Upside down, they finished what they started. They weren’t sure whether they were coming or going, but whatever it was, it was satisfying. When the explosion of their passion was over, they at last contemplated the fix in which they found themselves.
“My neck is very stiff,” Penny commented.
“That’s because you have your weight on it.”
“That’s true. But knowing it doesn’t help.”
“Look. My feet are touching the ceiling,” Sonia noticed. “I can walk on the ceiling. Look.”
“How can I look? It’s pitch-black in here!”
“My God, Penny, you’re just like a woman the way you complain!”
Penny bit his tongue and didn’t answer.
“If you’ll just shift your weight down toward the bottom of the bed, it’ll open again and we can get out of here,” Sonia advised.
Penny did as she suggested. Sonia also slid down toward the foot of the bed. It worked. The bed opened out into the room. Penny scrambled off before it could snap back again. Sonia followed more slowly. Immediately the bed flipped back into the wall.
Penny crossed the room and sat in the armchair. Sonia followed and plumped herself down on Penny’s lap. She missed. She sat down hard on the floor. Penny giggled.
“It’s not funny!” Sonia groped her way to her feet. “If you’d ever had an astigmatism, you wouldn’t laugh.”
“I’m sorry,” Penny apologized.
“Are you really?” Sonia peered closely, trying to read Penny’s face for sincerity. “You shaved your moustache!”
She snapped her fingers. “l knew something felt different.”
“Yes,” Penny said. “I did. You mean you just noticed it?”
“Well, with my eyesight—”
“You should either cut your bangs or get a Seeing Eye dog.”
“I wish you hadn’t mentioned that.” Sonia shuddered.
“Mentioned what?”
“Seeing Eye dog. It reminds me of my brother. And that makes me very sad.”
“I’m sorry. Is your brother sightless?” Penny asked delicately.
“Of course not. You know he isn’t! I told you all about his problem when you loaned me the money. Don’t you remember anything, Penny?”
“I guess I did forget. Tell me again.”
“My brother is a Seeing Eye man for a blind dog.”
“He’s a what?”
“A Seeing Eye man for a blind dog. I told you all about it. I don’t see why—-”
“Pretend you’re just telling me for the first time. Please. Humor me. Now, just start at the beginning.”
“Well, all right. If you insist. There was this wealthy old lady and my brother was her social secretary until she died. She had this Russian Wolfhound, which went blind as it got older. In her will, she made provisions for my brother to continue on at the salary he was getting if he continued taking care of the blind dog. The bulk of her estate she left to the dog. That was two years ago. And for all that time my brother’s been a Seeing Eye man for a blind dog.”
“But what does that have to do with the money?” Penny, mind in a whirl, was trying to sort out the facts. Some of them had been established during the cab ride from the police station with Sonia. Penny had found out that Sonia must have pressured Pennington P. Potter for money the day of the robbery and suicide. It became clear that Potter had delivered that money to Sonia at some point between the time he’d taken it and the time he’d killed himself. That made Sonia the number one culprit responsible for Potter’s actions. If that were so, then Penny had to recover the money from Sonia and return it to the Fuller Lawn Manure Co. It seemed the only way Penny could keep from accompanying Potter’s body to jail, since eventually the law must catch up with it. Penny had to get the money before being nabbed by the police. It was the only possibility of leniency. So, now, Penny drove hard to find out what Sonia had done with the money. “What about your brother? What about money?” Penny persisted.
“How many times do I have to—?”
“Tell me.”
“If I’d known you were going to keep at me about it this way I never would have asked you—-”
“Please.” Penny tried being conciliatory. “Just go over it once more. Just the way you did the day you told me the first time.”
“Oh, all right.” Sonia sighed. “Well, I told you about my brother being a Seeing Eye man and what that was doing to him, how it was making him feel.”
“What do you mean? What was it doing to him? How did it make him feel?”
“Unmanly. Well, I mean—how would you feel if your sole function in life was to keep some old pooch from bumping into things? It made my brother feel like he wasn’t fulfilling his potential.”
“I can see what you mean.”
“Yes. And it was affecting all the other areas of his life too. Like he’d meet some girl at a party and she’d ask what he did for a living and he’d have to tell her he was a Seeing Eye man for a blind dog. It wasn’t so much that the girl minded, or that she’d laugh—-although an awful lot of them did from what my brother told me; girls today can be so damn insensitive! No, what was really bad was the way it made him feel inside having to say it. Put down; that’s how he felt. And feeling that way, he could never even get off the ground with a girl. Relationships were impossible for him. The only one he could relate to was that blind mutt. Of course that relationship was filled with suppressed hostility.”
“Why didn’t he just kick the dog down an open manhole,” Penny suggested.
“Because then his salary would stop. I told you. But he did give the dog an occasional kick. He couldn’t suppress all his hostility. Still, that only made things worse. He’d feel guilty about being sneakily violent toward a handicapped dog. His self-image would really sink to its lowest ebb. Then came that bit with the Internal Revenue Department and his self-image was virtually obliterated altogether.”
“He had tax troubles?” Penny inquired.
“They called him down to question his dependents and his exemptions. It was traumatic for my brother.”
“What happened?”
“Well, you see, he’d claimed the Russian wolfhound for triple dependency. First he took the regular dependency allotment. Then he took the extra exemption because the dog was blind. And then he took a third exemption because the dog is over sixty-five years of age.”
“Come on now!” Penny was skeptical. “Who ever heard of a dog living to age sixty-five?”
“That’s the attitude the tax people took. My brother explained to them that one year in a clog’s life is the equivalent of seven years in a human life, and that since the dog had lived for ten years that made him seventy years old. But they wouldn’t buy it. They disallowed the exemption.”
“Well, I can see the logic—”
“So could my brother. Intellectually. But emotionally it tore him apart. They also disallowed the dog’s medical bills and the drugs my brother had to buy for him. And they were downright nasty about the ‘Dog Yummies’ item. However, the hardest time they gave him was over the way he’d categorized his job. They said there was no such thing as a Seeing Eye man for a blind dog. You can imagine how that made my brother feel. I mean, talk about identity problems! And then there was all that money he had to come up with, or they said they’d put him in jail for falsifying his tax return! My poor brother!”
“So he came to you for help,” Penny guessed. '
“Who else could he go to?”
“And you came to me?”
“Sure. It was just a few days--” Sonia couldn’t understand why Penny was still asking questions.
“Did I give you the money?”
“Yes.”
“And you gave it to him?”
“Yes. But why—?”
“We have to get it back.” Penny was firm.
“I can’t. He gave it to the Internal Revenue Service.”