When I found his office, there was no Max in it, but there were thousands of pounds of dismembered electronic equipment. I called his name but got no answer. The sign on his door listed office hours, one of which was right now. I sat down to wait. The room was beautifully cool, the light diffuse.
Thirty minutes later I woke disoriented and frowzy, sat as upright as I could until the confusion cleared, and found myself staring directly at Max Luhrmann. He was across the desk from me, quizzical and, for just a moment before he fully registered that I was awake, curious with a touch of pleased. When he saw I was awake his face quickly shifted to something flatter, more impassive. “How long have you been staring at me?” I demanded.
“Just for a minute. So, Neave Terhune, what brings you here?”
I described the telephone calls, the meat on the door, the renewed relationship with Lilly, who claimed she didn’t know where Ricky Luhrmann was. “The police say they’ll help but they can’t do anything if they can’t find Ricky. So how do I find Ricky?”
“You don’t want to find him, Neave.”
“Bullies stand down if somebody faces them,” I insisted. “I’m going to face him.”
“That’s a charmingly romantic idea, but I don’t think it actually works like that in real life.”
“It’s a time-tested technique.”
“Maybe in second grade it is.”
“Ricky’s not going to hurt me,” I insisted.
Max lifted his shirt, pulling it high enough to expose two white keloid lines running from his abdomen to his breastbone. “I bounced against a windshield trying to stop Ricky. He’d grabbed a girl’s skirt, slammed it in the car door, and tried to drag her into mutilation if not death. So you see, Ricky is entirely capable of hurting someone. Say, you, for example.”
I looked at the gnarled lines of white scar tissue. I thought about Lilly telling me that Ricky swore the mothers in the neighborhood were afraid of Max, who was rough with the girls.
He let his shirt drop. “It doesn’t help to stand in front of some kinds of people. It can make them more determined to run you down. If you involve anybody else, like cops, it will only escalate. Ricky escalates. Resist him, he escalates harder. He doesn’t care about rules as much as he cares about other things. Walk away from this.”
“But Lilly…” I began.
Max turned away from me. “I have a lot of work to do. Please shut the door on your way out.”
I stalked back to my car telling myself that he was wrong. I had an almost animal sense that backing away from this man would be seen as a display of weakness, a dangerous admission of fear.
I pulled the car door open. At first glance what was lying peacefully in the driver’s seat was a sleeping dog. Who would have expected a neighborhood dog to jump through the open window and fall asleep in the front seat? The idea tickled me, though, and I was smiling as I said, “Come on, you. Out you go.” The little form stayed still. I reached out a hand and stroked its head, which flopped to one side. It hung loosely from the body and now I could see that the dog’s neck had been twisted almost entirely around, snapped before the animal was arranged peacefully on my car seat with its head propped on its paws. The body was still warm. I jerked upright and scanned the street. No one in sight. A trickle of blood had run down from the dog’s muzzle and only just dried on the car seat to a purplish crust.
I walked slowly, woodenly, back into Max Luhrmann’s basement office. He looked up from his desk, saw my face, and stood up. He fell in line behind me, let me lead him back to the car and the small body curled on the passenger seat.
“It’s him, isn’t it?” I asked.
“It’s possible.” Max leaned over and touched the dog, leaned down, smelled the dog’s fur. He turned to me. “A woman’s perfume. Your sister’s?”
“Is it Chanel No. 5?” I leaned over and breathed in. Lilly’s perfume. “How did you know to smell the dog?”
“It’s something that he’d do.”
“How do you know that?”
“It’s just the way we are. Sometimes I can get in his head; he can get in mine. Doing this with the dog in front of my office, I suspect Ricky’s saying a little something to me as well as to you.”
“Like what?”
“That he’s watching me as well as you. He doesn’t like me talking with anyone about him and he knows that’s the only reason you’d be here. He’s telling me he doesn’t like it.”
“What would happen if you talked to anyone about him?”
“They might know him better.”
Suddenly I thought of Lilly standing before me on her wedding day all wrapped up in a Champagne haze and sixty pounds of couture silk. I don’t know … there was a little sister … Some kind of accident … the start of all the bad feeling. “Max, you had a sister? What happened to her?”
“She died.”
“How?”
His voice flattened and the words came out like beads he’d been fingering for years and years. “She drowned.”
“Lilly told me that was the beginning of the bad feelings between you and Ricky. Is that true? What happened?”
He turned and took a step away, said, “I’ll get a box. Take the dog away.”
“Don’t touch the dog yet. I’m calling the police and I want them to see this exactly the way it is now.”
Max shrugged, a gesture showing just how helpful he thought the police would be, and he was right. He waited with me for a cop to arrive. It was Officer Petzoldt, who actually rolled his eyes when he saw me.
“So somebody put this dog in your car? Is it your dog, Miss Terhune? Was anything taken from the car?”
We established that the dog was not mine, that no one took anything from the car, and that I firmly believed that Ricky Luhrmann killed the dog and put it there as a threat.
“People are funny, Miss Terhune. Have you found the mutt’s owner?”
No we hadn’t, though we’d walked around the immediate area while we’d waited for him to get here, asking anyone passing by if they’d heard of a missing dog. No one had.
“Well, Miss Terhune, I’m not exactly sure what crime you’re reporting,” he said with a sigh. “But as to the perfume smell, the dog is in your car and you wear perfume. We’re probably just smelling your perfume.”
“I don’t wear that perfume.”
The policeman turned to Max. “This guy she’s talking about is your brother?” Max nodded. “So you didn’t see him do this either? Nobody saw anything?” Max said he had not. “And can you give me an address or place of employment for your brother?” Max said he could not. Officer Petzoldt shrugged. “It’s a dog, lady. And honestly, I don’t smell much of anything. Maybe somebody didn’t like the dog, or didn’t like you, or maybe both, but there’s no witnesses and you can’t even get anybody on this block to claim the dog. It’s not gonna go to the Supreme Court, even if we found the guy you think may have done it.”
Max stood beside me on the sidewalk as we watched Officer Petzoldt drive off. He’d found a cardboard box and gently lifted the body from my car, set it in the box. “I’ll take care of this.” He started walking away from me, holding his box of dog gingerly to one side.