A Bite of Death

by Susan Conant

  "She's read the file."

  "That's what I think. In Joel's file on Donna Zalewski, it says she's using Sinequan. Or maybe had used it. And Kelly knows about Arsenault because Joel does. Joel knows all about him and really hates him. I mean, not personally, I guess, but hates how irresponsible he is. So Kelly did exactly what I did. She made an appointment. He saw her right away. He gave her a whopping prescription with a lot of refills."

  "And?"

  "And she opens the capsules, takes the powder inside or maybe dissolves the whole thing, and somehow gets it into something in Donna's milk box. I don't know what. I don't know how. And since Donna's taking it, anyway, and since she's more than a little flaky, it works, just as planned."

  "Except for Elaine Walsh."

  "Exactly. Elaine doesn't stop. So Kelly does a repeat performance. Why not? It worked the first time. Only, of course, Elaine wasn't taking Sinequan, and she wasn't suicidal, and she wasn't writing any letters. My guess is that Kelly hoped it would somehow look like suicide, mostly because she'd have known that Elaine would be depressed about losing a patient. I mean, she'd have known how hard therapists take that. But you know what I think? I think maybe Kelly didn't know how else to murder someone. It's as simple as that. It was the only way she'd ever done it, and it had worked fine that time. Anyway, what happened the second time, with Elaine, is what makes me think it was Kelly, not Joel. Listen."

  "I am." He lay down, shoved Rowdy gently to the edge of the mattress, and stretched.

  "That time, we know for sure what the stuff was in, right? Cottage cheese. And also, we know it was mixed in. It wasn't just sprinkled on top because there were traces of it in the empty carton. Okay? So there are two possibilities. One, she goes to Elaine's, opens the milk box, takes the top off the carton, puts the stuff in, and pulls out a spoon and stirs it up."

  Steve looked skeptical.

  "Right," I said. "So the likely scenario is this. She orders cottage cheese from Pleasant Valley. So does Elaine. I'm not sure how Kelly knows, but she does. Anyway, Kelly takes her own carton, doctors it up at home, and when she gets to Elaine's, all she has to do is substitute it. That's all. Open the milk box, take out Elaine's, put hers in. It'd take a couple of seconds."

  "Hold it," Steve said. "Why is she messing around with someone's milk box?"

  "That's one reason it was Kelly," I said. "Because she's the one who walks the dogs. There's a leash law, right? And she always has Tuck on leash. But not Nip. He just sort of ambles along with her. He doesn't really need to be on leash. I know that all dogs belong on leash if they're within a mile of a street. I agree, but she doesn't. Anyway, she carries a leash for him, but he's usually wandering around. So if she's on Elaine's porch? Or, for that matter, Donna's? Well, it's because her dog has gone onto someone's porch, and all she's doing is getting him back. And not only that, she's stopping him from raiding the milk box. It's the perfect excuse. And, of course, the other thing is, she walks those dogs everywhere. All the time. She's like the mailman. Nobody wonders why she's anywhere because she's always around, walking the dogs."

  "Doesn't he ever do it?"

  "He probably does, once in a while. And on weekends, they both do. They walk them together. But we don't get milk delivered on weekends, not on our route. I'm on the same one. And Joel is working during the week. He's seeing clients. She isn't. She's walking the dogs. Cooking. Doing all the domestic stuff."

  "So why not both of them? Even if she's the one who made the delivery, so to speak."

  "I'm telling you, it's possible. But she could have done it alone, and he couldn't, also because of the way their kitchen is. It's not a normal kitchen. It's fantastically ordered, like a lesson in domestic science or something. Everything in the freezer and the refrigerator is listed. It's all posted on the outside. If he'd snatched something out of there, she'd have probably noticed. But if she'd taken the cottage cheese . . . ? Look, it's morning. He goes to see his clients. She doctors up the cottage cheese, takes it to Elaine's, substitutes it, comes home, and pops Elaine's cottage cheese in their refrigerator. He wouldn't have known."

  Steve nodded.

  "But Joel? Suddenly, he shows up in the kitchen, grabs a fresh carton of cottage cheese, runs off with it, mixes in some Sinequan, and announces to Kelly that he's taking the dogs for a little stroll?"

  "She could've been out somewhere."

  "Absolutely. It is possible. That's why I'm trying to think it out. But the point is, it would've been easy for her, harder for him. And look. This is not a couple that believes in doing everything fifty-fifty. Some couples have two phones because otherwise they fight about how to divide up the phone bill, and if you call the wife at the husband's number, he won't get her and makes you call hers, and vice versa, right? Well, that's exactly what they're not like."

  "Yeah, but wouldn't he have guessed something was up?"

  "Well, of course he would. He had to know. I don't know that he necessarily knew about Donna. But he had to know about Elaine. I mean, he couldn't possibly have believed that that was just a coincidence. From his point of view, it would've been absolutely too good to be true. He had to figure it out. But what was he supposed to do? That's why he didn't challenge me. That's why he looked proud of himself. Kelly is his wife."

  "They're both women," Steve said flatly.

  "Not to each other. That's why she killed Elaine. And Donna. Or why they both did. They just wanted to stay who they are."

  "So do I," he said. He sat up, took Rowdy's collar, led him into an exam room, and shut the door. Then he came back to the mattress. "And we're not both women."

  24

  At about five a.m., my heart moved from my chest to my bandaged hand, where it pounded me awake. The airless corridor stank in equal parts of sick dogs and healthy people. Without disturbing Steve, I retrieved my clothes and felt my way to the door to Kimi's sickroom. The early morning light of a bleak, gray day was coming through the windows as I pulled on my jeans and sweatshirt, but no morning is ever entirely bleak and gray when you own a good dog. Kimi did her best to struggle to her feet, made it, shook herself, wagged her long, lovely tail, and wooed softly to me. I opened her cage and let her loose. She was wobbly on her feet, but her spirits were restored.

  "Something tells me there's no breakfast for you today," I whispered to her. "Sorry."

  I knelt down, and she did her best to get her forepaws around my neck. I had to help her. Then she scoured my face with her wet tongue. Rowdy, who could sense serious competition for my affection even in his sleep, whammed open the swinging door, barged in, and shoved her out of the way.

  "Gentle," I told him softly. "Be gentle. Go easy."

  I heard Steve mumbling something.

  Kneeling on the floor, with my hand pounding, my clothes dirty, my breath foul, and my face early-morning greasy and dog-lick shiny, I felt grubby and oddly clear-headed. I owned the two most beautiful dogs on earth. They were gentle, affectionate, intelligent, and still alive. Their safety freed my anger. Did I have to know which of the Bakers had almost killed them before I did something about it? If I'd almost died, would either of them have stopped to gather information, ponder, and debate? Alaskan malamutes don't necessarily start fights. But they never, ever run away from them, either. I hadn't started anything. Why should I run away? Why should I wait? Imagine an Alaskan malamute giving someone twenty-four hours. The right person? A malamute wouldn't have cared either way. Mostly, though, a malamute wouldn't have delayed for what I suddenly saw as the central reason I'd been so understanding, so compassionate, so timid: A malamute bitch wouldn't have been afraid to confront another female. Malamutes are genuinely unprejudiced, and when they judge, entirely impartial. Unafraid of their own strength, the bitches do not hesitate to take on one another.

  My hand hurt like all hell, but the pounding felt more like anger than like pain, the insistent surging of my own strength. But my mind was lucid. No one else had played fair, not Donna, not Elaine, not the Ba
kers.

  An hour later, I was parking the Bronco on Lakeview in front of Joel and Kelly Baker's house. My hair was still wet from a quick shower at home. Something had made me wear black: black jeans, a black cotton turtleneck, a black sweater. In the bathroom mirror, my scrubbed face had looked as white as if I'd powdered it with talc, and I'd left it that way. I felt stark and thin. I wasn't smiling.

  The day was so cold that ice crystals must have formed in my hair by the time I reached the Bakers' front door, and if I hadn't been wearing gloves, my good hand would have lost a chunk of flesh on the wrought-iron door knocker. I rapped it hard. There was a doorbell, too, but chimes would have felt like the wrong music.

  Nip and Tuck understood my intentions. When they heard the iron knocker hammering on the pretty yellow door, they must have dashed toward it. I could hear them right on the other side. Rhodesian Ridgebacks were bred to hunt big game and to guard the house. There may be breeds that growl more loudly or deeply than Ridgebacks, but none I've ever heard can growl more menacingly than those African lion hounds. When mastiffs, bullmastiffs, and Rottweilers growl, it fits. They look tough and sound tough. Ridgebacks? They're quiet, peaceful dogs, strong and elegant—except for that blood-chilling contrabass that starts deep in the abdomen, rolls and builds in the throat, and hones itself to sharp thunder as it passes through a Ridgeback's jaws. I'm not afraid of dogs, but at the sound of that roar, my heart traveled back to my chest, where it had room to double in size and pound until my ears rang. And I finally understood the fit between the Bakers and their dogs. Rhodesian Ridgebacks are not always what they seem.

  I've never known whether Kelly Baker expected me or not. When she opened the door, she had a hand around Nip's collar, and the big, beautiful dog was glaring at me and still growling softly. Tuck, the bitch, echoed him as she paced nervously behind Kelly.

  "Dogs," I said. "I've been thinking a lot about dogs this morning. I've been meditating on the subject of dogs and deceit."

  "Come in," she said. "The dogs won't hurt you." The fine skin on her face was even paler than mine, except for the dark purple marks under her eyes. She was wearing a flour-spotted blue denim apron and under it, a light peach jogging suit with stained cuffs.

  "I know," I said, and somehow I felt confident that it was true. Even with my stitched and bandaged hand pulsating out proof that a dog would, in fact, bite me, I wasn't afraid of them. I was afraid of her and frightened of confronting her, much more frightened than I'd been of Joel, more frightened than I still was of him.

  The front hall, like the kitchen it led to, had the kind of red-brown Welsh tile that my own kitchen linoleum is meant to simulate until I can afford the real thing. A newly refinished Victorian coatrack stood in a corner, with a couple of Kelly's bright parkas suspended from its hooks and a collection of hats and mittens layered on a little shelf at the top. The coatrack dwarfed Kelly, as I did myself, and, as always, the two big, muscular dogs made a dramatic foil for her tiny, conventional femininity. A little table in the hall held out-of-season paperwhites in a delicately painted cachepot. The half-rotten odor of the forced spring flowers mixed weirdly with the wholesome smell of fresh bread.

  Kelly pulled Nip toward the kitchen, and Tuck trailed after them, eyeing me as I followed her. An industrial-size mixer equipped with a bread hook stood on one of the cherry counters. White dough coated the hook, and a broad, wide floured pastry board sat next to the machine. On another cutting board were arrayed four perfect, oversize blood oranges, one already peeled and cut into slices, and a white-handled knife with a narrow, finely serrated, razor-thin blade. A tiny red light glowed on the restaurant range; the oven was on. A futuristic machine that wasn't a Mr. Coffee made dripping sounds and smelled like French roast. Kelly had been cooking a normal breakfast. No, an ideal breakfast. The best coffee. Perfect oranges. Home-baked bread.

  "You want to sit down?" Kelly let go of the dog's collar and waved her hand toward a high stool at the granite island in the middle of the kitchen. The dogs had stopped growling, and both lay down on the tile. "I won't offer you anything to eat."

  "That's good," I said. "Don't." But I sat on the stool. On the granite in front of me was an array of five-by-eight blue-lined index cards. Embossed in red at the two upper corners of each card were tiny, stylized pictures of flowers, and, between the flowers, also embossed in red, were the words "From the Kitchen of Kelly Baker." One of the cards showed a neatly scripted recipe for raisin pumpernickel bread. Some of the cards were blank. I rested my elbows on the granite and tucked my chin into my good hand. "You got my message," I added.

  She edged the oven door open and peered in. Then she turned toward me, let her arms fall helpless to her sides, and started to cry.

  "You have to understand that no one does something like this to my dogs," I said. "No one. No one hurts them. You can't do it to them, and you can't do it to me. I don't know why you ever thought you could. And stop crying. Where the hell is Joel?"

  She ran a hand over her face and wiped both hands on the apron. "In his office. He's been up all night."

  "Doing what?"

  "Writing up his cases, every one of them. He says he's referring everyone, and he needs to have something to give to the therapists he refers to. He always does that whenever he makes a referral. He doesn't just hand out names and tell people to try calling."

  "How responsible of him," I said.

  "It is!" For the first time, she sounded angry. "Most therapists just give people a couple of names. They never even bother to call the therapists to see if they have time or if they're interested."

  "He's a perfect little model of ethical conduct, isn't he?" I said.

  "He damn well is," she said. "It's no joke."

  "I know it's not a joke. A lot of what's happened would sound like some melodramatic joke, but none of it is."

  "I feel sick about your dogs."

  "I feel sick about Elaine," I said. "I feel sick about Donna Zalewski, and I never even met her."

  When she reached toward me, I thought for a second that she was going to grab me, but all she did was pick up the recipe cards and start tapping them until their edges were even.

  "Joel didn't do anything," she said. "You of all people know that. Nobody played fair with him."

  "Nobody played fair with Kimi, either," I said.

  "Who the hell feeds cottage cheese to dogs anymore?"

  "A lot of people used to," I said. "Some people still do. You should have known that. When you think about it, it's like Sinequan, isn't it? It isn't trendy, but people still use it, don't they? Is that what it was in the chocolate? For once, you got into some kind of culinary rut? I thought you were supposed to avoid using the same ingredient over and over again. Isn't that one of the basic principles?"

  And, of course, she started crying. "I would never, never hurt a dog."

  "I played fair before," I said. "I gave Joel twenty-four hours. You know why? Mostly because I felt sorry for both of you, and I also felt sorry for his clients. What Donna and Elaine did to him was totally unfair."

  "It could happen to anyone," Kelly said. "Have you thought about that? It could happen to any male therapist, any man at all."

  "I know. Only this time, it didn't. It happened to Joel."

  "And what were we supposed to do?"

  "Go away somewhere? Start over? Come clean?"

  "We are not dirty."

  "I never said you were. I don't think that."

  "How would you like to go somewhere and hide and start over? And spend the rest of your life hoping that no one ever catches you?" Then she looked at the dogs. "And what about them?"

  I couldn't follow her. "What about them?" I said. "They wouldn't care."

  "We're supposed to vanish somewhere, right? Like criminals? And how were we supposed to show the dogs after that? Just how were we supposed to register them for a show? Our names would be there, in every catalog. And how were we supposed to breed Tuck when we couldn't say who we were? W
as she supposed to have puppies that we couldn't register because we didn't dare to write our names down?" Tears were rolling down her face.

  As I may have mentioned, I've always admitted that I'm not sane on the subject of dogs. I'd always believed it, too, until I finally got what she meant. Compared with her, I was a paragon of mental health. I believed her, of course, but Rita said later that she wasn't crying about dogs at all. She wasn't crying about not entering Nip and Tuck in AKC shows, but about losing what Rita called "the consensually validated legitimacy" of her life with Joel. And she wasn't crying about puppies, either, according to Rita, but about human babies she couldn't have herself. It's possible that Rita and I are both right about what was really wrong with Kelly Baker. I understood, as most people, including Rita, might not, that her craziness consisted of blurring the distinction between people and dogs.

  "The dogs wouldn't have cared if they'd never gone to a show again," I said. "All the dogs care about is you, Kelly—you and Joel, and maybe each other. They don't care if Joel wants to pretend to be a man."

  When I said that, she stared hard at me and shook her head back and forth in a series of nervous little jerks. "I don't know what you're talking about," she said.

  I went on. "Things like that don't fool dogs at all. Kimi wasn't fooled, and your dogs aren't, either. But they don't care. They don't give a damn about superficial things. They want to be fed. They want to be warm. And they want to be with the pack and know where they belong. They are incapable of serious deceit. It never occurs to them to be what they aren't. And they can kill, but they can't commit murder."