Dog Dish of Doom, page 18
“She’s gone,” he said finally. He sat down heavily on the sofa that Bruno had been practicing on. Les dropped his head into his hands and actually vibrated a little. “I don’t know what to do. She’s gone.”
How do you tell a major talent—one who could help your career quite a bit—that he’s overreacting to the point of insanity? Jeez, Les, maybe you should go decaf seemed a little callous and probably ineffective. But watching the man disintegrate before my eyes wasn’t really an option.
Luckily my mother, having lived through a teenage daughter, knew how to handle excessive drama. Being married to a stage performer and being one herself probably didn’t hurt either. She walked over and put a warm hand on Les’s shoulder. “It’s all right,” Mom said. “I’m sure Akra will be right back.”
Les looked up and I swear there were tears on his cheeks. “You think so?” he whimpered.
Mom didn’t get the chance to answer, because Les’s phone sounded the title song to Oklahoma! as a ringtone. He pulled the phone out of his pocket and looked at it, then exhaled … well, theatrically, and pushed a button. “Akra is texting.” But when he pushed the button, all the tension came back into his face and his neck muscles tightened. Les looked ten years older.
“What?” I asked.
He didn’t seem capable of speech; he just extended his hand with the phone in it, so I took the phone from him and looked at it. Sure enough, there was a text message on the screen.
It read We have your assistant. Bring the dog.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
“I should just put a cot in the back here and move right in.” Detective Rodriguez was her usual disgruntled self. I don’t think Rodriguez had been gruntled in years. She was standing—never let the witnesses see you sit—on the stage at the Palace, looking at a distraught Les McMaster, a completely passive Bruno, a somewhat nonplussed Mom, and whatever I was, sitting on the scenery for Oliver Warbucks’s mansion. If she’d said, I suppose you’re all wondering why I asked you here tonight, it would have seemed entirely appropriate.
“We can’t help it if things keep happening around here,” I piped up. “Somebody turned off the lights and took Akra away.” Les choked a little behind me. “None of us did it; it was too dark. So don’t blame us.”
Mom looked a little sharply at me. She doesn’t approve of impolite talk, especially when directed at one of New York’s finest, who in my opinion hadn’t been as fine as she could have been since this affair began. So I ignored the admonishment in my mother’s eyes and looked Rodriguez directly in the eye.
“I don’t blame you,” the detective said without any inflection. “Not yet anyway.”
I’d already been blown up and threatened today and someone had tried to take my client away. They probably would have succeeded if they’d had more time and he hadn’t been on the leash. So I wasn’t in a mood to be docile.
“What is that supposed to mean?” I demanded.
“Akra,” Les murmured from the settee. “Akra.”
“The text is all you have?” Rodriguez said, completely ignoring my question. “They have the assistant, bring the dog?” She’d already seen and confiscated Les’s phone, so she knew that part of the incident for sure.
“That’s it,” I said. “They don’t even say where to bring him. Or which dog, for that matter. What if they actually want Horatio?” Gwen Harper was nowhere in the vicinity; a shame, as it would have been a real treat to see her react to that one.
“I don’t think there’s much question about which dog they want,” Rodriguez answered, as if my suggestion had been serious. “They’ve already tried to get him from you twice before.”
“Have you found Taylor Cassidy?” I asked. “I’ll bet she knows all about this.” Taylor was my current prime suspect. In two minutes, I’d probably have a different one. I was discovering that I am fickle, suspect-wise.
“We have not been able to locate Ms. Cassidy yet,” Rodriguez said, not making eye contact. “She is not at her home or her parents’ home and she is not answering her cell phone.”
“What about work?” I asked. “She can’t make a living walking dogs. What does she do for a living?”
“Apparently her hours are flexible,” Rodriguez said. Her lips had gotten thinner. There was something she wasn’t saying, but just pestering her wouldn’t do any good, I’d learned. Hey, I wasn’t trying to solve Trent’s murder anyway; that was her job. I was just here watching the director of the show my client was about to begin appearing in have a nervous breakdown. “She appears to be an entrepreneur.” Like Trent.
Les was breathing heavily, almost to the point of hyperventilating, and had his head between his knees. He was rocking back and forth. I had to wonder exactly what he’d done in his life before he’d met Akra, or whether she had created him completely out of whole cloth for her own amusement.
“What … are we going … to do about Akra?” he managed between gasps of oxygen. Again, it was a good question.
“We’ll wait until there are further instructions about where they want us to bring the dog,” Rodriguez said. “Then we’ll set up a drop.”
I looked up sharply. “A drop? You actually want me to bring Bruno to some crazy dog wackos and just leave him there? I’m sorry, Detective, but that’s not going to happen. My client doesn’t go anywhere he could be in danger.” It made me feel so virtuous to say that, until I realized that if Akra was indeed being held, I was doing her no favors with my high-minded words.
“Akra,” Les moaned, in case any of us hadn’t gotten the point yet.
“I’m not expecting you to do anything of the sort,” Rodriguez told me. “I’m saying we’ll set up the meeting, make the perps think that’s what’s going to happen, and get them along with Ms. Levy, clean and safe.”
That didn’t sound the least bit clean or a tiny morsel of safe, but I didn’t have a better idea and besides, that was when Les’s phone played Rodgers and Hammerstein again. He pulled it from Rodriguez to his face quicker than Wyatt Earp going for his six-gun. “I have a place and time,” he croaked after a moment. He handed the phone to Rodriguez.
She read the message and nodded. “Okay,” she said, but her jaw was already beginning to clench. “We don’t have much time to set up. Let’s get going.” She took a couple of steps toward stage right and stopped when no one followed her. “Well?”
“Well, what?” I said. “We don’t know where you’re going or what you want. And I repeat, I’m not taking Bruno anywhere he could be threatened. So what is it you’re saying, Detective?”
She was already talking into a cell phone she’d produced from a jacket pocket. “I need snipers and a team at GCT in twenty,” she said to the anonymous person on the other end. “So in other words, I need it ten minutes ago. Clear?” She put the phone back in her pocket and looked at Les, then at Mom, then at Bruno, then at me. “We need you to take Bruno to Grand Central Terminal right now,” she said. “I promise you he won’t be in any danger at any time and you might very well be helping to catch Trent Barclay’s murderer and save Ms. Levy’s life. Is that good enough for you?”
It wasn’t, but what was I going to do? I looked, as I often do, to my mother for an idea. It’s what I’d do when Dad had some cockamamie sketch worked out and he’d written a part I knew I couldn’t play. Mom would find a way to keep it funny without forcing me to do something uncomfortable, like pretend to be five when I was sixteen and desperate to impress this one busboy who worked weekends.
“Mom?” I said.
“It’s showtime,” she answered, and stood up, straightened her skirt. She held her head high and led me—and by extension Bruno—toward the wings.
“Akra,” Les whispered.
* * *
Grand Central Terminal (it’s not officially called Grand Central Station, except by everybody) is one of the wonders of New York City. If you ever visit, by all means come and take it in. The architecture is staggering, the ceiling with the painted sky showing the constellations of the zodiac astonishing, and the beauty not at all diminished by time. So definitely put it on your list of places to see.
On this day, however, it was striking me as the least defensible structure on planet Earth, and that was not making me feel better. The fact that it had taken fifteen of the twenty minutes we’d been given just to get to the entrance was not boosting my confidence in the least.
“What’s the plan?” I asked Rodriguez. I was holding Bruno’s leash so tightly my hand would be cramped all day tomorrow. “How do we find these people and get you to catch them?” Because I’d looked around the crowded, enormous station and seen nothing that convinced me the NYPD’s finest, snipers or no, could pick out one particular person in this teeming mass and so much as ask for a driver’s license.
“We’re not going to be in the main concourse,” she said. “We’re doing this at the Apple Store on the balcony.”
“The Apple Store?” I parroted. “Does the Apple Store allow dogs?” Many welcome dogs, but I wasn’t sure about the one in Grand Central.
“It doesn’t matter,” Rodriguez answered. “We’re not going inside. The supposed exchange takes place on the stairway outside the store. The idea is you stand there with Bruno on the leash. Someone comes by with Ms. Levy and once you hand them the leash, they release her.”
I didn’t stop walking but I slowed down considerably. I didn’t care if we were late for this rendezvous. “You realize I’m not doing that, right?” I said to Rodriguez.
She nodded. “I told you. We’re going to grab the person with Levy before you can make the switch. And we have snipers at various vantage points around the station. Bruno isn’t going anywhere with anybody.”
“Snipers?” I said. It seemed I was repeating something Rodriguez said after every time she spoke. It’s a hobby. “You weren’t kidding about the snipers?”
“Do I ever kid?”
“I thought maybe you just had a really dry sense of humor.”
Now I wished Rodriguez had listened to me when I’d offered to wear a wire. Or at least that she’d given me a Bluetooth device so she could talk me through this. But she’d just said there wasn’t time and dismissed the whole thing.
We walked upstairs on the Lexington Avenue side toward the terminal balcony and started toward the Apple Store. I wasn’t feeling any better about bringing Bruno into this situation, but I didn’t see a way to back out now. And if Les didn’t get Akra back soon, we might find a small pool of him back on the stage where we’d left him. That wouldn’t be pleasant at all.
“I’m holding Bruno’s leash,” I told Rodriguez. “There’s no chance at all that I’ll hand it over to anybody.”
She didn’t move a facial muscle. “Fine with me,” she said. “I’m going to walk away now. Don’t follow me. Just wait until you see Levy, walk toward her, and don’t get too close to whoever is with her. We need a clear shot.”
“Yeah, because that won’t cause any commotion at all in the middle of Grand Central,” I said, but Rodriguez was already gone. I didn’t even see which direction she’d taken away from me. If the cop thing didn’t work out for her, she had a real future as a vanishing act. I could probably get her bookings if I represented humans.
“Don’t worry, Bruno,” I said as we approached the land of Mac. “I’m not letting you go.” Bruno trotted along beside me, unaware of the serious drama in which he was playing a leading role. I reached down and patted him on the back. Then we started walking again.
We took a position directly across from the Apple Store, really on a landing of the stairs below the balcony. The store took up the whole balcony and, as usual, it was packed. People were checking out computers and gadgets as if a woman’s life and (more significantly to me) a dog’s weren’t in jeopardy. I leaned on the railing and watched all the retail traffic go by, just casually standing there with “my” dog, but my heart was pounding and my stomach was not pleased with me.
My mother, who had insisted on coming along, was stationed at a lower landing. I looked down to note her position. She waved at me. Mom is not what you’d call a natural when it comes to police work. I turned back and faced the traffic from Tech Heaven once again.
I knew I would recognize Akra when she came by, but I wondered how I’d know which person was escorting her. If I’d never met the particular dognapper (I guessed now kidnapper would also be true), would s/he be standing close enough to Akra, maybe holding a weapon on her, for me to know? Wouldn’t they want to be more discreet than that?
Despite the fiends’ insistence that we show up at an exact time, there was no movement aside from the throngs of Steve Jobs acolytes coming up and down the marble steps. After ten minutes had gone by I began to wonder if we’d come to the right Grand Central Station.
Sorry. Grand Central Terminal. Although I wasn’t crazy about the sound of that last word.
But then, coming down from the Apple Store with a very severe expression on her face and no headset, which was somehow unnerving, was Akra. She was walking down the steps slowly, in a way I’d never seen her move before, and she looked extremely tense. Normally she just looked extreme, like someone who would never allow anything the least bit inconvenient to happen to Les McMaster, ever. She did keep looking over her left shoulder.
Behind her on that side, one step behind her the whole way, was Louise Barclay.
I had not expected that. Louise trying to abduct her own dog? What sense did that make? She was Bruno’s legal owner—or at least she acted like she was; I was still operating under the assumption that Trent had somehow stolen the dog but I had not a single shred of proof. Why would she be involved in this nutty scheme at all?
But there she was, and there was Akra, and here were Bruno and me. There didn’t appear to be anything in Louise’s hand (like a gun she’d be using to hold Akra). I didn’t approach them, but I stood up from my leaning position and waited for them to reach me.
Before I could say anything, Louise got close enough for me to hear in the din. “They’ve been arrested,” she said. “There were three of them, two men and Taylor. The cops cornered them in the ladies’ room. It’s all over.”
I looked up at Akra. “Are you okay? How did they get you?”
Akra shook her head. “I don’t know. When the lights went out, suddenly there was duct tape on my mouth and someone was holding my hands behind me. They put a bag over my head and the next thing I knew, I was in the back of a car.” She shivered a little.
Louise looked at me and held out her hand. “Let me have Bruno,” she said.
What? I’d grasped the leash so tightly in anticipation of someone trying to wrest it from me that I probably had permanent marks on my fingers. “Bruno?” That was the best I could do.
“Yes,” Louise answered, looking a little puzzled. “My dog.”
Oh, right. Yeah. Louise was Bruno’s owner. I loosened my death grip on the leash. But then something hit me. “How did you get here?” I asked Louise. “The last I saw of you was in the theater when you wanted me to go away and I had to invoke Bruno’s contract.” My head was a little woozy. Things were happening too fast. And, you know, I had been blown up earlier that day.
Louise sniffed at the memory. “I know. That was Mike’s doing. He was upset because he thought you got Bruno kidnapped last night.”
“What is the deal with Mike?” I asked. I get very direct when I’m wondering who’s going to abduct my client and try to kill me next. “What’s his connection? He told me he was a family friend, but nobody’s really a family friend.”
Louise’s mouth twitched a little. “Mike was a friend of Trent’s in school. They were thick as thieves for a while, Trent told me, and then they had a falling out over a girl or something and Mike didn’t get in touch for almost fifteen years. But once he did, he and Trent were right back to being bros. In fact, it was Mike who found Bruno when we wanted to adopt a dog.”
Wow—an actual piece of information! I barely knew how to handle it. “How?” I said, casually as if we were at a diner discussing the latest hit musical over coffee. In my head, I was taking copious notes to try and find clues to Trent’s murder and all this fuss over Bruno, who was a nice dog but didn’t seem worth killing people over. Sorry, Bruno. I hope you’re not reading this.
“I don’t know. He deals in investments for a regional bank in Connecticut, and somehow he smoked out a kennel that had the right kind of dog, so he called Trent and we had Bruno five days later.” She extended her hand for the leash again.
Akra, apparently miffed that her ordeal was no longer the main attraction at this coffee klatch, tapped her foot a little on the marble step. “Are the cops here?” she said. “Did they tell you not to call the cops? I hope you didn’t. I could have been killed.”
Which brought me back to my main point, sure to annoy Akra since it wasn’t about her. I looked back at Louise. “Wait. You didn’t tell me how you got involved in getting Akra back. Why are you here?”
“I got a text saying that she’d been taken and that she’d be here,” Louise said. “They wanted Bruno, but I couldn’t find you at the theater so I got in a cab.”
“I was being held in the ladies’ room on the main concourse,” Akra said, punching the word “held” a little too hard. It’s a common amateur mistake when you think the audience isn’t getting the point. Audiences are smarter than beginning actors think they are. “Somehow Louise found her way over there, and whoever was holding me told her she should get Bruno for them.”
“Whoever it was?” I asked. “Couldn’t you see them?”
“I had a black bag over my head,” Akra answered, making me wonder how they’d managed to sneak her into Grand Central that way. On the other hand, I’ve seen people walk through the streets naked and nobody blinked an eye except the tourists. “I heard what was going on, but I couldn’t see.”
