Give the Dog a Bone (18 page)

“The care provider was Rachel Taylor?”

“Yeah. Then, supposedly, a month or so after that, Mary had her accident. You ask me, I think the whole thing was a con. I don’t think she ever got hit by a car in the first place.”

I nodded and glanced again at the car and his work that I’d interrupted. “I’d better let you go. Would sometime next week be good for me to bring Maggie for a scheduled visit? Monday morning, perhaps?”

He stared through the windshield at Maggie, who’d kept up her steady barking at him. “Yeah, sure. I s’pose that’d be all right.”

“Okay. I’ll call first and set up an exact time. See you then.”

He tipped his hat then returned his attention to his engine. I drove off, Maggie quieting the moment we were out of sight. Arlen was not comfortable in the dog’s presence, and the feeling was clearly mutual. I remembered that Ken had once said that he trusted me because Maggie had liked me. Perhaps the corollary was also true—he hadn’t trusted his brother with Maggie because she shied away from him.

Something bugged me as I drove, and I realized it was a suspicion about Rachel Taylor. Something somebody had said about her didn’t match up correctly. Could Yolanda be right about her? Then again, what about Yolanda herself? Could she just be casting aspersions on Rachel to keep them from settling on herself?

I remembered then that I’d forgotten to ask Arlen about Ken’s patent. I still had an hour or so before my first appointment, so I decided to see if I could perhaps go into Ken’s trailer and get the number on the patent. I sorely wanted to dismiss forever my notion that Ken could have gotten money by selling the Clomicalm that had been prescribed to Maggie.

Remembering what a watchdog Yolanda was and her ability to identify specific car engines, I left the dogs in my car in the shade of the clubhouse at the trailer park’s entrance. Much as I’d come to like Yolanda, I was too concerned about her own involvement in the missing drugs to make her aware of my suspicions.

I made my way unseen to Ken’s front door and tried the doorknob. It was locked. I went around to the back and tried that door. Also locked.

I was not about to break in just to examine the patent. Frustrated, I gave up and rounded the trailer to return to my car. I gasped and froze in my tracks at the sight of Yolanda, training a rifle on me from her post at the foot of Ken’s property.

“Oh. It’s you,” she said, lowering the gun. T-Rex was off-leash beside her and trotted toward me with his tail wagging.

“You’ve got a rifle?”

“Don’t have any ammo, though. Jus’ keep it for its effect. What you doing here?”

“I wanted to get a look at Ken’s patent. The door was locked, though. You don’t happen to have a key, or know of anyone who does, do you?”

“Nope. Ken wasn’t much on lockin’ the place.”

“Do you think his brother might have a copy of Ken’s keys?”

She shrugged. “Could be, though I doubt it. Two of them weren’t too close. He always treated Ken like the black sheep of the family. Not much of a brother, if you ask me.”

“Did Ken ever show you his patent?” I asked, feigning a casual attitude. Yolanda had struck me as uneducated, but as shrewd and observant as anyone I’d met recently.

She nodded. “Oh, sure. Ken showed it to darn near everybody who set foot in his place. Course, he also had this fantasy that he’d made millions on the invention, but I never met no millionaire that lived like this. It’s like saying you live in the Taj Mahal, when you’re really holed up in its outhouse.”

“So you didn’t believe him?”

“Course not. But we’re all entitled to our little fantasies.” She paused, studied my features, then asked, “Did you?”

“Yes, actually.”

She chuckled. “Wouldn’t that’ve been something? If I was really living next door to a rich man all this time and never . . .” She let her voice fade and her eyes widened. “Course . . . that could explain Mary.”

“That she married him for his money, you mean?”

She nodded. “She obviously didn’t ever love the poor slob.”

“Ken had a shoe box full of hundred dollar bills. I saw them when I was here the day before he died.”

Yolanda put a hand up to shield her eyes from the bright sun as she studied my features. “You serious?”

“Yes. I saw the money myself, though apparently the police never found it.”

She let out a low whistle and shook her head. “Just imagine. Ken having all that kind of money, living in a dump like this.”

“He was quite the eccentric.”

I kept an eye on T-Rex, who had happily trotted ahead of us, back toward Yolanda’s trailer. Partway there, he started sniffing and pawing at something wedged in the corner of the steps and the trailer.

“But why would—” Her voice broke off as she caught a glimpse of what T-Rex had now occupied himself with. She froze and turned her back on the dog. “Say, Allie. Maybe it’d be best if you didn’t come in just now. The place is in a bit of mess and I think you should . . .”

I stepped aside to get a better view of what it was that T-Rex was playing with that she obviously did not want me to see. Transfixed, I rushed over to T-Rex and picked it up. It was a small packet of Clomicalm.

Chapter 18

Yolanda’s jaw dropped. “Well. I wonder how that got there.” Her cheeks had colored, further giving herself away.

I lifted the packet of pills. “You took these from Joanne Palmer’s office, didn’t you,” I said harshly.

“No.”

I could tell she was lying. “Why did you take the pills? Are you selling them?”

“Not me. That was Ruby’s scam, like I told you.” She held up her palms. “I didn’t have nothing to do with that. That was Ruby’s hot idea, ’n’ I stayed completely out of it. She talked Ken into taking Maggie to that idiot vet for a prescription.”

“Ruby orchestrated all of that on her own?” Frankly, that was a bit surprising to me. Ruby had seemed to have so little on the ball that I doubted she could outwit Joanne Palmer so easily.

“Yeah. That poor Ken was so trusting, he gave Ruby all of Maggie’s pills at no cost. And she got the pills from Palmer for nothin’ too ’cuz Palmer knew Ruby was drummin’ up business for her. Plus Ruby got some deal goin’ with another couple of dog owners, too, to get their pills in trade for something or other. Between T-Rex and the other dogs, Ruby got herself quite a stash collected. Then she’d sell ’em for ten times what they were worth. Only once you showed up, I guess she must’ve panicked and figured you’d find out somehow that T-Rex wasn’t on medication but should’ve been, so she must’ve overmedicated him on the spot. And then I went and accidentally did the same thing, gave him the same spiked dog food.”

I considered her story. Her explanation was at least possible. “That was quite a roundabout way for Ruby to sell drugs on the street. Not to mention that, even if she sold the pills for ten times their legitimate price, they wouldn’t bring in all that much money.”

“Yeah, but she’d done time at least twice for drug dealing and tol’ me she had to be real careful. She figured what she was doin’ now wasn’t illegal. That nobody could give her a hard time for selling drugs that was really meant for dogs.”

I nodded.

“Thing is, though, Ruby started eatin’ up her own profits, takin’ the damned pills herself. She was stoned half the time. I wasn’t thinking clearly when I was in that vet’s office. Her supply cabinet doors was wide open. And I was so mad at Ruby’s dying, and T-Rex nearly dying, and Ken dying, I started thinking maybe none of ’em would’ve died, ’cept for the pills. So I swiped them.”

“What did you do with them then?”

She shrugged. “Kept ’em. Then I calmed down and was thinking of trying to return them.” She met my eyes, her own gray eyes magnified by her lenses. “Allie, please don’t turn me in. I’d’ve prob’ly returned the pills eventually.”

“Does this look like the same container of drug samples that you took?”

She nodded. “One must’ve fell out and I didn’t notice it.” She grinned and pulled on the neckline of her blouse. “That’s an advantage of having some cleavage. I just shoved the lot of ’em down my blouse and waltzed off with a near grocery bag full ’fore anyone would’ve noticed.”

“Did you tell the police about what Ruby had been up to?”

She shook her head and averted her eyes. “I tried to help her out. Tried to convince her there was better ways of making money, but she wouldn’t listen to me. ’Sides, I didn’t ever really figure out what was goin’ on till she tol’ me about it. After Ken died.”

“So the police still don’t know, then?”

Again, she shook her head. “I don’t like talking to the police. Makes me nervous.”

“We have to tell them now. It could be related to the murders.”

“Don’t see why the police need to hear it from me.” She held up her palms. “I know I shouldn’t’ve taken those pills. I’m just gonna take ’em back to Dr. Palmer’s office and apologize.”

“I’ll drive you, but after that, we must go to the police station so you can tell them about Ruby. Not reporting a criminal activity is a crime itself. And two people have been murdered. It would be asinine of us not to notify the police.” I glanced toward the clubhouse, remembering that I had both dogs waiting there.

“I hope they don’t go arresting me just for borrowing from Palmer’s supply closet,” Yolanda grumbled under her breath. She opened her door.

“They won’t. You’re returning them. For all we know, Dr. Palmer still hasn’t reported the pills as missing. I’m sure they can’t arrest you for stealing something and then returning it when it hasn’t even been reported missing. I’m not worried.”

“Yeah, but you ain’t me.”

There was no arguing with that statement. She tucked her rifle under one arm and grabbed T-Rex’s collar once again. I held the screen door open for her. She paused as she looked back at Ken’s home.

“All this blood spilled because of one man’s money,” she muttered. “Kind’ve turns my stomach.”

We went into her kitchen and she stashed the rifle underneath her sink. Then she pulled out a metal and plastic-over-foam-rubber-padding chair from the table and stepped up on it to reach into the cabinet over the refrigerator. It was a bit daunting watching such a large woman on such a precarious perch, but she seemed perfectly at ease.

“It’s that damned phony social worker. Probably killed both of them,” Yolanda said, as if to herself. “Maybe she even dropped that packet of pills outside my trailer last night hoping someone would find them and she could frame me.”

This had to be close to the tenth time she’d accused Rachel Taylor of committing the murders.

“The thing is, though, Yolanda, there
is
no way Rachel could have ‘figured it out,’ as you said, that you’d taken the pills from Joanne Palmer’s supply cabinet. So she couldn’t have deliberately set you up like this.”

She glanced down at me. “You been working with dogs too long. You got yourself a pair of blinders when it comes to reading people.”

“That’s not true.”

“Oh, no? Answer me this.” With fists full of pill packets she stepped down, spreading the containers over the kitchen counter. “Why do you s’pose somebody like me can’t get you or nobody else to listen when I tell you I know full well Rachel’s the killer?”

“Lack of evidence, for one thing.”

“And you don’t want to believe that the friendly social worker to us poor folk is a cold-blooded killer.”

“Well—” I paused, mulling over her assertion “—that’s true, I guess. Nobody wants to suspect the person who’s supposedly there to help people in unfortunate circumstances. But that doesn’t change the fact that—”

“The facts are that two friends of mine who lived right near me are dead inside of a week! The fact is that, while I can’t prove it, I know who done it!”

I sighed and surveyed the pills spread out before us. “Do they all seem to be there?”

She shrugged. “No idea. I didn’t count ’em. If I had to guess, I’d say this is all of ’em, though.”

“Let’s get them into a bag so you won’t have to use your bra again.” I said this with a smile, and Yolanda laughed.

Someone knocked on the door. “Just a minute,” she called out.

I automatically rose and looked around the doorway to see who it was. Joanne Palmer was standing on Yolanda’s front porch. She stared at me through the screen door. “What are you doing here?” she asked me.

“I was about to ask you the same thing.”

“I came to get what Yolanda stole from me.” She let herself in through the unlocked screen door. Yolanda was now standing beside me. “I want my stuff back, right now, or I’m going straight to the police.”

“Yet another coincidence,” I said. “That’s just where we were about to head, after returning your pills.”

“Sorry ’bout stealing your medicine, Dr. Palmer. I shouldn’t’ve done it.” Yolanda swept the pills into a bag and handed the bag to her. “They’re all here, as far as I know.”

“There’s no reason to take this matter to the police. Now that you’ve given them back, we’ll forget all about the unfortunate incident.”

“It’s not that easy,” I interjected. “There’s too much involved. Two people are dead, and one of the victims had been selling ACP and Clomicalm herself.”

“What? That’s absurd.”

Yolanda said, “Ruby was getting many times the amount of pills T-Rex needed. And you were prescribing ’em like they was Tic Tacs.”

“Shit! Yolanda, you don’t know what you’re talking about! You’re going to get yourself arrested for stealing and abusing drugs, and I’m going to have some stuffed-shirt from vet licensing breathing down my neck! Don’t go to the police. Let’s just drop all this nonsense right now.”

Yolanda looked at me, then back at Joanne. Gesturing toward me, she said, “I tend to trust what she says more’n what you say. I’ll take my chances with the police.”

“You’re making the right choice,” I assured her.

Joanne leaned on the table and stared directly into Yolanda’s eyes. “The hell you are! You’re going to wind up in jail if you listen to her.”

“You will not. She’s trying to scare you because she doesn’t want to lose her license.”

Joanne frowned at me, then threw up her hands. “Fine. Yolanda, go ahead and go to the police with this. We’ll both take our chances.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Thanks a lot.”

“Pardon?”

“This is the last thing my business needed, Allida. I’m barely scraping by as it is. I only wanted to help sick animals, you know. I went through ten years of college and post-grad work to get to where I am now, and it’s all falling to pieces.”

“I’m sorry.”

“You don’t mean that, so why say it? I did what I needed to do for my patients. You think you know better than me? Wait till you run into a canine client with a brain tumor. Then you’ll see how fast you want to go with medicine over your training methods.”

Her bag of pills in hand, Joanne stormed outside, the screen door banging shut behind her. I looked at Yolanda. “Going to the police really is the right thing to do, you know.”

She nodded. “Let’s get it over with.”

We walked to my car. I rearranged Maggie to be in the back with Pavlov and gave Yolanda the passenger seat. Yolanda flipped on my radio and tuned in the Tracy Truett show. “I love this gal’s show,” Yolanda said. “Haven’t been able to hear it all month, ’cuz my radio’s broke. You ever listen to her?”

“Sometimes.”

Over the radio, Theodora was using her trancelike voice to speak about how hard it was for psychics to “gain respect from the mainstream.”

“
Is
there a mainstream in Boulder? Other than Boulder Creek, I mean,” Tracy asked. “Stream . . . Creek . . . Get it?”

“Oh, certainly there is,” Theodora went on, ignoring Tracy’s silly joke. “We’re a city of the self-obsessed, finding ourselves and our inner thoughts endlessly fascinating. Which leads to our preoccupation with therapists. Boulder citizens find it more acceptable to take their pets to a therapist than their souls to a spiritual counselor.”

“Oh, give me a break!” I muttered, ready to turn off the radio in my annoyance.

“Is that how you see yourself?” Tracy asked. “Are you a spiritual counselor?”

“Yes, and yet those with a license to practice therapy use some of the same techniques that I do.” Theodora sounded jealous and defensive.

Tracy asked, “They say that no one can make you do something under hypnosis that you wouldn’t do if you were fully conscious of your actions. Isn’t that right?”

“So I’ve heard, but then, there is a greater range of what people are willing to do than what they might admit to themselves. For example, if I were to suggest to you, Tracy, that you flap your arms and cluck like a chicken on the Pearl Street Mall, you would refuse, right? You’d be too embarrassed. But you would do so without hesitation under hypnosis.”

“Cluck, cluck, cluck, we’ll be right back,” Tracy said, causing Yolanda to slap her knee and laugh merrily.

I tolerated a couple of commercials, then turned off the radio.

My trips to the police station had become almost daily sojourns. This one with Yolanda proved similar to my previous experiences. We sat in a small, unexceptional room, and Yolanda told two officers the same thing she’d told me about Ruby’s activities with the Clomicalm and ACP and how she’d gotten it. Yolanda was quiet and subdued as I dropped her off at her home and then returned to my office with just the dogs as company.

Before I could get the dogs settled in for a while with water bowls and food in Russell’s office, I heard what sounded like someone trotting down the steps. Maggie barked in warning, touching off Pavlov’s barking as well. I returned to my office to see who this was.

The outer door flew open, and Theodora rushed in. She was wearing a redder shade of purple than normal, and her long hair was done up in some sort of a rat’s nest. “Oh, thank God. You’re all right.” She put a hand to her chest as she struggled to regain her breath.

“Yes, I’m fine. What’s the matter?”

“I had a vision. About you. You’re in terrible danger, Allida.”

I was not in the mood for this, and my temper instantly flared. “I
realize
that I’m in danger. And unless this vision of yours can tell me something useful, such as who the killer is so I can stay the hell away from him or her, I don’t want to hear it.”

She started pacing, her arms wrapped around her midsection. “It’s not by choice that I get these psychic visions, you know. I’ve always had them, ever since I was a little girl, growing up in New Jersey. I can’t control them, can’t predict how specific they’ll be or how revealing.”

She closed her eyes and grimaced. She stared at Maggie for a moment, then turned her gaze to me. “I saw an image of you. It looked like you tied in a chair, and someone was holding a gun to your head.”

“Oh, great. Didn’t you hear me ask you not to tell me unless it would be of some help to me? What am I supposed to do with that information, Theodora? Stay away from all chairs, for fear someone will pull a gun on me? Obviously I’m not going to voluntarily get myself taken hostage at gunpoint, so it’s not as though I’ve got any ability to avoid that scenario.”

She looked at me, her face pale with fright. “We’re connected in this. I’m not sure how or why, but we are. Otherwise, I wouldn’t have seen you so clearly. You’ve got to beware, for my sake, too.” She searched my eyes. “Only be around people you trust. That’s the only thing I can suggest.”