Bark M for Murder

by An Anthology

  At the desk, the dogs maintained a civilized sit-and-stay while Maddy checked in under Bud’s mother’s maiden name—Margaret Anderson. She had been smart enough to make that arrangement in advance and had told the reservations office that the credit card billing would be in the name of Madison Watkins. After all, if Jamil was a talkative sort of fellow, Maddy couldn’t risk using her own name in the unlikely event that he happened to mention Maddy to Gennie.

  Once the luggage was on its way to the room, Maddy and her dogs paid a visit to the concierge’s desk. “I have a very busy day tomorrow,” she told the young woman standing there. Her name badge said she was Sally, but she didn’t strike Maddy as a Sally.

  “Lots of errands to run and so forth,” Maddy continued. “I need to go around town and check on some of my late husband’s projects and investments. I’d like to make arrangements for a cab, and I’d like to keep it all day.”

  “Madame, are you sure you’d like a cab?” the concierge asked. “We have any number of suitable car services available…”

  Maddy was adamant. “I understand there’s a new cab company in town, she said. ”I’m told they drive those old-fashioned-looking cabs, the same ones they have in London. The British Cab Company, maybe? The English Cab Company?“

  “You mean the London Cabbie Company?” Sally asked.

  “Yes,” Maddy said, brightening. “That’s it. The last trip my husband and I took before he died was to London. For several days we rented one of those, driver and all. It was a wonderful vacation. I’d like to do it again.”

  This was all a total fabrication, of course. The only time Bud had been near England was when he was on a ship waiting for the D-Day invasion. That could hardly be called a vacation. Maddy herself had never been to London in her life. Everything she knew about London cabs came from the movies or else from those mystery programs on PBS, but it sounded plausible enough—in a sort of flighty, not-too-bright way.

  “Really,” Sally began, “I do think a car service would be more suitable—”

  “No,” Maddy insisted. “My mind’s made up. I had a friend who used this company when she was visiting Seattle a few months ago. She had a wonderful driver. What was his name again? Let me see. She never mentioned a last name, just a first. Was it James? No, that’s not it. Joaquin? No, but it was foreign-sounding like that. I mean you knew he came from some other country. Ah, yes, Jamil. That’s it. She said he was terrific, and oh so helpful. When you call them, let them know he’s the driver I want. I’ll be paying for a full day’s work. I’d like to have him here no later than nine a.m.”

  “Very well, madame,” Sally said, making a note of the needed arrangement in her large notebook. “I’ll be sure to tell them. If for any reason that’s not agreeable, I’ll give you a call. In the meantime, will you be needing a dinner reservation?”

  Maddy glanced at her watch. It would soon be time for American Justice, and she adored Bill Kurtis. “Oh, no,” she said. “I think we’ll just order from room service.”

  “Certainly, madame.”

  “And about walking the dogs,” Maddy added. “As you can see, they’re very well behaved, but I’m a little leery about walking them myself at night on the city streets.”

  “One of the bellmen will be happy to assist you with that,” Sally said. “Just call down to the bell captain whenever they’re ready.”

  With the dogs still on their leashes, Maddy made her way up to her fifth-floor room. The next elevator ride didn’t startle the dogs quite as much as the first one. Once in the room, Maddy let the dogs off leash and they raced around the room, playing tag and leaping on and off the bed as though the hotel experience had been designed for their own personal enjoyment. And that wasn’t far from wrong. In the spacious bathroom, Maddy found a paper doggie-motif mat on the floor with both a filled water dish and two matching bone-decorated food dishes. On the dresser she found a fruit basket for her and a pair of individually wrapped milk bones for the dogs.

  “Yes, puppies,” she said, handing the eager dogs their treats. “I think this will do very nicely.”

  Undressing, Maddy put on the luxurious robe she found hanging in the closet, then she settled in to do her homework. When she called Rex’s office, she hit the jackpot. According to his secretary, not only was Rex not in right then, he was at an out-of-town conference and wasn’t due back until late the next evening. Nothing could have suited Maddy better. Using the pretext of a birthday gift, she cagily played the mother card. By the time she got off the phone, Maddy was in possession of the names and addresses of all of Rex’s current projects. Then she logged onto the Internet and located each of them on Mapquest.

  Pleased with herself, Maddy then settled down to watch American Justice. She ordered a room service dinner, which was delivered during Cold Case Files. She and the dogs ate their evening meals with crime solving going on in the background. At eight o’clock she called the bell captain and requested assistance with Aggie and Daphne’s evening walk.

  When a somewhat wary bellman arrived at her door, she handed over the leashes, a sizeable tip, and a list of the necessary instructions—sit, stay, no pull, leave it, and get busy. When Rex was little, his baby-sitters always required much more coaching and a lot more money. Dogs really were easier than children.

  Once the dogs came back from their evening constitutional, Maddy, too, was ready to go to bed.

  The next morning she was up and out early. She called for her CRV and took the dogs for a brisk walk in Myrtle Edwards Park, then she returned to the hotel, had her breakfast, and dressed carefully for her morning’s outing.

  Appearances, of course, were everything, and a sufficient amount of feigned dottiness was also essential. To that effect, Maddy wore a little-used outfit her daughter-in-law had insisted on giving her for her last birthday, in the aftermath of Maddy’s losing all her old clothing in the fire.

  It wasn’t that she disliked the bright red St. John knit jacket and skirt Gina had chosen, but they had been so astonishingly expensive and so amazingly bright that Maddy had been reluctant to wear them. The color was far too vivid for Maddy to feel comfortable wearing it to church, where it would have caused everyone’s eyes to pop out of their heads, but the bright red blazer with its shiny gold buttons was exactly the right look for today. To compliment the outfit, Maddy wore a pair of very serviceable tennis shoes. Along with her purse she carried the battered briefcase as well as one of Bud’s old hard hats.

  Yes, she thought, perching the hard hat jauntily on top of her head and examining the ridiculously incongruous effect in the full-length mirror on the back of the bathroom door. This should do very nicely.

  Aggie and Daph were disappointed when Maddy left without them, but she knew they’d survive. She stopped by the bell captain’s desk and made arrangements for several scheduled dog walks during the course of the day, then she settled down in the lobby to wait.

  Jamil Mahmoud appeared a few minutes later. Living up to both his name and his advance billing, the young man boasted movie-star good looks— olive-tanned skin, sparkling eyes, white teeth, a selection of gold necklaces visible beneath an open-necked shirt, and a very engaging smile. “Mrs. Anderson?” he asked.

  For a moment, Maddy was so startled by his use of her pseudonym that she almost failed to respond. “Oh, yes,” she said, after a pause. “You must be my driver.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. “Yes, I am. May I help you with that?” he asked as Maddy reached for her briefcase.

  “That would be very nice, thank you,” she said. “It contains a list of all the addresses we’ll be visiting today.”

  Jamil held her arm solicitously as they made their way down the escalator. “You’re here from out of town?” he asked.

  Maddy nodded. “We used to live here, but I live in Olympia now,” she explained. “My husband died not too long ago. I needed to come check on some of the projects that were in progress when he died.”

  Jamil’s cab was waiting jus
t outside. When Maddy settled into the boxy but roomy interior, she found it was far more comfortable than she expected—and much cleaner.

  “I’m so sorry to hear about your husband,” Jamil said, putting the vehicle in gear. His English was slightly accented but grammatically perfect, far better than Shannon’s as a matter of fact. “His death must have been sudden.”

  “Yes,” Maddy said with a nod. “It was sudden. A heart attack with no advance warning at all. And here I am left to tie up all the loose ends. If’s a terrible responsibility.”

  “Yes,” Jamil said, glancing at her in the rearview mirror. “I’m sure it is. Where shall we go first?”

  She gave him the address of a mixed-use development going up just off 45th in the University District.

  “Your husband was a builder?” Jamil asked, observing Maddy’s reflection in the rearview mirror as he maneuvered the cab through traffic and onto northbound 1-5.

  “Not a builder so much as a developer,” she said. “He would obtain the property and the financing and then do the build-out as well.”

  “It sounds complicated,” Jamil said.

  “Jonathan loved making deals,” she returned with a sigh, all the while congratulating herself on using Bud’s parents’ real names—Margaret and Jonathan. It made it much easier to keep her stories straight “I miss him so much,” she added, dabbing at the corner of her eye with a lacy handkerchief.

  She still did miss Bud. That much, at least, wasn’t playacting.

  “Tie must have been a very smart man,” Jamil added.

  Maddy nodded. Bud had been smart. He could have had a basketball scholarship to the University of Washington, but all that changed when he went away to World War II, and everything else changed after that. When the war ended, he could have used the GI Bill and gone to college but by then he didn’t want to. Instead, he had used his natural gift for mechanics and his joy at tinkering to open and run the machine shop that, along with Maddy’s teaching, had kept them in good stead all those years, although in the last few years, he had been losing ground in a world run by computer chips. In that way, Maddy supposed, his death had been a blessing. At least Bud had died before being rendered obsolete.

  Jamil pulled the cab up in front of a fenced-off construction zone. “Would you like me to come in with you?” he asked.

  Maddy didn’t like the way he kept looking at her in the mirror. She worried about whether or not he could tell she was lying. She had always known when her kindergartners were telling whoppers. Hopefully she was older and wiser and a little more tricky than that.

  “Oh, no,” she said smoothly, donning the hard hat. “I’m sure I’ll be fine.”

  Taking both her purse and briefcase, she dodged around the chain link barriers. Just inside the Tyvek-wrapped building, a construction worker waved Maddy down.

  “Hey, lady,” he said. “You can’t come in here.”

  “Yes, I can,” Maddy replied determinedly, consulting her list, the one with all the information she had wangled from Rex’s secretary. “I’m here to see Mr. Hammond. I believe he’s the site superintendent.”

  Sighing and rolling his eyes, the worker reluctantly led Maddy out behind the building to a battered construction trailer. “Hammond’s in there,” the guy said, pointing.

  Straightening her shoulders, Maddy stepped up into a grubby trailer that reeked of cigar smoke and rancid coffee. Inside she found a barrel-chested man seated behind a desk that was covered with mounds of blueprints.

  “Who are you?” he demanded rudely, not bothering to rise to his feet. “What do you want?”

  “I’m Mrs. Watkins,” she said primly. “Rex’s mother. And a show of manners might be nice.”

  Caught off guard, Hammond swallowed his bluster. “Sorry, Mrs. Watkins,” he said.

  Belatedly he stood up and offered her a chair after first using his shirt sleeve to brush away some of the gray plaster dust that seemed to coat every flat surface in the room. Then he rolled up the blue prints with one meaty paw and brushed away some of the remaining plaster dust there as well.

  “It hasn’t been a good morning around here,” he added. “We’re running way behind schedule. What can I do for you?”

  “My son’s fiftieth birthday is coming up soon,” Maddy said. That was conveniently true. In actual fact Rex’s big 5-0 was less than a week away. “I’m putting together a little surprise for him,” she added, opening the briefcase and removing a brand-new Ziploc bag that she had brought along for this exact purpose. “I’m going around to all his current projects and collecting little pieces of… well… stuff. A bit of this and that. I’m planning on making a collage from whatever I gather. I’m going to have it framed so I can give it to him for his birthday.”

  “What kind of stuff?” Bill Hammond asked.

  “I don’t know. Whatever you’re working with right now. A little piece of that insulation I saw stacked outside would be nice. Or a piece of copper tubing. Whatever you’re working with at the moment. And it doesn’t have to be much. Just enough to fit in this bag. I’d like you to tag whatever you give me with your name, the date, the project, and a description of what it is. That way, years from now, Rex will be able to look at the collage and know just where each project was at the time of his birthday.”

  “Oh,” Hammond said. “Sort of like an evidence bag, only different.”

  “Exactly,” Maddy told him with a smile.

  “If you’ll excuse me,” Hammond said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  Moving his large bulk with surprising alacrity, Hammond got up and left the trailer. Maddy couldn’t help but feel a sense of satisfaction. Her little dig about his minding his manners had awakened some long-forgotten trace of polite behavior in the man. It worked the same way with bad grammar. Some people needed occasional nudges now and then to remind them about what was right and what was wrong in order to get them back on track.

  Hammond returned a few moments later with a three-inch square of white foam.

  “Insulation,” he explained unnecessarily, since Maddy knew exactly what it was. “I cut off a chunk that I thought would fit. Do you want me to label it?”

  “Please,” she said, handing him the plastic bag. “That would be very nice. And date it as well.”

  He wrote laboriously, frowning with concentration. Obviously, as a child, penmanship hadn’t been one of Bill Hammond’s strong points. It still wasn’t.

  “You will remember to keep this a secret, won’t you?” she asked, as he handed the bag back to her and she slipped it into her briefcase.

  “Absolutely, Mrs. Watkins,” he returned. “My lips are sealed. You can count on that.”

  When Maddy emerged from the building a few minutes later, Jamil had his cab stationed in a no-parking zone right in front of the construction entrance. He hopped out and hurried around the vehicle to open the door and help her into the seat.

  “Thank you, Mr…”

  “Mahmoud,” he supplied.

  “Thank you, Mr. Mahmoud,” she finished. “You’re very kind.”

  “Where shall we go from here?” he asked.

  Once again Maddy was struck by the perfection of his grammar. It was downright remarkable.

  “The next stop is all the way up in Shoreline,” she said. “It’s a new strip mall at Aurora Avenue and 176th.”

  “You just sit back and relax,” Jamil assured her. “I’ll have you there in no time.”

  Maddy sat back in her seat and pretended to do just that. “Have you been driving cabs long?” she asked. “You certainly seem to know your way around Seattle.”

  “For two years now,” Jamil said, “although not always for this same company. I was trained as a computer engineer, but when my wife became ill, I needed a job that was more flexible. Software engineers must put in very long hours.”

  “Your wife is ill, then?” Maddy asked.

  Jamil nodded sadly. “She was ill. I brought her here so she could be treated for cancer at the
University of Washington. Unfortunately, it was too late.”

  “You mean she died?” Maddy asked.

  He sighed. “Yes,” he said. “And I just haven’t had the heart to go looking for a different job. That’s why I’m still here.”

  So, Maddy thought, I’ve caught Mr. Mahmoud in his first lie! What about his expectant wife and his little boy?

  “I’m so sorry for your loss,” Maddy said. “I know how much that hurts.”

  “Yes,” he agreed. Looking back at her in the mirror, his dark eyes brimmed with emotion. “It is very sad.”

  As they drove north through the city, Maddy sat back and tried to decode what Jamil’s comment really meant. Shannon had said Gennie’s boy wonder had a wife and child and was expecting another. That, at least, was what he had told Gennie. The question was did he still have a wife or had he ever had a wife at all?