Little Dog Laughed by Joseph Hansen Read Free Book Online Page A

San Feliz?”
    “Three o’clock,” Dave said. He’d been unable to sleep for worry, had kept waking every ten minutes to reach for the clock with its red glowing numerals, wondering if Cecil had been right, after all, to go back to the news business. Working with Dave had once got him shot almost to death. Working with Dave had put a gun in his hand and forced him to kill a man. But was the news business any safer? Where the hell was he, anyway? In the dark, Dave had pawed out for the telephone, then drawn back his hand. He was going to make a fool of himself, and of Cecil, which was worse. Instead, he got out of bed, went down the raw wooden steps from the raw wooden sleeping loft in the rear building, poured Glenlivet over ice cubes in a thick glass, and found a book to read. He stretched out on the corduroy couch in solitary lamplight, listened for the sound of Cecil’s van, and told himself grumpily not to be a mother hen. “You got to the studio at one and then you had to edit the film. Unidentified young Latino, face down in the water of an irrigation canal, shot through the head.”
    “Nobody knew him,” Cecil said. “Nobody ever saw him before. Everybody muttered and crossed themselves a lot and rolled their eyes. Some of them were throwing kids and chickens into pickup trucks and leaving before I could start asking questions. Weird scene. You could smell the fear in the air. Sharper than chili peppers.”
    Dave tasted his drink. “You make a mean martini.”
    But Cecil was brooding. “They’re never going to find out who did that. He’s just dead meat. Not even a name to put on his grave. Wasn’t any older than I am. Where did he come from? He had to be staying in one of those shacky little so-called houses with all those old people, pregnant girls, kids, young men looking fifty. But no one knew him, not a stoop laborer, not a foreman, not a rancher.”
    “They knew him,” Dave said. “They just didn’t want trouble with Immigration and Naturalization. Tell me about Streeter. What did he want at your television station?”
    “A talk with the news director. Urgently.”
    “Donaldson—is that his name?”
    Cecil nodded. “Who does not work that shift, right? And Jimmie Caesar and Dot Yamada said, tell us, but he wouldn’t tell them. I was busy. I’d just gone along the hall to the men’s room. That was how I happened to see him. Doors are half glass there. He was loud, agitated. Door was closed, but it didn’t stop the sound. He was saying just what his daughter told you.”
    “That he had the hottest story of the decade?” Dave said. “That surprises me. Did they find Donaldson?”
    “They were scared to try.” Cecil took a fast gulp of beer. “He’s a bear. And he’s got a wife and five kids, but he sleeps around, tells her he’s at the station when he’s really bedding down some pretty new lady, all right? So they didn’t want to phone. Couldn’t very well explain that to Streeter, could they? Seeing their faces, I couldn’t help but laugh.”
    “But they knew who Streeter was, surely,” Dave said. “A Pulitzer Prize winner? They had to take him seriously.”
    “If they didn’t know before,” Cecil said. “They knew it after he got a sore throat yelling at them. He was—how shall I put it—just a little bit keyed up.”
    “Not frightened?” Dave wondered.
    “Frightened?” Turning the word over in his mind, Cecil sat forward, tilted the remaining beer from the green bottle into his glass, piling up the foam again. The Haydn strings traced lacy patterns in the canyon stillness. “Maybe.” He looked hard at Dave. “What makes you think so?”
    “He was a print journalist, not a broadcaster.” Dave’s jacket lay over the couch arm. He rummaged in it for cigarettes. “He stood to make a lot of money and build his reputation with a story on paper—for the New York Times , the Washington Post , some place like that. Yet here he is, suddenly ready to rush the story