Dog Dish of Doom, page 8
“You’re completely wrong about Bruno; he goes back tomorrow.”
“Uh-huh.”
“Uh-huh yourself. As for the theater, well, I have to be there anyway because I’m in charge of Bruno’s rehearsal time now. And everybody will be talking about what happened to Trent, even though almost none of them has ever met him, because there’s nothing show people like better than gossip. And if they say something that can help in the solving of a very serious crime, well, I’d be a bad citizen if I withheld that information from the police.”
Sam clapped his hands a few times. “Very nice. An almost flawless rationalization.” It was good he wasn’t going to ask me out again, because he wasn’t doing himself any favors with this self-satisfied attitude.
“Rationalization for what?” I asked. “Do you think I should refuse to help Rodriguez?”
“No, I think you’re absolutely doing the right thing. But let’s be honest. You’re not going to snoop around because of what they taught you in seventh-grade civics class and you’re not doing it because you’ve been cornered and trapped by your parents and the detective.” Sam sat on the counter and looked down at me. His wiseguy smirk had given way to a concerned gaze.
“No? Then why am I doing it?” I asked.
“Because you’re a show person too, and there’s nothing you like better than gossip. You’re nosy and you want to know who killed this Trent guy. And you want to know it before everybody else so that you can tell everybody else. Deny that.”
“I don’t have to take this abuse,” I said, standing. “I can go home and take other kinds of abuse.”
“You hate it when I’m right, don’t you?” he said.
I picked up the leashes from the counter and examined the billboard-sized bandage on my arm. “I’m not a showbiz person, Sam. I got out of that a long time ago because I didn’t like the life. I’m a lawyer and an agent and a business owner. That’s what I am.”
I got the leashes on Steve and Eydie, who had walked over as soon as they saw I’d picked them up. Bruno was being more reticent only because he didn’t know the routine here. In fact, he didn’t know “here” at all.
“Now, if you don’t mind,” I continued, “I have to get this dog ready for rehearsals of his musical tomorrow.”
“Of course. It’s been a pleasure. Feel free to fall down outside my store anytime.” Sam was back to the wiseguy smirk, and I think I liked him better that way.
“I’m not showbiz, Sam,” I reiterated.
“Did I say something?”
I had to think about that conversation all the way back to the house. I had turned my back on the whole stage life when I told Mom and Dad I wanted to go to veterinary school. I didn’t like the fake façade, the idea that I had to pretend to be happy when I really wasn’t, the ritual of putting on a show every night and making it seem like I’d never done it before. I felt embarrassed in front of a crowd. I didn’t want anyone to notice me.
If my face didn’t resemble both of my parents, I would have thought I was adopted from a well-meaning family of introverts who couldn’t afford to put me through the quietest school in the country for fear that I’d in some way attract attention.
Why did I care what Sam thought about me anyway? I’d known him for years and he’d been a decent friend, certainly not the first person I’d call when I’d had a hard day or just couldn’t see how I was going to make this business work.
That would have been my father. Followed by my mother.
And anyway, just because I was an agent, it didn’t mean I was a real showbiz person. I was performing a function that required knowledge of legal and technical issues and a good understanding of human nature at every turn. And it helped that I generally liked animals better than people. I could communicate in ways that some of the “professionals” who handled the nonhuman actors hadn’t thought of yet. I was using the skills I had been given and I was doing pretty well for myself, thank you.
Who was I mad at, again? Right. Sam.
Okay, so I would admit that I do enjoy the odd piece of gossip, but who doesn’t, really? And I did feel at home in a theater, but come on. I actually did grow up in one (it was in a resort hotel, but let’s not split hairs, shall we?).
The heck with Sam, I told myself. I was right to turn him down when he asked me out that time. He’d probably just needle me until I had to think about what he’d said all the way home with three dogs, two of whom were actually mine.
And that was why I wasn’t thinking about what was actually going on around me when I arrived home, brought the dogs in through the back door, and gave them each a treat. I was consumed with my identity crisis, and that’s the excuse I’m going to use from now until the rest of my life.
Because once I made my way into the living room while considering pouring myself a fairly stiff drink, I saw a young woman sitting in the armchair looking at my parents, who were on the sofa looking slightly uncomfortable, although I’m sure the young woman didn’t see that. Mom and Dad were pros at making the audience feel welcome and giving off the aura of absolute joy at having people in to see them.
When I say “young woman,” I mean one in her late twenties who had been given gifts of genetics and didn’t mind showing them off. She was wearing, if that’s the word, a pretty low-cut shirt and jeans that might very well have been sprayed on. And that was her idea of casual, clearly.
I didn’t hear what they were talking about before I walked in, but the guest’s presence had thrown me a bit. She certainly wasn’t one of the potential acts for the senior-center show, and she wasn’t anyone who would have been there to visit me, so I was hoping she was there to offer my parents a lucrative booking, perhaps in a country other than the one I live in. Just for a few months.
“Sorry, am I intruding?” I said. All three heads turned in my direction.
“Oh, there you are!” Mom looked at me, then at the bandage on my arm. “What happened?”
“It’s nothing. I couldn’t find a smaller bandage. What’s going on?” I walked a little farther into the room to get a better look at our guest.
She was young but not naïve, sexy without being beautiful, blond but not really. She smiled at me with a look less practiced than the one my parents had been giving her, but not nearly as professionally authentic. She wasn’t a great actress, and she wasn’t that happy to be in my house.
She stood up and extended her hand. “You must be Kay,” she said. “I’m Taylor Cassidy.” Then she looked at me, waiting for a reaction, as if the name should have meant something to me.
“Hi,” I said, trying not to make it sound like a question.
“Taylor has been telling us about her job with Trent and Louise Barclay,” Dad said, not overplaying his role for once. “She came all the way from the city.”
“That’s a long ride,” I said. “Why haven’t my parents given you a cold drink?” The idea of a nice shot of … anything had not yet left my mind.
“I didn’t need anything, really,” Taylor said. “I’m just here to pick up Bruno and bring him home.”
It shouldn’t have alarmed me; I knew Bruno wasn’t my dog.
“You work for Louise?” I said. Proof of employment would be necessary before I gave up the dog to anyone.
“Yes,” Taylor Cassidy said. “I’m their dog walker.”
CHAPTER EIGHT
Okay, that was awkward.
Les McMaster had said he’d heard—from Louise—that Trent/Moshe had been having an affair with the woman they’d hired to walk Bruno, presumably when both he and Louise were out doing … something. And now here she was in my living room, asking for Bruno’s leash. And I’ll admit to some hesitation in giving it to her.
To be clear, the leash itself I wouldn’t have minded handing over, but Bruno? The dog sitter had taken a long drive to retrieve him.
If, of course, she really was the dog walker.
“Do you have some identification?” I asked “Taylor.”
She nodded, smiling. “Of course. I wouldn’t just let a dog I was watching walk out the door without some assurance either.” She reached into her purse, which had been sitting on the floor next to the easy chair, and produced a valid New York state driver’s license with her picture and the name “Taylor Cassidy” quite clearly printed on it.
“I have a problem,” I told her, even as my father was eyeing the young woman warily. Dad has good instincts about people, and if he was worried about Taylor for any reason, that was good enough for me.
Besides, Bruno was getting along so well with Steve. The two of them were back on Steve’s dog bed, lying peacefully, tails occasionally wagging. It would be a shame to break them up.
Taylor looked at me, seemingly confused. “What? That’s me.” She pointed at the license and I handed it back.
“Oh, I’m sure it is, but how do I know you’re Bruno’s walker? He didn’t come over to you and greet you like I would expect he would if you were such a good friend, someone he sees every day. In an unfamiliar setting like this, he should be thrilled to see you, but he didn’t move a muscle.” He was, in point of fact, snoring at the moment, but I didn’t see how that was relevant. Bruno had adapted easily to my house and seemed not to have any separation anxiety when I’d taken him from Louise, but his lack of response when we’d come back from our walk and discovered Taylor in the room was curious.
“Well, he doesn’t know me that well. I only walk him occasionally, when both Louise and Trent are out of the apartment, and that’s only been once or twice a week.” A likely excuse. I’d met Bruno all of four times in my life and he’d come home with me like I was a … kindhearted woman and he was a drunken sailor on shore leave. “You can call Louise and ask if she wanted me to come get him,” Taylor added.
Louise, who had tried to get me arrested this very afternoon and who had been ignoring my calls all day, would very likely reject the number again if I called her. “Do me a favor,” I said to Taylor, “and give her a call. I’m not sure I have the right number for her cell.” I started to say I’d always dealt with Trent, which was mostly true (I still had Louise’s number, obviously) but then something struck me as odd.
Taylor had referred to Trent in the present tense.
“Of course,” she said, pulling her phone out of her pocket. “Happy to do it.” She pushed a button on the phone—she apparently had Louise on speed dial—and waited a few seconds. “Louise?” she said casually. “It’s Taylor.”
I gestured to her to hand me the phone, and she did so without saying a word about the change of conversation partner. “Louise? It’s Kay. Did you send your dog walker to my house in New Jersey to pick up Bruno?”
The person on the other end of the phone hung up.
I considered that for a moment. Then I said, “No, she isn’t a small redhead. She’s tall and blond. Do you know her? I can take a picture and send it to you if you like. Let me get my own phone and send it to your number.”
Taylor grabbed the phone out of my hand. “She hung up on you,” she said, a real edge to her voice now.
Mom put her hand to her mouth. “That’s so rude,” she said.
“Yes, she did,” I said to the blonde. “How did you know?”
“I could hear it.”
“No you couldn’t,” Dad answered before I could say it myself. “Not from that distance.”
I took a step closer to the younger woman. “You want to tell me what’s really going on?” I asked.
Taylor’s mouth became a horizontal line so straight you could use it to level a bookshelf you were hanging. “I told you,” she said. “I’m here to take Bruno home because Louise asked me to come get him.”
“Why didn’t Louise call me to tell me you were coming? Why did she just hang up on me now?”
She sneered a little. “She doesn’t like you. She says you’re bossy and you think Bruno is your own dog, but he’s not. Trent thinks the same thing.”
There it was again.
“Trent?” Mom asked. “Isn’t that the man who—”
“Yes,” I cut her off. “The man who is trying to get Bruno a part in Annie. That’s Trent.” For some reason this woman didn’t know Trent was dead. And since this appeared to be an adversarial relationship now, I felt any information I had that she didn’t was definitely an advantage.
“He’s going to fire you,” Taylor snarled.
“I sincerely doubt it. Now, who are you really and why do you want to take Bruno away?”
Taylor could have reacted with anger, which was what I expected. She could have scoffed and told me I had no idea what I was talking about, which was an option. She might have laughed with an evil edge, twirled her mustache, and kicked one of the dogs while demanding I submit to her every whim, which would have been appropriate only if she were a character in an eighteenth-century melodrama. All those were choices.
Instead, she started to cry.
“I’m sorry,” she gasped out between sobs. “I was supposed to come and get the dog and that was going to be it. I just had to bring him back to Manhattan and feed him, I swear. Nothing bad’s going to happen to the dog, honest.”
I sat down. Maybe I was stunned by this odd change in the room’s mood. I was simply lost for a reaction to her outburst, had dozens of questions, and didn’t know which one to ask first, or whether I’d be able to trust the response to any of them.
Luckily my father stepped in. He dropped his voice down to a kindly murmur and looked Taylor in the eyes. I could see him consider taking her hands in his, then deciding against it, thinking it too much for the character he was playing.
“It’s okay, honey. Now, you just sit down here and tell us the whole story from the beginning.” I think he was channeling the character he played in our longtime first-act closer, Nudnik, which consisted of Dad pretending to be a milquetoast who was always acceding to his shrewish wife and bratty daughter (you can imagine the casting). Got lots of laughs with that one.
Taylor sat and Mom handed her a tissue from a box on the table next to the piano, no doubt used for those auditioners who might care to clear the sinuses before belting out yet another rendition of “New York, New York” as it might have been sung by Ernest Borgnine. She nodded a few times, as if agreeing with something someone was saying to her that only she could hear.
It took a few moments, but she got control of herself and her nose (after two more tissues), and Dad again suggested she start at the beginning.
“It wasn’t anything bad, I promise,” Taylor said. “Louise called me about four this afternoon. She said Bruno didn’t need to get walked because he was here in New Jersey.” (People from New York think New Jersey is all one place, like once you cross the Hudson River it couldn’t matter less if you’re in Short Hills or Camden. After a while you just let it pass.) “So I was making plans to go out to a bar with a couple of my friends and I got a text on my phone.”
I get texts all the time, but Taylor made that one sound like it had death in it. She shuddered a little. “Who sent the text?” Dad asked. He was still in his Nudnik role but much more subdued than onstage, where everything had to be played broadly. This was just a gentle old—um, middle-aged—gentleman asking her questions because he wanted to help.
The man was a master.
Taylor shook her head. “I don’t know,” she said. “The number was blocked, and normally I’d just delete something like that. But the first words were, ‘If you value your life,’ and that got me so scared. I read the whole thing.”
“What did it say?” Mom asked. She was definitely not playing her Nudnik role of the overbearing wife. Mom isn’t as natural an actress as Dad is an actor; she tends to fall back on actually being herself, which is a welcome change of pace in my family.
Taylor looked at her, as if just being reminded there was anyone in the room except herself and Dad. “It said that they knew where I lived and they could get to me, and if I didn’t come here—whoever it was had the address—and bring Bruno back to the city, they’d know how to find me. I can show you the text.”
She punched the screen on her phone a few times, and showed it to Dad. He took the phone from Taylor—and I cringed at the thought of fingerprints, but Dad held it gingerly by the edges—and turned the screen toward me.
Sure enough, the text message, which did not show a sender’s address or phone, read, If you value your life, bring Louise Barclay’s dog Bruno to the address being sent in a separate text. It then gave my address as the place to find Bruno. The dog will not be harmed, but must be brought here. You are being watched. If you don’t follow our instructions exactly, we will know how to find you and you won’t know when it’s coming.
“You see?” Taylor said, the quiver coming back into her voice. “I had to do it or they were gonna kill me!”
“Why didn’t you call the police?” I asked. I’d found my voice somewhere around the time Taylor had dropped her second used tissue on my side table. I must not have sounded as comforting as Mom and Dad had, because Taylor looked like I’d slapped her.
“They always say not to call the police or something bad will happen, don’t they?” she said. How stupid I must have been to think otherwise!
“I think maybe it’s best to ignore that advice,” Mom said, her voice soothing over my thoughtless impertinence. “Call the police. If you have the address where you were supposed to take Bruno, they’ll be able to find the people who sent you that text, won’t they?”
“They’re watching me!” Taylor groaned, and Bruno looked up at her. He couldn’t smell her from that far away—probably—but he still didn’t seem to recognize the woman making those odd noises. “They’re probably out there right now!”
Well, that wasn’t a fun thought. I looked at Dad. “You think?” I asked.
He made a face like something smelled bad. “I really doubt it. But I still think we should call the cops. If someone is out there, we can end this right now and probably catch the person who killed Moshe Berkowitz.” Then, in as theatrical and phony a gesture as I have ever seen from a seasoned pro, my father put his fingers to his lips as if he hadn’t just meant to let that information out.
