Play Dead (28 page)

As she spoke, I remembered something. “A
couple of childless friends of mine got divorced last year in Colorado. She
told me that the judge split all of their assets right down the middle. If he
emptied out your checking account to buy himself a new car, that car counts
toward his half of your mutual assets.”

“But... he always said cars were a waste of money. He
drives some beat-up old Chevy Nova.”

“Not anymore. He’s driving a brand new
Mercedes convertible.”

Kaitlyn smiled broadly and reached over
the table to squeeze my hand. “Oh, my God! That’s worth almost as much as my
little house!”

“Which would mean, depending on equity,
you get the house, he gets the car.”

“If what you’re saying is true, I might
not have to sell my home!” She leapt out of her chair and punched a fist into
the air. “Oh, Allida. This is the greatest news I’ve gotten since Bill moved
out! Know how I’m going to celebrate?”

So now Bill’s moving out had been
good
news?
Quite the emotional reversal on her part, but I learned to expect as much from
her. “By calling a window-\ repair service?”

“No, I already did that. I’m going to buy
myself a puppy! One that looks just as much like your Doppler as I can find.
And guess who I’m going to hire to train it?”

In a moment of truth, I realized that I
really did believe Kaitlyn. For all of her idiosyncrasies—bizarre as they
may be—I truly could not believe she would hurt a puppy. “I’d be happy to
help you train your puppy, but, Kaitlyn, they take a lot of patience. You can’t
just, oh, for example, hurl a can at its head when it does something wrong.”

“I know that. I’ve done some thinking, and
I realize I really do need some help getting control of my emotions. Do you
have any fellow psychologists you’d like to recommend?”

I smiled at the thought of referring her
to a dog psychologist. “Not offhand, but don’t let that stop you. Also, please
remember you have to wait until after the divorce is finalized. Otherwise the
puppy will be half Bill’s.”

“No way I’d let that animal hater near my
puppy. I’ll tell you that much right now.”

That evening, I drove to the senior center
where the vegetarian cooking classes were held. I arrived early and got the
chance to speak with Naomi Smith, who was already in the kitchen, chopping
celery and some long, green vegetable I couldn’t identity. Naomi was a pretty
woman with a ready smile. She was not much older than I and her hair was about
my shade of light brown, but she was considerably taller. No surprise there.

I introduced myself and explained how I’d
come to meet Beth Gleason. “I’m concerned about the possible connection between
Hannah Jones’s death and Beth Gleason’s, who took this class from Hannah a few
months ago.”

“Ah, yes. I remember Beth. I was saddened
to learn about her senseless murder.”

“What was Beth’s relationship with Hannah?”

Naomi gave a small shrug. “Oh, Beth seemed
to want Hannah to mentor her. Beth was a flake, but a reasonably nice one.
Hannah liked her more than I did, probably because Beth was so complimentary
about Hannah’s dog, which was the fast lane to Hannah’s heart. Beth was just so
spacey, I could only tolerate her in small doses.”

That didn’t tell me much, except perhaps
to verify Susan Coming’s version of Beth and Hannah’s relationship. “What about
Hannah? What was she like?”

Naomi gave me a sad smile and resumed her
chopping. “She was one classy lady, believe me. Though she did have a terrible
temper. You should’ve heard the way she screamed at a student for whapping her
dog on the nose one time. Hannah booted her out of class and nearly slapped
her.”

“Really?”

“I don’t know if I believe she took her
own life. I mean, you can’t know a person well enough to be certain about
something like that. But I do know that Hannah had a lot to live for. She told
me she was investing in a start-up company; her leukemia was in remission.
Nothing could have surprised me more than her so-called suicide.”

Others had begun to file in, greeting
Naomi as they took places around the long kitchen counter. I thanked her and
sat in the corner of the kitchen, my mind drifting as she worked with eight
students of a wide variety of ages. The oldest students were in their late
seventies, at least—a couple—him tall and thin, her short and not
thin. They argued ceaselessly about who was to do the chopping versus the
measuring and actual cooking.

Afterwards, while we all shared a small
portion of the output of the class—ratatouille—I chose to sit at
the elderly couple’s table, largely because I noticed several long, dark hairs
on their pant legs that looked suspiciously like dog hair.

I introduced myself, and the woman gave me
a big smile. “I’m Eudora Finch, and this is my husband, Harry Finch.”

“You don’t need to give both full names
like that, Dora,” Harry growled over his plate. “You could’ve just said, ‘We’re
Eudora and Harry Finch.’ She’d ‘ve figured out which of us was which.”

Eudora sat with pursed lips till he
finished, then said pleasantly, “My husband, Harry, is the grouchy old man
sitting across from us. What do you do for a living?”

“I’m a dog behaviorist.”

Her eyes widened, and she glanced at her
husband, who had stopped eating to stare at me. “Did you hear that, Harry?”

“‘Course I heard that! I’m two feet away,
for cryin’ out loud!”

Undaunted, she beamed at me with slightly
yellow but perfectly straight teeth. “You are a godsend!” She wrapped both of
her dry hands around my forearm. “We need you to help us. Our dog has stopped
eating.”

Every nerve ending in my body snapped to
attention. “Your dog stopped eating? Entirely?”

“Oh, well, no,” Eudora said. “Not
entirely. She just stopped eating her dog food. She’ll eat hamburger and the
scrapings off our plates.”

“When did this start?”

“Last month,” Harry said, shoveling the
last of his food into his mouth.

“We weren’t worried about it at first,”
Eudora said. “We just assumed she liked her other dog food so much better that
she was holding out for that.”

“You mean, you’d purchased another brand
of food that your dog liked better?”

“Yes, precisely. But the salesman
disappeared on us, and there’s none of his product in the pet stores yet,
though we keep looking and hoping.”

Harry growled at his wife, “Told you now
that Hannah was dead, we’d never find that brand in a store, but you wouldn’t
listen.”

“What did Hannah have to do with the dog
food?” I asked him.

“Clean up time,” Naomi Smith called. All
of the students dutifully got up—not counting me. “Who’s on broom duty?”
Naomi asked.

Since nobody leapt to the forefront, I
decided that
“broom duty” was
the very least I should do for auditing a class and eating their food. I raised
my hand.

Harry took the opportunity of my having my
hand in the air to whisk my plate off the table, though I wasn’t done. Everyone
cleaned remarkably fast, and by the time I’d swept the floor, only the Finches
and I remained. Harry was standing in the doorway by then, urging us to hurry.

“How did you meet this salesman, Eudora?”
I asked as Harry turned out the light just before we could reach the door.

“Right here. In class. Oh, he seemed like
such a nice young man. And it was all natural, fresh ingredients. High on
protein, and yet meat-free. He called it Dog TOFUd. Get it? He spelled it ‘tofu,’
in capital letters, then with a small
d.”

Eudora and I walked slowly down the hall,
side by side, while Harry strode in front of us, occasionally glancing back
with his face set in a scowl, shaking his head. We soon passed the exit where
my car was parked and continued down the long corridor.

“He was all set to have his Dog TOFUd
company backed by Hannah Jones,” she went on. “It’s a vegetarian dog food that’s
so good, he said our dog would choose it over her regular brand in a taste
test. ‘Course, we’re no fools. We checked it out with Hannah, and she said she
was feeding it to her own dog. She owned an adorable collie named Sage. She was
going to invest millions for him to produce it, and Harry and I were to buy a
lifetime supply, plus get stock options on the ground floor for a mere ten
thousand dollars. Guaranteed to triple their worth in two years.”

“What was his name?”

“Misty. Only she’s a female.”

I looked at her in confusion, then
realized she thought I was asking for her dog’s name. “No, I mean what was the
salesman’s name?”

She let out a puff of air. “Heavens. I can’t
remember. I’m not even sure he ever told us.” She cleared her throat, then called
to her husband, already half the length of the hallway ahead of us, “Harry?
What was the salesman’s name?”

He turned, hitched his brown pants higher
on his waist to reveal more of his white socks, and said, “Damned if I know.”
He turned the corner. “You two coming?”

Eudora gave him a wave to indicate that,
yes, we were coming—had he been able to see the gesture, that is. We
turned the corner of the sprawling, one-story senior center. “I was pretty
skeptical at first. Then he demonstrated it right in our own apartment, and
sure enough, Misty chose Dog TOFUd over her own brand.”

And,
I thought sourly,
I’ll bet the salesman managed to make
their own dog food repugnant during the process of this taste test.

“We gave him a check, made out to his
company name, and he gave us a four-week supply. Then he suddenly stopped
coming to class, and we still can’t find him.”

“Did you report this to the police?”

She sighed. “No. Not yet. We were...starting
to think he scammed us, and we didn’t want to admit to being the typical,
foolish old folks. Kept thinking he’d come back. Will you help us train Misty
to eat regular dog food again?”

“Yes.” And my treatment program was going
to be pro bono to make up, in a small measure, for the con man. We were dealing
with a scam artist here, preying on the elderly dog owners of the community. He
had some routine going where he surreptitiously poured a repellent on the owner’s
dog food and brought in his own vegetarian brand.

If he’d mistaken Hannah Jones as being
gullible or feebleminded enough to fall for this ruse and she’d later caught
on, perhaps this explained both the tainted dog food and her violent death.
Hannah could have been on to his ploy. Perhaps the concept of his having done
something so harmful as ruining her beloved dog’s food made her so irate she
grabbed her gun to threaten him, and things escalated from there.

Furthermore, perhaps Beth, as a former
member of the vegetarian cooking class, happened to spot him while she was
walking her dog. When Sage started barking at him, she put two and two
together, and he killed her to keep her from revealing his identity.

We rounded a second corner and started
down yet another long hallway. I’d realized from having seen the outside that
this building was large, but this was beginning to feel as though we were
traversing the Pentagon. Up ahead of us, Harry now fumbled with the lock to an
apartment. A black toy poodle zipped out the door before it was fully opened
and slid across the newly waxed floor, paws spread wide, but came to a
skittering stop in front of Eudora.

“How is my little girl?” she cooed as she
ran her fingers through the tight curls on the dog’s head. She turned to me and
said, “Misty, this is...oh, dear, I’ve forgotten your name.”

“Babcock,” her husband called out from
inside the apartment. “Allida Babcock.”

“Yes, and this is Misty.” Eudora held the
little dog, who started sniffing, up to me.

“Don’t just stand there blocking the door,”
came Harry’s voice. “Let her inside before the flies escape.”

I raised my eyebrows at this last phrase,
but Eudora clicked her tongue and gave her husband a dismissive gesture. She
murmured to me, “That’s Harry’s idea of a joke. We don’t have flies.”

“No, but we
will
have if you stand
there with the door open all the time.”

Eudora marched inside to bicker with her
husband, to wit, that he was “an impatient old grouch” and she was “a
glue-footed slowpoke.” I observed Misty in the meantime. She didn’t look
undernourished, though she would be eventually if all she ate were the Finches’
leftovers. The air inside their small apartment had a certain unpleasant scent
to it that I didn’t want to mentally analyze, but otherwise the atmosphere was
quite pleasant. The furnishings were sturdy and yet nice, augmented with
personal bric-a-brac and pictures.

Eudora showed me to Misty’s food dish,
full of kibble. I scratched the kibble with a nail and then tasted. My mouth
was filled with a bitter taste. I explained about the dog repellent to the
Finches, then asked if they could please describe the salesman.

They exchanged glances. “Well, let’s see,”
Eudora began. “He was tall, thin, and had a heavy beard. Brown. He had brown
hair.”