Dog Dish of Doom, page 23
“Stop wasting my time,” Mike said, thrusting his hand with the gun toward me a little. “I’m getting more than a million for this dog and you think you can talk me out of it with a contract for a musical?”
“I have paperwork that shows Louise doesn’t rightfully own Bruno,” I said, despite having no such item in my possession. For all I knew, no such document existed on the planet. But Louise and Mike didn’t seem to know that, because their faces registered concern more than surprise. “Bruno doesn’t belong to you,” I said to Louise, “so you have no right to transport him anywhere.”
“Enough,” Mike said. He looked around. The gun was mostly concealed in his hand, but he couldn’t shoot me here and not draw a crowd; there were people scattered around the piers. There were crew members on the ship. Anything he did here would be seen. He gestured with the gun toward a public restroom facility about twenty yards from where we were standing. “Let’s go over there.”
I didn’t move an inch. “You’re not serious, are you?” I said. “You think I’m just going to walk over there and let you shoot me?”
“You’ll go over there and we can figure this out,” Mike said.
“I can figure it out here.”
“Get over there.” He gestured again.
“Why? You can’t shoot me here, and you can shoot me there. I like it better here.”
Louise looked over at him and out of all the possible emotions she might register when looking at Mike holding a gun on me while getting ready to load Bruno onto a ship headed for Taiwan, she chose to look annoyed. “Will you cut it out?” she said. “We only have a few minutes to get Bruno onto the boat.”
Mike’s teeth were clenched so hard I considered recommending a dentist I know to fit him for a night guard. “She’ll run away if we leave,” he hissed at her. “She knows it’s not really your dog.”
Aha! Finally an actual admission. Should I let Mike know that was the first time I’d confirmed my suspicions about Bruno? No. Better not to further antagonize the man with the deadly weapon.
“You said you had nothing to do with Trent’s murder,” I reminded Mike. “So if it wasn’t you, who was it?”
The ship’s whistle blew, which only served to refocus the attention of the two holding Bruno hostage (which was the way I’d decided to look at it). They looked on board. “We’ve gotta go,” Louise said.
“You take the dog,” Mike suggested. “I’ll make sure she doesn’t do anything stupid and then we can decide what to do about her when you get back. The wire transfer has to go down quick, before the ship sails.”
Louise nodded her agreement and reached for the leash. Mike reached over to give it to her, still leveling the gun at my midsection, which is one of my favorite sections, and therefore a place I’d prefer not to be shot. The scene was not going as I’d planned, which reminded me that I hadn’t really planned it much at all.
“Akra killed Trent, didn’t she?” I said. It was a Hail Mary pass based strictly on the way Mike had reacted to my previous mention of her name. Akra’s, not Mary’s.
Louise took in a breath and hesitated for a second. Mike simply said, “Shut up.” But he made a mistake. He took a step toward me and it was clear from his voice and his manner that he did not mean to give me a nice warm hug. My impulse was to pull the fake gun, but going up against a real one it would probably not have the same impact it might have otherwise.
I needn’t have worried anyway. Bruno, seeing Mike make a threatening move toward me, simply did what dogs do when they sense danger. In a nanosecond, he reached over from his position at Mike’s feet and sunk his teeth into the man’s calf.
Mike made a noise like a man whose leg was being bitten by a dog and dropped his arm to his side. In a split second I chose between bolting for the restroom and reaching over to grab the gun. I selected the latter option and disarmed Mike as Louise scolded Bruno for saving my life.
Before I could properly aim the gun at either of them, though, I heard Detective Rodriguez’s voice through a bullhorn behind me. “Don’t move,” she said. It was unclear for whom the message was intended. “This is the New York Police Department.” That didn’t really clarify the issue. It was also odd, seeing as how we were in New Jersey.
“Can I move?” I shouted. “Detective?”
Even through the megaphone you could hear the exasperation. Rodriguez was a real talent at exasperation; she could go pro with it. “Of course you can move,” she said. “But Mr. Goldman and Ms. Barclay, you are both under arrest.”
I turned around—having been given permission to do so—and looked. Rodriguez was maybe fifty feet away, which made the bullhorn she was holding sort of overkill. She could have just yelled and been heard just as clearly. And she was closing the gap between us rapidly. Within seconds, she was behind me, holding her gun on Mike, who was looking down at his leg.
“I’m bleeding!” he wailed. “He broke the skin!”
“That’s the master criminal?” Rodriguez asked me.
“As a matter of fact, I don’t think he is,” I answered. “So you were just going to let him shoot me?”
Rodriguez frowned. “You had nothing to worry about. There are snipers on both those buildings.” She pointed to a maintenance facility and an administration building, each of which was four stories high and close enough that a shot, for a trained sniper like Bradley Cooper, probably wouldn’t have been that big a deal.
“And they did nothing because…?”
“Because there was never any reason to,” Rodriguez countered. “Give us a little credit.”
“My leg!” Mike moaned.
“He is a big baby, isn’t he?” the detective said. Two uniformed police officers, both African American and large, appeared with zip strips and started to restrain Louise and Mike, who kept whimpering. Bruno, unconcerned now that I had his leash, yawned.
“Have you found Taylor Cassidy?” I asked Rodriguez. “Akra Levy?”
“Ms. Levy is back at her job with Les McMaster,” the detective said. “Ms. Cassidy we have not found. She must be staying with a friend.”
“Huh!” Louise snorted.
Rodriguez turned to her. “What does that mean?”
“She’ll have plenty of friends to bunk with,” Louise sneered. “Like half the seventh fleet.”
She was speaking in riddles. “Taylor’s in the navy?” I asked.
Louise looked at me and her expression spoke volumes about my clear lack of a formal education (although I had mostly gone to school in the Catskills). “She’s a prostitute, honey. She can find a place to sleep, believe me.”
Rodriguez didn’t seem at all surprised, but my eyes must have grown to the size of quarters. “A prostitute?” I said. “Not a dog walker?” Okay, so that wasn’t my best ad lib ever.
“Yeah, she’s a dog walker.” Louise rolled her eyes. “That’s how she affords an apartment on the Upper West Side.”
“So how come she was walking Bruno?” I asked. I’m cutting out the part where I stuttered on “so.”
“I’m not talking until I see my lawyer,” Louise countered. Spoilsport.
“Ow,” Mike whined again.
“Oh, take these two away,” Rodriguez said. “We’ll question them at the precinct.”
“A prostitute,” I repeated. It should have clarified matters, but it so didn’t.
“Yeah, we knew that. It’s what she meant when she told you a woman like her couldn’t call the cops. Although she could have. I wasn’t going to arrest her for that if she gave us some good information about Trent Barclay’s murder.”
“Well, Mike Goldberg didn’t know that,” I said. “Maybe he was threatening her as the time to ship Bruno was getting closer. He didn’t want to screw up the deal with whoever was buying the dog in Taiwan.”
“Yeah, Mike Goldberg. What did you mean you don’t think he’s the mastermind?”
“I’ve done a lot of negotiations,” I said as Louise and Mike were led away. “He was too scared when Akra’s name came up; I could have gotten him to sign a contract for a talking unicorn at that moment. Besides, he’s not the type to get his hands dirty. He’s the type who hires someone to get his hands dirty.”
“You think he paid someone to kill Trent Barclay?” Rodriguez sounded skeptical. “A knife in the back isn’t exactly the normal professional killer MO.”
“I don’t know about that,” I said. We started to walk, the three of us. Bruno seemed as natural at my side as either of my dogs would have. “What will happen to Bruno?”
Rodriguez considered. “Well, the guy who owned him is dead and his wife is going to be charged with a crime or two, one of which might be stealing the dog. We found records from a shelter in Poughkeepsie showing that a dog looking like this one was adopted six months ago by a Leo Mountbatten of New Rochelle. Mr. Mountbatten reported the dog stolen three months ago, taken from his fenced-in backyard while the owner, an elderly widower, was watching Jeopardy! on TV.”
Oddly I felt my heart sink. “So Bruno will be going back to Mr. Mountbatten?” I asked.
Rodriguez shook her head. “I’m afraid Mr. Mountbatten passed away last month, so Bruno would have been on his own at another shelter anyway, I guess. Do you want to keep him? I’m not sure if you can but once we check the records to see if Mountbatten had any relatives, he might be available.”
I had decided when I started the agency that I would never adopt a client. Then I adopted Maisie, who was currently making a fuss in my office no doubt, and swore it would never happen again. But Bruno … Bruno had gotten to me. “Can I let you know once the dust has settled?”
Rodriguez looked at me sideways. “Might take a couple of days until I can check those records,” she said. “I still have to catch a killer. Why don’t you take Bruno until we can work that out?”
It would only be a couple of days. “Sure,” I said. “So how are you going to catch Trent’s murderer?”
“I’m not,” Rodriguez said. “You are.”
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
“I think he’s got it down.” Les McMaster looked at Bruno, who had just done a complete run through of the song “Sandy” (and yes, I know it’s not in the original play, but Les had imported it from the movie) with flying colors. The three young actresses who had performed the song with Bruno had already left the stage and were back in their dressing rooms with their moms. There was no performance scheduled for today, so everyone who had come in for the rehearsal was now free to go home. Except me and Bruno.
And Akra. She was back at Les’s side, holding her magical clipboard and saying “yes” a lot, except when I tried to engage her in conversation. To my eye, she was acting very suspiciously.
“He’s ready to go into the show,” Les said. “Can he start tomorrow?”
Since we hadn’t actually located a legal owner for Bruno, I was his temporary guardian, Rodriguez had proclaimed. She’d asked me to come here and put Bruno through the rehearsal in an attempt to smoke out Trent’s murderer, whom Rodriguez now believed was in the theater company. Louise and Mike’s stories had been believable, involving Mike being in Maryland that night (verified three times) and Louise having no upper body strength necessary to drive a knife that hard, so neither of them seemed to have been capable of killing Trent at the time he’d been knifed to death.
“Sure. Bruno’s ready to go,” I told Les. “The problem is that I’m not sure exactly who you’re contracting with for his services at the moment, so I’m going to set up an escrow account that you can pay into and work out who gets the money when all this is sorted out. Is that okay with you?”
Les nodded and called back to Akra. He never turned to look at her, just assuming she’d be there. “Do you have that?” he asked.
“Got it,” came the answer.
When I’d first seen Akra at the theater this morning, I’d felt compelled to confirm for Rodriguez that Akra had indeed reappeared at Les’s side. But there had been no way to covertly call or text without Akra seeing me do so. I was concerned that if she caught a whiff of suspicion, she’d bolt again. Better to do as Rodriguez had asked, and observe as much as possible to report back later.
“Great.” Les, in a sweater and khakis, could have been in a Gap ad. He rubbed his hands together and looked around, taking in the stage set. “We’re all set.”
He walked down off the stage to the front of the house, where I was standing. Bruno was wary of the stairs and sat on the edge of the stage. I moved toward the steps but Les caught me by the arm. “Do you think I’m a good director?” he asked.
What the what? “Everybody knows you’re a good director, Les. Where’d that come from?”
Les let go of my arm, so I went up and attached Bruno’s leash, pretending it was necessary. Bruno wouldn’t run away if the Sofia Vergara of dogs passed by carrying a sign reading IN HEAT AND INTERESTED.
“Not everybody,” Les said quietly.
“What?”
“Not everybody. Some people don’t think I’m a good director.” He sighed. “They think I’m a hack.”
Akra, having gotten closer in case Les had mentioned his next desperate need too quietly to hear from her previous perch, clicked her tongue. “No one thinks that,” she said.
Les didn’t answer but he still looked miserable. I decided it was time to change the subject. I couldn’t actually bring up Trent’s murder at the moment, so I moved on to something I actually wanted to ask. “I have been wondering,” I said to Les. “Why have you been so involved in casting a new Sandy? That’s not something a lot of directors in your position would concern themselves with.”
“It’s because they think I’m a hack,” he answered, looking at the floor. Had Les been drinking? “It’s because I can’t get another job. They wouldn’t let me direct Landfill because they think all I can do is make nice dances for suburban families.”
“You’re exaggerating,” Akra told him. This was about the other play, the straight play Les had wanted to direct. I’d thought it was a done deal. Dare I ask?
Wait! Landfill? The same as the file in Trent Barclay’s hard drive?
It hit me and came out of my mouth. “Trent was going to be one of the producers of Landfill.”
Akra shot me a poisonous look. Apparently this was a sensitive subject. It wasn’t that I didn’t realize; it was more in the area of me not caring that it was a sensitive subject.
But Les wasn’t listening to me anyway. He was in mid-rant. “I was that close to getting it and then they’d see I’m not just about tap dancing and eleven o’clock numbers,” Les said. “It’s a brilliant play and I get it like nobody else would. But they won’t let me do it.” He had been drinking. It was a miracle Les had gotten through the rehearsal, but he was nothing if not a pro and he wasn’t going to let those little girls see him smashed.
“Why not?” I asked. I would have hired him for the play, but then, I represent dogs for a living. And I needed to get him to say it.
“Bad publicity,” Les said. “Rumors I’d lost my edge. They said I was drinking. I wasn’t drinking!”
And then it all came together. Les was about to get the job he’d always wanted, directing an important new play that had Tony Award potential and could open him up to respect and admiration he mistakenly believed he’d never had before. And one little slip-up had caused the rumor mill that is showbiz to go into overdrive. Someone told the producers of Landfill he’d started drinking again. Maybe he had; maybe he hadn’t. It didn’t matter—the rumors had started and that was enough. Les had been cut out of the job.
“Oh my God,” I said. “You killed Trent.”
Akra’s head looked up toward me so fast I was afraid her neck would snap. “How dare you?” she hissed.
“You did. Trent made those comments backstage after the audition for a new Sandy. Right, Les? And somebody backstage heard it and let the word out. They said you were drinking again, and you suddenly became an insurance risk for Landfill. You hadn’t signed the contract yet, so they just withdrew the offer. ‘Creative differences,’ right? That’s what they’ll say?”
Les gathered himself. It was truly an awe-inspiring performance to behold: He drew himself to full height, seemed to sober up before my eyes, and regarded me with a glance that bordered on the regal.
“I have no idea what you’re talking about,” he said. But then he started up the stairs toward me. “I told you, if I couldn’t take a little criticism, I’d have been out of this business years ago.”
Idiot that I am, I did not tighten my grip on Bruno’s leash. If I had, I would have been able to expect the same kind of protection I’d gotten from him at the pier.
Instead, just as Les was advancing on me, I felt the leash pulled out of my hand. And sure enough, Akra had grabbed it from behind me and was leading Bruno, loyal but not that bright, away.
“I think he needs a walk,” she said calmly.
“He doesn’t need a walk,” I said, as if there were even a hint of sincerity in what Akra was saying. “He went out just an hour ago. He’s fine. Akra!” But they were gone.
“I had no reason to kill Trent Barclay,” Les said. “But Moshe Berkowitz, now, there was a man who needed to die.”
Moshe Berkowitz? It seemed a bad time to mention to Les that Trent and Moshe were the same man. Mostly because Les was standing about six feet from me and I’d prefer that he not make that five feet or less. “Um … why, Les?” I tried to sound casual, like I was asking him why he’d chosen to take a taxi rather than the subway when he’d gone to kill Trent. Sorry, Moshe.
“Because he was the weasel,” Les said. He didn’t look like a happy drunk at all. But at least he wasn’t advancing anymore. “Because he stopped me. He came here for one lousy audition with his dog and he stopped me.”
I could have told Les he was rambling, but would that have had the desired effect? I doubted it. Also, backing up suggested itself, but somehow I felt that if I moved, that would cue Les to move as well. Dammit! He could have gotten away with the crime. I personally had figured Akra for the killer. But no. I had to come out here and do Rodriguez’s work for her, and now I was feeling severely threatened by a man on the set of Annie. Somehow that seemed wrong.
