Dog Dish of Doom, page 15
“What happened to Bruno?” she wailed before I could so much as say hello. “I left you in charge of my dog for how long? And now he’s missing!”
It wasn’t like I hadn’t been playing this very scenario in my head continuously since I’d walked back from the theater bar, but now I knew precisely where Bruno was and that there was absolutely no danger to him whatsoever. Dad was right; I was no Meryl Streep. But I was a good agent, and that meant I knew how to tell the truth in a noncommittal, not necessarily informational way.
“I’m so sorry,” I told Louise. “I came back from getting Bruno some water to drink, and he was gone.” So far, no variation from the facts at all.
“I don’t care if you’re sorry,” my client’s owner responded. “I want that dog back, you understand?” I’m used to people being mad at me, but I’m not crazy about it. Louise had gone through an extremely difficult time and was still in the thick of it. I had to overlook the fact that I didn’t like her very much to understand exactly how much pressure there was on her. After all, the cops very likely thought she had killed her husband.
“I just don’t see what I can do about getting Bruno back to you right now, Louise.” Actually, I could see what was possible; I could just have driven Bruno back to his home with Louise and gone off to be his agent, but somehow that didn’t seem like the best plan of action just at the moment.
“Did you look through the theater?” Louise wasn’t immediately signing on to the idea that Bruno had been abducted. She was operating on the assumption that I, incompetent dog sitter that I was, had simply let him run off. I could use that.
“I didn’t find him in the theater,” I told Louise. No, I’d found him in my parents’ aircraft carrier in a parking garage, but that part wasn’t necessary information just at this moment. Maybe it would be tomorrow, after I’d figured out some way to discover who was threatening Bruno and forced Rodriguez, against her will, to arrest them.
“So what are you going to do?” Louise was challenging me.
“I’m going to go home,” I said. Because I was. I just couldn’t get into the car yet because then she might hear the “missing” dog snoring in the backseat, where I would be stationed. If you ever want to feel like an eleven-year-old again, take a ride in your parents’ car with them.
“Home?” Louise was appalled. “You’re not going to do anything else about this?”
“I can’t think of anything else to do, or I’d be doing it.” That was one hundred percent true.
“I’m going to sue you,” Louise Barclay told me. “I’m going to take you to court and get you to pay for every dime that dog would have been worth. You’d better get the deed to your house, lady, because you’ll be signing it over to me real soon.” Then she hung up.
I put the phone away and got into the backseat of the Toronado with the rest of the children. Bruno, startled, looked up, saw it was me, and put his head back down on Steve’s leg. Eydie gave up being appalled at everyone’s behavior and lay on her side, letting out a long sigh.
“Let’s get out of here,” I told my parents when they got into the front seats. “It’s been a hell of a long day.”
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
I did not tell Les McMaster that Bruno was still missing. I didn’t tell Les McMaster anything at all, but that was only because Les never called me to ask anything. Les, I learned from Akra, had left the theater ten minutes into the performance the night before without telling her—Akra—where he was going or when he would be back.
“That’s just weird,” Akra informed me. It was roughly the seventeenth weirdest thing I’d heard in the past three days, so I didn’t really react much.
“I was surprised Les was there at all,” I answered. “Why was he there for a weeknight performance?”
“He’s considering changing some of the blocking,” Akra said. “He doesn’t like the way ‘Hard Knock Life’ is playing and he has to replace some of the child actors who are getting too … mature. But the fact that he left without telling me—that’s weird.” Apparently Akra thought Les’s behavior was weird.
I was sitting in my kitchen, having walked Steve and Eydie. Mom and Dad (well, Dad) had warned me against walking Bruno just yet because Taylor had been at the house looking for him the night before he was threatened again by people who claimed to know where he was all the time. “No sense being reckless,” he said. I believe that there is indeed no sense in being reckless, almost by definition, so I’d let Bruno out in the backyard with the two other dogs for a while and then walked my own pets and left Bruno to explore the place on his own.
I’d avoided Sam’s coffee shop on the walk, in fact staying away from the center of Scarborough and heading more in the direction of the woods. It was easier to think, but I still hadn’t come up with much.
Louise had called three more times, which I had ignored. I’d called Detective Rodriguez, which she had ignored, probably because she didn’t want anyone to know she was associating with a known dog loser. It was possible I was projecting.
“Well, I can’t tell you much,” I told Akra now. I was watching the dogs interact. Eydie had suddenly taken up an if-you-can’t-beat-them-join-them attitude and was playing with the two males, who seemed a little confused by her abrupt change of mood. “Les didn’t say much of anything to me.”
Akra had called out of the blue and I was trying my best to hustle her off because I didn’t want her asking about Bruno. If she’d heard he was missing, he could lose his gig, which would be bad for my business. If she expected Bruno at rehearsal that day, I could get killed taking him there, which would be bad for me all around.
Or Bruno could get abducted, which I was especially anxious to avoid. The tag-team wrestling match that had been going on in my stomach when I’d thought he was missing hadn’t completely subsided yet. I couldn’t risk going through that again.
“I thought maybe he’d asked you about today,” Akra suggested. “I haven’t heard from him at all and I need to know his schedule. I mean, I know it, but he’s always changing it. He usually tells me so I can keep him going, but he’s just been, well, gone since the beginning of Act One last night, and that’s just…”
“Weird,” I said. It was a reflex. I was tired. I had not mainlined nearly enough coffee yet this morning.
“I know,” Akra agreed. “So, did he?”
I knew I was supposed to have kept up with this conversation, but Steve and Bruno were now playing tug-of-war over a knotted chew toy and Eydie was standing between them, looking like a referee. I almost laughed, but that would have been misconstrued by Akra, and I didn’t want to be rude.
“Did he what?” I asked.
“Ask you about today,” she answered with a slight edge of incredulity at what a complete idiot I had turned out to be.
Oh. That. “No,” I answered honestly. If I said no more, maybe the subject of today and rehearsal and Bruno could be avoided.
Bruno let go of his end of the chew toy and Steve recoiled a bit, taken by surprise. I thought Eydie was going to bust out laughing, but she was way too classy a dame to let that happen. She lay down on the floor and contemplated life, womanhood, and a really old piece of rawhide. She decided to do nothing about any of them.
“Nothing?” Akra was surprised, after a moment. She’d probably expected me to say more. “He told me that he was pushing rehearsal because he had an appointment that conflicted.”
Better yet. Now I could buy a day for Bruno and me and it wouldn’t even be my fault. “I didn’t know about that, but it’s fine with me,” I told Akra.
“Good. So instead of coming at noon, please be here at three, okay?”
Dammit!
My mind raced. I really didn’t want to take Bruno out of the house, let alone into Manhattan, today. The threatened danger to him and, by extension, me, was not theoretical—Trent was dead and Taylor had clearly been terrified when she’d shown up here two nights ago. (Of course, last night at the show, she’d seemed anything but terrified, dressed to kill and … well, maybe that was a poor choice of words.)
But I couldn’t deny Bruno his shot at Broadway stardom and, after all, technically Louise was still calling the shots for him. The fact that she believed Bruno to be missing at this moment didn’t really change that; she had definitely wanted him to be in Annie. I had to respect the wishes of the woman who legally owned my client. But maybe I could buy myself some more time to iron all this out. Sure, it would take an iron the size of Utah, but nothing is impossible, right?
“Can we make it four?” I asked Akra. “I’d thought Bruno would be done before three, so I made him an appointment for a grooming.” Or I would now anyway.
“Les has a dinner at nine,” she said. “He’s got a photo shoot at seven and a meeting with a producer at six. Four might be pushing it.” The big ones never give so much as an inch.
Those who are simply agents to the paws, however, are pushovers. “Three it is,” I said. I hung up before she could ask anything else.
“That doesn’t leave us much time, Bruno,” I said, and he looked up at the mention of his name. He dutifully walked over and sat next to me, as if he were expecting me to explain the whole situation to him. But since I didn’t understand it, that seemed like a pointless exercise. “Let’s make a plan.”
Bruno seemed up to it, so I got a pad and pen—you can’t really make a plan on a computer—and sat down at the kitchen table.
“Here’s what we need to figure out,” I told Bruno. “First, why someone is after you to the point that they might want to take you away from Louise or from me.” Luckily, Bruno’s knowledge of English was limited, or this idea might have upset him. Instead, he lay down and his lips vibrated as he made a deflating sound. “That’s the most important thing right now, and Detective Rodriguez doesn’t seem nearly as interested in finding out. She thinks who killed Trent is more important, despite the fact that Trent will still be dead after she finds out. Once we figure out who’s after you, on the other hand, you will be much safer.” That part was for me, not Bruno, who was watching a little dust tumbleweed roll across the floor. My housekeeping skills could be more developed. I grew up in hotels. Other people clean up in hotels.
“So let’s think about this,” I went on, after having put the heading BRUNO on the paper in front of me. “Let’s face it, pal. You’re a dog.” Bruno wagged his tail. Steve looked over, because I’m pretty sure he thinks his name is “Dog.” “You’re a good dog, yes you are, and you’re a smart dog, but I don’t really see why this person or these people are so desperate to get their hands on you. Did you see what happened to Trent?” Bruno watched the dust bunny a little more and closed his eyes. “Well, if you can’t tell me, you can’t snitch to somebody else. So it’s not like you’re the dog who knew too much, is it?”
I got up. Despite my affection for written lists, I actually think better on my feet, pacing. There’s not a ton of pacing room in my kitchen, but I did what I could, careful not to step on any tails. I was waving my pen in my hand as I paced.
“The thing is, I don’t think anybody is trying to get hold of you because you’re such a brilliant actor.” I looked over at Bruno, who did not seem at all insulted. “You are, of course; you’re a star, believe me. But there still isn’t a great fortune in dog roles in show business. You can trust me on that. Rin Tin Tin ended up in the Actor’s Fund Home in Englewood, New Jersey, you know.” That last part wasn’t true, but it could have been.
“So if they don’t want you because of your acting and they don’t want you because you saw who killed Trent, why do they want you? That’s the question, isn’t it?” There had to be some other way in which Bruno was valuable or in some way important that I wasn’t seeing. “This is a job for the Internet, I fear.”
My laptop was on the kitchen counter, so I retrieved it and booted up at the table. Eydie had decided to follow the sun to another spot nearer the back door, but Steve stayed on the dog pillow, which was his favorite place in the world besides under my bed. Steve would pretty much live under my bed if he could. So he was considerably more familiar with the dust bunnies than Bruno, and paid them no mind.
I tried running searches on every possible scenario making Bruno an irreplaceable dog. I’d had him long enough to know by now that he could not have been carrying large amounts of drugs in his intestines, the way some cartels transport their wares across borders. And he was not the long-lost pet of a king, prince, or princess as far as I could tell.
Then it occurred to me that Trent Barclay had no record of Bruno’s adoption on his hard drive, and how curious that seemed. I hadn’t been able to access Louise’s computer, but Trent had appeared to be the one who kept all the records, and the ones that indicated how they’d added a member to their family were nowhere to be found. Why would Trent omit or delete those records?
He wouldn’t. The man had kept records dating back to the manufacturer of his dental retainer from when he was sixteen. If he had records about Bruno’s adoption, they would have been visible on his computer.
That train of thought led to only one station: Trent and Louise had not adopted Bruno the way they’d told me they had. I made a note to call Consuelo and ask her to organize a better system for vetting the owners of our clients before we get them to sign the contracts.
So if the Barclays had in fact not gotten Bruno through conventional pet adoption services, where had they managed to find the big hairy mutt? (And I mean that with the greatest affection.)
There were a number of possibilities. Trent or Louise could have had a friend whose dog gave birth to puppies, and they adopted Bruno. They might have just found him wandering alone on the streets of Manhattan with no identification and taken him in. They might have gotten him from a shelter out of state, or from a pet store (don’t buy your pets at stores!).
Any of those methods would have been legal. Any of them was plausible. But the problem was that Trent had told me he and his wife had adopted Bruno through a New York City–based shelter and that they’d “overpaid” for him. And that clearly had not happened. Trent hadn’t kept the records.
So I started to form an opinion, and no matter how insane it seemed at the beginning, I had to admit to myself that it fit all the facts as I knew them. From what I could piece together, it seemed that Trent and Louise Barclay had not adopted Bruno at all.
They had stolen him.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
“Stolen?” Dad asked. “Where are you getting stolen from?”
I’d spent much of the morning on the phone, talking to Rodriguez again, then to some friends I had in pet shelters around the tri-state area. My friend Betty Vassar at a shelter on Long Island had promised to nose around even more, but hadn’t called back yet. Nobody had any records of Trent or Louise Barclay adopting a dog, one named Bruno or anything else. Unless they’d flown him in from Utah, it was very unlikely that the Barclays had gotten Bruno through the usual—legal—channels.
Dad had gotten up around eleven, an early morning for him. He had senior-show auditions scheduled beginning at two and was then going to make up the list for callbacks and start getting in touch with the lucky finalists late in the afternoon. But now, in his pajamas and bathrobe (after all, it was only noon), he sat across from me at the kitchen table and frowned.
“Stolen?” he said again.
“It fits what I know,” I said. “There are no records of the Barclays adopting Bruno. There are no indications they got him from a friend, and if they’d bought him at one of those hideous puppy mills, for one thing he’d be a lot younger than he is and for another, there would be some sales records. Rodriguez made a few calls and couldn’t find any.”
Dad kept his voice low because Mom was still sleeping, even if she was two rooms away. “They could have found him. They could have brought him in from another state. A lot of dogs come up from the Carolinas these days; you told me that yourself.”
“But Trent didn’t keep any records, and he kept records of everything,” I countered. “Come on, let’s take the dogs outside.” Without waiting for an answer, I got up and opened the back door. Bruno, Steve, and Eydie all stood up and walked out, down the stairs to the fenced-in yard, and started sniffing around. It wasn’t like they hadn’t been here before, but the smells were just too interesting to ignore.
“So there’s nothing on his computer,” Dad said once we were outside in the sun. He could increase his volume to normal conversational levels now. “You don’t know that Louise didn’t keep the records, because you haven’t asked her.”
“What am I supposed to do, call her up and say, ‘Hey lady, can you prove you didn’t steal your dog?’ That’s a little on the nose, don’t you think?”
“I’m just saying, it sounds to me like you’re making a jump,” Dad said. He was watching the dogs, who had traversed the perimeter of the yard, making sure there were no threats. I picked up a tennis ball from a small basket I have on the deck and threw it where there were no dogs at the moment. They all ran to chase it. “I’m thinking you need more to go on before you go accusing your employer.”
“I’m not accusing anybody of anything,” I told him. Usually Dad is more supportive of any nutso idea I have, so his reluctance to hop on the stolen-dog bandwagon was confusing. “I just think it’s strange and I’m making some inquiries. If Bruno was stolen, and I think it’s likely, I’m going to have to find his real owners and bring him back to them.”
“Maybe it’s his real owners who are looking for him,” Dad suggested. Now, that was more like it. He was starting to see things my way, or at least acknowledge that it was possible.
“And they’re using blackmail and threats to find him?” Eydie came up with the ball and started to do a victory lap around the yard. The two males followed her, caught up in the moment.
“They don’t know you’re not the person who stole their dog,” Dad suggested. “They’re mad.”
“They know enough to send Taylor. What did you make of Taylor, besides her being a bad actress?”
