Underdog (25 page)
Three faces looked up from their paperwork. A man on the end smiled. “We have a vet.”
“No, I need a doctor! It's an emergency!”
“I guess we could make an announcement. . .”
“There's a man in the grooming area who's very ill. He needs help quickly!”
The official frowned. He looked at the other two as if wishing they could take a meeting. “Maybe we should call the local paramedics.”
“Yes, please do that. Hurry!” I pointed out where we were. One of the officials went to the phone. Another came with me. We ran together back to the set-up, dodging around crates and busy exhibitors.
Harry Flynn was right where I'd left him and he didn't look good. He was still on the floor, and he'd drawn his knees up to his chest. His mouth was half open; so were his eyes.
The official stopped running so suddenly I plowed right into the back of him. He turned around and firmly pushed me away. Still I was close enough to see as he stooped down and laid his fingers along the top of Harry's throat, feeling for a pulse.
“Is he . . . ?”
“Barely.”
We stayed with him until the paramedics came. By that time Harry's assistants had returned. Both were young women, one American, one Japanese. They clutched each other and looked close to tears. The grim looks on the face of the medical team as they strapped an oxygen mask over Harry's face and lifted him onto the stretcher didn't help matters any.
The ambulance left the grounds with lights on and siren blaring.
Twenty-five
After that the show went on as usual. Most exhibitors aren't rubberneckers. There's a lot of time and money invested in their participation in a dog show, and it would take more than an ambulance to distract them from their business. In this case, the paramedics had done their job so quickly and efficiently, most people seemed unaware that anything unusual had occurred.
One of Harry's assistants had gone with him in the ambulance. The other, the Japanese girl, had stayed behind to tend to the dogs. She was brushing a Scottie and introduced herself as Yuko. I asked if there was anything I could do.
“Bring Harry back?” she asked hopefully, her English limited.
“Not yet. We'll hear something later. I'm sure they're taking good care of him at the hospital.”
She nodded unhappily and went back to her dog.
Davey came skipping back to the grooming area, with Aunt Peg following more sedately behind. “Guess what we saw?” my son demanded.
I lifted him up and swung him onto a crate top. “What?”
“An ambulance. With sirens and flashing lights and everything!”
“Oh,” I said. “Right.”
Aunt Peg's gaze narrowed. “Is something wrong?”
“Harry Flynn collapsed.” I told her what had happened.
“Any idea what caused it?”
“No, but he looked really bad. I hope we'll hear something soon.”
When news came, it wasn't good. By early afternoon, Harry Flynn was dead. I wished someone would mention a heart attack, but no one did. Poisoning was suspected. The medical examiner was going to do an autopsy.
It was the police who delivered the news; a tall, spare black man named Detective Brucker. He brought a handful of uniformed officers with him. They cordoned off Harry's set-up and began asking questions of everyone in the area.
We'd just gotten back from the ring after the judging of Standard Poodles. Faith had shown nicely and beaten two other puppies. Aunt Peg's bitch, Peaches, had taken the points and gone Best Opposite. We were feeling pretty pleased with ourselves until we got back to the grooming area and found the police waiting.
When Detective Brucker found out that I was the last person who'd spoken to Harry, he put me at the top of his list of people to see. Peg and I banded the Poodles' hair out of their way and put them in their crates, then she took Davey for a walk. The detective and I put a pair of chairs in the aisle between the two set-ups.
We started with the preliminaries, and it quickly became obvious that the information I possessed was woefully lacking. I hadn't known Harry well; and aside from giving him a doughnut, I hadn't been paying any attention to him or how he'd spent his morning.
“You want to talk to his assistants about that,” I told Detective Brucker.
“We will. But first I'd like to nail down your involvement.”
My involvement?
“You arrived at the building at what time?”
I thought back. “A little before eight.”
“And you came inside and offered Mr. Flynn a doughnut?”
“Actually he asked for one, to go with his coffee. He saw the box I was carrying and we had plenty of extras.”
“What happened to the rest of the doughnuts?”
“Mostly we ate them. I think there might be one or two left.” I indicated the box, which had been shoved into a tote bag underneath a table.
Brucker motioned to one of the uniformed officers. The box and its contents were bagged and removed.
“We would be who?”
“Myself,” I said. “My son, Davey, and my aunt, Margaret Turnbull.”
There was a pause while he took down the names. “What kind of doughnut did Mr. Flynn have?”
“Glazed.”
“And were there other glazed doughnuts in the box?”
“Several. That's why I gave him one.”
“And Mr. Flynn was also drinking coffee at this time?”
“Yes.”
“Did you give him that, too?”
There was something in the deceptively casual way the detective slipped the question in. Surely I wasn't a suspect?
“No,” I said, holding my voice neutral. “I didn't.”
“Do you know where he got it from?”
“Harry said he thought one of his assistants must have stopped on the way to the show and picked it up for him.”
“We spoke with one of his assistants at the hospital.” Brucker consulted his notes. “A Rhonda Levine. She says that neither she nor the other young woman saw Mr. Flynn drinking or eating anything.”
“They were outside with the dogs at the timeâ”
“And that although she did see an empty coffee cup on one of the tables, she had no knowledge how it might have gotten there.”
I glanced over to the cordoned-off set-up. “Where's the coffee cup now?”
“Ms. Levine was cleaning up and threw it out.”
There were two large garbage cans in the vicinity. I was glad I wasn't the one who would have to sift through them. “You believe Harry was poisoned,” I said.
“It's a strong possibility.”
“By what?”
“We don't know that yet. I understand the dog shows run through Monday. If we have any further questions, will you be available?”
“My son and I are going home tomorrow night.”
That occasioned the need for another note. Brucker looked up. “Do you know of anyone who might have wished to harm Harry Flynn?”
“There were probably lots of people. From what I could tell, he wasn't a very likable man.”
“Any names in particular you'd like to give me?”
I thought for a long minute, then glanced over to the Shamrock set-up. For the moment it was empty. Both Rick and Angie were probably up at the rings. “Yes,” I said finally. “Jenny Maguire.”
He wrote the name down. “What was her relationship to Mr. Flynn?”
“Up until six weeks ago, she was a competitor of his.”
“What happened six weeks ago?”
“She died,” I said, choosing my words slowly and for effect. “Of arsenic poisoning.”
That got his attention and he asked a lot of questions, mostly about the circumstances of Jenny's death and who in Ridgefield had been handling the case. He didn't ask me who I thought had done it, and I didn't volunteer the information. It wasn't that I was trying to shield Rick, only that I couldn't figure out how this latest development fit into the case I'd been building against him in my mind. What would Rick have had to gain from Harry's death?
It was a question I broached to Aunt Peg after Detective Brucker had finished interviewing everyone in the area and moved on to talk to the club officials. His team had dusted Harry's set-up for fingerprints, sifted through the few belongings there, and were now removing the two big garbage cans from the building. Davey was munching on a hot dog and zooming his matchbox cars in and out of one of the large crates. Though we'd missed lunch earlier, neither Peg nor I had any appetite. We got the Poodles back out of their crates and were breaking down topknots and brushing out hair spray.
“With Harry out of the way,” she said, “Charlie wins that much more easily. That's got to look good for Shamrock.”
“Good enough to be worth killing over?” I asked skeptically. “According to Florence Byrd, Charlie's going home in a couple of weeks anyway. If Rick wanted to kill Flynn for that reason, he should have done it months ago.”
“Months ago, Charlie was beating Harry's dogs handily.”
“Because Jenny was showing him,” I said, and Aunt Peg nodded. “The poison must have been in the coffee. Harry thought one of his assistants had left it for him. That's why he drank it. So the murderer has to be someone who was here early this morning.”
“That doesn't rule out anybody. All the handlers get here as soon as the building opens to tend to their dogs and get ready for the day.”
“Rick and Angie were here when we got here. I didn't see them but their set-up was unpacked.”
“So was Crystal Mars,” said Aunt Peg. “When Davey and I were walking the Poodles, she was rehanging the banner above her booth.”
“It sounds like everyone was out and around this morning.”
“That's not unusual for a show this size. But I'll tell you what was unusual, now that I stop to think about it. I saw Dirk here this morning too.”
“What's unusual about that?”
“It's the first time I've seen him at a show when he hasn't been with Mrs. Byrd. If she wasn't here, why was he? And if she was here, why? It's the handlers who need to get a headstart on the day. The owners usually don't appear until judging time.”
I reached for my schedule and had a look. “Ascob Cockers went in at noon. I wonder if Charlie won.”
“He did,” Aunt Peg confirmed. “I saw Angie carrying the ribbon when she brought him back. I mentioned that Harry had been taken ill and she said she'd been wondering where he was. Then she laughed a bit and said she hoped he didn't improve by group time.”
“I guess she got her wish.”
“Did the detective question her and Rick?”
“He must have.” I smoothed out the long hair on Faith's ear, wrapped it in a colored plastic sheet, tucked it under and banded it in place. “I told Brucker about what happened to Jenny, and I saw him go over to the Shamrock set-up. Rick was getting ready to show a Bichon and Brucker followed him up to ringside.”
Faith stood up on her table and began to bark.
“Cut out that racket!” Florence Byrd said sternly. “Haven't you ever seen an old lady with a cane before?”
I quieted Faith as Mrs. Byrd made her way slowly to our set-up. Dirk was nowhere in sight. Aunt Peg opened up a chair she'd stashed between two crates and Mrs. Byrd sat herself down.
“Well, this is a fine mess,” she said. “Harry Flynn dead, and police everywhere. What is the world coming to? In my day, dog shows never used to be like this.”
Unless I was mistaken about the amount of winning her dog had been doing recently, this still was her day. If she'd come to complain, I could think of better ways to spend the time. “We were just talking about you,” I said boldly.
“Really?”
“And Dirk,” said Aunt Peg, following my lead.
“We were wondering what time you got to the show this morning.”
“Just in time to see Charlie win,” Florence said firmly.
“By then I gather all this business with Flynn was over and done with. I always thought of him as a particularly nasty man. Still, no one deserves to die like that.”
“Dirk was here earlier,” Aunt Peg mentioned. “I saw him leaving the building before the start of judging.”
“Dirk had business to attend to. I don't pry into my employees' affairs. It's none of my business and it's none of yours either.”
“No,” I allowed. “But it's something the police might be interested in.”
“The fact that my driver was in the building this morning? I doubt it. There must have been hundreds of people here.”
“But not hundreds of people with a connection to Jenny.”
“What are you trying to say, young lady?”
Aunt Peg moved over to stand beside me. “I imagine what she's trying to say is that two people are dead, most likely by the same hand. And the sooner this whole thing gets itself cleared up, the better.”
“The same hand?” Mrs. Byrd's gnarled fingers clasped the top of her cane tightly. “Does that mean arsenic was involved?”
“The police don't know yet. They're going to be doing an autopsy to find out.”
“Then it would behoove you not to jump to conclusions, wouldn't it?”
Lord, she was making me angry. “I'd rather jump to conclusions, than stand around with my head buried in the sand. You've been showing dogs a long time. I imagine you remember the days when people put arsenic in their dogs' food to improve their coats.”
“I most certainly do. Fowler's solution, that's what people used. You could get it from the druggist. A remarkably stupid practice, if you ask me. Quality care will achieve the same results in the end.”
“Not everyone has your resources,” said Aunt Peg. “And there will always be people looking to find a shortcut.”
Mrs. Byrd didn't appear to be listening. She was staring into the next aisle at Harry Flynn's set-up. Her face was creased by a perplexed frown.
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