Roll Over and Play Dead (4 page)

“Of course not,” I said, then stopped as I heard a thud, followed by an expletive inappropriate for my daughter’s tender ears. We all hurried around the house to the side yard. Daryl Defoe was sprawled in the mud. All around him were fragments of plaster, ranging from hefty pieces to pebbles.

“What the hell?” Culworthy demanded.

“The plaster had set, so I was going to bring it around front. I didn’t realize how heavy it was and how slippery the ground is,” he said, embarrassed.

I stepped over his legs and searched for the footprint. All I saw was smushy mud. “You managed to destroy not only the mold, but also the original print,” I said.

“It was an accident.”

Culworthy snorted. “Damn convenient one.”

Daryl got to his feet, slapping at the mud on his jeans and shirttail, and sending angry looks at all of us. “I don’t know what Colonel Culworthy meant by that, but if you think I made the footprint when I opened the gate to let the dogs out, and then destroyed the evidence by staging a fall, you’re wrong. Dead wrong.”

It was a terse yet accurate description of my thoughts. However, there was no point in mentioning as much, so I told the girls to wait in the car and led Vidalia back to the sidewalk. “I’m going to the animal shelter now,” I said. “I doubt there’s an animal control officer on the planet who’s capable of catching Astra, but I’ll make sure that she’s not there.”

She gave me a watery smile. “How very kind of you. I think I’ll pop the codfish in the broiler and study Astra’s chart for a clue to her behavior. Virgo rising can make her mischievous, especially as we approach the cusp. You can imagine how animated she is when Pisces intrudes; I tend to believe she thinks she can catch the fish somehow. But you know how cats are, don’t you?”

“Oh, yes,” I said vaguely, having no idea how cats were and not eager to learn. I assured her I’d report if I learned anything about Astra, then went to the car.

“We are going to the animal shelter,” I said as we pulled away from the curb.

Caron shook her head. “You may be going to the animal shelter, but I have this incredible amount of algebra homework. We are talking pages and pages of these screwy quadratic equations. It’s going to take hours and hours—minimum.”

“I thought we were going to Rhonda’s,” Inez contributed from the backseat. “Didn’t you tell her we—”

“I have all this algebra homework,” Caron said hastily.

“And I have your ticket in my purse,” I said.

Caron stuck out her lower lip, but she had enough sense to avoid further self-incrimination and we drove to the animal shelter at the south end of Farberville.

The building was made of concrete blocks and was set in the middle of an unpaved lot. Someone had made an effort to lessen its general aura of starkness with pots of begonias on either side of the door. I parked beside a small pickup truck with a covered bed and grilled windows. There were two other vehicles in the lot, one a hatchback and the other a much-abused, ancient Cadillac with the soaring tail fins of the fifties.

“I’m waiting here,” Caron said. “I’ll throw up if I have to look at a pile of dead animals.”

“No, you’re both coming with me,” I said as I dropped the car keys in my purse and clicked it closed. “This is an animal shelter, not a death camp. They pick up runaways and take care of them while the owners are being notified.”

Caron stared at the building. “There’s probably this big oven they kill the dogs in. And the dogcatcher looks like Quasimodo, only worse.”

“What do you think he does with the dead bodies?” Inez said in a hollow voice.

“I’m sure he’ll give you some if you ask sweetly,” I said as I got out of the car. The two followed reluctantly, and we went inside to meet Quasi.

There was a small reception room, with standard office equipment behind a counter. Directly in front of us was a door that, based on the cacophony coming from behind it, led to the kennel. The door on our left had a sign that read
DIRECTOR
.

As I hesitated, a petite woman with sensible dark hair opened the door, looked over her shoulder, and with a scowl, said, “You’re driving me crazy, and I don’t know how much longer I can put up with this. You might as well go sleep it off. If you show up in this condition one more time, you’re fired. Finito. History. Understand?”

Muttering to herself, she continued into the office and saw us. Her dark eyes narrowed for a moment, then relaxed. Her scowl was replaced with a pleasant smile. “I’m Jan Gallager, the director. We’re closed, but I’ll do whatever I can for you.”

“We’re looking for a couple of canine criminals,” I said. “The gate was left open. I thought they might have been picked up by the animal control officer.”

“Not today,” she said with a trace of tightness. “He hasn’t been out and he’s incapable of picking anything, including his nose. When did your dogs get loose?”

I glowered at Caron and Inez, who were still waiting for a hunchback to come through the door with a wheelbarrow of carcasses. “We aren’t sure,” I admitted. “Any time in the last forty-eight hours.”

The scowl wasn’t back, but the pleasant smile was gone, too. “Let me get this straight, please. You say your dogs could have disappeared any time in the last forty-eight hours, right? You haven’t seen them since then, or bothered to feed them?”

I felt as though I were facing a parole officer who’d heard rumors. “They’re not my dogs. I was taking care of them as a favor, and then my daughter took over the job. She reported their absence this afternoon.”

Jan put her hands on her trim hips and looked at the guilty party. “You last saw the dogs forty-eight hours ago? You didn’t feed them and supply water yesterday? Animals deserve proper treatment. How would you like to skip two days of meals?”

“I had someone go by yesterday to feed them,” Caron said.

“Was the food still in the bowls today?”

Caron shook her head. “No, so they must have gotten loose last night or today.”

“Unless,” Inez said, always eager to help, “Rhonda’s brother just pocketed the money and didn’t feed them.”

Jan looked as if she were about to launch into a well-deserved lecture when we heard a crash from her office. Wincing, she said, “I’m having a bit of trouble with one of our part-time employees. Go have a look at the dogs in the back and see if yours are there.”

She went into the office and slammed the door. Caron and Inez gave me piteous looks, but I squared my shoulders and said, “Come on, girls. Let’s get this over with.” I ordered myself to open the door, recoiled as the miasma of urine and disinfectant enveloped me, and led the way into a room with cages on either side.

Most of the dozen cages held several dogs. Some were barking, while others lay despondently on the concrete floor. A litter of fluffy brown puppies began to dance about, yapping excitedly and floundering into one another.

“Aren’t they precious,” Caron said as she bent down to look at them.

The sound, the smell, and the quickly discovered information that Nick and Nora were not present resulted in a headache. “Precious,” I muttered as I went into a smaller room. Here I found cats in boxes. I did not find Astra. The final room had boxes of supplies, brooms and mops, and an army cot with a gray sheet and a limp pillow.

Jan was looking through a notebook when we returned to the reception room. “No luck, huh?” she said sympathetically. “Maybe we’ll pick them up tomorrow and impound them. Give me a description, the address from where they escaped, and your telephone number. I’ll call you if they show up.”

I did so, but when I mentioned Miss Emily’s street, she flipped to the previous page in the notebook and said, “I thought that sounded familiar. Here’s another report of a missing animal from that area this morning. Damn that man!”

“You know who it is?” I said, startled.

“I don’t know who’s stealing animals, but I know where they’re likely to end up,” she said in a fiercely cold voice. “I’ll bet my skinny paycheck that Newton Churls is back in business. He swore he wasn’t buying local animals, and the sheriff was more than eager to believe him.”

“I don’t understand.”

“Newton Churls is the owner of NewCo. He’s a Class B dealer and has a place out east of town.” She caught my blank look. “He’s licensed to sell random source animals to laboratories and medical schools for research—and we’re not talking which dog food tastes better. The National Institute of Health gives away over three and a half billion dollars of your tax dollars so researchers can cut animals up, cripple them, blind them, burn them, infect them with diseases, and in general torture them. Over seventy million animals die this way every year so that someone can determine that you really shouldn’t drink paint solvent or put it in your eyes.”

“This is legal?” Caron gasped. “They can do this to people’s pets?”

“Yes, indeed. The dealers are licensed by the USDA, but rarely inspected. They’re not allowed to knowingly buy and later sell stolen pets. Every now and then one is reprimanded for filthy conditions and inhumane treatment. Churls no doubt has a wonderfully repentant expression when he’s promising to do better. It doesn’t stop him from selling someone’s beloved pet to a med school so they can see how long the dog can live with nails in his skull.”

“That’s horrible,” I said, struggling not to visualize Nick and Nora on an operating table. “But medical research is necessary, isn’t it? That’s how we develop and test new drugs that will save people’s lives. A child with leukemia deserves all the help he can get.”

“Some of it may be necessary,” Jan said. “However, the NIH is eager to give away money and not at all eager to ascertain if the proposed research is duplicative, inapplicable, irrelevant to humans—or if it’s conducted in a humane fashion.” She held up her hands and smiled. “Sorry, I’ll get off the soapbox now.”

“What about that Churls man?” Caron demanded. “If he stole Miss Emily’s dogs, we’ve got to call the police.”

“He doesn’t steal dogs; he’s much too cunning for that. He buys them from people and doesn’t ask questions about the source. When we see a pattern of thefts in a neighborhood, we suspect there’s a buncher working it.”

“A buncher?” I said.

Jan grimaced and said, “A middleman who picks up strays and answers ‘free to good home’ ads and notices. When things get lean, he may start collecting pets from backyards. He sells them to someone like Churls, receiving twenty to thirty dollars for a dog and half that for a cat. Churls then sells the animals for as much as a hundred dollars for dogs and seventy-five for cats. Last year Churls dealt with nearly five hundred dogs; we estimated he made forty thousand dollars.”

“And you think a buncher might have sold the Willow Street animals to Churls?” I said. “What do we do now? Should we call the police?”

“It’s not that simple,” she said, sighing. “It’s the county’s jurisdiction, so you’ll have to call the sheriff. He’ll tell you that he can’t search NewCo without probable cause. He’s wrong, because the USDA guidelines say that the dealer must cooperate with any citizen who suspects a pet is there, probable cause or not. The sheriff will refuse to send a deputy with you, which means Churls won’t let you inside the property and might come at you with a shotgun. It’s happened before.”

“Mother,” Caron said. That’s all she said, but the implication was that I’d best do something about this dreadful mess.

“You have to do something, Mrs. Malloy,” Inez said earnestly.

I shrugged at them. “I suppose we could stage a commando raid at midnight. Scale the fence, open the cages, and run like the wind.”

“He has pit bulls that he lets out at night,” Jan said. “I suggest you talk to the sheriff and—”

The door of the office banged opened, and out staggered a man with unfocused eyes, wet, flaccid lips, a nose that might have shamed Rudolph, and an overall aura of seediness. His wrinkled cowboy shirt was missing half its snaps, and his jeans were so baggy they threatened to slide down his skinny hips. He moved in a haze of alcohol.

To my regret, I recognized him. To my deeper regret, he recognized me and lifted up a whiskey bottle in salute.

“Wowsy,” he managed to say, “it’s the senator.”

Jan, Caron, and Inez were staring at me as if I’d grown a horn in the middle of my forehead. This was not an inappropriate response to hearing me being identified as a senator, and by this rather poor product of mutant genes and dedication to alcohol.

“Hi, Arnie,” I said weakly.

“You know this man?” Caron said, as scandalized as only a teenager can be when confronting a parent’s foibles.

“’Course she does,” Arnie said as he stumbled around the counter and collapsed in a chair. “The senator and me go way back, don’t we? Just the other day I was saying to myself, Arnie, I said, you ought to give her a buzz and see about doin’ lunch one of these days. Got some questions about the capital gains legislation.”

Inez was peering at him from behind the safety of the counter. “I know who this is,” she said in a thoroughly awed voice. “And so do you, Caron. It’s that man who was supposed to drive the convertible in the Thurberfest parade. He was so drunk that your mother had to drive, and somebody tried to assassinate the senator and that beauty pageant queen.”

From Jan’s expression, it was clear she was making some distasteful connections between her drunken employee and yours truly. I managed a faint smile and said, “It happened a long time ago, and I was assisting the local authorities in a murder investigation.”

“That’s not what Peter said,” Caron said. “He said you were meddling and that one of these days you were going to find yourself in a cold cell—”

“It was a little joke,” I said.

“I don’t think so, Mrs. Malloy,” Inez said thoughtfully.

An explosive snore caught our collective attention. Arnie’s chin was on his chest, and the bottle was tilted at a perilous angle. He was in no condition to make further inquiries about potential luncheon engagements. More snores rattled the blinds on the window and set off the dogs in the adjoining room in a frenzy of barks and howls.

Jan gazed at him for a minute, shook her head, and said, “I must have been out of my mind to hire him, but our budget was slashed right down to the carotid and he was the only applicant willing to work for minimum wage and a cot in the back room.”

“He’s not an animal control officer, I hope,” I said, remembering his penchant for early morning tippling and erratic driving.

“He was hired to assist with the animals and serve as a night watchman. But I’m down to two trained officers, one of whom is scheduled for major surgery, so Arnie has responded to a few emergencies. When he’s sober. A very few emergencies have met that criterion, I’m afraid, but there’s nothing I can do until I get the staff reorganized.”

“He’s the dogcatcher?” Caron said.

“The mind reels,” I said, nudging her into motion. “Thanks for letting us in after hours and telling us about NewCo. I’ll call the sheriff and do my best to elicit some help.”

We left Jan to deal with Arnie. Once we were in the car, Caron lapsed into moral outrage. “What are you going to do about that terrible Churls man, Mother? You can’t let him sell poor Nick and Nora to a laboratory where they’ll be subjected to torture. This is worse than Nicaragua—or El Salvador or one of those places. Nick and Nora are political prisoners, you know. They have rights.”

She kept it up all the way home, with occasional mumbles of support from the backseat. It was a refreshing break from Mousse, I thought glumly, but an erumpent social conscience in a postpubescent mind can be a dangerous thing. I was trying to decide on a course of action, but I was also battling with tendrils of pain between my temples and increasing sore ears.

I finally assured them I would take definitive action in the morning, shooed them into Caron’s bedroom, and mused over scotch, water, and aspirin. I went so far as to devise a scheme in which three lads with spiky orange hair, armed with amplification speakers the size of refrigerators, descended on Newton Churls’s property. It worked with Noriega, after all.

The following morning, however, I made a quick detour by Miss Emily’s house in hopes the dogs had returned, ascertained they hadn’t, and went to the Book Depot to call the sheriff.

Said person, one Harvey Dorfer, listened to me until I ran down, then said, “We can’t go onto the property without a search warrant, and we can’t get a search warrant without probable cause. Sorry, but it’s the law.”

“What about the USDA regulation that says you can?”

“State law says we can’t, ma’am. Now if you’ll excuse me, I got to see a man about a horse.”

“Wait a minute,” I said. “Federal law supercedes state law. Remember that little altercation back in the middle of the nineteenth century? It was called the Civil War, although I’m quite sure there was nothing civil about it.”

“Seems I heard tell about it. Our side lost, didn’t it? Well, those things happen, and as I said, I got to see a man about a horse.” He hung up on me before I could get out a mere sputter, much less an eloquent tirade.

I fumed while one of my favorite customers, a glazed hippie of indeterminate years, wandered around the science fiction rack and ultimately bought the book with the warrior and the slime. I dislike catch-22 situations, and this one was a doozy. The sheriff wouldn’t cooperate, and the vile Churls person did not sound as if he would be eager to give me a guided tour of his facility. All the while, Miss Emily was on a guided tour that soon would arrive at its zenith and start back to Farberville, where she presumed she would be reunited with Nick and Nora—since she had entrusted them to a responsible bookseller.

Keenly aware I would have to face self-righteous indignation when school was dismissed, I locked the store and drove to Miss Emily’s house with an obscure hope. The dogs were not in the front yard. I went through the house, frowned at the untouched bowls of dogfood on the back porch, and was heading for my car when I heard the abbreviated version of my name, as in, “Malloy!”

“Yes, Colonel Culworthy?” I said, stopping reluctantly.

He strode across the yard, his face as gray as his stubbly hair. He was wearing the khaki jumpsuit with bedroom slippers, which hinted of the level of his distress. “Patton’s gone.”

“Did you—ah, inadvertently let him out of your yard?”

“No. After what happened around here yesterday, I made sure the gate was secured. Did the final inspection myself, before retiring. Patton was in his doghouse. Now he’s gone.” He was attempting to bluster, but I could see he was deeply upset.

I repeated what the animal shelter director had told me the previous afternoon and the sheriff’s less than encouraging response, and this did nothing to slow the twitch in his eyelid or add color to his face. “I guess I’d better talk to Vidalia,” I concluded.

“Must take action. Must organize, devise a strategy, force entry,” he said, looking more lively as he no doubt formulated overt military action involving howitzers and tanks.

“Right,” I said. We went across the street to the red-bricked apartment building that Vidalia had told me she inhabited. Culworthy seemed to know the terrain; he marched up to the door on the end and rapped his knuckles on it. After a moment he rapped again with the fury of a machine gun.

“Colonel Culworthy and Claire,” a voice trilled from behind us. Vidalia was coming down the sidewalk, accompanied by a man and a woman. “You must speak to the Maranonis about this dreadful situation.”

I was introduced to Helen and George, who were both in their sixties. George was tall and lanky, with impressive silver hair, and his expression was as mild as a sleepwalker’s. There was, however, a glint in his eyes behind thick lenses as he appraised me from head to toe, and his smile seemed a shade wicked. Helen was short, busty, and forthright.

“Vidalia told us about Astra and Emily’s bassets,” she said briskly. “Let me tell you what happened to us yesterday. Juniper, our standard poodle, slipped out of the fence some time back and engaged in an illicit liaison with an unknown male dog. It resulted in a litter of six.”

“Cute little things,” George said, wiggling his eyebrows at certain of my anatomical protrusions. He reminded me of an emcee on a Las Vegas stage. I didn’t find myself overcome with dislike, but I wasn’t about to wander down a dark alley with him, either.

Helen gave him a dark look, then said, “When the pups were six weeks old, we ran an ad in the paper, offering them for free to good homes. Juniper’s pedigreed, but we had no theory of the paternal influence. Yesterday afternoon a man who claimed he lived in the country came by and took the whole litter. He was very interested in Juniper, and asked questions about her age, weight, and general health. This morning she vanished, too.” She gave George another dark look. “None of this would have happened had I been at home. I spent the day visiting a dear old friend in a nursing home.”

“Patton’s gone,” Culworthy said.

I repeated Jan’s dire prediction, which resulted in much handwringing and moist blinking, and eventually demands from all concerned as to how to proceed.

“The sheriff refused to cooperate,” I said.

“Surely you know someone, George,” Helen said. “You were in government until retirement.”

“I worked at the post office for forty years,” he explained to the rest of us. I alone was blessed with a wink. “I’m not sure the postmaster can intercede.”

“Can’t see that’ll do any damn good,” Culworthy growled. “Need a show of firepower. Force this dealer to allow us to inspect the facility.”

We were back to howitzers and tanks. Before he could elaborate, I said, “The primaries are coming up next year. Perhaps if we met with the sheriff as a group, and then threatened to contact the media, we might pressure him into action.”

“We can stage a demonstration,” Vidalia said, clapping her hands excitedly. “We’ll take our lunches and refuse to leave until he relents.”

“Demonstration!” Culworthy snorted. “Lot of that in the late sixties, early seventies. Pinko liberals and commies, if you ask me. Lacked courage to fight for their countries. Sat around and whined like babies.”

Vidalia fluttered her hands in protest. “They were very sincere in their beliefs, Colonel, and dedicated to the cause of peace. I don’t think it’s fair to categorize them as communists and babies. You never see babies crawling down the street with picket signs.”

“Didn’t say they were babies,” he sputtered.

The one person who could really liven up this escalating brawl came around the corner, heard us, and crossed the lawn in front of the apartment house. “Any luck finding Miss Emily’s dogs?” he asked.

Culworthy snorted and turned his back. Helen and George had retreated earlier, but now they both began to tell Daryl about Juniper and her offspring. Vidalia told him what I’d learned at the animal shelter. Culworthy made staccato remarks about draft dodgers and commies who were like babies, not actually babies. Although Daryl was listening to Vidalia, he was managing to toss out acerbic responses to the colonel.

The yapping, barking, growling, and whining reminded me of the noise at the shelter. “Stop it, all of you!” I said sternly. “This isn’t going to get your pets back!” When everyone quieted down, I reiterated my suggestion that we descend on the sheriff en masse and demand his assistance.

“Do you think it’ll work?” Vidalia asked.

“I know it will,” I said grimly. “I’ll bring Caron and Inez.”

Two hours later we had formed a caravan and were driving out the highway east of Farberville. Sheriff Dorfer had proved to be more astute than I’d surmised from our previous exchange; when confronted with the mob, he’d quickly decided that one of his deputies who lived in the vicinity of NewCo could, and would, accompany us. Deputy Rory Amos was to meet us at the turnoff and protect us from Churls’s renowned ill temper.

Vidalia had promised to bring the sheriff a plate of cookies the following day. She was now riding with Colonel Culworthy in his vehicle, which was the civilian version of a green military jeep. Daryl was riding in the Maranonis’ station wagon. I wasn’t sure why he had aligned himself with us, but I wasn’t opposed to increasing our bulk.

Beside me, Caron was working herself into an exquisitely shrill dither. “He ought to be shot. The idea of taking puppies makes me sick, literally sick.”

“We don’t know that the puppies are there,” I said mildly. “We don’t know that Nick, Nora, and the other pets are, either. I don’t think we should shoot him on first sight.”

“Well, I do,” she huffed.

“Are you going to tell your mother about biology?” Inez said from the backseat.

“Later,” she snapped.

I braked slightly to allow a sports car to pass, then resumed a mundane speed. “We have plenty of time right now, and I like to take an interest in your academic progress.”

“It’s no big deal,” she said, taking great interest in the cows in the pasture. “You may get a telephone call in the next day or so, that’s all.”

“That’s all?” I murmured. “Someone at the high school desires to chat with me?”

“Sort of chat.”

I gave her a quick look as I settled behind a pickup truck loaded with concrete blocks. “Sort of chat about what?”

“Oh, you know.”

“But I don’t, and I’m beginning to wonder if I do want to know.” Before I could turn on the full maternal thrust, I spotted the dark blue pickup truck I’d been told to watch for. I pulled over to the shoulder, as did the two cars behind me. Telling the girls to wait, I went over to the driver’s side, where a young man in sunglasses sat impassively, and said, “Are you Deputy Amos?”

He gave me a thin smile. “Yes, ma’am, and you’re the…the woman Sheriff Dorfer called about?” It was clear Dorfer had used a more colorful description, but I chose not to pursue it and nodded. “Okay, then,” he continued, “you all follow me. Churls’s place is a good six or seven miles down the road. When we get there, everybody needs to park outside the gate and stay together. And I mean it.”

We drove down a degenerating dirt road, winding past sloping pastures, a few surly houses and mobile homes with no mobility (except, perhaps, during a tornado), and finally arrived at a steel gate blocking the road. In the middle of it was a crudely painted sign:
PIT BULLS LOOSE THREE DAYS A WEEK
.
YOU GUESS WHICH THREE
.