I gave her a questioning look, but before she could tell me more, a sudden scream rent the air, and when we both looked in the direction of the scream, I saw that it had originated from a little girl, who now stood crying as she pointed an accusing finger at… Dooley!
Odelia and I hurried over, and soon we were joined by the girl’s mom. She picked up a plastic ball from the ground and examined it. Then she said, with a dark look at Odelia, “Is this cat yours?”
“Yes, he is,” said Odelia. “What did he do?”
The woman held out the ball, which was a nice shiny pink. “He punctured my daughter’s ball. See? It’s full of holes!”
“Oh, Dooley,” I said. “What did you do now?”
“I just wanted to help, Max!” said my friend. “That little girl’s ball had rolled underneath that bench over there so I decided to get it for her.” He gave me a shamefaced look. “I must have dug in my nails a little too deep when I grabbed it.”
“What are you going to do about this?” asked the woman, still brandishing the ball.
“I’ll pay for it, of course,” said Odelia dutifully. “Unless it can be fixed?”
“I don’t think so,” said the woman, still irate while her daughter was crying her heart out and screaming, “My ball! That pussycat broke my ball!”
“Oh, Dooley, Dooley,” I said as we let Odelia deal with the case of the punctured ball and retreated back to the relative safety of our bench.
“I just wanted to do my good deed of the day, Max,” he said. “I haven’t done my good deed yet and I saw an opportunity and I took it.”
“I thought we agreed you weren’t going to do any more good deeds without asking me first?”
“I know, but you were so busy talking to Odelia and here was this great opportunity to put my good for the day in so…” He looked really crushed, and I took heart.
“It’s all right, Dooley. It’s just a ball. It’s not the end of the world.”
“But look at that little girl, Max. She’s so sad. I wanted to make her happy and I made her unhappy. Instead of doing a good deed I did a bad deed. Now I’ll have to do two good deeds today. One to make up for this bad deed, and my regular good deed of the day.” He paused. “Or maybe I need to do more than one good deed to make up for this bad deed.”
“I’m sure that won’t be necessary, Dooley,” I said, slightly alarmed.
“Maybe I need to do ten good deeds to make up for one bad deed,” he said with spurious logic. “Oh, I really did it now, didn’t I, Max?”
“Please don’t do ten good deeds, Dooley,” I implored.
“Eleven,” he said. “Ten to make up for what I did to that ball and my regular good deed of the day.”
“You know what? Maybe you don’t have to be a cub scout. Maybe you can join some other club,” I suggested, seeing a future stretching before me littered with disaster after disaster. Because if all of Dooley’s good deeds kept backfiring like this soon he’d have to do hundreds of good deeds to compensate for the dozens he bungled. And there simply weren’t enough hours in the day.
“What other club were you thinking of, Max?” he asked, curious.
“Well, Odelia’s detective club, for one thing. If she’s out of a job, and takes your advice to start a detective agency, she’s going to need assistants who help her become the best detective Hampton Cove has ever seen. And that means you and I are going to be very busy indeed.”
His furry face lit up. “You really think so? She would hire us as her assistants?”
“Well, not hire us, per se,” I prevaricated. “But she would need our help for sure.”
“You know, Max, catching killers and making sure that they’re put behind bars is the best deed possible.”
“Oh, absolutely. In fact I think catching a single killer probably earns you brownie points commensurate with at least a hundred good deeds, so there’s that to consider.”
“I have no idea what you just said, Max, but it sounds good,” he said, having cheered up considerably. He glanced over to where Odelia was still negotiating with the little girl’s mother about compensation for the ball Dooley inadvertently destroyed. “Now all we have to do is convince Odelia to launch a detective agency.”
Chapter 30
It’s always tough for anyone to have to swallow their pride, and it was especially tough for our human now to swallow hers. Unfortunately that couldn’t be helped, at least not if Odelia wanted to keep her client from being sent to prison for a crime—or in fact two crimes at the last count—she didn’t commit. Rose was eighteen, so if convicted she would go to a regular prison as far as I knew, and not to some juvenile detention center, though I doubt whether those are any less disagreeable than a regular penitentiary.
And so it was that Odelia placed the call, and much to my relief I quickly saw a smile spread across her features, and by the time she ended the call, she was actually glowing.
“He’ll be here soon,” she announced. “And he apologized. Said things suddenly moved so quickly back there that he had a hard time keeping up.”
Soon wasn’t an understatement, as a mere two minutes after Odelia had placed the call, Dan Goory came hurrying up. His long white beard was flapping in the wind, and his eyes were darting to and fro trying to detect his former star reporter. When he spotted her, his face lit up like a Christmas tree, and he quickly wended his way over to where we were all sitting.
“Let’s go for a walk,” Odelia suggested, and that’s what we did.
“I’m so sorry,” were the first words out of Dan’s mouth. “I didn’t realize Kimberly had hogged your scoop. Frankly it’s a little shocking to me that she would do such a thing, which is what I was still coming to terms with when you told me what happened and which made me respond inadequately.”
“It’s fine,” said Odelia warmly. “Her actions took me by surprise, too. I’d never have expected anyone to behave in such an unprofessional and disrespectful way so I was a little shocked when I read that article under her byline.”
“She’s gone, you know,” said Dan.
“Gone? You mean…”
“She quit on me just now. Looks like she’s been playing us both for fools, Odelia. Though me most of all, I guess. She’s got an uncle who works for the New York Post, and she’d been trying to get him to usher her in but he was stalling, probably figuring she was a little wet behind the ears. So this piece she wrote—the scoop she stole from you—is what finally convinced the uncle to give her a shot at the Post. The only reason she took the job at the Gazette was to make an impression on her uncle. Basically I paid for her job application. She never had any intention to stick around.”
“I’m sorry, Dan.”
“Yeah, so am I. I should have known it was too good to be true. Looks like my plans to expand the Gazette across the region will have to be postponed for the time being.” He placed an arm around Odelia’s shoulder. “It’s just you and me, kiddo—like it’s always been.” He gave her an uncertain look. “Unless your resignation still stands. Cause in that case I think I might just have to fold. I can’t possibly run the Gazette all by my lonesome. I may be a sprightly old geezer, but I’m not as sprightly as all that.”
“Of course I’ll stay,” said Odelia.
Dan pumped the air with his fist. “Yesss,” he said, earning himself a smile from Odelia.
“Max!” said Dooley. “She’s not going to open a detective agency!”
“Doesn’t matter, Dooley,” I said. “She’ll still need us to be her eyes and ears, detective or no detective.”
“You think so?”
“Of course. Odelia needs us just like Dan needs her.”
“You mean like a sympathetic relationship?”
“I think you mean a symbiotic relationship, and yeah, something like that.”