Dog Helps Those (Golden Retriever Mysteries) (17 page)

He groaned. “Steve.”

“Hey, we’re going to that dog show tomorrow. You should be prepared in case we run into anyone who might be a suspect.”

“I really hate you, you know that?”

“Oh, come on. You know you don’t mean that. Just send me the list. You know you want to.”

“If I didn’t have this other case that the chief was hot for…”

“I know, I know. I’ll do some quick research for you, just to help you focus.”

“Fine. I’m emailing you the list now.”

“See you tomorrow morning. I’ll call you if I find anything before then.”

The email popped into my inbox a minute later, with three Excel spreadsheets attached. I saved them all to my jump drive and then opened the first one up.

It covered the casual clients who, like Rick, brought their dogs up to Rita’s occasionally for help with agility training. I was interested to note that Rick had been paying Rita twenty bucks a week for her help in preparing Rascal.

I opened the other two spreadsheets. One included a worksheet for every dog Rita had sold for the last five years, including the dog’s parentage, current owners, and any medals won at dog shows. The other was similar, but these were dogs Rita trained for both obedience and agility.

The sheer number of people was overwhelming, and I started to think that Rick had played me the way Tom Sawyer did when he got his friends to paint that fence for him.

I decided to begin with Rita’s training clients, because I’d seen the way she behaved, and it was easy to imagine her pissing someone off. There were a dozen embedded worksheets, one dog per sheet. Eight were current clients, and four were people who had trained with Rita in the past. I opened up the worksheet for the first of the ones who were no longer Rita’s clients.

The sheet for a dachshund named Lady’s Luscious Lover, aka Lush, indicated he was nowhere near a champion. He had been entered in eight shows, and only won a third-place ribbon once. Rita’s notes were scathing—Lush’s owner, a woman named Paula Madden, was unable to control him; the dog was slow, lazy and a disgrace to his pedigree. And those were the G-rated comments. I was surprised that Rita would use words like easy and brain-dead to describe Paula. I wondered if she’d said those things out loud, too.

I did a quick search on Paula Madden and discovered she owned a shoe store at the Oxford Valley Mall. When I pulled up one of her online ads, I saw that little Lush figured prominently. He was photographed resting his head on a pair of pumps, sniffing high heels, and with one paw delicately placed in a jeweled sandal. The rhinestones on his collar matched the ones on the shoe’s straps.

Okay, another crazy dog lover. I couldn’t throw stones, though. The big goofy golden dog snoozing on the floor next to me was proof of that.

The next sheet was curiously brief. Baby Blue Eyes had a similar pedigree, but had never entered a show. A brief note at the bottom of the page read: “Deaf. Offered replacement, but idiot refused.”

The owner’s name was Sal Piedramonte. His address was on Samarkand Court in Stewart’s Crossing, and I recognized it was one of the short cul-de-sacs in River Bend, at the other end of the neighborhood from my townhouse.

I lived on Sarajevo Court, which ran into Minsk Lane. The complex had been built by émigrés from the former Soviet Union, who had brought a bit of home to Stewart’s Crossing. My two-bedroom townhouse, with an attached garage, was
a
Latvia, and models
were named
for Serbia, Lithuania, Estonia and Croatia. The largest was the Montenegro, which I’d heard one of my neighbors call the Mount Negro.

I tried to remember if Rochester and I had ever met a deaf dachshund on our walks, but little dogs barked aggressively at Rochester, so we usually walked quickly past them.

Nothing jumped out at me about the dog on the next sheet, Puffball, other than that he had only one name, and I couldn’t find out anything about his owner, Pippin Forrest. Puffball had entered a few shows but Pippin’s handling was sloppy and according to Rita’s notes the dog hadn’t medaled.

The last owner to have left training with Rita was Mark Figueroa, and I knew him. He was an antique dealer in Stewart’s Crossing and he often stopped in at Gail’s café for coffee when I was grading papers. He was an avid reader, and we talked about mystery novels and travel memoirs sometimes. I didn’t realize he had a dog.

Rochester turned on his side and scratched his toenails against the wooden floor. “Rochester! No!” I didn’t want to end up getting stuck with a bill for refinishing the floors.

His feathery tail thumped against the floor, but he didn’t lift his head. “What’s up, boy? You need to go out?”

He jumped up as if he’d stuck his paw in an electric socket and began dancing around. I wanted to open the french doors and let him out into the garden, but I knew he couldn’t be trusted. He’d tackle some sandwich-eating student, intercept someone’s frisbee, or terrorize the squirrels.

Of course, because I had a lot on my plate, Rochester was maddeningly slow about doing his business. By the time I got back to the office a slew of new email messages waited for me, and I had to put aside sleuthing to work at the job that paid my bills. I kept hoping I could come up with some way to delegate some of the work to Rochester, because there had to be some way to channel all his intelligence and energy.

Instead, I did all the work myself, and he slept. Before I closed my computer down for the day, I printed out all the worksheets Rick had sent me so I could study them at home the next morning.

As usual, though, Rochester had other ideas.

I meant to make myself a quick dinner and then sit down with those printouts. But Rochester was antsy, even after our regular walk and his bowl food. He kept rocketing around the living room and the only thing I could do was take him for a long walk, and use the opportunity to check out my newly-discovered neighbor, Sal Piedramonte.

It was still early evening, the sky a violet blue, as we circled through the Eastern European-named streets of River Bend. We walked slowly, heading toward the other end of the neighborhood. I wasn’t sure where Samarkand Court was but I had a general idea, and after continuing past the big lake at the center of the community, we approached it. I noted Sal Piedramonte’s house, the same model as my own, and continued walking. When we turned the corner onto Vilna Vista, we stumbled into the middle of a doggy play date.

A dachshund and a Shih Tzu rolled around together in the grass. A golden we knew named Hopi dashed around them. Hopi’s dad, a white-haired retiree named Dave, motioned us to join in. I let my dog off his leash and he went chasing after Hopi, and I walked up to Dave.

He introduced me to the twenty-something dark-haired guy with him. “This is Sal. “That’s his doxy, Blue. The Shih Tzu’s my son’s. I’m taking care of him while they’re on vacation.”

“I’ve never seen a dachshund with a white ear before,” I said to Sal, happy to run into the guy I’d been looking for. “Gives her character.”

“There’s a reason for that,” he said. “One white ear, plus blue eyes, are markers for congenital deafness.”

I remembered the note on Rita’s spreadsheet. “She can’t hear at all?”

He shook his head. “The first couple of months I had her, I thought she was just stubborn, the way she ignored all my commands and couldn’t be housebroken. Finally one day a friend of mine was over and he figured out she wasn’t stubborn. She was deaf.”

“Wow. You didn’t know that when you got her?”

“The breeder should have known, but she pretended she didn’t.” The big dogs continued to run circles around us, but Blue and the Shih Tzu came over and sprawled on the ground at our feet. “I went back to her and complained, and you know what she said?”

I shook my head.

“She said she didn’t sell defective merchandise. So she would take back Blue and put her to sleep, and give me a choice of another dog.”

“That’s harsh,” I said. “I’d never consider a dog merchandise.”

“Me either. I told her what she could do with her merchandise and I walked out.”

“This was a local breeder?” I said, playing along.

He nodded. “Her name is Rita Gaines. Stay away from her.”

Dave agreed. “I’ve heard bad things about that woman, and not just from Sal.”

“Rita Gaines,” I said. “Isn’t that the name of the woman who was killed last week?”

“Really? You mean somebody beat me to it?” Sal said. “Good job, whoever did.”

“Now, Sal, you shouldn’t say things like that,” Dave said.

“Why not? She was a bitch, and I’m glad she’s dead.” He leaned down and picked up Blue, cuddling the dachshund in his arms, and I could see how bright her blue eyes were.

“How is it, having a deaf dog?” I asked. “I mean, you can’t call her or scold her or anything, can you?”

“We have a series of hand signals. Once I made sure she was always looking at me when I wanted her to do something, we started to get along fine.”

He raised the dog up and kissed her on her snout. “Isn’t that true, Baby Blue?”

Rochester hopped up and put his paws on my groin. I reached down and scratched behind his ears, and then we said goodbye to Dave and Sal and their dogs. Walking home, I wondered if Sal had been faking his surprise at Rita’s death.

Could he have killed her? What if he’d gone back to her to complain about something, and she’d made disparaging comments about his baby. Could he have gotten so angry that he’d have killed her? He was a young guy; he probably knew, at least a bit, about roofies and the effect they had. He could have slipped the roofie into her iced tea, then injected her with the cobra venom.

I shook my head. Rita hadn’t been killed in the heat of an angry passion—someone had thought the crime through carefully, noting the cobra venom at the barn and then figuring out how to inject Rita with it. That didn’t sound like a guy who was pissed off because his dog had been called defective.

Darkness fell quickly as we walked back home, and by the time we got there Rochester was worn out, and I’d spent too much time thinking about Rita Gaines without any result. I tabled those thoughts and turned to my laptop. I logged into the online course management software Eastern used, and navigated to the drop box where my tech writing students had submitted their final research papers.

Most of the students were decent writers, and we’d done enough exercises through the term that they had their research and citations pretty close to correct. I marked them on a couple of other criteria—including an appropriate, and correctly sized, picture or photograph; using a table to lay out the picture and the accompanying text; using different fonts as appropriate for headings and captions.

I looked up from grading the last paper to see Rochester over by the coffee table where I had piled the printouts of Rita’s customers. He had his nose up to them, and as I watched, he reared up and used his paw to swipe them to the ground.

“Rochester!” I yelped, jumping up. “Don’t do that.”

He began pushing the pages around with his nose. He had an unfortunate taste for paper, and I was worried that the next morning I’d be pulling the ropy, barely digested pulp out of his butt—not something I particularly enjoyed.

I remembered I had carried the sheets home in my briefcase—where I often had a couple of dog treats as well. Had the smell of the treats attached themselves to the pages?

He was sniffing at one sheet in particular as I leaned down and cleaned them up. I snatched it out from under his paws and saw it was the one for Mark Figueroa, my antique dealer friend, and his dog, Judy’s Last Song, a Chihuahua. Doing a bit of quick cross-referencing, I saw that Judy and Carissa’s dog, Tia Juana, had been littermates. But Mark had only attended a few training sessions with Rita before dropping out.

Did he have some kind of grudge against Rita? Perhaps she had criticized his dog, too. Mark and Gail, from the Chocolate Ear, were close friends, and I could ask her about him. But her café had closed by then, and Mark’s antique store in downtown Stewart’s Crossing would be closed, too.

I picked up all the spreadsheets and put them on top of a counter Rochester couldn’t reach, then went back to my laptop to finish grading the last paper. Then I exported the grade book to another Excel spreadsheet, where I calculated the semester totals. The last step was to enter them into the college mainframe. But since a couple of students might still submit their work late, I decided to wait. It was a lot of trouble to change a grade once it was in the mainframe.

After I shut down the laptop, I dug around on the kitchen counter until I could find Rochester’s brush. “Come here, puppy,” I called, and sat down on the tile floor. “We have to make you handsome for the show tomorrow.”

He scampered over and put his head in my lap. I started brushing his coat, pulling out strands of soft golden hair. “I could make a sweater out of you,” I said, as the hair piled up. He kept trying to go under the kitchen table, leaving me only his back end to brush, then turning around on me.

By the time I was finished hair was everywhere, and I had to get the vacuum cleaner out to pick it all up. Rochester clambered upstairs and hid from the noise under my bed. When I came upstairs myself, he came out and jumped up on the bed to watch TV with me.