The waiting should have made Doc Fink sweat. It didn’t. When Rhino returned he was still cool as a refrigerated cake. He was curious though. “What’s that stuff?” He referred to the items Rhino had lugged back with him.
“What's it look like?”
“A TV set.”
“You’re a smart illegitimate son.”
“But what’s that?”
“A video cassette player, you phallus!”
“Then that’s a cassette.”
“You got it.”
“But what’s it a cassette of?” Doc Fink wanted to know.
“You’re gonna find out.” Rhino turned to me. “Help me tie him to this chair, Steve.”
“You’re going to torture him with that stuff?” I was bewildered.
“Just help me tie him.”
I helped Rhino tie Dr. Fink to the chair. When he was secured, Rhino set up the TV set and the video cassette player in front of him. Then he stuck a gag in Doc Fink’s mouth. “So nobody hears his screams,” he explained. He plugged earphones into the TV and put them on Doc Fink. Last of all, he plugged in the cassette.
The cassette was a replay of the last Monday night football game the Stonewalls had played against the Miami Dolphins. It had been a pretty good game, fast-moving, packed with action, the score seesawing back and forth.
Watching it, I wondered what Rhino could possibly be up to. After all, Doc Fink was looking at the same replay I was. The only difference was that I couldn’t hear the sound and he could. But why should that make any difference? Why should that make him crack and tell us what we wanted to know?
It seemed ridiculous, and yet his screams, muffled by the gag, began before the first quarter was even over. Rhino let him suffer a little before he removed the gag. “Ready to talk?!’ he asked.
“No! I’ll never talk! Never!”
Rhino replaced the gag and the earphones. By halftime, tears were streaming down Doc's face. “Please! Please!” he begged when Rhino removed the gag again.
“Who’s behind the snatching of Terry Niemath?”
“I don’t know! I swear, I don’t know! Please! Don’t make me—”
But Rhino was merciless. He replaced the gag and the earphones once again. The Stonewall-Dolphin game proceeded.
The next time he removed Doc Fink’s gag, there was no doubt that Rhino’s technique had worked. “I’ll talk!” he babbled. “I’ll talk! I’ll tell you anything you want to know! Just turn it off! Please! Please! Turn it off! I’ll talk!”
“Who set up Terry Niemath?”
“The Baroquians! Somebody named Putnam. He paid me to knock her out so his men could snatch her. The Baroquians kidnapped her!”
The Baroquians! I was floored. I’d figured the mob, maybe, trying to narrow the point spread. But the Baroquians? Charles Putnam? Why would they kidnap Terry Niemath?
“Why?” Rhino demanded of Doc Fink. “Why’d they do it?”
“I don’t know! I swear I don’t know! I’d tell you if I knew! Don’t torture me any more! I would! I swear it! Just don’t make me listen to Howard Cosell56 announcing any more! Have mercy! No more, Howard Cosell!”
Howard Cosell! That's torture!
CHAPTER ELEVEN
“Shut up, Howard!” Doc Fink was still babbling from the results of the Cosell torture. “I want to know who tackled who! Shut up, Howard! I don’t care that the home city of the Stonewalls was named after the poet John Greenleaf Whittier! Shut up, Howard! I want to know if the pass was called back or not! I already know that the Watergate wimp played football for four years at Whittier College and could never make the first team. Shut up, Howard! I want to know if they made the first down or if they were short, not how the incumbent was shafted in Whittier’s Twelfth Congressional District in 1956. Shut up, Howard! Shut up! Shut up! Shut up!”
“Get hold of yourself, man.” Rhino slapped him lightly back and forth, across the face to cut off his hysteria.
“Sorry.” Doc Fink calmed down to a shudder. “It was just so awful!”
“Lots of people watch Monday Night Football,” I reminded him. “Millions of TV fans listen to Howard Cosell.”
“But not without commercials,” Doc Fink reminded me. “You have no idea how horrible it can be uninterrupted.”
“Where did they take Terry Niemath?” I got back to the business at hand.
“They’ll kill me if I tell you.”
“It’s either that or more Cosell.”
“Some place they called ‘the Orchard’. That’s all I know.”
“The Baroquian Orchard?”
“They just called it ‘the Orchard’.”
I turned to Rhino. “Let’s go.”
That afternoon, on the plane to San Francisco, Rhino explained to me where he’d gotten the idea for using the Cosell cassettes to torture the truth out of Doc Fink. “There’s this bar up near Buffalo I read about in the papers. The owner bought up a hundred used twelve-inch black-and-white TV sets at scrap prices. On Monday nights he’d turn ’em to Cosell one at a time. For twenty bucks, a customer could kick in a TV set when Howard started talking. In three weeks, the guy had tripled his business. The only trouble was that, by that time, he’d run out of sets. They’d all been kicked in by Cosell-tortured fans. Isn’t that a urinator?”
“Perfectly understandable.”
We fell silent as the stewardess brought us our drinks. When she’d departed, I turned to Rhino once again. “I think we’d better talky about what we’re doing,” I suggested. “Has it occurred to you that we work for Charles Putnam and his group of Baroquians? They’re the ones who hired us to put Terry Niemath across as a quarterback in the first place. And now it looks like they’re the ones who grabbed her. I think, before we actually do anything about getting her back, we’re going to have to decide exactly where we stand.”
“My first cohabitating obligation is to the Whittier Stonewalls,” Rhino answered. “I’m a scout for them.”
“Suppose the Putnam group, finding out Terry was pregnant, decided the best thing for the team would be to have her vanish?”
“You think that’s what happened?”
“I don’t know. I guess it’s one of the things we’re on our way to San Francisco to find out.”
“What if they had another reason for snatching her? Are we going to try to get her back?”
“That, old buddy, is the question,” I told him.
“What do we do first?”
“Get a good night’s sleep after we land. Rent a car in the morning. Drive out to the Baroquian Orchard and case the situation. Depending on what we find out, we’ll decide then what to do.”
“In other words, we get our feces together and play it by ear.”
“You got it.”
It was mid-morning when we reached the access road to the Baroquian Orchard the next day and were forced to make our first decision. Since we weren’t expected, there was a good chance that, if we drove up the road to the guard booth, we would be turned away. So we stashed the car behind a clump of bushes at the foot of the road and set out on foot.
We did not, however, set out empty-handed. Remembering the chain-link fence which surrounded the Baroquian’s property, we had thought to buy a pair of stout wirecutters in San Francisco, and now we took them with us. Emerging from a grove of redwoods which reduced us to ant height, we faced a remote stretch of this fence with no guards in sight. In a matter of minutes we had cut enough of it away to pass through to the other side.
It was straight uphill from there through a tangle of underbrush that crackled like breakfast cereal. Was it any wonder that we attracted the attention of one of the guards who patrolled the Baroquian Orchard? Fortunately for us, this particular sentinel wasn’t very long on imagination. He jumped me without bothering to determine if there was more than one of us. Rhino plucked him off me with no more trouble than if he’d been a tick on a spaniel’s ear.