Mike Shayne Mystery Magazine, Vol. 35, No. 4, September 1974

The Dog in the Night by Edward Wellen

All the houses were alike except for one — and, soon it would be the same, too.

Curiously detached: that was how Stanley Hofer seemed to himself to feel about the thing that had been driving him up the wall.

He lay awake at three a.m. as usual, full of helpless and hopeless rage as usual, staring at the Venetian blind shadows striping the walls as usual. But this night he found himself going suddenly calm.

Terribly calm and curiously detached as he listened to the howling dog.

It must have been some invisible and weightless last straw that did it. Whatever it was, it made him say inside himself, Enough. It has to stop right now, before I go mad.

Maybe it was too late. Was he already mad? He did not behave madly. He simply watched himself get up out of bed and with an almost peaceful and absentminded look frozen on his face walk to the dresser and open the bottom drawer.

He had to shake the drawer first to the left and then to the right a couple of times before it came loose, working it out in half inches, but then it came freely, too freely, fell out on the floor. He left it so and took out from under his winter woollies an oilskin-wrapped packet.

The effort had not shaken him out of his calmness. He carefully unrolled the oilskin and uncovered his revolver.

He made sure that it held a full load of cartridges and that the cylinder spun smoothly. He had kept up his license to own and carry it, though he had retired as a jeweler more than a year back. Now the solid weight of metal gave him additional will and strength and pleasant guilt — Martha had never liked having it in the house.

He stepped into his slippers and put on his robe over his pajamas. It was a night mild enough for pajamas alone but the robe had a pocket stout enough to hold the revolver. Some unconscious center of cunning was looking out for him; it did not want him to have to stop and answer questions if a cruising patrol car happened by. He went out into the night.

Stanley Hofer lived on Third Avenue and the house he wanted stood directly behind his on Second Avenue. In his free and easy dreamy state he felt he could have floated over the backyard fence. But he did not try to vault the fence. He went out the front door and kept to the sidewalk, along the row of mass-produced tract houses.

The dog’s howling faded as he walked away. He looked up at the moon. He smiled. Dogs howled at the moon but man had walked on it. It walked along with him. He turned right at the corner and then right again at the next corner. Second Avenue showed its rows of mass-produced tract houses. The dog’s howling grew louder.

Stanley Hofer’s hand tightened on the gun in his pocket. Was it a month ago, after long debate with himself, that he had nerved himself to complain to the police that the howling dog belonging to one Lyman Strafuss was disturbing him? The desk sergeant had taken his call but nothing had happened. He had waited and called again, waited and called again. Still nothing had happened. If anything, during the past week, the howling had seemed worse.

He had asked around and found out why nothing had happened. Even in a group of owners of lookalike homes some have more pull than others. This was a one-company town and Lyman Strafuss was the brother-in-law of a company big shot.

Having reinforced himself with the cumulative past, Stanley Hofer pulled himself back to the climactic present. He had lost count of the houses, but the howling told him which was Lyman Strafuss’s. There was no mistaking it, nor any doubting where it came from.

Here, painfully close, was the bark worse than any bite, the howl that ate nerves raw. Heedless of dew soaking his slippers, Stanley Hofer cut across the grass. He stubbed his toe on the lawn sprinkler. That did not bring him out of his dreamy mood of almost merry doom. He bared his teeth in a slow smile.

The stoop had the same number of steps as his own: he felt quite at home. He glued his finger to the bell push.

He listened for the howling to switch to a snarl. But it did not. It kept on unheeding, not changing its maddening tone. It did grow louder, though, when the door finally opened.

The door opened and produced a fat man with a thin smile. Even the thin smile faded: the face of Stanley Hofer was evidently not that of someone he might have expected to see.

“Yes?”

“No.”

Stanley Hofer drew the revolver and fired into the man’s chest.

The man saw it coming but could not believe it. It must have seemed to him like something in a dream.

Stanley Hofer had wakened from his own dream. He had come here to kill the dog. His center of cunning had told him the law did not do much to a man for killing a dog. But the thin smile on the fat face had shown him that he had to kill the dog’s owner. Why blame the dog for behaving like a dog? Blame the man for behaving like ah uncivilized man.

The man flew back from the doorway, pulling the door wide before the knob slipped from his grip.

Stanley Hofer stepped inside and stood looking down at the body, not really seeing it. He was listening to the howling. Curious. He would have expected the shot and the smell of blood to evoke a frenzy of barking or a cowering silence. But the howling went on its unchanging way.

A woman in a fright wig of curlers and a short filmy shift came sleepily downstairs plucking ear plugs from her ears.

“What was that? I told you not to—”

She wakened to the fact that Stanley Hofer was not her husband and quickly folded her arms about herself. Then she saw the gun in Stanley Hofer’s hand and followed his gaze to the body. She moaned and fell in a faint at the foot of the stairs.

Stanley Hofer frowned. He stepped past her into the living room. The dog: he had come here to kill the dog and he would round out the job. What sort of dog was it that hung back and let a stranger come into its master’s home and kill its master?

Was it tied up? Was that why it howled? He looked for the shine of the dog’s eyes in the dimness but found only the throb of its voice. The wall switch was in the same place as in his own house. He flicked on the light.

He did not bear the patrol car pull up outside. He stood by the whirring reels, still trying to understand, when the policeman walked in.

Stanley Hofer put up as much fight as a clothing dummy when the policeman relieved him of the gun. He was dimly aware of the policeman verifying that the man was dead, and bringing the woman out of her faint, and phoning headquarters and talking to the woman.

Then the policeman was talking to him.

“Who are you? Where do you live?”

Stanley Hofer mumbled his name and, finding his hands cuffed behind him, pointed with his chin in the direction of his house.

“Why did you shoot Mr. Hayward?”

The night turned suddenly cold.

“Hayward? You’ve got it wrong, officer. I shot Strafuss. Lyman Strafuss.”

The policeman shook his head. He spoke as to a child.

“The man you shot is... was — Cal Hayward. Lyman Strafuss is the next-door neighbor.” The policeman reached over and switched off the tape player. The tape had run out anyway and the howling had stopped.

“Mrs. Hayward says her husband’s been complaining about Strafuss’s dog. When he found himself getting nowhere, he tape-recorded the howling. And for a week now, at three a.m., night after night, he’s been playing it back at full volume from a window facing the Strafuss house. Mrs. Hayward says the Strafuss dog doesn’t howl when the tape recorder plays. It just listens to the recording of its own howling. But it’s been getting to Strafuss. That’s why I’m here. Strafuss complained to the police.”

And now, with the tape recorder silent, the Strafuss dog resumed its howling.