Chow Down

by Laurien Berenson

  Smokers, gathered in the shade of the building, were listening in avidly. Even jaded New Yorkers didn’t get to see a live show this entertaining every day. It was enough to make me want to walk past the whole bunch and pretend that I didn’t know any of them.

  Instead sympathy slowed my pace. Well . . . maybe that and a little curiosity. Faith sensed my ambivalence and used that as an excuse to detour over toward the group and touch noses with Yoda. For once the Toy dog was on the ground rather than in her owner’s arms.

  In that brief moment of hesitation on my part, Lisa felt the slight tug on her leash, glanced over to see what was causing it, and caught my eye. She looked stressed, unhappy, and desperately in need of rescuing.

  I didn’t even stop to think. I simply veered in, linked my arm through hers, and said firmly, “Come on. Let’s get out of here.”

  For a second, I didn’t think she’d come. But Lisa wanted an escape and I’d conveniently offered her one. She swooped down, grabbed Yoda up off the sidewalk, and away we went.

  It all happened so fast that Doug was still speaking as we made our getaway. I was pretty sure I heard Simone gasp.

  “Hey!” Cindy cried in protest.

  Lisa and I didn’t stop. We didn’t look back either. Our pace didn’t slow down until we’d turned the corner. Then I took a deep breath and checked to make sure that no one was following us.

  Fortunately the coast was clear. It would have been a little embarrassing if we’d had to start to run. Faith probably would have enjoyed herself though.

  “Where are we going?” Lisa asked after a minute had passed. She sounded perfectly content to follow my lead.

  “Home.” I steered her toward the parking garage where I’d left the Volvo. “Back to Connecticut. How did you get here?”

  “By train. Metro-North.”

  “With Yoda?”

  Lisa nodded. “She’s small enough to fit inside my bag and she knows enough to keep quiet. The conductors never notice and the other passengers think it’s cute.”

  “Well unless you have an objection, you can drive back out with me and Faith. I’ll drop you off at the train station where you left your car.”

  Doing so would take me out of my way but under the circumstances that hardly seemed to matter. Fate had just handed me a golden opportunity to find out what the heck was going on, and I wasn’t about to pass it up.

  “Sounds good,” said Lisa.

  After the verbal pummeling I’d just witnessed, I got the impression that anything that put distance between her and the Champions crew would have sounded good.

  I retrieved the Volvo and we pulled out into city traffic, which had grown exponentially in the last several hours. Lisa sat in silence, which was fine by me; I needed to concentrate on not missing any turns or hitting any double-parked cars.

  By the time we’d crossed the bridge back out of Manhattan and were zipping along the highway, however, I was ready to hear some answers. Faith, who’d given up her shotgun position to Lisa, was curled up on the back seat. Yoda was tucked in beside her. I turned off the radio and set the stage. No distractions, no excuses.

  With luck, Lisa would chalk up my intrusiveness to the cost of being rescued. The woman owed me something, didn’t she?

  “You caused quite a sensation showing up like you did back there,” I said.

  “Ummm.”

  She might have been agreeing with me. Then again, she might just have been stretching her lips. It was hard to tell.

  Lisa folded her hands in her lap and stared determinedly out the windshield. Like she was afraid that if she took her eyes off the road, we might hit something. It wasn’t the most promising start to a conversation.

  “So what’s up?”

  “Up?” Her gaze flickered my way.

  “You know . . . Everyone’s been looking for you. Where have you been?”

  “Looking for me?” Lisa sounded amazed. As if this was the first she’d heard of that.

  “That’s what happens when people disappear.” Up until this point I’d had very little interaction with Lisa. Maybe I’d overlooked the fact that she was mentally challenged. “Other people look for them.”

  This time she actually turned and looked at me. “I didn’t disappear.”

  “When we got back from Central Park last week, you and Yoda left Champions but never arrived home. Nobody knew where you were.”

  “Oh that.”

  Yes that! I wanted to scream. But I’m a teacher, I’ve had practice holding my tongue.

  “That was no big deal. I just needed . . .” She stopped and thought. “I guess I needed a little time off.”

  Though I was tempted, I refrained from drumming my fingers on the steering wheel. Instead I reminded myself that patience was a virtue to be cultivated, even under trying circumstances.

  “I can see that,” I said. “There’s been a fair amount of upheaval in your life recently.”

  A grimace twisted Lisa’s mouth. “You can say it, you know. My husband died. It’s amazing how many different ways people find to dance around the reality. It’s like everybody thinks that if they come up with a suitable euphemism, it will make all of us feel better. Well, maybe it works for them, but it doesn’t for me.”

  All righty then. Since we were done trying to put a nice face on things, she wasn’t the only one who could be blunt.

  “Larry died under suspicious circumstances,” I said.

  “Another reason why I felt I needed to get away.”

  Fortunately most of the traffic on the highway was heading into the city. I could take my eyes off the road without fear of causing a major pileup. “Were you afraid? Did you feel threatened?”

  “No . . . Yes . . . No.” She didn’t sound sure of either answer. I put that aside for the time being.

  “There must have been something that made you run away. After all, you left all your dogs behind.”

  “Not Yoda. And besides, a friend was looking after the others.”

  Judging by her dismissive tone, she seemed to think that the fact that she’d left first Sue, and now Bertie, holding the bag was unimportant.

  “Only for one day. Sue expected you to be back that afternoon.”

  “What can I say? I had a change of plans.”

  “Caused by what?”

  Lisa turned and leveled a look my way. “Is that really any of your business?”

  Well . . . No. But I wasn’t about to admit that. Instead I zigzagged the conversation in another direction.

  “Would you like to know where your Yorkies are now?”

  “I assume they’re right where I left them.”

  “No, they’re not. Sue had other things to do. She took the dogs and boarded them at a nearby kennel.”

  Lisa swore under her breath. I wondered if she was picturing the size of her board bill. Good. That meant that Bertie stood a chance of being paid for her time and trouble.

  “If you’d given your friend the courtesy of letting her know your plans, you could have had a say in what happened to your dogs,” I pointed out. The fact that Lisa was annoyed didn’t slow me down. If anything, it made me want to push her harder. “Sue had no idea when you’d be coming back. She called around to all your friends. She contacted the local police.”

  “Then she overreacted.”

  “You left behind your entire family of dogs. They were sitting in pens in your basement. Who would do something like that if they had a choice? Sue was worried about you. She thought maybe something terrible had happened.”

  “The Yorkies weren’t my family,” Lisa said shortly. “They were Larry’s. His dream, his mission, his accomplishment. It’s not that I don’t care about what happens to them, but I’m not about to let them run my whole life anymore. You know what showing can be like . . .”

  She looked at me and I nodded.

  “It takes over everything if you let it. People get obsessed with competing, with winning. I’ve spent my life doing exactly what was expect
ed of me. I’ve always been the good girl who did what other people wanted. And where did all that good behavior get me? Nowhere that I wanted to be. It was time I did something for myself for a change.”

  I pondered that as we zipped across the New York–Connecticut border. It sounded as though Lisa’s problems had started long before her husband’s death.

  “Was Larry one of those people who was obsessed with winning?” I asked.

  “Yes. Of course, I never could have admitted that before. Larry would have found my words unseemly and disloyal. Even now, it’s hard for me to realize that he’s really gone and I can speak my mind as I choose.”

  “Your marriage wasn’t a happy one.”

  “It had its happy moments. More in the beginning than later. I thought I married for love. Afterward I found out that my husband saw me as little more than another prize that had been worth pursuing and winning.”

  “So,” I said, probing carefully, “I guess you’re not sorry he’s dead.”

  “Of course I’m sorry he’s dead!” Lisa snapped. “I only wanted to be free of him. I didn’t want him to die.”

  So she said. I wondered if a lie detector would turn up a different answer.

  “Why didn’t you get a divorce?”

  “I was working my way toward that. That was the whole point.”

  Huh?

  “The point of what?” I asked.

  “Of entering Yoda in the contest. In order to win my freedom, I had to have a plan, a place to go, a source of income. Of all our dogs, only Yoda was mine and mine alone. She was the one who would provide me with what I needed to make my escape.”

  “By winning the contest and the spokesdog contract.”

  “Exactly. There would have been poetic justice in that, don’t you think?”

  “If it happened. But you might not have won.”

  “I wasn’t worried about that.”

  “Maybe you should have been.”

  “I don’t think so. Before everything fell apart, Yoda was a shoe in to take home the prize.”

  I’d heard Dorothy make similarly assured predictions about MacDuff’s chances. And the Reddings seemed to feel Ginger was invincible. Where did all their confidence come from? It was depressing to think that I might be the only finalist who actually thought her dog could lose. Didn’t Faith deserve better of me? And how had I managed to get myself so tied in knots over a contest that I didn’t even want to win?

  “Here,” Lisa said suddenly, pointing at the EXIT sign. “This is where you need to get off.”

  “But this is Darien.”

  “Right.”

  “I thought you lived in Southport.”

  “My car is here,” she insisted. “At the train station in Darien.”

  I put on my blinker and eased the Volvo off onto the exit ramp. “So you didn’t run very far. You’ve been staying in Darien.”

  Lisa nodded. As the car slowed, the two dogs in the back seat stood up. Faith shook out her hair. Yoda hopped her front feet onto the arm rest and looked out the window.

  The train station wasn’t far from the exit. I didn’t have much more time now. “Where have you been, Lisa?”

  “With an old friend.”

  “Who?”

  “Someone whose support I could count on. Someone who let me think for myself and didn’t try to tell me what to do.”

  I thought back quickly. Just recently someone had mentioned Lisa having a friend from the past in the area. After a moment, it came to me. It had been Sue. She’d said that Lisa’s college roommate lived nearby.

  “Your roommate from college,” I said.

  Lisa’s head whipped around. Her eyes widened in surprise. “Simone told you about that?”

  So help me, I nearly hit a tree. Good thing the Volvo responded quickly when I jerked the wheel back on course.

  Simone? I couldn’t believe it. The company’s PR director was Lisa’s old friend from college?

  That put an interesting spin on things, didn’t it?

  28

  “You’ve been staying with Simone?”

  I tried to sound like I’d had that piece of information all along, but some of the incredulity I was feeling must have crept into my voice because Lisa clamped her lips shut.

  “She’s an old friend of yours,” I said.

  Grudgingly Lisa nodded.

  “I saw the two of you talking last week in the park. I suppose I should have put two and two together.”

  “I just needed to get away for a little while, okay?” She stared out at the street in front of us, as if she was willing me to drive faster. Fortunately there were plenty of traffic lights along that stretch of the Post Road. “That’s not a crime.”

  “No, of course not.” Though it had been a big inconvenience for everyone around her. Including Simone, who’d protected her old friend’s privacy and taken the heat from Doug for it. “What made you decide to come back?”

  Lisa sighed. “For one thing, hiding out began to feel a little childish. For another, Simone made a better roomie in college than she does now. She said something that made a lot of sense though. She told me that Yoda and I needed to go on and compete. That if we gave up and let someone else win the contest, Larry would have died for nothing.”

  I could see the railroad bridge approaching. The station was on the near side. Another minute or two and Lisa would be gone.

  “Does that mean you think your husband’s death had something to do with the competition?”

  “It happened at the dog food company. What else could it have been?”

  “You told me that Larry suffered from vertigo,” I said. “Earlier you said that you thought he might have tripped and fallen.”

  “The police have indicated to me that such a scenario is highly unlikely. So now I have to wonder what really happened. The authorities tell me they have many suspects, but no evidence against any one particular person.”

  Welcome to the club, I thought. I put on my turn signal, pulled through a break in the oncoming traffic, and drove up into the parking lot. There was time for just one more question.

  “Why Larry?” I asked.

  “Pardon me?”

  “If the murder was related to the contest, if it was meant to influence its outcome, why was Larry the finalist who was targeted? All five of us have a shot at winning. So why would someone go after only Yoda? What made the murderer believe that she was the strongest contestant?”

  For a minute I didn’t think Lisa was going answer. We’d reached the train station, after all. I half-expected Lisa to retrieve Yoda from the back seat and scramble from the car. But she didn’t.

  I slid the Volvo into an empty parking space, and turned off the ignition. Then we both sat in silence.

  “I’m not proud of this,” she said finally. “But you have to understand the desperation I felt. It led me to make some decisions I might not otherwise have made.”

  “Go on.”

  “It was also Simone’s idea, though I’m not blaming her for a minute. I agreed to go along.”

  It occurred to me I might have gray hair before I found out what we were talking about. “With what?”

  “Chow Down has been in development for more than a year, and during that time Simone was the one who came up with a brilliant idea to promote the new product launch. Champions would hold a contest that would draw entries and attention from all over the country. The publicity it would generate would be well worth the hundred thousand–dollar prize. She took the idea to Doug and it was approved.”

  Lisa’s voice faltered briefly. When she spoke again, it was with renewed determination. “Then Simone came to me, her oldest friend, and also a woman who was struggling with a husband she no longer loved and a marriage she didn’t know how to get out of.”

  “Simone recommended that you to enter the contest.”

  “She did more than that.”

  The lightbulb went on. I should have seen this sooner.

  “She promi
sed you that Yoda would win, didn’t she?”

  “There didn’t seem to be any harm in the idea.” Lisa’s words came tumbling out in a rush. “After all, the contest was going to be a boon to the company. And Yoda would make an excellent spokesdog for the product. So we weren’t stealing anything, we were just manipulating some results. It wasn’t as if anybody would be hurt by what we were doing.”

  Nobody except the thousands of other hopeful contestants who had written essays and taken pictures, and entered the contest in good faith. And maybe me . . . who’d apparently devoted half my summer to a competition that had been rigged right from the start.

  “Did Larry know about that?” I asked.

  “No, of course not. I certainly couldn’t explain what I needed the money for. I told him about the contest after I’d already entered it. He thought Yoda was chosen to be a finalist in the same way all the others were.”

  But someone must have known that the little Yorkie was slated to win. Someone who had lured Larry into the stairwell for a clandestine meeting.

  “Who else did Simone tell?” I asked.

  “I don’t know. I never had any idea how she made the arrangements. Simone just told me that everything was all set and that ensuring the correct outcome would not be a problem.”

  Except that, as things turned out, she couldn’t have been more wrong.

  “So what happens now?” I asked.

  Lisa shrugged. “We go to the press conference tomorrow. The judges announce the winner. And Chow Down has a new spokesdog.”

  “Yoda?”

  “I have no idea anymore,” Lisa said. She sounded unbearably weary. “At this point, I just want it all to be over.”

  Lisa wasn’t the only one who wanted the whole thing to be finished. I was tired of running around participating in events that I now knew had been all but meaningless. The summer was slipping by, and I’d hardly had a chance to stop and enjoy any of it.

  When Faith and I arrived home, I discovered that Sam and Davey had been making plans. They’d decided to hold a cookout and they’d invited Aunt Peg, Bob, Frank, Bertie, and Maggie to join us.

  I should have been elated at the prospect of a family gathering. And I would have been, if only I hadn’t felt so thoroughly enervated.