Dogs, Lies, and Alibis

by Wendy Delaney

  “Something wrong?” he asked, easing himself down on the bench seat.

  I sat on the bench across from him and pulled out my notebook. “I’m afraid so. I’m here on behalf of the county coroner to ask you some questions about Colt Ziegler.”

  His forehead split into deep furrows. “The coroner. Are you telling me—”

  “I’m sorry, yes. His body was found early yesterday morning.”

  Sounding like he was venting steam, Mr. Ortiz slowly shook his head. “I knew that kid was going to get himself into more trouble.”

  More trouble? I needed to get him to elaborate.

  He leaned in, his voice barely audible as if it were being muffled by his soup-strainer mustache. “So what happened to him?”

  I didn’t want to get into any details other than what he could tell me. “That’s still being pieced together, but we’re talking to people who knew him to get a sense of what was going on in his life.”

  “I’ll tell you what was going on with him. Same problem that a lot of kids his age have: entitlement.”

  I was Colt’s age. Not that Mr. Ortiz cared about how I might interpret his editorial comments, but none of my friends acted like the world should cast roses at their feet.

  “So, were you having some sort of attitude problem with him here at work?” I asked.

  “Kind of. But in the form of some sticky fingers.”

  “Colt was stealing from you?”

  “I guess he got tired of waiting for a raise.”

  I scribbled stealing in my notebook.

  “It started with a couple of sacks of dog food.” Mr. Ortiz’s eyes hardened to onyx. “Then cash started disappearing from the till.”

  “I assume you confronted him about it.”

  “Yeah, right before I fired him.”

  “And when was this?”

  “Almost a month ago. Had to get the missus to increase her hours on the weekends. Seth, too. At least he seemed happy to make some extra money.”

  “Anything else going on with Colt that you noticed?”

  “Like what?”

  “Issues or problems that he might have mentioned.”

  “Whatever problems he had were probably of his own making. But no, until stuff started disappearing, I didn’t get the sense that anything was wrong.”

  I didn’t see much point in taking any more of his time until I saw his tan lips flatten as if he wanted to block the words at the tip of his tongue. “But maybe there was something you noticed?”

  He shifted his gaze to the surface of the picnic table that had been carved with dozens of initials. “It hardly seems worth mentioning.”

  “I won’t share anything you tell me with anyone else.” Except for Ben, and maybe Steve if it would get some heat off of Georgie.

  “It’s just that last month I had to break up a little scuffle between Seth and Colt.”

  “Define ‘little scuffle.’”

  Mr. Ortiz’s lips made another disappearing act behind his mustache. “It was more of a shouting match than anything else. You know, just two male dogs barking at one another.”

  Yeah, I’d heard plenty of that last night. Only unlike those two male dogs, Colt Ziegler was found dead not long after. “Do you know what it was about?”

  He shook his head. “I couldn’t get either one of them to talk, so I put Seth to work in the yard out here to keep them separated the rest of the day.”

  “Okay. Would you mind if I talked to Seth about this?”

  “Sit tight.” Mr. Ortiz swung his legs out from under the picnic table. “I’ll ask him to finish what he’s doing and come on back.”

  I was in the process of writing down everything I could remember hearing over the last five minutes when I looked up to see Seth step to the table.

  Wearing a faded blue T-shirt that revealed tattooed biceps, he spread his long legs in a military stance. “You wanted to talk to me?”

  I pointed at where his boss had been sitting. “If you don’t mind.”

  Looking as enthusiastic as a kid who had been sent to the principal’s office, Seth slid onto the bench seat.

  “We haven’t officially met.” I reached across the table. “Charmaine Digby.”

  He gave my hand a quick shake with a firm and calloused grip. “Seth Lukin.”

  “I work for the coroner’s office.”

  I watched him to determine how much more I needed to explain.

  By his solemn nod, I knew that I’d said enough. “May I ask you a couple of questions about your relationship with Colt Ziegler?”

  A muscle twitched at the corner of his mouth, his gaze focused on my notebook. “I guess.”

  Since Seth had appeared guarded from the outset of my arrival, I figured I should start with something innocuous and asked for his contact information and date of birth.

  He recited the particulars in a precise monotone. Definitely former military. Since he was just shy of his thirtieth birthday and appeared to be quite the physical specimen, maybe it hadn’t been that long ago that a uniform covered those tattoos.

  “How long have you worked here, Seth?”

  He pushed back a length of razor-cut brown hair with a left hand that wasn’t adorned by a wedding ring. “A couple of years.”

  “How about Colt? When did he start?”

  “Last November.”

  “How well did you know him?”

  Seth glanced up from looking at my notebook. “Well enough.”

  That told me nothing, which I assumed had been the intent. “Well enough to hang out? Maybe go out for a beer after work?”

  The muscle twitched again. “We did that…a while back.”

  “A while back before Colt was fired?”

  “Yeah,” Seth said with a sardonic edge.

  Clearly, this guy wouldn’t be a pallbearer. “I heard you two had some sort of a fight.”

  “Not really.”

  More like not anything he wanted to talk about. “What was it, then?”

  “It’s…complicated.”

  I pasted a smile on my face. “A lot of relationships are.”

  “Let’s just say we had a disagreement about a mutual friend.”

  “Who was the friend?”

  Seth fixed his gaze on me for the first time since he sat down. “No one who had anything to do with him getting killed.”

  He obviously believed that to be the truth, but I still wanted to know. “I need a name, in case we need to talk to him.”

  “Her.”

  I put my pen to the notebook that he was back to staring at. “Name, please.”

  “Jessica Tuohy.”

  I didn’t know her. “Does she live around here?”

  He nodded. “With me.”

  “Would it be safe to say that Colt liked her as more than just a friend?”

  I got another nod.

  Yeah, it was complicated, all right.

  “Other than this ‘disagreement’ you two were having over Jessica, did you have any other beefs with Colt?”

  “No,” Seth said flatly.

  Too flatly, because that mouth twitch was telling me something else was going on in his brain. “No other problems?”

  He pressed his lips together and shook his head.

  Fine. Maybe Steve could get him to talk. “Any mention of issues he was having with someone else?”

  “You mean other than Little Dog?”

  Crap.

  Chapter Nine

  “WHAT THE HECK was his problem with Georgie?” I asked for the third time since hitting the highway.

  And just like the other two times, Fozzie wasn’t spilling any beans about his former owner.

  One of Colt’s friends had to know something. Certainly his sister seemed to have been holding something back yesterday.

  “We can only hope she’ll have a looser tongue without her mother around. Right, Fozzie?”

  Ignoring me, he stuck his nose out the open window as I made the left turn onto Morton Road
, and didn’t move until we passed the horse farm near the five-mile marker.

  That’s when his sniffer started working overtime.

  “What do you think? Like the smell of the new neighborhood?”

  He turned to me with the same doggy grin I’d seen last night.

  “Good. It’ll be better than living in some old apartment.” Especially mine.

  Slowing as I rounded the next bend, I checked the numbers on the mailboxes and finally spotted one with the name Sparks in reflective lettering.

  Just past the stand of mailboxes, an arrow on a laminated yard sign for Sparks Tree Service pointed the way down a one-lane road bordered by pasture land on the right and ranch-style houses on the left. The fourth house at the end of the road had another tree service yard sign out front.

  “This must be the place,” I said, parking in front of a tall cedar edging the driveway.

  Fozzie whimpered when I reached behind his seat to grab my tote.

  I patted his head. “Let me talk to her first, then I’ll come back and get you.”

  Standing in his seat as I opened the driver’s side door, he barked, sharp and loud.

  “What’s the matter with you?”

  With his attention focused on the garage of the honeydew green house, he answered with more barking.

  “Dog, this is not the way to make a good first impression.” I climbed out of the car and wagged a finger at him. “If you want to get adopted, be good.”

  Once again, he ignored me, but as I walked by the cherry red minivan parked in the driveway, I heard the reason why: A chorus of barking from two black dogs at the side yard fence.

  The front door opened before I reached the porch. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised to see you here today,” Kendra stated with the warmth my grandmother typically reserves for door-to-door salesmen.

  As I approached I noticed her swollen eyelids. She was also wearing an oversized sweatshirt with plaid pajama bottoms—obviously expecting some alone time to grieve.

  Sorry, Kendra. “I was hoping you could help me sort through a couple of things your mom brought up yesterday.”

  Heaving a sigh, Kendra swung the door open to let me in. “I don’t know that there’s much more I can tell you, but we can talk at the table.”

  I followed her into an outdated galley kitchen with scuffed hardwood flooring, honey oak cabinets, and dingy wallpaper. It smelled of burnt coffee and whatever leftovers were clinging to the dirty dishes stacked on the counter.

  If the kitchen was the heart of the home, this one screamed for resuscitation. Only the cute factor of the baby pictures hanging next to a corner hutch added a little life to the room.

  “How old are your kids?” I asked, over the volume of the dogs barking at me from the other side of a sliding-glass door.

  “Five and seven.”

  Good. They’d most likely be in school, so no need to worry about little ears hearing not so nice things about Uncle Colt.

  While Kendra pushed a pile of papers and a laptop to the far end of the dinette table, the two dogs outside continued to loudly protest my existence. “Sorry for the mess. I was trying to get caught up with some bills after being gone most of yesterday.”

  “No worries.”

  She pointed at the chair I was standing next to. “Please sit, or they’ll never settle down.”

  While I slipped into a high-backed chair with a stained seat cushion, she turned to the two dogs. “That goes for you, too. Sit!”

  Taking the seat opposite me, Kendra glanced back at the two black fur balls giving me the death stare as they lowered their rumps to the wooden deck. “They don’t know you, so they’ll probably give you the evil eye while you’re here.”

  Better than getting it from one of Steve’s old girlfriends. “They’re beautiful animals.” The larger of the two looked a lot like Fozzie. “Are they related?”

  “Mother and daughter. The mom’s the Chow Chow.”

  I had a feeling I had left her son in the front seat of my car.

  Tucking back several strands of brown hair that had escaped her ponytail, Kendra worried her lips. “Could you tell me if there’s any news…you know…about…?”

  “About the cause of death?”

  Kendra nodded, her dark eyes glistening with tears.

  From what I’d learned when I stopped at the courthouse to check my messages, Colt’s autopsy was scheduled for tomorrow. “Nothing yet. We should know more later in the week.”

  She grabbed a tissue from the box by the laptop and wiped her eyes. “But you think George Bassett did this.”

  I didn’t want to, but so far, no one had come forward with any information to convince me otherwise. “I honestly don’t know what to think. That’s why I’m here.”

  While she blew her nose, I reviewed my notes. “Yesterday, your mother mentioned that there was a period of time where you weren’t speaking to your brother.”

  Shaking her head, Kendra winced. “He made a big mistake, and looking back on it, I should have done more to help him.”

  I wasn’t following her. “Are you talking about Colt making a mistake with George Bassett?”

  “No, that deal with George didn’t happen the way my mom thinks it did.” Her lashes bounced off her cheeks like nervous butterflies as she cleared the emotion from her throat. “You have to understand my little brother. He was a sweet guy in a lot of ways, but when he started using after high school, everything changed.”

  So, Tami had been right when she suspected her son of having a drug problem.

  “I tried to get him back into rehab, but he kept telling me he had the situation under control.” Kendra tightened her grip on the tissue wadded in her hand. “Stupidly, I believed him. Even let him stay here after the girlfriend he was living with kicked him out. It didn’t take long before I noticed that money was disappearing from my pocketbook. At first I thought Damon was just short on cash and had taken a twenty to buy lunch that day. When I finally mentioned it to him, he knew exactly where it had gone, and confronted my brother. He apologized, of course, but that was the final straw for my husband, and I had to ask Colt to leave.”

  She gave me a weary look. “A month later, I noticed that a bunch of charges had been run up on our credit card.”

  “Uh-oh,” I muttered.

  “That’s putting it mildly. Damon hit the roof. Hunted my brother down for days, and finally spotted his beater Camaro being towed to Bassett Motor Works.”

  “Was your brother in the—”

  “The tow truck? Oh, yeah. I guess it took both the driver and George to pull Damon off my brother.”

  “So, it wasn’t George who broke his nose.”

  Kendra shook her head. “I didn’t want any more family drama, so when Colt showed up for my mom’s birthday the next week, I let her think that George beat him up because he didn’t have the money to pay his repair bill.”

  Finally, an explanation of what happened two years ago that made some sense.

  “Things were never the same after that. I didn’t talk to him for weeks.” She blinked away a tear. “But if I had dragged his ass to rehab that night instead of walking out the door, maybe he’d still be alive.”

  “You can’t make someone change.” As I well knew from way too many years of waiting for my mother to act like the moms I used to see on TV.

  “I couldn’t, but I guess my cousin Eric finally convinced Colt to go. He even paid for it.” She reached for another tissue. “That’s where Colt met his girlfriend.”

  “Jessica?”

  “Pretty, but she had a serious drinking problem. At first I thought she’d be a bad influence on him, but I was wrong. She was great, and he was crazy about her. They even got an apartment together.”

  She wiped her leaky eyes. “I don’t know what happened, but everything seemed to fall apart last month.”

  It had sounded to me like Jessica and Seth happened. “Did Colt ever mention any trouble with a coworker?”

&nb
sp; “If he was having a problem with someone, I didn’t hear about it. I just know that money got really tight for him after he lost his job at the feed store.”

  Actually, prior to that based on Ray Ortiz’s reason for firing Colt. “He didn’t say anything about what was going on?”

  “Not to me, but you should probably talk to his girlfriend.”

  The one sleeping with his pal Seth? Yep, I intended to.

  I scratched down a couple of quick notes and decided that I had better move on to the other reason for my visit. “Thanks for clarifying what happened. I’ll provide your information to the prosecutor.” And Steve.

  “You don’t have to say anything to my mother, do you? It’s already bad enough between her and Damon.”

  I understood Kendra wanting to avoid an uncomfortable situation with her mother. With Marietta having parked herself across the street from Steve, boy did I understand. “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I tucked away my tote. “One last thing. You know Colt had a dog.”

  She tightened her gaze. “I know. I let him have his pick of Sarabi’s litter.”

  As if on cue the mama Chow shook her head, fluffing her mane as if to convince me she was worthy of her lioness name.

  “He was discovered running loose by one of the neighbors yesterday and—”

  “Thank goodness,” Kendra uttered, her hand going to her chest. “I got worried when I went to the apartment and couldn’t find him.”

  “I have him right now, but he obviously needs a permanent home,” I said, hoping to appeal to Kendra’s maternal instincts.

  “Why can’t Jessica keep him?”

  That didn’t sound very mom-like. “I’m pretty sure she moved out of that apartment a while ago.”

  “Great.” Kendra rubbed her temples like I was giving her a headache.

  “Since Fozzie can’t stay there any longer, I thought that you—”

  “That I’d take him?”

  I nodded.

  A humorless chortle escaped her pale lips. “I have a couple of energetic kids that I can barely keep up with, plus a husband who’s not crazy about us having two dogs, much less three. Sorry, not going to happen.”

  “How about your mother?”