Dog Dish of Doom, page 16
Dad thought. “She wants everybody to see her chest,” he noted.
He’s not one to make random statements like that, and he’s not a lecher. “What does that tell you?” I asked.
“She doesn’t think she can get by on anything else. Believes she doesn’t have any talent. Insecure.” If the stage hadn’t called, my father could have been an excellent psychologist. Or a great phony psychic.
“I think we have to find her,” I said. Eydie brought the ball over to me, presenting her prize, and I took it from her mouth. It was considerably less dry than before. Another couple of tosses and it would be unusable. I decided to give them one more round, but to favor Bruno with the direction of my throw. He was the guest, after all.
“Taylor? She was at the show last night, so she clearly hasn’t skipped town in terror like she wanted us to believe she would.” Dad twitched his mouth, a habit when he’s thinking hard. “What was she doing at the theater anyway? How does she score house seats in the orchestra?”
“Very good questions. How do you propose we find her?”
“Call her,” Dad said simply. “She wanted you to get in touch about Bruno. Tell her he’s missing and you’re worried. Ask where the supposed shady characters who were threatening her life wanted him dropped off. Get her to meet you there.”
“So you believe that Bruno was stolen now?” I said as Bruno, as planned, corralled the ball just a stride ahead of Eydie, who was faster but farther away. She wasn’t pleased.
“I never doubted you, sweetie,” my father said. “But this is one crazy show you’ve got yourself involved with.”
* * *
Taylor answered on the second ring; she’d seen my name in her caller ID. And despite what Dad thought about my acting, I was able to convince her—while staring at Bruno, who was lying in the sun and getting Mom to rub his belly—that I was at my wit’s end worrying about the dog’s welfare.
“Where did they want you to take him?” I said, voice quivering just enough that it wasn’t overacting, but with sufficient force that it would be audible. “Tell me where, and I’ll go there to look.” I figured it was better to make it Taylor’s own idea that she should accompany me. Dad, standing to the side in the living room and taking the occasional glance out the window for auditioners who wouldn’t show up for another ninety minutes, scowled a bit. He’s not huge on subtlety. It’s not that he can’t play it; he just chooses to do things more broadly because it pleases the audience faster.
But Taylor was a little slyer than I’d anticipated. “I don’t think that’s the way to go,” she said. “They gave me the address; that would be the first place we’d look.”
Fifteen years of ad libbing onstage had given me the ability to think on my feet. “But don’t you see,” I said, “they won’t know that we’re working together. They think they sent you here and I refused to help you.” Get the adversary to consider herself an ally. Because for all you know, she is.
“Well, they did send me there and you did refuse to help me,” Taylor answered. I felt it was wrong of her to dredge up the past, but I kept my mind on the objective.
I cried.
“I know, and I’ve been miserable about it,” I said. “If we’d worked together then, Bruno wouldn’t be in such an awful situation now.” Bruno, at the mention of his name, looked up and appeared about to bark. I hit the Mute button on my phone, but he just yawned, rolled over, and let Mom rub his belly again. It was becoming her hobby.
“What’s that?” Taylor asked. “Are you on mute?”
I pushed the button again. “I didn’t want you to hear me crying,” I said. Now, tell me I wouldn’t have killed at Second City.
Taylor sighed with a hint of exasperation. “Okay,” she said. “I’ll give you the address, but you shouldn’t go there alone.”
Give her just enough line, and then reel her in. “Maybe I can get my mother to come with me,” I suggested. Even Mom looked amused at the thought.
“Your mother?” Taylor sounded less amused and more thunderstruck. What kind of a complete idiot was she talking to? “Look. Just get in your car. I’ll meet you there in an hour.”
Bingo.
The drive to the Lower East Side took forty-seven minutes, according to my portable GPS device. It had felt like it took that long to convince Dad he shouldn’t cancel his auditions and come with me “for muscle,” but Mom and I had managed. I did call Rodriguez and tell her where I was going and what I was doing. I’m not stupid.
No matter what Rodriguez thought.
“Are you out of your mind?” she asked the Bluetooth device installed on my sun visor. “You’ve convinced yourself that dog you’re looking for was stolen by his owners before they owned him and now you’re going to meet the people who want you to bring him back?”
Oh, yeah. “I’m not searching for Bruno anymore,” I told the detective. “I know where he is, and he’s safe.”
There was a long silence, to the point that I wondered if my Bluetooth had run out of battery life or something. But finally, Rodriguez said, “You know where the dog is. Do you have the dog?”
Bruno was not in the car with me; that seemed far too dangerous a thing to try to pull off. Mom had promised to meet me at the theater with him in time for rehearsal, which was going to be tricky considering that I wanted to wrap this whole thing up before he went out in public again.
“No, I don’t have Bruno with me,” I told Rodriguez. Well, it was true. “But I’m telling you, I know where he is. What’s important right now is finding out who wants him and why.”
You could hear Rodriguez’s eyebrows furrow. “What exactly does this have to do with the murder I’m investigating?” she asked.
“If I knew that, I wouldn’t have to drive to a bagel factory to do some snooping.”
Her voice dropped an octave. “A bagel factory?” Rodriguez would have made some lucky comedian a great straight man.
“The address Taylor gave me—the one the supposed dognappers gave her—is the headquarters of a bagel bakery that went out of business two months ago,” I told her, and gave her the Houston Street (in New York, that’s pronounced HOW-ston Street) address. “I just want you to know where I’m headed in case, you know, something happens.”
“Like they’re out of marble rye?” More proof that Rodriguez would make a terrific straight man—she was no comedian.
“It’s abandoned, I told you. Look, I don’t know who I’m going to be meeting in fifteen minutes. If I don’t call you back in an hour, I’d appreciate it if you could send someone to that address to pick up my body. Is that really too much to ask?”
“Show people.” Rodriguez sighed and hung up. I took that for an indication that she’d do as I’d asked. Taking it any other way wasn’t going to get me anywhere.
I circled the block five times before someone left a parking space open and I grabbed it. This wasn’t really my area of town, so I didn’t want to have to wait for a parking attendant to get my car if I needed to make a quick getaway.
Besides, the meters are a lot cheaper.
The Lower East Side is not exactly ritzy, but it isn’t a scary part of town. But when you’re uncertain about your facts, alone on the street, on the way to meet people who probably threatened your life in a text message, nothing is exactly a safe, comforting walk. Everything hits me in the stomach, so I had butterflies, much like I used to get before a performance.
I didn’t see Taylor outside the Mitzvah Bagel Factory, a storefront that had clearly been abandoned for greener pastures—probably in Brooklyn, where the bagels could be considered “artisanal”—a while ago. I doubted my journey from Scarborough had been shorter than hers from another area of Manhattan, so that wasn’t really a great sign. I approached carefully, head in a constant state of swivel to search for danger.
You know what would have been really helpful in these circumstances? A dog. Alas, I didn’t have one with me.
When I had almost reached the narrow storefront, a figure turned the corner of an alley two doors down to the south. Taylor, dressed—I swear—in a trench coat with the collar turned up and boots almost to her knees, should have been smoking a cigarette and wearing a wide-brimmed fedora, but whomever it was from Central Casting who had dressed her had neglected those details. I never worked a really classy venue, but even a performer of my experience has some disdain for those who embrace the cliché without even considering doing something more imaginative.
It was her wardrobe choice now, I will tell you, that alerted me to the fact that Taylor was full of crap and badly playing a role. It doesn’t take Meryl Streep to recognize a lousy actor when you see one.
Oddly, that realization made me relax a little, making me feel that I knew who I couldn’t trust at this rendezvous. It would have been worse if I’d gone in thinking Taylor was entirely on my side here; I would have expected her to have my back. Now I knew she would only be trying to find the soft spot in it to slip the knife in if she could get close enough.
“Taylor,” I said with the requisite tone of affected urgency and quiet. “I’m over here.” Anyone that devoted to the mundane and predictable would expect me to act like I was also in a cheap melodrama. It made the illusion work better. For Taylor. She slunk over to me. I half expected her to puff on a cigarette and stand with one leg up on the base of a streetlamp, but she somehow managed to resist the urge.
“Do you think you were followed?” she asked as soon as I was within stage whispering range.
Followed? From Scarborough, New Jersey, to Houston Street? “No, I’m sure I wasn’t,” I answered. I would definitely have to be on my toes once we got inside. This was a setup if I’d ever seen one, and I’d seen one. In the movies, to be sure, but I had seen it.
“Good. Come around back. I can get us inside.” She turned and walked back toward the alley.
I wasn’t crazy about following, and was careful to check the alley for anyone who might be lying in wait, but there was no one. Some of what I saw wasn’t exactly pretty, but it wasn’t threatening either.
“Do you think Bruno’s inside?” I asked Taylor as I followed her through the alley to the back of the building.
“Probably not.” That was encouraging; at least she wasn’t trying to put that one over on me. “I doubt there’s anyone inside at all.” Nonsense. A flirt like Taylor didn’t get this dressed up unless she was certain someone other than me was going to see her. She was the most photogenic liar I had seen in quite a while, and I work in show business.
“Then what do you think we’ll find?” I asked.
She turned and looked at me disdainfully. “An empty bagel factory. You were the one who called me with this crazy idea. If they took Bruno here, they’re long gone by now.” Damn! That was what she’d say if she was on the level. Still, the collar on her trench coat couldn’t lie—Taylor was in on the plot somehow.
I reached into my pocket and fingered my cell phone. Dad had insisted I write a text message saying “Emergency,” address it to him, and then only hit the Send button if I needed help in a hurry. Since I had no idea what I was about to walk into, it was better to be safe than stupid.
We reached the end of the alley and Taylor turned right, so I followed her. There was a back door to Mitzvah’s, and it was closed with a padlock that was hanging loose, inviting the foolish inside. Taylor, apparently, was foolish, so she climbed the two stairs to the padlocked door, removed the lock, and made a show of “quietly” opening the screen door, then the business door, and looking around for danger before she walked inside.
I steadied myself at the back door, looked through the small window in the door to make sure no one was waiting behind it with a blackjack (we seemed to be in a 1940s Warner Bros. crime movie), and pushed the door open. I went into the building.
The “factory” was about the size of a small luncheonette, which it had probably been before Mr. and Mrs. Mitzvah had taken over the place to spread the sweet message of ethnic carbohydrates throughout the land. There were a couple of wooden tables in the center of the room and large ovens behind them. None of the equipment was being manned, of course, nor was the sales counter at the other end of the room. But there was still the smell of flour and sweat in the former bakery.
“How did you get the lock off?” I asked Taylor.
She didn’t turn around. “It was like that,” she said.
Sure it was. And you just happened to walk around the back to see it. “That was lucky,” I answered.
Taylor turned and regarded me with some disdain. “No, it wasn’t. Whoever was here waiting for Bruno must have left it that way. Now, shut up and look around.”
Okay, so that made sense, but the Lauren Bacall outfit said otherwise. “What are we looking for?” I asked.
“How would I know? This is your idea.” Taylor walked into the front room through a pair of swinging doors. That must have been where the retail part of the business had operated.
It was fairly obvious there was no one else in the room; there just weren’t many places to hide. So scoping out the possible danger didn’t take very long. The mission as I’d described it to Taylor was to search for Bruno, who was supposed to be missing. I knew better, so I spent remarkably little time on that task and tried to discern exactly why this would be the location the killers/aspiring dognappers would choose as a safe haven.
Mitzvah was out of the way, certainly. This section of Houston Street wasn’t exactly bustling, even now in the afternoon. And the building was definitely abandoned; there would be little need for anyone to come by and witness … what?
“There’s nobody in here,” I called to Taylor. “How about in there?”
She didn’t answer, and that’s when I became concerned.
I walked quickly to the swinging doors and pushed one open. The front room had been the retail area; there was a counter and the dust was slightly less thick where a cash register had no doubt once stood. But there was no Taylor. The front door was ajar. It had never occurred to me to check when Taylor had said to come around the back to get in. I went to the front door, looked out and up the street. There was no sign of her.
Confusion is not my best friend; I tend to stop and think when I should act. What would be the motivation, I wondered, to lure me to this building when it was clear I wasn’t bringing Bruno (because they thought I didn’t know where he was)? What was the point of Taylor making me come in through the back door when the front one was unlocked? It wasn’t like there was a huge crowd outside that would have seen me enter, and why would that have been a problem anyway?
And once inside, why would Taylor walk through the back straight through to the front door and bolt?
The clear reason was that whoever had set up this hilarious prank wanted me to be alone in the back room. So the next question had to have something to do with why that would be a desirable goal.
I walked back into the bakery, where the ovens still stood, cold, and looked around again. What would be the advantage for some nefarious people to have me back here, or for that matter anywhere in this building, without Bruno?
There wasn’t much to look at back here. The tables, the dust, the floor, the ceiling …
The ovens.
Sitting there, the two large industrial ovens, stainless steel with treadmill-like conveyor belts that would take the dough through the very hot interior to bake them, then drop them off the end into baskets left beneath the open doors. There were no baskets now, the doors were not open, and the ovens weren’t the least bit warm.
Or were they? I walked over gingerly, expecting the level of heat in the air to increase as I approached, but it didn’t. Very quickly and lightly I touched the steel door. It was perfectly cool. Okay, the ovens were definitely turned off.
The only thing left to do was open the door, but that seemed pointless. Still, one must explore every possibility. So I gripped the handle and lifted up.
And there was something in the oven. It was small and square and made of metal. And it was ticking, which seemed strange.
I remembered, in that nanosecond, an article I’d read somewhere. See, the thing about bombs is that unless you’re sitting on one, it’s not generally the explosion that kills you any more than it’s the gunpowder that kills shooting victims. Some devices are packed with nails, metal objects, and other debris that can embed in a body, and others rely simply on the environment around them to propel things into the air that can find their way into you and cause great damage. It was an interesting thing to know.
The smart thing to do would have been to run out the front door right after Taylor, who was clearly protecting herself from the blast she’d known would be coming. If I survived, I would definitely have to look into the possibility of revenge on that little bitch.
Instead, all I had left to do was to dive directly onto the dusty, grimy floor. Uncomfortable? Yes. Humiliating? Yet to be seen—if this didn’t help, embarrassment would be the least of my worries. But out of the line of the oven doors, which were made of heavy metal? Definitely. And I’d left the one open.
The explosion, when it came a second later, was actually something of a disappointment. You see movies and TV and bombs always seem to sound like the end of the world. Flames shoot from them. Cars tend to blow up. People walk away without looking back and light a cigarette.
None of that happened here. Instead there was a pop sounding like the opening gun of a 5K race and then some smoke, followed by a little shaking in the room, and yet more dust falling from the ceiling. It hardly seemed worth having hit the floor. I got up and brushed myself off the best I could.
Oddly, the fact that it wasn’t much of a blast was little consolation. Someone had tried to blow me up, and that’s not the kind of thing that sits well with me. I’m just funny that way. Also, I had enough adrenaline flowing through my system to motivate Trent Barclay through a fifty-yard dash even in his present condition.
But it was the kicker to the blast that really got me mad: The payload for this bomb, rather than being metal shavings, nails, or bolts, was made of paper. Strips of paper almost like the ticker tape that Wall Street used to drop on returning heroes during parades through New York’s Financial District. A number of these little strips had fallen at my feet as I lay on the floor. Now I bent down to pick one of them up.
