Give the Dog a Bone (13 page)

“Not really. Knew ’em well enough to say hey to, that’s all. Once Ken and I ended our work partnership, we didn’t used to socialize that much.”

This was a different story from the one he’d first given me, when he’d claimed that he went to his brother’s place “all the time.” I asked, “Why is that?”

He shrugged. “Couldn’t stand that damned wife of his, for one thing. Mary. What a gold digger.”

I made a sympathetic noise, agreeing completely with his assessment of Mary.

“All she ever wanted was to get money from him. See, Ken hit on a big discovery about TV circuitry. Happened a year after he and I had dissolved our business partnership. He struck it rich.”

“What unlucky timing for you, hey?”

He chuckled and shook his head. “Ah, hell. Some people are born lucky. Others aren’t.”

“You think Ken was born lucky?”

“Not by a longshot. Neither of us were. He had to fight for everything he got in this world. Just like me. But he’d’ve given me half of his profits on his invention anyway. I was too stubborn. Told him if he could make a fortune on some sweep-line TV part, I’d outdo him. It wasn’t as easy as I thought.”

Arlen helped me load the forty-pound bag of dog food into my cart. “What brings you to Boulder today?” I asked. “Visiting friends?”

“Uh, yeah. Exactly.” Arlen looked at his watch and said unconvincingly, “Oh, Jeez. Look at the time. I’d better get going.” He started for the front, deserting his cart.

“Aren’t you going to buy the dog treats you picked out?”

He turned to look back at me, but as he did so, I noticed the leather leash poking out of his pants pocket. It was curled up, the leather much too supple to be brand new. Why would he have an old leash with him?

“I’m . . . running too late now. I’d better just leave them. Nice seein’ you, though, Allida.”

“You, too.” Perhaps his sense of urgency to purchase dog treats had been driven by the need to bribe his way into Maggie’s heart, perhaps after having struck her today.

His eyes widened slightly, and he stashed the leash deeper in his pocket. “I, uh, look forward to seein’ you and the dog . . . Maggie, I mean, soon.”

“Yes. So do I.”

Though I intentionally made it seem as though I wasn’t looking, from the corner of my vision I saw him give me a slight double take as he left the store, his hand protectively jammed into the pocket that held the leather leash.

Chapter 13

As Russell had requested, I went to his condominium after work to water his plants, leaving Maggie in my car with the windows halfway down. It was a strange feeling—unlocking his door for the first time, walking into his home alone. Even to my inferior human nostrils, my first sensation was the pleasing scent of the place, a combination of too many fragrances at once to identify. Suddenly, I was filled with such a longing to be with Russell that my body ached. I wouldn’t feel quite so helpless in the face of these murders if he were here.

Perhaps Russell had even guessed that I’d feel drawn to him in his living quarters; surely he had a neighbor who could have easily fed the fish and watered the plants for him. After all, he must have made similar arrangements whenever he’d left town before we met.

The goldfish was in the kitchen. I dropped in a pellet of “weekend food,” and we locked eyes for a moment, the fish seeming every bit as unimpressed with me as I was with him. Or her. Good thing that goldfish never—to my knowledge—required therapy, as I was definitely unsuited for the job.

Russell hadn’t told me specifically where to look for plants, but I filled the small, yellow-plastic watering pot by the kitchen sink and went in search of all things green and leafy. Upstairs, I threw open the first door and saw that this was the spare bedroom, which was the only messy room in the house. Russell used it as a junk room, tossing his various rock-climbing gear and odd pieces of furniture and doodads without regard to any logical placement. If there was a plant in there someplace, it had better be a cactus or a self-waterer.

I went into the master bedroom. I’d never been in his bedroom before and felt a bit of a voyeur to be there now. He had a king-sized waterbed, with a multicolored striped down comforter and matching pillow shams.

There was a fern on the nightstand, which I watered. A photograph on the opposite nightstand caught my eye. It was an eight-by-ten, which I had to pick up and study before I could verify that it truly was a photograph of me . . . a head shot from just my shoulders up. I couldn’t place the picture, and only by noticing the unselfconsciousness of my smile could I remember the occasion. Russell had taken the picture at my house, just last month. He’d come to take me to some festival at Boulder Creek, and had asked me to pose with my dogs. I’d knelt between Doppler and Pavlov, but he’d cropped them out of the shot entirely.

Filled with sadness now, I set the picture back down and said quietly, “Oh, but Russell, I was smiling so freely because of my dogs. You can’t cut them out and still have me.”

I watered his other plants, stopped into Target for a new phone recorder, and drove home. Perhaps Maggie had picked up on my mood, for she was quiet the entire drive.

The dogs greeted one another and paid little attention to me. Mom gave me a big smile as she came from the kitchen to see me. Knowing Mom, she was probably feeling pretty guilty at having dropped Maggie off at my office.

She studied my features and said, “You look like you might have had a rough day.”

“Yeah, I did,” I muttered, not knowing where to start on my story of finding Ruby’s body.

“I’m so glad you brought Maggie home. I was afraid you’d overreact and not bring her.”

“She did fine. More or less.” Not counting her having been exorcised by a stranger in purple and smacked in the nose by a burglar-and-probable-two-time-killer.

“There was an article in today’s paper about the horrid mess you’re caught up in.”

“Already?” I stupidly asked in alarm, thinking she meant about the second murder.

“It was about those bones that Maggie dug up,” she went on. “They were from a grave in northeast Boulder. The police are thinking that it might have been some prank or initiation rites for a fraternity of some sort.” An instant later my first reaction must have registered, for she asked me pointedly, “What do you mean, ‘already’?”

Ignoring the question, I said, “I doubt the police really believe that the bones were just a prank. In any case,
I’m
sure the bones were a setup for Maggie to bring home, to push Ken over the edge.”

Mom furrowed her brow, pondering this, then said, “I don’t know, Allida. It seems reasonable to me that it could have been somebody’s immature prank. Maggie’s finding those bones might have been a coincidence.”

“Unless that’s what Ruby saw,” I murmured, thinking out loud. “Someone working with Maggie on fetching those bones. And Ruby never realized how important that was.”

“Who’s Ruby? I can’t follow a single word you’re saying.”

“She was one of Ken’s next-door neighbors. She left a bizarre message on my machine today. I went to check on her afterwards and . . . she was dead.”

“Oh, my God!” Mom leapt to her feet. “You found another dead body today? Allie, what is going on here?”

At the sound of her raised voice, all four dogs left their other canine activities and padded into the kitchen to join us. Dogs hope that any human outpouring of emotion might lead to their getting a tidbit, especially when the outburst takes place at the dinner table.

“I wish I knew.”

While gripping the top of her chair so tightly her knuckles were white, Mom studied my face. At length, she smoothed an errant lock from her braid and said gently, “We’ve got to get you out of here. Someplace where you’ll be safe . . . with your brother, maybe.”

“Mom, I’m not running halfway across the country. For one thing, the police will think that makes
me
look guilty.”

“Who cares? You’re not guilty. You’re my baby, and I want to protect you!”

“Mom!” I held my hands out, hoping that would be enough to help her realize that I was not a baby anymore.

“I wish you had never gotten involved with Maggie,” Mom muttered under her breath as she sat down again.

The next morning, I drove out once again to the trailer park. I was concerned about the fact that I’d taken it upon myself to put T-Rex in Yolanda’s care.

Despite what she’d said earlier, Mom now insisted on having Maggie stay home with her. This was convenient for me, but kept me preoccupied. Would Maggie drive Mom bananas by the time I got back? I assured myself that this would be a short visit; I had yesterday afternoon’s rescheduled appointments piled on top of today’s.

I climbed up the steps of Yolanda’s trailer. The front door was wide open, and I could see straight through this front-door screen and the glass back door into the yard. I spotted Yolanda out back and rounded the trailer. Yolanda knelt at the base of her small vegetable garden, with T-Rex lying on his tummy, his side pressed against the wire-mesh fence enclosing the garden.

“Good morning, Yolanda. I just wanted to drop by and check on T-Rex. How’s he doing?”

“Fine,” she answered over her shoulder, not looking up from her work of pulling out the tiniest of weeds from her soil. “You like cucumbers?”

“Not especially.”

“Me, neither. They sure like to grow here, though.” She rose and knocked the dirt clots from her knees. “Dog’s fine, as you can see.”

T-Rex rose and came over to me. He looked better than he had in a while. “You didn’t give him any medicine this morning, I take it?”

“Nah. No need for that. I took him out for a long walk first thing instead.”

“That’s great.” I knelt and gave T-Rex some strokes down his shoulders followed by an ear rub. “He’s got a lot of Labrador in him,” I murmured, more to myself than to her. “He was bred for hunting and swimming. He needs exercise, not to be drugged into complacency.”

Yolanda nodded, crossing her sturdy arms across her chest. “I know. Tried telling Ruby that. You know how folks are, though. We all seem to hear only what we want to hear.”

“Did you see anyone coming or going from her trailer yesterday afternoon?”

She shook her head. “Must’ve happened when I was watching my soaps. I’m pretty much lost to the world then.”

“I wonder if the killer was familiar enough with your routine to realize that.”

Yolanda shrugged. “Could be. That damned Rachel seems to know everyone’s routine around here.”

I must have raised an eyebrow, for she narrowed her eyes behind her bottle-cap lenses as if in disgust. “Nobody wants to listen to me, but I’m telling you, it’s Rachel Taylor. She did it. She killed Ken, and she killed Ruby, too.”

“Why do you think so? What motive would she have?”

Yolanda pursed her lips and shook her head, her eyes distant. “I don’t know
why
she did it. Just know that she
did
. I can read people.” She turned her magnified black eyes toward me. “Now, see, when I look at you, I can tell you got a whole mess of hurt you’re covering up for. But you got a bigger heart than you realize.”

Her words cut a bit close to the bone, and I snapped, “You could say that about almost anyone and it would seem insightful.”

She chuckled and shook her head, then got up and rounded the gate. “I was talking to this woman the other day. Lives down the other side of the trailer park. She says to me, ‘Yolanda, if’n you so wise, what you doin’ living here?’ ”

“What was your answer?”

“ ‘I guess that goes to show I ain’t so wise, then.’ ” She stroked T-Rex’s head. “My husband died a few years back. Left me enough money to live simply without working some eight-to-five job only to see it all go to the government.” She made a sweeping gesture. “I chose this.”

I nodded. Unlike my experiences with nearly everyone else in Ken’s life, I’d grown increasingly fond of Yolanda. She had a certain dignity and self-appreciation that I admired. Although it had been only a couple of days since we’d first met, it was already hard to fathom that I’d first thought of her as homely. Her pockmarked skin, thick glasses, and short bristly hair now just struck me as giving her features character. I wished I could trust her, could know for certain that she hadn’t killed her neighbors. But she might be running an elaborate act for me. She was intelligent and “read people,” yet she claimed not to know about Ken’s money, though he’d appeared to me to have blabbed about that to anyone and everyone. What if she knew all along about Maggie’s inheritance? She could be playing dog lover to win me over, all the while pointing a finger at Rachel Taylor to keep me from rewarding Maggie to the competition.

I realized suddenly that I’d been lost in silent reverie for quite some time. I asked, “What would you like me to do about T-Rex? Should I go ahead and call the Humane Society?”

She shook her head. “I’ll keep him. For good. Or at least, for as long as I live.” She let out a sad chuckle. “The last couple days around this place don’t give a person a whole lotta confidence in their life expectancy.”

I didn’t know how to respond and said only, “I’m sorry.”

“Not half as sorry as I am.” She shook her head. “C’mon T-boy.” With the dog in perfect heel position, she headed for her door, saying over her shoulder, “ ’Scuse me. I gotta find me a pickle recipe for all these cucumbers.”

Wanting to subtly find out how she “read” Dr. Joanne Palmer, whom I personally considered as more capable of murder than Rachel Taylor, I called after her, “Ruby used to take T-Rex to Dr. Palmer, you know. Are you going to continue to use her as his veterinarian?”

“No way.” She ushered T-Rex inside, then stood in the doorway.

“You don’t like her?”

She blew out a puff of air. “She had some kind of scam goin’ with Ruby and them damned pills. She’d give ’em to Ruby for free, and in exchange, Ruby’d talk up Palmer’s service to everyone, to all her phone customers and everyone around here. You wouldn’t know it to meet her, but you gave that Ruby a telephone, and she could talk pure honey. Best telemarketer I ever met.”

“I can’t imagine Joanne Palmer taking a chance like that . . . giving her patient’s owner free medication, just to get some referrals.”

She made a gesture as if pushing away my argument. “Well, whatever. I just know she was poppin’ those pills herself, and that Palmer had to have known, too.”

“You mean,
Ruby
was ingesting Clomicalm and ACP herself?”

“That’s what I’m sayin’.”

“How long has her practice been located just south of the trailer park?”

“Few years, is all. Of course, nobody in the trailer park used to be able to afford her, till Ruby gets into the pill business with her. Now a whole batch of my neighbors bring their dogs to her, claimin’ their dogs are too excitable and need medication.”

Yolanda went inside and shut the door without saying good-bye. I needed to go pay another visit to Dr. Palmer and ask about what Yolanda had just told me. If there was any truth to Yolanda’s assertions, Joanne Palmer needed to find a new line of work.

I left my car where it was parked, opting to walk through the neighborhood, down through the playground, and near the irrigation ditch where those bones had been found. As I walked, I tried to get a feel for how many dogs there were here. Would a veterinarian with a viable practice risk giving away canine medication just to drum up business? I’d heard that ACP was such a strong tranquilizer that people sometimes combined it with alcohol to get high . . . low? . . . but still. How big of a drug ring could
dog
medication possibly comprise?

Could my thinking about the murders be backward? Was Ken’s inheritance the least of the killer’s motive? Could Ruby and Ken have been killed because they found out about the veterinarian’s unscrupulous practices? That seemed so illogical.

Ruby had come this way the other day, on her way back from Dr. Palmer’s office, just after I’d found Ken’s body. Maybe she had seen something that put her directly in the killer’s path. There was nothing sinister in the view along the sidewalk now. It was a crystal clear blue sky, the air already getting hot. Ahead of me, the Flatirons stretched across the horizon, with only the traffic sounds from the nearby road marring the peacefulness. The long grass that flanked the irrigation ditch waved slightly in the faint warm breeze.