Collared For Murder

by Annie Knox

  CHAPTER

  Eighteen

  We managed to get Gandhi away from Jinx with a minimum of growling and absolutely no bloodshed. Jinx went in her big showcase kennel, clothed to model a pair of cat’s pajamas, and Gandhi got shoved in Jinx’s smaller kennel for transport home.

  It felt good to hear the clink of the metal kennel latches and to see Gandhi crouched down in the carrier. Gandhi had left human care about nine months earlier. He’d fared well, considering he’d survived a Minnesota winter on his own, but his free roaming days had taken their toll. He wasn’t as plump as he’d been when Sherry Harper had carried him around in a baby sling, and his lovely auburn tufts had grown matted. I wouldn’t feel comfortable until he got an all clear from the vet, but he looked like he’d survived and would live to burrow another day.

  Mari Aames stormed up to our table. “Izzy McHale, I should be reading you the riot act for letting your cat get out of your control, but it seems that Jinx here saved the day. Who knows what kind of damage might have been done if the other cats caught the scent of that rodent? I’m going to file a complaint with the hotel about this near fiasco.”

  I held up a hand in protest. “No! Please don’t do that. I actually know this guinea pig.”

  Mari looked puzzled. “He’s an acquaintance of yours?”

  “Yes. His name is Gandhi.” I proceeded to regale Mari with the saga of Gandhi and our inability to catch the wily critter. By the time I was done, Mari was tearing up.

  “Poor little guy,” she muttered. This, to an animal she might have roasted on a spit not ten minutes earlier.

  “I promise I’ll take him home as soon as there’s a break in the action. Soon.”

  “Okay. I guess we can just let it slide. It’s actually nice to have a happy ending around here.”

  “I know this whole event must have been very difficult for you, Mari,” Rena said. “I get the sense you were very close with Mr. Denford.”

  For an instant, Mari looked panicked, but then her face fell again. I was starting to get used to tragic Mari.

  “We were. I was a dedicated employee.”

  Hmmm. No mention of what kind of employer Phillip had been. Something told me the dedication didn’t run in both directions.

  “What’s that smell?” Mari said.

  “I don’t smell anything other than cat,” Rena replied.

  “No. There’s something . . . sweet.” She clutched her hands over her mouth and scooted away with a mumbled apology.

  “That was weird,” I said.

  “Nah. She’s just preggers.”

  I looked at Rena like she’d sprouted horns. “How can you possibly know that?”

  “Well, part of it is my special gift. You know how some dogs can tell if their owner is about to have a seizure? I can tell when people are pregnant. And Mari’s pregnant.”

  I cuffed her shoulder. “That’s a pretty bold statement to make on a hunch.”

  Rena rolled her eyes. “It’s not just a hunch. The crazy mood swings, hypersensitivity to smells, regular puking . . .”

  How could I not have noticed? That explained, too, why Mari had been so reluctant to drink her prosecco at lunch at the Red, White & Bleu.

  “This makes perfect sense,” I said. “If Mari was in love with Phillip and having his baby, but he was planning to fire her, as T.J. said he was, Mari had plenty of reason to be furious with the man. We’ve all been assuming that the murder was premeditated, but what if it wasn’t? Someone was driving Phillip around the morning he was murdered, and that was probably his assistant. They get back to the ballroom, he says something mean or snarky to her, and she grabs the pair of grooming shears from Ruth’s table and stabs him.”

  Rena nodded. “Yeah, that does make sense. Though it doesn’t explain the theft of the collar dangle.”

  “If Mari knew she was having a baby and was losing her income, maybe she saw the dangle as her baby’s birthright.”

  “Birthright? What century are you living in? She didn’t need a birthright; she needed state-mandated child support.”

  “Okay, fair enough. Mari’s pregnancy doesn’t explain the theft, but it really does fit the murder scenario to a tee. T.J. said Ruth and Mari left the ballroom at about the same time, and Mari looked like she was sick. If Ruth encountered Mari in a moment of weakness, Mari might have spilled the whole story. And that would explain Ruth’s cryptic comment about ‘it’ being in the blood.”

  Rena narrowed her eyes and bent to straighten a stack of delicate ruffs—simple elasticized circles of satin and embroidered fabric that could be slipped around the cat’s neck. “I’ll admit, it’s a pretty compelling story. But I’m not entirely sold.”

  I sighed. “Me neither. But it’s worth investigating a little further.”

  * * *

  I was at a stoplight on the way home when I got a text from Ama Olmstead asking me to join her at her apartment. I couldn’t leave Gandhi in the car, and showing up with a rodent in tow seemed rude, so I swung by Trendy Tails to drop off the guinea pig—careful to set his carrier high enough that Packer couldn’t mess with him—before heading to Ama’s house.

  When Ama and I had first gotten to know each other, she’d been living with her husband in a lovely little house with an office for her in a converted mother-in-law apartment. But after her separation from her husband, she’d moved into a smaller one-and-a-half-story cottage with stucco walls and whimsical wrought iron framing a wide front door.

  When you entered, it appeared that most of the house was consumed by a large living room with coved ceilings and a massive fireplace. A small dining area lay beyond the living room, a kitchen and two small bedrooms tucked behind it.

  I followed Ama up the stairs to the expansion space with its gabled ceilings and open-floor plan. Oddly, the new house was smaller than the old, but the size of Ama’s office had actually grown.

  She directed me to a rolling chair next to the desk. As she sat down, she snapped a piece of nicotine gum from its blister pack and popped it in her mouth.

  “You’ve given up smoking?”

  “I’m trying,” she said. “The last few months have had me reevaluating a number of my life choices.”

  “Good for you!”

  “So here’s what I have,” she said. We sat before a giant monitor covered with a grid of thumbnails of photos from the day of the show opening. She began flipping through them one at a time.

  “You were right. I don’t have a picture with Pris in it right before the blackout. Ordinarily, that wouldn’t mean much. There were a ton of people there, so I could have easily missed her. But here’s the interesting thing.”

  She clicked on a thumbnail, and it expanded to fill about half the screen. “This is one of the first pictures I took that day, right as the doors were opening at nine. I wanted to get a couple of shots of the people thronging into the ballroom, so I stood right near your table and took a couple of shots toward the main door and then over the heads of the crowd, with my camera pointed right toward the other front corner, where Pris’s booth was.”

  Right there, in the background but clear as day, was Pris. “Just like Rena said. She was there when the doors opened.”

  “And check out what she’s wearing.”

  In the picture, Pris wore a dark suit coat and a red shell. Because of the crowd, I couldn’t tell whether she was wearing pants or a skirt, but she was definitely in a suit.

  “Now we flip forward,” she said as she slid her mouse along the desk, causing each picture to pop up in turn. “This is the last picture I got before the lights went out. Hands down the best. The cropped version went on the front page of the Gazette.”

  I recognized the image from my evening at the police department. It was, indeed, a great picture. In the original photo, though, the framing was wider, a bit less artsy, and you could see a han
dful of people clustered near the prize table. Three whom I recognized: Ruth Kimmey, Peter Denford, and Mari Aames.

  Ama continued to breeze through the postblackout shots, and I caught glimpses of crime-scene tape, a shot of Jack directing someone to move, and a couple photos of crime-scene investigators removing Phillip’s body. Finally, after dozens of frames, she stopped.

  “And then I happened to catch this.” It was a picture taken from farther back in the ballroom. In the foreground you could see me talking with Pamela, Mari, and Marsha. In the background I could just see the door behind Pris’s grooming booth, with none other than Pris herself coming through the door.

  “So she was gone when the collar dangle was stolen.”

  “I don’t know about gone, but definitely not in the room. The interesting thing, though, is that she’d changed.”

  “What?”

  I looked more closely. Sure enough, Pris was no longer wearing the dark suit. She was wearing a blush-colored sleeveless top and a pair of pale slacks. The look was definitely more casual than what she had been wearing before.

  Was it possible? Had Pris killed Phillip and waited around in bloodstained clothes until there were people in the ballroom and then gone off to change? It hadn’t occurred to me as a possibility, because in my head Pris was wearing her usual shades of pale pink, pale blue, and white, colors on which she couldn’t have hidden so much as a drop of blood from anyone. But if she’d been dressed in dark colors that morning, she could have hidden a smattering of blood for a bit during the crush of the opening of the show. It was possible, but was that what had really happened? And if Pris had killed Phillip, had she also lingered long enough to throw the fuses and sneak in to steal the dangle under cover of darkness?

  Something didn’t seem right.

  I still wasn’t sure what had happened the morning Phillip died, but I knew my next stop had to be to talk to Pris again.

  * * *

  I found her where I’d left her, at Prissy’s Pretty Pets.

  She was no longer alone, though. Dee Dee Lahti had apparently returned from the cat show to pick up some additional supplies.

  Dee Dee didn’t have the good sense God gave itty-bitty bunnies. Whatever sense of dignity she’d ever had had been beaten out of her by her husband, a man who casually slipped in and out of criminal activity. Still, Dee Dee had one joy in her life: her dog, Pumpkin. She’d taken on the position of gofer for Pris’s shop so that she could occasionally get the tiny Shih Tzu groomed. I’d given her a few outfits for the dog, always careful to point out that they were prototypes, items I couldn’t sell, so she wouldn’t think the gifts were charity. Taffy did the same thing with her day-old baked goods. “Please take them. You’d be doing me such a favor.”

  In short, the women of Merryville rallied around Dee Dee. We couldn’t protect her from her no-good husband—only Dee Dee herself could do that with a call to the Merryville PD—but we could make the rest of her life a little easier

  When I arrived at Prissy’s Pretty Pets, Dee Dee was loading a plastic tub with towels and a few bottles of shampoo. Her purple muumuu swished around her as she gathered up the items in an apparent frenzy, but she came to a screeching halt when she saw me.

  “Izzy!” She shuffled over and gave me a hug that smelled of menthols and mothballs. “I haven’t had a chance to talk to you in a long time.”

  “I know. We’ve both been on the floor of that cat show for days, but there’s hardly time to think, let alone talk.”

  “Are you enjoying the show?”

  “As much as possible, under the circumstances.”

  Dee Dee nodded solemnly. “Yes, Mr. Denford’s murder was very sad. Ms. Marsha doesn’t let people see, but I’ve caught her crying three times now. Our booth is relatively quiet, so she just comes back and sits there.”

  I couldn’t imagine how Marsha was holding up as well as she was. Well, actually, I could. The occasional Xanax did wonders for keeping tears in check.

  Still, the pain of losing her husband must have been so raw. Granted, her husband was a good twenty years older than she was, chased skirts like a champ, and was overall a not very nice man. But in the end he was still her husband, and the loss of that intimacy and stability was dreadful. I’d had a small taste of that feeling when my boyfriend of seventeen years dumped me, but if I really wanted to, I could call Casey, hear his voice, remember the good times in our relationship. Marsha didn’t have that option.

  Pris emerged from the back of the store. “Dee Dee, you need to hustle those things over to the cat show. Mandy just called in a panic because they have only one towel left.”

  “Sorry,” Dee Dee muttered. She picked up her basket of goodies and headed to the back of the shop, where I was sure there was an alley entrance.

  Pris shook her head. “That one is a piece of work.”

  I couldn’t hold back a smile. “She sure is. But it seems like things are working out okay with her working here at the store.”

  Pris waggled a hand. “So-so. She’s great with the animals, but she doesn’t have the patience or the attention span to actually finish any project she starts. The other girls hate working with her because they say they spend all their time cleaning up after her.”

  “Would you let her go?”

  “No,” Pris said adamantly. “Those girls need to learn to overcome obstacles and troubleshoot. I like to think of Dee Dee as a walking, talking life lesson.” She sighed. “There but for the grace of God and good genes . . .

  “Now,” she said, voice crisp and businesslike. “What brings you back so soon? Was there a problem with Jinx?”

  “Not at all,” I assured her. “I just had a question for you.”

  “And the phone wouldn’t do?”

  “Nope. Serious question.”

  Pris sighed. We had been getting along better since we’d started working on the cat show together, but I still knew that Pris barely tolerated me and my small-town outlook on life.

  “The morning of Phillip Denford’s murder, why did you change clothes?”

  “Excuse me?”

  “I just got back from Ama Olmstead’s house. She has tons of pictures from that morning. When the show opened, you were wearing a black suit. Then you were MIA for a while, and then you made it into a picture just after the blackout, but you were dressed in a pale pair of slacks and a more casual tunic top.”

  “What does my wardrobe have to do with anything?”

  “If you were wearing a black suit when Phillip was murdered, it would have hid the bloodstains until you had a chance to go change. And you were clearly gone at the beginning of the blackout, yet you told the police you were present in the ballroom and talking to Ruth Kimmey. Why would you lie about that if you didn’t have something to hide? And why change your clothes at all unless the black suit had to be dumped?”

  Pris motioned me to two hot-pink velvet chairs in the waiting area of the shop. I took a seat and so did Pris.

  “I thought you were on my side,” Pris said.

  “I’m on the side of figuring out the truth,” I replied. “I still think the crime seems a little too . . . messy for your taste, but the photographic evidence is damning.”

  “Why not take this straight to your boyfriend?”

  It was a fair question. I could have easily turned the information over to him or taken it straight to Gil Dixon, who was heading up the investigation. Let the pros figure it out.

  “For some reason, I really want to believe in you, Pris. I’ve had too many instances in my life when I’ve misjudged someone’s character and it’s had serious repercussions . . . trusting people who turned out to be cheats and liars and worse. I don’t want to be wrong about you. And I don’t want to give more fodder to the police to use against you if you really are innocent.”

  “You do realize we’re not friends.”

&nb
sp; “Of course. But we’ve got our bonds, however tenuous they may be, and I don’t want to break them.”

  Pris leaned back in the pink wingback, closed her eyes, and took a few deep breaths.

  “Here’s why you’re wrong, Izzy. First of all, the notion that a dark suit would hide the blood from Phillip’s murder is ridiculous. The man was stabbed in the neck with a pair of shears. There would have been blood everywhere. I don’t think I could have confined the blood spray to my suit without getting it on my body and in my hair.”

  “But there wasn’t any blood at all—or, at least, not enough to notice—in the space behind the prize table where Phillip would have been standing when he was murdered. The way he was stabbed must have caused him to bleed out more slowly.”

  Pris rolled her eyes. “Okay, fine. Let’s say that I really could have managed to keep blood hidden on a black pantsuit while I greeted cat show goers and directed my girls in opening the grooming station. Let’s assume that none of them would have noticed the darker wet patches. I had a perfectly normal reason for changing my clothes.”

  “And what is that?”

  “The suit wasn’t appropriate for the cat show. Pamela Rawlins may traipse around in her all-black wardrobe, but it’s summer. It’s time to wear lighter, fresher colors and something a little more casual and appropriate for the day.”

  “So why put on the suit in the first place?”

  Here she gave real pause. I could see the wheels turning behind her cerulean eyes.

  “This is between us, right? You’re not wearing a wire while Jack Collins waits in the car? You’re not recording this conversation?”

  “Yes, no, and no. Whatever you tell me stays between us . . . unless you incriminate yourself.”

  “Fair. I, uh, had an errand to run that morning.”

  “And you needed to wear a suit? What kind of errand?”

  “I went to see a lawyer. A divorce lawyer.”

  Pris had told me before that her relationship with Hal was a sham, that she wanted out but only if she could take half his money with her. She’d put up with a lot from the man and felt she deserved her share of their wealth. But given a rigid prenup, the only way that would happen was if she got proof of Hal cheating.