The Mind Thing

CHAPTER NINE

Doc Staunton awoke slowly, turned over, and raised his arm to look at his wrist watch. It was after ten, which was not surprising since he’d got to bed pretty late the night before. He’d gone into Bartlesville late the previous afternoon so the time would be right for him to phone the laboratory in Green Bay about the dog. He’d phoned them and had learned what, he realized now, he’d known all along he would learn.

The dog Buck had not had rabies. Nor had he had, aside from the injuries that had caused his death, anything organically wrong with him that could be determined by dissection. The dog’s having run in front of the car couldn’t be explained by anything ascertainably physically wrong with him.

Doc had sighed, and had phoned into Wilcox to try to reach the sheriff. The sheriff would be interested, or at least he should be interested. But the sheriff wasn’t available and his office didn’t know where he was. Doc had stayed in town for dinner at the better—such as it was—of the two local restaurants. Then he’d tried to reach the sheriff again, this time first at his office and then at his home number. He got no answer at the former and no satisfaction at the latter.

He’d killed a little time in the tavern and had been enlisted in a poker game starting in the back room. One of the local merchants, Hans Weiss, the grocer from whom he bought most of his supplies, had invited him and vouched for him. There were only four others, counting Hans, ready to start the game and they’d needed a fifth. The stakes were just enough to make the game interesting; nickel ante, fifty-cent limit. Doc lost twelve dollars in the first half hour without winning a hand, then a big hand put him ahead and he stayed that way. Twice, once around eight o’clock and once around nine, he tried to reach the sheriff and failed. The next time he happened to look at his watch it was almost midnight and he decided it was too late to try again that night. By that time there were seven in the game and he was the big winner, about seventy dollars ahead, so he didn’t think he should quit until someone else suggested breaking up the game. That hadn’t happened until one-thirty and he’d got home at two, still forty-some dollars to the good. And he’d become a friend of everyone in the game and had accepted an invitation to play again. After all, he had to give the boys a chance to win their money back. As a comparative stranger in their midst, that was the least he could do.

Now, Thursday morning, he yawned and got up. Might as well get into Bartlesville before noon and phone the sheriff; he could make an appointment, if the sheriff was free, to drive on into Wilcox to see him. Unless, of course, the sheriff was coming into Bartlesville anyway; then he could ask the sheriff to have lunch with him.

He made himself only coffee for breakfast and got into town by half-past eleven, where he phoned the sheriff from the drugstore. This time he connected.

“Doc Staunton, Sheriff,” he said. “Something I wanted to talk to you about, if you can spare me a few minutes. You coming here anyway, or shall I drive in to Wilcox and come to your office?”

“You caught me just as I was leaving, Doc. For Bartlesville.”

“Good. Can you have lunch with me, then?”

“Guess so. Sure, thanks. Which restaurant?”

Doc said, “Let’s meet at the tavern first. One drink won’t hurt us, if we’re eating right afterward.”

The sheriff agreed and said he’d be there within half an hour.

Doc walked from the wall phone to the drug counter to make a few purchases. The druggist was one of the men with whom he’d played poker last night and they greeted each other by name.

“Heard you call the guy you were talking to ‘Sheriff,’ Doc,” the druggist said. “Nothing wrong, I hope.”

“No. Just want to pass on some information to him.”

“Not about our poker games, I hope. Say, Doc, you live out the Bascombe Road, don’t you?”

Doc nodded. “I’ve wondered why they call it that, but I do. Last house. Why?”

“Another suicide out your way, last night. Or maybe you heard about it already?”

Something prickled at the back of Doc’s neck. “No, I hadn’t. Just got in town; this is my first stop. Who was it?”

“Old geezer by the name of Siegfried Gross. Not much loss; nobody liked him and he liked everybody even less than that. He lives—lived—about five miles out from town. That’d be about three miles from your place.”

Doc probed but found out only two things more: that Gross had killed himself with a shotgun sometime in the middle of the night, and that he had left a suicide note saying be was killing himself because of the pain of his arthritis.

He put his drugstore purchases in his car and strolled thoughtfully to the tavern. Mike, the bartender, was talking with two customers about the suicide of Gross, but none of them knew any more than Doc had already learned from the druggist.

Doc nursed a beer until the sheriff came in, then he downed what was left of it and he and the sheriff took the booth they’d sat in after the inquest.

“No beer for me this time,” the sheriff said wearily. “I can use a pickup, Mike. Double bourbon, water on the side.” Doc said he’d settle for another beer and Mike went back to the bar.

The sheriff yawned. “Guess you heard about Siegfried Gross,” he said. “I had to go out there in the middle of the night and ain’t slept since. Gawd, but I’m tired. And soon as we eat I got to go out there again.”

“Mind if I go with you?” Doc asked.

“If you want. Was it something about the Gross business you wanted to tell me, Doc?”

“No, I didn’t even know of it when I phoned you. It’s about the Hoffman dog. It did not have rabies.”

The sheriff raised bushy eyebrows. “You mean you had it checked? What for, it didn’t bite nobody. Or did it?”

“No, it bit no one. But I was curious, especially after you told me it was car-shy, why it ran blindly in front of my car. If it had been rabid, that would have explained it.”

“Hell, Doc, dogs get run over every day. He was probably tracking a rabbit that crossed the road there, had his nose down and wasn’t watching. You can’t make a supreme court case out of a dog getting itself run over.”

“I suppose not, but—Sheriff, was there anything unusual in connection with Gross’s suicide?”

“It was plenty messy. Put the barrel of a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger, blew his brains all over the place. Took our mortician friend over an hour to clean up that kitchen. Lord, what a mess.”

“Will there be an inquest?”

“With a suicide note in his own writing, what for? Just a waste of taxpayers’ money. Well, let’s have one more quick one and then go and eat, huh?”

It wasn’t until over dessert and coffee that Doc again asked if there had been any unusual circumstances, anything at all, in connection with the suicide.

“Funny thing or two happened the same night, but nothing to do with the suicide,” the sheriff said. “An owl flew through the window, through the glass, I mean, around midnight, and Gross had to shoot it because it had a busted wing.”

“With the same shotgun?”

“Hell, no. Used a twenty-two rifle for that. And it was maybe three hours after that he killed himself, but I figure he couldn’t go back to sleep and laid there suffering and finally decided to put himself out of his misery like he’d done to the owl, and went down to the kitchen and did it.”

Doc frowned. “Was there any physical contact between Gross and the owl?”

“Not till after it was dead. After he shot it Gross tossed it out through the busted window and told his wife he’d bury it in the morning.” The sheriff stopped to take a swallow of his coffee. “Loursat, that’s the guy next door, buried it. And the cat. Sometime in the night Gross’s cat got in Loursat’s barn and a vicious dog there killed it.”

Doc Staunton took a deep breath. He said softly, so softly that the sheriff could barely hear it, “ ‘The Owl and the Pussy-cat went to sea, in a beautiful pea-green boat’.”

“Huh?”

“Line from a nonsense poem by Edward Lear. Sheriff, have you ever known an owl to fly through a pane of glass before?”

“Dunno about an owl especially, Doc, but birds fly into glass all the time. Got a picture window in my house that a bird flies into—oh, maybe once or twice a week. Mostly sparrows. Usually just stun themselves a minute, but once in a while one breaks its neck. Well, guess we’re ready. You want to ride out with me, or go in separate cars so you can go on home after?”