by Nic Saint
Shaking my head, I walked off.
“Max?” Brutus called after me. “Aren’t you going to eat that?”
“I just lost my appetite!” I called back.
“But I thought you said you were hungry?” Dooley said.
“Not anymore!”
“Great,” said Brutus. “So we did all of that moving his kibble around for nothing.”
“Might as well eat it,” said Harriet, and soon I heard the telltale sounds of cats chewing on kibble. My kibble!
Ugh.
I decided to remove myself from the source of this awful sound and walked out of the house and into the backyard. I even walked all the way to the back, so I wouldn’t have to hear Dooley, Brutus and Harriet eating, and as I lay down in the shade of the rose bush, a voice tootled into my ear, “Max! Have you caught Bob’s killer yet!”
I jumped in surprise, and when I glanced down at the mulch that Odelia likes to spread on top of the rose bush’s roots, I saw that once more I was in the presence of Mr. Ed.
“I’m sorry, Mr. Ed,” I said. “But the men who were caught and have been accused of the abduction and murder of Bob Rector have denied their involvement.” And in a few short words I explained to the snail what had happened last night at the Star hotel.
“I didn’t even know Bob had two cousins,” said Mr. Ed when at length I’d finished recounting my tale. “What did you say their names were?”
“Wim Bojanowsky and Suppo Bonikowski. They were staying at the Hampton Cove Star, in the room adjacent to Lord Hilbourne’s suite.”
“Oh, yeah. The keys to the city guy. He’s some kind of prince or king, right?”
“He’s a British blue blood, though I don’t think he’s a prince exactly, or a king. Merely a lord. Apparently they’ve got a lot of those over in England.”
“They probably create them in a factory outside London,” said Mr. Ed. For a moment he didn’t speak, and judging from the thought wrinkles that appeared on his sticky green brow, he was thinking hard. “What if Bojanowksy and Bonikowski were in on the whole thing?”
“What do you mean?”
“What if they set this whole thing up, along with Bob? I mean, what are the chances of Bob’s cousins being in town the same time he is? Or do they always travel in packs?”
“They mentioned they were here on holiday, along with their cousin. Though I also saw them at Town Hall, where they were working as waiters handing out finger food.”
“So they claim to be tourists, and yet they’re waitering. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”
I shrugged. “Maybe they needed to make some extra money. Vacationing in the Hamptons can be expensive.”
“Mh,” said Mr. Ed. “Don’t they have jobs at home? What do they do?”
“Bojanowsky is a customer success manager at a furniture store. And his cousin is between jobs at the moment and has been paying the bills by temping as a manny.”
“Not exactly high-powered careers,” Mr. Ed mused. “Or high-paying ones.”
“That doesn’t mean they’re criminals,” I pointed out.
“It doesn’t,” he conceded. “So… tell me again what they said happened?”
“The cousins say they’re the victims of an attack carried out by Johnny and Jerry, while the latter claim the cousins were attacking Hilbourne and they saved his life.”
“I’m inclined to believe your Johnny and Jerry, Max. Call me prejudiced but any cousin of Bob Rector is a bad egg in my view. So there was blood on the carpet, and the cousins were caught… doing what exactly to this Lord Hilbourne?”
“Holding him upright, as he appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Which caused our two homegrown crooks to conclude the cousins had been beating the guy to a pulp. Which they hadn’t, as there wasn’t a mark on him. Not a scratch or a dent or even a single tiny bruise. But he did suffer an aneurysm. And he did lose a lot of blood and is now in a coma.”
“Mh…”
Mr. Ed’s tentacles were gently waving. Did you know that snails possess no less than four tentacles? Two on top of their head that contain their eyes, and two smaller ones they use to smell stuff on the ground. Mr. Ed’s big tentacles were now pointing at the sky, as he was momentarily locked in silent contemplation, while the smaller ones were idly sniffing at the mulch under our feet. I could tell he was thinking hard. I was thinking hard, too. So there you have it—cat and snail, both thinking hard, pooling resources.
“So what do you think?” I said finally.
“I’m suddenly reminded of the fact that Bob was an engineer.”
“He was?”
“Mh. He once told Evelina he used to work for some big tech startup.”
“You didn’t tell me that.”
“I didn’t think it was relevant.”
“Do you think it’s relevant now?”
He gave me a keen look. “Don’t you?”
I nodded slowly, putting together all the pieces of the puzzle.
We shared a long look. “I wonder,” he said, “what happened to the other watch.”
Chapter 37
We’d all gathered in Odelia’s cozy little home, which incidentally is also my home. I could have gone down to the police station to file a report, or even down to the Gazette to explain things to Odelia, but I felt it more prudent to save my strength. After all, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I’d willingly surrendered my kibble to my housemates.
And so instead I opted to patiently await the return of my human from work, and when I told her I thought I’d solved both the crime of Bob Rector’s death, and of Lord Hilbourne’s mysterious illness, she immediately called her uncle, and the rest of the family, for a family meeting, something she said she’d been intending to do anyway, though she wouldn’t say why—probably wanting to surprise me with some great news about the wedding, I suspected. Like the fact that she’d found a different venue, which could host two or three thousand people, and a DJ who was used to playing big places like that, and a caterer who was ready to cater to thousands. And worked on credit.
And so it was that Dooley, Brutus and Harriet and myself were seated in front of the TV, and our humans were seated on the couch, wondering what all the fuss was about.
“So Bob Rector,” I said, “was the cousin of Wim Bojanowsky and Suppo Bonikowski, and I think in the end that’s what this whole case revolves around.”
Odelia dutifully translated my words for the convenience of Tex, Uncle Alec and Chase, a service Marge and Gran obviously didn’t need.
“I’ll tell you what I think happened,” I said, “and then you can decide if I’m right.”
“Sounds good,” Uncle Alec grunted. “This case is making me lose sleep—and what little hair I’ve got left on my head,” he added, patting his balding scalp.
“So the cousins must have heard that Hampton Cove had decided to award Lord Hilbourne the keys to the city, and also that the guy was loaded. And since Bob had been working on a very interesting new invention, they decided to put it to good use and test it out on Hilbourne.”
“What invention?” asked Marge.
“Well, this is just speculation on my part, but I suspect it’s some kind of device that impacts a person’s nervous system. Wear it, and the person on the other end has access to whatever your eyes can see and whatever your ears can hear. Amongst other things.”
“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Brutus.
“No, I’m afraid I’m not. It is, in fact, the only explanation for what happened. Or at least the most plausible one.”
“Only problem was that due to his busy schedule Hilbourne was a couple of days late in arriving, and so Bob and his cousins were left languishing in town, with too much time on their hands. Which is when Bob happened to meet Emma Bezel, who was on the lookout for a decent guy her sister could date. Bob very quickly discovered that Evelina was a millionairess in her own right, and so he and his two cousins decided to try their nifty little device on her, as a test run before they t
ackled Lord Hilbourne, the big fish.”
“So Evelina was the appetizer and Hilbourne the main menu,” said Gran.
“Exactly. Only Bob had taken a liking to Evelina, and didn’t want to subject her to a device of which he wasn’t sure if it worked exactly as intended. I think he must have felt that maybe, just maybe, there were still a few kinks to be worked out. And in the end he didn’t want Evelina to act as a guinea pig. Only his cousins didn’t agree with this assessment and decided to go through with the plan, overruling Bob’s reservations.”
“So why this whole kidnapping spiel?” asked Chase after Odelia had translated my musings.
“I think Bob put his foot down, at which point they decided to change tack and pretend that Bob had been kidnapped. A good old-fashioned kidnapping, after all, has never failed to bring home the bacon, and it didn’t fail this time either.”
“No, seventy-five thousand is a tidy sum,” Uncle Alec agreed. “So why kill Bob?”
“I think there must have been some kind of fight that broke out between the cousins, over who got what share of the money, and one of them must have pulled his gun and accidentally shot Bob. I don’t think it was their intention to kill him. But once they had, they had to get rid of the body, and make sure they weren’t implicated in any way.”
“What a story,” said Dooley, who was enjoying this tremendously, I could tell.
“Which brings us to the Lord Hilbourne fiasco.”
“You’re saying fiasco,” said Marge. “You mean not everything went according to plan?”
“Not exactly,” I said. “When we were at the hotel last night I remembered the two cousins from the Town Hall ceremony in honor of Lord Hilbourne. They were doling out finger food to the esteemed guests. I think what they were really up to was planting the device Bob made, knowing that Hilbourne would wear it, at which point they had him.”
“What device?” asked Gran.
“I know!” said Dooley. “The key, right!”
“Not the key,” I said with a smile. “The watch. You’ll remember that Charlene handed Hilbourne a nice watch along with the key. The key was to be worn around the neck, and the watch around his wrist. I think that watch was the prototype smartwatch Bob Rector designed, its function being not just to monitor heart rate and blood pressure, like many of these gadgets, but also to hook up to the wearer’s nervous system, and offer the person on the other end, who’s monitoring the feed, a look into the person’s head.”
“The laptop!” said Gran. “Of course!”
“Exactly. Somehow they managed to swap out the watches before the ceremony. So the watch Charlene handed Hilbourne was in fact Bob’s smartwatch prototype. The idea was that Bob’s cousins would monitor what happened inside Hilbourne’s head, and that way they could hopefully glean important information like bank accounts, passwords, his passcodes and such, and somehow empty the accounts and transfer the money to their own bank accounts—presumably located in some non-extradition tax paradise.”
“And so when Johnny and Jerry asked to change rooms…” said Odelia.
“They refused, as they didn’t know how far the range of that smartwatch extended—presumably not very far—and they needed to stay as close as possible to pull this off.”
“So what went wrong?” asked Tex.
“I think the watch, being the first of its kind, didn’t work as planned. I think it gave Hilbourne some kind of shock to the brain—an aneurysm.”
“A brain bleed,” said Tex, nodding.
“But if his brain was bleeding, why was there blood on the carpet?” asked Marge.
“His brain was leaking!” Dooley cried.
“It’s possible,” Tex conceded. “It depends where in the brain the hematoma occurred. The fact that he bled through the nose probably saved his life, as pooling of blood inside the cranium puts pressure on the brain and could have killed him before he got to the hospital.”
“So instead of looking into his brain and stealing his passwords,” said Gran, “they almost killed him.”
“They must have panicked,” said Marge.
“And Johnny and Jerry chose that exact moment to force their way into the room,” said Gran, “and thought the cousins were roughing up Hilbourne and decided to intervene.”
“The cousins must have realized something was terribly wrong when they heard Lord Hilbourne cry out in pain,” I said, “or maybe they saw what was happening on their laptop, so they hurried into Hilbourne’s suite, wanting to help Hilbourne, and help themselves by swapping the watches again—making the evidence disappear. But Johnny and Jerry dropping by ruined their plan.” I shrugged. “And the rest I think you know.”
“When Mr. Ed first approached you,” said Harriet, “he said he heard Bob say ‘If I can just convince her I’m home free.’ It made Mr. Ed suspicious. What was that all about?”
“I think at first Bob was planning to outfit Evelina with the smartwatch, as planned. But he had to convince her to wear the watch all the time, so they could gather enough data. Later on he changed his mind and told his cousins he couldn’t go through with it.”
“I have a question, too,” said Tex. “When Emma Bezel asked me to date her sister, she didn’t tell me that Bob was dead. She told me he’d broken Evelina’s heart by not showing up for a date. Was she lying to me or didn’t she know that Bob was dead at that point?”
“Of course she was lying,” said Gran with a shake of the head. “Much easier to convince you that way. Imagine if she told you that her sister’s boyfriend had been found dead in the back of a potato truck. Would you have been as eager to have lunch with her?”
“Um…” said Tex, giving this a think.
“On second thought, better don’t answer that,” said Gran.
Odelia got up and pressed a kiss to my furry brow. “You did well, Max. I’m proud of you.”
“We’ll have to confirm Max’s theory,” said Uncle Alec, “but it all sounds very plausible to me. So plausible in fact that I think I might recruit him as my newest detective, Odelia.”
Odelia smiled and said, “No way. He’s my assistant.”
“Fair enough,” said the Chief with a grin. He got up to leave, but Odelia said, “Not so fast, Uncle Alec. I also have an announcement to make.”
“We have an announcement to make,” said Chase.
“Chase and I have given this a lot of thought,” said Odelia.
“And we’ve decided…” Chase continued.
“… that the wedding is off,” Odelia finished.
“What?!” Gran cried.
“But honey!” said Marge.
“I knew it,” Tex said, shaking his head. “I just knew it.”
“Well, that saves me the cost of having to rent a tux,” Uncle Alec muttered.
“What we mean to say is,” said Chase, “that the wedding as we originally envisioned it is off.”
“It’s become too unwieldy and too big for us,” Odelia explained.
“Instead I’ve got six plane tickets here,” said Chase. “One for each of you and also for Charlene and Scarlett.”
“Tickets? Tickets to where?” asked Gran.
“Vegas. If you agree, we would like to fly you out there next Saturday.”
“And you,” said Odelia, gesturing to myself and my three friends and housemates.
“We’re going for a Vegas wedding,” said Odelia finally, a big smile on her face.
“Just you guys,” said Chase, “and no one else.”
“How about it?” asked Odelia, and both she and Chase looked a little trepidatious all of a sudden, unsure of how their family would react.
“I love it,” said Uncle Alec.
“Absolutely!” said Marge, and streaked forward to hug her daughter.
“Does that mean we have to write to all those people to disinvite them?” asked Gran.
“I think a message in the Gazette will suffice,” said Odelia.
“Then count me in,” said Gran.
“And me!” said Tex.
“Chase’s granddad is also coming,” Odelia said, “and his mom and aunt. And that’s it. We’re going for the ultra-limited approach.”
“Sometimes that’s the best one,” Marge agreed.
And frankly I couldn’t have agreed more.
“Vegas,” said Dooley, wide-eyed. “Do they have cats there, Max?”
“Sure,” I said. “It’s just a town like any other, Dooley.”
“Well, maybe not like any other,” said Brutus with a grin.
“But they’ve got kibble, right?”
“Of course they have kibble,” I said.
And hopefully it was the non-pre-chewed kind.
Chapter 38
The wedding had gone off without a hitch. The same couldn’t be said for the post-wedding dinner, which Tex had taken upon himself to preside over. Unfortunately he’d opted for one of those sushi places where the customer is supposed to do everything themselves. But even as Tex grabbed the knife and tongs handed to him by an overoptimistic server, and started slicing and dicing morsels of food then aiming them at his clients’ plates, those clients—or victims—were still basking in that post-wedding bliss too much to bother about what landed on—or in the vicinity of—their plates.
Chase’s grandfather, mom and aunt had left by then to get an early night—they must have had a premonition, for at some point I heard Gran loud-whisper into Scarlett’s ear that they could always move to a different restaurant when this ordeal was over.
“It’s nice of them, don’t you think, Max?” said Dooley. “That they don’t want to hurt Tex’s feelings?”
“I think ultimately they’re doing him a disfavor, though,” I said. “After all, if only someone stood up and told him he’s probably the worst chef in the history of chefhood, maybe he’d take steps to remedy the situation, instead of making it worse.”
We watched as Tex intensely studied a piece of fish, frowning as if willing it to reveal its culinary secrets.