Nothing to Fear But Ferrets

by Linda O. Johnston

  “All right,” I agreed with resignation.

  I led him into the kitchen, where Lexie greeted me with enthusiasm, though she eyed Noralles suspiciously. Did she remember him from our last ugly encounters? Who knew what went through her sharp canine mind?

  I started to sit on one of Charlotte’s kitchen chairs till Noralles nixed it. “This room needs to be examined for evidence,” he said, “in case you killed him here.”

  I glared, and he had the gall to grin.

  “Let’s go outside,” he said, all serious again.

  In my backyard, enough landscaping hugged the wrought iron surrounding my estate to provide privacy.

  Over the fence around the swimming pool hovered the top floor of the garage—my apartment and home. Since the Hummer had hit the house wall nearest the street, its effects weren’t in evidence here.

  Turning, I’d the ill fortune to find Noralles still behind me. Without asking his okay, I strolled to the fence near the pool and leaned on it.

  I commanded Lexie to lie at my feet, which she did for five seconds before popping up again. I lifted her into my arms, which was good for a few moments of canine calm.

  Noralles stood beside me. “Now, we can do this in a game of twenty-plus questions, or you can just tell me what you know. Which will it be?”

  I preferred the former, but it would take extra time and piss him off even more. Besides, even with a suspended law license, I was an officer of the court. That meant I had to cooperate with the law, like it or not.

  I therefore latched on to Noralles’s latter suggestion and told him, “I believe the victim is a man named Chad Chatsworth.”

  “But you don’t know him, even though he’s now dead in your house?”

  “Not really, though I met him here on Friday night.” I told Noralles that I still I rented out the large house on my property owing to economic necessity. I described the Hummer accident, and how I’d found the ferrets. Then I told him about the party. “Chad and I happened to walk in at the same time. Later, one of the neighbors who watched the show my tenant Charlotte starred in said that Chad Chatsworth was the guy she dumped in favor of money and future TV projects.”

  “And Chatsworth was a guest at the party?”

  “I think he crashed it. The neighbor also told me that one of the rules that allows Charlotte to keep her prize is that she can’t have contact with her dumpee.”

  “You came in with him?”

  “Kind of. I saw him first on the front walk. He introduced himself as Chad. No one greeted us at the door, so he just walked in. Me, too. I lost track of him and later heard Charlotte and her boyfriend, Yul, ask him to leave.”

  Okay, so I spoke euphemistically. But I’d been the subject of a couple of Noralles’s murder investigations. I wasn’t about to sic him on my tenants just because they’d had a falling-out with the victim.

  Of course, that victim was found dead in the house they rented, after he’d been told never to darken its doorstep again.

  But Charlotte a killer? Yul?

  Ferrets?

  What if Charlotte actually had been having a relationship with the guy who’d won her heart on that reality show—and tried to keep it from the world so she could keep her financial winnings, too? Did he threaten to out their relationship and jeopardize her juicy prize?

  Did Yul find out about said relationship and get peeved enough to pull a Sredni Vashtar on Chad?

  Or did the freed ferrets do it on their own?

  If so, who’d freed them? Chad? And then he’d lain down on the floor so they could chew him to death? I didn’t think so.

  Could it have been an accident—Chad tripping, falling in a way that scattered both ferrets and their food while hitting his head and falling unconscious?

  Then the ferrets, while scarfing up their spilled food, scarfed up some of Chad’s flesh, too?

  Seemed pretty far-fetched.

  Before Noralles could bombard me with more questions than I’d asked myself, a woman wearing latex gloves slipped out through the kitchen door. Lexie squirmed in my arms, but I held her there. “I’d like to go over a few things with you where we found the victim, Detective. It looks as if he was attacked by those ferrets—all over, but most severely at his neck. His carotid artery was severed, and he died from loss of blood.”

  “Have you called L.A. Animal Services?”

  “Yes, and a couple of their officers are here now.”

  I followed Noralles back inside the house, Lexie still wriggling under my arm. I watched as a guy and a girl in blue shirts and light pants who’d collected the ferret cage maneuvered out the den door as Noralles stood back to let them pass.

  “What’s going to happen to them?” I asked, holding the fascinated Lexie all the tighter.

  “We’ll hold them pending the outcome of the investigation into this incident,” the woman said, stopping just outside the door and effectively blocking Noralles from entering the den. Though she was slighter than her male counterpart, she seemed to be having an easier time holding up her end of the cage.

  “If it turns out that the ferrets were guilty only of chewing a corpse and not committing the murder, what will happen to them?”

  “We’ll call a ferret rescue group to come get them,” the guy said, panting a little. His shirt showed a damp stain at the armpits.

  I hated to ask, since I figured the answer was obvious, but said, “And what happens if the conclusion is that they killed the victim?” I didn’t meet Noralles’s eyes, though I knew they were watching me.

  “Then they’ll be humanely euthanized,” the lady said, and the two continued toting the cage from the house.

  Humanely euthanized. Sounded like an oxymoron to me. Ferret capital punishment.

  “But why would he have let them chew his neck like that?” The words burst out before I could contain them.

  “I’m wondering that, too, Ms. Ballantyne,” Noralles said, entering into the conversation, then exiting as he eased past the animal control people and disappeared through the door.

  I heaved a sigh as I watched out the front door while the animal control truck took off. A coroner’s truck still sat behind the vacated space and in front of my wrought-iron fence.

  The killings before had involved me because my pet-sitting clients had been the victims.

  This killing involved me, too, since it took place on property I owned and loved. Plus, I’d met Chad … sort of.

  My tenants might be involved, although I hated to imagine that. But one way or another, their ferrets were at best witnesses, at worst small murderers.

  The investigator on the scene had implied that Chad was chewed to death. But I had too many questions just to bite into that as the answer. It sounded as if Noralles did, too.

  One thing I knew for sure. After all I’d already gone through, I wasn’t about to let anyone get framed for something she didn’t do.

  Not even those weaselly little ferrets.

  Chapter Seven

  IF A LITTLE thing like a Hummer hitting a house brought out the neighbors in force, imagine what an assemblage of law enforcement vehicles, including a coroner’s van, did.

  As Noralles finally left Lexie and me standing alone outside, the same group who’d gawked at the damage to my home descended. My pup and I headed outside the fence toward the street, to prevent them from sticking their noses closer to the crime scene.

  Phil Ashler, the retired guy from across the street, appeared as if the excitement had interrupted his dinner, for he clutched half a submarine sandwich in one hand and a water bottle in the other. Thin enough to fit nearly anywhere, he insinuated himself at the forefront of the crowd. Lexie sniffed the air, obviously enthralled by the scent of his snack, but I held her tight at my side to prevent her angling for handouts.

  “What happened, Kendra?” demanded Tilla Thomason, usurping my other side. I winced, recalling her gossipy tirade at Charlotte’s last party. Though Tilla’s face was a plump frown of concern, a
potential new scandal brought a gleam to her watery brown eyes.

  Not about to ignite a conflagration that would undoubtedly consume the neighborhood anyway, I simply said, “There’s been an accident. Someone got hurt inside the house.”

  “I’ll say,” said Tilla’s husband, Hal. Daylight revealed even more that though he was not as overweight as his wife, his girth straining his white knit shirt suggested he was a proud participant in the culinary largesse that added to her mass. Hal stared at the gurney being wheeled out of the house. On it was a closed body bag, and every eye in the area joined his in watching as it was loaded into the coroner’s vehicle.

  When I turned back, I saw Hal eyeing Tilla expectantly. Dutifully, she began barraging me with questions. “Accident? Are you sure? It looks as if someone died. Who was it? How did it happen?”

  “Sorry,” I said. “As you can see, this is a police investigation. I can’t talk about it.”

  She screwed her features up to prepare a protest, but I was saved from it by the screech of bicycle brakes as Lyle Urquard stopped abruptly, sliding to a stop at the curb so fast that his cycle slipped. So did he. I grimaced in empathetic pain as the already bloody sides of his legs slid along the pavement. Again. This time not even his helmet had helped, for his cheeks were scraped, too.

  All we needed was Ike Janus and his Hummer to make our little horde complete. Or maybe that wasn’t irony oozing from my thoughts, for the guy had seemed the take-charge sort. Maybe he could have taken charge of this horrible situation, dispersed the crowd, and gotten the cops to hurry.

  Sure. Like he’d gotten his incommunicado insurance adjuster to hurry. He’d sworn he was on top of it when I’d called to remind him, but still no one had contacted me.

  Right then, I needed air. I needed privacy. I needed for the whole horrible situation not to have happened.

  Just like Chad would have said, had he been able.

  “But, Kendra,” Tilla protested, “you’ve got to warn us. This is our neighborhood, too. If someone’s been attacked by a burglar or something, we all need to know so we can stay alert.”

  “That’s right,” Phil Ashler seconded, his mouth full of sub sandwich.

  I doubted they needed to fear ferrets sneaking in during the night to feast on them. But I still hesitated to cast verbal stones at the furry little creatures.

  “I don’t know what happened,” I dissembled, though it was far from being a big, fat lie. “I’m sure the police will tell us what they can.” Now that was a large, obese prevarication.

  “We need to call a Neighborhood Watch meeting,” Lyle suggested, still blotting his bleeding leg with a tissue.

  “As soon as we know what to discuss,” Hal Thomason agreed.

  They all stared at me once more.

  This time, what saved me wasn’t an awkward bicyclist but an even more awkward situation, for a small sports car came up to the driveway and the gate began to slide open.

  Charlotte and Yul were home.

  Yul was driving, and I stood nearer the passenger side as the car started through. The window rolled down, and Charlotte shouted out, “What’s going on, Kendra?”

  I wasn’t about to reply in front of this entire assemblage that someone she’d argued with had died in her den.

  I didn’t need to, for even as I inched forward after the car, the front door opened and Detective Ned Noralles leached out. Even from this far away, I could make out the crocodile-snide smile on his face.

  “Oh, Charlotte,” I whispered after them. “Yul, too. I don’t envy you your next few minutes.” Or days. Or even weeks.

  Even though I’d not become best buddies with my huggy, gushy, rich reality show graduate tenant or her strong, silent, and possibly smarter-than-he-acted boy toy, my sympathy definitely swayed me, for now, into their corner.

  But if it eventually turned out that either or both had actually conspired to kill someone in my beloved house, heaven help them!

  NOT THAT I was surprised, but less than five minutes later the media descended. Actually, I wondered what had kept them.

  The vans that appeared looked prepared to lift off and hover if their dish antennae on top started rotoring like helo blades. They jostled for the few remaining prime parking places on the constricted, twisting lane. Before they could negotiate the street or settle their pecking order, swarms of reporters leapt out and thrust microphones in front of whoever didn’t thrust them back. Camera jockeys followed, gesturing cues to their on-screen personalities.

  My cue to leave.

  “Let’s go, Lexie.” I gave my trained pup a small jerk on her leash to let her know to stand and heel.

  That apparently was a cue for one of the untrained reporters to swoop and shove a mike at my mouth.

  “You’re Kendra Ballantyne, aren’t you?” The short-skirted TV newsmonger flashed me a nasty grin of the Cheshire cat variety.

  “Never heard of her.” I turned my back.

  “What happened, Ms. Ballantyne?” came the shout from behind me. “Was someone killed in your home? Who was it?”

  Too bad it wasn’t one of you, I thought, immediately retracting the ungenerous thought. Dead was dead, and I’d seen enough death lately to last for several litigators’ lifetimes. I didn’t wish permanent termination on anyone, even my worst enemies—which included reporters.

  A little well-directed damage, though, like someone else snatching up their news scoops … that was a taste of just deserts that I’d eat up, given the opportunity.

  I hustled Lexie and me back inside through the gate, ignoring the hapless uniformed officer assigned there to hold back the hovering hordes.

  “Hey,” he called, hurrying after me.

  “Sorry,” I said to him softly. “I live right there.” I gave a fast gesture with my head toward my upstairs apartment. “Feel free to check with Detective Noralles.”

  “I’ll do that.” Harried dismay turned the young man’s forehead into one big frown as the reporters took his momentary distraction for invitation and started spilling through the gate.

  Ignoring me, he gestured for backup and began shooing them all back again, his hand hovering over another item on his belt—his holstered weapon—that attracted everyone’s attention a lot more pointedly than his radio. The group began to recede.

  For that moment. But cops would be combing my property for clues for the rest of the night. And wherever law enforcement engaged in a homicide investigation, the media wasn’t about to slink away.

  I had a phone call to make. Only, my wall phone rang even before I’d let Lexie off her leash.

  Did I dare answer? My only caller ID was on my cell phone. One of the diehard reporters could have somehow latched on to my unlisted number, and simply saying hello could lead to beating off a whole new barrage of questions.

  But I was once a litigator. Would be again, soon. My mouth was my most skilled instrument, and I readied it to spew curses and threats if the caller was someone I didn’t want to hear from. I snatched up the receiver and growled, “Yeah?”

  “Kendra?”

  My braced body nearly buckled. “Jeff, I’m so glad it’s you.”

  “I’ll bet. What’s happened? The news is full of pictures of your house and speculations you’re involved in another murder.”

  “Tell me about it. No, on second thought, don’t. I’ll tell you. At your house, in about half an hour. Do Odin and you feel like a couple of overnight guests tonight?”

  I could hardly have felt more relieved when he assured me they did.

  Chapter Eight

  OTHER THAN WHEN Jeff had initially hired me to pet-sit for Odin—he’d been my first customer when I’d begun to wonder whether Lexie and I would wind up begging on street corners—I can’t recall a time I’d been so happy to slip my Beamer into the driveway at Jeff ’s home.

  The pseudo Mexican ranch-style house was located in the flats north of Ventura Boulevard in Sherman Oaks. It had become my home-away-from-home, even when—especia
lly when—Jeff was out of town, since I was Odin’s surrogate human and usually moved in to look after the Akita along with my Cavalier.

  Of course there were many times since initiating our business relationship when I’d been more than a little happy to see Jeff himself. Even aside from the sex, he’d become pretty important to me.

  And counting our definitely delightful sexual exercises, he was even more important to me. But who was keeping count?

  Odin greeted Lexie at the door with a woof and a house-thorough romp. Jeff greeted me at the door with a glass of wine and a kiss that tossed into oblivion the day’s most terrible trials and tribulations. Temporarily.

  “Do you want to talk first or eat first?” he asked. The sleeves of his white shirt were rolled up unevenly, exposing unmatched lengths of hair-sprinkled arm. Sexy.

  Then there were his faded jeans, snug in all the sexiest places. Okay, so it wasn’t just refuge and a repast on my mind. Not after that kiss.

  “Let’s talk while we eat,” I replied, tearing my stare from his big and beautiful bod.

  For an instant, I thought of Chad and how good-looking he’d been. What a waste—even if he hadn’t been the great guy my initial impression suggested.

  Jeff had brought in Peruvian takeout, some lomo saltado sautéed beef for him, and pescado sudado, steamed fillet of fish, for me. Good stuff, and filling, with aromas obviously enticing to our respective imploring canines.

  But unlike Lexie and Odin—whom we made settle for simple dog food despite their exceptional begging efforts—I hadn’t a huge appetite as I told Jeff about Lexie’s earlier excited behavior, leading to the discovery of Chad’s unenviable end.

  “Ferrets?” he said after swallowing a chunk of bread. “Chewed on a corpse?”

  “Or converted a living person into a dead one,” I replied.

  “Is that in their nature?”