Collared For Murder (6 page)

The storm was hard but quick. I don’t know what possessed me, but as my tears subsided, I straightened in Sean’s arms, looked him dead in the eye, and kissed him.

It was a nice kiss. No fireworks, no sparks, but a soothing warmth spread through my veins. For his part, Sean stood perfectly still. He didn’t lean in to the kiss or hold me tighter, but he didn’t step away, either. Rather, I was the one who, after just a few short seconds, jumped back as though I’d been teetering on the soft edge of a cliff.

“Oh God. I’m so, so sorry,” I muttered as I wiped the lingering tears from my face. “That was horrible.”

“Gee, thanks,” Sean said, his lips quirking up in a wry smile.

“Oh, no . . . I didn’t mean to . . . Oh heavens. I don’t know what I’m doing.”

“You’re apologizing for kissing me. No apology necessary.” I opened my mouth, but he cut me off. “Before you say another word, I know you were overwrought and that you weren’t thinking clearly. I won’t hold you to it. Let’s just pretend it never happened.” He was letting me off the hook, but there was an impatient edge to his voice, one that made me feel small, like I was being a drama queen by thinking the event even merited an apology.

For the most part, I was overwhelmingly relieved by his comment. But somewhere in the darkest, most shameful corner of my heart, his reaction stung. He was so matter-of-fact about it. The kiss had been spontaneous on my part, the result of an overabundance of emotion in general rather than emotion about Sean specifically. And I did love Sean as one of my oldest and dearest friends, so I didn’t want him to suffer. But his apparent ability to blow it off was a bit of a hit to my ego.

“Well,” Sean said, picking his bowl back up, “I’ve been retained by Pris Olson. So far she’s been charged only for the theft, but Jerry in the county attorney’s office made it clear they were looking hard at her for the murder, too.” He took a bite of his ice cream, and his eyes fluttered shut as he slipped the spoon from between his lips. “Dang. That hits the spot. Anyway,
it took all day, but Hal Olson finally convinced Judge Rancik to arraign Pris after hours and set her bail so she could go home tonight. I feel like I’ve been at the courthouse for a week rather than a single day.”

“You must be exhausted.”

“Yeah, but I still wanted to see you. Pris is so wound up about the arrest and the indignity of spending hours in a holding cell that she couldn’t think straight. The only information I got, I got from the cops and the prosecutors; talking to Pris was like talking to a wall. But I want to do some damage control on this ASAP. I want to point the police in a different direction before they get around to indicting my client for murder. So I wanted to talk to someone who was actually there today, actually at the scene of the crime.”

“I don’t know what I can tell you. Denford must have been killed sometime before everyone arrived this morning. I mean, his body was in the middle of a crowded room. But the jewels were on display before the lights went out. I’d been admiring Jolly’s handiwork not fifteen minutes earlier. It was only after the lights came back on that I noticed they were missing . . . and no one else reported seeing anything amiss before then, either.”

“That’s helpful. So the murder and the theft weren’t committed at the same time. Maybe not even by the same people.”

“No one will believe that,” I said. “The two crimes
were committed in such physical and temporal proximity, everyone will assume that there’s only one perpetrator.”

He leaned back against the counter, ankles crossed, and stared into the middle distance for a while. “What about Pris?”

“What about her?”

“Well, was she acting funny this morning?”

“She had some sort of blowout with Phillip yesterday afternoon, but I didn’t see her in the ballroom at all this morning. At least, not until the lights came back on. I was a few minutes late to the opening of the show. Rena said she saw Pris before I got there, but by the time I arrived, I couldn’t find her anywhere. And I was looking for her, because we had business to discuss. If she was in the ballroom at all before the blackout, she’d left by the time I got there.”

“Really? She insists she was in the room, at her station, the whole morning.”

“Well, that’s weird. Why would she insist she was at the scene of the crime—a statement that makes her look guilty—when I’m mighty sure she was gone?”

“Her being gone when you got to the ballroom doesn’t exactly get her off the hook, especially if Phillip was killed before the masses started showing up this morning. But still, you’re right that she’d want to distance herself as much as possible from the location, if only to provide an alibi for the theft of the dangle.”

“I feel like I know Pris pretty well, but I don’t always understand why she does the things she does. The woman moves in mysterious ways.”

“Well, you certainly know Pris a lot better than I do. Is she capable of these crimes?”

“Rena made a pretty good case at dinner that the crimes aren’t Pris’s style. She’s more subtle. She would have found a way to embezzle money from someone, or helped Hal with one of his many scams, rather than steal an actual thing out from under everyone’s noses. But Pris has been under pressure lately, and so who knows?”

“But does she have it in her to break the law? Ignoring how the crimes were committed, does she have it in her to steal and kill?”

“There are times when I actually enjoy Pris’s company, but I’m always aware that her moral compass is a bit askew. Under the right circumstances, I could see her as a killer.”

Sean sighed. “Yeah, that’s the impression I got, too. And whatever happens, I can’t let her get in front of a jury. She’s so . . . so . . .”

“Superior? Dismissive? Snide?” I offered.

He laughed. “Yes. That. All of that.”

“Listen,” I said, “I know our friendship took a real blow that night of the storm.” The night an eighteen-year-old Sean Tucker pledged his love to me and begged me to dump my boyfriend. The night I shot him
down and told him I didn’t love him. The night he rode his bike off into the darkness and the rain and commenced a fifteen-year stretch of silence between us.

“It did,” he conceded.

“But we’re still friends, right? We’ve gotten past that bitterness?”

He blinked, considering. “I’m not sure I’ll ever be totally past that, Izzy, but yes, we’re still friends.”

I sighed in relief. “Then I have a major favor to ask. As your friend. If you haven’t really talked with Pris about the theft and the murder, could you still back out of representing her?”

Sean tilted his head to one side, brow furrowed in puzzlement. “I suppose so. In fact, I have a fairly full schedule these days and was thinking of referring her to my friend Rudy over in Wild Rapids. He’s got more experience working murder cases, and he wouldn’t be going into the case with the baggage of actually knowing Pris.”

“You mean he doesn’t already think she’s shady?”

Sean smiled. “I wouldn’t go quite that far, but I certainly know Hal and I don’t hold him in particularly high esteem. I’d like to think I’m a professional and could give Pris zealous representation no matter what my preexisting thoughts about her and her spouse may be, but why risk it?”

“Thank you.”

“Like I said, I’m not really doing it for you, though
I’m glad the decision makes you happy. But why would you want me to give up representing Pris? What difference does it make to you?”

“Because, before this is all over, I may need your services more.”

Seven

R
ena and I arrived at the show bright and early the following morning. Once again, Jinx did her turn as fashion model while wearing hot-pink neck and mitt ruffs. The effect was a sort of seventies bell-bottoms-and-poncho look, and the hot pink set off my big girl’s black-and-white fur to perfection. Since she clocked in at nearly twenty pounds, I had her set up in a crate for medium-sized dogs because cat kennels were just too cramped for her to spend an entire day in.

I’d had Jinx for several years, having surprised myself by adopting her at an event at the Merryville mall. As she’d aged, she’d started slowing down, her body becoming more lean. Still the cat had swagger. She looked at me through the bars of the kennel, and
I could swear I saw her wink at me. Unlike many cats who get skittish around strangers, Jinx lapped up the attention like sweet cream.

Rena offered to man our stall for the morning while I wandered the show a bit, trying to locate Gandhi. I took a handful of our cards to hand out as I hunted.

I made a complete circuit around the ballroom, watching the fanciers tending their furry charges and scanning the floor for a glimpse of Gandhi. I couldn’t decide whether I hoped he was in the room with all the cats—where he was prey, but where I might actually find him—or that he had escaped into some other part of the hotel—where he would be on his own, a life that seemed to work for him, until some disgruntled guest or health inspector got the little guy exterminated.

I’d finished a lap of the room, with one potential guinea pig sighting (it turned out to be a plush cat toy), and was on my way back to our booth, when someone tapped me on the arm.

“I remember you.” I turned to find I had just passed the outspoken woman from yesterday’s crime scene, the woman with the wire-rimmed glasses and the cribbage board. “You were the one who found Phillip’s body.”

“How do you—?”

“Know so much about what happened?” she finished for me. “Well, my table is right there.” She pointed to a table at the end of the row, just one in from the aisle
where we’d set up the Trendy Tails booth. “And I pay attention.”

Hmmm. I wondered whether other people might refer to her “paying attention” as “meddling.”

I extended my hand, happy to welcome a kindred spirit. “Izzy—”

“McHale. Yes, I know. You design the cat clothes.”

“And dog clothes.”

She blinked at me like I’d suddenly started speaking another language.

Finally, she took my hand. A bracelet hung from her birdlike wrist, tinkling with charms shaped like hearts and cats. “Ruth Kimmey.”

“It’s nice to meet you, Ruth. Which of these beautiful babies is yours?”

I followed Ruth the handful of steps to her station. Her kennel was made of black wire and draped with faux leopard fur. Inside, an oval cat bed exploded with fur the color and texture of dandelion fluff. As I bent down to examine more closely, the fluff rippled gently and one baleful blue eye popped open and latched onto me.

“Gorgeous,” I said.

“He is, isn’t he? This is Cataclysm Ranger.”

“Cataclysm?”

Ruth cocked her head and studied me curiously. “Do you know much about cat shows, Izzy?”

I shrugged one shoulder. “Not much,” I conceded.
“I’m sure some of my customers show their animals, but it’s not something that comes up in our conversations over fashion.”

“Well, let me bring you up to speed. I love to share my love of cats with others. Show animals are known by their mother’s cattery—in Ranger’s case, his mama was from a cattery in Iowa called Cataclysm. He’s a peke-faced sterling Persian.”

“A what-what?”

“Peke-faced means his profile is vertical, without a muzzle sticking out to ruin the line. Sterling means his fur is white with just the very tips shaded in gray. That’s what makes him sparkle like that.”

“Interesting.”

“Ranger is a grand premier. He’s actually racked up enough wins that he’d be a grand champion if my son-of-a-gun ex-husband hadn’t had him neutered. He’s nearly flawless. Just a hint of tarnishing around his nose.”

One thing I’d learned during my days of planning for the cat show is that unaltered cats competed for champion and grand-champion status while neutered males could only achieve the status of grand premier.

As the cat lifted its head and opened both eyes I could see just the faintest hint of yellowing in the fur between Ranger’s nose and upper lip. If Ruth hadn’t pointed it out, I wouldn’t have noticed.

“You can barely see that,” I said.

Ruth shrugged. “The judges are paid to see that. Even when I use Ducky White on his muzzle, the judges seem to spot it.”

“Ducky White?”

“It’s a coat chalk. My personal favorite. It’s used to whiten the coat and absorb any stray oil on the cat. Like I said, it hides Ranger’s tarnish well, but not quite well enough. He more than makes up for that coat flaw with his straight back and perfect little cobby body. He also shows well. His temperament is perfect. When he’s in the judging ring, being handled by the judge, he’s alert but still. And when the judge brings out a toy, he sits up on his back legs, showing off his body structure, and reaches up and out to bat at the toy so he doesn’t block his beautiful face. He nails it every time.”

“Wow.” I studied the giant fluff ball in the crate. Jinx was a long-haired breed, and her fur was winter-ready plush, but it was nowhere near as full and dense as Ranger’s. I thought about how much time I spent combing out Jinxie’s lovely locks. “What does it take to keep Ranger’s fur so nice?”

“Daily comb-outs to start. Then, the day before the show, Ranger gets a full bath: four lathers with complete rinses between each, then a blowout, followed by a bit of grooming just to make sure his coat is perfectly symmetrical: ear tufts, whiskers, and eyebrows. Day of the show, I comb through the Ducky White to freshen him up and try to cover that tarnishing a bit.”

“So that’s what Pris would have done? The full bath?”

“If I trusted a stranger with my Ranger, then yes. But I don’t. I always groom him myself, tip to tail. Though I seem to have forgotten my grooming kit, so that criminal will get some money out of me before the day is done. Or, at least, her business will.”

That criminal
. Poor Pris. We’d both been hoping that this show would help our businesses really take off. I’d hoped to gain some more Internet business, and Pris had hoped that she could secure invitations to other M-CFO events where she could set up mobile grooming stations. But with the cat fanciers referring to Pris as “that criminal” instead of “that groomer,” I feared she—and Prissy’s Pretty Pets—might be doomed.

“I won’t be happy about it, though,” she continued. “Pris doesn’t carry my brand of grooming shears. I only use Guttenheim shears. The kind that Mr. Denford sells on his Classy Cat Web site.”

Ruth reached a finger through the bars of Ranger’s kennel and stroked the area beneath his mouth, what would have been his neck if Persians had real necks.

“I’m surprised you’re not out watching the agility show. Ranger here only does conformation judging; I wouldn’t risk him getting grimy or falling on the agility course. But it is wildly entertaining to watch.”

Ruth beckoned to a statuesque woman in a crystal-studded leopard tracksuit, her hair bleached beyond
blond, her eye makeup more appropriate for a cabaret than a cat show. I recognized her as the breeder who’d gotten into a tizzy about her tabby’s markings on the day before the show was scheduled to start. She’d been in head-to-toe leopard then, too. Apparently, she had a very distinct sense of style.

The woman squeed and rushed to our side, a happy little waggle in her walk.

“Izzy, this is T. J. Leuzinger, owner of Cataclysm Cattery. T.J., Izzy owns Trendy Tails, the pet boutique here in town.”

T.J. reached out and grasped one of my hands in both of her bejeweled mitts. Her hands smelled like coconut.

“So great to meet you, Izzy. I’ve seen some of your designs in the showroom. You’re quite a hit.”

Her comment did my heart good.

“T.J., could you watch Ranger for a bit? I don’t want to leave him alone, but Izzy here’s never seen a cat-agility competition so I want to show her what we do.”

“Of course. Be happy to. I haven’t had a chance to get caught up with this handsome fella in quite a while.”

We left T.J. making cooing sounds to Ranger as Ruth led me out the side door of the North Woods Hotel and into a giant parklike setting. Although you could hear cars passing by, lilac bushes blocked the
green space from any view of Beechnut Road. In the distance, I spotted a gazebo where many a Merryville wedding had taken place. Closer, though, a generous white tent had been set up about fifty feet from the door. A huge crush of people gathered tight around the perimeter of the tent. From the cheering, I guessed that the agility show was already in progress.

Despite the crowd, Ruth managed to strong-arm her way to the front, securing the two of us spaces to stand just outside the velvet rope that marked off the course. I felt guilty about both our barging and my height, so I crouched down a little for the people behind me.

I quickly took in the lay of the land. The agility course had been “carpeted” with a cheap green Astroturf, likely to protect the tender pads on the cats’ paws from dirt and rocks. At one corner of the course, a pudgy man in jeans and a “Cats Rule, Dogs Drool” T-shirt was getting a lean Russian blue situated to start.

“In case you were wondering,” Ruth said quietly, subtly pointing her pinkie toward the judging table, “Pamela Rawlins is not a fan of agility. She’s a conformation snob.” Pamela sat at a small table, wedged between Mari Aames and Marsha Denford, her pitch hair glistening in the bright August sunlight. None of the women appeared particularly happy to be there, but Pamela’s face was set in an obvious pout.

“My gracious,” I said, “how can three women manage to have their backs to one another while still sitting in a straight line?”

Ruth hooted. “You got that right. Those ladies would literally bend over backward to avoid one another.”

“Why? They were all clustered together like baby chicks yesterday while the police were processing the crime scene. There was plenty of space in the ballroom, even with the taped-off bit. I assumed they must have wanted to be together.”

“Oh, sure,” Ruth said. “But I don’t think they were offering one another sympathy. I think they were each keeping an eye on the other two. See, all three of them wanted a piece of Phillip Denford, and there just wasn’t enough of Phillip to go around.”

“Really?” I prodded.

“Absolutely. Marsha and Mari have been at it for years. Marsha needs Phillip so she can be Marsha Denford and Mari needs Phillip so she has a job. Each sees the other as a threat. Then, last year, there was a rumor that Denford and Pamela had had a little fling. This, of course, did not make Marsha happy. I don’t know whether she was genuinely hurt by the affair or just embarrassed by it, but either way she’s given Pamela the cold shoulder ever since. And Pamela pushed her way into acting as cocoordinator of this silver-anniversary event, edging Mari farther to the side and threatening her job. I’m not sure what Pamela wanted
out of the whole deal—if she was happy playing a bigger role in the M-CFO or if she saw herself as some genuine love interest—but Phillip definitely planned to placate her with the event coordinator title . . . Even then, it was just a title. Mari’s still the one who did all the heavy lifting.”

“It all sounds so . . . complicated.”

Ruth laughed again. “This is nothing compared to the old days. The world of cat shows, or at least those sponsored by the Midwest Cat Fanciers’ Organization, has always been a hotbed of intrigue. I have to admit that the murder takes things to a whole new level, but it’s still tame compared to the days of off-the-books kitten swapping and key parties.”

I tried to imagine mousy-looking diminutive Ruth Kimmey, garbed in a cat sweatshirt, tossing her keys into a bowl, and I just couldn’t get there.

“Oh, he’s ready to start,” she said. “This should be good. That’s Jeffrey Brockman. Some people call him ‘the cat whisperer,’ because he can get his animals to perform the most amazing feats of agility on courses far more difficult than this.”

Sure enough, the man with the Russian blue was standing on his tiptoes, a cat dancer toy in one hand. A bell rang, and he started to trot along the side of the course, leading the cat with the wand. The blue ran up a ramp, then down the other side, made its way
through nylon tunnels that curved in gentle arcs, slithered its way through a slalom of orange cones, and then did a graceful leap over a low hurdle. As he landed, though, his tail caught the crossbar of the hurdle and knocked it off. The whole crowd gasped.

Ruth moaned softly. “Too bad. Ivan was a favorite for the course. His time was great, but there will be a deduction for knocking off the crossbar. Jeffrey must be crushed.”

It was true. Even across the tent, I could see the expression on Jeffrey’s face. He was stroking Ivan gently, letting the cat nibble treats from his hand, but he looked distraught.

For some reason it struck me hard as I took in the sense of longing and loss in Jeffrey’s expression: other than Mari Aames, no one had looked even half so devastated upon learning of Phillip Denford’s demise.

*   *   *

Jack brought Rena and me lunch that day, toasted cheese sandwiches wrapped in wax paper, creamy tomato soup in a thermos, and a half-dozen tea cookies from my friend Taffy’s Happy Leaf Tea Shoppe.

“Any luck finding Gandhi?” he asked as he handed over the canvas lunch bag, a teasing smile gracing his lips. I’d filled him in on our tiny escape artist’s newest trick: a rodent navigating a room filled with cats.

“Not yet. Any luck finding Phillip’s killer?”

He glared at me and shook his head. “Look. I realize the evidence so far is circumstantial, but all of it points to Pris. We know she had a fight with Phillip the day before he died. We know she had access to the type of tool used to kill the man. And we know that she stole the jeweled collar piece.”