Rottweiler Rescue (14 page)

“I expected a call back,” I told him, “not a personal visit.”

“I don’t like being a murder suspect, and I thought the chances of convincing you I didn’t kill Jack would be better in person.”

He had no idea how right he was about that. If I let him know his ebony skin and almost black eyes put him absolutely out of the suspect category, would I be unable to get any other information out of him?

“What makes you think anyone suspects you of killing Jack?” I asked. “My messages only said I’d like to talk to you about him.”

“The canine grapevine is a wonderful and efficient thing,” he said, holding his open hand out to Sophie and starting to make friends. “Now what will it take to get you to scratch me off your list? I don’t even remember the exact date Jack was killed any more, but I brought my calendar with me in case I definitely was somewhere else.”

“Hasn’t anyone from the sheriff’s office contacted you about that?” I asked.

“Nope. You’re the first.”

Evidently Lieutenant Forrester didn’t agree with me about the murderer coming from the dog show world enough to send deputies out to interview Jack’s former clients. Of course, maybe the sheriff’s office had some way of knowing in advance there was no way Tyrone Mullin was the man I saw.

“Look, Mr. Mullin, you don’t have to worry about it. I know you aren’t the man I saw leaving Jack’s that morning, but I’d appreciate it if you’d tell me what you can about Jack.”

“Oh, so you’re willing to spread rumors behind my back, but face to face, all of a sudden you know I’m not the one,” he said. “If you know that, how come you kept calling my house?”

If I let him work himself into real anger, I’d never get any information out of him anyway. Better to tell him the truth now, calm him down and hope he’d be willing to talk to me.

“I called because I wanted to talk to you about Jack,” I said. “And, yes, I’ve been thinking any man who had dealings with Jack might have killed him, but when you introduced yourself just now, I knew it couldn’t be you. The man I saw had a ski mask on, but I saw his eyes and a bit of skin around them. He was white.”

That gave him pause. And I hadn’t even mentioned that he was also too short, too skinny, and with as much gray as he had in his hair probably too old.

After a moment the scowl faded from his narrow face, and then he grinned. “Are you telling me for once being black means I’m
not
a suspect? Man, it must be true that if you live long enough everything happens to you. Next time I’m stopped by some cop for DWB I’ll remember this.”

“DWB?”

“Driving While Black,” he told me. “Probably you think we make that up.”

“Actually, I don’t,” I said. “When I was first divorced and driving an old junker I’m pretty sure I got stopped a lot late at night for DWP — Driving While Poor. Maybe I don’t blame the cops, but it was kind of scary.”

“Damn right it’s scary, and I do blame them,” he said.

I just nodded. “I’ve been working with the dogs for a while, and it’s about time to go in and get something cold to drink. Can I talk you into having an iced tea or a Coke with me and telling me about Jack?”

“Nah, I need to get home,” he said. “I just wanted to make sure no one was out playing detective and making me a murder suspect.”

“Please,” I said. I told him how little I’d seen the morning of Jack’s murder, about helping Susan with the rescue booth at the specialty show, and about the attack in the King Sooper’s parking lot only days after the show.

He looked at Sophie in wonder and whistled. “Wow. That’s pretty impressive, the dogs saving you like that.” He kept staring at Sophie for a moment, then looked up. “Okay, what the hell, I’ll tell you what I can, but I don’t know anything that will help you.”

Sure he did, but as I let him into the yard through the side gate and led the way to the house, I wondered if he’d tell me.

Back in the house, I made small talk while washing dog drool and cheese crumbs off my hands and pouring iced tea for me and a Coke for Tyrone Mullin. When he realized Robo had been in the car with Sophie the night the dogs rescued me from the killer’s knife, he looked relieved.

“Truth is, I didn’t believe you about the car window when I was just looking at the one dog, but seeing the big male, sure, the two of them could take a car apart.”

That was a possibility I didn’t even want to contemplate. “Mr. Mullin....”

“Call me Ty. We’re all but breaking bread here together, aren’t we?” He grinned at me again with a roguish look that made me wonder if he’d showed up at my door planning to charm his way off my suspect list.

“Okay, Ty it is,” I said. “How did you come to be a client of Jack’s?”

“Well, let’s see. Where to start. I worked with a guy who showed his dogs and he kept inviting me to go to a show, kept telling me how much fun it was. My wife and I finally went one weekend, more to shut him up than anything. His dog was pretty enough, I guess, a Bouvier, but while we were at the show, we saw the Rottweilers, and man, that was it for me. I’d seen them before, but street dogs, you know. When I saw those show dogs, well, it was love at first sight as they say.”

“How about your wife?”

“It took me a while to talk her around. She started out wanting a little fluffy dog, but once she met some of the Rottweilers, she started to see it my way. The second show we went to, on our own that time, there was this big male — he was such a clown, kind of yodeling at the guy handling him, playing to the crowd.”

“Had you had dogs before?” I asked.

“Sure. Well, not really. Both of us grew up around family dogs. Mixes, you know. When we first got married we always lived in apartments, no yard or anything. We never thought about a dog. But there we were, our kids were grown and out on their own, we’d just moved into a house with a nice fenced yard, and we decided we wanted a dog, and a dog we could show. So we were talking to some of the people at that show about it, and Jack heard us.”

“And he sent you to a breeder.”

“No, lots of people gave us names, but Jack
took
us to a breeder, and he all but picked a puppy for us.” He named a breeder I’d heard of but never met. “You know, he acted like, here’s the one I’d take, but it’s up to you. You know what puppies are like. They were all cute. We’d have taken any one of them. And so that’s how we got Max.”

“Sounds like Jack did well by you then,” I said. “Max was a great show dog. But to be honest, I don’t know what puppies are like, at least not little ones. The youngest I’ve ever had was Sophie, and she was almost five months old when I adopted her.”

If I were being
really
honest, I not only didn’t know what small puppies were like, all I knew about Max as a show dog was that Susan had gone on and on about him when making up the list of who I should talk to about Jack. Of course there had never been a peep out of her about the far more pertinent fact that Max’s owner was not of the same race as the murderer.

“Well, in one way you missed out,” Ty said. “Puppies that age are
cute
. In another way you got the best of it, because they can drive you crazy, always into stuff, but Jack helped us there too, told us what to do. And right from the beginning he’d come over maybe once a week or so and work with the puppy and show us how to stack him and things like that.”

A stack was a show pose, but if Ty went much further into dog show vernacular, he’d lose me. “So Jack handled Max’s show career right from the beginning?” I asked.

“You bet, and he did a damn fine job of it too. Max won his championship at fourteen months old, his first Best of Breed a couple of months later, and his BISS the next year.”

Oh, boy, BISS is Best in Specialty Show. He hadn’t lost me yet, but if I didn’t keep a look of complete understanding pasted on my face I was going to get treated to one of those drawn out explanations of AKC rules and titles that Susan was always giving me. Ty was on a roll.

“You know how many people try all their lives and never get a dog like Max? And here we are, complete novices, and we luck into getting Jack to help us and he picks us out a dog like Max. Do you have any idea how lucky we were?”

I nodded as knowingly as I could and tried to get him to roll in the direction I wanted to go. “So you were happy with Jack and you didn’t stop showing Max because you had problems with him?”

“Hell, no! If anybody told you that, they’re lying. Max did enough winning. We retired him. He won another Best of Breed last November, and we decided to retire him while he was still on top. Sure my wife got a little upset with Jack that one time, but it was nothing. We talked it over, and she saw that it was nothing, that it was all a mistake. Jack was our man.”

Ty was no longer looking at me, but staring at his glass, swirling the ice cubes in the little bit of Coke left at the bottom. Given the feisty nature he’d already shown, if I tried to find out what his wife had gotten upset about, he’d surely dig in and refuse to tell me.

I got up and poured the last of the can of Coke into his glass and refilled my own glass, deciding to leave the disagreement between Jack and Tawana Mullin alone for the moment.

“So with Max retired are you retired from dog shows too?” I asked, sitting at the table across from him again.

He shook his head. “No, we’re hooked. We’ve been talking about getting another puppy and starting over, but with Jack gone, I don’t know — we need to think about it some more. My wife has been showing Max in rally and obedience anyway. She started taking him to obedience classes while Jack was still showing him. Jack didn’t like it much, but my wife can be — let’s just say, once Jack saw that what Tawana was doing wasn’t hurting Max, he came around.”

I really needed to talk to Tawana Mullin. “It sounds like your wife had some minor disagreements with Jack. What was the little thing that upset her?”

“Nothing. It was just nothing, and if you think you’re going to make a big deal of it, you’re wrong.” He stood up, intent on leaving rather than telling me what I wanted, needed to know.

“Please, Ty. Jack is dead. Nothing can hurt him now, and maybe he’d rather see his murderer caught than have you keep any secrets. I can’t help but feel if I can just find out enough about Jack, it will show me who would have wanted to kill him. Can I talk to your wife? Can I call her?”

“No, damn it. He just told this little joke, and she took it wrong. We got it all straightened out. It was nothing.”

“Please?” I did an imitation of Sophie’s best guilting look.

“I’ll tell her what you want. If she’s willing to talk to you, she’ll call you. Don’t you call us again.”

With that Ty, who was probably Mr. Mullin to me again, walked out, leaving me to try to figure out how I could have handled the conversation better.

An hour later, I was
on the computer, busy signing up for an email list dedicated to positive dog training methods, when the phone rang. I knocked it half off the desk in my hurry to answer. The voice in my ear was not Tawana Mullin’s, and Susan picked up on my disappointment immediately.

“I’m obviously not the person you were waiting to hear from,” she said. “Have you got a new boyfriend? Who is it, that lawyer?”

“He’s married, and no, I don’t,” I said. “But I am waiting for a call from someone I really want to talk to. Can I call you back later?”

Susan was agreeable, and I went back to the Internet, thinking I’d wait till early evening, then call Susan back. Silly me. Half an hour later she was on my doorstep.

“I had a call from a family that sounds perfect for Millie,” she said. “That’s what I was going to talk to you about, so since you want your line free, I decided to just pop over and see how she’s doing for myself.”

Susan only needed a few minutes to run her hands over Millie from head to toe, look in her mouth, handle her feet, offer her a rawhide chew, and take it back. “She was pretty good about all this when I first took her in,” she said, “a little touchy about her feet, but basically good. How is she about her nail trimming?”

“Fine. And she’s very good at basic commands except for the down. We’re working on that. Are you taking her somewhere tonight?”

“Oh, no, I just wanted to see how she’s doing. I don’t have the written application with references yet.”

A light bulb went on in my head. Susan may have had a phone call from someone who sounded likely for Millie, but until she got a written application with references, she never took anyone seriously. The real reason she was in my kitchen was for an update on what was going on, and she didn’t want to wait, maybe for hours, until I called her back.

So I told her all about my visit with the Jamesons. Knowing she’d keep the secret, I also told her about Maida. She was as delighted to hear the story as I had been.

“Damn Myron. Still, it worked out in the end. Who would have believed it! See. I told you Jack was a nice man.”

Jack had been a very human mixture of nice and far from nice, and Susan knew it as well as I did by now, but I didn’t argue with her. Instead I told her about Tyrone Mullin’s visit and what I hoped to learn from his wife if she called me.

“I’m half afraid he won’t even tell her I’d like to talk to her. And if he doesn’t, I’m going to have to track her down somewhere where he can’t stop me from talking to her, I guess.”

Susan nodded her head in agreement. She was about to leave for home when the phone rang. As soon as she realized the caller was Tawana, she sat right back down, listening to my side of the conversation as avidly as I listened to Tawana.

“Ty got home pretty upset,” she told me. “It took me quite a while to get him to tell me what happened.”

“I was afraid he wouldn’t ask you to call me,” I said.

“He wasn’t going to. I had to pry it out of him, and I waited till he went upstairs to call you so he wouldn’t be right here trying to stop me from telling you. He thinks I’m crazy. We had big fights about it when it happened, and finally I figured it was better to just let him think he convinced me I was wrong, but I wasn’t. I know what I heard, and I know what he meant.”