Play Dead (24 page)

Dennis never showed up, but he finally
called just as I was about to leave. Susan handed me the phone, and he
immediately explained, “Something came up at work. How’d it go?”

“Fine. I’ll just need you and everyone
else in the family to reinforce the message that Shakespeare is only to eat the
food that is directly offered to him.”

“No
problemo.”

His haughty tone of voice annoyed me. Was
I just being touchy here, or was Susan infinitely classier than her yuppy
husband?

“Say,” he went on, “I hope this little
incident hasn’t made you decide against us getting Sage.”

I squared my shoulders. My nervous system
was now tensing as if the very mention of the collie’s name were as grating as
nails on a blackboard. “I’m sorry, but since the last time I spoke with you, I’ve
decided to give Sage to somebody else.”

“What do you mean?”

From the corner of my vision, I saw Susan
react and give me her full attention as well. “Exactly what I said. I already
found a good home for Sage.”

“Damn you! How can you decide something
like that without waiting to see if we’d make you a better offer?”

His shouts rang in my ear. Out of
deference to his wife and son who were still nearby, I kept my voice level. “This
isn’t a public auction. Through no choice of my own, I’ve found myself in
charge of finding a good home for a dog. That’s what I’ve succeeded in doing.”

“Have it your way. We’ll find ourselves
another collie. In the meantime, you’re fired!” He hung up on me.

I set the receiver down and looked at
Susan, who was now hovering beside me, no doubt having surmised the rancor
between her husband and me. “Is everything all right?” she asked.

“Except for the fact that I’ve been fired,
yes.”

She lifted her chin and said pleasantly, “Oh,
you have not been.”

“Your husband was quite clear. He said, ‘You’re
fired.’ That’s pretty hard to misinterpret.” Along with his having cursed in my
ear.

“In that case, you’re rehired, by me.” I
started to protest, but she brushed my concerns aside with the explanation, “I’ll
handle things with my husband. He’s always made it clear that he thinks I’m in
charge of Shakespeare, so that makes this my decision.”

I couldn’t argue with her logic, though
Dennis probably could. The friction between Dennis and me reminded me that I
had yet to attempt to learn more about Sage. “By the way, did you or your
husband ever meet Beth Gleason?” I asked on the off chance that this could lead
me to a clue.

To my surprise, she sighed and nodded,
combing her fingers through her blond curls. “That young woman was quite a
nuisance, always hanging around Hannah. At first, I used to think she wanted
Hannah to adopt her or something, till I found out that her father could have
bought and sold all of us put together.”

I was so confused by this my thoughts were
reeling. Beth had given me the impression that she only knew Sage and Hannah
Jones through the cooking class.

The hammer and peg board long since
deserted, Brian had been darting from room to room, but now entered and asked, “Mommy?”

“Not now, honey,” she replied.

“You knew Beth’s father?” I asked, trying
to work backward to make some sense of this.

“Just by reputation. He’s the CEO of a
major computer company. Beth, however, latched on to Hannah after taking one of
her cooking classes. In the last few weeks before Hannah died, every time I’d
drop by for a visit, there was Beth. The minute Hannah died, Beth was on the
phone to us, leaving message after message asking if we’d give her the dog.
Dennis and I decided Sage would be better off with someone else—anyone
else—as an owner. We took him down to the shelter and...” Susan lifted
her hands in a gesture of surrender “...the joke was on us. She’d left her name
there as wanting to adopt a collie, and she got Sage within a couple hours of
our bringing him in.”

That didn’t jibe with what Beth had told
me. She’d said she called
Hannah’s
machine to inquire about adopting
Sage. That once she got him, she called the number Dennis had left in the
kibble, but wouldn’t tell the Comings where she lived.

“What did you do when you learned that
Beth had adopted Sage?”

She shook her head and lifted Brian, who’d
begun tugging on her sweater for attention. “Nothing. What could we do? We
spoke to her only once after that and—”

“When she called the number Dennis had
left in the dog food?”

“Right. We wished her well and asked her
to keep us posted as to how Sage was doing.”

“How did she know to call you prior to
that?”

Susan furrowed her brow and turned her
attention to her son, who said in no uncertain terms that he wanted “Juice!”
She carried him into the kitchen, asking me over her shoulder, “You mean...when
she was trying to get us to give her the dog?”

“Yes.”

She filled a Winnie-the-Pooh cup with what
looked to be fresh-squeezed juice and sent Brian on his way again. Watching
her, though, I got the strong feeling my question had upset her. It had
apparently never occurred to her to wonder about this. “I don’t know. Dennis
must have said something to her at some point about how we watched Sage
whenever Hannah was out of town.” She wasn’t meeting my eyes. “Or maybe Hannah
had told her that.” After a pause, she brightened. “That must be it. As far as
I know, she never even met Dennis. I mean, he’s always gone during the day,
when Beth tended to be at Hannah’s place. Of course! Hannah would have told her
at some point that we watched her dog.”

She looked positively relieved at having
come up with this answer. Why was the thought of Dennis and Beth having spoken
prior to Hannah’s death so unsettling to her? Only one answer to that question
came to mind, which would mean Dennis Corning was every bit as big a jerk as I’d
felt he was. Bigger, even.

At five
p.m.,
I was waiting, as planned, on the curb outside George Haggerty’s house,
listening to Rex’s pathetic howls within. A classic case of separation anxiety.
This was one bored, lonely dog who considered himself master of his pack and
couldn’t understand why his pack members— George and his wife—were
deserting him during the day.

George pulled into his driveway, and we
agreed to have me go into the house first. We further agreed that I would put a
leash with a gentle leader on Rex, which George would give a quick yank on and
say “No,” while I activated my noisemaker. I went in through his garage,
surprising Rex, who was all poised to leap on his owner. To Rex’s great credit,
it looked as though he was tempted to goose me, but remembered what had
happened yesterday. I slipped the collar over his head and glanced around,
seeing no immediate signs of destruction.

George came in, the dog pounced, George
snapped the leash and said, “Down,” instead of “No,” but otherwise everything
went according to plan. Rex stood there blinking as if wondering what had
happened.

“Let’s see how many more of my possessions
he’s laid to waste during the day,” George muttered, surveying the place as he
strode past me.

Normally, after having destroyed parts of
the house in the owner’s absence, a dog cowers when his master does
this—not because the dog knows he’s done wrong, but because the dog has
learned that Master Plus Damage Equals Punishment. Rex, however, trotted
happily by George’s side, which told me that George wasn’t punishing Rex.
Maybe, I silently mused, I’d been misspelling Rex’s name all along. Maybe it
was
Wrecks,
as in what he did to the house.

George returned with a small,
unrecognizable object clenched in his hand. He promptly threw it in the trash. “Well,
it’s a little better, anyway.”

“Don’t get discouraged.” I removed the
leash while speaking. “This has been going on for more than a year. It’s going
to take more than one or two sessions till he’s learned new habits.”

George ran his palm across his baldpate,
his shoulders sagging. In a major non sequitur, he said, “The papers said they
were reopening Hannah Jones’s murder case.”

“They’re calling it murder now?”

“Actually, the coroner still says it
appears to be a suicide, but they want to look into the possible connection
between the two deaths.” He plopped down onto his dilapidated couch and looked
up at me. “Maybe Hannah’s dog is cursed, like Jimmy Dean’s car.”

“Excuse me?”

“You know. That young actor. He was
probably before your time. Everybody who owned even a piece of that car he
crashed in would get into a terrible accident. Maybe it’s the same with Sage.
If I were you, I’d give him to somebody you don’t like very much.”

This conversation was giving me the
willies. Was Mom safely back from her flight lessons? If not, Sage and the
other dogs had been all alone most of the day.

“Could I use your phone?”

“Sure. In the kitchen near the sink. It’s
slightly gnawed, of course, but it still works.”

My mother answered on the first ring. I
greeted her, then said, “I’m at a client’s house now, but I’m going to be
leaving in—”

“You need to get a cellular phone or at
least a beeper.”

“I know. I will. It just seems so...Boulderish.
Why? Have you been trying to reach me?”

“Pavlov is acting really strange.”

My heart started pounding, but I managed
to ask relatively calmly, “What’s she doing?”

“She won’t come when I call. She’s in the
far corner of the yard, and whenever the other dogs come near her she barks. It’s
as if she’s guarding something.”

“Oh, shit!” I blurted, realizing what was
likely going on with my dog. “Mom, drop the phone and go out there now! See if
she’s near a piece of meat on the lawn!”

“A piece of meat? I haven’t given her
any—”

“I know! That’s my point! Somebody could
have tossed poisoned meat over the fence!”

“Oh, dear Lord,” my mother cried. There
was a
thunk,
then a long silence after she dropped the phone.

“You were right,” Mom said, breathless
from her dash across the lawn, her voice strained with barely checked emotion. “Pavlov
was guarding a big chunk of hamburger.”

“Are there any bite marks in the meat?”

“No. I don’t think the dogs ate any of
this
meat. I just hope there weren’t any other pieces that Doppler or Sage...”
She let her voice trail off.

“They’re probably fine,” I said to
reassure both my mother and myself. “What you found had to be all of it, or
Pavlov wouldn’t have been acting so territorial.”

Though my statement sounded good, it was
overly optimistic. I’d taught Pavlov to eat only what was specifically offered
to her by me or her caregiver. With her natural guard dog instincts, she’d
taken it upon herself to prevent the other dogs from eating the
hamburger—probably because she was hoping Mom or I would later give her
permission to eat it. Her behavior in no way guaranteed that Sage or Doppler
hadn’t already gobbled down hamburger chunks from other locations in the yard.

I fought down a rising sense of panic. I
was too far away to get there fast enough to help the dogs if they’d eaten
poison. My mother was going to have to take care of this.

Antifreeze was by far the most common
source of poisoning for a dog. After showing signs of drunkenness, a poisoned
dog would pass out, at which point it became a desperate race against the
clock; the earlier the dog’s stomach got pumped the better.

“Mom, do you know what antifreeze smells
like?”

She paused. “No, not specifically.”

“Go into the garage, find a bottle of
antifreeze, and see if the meat smells similar. If so, watch for signs of
alcohol poisoning—disorientation, staggering, and all other signs of
drunkenness.”

My own stomach was in knots. I looked at
George, who was blatantly listening in on all of this with considerable
interest. I didn’t want to have to reschedule yet another appointment with Rex
if I could avoid it. Mom returned to the phone and told me that the meat did
seem to bear the same odor as antifreeze. I covered the mouthpiece and asked
George, “Is it all right if I give my mother your phone number? We’ve got a
problem that could escalate.”

“Of course,” he said. “Did someone try to
poison your dogs? Is this about Sage?”

“No! Sage is fine!”

His face fell. He probably was every bit
as nice a man as he seemed to be, concerned about the condition of an innocent
dog. But how could I know for sure? I deliberately had not spoken Sage’s name.
Had George simply
guessed
that Sage was at my mother’s house? Dammit!
This was all so out of control that I didn’t even know what to say to my
clients!

I turned my back on George and gave Mom
his number, with the instructions to race the dogs to the veterinary hospital
upon even the slightest symptom of poisoning, and then to call me. I hung up,
took a calming breath, and returned my attention to George. Rex, I noticed,
watched us from a short distance behind George, as opposed to standing between
us as he had on my first visit. This was another sign of progress toward
improved behavior.