Collared For Murder (14 page)

Sixteen

“W
hat the heck does that mean?” Sean asked.

“I don’t know. I’m thinking it must have something to do with breeding.”

“Breeding?” He took a sip of Taffy’s chamomile mint tea. “Like cat breeding?”

“Yeah.”

The police had insisted on shutting down the cat show for the rest of the day. I’d left Jack back at the North Woods Hotel, working with his crew to sort through whatever evidence they might find, and had asked Sean to meet me at the Happy Leaf for scones and herbal tea: something to soothe my nerves after a long and emotional day.

“Why on earth would anyone care enough about cat breeding to kill someone?”

“There’s a lot of money involved. Not to mention pride. T. J. Leuzinger was about to have a breakdown after she heard about Ruth’s death, and I think a good chunk of her emotion had to do with Ranger’s fate rather than Ruth’s. She didn’t even own Ranger anymore, but she acted like she was basking in the cat’s reflected glory.”

Sean tore off a corner of a lemon cream scone. “So which breeder would want Phillip dead?” he asked before popping the tidbit in his mouth.

“I’m guessing Phillip made plenty of enemies along the way, but I know that he basically destroyed Pamela Rawlins’s breeding business by blackballing her Tonga from the show circuit. It meant that Tonga was no longer a viable sire, and it cast a cloud of doubt on her entire breeding operation. I think Ruth’s comments move Pamela to the top of our suspect list.”

I took a sip of my tea. It was tasty, but still a little bitter for me. I added another spoonful of sugar. I looked up to find Sean smiling at me.

“What?”

“You have such a sweet tooth.”

“Look who’s talking.”

His smile widened. “I know. I need Rena to bake for me more. Do you think she’d start me on a regular rotation of her banana bread and her chocolate-chocolate-chip cookies if I asked her pretty please?”

I clinked my spoon against the side of my cup to
shake off any excess liquid. “I think she’d do just about anything you asked her to do. That girl adores you.”

“And you?”

“And me, what?” I said.

“Do you adore me?”

“Sean. That’s not fair.”

His smile disappeared. “Right. And life is always fair.”

“I don’t want to start this.”

“Of course not. On the one hand, you can’t keep your nose out of everyone’s business. But on the other, when the spotlight is on you, you become completely nonconfrontational. You don’t want to face anything ugly.”

“Seriously? Sean, after the day I’ve had, I cannot possibly have this fight with you. I need you to support me right now.”

“Yes, you certainly do.”

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Sean frowned at me, and for a second I thought I saw a flash of fear in his eyes. “I got a call from Gil Dixon right after you called me this afternoon. He’d heard that you were buying the property at 801 Maple, and he suggested the cops were going to get a subpoena for your financial records.”

“So? There’s nothing hinky with my financial records, unless hovering on the edge of broke is hinky.”
Trendy Tails was doing reasonably well, but every penny of profit was going back into the business, and I took only enough salary to get by.

“That’s the problem. How does someone with no money expect to buy a well-constructed, recently renovated three-story house?”

I shook my head before taking a sip of my now-sweet tea. “Ingrid’s selling me the place for a song.”

“I know that, and you know that, and eventually the police will know that. But for now they’re going to look at that apparent anomaly and wonder. The very fact that they’re bothering with your financials means that someone—at the very least Gil Dixon and possibly someone in the county attorney’s office—still considers you a viable suspect for the theft of the collar dangle. And they’re only looking at you for the theft because you have a motive for the murder.”

“But now it’s clearly not me. Ruth’s death proves it.”

Sean popped another bite of scone in his mouth. “It proves no such thing. Another person you were close with is dead. Pris never even spoke to Ruth, but you have been attached to the woman’s hip.”

“That’s not true,” I said. “Pris said she’d been speaking to Ruth right before the lights went out on the day of Phillip’s murder. She did know Ruth.”

“Who told you that?”

“Pris.”

“Well, someone’s lying, then. I’d just heard about Ruth’s death, so I asked Gil about Ruth’s statement the day of Phillip’s murder. Ruth told the police that she’d run up to her room to get a sweater. The lights were on when she left and on when she got back. She wasn’t talking to anyone when those lights went out. In fact, the police think that that may be why she was killed: that she may have unwittingly seen the person who tripped the breakers out in the hallway on her way up to her room.”

I swallowed hard. “Maybe that’s exactly why she was murdered,” I said. “Maybe she saw Pamela or Mari out in that hallway and had just realized the significance of what she’d seen.”

Sean set his cup down hard enough to rattle its saucer.

Taffy looked up from the counter, where she’d been quietly humming while she piped frosting on her famous tea cookies. “You two okay?”

“Fine, Taffy. Just got a little carried away,” I said.

Sean forced a smile. “Sorry about that.”

She went back to her piping.

“Listen, I don’t really care what Ruth saw or didn’t see. I don’t care what she said, what she thought, or why she died. What I care about is you, and I want you to stay away from that cat show.”

“What?”

“Two people are dead, and you’ve managed to
become a suspect in both murders . . . not to mention the theft. Somehow your efforts to solve this case are making you look guiltier by the second. And then there’s the danger. Let’s say Ruth was killed because she saw something. She was killed where and when she was supposed to meet you. Do you realize how close you could have come to being hurt?”

“Okay, Sean. I get it. I’m not actually trying to get into more trouble here. I’ll do my best to lie low. I promise.”

He offered me a grudging smile, and I returned it with all the warmth I could muster.

I had every intention of keeping that promise. I swear I did.

*   *   *

Later that day, I decided to take Jinx in to be groomed at Pris’s brick-and-mortar store so she’d be looking her best for the cat show. While Jinx was infinitely tolerant of me dressing her up in all sorts of outfits, she did not handle baths well. It was likely my fault. I’d always considered cats to be self-cleaning creatures, so she wasn’t used to being forced to stand in water while having more dumped over her head. Those rare times when she needed assistance with her ablutions, it had not gone well. Jinx was a big girl, and I had a hard time wrestling her in a bathtub. Always, she shot her four legs out to brace herself on the sides
of the tub, making it impossible to get her down to the level of the water.

Frankly, I had an ulterior motive for bringing Jinx in for grooming. I was hoping to run into Pris at her store, too. Since Phillip’s death, she’d avoided the cat show, and I really wanted to talk with her. Luckily, she was working the front desk. Even though she was alone in the salon, she wore a pale pink twinset with an A-line khaki skirt, a string of pearls at her throat and a diamond tennis bracelet gracing her wrist.

“I’ve decided to enter Jinx in the household-pet division of the show.”

“Really? That seems so unlike you.”

Normally, I would have spent a few seconds reading into that statement, trying to parse out if there was a jab in there or not. Instead, I responded right away: “I know, right?”

“So what’s prompting all of this?”

“Well, Ruth Kimmey was saying . . . Ruth is one of the—”

“I met Ruth.”

“Right, well, she was saying that Jinx has great coloring and all the markers of a prizewinning Norwegian forest cat. And I thought, why not? I won’t be hurt if she loses. Either way, it will be a great story. You only live once, after all.”

“Isn’t that the truth?”

“So do you have time for a quick groom?”

Pris craned her neck to look around the empty store. “Yes. I think I can fit you in.”

She took Jinx’s crate and lifted it over the counter that separated her from her clients. “To be honest, I’m losing my mind working here all alone. It’s been so quiet. Would you be willing to stick around and keep me company for a bit?”

“Me?”

Pris smiled a soft, secret smile. “Come on. Don’t act so shocked. I know we don’t usually move in the same social circles, but we are in the same profession.”

Not to mention that Pris’s own social circle had all but given her the boot at that point.

“And it’s true you’ve accused my husband of murder. Twice. But I think giving me an alibi this go-around more than makes up for that.”

I laughed at her lopsided math.

I followed her around the counter and into the back of the shop. While the front of Pris’s store was all luxury—heavy carpets, gold-framed mirrors, gilt shelves lined with high-end grooming products—the back was where the action happened. There looked to be six stations, each with a sink and a long extender hose like my hairdresser used, a table with a stand for hooking collars, and a dryer box. It was utilitarian but pristine, sparkling with white and chrome.

“So have the police backed off you for Phillip’s murder?”

Pris laughed. “You don’t mince words, do you?”

“Hey, we’re both smack in the middle of this thing.”

“I guess so.” She sighed. “They went through all my inventory of grooming shears to confirm what I’d already told them: I only use Cutsright grooming products. The shears that killed Phillip were Guttenheim. I have no problem with Guttenheim shears, but I get a better discount through Cutsright. So the shears that killed Phillip weren’t mine. That seems to have helped a little.”

“A little?”

She took Jinx out of her cage and dropped her into the sink. Jinx, being the generally chill cat she was, seemed perfectly fine hanging out there, though something told me she’d be less happy when the water came on.

Pris reached for a pair of elbow-length rubber gloves, much thicker than the kind I used in my own kitchen. Before putting them on, she spun around and leaned against the sink. She raised her hand to stroke her pearls, but then flinched and dropped the hand to the gloves again.

“They’re still after me hard about the stolen collar dangle. I’ve told them I have no idea how it ended up in my purse, but of course that’s falling on deaf ears.
‘Yeah, right, lady.’ And then,” she said with a sigh, “there’s my great big fat motive for killing the man.”

“Motive? Does this have anything to do with the fight you had the night before he died?”

Pris narrowed her eyes, sizing me up. “I guess you’ll hear all about this from your great big hunk of a detective. Nice job, by the way.”

She made my relationship with Jack sound so calculating. I couldn’t muster up the will to thank her.

“Well, here’s the thing,” Pris said. “Phillip’s death made Hal’s and my life so much better.”

Pris was married to Hal Olson. He was one of those guys who everyone thought was slightly shady, always trying to put together some kind of deal (preferably a deal that brought him money). Still, he’d managed to get himself elected mayor of Merryville, and he hadn’t bankrupted the town yet.

“How did Phillip’s death help you two?”

“A few months ago, Marsha—who’s a lovely woman, by the way—talked Phillip into serving as an angel investor for The Woods at Badger Lake. He provided us with the capital to keep the contractors at bay while we fought the Department of Natural Resources on the whole rare-owl-habitat brouhaha. But in exchange for Phillip’s financial support, Hal gave him a fifty-percent share in the project. Just last week, we got some good news from our lawyer. It looked like the DNR was going to relocate the burrowing owls so we
could continue to build. But we were tapped out. Like, we didn’t have enough money to pay our mortgage for one more month.”

“Wow. I didn’t know it was that bad, Pris.”

“That was sort of the point. We had to try to keep up the impression that we were fine financially to prevent our creditors from swooping in like a bunch of vultures.”

I didn’t bother to tell her that everyone in town knew they were struggling.

“The ruling from the DNR was right there, so close we could taste it, but we couldn’t hold out another day. Phillip offered to buy out Hal’s shares in the project for pennies on the dollar. It would have stopped us from hemorrhaging cash and it would have paid the month’s mortgage, but it would have cut Hal off from any of the profits from the project.”

“Denford really was a snake.”

“Snake doesn’t begin to cover it. He’d structured the original deal with Hal to leave open this possibility, and Hal had been so eager for the cash he hadn’t thought about all the consequences. He thought that we were all friends, the Denfords and the Olsons. They had us over to their house for dinner. We drove three hours just to get there. We toasted with champagne. Hal never considered that for Phillip the whole deal was straight business.”

“But how did Denford dying help?”

“Denford never started the purchase process. He’d drafted papers, shown them to Hal, but he hadn’t taken any steps to execute the agreement. When he died, everything froze. His personal assets will be held until his estate goes through probate, and he played everything so close to the vest that he never informed his business manager of the deal. Hal was able to point to Phillip’s death to buy us a little time with our creditors, and the DNR announced its decision to let us continue construction yesterday. Basically, we’re saved.”

I wondered if I was saved, too. Had Phillip already signed contracts to produce the knockoffs of my clothes? He’d said the cat pj’s he brought in were just prototypes. Maybe his death would put an end to his plan to destroy my business.

“Anyway, the night before Phillip was killed, we had a fight about his plans to force Hal out. Crazy me, I thought I could talk him into being a human being. The whole situation gave me reason to kill Phillip
and
reason to steal the jewels from the collar ornament.”