Bark M for Murder

by An Anthology

  I shook my head. “God, she really is evil.”

  She put a hand on my shoulder. “Was, Jack. Was.”

  Delgado had kept a diary. We found it in the cabin and the story it told was pretty much the way I’d outlined it for Jamie that night after I’d gone jogging with Frankie. I’d gotten only one thing wrong: Mike Delgado hadn’t been in love with Janet Slemboski; he was her father.

  “God and family first,” I told Jamie when we read that.

  “Yeah, it makes a nice motto for a tattoo I guess, but in this case…”

  Slemboski’s mother had gotten pregnant just before Delgado shipped out for duty overseas. While he was gone she had the baby and gave it up for adoption. One day, about nineteen years later, Delgado saw Cady Clark at the shopping center in Belfast and was dumbstruck: she looked exactly like her mother.

  He followed her, found out who she was, checked into her background, found out about the real Cady Clark, the missing girl from New Jersey, contacted that girl’s parents, but eventually decided not to tell them about her. He’d been keeping tabs on Cady on his own ever since.

  He pulled her over on the highway one night, told her who he was, and that he wanted to help her cover up the murder of the real Cady Clark (her body was finally found in a creek bed in New Jersey, thanks to info from the diary). He’d been helping her evade the consequences of her actions ever since, right up to the day she killed him (the autopsy showed he’d died of arsenic poisoning), then laid him out under the tarp and shot him between the eyes, just for the fun of it.

  Nice family.

  We never found out the real identity of the woman who’d been burned in the car explosion.

  Like I’d told Jamie, some cases you just can’t solve.

  Charley spent the plane ride back to Maine happily chewing a bone in a carry-on crate stashed under my seat.

  Once we were airborne, Jamie sipped her Bloody Mary and said, “You know, I think I’d rather work on a case with an outright serial killer than on another one like this.”

  “No you wouldn’t,” I said. “Trust me. A serial killer will get under your skin far more than this girl ever could.”

  “Why?”

  “Because,” I sipped my scotch, “since a girl like this one has no empathy for the rest of the world, it’s easy not to have any for her. But a serial killer has a wounded psyche; and you’re a doctor and you’ll feel a grain of compassion for him no matter how much you hate what he’s done. And he’ll play on that, if you happen to get close enough to let him. Trust me, a case like that will screw with your emotions for a long, long time. You may never get over it. But by the time we get back to Maine we’ll have forgotten all about what’s-her-name who died in the snow back there in Utah.”

  “Now that you mention it,” Jamie said, stirring her cocktail with a celery stalk, “what the hell is her name?”

  Over our soft, convivial laughter you could just make out the sound of Charley happily chewing his bone.

  The Case of the London Cabbie

  J. A. Jance

  Getting up from the table, Maddy Watkins found her two red-dog golden retrievers, Aggie and Daphne, watching her avidly. After a lifetime’s worth of reading mysteries, it was only natural that she would name her dogs after two of her favorite writers—Agatha Christie and Daphne DuMaurier. “Not yet, girls,” Maddy said, avoiding saying the magic word “walk,” which would have sent the two dogs into spasms of anticipation. Instead, she gave them their after breakfast treat. Disappointed, the dogs followed her into the living room. With resigned sighs they settled down on a nearby rug while Maddy deposited her coffee cup on the table next to her easy chair and picked up her newspaper. With pen in hand, she was about to embark on that morning’s New York Times crossword puzzle when the phone rang.

  “Aunt Maddy?” a woman’s voice asked. “It’s me—Shannon.”

  The second part of the introduction was not only grammatically incorrect, it was also totally unnecessary. Shannon Lester, Maddy’s only niece, had been taught grammar by a generation of teachers who had evidently never grasped the difference between the subjective or objective case, and who wouldn’t have known the difference between a transitive or intransitive verb if one had walked up and smacked them in the face.

  “Good morning,” Maddy said. Suppressing a small sigh, she put down her pen and pulled the coffee cup closer. Once Shannon got on a telephone, she was often incredibly long-winded. Talking to her niece made Maddy wonder why it was some people never worried about long-distance charges. “How are you today?”

  “It’s Mother,” Shannon said, sounding very near tears. “I just don’t know what to do.”

  Shannon’s mother, Genevieve Gaylord, was Maddy’s sister and only sibling. As far as blood relatives were concerned, Genevieve sometimes made Maddy wish blood wasn’t thicker than water. Maddy had been told time and again over the years that, at age three, she was far too young to remember the day her mother had come home with her “adorable” baby sister. Yet in that regard, Maddy remembered all too well—and Genevieve, with some notable exceptions, had been a pain in Maddy’s neck ever since. Still, when Maddy’s husband, Bud, had taken sick and died, no one had been more supportive than her sister Gennie. That had to count for something.

  “What now?” Maddy asked.

  “Mother’s in love,” Shannon said, deteriorating into real tears now. “You’ve got to help me, Aunt Maddy. She’s really gone off the deep end this time.”

  Genevieve’s falling in love was hardly news from the front, either, and her taste in men was usually, to put it charitably, unfortunate. Gennie had fallen off the rails the first time at the tender age of fourteen when she had lied about her age and eloped with a sailor from the Bremerton Naval Station. That marriage had ended in an amicable divorce prior to Genevieve’s eighteenth birthday.

  Childless for years, Gennie had been astonished to find herself pregnant with Shannon, a “change of life” baby. Maddy could never remember from which marriage Shannon had come, number three or four. The father had disappeared into the ethers when Shannon was five, and there had been several more short-term marriages to several eminently forgettable men. Genevieve’s lifetime’s worth of often juvenile behavior was part of the reason Maddy had gone to great lengths to maintain a cordial and supportive relationship with her niece. Poor Shannon deserved to have some adults in her life who actually behaved like adults.

  “That’s hardly surprising,” Maddy said briskly. “It was bound to happen sooner or later. Joe—that was the last one’s name, wasn’t it? He’s been gone a good year and a half now.”

  Joe Gaylord had been more than a little rough around the edges, but in many ways the retired naval chief had been the best one of the lot. He hadn’t made bundles of money over the years, but he had been tight as could be with what he did have. When he succumbed to a massive and completely unexpected heart attack, he had left his widow in far better financial shape than she could ever have imagined.

  “I married him for love,” a bereaved Gennie had declared to her sister shortly after the attorney had revealed not only the contents of Joe’s will but also the extent of his considerable assets, all of which now belonged to his widow. “I had no idea Joe had that kind of money.”

  So much the better, Maddy remembered thinking at the time. If Genevieve had known there was money, there would probably be a whole lot less of it by now.

  “This one’s nothing like Joe!” Shannon said heatedly. “Nothing at all. You’ve got to do something about it, Aunt Maddy. You’ve got to put a stop to it.”

  Despite having very strong opinions about the dubious propriety of Gennie’s general behavior, Maddy nevertheless found herself bristling. Yes, Genevieve had made some bad decisions over the years, but so had Shannon. The idea of Shannon suddenly calling the shots where her mother’s life was concerned definitely rubbed Maddy the wrong way. As far as she was concerned, adult children suddenly taking it upon themselves to boss their parents ar
ound was an idea whose time had not yet come. And for good reason—namely Maddy’s own son, Rex, and his fashion plate of a wife, Gina.

  Rex, a middle-aged Seattle real estate developer, was not only very bossy—having inherited a healthy dose of bossiness from his mother’s side of the family—he also had a very high opinion of his own opinions. With his father dead, Rex seemed to think his mother was supposed to look to him for all kinds of counsel and advice.

  When Maddy acquired a pair of puppies after her old dog Sarah had to be put down, Rex was dead set against it. (Fortunately for Aggie and Daphne, she had ignored him.) On the other hand, he had been all for the idea of Maddy’s moving out of her modest waterfront home on Whidbey Island’s Race Lagoon, two hours west of Seattle, so it could be redeveloped into what Rex liked to call a “real waterfront property.” As if the house Bud and Maddy had built together—the house Rex had been raised in—hadn’t been good enough to suit him.

  Fortunately for Maddy’s personal financial situation, she had disregarded Rex’s expert advice on that score, too. In the aftermath of the terrible and deliberately set arson fire that had burned Maddy’s home to the ground, she decided to make her own arrangements rather than accept her son’s “sweetheart” deal. The idea that she had bypassed him on the issue left Rex’s nose permanently out of joint. In fact, he barely spoke to his mother anymore, which, from Maddy’s point of view, wasn’t as bad as one might think. She found Rex to be far less annoying when he wasn’t speaking to her than he was when he was.

  Upon hearing Shannon’s tale of woe, Maddy’s first thought was that her niece was barking up the wrong tree and should get a grip. People Gennie’s age ought to be allowed to make their own mistakes, which meant that their children should mind their own business. That was what Maddy thought, but she was far too polite to come right out and say so.

  “What’s the matter with your mother’s new beau?” Maddy asked, envisioning some nice retired civil engineer or maybe another navy guy, an officer this time, who, after being widowed, might have moved into the adult community—Lakeside Senior Living on Lake Union—where Genevieve and Joe had moved shortly before Joe’s death.

  “For starters,” Shannon said, “he’s twenty-nine years old.”

  That took Maddy’s breath away. “Did you say twenty-nine?”

  “Yes.”

  “But Gennie’s forty years older than that!”

  “Exactly,” Shannon replied.

  “What does he do for a living?” Maddy asked.

  “He’s from Saudi Arabia,” Shannon returned. “He claims he’s a computer engineer but that he can’t find work right now, so he’s driving a cab for that new London Cabbie Company, the one that uses those funny-looking black cars that look like they’re from the thirties. That’s how he met her. He drove Mom from her hair appointment downtown back to Lakeside.”

  “A computer engineer who can’t find work in Seattle? Impossible!” Maddy exclaimed. “What’s his name?”

  “Jamil bin Mahmoud, which, as far as I can tell, means ‘Handsome son of Mahmoud.”“

  “Handsome is as handsome does,” Maddy muttered.

  “Yes,” Shannon agreed. “Mom is just ga-ga over him. The problem is, he has a wife and a little boy with another baby on the way.”

  “You mean he’s not even divorced?” Maddy asked in dismay.

  “Divorced? Are you kidding. Mom told me that he’s Muslim and he said, according to Sharia, Islamic law, he’s allowed to have four wives.”

  “Not if one of the four happens to be my sister!” Maddy vowed, doing an immediate one-eighty on her initial determination to not let Shannon dictate the conditions of her mother’s life. This was different. “Do you think he’s a terrorist?” Maddy added.

  “A terrorist?” Shannon responded. “Of course not. Being a Muslim doesn’t automatically make him a terrorist. I just think the guy’s a jerk. All he’s after is Mom’s money.”

  Maybe, Maddy thought. Then again, maybe not.

  “Can you help me on this?” Shannon continued. “If you talk to Mom, maybe you can get her to come to her senses.”

  Coming to her senses wasn’t something that was in Genevieve Gaylord’s makeup or in her repertoire, so Maddy didn’t hold out much hope on that score. After a strict Lutheran upbringing, Maddy and Gennie had both left home in search of forbidden fruit. Fortunately for eighteen-year-old Maddy, Bud Watkins had been there when she was ready to take her first bite. Unfortunately for Genevieve, she either had never encountered that same kind of good raw material or else, with the singular exception of Joe Gaylord, she hadn’t had brains enough to hang on to it when she did.

  “Let me think about this,” Maddy said. “I’ll take my girls for a walk. That’s when I do my best thinking. Once I decide what, if anything, I can do, I’ll let you know.”

  Aggie managed to pluck the word “walk” out of context. Her ears pricked up and she came to attention. Daphne, following her sister’s lead, leaped up as well.

  “Thanks, Aunt Maddy,” Shannon said. “I knew I could count on you.”

  Maddy wasn’t so sure about that. Pushing aside both her cold coffee and the unworked crossword puzzle, she got to her feet.

  “You’re right, girls,” she said. “We need to go for a walk. Go find the leashes. Bring them to Mommy.”

  The dogs needed no further urging. They raced off to find the leather leashes that Maddy kept in a basket near the front door. She had taught them to bring the leashes as an add-on to the “Find it!” command they had learned during their thirty-day obedience training boot camp at the Academy for Canine Behavior. Their ability to bring their own leashes had been a necessity back during the time Maddy had been struggling to recover from hip replacement surgery. Now having the dogs bring their own leashes was more a convenience than anything else—and a trick they enjoyed performing.

  “Okay,” Maddy said, once the leashes were in place. “Go find the purse. Bring it to Mommy.”

  And so the dogs raced off and brought that, too.

  “Good dogs,” she said, slipping the strap over her shoulder. “All right, now. Off we go.”

  And off they went. The three-year-old goldens walked demurely at Maddy’s side while she held the leashes slack in her hand. Their Academy-fostered canine manners made them obedience standouts with the other dogs they met on their treks through Oak Harbor. Rex had been appalled when he found out how much she had paid for that single round of obedience training.

  “It was an investment in my future,” she had replied. “You wouldn’t want them pulling me down an embankment and rebreaking that expensive bionic hip of mine, now would you?”

  Thankfully, that one comment had been enough to shut him up. That was how you had to operate with someone like Rex, Maddy had learned. One had to be firm—calm but firm—and utterly uncompromising. It worked the same way with the dogs—although Aggie and Daph were far less trouble, and infinitely less demanding, than Rex Alan Watkins.

  Wearing a light jacket as a barrier against the cool March winds and even cooler possible showers, Maddy and the dogs set off at a brisk pace from her cozy cottage on Oak Harbor’s Fidalgo Street for the short walk to Hester Block’s waterfront property on Bayside.

  Maddy had been astonished by the amount of money that was offered when she looked into the possibility of subdividing and redeveloping the Race Lagoon waterfront acreage she and Bud had bought for a song back in the 1950s when they were newlyweds. But even with all that money at stake, Maddy had been close to turning the deal down based solely on the fact that Ag and Daph would no longer have private beach access. That was when her childhood chum, Hester Conrad Block, had come to the rescue.

  “You can bring your dogs down to my place whenever you like,” Hester had offered. “I’ll give you a key to the gate. You and your precious puppies can come and go as you please.”

  Which is exactly what they were doing right now. Maddy’s comfortable new house a few blocks back from the beach had
been purchased at a fraction of the price of waterfront property, but she still had all the benefits. What could be better? Beach access and none of the accompanying headaches.

  Once through the gate Maddy let the girls off their leashes. They raced ahead of her down the bank while she followed at a far slower pace, thinking all the time of Gennie. Poor Gennie. She had always been the cute one—petite and good-looking. She took after their mother, which included being somewhat on the dim side.

  Maddy took after their Scandinavian father— big-boned, big-framed, and smart. All through their school years lots of people doubted the two of them were truly sisters. And the fact that Gennie’s schoolwork had compared so poorly to that of her brainy older sister’s hadn’t helped the situation, either.

  But Gennie’s real problem, her fatal flaw, was that she had always been incredibly kind-hearted. That fact alone accounted for all the broken human flotsam and jetsam she had taken in over the years, married, and then tried to rehabilitate. Her taking up with an impoverished and underemployed computer scientist was simply a new verse in a very old song.