Metzger's Dog

32 It was three-thirty on Monday morning when Porterfield first noticed the car. He heard the idling engine at the end of the street as he was sitting alone in the darkened living room. He pushed the curtain aside and looked out to see the car move down the street as slowly as a man’s walk and then stop, its headlights out. After a few seconds a man emerged wearing a dark sweat shirt and a knitted watch cap that was pulled down to his eyebrows. After he was out he bent over and picked up something from the back seat, then walked up the sidewalk with it. As he passed under the streetlamp, Porterfield released the curtain and made his way to the bedroom. The man had been carrying a thick stack of newspapers.

On Tuesday afternoon Porterfield left the Seyell Foundation office an hour early. That was the second time he noticed the car. When he turned the corner onto the street, the car was stopped in the same place. As he approached, the driver started the dusty brown Ford Galaxie and moved slowly down to the next corner and turned out of sight. There was no question in his mind that it was the same car. The ticking sound of the unbalanced fan when the engine idled was the sound he’d heard the night before.

Porterfield said to Alice, “Do you know if our paperboy—I guess I should say paperman—lives around here?”

“I see him quite often, but I’ve never spoken to him,” said Alice. “Isn’t that terrible? He’s such a sweet-looking little boy, but there’s something about seeing someone at five o’clock every morning in your bathrobe. The only way you can tolerate it is to avoid conversation.”

Porterfield nodded. He was thinking about hunting turkeys. An old farmer had once told him the way he hunted wild turkeys was to take a walk in early summer to a clearing in the forest carrying a broom handle painted dark gray. He’d prop the broom handle on a fallen log or in the low branches of a bush and leave it there. The turkeys would get used to seeing it so that soon they’d strut within a few yards of it. By fall it would be so familiar to them that they didn’t seem to see it anymore. On the first day of the turkey season the farmer would sit in the clearing. He swore the turkeys never noticed that the broom handle had been replaced by the barrel of a shotgun.

On Wednesday at three-thirty in the morning Porterfield heard the car’s ticking fan as it turned the corner onto the street. It was easier to hear on Wednesday because Porterfield was sitting in the lawn chair on his neighbor’s patio, and the redwood fence did nothing to muffle the sound in the still night air.

Porterfield stood up and looked between two boards of the fence. As usual, the man got out of his car and then reached back in for his stack of newspapers. This time when the man passed under the streetlamp Porterfield squinted to see his face. The watch cap was pulled down low over his brows, but Porterfield could see the small, dark eyes and the wide mouth under the bristling blond moustache.

The man walked up the sidewalk of Porterfield’s house, then walked around to the window beside the driveway. Next he moved across the front lawn to a clump of bushes at the corner of the neighboring house. Porterfield watched him walk from house to house, examining shrubbery, standing under windows, and sighting angles and distances.

When the man turned and walked up the driveway toward Porterfield’s garage, Porterfield slipped through the gate of the redwood fence and along his neighbor’s hedge to the street.

It was nearly ten minutes before the man returned to his car. He opened the door and placed his stack of newspapers on the front seat, then slid into the seat beside them. He started the car and let it drift quietly down the street to the corner before he turned on his headlights.

Porterfield said, “Make much extra money peddling papers, Lester?”

The man jerked in his seat and half turned to gape over his shoulder. “Porterfield.” After a second he seemed to collect himself. He steered around the corner and accelerated. “Not much money in papers these days, Ben.”

“You’re supposed to be in Guatemala, Viglione.”

Viglione turned his head to the side and said, “No, you’re wrong. Special assignment, temporary duty.”

Porterfield chuckled. “Lester, when I heard we might be having this kind of trouble, I thought about who might show up, but I didn’t think it would be you. I guess I should have. It’s your specialty. But I didn’t think anybody would take the chance of letting you in on it. You came to see me. Is someone at the Director’s house?”

“What are you talking about? I’m just here for a conversation.”

Porterfield sighed. “Lester, what is all this stuff back here?” Porterfield picked up a short, heavy hardwood stick connected by a few links of chain to a second stick. “Nunchaku.” He opened a paper sack and poured several star-shaped plates of steel onto the back seat, so Viglione could hear the clinking. “Shuriken. What else? Piano wire, push knives. What is it with you, Lester? Don’t they sell nine-millimeter ammo anymore, or are you just getting overconfident?”

“I’m not here for that.”

“If it had been anything else they’d never have picked you.”

“We worked together in the old days.”

“I guess I remember you better than you remember me. Pull over up ahead and let me off, or I’ll be half the night getting home to bed.”

Viglione slowed the car and coasted to the curb. Porterfield swung his legs out on the left side and said, “I found the picture.”

Viglione’s right hand moved toward the pile of newspapers. Porterfield could see the gleam of the black metal finish of the pistol as the fingers fumbled for the handle, but Porterfield’s right arm was already in motion. The nunchaku hissed in the air and the chain swung the club into the back of Viglione’s head, making a hollow thud. Viglione’s head kicked forward, but his hand came up with the pistol in it. Porterfield crooked his arm around Viglione’s neck and pushed off on the door frame with both feet, twisting his body at the same time. Viglione’s neck snapped with a sickening crack, and Porterfield released his hold. He knew Viglione was already dead.

Porterfield muttered to himself, “You’d have a hard time killing an old lady with those things.” Then he spent a few moments wiping the handles of the nunchaku and collecting the papers from the back seat: the notations Viglione had made of the times Porterfield left home in the morning and returned at night, the crudely sketched map of the house and grounds, and the photograph of Alice.