Dog Dish of Doom, page 12
I’m not an animal agent for nothing, you know.
Les conceded the point, nodding in a knowing fashion. “Okay, you’re right. Bruno’s not commanding Brad Pitt money just yet. But I still don’t see a reason for anybody other than Louise to kill Trent.” He stood and started pacing the stage, but I could tell he was figuring on blocking for the scene Bruno would be playing, looking at one side of the stage, which was set for Oliver Warbucks’s mansion, then at Bruno, then at the fake door, then at the fake staircase, then at Bruno again. He started to hum “Shut Up and Dance” absently.
“Maybe the dog walker killed him because he wasn’t going to leave Louise for her,” I suggested. I knew Les could think on two planes at the same time. He’d told me it helped him think about the scene “organically” instead of “intellectually.” I figured however the guy directing the show wanted to think was his business as long as I got Bruno’s commission.
But Les’s voice was less focused when he answered because he was in full director mode now. “How’d the dog walker get into the apartment?” he asked.
“She probably has a key; most of them do. If Trent or Louise was home to let her in, they could walk Bruno themselves.”
“No, it was Louise.” That settled it for Les; he gestured to Bruno. “Come here, boy.”
Bruno wanted to keep chewing on his cloth hamburger. You could see it. But man, he was a pro. He dropped the toy and walked over to Les as if it had been his idea. “Sit, Bruno,” Les said. Bruno sat, probably wondering why he’d gotten up from his chewing just to do that. “Good boy.”
“Why not just divorce Trent if she was that mad?” I asked. “Why bother putting a knife in his back? Frankly, I don’t think Louise has the upper-body strength to do it.” I had no clue about Louise’s pectoral power, but I felt like Les was deciding too easily, and I didn’t want to see anybody get railroaded. (Not that Les had even spoken to the police as far as I knew. But the whole Akra thing was too big a coincidence, and now I couldn’t bring it up or he’d fly off the handle again.)
“What am I, Sherlock Holmes?” Les said absently. He lifted his hand, saw Bruno follow it with his eyes, and smiled. “Sorry. I didn’t mean to snap at you.” It was the least combative thing he’d said to me in the last five minutes and he was apologizing. “I got some bad news about a job and I’m cranky.” He went back to looking down. “Okay, Bruno. Walk to here.” Les, hand still in the air, took six steps backward to a pristine-looking sofa that was probably all plywood. He knew exactly where it was on the stage, and didn’t have to look to stop in exactly the right spot.
Bruno, following the hand, got up (now no doubt thinking the man was crazy—sit down, stand up, sit down, stand up…) and walked over to the spot to which Les had led him. He did not sit down when he got there. “Wow, you’re smart,” Les told him. Personally, I didn’t think Bruno had shown a fraction of his brainpower yet, but if the director wanted to be impressed, I certainly wasn’t going to argue. I guessed that bad news about a job was something about the straight play he’d been meeting about. It’s rough when directors (or actors, or writers, or anyone in showbiz) tries to break out of the mold and do something different.
Without so much as breaking his gaze with Bruno, Les said to me, “Look. I think Louise killed her husband because he was screwing some other woman. If you want to think something else, go ahead. It’s a free country. Why do you care so much?”
Why did I care so much? A man was dead. Shouldn’t I care? I’ll grant you, he was a man I didn’t like much, but that’s not really a reason to applaud his murderer. “I care because I knew Trent and somebody killed him,” I said. “Isn’t that enough?”
“Not for you to be playing Nancy Drew. Get up on the sofa, Bruno.” He patted a sofa cushion and Bruno obligingly leapt up onto it. He sat, the very picture of a … whatever breed he was … and even opened his mouth in a small grin at his precociousness. He knew dogs weren’t allowed up on such fancy furniture. If it was real.
But I was still ruminating on Les’s suggestion that I was investigating Trent’s murder. Was that what I was doing? Wasn’t it just collecting information for Detective Rodriguez? Wasn’t I more of a spy (of the dirty, rotten variety) than a sleuth?
“I’m not playing Nancy Drew,” I said, believing it in my heart of hearts (which is just your heart, when you think about it). “I’m being a hopeless theater gossip, like you.”
“The audience is going to love that entrance,” Les said, looking at Bruno. “Audacious without being obnoxious.” He turned toward me. “Has he ever worked in front of an audience before?” Probably something he should have asked sooner, but then, it was probably something I should have told him already, so let’s call it a draw.
“Not one this big,” I said. It wasn’t technically a lie; it was more of a dodge. Certainly Bruno had never done Broadway before.
“Well, he’s going to get applause and he’s going to get laughs,” Les said. “He’d better get used to the sounds.”
“Maybe we should have him here in the auditorium during a performance,” I suggested. “Somewhere he won’t be conspicuous, but where he’d be close enough to see and hear the audience. See how he reacts.”
“That’s an excellent idea,” Les said. “Can he make the show tonight?”
While Louise was dealing with Trent’s funeral and had asked me to take care of the dog? Yeah, I thought I could manage that, but I’d have to ask Mom and Dad to walk Steve and Eydie. Consuelo was handling the office, so that wouldn’t be a problem.
“I don’t see why not. Where’s a good place for him to stay?” I looked around the theater. “We don’t want it to be backstage; that wouldn’t be like a real audience experience.”
Les broke his concentration with Bruno and took a quick look into the auditorium. “There’s a box upstairs that only gets used when we have a total sellout,” he said. “Bruno would be in the audience, but not in the orchestra or the balcony. He can be in the room but not cause a distraction.”
We agreed that sounded like a good idea and Les snapped his fingers or rubbed a lamp or whatever it is he does and Akra appeared, to be given instructions on how Mr. Bruno would be accommodated at the theater this evening. After that Les walked Bruno through some simple moves on the stage, shouting out the lines of dialogue that would cue those moves so Bruno could get used to hearing them. After about a half hour, he proclaimed Bruno sufficiently rehearsed for his first day and released us back into what is laughingly referred to as “the real world.” Then he muttered something about “trying to save my career” and summoned Akra, who already had six phone messages for him.
I didn’t know how much reconnaissance I’d managed for Rodriguez, but as soon as we were back on the street I called the number she had given me and told her about Les’s theories, Akra’s odd attitude toward Louise, and Gwen Harper’s probably meaningless acrimony toward Trent, or as she called him, “Brent.”
The detective listened—although I thought it was possible I heard her stifle a yawn—and asked what I thought it all meant. “Isn’t that sort of your job?” I asked.
“You’re my eyes and ears in the theater. What’s your take on what you heard?”
I stuck my hand out to hail a cab. Try doing that sometime in Manhattan on a weekday when you’re traveling with what appears to be a walking area rug. This was going to take a while. “I don’t think anybody knows anything, but if one of them does, it’s Akra,” I said finally. Three cabs with their signs lit up passed me in hopes of finding a fare that wouldn’t make the cab smell like a dog, or worse.
“I haven’t spoken to her yet.” Rodriguez sighed. “Les McMaster thought he was such a big deal discussing a man he met once that he took up all my time.”
“He met Trent twice,” I reminded her. “Trent apparently came to the theater behind my back.”
“It’s all about you, isn’t it?”
I considered ordering a ride from Uber when an actual taxicab slowed to a halt and let Bruno and me into the backseat. I gave the driver the address for Louise’s apartment. I figured if Louise was back, we could pay our respects and tell her about Bruno’s appointment at the theater tonight. If she wasn’t, I now had a key and could both let Bruno relax in his familiar home and maybe snoop around a little for Rodriguez, although her lack of enthusiasm was sort of deflating that idea.
“Akra’s still my best bet for knowing something,” I said. No sense getting into a war of nerves with Rodriguez. She didn’t have any nerves.
“Maybe I’ll pay Ms. Akra a call before the show tonight. If you think she’s involved in the murder…”
“That’s not what I said,” I warned. “I said I didn’t think anyone at the theater knew anything, but she was the closest you’d get.”
“Noted. I’ll be at the theater by six.” She hung up before I could explain that two hours before curtain was absolutely the worst time to disturb a theater company. She’d probably ignore that anyway, because, you know, she was the police and they were just silly actors.
When we got downtown to Louise’s apartment, Bruno actually showed some signs of wariness on approaching the building’s entrance. His tail went down, although not between his legs, and his ears were not at full height. He’d seen something bad there, all right, and he wasn’t happy about it. Dogs have memories, despite the fact that they’ll act like you’ve been gone for weeks when all you did was take out the garbage. They’re not great with how much time has passed, but they do remember what happened.
He didn’t resist when I led him into the building, which I thought might be a possibility. He got into the elevator after only a second of hesitation, and he did not whimper. Bruno was a brave dog.
I rang the bell a couple of times and knocked on the door, which made Bruno bark. I’m not sure he knew which side of the door we were on, and he was probably used to alerting the humans when he heard that noise. It didn’t much matter, as there was no sound in the hallway and Louise did not answer the door. I used the key to let us in.
I let Bruno off his leash. He wasn’t as hesitant as he’d been the first time he’d walked into my house, but he also didn’t get excited and scamper about the room the way you might expect a dog who hadn’t been home for most of two days to do. He walked around, tail back up but not wagging, looked in each room, then took careful note of where I was—in the little office area off the kitchen—and lay down right where he could see me.
Let me say right off that I am a fervent advocate of privacy and do not believe in looking into someone else’s private files. But since I believed myself to be a duly deputized agent of the New York Police Department, and having been given a key to the apartment by its owner, I thought it was necessary to see if I could uncover any evidence that would exonerate Louise in Trent’s murder.
Hey. I had to look on her computer and I needed a way to justify it. Think what you want; I sleep fine at night.
I didn’t know how much time I’d have. In theory, I could stay here enjoying Louise’s unintentional hospitality for at least three hours. But I don’t like being in someone else’s house when they’re not there, so I wanted to make this quick. Besides, Louise could also come through the door at any moment and wonder what the hell I was doing looking through her personal files.
The question was: What should I be looking for? I wasn’t a trained (or any other kind of) investigator. If there was a file on Louise’s hard drive called Stuff About Trent’s Murder, that would be helpful, but it was fairly unlikely. I turned the computer on and waited for it to boot up.
While it did, I looked over at Bruno, who had fallen asleep, and wondered what kind of life he’d had here if he was so unimpressed at being back in the place you’d think he’d call home. Trent had told me he and Louise had owned Bruno for six months after adopting him from a shelter, but had only recently decided he’d make a great theater dog. Before that, he’d been a full-time pet. He seemed now like he loved the showbiz life, so maybe his previous time here had not been that exciting. Some dogs need the action.
The screen came to life. I opened the hard drive and started scanning folders. There were files clearly marked for projects from Trent’s software business, with names like Bugger Off and Twinker that turned out to be a security program and a fledgling social network based on junk food. I was hoping these were not projects Trent had left unfinished, because they weren’t going anyplace now.
There was also a folder for something called Landfill, but I couldn’t figure out what it was because the spreadsheet inside was unmarked, just showing potential profit projections and expenditures in the hundreds of thousands of dollars, which I’d doubt Trent could have dreamed of providing.
Aside from that, the folders were pretty standard. There were sample contracts, calendars, invoices, income records, and other by-the-book business files, as well as personal files, including Trent’s checkbook, which I did not open. Even when I’m sneaking through someone’s hard drive, I have my standards.
But then it became necessary. I noticed that every receipt Trent had received in the past three years, every oil change (for a man who lived in Manhattan?), every pair of socks, every restaurant bill, was scanned and stored in a file marked, oddly, Kittens. I supposed that was Trent trying to be cagey. Or funny.
So I had a good look at all the purchases he’d made, and his incredibly thorough recordkeeping made it possible to pretty much trace the man’s life in detail. On October 14, for example, he had purchased a dozen doughnuts (with a debit card), then had lunch at John’s Pizza in the Times Square area, then taken a cab to his home, then ordered Thai food from Suit and Thai, which must have seemed witty at the time, and capped off the evening buying three songs (Taylor Swift, Kanye West, and ELO?) from iTunes. That was not an atypical day.
But with all the detailed records and the almost insane attention to chronicling all that was Trent Barclay’s financial life, there was not so much as one record showing the date, place, or price paid for Bruno’s adoption. There was no license recorded. There was nothing indicating a veterinarian appointment. There were receipts for dog food and supplies, but that was it.
For six months.
That went beyond odd. Bruno’s life with Trent and Louise was practically undocumented in his files. For a man who had actually kept receipts from Dunkin Donuts for single iced coffee purchases, it was a huge warning sign. The only problem was, I didn’t know what it warned.
Bruno, the object of my consternation, snored a little at my feet. I’d have to think of feeding and walking him before the show tonight, and had no idea where Louise kept the dog food. I had his leash and always carried bags (for the walk) in my pocket, but a quick search of the place was definitely called for pretty soon.
Maybe I should check on Louise’s computer first, though, I thought. If Bruno’s records were there, it would answer a number of questions.
The thing was, Louise operated off a laptop, I’d noticed the last time I was here. And it was not anywhere in sight at the moment.
I stood up, which sort of woke Bruno. He opened his eyes, raised his head, saw I was still there, and decided nothing alarming was going on so it made the most sense to just go back to sleep. Bruno was a very logical dog.
He didn’t stir even as I stepped over him to walk into the kitchen. I had, I’ll admit, been avoiding this room, but the crime-scene tape was now gone and I was careful not to look too hard at the floor, where Trent’s body had fallen. Now I was on a mission to find Bruno’s food, mostly because I had no idea where to look for Louise’s laptop. For all I knew, she’d taken it with her to keep up on Twitter during Trent’s funeral. Maybe she didn’t have a smartphone.
I figured Bruno’s food would be in the small closet to the left of the refrigerator. I had no idea if it would be in cans or bags, but the cabinets over the sink and under the sink would probably be devoted to dishware and cleaning supplies. So I opened the closet door and looked inside.
And that’s when the apartment door opened and Louise walked in.
“What are you doing here?” she asked, annoyed.
She walked in, followed by two people I hadn’t met before. All three were dressed in black: Louise in the somewhat va-va-voom suit she’d had on when I saw her at the theater; the woman behind her, older and smaller, in a black dress and hat; and a man, in his forties, tall, slim, and not looking that mournful, in a black suit with a really blue tie.
Bruno got up, indifferent, and walked over in the hope someone would pet him. Nobody else made a move, so I stroked his head. I’m your friend, Bruno.
“I’m looking for food to give Bruno,” I told her. “I figured I’d give him a break for an hour or so.” I told her that Bruno was expected back at the theater by six, which was probably early. I just wanted to see the reception Rodriguez got from the company when she got there.
The older woman looked me up and down and clearly found me wanting. “Who brings a dog to a shiva?” she asked Louise. She thought Bruno was my dog. Apparently she didn’t visit much.
“No, Mama, she’s not here for that.” Sometimes it’s nice to hear how people refer to you when you’re not there. I clearly wasn’t here now, but this was not one of those times. “She’s here to take care of the dog.”
The older woman seemed confused. “Whose dog is it?”
“Mine,” Louise said.
“You and Moshe have a dog?” She said “dog” like it was “nuclear waste material.”
I held out my hand in an attempt to prove I was still in the room. “I’m Kay Powell,” I told the woman. “I help negotiate Bruno’s contracts.”
The woman took my hand, but clearly would have preferred I put on a pair of gloves first. No, mittens. “I’m Moshe’s mother,” she said. “We just came from my son’s funeral.”
