“I don’t want to tell you what to do,” he started to say, but just then my cell phone started ringing. I had left it on the little table in the hallway. I looked at the screen and saw it was Jimmy G.
“Who is it?” Pepe asked. He had come running.
“Jimmy G!” I said.
“Don’t answer it!” said Felix.
“Answer it!” said Pepe.
“I have to answer it,” I said to Felix. “He’s my boss and we’re on a case.”
Felix just shook his head. “It’s a mistake,” he said.
“Where are you?” That was Jimmy G.
“At home. Why?”
“Jimmy G needs you here.”
“At the office?”
“No, in the field.”
“But why?”
“Jimmy G needs to find a copy of the trust document, and Jimmy G expects you to help.”
“But with our client dead, who’s paying us?” I asked.
“Do not worry your pretty little head about that. Jimmy G’s got that under control. Just get your butt over to Whidbey Island and talk to Jillian Valentine. She runs an art gallery on Main Street in Langley. She’s one of the parties in the suit against the trust and thus a suspect. Plus, maybe she has a copy of the trust document.”
“It’s kind of late to be heading over there today,” I said, giving Felix a smile. He was leaning against the wall with his arms crossed. “How about I get there first thing tomorrow morning?”
“Traffic’s supposed to be horrible tomorrow,” Jimmy G said. “First day of the lavender festival. Besides Jimmy G has reserved a room for you at a place in Port Townsend called the Floral Fantasy B&B.”
“What?” That did not sound like the kind of place Jimmy would recommend.
“Yes, it’s run by Kevin Carpenter. Another one of the suspects in this case.”
“Do you think they would let me bring a friend?” I asked, with a meaningful look at Felix.
“What kind of friend?”
“My boyfriend, Felix,” I said, then wondered if that was the right term for Felix. We had not really defined our relationship. But it seemed OK with him. He looked intrigued.
Jimmy G snorted. He had met Felix only a couple of times. “Yeah, if he’s the kind of guy who likes scented candles and bubble bath.”
“Great!” I said. I hung up and turned to Felix. “Want to go stay in a B&B in Port Townsend?”
“When?”
“Tonight!”
Felix looked sad. “I can’t. I’ve got three clients in the morning.”
“Can you cancel them?” I asked hopefully.
“No more than you can say no to your boss,” he said. He looked downcast.
“Tell you what,” I said, “Pepe and I will go over there tonight and scope it out. If it looks good, maybe you could come tomorrow? For a romantic weekend getaway? Apparently there’s a big lavender festival. We can see what that’s like.”
Felix looked mollified but still unhappy. “I just hate it that you keep canceling on me,” he said. “I don’t think you should be putting your job first.”
“You put your job first,” I pointed out.
Pepe had run off again, but Fuzzy was hovering around us. She hates it when we fight. She used to belong to a couple who fought a lot, and it makes her nervous.
Felix shook his head. “Look, I don’t really feel like talking about this anymore. Why don’t you call me when you find out what’s happening, and meanwhile I’ll think about it. Come on, Fuzzy!”
And the next thing I knew he had walked out the door.
Chapter 23
Jillian Valentine lived in the small town of Langley on Whidbey Island. Taking a ferry was the only way to get to the island without driving miles to the north, crossing a narrow bridge to the north side of the island, and then driving down its length. So I told Pepe there was no choice but to take a ferry ride.
We caught the boat from Mukilteo, and it was only a fifteen-minute voyage to the island. Pepe kept his mouth shut as we boarded (which was unusual for my chatterbox dog), but I knew he wasn’t happy about taking another boat ride. Neither was I.
I was still thinking about my unhappy encounter with Felix. And how I had to eat all the pasta by myself. The ice cream, too. All I could hope was that the B&B that Jimmy G had mentioned would be the perfect place for a romantic weekend. Although Felix had spent a couple of weekends at my place, and I had spent one weekend at his place (Pepe complained bitterly the whole time since Felix doesn’t have a TV), we had never gone on a trip together. It might take us to the next level. But to get there, I would have to finish up this case. I could only hope that this Jillian would have the document Jimmy G thought we needed.
Langley is a quaint little town on the water just a few miles from the Clinton ferry dock. Main Street, only six or seven blocks long, is composed of old, but brightly painted, false-fronted wooden buildings. Many of them are small shops selling items to tourists. There are some restaurants, too, including a turn-of-the-century, two-story building that housed a large pub.
It wasn’t hard to find the art gallery. It was a nondescript, baby-blue wooden building on the water side of the street. Only a single story fronted the street, but there were two more floors that extended down the small hillside to the water in a terrace-like fashion. The stairs at the side were somewhat rickety.
“Is this it?” Pepe asked. “It does not look like much.”
“This is the place,” I told him, looking at the newspaper-covered picture window at the front of the building. There was a sign over the door saying VALENTINE GALLERY. There was also a big sign in the window that read FOR LEASE.
“We came all this way, and there is no one here,” said Pepe.
Just then, a woman came up the side stairs with a stack of matted art prints in her arms. She was tall and thin, with long hair pulled back off her narrow face and held with a gauzy scarf. She wore a long purple skirt and a dark-purple vest cinched tight over a loose, lilac-colored Indian blouse, along with big hoop earrings and an armful of glittering crystal bracelets. The whole effect was fairy/gypsy.
She dumped the prints into an empty plastic carton on the back of a baby-blue scooter parked in front of the building.
“Hi,” I said. “I’m Geri Sullivan. I’m looking for JillianValentine.”
“That’s me!” She pushed away a stray hair with her forearm and looked at me puzzled. “So?” Her tone said, “Why should I care?”
I hesitated. According to Jimmy G, I was supposed to be assessing the motives of all the potential heirs. Should I tell her that?
Pepe was sniffing around her ankles, and she flinched. A few of the prints slipped from her fingers and scattered on the asphalt. Luckily they were all wrapped in plastic.
“Can you control your dog?” she asked.
“Pepe!Aqui!” I said, snapping my fingers. Of course, this had absolutely no effect on Pepe, who simply began sniffing the prints she had dropped.
I bent to help her pick them up and saw that they were landscapes. One showed a Tudor mansion at sunset with the windows just beginning to glow yellow and behind it a smear of purple that I took to be a lavender field.
“Why, this looks like Carpenter Manor,” I said, surprised.
She jumped at that. “How do you know that?” she asked.
“Well, we were just there . . .” I gestured at Pepe.
She gave me a sharp look. “Whatever for?”
“A good chance to find out what she knows,” Pepe pointed out. “If I were conducting this interrogation I would imply we worked for her side.”
Easy for him to say. I hate lying. So I settled for ambiguity. “We were hired to investigate the situation with the dogs.”
“Oh, yeah.” She seemed relieved. “Julian said he had hired someone to figure out how to break the trust!” She stuffed the prints into the plastic crate. “So what do you want to know?”
“Do you have a copy of the trust document?” I aske
d.
“Are you kidding?” she asked. “Julian would never confide in me. He keeps treating me like his idiot little sister, just like he did when we were young.”
“So were you and your brother annoyed when your mother left all her money to the dogs?”
“Hey, who expected anything else?” she said bitterly.
“She always preferred dogs?”
“She was always a selfish bitch,” said Jillian firmly.
“Hey!” said Pepe. “I object to the use of that word in a pejorative way. A bitch is one of the loveliest creatures on the face of the earth.”
“Can you tell me more about your relationship with your mother?” I asked Jillian.
She blinked. “Look, I’m in kind of a hurry. Got to get this stuff over to Sequim tonight.”
“You’re going to Sequim?”
“Yeah, I’ve got a booth at the lavender festival. I can make a big chunk of change in just a few days if I get my stuff over there. Maybe even enough to pay my back taxes. If you want to keep asking me questions, you need to give me a hand.”
“Sure,” I said.
“I can lend a paw,” said Pepe.
Jillian headed down the steps, and Pepe followed at her heels. I paused on the landing to admire the view: sparkling blue water, mist-cloaked islands, foggy mountain peaks layered one on top of another, suggesting infinity.
Pepe came racing out of the room. “Geri, quick! You must see this!”
I followed as he scampered through the door. The room was huge, just a big open space, with windows at the front looking out on the view. The old wooden floor was peppered with blotches of dried paint. I almost tripped over a big tarp on the way in. All around the room were paintings sitting on easels, paintings stacked against the wall, paintings spread out on tables.
Pepe stood in the middle of the room, his eyes bugging out and his whole body shivering.
And no wonder. The paintings were all of dogs. Dogs of all shapes and sizes, all breeds and colors. All the dogs were dressed in human clothing. I saw a Renaissance princess, a policeman, a Rastafarian, a Victorian gentleman. And all the dogs had the faces of human babies. Did I mention they were all painted on black velvet?
It was the most disturbing thing I had ever seen. It was bad enough seeing dogs dressed like people. Pepe and I had often talked about William Wegman’s photos of his Weimaraners. Pepe thought dressing them up was animal abuse. I thought Wegman was making a comment about the way we tend to treat our animals as if they are human.
But the baby faces made the paintings really disturbing. Most of the dogs appeared to be crying or drooling. None of them were appealing.
“Do you like them?” asked Jillian, watching me.
“They’re really unique,” I said.
“I know,” she said, beaming with pride. “The weird thing is no one wants to buy one. I think I’m just ahead of my time. Instead I have to sell this tripe!”
She gestured at a small card table that contained more plastic-covered prints and the machine she used to wrap them. “For now. To keep afloat. But someday I’ll be recognized for my true talent.”
“Good luck,” said Pepe. “You will need it.”
“Oh,” was all I could think of to say.
“Here! We’ve got to get moving!” Jillian dumped a load of plastic-wrapped prints into my arms. One slipped to the floor, and Pepe trotted over and was about to scoop it up when he stopped and stared at it, transfixed.
“What is it, Pepe?” I asked.
“It is the sun around which I revolve,” he said. “The divine Phoebe.”
I snatched it up.
The picture depicted an old red barn standing in the midst of lavender fields and, in the foreground, a black-and-white dog. It could have been the farm dog. It could have been any black-and-white dog.
“What makes you think this is Phoebe?” I asked.
“Phoebe?” Jillian asked. “I didn’t say that.”
“You think I would not recognize my love,” Pepe asked indignantly. “Would you not recognize Felix if he stood in front of that barn?”
“It would depend,” I started to say.
“Geri, you must buy this print,” said Pepe. “I cannot afford to let some other Lothario get his paws on this image.”
“Very well.”
Jillian looked at me quizzically.
“You talk to your dog?”
“Yes!” I said. I was tired of explaining. I was tired of hiding it. “He wants me to buy this print.”
“You’re as crazy as my mother,” said Jillian. “Anyway, that one’s thirty dollars.”
Thirty dollars seemed steep for a color print wrapped in plastic, but I dug out the money from my bag and handed it over to her. She tucked it into her pocket and handed me the print. I handed it to Pepe, who carried it proudly to the door.
“So your mother thought her dogs talked to her?” I asked.
Jillian nodded impatiently. She scooped up a handful of prints and dumped them into my arms.
“What did they say?” I wanted to know.
“Who knows?” she asked. “Whatever it was, it was more interesting than anything I said.” Jillian grabbed her own armful of prints and headed for stairs.
“Mrrrmph,” said Pepe. He was trying to tell me something, but his mouth was full. He nodded his head toward a big canvas half hidden by the door. I bumped the door open with my hip so I could see it more clearly and promptly dropped all my prints.
It was a portrait in the tradition of a Madonna and Child. But the Madonna was a giant, golden-blond cocker spaniel wearing blue robes and the face of Lucille Carpenter. And she was looking away from the child in her paws: a tiny, fluffy, silver Yorkshire with the red face of a squalling baby.
Chapter 24
Jimmy G sat in his ’62 Thunderbird half a block down the street from the Valentine Gallery. He was on a stakeout, surreptitiously watching his own operative to make sure she followed through on his instructions. Stakeouts were usually boring affairs, but he didn’t mind this one: Jimmy G thought this Jillian Valentine was a pretty hot number, easy on the eyes, even liked her retro-hippie style of dress. Of course, he wouldn’t include that in his next report to the judge. He knew that older brothers could get kind of wacko-overprotective of their little sisters, something he’d found out the hard way when he was dating Kimberly Haney back in high school and her brother, Chad, big linebacker on the Roosevelt Roughriders football team, had taken exception and boffed him upside the head.
Anyway, he could see Geri talking to Jillian on the sidewalk outside the art gallery and wanted to know what they were saying. So he took out the directional mike that had cost him plenty, took off his fedora and put on the headset, then pointed the mike at them.
All he got was static—snap, crackle, and pop!—like he’d put his ear next to a bowl of Rice Krispies. Blasted thing! It was supposed to pick up sound from exactly where you pointed it, with a range of a hundred yards or more, not make him listen to his breakfast. Jimmy G tried to adjust the mike’s receiver, but all he got when he tried it again was louder static.
He shut the thing off and tossed it on the seat beside him. Never should have bought it used, he thought, especially from those bums at Liberty Pawn & Loan.
Jimmy G lit up a stogie and puffed on it hard. He had to do something. He needed to get his mitts on a copy of the trust document. Somebody had to have another one besides the one he’d lost.
Just then, Jillian came up the stairs at the side of the gallery with another bunch of what looked like art prints in her hands. She said something else to Geri, then loaded the prints into the carrier on the back of a little baby-blue motor scooter and putted off down the street. Where was she going?
Jimmy G grabbed his cell phone and called Geri.
When she answered, he said, “What’s shakin’, doll?”
“Not much,” Geri said. Then she asked. “Where are you calling from?”
Jimmy G hesitated. Could she
see his car? “At the office. Why do you ask?”
“The call is so clear. You could be right across the street.”
Jimmy G almost dropped the phone. Was she messing with him? He refocused. “Did you get a copy of the trust document?”
“No. I talked to Jillian, but she said she never saw it.”
“That’s what they all say.”
“What?”
“Jimmy G means that’s a sure sign of guilt.”
“We just finished talking to her. She’s heading off to Sequim.”
“Good. See if you can look around and find it. I bet she has a copy squirreled away.”
“You want me to break and enter?”
“Do what you have to do. Take the initiative.”
He hung up before she could say another word. While Geri was looking through the building, he needed to follow Jillian, just in case she could lead him to someone else who did have a copy of the trust document.
He could still hear the buzz of her little scooter (probably needed a tune-up) and caught up quickly, just as she pulled onto the only high-speed highway on the island, heading north. Jimmy G made sure to keep several cars between him and her, so she wouldn’t suspect she was being tailed.
She pulled off the highway at the exit for the Keystone Ferry. There was a long line of cars when he reached the ferry dock. Looked like they would have to wait for the next boat, which was an hour away. But what Jimmy G had forgotten was that motorcycles and bicycles got waved onto the ferry first. Jillian on her little blue scooter just breezed past the long line of cars and onto the ferry.
All Jimmy G could do was sit there and watch, tapping his fingers on the steering wheel, as the ferry sailed away.
Chapter 25
“Clearly she has some issues,” said Pepe, as we watched Jillian zip away on her little blue scooter.
“Yes, and we didn’t learn much,” I said, mournfully.
“At least, we know where to find her,” Pepe said. “And I have the portrait of my love.”
The phone rang. It was Jimmy G.
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