The Fourth Hand

Whether he cocked the revolver with his right hand before attempting to transfer it to his left, or whether he’d cocked the weapon inadvertently when he removed it from the glove compartment, we’ll never know.

The gun fired—we know that much—and the bullet entered Otto’s throat an inch under his chin. It followed an undeviating path, exiting the good man’s head at the crown of his skull, taking with it flecks of blood and bone and a briefly blinding bit of brain matter, the evidence of which would be found on the upholstered ceiling of the truck’s cab. The bullet itself also exited the roof. Otto was dead in an instant.

The gunshot scared the bejesus out of the young thieves at the back of the truck. A patron leaving the sports bar heard the gunshot and the plaintive appeals for mercy by the frightened teenagers, even the clang of the crowbar they dropped in the parking lot as they raced into the night. The police would soon find them, and they would confess everything—their entire life stories, up to the moment of that earsplitting gunshot. Upon their capture, they didn’t know where the shot had come from or that anyone had actually been shot.

While the alarmed patron returned to the sports bar, and the bartender called the police—reporting only that there’d been a gunshot, and someone had seen teenagers running away—the taxi driver arrived in the parking lot. He had no difficulty spotting the beer truck, but when he approached the cab, knocked on the driver’s-side window, and opened the door, there was Otto Clausen slumped against the steering wheel, the .38 in his lap.

Even before the police notified Mrs. Clausen, who was sound asleep when they called, they already felt sure that Otto’s death wasn’t a suicide—at least it wasn’t what the cops called a “planned suicide.” Clearly, to the police, the beer-truck driver hadn’t meant to kill himself.

“He wasn’t that kind of guy,” the bartender said.

Granted, the bartender had no idea that Otto Clausen had been trying to get his wife pregnant for more than a decade; the bartender didn’t know diddly-squat about Otto’s wife wanting Otto to bequeath his left hand to Patrick Wallingford, the lion guy, either. The bartender only knew that Otto Clausen would never have killed himself because the Packers lost the Super Bowl.

It’s anybody’s guess how Mrs. Clausen was composed enough to make the call to Schatzman, Gingeleskie, Mengerink & Associates that same Super Bowl Sunday night. The answering service reported her call to Dr. Zajac, who happened to be at home.

Zajac was a Broncos fan. Just to clarify that: Dr. Zajac was a New England Patriots fan, God help him, but he’d been rooting for the Broncos in the Super Bowl because Denver was in the same conference as New England. In fact, at the time of the phone call from his answering service, Zajac had been trying to explain the tortured logic of why he’d wanted the Broncos to win to his six-year-old son. In Rudy’s opinion, if the Patriots weren’t in the Super Bowl, and they weren’t, what did it matter who won?

They’d had a reasonably healthy snack during the game—chilled celery stalks and carrot sticks, dipped in peanut butter. Irma had suggested to Dr. Zajac that he try the “peanut-butter trick,” as she called it, to get Rudy to eat more raw vegetables. Zajac was making a mental note to thank Irma for her suggestion when the phone rang.

The phone startled Medea, who was in the kitchen. The dog had just eaten a roll of duct tape. She was not yet feeling sick, but she was feeling guilty, and the phone call must have convinced her that she’d been caught in the act of eating the duct tape, although Rudy and his father wouldn’t know she’d eaten it until she threw it up on Rudy’s bed after everyone had gone to sleep.

The duct tape had been left behind by the man who’d come to install the new DogWatch system, an underground electric barrier designed to keep Medea in her yard. The invisible electric fence meant that Zajac (or Rudy or Irma) didn’t have to be outside with the dog. But because no one had been outside with her, Medea had found and eaten the duct tape.

Medea now wore a new collar with two metal prods turned inward against her throat. (There was a battery in the collar.) If the dog strayed across the invisible electric barrier in her yard, these prods would zap her a good one. But before Medea could get shocked, she would be warned; when she got too close to the unseen fence, her collar made a sound.

“What does it sound like?” Rudy had asked.

“We can’t hear it,” Dr. Zajac explained. “Only dogs can.”

“What does the zap feel like?”

“Oh, nothing much—it doesn’t really hurt Medea,” the hand surgeon lied.

“Would it hurt me, if I put the collar around my neck and walked out of the yard?”

“Don’t you ever do that, Rudy! Do you understand?” Dr. Zajac asked a little too aggressively, as was his fashion.

“So it hurts,” the boy said.

“It doesn’t hurt Medea, ” the doctor insisted.

“Have you tried it around your neck?”

“Rudy, the collar isn’t for people—it’s for dogs!”

Then their conversation turned to the Super Bowl, and why Zajac had wanted Denver to win.

When the phone rang, Medea scurried under the kitchen table, but the message from Dr. Zajac’s answering service—“Mrs. Clausen called from Wisconsin”—caused Zajac to forget all about the stupid dog. The eager surgeon called the new widow back immediately. Mrs. Clausen wasn’t yet sure of the condition of the donor hand, but Dr. Zajac was nonetheless impressed by her composure.

Mrs. Clausen had been a little less composed in her dealings with the Green Bay police and the examining physician. While she seemed to grasp the particulars of her husband’s “presumably accidental death by gunshot,” there was almost immediately the expression of a new doubt upon her tear-streaked face.

“He’s really dead?” she asked. Her strangely futuristic look was nothing the police or the examining physician had ever seen before. Upon establishing that her husband was “really dead,” Mrs. Clausen paused only briefly before inquiring,

“But how is Otto’s hand ? The left one.”

CHAPTER SIX The Strings Attached

IN BOTH THE Green Bay Press-Gazette and The Green Bay News-Chronicle, Otto Clausen’s postgame, self-inflicted shooting was relegated to the trivial end of Super Bowl coverage. One Wisconsin sportscaster was gauche enough to say,

“Hey, there are a lot of Packer fans who probably considered shooting themselves after Sunday’s Super Bowl, but Otto Clausen of Green Bay actually pulled the trigger.” Yet even the most tactless, insensitive reporting of Otto’s death did not seriously label it a suicide.

When Patrick Wallingford first heard about Otto Clausen—he saw the minute-anda-half story on his very own international channel in his hotel room in Mexico City—he vaguely wondered why that dick Dick hadn’t sent him to interview the widow. It was the kind of story he was usually assigned.

But the all-news network had sent Stubby Farrell, their old sports hack, who’d been at the Super Bowl in San Diego, to cover the event. Stubby had been in Green Bay many times before, and Patrick Wallingford had never even watched a Super Bowl on TV.

When Wallingford saw the news that Monday morning, he was already rushing to leave his hotel to catch his flight to New York. He scarcely noticed that the beertruck driver had a widow. “Mrs. Clausen couldn’t be reached for comment,” the ancient sports hack reported.

Dick would have made me reach her, Wallingford thought, as he bolted his coffee; yet his mind registered the ten-second image of the beer truck in the near-empty parking lot, the light snow covering the abandoned vehicle like a gauzy shroud.

“Where the party ended, for this Packer fan,” Stubby intoned. Cheesy, Patrick Wallingford thought. (No pun intended—he as yet had no idea what a cheesehead was.)

Patrick was almost out the door when the phone rang in his hotel room; he very nearly let it ring, worried as he was about catching his plane. It was Dr. Zajac, all the way from Massachusetts. “Mr. Wallingford, this is your