The Silence of the Chihuahuas

by Waverly Curtis

  “Brad thought it was cute,” said Jay. His voice got sad. “It made him want a dog more than ever. I told him he couldn’t have one. Do you think that’s why he left?” His voice was now wistful.

  “What do you mean left?”

  Jay looked embarrassed. “Well, I hadn’t seen him for a couple of days. I thought he was off on one of his little shopping sprees.” It was true. Brad could take off to go check out an antique store in Arlington, a small town north of Seattle, and end up two days later two states away in Montana, buying the entire inventory of a taxidermist who was going out of business.

  “Was he acting weird before he left?” I asked.

  “Yes, he was jumpy and irritable. And when I asked him why, he just snapped at me.” Jay flapped his hands in the air near his head to indicate how frazzled he was. That disturbed the parrot who flew up, circled around my head (I ducked) and then settled on a nearby lamp. “I thought he was getting cold feet.”

  “Cold feet about what?”

  Jay’s big brown eyes got sad. Almost as sad as Pepe’s eyes when he wants something. “He didn’t tell you, did he?”

  “What? What are you talking about?”

  “The wedding. Our wedding.”

  I was shocked. “You and Brad are getting married?”

  Jay nodded. “On Halloween. But if he didn’t tell you, his best friend . . .” His voice trailed off.

  Pepe was sitting at my feet, looking at me. He seemed to be trying to get a message through to me. Oh, a message.

  “You said he left some sort of message,” I said. “What did it say?” I swear Pepe nodded his head. I could almost hear him saying, “Good work, partner.”

  “I’ll show you.” Jay got up and went out into the hall. He came back with an invoice, a bill for an armoire, on which was scribbled in Brad’s loopy handwriting:

  Crisis in the kingdom. Off to slay the dragon. Home soon.

  I looked at it. I read it out loud for Pepe’s sake.

  “When did you get this?” I asked.

  “I don’t know,” said Jay. “I just found it this afternoon. It was on top of the bureau in Brad’s room. You know I never go in there.”

  I knew that Jay was horrified by Brad’s messiness so they had separate bedrooms. Jay was a neatnik whereas Brad scattered chaos in his wake.

  “Do you know there’s a three-day Pay or Vacate notice at the store?” I asked.

  Jay ran his hands through his tousled hair. “Yes, the landlord has been calling. He says Brad is six months behind on the rent. I told him I would send him a check, but he said he’s tired of having to chase after Brad for the rent.”

  “Maybe Brad was referring to the landlord when he said he was going to slay the dragon?” I asked.

  Jay brightened. “Could be. Never thought of that.”

  “Can you give me the landlord’s name?” I asked.

  “Sure,” Jay got up and went out into the hall. We followed and watched him root around in a pile of business cards that lay in a silver tray on a curving sideboard with a marble top. A vase full of dried stalks of angelica stood beside it, each dried flower head like an explosion of fireworks “Here it is. His name is Samuel Morris. It says his office is in Bellevue. I believe he owns several small properties on Eastlake. My hunch is that he’s getting ready to sell to a big developer and he’d be happy to see Brad out of there.” Jay handed me a card. He looked at me with his bright eyes. The parrot looked at me with his bright eyes.

  “Well, thanks,” I said. “I’ll let you know what I find out.”

  “Please do,” said Jay. “I’m so worried about him.”

  “Why not call the police? How long has it been?” The note was undated.

  “That’s just it,” said Jay. “I’m kind of embarrassed to admit that I don’t really know when he disappeared. I mean sometimes he sleeps at the shop, so I just assumed he was there. You know how he gets when he’s working on a project.”

  It’s true. Brad once completely refinished a dining room table and reupholstered fourteen matching chairs in one all-night binge. When he was working on a project, he was obsessed.

  “Well, when’s the last time you saw him?”

  Jay looked up into the air to the left of his head. I tried to remember from my research if that meant he was making something up or looking back at his memories. “Well, I know I saw him on Tuesday. No make that, Monday, because he came home really late and really drunk and I told him to go sleep in his bedroom.”

  “So he’s possibly been missing for three days?”

  “Well,” Jay looked embarrassed. “Maybe. I mean, it’s possible.” He held out his hands. “You can see why it would be awkward to go to the police.”

  “I think you need to,” I said. “They’ll listen to you, since he’s been gone for so long. They might even have a way to help you figure out when he was last seen. Do you know what bar he was drinking at?”

  Jay frowned. “Probably the Cuff or the Manhole. Maybe Neighbors.” He named several gay bars on Capitol Hill. “Those are the ones he frequents.”

  “Have you gone to any of them? Asked around?” I asked.

  “It would be too humiliating. I don’t know anyone any more,” said Jay. “That’s where we met—in a bar—but once I found Brad, I was done with all that. But Brad still goes out once or twice a month. He loves to dance and flirt and gossip. I thought that’s all he was doing.” He looked pensive for a moment. “But maybe he was looking for a way out. Maybe he ran off with some guy he met.”

  “Brad wouldn’t do that to you,” I said. “He loves you. And you guys have been together for, what, ten years?”

  Jay sighed.

  “Oh, there is one other possibility,” said Jay as Pepe and I went out the front door. “Brad always called one of his clients the dragon lady. Maybe he was talking about her.”

  “Ah yes! I know the one,” I said. That would be Mrs. Fairchild. I had helped Brad deliver a hand-painted medieval-themed armoire to her house one day. After we had staggered upstairs with it, she decided the colors clashed with the curtains and had us carry it back down to the van Brad had rented.

  We went out to the car. I looked over at Pepe who was watching me. “That didn’t sound right, did it?” I said to him. He shook his head. “Something’s fishy,” I said. Pepe nodded. “Well, the good news is that I know where Mrs. Fairchild lives. And I know Brad was working for her. Let’s go talk to her first.”

  Pepe nodded his consent.

  But it wasn’t good news that I knew where Mrs. Fairchild lived: in a luxurious fake Southern Colonial plantation house in the tony streets down below Volunteer Park. It wasn’t good news that the front door, hidden from the street by an overgrown yew hedge, was open because that meant Pepe would go dashing into the house before I could stop him. And it wasn’t good news at all, that when I followed him into the lemon-yellow kitchen, I found the dead body of Mrs. Fairchild lying on her kitchen floor in a pool of dried blood. The smell of fresh paint still lingered in the air. But it was faint under the stronger scent of what Pepe would say, if he could speak, was the smell of muerte.

  Pepe’s Blog: Sniffing the Scene

  Good news, mi amigos! We found a dead body! There is nothing more exciting for a private detective than a murder investigation. Especially for a seasoned detective like Pepe Sullivan. I let my partner, Geri Sullivan, handle the more mundane aspects of the private eye business: the phone calls, the computer research, the driving from place to place, and the interviews with suspects and witnesses. She did pretty well interviewing the unpleasant man with the unpleasant parrot, but she did not seem to notice that he was lying.

  A dog can always tell. You tell us you won’t be gone long and then you disappear for hours, although I am not really sure about what an hour is. It seems an arbitrary period of time that involves having nothing to do between meals and walks and naps and tummy rubbing.

  Unfortunately, I could not tell what he was lying about. Was he lying when he
said he had not seen his partner for days? Or that he no longer went to bars? Or was he lying about not knowing the name of the dragon lady? Luckily, Geri knew where the dragon lady lived, so I was able to turn up the first clue in our case: a dead body.

  Unfortunately, this discovery is not good news for Geri’s friend, Brad, who she is trying to find. Because I could tell Brad had been in the kitchen. His smell—a nasty mixture of some kind of musky cologne mingled with paint remover and dust—was all over the body. But I did not tell Geri that. She will have to figure it out on her own.

  Chapter 4

  Pepe would normally have yelled at me to be sure I didn’t do anything to contaminate the crime scene. Then he would have sniffed around, gathering clues and telling me what he found. But this wasn’t normal at all. Instead I scurried out of the house, feeling nauseous, and threw up in the bushes in the front. Then I called 911 and stood on the front porch crying. Pepe disappeared—no doubt gathering clues, but ones he couldn’t share with me.

  I really wanted to talk to someone so I called my boyfriend, Felix. The call went straight to voice mail and I didn’t bother to leave a message. Felix had been really distracted lately, and sometimes he wouldn’t return my calls until the next day. Nothing makes a woman feel more vulnerable than leaving a message asking a man to call and then waiting and waiting and waiting for that call.

  At least I didn’t have to wait long for the police. A blue and white cop car, blue lights flashing and siren wailing, pulled up within minutes. The driver was a female police officer. She got out of the car and swaggered up to me.

  “Are you the one who called?” she asked. Her strawberry-blond hair was short and tight on the sides, almost like a man’s haircut.

  “Yes,” I said.

  A young man—he looked barely old enough to have graduated from high school—emerged from the passenger side of the car. But he was wearing the slate blue uniform of a Seattle cop. “You called in a 187?” he asked eagerly.

  The female cop frowned at him. “We don’t use code with civilians,” she said. She turned to me. “You reported a dead body?”

  “Yes I did. It’s in the kitchen.”

  “I see,” she said. “Do you live here?”

  “No.”

  “Do you know the victim?”

  “No.” It was not entirely a lie.

  The two cops exchanged a glance that made me feel I was a suspect.

  “I know her name,” I admitted. “Mrs. Fairchild.”

  The female police officer spoke. “We’ll go in and check it out. So which way is the body?” I stepped with them into the living room and pointed through the dining room towards the door of the kitchen.

  “You stay out here and don’t go anywhere. We need to talk to you some more,” said the woman cop.

  I didn’t like the sound of that, but what could I do? Because I hadn’t done anything, I shouldn’t have to worry. But I did. I sat down on the living room sofa—which looked a bit like a giant bee since it was upholstered in yellow and black stripes—and wondered what happened to my dog. Just then he came slinking into the room. Probably scared away from the crime scene by the police.

  He hates the police. I think he confuses them with the animal control officers who scooped him up off the streets of LA and put him into what he calls “dog prison.” I have tried to point out to him that if he had not been in a shelter we would never have met, but so far he does not seem moved by that argument.

  I picked him up and held him. He was shivering.

  “What did you smell, Pepe?” I asked. “What do you know?” And just then, two men walked through the open front door. They did a double take when they saw me talking to my dog. So did I. I recognized them. So did Pepe. He barked.

  The older detective, Larson, was balding and wore wire-rimmed glasses and a rumpled navy-blue suit, just like he had the first time we’d met. “Well, we meet again,” he said.

  At the same time, the two beat cops came out of the kitchen.

  “You know this woman?” the female officer asked.

  “Yeah, we know her all right,” the other detective said. “Who could forget her and that nasty little dog?” Sanders was a tall black man with a shaved head, dressed impeccably in a camelhair sports coat and crisp tan slacks.

  “Yeah, that’s right,” said Larson. “Claimed to be a PI. She was involved in another murder case a little over a year ago.”

  “For your information I am a PI,” I told them, even though I had yet to be officially licensed. “And I just stumbled over this murder.”

  “Like the first time, huh?” said Sanders, very sarcastic.

  “Yes,” I said emphatically.

  “So where you go, murder follows.” That was detective Larson, also being sarcastic. He didn’t give me time to reply, just quickly told the uniformed cops, “OK. Why don’t you show us the crime scene?”

  “Looks like the cause of death was blunt force trauma,” said the younger cop quickly.

  His woman partner gave him a chiding look. “But we’ll leave the determination to the coroner,” she said.

  “What about her?” the young man asked. He was irrepressible in his desire to be doing something significant. “Should we cuff her?”

  “She can wait out here until we’re done,” Larson said.

  “Are you sure?” he asked. “I mean, if she was involved in another murder—”

  “I don’t think she’s a flight risk,” Larson told him.

  “Yeah, but her dog sure is,” said Sanders. “Bit one of our technicians last time around,” he told the uniforms. “Then made a break for it. Had to put an APB out on him.”

  “On a Chihuahua,” said Larson. They all shared a laugh at that.

  I expected Pepe to comment on our situation, but he just stopped shivering in my arms and kept silent. His big ears rotated toward the kitchen where the cops were surveying the scene. I could only hear a low murmur of voices but he, no doubt, could pick up actual words. Still if he wasn’t going to help me out, I needed to do something myself.

  The living room was a hideous hodgepodge of styles. Here and there, I recognized Brad’s work (the yellow-and-black sofa, for instance, and the huge gilt mirror over the fireplace, and maybe the blue-and-white Chinese vase in the corner full of dried pampas grass), but nothing really went together. The fireplace mantel was covered with little ceramic figures of peasant children. Two walls were olive green and one wall was turquoise; the remaining wall contained a mural of an indistinguishable nature scene. Was it a meadow? A forest? Were those nymphs frolicking in the woods? Or were those sheep making their way up a mountain trail?

  I made my way over to look at the details and found myself standing in front of a rolltop desk. As I peered at the desk more closely, I saw that it had cubby holes organized and even labeled. One read BILLS PAID, another read BILLS TO PAY, another read PENDING.

  I was curious about that last one, especially since it contained the most items. So I pulled out the handful of papers inside. Most appeared to be invoices from various contractors who had worked on her house, including a plumber, a carpenter, and a faux finisher. But seven of them were from Brad. They went back for months and included bills for furniture purchases, upholstery work, and the painting of the kitchen. She’d written across the bottom of all seven bills, “Not a penny until it’s done right!”

  I knew Brad had done a lot of work for Mrs. Fairchild. I didn’t realize that she had not paid him for any of it. I couldn’t help thinking about his fanciful note: “Off to slay the dragon.” And then I thought: what if the cops saw these bills? Would they think it was a motive for murder? Would they think that Brad killed her?

  I was just about to stuff them into my pocket, when the police came back into the dining room.

  “What have you got there?” asked Sanders.

  “Yeah,” said Larson, looking past me at the open rolltop. “Going through the dead woman’s desk, huh?”

  Pepe barked at the cops and w
ent charging toward them. I ran to intercept him and dropped the bills I was holding. Like toast always landing on the buttered side, a couple of Brad’s bills landed face up.

  “You’re disturbing the crime scene,” the female cop told me as Sanders came over and picked the bills up off the floor, then took the rest out of my hand.

  “You could be arrested for that, you know,” said the young male cop.

  “Something important here?” asked Sanders, looking through the bills in his hand.

  “No,” I told him. At least they wouldn’t know they came out of the PENDING file. On the other hand, the dates and the note on the bottom were pretty clear.

  “Sure.” He gave me a suspicious look, then told the uniformed cops, “Why don’t you two put up the tape? Front door and back door. We don’t want anybody else traipsing in before forensics gets here.”

  As they went out, Sanders told me, “Have a seat, Miss Sullivan. We need to take your statement.”

  Both the detectives sat across from me at the dining table. Sanders put the bills on the table as he took his seat and, of course, a few of Brad’s bills were face up for all to see.

  “Do you know the victim?” Sanders asked me.

  “Not really,” I said.

  “What does that mean?” That was Sanders.

  “I came here once with my partner, Brad, to deliver some furniture.”

  “Partner?” Larson gave that a bit of a leer.

  “My business partner. Brad owns an antique shop. He does interior design and furniture restoration.”

  Sanders looked around the dining room which was, if possible, in even worse taste than the living room. It was ringed with china cabinets full of silver and gold tableware. The wallpaper was silver flocked. The tablecloth was a piece of intricate but stained white crochet work. His eyebrows lifted but he said nothing.