A Whisky, Tango & Foxtrot Mystery 04 - A Deadly Tail

by Dixie Lyle

  ZZ nodded. “Yes, and I’d prefer a few less of them. For instance: Who killed someone and blew up my house?”

  Lucky Trentini, who’d been following this exchange with the rapt attention of a professional voyeur, cleared his throat. “Uh, I’d like to weigh in, if I may? First, despite the fact I had no idea my leading man was sleeping with my FX person, I do try to pay attention to what’s happening on my set. Second, I really wish you had a butler because then we’d have at least one viable suspect.”

  Max Tervo spoke up. “It’s not that we have any lack of suspects. It’s that we have too many.”

  “Well then,” said ZZ. “Let’s narrow it down, shall we?” She picked up the remote beside her plate and thumbed a few buttons. The three giant flatscreens on the walls currently showing eighteenth-century paintings shifted from pastel landscapes to pages of documentation.

  “This is the forensics report from the police report on the bomb,” ZZ said. “Don’t ask how I got it.”

  “How’d you get it?” asked Keene.

  “I have lots of money. Now, Catree: These findings seem to agree with your assessment. But no trace of an explosive booster—like Semtex or C4—or a detonator was found, which has the investigators puzzled. They don’t know how the bomb was set off. Their current theory is ambient heat from the fireplace itself, which is obviously absurd; no fires were lit that morning, and the fires from the previous night were long extinguished.”

  Most of us were desperately trying to read the report on the screen, except for Keene and Fikru. “What’s happening?” asked Keene, sounding a touch desperate. “A minute ago we were in some sort of soap opera, and now it’s an episode of one of the sciencey police shows. Am I a guest star?”

  “Sssh,” I said. “Relax. It’s just a cameo, you don’t have any lines.”

  “Oh, right then. Tell me when the pancakes arrive.”

  I don’t always give ZZ enough credit. Yes, she’s eccentric, and yes, the list of things she’s interested in can change without warning—but when she really cares about something, she’s a force of nature. She devours information the way a blue whale consumes krill, taking in huge amounts and sifting it for relevant information. Even though I’m her executive assistant and extremely good at research, it’s the one area she rarely asks me for help with; she prefers to do it herself. I should have known she’d be investigating this as well, and that she’d be doing an amazing job. I may have talking spirits and shape-changing dogs on my side, but ZZ has resources of her own—she not only has lots of money, she has lots of friends. Smart, well-connected, powerful friends.

  At that point the maid arrived with the main course. Everybody got a serving of beef Wellington with garlic mashed potatoes and pickled beets on the side—except for Keene.

  He got pancakes. My boyfriend has an odd sense of humor, but he does pay attention.

  We discussed the report while we ate, ZZ putting up fresh pages as we finished what was on-screen. The rest of them soon came to the same conclusion I already had: The bomb had to have been planted sometime in the night, after the evening fires had burned down.

  “Who had access to the room?” Max Tervo asked. “Rolvink and Natalia, certainly.”

  “The maids, ZZ, and I all have master keys,” I said. “None of them has gone missing—I checked.”

  “I think we can safely eliminate any of them as suspects,” said Oscar. “Unless one of our household servants has an unsavory past I’m unaware of?”

  I shook my head. “Shondra’s very thorough when it comes to background checks. I trust everyone on staff. Anyway, the maids had all gone home for the night.”

  “Maybe they killed each other,” Lucky suggested. “Rolvink plants the bomb, then Natalia kills him. She comes back the next morning and ka-boom!”

  “A neat theory,” said Max Tervo, “but untenable. Natalia, as anyone who’s worked with her will attest, is squeamish in the extreme. She can barely stand to be around artificial gore, let alone the real thing. If, as rumor has it, the body was dismembered, then it couldn’t have been her.”

  I nodded. “But why would Rolvink try to kill his lead actress—whom he also happened to be sleeping with?”

  “Maybe she was pregnant,” Jaxon suggested. “A sleaze like Rolvink would go pretty far to avoid palimony payments.”

  “Not possible,” said Lucky. “Natalia can’t have kids.”

  We all looked at him. “What?” he said. “Insurance companies demand to know all kinds of things before they’ll cover a film shoot. Drug tests, medical history, psych evaluations. If an actress is going to quit halfway through a shoot because she’s showing, they want to know. Don’t blame me, I didn’t make the rules.”

  “The bombing is too calculated for a lovers’ spat,” I said. “Natalia wouldn’t blow herself up, and Rolvink was already dead by the time the bomb was planted. So how was the bomb planted in her room in the middle of the night, if they were the only two with access?”

  I thought I’d figured that part out all ready, but I wanted to see who would speak up. There was at least one other person who knew how the bomb had been put into place, and quite probably they were seated at the same table I was.

  We were all quiet for a moment. Then Max Tervo said, “The bomber didn’t need access to the room. They only needed access to the chimney.”

  “Of course,” said Catree. “Lower it down the flue on a line until it’s at the right height. It’s obvious.”

  “You could even send a thermometer down first,” said ZZ. “Make sure it wasn’t too hot and you wouldn’t be risking your life. All you’d need was access to the roof.”

  “In the middle of the night,” I said. “After the fire in the study had gone out. Lucky, you were up fairly late, right?”

  “Yeah, until around two, and I kept the fire going. I like a nice blaze, it helps me think.”

  “So the bomb was planted after two,” said Catree. “And since the Catree is out of the bag, so to speak, I’m going to address the elephant in the room.”

  Keene glanced around nervously. “What, it’s back?”

  Fikru took a more careful look around. “No.”

  “I didn’t do it,” said Catree. “I have the know-how and I was no fan of Rolvink, but I didn’t blow anything or anyone up—and I can prove it.”

  Jaxon nodded. “True. She was with me, in my room, from one AM to five. So unless anybody thinks we’re both lying, we’re each other’s alibi.”

  “I withdraw my previous comment,” said Oscar. “That’s the most romantic thing I’ve ever heard.”

  Which sounded great … except I knew Jaxon Nesbitt had a good reason for wanting Rolvink dead. What I didn’t know was how far Catree was willing to go to help him …

  * * *

  We talked things out a little more, but didn’t come to any solid conclusions. Max Tervo, Yemane Fikru, and Lucky Trentini all maintained they were alone in their rooms after two; Catree and Jaxon had stated they were together. Keene, though his memory was still fuzzy, had been awake and outside the whole time, constructing his “enhanced” croquet field.

  I’d verified Fikru’s claim, and Max Tervo had been in the graveyard at the approximate time of Rolvink’s death. Everyone else was still a suspect.

  After dinner I went up to my office to finish some paperwork I’d been putting off. I knew I should really go home, but something was nagging at my subconscious. Whiskey had taken off on a mysterious errand, so I decided to go for an evening walk in the gardens by myself and tried to pry whatever it was out of the depths of my noggin.

  I was so deep in thought I almost walked right into Lucky Trentini. Or rather, right over him; he was down on his hands and knees on the path, peering intently at the ground.

  I stopped. “Um. Hi. Lose something?”

  He didn’t look up, just kept scanning the edge of the path. “No. Not exactly. I mean, I am looking for something, but it’s not something I lost. Just something I haven’t found, yet.�
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  I frowned. “Can I help?”

  “No!” He sounded more panicked than angry. “It’s just—it’s hard to explain. It’s something I do every day I’m working on a film—during actual shooting, anyway. Started when I was just a production assistant.”

  “And what you’re doing is?”

  Now he looked a little embarrassed. “I’m … trying not to find a four-leaf clover.”

  “Really. Seems as if that would be easy to do.”

  “Like I said, it’s hard to explain. It’s just … when you’re a PA, you often get stuck out in the middle of nowhere, with nothing but an orange vest and a walkie-talkie for company. So this one time, when I’m making sure nobody walks up a certain footpath in this forest, I start looking for a four-leaf clover. Just to, you know, pass the time.”

  “Did you find one?”

  He sighed. “Yeah. Unfortunately.”

  “Um. I don’t follow.”

  “Neither did I, at first. See, right after that it started raining. And my walkie-talkie stopped working, and when I walked back to the shoot to get another one, a dog ran down the path I was supposed to be guarding and ruined a shot. Also, I got fired.”

  “That doesn’t sound like your typical four-leaf clover story.”

  “Maybe not. But it got me thinking. About luck and probability and how superstitions get started. And I realized that the whole four-leaf clover thing is just a metaphor about probabilities. You know what the chances are of finding a four-leaf specimen in a field of clover? One in ten thousand. But all that means, in mathematical terms, is that something extremely unlikely just happened. Which meant, to my mind, that the string of bad luck that immediately followed my finding it was just as unlikely as a bunch of good things happening all at once.”

  I smiled. “So far, you’re sounding pretty rational. You know, for a guy on his hands and knees looking for a four-leaf clover in October.”

  “Well, this is the not-so-rational part. See, I can be a little stubborn and a little obsessive, so I happen to know it took me exactly twenty-eight minutes to find that four-leaf piece of disaster. So the next time I was working on a film, I spent the same twenty-eight minutes searching for another one.”

  Whiskey started nosing around in the cold grass, too. [I wish I could help, but I doubt if they smell any different than the three-leaf kind.]

  “Which I didn’t find,” Trentini continued. “But I didn’t have a really crappy day, either. And after that … it kind of snowballed.”

  “So you devote twenty-eight minutes of every day you’re filming to looking for something you hope you won’t find?”

  Now he looked both embarrassed and anxious. “It’s worse than that. It has to be the same twenty-eight minutes every day. From eight PM to eight twenty-eight.”

  “Well,” I said. “We all have our rituals.” I hesitated, then added, “Maybe I shouldn’t mention this, but—isn’t talking to me screwing up your routine?”

  “Kind of. But I looked at my watch when we started talking, and I’ll add whatever time this conversation is using. I’m trying to be more flexible about the whole thing.”

  “Good for you. I’ll let you get back to it.”

  “Thanks. Uh—don’t mention this to anyone else, will you? I try to keep it private. Max struck up a conversation after dinner the night before the explosion and I had to fake a bathroom emergency to get rid of him. Luckily we were in the graveyard; clover’s easy to find there.”

  “Of course. Our guests’ privacy is extremely important to us.”

  When we left him, Trentini was studying his watch intently. Waiting for the exact instant to leap back into his specialized little zone of insecurity, hunting for something he didn’t want to find. There was some sort of metaphor in there, but I had too much on mind to try figuring it out. Sometimes, you just have to leave other people’s craziness alone.

  Which didn’t, of course, mean that craziness would leave you alone. Tango darted from beneath a shrub directly in front of me and skidded to a stop on the path.

  “You have? Well, that’s … interesting. Who was the culprit?”

  Tango stared at me intently, her tail lashing.

  Ohhhhhhhhkay …

  19.

  “Would you mind explaining that?” I asked.

 

  Which is when Whiskey trotted out from behind a bush, carrying Unsinkable Sam by the scruff of his ghostly neck.

  I stared. I blinked. I started to speak, and then stopped. Finally, I managed to get a few words out. “You’re saying—hang on. You’re saying this cat is a Nazi?”

  Tango said.

  “I hate to break this to you, kitty, but even the most dedicated spy would give up seventy years after the war ended. And the organization they served no longer existed. And, you know, they were dead.”

  Unsinkable Sam glared at me sullenly.

 

  “That’s—I don’t—” I glanced helplessly at Whiskey. My life was a surreal environment before I learned how to communicate with dead animals, and since Whiskey and Tango showed up it had become even stranger. But this? This was a whole new level of weird. I was used to Tango’s cat-centric views of any given situation, so her accusing a fellow feline of being a deep-cover German intelligence agent responsible for the sinking of several British ships wasn’t as big a shock as you might think.

  No, what I couldn’t wrap my skull around was that Whiskey seemed to be endorsing this craziness. He was supposed to be the sane one, the voice of reason, the gently applied brakes to Tango’s full-thrust wacky.

  “Whiskey?” I said. “What’s your take on this?”

  Not surprisingly, his telepathic voice came through just fine even when he had a mouthful of cat. [I’m afraid I must concur. Sam was indeed doing his best to—ahem—torpedo the production. Tell her, please.] He shook his head, ever so slightly, and Sam swayed back and forth.

  Sam spat.

  “But how?” I asked.

 

  Whiskey saw the look of disbelief on my face. [It’s not as fantastic as it seems. The Nazis also had a program where dogs were trained to talk.]

  “If this is the setup to an elaborate practical joke, I will make you both pay.”

  [The Hundesprechschule Asra in Leutenberg was an institution devoted to teaching dogs how to count, talk, and reason. It existed from 1930 to 1945 and had Hitler’s support. At one point they also had a cat.]

  said Oskar.

  I tried to put my brain into gear. “Okay, so you were a Nazi infiltrator during the Second World War. What does this have to do with Tango’s production?”

  For a moment Oskar didn’t say anything. Then,

  [I fail to evince even the slightest iota of surprise.]

 

  “Absolutely,” I said. “Uh, what exactly is the music, here? Are we the music? Am I the music? Because I’m really not that well versed on what the penalty is for something like this, or how it gets enforced. Little help?”

  [I’ll take him to Eli. He’ll decide on an appropriate punishment—which I imagine will
include being banned from using the Great Crossroads for a while.]

  “Yes, Eli. Good idea. Why don’t you take him over there right now.”

  [I shall.] And with that, he was off, his prisoner swaying from his jaws. I almost expected Oskar to mutter, And I would have gotten away with it, too, if it weren’t for that meddling dog and his friends …

  “Okay, so you were right,” I said to Tango. “But you still have a bunch of disgruntled actors to deal with. Hurt feelings, ruffled feathers. It’s going to take a delicate touch to—”

 

  Terrific. My cat, the living personification of the old Hollywood studio heads. I sighed. “Look, let me handle that, okay? I think I can smooth things over.”

 

  Tango darted away. I sat and thought. By the time Whiskey got back, I finally had to admit to myself that whatever was nagging at me wasn’t going to reveal itself just yet, and it was time to go home. Maybe some sleep would help.

  Whiskey was strangely silent during the drive. When I asked him what Eli’s decision about Oskar was, he wouldn’t tell me.

  “Why?” I said. “Is this one of those things you can’t talk about? Is there … well, you know. A Bad Place for animals?”

  [Hmmm? No, of course not. That’s a human thing. What’s going on with Oskar is more … complicated.]

  “More complicated? Of course. Because the ghost of a Nazi cat spy trying to sabotage the graveyard theatrical production of a bunch of dead animals isn’t complicated enough, obviously. Who’s the actual mastermind behind this diabolical plot? The reincarnated clone of Godzilla’s chiropractor?”

  [Large radioactive lizards rarely need a chiropractor.]

  “Don’t think you can distract me by saying rarely. I know a radioactive red herring when it’s waved in front of my nose.”

  [Nor are herrings generally any shade of—]

  “Okay, okay. You don’t want to talk about it, fine.”

  And he didn’t. In fact, he didn’t say much of anything, all the way home. Or between the time when we got there and I went to bed.