Groomed For Murder: A Pet Boutique Mystery (8 page)

“That doesn’t mean that you have to be immune to Jane Porter’s meanness.”

Ingrid nodded and drew in a deep breath. “You’re right. I think it’s time I headed to church. Maybe the good Lord can squash my impulse to drive out to Quail Run and punch Jane Porter in the kisser.”

I watched her leave, her pocketbook tucked under her arm. She held her head high and she talked tough, but I could still see the sadness of that old wound hanging over her head.

Seven

R
ena, Sean, and I must have made quite a sight as we traipsed down Maple Avenue. Rena walked Daisy, who was doing the sniffing dance with Hetty Tucker’s greyhound (soon-to-be groom-hound), Romeo. Sean struggled to keep hold of the antsy greyhound while still tugging along his own lethargic basset hound, Blackstone. And, of course, my Packer was leaping in crazy twirls trying to get everyone’s attention at once. The dogs were all so interested in one another that we moved at a snail’s pace down Maple, past Dakota Park, through the historic Birch Mound neighborhood, and eventually up Walking Bird Lane to Badger Lake and the old Soaring Eagles Adventure Camp.

By the time we approached the site where Hal Olson was building his vacation community, I think the humans were all ready to drop the leashes and let the
dogs fend for themselves. Sean had taken to cursing under his breath, tiny Rena—whose stride was so much shorter than the rest of ours—was panting softly, and I was clenching my teeth in annoyance.

“Dogs! Enough!” I said, trying to inject my tone with as much steel as I possibly could.

Surprisingly, all four mutts turned their faces up to mine with comical expressions of wide-eyed wonder, as though they’d forgotten there were people involved in this walk at all.

We all stood there, a frozen tableau, getting our respective minds back on track.

“Well,” Sean said, “what now?”

“I don’t know,” Rena responded. “I guess we look around.”

“For what?”

Rena and I shrugged in tandem.

“Ahh,” Sean said with a little laugh. “Like Justice Stewart on obscenity: we’ll know it when we see it.”

Rena and I looked at each other. She frowned and raised her hands in the universal expression for “What the heck?” I frowned and shrugged in the universal expression for “I have no idea.”

Sean started to laugh, and his laughter grew until he’d plopped down to sit on the ground, Blackstone crawling into his lap as if on cue. “Lord love a duck,” he said. “We have absolutely no reason to be here, do we? I mean, what could we possibly find that is at all relevant to Daniel’s murder just by meandering around the work site?”

“Maybe nothing,” I conceded, “but you never know.
We’re talking about Hal Olson here. Not exactly a master criminal. He’s a manipulative womanizer who plays fast and loose with ethical norms, but he’s not very discreet about his exploits.”

“But that’s exactly it. Hal is not a master criminal. How could he be responsible for Daniel’s murder? Heck, Hal wasn’t even at the party.”

“One step at a time,” I said. “I just know that if we figure out what Daniel was writing his story on, we’ll figure out why he was killed . . . and then it’s just a hop, skip, and a jump to who killed him.”

Sean heaved a sigh. “All right, then, let’s see what there is to see.”

Leading the dogs, who were now much more subdued, we skirted the fence surrounding the construction site and picked our way through the debris to see what Hal was building.

I knew they were building condos, but the terrible sameness of all the units hit me only when I saw them in person. I suddenly understood Richard Greene’s frustration that these cookie-cutter buildings would obscure the view of the lake from every other point along the shoreline.

“Hmmm,” Sean muttered.

“What?”

“Most of the people who can afford waterfront property like this expect high quality. This house wrap they’re using is the most cut-rate stuff on the market.”

Rena stopped in her tracks, her Doc Martens kicking up a little cloud of dust. “How on earth do you know that?”

Sean smiled like the cat who ate the canary. “I’m a man of many talents.”

“Right.”

“Oh, fine. My cousin Bubba runs a construction company just outside of Oxford. When I was doing my undergrad at Ole Miss, I worked summers and weekends for him. I remember him talking about this particular brand of house wrap and how one of his competitors was using it. It allowed the other guy to come in with lower bids, but Bubba wouldn’t touch the stuff. Said it was a rip-off.”

“Doesn’t really surprise me,” I chimed in. “Hal can squeeze a dollar until it squeals. Maybe that’s how the Brainerd contractor was able to underbid Steve, because he plans to use substandard materials.”

“True,” Sean said, turning his head to survey the delicate curve of Badger Lake’s shoreline, “but what a waste to erect shoddy condos on this beautiful property.”

We wandered through the huddle of buildings, each the same as the last.

“Given how much work they have to do to finish these out, they don’t seem to have many building materials lying around. I would expect huge stacks of shingles and bags of plaster, not to mention an earthmover or two to clear out that last section of property.” He pointed to the far end of the old camp, where stakes were set in the ground indicating new builds, but the land was still covered in low brambles and mounds of dirt.

“So what does that mean?” I asked.

“Well, it makes me even more curious about what Daniel was doing out here. It doesn’t look like there’s that much work going on. Nothing to watch.”

We completed our tour of the property, finding nothing else of interest, and were just about to give up and start the long walk home when a voice called out from the trailer parked right by the water’s edge.

“No trespassing.” The voice was little more than a growl, so gravelly it was difficult to understand. “I gotta gun.” That statement was punctuated by the unmistakable sound of a round sliding into the chamber of a pump-action shotgun.

The three of us turned around slowly. There, in the trailer’s open doorway, stood a woman in a purple flowered muumuu, a cigarette dangling from her coral-painted lips, and her weapon leveled right at the three of us.

“Son of a—” Sean muttered beneath his breath. “I knew you two would find a way to get killed.”

I shushed him softly, trying not to agitate the woman who could blow us all away with a twitch of her finger.

Rena raised her hands in a sign of surrender. “Dee Dee? Dee Dee Lahti?”

“Yeah. Who’re you?”

“It’s Rena Hamilton.”

Dee Dee cracked a laugh, the sound like the rasp of sandpaper over raw wood. “Dang, girl, I didn’t recognize you with your hair that color. Last time I saw you, it was kind of a teal.”

Rena had a pretty distinctive look. Apart from barely
clearing five feet, she had a ladder of earrings marching up her lobes, a studded collar around her neck, an old Ramones T-shirt hanging off one shoulder, and enough black eyeliner to write out a novel. No matter what color her hair happened to be, it was hard to mistake her for anyone other than who she was.

“Right,” Rena replied. “I think that was last Veterans Day. I brought Dad to the party at the VFW and you were there with Kevin.”

I had never had the pleasure of meeting either Dee Dee or Kevin Lahti, but the couple had quite a reputation. Dee Dee was Merryville’s resident crazy dog lady. She and Kevin lived in a little house on the edge of town, where Dee Dee kept at least a dozen dogs. She was known for her ratted bleached-blond hair, the circles of brilliant lipstick she used to outline her mouth, and the endless stream of Parliaments hanging from her mouth, often with a precarious inch-long column of ash shivering at the end.

In short, Dee Dee was crazy, but—the shotgun aside—basically harmless.

Her husband, Kevin, on the other hand, was as dangerous as an angry badger. He’d done a couple of stints in Stillwater for aggravated robbery and made his money off the books, leading hunting, fishing, and canoeing expeditions. He was too rough around the edges to appeal to Merryville’s tourist crowd, and his knowledge of the wilderness was a little too “real” for the tourists’ neatly tailored bird-watching trips. Still, somehow he was keeping body and soul together.

“Who you with, Rena?” Dee Dee squinted her eyes as she tried to make us out, a note of suspicion lingering in her voice.

“These are my friends Izzy McHale and Sean Tucker.”

“McHale? You related to Edie and Clem McHale who taught there at Eisenhower High?”

“Yes, ma’am. I’m their second daughter.”

“Oh, well then. I had your folks in high school. Never really took to your dad’s history class, but he was a nice man. And your mom let us write poetry in English. Didn’t even care if it rhymed. Good people.”

Apparently the goodness of my parents gave me, too, a patina of goodness. At least in Dee Dee Lahti’s eyes.

“Well, come on over here so I can meet all those dogs you got.” Dee Dee didn’t put the shotgun down, but she did tuck it under her arm. I led the way as the three of us walked our menagerie over to meet Dee Dee.

As soon as the dogs got close, Dee Dee dropped to her knees in the dirt and began loving on all four animals, laughing like a rusty hinge on a windy day as the pooches licked her face and bonked their heads into her hands.

“Why don’t you all come inside while I get some treats for your fur babies?”

I still hadn’t figured out what Dee Dee was doing at the construction site, so I had no idea what to expect when I climbed the steps into the giant trailer. Still, I was surprised at what I found: an office space, neat as a pin, complete with architectural drawings and
whiteboards lining the walls. The only flaw in the otherwise perfect little office space was an ashtray overflowing with Dee Dee’s cigarette butts. The air was heavy with the dueling scents of the smoke and a lemon air freshener.

We piled into the trailer, four people and four dogs, and Dee Dee waved toward the tan twill sofa to indicate that we should have a seat.

She made her way around one of the desks, plopped into the chair, and dug through a drawer for a handful of dog treats for our critters. It was only then that I saw Dee Dee’s dog, a Shih Tzu with flowing auburn and white hair. The dog was perched on a purple velvet pillow resting on top of the desk. Next to the pillow, there was a china plate with what appeared to be scrambled eggs and sautéed chicken livers. This was one pampered pooch.

Dee Dee must have tracked my attention. “This is Pumpkin. She’s mama’s special baby, isn’t that right, Punky-kins?”

“She’s beautiful.”

“So what are you three doing out here again?”

Rena, sitting on the arm of the sofa, jumped in. “Just taking a walk. Trendy Tails opens late on Sundays, so we thought we’d take advantage of the beautiful weather and give the dogs some exercise.”

“You’re really not supposed to trespass on the work site.”

“Sorry about that. Curiosity just got the better of us. We’ve heard so much about the development that we wanted to see how it was coming along.”

Rena sounded so casual. Technically, she wasn’t lying, but she certainly wasn’t telling the whole truth. Personally, I’m completely transparent. I can’t lie to save my life. But Rena was born with a streak of grifter in her soul, and she could sweet-talk the devil.

“What about you?” she asked. “You working on the site?”

Dee Dee drew herself up proudly. “Yes. I’m working the office here. I answer the phones, take lunch orders, that sort of thing. It’s not a glamorous job,” she said, her sly smile suggesting otherwise, “but I’ve got my foot in the door now. Figure if I do a good job, maybe I can get Mr. Olson to hire me out at the RV lot. That’s why I’m in today. Get some files tidied up so Mr. Olson can see what a hard worker I am.”

For Dee Dee, who lacked some basic social skills and bordered on mental illness, this position at the work site probably represented a huge leap in her career opportunities. Still, I couldn’t imagine Hal Olson letting Dee Dee Lahti get in front of customers at his lot. Frankly, I was hard-pressed to figure out how she’d gotten the job at the construction site.

As though she’d heard my thoughts, Dee Dee answered my question.

“Steve and I were never all that close. I’m twelve years older than he is, and I married Kevin when Steve was still in grade school. But I’ve managed the desk for him on some of his projects and he remembered his sister. He knew I needed a job pretty bad, so he wrote a really nice letter of recommendation for me, even though he was pretty mad at Hal at the time. He’s so
successful. Got that pretty wife and that beautiful baby boy. I’m so proud of him.”

Sean and I shared a glance. Really? Steve Olmstead and Dee Dee Lahti were siblings? I’d known Steve for years, but if Dee Dee Olmstead had become Dee Dee Lahti when I was in grade school, I suppose it wasn’t shocking that I’d never made the connection. And I had to give Steve props for putting his reputation on the line for his loony sister.

Hal Olson’s motivation for hiring her, on the other hand . . . that I could not begin to puzzle out.

“So you’re here just about every day, then?” Rena asked.

Dee Dee nodded. “Yep. This place couldn’t run without me.”

Sean leaned forward. “You ever see other people lurking around here?”

For an instant, Dee Dee looked surprised. Then her eyes shifted to rest on Pumpkin.

“What do you mean, ‘lurking’?”

“You know. Just someone who didn’t belong here spending a little too much time hanging out.”

Dee Dee turned her face back to us, her brow lowered and the suspicion on her face now unmistakable. “You mean the way you three are lurking?”

Apparently Dee Dee was a little sharper than I gave her credit for.

Sean just took it in stride, smiling back at her. “You could say that.”

Dee Dee twisted her mouth to one side like she was contemplating something. Finally, she said, “Well, that
fella that just died. He was here a lot. Never came on the work site, mind you. Not like you all. But he’d stand right at the edge of the water so he could see around the fence and watch what was happening.”

“Didn’t you find that a little odd?”

A hint of pink crept across Dee Dee’s cheeks, and her gaze drifted back to Pumpkin. “Maybe. But it wasn’t really my place to say anything.”

“What did he do out there?” I asked.

“Nothing,” she said. “He just stared.”

Just stared.
That’s what Richard Greene had said, too: that Daniel Colona had just stared at the work site.