Collared For Murder

by Annie Knox

  Despite being a total sleazebag, Phillip Denford had outdone himself. He’d had Jolly Nielson, our local jeweler and Rena’s girlfriend, create a custom collar dangle. According to Rena, the actual design had been conceived and drawn by Phillip’s artist son, Peter. This was no ordinary collar dangle: crafted of the most delicate platinum filigree and set with both a five-carat fancy-cut diamond and a five-carat Colombian emerald, it was a work of art. Very expensive art. Jolly had even made a platinum cage to house the accessory. Hanging from the top of the cage, the pendant could twist and turn ever so slightly, catching the lights surrounding it from a host of angles. It certainly looked expensive, but its true value wouldn’t be known until the end of the show, when it was presented to the grand-prize winner. At that point, a gemologist and an insurance adjuster would swoop in to make the determination of the dangle’s cash value and make sure it was insured before the winner even left the room.

  The prize had been artfully situated atop a table near the best-in-show ring. The table was draped with pale pink satin gathered in sensuous fabric curls on the table’s surface. The cage had been set atop tiered satin-covered boxes, and the whole setting was filled with crystal vases of pink peonies, white lilies, and delicate green Kermit mums. The arrangement looked like something out of a fairy tale, and it seemed out of place surrounded by the chaos of the show.

  The only thing marring the tablescape was a paper cup from Joe Time Coffee that someone had carelessly left on the corner. I walked over and snatched up the cup, still half-full of milky coffee, and walked it to the large waste can just behind our station. I thought about tucking it behind Jinx’s cage in case someone came back for it, but frankly, it smelled funky, like someone had dripped perfume into it. It reminded me of my friend Taffy’s Happy Leaf Tea Shoppe, a faintly musty and cloying smell. Near as I could tell, the stuff had gone off and should probably be tossed, and if someone still thought it was any good and came back to claim it, I would take the heat.

  “Thanks! I was just about to do the same thing so I could get a clean picture.”

  I looked up to find Ama Olmstead, a reporter for the Merryville Gazette, facing the prize table with her sleek digital camera in hand. The petite Danish woman, pixie cute, used to carry a slew of camera equipment with her back when her strapping husband, Steve Olmstead, had been available to help her lug it around. Steve and Ama were divorced now, though, and the single mom had had to pare down her life in a multitude of ways, from moving into a smaller house to limiting herself to one really good camera for her assignments.

  “How have you been, Ama?”

  “As well as can be expected,” she said with a half smile. “I’ve been meaning to tell you that Jordan has started calling Packer ‘his’ dog.” We both laughed. Ama’s toddler son often played with Packer when the pooch and I ran into the Olmsteads in Dakota Park. Packer was great with children, and Ama had often expressed gratitude that Jordan would grow up loving dogs instead of fearing them.

  “Are you thinking about getting him his own?”

  “Someday. When he’s old enough to walk it and scoop its poop. Right now I have my hands full, and I’m happy for him to simply have the occasional playdate with Packer.”

  “Well, anytime you want some canine companionship, you know my number. Packer has boundless energy, so he’s always game for a romp in the park.”

  “Thanks for that.” She swept her hand in an all-encompassing gesture. “This is quite the show, isn’t it?”

  “I had no idea,” I confided. “I figured it would be big and good for business, but I had no idea just how big it would be.”

  She grinned at me. “Want a little free promo? I can get a picture of you and Rena at your booth.”

  “Oh my gosh! Would you?”

  One of the lessons I had learned during my months as an entrepreneur was that one never turned down the chance for free publicity.

  “Rena,” I called. “Ama wants to get a shot of us in front of our booth.”

  “Ooh! Fun!” Rena replied, scrambling around from the back of the table. “Here—let me get your bangs straightened.” To my horror, she licked a finger and used it to sweep a swath of hair from my face.

  “Rena!”

  “Oh, chill out,” she muttered.

  Ama was laughing so hard she was bent at the waist and wiping her eyes. “You two should take this show on the road,” she said when she came up for air.

  I held up a kitty capelet while Rena pretended to take a bite out of a salmon cracker, and Ama snapped our picture.

  “I need to scoot off to take some pictures of the cats and guests. But it was great seeing the two of you.”

  “Same here, Ama.”

  “Where’s Pris?” I asked Rena as Ama made her way out through the crowd. I could see all her worker bees buzzing around the spa station in the corner of the ballroom, but I couldn’t spot Pris in the midst of the fray. I felt a stab of irritation. We’d made an arrangement to share each other’s cards with the cat owners, and if someone bought a service from Pris and an item from me, they got ten percent off both purchases. I had my cards ready to go, but Pris still hadn’t brought hers over.

  “I don’t know,” Rena replied. “I saw her when I first got here this morning, but it’s such a zoo in here I can barely keep track of myself.”

  Tension in the ballroom continued to mount as we all waited for an announcement that the day’s activities were beginning. But I didn’t see anyone in charge. I expected to see Pamela Rawlins, her brown Burmese, Tonga, draped around her neck. She was technically the organizer of the event. I scanned the room, looking for signs of her sin-black topknot moving through the crowd, but nothing.

  Neither Marsha nor Phillip Denford had made an appearance yet, and Marigold Aames—who seemed to be the driving force of the Denford operation—was MIA, too. The only Denford in sight was Peter, and he stood off to the side, in an empty judging circle, sipping a cup of coffee.

  I frowned. My sixth sense told me something was up.

  I reached beneath our table to grab a box of outfits, thinking I might find a wardrobe change for Jinx for later in the day. As I picked it up, I thought I heard a rustling sound coming from inside. I set the box on the table and cautiously lifted a corner open. In a wink, something small and furry wiggled out from the confines of the box and leapt from the edge of the table.

  My first thought was that Rena’s ferret, Val, had hitchhiked to the show in the box, but then I realized that Rena would have left Val at home for the day and that the critter who’d scampered from the box was too small to be a ferret.

  “Was that Gandhi?” Rena squealed.

  Lord have mercy. It absolutely was Gandhi, making one of his rare and inopportune appearances.

  Nearly a year before, a woman named Sherry Harper had died in my back alley, and her auburn guinea pig, Gandhi, had escaped into the wild. Over the months, we’d tried to catch him as he took up residence in businesses up and down the alley: Richard Greene’s Greene Brigade, then my friend Taffy’s tea shop, and eventually in Xander Stephens’s record shop, Spin Doctor. I lived in fear that he’d find his way to Ken West’s restaurant, Red, White & Bleu, and end up in an exterminator’s crosshairs.

  I hadn’t seen Gandhi inside Trendy Tails since he first went missing, but somehow he must have gotten in and managed to elude Jinx for long enough to hop a ride to the M-CFO cat show.

  The absolute last place a guinea pig should be.

  I crouched down to see if I could spot the little fella, but between the table drapes and the sea of legs, he was long gone.

  “Lose something?” I looked up to find Jack smiling down at me.

  “Yes. No. Sort of,” I muttered as I climbed to my feet. Jack stood next to my aunt Dolly, who—alarmingly—held Packer, my pug-bulldog mix, on a leash.

  I hugged everyone in sight, including my dog, who
returned my affection with a big slobbery puppy kiss, before narrowing my eyes and chiding Jack and Dolly. “Why did you bring Packer?”

  Jack shoved his hands in the pockets of his cargo shorts and shrugged. “Don’t look at me. I’m just the driver.”

  Right. “Just the driver.” Like he had no control over Dolly, no obligation to rein her in. Jack knew Dolly did inappropriate things on a daily basis; it took a village to keep Dolly in check. Besides, Jack was a cop, for heaven’s sake. He should have been the voice of reason. But I was inclined to give him a pass. Once Dolly got an idea in her head, it was hard to talk her out of it. In fact, the more rational you tried to be, the more she dug in her heels. While Jack was very serious about his copness, he wasn’t a bully; I couldn’t imagine him forcing Dolly to do something she didn’t want to do.

  For her part, Dolly cocked her white-haired head and narrowed her eyes right back at me. “Izzy McHale. I never knew you to be so discriminatory. Packer has just as much right to be here as anyone else.”

  “But it’s a cat show.” I knew I was stating the obvious, but what else could I say? I swept my arm around to display the tables full of cats.

  “And I’m sure all the cats are lovely,” Dolly said. “But Packer wanted to join in on the fun, and you know he’ll be a perfect gentleman.”

  I knew nothing of the sort. Both Packer and Jinx were ill-behaved little creatures, spoiled rotten by Ingrid, Dolly, and occasionally me. Besides, even assuming we could corral Packer under our display table, I knew his presence would disturb the cats.

  Sure enough, Packer let out a snuffling little bark, and the cats in the cages closest to my table started to roo. The international feline call of distress spread from cage to cage, table to table, until the collective keening of two hundred cats overwhelmed the room. Even Jinx had her ears flattened back on her skull, and she usually ignored Packer like he was a piece of furniture.

  As though the cat calls had summoned her, Pamela Rawlins strode into the ballroom through the main door, about twenty feet from my table. She had her eyes downcast and her shoulders hunched with tension as she made a beeline toward the prize table. She leaned in to examine the glittering collar dangle, head cocked this way and then that, before turning on her heel and walking back the way she’d come.

  I heard sniggering behind me and turned to find both Rena and Jack, heads down, shoulders shaking suspiciously. “You two are not helping,” I hissed. “Dolly, you have got to take Packer home.”

  “But I want to stay.”

  I pinned Jack with a stern look. “Jack will take you back to 801 Maple so you can drop off Packer and leave him with Wanda, and then he will bring you back to the show. Right?”

  “Yes, ma’am,” he said, scuffing his toe like a wayward child.

  Before they could move, a thunking sound resonated from the hallway, and the lights in the ballroom went out. In the vast windowless room, there wasn’t so much as a glimmer of light. After a heartbeat of silence, both the cats and the people began to whine and call out, everyone disoriented in the sudden darkness. Not to be outdone, Packer took up a howling complaint.

  I felt a rush of air as someone moved quickly past me. I was disoriented by the dark, but I got the distinct impression that the person was moving from my right—from somewhere near the main ballroom door—to my left—toward the back corner of the ballroom, where the conformation-judging rings started to wend their way around the room, forming a big U that ended right by the other front corner of the room, where Pris’s grooming station had been arranged.

  A minute later, I was blinded by light from the corridor as Jack threw open the main doors and secured them to the heavy magnets set in the wall. A maintenance worker rushed up to him, and the two exchanged a few brief words.

  Slowly that beacon of light from the doorway lowered the level of chaos in the room. Jack yelled out across the crowd, “Just a tripped fuse, everyone.” Everyone hushed, and it seemed like all attention—human and feline—had turned to Jack. I felt a swell of pride at his confidence, the way he commanded the room. “We’ll have light again in a second.”

  As his last syllable trailed away, there was another thunk, and the lights returned, leaving a roomful of people blinking as their eyes readjusted to the bright ballroom chandeliers.

  “On that note,” Jack said, “we’d better get going. Heaven forbid the lights go off again and we lose Packer in the ensuing panic.” He gently took Dolly’s elbow and, like the big Boy Scout he was, drew her toward the wide-open entrance to the ballroom.

  Dolly and Jack were almost to the door when Packer suddenly let out a yip and pulled away from Dolly, ripping his leash from her hands. Dolly looked back at me in helpless horror as Packer did a joyous pirouette and landed in a crouch, ready to sprint off to heaven knows where.

  Great. I get invited to a potentially life-altering cat show, and I manage to release both a guinea pig and a dog into the mix within the first hour. Brilliant. At least the lights were on.

  Without hesitation, I dashed after the dog, praying I’d get to him before he knocked over a table and sent a dozen cats hurtling through space. He started to scamper behind the table holding the grand-prize collar dangle, so I made an end run around the other side, trying to cut him off.

  When I reached the back of the table, only a few feet from the ballroom wall, I realized Packer wasn’t running anymore. He’d found what he was looking for.

  Packer sat, restlessly shifting his little body from haunch to haunch and occasionally licking his chops with his long taffylike tongue. Right at his feet, a plaid pant leg protruded from underneath the table.

  My heart caught in my throat. I reached out a toe to nudge the leg, but I got no response. Passed out, or dead? There was only one way to know.

  I stood on my tiptoes, caught Jack’s eye, and beckoned him over. A mischievous smile played across his lips and he gave me a suggestive wink as he walked across the room to join me, but when I pointed at the leg, he sobered right up. Dashing Jack disappeared and Detective Collins took charge.

  He met my eyes and, without either of us saying a word, we bent down. That’s when I saw the rusty brown flecks that stained the blush-colored satin puddling on the floor. Jack lifted the fabric with two fingers, and we both peered under the table.

  There lay Phillip Denford in a viscous pool of blood, a scrap of white cloth clutched in his hand and what appeared to be a pair of grooming sheers sticking straight out of his neck. I knew dead when I saw it, and Phillip was deader than disco.

  I suddenly felt woozy. Alas, this was not the first time I’d been so close to a dead body, but it was the first time I’d been so close to so much blood, and the scent rested like a bad penny on my tongue. A mixture of horror and fear seared my blood. I stood up, maybe a bit too quickly, and caught my balance on the edge of the table. The stand holding the grand prize teetered precariously from my jostling, and I snatched out a hand to hold it steady.

  And that’s when I saw that the jeweled collar dangle was gone.

  CHAPTER

  Five

  For the first three hours, the ballroom was a madhouse. The Merryville PD had set up a flimsy perimeter of crime-scene tape to cordon off the front corner of the room, where we’d found Phillip Denford and lost the hundred-thousand-dollar collar dangle. I don’t know what I was expecting them to use, but I’d gotten the same yellow plastic tape at Parties Plus for Aunt Dolly’s most recent birthday party. It made the cops’ stuff seem oddly unofficial.

  That impression was heightened by the low police presence. A group of officers was out on Highway 59 working a multicar-semitruck accident that had traffic backed up for miles in either direction, and another group had gone down to the Twin Cities to get trained in using the new body cams the department had purchased. Jack was the only detective on-site, and he was dressed so casually, in cargo shorts and a pale green Henley, t
hat he didn’t look like any kind of cop at all. I counted a meager three officers and two crime-scene techs, including the poor officer trying to man the door to the ballroom.

  As soon as the first uniformed officer had shown up, cell phones had emerged from pockets and purses in a wave. Everyone involved with the cat show—from trainers to owners to random family members—knew that something big was happening in the ballroom, and everyone wanted to join the crowd inside so they could watch the drama unfold. The problem was there were two doors off the main hotel hallway that led into the ballroom: the main door up by my vendor table, which opened directly into the crime scene, and the one at the far end of the ballroom, which opened into the space in which Pris had set up her grooming operation. Two doors and only one officer, who was splitting his attention between guarding the main doorway and watching what was taking place behind the prize table.

  In short, a steady flow of gawkers had made their way past Prissy’s Pretty Pets, swelling the crowd to nearly twice the size it had been when the first hue and cry had been raised.

  Dolly didn’t want to miss a single detail, so she managed to worm her way to the front of the crowd, closest to Phillip’s body. “It’s research,” she said. “Research for when I become a PI.” Personally, I’d been present at enough crime scenes that the actual mechanics didn’t particularly interest me. In fact, they nauseated me. I put Rena in charge of Dolly, making sure Dolly didn’t plunge past the crime-scene tape to “help,” while I fell to the back of the crowd, tugging Packer along behind me.

  When I got clear of the horde, I knelt down to give Packer some loving. He waggled his little butt while I scratched his ears and cooed praises for being such an observant dog. He’d rolled over on his back for a good belly rub when I heard the weeping.

  I turned to find Marsha Denford, Pamela Rawlins, and Mari Aames, all of whom must have found their way into the ballroom after Phillip’s body had been found. They stood in the same general area, but they didn’t seem to be together: no hugs, no clasped hands, not even any eye contact. Tears poured from Mari’s red-rimmed eyes, her cheeks mottled and the knot of honey hair on top of her head askew. Pamela’s thin crimson lips pressed into a straight, harsh line. She shifted from foot to foot while her fingers flew over the screen of her smartphone. Both were obviously upset.