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it up precariously high. Mr. Blounder released the door handle and licked his lips nervously.
“I think we need to talk,” she told him.
B RUCE JACOBS’ CHAIR was driving him crazy. He was ready to go out and buy a new one and pay for it himself. He was no featherweight, but a chair shouldn’t break just ‘cause a guy weighed over two hundred pounds. Well, closer to two-fifty, but he was also six feet four inches tall. This was the third chair he had destroyed in a month. He wasn’t sure Acquisitions would send him another one. After a while the air just seemed to go out of the pneumatic lift, and they wouldn’t pop back up to the proper height anymore. So here he was sitting about a foot off the floor. The phone rang.
Reaching up to his desk, he picked up the phone and said politely, “Hello. This is Bruce Jacobs speaking.”
“I have to tell you something,” a young boy said.
Jacobs guessed the kid was fourteen. His voice was deep but clean-sounding. Nothing had roughed it up yet. “Try me.”
“Well, it’s really about two things.”
“Start with one.”
“Which one? One’s a killing, and one’s a drug deal.”
Jacobs stood up from his chair. “That is a hard choice.”
“I’ll tell you the killing first. Because that’s really what started all this. Don’t tell my mom I called, though, because she told me not to. I know about you, and I read about you in the paper, how you caught those guys that had taken that money away from the old woman. Well, that was my grandma. So that’s why I called. She said you were a very polite man. That goes far with my grandma.”
“So who got killed?”
The boy didn’t say anything. Jacobs realized he wanted to get a tape on this. “Is it okay if I turn on my tape recorder?”
“Yeah, I guess. Listen to my whole story before you say anything. Don’t laugh.” The boy started in, “Two weeks ago, my dog died. At first, Mom tried to persuade me it was nothing. The dog was old, she said. Hah! Jack was only ten. That really isn’t old in dog years. I mean seventy is hardly old anymore, when the life expectancy of a woman is now eighty-three. Do you think dogs’ life expectancies go up as humans’ go up? I do. Jack felt fine that morning. When I got home from school, he was dragging his tail. Then he just lay down and died. Of course, I couldn’t persuade Mom to do an autopsy, so we had to just bury him. Well, I went and looked in the backyard. See, Jack stays outside while I’m gone at school. We have a fenced-in backyard. There was this white paper plate next to the fence. I could see the stains of some meat on there. So I think that the neighbor fed it to him.”
“Why do you think your neighbor would do that?” Jacobs paced around the room as far as the telephone cord would let him. Hard to work on a phone with a cord these days. Didn’t allow for the movement his cordless phone at home did. He paced when he needed to think. As long as he was hitting them up for a new chair, he should try for a new phone too.
“There’s this new guy living next door. He rented the place about two months ago. People are kind of coming and going from his house. Jack barks at everybody. I think he doesn’t like the way they smell. The guy’s name is Red. Don’t know his last name. He’s kind of a skinny, sleazy-looking guy. Sometimes he’s gone for a while. Then, when he comes back, people start coming around again.”
Bruce leaned over his desk and wrote Red on a scrap piece of paper. He underlined the name three times. “Where do you live?”
“Buchanan, you know where that is. Just off of Hennepin in North Minneapolis.”
“Yeah, I know.” Marginal neighborhood. Lots of families, but could be pretty rough. “That’s over by where they dug up those bodies, isn’t it?”
“Yeah, that was pretty cool. Anyways, I figured they poisoned Jack because they didn’t want him making so much noise when all these people came over. So I put it together and figured they