Dog Dish of Doom, page 9
I looked at Taylor. Her eyes crinkled up and her nose got four creases in it. “Who’s Moshe Berkowitz?” she asked. “Is that, like, a code or something?”
Dad was an actor, but I was an agent. I knew how to negotiate terms and how to hold back and share information when necessary, for strategic purposes. So I said to Taylor, “Moshe Berkowitz was Trent Barclay’s real name.”
I saw Mom turn to watch Taylor’s reaction as well.
It was pretty spectacular. Her eyes grew to the size of Eisenhower silver dollars (pretty big) and her lips retracted into her mouth. She made a few noises I’d never even heard one of my clients make, and then she took some deep breaths. “Trent’s dead?” she croaked.
I nodded. “Somebody stabbed him in the back last night in his apartment. I’m sorry I had to be the one to tell you.” I wasn’t that sorry. Taylor had tried to dognap Bruno and had dropped used tissues on my side table. There are some things that simply can’t be forgiven.
“The police,” Mom reminded. “We should be calling the police.”
“No!” Taylor insisted. “Listen. Here’s what we’ll do. These people have killed Trent, and that means they’re not kidding. If they’re watching us, the only thing for us to do is let me take Bruno outside, make it look like I’m going to drive him away. I’ll put him in my car, drive around the block once, and then come back after I think they’ve left. Okay? I’ll bring him right back.”
Having had more time than Taylor to get used to the idea of Trent being dead, I wasn’t buying the “we’ll-be-watching-you” act her blackmailers had offered. “No chance,” I said. “You’re hysterical. You’re scared. You’ll take Bruno exactly where they want you to take him. I’m not going to let that happen. As his agent, it’s my job to give him the best advice possible, and tonight that advice is to stay right where he is and be cozy with Steve.”
Steve, indeed, had his right forepaw on Bruno’s shoulder. Steve was also snoring so loudly that Eydie grunted in disgust. From the kitchen.
“No, really,” Taylor attempted. “I promise. He’ll be back here in five minutes. Just don’t make me walk out that door alone.” She looked at my front door as if it led directly to the guillotine. Which was silly. We had the guillotine removed from the front yard years ago.
“You won’t have to,” Dad told her. “I’ll go with you.”
“Jay!” my mother said.
My “Dad” was a little less urgent, but it carried the same message.
He looked at us as if we were mental patients off our meds. “Just to the car,” he said. “There’s no one out there, so there won’t be any danger.”
“I’m not going without the dog,” Taylor tried to demand. But her voice just couldn’t carry it off.
“Okay, suppose I were stupid enough to let you put a leash on Bruno and take him out the door,” I said. “And let’s say—although I think it very unlikely—that you’re telling the truth and you’ll bring Bruno right back here in a few minutes. How does that help you?”
“They won’t shoot me on my way to the car,” Taylor offered in a “well, duh” inflection.
“But you won’t bring Bruno to the designated spot,” I reminded her. “So you haven’t bought yourself more than an hour or so.”
Taylor’s mouth made some very interesting movements. Her lips moved back and forth, horizontally, at the same time they were going into, then out of, her mouth. She looked like she was chewing on her own lips and trying to decide if they needed more salt.
“After I drop him off, I can leave the state,” she said. “I have family in Ithaca.”
“Why do they want Bruno?” Mom asked.
Everybody turned in her direction. “What?” I said.
“Why are these mysterious people so dead set on getting Bruno?” Mom answered. “Is he filled with diamonds or something? He’s a sweet dog, but they could probably find another one at a decent shelter. Why do they need Bruno?”
It was a good question.
“How am I supposed to know?” Taylor whined, as if we’d expected an answer out of her. “They’re gonna kill me and all you care about is that dog.”
“That dog is my client,” I told her. “It’s my job to see that nothing bad happens to him at all. I’m the only one looking out for him right now, so I’m going to make the decisions in matters of his welfare. And that means right now, I’m going to call Detective Rodriguez and tell her exactly what’s been going on. Give me your phone. It’s evidence.” That sounded professional.
“No!” Taylor turned and ran out the front door before any of us could even comprehend what it was she was doing. I heard her footsteps, running, on the gravel in front of my house, then her car start up and drive away, the engine noise fading into the distance.
I heard absolutely no gunfire at all.
We stood there for a long moment. Then Dad let out a long breath and sat down on the sofa next to Mom. “What did it for you?” he asked.
“The bit about driving to Ithaca,” Mom answered without hesitation. “It was just too rehearsed. Who thinks of Ithaca that spontaneously?”
He nodded. “For me it was the reaction when she heard her boss had been murdered. She didn’t ask any questions. She just spent all her energy being shocked.”
Mom nodded. “I saw that too,” she said.
Dad looked at me. “How about you?”
“The way Bruno didn’t care if she was here or not. Even if she really is his regular dog walker, he doesn’t like her as much as he likes me, and he’s known me less than a week.”
Dad digested that. He patted Mom on the shoulder and leaned back on the sofa. “I suppose we really should call Detective Rodriguez on this one,” he said. “But one thing’s for sure.”
Mom, after decades of feeding him straight lines, knew how to play the scene. “What’s that, Jay?” she asked.
“That was one of the worst acting performances I’ve ever seen.”
CHAPTER NINE
Rodriguez took the information I had for her over the phone, saying it was late and she didn’t see any reason to drive out to what she called “the boonies” to take a statement she could hear just as well from her home in Astoria, Queens. New Yorkers call the police their “finest,” but don’t pay them nearly enough to live in Manhattan.
“What do you think it all means?” I asked her when she was finished taking down the whole bizarre Taylor incident.
She sighed. “That I’m going to be working late tonight, and probably tomorrow. You going to the theater tomorrow?”
“Yeah, I’ll be there at noon.”
“Noon? They don’t get started until noon?” Rodriguez seemed appalled at the slavish nature of theater folk.
“Yeah, and they work only until about one in the morning. It’s a damned soft life,” I more or less snarled. I won’t identify with theater people, but they are my family. You make a wiseass crack about them and I’m going to get testy.
“Okay, okay,” the detective answered. “Nobody’s trying to say anything bad about your pals. Just ask around and let me know what you hear.” Then we said our goodbyes and I disconnected the call.
Mom and Dad had finally gone to bed, Dad still insisting that it would be helpful for him, at least, to come with Bruno and me to rehearsal the next day. I saw this as a thinly veiled attempt to go meet Les McMaster, but I didn’t say that to my father because the man could argue Eva Braun into attending a bat mitzvah. I saw no point. If I left early enough in the morning, Dad simply wouldn’t be awake in time.
I made sure all the water bowls were full and put the food bowls up on the counter for the night. Dogs need a routine, and eating late at night, especially in (for Bruno) an unfamiliar house would not be helpful to the dogs or my rugs. They probably wouldn’t get up to eat during the night anyway.
I sat down at the kitchen table after pouring myself a bowl of Cap’n Crunch. Hey, you can eat kale at midnight if you want to, but sugary cereals are my snack of choice when I need to think. And I needed to think.
All I’d wanted to do was help Bruno get a role in Annie, one that didn’t actually have all that much stage time and was probably sort of underutilizing his talents. Strategically, it would be great for him, giving him exposure and getting that first big role under his (metaphorical) belt. It might lead to some TV or film work or possibly some advertising, which could be very lucrative.
But in my attempts to ingratiate the dog to a Broadway director, somehow I’d ended up boarding Bruno, hiding from Louise, dropping a dime on Taylor, snooping for Rodriguez, and wondering two things: who had killed Trent, and why I’d never known his real name was Moshe Berkowitz.
Perhaps the first question was more pressing than the second.
One thing about Cap’n Crunch cereal is that it lives up to its name. I could hear nothing but the crunching in my head, and that’s part of the appeal. There were no distractions from anywhere to take me away from my ruminations.
The trouble was, my ruminations weren’t getting me anywhere.
It wasn’t my business to solve Trent’s murder; that was Rodriguez’s problem. All I had to do was get a few juicy tidbits to her and let her do the rest. My job was getting Bruno through the process of learning to be adorable on cue, something he could pretty much do in his sleep.
But I couldn’t help trying to put the puzzle pieces together. There had been no signs of forced entry at Trent and Louise’s apartment, Dad had noticed. So whoever killed him either had access to a key or lived there, because the police found the door locked after Louise’s 911 call.
The dog walker might have a key to the apartment. If she was the dog walker. Neither Trent nor Louise had ever mentioned a dog walker to me, and I was fairly well involved with the care of their dog.
But it was certain that Louise had a key to the apartment, she admitted to being in the bedroom at the time, and she apparently knew that Trent was having an affair with someone. Les had told me he’d heard the fling was with their dog walker.
Taylor was becoming a central figure no matter how you sized up this crime. But what motive would she have to kill Trent, leave Bruno in the apartment, and then come to my house in New Jersey the next night to try to dognap him? Why not just take him after Trent lay facedown in the water bowl, if it were that important?
I had a lot of questions, almost none of which were my direct responsibility, and yet I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep. The cereal wasn’t helping, which was unusual. I don’t get a “sugar rush,” and think such a thing is a myth, but normally just sitting quietly and crunching along would relax me to the point that I could sleep. Not tonight.
There was only one thing to do: Internet research. That’ll put me to sleep faster than a glass of warm milk while reading spreadsheets and listening to a politician’s oration.
I figured if I could purge the subjects currently monopolizing my mind, I might be able to move past them and get to sleep before the sun rose in my bedroom window. That was a good few hours off, but I was already preparing for a losing battle. I’m a glass-half-never-filled kind of girl.
The name Moshe Berkowitz, unsurprisingly, got 122,000 Google results. Everything gets at least 122,000 Google results. You’d have to be a silent monk in the Himalayas to get less than 122,000 Google results.
I’m saying Google tends to overrepresent.
I sorted through the listings, many of which were about one particular man who had never turned into Trent Barclay and was therefore not relevant to the research I was doing, which at the moment had no focus whatsoever. Once those were out of the way, there were the usual LinkedIn listings, Facebook pages, a couple Twitter feeds, four news items about Moshe Berkowitzes who had ended up in jail (two items each for two Moshes), and several listings for attorneys with that name.
The one that attracted my attention at about two in the morning (so much for getting enough sleep tonight) was one that on the surface didn’t seem to pertain to my Moshe/Trent. And it didn’t appear to have much relevance to his murder. At first.
It was a graduation notice, some twenty years old, from a Yeshiva in New Rochelle, New York, whose graduates included one Moshe Berkowitz. That didn’t seem to have much to do with anything, and I was about to leave the web page, until my eye happened to stop on one of the other names in the graduating class.
Akra Levy.
Okay, of course this couldn’t be the same Akra who was Les McMaster’s assistant. Could it? I mean, how many Akras do you run into during the average day? But her having the same name as one of Trent Barclay’s old Hebrew school classmates was just a little suspicious, wasn’t it?
Would it explain, for example, why the Barclays—when there were still two of them—had gotten the call for Bruno’s second audition instead of his agent (that’s me)? You thought I forgot about that? I had not forgotten about that.
Would it explain why Les had heard about Trent having an affair with his dog walker, presumably Taylor? Suddenly the connections between Les and the Barclays seemed easier to explain, yet considerably shadier.
It took another half hour or so to track down Akra Levy. She was widowed, her husband having died—of cancer, not murder—at a very young age, which was tragic.
And according to her Brandeis University alumni magazine, she was now “working as an executive assistant to a major Broadway director.”
This was not helping me get any sleepier.
I resolved to call Rodriguez in the morning—okay, later in the morning—with the connection I’d uncovered. I’d done enough staring at a screen for one night, and besides it wasn’t having the desired effect, which was to render me unconscious.
I shut down the computer and dragged my weary butt into my bedroom, where an honest-to-goodness book lay on the night table. I turned on the light over the bed, turned off the overhead fixture, got under my comforter after kicking off my slippers, and settled back to relax and read. That for sure would relax me, especially at this time of night. It started working immediately, as within half a page I felt my eyelids gaining weight faster than Steve when there was leftover chicken for dinner.
And that’s why I came close to having a major heart attack when my cell phone buzzed.
Who could be calling me at this hour? That’s not ever a good thing. Luckily Mom and Dad are my only family, and they certainly weren’t calling from the other room, so the disaster being communicated couldn’t have been too horrible. I caught my breath and grabbed for the phone, which luckily was not far away. It almost immediately stopped buzzing, which indicated the contact had not been a phone call, but a text message. That didn’t make its timing any less alarming.
I hit the button for the text and looked for the indication of its source. There was no number or name, just the words “Caller Unknown,” which is about as helpful as someone telling you there’s a foolproof way to assure you’ll win the Powerball lottery, but they’ve forgotten what it might be. I clicked through to the message, hoping it was simply a misbegotten advertisement or an overzealous client’s owner wanting to know why her pet hamster was not yet a household name. That would be okay, because I wouldn’t have to deal with it until at least daylight.
Instead, the text I opened began with the words, “If you value your life…”
CHAPTER TEN
“I don’t think it means much of anything,” Det. Alana Rodriguez told me.
I was sitting in her “office,” which was essentially a small cubicle without walls (a desk) in the Sixth Precinct of the New York Police Department, having gotten a grand total of no sleep and shown up here at seven in the morning. I’d waited forty-five minutes for Rodriguez to arrive, bagel and coffee in hand. And she had the nerve to look annoyed that I’d interrupted her morning routine.
“I got a text message that said I should essentially abandon a dog I’m watching, who’s a client of mine, to some fate I can’t be sure of or my life will be in danger, and you don’t think it means much of anything?” I gave Rodriguez my best skeptical look. “I feel so much better.” I looked around. “Is there a tip jar? I’d really like to thank you for your efforts.”
She sat down and moaned a little at my amateur emotionality. “I’m not saying I don’t care. I’m saying I think this is an empty threat. You got the same message you said that dog walker got yesterday, and as far as my morning bulletins can tell, she didn’t end up facedown in the Hudson River just yet. Someone’s trying to scare you.”
“They’re doing a really effective job.”
Rodriguez took a sip of her coffee, which was not from a fancy chain and I would bet money was hot and black. “What’s interesting is that somebody really wants that dog of yours.” She looked down at Bruno, who was sitting attentively but calmly next to my chair. “Can you guess why that might be?”
I scratched my client behind his ears. “He’s very good at whining and looking worried,” I said. “That’s a marketable skill. Do you think maybe he saw the murder and someone is afraid he can point to them?”
Rodriguez’s forehead wrinkled. “That happens in the movies,” she said. “Unless the dog is going to stand up, point at a suspect, and shout, ‘That’s him, Officer! Get out your zip strips!,’ I think his value as a witness is fairly limited.”
I flattened out my lips. Okay, I pouted. I don’t do it as winningly as Bruno, but it felt right at the time. “It doesn’t make sense that this whole melodrama with Bruno isn’t connected to Trent’s murder,” I mused, really saying aloud what I’d been kicking around since the text arrived early—and I mean early—this morning. “I can’t believe whoever’s behind this is suddenly convinced he’s worth millions and is trying to blackmail first Taylor and now me into turning him over. It’s got to be something else.”
