A Whisky, Tango & Foxtrot Mystery 04 - A Deadly Tail

by Dixie Lyle

  That turned out to be surprisingly easy; we just closed the window, opened the door, and had Whiskey usher him inside. “I’ll jam something into the frame from the outside for now,” Caroline said. “Until I can install something a little more permanent.”

  “I’d suggest a cell in low-earth orbit, except I’m pretty sure Oswald would be the first ostrich in history to figure out how to fly. And to invent heat-shielding made from feathers and bird poop.”

  “Speaking of escapees … I’ve figured out how the honey badger has been getting out. He went old-school—World War Two POW, in fact.”

  “A tunnel, you mean? But—from where? I couldn’t see any evidence of digging.”

  “Inside the burrow. Down, then out about twenty feet away, under a hedge.”

  “What? There’s a foot of concrete under that burrow!”

  “I know. But honey badgers are strong, persistent, and have impressive claws. I mean, I’m impressed.”

  “The Great Escape, honey-badger-style,” I murmured. “Wait—in the movie, they came up with clever ways to hide the dirt from their digging. How did the badger do it?”

  “As near as I can figure, he ate it.” She shrugged. “I should have noticed, I know. But he consumed it in small enough quantities that it didn’t cause a significant change in the appearance of his droppings.”

  “So what are you going to do?”

  “I’ve moved him into a temporary cage. We’ll have to dig up the floor, put in a layer of steel—not mesh, actual steel—and put earth over it. If he can dig through that, I say we give him a cape and let him go.”

  “Works for me.”

  I told Caroline I’d get some estimates for contractors to do the work on the pen, then collected Whiskey and headed back toward the house. Two crises dealt with already, and I hadn’t even made it in the front door yet. But now I had a new item on my agenda: talk to Yemane Fikru and find out what sort of deal—if any—the possibly-late Maurice Rolvink had tried to make with him.

  Once I was actually inside, I made my usual rounds: to the kitchen, first, to make sure breakfast was going fine. Ben met me at the door with a kiss, which is also part of my rounds. Priorities, you know.

  “No Tango?” I said, glancing around. “She’s usually here patrolling for renegade bacon.”

  “Haven’t seen her for a while,” Ben said. “She bolted down her breakfast, muttered something about a casting call, and vanished.”

  “Well, this should be interesting,” I said. I told Ben about the argument my partners had last night and Tango’s claim.

  Ben grinned. “A movie, huh? With ghost actors? How’s she planning on filming it?”

  “Beats me. Maybe she’s got connections with the ghost of Stanley Kubrick’s cat.”

  Ben shook his head. “Just when I think this place can’t get any stranger…”

  “Speaking of stranger,” I said, “how’s class going?” Ben was undergoing tutoring in some of the finer points of being a Thunderbird by Teresa Firstcharger, a fellow weather elemental. Most of the instruction took place in Thunderspace, a mystic dimension where time passed differently, which was convenient when you needed to cram for finals and suddenly five minutes turned into a day and a half. Ben usually went first thing every morning, which meant he’d already put in a full day before putting on his apron. That might sound exhausting, but Ben told me being in Thunderspace charged him up; he always felt great after spending some time there.

  “Didn’t go today,” Ben said. “Teresa’s taking some time off. Got a big First Nations conference coming up and needs to focus. Gave me homework to keep me busy while she’s gone, though.”

  “Oh? Let me guess—a ten-thousand-word essay on the history of weather vanes and how they influenced the design of early-nineteenth-century roofs.”

  “Nope. She wants me to work on my landings.”

  “Your landings? Is there something wrong halfway up your staircase?” I glanced down. “Hmmm. Hard to tell. Could be banister rot.”

  “No, I mean my actual landings. When I’m, you know…”

  “A big bird?”

  “You know I hate it when you call me that.”

  “Oooh. Not a big bird, more of a grouch. Your garbage can leaking again?”

  “So, references to Sesame Street are your preferred method of flirting?”

  “Only when I’m semi-serious. If I’m really into a guy, I’ll drop some heavy Muppet Show innuendo.”

  Ben started cracking eggs into a large steel bowl. “That reminds me of a joke. What’s green and—”

  I held a finger up to his lips. “Stop. I’ve heard that joke and it’s disgusting. Also highly inappropriate in the vicinity of bacon.”

  “Bacon?” said Catree, walking through the back door with her steel mug in one hand. “Yes, please. Unless I’m being highly inappropriate, in which case pretty please. With extra bacon on top.”

  “Hey, Catree,” I said. “I’m working on the front-lawn problem, I promise.”

  She spotted a carafe of coffee and filled her mug. “I’m sure you are. But don’t rush on my account; I’m getting paid for my time regardless. And I think our producer is past caring—I just hope his last check clears.”

  I frowned. “You really think the body I found is his?”

  “Let’s see. They’re having trouble IDing it, so it must be mutilated pretty bad. That pretty much fits in with the fantasies of everyone who ever met the man, so chances are good. Plus, I’m an optimist.”

  “Doesn’t sound like he was real popular,” said Ben.

  “Maybe among invertebrates. I think he must have been part slug, because mostly what he produced was slime. There’s a school of thought that leans more toward the snail side—some sort of metaphor about the shell and callousness—but I never bought into that. Nope, garden-variety slug all the way.”

  “You’re obviously not worried about being blamed for his death,” I said.

  “Or am I?” she asked, trying to look mysterious. “Maybe I’m trying to deflect suspicion by pointing out the obvious. Maybe I’m so confident in my evil scheme I can openly proclaim my loathing. Maybe I know there are so many people who feel the same I’ll just disappear into the crowd. Or maybe I’m just really, really impulsive and unable to keep my mouth shut.”

  “I won’t tell if you won’t,” I said. I grabbed a muffin from the counter and took a bite. “Seriously, he couldn’t have been that universally hated.”

  Catree shook her head. “You didn’t know the guy. I think even Natalia despised him, and she was sleeping with him. If that corpse turns out to be someone else, I’ll bet you a vat of coffee and a grilled cheese sandwich Rolvink killed him to fake his own death and skipped the country with every dollar he could embezzle.”

  Ben looked puzzled. “A grilled cheese sandwich?”

  “Hey, I love grilled cheese sandwiches.”

  I leaned on the counter and took another bite of the muffin. “How about the director? Rolvink’s financing his project—Lucky can’t bear him too much ill will.”

  “No? Word is, Rolvink really screwed him on the financial end. If this film makes any money, it’ll all go into Maurice’s pocket. If it doesn’t—well, I heard Lucky put up his house as collateral for some of the financing. Been in his family for generations.”

  “And if Rolvink goes missing?”

  Catree shrugged. “Depends on if the money went missing, too. If Rolvink just drops dead, the production goes ahead—believe it or not, this isn’t the first time something like this has happened in the movie biz, and the contracts have evolved to deal with every possibility. These days the apocalypse could occur and there’d be multiple clauses on how each and every facet would affect production: If the party of the first part is raptured, all agreements between the licensee and the guarantor shall still be valid, unless the party of the second part is killed by a plague of frogs. And so on.”

  Interesting. Even if Rolvink was dead, the movie wasn’t. Like the zo
mbies it was portraying, it would lurch along until someone came along and shot it in the head. Or it ate them.

  Okay, maybe it wasn’t that much like a zombie.

  “Well, this is pleasant, but I have to get to work,” I said. I gave Ben a kiss, Catree a wave, and strode away while pulling out my phone. Whiskey, as usual, trotted along behind me.

  “You’re being quiet,” I said to Whiskey as we headed for my office. “You didn’t even chime in when I mentioned Tango’s new project to Ben. I thought for sure you’d have a few choice comments to make.”

  He sniffed. [You thought incorrectly. Dogs prefer to confront an opponent honestly, rather than talking about them behind their back. Human beings have an idiom for doing such a thing, I believe; you call it being catty.]

  “Which, ironically enough, you’re sort of doing right now by pointing that out.”

  He gave me one of those worried looks dogs do so well. [That was not my intention.]

  “Don’t worry about it, doggy. I’m just yanking your chain.”

  [I’m not wearing a chain. Or a collar, for that matter.]

  I sighed. “Never mind. Let’s just—”

  I stopped dead. Farther down the hall, blocked by police tape, was the bombed room. That was still off limits, but the other rooms had been cleared for use.

  Including the room next to Natalia’s, the one Rolvink had been staying in.

  “Whiskey, have you ever had an idea so obvious that when you thought of it, you immediately felt stupid because you didn’t think of it earlier?”

  He considered this. [No.]

  “Well, prepare for a new experience. Maybe the police are having a hard time telling whether or not that corpse belongs to Maurice Rolvink, but you could tell in an instant.”

  [That’s true—if I’d ever met the man. You were keeping me locked up in the office, remember?] That accusing look was back on his face again.

  “Let’s try not to dwell on the past. You may not have met him before—but you can still meet his stuff.” I walked toward the door of Rolvink’s room, pulling out my master key as I went.

  Whiskey didn’t follow. I glanced back and saw that he was still standing there, the oddest expression on his face: it’s hard to describe, but I’m going to go with confused embarrassment as opposed to embarrassed confusion. “Whiskey?”

  [Foxtrot. That reaction you mentioned a moment ago?]

  “Yes?”

  [I believe I’m having it.]

  I grinned. “Don’t take it too hard. We had a bombing right on top of finding a corpse; that tends to tax the crisis-management protocols. You wind up paying so much attention to the actual emergency and its aftermath that anything not stamped URGENT in bright-red letters gets shuffled aside for later. My brain just informed me that now is, in fact, later.”

  [So it is. Shall we?]

  I unlocked the door and opened it. “After you, my dear bloodhound.”

  [That won’t be necessary. My current nose is more than enough to identify a simple human scent.]

  A brief word about Whiskey’s olfactory abilities, and that word is phenomenal—which, at four syllables, isn’t brief at all. But it is accurate, and not just because his talent at shape-shifting also grants him the skills of the breed he’s emulating. No, what’s really amazing is his access to a supernatural library of smells, an olfactory repository that holds every aroma and odor ever experienced by any dog’s nose, ever. It’s an awfully handy—or nosy, I guess—tool if you’re an investigative sort. Which we definitely are.

  Whiskey paused at the threshold and took a first, tentative sniff. [Hmm. Still a lot of charred wood in the air, but I think I detect something familiar…]

  “Inside,” I said, softly but urgently. “I don’t want any nice police officers wandering out and seeing us being all Sherlocky.”

  [Very well.] He stepped into the room and I stepped after him, closing the door behind me.

  Whiskey immediately went to the suitcase lying open on the bed. He jumped up and sniffed at the clothes. [Yes. These were worn by the man whose body we found. His scent is all over this room.]

  So Maurice Rolvink was dead. But who killed him—and how?

  8.

  While we were there, we did a quick search of the room for anything that might tell us more. The police had already done that, of course, and about all we learned that they didn’t know was the brand of Natalia’s perfume.

  [There’s not much of it, though,] Whiskey reported. [I don’t believe she spent much time here.]

  So if what Catree told me was true, Rolvink and Natalia went to Natalia’s room for their little trysts as opposed to the producer’s. That said something about their relationship; Rolvink wasn’t letting her get too close. They may have been sleeping together, but they weren’t exactly a couple.

  We slipped out of the room, locking it behind us, and continued on to my office. I had some thinking to do.

  “Let me bounce a few things off you,” I said to Whiskey once I was seated behind my desk and he had taken his usual spot (well, usual when Tango wasn’t occupying it) on the sofa.

  [Please don’t. Just because I’m made of ectoplasm doesn’t mean I don’t feel pain. Also, it seems rather pointless.]

  “Don’t be so literal. I meant ideas, doofus.”

  [Carry on.]

  I squinted at him suspiciously. My dog’s ability to grasp human idioms is not exactly consistent, and seems to vary depending on his mood. He’s not the only one with a chain that gets yanked.

  “Okay. We know Rolvink wasn’t a popular guy. If he was killed by the one of the guests, as opposed to our resident bee-poop eater slash bodysnatcher, then we might not be looking at a single murder—we might be looking at two murder attempts, only one of which succeeded.”

  [But Rolvink was already dead when the bomb went off.]

  “Yes. Which suggests that the two killers may have been working independently, neither one aware of the other’s plans. One plants a bomb and sets it to go off when they think Rolvink will be in Natalia’s room, while the other actually stalks and kills Rolvink.”

  [A man so despised that people are competing to eliminate him? Perhaps.]

  “There are other possibilities, of course. The killer sets the explosive, then learns that Rolvink won’t be there when he’s supposed to and kills him in person, instead.”

  [And the bomb?]

  I shrugged. “Maybe the killer can’t get back in the room. Maybe they hate both Natalia and Rolvink and always planned to kill both of them. Maybe…”

  [Maybe they suffered a blackout and forgot they’d planted a bomb in the first place.]

  I raised my eyebrows in disbelief. “Seriously? Come on. First of all, Keene’s not even a suspect—what’s his motive? Second of all, planting a bomb takes planning and precision—it’s not the kind of thing you do while wired out of your skull.”

  [But turning the front lawn into an obstacle course is?]

  “Yes, actually. One shows poor impulse control and a touch of manic delusion, while the other is obsessive, sociopathic, and violent. Which, weirdly enough, is also a pretty good description of the two basic kinds of serial killers: disorganized and organized.”

  He put his head down on his paws. [That still doesn’t explain what that monstrosity is or why he built it.]

  “Well, maybe we can figure it out. Deductive reasoning, right? It’s what we’re good at.”

  [I see little reason in Keene’s creation, or in trying to understand it.]

  “You never can tell what’s important in a mystery, Whiskey. You have to pay attention to all the information, especially the stuff that doesn’t make sense. More often than not, that’s what solves the case.”

  [Let’s get back to the bomb. What do we know about it?]

  “Well, let’s see. I got a good look at the room before the police closed everything off, and it looked like the bomb was on the mantelpiece, just over the fireplace.” I frowned. “No, wait. That’s not quite
right. There were bricks all over the room. If the bomb had been on the mantel, the bricks would have been blown backward, into the chimney itself. I mean, I’m no explosives expert, but doesn’t that make sense?”

  [I suppose. Wouldn’t they have fallen through to a lower fireplace as well?]

  “Yes, and that didn’t happen. Lots of soot and ash blasted through, but no bricks. Which can only mean one thing.”

  [The bomb was in the chimney.]

  “And that gives us a timeline. The night before the big boom it was cold, and the fireplaces on both the first and second floors had blazes in them. That means the bomb had to be placed afterward, late enough that the fires were out and before the next morning.”

  [Obviously. Which means someone gained access to Cardoso’s room in the middle of the night.]

  I nodded. “And was able to do so without waking her up—or maybe because they knew she wouldn’t be there.”

  [Which raises many questions, but answers none of them.]

  I leaned back in my chair. “Yeah, but at least we have a starting point. We need to find out if any of the guests were out of their rooms during the night.”

  [Well, we already know one was. We even know what he was doing, though not why.]

  “You’re right. And if anyone was likely to have seen something in the wee hours, it’s the guy that was hauling exercise equipment out of the storage room at three AM…”

  * * *

  We found Keene in a little nook just off the dining room, clutching a cup of tea and staring blankly out at his handiwork. He wore a pair of rumpled red silk pajamas, oversized plush slippers in the same color, and the beginnings of a wispy beard. He glanced blearily at me when I pulled up a chair and sat down next to him. “Not you again,” he said.

  “Good morning to you, too. Don’t worry, I’ve dialed the cheerfulness down a few notches. How are you feeling?”

  “Like I just slept for sixteen hours but forgot to lie down.”

  “Ouch. Well, now that you’ve seen your creation again for the very first time, what do you think? Anything coming back to you?”

  He took a slow sip of tea and considered the view. Looked all the way to the right, winced, then looked to the left. “Huh. Is that an inflatable walrus?”