The More the Terrier

by Linda O. Johnston

  Then I asked where she’d gotten her pup.

  I watched in the mirror as her face clouded over. “At a shelter that I thought would be perfect. The woman who owned it was so well known around here—used to be a star among those of us in the beauty community. She’d started, then sold, her own high-end cosmetics company. Her stuff is really great—I still buy a lot of it. She died recently, though. The bitch.” She met my eyes, then looked abashed. “Sorry. I know I shouldn’t speak ill of the dead, but the way she acted . . .”

  “Toward the animals?”

  “No.” Nalla began sectioning my hair and using clips to keep some out of the way. “Toward people. She made me come back three times before I could take Pitsy, and even then she kept giving me a hard time about how to treat my sweet dog. Telling me over and over how to train her and feed her and love her and . . . Did you know her? Her name was Bethany Urber. I know she started this whole network of other pet rescue organizations, Pet Shelters Together. Does your shelter belong to it?” She started trimming, and I became concerned suddenly that her emotionalism might lead to a really horrible haircut.

  “No.” I kept my tone even as I watched every snip. “But I’ve heard of her. How did you handle her demands?” Unspoken meaning: Did you start hating her enough to want to quiet her by shooting her?

  “I thought about just leaving the first day I visited her place, but I’d fallen in love with Pitsy. There were some other people around. I guess one was her assistant . . . Cricket? She tried to smooth things over. There were a few other women there—I gathered they all ran shelters, too, and were part of that network. One even suggested I might want to visit her shelter, that she had some pit bull mixes there, too. I figured, from the shocked looks the other two gave her, that recommending another place was forbidden around Bethany. If it weren’t for how strongly I already felt about Pitsy, I’d probably have just walked out, maybe even gone to that other person’s shelter.”

  “Who was that?” I asked. “Which shelter?”

  But she didn’t know.

  She did, however, after adopting Pitsy, prevent Bethany from the home visit that was so important to many of the best private shelters. They’d argued about that, too. Also about Bethany’s many phone calls still telling her what to do. Nalla stopped taking Bethany’s calls and would only talk to Cricket.

  I couldn’t fault Bethany completely. I acted similarly at times, in the interest of protecting the animals we adopted out. But I probably came across a lot more tactfully—something that didn’t come easily to me, either.

  “I did go back there one more time, just to tell her off,” Nalla admitted. “Stupid, maybe, but I was pretty damned mad at her for her attitude. I accused her of abusing the animals under her care, in a way. If she turned off other potential adopters like she’d turned me off, how many of the animals she cared for wouldn’t get the right homes? She was so mad that she threatened to take Pitsy back, which is why I wouldn’t let her come see us. Fortunately, we live on a middle floor in a condo with a great security system, so she couldn’t just barge in. I’ve got a dog walker who takes Pitsy out days I’m not home, and I warned her to watch out for Bethany. And I threatened Bethany right back.” Nalla shrugged. “Even more stupidity? Yes. And the thing was, some guy was hanging around. He heard it all. He must have told the cops about it, because they came to talk to me after Bethany was murdered.”

  I assumed the guy was Miguel, and that was why he’d told me to look at Nalla as a possible suspect.

  “But,” Nalla said, flourishing her scissors as she gave what appeared to be a final snip to my hair, “I didn’t do it. If someone had to get murdered, I can understand why it was Bethany. But as long as she left Pitsy and me alone, I’d have had no problem letting her live forever. Here, want to take a look?”

  She passed me a hand mirror, twirling my chair around so I could check the reflection of the back of my head.

  The cut looked good.

  The information she had provided gave me additional food for thought.

  So when I saw the amount on my bill, I swallowed my gasp and even added a nice tip to my credit card receipt. This killer inquiry was costing me a lot, and it wasn’t the sort of expense that I could get back from HotRescues or Dante, even though he was very generous in bonuses and raises that helped me keep my kids in school. I’d better end my investigation successfully.

  I’d add a section on Nalla to my find-Bethany’s-killer computer file.

  Eliminate her as a suspect? Not really.

  I’d place her toward the end, though, near Miguel and Mamie.

  But thanks to her, I now had additional questions to ask a few people who were already in that growing file.

  At the same time I’d printed out Miguel’s e-mail about Nalla that morning, I’d also sorted through the correspondence I continued to receive about Bethany. As I’d hoped when I requested that people send me their memories, the members of Pet Shelters Together still dissected and vivisected Bethany and their relationships with her. She’d been a saint, trying to help people help animals. She’d been a thorn in many sides as she had engaged in some less-thanlovable stunts in her crusade to get people to join and do her bidding. I’d need to spend a lot of time figuring it all out, but in the meantime I knew who I next intended to visit.

  Sylvia Lodner, a member of the network, had been the first to tell me that my asking for eulogies over the fruit of Bethany’s efforts would most likely dredge up some pretty rotten stuff about her, too.

  Sylvia’s shelter, Pet Home Locators, was in Torrance, about twenty miles southeast of Westwood. My GPS got me there in about half an hour, since traffic was cooperative, too.

  The shelter was on a side street off Torrance Boulevard. I almost drove by it, since its entry was marked only with an inconspicuous sign. I parked on the street and headed up the driveway.

  At its end was a nondescript building that people evidently had to go through to reach the shelter area. The exterior resembled a series of ticket windows, where visitors had to check in and talk to someone before going any farther.

  I headed for the first window. “Hi,” I said to the teenage boy behind it who was thumbing through some paperwork. He looked up, apparently startled.

  “Hi.” He smiled. “Can I help you choose a new pet today?”

  I laughed. “You’ve been trained well. But I’m actually here to see Sylvia Lodner. Please tell her Lauren Vancouver would like to talk to her.”

  The boy left, and Sylvia appeared at the window less than a minute later. “What are you doing here, Lauren?” Her voice sounded less than welcoming, and the expression on her face—which had almost always been solemn when I’d been around her—now looked downright suspicious.

  Not surprising, the logo on her bright red shirt that contrasted attractively with her light African American skin tone said, “Can we help you choose a new pet today?” Obviously, that was a theme around here. A good one.

  “I’d just like to talk to you about what you submitted to me on Bethany,” I said. “I had a few questions.”

  “Ones you couldn’t e-mail to me? Never mind. Why don’t I show you around this outstanding facility, since you’re here, and we’ll talk.”

  She pointed toward a door off to my right. It opened, and she motioned for me to join her.

  She showed me through a small but well-kept facility. Dogs of all sizes leaped around in their enclosures, demanding our attention. There was a separate building at the rear where cats were each kept in their own generoussized crates.

  In all, I really liked the place. I told Sylvia so.

  “Thanks, Lauren.” We had just left the cat building, and she turned to me and gave me one of her rare smiles. “So what is it that you really want from me?”

  I laughed. “I’m still trying to figure Bethany out, before I try putting the information together for the Web site I intend to create in her memory.”

  “Bull-puckey, as we say around here, since we’ve
got a lot of young volunteers. You’re still butting in, trying to figure out which of us killed her.” We’d reached a small outside sitting and exercise area paved in concrete, and Sylvia pulled lawn chairs up for each of us. “Have a seat, and I’ll tell you all I know, which isn’t much.”

  “To clear the air a little,” I said, “you’re right. I am butting in. But I’m only looking for the truth. Mamie Spelling and I have a long history, but if she killed Bethany, so be it. If she didn’t, I’d like to help her. That’s all.”

  “That’s enough, isn’t it? Never mind. Here’s my input. First, I didn’t kill Bethany but I can’t say I liked her much. I did like her idea of a network of shelters with combined resources. That’s why I joined. Not because she pulled any of her stupid stunts on me, though she tried.”

  “Like what? Your place here is wonderful. She couldn’t have threatened you with going to the authorities, like she did with Mamie.”

  Sylvia sat back on her chair and crossed her arms, as if fending off whatever Bethany had done to her. “No, but she did her homework and figured out my vulnerability, too. Pet Home Locators gets a lot of small donations from people who believe we’re hurting for money. That’s what we do when we’re begging—show how much our animals need the help of everyone out there who loves pets. We don’t have the kind of resources I understand you have, with your affiliation with HotPets. But . . . well, I don’t want to get into a lot of detail that you could use against me, too, but suffice it to say that, even though this is a nonprofit corporation, it runs on certain—shall we say—underreported profits from some unrelated products a few members of our board of directors make and sell. Some of the proceeds would be tax-exempt anyway for a nonprofit, but not necessarily all of them. And if you ever mention that to anyone, I’ll deny it.”

  “Did you deny it to Bethany?”

  “Wouldn’t have done any good. She knew and tried to hold it over me. But the main reason I wanted to join her network was to wean our organization away from that less-than-ideal situation. I hated what Bethany tried to do to me, but it was her normal course of operation. Any one of us could have hated her enough to kill her, I suppose. But if hating the way she asserted a nasty form of control over anyone was a motive, we all have one. And tight-fisted? Amazing! She kept detailed records about all sorts of piddly things, including how many PST T-shirts were bought, how many pins she gave out to members, everything. When one of the members lost a pin, she almost flipped her lid.”

  “Give me your opinion, then. Assuming that Mamie didn’t kill Bethany, and you didn’t, who would you choose as top suspect?”

  She looked at me as if assessing whether to hand her beliefs over to me. “This goes no further?”

  It was a question. I had an answer. “You don’t know me well at all. I could say anything, then tell whoever you suspect what you said.” Her eyes widened in shock, even as her mouth pursed grimly. “But that’s not me. I won’t bother giving a list of references. I’d only choose people who’d back me up. I hope that the fact that a businessman as astute as Dante DeFrancisco put me in charge of the shelter he funds, and still has me there six years later, speaks in favor of my reliability. So, I swear on my job and my continuing good relationship with Dante that what you say will go no further.”

  To my astonishment, she laughed. “You’re a character, Lauren, and I’d thought you were just another shelter operator with an agenda of your own. Okay, I’ll trust you. What I have to say isn’t worthy of your oath anyway. But if I had to choose someone I’d met who also knew Bethany—and I’ve even met that money-grabbing boyfriend of hers—I’d focus on Cricket.”

  Not that much of a surprise, but I asked anyway, “Why her?”

  “She hasn’t bothered me, but I’ve heard rumors she’s playing the same kinds of games that Bethany did—coercing people to join and toe the lines she draws. Lording it over members, and even, in some ways, making fun of Bethany and suggesting that her actions, before her death, were pathetic compared with how Cricket intends to run things. More conservatively, for one thing—so there’ll be more money available for those who buckle under to her demands . . . and also for her. A good motive for getting rid of her boss, don’t you think?”

  “Could be,” I agreed. But that seemed too easy. I needed more information. “If she hasn’t acted that way with you, how did you hear about it?”

  “I heard a conversation between a couple of members.”

  “Who are . . . ?”

  “Darya and Raelene. But remember, I haven’t told you a thing.”

  “Gee, and I wish I could convince you to tell me something useful.” I smiled at her, and she returned it.

  I left soon afterward, with names of two more people I intended to talk with soon.

  Chapter 27

  I don’t necessarily become obsessed when confronted with a problem, but if I think I can solve it relatively quickly, I do tend to focus on it. A lot.

  Like now. I’d possibly zeroed in on Bethany’s killer, but I didn’t want to tell the police my suspicions of Cricket without at least some evidence to back it up. No doubt they’d looked at her, too. Maybe they still were considering her. That could be why Mamie hadn’t been arrested.

  But their perspective would be different from mine. Official. I could go places and ask things they couldn’t under the law, or might not even think of doing.

  Which was why I was on my way to Redondo Beach on Thursday morning.

  Raelene Elder was the chief administrator of Redondo Rescues. I’d called to let her know I was coming, something I didn’t always do lately with people I wanted to talk to. But at least when I’d dropped in at Sylvia’s rescue facility yesterday, I’d been halfway there after my hair appointment with Nalla.

  That’s why I was musing about obsession. I’d been thinking about helping to solve Bethany’s murder ever since she died, created my business plan for keeping track of all I learned, and even researched it in various ways. In the past few days, I’d talked to a lot of people. Felt as if I was making progress—and I wanted to get this thing done at last.

  Redondo Rescues turned out not to be especially near the beach for which it was named. In fact, it was closer to Sylvia’s shelter in nearby Torrance than I’d realized.

  Even though Redondo Beach was considered somewhat affluent, I found Raelene’s shelter only a bit nicer than Mamie’s on the outside. The fence around it was chain-link and seemed dilapidated, sagging here and there. The onestory building at the side of the property could have used some work, too.

  I opened the gate and walked in. Raelene must have been watching for me. She strode out of the building, a smile on her face. Her puffy yellow hair was in disarray, but she obviously wasn’t trying to impress anyone here, the way she may have been at the PST meetings. She wore what was a uniform of sorts for all of us shelter administrators, our assistants and employees: a shirt with our facility’s logo—hers was yellow—over jeans.

  “Lauren, how nice of you to come. Let me show you around.”

  What impressed me most about Redondo Rescues was the number of people around taking care of the animals. I didn’t know how many were employees and how many were volunteers, but there appeared to be a high ratio of humans to residents. The animals were housed in a series of elongated buildings kept clean and mostly odor-free.

  The animals could have used more toys and other amenities like I was fortunate enough to get from HotPets, but the dogs were obviously walked frequently, judging by notes posted on bulletin boards in each area, and were played with, too.

  I gushed over those residents, a lot more canine than feline, all obviously well cared for. So what if the money around here went into pet care and not so much into aesthetics?

  I’m not especially known for tact, nor did I want to spend a lot of time here when I had other people to chat with and, more important, my own shelter to run. As we headed toward the front building again, I jumped right in.

  “I’m still collect
ing whatever information I can about Bethany, Raelene. A lot of what’s been sent to me already is kind of what I expected—a combination of good and bad.” I looked up, since Raelene was taller than me. Equally slim, though. “Some of it suggests that she was . . . well, hard on people. That she’d do anything to get rescuers to join Pet Shelters Together. Was that your experience?”

  She didn’t love Bethany, either, but she told me that she’d liked the concept enough to join anyway, as Sylvia had.

  “What about Cricket? How is she doing so far as the head of the network?”

  Raelene shook her head as our gazes met. “Hard to tell. It hasn’t been very long. But I get the impression that she’ll be even worse than her predecessor. If she is . . . well, as I said, I like the concept, but it has to work for me in practice. Redondo Rescues may secede. I’m even thinking of starting a different network and seeing if anyone from the group will join me.”

  “I’ll bet they would,” I said. “So . . . have you spoken with anyone else about this? I mean, about how difficult Cricket is.” I knew at least a partial answer, since Sylvia had already told me about overhearing a conversation between Raelene and Darya.

  “Sure, a few people in PST. I’ve hinted at my idea of a competitive network but haven’t come out and suggested it yet.”

  “I’d love to know about it when you do.” I paused, then asked, “How did Cricket and Bethany get along together?” Okay, maybe I would throw in a dash of tact here. “If Cricket has taken Bethany’s positions on how to run the network and run with them, can I assume they were good friends?”

  Raelene laughed. “I get it. You’re zeroing in on Cricket as doing Bethany in, instead of Mamie. My opinion? It could have been either of them, for different reasons. Hey, maybe you could get the cops to arrest them both, as some kind of conspiracy.” At my expression, she shrugged. “Or not. I know you’re hoping to clear Mamie. Anyway, keep me informed, to the extent you can. I’m really interested in learning the truth.”