The sheet for a dachshund named Lady’s Luscious Lover, aka Lush, indicated he was nowhere near a champion. He had been entered in eight shows, and only won a third-place ribbon once. Rita’s notes were scathing—Lush’s owner, a woman named Paula Madden, was unable to control him; the dog was slow, lazy and a disgrace to his pedigree. And those were the G-rated comments. I was surprised that Rita would use words like easy and brain-dead to describe Paula. I wondered if she’d said those things out loud, too.
I did a quick search on Paula Madden and discovered she owned a shoe store at the Oxford Valley Mall. When I pulled up one of her online ads, I saw that little Lush figured prominently. He was photographed resting his head on a pair of pumps, sniffing high heels, and with one paw delicately placed in a jeweled sandal. The rhinestones on his collar matched the ones on the shoe’s straps.
Okay, another crazy dog lover. I couldn’t throw stones, though. The big goofy golden dog snoozing on the floor next to me was proof of that.
The next sheet was curiously brief. Baby Blue Eyes had a similar pedigree, but had never entered a show. There was a brief note at the bottom of the page which read: “Deaf. Offered replacement, but idiot refused.”
The owner’s name was Sal Piedramonte. His address was on Samarkand Court in Stewart’s Crossing, and I recognized it was one of the short cul-de-sacs in River Bend, at the other end of the neighborhood from my townhouse.
I lived on Sarajevo Court, which ran into Minsk Lane. The complex had been built by émigrés from the former Soviet Union, who had brought a bit of home to Stewart’s Crossing. My two-bedroom townhouse, with an attached garage, was a Latvia, and there were models for Serbia, Lithuania, Estonia and Croatia. The largest was the Montenegro, which I’d heard one of my neighbors call the Mount Negro.
I tried to remember if Rochester and I had ever met a deaf dachshund on our walks, but little dogs barked aggressively at Rochester, so we usually walked quickly past them.
Nothing jumped out at me about the dog on the next sheet, Puffball, other than that he had only one name, and I couldn’t find out anything about his owner, Pippin Forrest. Puffball had entered a few shows but Pippin’s handling was sloppy and according to Rita’s notes the dog hadn’t medaled.
The last owner to have left training with Rita was Mark Figueroa, and I knew him. He was an antique dealer in Stewart’s Crossing and he often stopped in at Gail’s café for coffee when I was there. He was an avid reader, and we talked about mystery novels and travel memoirs sometimes. I didn’t realize he had a dog.
Rochester turned on his side and scratched his toenails against the wooden floor. “Rochester! No!” I didn’t want to end up getting stuck with a bill for refinishing the floors.
His feathery tail thumped against the floor, but he didn’t lift his head. “What’s up, boy? You need to go out?”
He jumped up as if he’d stuck his paw in an electric socket and began dancing around. I wanted to open the french doors and let him out into the garden, but I knew he couldn’t be trusted. He’d tackle some sandwich-eating student, intercept someone’s frisbee, or terrorize the squirrels.
Of course, because I had a lot on my plate, Rochester was maddeningly slow about doing his business. By the time I got back to the office there were a slew of new email messages waiting for me, and I had to put aside sleuthing to work at the job that paid my bills. I kept hoping I could come up with some way to delegate some of the work to Rochester, because there had to be some way to channel all his intelligence and energy.
Instead, I did all the work myself, and he slept. Before I closed my computer down for the day, I printed out all the worksheets Rick had sent me so I could study them at home the next morning.
As usual, though, Rochester had other ideas.
17 – Defective Merchandise
I meant to make myself a quick dinner and then sit down with those printouts. But Rochester was antsy, even after our regular walk and his bowl of food. He kept rocketing around the living room and the only thing I could do was take him for a long walk, and use the opportunity to check out my newly-discovered neighbor, Sal Piedramonte.
It was still early evening, the sky a violet blue, as we circled through the Eastern European-named streets of River Bend. We walked slowly, heading toward the other end of the neighborhood. I wasn’t sure where Samarkand Court was but I had a general idea, and after continuing past the big lake at the center of the community, we approached it. I noted Sal Piedramonte’s house, the same model as my own, and continued walking. When we turned the corner onto Vilna Vista, we stumbled into the middle of a doggy play date.
A dachshund and a Shih Tzu rolled around together in the grass. A golden we knew named Hopi dashed around them. Hopi’s dad, a white-haired retiree named Dave, motioned us to join in. I let my dog off his leash and he went chasing after Hopi, and I walked up to Dave.
He introduced me to the twenty-something dark-haired guy with him. “This is Sal. “That’s his doxy, Blue. The Shih Tzu’s my son’s. I’m taking care of him while they’re on vacation.”
“I’ve never seen a dachshund with a white ear before,” I said to Sal, happy to run into the guy I’d been looking for. “Gives her character.”
“There’s a reason for that,” he said. “One white ear, plus blue eyes, are markers for congenital deafness.”
I remembered the note on Rita’s spreadsheet. “She can’t hear at all?”
He shook his head. “The first couple of months I had her, I thought she was just stubborn, the way she ignored all my commands and couldn’t be housebroken. Finally one day a friend of mine was over and he figured out she wasn’t stubborn. She was deaf.”
“Wow. You didn’t know that when you got her?”
“The breeder should have known, but she pretended she didn’t.” The big dogs continued to run circles around us, but Blue and the Shih Tzu came over and sprawled on the ground at our feet. “I went back to her and complained, and you know what she said?”
I shook my head.
“She said she didn’t sell defective merchandise. So she would take back Blue and put her to sleep, and give me a choice of another dog.”
“That’s harsh,” I said. “I’d never consider a dog merchandise.”
“Me either. I told her what she could do with her merchandise and I walked out.”
“This was a local breeder?” I said, playing along.
He nodded. “Her name is Rita Gaines. Stay away from her.”
Dave agreed. “I’ve heard bad things about that woman, and not just from Sal.”
“Rita Gaines,” I said. “Isn’t that the name of the woman who was killed last week?”
“Really? You mean somebody beat me to it?” Sal said. “Good job, whoever did.”
“Now, Sal, you shouldn’t say things like that,” Dave said.
“Why not? She was a bitch, and I’m glad she’s dead.” He leaned down and picked up Blue, cuddling the dachshund in his arms, and I could see how bright her blue eyes were.
“How is it, having a deaf dog?” I asked. “I mean, you can’t call her or scold her or anything, can you?”
“We have a series of hand signals. Once I made sure she was always looking at me when I wanted her to do something, we started to get along fine.”
He raised the dog up and kissed her on her snout. “Isn’t that true, Baby Blue?”
Rochester hopped up and put his paws on my groin. I reached down and scratched behind his ears, and then we said goodbye to Dave and Sal and their dogs. Walking home, I wondered if Sal had been faking his surprise at Rita’s death.
Could he have killed her? What if he’d gone back to her to complain about something, and she’d made disparaging comments about his baby. Could he have gotten so angry that he’d have killed her? He was a young guy; he probably knew, at least a bit, about roofies and the effect they had. He could have slipped the roofie into her iced tea, then injected her with the cobra venom.
I shook my head. Rita
hadn’t been killed in the heat of an angry passion—someone had thought the crime through carefully, noting the cobra venom at the barn and then figuring out how to inject Rita with it. That didn’t sound like a guy who was pissed off because his dog had been called defective.
Darkness fell quickly as we walked back home, and by the time we got there Rochester was worn out, and I’d spent too much time thinking about Rita Gaines without any result. I tabled those thoughts and turned to my laptop. I logged into the online course management software Eastern used, and navigated to the drop box where my tech writing students had submitted their final research papers.
Most of the students were decent writers, and we’d done enough exercises through the term that they had their research and citations pretty close to correct. I marked them on a couple of other criteria—including an appropriate, and correctly sized, picture or photograph; using a table to lay out the picture and the accompanying text; using different fonts as appropriate for headings and captions.
I looked up from grading the last paper to see Rochester over by the coffee table where I had piled the printouts of Rita’s customers. He had his nose up to them, and as I watched, he reared up and used his paw to swipe them to the ground.
“Rochester!” I yelped, jumping up. “Don’t do that.”
He was pushing the papers around with his nose by the time I got over there. He had an unfortunate taste for paper, and I was worried that the next morning I’d be pulling the ropy, barely digested pulp out of his butt—not something I particularly enjoyed.
I remembered I had carried the sheets home in my briefcase—where I often had a couple of dog treats as well. Had the smell of the treats attached themselves to the pages?
He was sniffing at one sheet in particular as I leaned down and cleaned them up. I snatched it out from under his paws and saw it was the one for Mark Figueroa, my antique dealer friend, and his dog, Judy’s Last Song, a Chihuahua. Doing a bit of quick cross-referencing, I saw that Judy and Carissa’s dog, Tia Juana, had been littermates. But Mark had only attended a few training sessions with Rita before dropping out.
Did he have some kind of grudge against Rita? Perhaps she had criticized his dog, too. Mark and Gail, from the Chocolate Ear, were close friends, and I could ask her about him. But her café had closed by then, and Mark’s antique store in downtown Stewart’s Crossing would be closed, too.
I picked up all the spreadsheets and put them on top of a counter Rochester couldn’t reach, then went back to my laptop to finish grading the last paper. Then I exported the grade book to another Excel spreadsheet, where I calculated the semester totals. The last step was to enter them into the college mainframe. But since there were a couple of students who might still submit their work late, I decided to wait. It was a lot of trouble to change a grade once it was in the mainframe.
After I shut down the laptop, I dug around on the kitchen counter until I could find Rochester’s brush. “Come here, puppy,” I called, and sat down on the tile floor. “We have to make you handsome for the show tomorrow.”
He scampered over and put his head in my lap. I started brushing his coat, pulling out strands of soft golden hair. “I could make a sweater out of you,” I said, as the hair piled up. He kept trying to go under the kitchen table, leaving me only his back end to brush, then turning around on me.
By the time I was finished there was hair everywhere, and I had to get the vacuum cleaner out to pick it all up. Rochester clambered upstairs and hid from the noise under my bed. When I came upstairs myself, he came out and jumped up on the bed to watch TV with me.
As I scanned through the channels with one hand and scratched behind Rochester’s ears with the other, I felt very righteous about completing my grades, since they weren’t even due for a few more days. That freed me up for investigating over the weekend with Rick. I thought about entering them into the college’s mainframe computer, but that’s always more of a pain to do from home than from school, even without the interference of Freezer Burn, so I thought I’d wait until Monday.
18 – Show Time
Saturday morning, Rick picked Rochester and me up in his truck, and we drove up route 611 through Doylestown and Quakertown to get to Bethlehem. Dogwoods were blooming in pink and white and maples were rich with green buds. We passed at least three spring-cleaning yard sales, rickety card tables piled with chipped dishes, out-of-date textbooks, and other useless junk its owners hoped would put a few bucks in their pockets.
We parked in front of the college’s Technology Center, in view of a series of white tents where the show was being held. Around us were dozens of cars, trucks and RVs, and almost every one sported some sort of dog bumper sticker, from “My Labrador Retriever is smarter than your honor student” to “It’s the Golden Rule: Goldens Rule” to “Proud Parent of a Bichon Frise.”
“Dog people,” Rick said, shaking his head.
“And what are we? You spoil Rascal more than I do Rochester.”
“Don’t remind me.”
From the parking lot, we heard the loudspeaker announcing the walk-through for the standard class for novices. “Shit, that’s us,” Rick said. “We’ve got to hustle.”
“What do you mean? Are you competing?”
Rick tugged Rascal’s leash and hurried forward. “It’s Rascal’s first time,” he said over his shoulder.
I shook my head and followed with Rochester. He had already prepaid his admission and Rascal’s entry fees, so he sailed past the elderly woman at the registration table. By the time I had paid our admission and picked up a program, then walked into the broad lawn where the tents had been set up, Rick and Rascal were already in line next to one of the rings.
Ring seemed the wrong word, even though that’s the way they were labeled. It was more like a rectangle, with all the equipment set up inside. I’d seen all the stuff at Rita’s, but somehow it looked more impressive under the sprawling white canvas tent, with dozens of dogs around. As I watched, a woman led her whippet up a ramp, across a flat plank, then down. Ahead of her, a borzoi was climbing the A-frame while a Sheltie was on the teeter-totter.
I checked out the program. The events were divided into four classes by height; Rascal was in the third category. The loudspeakers competed with the barking of dogs and the whir of portable fans that cooled the area. I couldn’t see how the dogs could concentrate on what they were supposed to do. I kept Rochester on a short leash by my side, and sometimes I had to hold him back if he wanted to sniff another dog or take off in search of Rascal.
We skirted the main performance ring and walked between two rows of vendor tables. Fortunately most of the merchandise on display was for little dogs—pink plastic carriers with mesh windows, rhinestones collars and tiny leather jackets with upturned cuffs—or I’d have ended up buying Rochester something I’d regret later, like a pair of felt moose antlers or a big rubber clown nose. I did like the harnesses at one booth, and if Rochester didn’t already have a couple of beds I’d have been tempted to buy him another from a vendor with wide variety of beds, cushions and dog blankets. There was even a booth selling clothes for the humans accompanying their dogs around the course.
All around us were dogs on platforms being groomed, dogs practicing their jumps, dogs on leather leashes and plastic cords. The biggest seemed to be the giant Schnauzer, and there were a couple of teacup Chihuahuas that I could hold in the palm of my hand.
I spotted Carissa, the elegant Latina who had trained her dog at Rita’s. She wore a pair of cream-colored pedal pushers and a sleek V-necked athletic shirt made of some kind of expensive microfiber. It clung to her in all the right places, and it was decorated with tiny rhinestones which matched the ones on the collar worn by her Chihuahua, Tia Juana. I introduced myself to Carissa.
“Oh, Rita,” she said. “How terrible. When I heard the news I was so upset. So was Tia. Sadly in my country we are too familiar with violent death.”
That was interesting. How did she know Rita had b
een murdered? As far as I knew the papers had only reported her death, not the crime behind it. “Did you know Rita well?”
“I bought Tia from her and she convinced me to start training her. I wouldn’t say I was her friend, but I’ve been investing with her for years.”
Rochester leaned down to sniff Tia Juana. “She didn’t seem like the type to make friends,” I said.
“Well, you won’t find many people here who liked her,” Carissa said.
“Really? Why not?”
“She was a very fierce competitor and she had no self-control when it came to telling people what she thought of them and their dogs. As if she was the only reputable breeder around.”
“That must have made a lot of people angry.”
Carissa nodded toward a forty-something Asian man in pressed khaki slacks and a military-style shirt festooned with pockets and epaulets. As I watched he pulled a treat out of one of those pockets and fed it to the fluffy white bichon he had on a bright blue leash. The dog’s haircut made his face look round as a dinner plate.
“That’s Jerry Fujimoto,” Carissa said. “He raises bichon frises and trains them for his owners. Rita was always bad-mouthing him and his methods. I heard he lost a number of clients because of it.”
“But she didn’t raise bichons herself, did she?”
“No, only doxies and Chihuahuas. But she definitely had her own way of doing things, and if you didn’t agree with her she’d let you have it.”
Tia Juana yelped as Rochester’s nose got too invasive, and I jerked back on his leash. “Sorry. He still has a lot of puppy in him.”
She looked at her diamond Rolex and said, “We need to get ready anyway. I want Tia to get some practice at the long jumps.”
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