by Josh Pachter
A buzzer woke me a few hours later, and I realized my boss had triggered the emergency button on his bedside command center. I rolled out of bed, threw on my robe, and grabbed my smartphone before heading downstairs, quickening my pace when I heard something crash in his room.
I burst through the door to find a long-haired, heavily tattooed man straddling Dingo. I grabbed the empty Merlot bottle left over from Dingo’s late-night self-medication and aimed for the bleachers.
“Call 9-1-1,” the man shouted. “He’s not breathing!”
I stopped midswing, realizing the guy was performing CPR on my employer, not strangling him. I fumbled my smartphone from my robe and dialed. After explaining the situation to the operator, I turned on the Good Samaritan. “Who the hell are you, and how did you get in here?”
“Toby Entemann,” he said. Dingo had resumed breathing by then. “Dingo buzzed me in. You must be Jughead Badloss. He told me about you.”
“And how—?”
“He moved heaven and earth to locate me, and when I learned from Inspector Framer that the great Tiberius Dingo wanted to see me, I slipped away from a previous engagement to come here.”
I thought Inspector Framer had retired after failing to pin Teddy Aerieman’s death on Dingo when the poisonous tropical spiders Dingo collected killed and partially ate the arachnologist he’d hired to care for them. Dingo had donated the surviving spiders to the O. Orkin Insect Zoo at the Smithsonian Museum of Natural History in DC, and the habitat on the brownstone’s top floor had been abandoned. I said as much.
“You must be thinking of Framer’s father,” Toby said. “He’s been down in Florida for almost a decade. Junior’s been walking in his daddy’s shadow ever since he joined the force. When they finally promoted him to Homicide Division, the brass even stuck him in his old man’s old office.”
The EMTs arrived before I could ask any more questions, and Toby disappeared during the confusion.
Dingo had not left the brownstone in more than a decade, but his vices had finally bested him, so I made an executive decision in his best interest. I also phoned his personal physician—who’d served as a medical consultant on several of our old cases—and Dr. Clayton Oswald met us in the Emergency Room of Hale Mary Fuller Grace.
I explained—without mentioning Toby Entemann’s involvement—what had happened.
“Dingo’s lucky he buzzed you when he went into cardiac arrest or he might not be here to complain about all the people touching him.”
“He isn’t doing much complaining,” I said. He wasn’t actually doing much of anything.
When I realized there was nothing I could do for my employer that wasn’t already being done by professionals, I went upstairs to Intensive Care to look in on Ruth’s brother. I had no idea if life support would bring Christian back, or if it was merely delaying the inevitable. I tried to question a nurse, but once she determined I wasn’t related to her patient she refused to speak with me.
I turned to leave and bumped into Inspector Framer, who was the spitting image of his father. With an electronic cigarette clenched between his teeth, he growled, “What are you doing here?”
I told him Dingo had been hospitalized a few hours earlier.
He expressed no symphony for my employer’s plight and repeated his question with a different emphasis. “Why are you here? Why are you in Mr. Entemann’s room?”
“His sister is our client.”
“She hire you to find out who tried to off her brother?”
“No, she—” I caught myself. “The automobile wreck wasn’t an accident?”
“My dad warned me about you and Dingo,” he growled again. “You stay the hell away from my case.”
“But the accident—”
“Get out of my sight, Jughead, and don’t let me catch you nosing around Entemann’s room again.”
I returned to the ER, but Dingo had been transferred to a private room. I tracked him down and, for the first time, took stock of his situation. My employer was unconscious, whether sedated or as a result of what had happened at the brownstone I couldn’t tell, but something was amiss.
I stopped the first nurse to enter his room. “Where’s Mr. Dingo’s watch?”
She directed me to the room’s closet. Inside I found a clear sealed bag with the contents listed on the front in black marker:
1 blue pajama top, size 9XL
1 blue pajama bottom, size 9XL
I looked up. “No jewelry, no watch, no—”
“Security does the inventory. Take it up with them.”
I did. They claimed Dingo had not been wearing a watch when he’d arrived in the emergency room, and the emergency medical service that had transported him to the hospital also claimed Dingo had not been wearing a watch. That meant one of two things: either someone was lying, or Toby Entemann hadn’t been trying to save my boss’s life—he’d been stealing his watch.
The day had barely begun, and already things were headed south.
I returned to the brownstone midmorning to find the chef beside herself. “How is Mr. Dingo?”
“I’m not sure.”
I settled at the kitchen table, and she took the seat opposite mine. For the first time since the whippet in white had entered our employ, I actually looked at her, seeing the woman and not just the uniform. I glanced at the name embroidered in dark blue above her left breast: E. Claire.
“E?”
“Elizabeth,” she explained. “Elizabeth Claire Goodnight.”
She looked as if she expected her name to mean something to me. It didn’t. Not right away.
“I accepted this position so I could meet you,” she continued. “You knew my mother, Carol Goodnight.”
Carol Goodnight. The suicide blonde. I’d interrupted the foot pursuit of a suspected embezzler to talk her down off a bridge. She’d spent a week in my room while Dingo and I cleared her of criminal charges relating to the theft of several thousand dollars from her employer’s safe. She hadn’t told her husband of the accusation and would have leaped from the bridge if I hadn’t come along when I did. She’d let him think she had run off with me.
I waved vaguely at my kisser. “Your father did this.”
Elizabeth tilted her head to the side and examined me for a moment. “My father messed up your face?”
“Your mother and I, we—”
“She said you didn’t, but I’m not sure my father believed her.”
Silence hung in the air between us. I didn’t know what Elizabeth was thinking, but I was remembering how close her mother and I had come to consummating our relationship that first night in the brownstone. If Dingo hadn’t buzzed me from his office, the last stitch of her mother’s clothing might have dropped to the floor. I still think my employer interrupted us on purpose, because he’d had nothing important to tell me when I joined him after being buzzed. But he did not bother to buzz the following evenings.
Finally, Elizabeth broke the silence. “I’ll need to make some adjustments to Mr. Dingo’s diet when he returns home.”
I wasn’t thinking clearly when I put myself to bed a few minutes later. I had rarely worked a case on my own, but I knew our client expected continued attention to her needs. I slept until late afternoon, ate a light dinner in the kitchen, and spent time on the phone with Mook, bringing him up to speed on all that had happened. I asked what, if anything, he had learned from tailing our client. He had nothing of significance to report, so I said, “We need to track down Tony Entemann. If Dingo could find him, we can, too.”
“I’m on it.”
After I disconnected the call, I laid my cell phone on the table and stared at it.
“Are you looking for the man who was here last night?”
I looked up at Elizabeth Claire. “You know something about that?”
“I saw him leave,”
she said. “While the EMTs were taking care of Mr. Dingo, he slipped out the back.”
“And went where?”
“Over the fence,” she said. “I heard a motorcycle.”
My phone rang before I could ask another question, and I saw our client’s name on the screen.
I answered. “Yes, Ruth?”
“Where have you been?” she asked. “I haven’t heard from you.”
“I looked in on your brother and had a run-in with your nephew.”
“What do they have to do with my current situation?” she demanded. “You think my own family is stalking me?”
I didn’t answer her question directly. “Do you still think someone is following you?”
“I saw a man watching me this morning.”
“Did he look like a Q-tip in sweatpants?”
“Why, yes, that’s a perfect—”
“That’s Mook. He’s one of the operatives we’ve got watching you.”
“I liked it better when you were watching me,” she said. “I feel safer when you’re within arm’s reach.”
“I will be,” I said, “at the next dance.”
No sooner had I finished my conversation with Ruth when Dr. Oswald called to remind me I had medical power of attorney for my employer and to tell me Dingo needed coronary bypass surgery. “His lifestyle has finally caught up to him,” Oswald said. “There’s no other option.”
I couldn’t imagine life without Dingo. Though we were employer and employee, we were the closest things to family either of us had. After several minutes of discussion, I approved the operation.
“Good,” the doctor said. “I have surgery scheduled for first thing in the morning.”
I spent the next few hours digging through the files we’d relegated to the basement when we converted Dingo’s office to his bedroom, searching for the original copy of his medical power of attorney. The first three filing cabinets contained records from many of the cases Dingo had successfully solved during his decades as the city’s premiere private investigator, including a dozen from before my association with the firm. I could easily have gotten lost in a haze of memories, so I forced myself to continue hunting until I located our wills, powers of attorney, and medical powers of attorney, paperwork we’d completed when Dingo had first exhibited an inability to walk to the elevator without becoming seriously winded.
I took the medical power of attorney to Hale Mary Fuller Grace, signed the authorization for the coronary bypass, and looked in on Dingo. Wan but conscious, he ordered me to report.
I reported.
“The last thing I remember is talking to Toby Entemann,” he said. “He was telling me about the rift between his father and his aunt.”
“How did you find him?”
“I called in a number of favors, old colleagues who remember working with us in the past. Some of them still have connections. Toby’s working undercover inside one of the motorcycle gangs, and I was lucky I was able to pass a message to him.”
The next morning, I collected one of E. Claire’s used hairnets on my way out the door and stuck in it a manila envelope. While Dingo was under the knife, I sat in the hospital’s waiting room and called Mook. I told him what I needed from the two women he was tracking.
As Dingo recovered from the surgery, I asked Dr. Oswald to look into another matter. I handed him the manila envelope containing the hairnet and had him take a swab from the inside of my cheek. I thought I knew what the results would show, but I wanted to be able to prove it.
I also gave him a used tissue lifted from a woman’s purse and a water glass taken from a diner that morning. I had no idea if my suspicions would pan out, but my employer was in no position to provide guidance.
Dr. Oswald had access to medical records obtained by various entities belonging to the Hale Mary Fuller Grace Medical System, and I hoped he could use what I’d given him to match DNA across the multiple suspects in the Entemann case.
A few days later, Dingo stared at the square of green Jell-O on his dinner tray. “My life has come to this,” he moaned.
Confinement to a hospital bed inside an actual hospital was the epitome of hell for my employer. Being poked and prodded by a constant parade of doctors, nurses, and aides made his skin crawl, and the lack of control over his diet made him grouchy. I said, “You’re lucky you still have a life.”
“Did you bring the Merlot?”
“No.”
Dingo glared at me for a moment before looking away. I don’t know what he saw when he gazed out the window—all I saw was gray sky, a crowded parking lot, and a never-ending stream of traffic crawling along the highway—but when he turned back the scowl had disappeared. He asked, “What have you learned?”
I told him everything that had happened since he was taken from the brownstone, including our newest chef’s connection to the suicide blonde and the uncomplicated family tree of our client.
“You’ve been busy,” he said.
My cell phone rang, and I answered when I saw that the call was from our client. I put her on speaker so that Dingo could hear both sides of our conversation.
“The hospital just phoned,” Ruth said. “My brother is dead.”
“I’m sorry to—”
“He can rot in hell,” she said. “Have you made any progress with my case?”
I was about to say we hadn’t, but Dingo interrupted me.
“I think I can put the matter to rest this evening,” he said, “if you’ll come to my hospital room after dinner.”
She agreed to join us at six o’clock, and we ended the conversation.
“We have a murder on our hands, Jughead,” Dingo said, “and it’s time we wrapped it up.”
He gave me a list of names, and I made the calls.
That evening, Dingo’s hospital room seemed more crowded than his office had ever been during the denouement of a case. It was the first time he solved a case while lying down, and the first time he gathered client, suspects, and interested parties in a hospital room. Ruth Entemann arrived first, followed a few minutes later by her nephew Toby. Then Mook showed up with Elizabeth Claire Goodnight in tow. Inspector Framer came last, dragging Jennifer Wilson with him.
“What’s this all about?” Framer demanded.
Dingo didn’t answer directly. Instead, he looked at each of us in turn and cleared his throat. “This started as a simple case of a woman”—he turned briefly to indicate our client—“who believed she was being stalked.”
Ruth nodded.
“That was simple enough. We identified Ms. Entemann’s stalker within forty-eight hours, though we didn’t know the motive for the stalking. Then the case took an unexpected turn. Before we conclusively identified Ms. Wilson as the stalker—”
Jennifer Wilson straightened. “I never—”
“—we realized that our client had something in her past she was hiding from us.”
Dingo addressed Toby. “Your father passed away earlier today, and that’s why Inspector Framer is here. Your father’s death wasn’t an accident. It was murder. You stand to gain from his death, but it turns out you’re not the only one who does.”
He turned to Ruth. “You told Jughead you were unable to have children, which is only partially true. After he spotted your C-section scar, we had Dr. Oswald examine your medical records. You did have a child, long ago. You gave the infant up for adoption, and complications from the C-section prevented you from having additional children.”
He looked at Jennifer. “You were adopted at birth, but only learned the truth as an adult. You wanted to know who your parents were and why they had given you up. When you finally gained access to your adoption records and saw your birth certificate, it listed only your mother’s name. The space for your father’s name was blank. But you were able to go in search of your mother. You also saw the p
aperwork relinquishing parental rights and realized that your birth parents had failed to relinquish inheritance right. That means that you stand to inherit a great deal of money upon the deaths of your biological parents.”
Inspector Framer pulled the electronic cigarette from between his lips and asked, “So Ruth is Jennifer’s mother, but who’s Jennifer’s father?”
“The DNA tests Dr. Osgood ran,” Dingo continued, “indicate that the family tree doesn’t branch.” Dingo looked at Ruth. “Your father paid good money to make the problem disappear. He didn’t want anyone to know what had happened between his children.”
“I was fifteen,” Ruth said. “My father sent me to a home where they butchered me while taking my child.”
Toby looked at Jennifer and said, “You’re my cousin?”
Dingo added, “And your half sister.”
“My—?”
“You share a father,” he explained, in case anyone in the room had failed to grasp his subtlety. “She’s also the person who murdered your father and planned to murder your aunt.”
Inspector Framer glowered at Dingo. “You can prove all this?”
“Have I ever been wrong before?”
Inspector Framer cuffed Jennifer, read her her rights, and led her away.
When they were gone, Ruth said, “There’s a sickness in my family.”
“We don’t have to perpetuate it,” Toby said. “Maybe we can heal the wounds.”
Tony led his aunt—our client—out of the room.
Dingo turned to Elizabeth, who was wide-eyed at the events she had just witnessed. “There’s one other mystery to solve,” he said. “I wasn’t wearing my watch when Toby Entemann tried to revive me. I had taken it off and set it on my dinner plate. You found it when you cleared the previous evening’s dishes from my room. You knew it was the watch your mother gave me because your grandfather’s name is etched on the back, and it was the only thing of value Carol ever owned.”
“My mother said she gave her grandfather’s watch to the man who saved her.”
Actually, the suicide blonde gave the Rolex Oyster to Dingo after we cleared her of theft charges. All she gave me were memories of our week together and a daughter I never knew I had.