by J. A. Jance
“Turns out that long before Saturday, Purcell had multiple arrests for domestic violence—three of which occurred in the last six months. Each time, even with a no-contact order in place, his wife took him back the minute he got out of the slammer. This time, though, I think the presence of the weapon—BB gun or not—got her attention. After a full day of urging on our part, she finally agreed to get help. One of my victims’ advocates spent the day finding a shelter that would take the wife and the two kids, but . . .”
“But not the dog,” I finished.
“Right,” Mel agreed. “Not the dog, and that left the kids—Chrissy and Lonny—absolutely heartbroken. Rambo evidently came to them as a pound puppy, and they didn’t want her having to go back there. Since it was the only way to get the wife and kids taken care of, I offered to look after Rambo until they have a chance to get settled somewhere else.”
“That could take months,” I objected.
“Exactly,” Mel said with a nod. “But still, it’s only temporary, and we do have a fenced yard. Besides, wasn’t the plan all along that that once we got settled in here, we’d look into getting a dog?”
That had been somebody’s plan, just not necessarily mine. I glanced at Rambo, who continued to study me with unwavering concentration. There’s a big difference between discussing a hypothetical dog and looking at a creature who seemed fully capable, if she once set her mind to it, of eating me for lunch. Compared to Rambo, Snooks—my first wife’s ankle-biting dachshund—was a lightweight.
“I don’t think she likes me,” I said.
“If you had met Kenneth Purcell, you wouldn’t blame her,” Mel said fiercely. “The guy’s a piece of work who has terrorized his family for months on end, and he’s probably done the same thing to the poor dog.”
So there it was—a done deal. For good or ill, either temporarily or maybe forever, Mel and I were now responsible for a dog—this dog. Another lesson I’ve learned over time is that once you’re beaten, give in gracefully and get on with it.
“Okay then,” I said. “What’s for dinner?”
The remodel on our newly acquired house had included the installation of a gourmet kitchen. The ironic thing about that is that neither Mel nor I qualifies as a gourmet cook. Our very high-end, six-burner gas range boasts two ovens along with both a stovetop griddle and grill. The last two items—the grill and the griddle—are the ones that get the most use. That night, with Rambo watching our every move, we heated up a can of tomato soup and made a stack of grilled cheese sandwiches.
Our kitchen is part of a great room that looks out over the water of Bellingham Bay. On the far side of the kitchen island is a dining room table and beyond that the living room. I prefer eating at the table so we can enjoy the view. By then it was fully dark outside, so the view wasn’t exactly an issue. Nonetheless, Mel and I took our usual places. We had barely tucked into our own food when we heard an unaccustomed crunching noise coming from the far side of the island.
“Good,” Mel said. “At least she’s eating.”
A few minutes later, Rambo made her grand entrance. Leaving the kitchen behind, she sniffed her way around the dining area and living room before stopping in front of the outside door. Then, with her nose practically touching the doorknob, she glanced back in our direction.
“I think she needs to go out,” Mel offered.
This was uncharted territory for me. “What should I do?” I asked. “Put the leash on her to take her out?”
Like water-view houses everywhere, the back door of our house is the one we use for most of our comings and goings. The front entrance, located at the near end of the living room, opens onto a porch and into a grassy yard, which runs steeply downhill and ends in a cliffside fence overlooking the water. There was no doubt in my mind that in this weather, the wet grass would be very slick. I didn’t relish the idea of going out in the dark and cold and being dragged down that slippery slope by a dog the size of a small Shetland pony.
“How about if we trust the fence,” Mel suggested. “Let’s let her out and see what happens.”
I got up from the table, walked over to the door, and switched on the yard lights. When I reached for the door handle, however, Rambo cringed away from me as though I was about to hit her. It broke my heart—damn Kenneth Purcell!
“It’s okay, girl,” I said, opening the door and then stepping aside to give her room. “Off you go.”
She bounded outside and I walked over to the window. Using the yard lights, I was able to observe her progress. She sniffed around some, exploring again, but soon got down to business. When she finished, she came right back to the porch. Despite the cold, I had left the door ajar so she could come in when she was ready. Once she did so, Rambo went straight back to the kitchen and curled up on her bed without stopping off for any unnecessary interaction with us.
“He must have hit her a lot,” Mel observed, when I resumed my place.
“That’s what I think, too,” I said. “But the good news is, she’s clearly housebroken, and she knows enough to ask to go out when she needs to.”
“We’ll need a doggy door,” Mel said.
“I thought having her here was a temporary arrangement.”
“A temporary doggy door, then,” Mel replied. “But we still need one.”
Rambo stayed in the kitchen while Mel and I hung out in the living room, where we ended our evening in front of the gas log fire, Mel with a glass of her favorite Cab in hand and me with a single bottle of O’Doul’s. In the course of the evening, I recounted everything I had learned about Maxwell Cole’s death as well as the whole convoluted story surrounding the Marcia Kelsey homicide. It took time for me to recall the name Alvin Chambers. He was a security guard at the school district offices at the time of Marcia’s murder. As far as we were able to ascertain, he was an innocent bystander, a piece of collateral damage who was mowed down in the course of Jennifer McLaughlin’s murderous pursuit of vengeance.
“What a sad story for all concerned,” Mel said when I finished. “Whatever happened to John Madsen?”
“No idea,” I told her. “For all I know, maybe he went back to wherever it was he came from—somewhere in the Midwest, I think.”
“And Erin?”
“You’ve got me there, too. People don’t always stay in touch, you know. When something like that is over, the best thing for some folks is to leave it as far in the past as possible.”
“What about Maxwell Cole?” she asked. “Are you planning on going to the funeral?”
“I don’t think so,” I answered. “He was a jerk. We weren’t the best of friends while he was alive. Now that he’s dead, showing up at the funeral would make me feel like a complete hypocrite.”
“He must not have seemed like a jerk as far as Marcia and Pete Kelsey were concerned,” Mel observed mildly.
She didn’t say anything more than that. She put the idea out there and left it hanging in the air, leaving me free to draw my own conclusions.
When it was time to go to bed, I took Mel’s empty glass and my empty bottle back to the kitchen. When I got there, Rambo was still lying on her bed. The food dish was empty; the water dish half-empty. I refilled it on the spot. As I did so, she looked at me and I at her. She was a stranger in our midst. I had no idea if we even spoke the same language.
“Do you need to go out?” I asked.
Obligingly, Rambo rose to her feet, shook, and then walked to the door. Obviously “out” was a word that worked for both of us. I stood shivering in the open doorway, watching while the dog made her rounds. Tomorrow I’d need to go out and revisit those locations, cleaning up behind her. When she finished and came back inside, I set about walking around the house, turning off lights. With that nightly ritual completed, I undressed in my walk-in closet and stopped off in the bathroom long enough to brush my teeth.
When I came into the bedroom, Mel was already in bed with the lamp on her side of the bed turned off. (I’m more than a little envio
us of that sometimes. She’s someone who is able to fall asleep as soon as her head hits the pillow. I’m more of a tossing/turning kind of guy.) Mel was asleep on her side of the bed while Rambo was stretched out full length on mine.
I lifted the covers on my side of the bed and made as if to get in. At that point, the dog raised her head and bared her teeth. She didn’t say a word; she didn’t have to. Irish wolfhounds have very long canines, and sometimes not having an argument is the best way to win it.
Without another word, I shut off my bedside lamp and then retreated to the guest room. Obviously something had to give, but tomorrow would be plenty of time to deal with that. Right now, as far as J. P. Beaumont’s sleeping arrangements were concerned, the guest room would have to do.
CHAPTER 6
“HOW’D YOU SLEEP?” MEL ASKED THE NEXT MORNING when I stumbled into the kitchen in search of coffee. We have a Dux bed in our master bedroom. The mattress situation in the guest room is a lot less posh than that, and my back was killing me.
“I’m surprised you didn’t inquire about where I slept,” I grumbled, without really answering the question as she passed me my coffee mug. “That would have been more to the point.”
“If Rambo was in your spot, why didn’t you just make her get off the bed?”
“Because she growled at me,” I answered, “and showed me her very sharp teeth.”
“Did you do that, Rambo?” Mel asked the dog. “Really?”
The miscreant in question was already in the kitchen and snugly curled up on her own bed at the moment. Reading Mel’s tone of voice as entirely nonthreatening, she thumped her yardlong tail briefly, all the while keeping her black eyes focused on yours truly.
“Obviously she hates me,” I said.
“Hating you and being scared of you aren’t the same thing,” Mel corrected, “but we can’t have her booting you out of the bedroom. If need be, we’ll put her in the bathroom when it’s time for us to go to bed tonight.”
“Good idea,” I said. It may not have been a final solution, but it was a step in the right direction. “What’s on your agenda today?”
“Officer-involved shooting day three,” Mel answered. “I’m sure it’s going to be an absolute blast.”
She left for work shortly thereafter, leaving Rambo and me alone in the house, maintaining an uneasy truce and tolerating each other rather than getting along. I took my coffee and iPad and retreated to the living room to read the online papers. Rambo stayed in the kitchen. When the need arose, she would venture into the living room, but only as far as the front door, where she would stand staring pointedly at me until I got the message. When her water dish hit empty, I filled it. Ditto for her food dish.
I briefly considered gathering up the leash and taking her for a walk, but I got over that in a hurry. After days of rain, the clouds cleared, the temperatures dropped, and we got hammered by an arctic blast that turned everything remotely damp into ice. Walking on ice is not recommended for people with even one fake knee, let alone two.
Halfway through the day, I decided to make myself useful. I put on a Crock-Pot of Senate Bean Soup. (The recipe is so easy even I can follow it.) Then I bestirred myself from the house. Grateful to have all-wheel drive, I motored over to Home Depot, where I studied the doggy door situation. Not wanting to saw a hole in our very expensive front door, I opted for one that would work with the patio slider at the far end of the family room. I bought the one labeled “large.” If they’d had a size called “immense,” I would have come home with that, but large was as good as Home Depot got. I had to use bungie cords to tie the box in the open trunk long enough to get it home.
I also stopped by Target, where I bought the largest leather dog collar I could find. I wouldn’t have wanted to wear a pinch collar, and I didn’t see why Rambo should, either. She apparently agreed. When I finally managed to remove that sprocketed mess, she rewarded me with a semi-wave of her tail and a vigorous shake of her very floppy, hair-fringed ears.
The supposedly easy installation instructions for the doggy door turned out to be not so easy at all. Standing half in and half out of the house on a wooden deck, I damned near froze my butt off getting the damned thing properly placed. Not only that, the weather stripping provided in the carton was pretty much useless. I fixed the draft problem with what’s known as the Man’s Home Companion—several layers of carefully applied duct tape. Once done, it was not a thing of beauty, but, as Mel and I had both agreed earlier, it was only temporary.
Worried about icy road conditions and tempted by knowing Senate Bean Soup was on the menu for dinner, Mel arrived home at a surprisingly early hour—6 P.M. I think she was also concerned about whether or not open warfare had broken out between Rambo and me during her absence.
Predictably, Rambo welcomed Mel home with tail-wagging enthusiasm. “How’d it go?” Mel asked.
“We survived,” I told her, “but you need to come see this. Your DIY guy rides again.”
I led Mel into the family room, where she allowed herself to be suitably impressed by the doggy door. Rambo? Not so much. She sniffed at it, but that was all. When Mel went out onto the deck and tried to coax the dog to join her by way of the clear plastic flap, Rambo was having none of it. You can’t really say that she turned on her heel, since dogs don’t actually have heels, but she did an immediate about-face and returned to her spot in the kitchen. Later, while Mel and I were in the dining room savoring our soup and Rambo needed to go out, guess what happened? She went straight to the front door—the nondoggy one—and then glanced at me over her shoulder with a look that said, “Well, are you going to open this or not?”
“So much for that,” I said. “I hope we have better luck with the sleeping arrangements.”
As we often do, Mel and I talked shop over dinner—supper, as my mother would have called it. We didn’t talk so much as Mel vented and I listened. She and I were partners long before we were lovers, and the idea of your partner having your back never goes away. In this case, she didn’t need answers from me so much as she needed to unload.
I don’t envy Mel’s job, but I understand it. Being the top cop in a small city is complicated. Not only do you have to navigate the variable ups and downs of police work, but you have to do so under a microscope of public scrutiny and with a whole lot of small-town politics thrown in on the side. Toss in the current climate, where the news media yells police brutality first and asks questions later, and you’ve made an already difficult situation virtually impossible.
In the course of her rant, I learned that although Kenneth Purcell remained hospitalized in serious condition, his doctors were planning to release him on Tuesday or Wednesday. Once that happened, he would be placed under arrest on a variety of charges and transported to the Whatcom County Jail. How long he’d be in the lockup after that would be up to a judge.
“How about the wife and kids?” I asked.
“They’re in a YWCA shelter down in Redmond, one where they’ve moved into a fully furnished apartment complete with pots and pans, dishes and linens,” Mel told me. “Serena Holland, my victims’ advocate, thought that, considering the violence involved, putting that much distance between Kenneth and the rest of the family was our best recourse. Which reminds me,” she added, pushing away from the table and pulling out her phone, “I need to take a picture of Rambo so Serena can send it along to Nancy and the kids. Chrissy needs to know the dog’s okay.”
“To prove you didn’t go back on your word and send Rambo to the pound?”
“Exactly.”
“Are they still hoping to get her back?”
“I guess.”
“But is that a good idea?” I wondered.
“What do you mean?”
“How old are the kids?”
“Four and seven, something like that.”
“Look,” I said. “Pardon my saying so, but Rambo is one big mother of a dog. When she growled at me, she made a true believer of me in a hurry. What happens i
f one of those little kids gets on her wrong side? What happens then? With those fangs of hers, she could tear someone limb from limb in a matter of minutes.”
Mel left the table, shaking her head. I noted the flash as she took the photo. Shortly after she returned to the table, I heard the swoosh as she forwarded the picture off to someone else.
“You really think Rambo’s that dangerous?” she asked.
“I do.”
“Crap,” Mel said. “What if you’re right?”
I didn’t want to be right, but the fact that I might be scared the hell out of me. I was glad when Mel changed the subject, although the new topic wasn’t much of an improvement.
“Any word on the Maxwell Cole situation?” she asked.
I’ve learned enough about women over the years to understand that in this case, Mel’s use of the word “situation” was actually code for “funeral.” She was still of the opinion that I ought to go, while I remained convinced that the final arrangements for my longtime frenemy were none of my business.
“As far as I can see online, the ME has yet to release the autopsy results,” I told her. “Not only that, the fire itself is still under investigation.”
Mel nodded. We both knew enough about fire investigations—especially fatality fire investigations—to understand that those take time.
At that point, by mutual agreement, we got up, cleared away dinner, did the dishes, and again repaired to the family room, where we turned on the fireplace and watched an evening’s worth of mindless entertainment on television just like any other normal married couple. When it was time to turn off the boob tube and go to bed that night, Mel suggested that she turn off the lights while I hit the sack first.
Once I was safely in bed—fully occupying my side—she came into the bedroom, dragging Rambo’s dog bed behind her. Mel placed it on the floor in front of her bedside table. As soon as Mel went into the bathroom to undress and make her ablutions, Rambo ignored the bed on the floor and hopped up on the bed beside me. She circled once and then, with a contented sigh, settled down on the bed with her head neatly positioned on Mel’s pillow.