A Dog's Ransom by Patricia Highsmith Page A

protective idea. He could put the thumbscrews on the young cop, in case he ran into him again. After all, the cop had let him go , hadn’t he? Kenneth’s idea was to say the cop had agreed to let him escape, if he got some of the money of the second ransom payment. This idea was a bit fuzzy in Kenneth’s head, but he sensed that essentially it was sound. To make it sounder, Kenneth intended to burn some of the money, destroy it. Kenneth was staring at the damp bundle on the round wooden table as his thoughts jumped this way and that. He was also prolonging the moments before he had the pleasure of looking at the money. At last Kenneth washed his hands in the bathroom, dried them on a fresh towel, and opened his package. There it was again, stacks and clumps of greenbacks, all tens, five bundles of twenty tens each!
    He intended to burn five hundred dollars. It was a shocking thing and above all strange, but before he could think too much about it (because he was sure he was right), Kenneth slipped the rubber bands off two bundles and counted off ten ten-dollar bills from a third bundle. He tried it first in an ashtray, but it went slowly, and he decided on the basin.
    The bills were surprisingly resistant to fire, but at last he could get five or six going at once in the basin, and soon he had to pause and collect the ashes in pieces of newspaper. It took him nearly a quarter of an hour to burn them all, and it was curiously exciting, all that money, that power, that freedom going up in smoke, turning to nothing. He rinsed the basin, and opened both the window in his bathroom and the window in the bedroom to get the smoke out. He had been enjoying the smoke, but he didn’t want the hotel people to think a fire had broken out.
    This possibility made him rush to the remaining money on his table and stow it away with the other money in case anybody insisted on coming into the room. He had stuck the money now in a folded sweater in one of the drawers, since he thought women might come in to fuss around with the bed while he was out. But when he slept, he thought it wisest to keep the money in a pillowcase.
    Now it was five past midnight. He imagined Edward Reynolds waiting at York and 61st Street, waiting for the dog. In the rain. How long would he wait? Kenneth smiled a little, feeling no mercy at all. Let the snob buy another dog. He could afford to. Reynolds was really a dope to have paid two thousand dollars. That made Kenneth feel superior. He might not have as much money as Reynolds, but it was plain that he had more brains.

8
    C larence’s new 8 p.m. to 4 a.m. shift gave him Tuesdays and Wednesdays off for the next three weeks. Tuesday noon, he rang his precinct house to ask if there had been any message from Edward Reynolds. The Desk Officer, whose voice Clarence didn’t recognize, said no.
    “Are you sure? It’s about a dog theft. A ransom.”
    “Absolutely not, my friend.”
    Clarence was at Marylyn’s apartment. She had gone out at 10 a.m. for a dictation job on Perry Street. He had no plans with her for the day, because she said she wasn’t sure she would have any time for lunch. Clarence made some scrambled eggs for himself. He walked around the Village, up to 10th Street, finally took a Sixth Avenue bus uptown, and stared out the window all the way, looking for a short, chunky, limping type like Rowajinski. Clarence rode to 116th Street, then walked to his precinct house. He asked what they had found out about a sister of Kenneth Rowajinski.
    A young patrolman whom Clarence had seen only once or twice before looked it up for him and said: “One sister named Anna Gottstein. Lives in Doylestown, Pennsylvania.”
    Clarence wrote down her address and telephone number which was under her husband’s name, Robert L. Gottstein. “Thanks very much,” Clarence said.
    Pennsylvania now, not Long Island.
    Clarence took the subway back downtown, looking over all the passengers, everywhere. What else could he