Who Let the Dog Out? (3 page)

They will head to a small town called Ashby, which is actually an island, connected to the mainland by a small bridge. There are 740 people in Ashby at this time of year, far more than in the winter.

The people of Ashby are not expecting these visitors, and their town was chosen for no reason other than unlucky geography. It is situated perfectly: if there were a bull’s-eye, Ashby would be in the center of it. The citizens of Ashby will not even realize the invaders are there until it is too late.

By that point their fate will have been sealed.

Coincidences bug me. They don’t bug me as much as people who wait until all their groceries are rung up before reaching for their wallet or opening their purse. And they don’t bug me nearly as much as drivers I wave ahead of me, who then neglect to thank me. Or as much as football announcers who refer to simple blocking as putting “a hat on a hat,” or who say that the solution to a team’s problem is the need to have someone “step up and make a play.” And coincidences don’t bug me anywhere close to as much as DVD packages that can only be opened with a chain saw.

But they do bug me, and I basically don’t believe in them.

As coincidences go, this would be a pretty big one. Literally minutes after entering our foundation building, going directly to Cheyenne’s run, and stealing Cheyenne, Gerald Downey was brutally murdered.

Very little of it makes sense, at least at the moment. If Cheyenne was Downey’s dog, and she got lost, then why go through the elaborate theft? He could have simply showed up at the foundation and provided evidence of ownership, and we would have turned her over.

That evidence would have been easy to provide, be it vet records or even a photograph. Everyone has some photographs of their dog, even slimeballs like Downey. We have no interest in making it difficult for owners; we want them to reunite with their dogs.

If Downey did not own Cheyenne, then why steal her? She’s a great dog, but there are thousands of great dogs available in area shelters and with rescue groups. She’s a mutt, so she would have no value if he was looking to sell her.

Maybe Downey was stealing her for someone else, and for some reason that other person couldn’t or wouldn’t come down to the foundation and identify her as his dog. Might that person have killed Downey? But if he did, why not take Cheyenne? If she was important enough to hire Downey to steal her, why leave her there?

As I may have mentioned, these are the kind of questions that bug me.

I want to talk to Laurie about it some more, but I can’t do it at breakfast. Since Ricky has joined our family, we try and eat as many meals together as possible. Occasionally our schedules prevent us from all being home for dinner, but when it comes to breakfast, we’re pretty much at one hundred percent.

Laurie, overprotective mother that she is, doesn’t want to discuss things like murder and near decapitations in front of Ricky. But Ricky fills the conversational space; he’s in a very talkative mood this morning.

“I hit the ball yesterday.”

“Yeah, I’m sorry I missed it. I heard it was a home run.”

“Mom tell you that?”

“She did. She’s very proud of you.”

“I just hit it a little bit, and then the other team made a lot of errors.” He turns to Laurie. “That’s not a home run, Mom.” He gives me a little eye roll, a gesture that seems to say that we guys should know better than to believe women when it comes to something like baseball.

“I thought it was great,” Laurie says.

Laurie and I basically take turns walking Ricky to and from school. He goes to School Number 20, which is about a fifteen-minute walk from our house. It’s where I went to school, and it looks absolutely the same.

When it’s my turn, as it is today, I often take Tara and Sebastian with us, which becomes their second walk of the morning. But Laurie says she’d like to come along today, and suggests we leave the dogs at home. It seems like a strange request, but I wait until we’ve dropped Ricky off to ask what’s going on.

“I know you want to talk some more about what happened last night. Coincidences bug you, and you want to look into it.”

“How did you know that?”

“You’re not exactly inscrutable, Andy.”

“I need to work on that.”

She holds up a set of car keys. “Let’s go,” she says, and we walk back to our car and head over to the murder scene.

If you ever want to attract a crowd, wrap yourself in police tape. Long after a criminal event has occurred, people seem drawn to the scene by the presence of that tape, as an apparent signal that “excitement occurred here.”

But when it comes to bringing out the masses, police tape takes a distant backseat to media trucks, which in turn pale next to reporters and cameramen.

Local news stations have a weird habit of sending those poor people out to the scene of events that have long been over. For example, the other day the Giants signed a free agent running back, and the local sportscaster reported the news at six o’clock in the morning from outside the empty stadium. The reason it was empty is that the season doesn’t start for five months, and the running back that was signed was in Milwaukee, where he lives.

But the media people are here at the murder scene, as are heaping helpings of police tape, so crowds are milling about. There are also some cops here, probably wrapping up their investigation, as well as making sure no one enters the house.

Having been a member of the Paterson Police Department, Laurie pretty much knows everyone on it. I know a lot of them also, but since my connection to them has mostly been as a defense attorney attacking them in cross-examination, they have always disliked me rather intensely. I thought my defending Pete, one of their own, might make them think more kindly of me. It hasn’t.

So Laurie walks over to talk to a detective named Danny Alvarez, who greets her with a big smile. They talk for a while, and while I can’t hear what they’re saying, I see Laurie point back toward me. Alvarez looks my way, and loses the smile.

After maybe three minutes, Alvarez walks off the porch and down the driveway, and Laurie comes over to me. I ask her what’s going on.

“Alvarez is setting it up for us.”

Before I get a chance to ask what that means, Alvarez comes back up the alley and gives Laurie the thumbs-up sign. “Let’s go,” she says, and I follow her down the same driveway Alvarez had gone down. “We’re going to talk to Downey’s landlady,” she says. “Her name is Helen Streiter.”

When we get to the back of the house, I point to the screen door to Downey’s house. “Pete said that door was open, that we might have scared the killer off.”

We look around at the surroundings. There are houses and driveways everywhere, from both Downey’s street and the one behind it. There is not, as I suspected, a doghouse.

“You want to talk to me?” a voice says, and we see that there’s a woman waiting at the screen door in the back of the house next door to Downey’s. She’s wearing something that’s either a housecoat or a dress, but whatever it is, she looks like she bought it the year the Cubs won the World Series.

She stands by the open door, with no obvious inclination to let us inside. I can see that she is barefoot, which in context does not seem particularly surprising. “The cop said I was supposed to talk to you, but I ain’t got all day,” she says with a sneer, immediately getting on my nerves.

“You rushing to get ready for the prom?” I ask.

“What’s that supposed to mean?”

Laurie frowns slightly at the unproductiveness of my comment. “Ms. Streiter, we just want to ask you about Gerry Downey’s dog,” Laurie says.

“Dog? He ain’t got no dog. I don’t allow no dogs.”

“Are you sure about that?”

“Course I’m sure. Anyway, Gerry hated dogs. There’s a dog across the street that barks during the night, when he hears noises out on the street. Gerry told me once he was going to shoot the damn thing.”

“And it’s not possible he could have had a dog without you knowing about it?” I ask.

“A dog that don’t bark? That he doesn’t have to let out? That nobody knows about? Come on … gimme a break.”

Gerry Downey didn’t own a dog, and didn’t like them. Even if those things weren’t true, he wouldn’t have been allowed to have one where he lived. But he broke into our foundation building and stole one, just before he was brutally murdered.

“He must have stolen Cheyenne for someone else,” I say, as we’re driving home.

“But not the person that killed him” is Laurie’s reply. “Because that person wouldn’t have left her there.”

“So we need to find out who Downey had been in contact with in the last days before his death,” I say.

“We only need to if we really care why Downey stole the dog. You have her back, and Downey is dead. Some people might consider that resolution enough.”

I nod. “True. On the other hand, whoever authorized the theft of Cheyenne is still out there, and might do it again. Which would violate our protection philosophy.” Willie and I feel that once we rescue a dog it is in our protection, and we have full responsibility for it for the rest of its life, even after we find it a home.

“Why am I not surprised?” Laurie asks.

I respond with a question of my own. “You think we should put Super Sam on it?”

Laurie considers this for a moment. On some recent cases, I have used Sam Willis, my accountant-turned-computer-hacker-extraordinaire, to track movements and contacts of certain subjects of our investigations. He often does this by hacking into phone company records, learning whom the person spoke to. He also can access GPS records and determine where the person’s cell phone has been, since each one has a GPS built into it. It’s not one hundred percent, but people and their cell phones are rarely in different locations.

“Might as well,” she finally says, which serves as evidence that she does not consider what we are doing to be particularly important. Laurie believes in old-fashioned, pavement-pounding police work. She recognizes the value of using technology, but it is rarely her first or preferred option.

Instead of going home, we head down to my office on Van Houten Street. I haven’t been there since Pete’s trial ended, and if I never go back I’d be fine with it. I’m not exactly a workaholic.

The only reason we’re going there now is that Sam’s office is down the hall. This way I can talk to Sam, and at the same time drop off a rent check that I forgot to mail. Sofia Hernandez owns the building and operates the fruit stand on the main floor. If I bring her the check in person, she gives me a cantaloupe, and they’re always ripe.

My assistant, Edna, is not in, which does not exactly represent a news flash. She’s training for a crossword puzzle tournament, and since she hardly ever works even when we have a client, there is no reason at all for her to come in when we don’t.

The office is a little dusty. Sofia’s daughter, also named Sofia, is supposed to come in and tidy up once a week. I think she may have missed a couple of weeks, but I don’t want to get her in trouble by telling her mother. I also don’t want to jeopardize my cantaloupe perk.

We’re about to head down to Sam’s office when he shows up. “I thought I heard you. We have a case?”

Sam considers himself a cross between Sherlock Holmes and Eliot Ness, and closer to the latter. His work as my investigator has soured him on accounting, but that is unfortunately how he makes his living. He wants to be around when the shooting starts, which represents quite a change for him. A few years ago he would have said that Smith & Wesson was an accounting firm in Passaic.

“We don’t have a case. We have a research project.”

“Oh,” he says, obviously disappointed.

“But it involves a murder, and I can’t promise, but there’s a chance you can shoot someone.”

“Cool. Is it the murder on Twenty-sixth Street? The guy who got his neck sliced?”

“That’s the one.”

“We looking for the slicer?” he asks.

“At this point we just want to learn about the slicee.”

“Gerald Downey, right?”

“Right.”

Laurie enters the conversation for the first time. “Sam, we think someone hired him to steal something. So we want to know who he’s been in contact with the last couple of weeks, and maybe if he received any unusual amounts of money.”

“What did he steal?”

“A dog.”

“A valuable dog? Like a show dog?” he asks.

“No. A mix.”

“That’s weird.”

“Yes, Sam,” I say. “Weird is exactly the word for it.”

“If you run down to the jail now, you can get yourself a client,” Pete says. Pete knows I have no interest in a client, so if he’s calling me at home to tell me that someone is in jail, it must relate to the Downey case. “You made an arrest?”

“I performed extraordinary police work, which resulted in the perpetrator being brought to justice, and our community made safer.”

“Who is it?”

“Guy’s name is Tommy Infante. He’s a business associate of Downey’s and they had a dispute. It didn’t end well.”

“What about Cheyenne?” I ask.

“What does that mean?”

“The dog. Where does she fit in? Was she Infante’s dog?”

“Give me a break, Andy. The dog doesn’t fit in; it’s a dog. The dispute had nothing to do with the dog. Leave me alone with the damn dog.”

“The victim stole Cheyenne an hour before he got killed. That’s how you found the body in the first place.”

“So mention that in the eulogy.”

“Do me a favor—”

Pete interrupts. “Another one?”

“It’s only just begun. Can you call over to the jail and clear the way for me to see Infante?”

“You’re a pain in the ass,” Pete says, and hangs up. His gratefulness to me for representing him seems to be wearing off.

I ask Laurie, who has overheard my side of the conversation, “You up for a romantic afternoon at the jail?”

“One of us has to pick up our son at school, unless we get him an apartment there.”

I’ve got a feeling I’m not in line for the father of the year award, because I had completely forgotten about that. I’ve spent almost forty years trying to learn how to take care of myself, and doing so for another human being does not come naturally.