Chow Down

by Laurien Berenson

  Plenty, but I started by stating the obvious. “I don’t know who murdered Larry Kim.”

  “It wasn’t me.”

  “That’s what everybody says. But Lisa thinks her husband’s death was related to the contest, and I have to agree. Someone saw Yoda as a threat. The killer must have known that the Yorkie was supposed to win. He thought he saw a way to eliminate her from the competition and he took it. So this is important, Simone. Who else was in on your plan?”

  For once, the PR director didn’t argue. Finally she seemed to have found my logic compelling enough to try and help me work things through.

  “Lisa and I came up with the idea,” she said slowly. “And once Doug had seen Yoda and realized what a great spokesdog she would make, he agreed to go along.”

  “So it was just the three of you?”

  That would have been enough to decide the outcome in their favor. Yoda would have had two votes out of four, including Doug’s, which Cindy had told me earlier counted for more than the others.

  “And Chris,” said Simone.

  “Chris?” I repeated. That was the second time his involvement had surprised me. “How did he find out what was going on?”

  “It was during a meeting we had about the direction we wanted the contest to go. Upper management only.”

  I assumed that meant just the vice president and the two directors, excluding Cindy, who was only a product manager.

  “Chris felt that his input wasn’t being given the weight it deserved. He thought we were ignoring his contributions. Oh, let’s be frank. He threw a hissy fit. He wanted MacDuff to win the contest, and if MacDuff wasn’t going to win he wanted to know the reason why. Finally, just to shut Chris up, Doug told him that Yoda was our pick and there was nothing he could do to change that.”

  “I wonder where Chris was when Larry was killed?” I asked. I’d been thinking out loud and didn’t really expect an answer, but it turned out that Simone’s thoughts had mirrored mine.

  “He’d already left the conference room. He said he was going upstairs. Chris’s office is on the fourth floor. He said there was someone he needed to see.”

  Bingo, I thought.

  30

  The door to Simone’s office opened. Her secretary stuck her head in. “Everybody’s going down to the lobby for the press conference. And Mr. Allen just called. He wants to see all the finalists in the conference room for a quick briefing before they head downstairs.”

  “You’d better go.” Simone rose quickly. I got the impression that she didn’t mind having an excuse to get rid of me. “Doug hates to be kept waiting.”

  “What are we being briefed on?” I asked. Surely Doug wasn’t planning to spill the beans about the winner. More likely, we’d be receiving a lecture on how to conduct ourselves in front of the press when we lost.

  Simone just shrugged. Now that our meeting was over, her thoughts had clearly moved on.

  “Go,” she said, making shooing motions with her hand. “Tell Doug I’ll see him downstairs.”

  Faith and I left the office and headed in the direction of the conference room. Walking down the hall, my feet were dragging. Faith kept scampering on ahead, then having to stop and wait for me to catch up.

  The truth was, now that my association with Champions Dog Food was about to come to an end, I wanted more time. As soon as the contest winner had been announced, the finalists would disperse and the committee members would move on to new tasks. And I’d be out of excuses for hanging around and asking questions. I might be forced to concede that I hadn’t been able to figure out who killed Larry Kim.

  Faith and I hadn’t gone very far when I heard the door to Simone’s office open behind us. I paused and took a peek back.

  Though nearly everyone on the third floor was gathering by the elevator to head down to the lobby, the PR director was striding purposefully in the other direction. As I watched, she reached the door to the fire stairs, shoved it open, and ducked inside.

  Briefly, I gazed back in the direction of the conference room. The other finalists were probably already there with Doug. No doubt they were waiting for me and Faith to show up.

  Duty warred with curiosity. Sad to say, it was a brief battle. I wanted to know where Simone was in such a hurry to get to and there was only one way to find out.

  “What the heck,” I said to Faith, chucking her under the chin and alerting her to the fact that we were about to go the other way. “It’s not like we were going to win anyway.”

  We reached the stairwell just in time to hear the heavy fire door shut on the landing above us. Together, Faith and I went running up the steps to the fourth floor. I eased the door open slowly.

  Simone’s heels were beating a brisk tattoo on the shiny floor. Thankfully, they covered any noise I might have made. I watched Simone detour right when she reached Chris’s office. She shoved open the door and marched inside without knocking. Faith and I slipped out of the stairwell and followed.

  The fourth floor, like the one below, was now mostly deserted. The majority of the Champions employees were down in the lobby, waiting to share in the excitement of the press conference and the big announcement. Nobody noticed what Faith and I were doing as we crept quietly along the corridor.

  I’d expected that we would have to be right beside the doorway to hear what was going on, but Simone must have been counting on nobody being around. Either that, or she was simply too angry to moderate her voice. Even though we were still two doors away, I was able to hear the first words she addressed to Chris.

  “Are you crazy? What the hell did you think you were doing?”

  “Calm down, okay?” Chris’s voice was pitched much lower than Simone’s, but it didn’t matter. Faith and I were close enough now. I could hear just fine. “What’s the matter? What’s going on?”

  “I’ll tell you what’s going on,” she snapped. “The deal we made is off!”

  “No, it’s not. You can’t do that.”

  “I can and I am.”

  “It’s too late,” Chris said. He sounded triumphant. “The announcement’s about to be made.”

  “There’s still time. Doug won’t start the press conference until I get there. All I have to do is pull him aside and tell him I’ve reconsidered.”

  “You’ll just end up making yourself look like an idiot. You already told him you thought MacDuff should win.”

  What? I shrank back, shocked. Where had that come from? Wasn’t Simone supposed to be Yoda’s most ardent supporter?

  “Only because you blackmailed me into changing my vote when Lisa went AWOL,” said Simone.

  “Hey man, Larry was dead and she was gone. Nobody had any idea when she was coming back. You’ve got a lot of influence around here, but even you couldn’t convince Doug to name a missing finalist as the winner.”

  I leaned forward again, hand cupped around Faith’s muzzle to ensure her silence. This was getting more interesting by the moment. Simone had thought she was doing the right thing by keeping Lisa’s whereabouts a secret and it looked as though it had ended up costing them both.

  “Besides,” Chris countered. “Blackmail is a pretty strong word coming from someone who stole my idea and passed it off as her own.”

  “I told you at the time that that was an accident. It wasn’t supposed to happen. Doug and I were going through a rough patch when you approached me with the proposal for the contest. I was going to give you credit when I took the idea to him. Honestly, I was. But next thing I knew he was calling me clever and innovative—”

  “Words he would have applied to me, if he’d known the truth.”

  I maneuvered until I could see Simone through the crack between the door and the jamb. She had her arms crossed over her chest.

  “You could have told him,” she said.

  “Yeah, right. Like he’d have taken my word over yours. Especially after you’d already gotten to him first.”

  “You know what they say about the early bird . . .”<
br />
  “Oh, stuff it,” Chris said impatiently. “This discussion is over. Nothing is changing. We’re both going downstairs to stand and smile for the press while Doug announces that MacDuff is the very deserving winner of the ‘All Dogs Are Champions’ contest.”

  “No way,” Simone replied. “Trust me, that is not happening. Now that I’ve been made privy to additional information, I’m going back to my original plan, and you won’t dare to try and stop me.”

  “What additional information?”

  “Are you sure you want me to spell this out for you, Chris? Because you don’t come off looking very good. You were the one who was in the stairwell with Larry Kim when he fell, weren’t you?”

  Chris shook his head in denial, but Simone ignored him and kept speaking. “I guess you thought that if you could eliminate Yoda, MacDuff would have a clear path to winning the contest. Is that why you pushed Larry down the stairs? Were you hoping to injure Yoda so badly that she couldn’t continue to compete? You ended up with more than you bargained for, didn’t you?”

  The phone on Chris’s desk rang. Looking murderously at Simone, he reached over and picked up the receiver.

  “I’m on my way,” he said. “Yes, she’s here, too. We’ll be coming right down.” There was a pause, then he added, “No I haven’t seen Faith or Melanie. I don’t know where they are.”

  “They went to the conference room,” Simone said. “That was at least ten minutes ago.”

  “No, we didn’t.”

  Faith by my side, I stepped through the doorway. I’ve never been very good at skulking around, and besides, I wanted to hear Chris’s reply, too. Simone might let him get away without answering her questions, but I wasn’t about to.

  “Oh, fu—” Chris looked up. Then he turned back to the phone and said, “No, nothing’s wrong. Melanie’s just shown up. We’re all on our way.”

  “How much did you hear?” Simone asked.

  Chris hung up the phone and walked out from behind his desk.

  “Everything. Except the answer to your last question.”

  Chris turned his back on Simone and looked at me. “Seriously. You didn’t believe all that garbage she was saying, did you?”

  “Most of it.”

  “You think I killed Larry Kim?”

  “Someone did. Why not you?”

  “What would I have stood to gain?”

  “I don’t know yet. But I do know that you really wanted MacDuff to win the contest. Just like Simone really wanted Yoda to win. Maybe you had some sort of deal going with Dorothy.”

  “Goddamn deals.” Chris snorted out an exasperated sigh. “I’ve heard enough of that crap to last me a lifetime. I’ll tell you what the deal was that I had going with Dorothy. If I could get MacDuff to win the contest, my mother would get off my back. How’s that for an incentive?”

  “Your mother?” Simone looked just as puzzled as I felt.

  “What does she have to do with anything?”

  “Dorothy Foyle is my aunt. She’s my mother’s dotty sister, excuse the pun. When she was busy traveling all over the place showing MacDuff, my parents never saw her, which suited them just fine. Then MacDuff got old and got retired and suddenly Dorothy had time on her hands. For the past several months she’s been calling every day, dropping by my parents’ house to chat, and basically driving my mother nuts. And when my mother’s unhappy, everyone else around her had better watch out.”

  Every once in a while it was nice to be reminded that I wasn’t the only one with problem relatives.

  “Next thing I know, Dorothy comes up with this big plan. Or maybe it was my mother’s plan. Who even cares anymore?” Chris reached up and raked his fingers back through the sparse hair at his crown. His frustration with his family was so palpable that I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.

  “Wouldn’t it be nice if MacDuff could be on television? Wouldn’t that be a wonderful outlet for his talents instead of just letting them go to waste? As if a dog his age has any ambition left. For Pete’s sake, he’s nearly fifty in human years. Let’s see who we know who has connections . . . What about Chris? Surely he could be useful somehow. He works for a major dog food company . . .”

  Chris was rambling on, almost talking to himself now. Simone was staring pointedly at her watch. She was probably wondering how much longer Doug could continue to hold up the press conference. As for me, I was waiting for Chris to get to the point.

  “So my aunt and my mother sit me down at the kitchen table and feed me cake and tell me all about this supposedly brilliant idea they’ve cooked up between them to hold a contest—”

  “Wait a minute!” Simone cried. “You mean you had the nerve to put me through the wringer for taking credit for your idea and it wasn’t even yours to begin with?”

  “Yeah, something like that.” Chris’s watery blue eyes blinked behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Ironic, huh?”

  Sheesh, I thought. These two deserved each other.

  “And then what?” I asked impatiently.

  “And then,” Chris said, “Simone grabbed the idea for the contest and ran with it. Next thing I know, not only was I not getting any credit but Dorothy and MacDuff weren’t winning either. Talk about your basic lose-lose situation.”

  “And that was worth committing murder over?”

  “How many times do I have to tell you? I’m not a murderer and I didn’t kill anyone. If I’d thought that was a plausible way out, don’t you think it would have occurred to me that it was simpler to fix the problem at the source and just strangle my Aunt Dorothy? The only thing I did was talk to Larry and try to make another deal.”

  My head was spinning from all these back-room machinations. Were Faith and I the only ones who hadn’t been approached? I wondered. I supposed that said something, probably unflattering, about how seriously we’d been taken as contestants.

  “Fine,” Simone snapped. “We’ll have to finish this later. We’re holding everything up downstairs. Let’s go.”

  The four of us filed out of the office. Later my ass, I thought. We could all walk and talk at the same time. Simone and Chris headed for the elevator. Faith and I followed. I wasn’t about to let the two of them out of my sight.

  “So you didn’t intend to kill Larry,” I said to Chris. “You only wanted to make a deal with him.”

  “That’s what I’m trying to tell you. By that time, I’d pretty much figured out that Simone was backing Yoda because Larry and Lisa needed the money from the advertising contract. Well, Dorothy didn’t care about the money. What she wanted was the fame and the excitement. The chance to see MacDuff back in the spotlight again. So after the opening reception, I pulled Larry aside—”

  “In the stairwell,” I said, just to make sure that I was keeping things straight.

  “Right. It’s not like I wanted anyone to overhear what I was saying. I told him that since the fix had already been put in once, if he’d agree to work with me, I was sure we could make a mutually beneficial business arrangement. All he had to do was withdraw Yoda from the contest and let MacDuff win and I’d make sure that he and Lisa got the money they needed.”

  “Oh . . . my . . . God,” Simone said softly as the elevator doors opened and the four of us stepped inside.

  Chris hit the button that would take us to the lobby. “What’s the matter? It’s not as if I was doing anything worse than what you’d already done yourself.”

  “You idiot!’ she said. “Larry didn’t know about the arrangement I’d made with Lisa. He wasn’t supposed to know anything about that. The Kims didn’t need money, Lisa did. She was going to use it to buy her freedom. From him.”

  Chris gulped. “I guess that explains his reaction.”

  “Which was?”

  So help me, I half-expected him to say that Larry Kim had thrown himself down the steps. At that point, I was almost ready to believe it.

  “He turned kind of pale and got this funny look on his face like someone had just punch
ed him in the gut. I remember wondering what he was so upset about. He’d already made one deal, so it wasn’t like he could say he didn’t know how the game was played.”

  “And then?” I asked.

  “And then nothing,” said Chris. “Larry reached out and pushed me away from him, like he found me repulsive or something. So I left. Last time I saw him, he was standing in the stairwell, holding Yoda and staring off into space. I don’t have any idea what happened after that.”

  31

  Well somebody had to know, I thought, as the elevator bumped to a gentle stop and the doors whooshed open.

  I supposed I should have been prepared for the scene before us, but my mind had been on other matters. It was chaos. Bright lights seared my eyes. My ears were assaulted by a cacophony of sound. Cables snaked across the floor. People were everywhere.

  Faith took one look at all the commotion and pressed up hard against my thigh. As the two of us stood and stared, I dropped a hand down to steady her. Between the Champions employees and news teams from several local stations, the press conference had drawn a huge crowd. Simone must have been superb at her job to have garnered coverage like this.

  Chris and Simone both recovered faster than I did. They moved past me into the lobby and immediately began to work the crowd. Meanwhile Faith and I had to scramble to beat the closing elevator doors.

  “Where have you been?” Doug demanded, materializing at my side. He wrapped his fingers around my upper arm and closed them like a vise, as if he was afraid Faith and I might disappear again if he didn’t hold on to us.

  “I was upstairs with Chris and Simone. We were having a very enlightening discussion.”

  Doug steered me toward an alcove on the side of the lobby. The other four finalists were waiting there, bunched together in a tight little group. Nervousness emanated from them like a palpable wave.

  Doug growled under his breath. He was clearly not amused by my excuse. “Now is not the time for enlightenment.”

  “On the contrary, it may be the only time. Or the last chance we’re going to get.”