Bass’s eyes were closed. I assumed he was being stubborn, but Jeremy stood up and announced that he had passed out from the pain.
“You can hide it, mask it, but stopping the pain is something few can do. It creeps in, won’t go away. There are Yoga techniques, but Bass never had the intellect or the spirit for such things. He is a monster, Toby, but he is a monster with pride. You will not get your answer from him.”
I took Jeremy’s word for it and suggested that he take Bass to his place and keep him secure until I figured out what to do with him. I couldn’t turn him over to Phil, not without some evidence, not without a confession, which it didn’t look as if I would get. Jeremy lifted the unconscious Bass onto his shoulders, refused the gun I offered him, and went to the door.
“That music playing when I came in,” he said. “Mozart’s Sonata Eleven in A. Please check the record for me.”
As he stood in the door under Bass’s weight, I went to the turntable and checked the record. He was right.
“In music Olson had some taste I guess, but not in friends,” I said. “Some of us do better than others that way.”
“You are a sentimentalist, Toby,” he said and went down the hall with his burden.
Finding the missing Fala was a slight problem. I put my.38 in my cracked leather holster, removed the bullet clip from Bass’s.45, and went to the room of cages. The animals wanted no part of me. They had had enough. The dog I was looking for wasn’t there.
I went through the hall and into rooms one at a time, coaxing and calling. I found the big cat on a shelf, his green eyes glowing at me. He hissed and I stayed away It took me about five more minutes to find the dog squeezed under a cabinet. I pulled him out whimpering, held him, petted him, and told him everything was going to be just great, that huge cans of Strongheart were waiting for him, that he’d soon be back standing up and breathing dog breath on the president. It helped a little.
I started down the hall for the front door, the dog cradled in my arms, and almost ran into the beam of a flashlight through the window. I pulled back against the wall and heard voices outside.
“I don’t hear anything,” said a man.
“Maybe they’re just hearing things, a dog or something going screwy,” came a second male voice, younger.
“Dogs don’t sound like guns,” came the first voice impatiently. “The guy over there said it was a gun.”
“So,” said the other guy, “do we go in or what?”
“We go in,” sighed the first cop. I eased back down the corridor, trying not to trip over the debris of the battle. I wished I had turned the lights out in the animal room, but I didn’t have time to do it now. Balancing the dog, I turned off the light in Olson’s office and went for the window. Behind me I could hear the door to the clinic open. I eased the window open with one hand.
“You hear that?” I heard the young voice coming down the hall.
“I heard,” came the other voice as I put one leg through the window. The tape pulled against my chest as I bent over and got out, trying to keep the dog from getting hurt.
A breeze caught me, and a wet chill ran down my back. I was sweating again. The light went on in the room a few feet behind me, and I ran like hell.
I was about thirty feet away and slowed down by two guns and a dog, when the voice called, “Hold it, police.”
Maybe I could have stopped and explained. Maybe I would have wound up back in Phil’s office with the dog but no murderer and some very bad headlines for the Roosevelts. So I kept running. The cop fired, but I could tell from the sound that he wasn’t shooting at me. Given another few hundred thousand miles of push, he might have hit the moon. My chest was burning like dry ice had been pressed against it. I don’t know if they followed me. Maybe they did. I was back on the street and ducked into the nearest clump of bushes. I gave it a full twenty seconds, was sure no one was behind me, and in spite of the pain and the dog licking my face, I ran for the corner, rounded it, and got to my car. It would have been nice if the night were over, but I knew it was just starting.
Getting the front door open when I got to Mrs. Plaut’s rooming house was a minor but distinct problem. I was afraid to put the dog down, afraid that he’d make a run for it. So I used my key and kept saying “Good boy,” as I let myself in. The house was dark. The time was after eleven. By the glow of the forty-watt night light at the top of the stairs, the dog and I moved without a fall, bark, or comment from a resident.
I was almost at the top step when the dog began to whine. It started low and then rose.
“Cut it out,” I whispered, but he didn’t cut it out. I had two choices. I could either run for my room and try to keep him quiet or I could recognize what he wanted and go back outside. I went back down the stairs and let us out quietly. The dog whined all the way.
When I got him down the porch steps, I held onto him tightly while I got my belt off and looped it around his neck. With one hand on my pants and another on my belt serving as a leash, I let him lead me to the curb. I was on the way back to the porch when the front door opened and I started working on a lie, but it wasn’t needed.
“Toby,” whispered Gunther. He was in total disarray, at least for Gunther he was. He wore pants, shirt, tie, vest, but no jacket. “I heard you coming up and then going down.”
“I had to walk the dog,” I explained, whispering back.
He looked at the dog and the dog looked at him curiously. On his hind legs, the dog would have been about Gunther’s size. We could have saddled the animal for him.
“This, then, is the dog of the president of the United States?” he whispered.
“Looks that way,” I said.
“Why are you bringing him here instead of to the police or the president?” he asked reasonably.
I came up on the porch and sat on the bottom step. Gunther moved closer. We were about eye level.
“I think the people who took the dog have a woman named Jane Poslik,” I explained. “I might have to make a trade or something. I’ll just have to wait till they contact me and try to stay out of the way of the police, who I promised to give the killer to.”
I sat on the porch talking and the animal kept his eyes riveted on Gunther. Gunther stood erect the entire time while I went over the events of the past two days. Gunther touched a spot just under his lip, a sure sign that he had an idea.
“In my mind,” he said, “I have gone over the listing of suspects, events. Perhaps it is a problem in logical or even literary formalism.”
“Maybe,” I said with no great hope as I reached over to pet the dog. “I’ve got a plan.”
“What might that be?” asked Gunther seriously. A slight night breeze ruffled his neat hair and a tiny hand went up immediately to put it back in place.
“I’ll find Lyle and threaten to kick his face in if he doesn’t confess and tell me where Jane Poslik is,” I explained. “It’s direct, simple, and inexpensive.”
“And not likely to yield results,” he said pensively. “May I suggest an alternative procedure?”
“If it’s not one that requires a lot of thought on my part,” I said wearily. “I’ve had a long hard day. Hell, a long hard lifetime.”
Thunder rumbled somewhere far over the hills near Santa Monica as Gunther went through his chain of logic. It made sense to me but it would take time to set up. It also involved the possibility that I had made a big mistake.
When he was done talking and I agreed, as much out of pain and tiredness as out of conviction. I picked up the dog. did an awkward dance as I put my belt back on, and followed Gunther into the house and up the stairs.
When we got in front of my room, I whispered to Gunther, “I’ll set it up for tomorrow night, in my office.”
“That,” said Gunther, “will be sufficient.”
When I got into my room, I considered removing the itching tape on my chest, but that would have proven foolish. Instead, I took off my clothes, put on fresh underwear, took one of the pills Doc Hodgdon had given me, and shared the last of a bottle of milk with the dog.
“You want Wheaties?” I asked. He looked like the answer was yes. so I gave him a bowl of Wheaties, which he ate dry.
