“Why does something have to be wrong with her?” he snapped.

“I don’t know,” I said. “Something in your tone of voice.”

Crawley wheeled himself around, banging his knee on a little end table. I knew it must have hurt, but he refused to give me the satisfaction of a groan. “As it happens, my granddaughter does have a handicap.”

“So she’s in a wheelchair, too?”

“I didn’t say that, did I?”

I waited for more details, but Crawley gave none. So now I was moved from walking dogs to babysitting for some spoiled Veruca Salt-ish little girl.

“You will be here at ten o’clock sharp tomorrow. But first you will introduce yourself to the shower in your house, and you will dress in something presentable. You will also refrain from calling me Chuckles in front of her.”

“Tomorrow’s Saturday. I’ve got stuff to do on Saturday.”

Which was actually just a whole lot of lying around, and I guess he figured that out, because he said: “Don’t force me to make your life more miserable than it already is.”

I finally realized who he reminded me of: the Emperor in Star Wars. “Fine. But right now I’m gonna walk dogs so the Schwa doesn’t have to do all the work.”

“You’re such a Boy Scout.”

“Hey!” I said. “Enough with the insults!” I hooked Gluttony to a leash, and left.

“Maybe she’s like the Elephant Man.”

Howie, Ira, and I hung out in my unfinished basement later that night, for the first time in a few weeks. We didn’t find much to say to one another, so we resorted to our old standby, playing video games. Our current choice was “Three Fisted Fury,” in which steroid-pumped opponents, having been exposed to radiation, have grown more than the usual number of arms and must battle for ultimate dominance of the world. You know—just like the movie.

It was Howie who suggested the Elephant Man theory. We had all been trying to figure out what condition Crawley’s granddaughter suffered from that was bad enough for him to pay me to spend time with her.

“I mean, she’s got to be ugly in some basic, unnatural way to make it worth money,” says Howie.

“Maybe not,” said Ira. “Maybe it’s Tourette’s syndrome.”

“What’s that?” I asked.

“It’s where you have these little seizures and can’t stop cursing people out.”

“Sounds like most people I know.” I swung at his character on the screen with my left and right arms, then caught him off guard with an uppercut from my third arm. He lost ten points of life.

“Hey,” says Ira, “what if she’s the surviving half of Siamese twins connected at the head, but separated at birth. Only one of them could survive, because there was only one brain between them.”