“Wait,” I pleaded. “Just stop talking for a minute, Schmidt, and let me think. Did you find…No, that’s not the most important…How was he…What I want to know is, who was it?”

“You don’t have to shout,” Schmidt roared, clapping his hands over his ears.

“I’m sorry,” I whimpered.

“Have some hay,” Tony suggested. “It’s very good when you’re feeling faint.”

Suddenly I felt better. It may have been the caffeine, but I think it was just Tony—the comradely grin, the familiar dimple, the tacit acknowledgment that the whole scenario had the lunatic logic of a Lewis Carroll plot. The cat jumped on my knee and began washing her whiskers.

“Let him tell it,” Tony went on, indicating Schmidt. “He’s been bending my ear with his tale since six A.M. He’d have rousted you out at that hour if I had let him, so you can thank me for your extra sleep.”

“Thank you,” I said meekly.

“Bitte schön. I might add,” Tony added, “that if he had bothered to mention this little detail last night, instead of waiting until this morning—”

“There were more important things,” Schmidt protested. “The spy from East Berlin—”

“Schmidt, you were so drunk you wouldn’t have known a spy from a brontosaurus,” I said wearily. “Never mind. Tell me now.”

Schmidt made a long dramatic story of it, but there really wasn’t much to tell. He had arrived at my house shortly after Tony and I had left. After Brotzeit, lunch, and a short nap, he had decided to take a little exercise. Jogging briskly and breathlessly around the block, he had attracted a pack of dogs. (Schmidt is irresistible to dogs; he is so round and so roly-poly, and he yelps so delightfully when they nip at his ankles.) Trailed by the fascinated pack, he had fled back to the house, but had been too distracted by the nips and barks and whines to unlock the door. In the hope that his admirers would lose interest and go away, he had slipped through the side gate into the back yard. One of the dogs had slipped through with him; from his vivid description, I recognized the animal as the beagle who lived three doors down. When the dog abandoned him and began digging furiously in a snowbank by the fence, Schmidt was curious enough to investigate.

I couldn’t blame him for getting drunk. As soon as he realized what the snow concealed, he had bundled the dog out the gate, but its frantic howling provided a ghastly background accompaniment to his excavations. The stiff white flesh was the same shade and temperature as its icy shroud, but Schmidt had no difficulty recognizing the face of Freddy.

I patted Schmidt’s hand sympathetically. He frowned at me and pulled it away. “It was a terrible sight. I am glad it was I and not you who found him, Vicky. His eyes were open and coated with a thin layer of ice….”

Shocked though he was, Schmidt had dug snow away until he found the dark-crusted stains on the breast of Freddy’s fancy Hawaiian shirt. They came from multiple stab wounds, according to Schmidt—and I was willing to take his word for it. However, there was no blood on the snow. Freddy had been long dead and half frozen when someone tipped him over the fence into my back yard. It must have happened the night before, after I took Caesar to visit his friend Carl.