Despite my uncharitable thoughts, I said, “This is quite a place you’ve got here.” If anything, that was an understatement. Dennis was leading me down a hallway toward a kitchen that could easily hold my entire house. Kaitlyn Wayne’s entire house, I should say.
“Thank you. So you believe me when I tell you we could afford to have another dog.”
“Yes, but that’s really not the issue. By the way, do you own a white car?”
“No, why?”
“There’s one just around the corner with its lights on,” I lied.
“Ours are in our garage, of course.”
I nodded and ignored his haughty, you’re-such-an-idiot tone of voice. This was the price one pays when one can only come up with an inane excuse for asking an inappropriate question.
A salt-and-pepper shih tzu that I knew must be Shakespeare ran up to me, claws clicking on the hardwood flooring. Shakespeare started with his shrill bark. Being barked at reminded me of such a stupid omission I had to restrain myself from striking my forehead. I hadn’t warned my mother about Sage’s reaction to men in hats! If she took him anyplace but straight to my office...
A two-year-old boy ran up as well, with a huge grin that seemed to take up most of his face. I couldn’t help but notice that the grin was all he was wearing.
“Brian! Bri! Get back in here! And put some clothes on before I—”
I’d forgotten Dennis’s wife’s name, but she was certainly an attractive woman—blond curly hair and blue eyes. She could have been a professional model. She stopped mid-sentence as she saw me.
“Sorry,” she said. “We’re in the perpetual stage of potty training. We sometimes reveal more of ourselves to guests than they want to see.”
“That’s okay. I’m not that easily embarrassed.”
“Good, but I am.” She grabbed her son underneath the armpits and scurried off with him.
Dennis eyed me at length. We stood in the center of his immense kitchen, and he made no move to offer me a chair. “Let’s get right to the point. I want Sage. How can I convince you to give him to me?”
“I’m not sure that you can,” I told him honestly. “And while your directness is a refreshing approach, not to mention a time-saver, it’s a little off putting.”
He gave me a smug grin and gestured at the cherry-wood kitchen set. “In that case, Ms. Babcock, do sit down. Can I offer you some fresh-squeezed juice? Have you eaten yet?”
“No and yes, thank you.” Even as I was telling myself what a complete jerk this guy was, I took a seat, largely because I really wanted some background information on Sage, and he and his wife were now the only remaining people I could ask.
I held Dennis’s gaze, and he finally pulled up a chair across from me. As he did so, he yanked the sweater off his shoulders and draped it over the empty chair between our seats. “You say Sage is staying at a good spot, for now, but you didn’t say if this was going to be a permanent situation.”
In that moment, I realized that I very much wanted to keep Sage myself. This meant I would need to find a place in Boulder where I could keep all three dogs. “That’s right. I’m going to do what I can to make it a permanent home for Sage.”
“We’re really fond of Sage ourselves. As you know, my wife is occupied at the moment with my son; however, we’ve agreed that it’d be in the dog’s best interest to let him move in here with us.”
“Let me be frank, Mr. Corning.”
“Dennis,” he interrupted, flashing me a full-wattage smile. “Tell you what. You be Allida, I’ll be Dennis, and neither of us will be Frank.”
It was a little too late for me to be charmed; otherwise, I might have laughed. “The thing is, Dennis, I simply can’t let anyone I don’t know well have contact with Sage until Beth Gleason’s killer is locked up. I’m sure you understand.”
“No. I don’t understand that at all. You can’t possibly think we had anything to do with that, or with Hannah’s death.”
His wife entered the room just then, saying, “I’ve got Brian down for his nap, at last.”
“Susan, Miss Babcock here thinks we had something to do with Beth Gleason’s death,” Dennis told her, by way of getting her up to speed with our conversation.
“What?” Susan said, eyeing me as if my body were morphing into a hairy beast.
“I never said that, Mr. Corning. Dennis, rather. I have to be cautious, so I’m not going to reveal the location of the dog to you or to anyone.”
“I see,” Susan said, taking a seat next to her husband.
“Maybe you can help me clear up a mystery surrounding Hannah Jones,” I said. “I don’t understand why the dog food that we got from you, at least indirectly, was tainted with a dog repellent.”
“What are you talking about?” he snapped.
I launched into a brief explanation of the condition of the dog food and how I’d gotten possession of the slip of paper with his name and number on it.
Dennis frowned. “I did donate the bag of dog food I found in Hannah’s kitchen, and I also stuck a slip of paper on top of it in case the new owner had any questions. Donated a box of dog treats, as well. But Sage wouldn’t eat that food at all when we brought him home with us. Remember, honey?”
Susan nodded. “We fed him Shakespeare’s food. He ate about ten times as much as Shakespeare.” She paused, her pretty, blue eyes staring directly into mine. “But why would someone have done that to Sage’s food?”
“That’s the question of the hour,” I replied. “Could Hannah have done it? Could she have been trying to change Sage’s eating habits and want to train him to dislike dog food?”
“Christ, no,” Dennis said, shaking his head. “Hannah loved that dog more than anything in the world.”
“Absolutely,” Susan said. “She would have given her life to protect him.”
“Is there any chance that she did do just that?” I asked.
They looked at each other. At length, Susan shrugged. “As I said before over the phone, Hannah had cancer, so suicide wasn’t out of the question. But to be honest with you, I’ve never fully accepted that. I would believe someone shot her as she tried to protect Sage. Nobody could ever convince me she’d ruined his dog food.”
“Same here,” Dennis said.
“Did you happen to notice if she had any visitors the night she died?”
Dennis shook his head. “I was out of town on business that night. Hon?”
Susan shook her head. “Brian and I stayed at a friend’s condo in Vail that night.”
Dennis pushed back from the table and stood up. “I can certainly understand now why you’re reluctant to let that dog out of your care.” He picked up Shakespeare. “If he were mine, I wouldn’t let him out of my sight.”
I rose as well and thanked both of them, feeling much better about Dennis at the end of the visit than I had at its start. Yet I drove off in a state of more confusion than ever. If neither Hannah nor the Comings had tampered with Sage’s food, who had? And why? What possible motive could somebody have to kill both Hannah and Beth?
Everything seemed normal when I reached my office, though Doppler was unusually nervous. Chet Adler barged in just as I was calming him.
“‘Bout time you got here. Shit. I’ve been waiting for hours.”
“I’m sorry about Beth.”
“You’re sorry? You’re sorry! It’s your damned fault she’s dead! If it hadn’t been for you and that call-in show, nobody’d even know about her and that stupid, mangy mutt of hers!”
Doppler had been trained not to bark at visitors, but he justifiably began barking now. Chet pointed at him. “Speaking of mutts, if you don’t want me to kick yours through the door–”
“Doppler, cease!” I cried. The dog immediately stopped barking and looked up at me. “Mr. Adler, just—”
“Don’t try ‘n’ bluff me! You know full well you’re responsible. What I want to know is, why her? Why didn’t the shithead kill you and the collie if he thought t
he fleabag could recognize him?”
“I don’t know the answer to that question. I wish I did.”
“The police wouldn’t tell me shit. Where did you find her? Did she say any last words?”
“No. I found her in a yard on Spruce Street.”
“And? Did the house belong to a customer of yours?”
“No. I think she might have climbed the fence into the yard to try to get away from her attacker. That’s all I can tell you.”
“I want the names of all your customers.”
“Why? What possible good would—”
The veins on his forehead were bulging. “Some bastard got to Beth through you. I want to find the shithead. I’m gonna kill him!”
I took a step back. “Calm down, Chet.”
“Just as soon as I get what I’m after.” He crossed his arms and stepped to within a couple of inches of me, my chin nearly touching his chest. I could smell liquor on his breath.
I had far too much experience staring down growling dogs to fall for this power-assertion technique. I stayed put and said, “Back off. I’m not giving you my client list. Even if I did, what possible good would it do you? Do you plan to bully each person on the list into confessing?”
He glared at me, then finally said, “Shit, I don’t know,” and took a step back.
“Chet, let the police handle this.”
“Lot of good you are,” he snarled, then he stormed out the door.
I was shaken by the confrontation. He struck me as a loose cannon, and I wanted nothing to do with the man. Deciding to make use of the few minutes I’d have until Mom arrived, I typed up notes on my customers and made out bills, checking my watch periodically.
I shut off my computer afterwards and stared forlornly at the door. As a child, I’d once asked her who the people at the time-and-temperature number called when they needed to set their clocks. She’d answered, “Me.” It took me the longest time to realize she’d been joking, largely because my mother was compulsively prompt.
Why, then, was she nearly an hour late?
Chapter 13
By the time another half hour had passed, I was all but frantic. I’d called her four times. I’d also called every friend I could think of whom she might have dropped in to visit, all to no avail. What was this? Get-Even-with-My-Daughter-For-Scaring-Me-Last-Night Time?
Leaving the office unlocked and my answering machine on, I took Doppler on a walk to check for any signs of Mom wandering around lost. No luck. I was sitting on the top concrete step of my entranceway when she finally drove up in her covered pickup and parked next to my car in Russell’s space. She didn’t seem to see me sitting there, but both Sage and Pavlov greeted me with great enthusiasm the moment she opened the door to the truck bed.
Her jaw was clenched and her lips pursed. She marched with such evident anger that even her braid seemed to be taut.
I rose, still petting both of my big dogs. Doppler, too, was so excited at the sight of his canine friends he tried to engage them in a game of tag, despite the leash I still had a hold of. Surmising that this was not the time to go on the offensive with my mother, I merely greeted her and asked what had happened.
“Some dog hater who thinks he’s a big deal police officer gave me a ticket for having the dogs in the mall.”
“Well, Mom, dogs aren’t allowed in the mall.”
“It’s a stupid rule!”
“Not really. It’s a pedestrian mall, period. They’ve got all this expensive brick, and they have to have certain rules to protect that and the pedestrians, such as ‘No animals, no bicycles, no vehicles.’”
“I was just walking the dogs. It’s not as though I were riding through on a horse-drawn cart constructed out of bicycle wheels! The ticket was for fifty dollars. Fifty bucks! The city of Boulder has it in for dogs.”
She put her hands on her hips and glared at me.
“There was somebody walking a black lab right in front of us and she didn’t get a ticket. The officer singled us out because Sage started barking at him.”
“Was he wearing an officer’s cap?”
“Of course, but that hardly makes his ticketing me, and not the labrador owner, any more acceptable! It wasn’t fair, Allida! I went down to the courthouse to make a formal protest.”
I was so tempted to repeat her oft-heard refrain, “Who says life is fair?” that I had to bite the inside of my lip.
“You can’t just ticket one dog owner and let the next one stroll on past without a word! And did I happen to mention that the unticketed dog owner was a pretty young girl? I’ll tell you, Allie, I am not going to pay this. I’ll fight them with my dying breath, but I refuse to sacrifice my ideals for an arbitrarily enforced law.”
I couldn’t resist leaping on that last remark as I ushered her into my office. “Just because the enforcement of the law is arbitrary doesn’t give you the right to ignore it. Couldn’t you just have left the dogs in the car till you were done shopping?”
She gave me an angry visual once-over. “I don’t know how I managed to raise such a conformist for a daughter, but it’s damned annoying.”
“On that note, this is my office.” I held my arms out to demonstrate—Mom’s mood too sour to let me give in to the temptation to say, “Ta Dah!”
“Oh, yes.” She turned in a slow circle. “It’s Very nice, dear.”
It’s pretty hard to take someone on a tour of a one-room office, so I wound up including the bathroom, forgetting that I’d neglected to replace the cup under the leaking pipe last night, so the floor was wet. Mom slipped and nearly fell, but I managed to catch her. Despite our acrobatics, she noticed the flowers and asked, “Who gave you those?”
“They’re from Russell Greene, my officemate.”
“Is there any reason they’re floating in the sink?”
“It’s been a hectic two days since he gave them to me.” In a flurry of motion, I swept the flowers out of the sink, shook them off, and returned them to their jar. “I had to use the vase for Doppler’s water dish, and I forgot to replace it. There.”
Mom crinkled her nose at the mayonnaise jar. “I’ve got a lovely applesauce jar back home if you want to upgrade the vase.”
I snapped to attention at the sound of my outer door opening. All three dogs barked and galloped toward the sound. If this was merely Russell trying to get to his office, the poor man would need therapy for post traumatic stress disorder.
Mom and I no doubt shared the same concern for my unsuspecting visitor and raced into my office. Pavlov and Doppler stopped barking almost immediately, as Joel Meyer, sans his good buddy Tracy Truett, greeted them. Sage, however, continued to bark.
Admittedly, I’m somewhat warped, but there’s nothing sexier in my estimation than a man petting a dog. No sooner had this thought formed in my brain than I disagreed with myself—but still, Joel looked a zillion times more handsome now with one hand out to Doppler and another scratching Pavlov’s ear than he had yesterday with a tire iron in his hand. Also, his dark hair and beard had been neatly trimmed since yesterday, and he was wearing a cotton plaid shirt instead of the torn flannel one.
Though Joel had seemed to win over both Pavlov and Doppler, Sage was keeping his distance and barking. The collie looked back at me and then returned his attention to Joel in what was dog language for, “Take a look! This could be trouble!”
“Sage, no,” my mother said firmly. Sage let out a couple of more sharp woofs, then quieted. But he stayed at attention, staring at Joel. As I appraised the situation, I had to say that Sage wasn’t acting nearly as threatened by Joel’s presence as he had the other day when Russell entered wearing a hat.
“Hi, there. Who’s this?” Joel said, offering his palm to Sage to sniff.
Sage barked and then growled. Joel put his hand down and stayed put. Few people realize that the best way to approach a strange dog is to come around to the dog’s side. If you simply hold your hand to its nose, for all the dog knows, he’s about to ge
t slapped. At least Joel had offered his hand palm up.
“I’ll just put him in this other room, all right?” Mom asked, already tugging Sage toward Russell’s office.
Now I really was uneasy. Sage hadn’t acted this defensive, even when he was next to his dead owner. It could be a very understandably anxious state for him to be in, but it made me nervous.
“I see your tires are all nice and round. The spare must have been good.”
“Yes, thanks. Nicely done.”
“Everything going all right?” he asked.
“Just fine, thanks.” I could pad my answer a little to be more friendly to him, but what could I say? No dead bodies? No rabid canines? “You?”
“Doing fine, thanks. I see you have a client, so I won’t keep you.”
“I’m not a client,” Mom said as she returned to my side. “I’m her mother. What kind of dog do you own?”
Joel gave her a charming smile, and I remembered what a sucker Mom was for men in beards. “A little mutt. Her name’s Suzanne.”
“You should bring her to Allida. She’s the best. And all dogs have some behavioral things that could stand improvement. Allida’s services are worth every penny she charges, and then some.”
His attractive dark eyes sparkled as he shifted his vision to me. “Hey, that is a good idea. What do you say, Allida? Can you fit Suzanne into your schedule this week?”
“What would she be seeing me for?”
This question gave Joel pause, but only momentarily. “For one thing, she’s terrible around other dogs—never stops barking, tries to bite them. I’ve never worried about it too much, to be honest with you, but Tracy pointed out to me the other day that she’s going to start a fight with a bigger dog one of these days, and she won’t stand a chance.”
“I can help train her out of that,” I said, perhaps overly confident in Mom’s presence. Having been a trainer of what was often large groups of dogs of all shapes and sizes, this was among the first behavior problems I’d helped dogs to overcome.
“Great!” Joel gave me a downright eager glance. Next thing I knew, we had set an appointment for him to bring Suzanne here the next morning, since we would need to start by working in a neutral territory. Unless trained otherwise, all dogs bark at other dogs when on their own property. He left in great spirits.
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