The Twelve Dogs of Christmas

by David Rosenfelt

  “I don’t care if it’s J. Edgar Hoover’s case; you can get this done. Now will you just take care of it?”

  “It’s an active scene,” he says. “Our people are searching it.”

  “We’ll just go in and get them, and your people can watch us the whole time. Come on, even you can’t want puppies to starve to death.”

  He’s quiet for at least fifteen seconds, apparently weighing the starving puppies versus the favor-to-the-defense-lawyer conundrum. Finally, “OK. ten minutes. I’ll make the call.”

  “You’re a real softie.”

  I head to Pup’s house, which is pretty close by. I don’t bother calling Willie; I know he won’t have left. He’ll be thinking about the dogs as well.

  Sure enough, he’s standing just outside the police barricades. He obviously called his wife, Sondra, who is there with him. She works full-time with him at the Tara Foundation.

  “They won’t let us get the dogs,” he says.

  I nod and walk over to a cop that I know, a sergeant named Alan Silver. He’s never been a fan of mine, especially since I once made him look bad in a cross-examination.

  “Captain Stanton call you?” I ask.

  “Yeah, he called. You got ten minutes.” He looks at his watch. “Now it’s nine minutes and fifty-five seconds.”

  I signal for Willie and Sondra to join me. We get all the dogs out of the house with two minutes to spare. We have no need to take any of the equipment, because we have all of it at the foundation. Willie grabs a bag of food, because we have mostly adult dog food, and this is specially made for puppies.

  Sondra has brought the van that we use to pick up dogs from the shelter, so we load them all in there. There are twelve puppies, the mother, and Pups’s own pet, an adorable miniature toy poodle named Puddles. “You guys going to be OK from here?” I ask. “I need to get down to the jail.”

  “We’re fine,” Sondra says.

  “Everything’s cool,” Willie says, echoing her sentiment. “Did Pups kill that guy?”

  “I don’t know,” I say. “What do you think?”

  “Damn,” he says. “There’ve been times I thought she was going to kill me.”

  I head down to the county jail and tell the guy at the reception desk that I’m Martha Boyer’s attorney and that I want to see her. He must be new, because I’ve never seen him before, and I’ve spent plenty of time down here.

  “You’re a little late,” he says.

  “What does that mean?”

  “They just wheeled her out of here. I think she had a heart attack.”

  I head for St. Joseph’s Hospital.

  It’s the only full-service hospital in Paterson since the Barnert Hospital closed, so it’s a pretty good bet that St. Joe’s is where they took Pups. I was born at St. Joe’s, yet when I pull up I notice that they still have not erected a statue commemorating that fact.

  There are two police cars in front of the emergency room, which is not exactly a shocking event here in downtown Paterson. I park and go in, and again see Sergeant Silver, who has obviously just been redeployed here. It’s a break for me, because the phone call from Pete has given me some credibility when it comes to access.

  He half sneers when he sees me. “So everyone is right,” he says. “You really are an ambulance chaser.”

  “Don’t ever lose that wit,” I say. “What’s going on with my client?”

  “She collapsed at the jail, and they took her here. Might be bullshit. We’re waiting to find out.”

  My heart warmed by his compassion, I head upstairs to the cardiology department. Once there, I go to the nurses’ station and introduce myself as Pups’s attorney. “How and where is she?” I ask.

  “She’s in the intensive care unit, being examined and treated by Dr. Sonaya.”

  “Will Dr. Sonaya come out here when he’s finished?”

  “She just did,” a voice says, emphasizing the “she.” I look over and see a doctor who is definitely female walking up to me. “What can I do for you?”

  “I’m Martha Boyer’s attorney. How is she?”

  She hesitates, as if choosing her words. “How much about Ms. Boyer’s health issues do you know?”

  It seems a somewhat strange question to ask. “Just that she collapsed and was brought here.”

  She nods. “Give me a few minutes.” Then she goes back in the direction that she came from.

  A few minutes becomes ten, and as I’m starting to wonder if she’ll ever come back, she does. “I just needed to get clearance from Ms. Boyer,” she says. “Confidentiality.”

  “Did she have a heart attack?” I ask.

  She shakes her head. “No. She suffered what is called supraventricular tachycardia, which is basically a dramatic increase in heart rate. It can be brought on by stress or intense emotion. Based on the police involvement, my guess is she’s had plenty of both today.”

  “That’s for sure. Is she going to be OK?”

  Another hesitation. “This time I believe she will. We’ll monitor her closely for a couple of days, but if there are no further complications, I would be optimistic that she will recover from this event. But it’s a serious condition, and she’ll need to be on medication.”

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “No, not now, but she knows that you are here. Is there a message you want conveyed to her?”

  “Just please tell her not to talk about her case to anyone but me.”

  She nods. “I can do that.”

  She tells me that Pups should be able to see me tomorrow or the next day at the latest. Since there’s no reason for me to hang around anymore, I head back home.

  Local news radio is already all over the story, and, as always, the unspoken initial assumption is that the police are probably right and that Pups is probably guilty.

  It’s been quite a day for Pups, going from a courtroom victory to a charge of murder to a semi–heart attack. I’m both looking forward to and dreading hearing her side of the story. Pups is not necessarily the most stable person in the world, and I know how angry she was at Hennessey. Even worse, she announced in court how she threatened to “cut his heart out and shove it down his throat.” If the autopsy shows his heart stuck in his throat, that could be a problem.

  I can’t really even think about how I might defend her until I know all the circumstances and have heard her side of the story. So for now I’ll just hope that she has a cousin whom she considers the best defense attorney on the planet, and who is chomping at the bit to take on her case.

  It’s almost midnight when I get home, and I’m exhausted. Laurie has waited up for me and, naturally, wants to be updated on the night’s events. Her being an ex-cop, I know that Laurie’s initial inclination is to side with the police, but she just listens and doesn’t openly take a side.

  “What effect will her being in the hospital have on the process?” she asks.

  “She won’t be arraigned until she’s physically capable of it. My sense is that it won’t be more than a few days; being arraigned is not exactly physically taxing. When she’s able to be up and about, they’ll get her into court.”

  “You ready for bed?” she asks.

  That is not a tough call, since the last time I wasn’t ready for bed with Laurie was never.

  At this point, there is no sense getting our investigative team together.

  We don’t know anything, and we won’t be receiving any discovery information until Pups is arraigned. The media is painting it as a simple story; the police believe that Pups got revenge on Hennessey for trying to get her evicted and shot him.

  I head down to the hospital and am pleased to learn that she is doing very well and is in the process of being taken out of intensive care. I send in word that I’m there and want to see her, and the response that comes back is positive.

  I am going to have to wait for at least an hour, so I head for the lounge. The place is filled with Christmas decorations in a completely unsuccessful attempt to
make it look something other than depressing.

  There are two police officers present, no doubt to prevent Pups from breaking out of intensive care and making a run for it. I assume that they know me, because they give me the typical sneer; they must learn sneering at the police academy. I smile sweetly in return.

  I get some coffee out of the vending machine. After one taste, I fight the urge to spit it out; it tastes like it has come directly out of the Passaic River. It’s so awful that I offer to buy the officers some. They accept, so I’m able to get a little bit of liquid revenge for the sneering.

  When I’m finally led into Pups’s room, I’m taken aback by what I see. She’s still hooked up to a bunch of tubes and wires, and she looks ten years older than the last time I saw her, which was less than twenty-four hours ago. There is something else about her that I have never seen before.

  She looks vulnerable.

  And scared.

  “Where are the dogs?” is the first thing she asks.

  “Willie has them. They’re fine.”

  “You get Puddles also?”

  Pups is totally devoted to her toy poodle. “Of course,” I say. “Willie says she has already laid claim to the couch.”

  She smiles. “Good.” Then, “You gonna help me deal with this crap?”

  “That’s why I’m here.”

  “I didn’t kill the son of a bitch. I would have, without losing a wink of sleep, but I didn’t. It’s all a bunch of garbage.”

  “Do you know who did?”

  “No.”

  “You up to telling me what happened?”

  She nods, but starts to cough before she speaks. It’s a fairly violent cough; I’m afraid she’s going to disconnect the tubes. Finally, she says, “He called me.”

  “Hennessey?”

  She frowns. “No, Gandhi. Of course it was Hennessey. He called me and told me he wanted to talk to me, that he wanted to apologize.”

  “What did you say?”

  “That he should kiss my ass.”

  I nod. “Nice and conciliatory. What happened then?”

  “He asked me to come over; said he wanted to talk and give me something, a gift for the dogs. He said he felt terrible about the whole thing and wanted to be a good neighbor.”

  “So you went?”

  She nods. “I went. When I got there, I rang the bell, and he yelled out that the door was open and I should come in. He said he was in the kitchen. So I went in, and I didn’t see him there, so I opened a door that I figured might be the kitchen.”

  “Was it the kitchen?” I ask.

  “Yes, and he was in there. He was lying on the floor with half his head blown off.”

  “What did you do?”

  “I got the hell out of there and went home. And then I called 911 and told them what was going on. When I heard the sirens a couple of minutes later, I went out to meet them. But they told me to wait outside; they wouldn’t let me back in his house. Which was OK with me; I didn’t want to have to see that again.”

  “What happened next?”

  “They told me to wait in the police car, that they would need to question me. I was stuck in there for two hours, and when they finally came over, they read me my rights and arrested me.”

  “I’m confused about something,” I say. “If he was dead on the floor of the kitchen, how did he call out to you to come in?”

  “Good question, Sherlock.”

  “Did you know his voice well enough to recognize it?”

  She shakes her head. “No.”

  “Did the voice on the phone sound like the voice in the house?”

  She shrugs. “I don’t know. Maybe.”

  “Did you hear any other noises, like someone else might have been in the house?”

  “No.”

  “Do you own a gun?”

  “Who am I? Annie Oakley? No; they scare the hell out of me.”

  Pups can be a tad caustic, and the events of the last twenty-four hours seem to have darkened her mood somewhat. But I press on. “And you have no idea why the police think you did it?”

  “The only thing I can think of is that I talked about him in court and sort of threatened him.”

  I don’t want to say it to her now, but they must have more than that if they placed her under arrest.

  “OK,” I say. “We’ll find out what they have and go from there. How are you feeling?”

  “Better than yesterday, worse than every other day of my life.”

  “OK, get some rest and I’ll tell you when I learn more.”

  “So you’re my lawyer?”

  “If you want me,” I say.

  “You’re probably no worse than anybody else I’d get.”

  “Stop it,” I say. “You’re making me blush.”

  Jason Ridgeway did not see how things could be going better.

  It’d been some year for Ridgeway, actually some two years. An obscure town councilman, he had agreed to run for state senate. The offer had been made to him because it was not exactly a coveted slot; everyone with any knowledge of South Dakota politics considered it a quixotic effort. It was a district solidly in the opposition party’s corner and occupied by a popular incumbent.

  Two weeks before the election, that popular incumbent had become decidedly less popular, when it was revealed that he had been accepting bribes for as many years as he had been in office.

  It was too late for his party to remove him from the ballot, and since very few people were willing to vote for a known thief, Ridgeway became the default winner.

  Young and good-looking, he had latched on to a few popular local initiatives and was making a name for himself. The party saw in him a potential national candidate, which is why they gave him significant committee assignments, the most recent being the chairman of the Environment and Natural Resources Committee. In South Dakota, they take their environment and natural resources pretty seriously.

  With the job came some perks—not national-level perks; South Dakota state senators don’t get to ride on Air Force One—and this weekend was an example of those perks: Ridgeway was attending a three-day EPA meeting of local environmental leaders, inside and outside the government, held in Las Vegas.

  Ridgeway had never been to Vegas before. Until this weekend, he’d considered Omaha “the big city.” Except for the meetings themselves, which were quite boring, he’d loved every minute of the trip.

  Especially last night.

  The delegates, Ridgeway included, were staying on the strip at the Mirage. Last night, while most of his colleagues were in the casino, Ridgeway took a cab downtown. He wasn’t much of a gambler, anyway, and didn’t have much money to waste.

  He found a really great hotel bar and had a drink. One drink became five, maybe six, and the next thing he knew there was a great-looking woman next to him, hanging on his every slurred word.

  If Ridgeway was honest with himself, he wouldn’t blame the alcohol. Once she put her hand on the inside of his leg, he didn’t have a chance. He would have followed her anywhere, even if he had been drinking club soda.

  At least he was smart enough not to bring her back to his hotel. She was already staying at this particular hotel, so they just went upstairs to her room. He didn’t have to check in, and, as far as he could remember, he never even told her his name.

  Nothing could be traced back to him; it was as if it never happened. And the truth is that he didn’t really regret what he did; it was fantastic, and an experience that he knew would truly be once in a lifetime. And it had to be; with his wife and two kids at home, any revelation of this type of behavior would destroy both his political career and his personal life.

  So he would never do it again, but he sure had the memory of this one time. Having breakfast at the Mirage and planning to head to the airport in a couple of hours, it was really all he could think about.

  He was sitting alone and just about finished when a man came over to the table. “Senator Ridgeway?” the man asked, a sm
ile on his face.

  “That’s me.”

  “I just wanted to say hello. My name is Caffey. I’m a big fan, and I know you’re going places. I want to be able to tell people I knew you when.”

  Ridgeway laughed. “Well, you can tell them that.”

  The man smiled again. “I think I’ll just do that.” He turned to walk away but then stopped and said, “Hey, I hope you don’t mind, but can I take a selfie with you? People back home will get a kick out of it.”

  “Sure. Why not?”

  The man took out a cell phone and moved next to Ridgeway, leaning over so that their heads were next to each other. He held up the phone, and Ridgeway looked toward it. But he didn’t see the image of himself and the stranger.

  He saw the woman from last night, in her room.

  With an icon that indicated it was a video.

  “Press play when you get to your room and no one is around, Senator. You can keep the phone; I’ve got other copies.”

  Ridgeway tried to say something, but, in his horror, words did not come out.

  “One vote, Senator. We’re going to call on you for one vote, and then we’ll be out of your life. It won’t hurt a bit.”

  And then he walked away.

  Getting ready for a fun holiday?”

  The voice is Rita Gordon, the clerk at the Passaic County courthouse. Rita knows me very well, and she knows that preparing to try a murder case is not my idea of a joyous holiday season.

  Rita even knows me in the biblical sense, though I’m not sure the forty-five-minute affair we once had would even register on the official list of biblical dos and don’ts. It was during a brief period when Laurie had left me and moved to her home town in Wisconsin, and I haven’t mentioned it to Rita since because it seems awkward to do so. Rita hasn’t mentioned it either, and I’m afraid that it’s because she’s forgotten it even happened.

  “Totally,” I say. “I’m already covered in tinsel.”

  “Sounds adorable, but tomorrow is suit-and-tie day.”