A Dog's
Life
by Myra Love
Chapter
VII
“I’d really rather be driving,” I grumbled at Anita. She made eye
contact with me in the rearview mirror and grinned so broadly I thought
her face would crack.
“What’s the matter, Andy? Is Dr. Phil giving you a hard time?”
The dog was on my lap, licking contentedly at my knee. My pants
were soaked through with dog slobber, and he showed no sign of stopping.
It could have been worse, I suppose. He could have been jumping up
and trying to lick my face again. Or he could be heaving himself
toward Anita and the steering wheel.
It had taken a good half-hour to persuade Tad Jackson to hand over the
leashed dog to us. He insisted that we had no right to it. I
told him finally that I’d arrest him for possession of a stolen animal
if he didn’t back off.
“What do you mean by that?” he demanded. “This dog isn’t stolen.”
“Yes, it is,” I replied. “Mattie and Jim Keeley reported it stolen
a few days ago. If you don’t want to get hauled in for theft or
for receiving stolen goods, you’d better hand over the dog.”
“But they asked Mr. Clausen to take care of the dog, and he asked me,”
he protested.
“That’s not their story,” I replied, adding in a sharper tone of voice,
“So what’s it gonna be? Do you want to go to jail?”
He shook his head violently and held out the leash. “Here!
Dog’s nothing but trouble anyway.” He slunk off, and I heard his
truck start. His tires kicked up a small cloud of dust as he drove away.
Anita then sent me into the hut to pick up the radio transceiver.
When we’d gotten to her car, she grumbled, “We forgot to get Dr. Phil’s
crate from Tad. You’ll have to sit in the back and hold him, Andy.
I can’t have him up jumping over the seat back and getting in my way.”
I sighed and climbed into the back seat with the dog. He struggled
to get up front for a few minutes, but I grabbed him and firmly pulled
him back onto the seat next to me. I got a lot of drool on my
hands and shirt for my trouble. As if to apologize for fighting
with me, the dog then climbed up onto my lap and started licking.
I pushed him off, but he got back on and went back to work. “So
now what?” I complained at Anita. “You messed up my chances of
getting Clausen with the dog in his possession. How do we prove he
was in on the scam?”
She sniffed disdainfully. “We don’t. We let your aunt and
uncle have their dog back and see what happens.”
“But…” I started to protest.
“Clausen isn’t as important as Jim and Mattie, Andy,” she said in the
patient tone I’ve heard her use with people she thinks are a bit slow.
“Okay,” I agreed grudgingly, “we’ll do it your way, but the chief is
going to be really upset with me.”
I could see her smirk in the rearview mirror, but she said no more, so I
concentrated on keeping the dog’s nose out of my crotch and held my
peace.
When we got to Mattie’s place, Dr. Phil started to pant rapidly. I
couldn’t tell if his reaction was excitement or anxiety. I grabbed
hold of the leash and slowly opened the door. He was in no hurry
to get out. In fact, he slid over to the other side of the back
seat and I had to coax and pull him to get him onto the street.
“Interesting. He doesn’t seem at all thrilled to be home.”
Anita tugged at the leash and said, “Come on, boy,” in a firm voice.
The dog let out a short yelp before yielding to the inevitable and
following her up the walk to the front door. I raced after them
and caught up just as Anita turned to look for me. “You ring,
Andy. If Mattie sees me, she’ll slam the door in my face.”
I stepped past Anita and Dr. Phil, who was trying to take a bite out of
my leg as if he hadn’t spent most of the car ride licking my knee.
Anita tried hard not to laugh and almost succeeded. Before I had a
chance to ring, the door opened and Mattie emerged, looking very
annoyed. “I thought I told you not to come around without calling
first, Andy Searle. I’ve got half a mind to call our lawyer and
sue the police for harassment.” She took a deep breath.
I didn’t want to give her time to start in again, but I wasn’t sure what
I wanted to say. I didn’t have to say anything because Dr. Phil
did. At the sound of Mattie’s voice, he yelped loudly and pulled
his leash out of Anita’s hand. In less time than it took me to
yell, “look out,” Dr. Phil had launched himself onto Mattie. I
watched her face and was relieved by what I saw when she caught the
flying dog in her arms: pure, unadulterated joy. I glanced over at Anita
for a second, and her face registered satisfaction, perhaps even
pleasure. I realized that she wanted Mattie to be happy. Considering how
rude Mattie was both to her and about her, it amazed me,
“Oh Andy! You found him.” Mattie’s voice called me back into
the present. “I can’t thank you enough.” The rest of her
words were muffled by the slobbering of dog kisses. I was about to
tell her that Anita was really the one who’d figured out how to get the
dog back when Jim came to the door.
“Hey, what’s all the racket?” he growled before he saw Dr. Phil in
Mattie’s arms. He did a double-take then and tried to control his
facial expression. It was too late though. Both Anita and I
saw the look of disgust when he realized his wife was holding the
supposedly kidnapped pup. That look turned sly, and he smiled
broadly at me. “Well congratulations, Andy! Looks like you
solved the mystery. Did you arrest the culprit?”
“CC Clausen’s custodian Tad had the dog. He claimed that you and
Mattie asked CC to find someone to take care of it.” I put my
hands on my hips and waited.
“Why, that’s just not true,” Mattie snapped. “I’d willingly never
let this little boy out of my sight, would I?” It was astonishing
how her voice changed to a soft croon as she petted the dog. He
wagged his stub of a tail and whined delightedly.
Jim frowned, then grinned at me sourly. “Well, we all know that I
owe Clausen money. I guess he decided to use the dog as a way to
pressure me.”
“So that’s your story?” I asked, allowing my skepticism to show in my
voice. “You weren’t in on a plot to scam money out of townspeople
by reporting the dog missing and trying to get contributions towards his
ransom?”
Jim’s face mimed a surprised expression, but it wasn’t all that
convincing. “Why, Andy! How could you think such of a thing
of your aunt and uncle?” he said, sounding hurt. “You can see how
much Mattie loves that dog.”
“I didn’t say Mattie was in on the scam,” I said and waited.
He just smiled back at me. “I’d never do anything to hurt or upset
Mattie,” he replied, his voice sounding oily. “You know that.”
I knew no such thing, but the happy look that appeared on my aunt’s face
when he made the claim silenced me. I turned on my heel and
started to leave.
“Andy,” Mattie called out after me, “come to dinner sometime soon, okay?
And bring what’s her name, Lena, if you like.”
“Lisa, her name is Lisa.” I was halfway to the station before I
realized that Anita was no longer with me.
“Well, at least you found their dog,” the chief said. He wasn’t
pleased though.
“And he stopped Mr. Keeley from carrying out the scam he’d planned,”
Donald added.
“Yeah, but Jim Keeley, CC Clausen, and anyone else who was involved got
away scot-free, and there’s nothing to stop them from dreaming up
something else.”
I felt like a failure. I wasn’t even the one who’d found the dog.
A wave of irritation rose up in me, mostly annoyance with Anita, who’d
insisted on returning the dog to Jim and Mattie instead of letting Tad
Jackson take it back to Clausen. I was sure that was what he’d
have done. Why, I asked myself, do I always listen to Anita
Carswell?
I knew the answer, of course. Anita had saved me from myself time
and again. She was also my friend. Nevertheless, I enjoyed
my annoyance. It felt better than self-pity.
“So now what?” Donald chimed in again, looking from the chief to me and
back to the chief again.
“Now nothing,” the chief grunted in reply.
“No,” I said, pulling myself together. “Now I go confront Clausen
and Tad Jackson with Mattie and Jim in tow.”
The chief shrugged. “Do what you have to do,” he said. “But
I’m not going to hold my breath waiting for anything good to come of
it.”
“At least they’ll know we’re on to them,” I insisted, as I headed out
the door. I heard the chief snort, but that was the extent of his
response.
“Absolutely not!” Mattie spat the words out. “I will not go to see
Mr. Clausen. He is a bad man.” She hugged Dr. Phil to her
chest. “I don’t understand why you haven’t arrested him.”
I resisted the impulse to roll my eyes. “We’d like to arrest him
and everyone else involved,” I replied. “But we need evidence.
We were hoping that putting you and Jim and Tad together in a room with
him might help us get that.”
She frowned at me. “You’re out to get Jim, aren’t you? He
warned me about that, but I didn’t believe him. He’s right
though.” Her frown deepened and she gently let Dr. Phil down and
put her hands on her hips.
“We’re not out to get anyone. We just want to get to the bottom of
things.”
“You keep saying ‘we’, Andy Searle, but I don’t see anyone else here but
you.”
She had me and she knew it. “Okay, the chief has given up,” I
admitted. “But don’t you want to know what happened? Don’t
you want to be sure it doesn’t happen again?”
She smiled and patted my arm. “To tell you the truth, Andy, I
don’t care. I’ve got Dr. Phil back safely.” She bent down to
pat the dog stretched out at her feet. “And Jim has promised to
stop gambling. He says he never had any idea that his gambling
would lead to an attack on my baby doggie. So I have everything I
need. Thanks again, Andy, for finding Dr. Phil.”
I sighed, defeated. “It wasn’t me that found him. It was
Anita Carswell.”
Mattie’s smiled knowingly. “I thought as much when I saw her come
up the path when you brought him back.” She patted the dog again.
He whined and squirmed upwards to lick her face. “Well, I guess I
owe her, though I still wouldn’t invite her into my house if you paid me
in diamonds.” She pushed Dr. Phil’s snout aside and scratched the
top of his head. He wriggled in pleasure and let out a short bark
that sounded like a grunt. “Do you think I should send her a thank
you note?”
“I don’t think that’s necessary. Of course, if you want to…”
Mattie shook her head. “No, I don’t want to. I’d only do it
to be polite.”
Anita was resaccing an oversize striated green Sheaffer Balance when I
walked into the kitchen. She looked up from it only long enough to
invite me to sit down. “Water is on for tea,” she mumbled and then
reached for the talc.
I sat and watched her work. It always amazed me that she was able
to see well enough to fix pens at her age. She’d laughed at
me the first time I’d said that. She’d just turned seventy-five
then. “My distance vision isn’t what it used to be, but I can see fine
up close.” That didn’t stop me from repeating myself every
couple of years. She pointed that out each time, but I could tell
she didn’t really mind.
She carefully fitted the section to the barrel and set the pen aside.
“You look disgruntled, Andy.”
Disgruntled hardly did justice to how I felt. I had to take a deep
breath. Otherwise I’d have told her just how bad I felt and how
very much it was her fault for not letting me set up Clausen by
following Tad Jackson back to his lot when Tad still had the dog.
“Still stewing about not nailing Jim and CC Clausen?” she asked gently.
I nodded.
“Well, it’s not too late,” she said, reaching for another smaller,
flattop pen.
That did it. “If you’d let me follow Jackson back to Clausen’s
place when Tad still had that darned dog, this would all be over by
now,” I grumbled.
She smiled faintly and shook her head. “Andy, you’re a grown man
and a police officer. If you’d really wanted to follow Tad to
Clausen, there is no way I could have stopped you.”
I grunted and started to chew on my thumbnail. She wasn’t being
fair, but I didn’t know what to say to prove that to her.
She put down the pen she was holding. The color was marbled red
and cream, very easy on the eye; I had to restrain myself from asking
about it. The last thing I wanted was to listen to a lecture about the
history of a certain brand or model of fountain pen.
“You can still use Tad to get to Clausen, you know,” she said in a
deceptively neutral tone of voice. “CC fired him for messing up
with Mattie’s dog, and he’s an angry young man at the moment. I’m
sure he’d make a credible witness and you would be able to arrest
Clausen and make the charge stick. But that won’t really solve
your problem, will it?”
“It would be a start,” I protested, but I knew deep down that she was
right. Jim was my problem. I just knew he’d been in on the
scam and I didn’t believe he would stop gambling. Yet I didn’t
want him to inflict any further hurt on Mattie, so there didn’t seem to
be any way to stop him. I looked up at Anita, expecting her to
have picked up the pen and started working on it again, but she was
looking at me with a very soft expression. I smiled. “You’re
right, of course,” I admitted. “There’s still the issue of Jim’s
gambling, even though Mattie told me he’d sworn off.”
Anita pursed her lips. “He’ll swear off gambling the day I grow
long ears and a tail.”
I laughed at the image; I couldn’t help it. “You’d look great with
a tail, but I’m not sure about the ears.”
She chuckled. “I’m worried about your aunt, Andy. I’m not
just afraid that Jim will hurt her but that he’ll get her involved in
something questionable, if not downright illegal. That attempt to
get the townsfolk to contribute to the dog’s ransom was a near miss, and
she was right in the middle of it.”
I sighed. “I’ll admit that I’d wondered if she were in on the plot
from the beginning. She’s very protective of Jim and I’ve noticed
she does what he tells her to do.”
Anita, much to my relief, shook her head. “She’s even more
protective of her dogs,” she said crisply. “She’d never put them
at risk.”
I wished I could be as sure as she was. As I watched, she put the
pen together, first spreading a thin line of shellac on the parts she
was joining. “There,” she said in a satisfied voice, “now that can
go back to its owner.”
“Whose pen is it?” I asked.
She looked pleased with herself. “Do you remember Tim Coolidge?”
I shook my head. “Can’t say that I do.”
“No, I don’t suppose you do. He’s not all that memorable.”
She seemed barely able to contain her glee. “Tim’s grandfather
gave him this pen. He heard from someone that I could repair it.
All it needed was a sac.”
I nodded, wondering why she was so pleased. I’d seen her do much
more complicated repairs.
“He used to work for CC Clausen,” she added, trying to make it sound
like an afterthought. “And Tad Jackson is his nephew.”
My head jerked upwards. “Don’t tell me: he got Tad the job with
Clausen.”
Anita grinned broadly. “That’s right. And he’s not happy at
all about what Clausen had his nephew doing to earn his pay.”
“You filled him in on the details?”
She shook her head. “I didn’t have to. Tad did.”
“But I thought Tad was convinced Mattie and Jim had asked Clausen to
have the dog looked after?”
“Yes, but Tad is a very gullible young man with certain mental
limitations that we’re all aware of. Tim Coolidge is anything but
gullible. From the little bit of information he got from Tad, he
figured out the real story. He doesn’t like having his
nephew misused in the commission of a crime.”
“So what do we do?” I asked.
“We don’t do anything. I, however, have to return this pen to Mr.
Coolidge. If you promise to keep your mouth closed, you can come
along for the ride.”
© 2016 Myra Love - All Rights
Reserved
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