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Play Dead

Page 18

by Leslie O'Kane


  “They’re probably fine,” I said to reassure both my mother and myself. “What you found had to be all of it, or Pavlov wouldn’t have been acting so territorial.”

  Though my statement sounded good, it was overly optimistic. I’d taught Pavlov to eat only what was specifically offered to her by me or her caregiver. With her natural guard dog instincts, she’d taken it upon herself to prevent the other dogs from eating the hamburger—probably because she was hoping Mom or I would later give her permission to eat it. Her behavior in no way guaranteed that Sage or Doppler hadn’t already gobbled down hamburger chunks from other locations in the yard.

  I fought down a rising sense of panic. I was too far away to get there fast enough to help the dogs if they’d eaten poison. My mother was going to have to take care of this.

  Antifreeze was by far the most common source of poisoning for a dog. After showing signs of drunkenness, a poisoned dog would pass out, at which point it became a desperate race against the clock; the earlier the dog’s stomach got pumped the better.

  “Mom, do you know what antifreeze smells like?”

  She paused. “No, not specifically.”

  “Go into the garage, find a bottle of antifreeze, and see if the meat smells similar. If so, watch for signs of alcohol poisoning—disorientation, staggering, and all other signs of drunkenness.”

  My own stomach was in knots. I looked at George, who was blatantly listening in on all of this with considerable interest. I didn’t want to have to reschedule yet another appointment with Rex if I could avoid it. Mom returned to the phone and told me that the meat did seem to bear the same odor as antifreeze. I covered the mouthpiece and asked George, “Is it all right if I give my mother your phone number? We’ve got a problem that could escalate.”

  “Of course,” he said. “Did someone try to poison your dogs? Is this about Sage?”

  “No! Sage is fine!”

  His face fell. He probably was every bit as nice a man as he seemed to be, concerned about the condition of an innocent dog. But how could I know for sure? I deliberately had not spoken Sage’s name. Had George simply guessed that Sage was at my mother’s house? Dammit! This was all so out of control that I didn’t even know what to say to my clients!

  I turned my back on George and gave Mom his number, with the instructions to race the dogs to the veterinary hospital upon even the slightest symptom of poisoning, and then to call me. I hung up, took a calming breath, and returned my attention to George. Rex, I noticed, watched us from a short distance behind George, as opposed to standing between us as he had on my first visit. This was another sign of progress toward improved behavior.

  “Sorry I snapped at you. Some bastard barely missed killing one of my dogs.”

  George held up his palms. “Hey, don’t think twice about it. I understand completely. Are all of your dogs okay?”

  “It appears so,” I answered, but once again, was confronted with the thought that, if George Haggerty was the killer, I’d just done him the favor of letting him know that his plan had failed. He would have already gathered that much from what he’d overheard, though. Extending that rationale, I added with considerable pride, “My German shepherd not only didn’t eat the meat herself, but guarded it so the other dogs wouldn’t eat it.”

  “I’ve never heard of a dog refusing to eat meat. How did you train her to do that? And why?”

  “Back when she was a puppy, there were a few reports of dog poisonings in the papers. I worried that, since her breed occasionally gets bad press, she might be a target someday.” Not to mention the fact that my own dogs had been my “proving ground” for work with others’ dogs and therefore were trained in all kinds of potentially useless ways. However, this being one of those rare opportunities when I’d actually been asked to blow my own horn, there was no sense in my deliberately playing off-key. “I just used my usual basics—sound aversion if she started to eat something I hadn’t offered her and positive reinforcement when she did as instructed.”

  “Huh,” George said, casting a long look Rex’s way before returning his gaze to me.

  I forced myself to work with George and Rex as best I could manage despite the tremendous distraction. Rex was making considerable progress. By George’s asserting himself as alpha dog, Rex was beginning to accept basic commands and was allowing George to leave the house for brief periods without whining. Nevertheless, my thoughts and my heart were elsewhere. Afterwards, I drove home as quickly as rush hour traffic would allow.

  Mom showed me the hunk of hamburger she’d collected from the portion of the yard that Pavlov had diligently been guarding. The two of us agreed that the meat indeed had a characteristic smell to it—antifreeze. She’d brought the dogs in, and we kept them in the kitchen with us while we watched for signs of their having consumed any. The dogs were fine. Mom and I were nervous wrecks.

  We took out our fears and frustration in the good ol’ method that has stood the test of time among dysfunctional families the world over, yelling at each other. Mom would no doubt have recalled our conversation differently, yet the fact was, she started it.

  Just after we’d relaxed enough to take seats at the small, oak kitchen table, she said, “I thought you were trying to keep Sage’s location quiet. How could the hateful, cowardly scumbag even know Sage was here? Did you tell your customers I had the dog?”

  “Of course not, Mother! How stupid do you think I am?”

  She tightened her jaw. “I don’t think you’re at all stupid, Allie. Just so stubborn that you get in over your head.”

  I furrowed my brow and glared at her. “If I’m stubborn, guess which side of the family I inherited it from?”

  “In my case, it’s known as determination. And believe you me, I’m determined not to let anyone get within ten feet of these dogs again.”

  “Good. Which is why we need to move out of here for a while. We should all just...move into a hotel or something.”

  “Allie, that’s ridiculous! What kind of a ‘hotel’ would accept a collie, a German shepherd, and a cocker spaniel?”

  “I don’t know,” I snapped. “There has to be some fleabag place around here somewhere.”

  Mom crossed her arms and glared. “This is my home, and I won’t be chased out of it.”

  I clicked my tongue. “God, Mom! If I had said that, you’d accuse me of being stubborn, and you’d be right! Now that you’re saying it, you’re merely ‘acting determined’!”

  She maintained her cross-armed countenance. “Call it what you will,” she answered in clipped tones. “In any case, I’m not leaving my house. You can take Doppler and Pavlov and go, if you’d like.”

  “You’ve got to listen to me, Mother!” I rose for emphasis and leaned against the kitchen table to stare into her eyes. “The killer’s after Sage. That’s his one link to the murders. We have to go someplace. What would have happened if I’d kept Pavlov with me this afternoon? Sage would have eaten that poisoned meat and possibly died.”

  “Maybe so, but that was before I fully understood the danger Sage was in. Now that I am fully aware, I can protect him.”

  I sank back into my chair, suspecting that my arguments were only forcing Mom to dig her heels in more. When could this have happened? Pavlov had acted normally when I let her out, and she has such an exceptional sense of smell, I highly doubted the meat was here when I dropped her off late morning.

  If worse came to worst, we could always put the dogs in a kennel, but the thought of the dogs exposed to tons of contaminants and unable to exercise properly was truly unpleasant. Plus, Sage would also be vulnerable to the killer in a kennel, and he’d be totally out of our range of influence. In any case, I needed to mend fences with my mother, as fencing was about all we had going for us in the way of protection.

  Forcing my voice to sound as relaxed as possible, I asked, “Did you see anything at all around the time the meat must have been tossed over the fence?”

  “I didn’t see anything, but
, come to think of it, there was a strange door-to-door sales call. It was from some man who claimed to be selling ‘organic dog food,’ which he claims he ‘makes fresh and delivers to your doorstep.’ I told him I wasn’t interested, and he left.”

  I tensed with alarm. “That’s too much of a coincidence. Maybe he was going to try to poison Sage in person, then when you wouldn’t let him in, he tossed it over the fence. What did he look like?”

  “He was a big, strong guy. Mid thirties or so. Wearing a bad-quality hairpiece. German accent.”

  “A hairpiece?” I repeated.

  “Looked as though he’d bought it off an Elvis impersonator. Phony sideburns, the whole nine yards. He kept insisting if I’d just let him demonstrate, I’d see how much the dog loved his product.”

  “Wait a minute. If he was the killer, he had to know that Sage would start barking at him. Did Sage, or either of the other dogs, see him?”

  “No. They were all in the backyard when he came to the front. I remember one thing. He was wearing really strong cologne.”

  “Maybe he was trying to disguise his scent from Sage. Did you get his card or a brochure?” Mom was already shaking her head, so I continued, “Was he driving a company car?”

  “No, just a plain, white four-door.”

  I grabbed my head in frustration, mostly to stop myself from reaching across the table to grab my mother. She’d teased me about my fears regarding a white car, then she missed our best chance to identify it! “Mom, a white car? Didn’t you get the license plate or anything?”

  She shook her head. “I didn’t make the connection then. I was tired. I’d just gotten home, and it was broad daylight and everything. I didn’t think there was anything sinister about him—just one more pushy door-to-door salesman. He said his name was George Heidenburg.”

  George Haggerty was my only bald client who might be inclined to wear some sort of toupee. The names were bizarrely similar. But there was no possibility of the Georges being one and the same. George Haggerty had been with me when the salesman was visiting Mom. Besides which, it now dawned on me that during my last conversation with my George, I’d stupidly blurted out that Pavlov had protected Sage from the tainted meat. If this bogus salesman worked for George Haggerty, I’d given them instructions on how to pull off their nefarious plan. Mom was right! I was every bit as stupid as Mom claimed she didn’t think I was!

  Returned to my previous level of anxiety, I renewed our argument regarding how we had to hide our dogs, and preferably ourselves, too. Mother retorted that she would “sooner keep watch over Sage with a rifle in her hands” than move into a hotel or a friend’s house.

  “In that case,” I argued, “I’ll just move Sage to a friend’s house.”

  “No! The poor dog has been orphaned twice. It would be too traumatizing to Sage after all he’s been through.”

  “After we get him back, I’ll work with him. That is my job, after all. Remember all that stuff you told Joel Meyer about my being ‘worth every penny’ I charge, ‘and then some’?”

  “Oh, please.” She flicked a hand at me. “That was a prospective customer. I’m your mother.”

  I fisted my hands. The heck with “mending fences.” I know when I’ve just been insulted! “Which means that you know me too well to give me any credit?”

  “I didn’t say that. Sage is my dog now, and I’m not going to let him out of my sight.”

  The words had a chilling effect on me. They were the exact same ones Dennis Corning had used when advising me how I should treat the collie. “Mom, moving Sage could prove to be the only way to keep him alive!”

  “Don’t you use that tone of voice to me, young lady!”

  Oh, good Lord! My teen years all over again. Was this nightmare never going to end?

  “I am going to stay in my own home and watch Sage and that’s final.” She rose from the table.

  When my mother says, “that’s final,” she means it. Short of kidnapping Sage myself, all I could do was vow to help keep watch over both Sage and Mom, and to step up my own pace toward doing anything I could to help the authorities solve the crime. “What did the police say when you called them?” I asked.

  “Oh, shoot!” She snapped her fingers. “I never did get around to doing that, I was so concerned with watching the dogs every second.”

  I sighed and grabbed the phone. The Boulder Police had been very professional and courteous in their dealings with me, and yet I had a hunch that they’d concluded I was an utter flake. By now, they’d likely tagged me The Dog Lady, intent on sticking my nose into their investigations.

  A female answered the nonemergency number I’d called.

  “My name’s Allida Babcock. Somebody tried to poison my dog. I need to speak to someone assigned to the Beth Gleason murder case.” There was a pause, which I interpreted as confusion over my request, so I quickly added, “My dog was a witness to the murder.”

  “I see. Just a moment, please.” Her voice had an overly animated lilt to it, which indicated that I might as well have claimed there was a spaceship on my roof. Nonetheless, I eventually reached an officer who agreed that a trip out to Berthoud was warranted to collect the hamburger as evidence and interview my mom.

  An hour later, Mom gave the same description of the dog food salesman to the uniformed officer that she’d given me. Unfortunately, since the salesman had been standing on one of the porch steps but she couldn’t say for certain which one, she was only able to give a range of height within six inches—between five foot ten and six foot four. The description was so vague—especially since it appeared that his hairpiece was a deliberate disguise—it could have been most any youngish, Caucasian man.

  I had so many unanswered questions. Why was Sage’s dog food tainted? What was Beth’s relationship with Hannah Jones? Who was driving this white car that kept showing up? What was Bill Wayne really searching for in my room—and was his search somehow related to the murders? I felt as though I could jump out of my skin, and yet there was nothing I could do.

  Of my own personal list of possible suspects, Chet Adler was so remarkably tall that I very much doubted she could mistake him for possibly five-ten. That left Dennis Corning, Alex Ferron—aka The Man Formerly Known as Keith Terrington—Bill Wayne, George Haggerty, John O’Farrell, and Joel Meyer—but only if he’d shaved his beard today, which seemed unlikely. Because I couldn’t believe Alex was involved, that left Dennis, Bill, and John—provided there was one man, acting alone, who’d committed the evil acts, and that this was not a completely innocent door-to-door salesman. And, anyway, an “innocent door-to-door salesman” was an oxymoron.

  It was after seven P.M. Mom and I ate dinner, but now that she was used to me as a house guest—after all of one day—she agreed to let me cook, so I made lemon chicken and rice. Both the chicken and the rice were dry and unexciting. Though our antagonism toward each other had, thankfully, faded, my thoughts were in such turmoil that I was lousy company.

  If only I could explore the link between Hannah Jones and Beth Gleason, I thought, pushing some grains of rice around my plate. But how could I, when all that remained of the link was the collie? A second connection between the two women occurred to me then—one that was so obvious, I was tempted to whack myself in the head.

  “Mom, do you know anything about this cooking class that Hannah Jones used to teach?”

  Mom peered up from her plate at me. “Why? Looking for guidance?”

  “Just trying to learn more about Hannah and Beth, really.”

  “It was through one of those adult education classes you see offered all the time. I took a class ten years ago, and they still send me schedules every six months or so. I might have an old class schedule around here someplace.”

  She rifled through a stack of papers on top of the refrigerator until she found what looked like a small newspaper. “Here it is.” She paged through the catalogue, then flipped it back over and glanced at the cover. “They even have a class goin
g now. I didn’t realize that.”

  “I’m sure they cancelled it and gave refunds or something when Hannah died six weeks ago.”

  “Not necessarily,” Mom said, looking at the paper. “It says here she had a co-teacher named Naomi Smith. She might have kept the class going.”

  “Let me see.” I snatched the class catalogue away from her. Mother was right. “Hot dog,” I muttered under my breath, feeling as though I was finally on to something.

  “Vegetarian ones only, I’m sure,” Mom replied, still overly focused on food.

  At eight A.M. the next day, I arrived at my office. During my drive into Boulder, I’d come up with the idea of calling all the Smiths listed in the directory until I could happen across Naomi’s number. I tossed my purse down, dropped into my chair, grabbed the Boulder phone book, and paged through to “Smith.” The entry was surprisingly large. I made an estimate. Approximately four hundred and fifty Smiths in the directory—none of whom were listed as Naomi Smith.

  Time for Plan B. I called the registration number for the school, asked if I could please speak to the director of education there, then inquired whether the class was still going on. It was. Better yet, she gave me Ms. Smith’s number without my even having to make up an excuse for wanting it.

  I dialed this number, and Naomi Smith answered. “My name is Allida Babcock,” I told her. “I’m calling to ask about the cooking class that you teach.”

  “Oh, yes. Our last class of the semester meets tonight, but you’re welcome to drop in and audit, to see if you’d be interested in signing up for the next class. That one starts in four weeks.”

  “Great. Thank you so much,” I said and hung up, slightly appalled at how deceitful I’d just been. Upon further reflection, however, I decided that a little dishonesty went a long way. Trying to learn more about two murdered women from the same cooking class was not phone conversation material.

  Energized with the admittedly false sense that I was taking some action to find Beth Gleason’s killer, I drove to Joel Meyer’s house with a renewed sense of purpose. My jaw dropped when he came to the door.

 

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