Double Dog Dare (16 page)

I scanned the vehicles parked on the street. I didn’t see any adorned with a What’s the Scoop sign. But the person apparently picking up dog poop from the front yard facing Avvie’s next-door neighbor sure resembled, from this distance, the younger guy I’d seen near my home the day Rachel had pointed out the newest poop scooper on our street. Not that I was certain—especially with my mind, despite my best intentions, a bit wine-clouded. But that’s what I thought from the way he moved and his similar outfit, including frayed jeans, although his muscle shirt du jour wasn’t white but gray.

Heck, he could be someone else altogether, even the person who lived there, out clearing his own premises of poop. But the metallic tool he used resembled those I’d seen in the hands of the What’s the Scoop staff.

With a shrug, I drove off toward this evening’s first pet-sitting gig: Widget, a cute terrier mix. Rachel had been his caretaker not only for midday walks, but also for morning and evening visits during a few days this week. Now it was my turn to drop in and feed and walk the adorably energetic pup, whose owner lived in a small stucco home in the northern Valley. That meant a bit of a distance to drive, but I stayed on Coldwater heading north, soon reaching the straight and flat area beyond the canyon.

I was at Magnolia Boulevard when my cell phone rang. Of course I immediately grabbed it from my purse and put it on speakerphone. I hadn’t yet gotten myself a hands-free or Blue Tooth to chew on in the car even though talking on a cell phone held to your ear while driving was illegal in California.

I checked caller ID, which I recognized immediately. Not someone I wanted to speak with, but what else could I do?

“Hello, Amanda,” I said formally to Jeff’s ex-wife, who’d promised to stay far away from him when I kept my own promise and helped clear her of a murder accusation.

“What’s going on, Kendra? Why didn’t you tell me Jeff’s missing? It’s one thing for me to keep away from him, but that doesn’t mean I don’t care. I’m holding you responsible, Kendra, since he’s yours now. Where the hell is Jeff?”

Chapter Thirteen

I WISHED I had some kind of canned response to toss out now, each time Jeff’s name came up, although I would of course obtain a very different reaction from Amanda Hubbard than I had from Avvie Milton.

With my wine-misted mind, and even mistier eyes, I decided to move to the side of the road. Fortunately, I saw a small shopping center, so I pulled in and parked.

“There’s not much I can tell you, Amanda,” I told her. “How did you find out about Jeff?” Corina Carey’s, or her cohorts’, blatant attempts to blast the Escalade escapade into the news? But that was a few days ago now. Maybe Amanda had missed it, since she sounded as angry as if this was all new to her.

“Your friend the police detective, Noralles, came to my house to try to detect something,” she spat into the phone. “Naturally, I couldn’t answer any of his questions. I didn’t even know there was a problem, let alone have an idea of a solution. Now tell me, Kendra, what’s going on? Even if you can’t explain where Jeff is, you were at least aware he was missing.”

“Yes,” I said sadly. No use rubbing it in that she could have learned about it sooner had she paid attention to the brief media flurry. I related what little I knew, up to and including the location of his Escalade submerged in the canal up north.

“And you were going to tell me about this when?” she demanded.

“How about . . . never?” I intoned. “It really isn’t your business any longer.”

“Bitch!” she screeched, then hung up.

I sat for a few minutes without moving—except for those damnable tears rolling down my damp cheeks yet again. At least this confrontation had been by phone and was brief. With luck, this would end my contact with Amanda regarding this situation.

On the other hand, my luck these days was decidedly awful.

Still, as I sat there, an idea snuck into my mind. I dug into a pocket of my enormous purse and—yes! There it was. The business card handed me by Beryl Leeds at The Clone Arranger.

I didn’t imagine she lived in her P.O. box, which had a Beverly Hills zip code, but for ease of retrieving her mail, she might have selected to have it sent there because she actually resided in that upscale L.A. area.

She’d had some apparent success with The Clone Arranger. She knew the cast of characters, even the deceased Earl Knox, though she had been shown out of the visitors lounge by a more august executive, Mason Payne.

Even though I’d introduced myself under an alias to Ms. Leeds, might she nevertheless allow me to visit her and her cloned pup? I called to find out.

The answer, almost to my utter surprise, was yes. She gave me her actual address, and even directions, when I called her, so I headed there, back over the hill once more.

Unsurprisingly for someone who’d once had a starring role in a popular TV show, her house was huge, although perhaps not by Beverly Hills standards. It was on a wide residential avenue, surrounded by substantial peers. I saw it through the light-colored metal of the gate anchored into a tall wall that appeared to be marble. I parked on the nearby street, and at the gate I pressed a button on an intercom and announced myself.

The gate swung open automatically, and I trod over artistically arranged concrete pavers to the front door. There, I heard a bunch of barking while a housekeeper allowed me in and showed me into a vast living room with a vaulted ceiling, oil paintings on the walls, and burgundy leather furnishings atop a tight-woven pink rug. On one of the multiple sofas sat Beryl, surrounded by several Labrador retrievers.

Wearing slender blue jeans with a loose, lacy top, she rose gracefully at my entrance, and the dogs slipped onto the floor and approached me. “So you’re Kendra Ballantyne, and not Kenni Ballan?” she inquired with a laugh. Her arched brows, slightly darker than her pale brown, well-styled hair, rose in apparent amusement. “Why the subterfuge at The Clone Arranger?”

I had stooped to pet the pups. Two were pale in color, one full-grown and one clearly young—original and clone, I supposed. The third was the chocolate Lab I’d met before, Melville. He seemed to take stock of who I was—a friend, Beryl reminded him when he didn’t act especially sure at first. Then he settled down and let me pat him. Beryl confirmed her fur kids’ identities and the pup’s origin before I responded to her question.

“I’ll be frank, Beryl.” I waited while her housekeeper served us steaming, strong-smelling coffee in floral china cups, then left the room. I continued, “I’m an acquaintance of Lois Terrone, the woman identified in the media as a person of interest in Earl Knox’s death.”

Any semblance of amusement immediately disappeared from Beryl’s attractive, midforties face. “Then why should I speak with you?” she asked as coldly as if the room suddenly swirled with snow.

“Because I’m seeking the truth. If it helps to clear Lois, all the better, but if not, that’s the way it is.” I took a sip of coffee. Definitely strong. I felt the caffeine skate-board through my veins, eradicating any remaining effects of my earlier sips of wine. “I was at The Clone Arranger that day with a friend’s dog, since I wanted to learn about the business. Lois was upset because she believed they had something to do with the death of the beloved dog she had brought there to be cloned. Meeting you, and hearing how satisfied you were with their work, made me more inclined to believe that what happened to her dog was unfortunate but unrelated to her handling there.” Not entirely true, but it made Beryl’s frozen features start to relax, allowing her accordioned crow’s-feet to loosen up.

“That’s right,” she said softly. “I’d heard from Mason and some of the others about that poor woman, their lack of success in that particular cloning, and how upset she was when her dog died. But you can see how wonderful their results can be. Come here, Cartwright,” she crooned to the Lab puppy with the large feet. Cartwright wriggled his way over to his mistress, his DNA-identical dad, Churchill, right behind.

They did look alike, despite the difference in their ages. Both were similar shades of off-white, with alert brown eyes, slim builds, and adorable and intelligent faces.

“And you didn’t have any trouble with Churchill about having his DNA removed, however they do it, or health issues afterward?”

“Not a one,” Beryl replied firmly, with Labs on her lap once more. “And that woman—Lois? She talked about making trouble for them, and I, for one, was really perturbed. I’d planned on doing testimonials, not just on their website—whatever was necessary to help The Clone Arranger keep doing its wonderful work. We’ve even discussed my doing an infomercial on their behalf.”

“I understand,” I said. Then had to ask, “Since you’re a treasured customer of long standing, did The Clone Arranger ever explain their method of cloning to you?”

She scowled. “Even if they did, I’d hardly tell you, Kendra. It’s highly secret.” She brightened once more. “But my expertise is acting, so I doubt I’d understand the finer points of cloning anyway. I just paid them, then received my darling duplicate puppy dog. And believe it or not, they charged less than some other outfits I heard about, including one that went out of business. In any event, I’m expecting a baby and I’ll be able to bring it home in a few months, assuming everything went well with Melville, and so far I’m told it did.”

The chocolate Lab, who’d stayed with me while I stroked behind his ears, apparently heard his name and headed for his mistress.

I had only one more question to ask. “Did you happen to see anyone at The Clone Arranger who might have . . . well, perhaps been jealous of Earl? Or angry with him? Or—”

“You mean, my dear,” she said drolly, “did I happen to see anyone who had it in for him enough to kill him, to take the heat off your friend Lois? The answer is no. Everyone got along fine.”

Not exactly the answer I’d hoped for, but I had gotten a lot out of my interview with Beryl Leeds. As I’d believed before, she was one happy customer of The Clone Arranger. She’d seen suitable results.

Did that mean Lois’s complaints, and Jeff’s ensuing investigation, had been inappropriate?

I wasn’t quite willing to go that far . . . at least not yet.

ON MY WAY back from Beverly Hills, I received another cell phone call. Okay, I was a lawyer. Getting a call from a frantic client, even on a Saturday afternoon, wasn’t entirely unanticipated. It definitely acted as a distraction from all the other, worse stuff churning around in my life.

It was Corbin Hayhurst of Show Biz Beasts, who said they’d been contacted by some of their unhappy customers and were told to expect service of an official lawsuit complaint the following week. “What should we do, Kendra?” he all but wailed. “I thought you said there wasn’t any basis for someone to sue us.”

“No reasonable basis,” I confirmed. “The thing is, under our legal system, people can sue each other for unreasonable stuff, and it’s up to the defense to show how stupid it all is.”

“Then you’ll fix it?”

“I’ll certainly do my damnedest,” I equivocated as I pulled the car up to my first late-day pet-sitting spot. “But nothing in the law is certain.” At his silence, I said, “Tell you what. I’ll come see you tomorrow and we’ll talk about it some more.”

“At my expense at your hourly rate,” Corbin grumbled, but we nevertheless set a time, late morning. So what if it was Sunday? Weekends meant little in the la-la land of L.A.

The distraction of that client call assisted me in temporarily ignoring the whole Jeff situation—or so I told myself. In fact, I enjoyed my pet-sitting, then my post-dinner games with Lexie and Odin. Odin’s injury still seemed to be healing well. At least it looked good, and certainly didn’t prevent him from playing.

Later, we got together with Rachel and Beggar at my rented-out abode, and Rachel and I compared notes for our animal care the upcoming week.

Fortunately for me, and sadly for her, her exciting upcoming auditions had been postponed. But at least her dad, Russ, would be back in the area, which was always a good thing for her development of additional film industry contacts.

No post-shower phone calls that night, so my heart rate remained stable. My sleep quotient stayed low, though, so I got up and worked on my lists of anything new I could think of relating to Jeff and his vanishing act—which at that point wasn’t much. I booted up my computer, too, but mostly played solitaire, as I soon realized I’d already researched the same old stuff on my lists: cloning, The Clone Arranger, its personnel, Jeff Hubbard, Hubbard Security, Lois Terrone . . . I was fast running into a rut.

So what else could I get into? My legal cases, of course. My favorite involved my relatively new attorney avocation of ADR: animal dispute resolution. What could I do to get the dissatisfied customers of Show Biz Beasts to calm down and call off their proposed lawsuit? Nothing sailed off the computer screen and into my tired mind, but at least I’d set my subconscious back onto that particular path . . . I hoped.

Eventually, I snuggled into my bed, solo except for the cuddliest of canines, Lexie and Odin. The next morning, I intended to take my charges along on pet-sitting so I wouldn’t be alone in the car. As we prepared to pile into my rental car, I noticed my neighbor across the street, Phil Ashler, out walking his relatively new rescue dog, Middlin— middle-size and a middling shade of brown. I hurried to the wrought iron fence to say hi—about the same time he was greeted by the older poop scooper who was exiting the minivan with the Where’s the Scoop sign on the side. Where was he working around here this morning? I assumed that Rachel had intended that he clean up on my property only once a week, and same thing with Phil and Middlin.

“Hi, guys,” I called out as Lexie and Odin leaped against the fence beside me, obviously excited at the sight of Middlin.

“Kendra!” exclaimed Phil. My retired neighbor wore a baggy yellow T-shirt that emphasized his sallow complexion. He approached the fence with Middlin, which caused Lexie to slink into submission, but the more assertive Akita, Odin, stood his ground. Good thing the fence wouldn’t let any of the canines get closer together. “Good to see you,” he said. “How’ve you been?”