Paws before dying (26 page)

He put his beer can and the transmitter on one of the tables, reached out, and took the Buck Special from her. She didn’t resist. Then she stood there with her arms hanging helplessly at her sides. She looked bewildered, but no more than the last time I’d seen her.

Either the feel of the Browning or his mother’s presence, maybe both, renewed Dale’s energy. He started telling his brothers that he wasn’t going anywhere. Then he launched into a jumble of inarticulate, pained accusations. Most were about Buddy. None were directed to Edna, who was gazing around with mean, empty eyes. Dale was well into his tirade when a man I’d never seen before wove his way down the stairs. I didn’t know him, but the close atmosphere of the damp cellar reeked of his invisible companion, a guy named Jim Beam.

Although the father and his sons all resembled one another, Mitchell Dale Johnson, Sr., looked most like an aged, wasted version of Dale. He had the same big-boned, wide build, but without the flesh and youth. His vague, bloodshot eyes said he was as drunk as Dale, too. His face and neck were a sickly, wrinkled yellow-gray. Gray-blond hair stood out from his head in strange waves, like the gelled and crimped coiffure of a very old woman. In freakish contrast to Edna and to his own disheveled drunkenness, though, he was fastidiously and expensively dressed in a red plaid Pendleton robe over white linen pajamas. His black leather bedroom slippers gleamed. He even wore socks.

He was evidently just sober enough to have caught the gist of Dale’s rambling. “Shut your drunken trap about Buddy,” he ordered Dale. He slurred his words less than I’d expected. “Buddy was a useless piece of shit, like that goddamned thing you’ve got now. I shouldn’t’ve bothered to get him gassed. I should’ve wrung his neck myself.”

Dale turned slowly toward his father. His face had lost the pleasure I’d seen when he’d been waving the transmitter around. In fact, the expression on his thick, lifeless features was completely flat; he didn’t have one. He calmly raised the shotgun, squeezed the trigger, and shot his father dead. With a Buck Special at a range of about three yards, the second shot was a little superfluous, but Dale evidently didn’t want to take any chances.

Both blasts filled my ears with what felt like burning paraffin. The odor of blood and gun blended sickeningly with the reek of beer and Jim Beam. Most of what had been Mitchell Dale Johnson, Sr., was distributed in red, gray, and white spatters over the cellar stairs. I’m not squeamish, but I wish I hadn’t seen his feet. They still wore socks and those black leather slippers.

Still carrying the gun, Dale finally took Mitch’s advice. He stalked out through the door to the garage. Seconds later, an engine started, and Mitch, who’d been trying to make Edna stop screaming, tore for the door in a rage. “That’s my Corvette!” he yelled. “He’s stealing my Corvette!”

I took advantage of the chaos. With Rowdy’s lead in one sore hand and that deadly collar in the other, I stood up and nodded to Leah to follow me. As the four of us stumbled out to the garage, no one tried to stop us. Willie had taken over Edna, and he must have heard the sirens, anyway, and known it was over.

When we got outside, two police cruisers blocked the street, and a third, doors open, headlights glaring, idled about halfway down the driveway. Mitch was standing at the bottom of the drive staring at the shattered windshield of his Corvette, which had never even reached the street. One cop was holding the Browning, and another two kept Dale upright between them. His hands were in cuffs. There was blood on his face, and he was screaming at the cops: “I’m bleeding! Look what you did! I’m bleeding! You bastards shot me! You shot
me
!”

What choice did they have? Dale had been aiming the Buck Special directly at them. They had to defend themselves. The bullet had nicked his ear.

Chapter 29

“Ever,” Rita emphasized. “This was a family in which no one could
ever
leave home. That was one meaning of Mother’s symptom.”

“Would you not call her Mother?” I said. “Her name is Edna.”

“Sorry,” Rita said. “It’s kind of a professional tic.”

Dale had been in custody for two days. Leah was at the Newton-Wellesley Hospital visiting Jeff, and Rita and I were sharing a dinner of take-out Chinese food in her kitchen.

“Anyway,” she went on, “the agoraphobia was like a family banner she carried, a cross, if you will, and it was a heavy one. She made a big sacrifice to make sure everyone got the message: Don’t leave home. Her role was to act that rule out, to make it highly explicit. And, of course, the others supported her in it. They made it possible for her to make that contribution to the family.”

“Doing the shopping.”

“And everything else. And when the others leave home, go to work, where do they go?”

“Home away from home. The family business. And the names, right? I mean, how many families are there where three People all have the same name?”

“In itself,” Rita said, “it isn’t necessarily pathological, but in this context?”

“Rita, you want to know the weirdest thing? After everything Dale did, it’s weird, but I feel sorry for him, because of Buddy. That’s what started it. You know, Jack Engleman knew about that? So did Rose. The incredible thing is that the dog, Buddy, Was supposed to be therapy for him. When Dale was whatever, seven or eight, he was already in trouble, and some counselor at school talked the parents into buying him a dog. As therapy, right? He was bullying the other kids around and getting in fights and stuff. And the dog was supposed to socialize him.”

“Only nobody looked at the family,” Rita said.

“Right. So these monsters get him the dog, but what do they do? They make him promise that he has to take total care of it. He’s a little kid, right? And he’s supposed to be a hundred percent responsible. So, naturally, he isn’t. He can’t be. He’s too young, and he’s a screwed up kid, anyway. So his doting parents decide that here’s the chance to give him a good lesson in responsibility, keeping his promises, all that. I heard this from Willie and Mitch, that night. Anyway, the parents take the dog to some shelter, and then they come home and tell Dale all about Buddy being gassed to death, and they actually tell him that it’s his punishment, because he didn’t keep his promise. Is that unbelievable?”

“No,” Rita said sadly.

“You mean you...?”

“In my business, you’ve heard everything before,” Rita said. “When he talked about Buddy, honest to God, Rita, it was the only time he was real, in a way. The rest of the time, he was yelling and storming around and everything, but it felt hollow, I guess. And when he aimed at his father? And even when he shot him? His face was totally empty. Blank. He could’ve been aiming the remote control at a VCR. Except he definitely liked aiming that remote trainer at Kimi. He liked causing pain, all right.”

“Giving what he got,” Rita said.

“But when he talked about Buddy, there was real pain. You could hear it in his voice. He was like a little kid. It was as if it’d just happened.”

“For him, it had,” Rita said. “That’s the point. It was always still happening, over and over again. Everyone was someone taking his dog away. Rose Engleman? And Leah? And you? You were all the same person, gassing his dog.”

“That’s the other thing,” I said. “About the gas. His parents actually told him all about the gas chambers at the shelter or wherever it was. Shelter, right. And somehow he got it hooked up with the... the holocaust. I heard that from Kevin. I mean, the family were all anti-Semites, but apparently Dale—not when he was a little kid, but later—when he heard about the concentration camps and everything, he got sort of obsessed. But wouldn’t you think he’d have taken the side of the victims?” Rita shook her head. “Identification with the aggressor, it’s called,” she said. “The ones who did the gassing. The ones in control. The ones who cause pain. So he’s one of them. It’s the oldest story in the world, really. The abused become the abusers.”

“Well, he got his revenge,” I said. “I guess the miracle is that he didn’t shoot Edna, too. Anyway, about Leah?”

“She’s relieved that Jeff’s okay. She’s very angry at Willie, of course. She feels betrayed. She doesn’t understand that the nature of that family was such that he
had
to tell Dale. In that family, the alliances were just as strong as the antagonisms. They were so enmeshed that a threat to one of them was a personal threat to everyone. So when Willie heard you asking about shock collars, and then he heard Leah say something about having the pictures, he put it together and went home to tell Dale. Only, of course, instead of taking off or turning himself in, Dale found out where Leah was. Willie was in that class with Leah and Jeff, and he was there when they left. And I’m sure Dale had no trouble getting that out of him, and Willie knew where Jeff lived. It’s right on that list from your dog club. So all Dale had to do was wait at Jeff’s. Then he followed them.”

“If I’d listened to Steve, I’d’ve—”

“Speaking of whom,” Rita interrupted.

“Yeah. It’s okay now,” I said. “But it did take him an awfully long time to get the police to the Johnsons’, although it wasn’t as long as it seemed then. But they wasted a whole lot of time in the woods.”

“Holly, if you didn’t know where you were going, how was Steve supposed to know where you were?”

“Because he’s a vet,” I said, “which means he’s supposed to know everything. It’s one of the burdens of high priesthood. Anyway, he was right, about stopping at the woods, even though he was wrong about whose idea it was. It was Leah’s, and it never occurred to me, because I thought, well, she knows they can come here! And I knew about the Eliot Woods. I’m even the one who told Steve it was a lovers’ lane. It never crossed my mind that they’d be so stupid. You know, they weren’t even in the car when he smashed the window? He was after the pictures, and I guess that’s where he thought they’d be. And Kimi was with them, not that she would’ve tried to protect the car or anything. And she might’ve done something when he attacked Jeff, but when Jeff went to see what was going on, he made Leah keep Kimi with her. And after that, there was nothing Leah could do, because he slapped that collar on Kimi, so all she did was try to spare Kimi.”

“Speaking of which,” Rita said, “she must’ve got some jolt. Is she all right?”

“Yeah, I think so. Malamutes are tough, and she’s tough even for a malamute. She probably wouldn’t want to walk into that cellar again, but obviously she won’t have to. The dogs’ ears are probably still ringing—mine are—but I think their hearing is okay.”

“So, look,” Rita said. “There’s one other thing. Did he actually plan to kill Rose? How could he have known...?”

“Did he know about the pacemaker? Probably not. But one thing he did know about was electricity, because, it turns out, he took electronics in high school. When I thought about who’d know about electricity, mostly I thought about Dr. Zager, you know, drills and stuff. And it never occurred to me that if he got off on beating the dog, he’d really, really get off on a shock collar. I didn’t put it together until I saw the deer rifle.”

Rita looked puzzled.

“Hunters,” I explained. “Really, obedience people don’t use those things that much. Hunters do. They’re the big market for shock collars. I should’ve known. Right on their coffee table, they had
Outdoor Life,
for God’s sake. Anyway, I’ve thought a lot about whether he planned to kill her. One thing is, I don’t see how he could’ve known about the pacemaker. But, on the other hand, one thing he’d’ve learned about in school is electrical safety. And hazards. So he’d know about water, that it’s a great conductor, and he’d know that some people can survive gigantic shocks, and that sometimes, a really small shock, like fifty volts, can kill you. In a way, that’s the worst of it.”

“What is?”

“That he didn’t know. I don’t think anyone’s going to end up proving it, but if you ask me, he didn’t know whether she’d just get a bad shock or whether it’d kill her. He thought he’d killed Jeff. If you’d seen Jeff, you’d see why. I thought he’d killed him, too. But with Rose, if you ask me, he just didn’t care. Prob-ably if she’d lived, he’d have threatened to do the same thing to Caprice unless she gave him the pictures and kept her mouth shut. But he didn’t care one way or the other about whether she lived or died. After what his parents did to him? After Buddy? Rita, when they killed his dog, they half killed him. How was he supposed to know the difference?”

Chapter 30

MITCHELL Dale Johnson, Jr., you’ll recall, having calmly watched his brother Dale shoot their father, lost his temper only when he realized that Dale was stealing his Corvette. After that noble demonstration of his firm sense of priorities, Mitch was awarded the guardianship of his mother, Edna, but I suppose that the court didn’t have much choice. Dale would hardly have been suitable, and Willie was a bit young for the task. At any rate, Mitch rather quickly sold the house next to Jack Engle-man’s and took advantage of the depressed market to buy a three-bedroom condo near Kendall Square in Cambridge. One of the extra bedrooms is for Edna, who is supposed to move in with Mitch as soon as she’s discharged from the psychiatric hospital. The other bedroom is not, as you might suppose, for Willie, but for Dale, in case he gets a furlough or an early release, I guess. Willie, you see, has broken the family rule. He’s been accepted at a junior college with a canine science program. He’ll spend two years learning to groom and handle dogs. I wonder whether he’ll come home for Christmas.