A Dog's Ransom

by Patricia Highsmith

“Who was that?” Greta asked.

  “A policeman from the station house where I went today. He wants to come to see us tomorrow morning at eleven.”

  “He’s got some news?”

  “No, he said he hadn’t. Sounds as if he’s coming on his own.” Ed shrugged. “But it’s something. At least they’re making an effort.”

  4

  Patrolman Clarence Pope Duhamell was twenty-four years old, a graduate of Cornell University where he had majored in psychology, though with no definite idea of what he wanted to do with it when he left university. Military service had followed, and he had sat for two years in four camps in the United States as a Placement Counselor for draftees. Then honorably discharged, and having escaped Vietnam much to the relief of his parents, Clarence had taken a job in the personnel department of a large New York bank which had some eighty branches throughout the city. Clarence after six months had found the work surprisingly dull. The Preferential Hiring Law of the Human Rights Commission forced him to recommend people of “minority races” whatever their lack of qualifications, and he and the higher-up hiring officers had been blamed when accounts later got fouled up in the bank. It was good for a laugh, perhaps, and Clarence could still remember Bernie Alpert in the office saying: “Don’t take it so personally, Clare, you’re just out of the army and you’re just obeying orders, no?” Thus the bank personnel job had been not only unsatisfying to Clarence, but it had seemed an impasse: he was not even permitted to choose the best, the right person, and that was presumably what he had been trained to do. Casting about with a completely open mind—Clarence tried to keep an open mind about everything—he had read about police recruitment. Into the office at the Merchant and Bankers Trust Company’s personnel headquarters itself, in fact, had come some brochures in regard to joining the police force, which might have been dropped there by some hand of Providence, Clarence had felt, for bewildered people like himself. The variety of police work, the benefits, the pensions, the challenges had been set forth in a most attractive way. These brochures emphasized the service a young man could render his city and mankind, and stated that a policeman today was in a unique position to make contact with his fellow men, and to steer wavering individuals and families back into a happier path. To Clarence Duhamell had come the realization that a policeman need not be a dim-wit flatfoot, or a Mafia member, but might be a college graduate like himself, a man who knew his Krafft-Ebing and Freud as well as his Dostoyevsky and Proust. So Clarence had joined up with New York’s finest.

  Clarence had been brought up in Astoria, Long Island, where his parents still lived. On his mother’s side, Clarence was Anglo-Irish, and on his father’s remotely French and the rest German-English. After a year with the New York Police, Clarence was reasonably satisfied. He had been disillusioned in some ways: there had been enough contact with individuals (delinquents or criminals of whatever age), and a stretch with a downtown East Side precinct house had brought such violent incidents that Clarence (with a walkie-talkie) had had to run for cover and telephone for the squad cars several times. It had been his orders from the precinct captain to keep himself in fit condition for action, and to summon assistance at once in all circumstances in which he thought a gun might be used. Well and good, but Clarence had finally asked to be transferred, not out of fear, but because he felt about as useful as a streetlamp on that patrol beat. The Upper West Side precinct where he was now based was little better, but for different reasons: the fellows were not so friendly, nor were the superior officers. Clarence was no longer a rookie. At the same time he was still young and idealistic enough not to accept kickbacks, even the two-dollar-a-week kickbacks some stores offered cops in order not to be fined for, or to correct, petty infractions. Some cops got a lot more, Clarence knew, some up to eight hundred or a thousand dollars a month from pay-offs. Clarence had always known pay-offs existed in the force, and he wasn’t trying to reform anyone or to inform on anyone, but it became known that he didn’t take kickbacks and so the cops who did—the majority—tended to avoid Clarence. He wasn’t fraternity material. Clarence was consistently polite (no harm in that) but he was afraid to be chummy unless the other cop was chummy first. The cops in Riverside Drive precinct house were not a chummy lot. Clarence did not want to ask for another transfer. A man had to make his own opportunities. To stay in a rut was easy for everyone, Clarence thought, and the majority lived out their lives in a secure groove, not venturing anything. If he didn’t like the force in another year, Clarence intended to quit.

  Because he mistrusted routine—ruts could never reveal an individual’s destiny—he had telephoned Edward Reynolds, who had seemed to him a decent man with an interesting problem which his precinct wasn’t going to pay much attention to. Such people as Edward Reynolds didn’t turn up every day. In fact the main reason for Clarence’s boredom was the similarity of the crimes and the criminals, the petty house robberies, the car thefts, the handbag snatches, the complaints of shoplifting, the muggers who were never caught—and neither were most of the shoplifters caught, even if they were seen by a dozen people running down the street with their loot.

  When Clarence had taken the personnel job at the bank, he had leased an apartment on East 19th Street, a walk-up on the fourth floor. This one-room, kitchenette and bath he still had, and the rent was cheap, a hundred and thirty-seven dollars per month. Clarence kept most of his clothes here, but for the past three or four months he had been spending most nights with his girlfriend Marylyn Coomes, who had an apartment on Macdougal Street in the Village. Marylyn was twenty-two, had dropped out of NYU, and was a freelance secretary-typist, though she took a regular job often enough to augment her income considerably by claiming unemployment after she quit it. “Soak the Government, they’re loaded,” said Marylyn. She got away with murder. Marylyn plainly lied, and Clarence did not admire her ethics, and tried to put them out of his mind. Marylyn was very left, much more so than Clarence, and he considered himself left. Marylyn believed in destroying everything and starting everything afresh. Clarence thought that things could be improved, using the structures that already existed. This was the great difference between them. But far more important, Clarence was in love with Marylyn, and she had accepted him as her lover. Clarence was the only one, of that he was ninety-nine percent sure, and he often thought the one percent doubt was only his imagination. Clarence had had two affairs before, neither worth mentioning by comparison with the apricot-haired Marylyn. The other girls—one had been young, timid, acting as if she were ashamed of him, and the second had been a bit tough and casual, and Clarence had known he wasn’t the only man in her life, which had been an impossible situation for him. He put both those affairs down to experience. Marylyn was different. He had quarreled with Marylyn at least four times, and yet he had gone back to her after staying away perhaps five days. At least four times he had asked Marylyn to marry him, but she didn’t want to marry just yet. “Maybe never, who knows? Marriage is an outmoded institution, don’t you know that?” She was hopeless with money. If she had twenty-eight dollars from a typing job, she would blow it the same day she got it—on a groovy coat from a thrift shop, a potted plant, or a couple of books. She seemed to pay her rent all right. Her money was her money, and Clarence didn’t mind how she spent it, but once he had seen a couple of dollar bills actually falling out of her raincoat pocket as she went down the stairs in front of him. She didn’t like billfolds. Now he slept more often at Marylyn’s apartment than on East 19th Street. This was not kosher by Police Department rules, Clarence supposed, but on the rare occasions when he might be summoned by an emergency call, he had taken the trouble to sleep in his own apartment. The emergency calls had never come, but one never knew.

  On the Sunday morning that Clarence was supposed to call on Edward Reynolds, he awakened in Marylyn’s bed on Macdougal Street. He had told her about his appointment with the man whose dog had been stolen. Clarence made a coffee and orange juice from
a frozen tin, and brought it on a tray to Marylyn who was still in bed.

  “Working on Sunday,” Marylyn said in a sleep-husky voice, and yawned with a lazy hand over her mouth. Her long reddish-blond hair was all over the pillow like a halo. She had a few freckles on her nose.

  “Not working, darling. No one’s ordering me to see Mr. Reynolds.” As Clarence adjusted the tray so it wouldn’t tip on the bed, he caught a delicious hint of her perfume, of the warmth of the sheets that he had left a few minutes ago, and he would happily have plunged back into bed, and it even crossed his mind to do so, after ringing Mr. Reynolds and asking if he could come at noon instead of eleven. However, best to start off on the right foot. “I’ll be back before one, I’m sure.”

  “You’re free this afternoon—and tonight?”

  Clarence hesitated, briefly. “I’m on tonight at eight. New shift.” The shifts changed every three weeks. Clarence disliked the 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift, because it kept him from seeing Marylyn in the evenings. It was the third time he had had such a shift. Clarence sipped his coffee. Marylyn had given a slight groan at his news. She wasn’t fully awake yet. Clarence glanced at his wrist-watch, then at the straight chair in front of Marylyn’s dressing-table, half expecting to see his trousers and jacket there, but he had hung them up last evening, and over the chair-back now was a black bra, and on the seat of the chair a public library book open and face down. Marylyn was not very neat. But it could be worse, Clarence thought, she could be sharing the apartment with another girl, and then things would have been hell.

  Clarence took a shower in the small bathroom, shaved with the razor he kept there, and dressed in his ordinary clothes—a dark-blue suit, white shirt, a discreet tie, oxblood shoes of which he was especially fond and which he now wiped vigorously with a rag he found under the kitchen sink. Then Clarence combed his hair in Marylyn’s bathroom mirror. He had blue eyes that were a little pale. He kept his light-brown hair as unshort as possible, though the force was surprisingly lenient about that. His upper lip was almost as full as his lower—a pleasant, tolerant mouth, he liked to think. Seldom grim, anyway.

  “Want me to buy something for lunch, or want to go out?” Clarence seated himself, gently, on the edge of the bed.

  Marylyn had put the tray aside, on Clarence’s side of the bed, and had turned over face down. She liked to lie in bed a half-hour or so after her coffee—thinking, she said. “I told you I had that chicken,” Marylyn mumbled into the pillow. “Come back and come to bed and then I’ll cook it.”

  His heart gave a leap and he smiled. He stretched out beside her, kissed the side of her head, but was careful not to stay long enough to wrinkle his shirt front. “Bye, darling.”

  He arrived at the Reynoldses’ apartment house at one minute to eleven, and asked the doorman to ring up Mr. Edward Reynolds, who was expecting him—Clarence Duhamell. After an affirmative work from the doorman with the telephone, Clarence took an elevator to the eighth floor.

  Mr. Reynolds had the door open for him, and looked surprised to see him in civilian clothes.

  “Good morning. Clarence Duhamell,” Clarence said.

  “Morning. Come in.”

  Clarence walked into a large living-room where there was a piano, paintings on the wall, and lots of books. Clarence at first did not notice the woman sitting in a corner of the big sofa.

  “My wife, Greta,” Mr. Reynolds said.

  “How do you do?” said Clarence.

  “How do you do?” She had a slight accent.

  “Won’t you sit down? Anywhere you like,” Mr. Reynolds said casually. He was wearing a dark-blue sportshirt and unpressed flannel trousers.

  Clarence sat down on a straight chair which had arms. “I’m not sure I can help with your problem,” Clarence began, “but I’d like to try. I heard you say at the precinct house that you had four letters.”

  “Yes. I left them at your precinct house. And evidently the writer of the letters has our dog.”

  “Just how was the dog stolen?”

  Ed explained. “I didn’t hear any noise, any barking. It was pretty dark. But I can’t imagine how anyone got hold of the dog.”

  “A French poodle,” Clarence said.

  “Black. About so high.” Mr. Reynolds held out a hand less than two feet from the floor, palm down. “Her name’s Lisa. Not the kind to go off with strangers. She’s four years old.”

  Clarence took this in carefully. Mr. Reynolds was pessimistic about him, Clarence sensed. Clarence felt that Mr. Reynolds was a rather sad man, and he wondered why. He had dark eyes, a firm mouth that had the capacity for smiling, for laughter, but the mouth was sad now. He would be a reasonable and patient man, Clarence thought. “And you paid the thousand dollars.” Clarence had overheard it in the Desk Officer’s room.

  “Yes. Obviously a mistake. I got a letter asking for it, you see. The dog was to be returned an hour later after the money was collected—on York Avenue and Sixty-first Street—Would you like a cup of coffee?”

  Mrs. Reynolds got up. “I’ll heat the coffee. It’s quite fresh, because we got up late,” she said to Clarence with a smile.

  “Thank you,” said Clarence. “Have you got any enemies—someone you might suspect, Mr. Reynolds?”

  Mr. Reynolds laughed. “Maybe enemies—non-friends—but not like this. This fellow’s cracked, I think. You saw the letters?”

  “I’m sorry, I didn’t.” Clarence felt at once stupid and at a disadvantage. He should have asked to see the precinct’s photostats. Clarence had been shy about asking to see them, and now he reproached himself. “I can look at the photostats tonight. I go on duty at eight tonight. My shift just changed.”

  Mr. Reynolds was silent.

  “Is there any person in the neighborhood you’ve noticed,” Clarence asked, “watching you?”

  “No. Sorry. I’ve tried to think.”

  Mr. Reynolds had a large head with thick, straight black hair that had a few fine lines of gray in it. It was coarse, unruly hair that did not want to lie down, though there was a side parting in it. His nose was strong and straight, not handsome, though his dark eyes and his mouth were handsome, in Clarence’s opinion. He made Clarence think of a Roman general—maybe Mark Antony.

  Mrs. Reynolds came in with a tray of coffee and Danish pastry. Her accent was German, Clarence thought. She looked Jewish, or partly Jewish.

  “I intend to keep an eye out for people in this neighborhood,” Clarence said. “It must be someone in this neighborhood. May I ask what time you go to work and come home, Mr. Reynolds?”

  “Oh—I take off just before nine and come home around six, six-fifteen. You know, I’d like this cleared up quickly, if possible,” Ed said, squirming with sudden impatience. “Our dog is the important thing, to hell with the thousand dollars. I don’t know what conditions this moron is keeping the dog under, but it can’t go on for ever.” He glanced at Greta, who was making a silent “Sh-h” to calm him down.

  “I understand.” Clarence tried to think what to do, what to say next. He was afraid he had not made the best impression, not the excellent impression he had wished to make.

  “I hope the police are checking to see if any anonymous letter-writers live in this neighborhood. Seems to me that’s the obvious thing to do.” Ed sipped his coffee.

  “I’m sure they are. I’ll call up Centre Street and see what I can find out.”

  “More coffee, Mr. Duhamell?” asked Mrs. Reynolds, pronouncing his name as if she knew how to spell it.

  “No, thank you. Have you a picture of the dog?”

  “Oh, lots,” said Ed.

  Greta went to a tall bookcase and out of nowhere, it seemed, produced a photograph in a white cardboard folder.

  It was a color photograph of a black poodle sitting beside a table-leg, the dog’s eyes blue-white from
the camera’s flash.

  “Poodles look all alike to people who don’t know them,” said Greta Reynolds. “But I would know Lisa from two blocks away—as far as I could see her!” She laughed.

  She had a warm laugh, a friendly smile.

  Clarence stood up and handed the photograph back. “Thank you. I’ll also prod the fellows at the precinct house. The trouble is—we’re swamped with routine things now, like the robberies by junkies—”

  “Ah, the junkies,” said Ed with a sigh.

  “Thank you very much for seeing me,” Clarence said.

  “We thank you,” Ed said, getting up. “Really, we hadn’t expected any personal attention. Apropos, what about a private detective? Or am I being naïve? Could a private detective do anything more than the police?” Mr. Reynolds smiled his twisted, discouraged smile.

  “I doubt it. We’ve got the files on such letter-writers, after all. The important thing is to work on it,” Clarence said.

  They saw him to the door.

  “I’ll be in touch as soon as I know anything,” Clarence said.

  It was chilly, and Clarence wished he had brought his overcoat from Marylyn’s. He walked slowly towards Broadway, looking on both sides of the street for loiterers or anyone who seemed to be watching the Reynoldses’ building. Clarence didn’t like the Riverside Drive area, because the big apartment buildings looked gloomy even in daytime. No shops anywhere until Broadway, no color, just big concrete blocks of apartments that looked as if they’d been standing for eighty years or more. Most of the people also seemed old, and Jewish or foreign, and somehow sad and discouraged. However, the Reynoldses were different, and their apartment certainly wasn’t a bourgeois museum. There were modern paintings on the walls, interesting-looking books, and a piano that looked as if it were played—sheet music on it as well as Chopin and Brahms books. Clarence walked up one block on Broadway, then turned west, shoving his hands into his trouser pockets against the wind that came suddenly from the Hudson River. He wanted to see where Mr. Reynolds had lost his dog Lisa.