Dog Dish of Doom, page 20
But that drove me just a little bit nuts. “I was telling you it was about Bruno from the beginning but you didn’t want to hear it,” I told the detective. “You thought it was about Trent Barclay having an affair with somebody and his wife getting mad at him. Did you manage to track down how Trent and Louise ended up with Bruno?” Betty Vassar from Long Island had called me back before we’d reached Consuelo’s. She had nothing.
I sat on the edge of the fountain, which not surprisingly was cold, and folded my arms in what I thought was a defiant gesture. I probably looked like Barbara Eden in I Dream of Jeannie. Hey, I get a lot of stations.
“Not yet,” Rodriguez said without making eye contact. “But now that I know he’s a valuable dog and a rare one, and with the picture you gave me, I can make some inquiries about kennels that deal in such animals.”
There was a long silence. Finally Dad said, “You’re welcome.” Dad is all about keeping the audience happy, but not when it gets in the way of making sure everyone knows what a genius his little girl (that’s me) is.
“Okay, go home,” Rodriguez said, once again not responding to my father. “You’ve done all you can today. Call me if you think of anything else.”
“Will you call if anything happens?” I asked.
“No. I’m the cops. I don’t have to keep you informed. You don’t even live in my city. But I’ll tell you what: Since you’re my CI, you’ll be my first phone call if I need any information on someone in that theater. I still think that Les guy is suspicious.” With that, she turned and walked away without so much as a backward glance.
“I’m starting to like her,” Dad said.
I stood up. “Well, I guess that’s it for tonight,” I said. “Let’s get back to Mom and I’ll drive you guys home. Steve and Eydie need a walk.”
“I got Sam to walk them,” Dad said. “I think we have somewhere else we need to go.”
* * *
Despite my not wanting to go all the way downtown again, I am a good daughter and let my father pay for a cab to Louise Barclay’s apartment building, where we waited for a resident to exit so we could get in the front door, and then climbed back up the stairs to Louise’s apartment door.
The question was, why? And I asked it of my father. “We’ve been there. I’ve been there twice,” I reminded him. “What is it we’re going to accomplish by waking Louise up and annoying her right now?”
“Detective Rodriguez said Louise wasn’t in her apartment,” Dad said. “That means nobody should be there now. We can have a look around.”
“For what? I’ve been in there, even looked at Trent’s hard drive. There’s nothing to learn about Bruno there. Besides, how are we going to get inside?” I could have kicked myself for giving back Louise’s key, but that would have hurt. I stared at the door, upon which we had knocked just to be sure and whaddaya know, Louise hadn’t answered. The door still was locked and looked pretty adamant about not letting us in.
“Watch and learn,” Dad said. He reached into his pocket and pulled out a paper clip, which he unfolded and inserted into the lock. After a few moments of jiggling and pulling, during which I stared at my father with a completely different type of respect than I’d ever had before (and worried that a neighbor would pass by and call the cops), something clicked inside that lock and Dad tried the doorknob, being sure to put his sleeve between the knob and his fingers.
The door swung open.
“How did you…” I began.
“I worked with an escape artist for a couple of months, back before I met your mother.”
We went inside and closed the door behind us. Dad turned on the light in the living room, pointing to the chain on the door. “See? Nobody put that on. That means nobody’s home.” He walked into the kitchen, where Trent’s dog-dish nosedive had taken place, and just stared for a moment. “The problem has been that we’ve been too focused on Bruno,” he said.
“Too focused on Bruno? Bruno’s my client. What else should I be focused on?” I walked in behind him and looked where he was looking, but I didn’t see anything I hadn’t seen before: a refrigerator, some cabinets, a ceramic tile floor in a checkerboard pattern …
“This is not just about getting an expensive dog,” Dad said, finger pointing upward like the Sherlock Holmes he believed he was all of a sudden. “This is a murder investigation. And there’s got to be something here that will help us understand better what happened the night Trent died.”
“Isn’t that sort of the cops’ job?” I asked. Dad was walking, slowly with his director’s observant eye focused, around the tiny kitchen floor, not looking down, where Trent fell, but up at eye level, straight on. I had no idea what he was searching for, but then I’m guessing he didn’t know either.
“Yeah, how’s that been going so far?” he said. His hand went up to his chin in a contemplative pose. Dad wasn’t as theatrical as Les, but that was only because he so rarely got to play the main room. “See, sweetie, you’re missing the big picture. You’re curious about who killed Trent, sure, but you really care about Bruno and making sure he’s all right.”
“How is that missing the big picture?” I get defensive when someone suggests to me that humans are more important than my clients. “Trent’s dead. He’s going to stay dead whether someone figures out who killed him or not. But Bruno…”
My father stopped at one side of the kitchen and stared, but not so blankly that he couldn’t cut me off. “Bruno’s predicament has got to be tied to Trent’s murder,” he said. “I say you’re missing the bigger picture because you don’t see that if we can figure out what happened to Trent, we’ll have a better idea of how to help Bruno.”
His cell phone made a sound like a large man belching after a heavy dinner. He took it out and glanced at it. “Your mother says we should leave soon,” he said.
“Is something wrong?”
“No, but she feels like she’s imposing on Consuelo and Dee.” I knew that wasn’t all in a text from Mom. They’ve been together so long that they can pretty much read each other’s minds, which, now that I thought of it, wouldn’t be a bad act.
“What are you looking for?” I asked him finally. Mostly because I didn’t see anything especially worth looking at, but Dad seemed to think the air in the center of Louise’s kitchen was fascinating.
“I’m picturing the scene.” He tried to stand on his toes for a second, but didn’t seem to find it satisfactory. So he looked around the floor again, found Bruno’s large food dish, and picked it up. There was no food in it. Dad turned it over, placed it back on the floor, and stood on it. “That’s the right height,” he said.
Not if Bruno ever wanted to eat out of that bowl again. “For what?” I asked.
“To see from the killer’s perspective. See, Trent was stabbed in the back—no jokes, little girl—and the way he fell onto that water bowl over there, it follows that he went forward rather than to the side. Straight down. That means the person who stabbed him had a downward thrust, not an attack from below or directly. It was a taller person who stabbed Trent.” He stepped down off the bowl as if expecting a round of applause.
“Amazing, Holmes!” Okay, so I was being snarky, but you can’t let an old ham like Dad go on in his role too long or he starts to believe his own press releases. “We’ll arrest LeBron James and be home before tea.”
“You’re a real wiseass, you know that?”
“I learned from the master.”
Dad ignored that remark, which was wise on his part. “If Trent was stabbed by a taller person, even a little taller, that lets Louise out.”
“Unless she used the same brilliant bowl-standing technique you just used,” I said.
“That seems unlikely. Besides, for someone to knock him down that hard, the killer would have to be pretty strong. Louise is fairly scrawny, especially in the arms and, um, upper body.”
“Hey. You’re married.”
My father gave me a don’t-be-ridiculous look. “But Akra is tall, and she looks strong. It could have been her.”
“Could have been Les too,” I said. “I don’t think it was Gwen Harper, mostly because she doesn’t really have a motive and couldn’t remember who Trent was, but she’s not exactly an Amazon either.”
“What about this Mike guy?” Dad asked. “I don’t really know him at all, but he’s not small and he’s, you know, a guy.”
I thought about it. “He doesn’t really seem to have appeared until Trent was already dead, and besides, he was Trent’s school chum, not Louise’s. But he must have known Akra at some point too.”
“Has he got motive?” Dad was playing the inspector now and had to check his natural urge to employ a British accent I knew he could do convincingly.
I shrugged. “How would I know? Nobody seems to have a real motive here, except that Bruno is apparently worth all kinds of money. But killing Trent didn’t change anything about that. Bruno is still Louise’s dog.”
Dad turned to me, a thought clearly having crossed his mind. “Was he always?” he asked.
I’d spent the day trying to figure out this complicated plot, being blown up, handing my client over to his owner while thinking that was a bad thing to do, and then having a delicious authentic Mexican dinner. I was tired to the point that I would do anything to get out of this apartment and back to my nice warm bed. But Dad was on a roll, and I knew the only thing that could possibly placate him was for me to make real progress in what he now saw as his investigation.
“Let’s check out Louise’s computer,” I said, and headed into the living area (it wasn’t large enough to be a living room), where I’d seen her laptop on a rather nice side table with two drawers. I picked it up and hit the Power button.
“I thought you did that already,” Dad said, following me in.
I shook my head. “I only looked at Trent’s. Didn’t have time before Louise came back to her own apartment and messed everything up for me.” The screen flickered on.
Dad watched over my shoulder as I opened Louise’s main drive and looked at the list of folders, which was not especially impressive. She did not keep bank records or any records with Bruno’s name listed, a quick search of the system revealed. But with Louise’s personality in mind, I figured there had to be one file that would hold some of her personal information, and that might hold a clue. I told that to Dad.
“How do you find something like that?” he asked. “She’s not going to have a file marked ‘Secret Stuff I Don’t Want You to See.’”
“No, but there is one thing I can search for that will lead to at least some of Bruno’s records.” And I went to the search box and typed in my own name. “She had to get in touch with me once they decided Bruno was a showbiz dog. Why do that with a Tibetan mastiff worth over a million dollars?”
“The only explanation,” my father said, “is that Louise and Trent didn’t know Bruno was a Tibetan mastiff worth over a million dollars.”
“Maybe.” I found two mentions of my name. One was in the address book, where my cell number and office number were stored. That was not of much use, seeing as how I already knew my cell and office numbers. “What’s this?”
The second mention of Powell and Associates came in a file that had been named, in perfect Louise Barclay fashion, Boring. I’m sure her rationale was that if she labeled it that way, no one other than she would want to open it. I immediately opened it.
“Whoa,” Dad said. “The mother lode.”
Sure enough, the Boring file Louise had created included every password and user ID she had on file in case she needed to remind herself. There were (in addition to my and Taylor’s contact numbers) credit card numbers, Social Security numbers for herself and Trent, a mortgage loan on the apartment (who knew it was a condo?), and information about investment accounts and bank accounts Trent had conveniently left out of his more straightforward and detailed records on his own computer. This was clearly a family in which delegation of responsibility was more than a concept; it was a way of life.
“We haven’t got anything yet,” I reminded Dad. “I’m not checking Louise’s MasterCard balance.”
“But her bank account could show you something about when she adopted Bruno,” he noted. “Wasn’t it just a few months ago, according to Trent?”
“Her bank account?” I felt a little queasy. “Isn’t that fraud, or something?”
“It’s never fraud if you don’t get caught, and you have the access codes.” Dad pointed at the spot on the screen as if I hadn’t already noticed Louise’s notations about the Wells Fargo Bank account that was no doubt in her name alone and was therefore the only one listed just on her computer.
“How about morals?” I said. Was it okay to peer into a woman’s finances if she was possibly holding a large hairy client hostage?
“A man died here a few nights ago,” Dad answered. “I think whoever did that has abandoned the moral high ground.”
“We don’t know it was Louise,” I pointed out. “She’s short.”
“We don’t know it wasn’t. Maybe she stood on a box.”
“You just said she was scrawny.”
“Check.” Dad pointed at the screen.
Having broken into her home and opened her confidential files, the fact was I had very little in the way of moral ammunition. I opened Louise’s browser, one I would not have ordinarily used because it’s so damn slow, and finally got the Wells Fargo website on the screen. I checked back at the Boring document, punched in the ID and password, and voilà, a mere forty seconds later I was staring into Louise Barclay’s most recent bank records.
“Is this the kind of daughter you raised?” I asked Dad. “Breaking into a woman’s most confidential…”
“What does it say?” He cut me off.
“Give me a minute, will you?” The most recent deductions from Louise’s checking account were, as one might expect, related to Trent’s funeral. There was a fee to a funeral home not far from here, a payment to the rabbi (who apparently had a PayPal account) and the deduction for the slinky little black number she’d been wearing the day of the funeral.
“What are you looking for?” Dad asked.
“I’m not sure. Something about Bruno. Vet bills, a payment to a shelter, a deduction that would indicate they’d paid privately to a breeder or someone less reputable for a dog like that.” I scrolled down the page. “But there’s nothing here.”
“It’s been a few months,” Dad told me. “Keep going.”
I did, but there weren’t any suspicious deductions from Louise’s account at any time during the past six months. “That’s weird,” I said. “Even if they got the dog illegally or off the books, you take him to the vet when you adopt a new animal. There’s nothing here.”
Dad shrugged. “Maybe they’re bad pet owners.”
“No tags, no license with the city, no records of rabies or any other vaccinations. They’re not just bad pet owners, they’re nonexistent pet owners.”
Dad sat down on the radiator. “So they were doing their best to avoid leaving a paper trail that would attach them to Bruno,” he said. “How did they pass your vetting system when they contacted you?”
“I checked with a reference they gave, but…” I reached for my phone and dialed Consuelo, who answered on the second ring. “We’re fine,” I said before she could ask. “Who was the character reference on Bruno?”
“Hang on.” Consuelo was no doubt accessing the company’s files from her home computer, which took a little time. “They had a license with the city, which I have scanned here. And we talked to a reference, a Ms. Kaly Rave. Remember her? You talked to her on the phone, from the New York Kennel Club.”
“Kaly Rave,” I said. “Can you spell that?” Consuelo did, and I wrote it on a taxi receipt I had in my pocket. “I’ll call her again in the morning.” I thanked Consuelo and hung up.
Dad looked at me funny. “No, you won’t,” he said.
Huh? “No, I won’t what?”
“You won’t call Kaly Rave in the morning,” my father told me.
“Stop being cryptic, Tonto. What do you mean, I won’t call Kaly Rave in the morning? She might have some insight into where Louise and Trent got Bruno.”
My father squinted at me. Apparently, I was far away, or directly in the sunlight. “You spoke to this woman before. What do you remember about her?”
“Well, we never met. I don’t remember her voice especially, but I asked her about Trent and Louise, she said they were okay and they treated Bruno well, and I pretty much left it at that. It wasn’t anything special. What am I missing?”
“Just a second,” Dad said. “Where did you get Ms. Rave’s number?”
“From Trent. I asked for a reference and she’s the one he gave me.” This was getting a little spooky, just based on the faraway look in Dad’s eyes. “You’re scaring me. What’s going on?”
He snapped out of his reverie and shook his head. “I’m sorry, sweetie; I didn’t mean to upset you. But don’t you see it? Isn’t it obvious?”
“No, it’s not obvious, or I wouldn’t have to ask you for the seventy-eighth time. What am I missing?”
Dad looked at my note again and nodded. “See, ‘Kaly Rave’ is an anagram of ‘Akra Levy.’”
CHAPTER TWENTY
“An anagram,” I said, shaking my head as I walked up to the house in Scarborough. “What is she, Professor Moriarty? What makes a person feel like they should hide themselves, but leave a clue behind? Isn’t that counterproductive?”
“These people are criminals,” Mom said, a few steps behind me. I could already hear Eydie howling at the sound of the approaching humans, who clearly had forgotten their responsibility to be present when she wanted them. “They’re not like you and me.”
“They are like you and me,” Dad told her. “They’re show people. They can’t stand to be anonymous.” Mom, who probably was thinking they weren’t exactly huge stars and was perfectly happy being anonymous, said nothing.
