“Right you are, dear. The show must go on, and it’s not doing anyone any good to sit here staring at poor Dr. Shelbert lying there dead.”
As I walked over to Cathy, I heard Beryl clearing her throat to get everyone’s attention.
“You’re speaking this morning.” I took the napkin from Tracy and dropped it onto the table. “In thirty minutes, to be precise. You need to get out of here, get a little air, and get your thoughts together.”
“I don’t think I can—”
“Look, Cathy, there are people out there who know nothing about what just happened. They’ve come from a great distance to hear you, to hear all of us. As tragic as this is, it would be a disaster to cancel the symposium and send them home. In fact, we can’t do that. The hotel has been paid for the week. Speakers and students alike have nonrefundable tickets. And we all owe Sam. If for no other reason, we have to come through for her. Now, can you do this?”
“But Rick—”
“Not doing your talk won’t help Rick one bit, now will it?”
“No. I see what you’re saying, but—”
“Let’s go up to your room for a few minutes, okay?”
Cathy nodded.
“Let me see your key.” She reached into the small purse she wore hooked onto her belt and took it out.
“Fourth floor. Good. Let’s walk,” I suggested, thinking it would be good for her to move. “I’ve heard such good things about your puppy seminars, Cathy. I’ve always wanted to see you in action. How many pups are being brought in for your demonstrations?”
“A dozen. Half are coming from a shelter, and the other half from breeders.” Her color improved as we climbed the stairs and talked about her work. She was still holding the key. I took it from her when we reached her room, unlocked the door, and stepped aside so that she could go in first. Sky was lying on the neatly made bed, a scented tennis ball between his white paws. I could smell the mint the moment I’d opened the door.
“Martyn looked so upset when he realized Rick was gone.”
“It must be just terrible, to work on someone like that and fail. I’m sure watching your talk will help him take his mind off this tragedy. It’ll be the best medicine for all of us, to stay involved in what we’re here for, isn’t that so?”
I could see towels on the bathroom floor and dog hair all over the gray rug, but the bed was neatly made. Cathy hadn’t slept here last night. She’d just come back in the morning to shower. Without thinking, I glanced over at the clock radio, happy to see it safely on the nightstand where it belonged. “Do you want to change?” I asked her.
“No, I’m okay.” She had stopped in the middle of the room, near the foot of the bed. She didn’t seem to know what to do.
“You look great,” I told her. “Do you have notes for the talk, or slides?”
“No. I don’t need notes, Rachel. I’ve been doing this talk on puppy basics for six years. Sam’s booked me all over the country and in Canada, but even before I met her, the local kennel clubs were inviting me to speak at their meetings. The breeders like to invite the pet-owning public to this talk because they want their pups to start out right. They care about them, but it also means fewer headaches for them, if people know what to do.”
As she spoke, her voice got stronger and deeper; her confidence returned. I glanced back at the clock radio. We had ten minutes left.
“Do you use Sky in your seminar?” I asked. He cocked his pretty head at the sound of his name, got up, picked up the tennis ball, and with a flick of his muzzle, tossed it right to my hand. I snatched it from the air and threw it back to him.
“He’d only drive everyone crazy,” Cathy said, cocking her head toward her dog. “If I didn’t throw the ball for him, he’d go looking for some sucker who would.” She smiled at Sky’s latest sucker.
“Does he need a walk? Or food?”
“I had him out earlier, playing Frisbee. He’s fine.”
“Shall we go, then?” The tennis ball came back, like a bad penny. “The room is probably full already. And you might want to take a look at the puppies before you work with them.”
I tossed the ball to Sky, closed the door, and slipped the key into my pocket. Cathy, too preoccupied to notice, wouldn’t have cause to discover it was missing until after her talk, which, alas, I was planning to miss.
I did sit in the back of the room long enough to watch Cathy begin. She was every bit as terrific as I’d heard, demonstrating beginning training with the puppies that had been brought in for a morning’s work. She used no collars or leashes, just her voice and high energy, mesmerizing each pup in turn so that it saw nothing but her. In no time seven of the pups, one at a time, none over twelve weeks of age, were following Cathy back and forth across the stage.
The audience, trainers and wanna-be trainers from all over the country, were mesmerized too, hoping that they would be able to work as gracefully and effectively with their clients’ pups when they got home, considerably richer in knowledge than when they’d left.
I stayed longer than I’d planned, watching Cathy teach sit and down, still without a leash and, even more surprisingly for a Californian, without food rewards. She lured a little blue-flecked Australian cattle dog, nine weeks old that very day, to follow her and then sit when she stopped. Her hands, moving like birds, were as exciting to the pup as toys or treats. His eyes stayed on Cathy, no matter where she moved. Two Dalmatians, the oldest of the pups, worked side by side, fallowing, sitting, then lying down. One lay down slowly, his eyes on Cathy’s eyes. The other threw himself to the ground as if he were pouncing on a coveted toy. And both stayed as she backed away, then went tearing into her arms when she called them.
When I saw Sam come into the auditorium with Freud, I slipped out the back door. If Sam was here, it meant the police had left. I headed for the front desk to begin my work.
The slow old man was behind the counter this time, his maroon blazer with the hotel emblem at least two sizes too big for him. He sat on a tall stool, his bony forearms lost in their sleeves, resting on the counter. Despite all the recent excitement, he looked dead bored. I thought I might be able to change that.
“Hello, again.”
“Good morning, miss,” he said, no sign of recognition in his eyes though I’d just talked to him an hour or so earlier about a medical emergency. “What can I do for you?”
“I wanted to write a few letters,” I told him, “but there’s no stationery in my room.”
“You’ve come to the right place.” He slid off the stool and pulled his jacket down over his thin body. “You just wait right here,” he said. He started toward the office door, then turned and came back to the counter. “Unless you’d like it sent up.”
“Oh, no, I can wait.” I shot him a Kaminsky family grin.
As soon as the door closed, I ducked under the shelf at the right side of the counter and began to look for Rick’s box. I didn’t know if he’d been carted off to the morgue with his key still in his pocket, but there were usually two, so that husbands and wives could go out and do their own thing and illicit lovers could arrive and leave separately, fooling only themselves, never the staff. I reached in and took the spare key from the back of the box for room 404, but didn’t get to crouch back under the shelf in time. The skinny old coot was standing in the open doorway to the office, a surprised look on his wrinkled, dry face.
“I was coming to knock, to save you a trip,” I said. “I need a pen, too. I was sure I’d packed one, but you know how it is; you’re always wondering, What will the weather be? Do I need a raincoat? Are these shoes dressy enough? You always leave something home. This time it was my pen,” I said, shrugging and trying to look honest and harmless.
He walked over to the shelf, unlatched it, and held it up for me. “Insurance regulations,” he whispered. “Guests aren’t allowed back here. It’s not that I’d mind a little company. This isn’t exactly Grand Central Station. But rules are rules. I’ll get you something to w
rite with.” He walked slowly back to the office, adding, “I hope you’re writing your parents.”
I was still behind the counter even though I could get to the other side without bending. I needed other keys—well, one more. What I really needed was a passkey. But the only keys I saw were the ones in the guests’ mailboxes, and the old man had left the office door ajar so I couldn’t go pulling open drawers behind the counter. Besides, the office, where he was, was more than likely where the passkeys would be kept.
I walked around to the appropriate side of the wooden counter and waited. He came back with a pen and laid it on top of the pile of stationery and envelopes he’d brought out the first time.
“You need anything else, just ask. And when I go off, you can ask my son. Works the second shift.”
I remembered a woman on in the late afternoon, a tough old bird, looked like a retired cop. Or like some of the women who hang out at Henrietta Hudson’s in my neighborhood, the ones who pick up the tab and sometimes, when tempers flare, the bar stools.
“Name’s Jimmy. Anything you need, even from the outside, he’s your man. Don’t request nothing from Mabel. She’s like to take your head off just for inquiring.”
So he meant to keep the tips in the family. I picked up the stationery and the pen.
“I met him when I checked in. He seemed to have a little problem with some of the dogs. I’ve been taking the stairs.”
“No need to do that. He’s got to take you. That’s his job. Though, to tell the truth, he nearly wet hisself the day you all checked in.”
I headed for the stairs, the old man’s chuckling following me all the way up to two. I stopped on three for Dashiell before heading for Rick’s room. There’s something so creepy being in someone else’s private space. Even when it’s a hotel room and all you get to see is what brand of toothpaste they use, it still feels as invasive as checking their bank balance, seeing if they’re a grasshopper or an ant, or hiding behind the curtain and watching someone else have sex. Just as thrilling, too. Perhaps it was how I’d replaced the rush of working with aggressive dogs. That aside, it was how I earned my living, and I needed my partner to share the load.
13
SO YOU’RE PERFECT? MY MOTHER USED TO SAY
There was no crime scene tape sealing Rick Shelbert’s room, a courtesy to the hotel, I suspected, since it might well have caused a mass exodus. I unlocked the door and stepped inside before Dashiell. Then I called him to follow me, put him on a down-stay, and let the door go. It locked, as they all did, automatically.
Had I expected anything extraordinary, I would have been disappointed. Rick Shelbert was apparently pretty much of a neatnik, even away from home. The only glitch in the system was Freud. Saint Bernards are not neat dogs, and while Freud himself wasn’t present, traces of him were everywhere. Looking around the room, I could make a case for those hotels and motels that charge guests with dogs security deposits. Of course, the big dog wasn’t a chewer. Nor was he unhousebroken. But when loose-flewed dogs shake their heads, saliva flies. It sticks to the walls like chunks of plaster, stains most fabrics, and when it dries it resembles the foam the ocean leaves behind at low tide, a web of schmutzy-looking bubbles.
The bed had been slept in, but Rick had pulled the covers and spread up before he’d gone downstairs for what would turn out to be his last meal. There were no clothes draped over the chair, the window seat, or the bureau. When I opened the dresser drawers, all Rick’s things seemed to be there, neatly folded, ready to use. So no one had packed his things yet either.
His calendar and address book were in the top drawer of the bureau. I opened the address book to the front, and there, of course, he had filled in all the required information, including whom to call in case of an emergency. It was a Mrs. Rick Shelbert, a lady who apparently had not only not kept her maiden name but lost her first name as well.
I opened the appointment calendar next, a current of excitement shooting down my arms as I did. But the week of the symposium was blank. I looked back at the weeks before, and they were filled with appointments: eleven-thirty, “Rog,” beagle mix, destructive chewing; one-thirty, “Chester,” Dalmatian, dog aggression; and so on. There was a check near each appointment to indicate they were kept. And at the bottom it said either cash or check to indicate the method of payment.
I walked into the bathroom, wondering what it was I’d expected to find. The towels were all neatly folded on the racks, none lying on the floor as they were in my bathroom. I touched a couple of them that were still damp. God, I could have used this man for four hours once a week at home.
I looked at Rick’s shaving things, his comb, his toothpaste. He used Sensodyne for sensitive teeth, and he had two extra inhalers with him, one in his dopp kit, the other that I’d seen sitting on the nightstand, along with a small bottle of Tylenol and a glass of water, ready for any contingency. I pulled back the shower curtain and looked at the tub. He had even rinsed the loose hair out before dressing and going downstairs, perhaps so the maid wouldn’t consider him messy. Such a precise person, I thought—why hadn’t he chewed his food more carefully? But suddenly I felt a chill down my back, as if I’d just gotten out of the shower and forgotten the air conditioner was on. In a milieu of envy and venomous competition, two of my former colleagues were dead, both dying accidentally. The shock collar trainer had been electrocuted. The foodie had choked on a piece of food.
Right.
I put my hand in my pocket and felt for Detective Flowers’s card. But if I called her now, what could I say? That the hair on my arms was standing up? That I thought there was something fishy going on at the Ritz Hotel? What if I were wrong? What would a phone call like that do to Sam?
Walking back into the room, I released Dashiell and told him, “Find it.” While he checked the place out with his nose, because you never know, I poked inside Rick’s suitcase, which was empty, and then turned to look at the almost perfect bed. I looked under the pillows first, to see if Rick had folded his pajamas and put them there. He had. Then I pulled down the spread, to see if Freud had drooled on the dark gray blanket, and that was why Rick had put the bed back together. And then, as long as I was at it, I pulled down the top sheet and blanket and found not what I had discovered in Alan’s bed, the detritus of a last night of ecstasy. In this case, I found a sheet so clean the maid might have pulled it tight and left it on instead of changing it.
I sat at the window, looking out at the park, waiting for Dashiell to finish his snooping. That’s when I heard the sound, his rabies tag hitting against the wastebasket at the far side of Rick’s bed, once, twice, three times. Something in there interested my dog, more than likely an empty can of Pedigree Choice Cuts that he was trying to swab out with his tongue.
“Leave it,” I told him, getting up almost as slowly as Jimmy’s old man and walking over to where he was. I hadn’t eaten, and it was catching up with me. Maybe there’d be something for me in the trash as well. And indeed there was.
Under the morning’s paper and a wad of tissues, I found what Dashiell had been sniffing. I took a plastic Baggie out of my pocket and slipped it over my hand, the way I do when I have to pick up after Dashiell outside. Then I carried the wastebasket over to the window seat, where there was the most light. Reaching in, I picked up what my dog had discovered—two used condoms, one of them broken.
I walked back into Rick’s bathroom and rechecked those towels. Three of them were pretty damp, as if they had been used after a shower—or two. One was dry, but the middle of it felt as if it had been starched. According to the Young Detective’s Handbook, that meant it had probably been spread out under someone’s cute little tochis in order to keep the sheets clean.
I wondered who his companion had been; someone, I hoped, who used birth control pills; someone, it seemed, who didn’t find Rick’s fastidiousness as big a turnoff as I did.
“So you’re perfect?” my mother used to say. “Life is about compromise,” she’d say if she
were here.
My grandmother Sonya, made practical by a childhood of poverty, would have had a comment, too. Nifter, shmifter, a leben macht er? she might have added. What difference does it make as long as he makes a living?
No matter the cost, my family only wanted me to be married, to have someone to take care of me, as if I were not a woman but an invalid. I wondered if Mrs. Shelbert’s family had felt the same way.
Then I stood in Rick Shelbert’s bathroom, thinking about Freud. Not the man, the dog. What an odd thing it was for such a tidy person to have chosen a slobbering heavy shedder for a pet. It hadn’t been an accident, a dog he’d purchased on impulse at the pet shop in the mall. He worked with dogs for a living. He had to know what it would be like to live with a Saint Bernard. Was his choice simply a testimony to how bonded we humans are to the canine species, that what we would never consider allowing in another person’s behavior, we patiently accept from our dogs, and have been doing so, according to the latest study, for approximately 135,000 years? Even if dogs were slow learners and not the clever opportunists I thought them to be, that was sufficient time to practice not only helping in the hunt, warming the sleeping area, and protecting the cave, but manipulative skills as well. Speaking of which, I heard Dashiell summoning me from the bedroom.
I went quickly to see if he had made another find. He had. There he was, my hero, sitting in the closet, barking at a twenty-pound sack of kibble.
14
IT WAS HIS HEART
Leaving Rick’s room, I went on to frisk Cathy’s, then caught the very end of her talk. After two and a half hours, the puppies she was working with could have earned their livings doing TV commercials. In fact, one of the things I’d learned was that Sky was the Huffy T-shirt border collie. Cathy had five of the shirts with her, though I hadn’t seen her wearing any so far. On them Sky was airborne catching a Frisbee; sailing over a fence; staring down a huddled mass of sheep; carrying a tennis ball in his mouth; and on the last one, doing agility weave poles. He certainly was a clever border collie.
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