A Dog's Ransom (10 page)

Clarence got up. He was wearing only his shorts, and he had to grab his father’s bathrobe from the john. His mother had already gone downstairs, and he heard her saying:

“One minute, please. He’s coming.”

Clarence glanced at his wrist-watch. A quarter to two. “Hello? Clarence Duhamell here.”

“Hi Clarence. Santini. We found this Polish guy, Rojinsk—you know.”

“You
did
?”

“Yeah, we did. Listen—” Long pause, while Santini blew his nose, or perhaps spoke to someone else. “Listen we want to see you. I know it’s your day off. Had a hard time finding you.”

“What’s the matter?”

“Well—see when you get here. Rowajinski’s here. So get here when you can, will you? Say by three, three-thirty?”

“Yes, sir.”

“What is it, Clary?” His mother was standing in the doorway between the sunroom and the living-room.

“I have to go into New York. Right away.”

“Oh, Clary! Without any lunch?”

Clarence ran up the stairs on bare feet. “They want me there by three, mom.”

When he came down, dressed, his mother said she had cut a slice of roast beef for him. He could eat it standing up, no fuss. Clarence ate half of it. He had taken a hasty shower, scraped at his face with his father’s razor. “This doesn’t happen often,” he said to his mother.

Santini’s tone had been off-hand, and Clarence felt he had been summoned only because he’d at least seen Rowajinski before and could identify him. The dog had been kidnapped a week ago today. He had let the Reynoldses down horribly and unforgivably.

9

K
enneth Rowajinski sat on a bench near the entrance of the precinct house beside a rolling, restless junky whom Kenneth fastidiously avoided touching. It was 2:40 p.m., and Kenneth had been at the station about two hours. He had twice asked to go to the toilet. He was nervous. They had come for him—a single policeman in plain clothes—just after noon. Kenneth still did not know how they had found him. He’d been out that morning around 11 a.m. to pick up some fruit and a hamburger and a couple of cans of beer to take back to his room. Of course there was his limp. And the cop, a black-haired fellow with fat jowls, a nasty grin, had said: “I thought you’d be in some crummy hotel, and I sure hit it right, didn’t I?” Chatting away while he scribbled in his notebook, standing right in Kenneth’s hotel room, the door wide open and a black maid staring open-mouthed from the hall. Invasion! Kenneth’s heart had begun to race, and it had not stopped since.

But Kenneth had fixed the bastard young cop who had found him at Mrs. Williams’s. That was more than a consolation, it was a bit of a triumph. That was hitting back, good and proper. Just wait till he walked in. Kenneth’s eyes, darting everywhere, darted most often at the front door on his left, because he knew the blond cop was due.

Across from Kenneth a black cop without a cap sat reading a comic book and chewing gum. His kinky black hair was graying. What a racket the police force was, taking taxpayers’ money, taking bonuses and pensions, swaggering around with guns, slapping tickets on cars, taking kickbacks from gambling joints (often in the back rooms of innocent-looking candy stores), and rake-offs from drug-pushers. All well-fed bullies, mainly Italian, though of course there were some Irish, too. The Italian who’d come into Kenneth’s hotel room had found his money very soon, counted it and pocketed it. Kenneth had seen the money being handed over in the station to a superior officer (another wop) behind a desk in the room opposite. One thousand one hundred and twenty dollars. It left Kenneth with eleven dollars and some change in his pocket. Kenneth did not know if they had telephoned Edward Reynolds yet, but he assumed so. Kenneth did not look forward to facing Reynolds, in view of his position, but he reminded himself that he had a deep and justified contempt for types like Reynolds, so why should he cringe?

Kenneth glanced at the door, expecting Reynolds as much as the blond cop. Kenneth kept moving a loose lower front tooth back and forth with his tongue and with suction. The tooth gave him slight pain every time he pushed it or sucked it. For at least the sixth time, Kenneth shoved the rolling junky off his left shoulder, and suddenly jumped up, causing the junky to roll all the way over and fall flat on the floor on his face. Kenneth adjusted his new overcoat and averted his eyes.

The colored guard laughed and got up from his chair, still holding his comic book. “Hey! Sommun gonna give me a hand here?”

Kenneth refrained from looking. The junky, like an old cockroach, was trying to turn himself over, or something. It occurred to Kenneth to walk out the door, but here was one of the wide-hipped cops—wide-hipped because of the gun and notebook and nightstick and handcuffs under his jacket, and also from sitting on coffee-shop and bar stools—lifting the junky and propping him back on the bench. The cop muttered a joke, the black grinned.

Then the young blond cop, in plain clothes, came up the steps and into the lobby, and saw him at once. Kenneth scowled and held his ground.

The blond cop went into the office opposite.

In a minute or two an older blond officer came out and beckoned to Kenneth.

“You recognize this man, Dummell?” asked the officer.

“Oh, yes, sir.”

“Manzoni picked him up at the Hotel George in the Village. Just casing hotels for a fifty-year-old man with a limp, you know?”

Manzoni had certainly had luck, Clarence thought, and said nothing.

They were back in the officer’s room now.

“Now Rowajinski here—” MacGregor referred to some notes on his desk. “Found in possession of one thousand one hundred and twenty dollars, all in ten-dollar bills. Just like the ransom, no? Ten-dollar bills? He says you took five hundred to let him go.”

“Yes!” said Kenneth firmly.

“No. I did not,” said Clarence.

“He’s bought some clothes, okay. Paid two days’ hotel bill, okay.” MacGregor ran his thumbs under his belt. “Dummell, we’re not accusing you, just asking. The five hundred—that’s about what’s missing from the two thousand, you see.”

The cop’s face was red, Kenneth saw, like the face of a guilty man. Kenneth could almost believe he
had
taken it. He might as well believe it, ought to believe it, because he had to stick to his story. “Yes. And I was to pay him three hundred later. Eight hundred in all!” Kenneth said in a burst of inspiration.

“Captain MacGregor, I give you my word. This fellow—if you’d like to search my apartment—my bank account—I haven’t got the money, sir!”

“Now don’t get excited, Dummell.”

“I’m not, sir!”

“If you say ‘no,’ it’s no.”

“Thank you, sir.—Have you spoken to Mr. Reynolds, told him we’ve got Rowajinski?”

MacGregor frowned, looking preoccupied. “No, not yet. Or I don’t know if Pete told him.”

Pete was Manzoni. “He’d be interested, sir. And the dog. It’s the dog, you know—”

“Oh,” said MacGregor. “Rowajinski says he told you right away the dog was dead. Is that true, Dummell?”

“It certainly isn’t true! He said the dog was with his sister in Long Island. That’s what I told Mr. Reynolds.”

The young officer glared at Kenneth as if he could kill him.

“I told you,” said Kenneth, standing as tall as he could, “that the dog was dead.”

“You did
not
! Captain—Captain MacGregor, are you going to believe this nut or me?”

“We’re not believing anyone yet. Relax, Clarence.” He pushed a bell on his desk.

Kenneth stood straight and tall, wearing his hat. The young blond cop, Dummell, shifted like a guilty man, afraid to speak. Kenneth sensed a certain victory. He went with good grace with a cop who came to take him away. Pajamas had been laid out on a cot. All right, a cell. But he’d fixed Dummell!

As the cop closed the cell door, Kenneth said, “I want a lawyer. I don’t have to pay for that, do I?”

The man drawled insolently, “You-ou’ll get one.”

Revolting lot! There were two hooks on the wall, not even a hanger, and a toilet and a basin. He peed. He was hungry. But he put hunger out of his mind and went to the barred door to try to hear something. He did hear what he thought were the voices of the Captain and the young cop, but he could not tell what they were saying. Unfortunate. But Kenneth was pleased that he had focused attention on Dummell and away from Reynolds and the dog. He had told a most convincing story to the cop who had found him about the Monday afternoon talk in his room at Mrs. Williams’s. The cop had said he was going to call on Mrs. Williams, and she could certainly confirm (no matter what nasty remarks she might make against him besides) that Dummell had come twice that afternoon, and had pretended the second time to be completely surprised that Kenneth Rowajinski had disappeared.

10

A
s soon as Manzoni and the other cop, whose name Clarence didn’t know, had left his apartment, Clarence went to his telephone, but stopped before he touched it. He was still shaken, and he didn’t want to talk with Mr. Reynolds when he sounded nervous. Clarence lit a cigarette, and looked over his living-room-bedroom, not seeing any detail, but conscious of its veil of soot, of the disorder that Manzoni and the other fellow had left after they had searched the place, conscious of his shame. Drawers were half pulled out, shirts mussed. They hadn’t turned the place inside out by any means, but that they had come here at all was insulting, especially that Manzoni had come, with his personal touch. “Did you need some extra money for your girl, Clarence?” How did he know about Marylyn? Or did he mean just any girl? They had asked to see his savings bank passbook. No recent big deposits. Even the pillows on the bed had been stripped of their zipped covers and were in disorder. “You haven’t been here lately,” Manzoni had remarked. “Where’ve you been sleeping?” Clarence had said he had spent several nights (or anyway his off-duty time) out at his family’s in Astoria. That was another thing: he ought to forewarn his mother to say he’d been out a lot to see them, in case the cops rang her.

Clarence dialed the Reynoldses’ number. It was just before six. “Mrs. Reynolds? This is Clarence Duhamell. I would like very much to see you . . . Yes, there is news, we’ve caught Rowajinski, in case the precinct house didn’t tell you.” (They hadn’t.) “I—I’d rather tell you when I see you,” Clarence said with tortured awkwardness. She had asked about the dog, of course, and he could tell she knew there was no hope. “I’ll come right away, if I may.”

Clarence took the subway, not wanting to arrive too soon, because he wanted Mr. Reynolds to be there. The rush hour was on, worst at Grand Central where he took the shuttle, difficult to breathe due to the pressure of people. Newspapers were crushed under passengers’ arms. It was a sea of disgruntled, grim, blank, brooding faces, waiting for the roaring train to spill them into a little more space somewhere. Out of habit, Clarence looked around for pickpockets, then realized that everyone’s hands were pinned at the spot they had been in when the last person had been thrust in by a guard, and the door slid shut. Clarence got out at the 103d Street station, and walked to the Reynoldses’ apartment house. The colored doorman was on duty.

By this time it was 6:40 p.m. Mr. Reynolds was in.

“So they’ve caught the Pole again,” Mr. Reynolds said after he had greeted Clarence in the foyer. “And what about the dog?”

“The Pole says now—” Clarence was following Mr. Reynolds into the living-room, “Good evening, Mrs. Reynolds.” She was standing by the coffee-table. “The Pole says that—that he killed the dog the night he caught her. That he hit her on the head with a rock.”

“Oh, Jesus.” Ed turned away. He pulled the palm of one hand down his face.

“All right, Eddie,” said his wife. “We almost knew, didn’t we?”

“What’re they going to do with this psychopath?” Mr. Reynolds asked.

“I don’t know, sir. He ought to be locked up. In a mental institution, I mean.”

“So—he hit her on the head. Then what? He took her away? She wasn’t there in the bushes. I looked. No sign of blood. I looked the next morning.”

“He said he carried the dog to his house. His room. He said he wrapped her in something and—left her somewhere. I don’t know where.”

“Buried her somewhere?” Ed gave a slight laugh.

“Eddie—” Greta’s voice trembled.

“I don’t know, sir,” Clarence said.

Ed shoved his hands into his pockets. He walked towards the window, his shoulders hunched.

Clarence said, “I’m surprised the precinct house hasn’t called you. They found most of the money on the fellow. He was in a hotel in the Village.”

“Oh, the hell with the money,” Ed said. He was thinking what a disgusting city New York really was. You had to rub elbows, you did rub elbows with creeps like this one every day of the week, every time you rode a bus or a subway. They looked like ordinary people but they were creeps. His heart was beating rapidly, and he was imagining tearing Rowajinski limb from limb, catching him by the throat and smashing his head against a wall. He could do it, he thought.

Greta was weeping without a sound, wiping her tears from time to time. Almost mechanically she was putting ice into three glasses, pouring scotch.

Clarence accepted the glass she gave him.

Ed Reynolds was wandering about with slow steps, looking at the floor.

“I’m now accused,” Clarence said, “of having taken five hundred dollars to let Rowajinski escape. Rowajinski accuses me.”

“Oh?” said Ed. It registered, but not much. What if it were true? So what? He glanced at the young cop’s serious blue eyes.
Was
he serious? Was he honest? Did it much matter?

“I don’t think my precinct Captain thinks I took it. They certainly won’t find the money on me at any rate. What I do reproach myself for—” He stopped, realizing that since the dog was dead, Mr. Reynolds wouldn’t give a damn about his inefficiency, or whether he reproached himself for it. And indeed, Mr. Reynolds might not have heard what he said.

Mr. Reynolds was talking quietly to his wife. He put his arm around her shoulder and kissed her cheek.

Clarence felt the sooner he left the better. He finished his drink at one draught. The drink hit his stomach and almost came up again, and Clarence tightened his throat, wincing.

Mr. Reynolds looked at him with mild surprise.

Just then Clarence remembered that he had to call Marylyn to arrange where to meet tonight. Was the play at 9:30 or 8:30? Since he could not possibly ask the Reynoldses to use their telephone for this, Clarence became slightly more rattled.

“Mr. Reynolds,” Clarence said, “I’m going to see that Rowajinski gets the maximum, gets all we can give him.”

Again, Mr. Reynolds did not seem too interested.

“Won’t you sit down, Mr. Duhamell,” said Greta.

Clarence handed her his glass automatically, because she reached for it. He sat down carefully on an upholstered straight chair. Greta returned in no time with a fresh drink for him.

“I have to tell you,” Clarence began, “that I am very ashamed that I let Rowajinski get away the first time. I told my precinct that. My Captain. I blame myself.”

“I understand,” Ed mumbled, wishing the fellow would leave. “Just what, frankly, can they do to this Pole? Just lock him up in a mental institution?”

Clarence shrugged. “I know they’re crowded. They can detain him now, anyway. I mean—a fine and imprisonment. It’ll be a long time before he’s out.” It was not what he had meant to say, and was it true that it would be a long time? “I’ll do my best. It’s strange that they suspect me of taking money, when I gave them the most careful description of this fellow, the Pole. A limp, that’s already a great help in looking for someone. But Manzoni—the one who found Rowajinski at the hotel in the Village—There’s no doubt he was lucky. I wish
I’d
found him. I—” Clarence had started to say he spent many nights in the Village himself.

The telephone rang. Ed seemed not to hear it. Greta answered it, then called her husband.

“Hello?” said Mr. Reynolds. “Yes . . . Yes, thanks. I heard.”

Clarence knew it was his precinct house, that they had waited until Mr. Reynolds was home to telephone. Clarence hoped Mr. Reynolds would not say he was here. Nervously, he took a swallow of scotch and water.

“Yes, I can do that,” Mr. Reynolds was saying in a bored tone.

They wanted him to pick up his money. Clarence was feeling the scotch. How could life get any worse? Clarence stood up when Mr. Reynolds put the telephone down.

“I’m supposed to go to the precinct house for the money,” Ed said. “Asked them to send a check, but they won’t. I’m supposed to go now.”

“Sit down, Eddie,” said Greta. “Relax for a
minute
.”

Ed paid no attention, only walked about.

Clarence thought of offering to accompany Mr. Reynolds to the precinct house. But Mr. Reynolds might not even want him to. “I must go now,” Clarence said. “I want to state my promise again. I will see that some justice is done. To the best of my ability.” He blurted suddenly, “Don’t think I like it, Mr. Reynolds, that I’m accused of taking five hundred dollars to let this psycho go! Not accused exactly but suspected.”

“I suppose that’ll blow over,” Ed said, bored with it. Lisa, his and Greta’s dog, was dead. Ed realized he was enduring grief such as he had endured when he knew definitely that his daughter was dead, had been killed. A dog, a daughter—there should be a great difference, yet the feeling was much the same. At least at that moment. And he could not sit still, he had to walk about, looking at the floor, wishing the cop would go. “I don’t think I want to see this Pole,” Ed said. “I don’t suppose I have to see him, do I?”

Clarence said, “Not if you don’t want to, sir, I’m sure.—Good-bye, Mrs. Reynolds. Thank you.”

Clarence went to the door. Even Mrs. Reynolds did not say anything except “good night” as she closed the door behind him. Clarence decided to take a taxi straight to Marylyn’s rather than look for a telephone. He felt ashamed, stupid, and somehow weak, as if he had behaved weakly.
I swear I’ll make it up to him
, Clarence said to himself.

E
D
R
EYNOLDS TOOK OFF HIS SHIRT
and washed at the bathroom basin. What was he washing off this time? “Darling, I promise,” Ed shouted over the running water to something Greta was saying, “they won’t keep me more than ten minutes, because I’ll refuse to stay there. You can start dinner, really.”

Ed walked to the precinct house. A black policeman, as before, sat on a straight chair at the door and barely glanced at Ed as he came in. Ed had asked him where to go. It was again Captain MacGregor whom he was to see.

There were two or three other police officers in the room where MacGregor was. “Edward Reynolds,” Ed said to MacGregor.

“Oh, yes,” said MacGregor. “Would you have a seat?”

Ed sat reluctantly.

“The kidnapper of your dog, Kenneth Rowajinski, was found today at the Hotel George on University Place. About twelve hundred dollars of the money was found in his room. He seems to have a savings account of about four hundred dollars . . .” MacGregor was consulting a paper on his desk.

Ed was suffering boredom. There were more details.

“. . . tomorrow,” MacGregor was saying. “At least we hope tomorrow. The psychiatric department is busy these days.”

Ed gathered that someone would come tomorrow to the station here to see the Pole.

Captain MacGregor went to a drawer and unlocked it, pulled out an envelope. “This is your twelve hundred and twenty dollars, Mr. Reynolds. We’ll get what we can to make up the rest for you. I am sorry about your dog.” He laid the envelope on the edge of his desk.

“What’re you going to do to this fellow, besides have a psychiatrist look at him?” Ed asked.

“Well—he’ll be under surveillance for several weeks. Maybe locked up. What they decide to do isn’t really for me to say.”

It never was, Ed supposed. There was always somebody just above, someone with more, or different authority, someone you never saw and who didn’t even exist in a sense.

“Would you like to speak with Rowajinski? He’s in the cage back there.”

Ed got up suddenly. “No, no, thank you. Serves no purpose, does it? My dog is dead.—How many police patrol Riverside Park, by the way?”

“Oh—a hundred, maybe more. It was very bad luck, Mr. Reynolds. I know the Park’s a rough place after dark. I know.”

Ed felt his anger rise. He hated it. Anger without purpose, hurting only himself. He tried to appear calm, but his bitterness found another outlet. “And this young officer—Duhamell? He let the Pole escape?”

“Ah, Patrolman Dummell! Yes. He’s new, fairly new on the force. He made a mistake there. It was another officer who picked up Rowajinski, not Dummell. Dummell’s got a lot to learn.”

“What’s this about his having taken five hundred dollars?”

“You know about that?”

“Dummell just told me.”

“Told you he took it?” The man’s small eyes widened.

“Oh, no. He says he didn’t. Says the Pole accuses him. But what do you think?”

MacGregor glanced down at his desk and shifted on his feet. “Dummell telephoned you?”

Ed hesitated, feeling disrespect for all of it, even a curious detachment. “Yes.”

MacGregor shrugged.

Ed sensed that MacGregor didn’t know what to say to be correct, safe. Did the police have to protect the police, Ed wondered, no matter what? Probably.

“About five hundred is missing from what we found on Rowajinski. Nothing that shows how he spent it. We are
asking
Dummell, yes. It seems funny to all of us that Dummell would’ve caught this guy and then left him for half an hour while he talked to you about a second thousand dollars. Isn’t that right?”

“Right,” said Ed dully. He didn’t give a damn. To hell with the police. They hadn’t even recovered his dog’s corpse. “So I thank you very much, Captain.”

“Oh, don’t forget your money, Mr. Reynolds! And you’re supposed to sign this, if you will.”

Ed did not even read the paper, just signed it.

“That’s a receipt for twelve hundred and twenty,” said MacGregor. “And we’ll certainly get the rest. We’ll attach this guy’s compensation.”

Ed nodded. Nods meant nothing. He walked to the door and out.

Ed took the familiar avenue homeward, Riverside Drive. What a funny city New York was—eight million people, and no one knew anybody and didn’t really want to. It was a conglomeration to make money, not because people were fond of their fellow men. Everyone had a fragile web of friends on the map of New York—friendships that had nothing to do with geography, neighborhood. Everyone in his way excluded the masses, the unknown, the potential enemy. And Duhamell or Dummell (easy to imagine his name becoming Dummell in another generation), was he honest? Did he need some money just now? Was there a girl in the picture? Ed stopped and turned half around, facing the river, thinking to go back to the precinct and tell them that he didn’t care, personally, whether Dummell had taken the five hundred dollars or not. No, even that was dramatic, Ed thought. And the police didn’t care, personally, either.