Never Say Sty (33 page)

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Authors: Linda O. Johnston

BOOK: Never Say Sty
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One, of course, was my former flame. Jeff played along fine, even when his former nemesis Ned Noralles seemed inclined to get Porker to pick on him.
“Hey, piggy,” he said. “And you, too, Porker.”
Ned just glared.
Then Porker approached the detectives. Vickie Schwinglan was clearly uncomfortable, but she smiled and played along.
Detective Howard Wherlon glared at potbelly person Ned Noralles, his fellow cop. But he must have known the cameras were on him, so he simply stood still and took it.
Until Porker started butting him like a bully with his big nose.
“What the hell?” Howard hollered.
Porker didn’t let up. And shortly thereafter, he was joined by Pansy, who started a loud piggy campaign—and when piggies are loud, they’re earsplitting!
“What’s the story, Detective?” inquired Vickie, shouting over the melee. “I went over it all with Mr. Krone—the entire chain of custody of that harness. You aren’t on it.”
Avvie gave a command, and smart Pansy quieted down. But she still stood steadfastly with her piggy. Likewise Ned and Porker. Dante and I remained beside them.
“But you apparently touched it enough for the pigs to smell your scent on it,” Ned said to Howard with a huge but snide smile. “Gee, Detective, are you the murderer you’ve been supposedly looking for?”
“This is all bullshit,” Wherlon said, his face red as he glared furiously from Ned to Porker and back again.
“If anything,” I said, coming closer, “it’s pig poop. But actually, I suspect it’s the truth—right, Detective?”
“I was here before only to watch the show—and see Detective Noralles, here, embarrass himself in front of the whole world.” As Wherlon was now embarrassing
himself
. . . “What motive would I have for killing that damned Sebastian?”
I knew the cameras were now on me. Corina Carey had been invited to other shows, and I knew the
National NewsShakers
reporter would be utterly irked that I hadn’t invited her here this afternoon. But I’d call her once we had what we needed on film. Then she could get her scoop.
By then, Brody Avilla had also joined us at this side of the stage. His movie-star face was on high alert. He looked like one of those guys in a high-adventure film, ready to pounce on the bad guys. But he waited along with the rest of us.
Unsurprisingly, Jeff Hubbard stood by his side. Jeff had a quasi-official reason, as a P.I., to play this game. Brody had some sort of supersecret claim to it, too, but even if I’d known what it was, I wouldn’t reveal it.
“How about this, Detective?” I slipped around Dante, who attempted to get in front of me. Protecting me? Or wanting to confront the possible killer himself? “Does the name Beth Black mean anything to you?”
Howard’s ruddiness suddenly faded to ash. “No,” he lied hoarsely. “Should it?”
Chip Fong stalked over. “She was one of our best agility contestants, and you know it. I recognize you now—you used to come to our meets. You were with her and her really great dog—I don’t remember his name, but he was a real winner, at least until Sebastian Czykovski started getting on Beth’s case. He kept harassing them both, subtracting points for faults the dog never made. Kept the poor, aging dog from making MACH—which caused Beth to try to kill herself, then leave the Anaheim area. You yelled at Sebastian, threatened him, but then I didn’t see you again after Beth left.”
“Yeah, like he said,” I told Howard.
“And let me guess why you chose me to take the fall, Wherlon,” Ned said, getting in his face. “I’m a whole lot better homicide detective than you’ll ever be, and I’ve told anyone who asked. I stopped you from getting a nice, healthy promotion, didn’t I? That was around the time your girlfriend left you. Of course I didn’t know the circumstances then, but I did know you weren’t working worth shit. You didn’t see that I was right, or I’d have stood up for you later, once you were doing the job okay again. So you took advantage here, two birds with one stone—right? You offed Sebastian for chasing off your girlfriend, then tried to frame me and my sister for it.”
“You’re all nuts,” Wherlon said. He shoved past Ned and started to leave.
Dante began to react, but Detective Vickie Schwinglan took charge. “Hold it, Detective Wherlon,” she said.
“Why? You gonna arrest me for the murder of that bastard Sebastian Czykovski? With no evidence?”
“There’s enough for me to ask you a few questions,” Vickie replied. “Let’s just go to the station and talk about it.”
“Forget that,” Wherlon said. He suddenly reached inside his jacket and extracted a nasty-looking police-issue weapon. “I’m outta here. And I’ll be happy to shoot anyone who tries to stop me—people, not pigs.”
With that, he started backing from the soundstage, waving the gun from side to side.
I felt, rather than saw, Dante react beside me.
Damn! He was going to get himself killed. I couldn’t let that happen. Like it or not, I cared about the tycoon with his delusions of control over me.
But before I could shove him aside, I heard an enraged bark, followed by a growl, and Wagner leaped out of nowhere, chomping his muzzle hard on Detective Howard Wherlon’s wrist.
I heard a huge report as the gun fired. I felt Dante fall to the floor.
“No!” I screamed.
Chapter Thirty
I THREW MYSELF over Dante, crying, oblivious to whatever Wherlon was doing. Let him run! I didn’t care—as long as Dante was all right.
“I’m okay, Kendra,” said his deep voice in my ear. Was it my pleading imagination pretending everything was fine?
No. Dante seemed unharmed. But he was hugging Wagner. His dog had been shot.
Thank heavens the wound appeared superficial, perhaps because of the gun’s odd angle. Dear Wagner hadn’t released Wherlon’s wrist, and the cop hadn’t been able to aim.
Now, Wherlon was being cuffed by Vickie Schwinglan.
“Where’s the nearest good vet?” Dante demanded.
There were a lot of veterinary hospitals around. I chose one nearby that I’d used for Lexie lately—now that I wasn’t especially friendly with a vet I’d nearly dated before, Dr. Tom Venson. He was farther out in the Valley, anyway.
“He’ll be fine,” the nice lady vet told Dante a while later, over the examination table where Wagner lay. The bullet had barely grazed him before slapping into the soundstage floor, fortunately not ricocheting to hit a person or pig. “Just keep him on these antibiotics till they’re gone, and wash the area with antiseptic a few times a day. If he starts chewing on it, bring him back and we’ll fit him with a collar to stop him.”
Wagner was able to walk out on his own four feet, tail wagging.
Only then did I remember to call Corina Carey. “Sorry you won’t get a scoop on the story,” I told her, “but I’ll be glad to get you personal interviews with me and others who were there and experienced the whole thing.” When I hung up, I told Dante, “I figure you won’t participate in further interviews with her, but that’s your call. Me? Well, you never know when you’ll need a press person as a friend. She’s scratched my back now and then, so I also scratch hers.”
“And her Puli’s?” he asked with a smile.
“And ZsaZsa’s,” I agreed.
I’d driven to the vet’s, which I was sure drove Dante crazy, since as fast as I’d gone, I was sure he’d have gone faster. But he’d been holding Wagner. Besides, it was my car, even if he was the moneybags behind it. I suspected the way he’d arranged my reasonable rate was to guarantee I’d pay it . . . or he would. I couldn’t really stay angry with him about that. I’d gotten my car, and I wouldn’t miss any payments. End of story. Sort of.
I asked if he wanted to drive my Escape back to SFV Studios.
“You bet.”
When we arrived, things were still busy but seemed to be winding down. The place was a crime scene, after all. Again. Detective Howard Wherlon, while stopping short of admitting to murdering Sebastian, had shot poor Wagner and might have hurt others, if he hadn’t been quickly subdued.
Brody came over as we stood outside the yellow crime scene tape. “You’re really something, Kendra,” he said admiringly. “That whole setup with the pigs was almost out of some farcical film comedy, but amazingly it worked.”
“Guess so,” I said modestly, even as three pigs and their people joined us—Avvie, Ned, and Nita. “But I give all the credit to our potbellied friends.” They all looked so pretty in their nonlethal harnesses and almost appeared to smile at my compliment. “Thank you all for what will be an amazing show. I assume it’ll still air on the Nature Network tonight?”
I looked inquiringly at Charlotte, who had joined the crowd, along with Rachel and Rick. “Yes,” she said. “I got the authorities’ okay, although it’ll need to be edited to take out the stuff Wherlon said and did, so we don’t taint the case against him. All our participants will have their faces blurred and their speech rendered unidentifiable.”
“It’s news!” said Corina Carey as she slipped in among us.
“If you don’t show it, or even if you do,
National NewsShakers
will take its chances and throw it out there. First Amendment, and all that. Now, who wants to be interviewed first?”
 
 
THE SHOW DID go on TV that night with IDs obscured by design. It was, of course, a whole new pig scenario, and no one was eliminated this week. We’d go back to our original idea next week, including inviting the losing piggy to go home.
Long after our pet-setting duties were enjoyed and completed, Lexie and I watched it in high def, curled up on the beautiful beige-on-beige sofa in Dante’s living room. Dante, to his absolute, pet-loving credit, had Wagner up on the furniture beside us, too, despite the ointment on his wound. There was a gorgeous doggy blanket—a HotPets special—tucked up beside him, but for comfort, not to protect the couch.
Dante’s personal assistant, Alfonse, had gone home, but Brody stayed with us. Not on the sofa, though, but on a nearby chair.
“You’re an amazing judge of character,” Dante said when the show was over, holding me tight in the middle of the dog sandwich. He kissed me, and I smiled.
“So I know the information I found out for you before helped you figure out it was Howard,” Brody said, “but I had the impression you’d already guessed—true?”
I nodded. “Not that I was sure, of course. But one day while I was pet-sitting, some really disparate stuff I’d heard started to congeal in my mind. Ned had mentioned that Howard once had a girlfriend who’d had something awful happen—she’d died, or had nearly died then dumped him. And a guy I met at an agility match said that Beth Black had a quiet boyfriend who tried to turn all officious when something went wrong for her, till she turned him off. Howard himself seemed inordinately interested in showing up at the
Animal Auditions
shows even before Sebastian was killed, although I don’t think the two of them ever talked. Even so . . . my mind blended it all and came up with the possibility that Howard Wherlon had been Beth Black’s boyfriend . . . and had finally wreaked his revenge on Sebastian, the man who’d chased her out of Howard’s life.”
“Great job!” Brody said. “And here I thought I knew a lot about investigating—what I learned from playing cops in films.” And whatever else he’d done in the past to pick up covert investigation techniques. But neither Brody nor Dante talked about that. “And your idea to get the pigs to point Howard out—extraordinary!”
“I’m a murder magnet,” I reminded them. “Using animals to figure out the killers is what I do. Now, if you have a cure for that particular disease hidden somewhere in your HotPet storage warehouse, Dante, I’ll take a million of them.”
He laughed—as my cell phone rang.
It was Ned. “I’ll never be able to thank you enough, Kendra,” he said. “Nita, too. And Porker and Sty Guy.”
“You can pay me back by telling me everything you know about the case against Wherlon. Oh, and I’ve got all sorts of speculations about Matilda Hollins, too. Got anything on her?”
“Sure, both of them.”
So Dante and Brody could hear—no attorney-client privilege involved—I turned on the speaker phone feature.
“Matilda knew about Howard’s affair with Beth Black. She’d have kept track of such things, especially since she’d had her own fling with Sebastian and therefore knew the agility crowd. I gathered that, even though she’s a pet shrink, she’d also been aware of human agility trainer Beth’s emotional issues. And Matilda also knew how angry Howard was at Sebastian for causing Beth’s breakdown and flight from the area. Apparently, when Howard came to
Animal Auditions
to harass me, he got angry all over again when he saw Sebastian and how he treated the contestants. He confronted Sebastian after the second show and killed him—probably a premeditated act, since he’d brought a unique pig harness with him. Beth had bought it for him at a flea market a while back so he could give it to me as a present when I supported his promotion—only I didn’t, so he’d kept it . . . then used it to kill Sebastian.”
“So he figured he’d frame you?” Dante asked.

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