Dog in the Manger: An Eli Paxton Mystery

by Mike Resnick

  “I don’t know,” he replied.

  “I wonder what the hell did happen between Artesia and here?” I mused.

  “Well, we’re pretty close to the Mexican border.”

  “Drugs? Why divert for four hours when the flight terminates in Monterrey anyway? It won’t wash.”

  “I never said I had the solution,” he replied. “But I think I’ve at least given you your next lead.”

  “The other pilot,” I agreed. “If one of them had to be killed, it stands to reason that the other one had to be in on it—whatever it is.” I polished off my beer. “Can you get me some information on him by tomorrow morning? The clerk didn’t even know his name.”

  “No problem,” said Pratt. “Where will you be in the meantime—back at Nettles’s place or at your motel?”

  “Neither. Someone out here wants to kill me, and for all I know they’ve got both places staked out. I’ll keep the room for another day—if they’re watching the motel, that may tie them down—but Lantz’s friend invited me up to Phoenix for dinner, and I’ll probably get a hotel room up there for the night.”

  “Okay,” he said. “But let me get you another car before you leave, just to be on the safe side. I’ll fix things up with Avis about the window.”

  Pratt was as good as his word, and half an hour later I got into a ’95 Cougar and headed north on Interstate 10 to Phoenix. I knew I had arrived when I ran into some heavy traffic and more smog than I had ever seen east of Los Angeles. I checked into a motel on the outskirts of town, gave my name as J. Bench, took a quick shower, and decided to grab a nap. I placed a wake-up call for six, and when it came I unpacked a pair of swimming trunks and went out to take a dip in the pool. When I got there I discovered that it was only four feet deep—evidently the management didn’t want anyone drowning on the premises—so I settled for another shower, and decided that I could easily turn into a three-shower-a-day man if I had to live in Arizona. Once upon a time Phoenix may have possessed the kind of dry desert air that was supposed to make a one-hundred-degree day feel more comfortable than a muggy eighty-five-degree day in the Midwest, but that was before three-quarters of a million air conditioners started pushing the humidity up around the 30 percent mark.

  I called Joan and told her that I would be over in half an hour. I didn’t think anyone had followed the Cougar from Casa Grande, but I had no desire to lead any would-be killers to Joan’s place in case I was mistaken, so I called a cab and told the driver to take me to her address by a roundabout way. By the time we finally arrived I was sure I wasn’t being tailed.

  Joan Linwood lived in a small townhouse on the east side of the city. It was stucco, like more than half the structures in the state seemed to be, and possessed a tiny front lawn of closely cropped semi-green grass. The second I pushed the buzzer a large dog began barking on the other side of the door. Joan opened the door a minute later, followed by one of the fattest animals of any species I had ever seen.

  “Do be quiet, Bingo!” she said, and the old Weimaraner instantly stopped making a racket. I saw that his pudgy, stubby little tail was wagging and felt a little relieved.

  “I take it you don’t spend long hours worrying about having your house broken into,” I said with a smile.

  “His bark is worse than his bite,” she replied, leading me through a small foyer into a redwood-paneled living room filled to overflowing with trophies, ribbons, and photographs of Weimaraners. It also had a huge stone fireplace which I couldn’t imagine she ever used in this climate, although the inner surfaces were black and charred. “As a matter of fact,” she continued, “he only had five teeth the last time I looked.”

  Bingo came up to me, sniffed furiously to see if I was carrying any food—I got the impression that anything smaller than Bingo and mildly organic would qualify—and finally went to a corner and laid down.

  “Can I get you a drink, Eli? “ she asked me.

  “Sounds good to me.”

  “Will a Margarita be all right?”

  “As long as it’s cold and wet.”

  She went off to the kitchen and returned with a pitcher of Margaritas while I looked around. There were three chairs and a naugahyde couch, none of them cheap but all showing signs of wear and tear, a condition I decided must be endemic to dog owners. There was an upright piano next to the fireplace, but I couldn’t see any music lying around so I assumed it was for show, or perhaps a relic left by her former husband.

  Joan poured me a tall drink and brought it over. I downed half of it in a single swallow.

  “I see you’re having a little trouble adjusting to our weather,” she said with a smile.

  “No,” I corrected her; “I’m having a lot of trouble adjusting to your weather.”

  “It grows on you. I moved here from Rhode Island, and the first month or two I thought I’d die of heat stroke. But after awhile you adjust to it. One of the more interesting sights you’ll see out here are the scores of little old ladies huddled up in sweaters on ninety-degree days.”

  “A sight I think I can live without,” I said, sitting down on the couch. She joined me and set her drink down on a Spanish-tiled coffee table.

  “I noticed all your trophies and ribbons,” I said, gesturing around the room. “You must have been very successful.”

  “Oh, I could usually give Maury Nettles a run for his money—until he got Baroness, anyway.”

  “Do you miss it much?”

  “I think I miss the puppies most of all,” she replied. “They took an enormous amount of work, and it broke my heart to part with them, but nothing in dogs ever gave me greater pleasure than playing with my pups.” She paused. “Nothing out of dogs, either. That’s why my husband left me.”

  “Were you married long?” I asked.

  “Nine years. It wasn’t his fault. I didn’t even own a pet when I met him. I just kind of fell into it. How about you, Eli—are you married?”

  “Not any longer.”

  “Do you have any children?”

  I shook my head. “We were only together a couple of years. She took a long hard look at the world and decided that she could do better than a cop. Given my current circumstances, I’d have to say she made the right decision.”

  “You seem reasonably successful to me. After all, here you are in the Golden West, working on a case.”

  “I’m a forty-three-year-old man who’s two thousand miles from home chasing after someone else’s dog,” I said. “It looks a lot less romantic from my point of view.”

  “I guess it’s all a matter of perspective. Are you getting hungry?”

  “I haven’t eaten all day,” I said, rising and following her to the dining room. Of course, I’d had half a dozen beers with Mike Pratt, but that wasn’t exactly the same thing.

  The dining room was modestly furnished, with a little round table and a phony chandelier hanging down over it. The seats and backs of the chairs were in good condition, but most of the legs had been gnawed on, probably by long-since-departed puppies, though I wouldn’t have put it past Bingo to grab a little imitation walnut appetizer when no one was looking.

  Instead of salad we began with fruit, which Joan told me was a Phoenix standard during the summer months. My body seemed to unshrivel as I downed the watermelon and orange slices, and I was feeling human again when she brought out the steaks.

  “Tell me, Eli,” she asked as I was deciding whether to impress her with my couth or to cover my plate with ketchup, “how does one become a detective?”

  I opted for the ketchup. “In my case it was easy,” I said. “I got kicked off the Chicago Police Force a few years back, and decided that I was too old to retrain.”

  “Have you caught any murderers?”

  I couldn’t tell if she was pulling my leg, so I decided to play it straight. “No. Humphrey Bogart to the contrary, being a private eye isn’t all that exciting or romantic. Ninety percent of my work is divorces and runaway kids.”

  “And the rest?�
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  “Mostly blackmail.”

  “That’s curious.”

  “Not really. If the cops nail a blackmailer he’s likely to go public just for spite. Private detectives sometimes have ways of preserving their clients’ reputations.”

  “That sounds positively sinister.”

  I shook my head. “It’s mostly a matter of knowing how and when to bluff. Most of our work is out-and-out drudgery, like following a woman through ten days of shopping and club meetings in the hope that she’ll meet some guy who’s probably just a figment of her husband’s imagination. If you don’t catch her at it you feel useless, and if you do you feel rotten.”

  “What did you do on the police force?”

  “Oh, a little of everything.”

  “Is that when your wife left you—when things got bad for you on the force?” she asked.

  “No. She left me before things even got good.”

  “Did you have much trouble adjusting?”

  “A little. And you?”

  “A lot. I’m thirty-four years old, and I just can’t play coy dating games any more.”

  I got the message, and she knew I got it. That problem solved, we went on to speaking about other things. She told me stories about the dog game, which still was pretty much of a mystery to me since I couldn’t understand why so many thousands of people would devote their lives to a sport where they couldn’t possibly make money. Then I told her about a couple of dope rings I had cracked in Chicago, adding only a handful of heroic embellishments.

  When dinner was over I helped her wash the dishes and walk the dog. Then, just for the record, she mentioned the bullet hole in my Avis car and suggested that it might be safer for me to spend the night in her townhouse, and just for the record I agreed that it probably would be. And then, with a minimum of wild passion and a maximum of warmth and friendship, we went off to bed like an old married couple. It had been a long time for both of us, but we managed to pull it off like a pair of old pros, and for a few very pleasant minutes I forgot that I’m twenty pounds overweight, none too pretty to look at, and starting to lose my hair.

  We talked for another hour or so, and I was just thinking of doing it again when the phone on the nightstand started ringing. Joan picked it up, listened for a moment, and then handed it over.

  “It’s for you,” she said.

  “Nobody knows I’m here.”

  “The police do.”

  I took the receiver.

  “Eli, this is Mike Pratt.”

  “How the hell did you find me?”

  “I’m a detective, remember?” he said. “You told me you were going to have dinner with Lantz’s friend, so I got her number from Nettles and took the chance that you might still be there.”

  “What’s the matter?”

  “I want you to call the Phoenix police and get a little protection.”

  “What happened?”

  “You stayed in Room 153 of the Lone Star Motor Inn in Casa Grande last night, didn’t you?”

  “Something like that.”

  “I checked: it was 153.”

  “What of it?”

  “They must have thought you were coming back. They hit it with a time-delay plastic explosive. There’s nothing left but the toilet bowl.”

  “Was anyone hurt?”

  “No. But it means you were right, that they’ve been keeping an eye on you. I see no reason not to think they’re watching you right now.”

  “I doubt it,” I said. “I was pretty careful.”

  “They’ve almost killed you twice. Be even more careful and call the Phoenix police.”

  “All right,” I lied. “I’ll check in with you tomorrow morning.”

  I hung up the phone.

  “Someone tried to kill you again,” said Joan. “There’s more to this case than just finding Baroness, isn’t there?”

  “I won’t lie to you. There’s a hell of a lot more. Baroness is just the tip of the iceberg.”

  “Just how much danger are you in?”

  “Probably none right now,” I said. “But if Pratt could locate me, so can some other people, and that could put you in danger. I think I’d better leave.”

  “I’m not afraid.”

  “That’s because nobody’s shooting at you yet,” I said, starting to climb into my clothes. “If I can get out of here quick enough, maybe nobody will.”

  She put on a terrycloth robe and walked me to the door. There was no awkward dialog about calling her again. She just told me to take care of myself and kissed me lightly on the lips, and then I was out in the street.

  I could have called a cab from her house, but I wanted to show myself and draw anyone who might have been following me away from there, so I walked six blocks to a little all-night grocery store I had passed on the way to Joan’s place and called from there.

  I got back to the motel without incident and went right to my suitcase, where I pulled out my .38 automatic and my shoulder holster. I put in a full clip, then laid them on a chair next to the clothes I would be wearing the next morning.

  It was time, I told myself, to stop messing around and go on the offensive.

  The only problem was that I still didn’t have the vaguest idea who I should go on the offensive against.

  6.

  My hotel bed had one of those vibrator attachments that you put a quarter into and it gently shakes you to sleep for about five minutes. Mine only shook for about forty seconds, but I thought I was going to lose my dinner before it stopped. Once I was done with that foolishness I decided to sleep like a normal human being, and did such a good job of it that I didn’t wake up until ten in the morning, when I heard an insistent knocking at the door.

  “Mr. Bench, I presume?” said Mike Pratt with a grin as I let him into the room?

  “How’d you find me this time?” I asked, starting to get dressed.

  “I told you: I’m a detective. When you didn’t call me by 8:30, I decided that you were either dead or else so safe that you could afford the luxury of oversleeping. Joan Linwood said you had left about one in the morning, so I checked with all the motels on the south end of Phoenix, found one with Johnny Bench registered for one night, put two and two together, and decided to drive out here. It’s probably safer, anyway; no sense showing yourself again in Casa Grande.”

  “Were you followed?” I asked, walking to the sink and sloshing cold water over my face.

  He shook his head. “I had the highway police set up a roadblock on Interstate 10 halfway between here and Casa Grande. They let me through, and had orders to keep traffic blocked for another ten minutes.”

  “You never heard of a telephone?” I asked sarcastically.

  “Oh, they could have called ahead,” he said, “but I changed cars just north of the roadblock. Believe me, Eli, I’m good at my job.”

  “Okay,” I said, combing my hair and hoping that the usual handful didn’t come out in the comb. (It did.) “Now that you’ve spent an hour and a half of your time and a few thousand dollars of the taxpayers’ money to get here, I hope you’ve got something to say to me.”

  “Now I know why you didn’t stay all night with Joan Linwood,” said Pratt with a laugh. “If she ever got a look at your sweet lovable self in the morning, I’d probably be arresting her for murder.”

  “Look, Mike,” I said as calmly as I could, “I’m not at my best in the morning. I’m especially not at my best the morning after someone tries to blow me into little pieces. And I’m most especially not at my best when it’s three hundred degrees outside and the sun isn’t even overhead. So why don’t you just tell me what you came to tell me?”

  He lifted a briefcase, which I hadn’t even noticed when he walked into the room, and laid it on the bed. It was one of those kinds with a three-digit combination that never works when you’ve got to pull your passport or airline ticket out in a hurry, but he popped the top up without any trouble and pulled out a manila envelope, which he handed to me.

>   “This is what I was able to get on Riccardo Fuentes,” he said.

  “The other pilot?”

  “Yes.”

  I opened the envelope and pulled out a computer readout. My eyes still weren’t focusing too well, and it was all in capital-letter dot-matrix type, so I laid it aside and withdrew an eight-by-eleven photograph. Fuentes was a good-looking son of a bitch, with dark soulful eyes and a natty little moustache. Evidently he hadn’t heard that greasy kid stuff was out, because his hair was slicked down firmly enough to withstand a hurricane. I figured his age to be about thirty, but there was no sense guessing: I was sure Pratt had all of his vital statistics on the readout.

  “This is it,” he said. “If you can’t turn up Fuentes, you’re back to square one.”

  “I know,” I muttered, finally picking up the readout.

  Riccardo Fuentes had been born in Mexico City, had illegally emigrated to Southern California with about three million friends and relations, had been refused induction into the United States Army and Air Force due to inadequate proof of citizenship, had worked the fruit farms for a number of years, and then moved back to Mexico. His current home address was Monterrey.

  He stood six foot one inch tall, weighed 163 pounds, had an appendectomy scar on his belly, black hair, black eyes, and was missing three wisdom teeth. He was twenty-eight years old, left-handed, bilingual, Catholic, twice married but never in the Church, and was currently being sued for bigamy by one Juanita Torres Fuentes in San Diego.

  “Well, you’re thorough, I’ll grant you that,” I said, tossing the readout onto the bed next to the photo.

  “We aim to please,” said Pratt.

  “How long has Fuentes been working for Federated?”

  “About sixteen months,” replied Pratt. “Of course, Federated itself has only been in business about two years.”

  “Any record besides the bigamy thing?” I asked.

  “Nothing. We especially checked out any drug connections, either as a user or a carrier. He comes up absolutely clean, though that could just mean that he’s been a careful boy.”