Gone With the Woof

by Laurien Berenson

  “Well, that didn’t happen,” he continued finally. “Not even close. Instead, Andrew was pissed. He wasn’t the kind of guy who was going to let some girl manipulate him into doing something he didn’t want to do.”

  “Not even one he was supposed to be in love with?”

  “Love?” Sherm laughed. “Where did you get that idea?”

  “They were living together, weren’t they? That sounds like a serious relationship to me.”

  “On Julia’s part, sure. As for Andrew, I don’t think he even knew what a serious relationship was.”

  “She must have been very angry about the way Andrew treated her,” I said.

  “Hell, yeah,” Sherm agreed.

  “Angry enough to want to hurt Andrew?”

  That brought him up short. “I don’t think I like what you’re asking.”

  “Why not? Obviously, somebody was furious with Andrew. From everything you’ve just told me, it sounds like that person could have been Julia.”

  “No way!”

  Sherm jumped to his feet. He stalked across the small room and glared at me from the other side. Clearly, I’d hit a nerve.

  “Again,” I said calmly, “why not?”

  “Because Julia’s not that kind of person, okay? She could never do something like that. And besides, like you said earlier, she was in love with Andrew. All she ever really wanted was for him to love her back.”

  As he stood there and pleaded Julia’s case, a piece of the puzzle suddenly fell into place. All at once I understood the subtext I’d been missing. Andrew might not have been in love with his girlfriend, but his best friend was.

  “I saw you,” I told him. “On Sunday, at Julia’s apartment. You went to visit her, didn’t you?”

  “So what if I did?”

  “No problem. I’m just wondering why.”

  “I wanted to make sure she was all right, that’s all. Julia’s got a lot on her plate right now, between the move and the baby and what happened to Andrew. . . . What kind of a friend would I be if I didn’t check up on her?”

  “You sound like you’re a very good friend,” I said.

  “I try.” Sherm lifted a hand and raked it back through his hair, a nervous gesture that must have worked better before his hairline began to recede.

  “So you’ve been helping her out.”

  “Someone has to. It’s not like Edward March is going to step in and do what’s right.”

  “Julia told me that she wanted to move back into Andrew’s cottage until after the baby was born,” I mentioned.

  “It wasn’t much to ask, but he turned her down cold. That was a mistake. Julia only wants what’s coming to her.”

  “As the mother of March’s grandchild, you mean?”

  Sherm nodded. “Her child will be Edward March’s only remaining family, and Julia wants her baby to be recognized as such. She wants him to inherit the legacy he’s entitled to. That’s what we’re fighting for.”

  I swiveled all the way around in my seat and stared at him. Fighting for?

  “What do you mean?” I asked.

  “It was my idea.” Sherm was clearly proud of himself. “Andrew died intestate. No surprise there. He wasn’t big on planning ahead. So his assets revert back to his closest living relative, his father. But I’m going to file a claim in probate court on behalf of Julia’s unborn child. He or she should be named as the beneficiary of Andrew’s estate.”

  Well, that was a new wrinkle.

  “Does Edward March know about that?”

  “Not yet. But he will just as soon as I get all the paperwork in order. And since Andrew never had a chance to properly acknowledge the child, we’re also going to file a civil suit. One way or another, March is going to pay. That old bastard is going to be sorry that he ever even thought of leaving Julia standing out in the cold with no place to go.”

  Either that, I thought, or March’s experienced legal team would squash Sherm Yablonsky like an annoying bug.

  I rose to my feet. “I’m happy to know that Julia has found herself such an ardent supporter.”

  “I’m only trying to do what’s fair.” His tone was filled with a smug sense of righteousness.

  Lucky for Sherm, what he thought was fair would also succeed in lining his own pockets. Not to mention make him look like a hero in front of the damsel in distress. At least he appeared to take his firm’s motto seriously.

  As I slipped on my coat, Sherm strode to the door and opened it for me.

  “I hope I succeeded in answering all your questions,” he said. It sounded like the kind of stock phrase that was issued to all departing clients.

  “Sure,” I told him. “You were great.”

  Sherm beamed at the praise. Talk about easy.

  I glanced at the name stenciled on the window, GRADY & YABLONSKY, ATTORNEYS-AT-LAW, and then back at the single desk in the small room. “Where’s Grady?”

  “He has Tuesdays off.”

  “So how does that work? On the other days of the week, do you guys share a desk?”

  “Not exactly. He’s like a roving lawyer.”

  “I’ve never heard of that.”

  Sherm was growing pink around the ears. “Yeah, well . . .”

  “You made him up, didn’t you?”

  “Okay, look,” he said. “There is no Grady. But two names on the masthead makes it sound like the firm is a more important place. The clients think they’re getting twice the representation.”

  “Good to know,” I said.

  As I walked back to my car, I pondered that. I thought about a guy who was in love with his best friend’s girlfriend, and wondered what other kinds of things Sherm might be willing to lie about.

  Chapter 21

  After meeting with Sherm, I returned home, and Sam, Kevin, and I had lunch together. The Poodles eddied around our chairs as we ate, like sharks trolling for chum. With an almost two-year-old at the table, they knew that their chances of getting lucky were pretty good. Someday our younger son will have table manners, but it doesn’t seem likely to happen anytime soon.

  Kevin ate half of his small turkey sandwich, then blithely tossed the other half on the floor, where Raven quickly scooped it up. Sam and I both ignored the transgression. I handed out peanut butter biscuits to the other dogs to even things up, then sliced up an apple for Kevin. He adores fruit, which was probably the only thing that kept the Poodles from getting lucky twice in one meal.

  After lunch, Sam disappeared into his office to do some work, and I called Bonnie to get George Weiner’s phone number.

  “What are you going to do with it?” she asked before giving it to me.

  “Call and see if he’d be willing to meet with me.”

  “He will be,” she said with certainty.

  “How do you know?”

  “George likes to hear himself talk. Once he finds out you’re willing to listen to him grumble about the company, you’ll be lucky if you can shut him up.”

  It turned out that Bonnie was right. As soon as I explained why I was calling, George agreed to see me. The fact that I implied I was an adult graduate student writing a thesis on sexual harassment in the workplace probably helped things along.

  George lived in Norwalk, so we settled on a meeting place halfway between us: a café on Forest Street in downtown New Canaan. I bundled Kevin up, grabbed the diaper bag, and headed out.

  Parking was tight on the small side street. And since Kevin tends to get distracted easily, walking in a straight line isn’t his strong suit. By the time he and I reached the café, George was already there. The only man sitting by himself, he wasn’t hard to pick out.

  George was a middle-aged man with a sizable paunch and a disgruntled expression that was framed by a pair of out-of-control eyebrows. He was slouched in his seat, plump fingers playing with a dirty napkin. Even though I was no more than a minute late, it looked as though he had already finished his first cup of coffee.

  Or maybe his second. Judging b
y his speedy response to my call, George seemed to have time on his hands.

  Weiner the Whiner, March had called him. And the first words out of George’s mouth did nothing to dispel that image.

  “Hey,” he said, sounding reproachful as Kevin and I made our way to his table. “You brought your kid.”

  “His name is Kevin, and he’s pretty easygoing,” I told him. “Just let me get an oatmeal cookie to keep him busy, and then you and I can talk.”

  His movements slow and cumbersome, George picked up his things and moved them to a larger table. In the time it took him to get resettled, I had whipped Kevin out of his snowsuit, found a child seat and dragged it over, and purchased a cookie that was half the size of a hubcap.

  I strapped Kevin into the seat, then broke off a piece of cookie and handed it to him. For insurance, I pulled out a couple of Matchbox cars and placed them on the table in front of his seat. George watched this flurry of activity with his head cocked to one side.

  “What?” I asked as I finally sat down, too.

  “Wouldn’t it have been easier to leave him at home?”

  “Sure,” I said with a laugh. “That would have been easier. I’m guessing you don’t have kids.”

  “Nope. Married, divorced, no kids.”

  “Sometimes they’re inconvenient,” I told him.

  “So I see.” He squinted in Kevin’s direction. “He looks like you.”

  “You think so?” That made me happy. I thought Kevin took after his father, but maybe since I often saw them together, it was easier for me to discern Sam’s features in our son than my own. “Thank you.”

  “So you want to talk about the work environment at March Homes.”

  “Right.”

  “And my lawsuit.”

  “That too. Maybe you could start by giving me a little bit of background.”

  It was like turning on a faucet. Words flowed out of George in a steady stream of recrimination. He’d worked for March Homes for five years, and in all that time, he’d felt underappreciated, mishandled, and misunderstood. He had worked incredibly hard and had watched while other employees advanced and his own career remained stagnant.

  “So initially, you were hired by Andrew March to fill the position of sales associate,” I said when George finally paused after talking for three solid minutes. “When you left the company last fall, what was your job at that point?”

  “Same thing, sales associate. There were half a dozen of us at that level, and I worked as hard as anybody. I was always bringing in new business.”

  I slipped Kevin another chunk of cookie. “Which is why you thought you’d earned the promotion.”

  “Right. When the job of sales manager opened up, it should have been mine. And it would have been except that Andrew March was too busy playing games to reward real talent.”

  “What kinds of games are we talking about?”

  George glanced at Kevin, like he thought maybe I should cover my son’s ears. Kevin had a piece of cookie in one hand and a toy car in the other; he was happily oblivious to our conversation. I could have promised that child a pony, and he wouldn’t even have noticed.

  “You know,” George said. “With the women in the company. Andrew had all the breaks. He was a single, good-looking guy, and on top of that, he was the boss. When it came to the female employees, he got around pretty good.”

  There was naked envy in George’s tone when he spoke about Andrew. If he ever had to give a deposition for his lawsuit, he was going to need to work on that. Or if the police got around to questioning him about his former boss’s murder.

  “I take it you didn’t like Andrew March much,” I said.

  “It was nothing personal. What I didn’t like about Andrew was that he didn’t play fair. I worked my ass off for that company. I deserved that promotion. The only thing holding me back was that I was the wrong gender to play footsie with the boss.”

  “So a woman sales associate got promoted over you?”

  George nodded glumly. “Maxine Wood.”

  “Was she good at her job, too?”

  “Yeah, I guess.”

  “Maybe she got promoted on merit,” I mentioned.

  George’s bushy brows lowered over suddenly narrowed eyes. He glared at me like I was a cute, fluffy puppy who’d unexpectedly bitten his finger.

  “She got the promotion because she slept with the boss,” he said.

  “That must have made you pretty angry.”

  “It did. Anyone would have been angry in my place.” George was determined to make me see things his way. “What Andrew did wasn’t right.”

  “I guess you must think he deserved what happened to him.”

  “Let’s just say I didn’t shed any tears when I found out.”

  “How did you find out?” I asked curiously.

  “I heard about it on the news. ‘A murder in Westport’ . . . That was the big headline, so I stopped to listen. It’s not like that happens every day.”

  “Were you shocked when you found out who it was?”

  “Nah.” George leaned in close, like we were pals sharing a secret. “Tell you the truth, first thing I did was laugh.”

  “Because Andrew’s death cleared the way for your lawsuit to be settled?”

  “Hell, no. I’ll ride that thing all the way to trial if I have to. I got a lawyer working on contingency, so it makes no difference to me. The reason I laughed is because Andrew March was one of those guys who led a charmed life. He thought he could do whatever he wanted and nothing bad would ever happen to him. And then it did.”

  George smiled then. For the first time since we’d sat down, he looked happy. “I’ll tell you what. Andrew got what he had coming to him, and I’m glad he did.”

  When Kevin and I got home that afternoon, Sam had good news.

  As I undressed Kevin and listened to what Sam had to say, the Poodles leapt and pirouetted around us in a frenzy of excitement, as if they knew we were talking about them. Since they’ve been eavesdropping on our conversations for years, maybe they did.

  “I just got off the phone with Peter,” he said. “We can pick up Augie this afternoon if we want to.”

  “What do you mean, if?” I asked with a laugh. “I can’t wait. We’ll go as soon as Davey gets home from school.”

  I pulled Kevin’s shoes off and stepped him out of his snowsuit. The moment he was free, he pushed my hands away and trotted purposefully down the hallway toward the kitchen. I had no idea what he was after. Neither did the Poodles, but they followed along anyway.

  All except Faith. She remained behind, her body pressed close to my legs, her expressive face tipped upward in my direction. The other Poodles might not have understood, but she had. I could read the question in her dark eyes.

  Faith had been my first dog ever. She’d also been an only dog for several years. Like an only child, she’d been accustomed to receiving all the attention and to ordering her world as she saw fit.

  First to redefine the easy balance of that relationship had been Faith’s daughter, Eve. And although the younger Poodle had slipped seamlessly into the family, I knew that Faith had had to make some adjustments. Davey and I were no longer just her people.

  Then Sam had moved in. With him came three more Poodles, and still more adjustments needed to be made. Time and space were ceded to the newcomers, and Faith’s and my relationship had had to adapt again. Gracious as ever, Faith had made accommodations, and the two canine families had merged smoothly.

  Now here we were once more, asking her to accept another new puppy into the fold. Faith was six years old now. For a Standard Poodle, that was well into middle age. There was no gray around her muzzle yet, no loss of spring in her step. But even so, at her age Faith could be forgiven for thinking that she’d already done her duty when it came to welcoming rambunctious newcomers into her home.

  So when the other four Poodles ran on ahead and she remained behind, wrapping her body around my legs, I knew that the ge
sture was a mute plea for reassurance that nothing would change too much. I squatted down so that we were face-to-face, and cupped her long muzzle between my palms. For a minute, we simply breathed in and out together.

  “You’re the best dog in the world,” I told her.

  Faith’s tail wagged slowly back and forth in acknowledgment. She already knew that.

  “You’ll always be my favorite.” I paused, then added fervently, “Always. No matter what.” Just to make sure that she understood.

  Faith did. Her long pink tongue came out and licked the bottom of my chin.

  “I know,” I said. “I love you, too.”

  We left it at that and went to join the others.

  Luckily, Davey didn’t have basketball practice that afternoon. His bus dropped him off at the end of the driveway just before four o’clock. Sam and I were waiting impatiently.

  We watched through a front window as he quickly left the plowed driveway, hopped over a small drift, and skipped toward the house across the snow-covered lawn. Only an eleven-year-old boy would not only choose the path of most resistance, but also look positively cheerful about it. When he stopped to scoop up a handful of snow and form it into a snowball, I strode to the front hall and yanked the front door open to hurry him along.

  My timing was impeccable. In the few seconds it took me to reach the door, Davey had cocked back his arm and let fly. A snowball the size of a small grapefruit went hurtling past my ear and smacked into the wall behind me.

  I know I jumped to one side. I might have let out a small shriek. The way my life works, you’d think I might have lost my capacity to be startled by now, but apparently not.

  All five Poodles came scrambling into the hall to find out what had happened. Tar won the race. He leapt up and snagged the icy missile before it even hit the floor.

  “Uh-oh,” said Davey. He hopped up the front steps. “What’d you do that for?”

  “I might ask you the same thing,” I said.

  “Because the door was closed,” my son replied with perfect preteen logic.

  Then he saw Sam and Kevin waiting behind me and hesitated. His whole family doesn’t usually turn out to welcome him home from school. At his age, we trust him to find his own way up the driveway and into the house. Sometimes he even grabs a snack before bothering to hunt us down and say hello.