Dog Dish of Doom, page 5
“He’s in the bedroom,” she said, as if I should have known that “in the back” meant one of the bedrooms, probably the master bedroom. “He’s been in there since Trent got killed, and he doesn’t want to come out.”
Bruno hadn’t been walked since late last night? That wasn’t okay. “Maybe I should take him out for a walk before we go. Where’s his leash?” I asked.
But Dad had his own agenda. “We’ll take the dog in a moment,” he told Louise. “Tell me what happened last night. As an attorney, I’m always curious about this sort of situation.”
I started to say, “Dad!” but remembered the role he was currently playing. “Howard, that’s not our business. Louise has been through enough.” I turned toward her. “I’m sorry, Louise.”
She waved a hand at me like a rag doll does when the little girl playing with it isn’t terribly well coordinated. “I don’t mind,” she said. “The doc has me on enough Xanax that really nothing bothers me right now.”
“So what can you tell us?” my father persisted. I gave him a look that was not my usual adoring-daughter gaze. He chose to ignore me.
“I was asleep.” Louise didn’t sound all that awake even now, and she drifted toward the entrance to the little kitchen and gestured vaguely with her left hand. “I don’t know what woke me up; it must have been something to do with what was going on in here. But I got up when I saw Trent wasn’t next to me in bed.”
“Was he already…” Dad did not ignore my look this time, probably realized what he was doing to Louise, and stopped talking. But Louise seemed unperturbed, dreamy, staring at the floor in the kitchen. I’m not even sure she knew Dad had said anything.
“I came out to see if he was in the kitchen, and he was,” she went on, seemingly in the same thought. “But he was on the floor, facedown, and his nose was in Bruno’s water dish. I thought he’d just fallen down, but there was blood on the floor, so I called his name, you know, Trent. He didn’t answer. I took another step forward and that’s when I saw the knife handle.”
She burped.
“And you didn’t hear anything?” This time it was me asking, because Louise didn’t seem to mind and what the heck, I’m naturally nosy. I get it from my father. “No struggle, no yelling? Wait.” The thought had just occurred to me. “Bruno didn’t bark?”
Louise shook her head. “He was in the bedroom with me, and I guess he just slept through it,” she said.
Dad had wandered away and was now standing by the apartment door, looking at it the way a stray cat might look at a cappuccino machine: as if it was an interesting object the like of which he’d never seen before.
“The lock isn’t broken,” he said. “There’s nothing wrong with the chain. Was it on when … this happened?”
Louise looked dreamier, and I thought she might very well fall asleep standing in the kitchen and strangle herself accidentally with crime-scene tape. I took her arm and led her to a chair in the office nook.
“No,” she said in answer to Dad’s question. “It was weird. We always lock the door all the time, when we’re here and when we’re not.” Her voice was taking on a singsong quality. She wasn’t going to be a reliable witness for much longer until she had a long nap.
“Why don’t you come in and put your feet up for a few minutes?” I said. “Show me where Bruno’s leash is, and I’ll take him out so you can sleep.”
Louise pointed vaguely at the desk and Dad walked over to find the leash, a pistol-grip model with extendable lead (I prefer the old-fashioned nylon leash) sitting next to a legal pad. He brought me the leash and I led Louise into her bedroom.
I found Bruno there, being the good-natured guy that he is, not whimpering or crying. He wagged his tail when he saw me and walked over when he saw the leash. He had been waiting patiently for far too long.
Dad and I managed to get Louise to lie down and I think she was asleep before she made it to the bed. She snored loudly as I latched the leash onto Bruno’s collar and led him out of the room. We didn’t even bother to keep things quiet; Louise would sleep for hours if I was any judge of narcotics-driven slumber. And I’m not.
“What was on the legal pad?” I asked Dad as we walked down the hall to the stairway.
“Les McMaster’s phone number,” he said. “How’d you know I was looking?”
“Whose daughter do you think I am, Howard?”
CHAPTER FIVE
“It was a simple screwup,” Les McMaster said.
Back in the Palace for Bruno’s callback audition, we were the only two people in the 1,700-seat auditorium. And Les was trying to explain to me how my client had been called back and I hadn’t been notified.
“You called Trent and Louise directly,” I said. “You know perfectly well that’s not the way things are done. You don’t bypass the agent.”
“And I’m telling you it wasn’t intentional,” he protested. “I asked Akra to take care of calling you, and for reasons I don’t know, she didn’t. But you’re here now and you’re getting your commission. I’m going to hire the dog.”
Bruno, who didn’t speak human, didn’t know the job was his. He sat beautifully at Les’s feet, the perfect dog for little Annie to adopt at the end of Act Two. Nobody had given him any direction, but he was very much in the role of Sandy. The dog was a natural.
Neither Les nor I had mentioned Trent’s death. Dad had suggested this course of action when we’d parted at the Port Authority Bus Terminal. Dad had decided against meeting this potential new agent—he said—and was heading home. But he thought it would be best if I waited for Les to say something about what had happened to Trent, to see if he was doing the overly upset mourning thing that show-business phonies (and most other phonies) do when someone they don’t like dies. If that’s what Les was doing, he’d missed his calling as an actor, because I was convinced.
“Bruno gets the job?” I said. “No provisions in his contract?” I’d have to tell Dad how cleverly I’d brought that up, to see if Les admitted he knew Trent wouldn’t be coming in and disrupting rehearsals with protests of his dog’s great talent at the expense of everyone else in the company.
But Les turned and looked at me. “Oh no, the provisions stay,” he said. “I thought we’d settled that yesterday.”
Bruno, perhaps confused that no one wanted him to perform some amazing feat of dog acting, stood and trotted toward Les, whom he could see was clearly the alpha dog in this pack. He whimpered a little, still auditioning, but got no response. To Les, this was a done deal. He didn’t need to see Bruno work any harder.
Les’s silence on the subject was odd: It didn’t make sense that he had no idea Trent was dead. If nothing else, Detective Rodriguez must have contacted him after I’d blatantly ratted him out during my interview. “Yesterday was yesterday,” I told Les. “Things have changed since yesterday.”
Les’s eyes got smaller. “You know about Trent Barclay, don’t you?” he asked.
The swine! He was playing the same game!
“No,” I said casually. “What about him?”
“Perhaps I shouldn’t say,” Les mused.
Say, I thought, trying to send the message telepathically. Say.
I’m not sure why it was important to me that Les mention Trent’s death before I did, but it mattered. I continued sending my thought messages.
“Well, if it’s not important,” I said, “don’t worry about it.”
He bit on his lips. Show people are notorious gossips, so holding back any information he considered significant was a concerted effort on his part. “It’s important enough,” he said.
“What?” Here it comes.…
“Trent is having an affair,” Les said.
I knew he had heard about … wait. What?
“An affair?” Maybe Les really didn’t know about Trent’s death. But the idea that Trent was cheating on Louise created another whole motive situation that could easily make her—with no sign of forced entry in her apartment the night her husband was stabbed in the back (literally)—a very serious suspect. I wondered if Detective Rodriguez knew about Trent’s dalliance.
“Yeah,” Les answered. “Word is he’s doing it with his dog walker.”
Wow. There are all sorts of terms for acts these days that I’ve never heard of. “His dog walker?” I was reduced now to simply repeating whatever Les said.
Les nodded. “I hear he has someone walk Bruno when he and his wife aren’t around, and maybe all the service isn’t for the dog. You know?”
Maybe I knew and maybe I didn’t. “Trent Barclay was cheating on Louise with a random person walking his dog?” I said.
“That’s what I hear,” Les said. “What do you mean, ‘was cheating’? Did Louise find out?”
It just came out. “Trent’s dead,” I told him. There. He had the upper hand now. So I was a rung lower on the show-business ladder. I’d live with it. Besides, I knew something Les didn’t and that seemed more important right at the moment. “Somebody stabbed him in the back and he landed in Bruno’s water dish.”
Les looked stricken. He paled and staggered back onto an easy chair on the set that Daddy Warbucks usually called his own. He put his hand to his forehead (Les, not Oliver Warbucks). His mouth dropped open. “What?” he croaked.
Nobody is better at being theatrical than a theater person.
“Yeah,” I went on. I thought I sounded more unconcerned than I should have. “Didn’t the detective come and talk to you about this?”
Bruno, finally convinced nobody wanted him to whine, beg, whimper, roll over, or otherwise play a role, lay down next to the sofa on the set and went to sleep.
“No. No, of course not. I would have said something,” Les said, his voice shallow and his breath coming in gulps. The man could work a room. His focus sharpened and he looked at me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“I thought you knew,” I answered, which was true but seemed inadequate. “I figured you were trying to see how much I knew and you were waiting for me to say something.” That was sort of it. If you looked at it charitably.
Les didn’t look at it charitably. “You were playing me,” he said, his voice sounding authoritative again. “You wanted to see if you could use the information in your negotiations about Bruno.”
That wasn’t entirely true. “Well, I wouldn’t say that.”
Les smiled. “You’re a much tougher agent than I thought you were, Kay,” he said.
Um … thank you? “It just never occurred to me that you wouldn’t know,” I answered. “You’re always at the center of everything.” One thing an agent really does know how to do is stroke egos.
“So there’s a police detective questioning people?” he asked. “That should be interesting.” He stopped. “I wonder why he hasn’t come to talk to me yet.”
“She,” I corrected. “I’m sure Detective Rodriguez is building up to you.”
“Maybe.” Les seemed distracted. He was probably thinking of commanding Akra to call the NYPD and demand to be interrogated in Trent’s murder. “But maybe I’m just not that big a figure in Trent’s life. I only met him once and I immediately wanted never to see him again.”
Time to tackle the tricky subject, I thought. Bruno snored a little, so he clearly wasn’t going to ask the question. “Les,” I said, “Trent was a little … agitated … after the audition yesterday.”
Les waved a hand. “If you think you can convince me he was really a wonderful guy, save your breath, Kay. I have an excellent sense of people, and Trent Barclay was an idiot.”
“Well, I didn’t know him that well, but maybe he was just having a bad day.”
He smiled a smug grin. The game of I-Know-Something-You-Don’t-Know was clearly tilting in Les’s direction. “I heard what he said in the dressing room yesterday,” he said. “He said I was a hack who couldn’t direct a grade-school pageant about STDs.”
“Dental health,” I corrected. Who thought they had pageants about STDs in fourth grade?
“Whatever. I heard it. I was right outside the dressing-room door. So I know exactly what kind of guy Trent Barclay was, and I know exactly what he thought of me. Don’t try to defend him, Kay.”
This probably wasn’t the time to ask him to add my parents to the ensemble.
“How mad were you?” I asked. Subtle, huh?
Les gave me a smirk. “Kay, if I got homicidal every time someone gave me a bad review, there’d be a string of corpses from here to Peoria, Illinois, my childhood home.”
That sounded just like something a guilty party would say.
Suddenly Les was leapfrogging Louise as my favorite suspect. “It wasn’t exactly a … wait a minute. How do you know about this supposed affair Trent was having with Bruno’s surrogate walker?”
Bruno looked up at the mention of his name. Dogs can sleep but still be sort of in the room. I winked at him on impulse and he lowered his head and closed his eyes again.
“Louise told me. She called me last night to apologize for the way Trent had been acting at the audition, and that’s why she knew about the callback and you didn’t. She sounded like she’d been drinking. A lot. And she said Trent was getting it on with the dog walker.”
“Getting it on?” What was this, 1977?
“You’d rather I quoted her directly? Because she was using the colloquial term.”
I tilted my head in agreement. “Okay. But they have a dog walker?”
Les nodded. “A lot of people in the city do.”
“Most of them aren’t in the dog-in-show-business business,” I pointed out. “You’d think they’d be more interested in his welfare and do it themselves.”
What I was really annoyed about was that Les knew about the dog walker and I didn’t, but these owners had been really serious about selective information for selected people. Which reminded me: “But how come Louise opened up to you so much?”
Les shrugged. “Like I said, she sounded like she was drunk. She probably would have opened up to the pizza delivery boy if he’d called looking for directions.”
“How’d she get your number? I didn’t give it to her.” It was like I was trying to convince Les that he hadn’t gotten a phone call from Louise the night her husband was killed, complaining that he was sleeping with his dog’s surrogate parent.
Maybe Louise was still at the top of the list after all.
“I have no idea,” Trent said. “She didn’t get it from me. Maybe she tracked me down through the union or the theater. But she called me on my cell, and I don’t give out that number if I don’t have to.”
“You should have had Akra call me after you told Louise about the callback,” I said. I was determined to get back some of my own, although I wasn’t sure what quantity of my own would be sufficient. Since it was already my own. And how had Les gotten my own? Am I rambling?
“I promise, from now on there will be no communication between Bruno’s handlers and me; I’ll always go through you.” Les stood and walked over to Bruno, who looked up at him. “Because Bruno’s going to be working very closely with all of us here, isn’t he?” He chucked the dog under his chin. Bruno wagged his tail, but it was hard to tell if he meant it. Actors.
“Good enough,” I said. I stood up and walked over to Bruno, leash in hand. Bruno understood and stood, a little shakily, which is not unusual when a dog has been asleep or close to it. He stretched and shook himself, then stood perfectly still while I attached the lead to his collar. “When will Bruno start rehearsal?”
“Tomorrow,” Trent said. “We want to get him into the show by a week from Tuesday.”
That was soon, but not impossibly soon. “Can I get a script?” I asked. “Maybe I can teach him a few of the moves before we start.”
“I’ll get Akra to give you one on the way out,” the director, all business again, told me. He looked up toward the back of the theater. “Okay, Akra?”
The tall, dark woman called back. “No problem, Les. This way, Ms. Powell.” I hadn’t even realized she had been in the auditorium, and wondered how long she’d been watching the scene playing out onstage.
As I walked up the aisle toward her, Bruno at my heel without my having to give him a command, I looked back at Les McMaster and considered how that scenario had played out.
With Akra there as a witness, he’d made sure he was “shocked” when I’d delivered the news of Trent’s death. Then he’d made sure to drop some very suggestive and persuasive evidence that made Louise seem like an unstable, angry wife who’d just discovered her husband was cheating on her. Les had, in other words, directed the scene beautifully.
He was back at the top of my suspect list.
CHAPTER SIX
I called Louise with the good news of Bruno’s employment, but her number went straight to voicemail. So I decided to take Bruno home and then head back to my office to deal with the parakeet, the bear cub, and the calico cat. Except I didn’t do that.
Instead, I took Bruno back to my house to meet Steve and Eydie.
As a professional theatrical agent, it’s important that I never become too emotionally attached to any of my clients. Any one of them could decide to change representation, quit the business, or go to stud at any time, and if I had gotten involved with that client, it would hurt. This was a business, and I understood that.
And as a professional theatrical agent for animals, I had the added complication of not falling in love with every furry face I met. There’s a reason we love pets and other animals so much, and part of why I get work is that people love to see animals in movies and plays and television shows. They’re darn cute, many of them. So I’d resolved when I started the business never to fall for a pair of doe eyes, even if they were on a real doe.
So my decision to take Bruno home—just for the day—was a departure from the routine. And it was simply born from the idea that his owner had died the night before, his other caregiver was high on any number of narcotics and probably alcohol, and I wasn’t crazy about going back to the apartment where Trent Barclay’s blood had mostly been cleaned off the kitchen floor the last time I was there.
