Sire and Damn (Dog Lover's Mysteries Book 20)

by Susan Conant

  “My babies,” Enid said.

  As practical as ever, Steve asked, “So, you didn’t feed Willie anything?”

  “Not a thing.” To Willie, she said, “We didn’t want to upset our tum-tum with table scraps, did we?”

  “You did the right thing,” Steve told her.

  After we’d again refused Enid’s offer of food and again thanked her, I put Willie on the slip lead I’d brought with me, and we left for Cambridge. Just in case Willie needed vet care, we’d taken Steve’s van, which he keeps well stocked with supplies for veterinary first aid and emergencies. Glancing at the odometer as he started the engine, Steve said, “Five point two miles.”

  “Willie didn’t travel on foot,” I said. “What happened? The burglar stole him, and then Willie roused himself and went for the burglar’s ankles? Or Willie was let out on Appleton Street, and someone picked him up and then let him go in Watertown? Or the burglar stole him, but he escaped?”

  “We’ll probably never know,” Steve said.

  Steve is seldom wrong. This time, he was.

  chapter ten

  “Holly, our burglar is dead!” Rita announced.

  She called while Steve and I were having breakfast and simultaneously checking our e-mail and Facebook.

  She added, “I can’t talk now, but I couldn’t wait to tell you. He was fished out of the river. A runner saw the body and called the police.”

  “How do you know it’s your burglar?” I asked.

  Steve murmured, “And not someone else’s?”

  I clarified. “How did—”

  Rita helped me out. “He has a head wound, and they found one of Quinn’s drug samples in his pocket. Provigil. I’ll be okay in an hour or two. I’ll tell you all about it.”

  “He died from the head injury?”

  “Presumably. I did warn you that my family was crazy, didn’t I? Someone whacked the burglar over the head and killed him and won’t admit it.” She excused herself. I promised to visit later in the morning.

  “A runner found the body,” I told Steve. “In the river, she said. The Charles, I guess. There’s a head wound, and there was a drug sample in his pocket. One of Quinn’s. That must be how the police made the connection.”

  “Did Rita say who the burglar is? Was?” Steve asked.

  “No. She couldn’t talk. I’m sure she has morning sickness. She thinks that someone in her family hit him with the poker, and then, I guess, he had a delayed reaction and died.”

  Having once had a head injury, I know a little about them. I didn’t die. Obviously. I got off easy. Anyway, something I’ve learned is that after head trauma, you can seem to be just fine and then develop symptoms, maybe a headache, and then have a fatal reaction. I was incredibly lucky.

  “Rowdy,” I said, “it is not your morning for the skillet. It’s Sammy’s. It’s your morning for the plates. And the skillet is still too hot, and we’re still eating.”

  My sensible words didn’t stop the saliva from dripping out of Rowdy’s mouth and onto the floor, and they didn’t diminish the almost irresistible cuteness of his expression. He just loves scouring the skillet we use for scrambled eggs, and Sammy and Kimi do, too. In fact, the main reason we have scrambled eggs for breakfast is to provide the dogs with the joy of serving as canine Brillo. Steve and I eat so many eggs that we’ll probably die of heart attacks, but if the dogs are happy, so what? Story of my life.

  “There was a lot of coming and going last night,” Steve said. “Somebody could’ve interrupted the burglar. Vicky was gone for a while.”

  “Quinn took a while to get to Vertex. Monty went out, and then he left before the rest of us. And Uncle Oscar was at the house the whole time.” Zara had left Vertex, too. I didn’t say so. “Well, we’ll know more later. Oh, not again! Tabitha has sent me that same damned blurry picture of the people she sold that puppy to. Breeder responsibility is one thing, but it doesn’t mean that you have to plague people who can’t help you.”

  “Leah says that her roommates want Kimi to stay.”

  “She e-mailed you?”

  “Facebook.”

  Steve is on Facebook, but I’m the one who’s active. Checking my cousin Leah’s Facebook page, I saw the status update about the roommates’ supposed eagerness to add a malamute to the household. “Hah! But the pictures are cute.”

  I typed a comment: Dearest Kimi, raid the refrigerator! I want you home.

  Steve said, “Zara chronicles every minute of her life. She’s posted on my wall to thank us for having her here.”

  “Mine, too. She gets little carried away.”

  “She’s already thanked us, and she’s two floors up from us right now.”

  I refilled my coffee cup. “If it hasn’t been said online, it hasn’t been said.”

  “Does she know that privacy settings exist?”

  “Does Mark Zuckerberg?”

  “Presumably.”

  “Well,” I said, “Zara presumably does too, but she believes in accepting practically every friend request she gets.”

  “You do the same thing. Who are all those people? You don’t know them.”

  “Most of them have malamutes. Or Siberians. Or dogs, at least. Even if they post in Russian or Polish or Japanese or some language I can’t even identify, I like seeing the photos, and I can always get a translation. I like the international feel. Paws across the water.”

  “Holly, the burglar wasn’t some dog owner in Russia or Poland or wherever. Anyone could’ve known when we left for Vertex. Look at this. She posted when she and Izzy got here. Then she posted pictures from Rita and Quinn’s, and then she checked in at Vertex with Foursquare. And she posted pictures from Vertex. That’s my dinner!” He sounded as if Zara had stolen the food off his plate. “And last night, she couldn’t wait to tell everyone about the burglary.”

  “She uses Twitter, too. And some other sites and apps.”

  Steve peered at his screen while I was crating Sammy with the skillet and putting my plate on the floor for Rowdy.

  “Anyone could’ve known ahead of time,” I said. “The burglar probably knew that we were going to Vertex and what time we’d get there. Scroll down on Zara’s page. There’s a link to the Vertex website somewhere and something about when we were going. So the burglar is—was—a Facebook creeper. There are plenty of them. They never post anything. They just get information from the people who do, and especially from people like Zara.”

  “Holly, no wonder Rita’s upset. Zara’s already got three albums about the wedding and one status update after another.”

  “With more to come. Actually, all the photos and stuff on Facebook are a compromise. Zara wanted to do a wedding website, but Rita talked her out of it. I think that she doesn’t know quite how much Zara has put on Facebook. Rita hates Facebook. She doesn’t understand it.”

  Steve laughed.

  “Well, she doesn’t. She thinks that everyone uses it the way Zara does. Anyway, after she absolutely refused to let Zara do a website, she let all the rest go because she didn’t want to sound like Vicky.”

  “You could talk to Zara.”

  “Me? I don’t want to sound like her mother, either. Did you notice what Izzy did at Vertex? She alerted when Vicky was stressing Zara. What if Izzy started alerting to me? I don’t exactly see myself as the kind of person that a service dog has to warn her handler about.”

  “Just have a little talk about privacy settings. And common sense.”

  “She’d tell me that she gets a lot of clients through Facebook. And she does. She does a lot of freelance editing for people who are self-publishing, and she stays in touch with other freelance editors.”

  “And ten thousand other people.”

  “You’re exaggerating. Besides, Steve, Zara will work it out for herself. She’ll know how the burglar found out when we’d be at Vertex. No one will have to tell her.”

  “She’ll know that the burglary was her fault.”

  “It wasn’t!
And I hope that she doesn’t see things that way. If she does, she’ll end up blaming herself for the death of the damned burglar, and that’s the last thing she needs to do. And what if Vicky turns out to be the person who hit him with the poker? Where would that leave Zara? Feeling responsible for making her mother kill someone. Please! She’s had enough problems in her life.”

  “No one made anyone kill the burglar.”

  “True. But someone did kill him. Someone did.”

  chapter eleven

  “He was a small-time crook named Frankie Sorensen.” Rita sipped her mint tea. She was so protective of her unborn child that she was afraid to consume large quantities of anything, including raspberry tea and the ginger tea that I’d also recommended. “Little Frankie. That’s what the police called him. No one came right out and said that it was good riddance, but that’s the distinct feeling I got, and I can’t say that I like that attitude. Holly, he was just a young man! Twenty-four. I asked. Not that I’m happy that he robbed our house and stole my dog, but that young man is dead.”

  Unless you count Uncle Oscar, who was asleep on a recliner, Rita, Willie, and I were alone on the patio in her backyard. Probably because no one knew what had caused Willie’s gastroenteritis, Rita was almost as protective of him as she was of her baby-to-be. Among other things, she insisted on limiting Willie to short on-leash walks. At the moment, Willie was on a six-foot leash that Rita had hitched to a table. He’d barked at me when I’d arrived and had even eyed my ankles. He was dozing now, but I was delighted to see that he was regaining his spirit.

  In deference to Rita’s canine invalid, I’d left Rowdy and Sammy at home, and India and Lady were at the clinic with Steve. Quinn, who’d been on the phone with the insurance company, was on his way to Lexington and Concord to visit the Revolutionary War sites with his parents. Zara had stayed home to work on an editing project.

  “And,” Rita continued, “I take that young man’s death seriously.”

  “Of course.”

  “Well, the police evidently don’t. At least that’s my impression. Not that this Little Frankie sounds like an altogether admirable individual. He was a drug user with a criminal record. He’d served a prison sentence.”

  “For what?”

  “He sent someone to the hospital. It sounds thoroughly sordid. He and his brother teamed up in a fight in some sleazy bar. The police seem to think that the brother did the major damage, but the one who went to jail was Frankie. They’d both been in jail before for drug possession. I had to pry this information out of the police. Do you think that I’d be justified in calling Kevin?”

  “No! Kevin almost never takes a vacation. Besides, he’ll be back on Friday. It isn’t as if he could do anything.”

  “He could tell me what’s going on. I feel the need to know who this young man was.”

  “We could look online. If I can’t find anything, Zara probably can. Speaking of Zara, where’s Vicky?”

  “Madame is taking her bath. She had the nerve to complain about the towels.”

  “If Vicky’s washing off her venom, you’d better watch out. It’ll run down the drain and corrode the pipes.”

  Rita laughed. “I wish that she’d run down the drain. She’s been unspeakably horrible about Willie.”

  “Willie’s looking great.”

  Rita beamed. “He is, isn’t he. His adventure doesn’t seem to have done him any harm. I’ve sent a cookie basket to the woman who found him. Enid.”

  I’d have advised flowers or fruit, but I didn’t say so. Besides, what business of mine was Enid Garabedian’s weight? None. “She was tempted to keep Willie. She had a Yorkie who died recently, and when Willie showed up on her doorstep, she thought he was a gift from God. Or maybe from her Yorkie.”

  “Then it was especially noble of her to call me.”

  “So, what else did you learn about your burglar?”

  “My burglar.” Rita was pensive. “Frankie Sorensen. What I learned was not much. He had a head wound compatible with being hit with the poker. The sample of Provigil was how the police made the connection. The packaging is distinctive.”

  “What kind of drug is it?”

  “Actually, Quinn says that it’s been somewhat displaced by something called Nuvigil. The patent was running out, so the company started pushing the new drug. Those samples were old. Anyway, it’s a stimulant. It keeps people awake. Quinn says it’s used for narcolepsy. And it’s given to people with sleep apnea to keep them from falling asleep in the daytime. Shift workers take it.”

  “Why was Quinn prescribing it?”

  “He wasn’t. Not very much. That’s why he had so many samples left. So, what else about Frankie? Not too bright. Good-looking. Grew up in Waltham. He still lived there. He was in trouble from the time he was a kid. Stealing cars, breaking into cars, a little drug dealing.”

  “Breaking and entering?”

  “Oddly enough, no. I asked.”

  “Anything to do with dogs?” My eternal question.

  Rita said, “I have no idea. But it’s curious that Frankie came from Waltham and Willie ended up near the Waltham line. And Frankie’s body was downriver from there, somewhere above the Watertown dam. Of course, who knows where he went in. And how.”

  “He stole Willie and then what? Willie got loose when Frankie died?”

  “Maybe.”

  “Rita, did anyone see or hear anything? Uncle Oscar was here all the time.”

  At the sound of his name, Uncle Oscar stirred and opened his eyes. “Holly Winter,” he said. “Where’s Rowdy?”

  “A lot of people just ask for Rowdy, Uncle Oscar. They don’t even bother about me.”

  “Just the way you like it,” Uncle Oscar said.

  I laughed. “Exactly.”

  “Uncle Oscar,” Rita said, “have you given any more thought to last night? Maybe you’ve remembered something.”

  Uncle Oscar looked miffed.

  “People forget things. Everyone does,” Rita said. “While we were at the restaurant, you got up and had some ice cream.”

  Oscar looked uncomfortable.

  “Rita doesn’t begrudge you the ice cream,” I said.

  “Of course not,” Rita agreed. “It was chocolate. Your favorite. The bowl was in the sink. Did you see anyone? Hear anyone? Uncle Oscar, did you hear Willie bark?”

  With maddening vagueness, he said, “Once or twice.”

  “Did you see anyone? Or hear anyone in the house?”

  “Vicky. She stuck her head in my room. Barged right in. I let her think I was asleep. That’s a very nervy woman. Your father’s a lot better off with your mother. Erica’s a nice girl. It’s a good thing Al married her. I hope he comes to his senses.” Uncle Oscar had made a similar remark to me. I wondered whether this was the first time Rita had heard him allude to a relationship between her father and Vicky.

  Her response suggested that she dismissed it as a figment of Oscar’s imagination. She caught my eye, shook her head gently, and changed the subject. “Uncle Oscar, would you like some coffee?”

  “Thank you, my dear, no.” He yawned. “If you’ll excuse me, I’ll head up to my room.”

  When he’d left, I said, “He certainly does sleep a lot.”

  “He gets up in the night,” Rita said. “He doesn’t have sleep apnea. He’s been tested. It’s just his age. Sleeping a lot is one thing, but it bothers me when he seems so vague. You just heard him. He can’t seem to remember that last night, sometime after we left, he fixed himself a bowl of ice cream.”

  “It’s pretty unlikely that the burglar, Frankie, helped himself to a snack.”

  “It was Uncle Oscar. He left the bowl where he always does, in the sink, filled with water, and the spoon in the bowl. It was there when we got home, so he got up either before or after the robbery, but he can’t seem to remember.”

  “Maybe he was half asleep.”

  “That’s exactly what’s worrying me, that maybe he drifts into states where he’
s half asleep. Fugue states. Sleep walking. Something like that. Holly, you don’t think—”

  “That Uncle Oscar grabbed the poker? And—”

  “He is not a violent person,” Rita said. “But he’s very devoted to me, and if he was in a dissociated state and saw this Frankie stealing my wedding presents? I guess it’s remotely possible.”

  “Speaking of the presents, has anything turned up? The police must have Frankie’s address. They must have looked there.”

  “I don’t know. Maybe they haven’t yet. They’re not very communicative. But if they’d found any of our possessions, I think they’d have said so. Oh, Holly? You know what else is missing? My earrings. Quinn’s special present.”

  “Damn! Oh, Rita, I’m sorry. What were they doing in the playroom?”

  “They weren’t there. They were in our bedroom, in the top drawer of my dresser. They were still in the Tiffany box. We think maybe that’s why Frankie took them, why he knew they were worth stealing.”

  “Are you missing any other jewelry?”

  “No, but I don’t own anything else like those earrings. Most of what I have is strictly costume jewelry or from local silversmiths. Goldsmiths. Artisans.”

  “Don’t you own a pearl necklace?”

  “Yes, but a kid from Waltham wouldn’t necessarily realize that the pearls are real. We’re hoping to get the earrings back, of course. And everything else. We made a list last night. Thank God for Zara’s database of presents! What’s missing is silver. Flatware. Some Christofle serving pieces. Vicky’s idea of being helpful was to tell us that they should’ve been in a safe deposit box.”

  “So, Frankie was in the house long enough to go upstairs to your bedroom and find your earrings, before or after he took the silver. Presumably before, since he was in the playroom when he got hit with the poker. Or maybe he returned to the playroom to get Willie. It’s weird. With all that sterling, I wonder why he bothered to go upstairs.”

  “Looking for a present for his girlfriend? I don’t know. Burglars usually want to get in and get out fast. Kevin told me about it once. I don’t remember why. Anyway, Kevin said that the average burglar is in the house for less than ten minutes. The burglar breaks in, makes sure he has a second way out, grabs what he wants, and bolts.”