert Lantz.”
“You have my sympathy,” she said caustically. “I heard from your secretary a little while ago.”
“I understand you saw Alice Dent at the airport on Sunday?”
“Yes,” she replied. “I was picking up a bitch that was coming in for breeding over at American. You’re not interested in Westies, are you?”
“Westies?”
“West Highland White Terriers,” she explained patiently. A certain tone in her voice gave me the impression that anyone who didn’t know what a Westie was should be sitting on a tree limb, scratching himself and eating bananas.
“Show dogs are a little rich for my blood,” I said politely.
“Oh,” she said, the hard edge vanishing from her voice as she appraised this new revelation. “Well, you must come over some time anyway, Mr. Paxton. Westies make wonderful pets, and I happen to have a four-month-old male who’s just ready to go into a pet home.”
“I’ll consider it,” I said. “Can we get back to Alice Dent for a minute?”
“There’s nothing much to tell. Alice recognized my van and stopped by to say hello, and we went out for a cup of coffee.”
“Did she still have the Weimaraner with her?”
“No. She had just shipped it off to Arizona or New Mexico or some other dusty little state out there.”
“Did she say what airline she had used?”
“Some little one I’d never heard of, ” came the reply. “I remember her saying that she’d had a difficult time finding the office.”
“Would it have been Federated?” I asked as the volume of barking increased sharply.
“Excuse me a moment, please,” said Beverly Danzig. I heard her scream “Shut Up! ” in a most unladylike voice, and the barking subsided somewhat. “What was your question?”
“Was the airline Federated Cargo Lines?”
“I really couldn’t say. That might have been it.”
“And she definitely didn’t have the dog with her?”
“That’s correct. Is Hubert in a lot of trouble, I hope?”
“I take it you don’t like him,” I responded.
“He’s too much of a prima donna for me,” she said. “Oh, he’s fine with the Herding and Sporting breeds, and he’s pretty good at working up a coat on a collie or an Old English, but he’s such a smug, pompous, superior bastard, if you’ll pardon my saying it. And he treats his kennel help like dirt. Poor Alice had been with him for almost a year and I don’
t think she’d gotten into the ring more than three or four times. How was she ever going to learn to be a handler with Hubert always hogging the spotlight?”
“I see,” I said. “If it becomes necessary, would you swear to what you just told me in a court of law?”
“You mean about Hubert? Absolutely.”
“No. About seeing Alice at the airport.”
There was a long, thoughtful pause. “Does this have something to do with Alice’s death?”
“No,” I lied. There was another pause.
“Well, I don’t like to get involved, but what the hell, if it happened it happened. I’m certainly not going to lie under oath.”
“That’s what I’d hoped you’d say.”
“About your puppy,” she said, getting back to a subject of considerably more importance to her, “I’m sure we could arrange a payment plan.”
I got off the phone as quickly and gracefully as I could, told Rose that I didn’t have anything further for her to do, and slipped her five dollars as she was preparing to leave.
I called Lantz, told him I thought I was on to something without going into any details, and explained that I would have to make a trip to Arizona. I hemmed and hawed a little and finally he caught on and gave me the number of his American Express card.
Most people who haven’t been to Cincinnati just assume that it’s another Midwestern megalopolis like Chicago and Detroit and Cleveland, but it’s not. It’s either a very small city or a very large small town, with a population that has remained constant at four hundred thousand for most of the century. The airport tends to shut down if the sun disappears behind a cloud, and getting nonstop flights to anywhere except Chicago and Atlanta used to be impossible until Delta decided to make Cincinnati a secondary hub. With the help of a very pleasant young woman at Delta I arranged a flight that took me to Dallas, where I transferred to a Texas International plane to Lubbock, and then took an even smaller airline that got me into Tucson, where I rented a Pontiac from Avis (my sympathies have always been with Number Two), and drove about sixty-five miles north to Casa Grande. It would have been a lot less trouble to fly into Phoenix and drive south a bit, but Cincinnati only had two flights a day to Phoenix and both had already departed.
I picked up three hours crossing the time zones, so while it was two o’clock when I left Cincinnati it was only a quarter after five, local time, when I touched down in Tucson. I called Nettles, who didn’t seem quite so hot under the collar this time, told him who I was, and got directions to his place.
As I began driving up Interstate 10 to the Casa Grande turnoff, I kept wondering why anyone would want to live in a place like this. Midwesterners are used to an abundance of water and green things; Arizona was dry, and consisted of varying shades of tan. And it was hot. Whoever said that dry desert heat is preferable to the stuff we get in the Midwest never tried to drive across Southern Arizona in a Pontiac with a faulty air conditioning system. It kept spitting warm water out at me, and by the time I hit Casa Grande I decided to rent a motel room and take a quick shower before going on to Nettles’ place.
There was a little restaurant attached to the motel, but the food was too spicy and the coffee was too weak. Finally I gave up on it and began driving out into the countryside, following Nettles’s instructions, and within about twenty minutes I arrived at his place, a long, low, impressive-looking stucco house with matching outbuildings, which I guessed housed his dogs.
Nettles walked out the front door to greet me as I pulled up. He was a small man, about five feet seven, with wiry gray hair and a wiry frame to go along with it. I put his age at about sixty, but he could have been a lot younger; I think the Arizona sun does strange things to the skin.
When I got out of the car the first thing I became aware of was the heat. As bad as my air conditioner was working, it was better than standing out there in the open.
The second thing was the background noise; there must have been two dozen dogs barking and howling from the direction of the outbuildings.
“Elias Paxton?” he asked, extending his hand. He had a strong, firm grip.
“And you’re Maurice Nettles.”
He nodded. “Come inside and have something cool to drink, Mr. Paxton,” he said, leading me up to the door. “I want you to understand that I don’t have anything against you personally. I know you’re just doing what Lantz tells you to. But he stole my dog and I’m going to nail him for it.”
I followed him into a beautifully tiled foyer. I couldn’t tell if the walls were stucco or adobe, but they were muted and cool. We proceeded to a paneled family room filled with spartan furniture. One wall was covered by photos of Weimaraners, most of them standing next to placards stating “Best in Show” or “Best of Breed,” which I understood, or “Winner’s Dog” and “Best of Opposite Sex,” which I didn’t.
Two other walls supported literally hundreds of trophies. A fourth wall, all glass, looked out over a large swimming pool.
“What’s your pleasure?” said Nettles, walking over to a wet bar.
“I’ll have a beer,” I said. “Or if you don’t have that, just ice water will do.”
He chuckled, popped open a couple of Bud Lights, poured them into tall glasses emblazoned with kennel club emblems—I assumed they were trophies—and handed me one.
“Hubert must be getting desperate to pay for a plane trip,” remarked Nettles, sitting down across from me.
“Do you want me to protect Lantz’s interests, or shall I just lay my cards on the table?” I said.
“Straight talk will do just fine,” he replied.
“One ground rule,” I said. “Anything I say for the next couple of minutes is off the record.”
“Agreed,” he replied. “My wife is sleeping at the other end of the house. She loved that animal as if it were her own child, and she’s been under sedation since Monday. We don’t have any live-in servants, and the kennel staff is gone for the night; there’s no one else around to overhear us.”
“Okay,” I said, taking a long sip of my beer. “Somebody stole your dog from Lantz.”
“He did it himself, ” he said firmly.
I shook my head. “I can prove that she got on Federated Flight 308 last Sunday.
“Horseshit!”
“Do you have her insured, Mr. Nettles?” I asked gently.
“So now Lantz is saying I stole her from myself to claim the insurance?” He laughed bitterly. “Of course I don’t have her insured!”
“Why not?”
“Because insurance on a show dog is astronomical. I’d be paying thousands of dollars every year just on Baroness.”
“Lantz told me that he carries insurance,” I pointed out.
“Certainly. Showing dogs is his livelihood, and he only shows other people’s dogs. I’m a hobby breeder, Mr. Paxton; all breeders are, to some degree or another. We don’t make any money at it, and we don’t insure our dogs. Oh, we might take out flight insurance for one trip, but that’s the extent of it. It’s too hard to prove value, and by the time a dog has established a national reputation his life is more than half-over and he’s a lousy risk.”
“You have no objection to my checking it out?”
“None whatsoever,” he replied. “We’re not in this sport to make a profit. It can’t be done. We’re in it because we love our dogs. All my life I’ve been trying to get something like Baroness, and I’m not going to let Lantz steal her from me.”
“From what I’ve been able to determine, he wouldn’t have any use for her.”
“Ransom,” suggested Nettles, his face hard.
“I doubt it. Ten thousand dollars isn’t worth risking his career for.”
“Ten,” repeated Nettles, outraged. “She’s worth thirty if she’s worth a penny!”
“Ten, thirty, it’s still chickenfeed,” I said. “There’s something a lot bigger going on.”
“What do you mean?” he demanded.
“I mean that I know the dog
was put on the airplane, but the cargo manifest has been tampered with. I know that Alice Dent paid for a crate, but the airline doesn’t have any record of it. I know there were four people who could vouch for the fact that Baroness was loaded onto the plane: Alice, a clerk, and two dockworkers; two of them are dead, one has been transferred, and one is out-and-out missing.”
“You make it sound like a bad spy movie,” he said skeptically.
“I don’t mean to,” I said. “It’s just that someone has gone to an awful lot of trouble trying to make it look like Baroness never got on that plane—more trouble than the dog is worth, anyway. Can you think of any reason why?”
He lowered his head in thought for a moment. “No,” he said at last.
“Then unless you’ve got some reason for wanting to ruin Lantz, I don’t have any answers.”
“What are you talking about?”
“The dog isn’t worth all that much,” I said, “but if I can prove that you’ve got some long-standing grudge against Lantz . . .”
“He’s a pain in the ass,” said Nettles. “He’s spoiled, and self-important, and he nickels and dimes you to death, but he’s the best damned handler in the country, and I never hated him or wanted to see him ruined until five days ago.” He put his glass down on an end table and got to his feet. “Well, are you ready to search the premises?”
“I wouldn’t know what to look for, Mr. Nettles,” I said with a smile. “I’m supposed to call Lantz tonight and get the name of a friend of his from Phoenix who can make positive identification if Baroness is here.”
“Let me show you around anyway,” said Nettles. “At least you can make a head count so you’ll know if any dog is missing when your expert arrives.”
He slid open a glass door and led me around the pool to the outbuildings, which looked like long low miniatures of the house. Each had a number of guillotine doors leading to fenced-in runs that were covered by tinted fiberglass, and all were filled with lean gray Weimaraners.
“Don’t they get hot out here?” I asked, reaching a couple of fingers through the chain link fence to scratch one of the dogs behind an ear.
“Certainly,” answered Lantz. “I only let them out at night and in early morning. The rest of the time they stay indoors, where it’s air-conditioned. And even allowing them out only after the heat of the day is past, I frequently have to mist them.”