All Shots

by Susan Conant

  “Lucky you.”

  “Leah, really! I love having Gabrielle here, and she’s pretty good at keeping a lid on my father. And at least Steve is away, so I don’t have to try to keep Buck from grating on his nerves.”

  “Do you want me to stay? I was going to move out tomorrow, but I could stay another few days.”

  I’d have loved it. “No, of course not. But thank you. All your friends are coming back. You’ll want to see them.”

  “If you change your mind…”

  “I’ll let you know.”

  “But I’m going to help you groom.”

  “You don’t have to.”

  “The LaundroMutt is a cool place. I want to.”

  “I’d love it,” I said.

  An hour later, we were at the LaundroMutt, which is, as Leah had said, a cool place, a self-service dog wash on the Fresh Pond rotary. Leah had Sammy in one of the big stainless-steel tubs, and I had Rowdy in the one next to it. Sammy, I should note, is a funny malamute. For one thing, he loves to fetch balls. He’ll keep retrieving as long as I keep throwing. Kimi regards this behavior as a sign of mental aberration. As Sammy flies after a ball and returns it to me, she watches him with an expression of perplexed disdain. For another thing, Sammy likes water. Kimi doesn’t mind it and will even go swimming, but Rowdy hates water. What he detests is the sensation of water on his skin, especially on his belly. I’d had to lure him into the stainless-steel tub with a fistful of roast beef, and even using the treat, I’d had to shove him up the folding ramp to get him in. Now that he was hitched to the tub and soaking wet, he was behaving himself in the sense that he wasn’t fighting to escape, but he was bellowing complaints that must have been audible in Harvard Square. When the dogs were thoroughly rinsed, we used the big professional dryers to blow them dry. My latest grooming discovery, the Chris Christensen 27mm T-brush, did an admirable job of grabbing hair that would otherwise have flown all over the place, and the T-handle minimized wrist strain. Even so, by the time we finished, most of the air in the LaundroMutt had been displaced by malamute undercoat, which probably lined our lungs. Leah is a decent groomer, but I’m better with nail clippers and scissors than she is, so I cut the dogs’ nails and then neatened their feet with a little trimming. Father and son looked spectacular, thus prompting me to check the sky for the black clouds that laborious show grooming generates. I swear that the harder I work on a dog’s coat and the better he looks, the more likely it is that rain will pelt down and, worse, that in spite of extreme vigilance, the dog will somehow find a gigantic mud puddle and transfer its contents to his coat. The sky had not yet darkened. Not yet.

  I posted one of the flyers at the LaundroMutt. When we got home, Leah left on her bike—her bicycle, of course, not a Harley or the like—with some flyers to post in the Square, and I went to Loaves and Fishes for food shopping, made a beef stew to serve to Buck and Gabrielle the next evening, checked the guest room, and was just sitting down to squeeze in some work time when the phone rang.

  “Francie here.”

  I was elated. “Has Strike turned up?”

  “Sorry. No. No news at your end?”

  “Nothing. I’ve posted to a lot of lists. That’s the most effective thing to do. I’ve also started putting up flyers. The other thing would be to contact the owner and find out whether Strike headed for home, but when I asked about the owner, Mellie clammed up.”

  “I have no idea why. Mellie does do that, though.”

  “Maybe you could talk to her. She knows you, and she’s just met me. Among other things, the owner has a right to know what’s happened.”

  “It’s possible that Mellie made some kind of promise. She takes promises seriously. And concretely. Her universe is very black and white.”

  “But why would she…? Well, maybe. I guess it could be a divorce situation, a sort of custody battle, and one of the partners could’ve stashed the dog with Mellie. Would you see if you can find out? See if you can get Mellie to say anything.”

  “I’ll try, but I probably won’t get anywhere, especially with Mellie so anxious. After what happened to Zach’s house sitter.”

  “Is that Dr. Ho?”

  “Lovely man. One of Mellie’s mainstays. He’s the one who gave her the DVD player and set it up for her. He somehow managed to make it so simple that she can use it. I wish someone would do that for me! And he tracked down all those DVDs about dogs.”

  “I wondered,” I said. “She actually does know a lot about dogs. I wondered where she’d picked up the vocabulary.”

  “Well, that’s where. She watches those things all the time. Some Scandinavian earth mother. I don’t know.”

  “Turid Rugaas,” I said. “Does Dr. Ho have a dog?”

  “Fish. Except that the poor things are probably all dead now. That’s why he had this house sitter, really. He’d’ve been better off hiring Mellie, but he knew she’d have trouble. Something about different tanks on different days, and if you overfeed them, they die. And the truth is, I think he was reluctant to give her the responsibility. Not that Mellie would’ve particularly wanted to be responsible, either, not for that long. Three weeks. And he’s in Africa. It isn’t as if he could come running home if there were problems.”

  “So, Holly Winter, the other one, was…”

  “What?”

  “That woman and I have the same name. It’s very—”

  “She’s unidentified,” Francie said.

  “Are you sure? What about her car?”

  “What car?”

  “A little blue car. In the driveway. The parking space next to the house.”

  “That isn’t hers. It’s Zach’s.” Francie cleared her throat. “We think, uh, the neighbors think…” She paused. “Zach has a little weakness.”

  “For cars? That one didn’t look—”

  “No, not cars. He has an eye for the ladies, so to speak.”

  “He got one of his girlfriends to house-sit? I don’t see that that’s—”

  “He hadn’t necessarily known her for very long.” Hesitantly, she added, “Meaning for more than a few hours. He, uh…”

  “He picks up women,” I said. “At bars? Clubs?”

  Francie laughed. “Not at all! We think his favorite place is Loaves and Fishes. You know those tables at the front? He buys sushi and then…”

  “He picks up women at a health food supermarket? That’s—”

  “Zach is very attractive. Charming. Very appealing. Why he…well, I have no idea. But he does.”

  “Maybe he likes his women well nourished,” I said.

  After a moment’s silence, Francie said, “I think I consider that a sexist remark.”

  “Not at all. The preference must extend both ways. The women are presumably picking him up, too. For all we know, they lurk at the sushi counter and trail after him. Or it’s a process of perfect equality. The raw fish acts as an aphrodisiac on both sexes alike, and whatever happens after that is strictly between consenting adults.” I paused. “Unless, of course, one of them ends up dead.”

  CHAPTER 9

  Kevin Dennehy’s gigantic appetite helps to account for his horrible taste in restaurants. He loves any place that dishes out mammoth portions. If he were served a plate heaped with garbage, he’d be perfectly happy as long as there was lots and lots of garbage, especially if it contained very few green vegetables. My dogs love vegetables, but life with malamutes has accustomed me to Kevin’s general attitude. I have often thought that instead of training my dogs with liver, cheese, and beef, I could use eggshells and coffee grounds. The dogs would get sick, but before they did, they’d work as hard as they do now. Consequently, it’s easy for me to resign myself to allowing Kevin to decide where we eat. The occasion has seldom arisen since he started going out with Jennifer Pasquarelli, whom he did not, I might mention, pick up over sushi at Loaves and Fishes. Still, she is exceptionally well nourished, at once buxom and trim. When they eat out, Jennifer drags Kevin to Asian restaurants an
d forces him to eat vegetables with foreign names. Jennifer is a Newton, Massachusetts, police officer, and she and Kevin met on the job. Actually, she was in trouble then because of her rude behavior to a Newton taxpayer, and Kevin was free this Friday night because she was in similar trouble once again. Specifically, when summoned to investigate a typical suburban crime, namely, the theft of a Mercedes-Benz hood ornament, Jennifer told the citizen to trade in his “goddamned status symbol” for a Ford or a Chevy and quit bothering the police about trivia. So, for at least the second time, Jennifer had been packed off to a training course on developing social skills for effective community law enforcement, and Kevin was free to pig out on meat.

  The restaurant he selected was one of his better choices, by which I mean that it did not have the reputation of giving its patrons food poisoning. It was a chain eatery in a big converted warehouse. The interior space was barnlike. The decor was based on rough wood and dead animals—rustic beams, deer heads, moose heads, stuffed pheasants—but the booths were cozy, the service was friendly, and the menu was extensive. The offerings did not, oddly enough, include venison, mooseburgers, or game birds, but there wasn’t an Asian dish among them, and the vegetarian items were in the pasta section and contained only what Kevin deems “normal” vegetables, that is, tomatoes and the like, and not bok choy, Chinese cabbage, or wild mushrooms. I ordered a Caesar salad and fettuccine Alfredo. Kevin went for a double portion of deep-fried mozzarella sticks to be followed by a sixteen-ounce steak with french fries. He was driving, so he had Coke instead of beer, but I had a glass of Merlot that wasn’t half bad.

  One of the appeals of the restaurant, from Kevin’s viewpoint, was the fast service. The drinks had appeared immediately, and we’d barely ordered the food when the server returned with our appetizers. I took the arrival of my salad and Kevin’s mozzarella sticks as a signal that he’d finally discuss the murder with me. On the way to dinner, he’d refused to say anything about it. His excuse had been that there were things he wanted me to look at, and when he’d parked his car, he’d retrieved a briefcase from the backseat and carried it in with him.

  After devouring a mozzarella stick, he shifted his briefcase from the floor to the seat of the booth, pulled out a sheaf of papers, and placed them on the table. “These are photocopies,” he said, as if to assure me that he hadn’t broken any rules about absconding with evidence. It struck me that he looked less like a gorilla than usual. The briefcase was one source of the impression. Also, he was wearing a khaki suit, a white shirt, and a flowered tie in colors that picked up the red of his hair and freckles, and the blue of his eyes. Non-ape colors: khaki, red, blue. And from the front, you couldn’t see that the suit jacket was stretched taut over his back and shoulders.

  “Am I allowed to look at them?” I ate some romaine, which was covered with hard granules of cheese. “Right side up?”

  “That’s why I brought them.”

  “This is my phone bill. Electric bill. Bank statement. I keep meaning to tell the bank to stop sending paper statements. I do all my banking online. Where did you get these?” I should explain that when Steve and I got married, he moved in with me, I kept my original name, and I didn’t bother to inform the utility companies of our union, so many of the household bills were addressed only to me. “What happened? The trash people rejected my recycling for some reason, and…?” Cambridge trash and recycling regulations are fierce and are fiercely enforced. You can be ticketed for putting out improperly prepared recyclables. The city doesn’t yet respond to violations of the trash rules by hauling away our bins and barrels, but I fully expect it to happen. But photocopying the offending papers and turning the matter over to the police? Too much even for Cambridge. “What’s going on?”

  Kevin was on his second plate of mozzarella sticks. He swallowed, wiped his hands, and again reached into the briefcase.

  “Kevin, if you intend to show me one of those horrible death photos, I don’t want to see it. I saw that poor woman once. That was more than enough.” I ate a little salad and added, “But, okay, I didn’t see her face. Apparently she’s not the other Holly Winter. Someone told me she was unidentified. If you really need to know whether I recognize her, I can do it.”

  What the photograph showed wasn’t a woman at all. I studied it closely. It was an eight-by-ten print with sharp focus and excellent detail.

  “Tell me about him,” Kevin said.

  “Her. Female. I’m all but positive. She’s a malamute. You knew that.”

  “I figured.”

  “She’s a breeder dog. Show lines.” A breeder dog: a dog from a reputable kennel rather than from a backyard breeder, a pet shop, or one of those ghastly Web sites that are nothing more than cyber pet shops. “Where did you get this?”

  “All this stuff,” Kevin said. “All of it was in Dr. Ho’s house.”

  “My utility bills? And a picture of a blue malamute? That’s what she is. Blue. The color is rare. It’s the rarest malamute color. It’s distinctive and unusual. I know she doesn’t look sky blue, but that’s what this color is called.”

  “Gray.”

  “This shade of gray is called blue. Like Russian blue cats, okay? It’s called blue. Take a look at the pigment on her nose. In my dogs, it’s black. Hers is slate gray. Or blueberry, except that it’s more gray than blueberries really are. And her eyes are light. It’s a little hard to see in the picture, but they’re not the dark brown you’re used to seeing. She’s a blue malamute. I’ve never seen her before. And I’d remember. I’ve seen pictures of blue malamutes, but I’ve actually seen only a few of them. The first one I ever saw belonged to a really nice man named Jim Hamilton. Jim died a few years ago. His wife, Phyllis, is a top breeder, and she has blue in her lines. Anyway, Jim had a dog called Steely Dan, and at shows, people always wanted to see the blue malamute, and Jim was always good about going out of his way to—”

  The server removed Kevin’s empty plate, left my half-eaten salad, and presented us with our main courses. I belatedly realized that my fettuccine Alfredo would contain the same flavorless cheese granules that were in the salad, as proved to be the case, but melting had improved the cheese, and the pasta was less mushy than I expected. Kevin’s steak looked big enough to feed six people. It was served on a platter and accompanied by a bushel or two of french fries.

  “You want some?” he asked.

  “Far be it from me to take food away from a growing boy. Anyway, this is a blue malamute, but I don’t think that Phyllis Hamilton bred her. She doesn’t quite have the look of Phyllis’s dogs. Phyllis’s dogs have small ears, not that these are all that big, and Phyllis’s dogs have plenty of facial markings, more than this. Do you know anything about her?”

  “Nope.”

  “And my utility bills? My bank statement? These are recent. I’m not sure when I threw this stuff out. Just before Labor Day? Kevin, I don’t like that.”

  “That was what made ’em think she was you.”

  “Who is she? You must know by now. What’s all the secrecy about?”

  “We don’t know much yet, but, yeah, she’s unidentified. There was a purse there, but it’d been emptied. No cash, no ID in it, junk dumped out. Lipsticks, empty wallet. The neighbors say that this Dr. Ho had a house sitter lined up, and the guy backed out at the last minute. He didn’t want to leave it empty because of the plants and the fish.”

  “Fish,” I said. “I can never quite get that. They’re pretty. But why keep pets that don’t love you back? Anyway, speaking of fish, I heard that Dr. Ho picks up women at Loaves and Fishes. The neighbors think that’s what happened.”

  Kevin shrugged. “No luck reaching him.”

  “He’s in Africa. That’s what I heard. What else was in the house? What else that belonged to the woman, I mean.”

  “Stuff in the name of Holly Winter.” Kevin is not normally laconic. He was working away at the steak and trying not to talk with his mouth full.

  “Kevin, you just showed me th
at. What else?”

  “The other one, too.”

  I helped myself to a french fry. “The other Holly Winter? There were things of hers there, too?”

  Kevin nodded.

  “Bills and stuff from her trash? Kevin, look, this whole situation is weird for me. Could you please give the steak a rest and talk to me?”

  He put down his knife and fork, wiped his mouth, and looked me in the eye. “It looks like someone got into the other one’s apartment. She was in England for the summer. Lah-di-dah. She just got back on Tuesday. And she left a key hidden where nobody’d ever guess. You got it: under the doormat. You see, the way it works is that the world’s divided in two, the smart and stupid, and the way you tell the smart ones, they’re at Harvard, and it’s a whole other world there, so—”

  “She went to England for the summer and left her key under the doormat? What did she expect? Harvard. I thought she had some connection with Harvard.”

  “ABD. Does that mean something to you?”

  “All but dissertation. In what?”

  “Statistics. She works, too. Teaches a course. Consults, whatever that means. And she knows this Dr. Ho. They’re not friends. She says they know each other from some group that hates Superman. What’s wrong with Superman?”

  “It’s not just Superman, Kevin. It’s media characters in general.”

  “I gotta tell you, Holly, you’re being a lot nicer about this than she is. Wants to know everything, wants to see everything, wants action. She’s wicked pissed.”

  “At a woman who had the misfortune to be murdered? Well, I don’t exactly like it that the woman went through my trash, but she obviously got a lot worse than she deserved. Kevin, is all this about identity theft? Because I don’t think my identity’s been stolen. I do all my banking online. I keep a close eye on everything, and there hasn’t been anything suspicious.”

  “Checked your credit lately?”

  “No. But I will. Kevin, did she say anything about the guy on the motorcycle? The one I told you about. Adam. Did he show up at her house?”