Dog Law (A Robin Starling Courtroom Mystery)

by Michael Monhollon

  “The whole family: first a little girl, then her big brother, then Dad.” He pushed the little brown puppy into my arms, and it wriggled against me, soft and warm from Paul’s jacket. “The final and toughest, though, was Mom.”

  “What kind of questions did they ask?”

  “Oh, you know. How big is your yard, how much time do you have to spend with it, would it be an outside dog or an inside dog.”

  I laughed, stroking the dog. “How did you pass that interview? You live in an apartment and work all day.”

  “I probably cheated a little. I described your yard.”

  My eyes narrowed against the possibility that he was broaching the idea of moving in with me, which wasn’t going to happen.

  “My fence is just chain-link,” I said. “That’s not going to hold this guy when he’s full grown.”

  I sat on the couch with the dog, and it twisted to look into my face with amber eyes.

  “We’ve got time. He’s just eight-weeks old. Eyes are already turning, though. The little girl told me two weeks ago they were blue.”

  “When you say we’ve got time…”

  “To train him. I really see him as mostly an inside dog, though.”

  “Well, sure. You haven’t got a yard.” The puppy had its neck extended, and seemed to be smelling my breath and memorizing the scent.

  “And my apartment doesn’t allow pets.”

  I picked up the dog and turned him toward Paul, its front legs sticking straight out, back legs dangling. “Then what’s the idea of this little guy?”

  “I thought he could stay here. Actually, I kind of got him for you.”

  “What do you mean, kind of?” I set the dog on the floor, where it sat to look up at me.

  “I guess I mean I’m equivocating in hopes of avoiding an explosion.”

  The dog toddled toward the French doors, where he stopped, nose pressed against the dark glass, evidently looking at his reflection. He yipped, and his tail wagged.

  I got up and turned on the outside light, and the tail stopped for a moment, then began wagging harder than ever.

  “I can’t have a dog,” I said. “I’m gone all day.”

  “But you run every day. You’ll have a running buddy, and he’ll get plenty of exercise.”

  I looked at him. “Is that what this is about?”

  “What?” His round face, beneath his dark, wavy hair, was open and disingenuous.

  “I ask you to run with me, and so you go find a dog to stand in for you?”

  “Look out!”

  I looked down. The puppy, looking out at the grass and the pine trees, had squatted and begun to pee.

  Paul was already there, scooping him up and holding him upside down so that the pee went up in a tiny fountain. I fumbled with the lock on the French door and wrenched it open, and Paul ran out and put the puppy in the grass. It was too late. The puppy evidently was done, its bladder empty. It looked up at us and wagged its tail.

  “I picked up a crate at Walmart. It’s probably a good idea to let him sleep in that, if you want to housetrain him. Of course, one of us will have to get up every few hours to let him out.”

  “One of us?” I had my arms crossed over my chest and my hands tucked into my armpits for warmth.

  “I can sleep on the couch the next couple of nights till he settles in.”

  “No, you can’t.”

  “If you don’t want to get up, I mean.”

  “What I really don’t want is this puppy.” I felt something and looked down. The puppy had its front paws on my foot and was looking up at me. When I made eye contact, he wagged his tail.

  I sighed. “What’s his name?”

  “Anything you want. The kids called him Brown Dog, I think because he was the only chocolate in the litter, but he hasn’t learned it yet. I was thinking maybe Deacon.”

  I bent and scooped the dog off the grass, holding him so that he faced me with his legs dangling. He looked at me with what might have been reproach.

  “Deacon’s a big name for such a little guy,” I said.

  “He’ll grow. The momma was there with the puppies, and she was pretty big. They said the daddy weighed a hundred twenty pounds.”

  “A hundred twenty! That’s huge for a lab.”

  “So he’ll grow into the name.”

  I tucked Deacon under my arm and carried him back inside. “Grab some paper towels and see what you can blot up from the carpet,” I said. “Then go get the crate. I’ll take him into the kitchen and sponge him off.”

  I never did get my run in. Paul stayed until eleven, and when he left the puppy stayed with me, along with his crate, a leash and collar, and a small bag of kibble. The crate was about the size of a deep desk drawer, so he was going to grow out of it in a matter of weeks. I put it on the floor next to my bed.

  As I got ready for bed, Deacon followed me from the closet to the bathroom, from the bathroom to the hall to turn out a light, from the hall to my bed, moving a bit unsteadily on his short legs. I held open the door of his crate and nodded at it.

  “Bedtime,” I said, but he only looked at me. “Bedtime,” I said again, scooping him up and putting him in his crate. He wasn’t able to turn around fast enough to keep me from withdrawing my hand and shutting the wire-door, but he yapped his objections.

  “Bedtime,” I said, and got into bed.

  He whined. I knew the best thing to do was let him whine himself out, which I expected him to do fairly promptly. After five minutes, though, I got up and cleared off my bedside table, putting the clock, cell phone, and water bottle on the floor. His crate was a little too long for the table, but not by much.

  “There,” I said. “You can look at me.”

  He looked.

  I got into bed and turned onto my side so I could look at him, too. He hesitated, then lay down and put his head on his paws.

  “Bedtime,” I murmured to him, and his tail thumped softly in reply.

  Chapter 5

  For breakfast Deacon had kibble, and I had oatmeal. “I still say Deacon is a mighty big name from such a little dog,” I told him as he ate. His tail wagged, but he continued to gobble his kibble as if it were filet mignon.

  When we’d finished breakfast and I was dressed and ready to go, I still hadn’t decided what I was going to do with him. There were three choices as I saw it: put down some newspapers and leave him in the garage, leave him in the house inside in his crate, or leave him in the back yard. In the garage he could get into mischief. There was no telling what he would chew up, and he might eat something he shouldn’t.

  His whining had wakened me shortly before three. I’d carried him outside and stood hugging myself against the cold while he nosed around and, eventually, peed. Evidently, he’d already developed an aversion to peeing in his crate, which was good. Equally evident, his bladder was still too small to last him the night—or all day, which was not so good.

  That left the back yard. I took him out and watched him run around a bit, then, when he wasn’t looking, slipped back into the house. I sighed, hating to leave him. This was why I shouldn’t have a dog. But I did, at least for now, and I had done the best I could for him.

  Forgoing the interstate, I took West Broad Street into town so I could stop by the Stevens house, where Natalie had been arrested. Her stepmother Chloe should be there, alone now until Mark Stevens returned from parts unknown.

  It was a big house on a one-acre lot: dark red brick, wood shingles on the gables, one story in some places and two stories in others. “The House of Seven Gables,” I murmured to myself, shivering in the early morning cold. I hadn’t counted them, but I thought the architect might have beaten Nathaniel Hawthorne by a gable or two. I glanced at my watch as I walked up the sidewalk, thinking that it might be early in the day for a wealthy woman who didn’t have a job or a family to get up for. On the other hand, what reason could such a woman have for staying up late?

  I rang the bell, which gave me a simple ding-dong
, no chimes. No one answered, so I rang again. And waited again. It was cold enough that I could see my breath. I went back down the sidewalk a little way so I could look through the arched window above the door. A bit of staircase was visible, and the railing of a second-floor hallway. No lights on that I could make out in the daylight, though, and no Chloe.

  Well, I was a lawyer and was supposed to be obnoxious. I stepped back onto the stoop and began pressing the doorbell repeatedly: ding-dong-ding-dong-ding-dong… I kept it up for thirty seconds or so and stepped back again to look through the window.

  No light had come on that I could tell. No one was at the rail, looking out. So. Chloe was a sound sleeper, or she was lying in her bed with her pillow clutched around her head—I pictured her in a mauve satin teddy—cursing the inconsiderate moron who was pumping her doorbell. Or she wasn’t home.

  I moved off the sidewalk onto a plush lawn that looked professionally maintained, moving along the shrubbery that lined the house, but the window treatments foiled any hope I had of seeing inside. At the end of the house I came to a pair of double-wide garage doors, both closed. A gate that consisted of iron scrollwork was set in the brick wall that enclosed the back yard. Peering through it, I could see a deck, some patio furniture, and a whole lot of trees. It was a nice place, really, the sort of place I might consider acquiring, should there come a day when I was representing millionaire playboys accused of murdering their wives.

  Since I was taking the slow road into town already, I stopped by the office of Rodney Burns, the man I was beginning to think of as my detective. He occupied an office on the backside of a strip shopping center that was nearly half vacant. When I got there, I drove around the end of the strip, avoiding the potholes that spotted the cracked asphalt. As always, the Venetian blinds inside Rodney’s plate glass window hung slightly askew, the ends of the blinds bent here and there. I opened my car door, and a cold wind jerked it from me so hard it bounced back at me. Goose bumps appeared instantly on my bare legs.

  I got out, shifting my briefcase to the hand that clutched my dress so I could slam the car door, then putting my other hand on top of my head to keep my hair from blowing away. When I let go of my hair to yank open the glass door into the office, the wind pulled it straight out like a flag, but at least it stayed with me. Inside, other than a short counter and a sink with some cabinets over it, the outer office was vacant except for a couple of client chairs and a modular computer desk and chair that held no computer and at which a secretary never sat. I let go of my dress and used both hands to brush my hair back from my face as I looked around the office. Actually, there was something at one end of the computer desk. It looked like…

  “Seen my new coffee pot?” Rodney asked me, poking his head out of the cluttered inner office. “It’s a Cuisinart.”

  “I see it. It looks nice.” I shrugged out of my coat and draped it over the empty wing of the computer desk.

  “I just made a fresh pot. Would you like a cup?”

  I moved my head equivocally. “Sure.”

  He disappeared back inside the inner office, calling, “It’s Krispy Kreme. I used to stop every day on my way to work, but now I can buy their ground coffee by the pound.”

  I followed Rodney to the doorway, blinked, then spotted him squatting at the end of his desk to shift a stack of files from in front of a cabinet. “It smells good,” I offered as he got the cabinet door open and extracted a gold mug with a VCU ram on it. He stood, holding the mug high like an athletic trophy he’d just won. On his way back past his desk, he snagged another mug, this one with a picture of Edgar Allan Poe on it and stained brown inside with old coffee. “Now I can have coffee any time of day I want, and I don’t have to go anywhere to get it.”

  He handed me the VCU mug with the air of one conferring an award. I took it in the same spirit, inclining my head in acknowledgment of the honor. He poured, but stopped in mid-pour with a stricken look.

  “I didn’t ask if you took cream or sugar.”

  “Black is fine.”

  He took a breath. “Because I don’t have cream or sugar. I’ll have to get some. I don’t have any on hand because I don’t use it myself.”

  “Why spoil a good cup of coffee?” I said.

  He smiled. When he had finished pouring the coffee, we sat in the client chairs in the outer office and looked at each other over the steaming mugs. The overhead fluorescents glinted off the slightly oily comb-overs that stretched across his narrow head. A little moustache emphasized the smallness of his mouth and added to an ineffectual look that I believed to be entirely misleading.

  “He invented the detective story,” Rodney said.

  I blinked at him.

  “I noticed you looking at my mug. Poe’s fictional detective was Auguste Dupin. ‘Murders in the Rue Morgue,’ 1841.”

  “Oh. Sure. Woman’s body stuffed up the chimney. I don’t think I’ve read it since junior high, didn’t realize it was the first detective story.” Probably not the time to mention I was an English major in college. I held up my own mug. “Did you go to VCU?”

  He nodded, birdlike. “For a year. Then I dropped out to start my agency.”

  As I sipped my coffee, my gaze strayed to the mangled blinds.

  “So what brings you to the West End?” he asked me.

  I lived in the West End, of course, but I worked downtown, so I took his meaning.

  “Well, I’ve got a case…”

  “Already! And you’ve just been on your own…”

  “A week and a half. I’ve become a grand master at spider solitaire, but it is nice to have something productive to do.” I told him about it, leaning over to extract the complaint from my briefcase. “See what you can find out. In addition to some general background on the Stevens family—you can probably get something on the internet—I’d like to know the name of the victim, what the police got from examining Natalie’s Lexus, anything you can get. This morning I’m going to stop by the station in hopes of talking to the officer in charge of the case. I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  “If anything.”

  “Well, that’s why I came to you. Backup.” I stood up and put my mug on the computer desk. “This is good coffee.”

  He nodded complacently, then as I was leaving said, “Ms. Starling.”

  I stopped with my hand on the door. “Robin,” I told him.

  “Robin. Another agency has given me some work recently. It’s tedious, and it doesn’t pay very well—searching records and collecting documents. Still, it does pay something, and I’m going to set it aside for this.”

  I gave him a grin. “I got a big retainer,” I said. “I’m good for it.”

  He looked relieved. “I hated to ask, but I know you’re not with the big firm anymore.”

  “Understood. We all have to pay our bills.” As I opened the door, a cold wind hit me right in the face and rustled papers all the way back in Rodney’s inner office.

  Once I found a space in the parking garage of the police station, I grabbed my briefcase—actually a leather portfolio that looked like a flat, oversized purse—and got out. The parking garage was cold, but I wanted to look as professional as possible inside the police station, so I stripped out of my coat and hustled without it for the door.

  There were three men in the homicide division. One of them looked in my direction, and I said, “Tom McClane?”

  He jerked his head in the direction of two men sitting in the back talking about college basketball. I approached, and one of the men looked up at me. He was wearing chinos, a white shirt, and what looked like a clip-on tie, his shield hooked to his belt.

  “Tom McClane?”

  He inclined his head in the other man’s direction.

  McClane was the clothes-horse. He was wearing a tweed jacket and a knit tie of the sort I hadn’t seen in a decade. He also wore a vest with lapels, which was something I hadn’t seen since the 1800s.

  “Help you?” he said.

  �
��I’m Robin Starling. I’m representing Natalie Stevens in the hit-and-run case.”

  McClane took his feet off his desk. “The vehicular homicide.”

  “Well, yes.”

  The other man stood, jerked his chin at McClane and headed for the door. McClane stayed in his seat. “That tells me who you are,” he said. “It doesn’t tell me what you want.”

  “What I want is to see the file.”

  He let out a bark of laughter. “And people in hell,” he began, and I nodded.

  “Want a glass of ice water,” I finished.

  It got me another bark of laughter. I got the idea he barked at a lot of things that weren’t funny.

  I said, “I can get it all through discovery, I know, but at the moment it’s ‘investigative information that may but need not be disclosed.’ I’m hoping we can work with the ‘may’ part.”

  He nodded his square head, which seemed all the squarer because of his salt-and-pepper flat-top. “I bet you are,” he said.

  I waited.

  He rolled his head on his shoulders, either loosening himself up for a prize fight or thinking. He cut his eyes upward, looking at me over the tops of his black-framed glasses. “I’ll get the file,” he said, pushed back his chair a couple of feet, and stood up.

  I blinked down at the top of his head and the scalp showing through the flat-top. Standing he was only five-seven or eight, several inches shorter than I was. He’d seemed much larger sitting down. He went to a row of filing cabinets, opened a drawer, and pawed through it while whistling tunelessly through his teeth. He jerked out a manila folder with an air of decisiveness and came back to his desk.

  “You can pull over that chair,” he said, indicating the next desk.

  I pulled the chair over and sat down. McClane squared the folder on the desk in front of him, shot his cuffs, and opened the folder. His face spasmed immediately.

  “Oh, hell,” he said.

  He turned the eight-by-ten photograph toward me, and I flinched. It was a close-up of gore, not immediately recognizable as a head because the shape wasn’t right.