A Dog's Ransom Page 5

  He skipped down the stone steps at 106th Street, past the statue of Franz Sigel on horseback—a Civil War soldier, Clarence recalled, a helper of the North—and crossed the Drive. Clarence walked into the park, turned north, and blew on his hands. There were clumps of bushes, small trees that would have given shelter to someone hiding. It was almost noon. Should he go up to the precinct house and ask about those letters now?

  No, don’t go, he told himself. At the same time, he was walking uptown on the west side of the Drive now, still keeping his eye out for the possible letter-writer, a man who’d be alone probably, looking furtive, suspicious of everyone. Or would he be cocky? Don’t go into the precinct house, he thought, because tough-boy Santini might be on. Asking for the letters might irritate him. On the other hand why should he care if he irritated Santini?

  Clarence made for the precinct house.

  An elderly black cop whose name was Sam or Sims or Simmy, Clarence wasn’t sure, was sitting on a camp stool inside the door, reading a comic book. “Well, well. Morning, Mr. Clarence.”

  “Morning to you,” Clarence said, smiling. He went into the first office on the left.

  It was not Santini at the desk—Santini could be in the next room where the files were—but a lieutenant named Boulton, a rather friendly fellow.

  “Well, well,” said Boulton, in the same tone as Sam.

  “Good morning, sir. I’m not on till eight tonight, but I wonder if those letters—the anonymous letters addressed to Reynolds—Could I have a look at the photostats? It’s the man whose dog was kidnapped.”

  “Reynolds,” said Boulton, gazing at a wire drawer heavy with clipped pages on his desk. He pulled the wire thing towards him. “Jesus, if anything—Yesterday, yes. Stuff ought to be filed. What we need is a girl around here.”

  Clarence laughed a little. The letters certainly weren’t in that wire drawer.

  “Reynolds. Yes, I recall.” He reached for a stack of papers on his desk, picked it up, then said, “Why do you want them?”

  “I was interested. I heard the man’s story when he came in yesterday. His dog’s still missing, so I thought it wouldn’t hurt if I saw the letters—or the photostats.”

  The lieutenant flipped through the miscellaneous papers, and pulled out some clipped-together photostatted sheets. Just then, the telephone rang, and Boulton flopped into his chair and reached for it.

  There were four letters, all dated by another hand, possibly Mr. Reynolds’s, and they were in chronological order. The first had a September date and said:

  DEAR SNOB,

  I DONT LIKE SMUG PEOPLE, WHO DOES? I SUPPOSE YOU CONSIDER YOURSELF A SUCCESS? WATCH OUT. THE AX CAN FALL. LIFE IS NOT ALL SMOOTH GROVES WITH LITTLE COGS IN THEM LIKE YOU. I HAPPEN TO BE A FAR MORE INTERESTING AND IMPORTANT PERSON THAN YOU ARE. ONE DAY WE MAY MEET—UNPLEASANTLY.

  ANON

  The letter must have been a nasty thing to receive, Clarence thought, and shifted on his feet before he read the next one, dated a few days later. Lieutenant Boulton was still on the phone.

  WELL SIR,

  STILL AT IT? YOU ARE A LITTLE MACHINE. YOU THINK THE MAJORITY IS WITH YOU. NOT SO! SINCE WHEN ARE YOU SO RIGHT? JUST BECAUSE YOU HAVE A JOB AND A WIFE AND A SNOB DOG LIKE YOURSELF? IT NEED NOT GO ON FOREVER TILL YOU CREEP INTO YOUR GRAVE. THINK AGAIN AND THINK CAREFULLY.

  ANON

  He progressed to the next two letters, the fourth about the dog Lisa. It was quite shocking to Clarence, having met the decent Mr. and Mrs. Reynolds. Boulton was off the phone now.

  “Thank you, sir.” Clarence handed the folder back. “See you tonight, sir.”

  “Not me. Not tonight,” replied the lieutenant with a smile, as if he had a big date and wouldn’t dream of working this evening.

  Clarence walked back along Riverside Drive, watching for people—men—who might be staring at him a little too long. Clarence felt happy and excited. He wanted to ring up his mother. That would please her. Except that just now, at a quarter to one, she and his father were probably sitting down to Sunday dinner, maybe with a couple of neighbors as guests.

  What about the little man in the dark gray overcoat and old shoes, shambling along, hugging the side of a building? The man didn’t look at him. Clarence had a glimpse of a stubble of beard on his face. No, this man was too fallen apart, Clarence thought. The poison-pen letter-writer couldn’t spell, but there was some demonic organization in him, he could get an address right (the envelopes had been photostatted beneath each letter), his bitterness seemed to have a certain drive. What kind of job would he have, if any? A lot of kooky characters were on relief, or over sixty-five and just making it on Social Security. Was this one over sixty-five? And what about the dog Lisa? That was the important thing, as Mr. Reynolds had said.

  Clarence impulsively hailed a taxi. He wasn’t in a mood to take the subway. Marylyn would still be in bed, probably reading the Sunday Times which he had bought late last night. At 8th Street, Clarence said, “Can you let me out here?”

  He went into the drugstore at 8th and Sixth Avenue and telephoned his parents in Astoria.

  “So how’s it going, Clare?” asked his father. “Are you okay?”

  “Everything’s okay. I just wanted to say hello.”

  Clarence spoke also with his mother, who made sure there was not a bullet through an arm or a leg, then she dashed off to turn something off on the stove. When was he coming out to see them? It had been so long since he’d been out.

  It had been about three weeks. “I dunno. Soon, Mother.” He started to say he was on night shift again, but his mother would worry about that.

  “Is your girlfriend taking all your time, Clary? Bring her out!”

  The usual conversation, but Clarence felt better after he had hung up. His parents hadn’t yet met Marylyn. Clarence, unable to repress a desire to speak of her, had deliberately repressed his enthusiasm about her, but it hadn’t escaped his father, who was now asking when were they going to meet his betrothed and all that. His father liked to use archaic expressions.

  At a delicatessen on Sixth Avenue, Clarence bought frozen strawberries and a can of cranberry sauce for the chicken, and also bread which Marylyn was always out of, mainly because Clarence ate a lot of bread. Clarence had the two keys to Marylyn’s house, one for the front door, one for her apartment door. Having let himself in, he knocked on her apartment door.

  “Clare?—Come in.”

  Marylyn was in bed with the papers, looking beautiful, though she hadn’t even combed her hair. “How was it?”

  Clarence knelt by the bed, the delicatessen bag on the floor. “Interesting,” he mumbled. His face was buried in the warm sheets over her bosom. He inhaled deeply. “Very interesting. It’s important.”

  “Why?” She mussed his hair with her fingers, pushing his head away. “Good God, I never thought I’d get mixed up with fuzz. Do you really take all this stuff seriously?”

  He sat back on the floor, watched her as she got out of bed and crossed the room to the bathroom. Her words were a shock, even though he knew she was kidding. She was of a different world, and she didn’t understand a thing, Clarence thought, about his life. In a curious way, Marylyn didn’t even believe in law and order. “I do!” he said to the closed door. He crossed his feet and got up nimbly from the floor. “They’re such nice people, the Reynoldses.” He smiled, at himself, and took off his jacket and tie. In bed, he and Marylyn understood each other very well. Not even any words needed.

  5

  At the moment when Clarence was slipping naked into bed with Marylyn on Macdougal Street, Kenneth Rowajinski on West End Avenue and 103rd Street was putting ball-point pen to paper to write a second ransom note. He was not sure he would send it. He wrote many letters that he didn’t send to people. Simply writing the letters gave him pleasure. After writing “NEW YORK” a
t the top of the page, he rested his elbow, pen aloft, and gazed into space, vaguely smiling.

  He was a short man of fifty-one, chunky but in good health. He limped, however, on his right foot. Four years ago the drum of a cement-mixer had fallen on his instep, breaking the metatarsals, and further complications had caused the amputation of his great toe and the toe next to it. For this reason Kenneth got two hundred and sixty dollars per month: he had been a semi-skilled laborer in construction work, good at pipe-laying, a good foreman in the sense that some men are good army sergeants though they may never rise higher. Kenneth had been lucky in claiming, via his lawyer, a skilled status with promise of immediate advancement when the accident had happened, so his compensation had been generous. But now Kenneth could never again (he thought with a kind of pride, self-pity and curious glory) jump about spryly on scaffoldings as he had once done, and for this he had been rightly recompensed.

  His face and head were round, his cheeks inclined to be ruddy, his nose bulbous and crude. Either his expression was jolly, or it was tense and suspicious, full of menace, and there was little between. When he relaxed as in sleep, even, his face was vaguely smiling. And his expression could vary in a trice—smiling, for instance, as he mused over a letter he was composing, scowling and hostile if there came a knock on his door for any reason, or even if he heard a footfall beyond his door. Kenneth lived in a semi-basement, corner apartment that consisted of one huge room and an absurdly small bathroom behind a door in one corner. There was a basin with a mirror above it, but there was no tub, and Kenneth washed himself, at least twice a week, standing nude on newspapers in front of the basin. The room, because never any sunlight came in, required electric light at all times, but Kenneth didn’t mind that. The windows were half-windows that started four feet up the wall and opened (but Kenneth never opened them) on West End Avenue. He could often see people’s legs, up to the hips, walking by, and occasionally a heel made a clink or a scrape on a metal grille in the sidewalk there. An ironing-board always stood ready in a front corner of the room, with a shabby standing lamp beside it. Newspapers, folded and open, half-read lay singly or in little stacks here and there on the floor, in corners, beside the limp bed which Kenneth sometimes made and more often didn’t. The kitchen consisted of a smallish stove with two burners and an oven against the wall and to the left of where Kenneth now sat at his table. Similarly, his closet was not enclosed, but was a rod suspended on two wires from a shelf against the wall. Kenneth had few clothes, however, three pairs of trousers, two jackets, an overcoat and a raincoat, and four pairs of shoes—one pair so old he knew he would never put them on again. He had a transistor, but it had become broken months ago, and he had never bothered getting it repaired. Just outside his door was a corridor that led to some steps that went straight up to the street door, and also there were steps to the right leading to the level of his landlady’s ground-floor apartment. The garbage bins and ashcans were left in Kenneth’s corridor, which was why he sometimes heard the footsteps of his landlady’s giant idiot of a son, who wrestled them forward and up the front steps. Kenneth suspected that the oafish son came into the corridor to spy on him through his keyhole, so for this reason Kenneth used a flap of tin (he’d found just the thing in a gutter) eight inches long and two inches wide. The top of this flap was nailed into the door above the lock, and the bottom part he kept slid behind the bolt that closed his door below the keyhole. This way, even if the son (whose name was Orrin) pushed the flap with something through the keyhole, the flap could not move sideways and permit a view of the room—because it was nailed with two nails at the top and therefore did not swivel. Also, from the inside, by pulling the flexible tin out of the bolt, Kenneth could lock his door from the inside, once he had come in.

  Kenneth was the middle offspring of three children of a Polish immigrant who had come to America just before the First World War and married a German girl. Kenneth’s sister Anna lived in Pennsylvania, and they almost never wrote to each other. His younger brother Paul now lived in California, and Kenneth had nothing to do with him. This brother was a bit of a snob, had made a little money, had two children nearly grown, and he had refused to lend (much less give) Kenneth any money on two occasions, when Kenneth had needed it, because work was slow. Kenneth had finally written Paul a blistering letter, after which there’d been not a word from Paul. Good riddance.

  There were times when Kenneth considered himself lucky to be, in a sense, independent of mankind, of the New York populace, because of his two hundred and sixty dollars per month income. At other moments, he felt sorry for himself, alone, with a limp, living in a not very nice place. Then sometimes he would love his big room and his free existence all over again. These happy moments were usually after a good meal of knockwurst and sauerkraut. Then Kenneth would lean back in his straight chair, pat his belly, and smile up at his ceiling with the naked lightbulb hanging from it.

  DEAR SIR:

  YOUR DOG IS ALIVE AND WELL BUT I HAVE DECIDED THE SITUATION WARRENTS ANOTHER $1,000 (THOUSAND DOLLARS) WHICH I FEEL SURE A MAN IN YOUR POSITION CAN AFFORD.

  Kenneth wanted to say that he himself needed another thousand dollars, but he could not put this in an elegant enough way, and he did not want to sound like a beggar.

  THEREFORE WILL YOU AGAIN AT 11 P.M. TUESDAY EVENING LEAVE A THOUSAND DOLLARS IN TEN-DOLLAR BILLS AS BEFORE BETWEEN SAME PIKES IN THE FENCE ON YORK AVENUE. THIS TIME I GUARANTEE THE DOG WILL BE TIED TO SAME PIKE AN HOUR LATER, SEIZE THE MOMENT!

  ANON

  Perfect, Kenneth thought. No need to copy it over. He stood up and went to reward himself with a beer from the small refrigerator by the stove, but there was only half a small bottle left, and that flat. Six or more empties stood on the floor. He’d have to buy more. Well, he could certainly afford to! Kenneth with the bottle of stale beer in his hand turned and smiled at his unmade bed. Between the sheets, at the foot of the bed, was something like nine hundred and fifty dollars wrapped in a dishtowel with a rubber band around it. Kenneth also had a savings account with a few hundred in it, but had no intention of making unusual deposits just now.

  Edward Reynolds was good for another thousand, no doubt about that. But Kenneth did not want the police crashing in on him. Could he afford to risk it? He knew Reynolds had been to the police, because he had trailed Reynolds from his apartment house on Saturday morning. Kenneth congratulated himself that he had guessed more or less when Reynolds would actually go to the police—Saturday morning—though he had also spied the previous morning and evening.

  What a useless thing! The dog, the snob dog, had been dead since Wednesday night. Crouching with a rock in his hand, Kenneth had hit her fair and square on top of the head as she had come galloping into the bushes there. A most wonderful piece of luck, Kenneth thought, not to mention that it had been a nice piece of skill on his part to conk a moving dog and knock her out at the first blow and without even a yip from her. Or had there been a yip, camouflaged perhaps by a chorus of carhorns just then, by a surge of traffic on the Drive? At any rate, Kenneth had gathered the dog up in his arms and gone on, northward, towards the next clump of bushes where he had delivered a second blow that surely finished the bitch off. Then, in the darkness, Kenneth had made his way up to the sidewalk, and by a somewhat devious route to the corner house where he lived. He had removed in the Park the dog’s collar and stuffed it into his pocket, and he had wanted to dump the dog into some rubbish container, but the containers were wire and one could see through them. Kenneth had taken the animal to his room. Only one or two people had glanced at it in his arms—Kenneth had kept away from streetlamps, of course—and those people hadn’t said anything, even though the dog’s head had been dripping a little blood. At home, Kenneth had wrapped the dog in one of his bed-sheets, the oldest one he had. Then he had walked with this nearly twenty blocks uptown to the Spic district and got rid of it in a rubbish basket—a wire one, but it didn’t matter with th
e dog in a sheet and in that neighborhood, littered with newspapers and garbage, and those people tossed newborn babies into rubbish baskets, so who was going to make a fuss about a dog?

  Then Kenneth remembered feeling the dog’s collar in his pocket as he walked home, and how he had not wanted to look at it, to read it—though he had, as he killed the dog, imagined examining this complicated collar at home and at leisure. It had dangling tags, a name plate, a couple of metal rings, studs, and the yellow leather was stiff and good. Kenneth had whipped it out of his pocket and flung it down a drain in a gutter.

  He had intended to ask a ransom of Reynolds, and now he had it. He had annoyed Reynolds, causing him to put an ad in the paper. He had deflated the pompous Edward Reynolds who wore swanky dark-blue overcoats and expensive shoes and sometimes gloves when it wasn’t particularly cold. And he had put an end to the dog who wore a plaid raincoat in bad weather and a red turtleneck sweater when it was cold.

  Kenneth liked to take walks, even aimless walks. His foot did not hurt when he walked, and his limp was caused mainly by the absence of toes there, but Kenneth occasionally exaggerated the limp, he even admitted to himself, when he could use a little extra consideration from people, or when he badly wanted a seat on a bus or a subway. Not that anyone had ever got up and given him a seat, but in case he was competing with someone for an empty seat, a limp helped. Kenneth liked his walks, because his mind raced madly, inspired by the ever-changing objects that his eyes fell upon—a baby carriage, a policeman, a couple of overdressed women glimpsed briefly in a taxi, a fat woman lugging home still more to eat in huge grocery bags, and the smug people into whose living-room windows he could see—men in shirt-sleeves watching television, a wife coming in with a tray of beers, warm yellow lights falling on bookshelves and framed pictures. Snobs. Crooks, too, otherwise how’d they get so rich, how’d they get a woman to live with them and serve them? Kenneth had little use for women, and believed they gravitated only towards men with money to buy them and to spend on them. He was convinced women had no sexual drive at all, or not enough to warrant mentioning, and that they used their physical charms merely to lure men towards them.