Drop Dead on Recall (10 page)

28

I went back to
the kitchen. Mom was down on her knees fooling around with the contents of a cabinet. “Whatcha doing, Mom?” I leaned over and took a look.

“Oh, Marsha! How nice to see you!” She reached out and patted my leg. “I’ve been stocking up. The price of oil is going to go up, you know. I read it in the paper.”

The cabinet was loaded with oil. Industrial-size bottles of corn oil, safflower oil, peanut oil. Two huge cans of olive oil, extra virgin.
Whenever I see that term, I think of Agnes Baumgartner, a self-
righteous little priss in every class I ever took in high school. Agnes, her pinched little face scowling over her buttoned-up white collars, was an extra virgin if I ever saw one.

“Mom, when did you eat? Shall I make you something?”

Her face lit up. “Cookies! Let’s bake cookies!”

“First I think you should have something nutritious, okay?”

She slumped into a chair and leaned her cheek on her fist. “Okay. But I’d rather have cookies.”

I opened the cupboard where she normally kept canned goods. The top shelf was bare. The next one down was crammed with condensed tomato soup. Say, sixty cans. “Mom, how about some tomato soup?”

“I don’t like tomato soup.”

“Great! Be ready in a jiffy.” I pulled out a can and found a can opener and a whisk.

Mom was at the table folding and stacking sections of paper towels as she pulled them one by one off a roll, and humming fragments of something I couldn’t quite piece together. My temples throbbed in time with my rambunctious thoughts. What did Detective Stevens want? What were we going to do about Mom? What was that song she was humming in spurts? What, or who, killed Abigail Dorn? And the question that slipped like a noose around my mind—am I really a suspect?

One problem at a time, Janet
.

“So, Mom, Bill’s coming over. Maybe you should stay with him for a few days.”

“Oh, yes! I could help with the baby until Julie’s on her feet.”

Who in the heck are Julie and the baby?
I bet Bill and his partner, Norm, didn’t know them either.

I set the soup on the burner, and went back to checking out the
cupboards. The shelf below the tomato soup was a hodgepodge of pastas, rice, coffee filters, dried beans and peas, an Englebert Humperdinck
cassette, lentils, couscous, oatmeal, wheat germ, an unopened pantyhose egg, three packets of zinnia seeds, and a humongous bag of popcorn. I backtracked to the stove for some therapeutic soup stirring.

She’s Come Undone
. That was it.
Perfect
.

I opened the cupboard where the plates and bowls had lived since I was a little girl. Empty. “Mom! Where are your dishes?”

“Oh, I was tired of those old things. I gave them to Goodwill.” Or maybe they were in the furnace room. I fought off the urge to beat my head against the edge of the cabinet, kept looking, and eventually found a ceramic mug among the soup cans.

“Soup’s on!” I set the mug of soup and a spoon on the table and watched Mom tuck a paper towel into her collar. She tried to pat it flat against her chest, but the lace jabot fought back.

She slurped a spoonful of soup. “Mmmmm! Delicious! I love tomato soup!”

She was finishing off her third mugful when Bill banged in through the back door. “Hi, Mom. Janet.” He glanced around the kitchen, eyes wide.

“George, you’re home early.” George was my father. He died of a heart attack in the middle of a Montana trout stream nineteen years ago.

“Mom, it’s me, Bill.”

“Oh, Bill!” She wiped tomato soup from her lips. “How was school?”

Bill and I adjourned to the living room and I filled him in while he tidied the cushions on the sofa. He finally ran out of excuses and promised to keep an eye on her until morning. “But this has to be temporary. I can’t watch her every minute. And I leave in two weeks for Thailand.” He was in full “all about me” mode by the time he got to his travel plans.

“You want some cheese with that whine, Bill?”

He glared into my eyes for a moment, then asked, “What’s up with you?”

My overtaut tether snapped. “Well, let’s see, my mother is losing her mind, I watched someone drop dead last weekend, and I’m apparently under suspicion for tampering with evidence. Otherwise I’m just dandy.”

“The Aunt Ellie woman at the dog show? I wondered if you were there.”

I nodded. He sat me down on the couch and heard the whole story.

“Look, if you need a lawyer, call Norm.”

“Norm’s a real estate attorney.”

“He’ll know who to call. You can’t just pick a criminal defense attorney from the phone book.”

My heart did a little tango as my brain screamed
criminal defense?

Then Bill shifted our focus back to Mom, his tone softer. “It’s time we get serious about other options.”

“Right.” A mix of emotions the size of a St. Bernard plopped onto my chest. “Listen, I need to get going. I’ll call you when I get home from school tonight. Check out the cupboards while you’re here.”

Mom was at the sink, washing the mug. “Gotta go, Mom. Love you.” I kissed her cheek.

“Okay, dear. Have fun. Be home by eleven.”

29

I got to the
Firefly Coffee House at 3:32. The place was quiet, so I figured I could do a little work before Detective Stevens arrived. I set my laptop on the table, bent to pull my notes from my bag, and dropped my favorite gel pen. I scooched down sideways to retrieve it. Big mistake. I slipped off the chair and gave myself a mild uppercut with the edge of the table, making my left leg straighten reflexively and scuttle the pen across the floor and under the legs of another table about ten feet away.

Two slick young guys in suits looked up from their laptops across the room, no doubt wondering why I was out unsupervised. I smiled at them and they pretended they hadn’t noticed me. By the time I retrieved my pen and the shreds of my dignity, I no longer felt like doing anything constructive, so I went to the counter and ordered a large mocha latte. Caffeine and chocolate would do me good.

I was settling back into my booth when Jo Stevens walked in. “You’re early.”

“Yeah, I had the silly idea that I could get a little work done.”

“Get the dog back to Mr. Dorn?

“Safe and sound.”

Jo opened the file folder she’d brought with her and flipped a few sheets of paper over, exposing what appeared to be a printout of an e-mail. “I have a few questions I thought you might clear up for me.”

“Okay.” I wasn’t sure I liked the sound of that.

“I have some e-mails from the victi … er, Ms. Dorn’s computer, and I don’t understand them. Dog jargon.”

“Okay.”

She picked up the e-mail printout and pulled a pen from her breast pocket. “What does ‘kurf’ mean?”

“Kurf?”

“C-E-R-F.”

I explained that the acronym is pronounced like
surf
. “Canine Eye Registration Foundation. It’s an organization that registers the results of eye exams on dogs and tracks genetic eye diseases in the different breeds.”

She nodded and made a quick note. “And ‘ofa’?” She made it rhyme with
sofa
.

I choked on my latte. “Well, that one we call by the letters. O-F-A.
Orthopedic Foundation for Animals. They keep records on a number of inherited problems in dogs, but usually when people mention OFA they’re talking about hips. You know, evaluations of hip x-rays, testing for hip dysplasia.”

She looked blank.

“Malformation of the hip joint. Causes arthritis and leads to lameness.”

“That German Shepherd thing?”

“Not just German Shepherds. Lots of breeds, and mixed breeds, can have hip dysplasia.”

“Okay. And AKC I guess is American Kennel Club?”

“Right.”

“And NSDR?”

“National Stock Dog Registry. They register various stock dog breeds.”

The blank look again. I was guessing she wasn’t a dog person, though she had seemed comfortable enough with Jay and Pip bouncing around her.

“Border Collies, Australian Shepherds, English Shepherds … Breeds that traditionally work livestock on farms and ranches.”

“Okay.” She finished a note to herself, shoved the e-mail back into her bag, then set her forearms on the table and leaned into them. “So tell me about breeding dogs.”

“The birds and bees part, or the human social side?”

Jo smiled. “Human social. It can be a big deal, right? Big stud fees and all?”

“Some dogs do have pretty fancy stud fees, but not like, say, horses. Hundreds usually, not thousands. What are you getting at?” She didn’t answer. “You need to be a little more specific. Details vary from breed to breed, place to place, person to person.”

Jo let her shoulders relax and leaned back. “If the dog’s value is in stud fees, why would someone turn down a stud fee?”

“Ah, well, first, you’re starting from a faulty premise. To responsible breeders and stud dog owners, the dog’s value isn’t strictly financial. I mean, most people are happy when the dog brings in a little money, sure. For a dog with the right credentials, we’re talking six to eight hundred dollars, maybe a thousand or a little more, in most breeds, maybe once or twice a year. Some dogs breed a lot more than that, but it’s not the norm among responsible breeders. So we’re not talking a fortune.” I took another sip of latte, wiped the whipped cream off my lips, and went on. “Anyway, the bitch is important too …” The detective’s eyebrows rose a couple of notches, so I explained. “Bitch—you know, female canine? Proper terminology. Like, you know, mare, hen, woman … I’ve been around dog people so long I forget that definition number one for
bitch
isn’t canine for most people. But if we’re talking about dog breeding,
female
sounds silly to me.”

“Okay.”

“Not that there aren’t a few of the two-legged kind in the dog world.”

She smiled again. “I bet. So back to why someone might say no to
a stud fee on a dog?”

“If a responsible stud owner doesn’t think the bitch has anything to offer the breed, you know, if she has major faults in terms of the breed standard, or hasn’t passed the recommended screening tests for potential health or temperament problems, she’d probably turn her down. Or she might think the bitch is okay but not a good match for her dog. All dogs have faults, and you don’t want to breed two that have the same faults themselves or in close relatives.”

She scribbled furiously, and I went on. “Good stud dog owners also care about who owns the bitch and won’t breed their dogs to any bitch whose owner they don’t trust to do well by the pups.”

“So you think Ms. Dorn would have been fussy about all this?”

“I think Abigail would have been very fussy, but …”

She cut me off. “It all sounds pretty judgmental. Lots of room for hurt feelings?”

“Sure, that can happen. Why the interest in dog breeding?”

“Part of the investigation.”

“But Abigail wasn’t standing Pip at stud.”

“Must have been. That’s what this,” she tapped the paper with her pen, “is about.”

“About using Pip as a stud dog?”

“Right.”

Another little secret
, whispered Janet Demon, ticking off all sorts of implications if that was the case. “When was it written?”

“Last week. Friday. The day before she died.”

“Now that
is
weird,” I said, mostly to myself and the table. Jo glanced up, then went back to writing in her notebook. So I told her, “Pip is neutered.”

She stopped writing. “He’s what?”

“The dog is a sucker for tummy rubs, and I’m telling you, he has no noogies.”

30

“Can I ask you
a couple of questions now?” I was revved up on
caffeine and sugar by then and feeling a bit more comfortable with Detective Stevens.

“Sure. But I can’t discuss the details of an ongoing investigation.”

I remembered her telling me before that she was just asking a few questions. “Is it an investigation now?”

“Not exactly. But something isn’t right.”

“And the men in charge think you’re hormonal for thinking that?” We shared a nonverbal female-bonding moment, and I said. “Windy and cool.”

“What?”

“It was windy and cool on Saturday. No bees.”

Jo’s pupils dilated a notch. “You’re very observant.”

“I’m a photographer. I see things.” I hesitated before asking, “What if she was poisoned? Would that show up?”

She sat up a little straighter and I swear I saw her ears prick forward like a terrier with a varmint in sight. “Depends. The effects of some toxins are obvious, but sometimes they have to know what to look for.” She turned those cop eyes on me. “Why would you ask that?”

“What else? She wasn’t shot or bashed in the head, and the bee-sting theory makes less and less sense.”

“Why did you remove Ms. Dorn’s bag from the crime scene and wash the contents?”

The blood raced out of my head, leaving me a little woozy. “I was trying to help Greg. I didn’t know it was a crime scene!” The women at the table next to us stopped talking and turned to check me out. I lowered my voice and leaned forward into the edge of the table. “I didn’t know it was a crime scene.” The blood rushed back, and my temples began to pound.

“Of course not.” She glanced at her watch as she stood and gathered her things. “Thanks for your time, Ms. MacPhail.”

“Janet.”

“Janet. I may need to speak to you again. You’ll be around?”

“Sure, other than weekend dog shows. I have my dog entered in a couple that are coming up.” My head was settling down, but my stomach did a flipflop. “Am I a suspect?”

“There aren’t any suspects yet. We aren’t sure a crime has been committed. We won’t know that until we have a cause of death.” And then she left, my peace of mind tucked into her pocket along with her nice little notebook.

_____

My “How to Photograph Your Pets” class was a welcome respite—nary a word about murder. I showed slides of good and bad photos, and I reminded the class that I post tips online, including Janet MacPhail’s #1 Rule of Photographing Pets:
Get down to the animal’s level
. Don’t shoot a picture from above. As I always explain, if you shoot from above, you’ll get a big-head and teensy weensy paws. Your pet won’t look too great, either.

Remember that, Janet,
whispered the helpful little angel on my right shoulder.
Perspective makes all the difference.