A Hell of a Dog

by Carol Lea Benjamin

  Chip crouched next to me. “It is, sort of. There’s one spot that looks cleaner than the rest of it. And it’s right above where Martyn landed.”

  “Must have been from one of the birds. It’s too small to have been made by Martyn standing there. He didn’t jump, Chip. He was pushed. Three people can’t have died accidentally in one hotel in just a few days. It just couldn’t happen.”

  I duck-walked backward and stood, looking around the roof. It was spring, no snow to show footprints of Martyn or his killer. It hadn’t rained either. There was nothing on the stairs we had climbed to get here. There was one thing, something black lying next to one of the huge exhaust fans.

  “Chip, look.”

  “Is that Martyn’s, do you think?”

  “I do. I think it’s the one he used in the temperament test.”

  The umbrella was closed, lying on the side of the fan farthest from the door to the roof. The little band that held the ribs neatly together was fastened, so that it almost appeared to be a cane.

  “What’s that all about? Was he going to float down to the street, as if he were the Penguin?”

  “No. This was a temperament test.”

  “What was?”

  “This murder.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “I don’t have the answer yet,” I told him, starting to feel like a broken record, “but whatever happened here began as a test of Martyn’s character. It was something clever, something he’d have to respond to. You know, the cops always say how dumb criminals are, that if they were half as smart as they thought they were, the detectives would be out of work because they’d never catch any of them. But whoever did this was no dummy. Come on. Let’s get out of here before the detectives arrive, because you better believe if I thought to check out the roof, they will too.”

  “There won’t be any prints on the umbrella, will there?”

  “Other than Martyn’s? No. Whoever is doing this is too damn smart to leave a signature.”

  We took the stairs down to the lobby, thinking our own thoughts as we walked. The old man still wasn’t behind the desk.

  “Shall I put the passkey back?” Chip whispered.

  “No. We’re going to need it again later.”

  “We are?”

  “Yeah, I don’t know when we’re going to be able to squeeze it in—you’re talking this morning, and we have the panel this afternoon. But there’s at least one more room we have to get into today.”

  He held the front door for me. The police had arrived and were milling around waiting for the medical examiner to show up. From the top of the stairs, we could see Martyn splayed out on the sidewalk.

  “Do you see a pattern in any of this?”

  I looked up at the roof. I remembered looking up at it from across the street, after taking Dashiell to the park. The building seemed to have grown taller since then, the roof seemed so far above the cold, hard sidewalk below it.

  “Yes and no. Rick and Martyn were killed—”

  “None of this is what it appears to be?”

  “None of this and probably not much about us—I don’t mean us,” I said, “I mean the other speakers. Rick and Martyn were killed after they spoke, but Alan was killed prior to his lecture. On the other hand, Alan’s shtick is so blatant, why would anyone have to wait to hear him speak to want to kill him? Everyone already knew what he did and hated him for it. Well, almost everyone.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “He had company his last night on earth.”

  “Who?”

  “I don’t know. Sam tried to make me think it was she, but I don’t believe her.”

  “Rachel, why did you think I was in danger last night? No one knows much of anything about me. I haven’t done a book, like Alan. I haven’t done TV, like Bucky. And I haven’t spoken yet.”

  “But you have. After the tracking demo.”

  “But that was—”

  “Precisely. Only for the speakers.”

  “What about Boris? He spoke. Shit, he’s irritated the hell out of everyone, repeatedly. How come he’s still among the living?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe because of Sasha. None of the men who were killed were here with a protection-trained dog.”

  “Still, Rachel, he’s not with Sasha all the time. He wasn’t with him last night. Everyone knew where he was, where we all were.”

  “Maybe he’s the doer,” I said.

  But what had Boris done that would make me suspect him—pretend he was a “wegetarian,” that he was the world’s greatest animal lover and didn’t eat them the way the rest of us do?

  Of course he had a temper. But everyone does, when you think about it. Maybe his boiling point was on the low side, but whoever did the killings seemed to me to be pretty cool, not a hothead like Boris. You couldn’t be so neat, so clever, if you were working in the heat of passion. Or could you?

  “What are you saying, that he could have gotten up and left after we did, then gone back to your room afterward and gone back to sleep? Or pretended to? But if he could have, then Woody could have. Or Bucky.”

  “I don’t know what to think. I mean, yeah, it’s possible it was Boris. I suppose anything’s possible. But what would the motive be? If it’s competition, shit, Martyn wasn’t taking dog jobs away from Boris. He was in England half the year. The other half he spent teaching seminars. He didn’t take private clients in this country at all. He didn’t have a book—and if he did, it would have nothing to do with Boris’s book. Boris, God bless him, is in a class by himself, and no matter what you think of his methods, he sells, year in, year out. The more things change, the more they seem to stay the same.”

  “What about the other two?”

  “Bucky and Woody?”

  “Right.”

  “Why? What’s the motive?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know.”

  “Me neither. That’s the problem. If I knew why, I mean really knew why, not all this guessing, I’d know who.”

  “So now what?”

  “Well, first the cops grill us under hot lights while we squeal and writhe, claiming we have a right to call our lawyers.” I watched the dark blue circle form around Martyn, listening to the sound of an ambulance approaching.

  “And then?”

  “Then we get breakfast,” I said, unable to take my eyes off the spectacle on the sidewalk and hoping like hell I’d figure out who was doing this before the next sad, gruesome scene.

  “And after that?”

  “You deliver your talk on aggression. And while you do, I see if I can get my hands on the phone records.”

  “How? The hotel won’t just give them to you, will they?”

  “No. But they have to give them to Sam. She’s the one who has to pay the bill.”

  Sam and Woody were standing near the body in a sea of uniforms.

  “She’s not going to be happy if they want to stop the symposium,” I whispered.

  “She may not have a choice now.”

  “She’s pretty persuasive. Look at the group she assembled here.”

  Sam and Woody were talking to Detective DeAndrea now. Woody seemed to be doing most of the talking, but I had the feeling he was speaking with Sam’s agenda in mind.

  “I’ll be back in the auditorium before the end of your talk.”

  “And?”

  “I don’t know yet, but I think we need to stick together.”

  “Good idea,” he said. “But we shouldn’t walk out at the same time.”

  “Why not?”

  He shrugged. “That’s what they always say in the movies. I’ve been watching a lot of bad TV lately,” he said, “late-night movies. Keep my mind off my troubles.”

  “Does it work?”

  “No,” he said. “Not one tiny little bit. So where were you when I was stealing the passkey?”

  “Last night, when I went for the ice, I went down the wrong corridor. Too much vodka. Instead of going back to three, I sta
yed on four. I ended up trying to fit my key into Beryl’s door.”

  “The old broad must have demolished you for waking her.”

  “But I didn’t. She doesn’t sleep with her hearing aid in. Never heard a thing. Then, when I was walking back down the corridor to come back to three, I heard a door open. At the time, I thought maybe I was wrong, maybe Cecilia woke her when she heard me at the door. I went back to apologize, to tell her not to be alarmed, it was only me. But when I got back to that part of the hallway, all the doors were closed. This morning, it occurred to me it might have been Cathy, that she might have waited up for Martyn. I thought maybe if she’d seen him, or talked to him, we might learn something helpful.”

  “What did she say?”

  “That she had waited up. She hadn’t meant to, but she was crying and couldn’t sleep.”

  “Over Martyn?”

  “Yeah. Man, he laid some real big line on her about how fucked-up his wife is, that he might leave her later on, and Cathy apparently went for it in a big way. Anyway, then subsequently, someone let her know he and the Mrs. were expecting another kid, just to see her reaction.”

  “Who did that?”

  I winced. “Me. I had to check out Martyn’s story, try to find out what was really going on. That’s my job.”

  “And?”

  “And I felt I had confirmed my suspicion that they’d been together when I saw the steam coming out of Cathy’s ears, so to speak.”

  “But you don’t think she—”

  “Gut feeling? No. Sky must have heard me. She said she opened the door and thought, What am I thinking? and closed it without ever looking out. Martyn must have gone down the other way. We probably missed each other by seconds.”

  “You believe her?”

  “I do,” I said. “Something has to tie all this together. True, Martyn lied to her and hurt her. For some, that could be a reason to kill. People kill for a lot less.”

  “For leather jackets, sneakers, sunglasses, a buck fifty, an imagined insult.”

  “True.”

  “So?”

  “Okay, suppose Cathy did kill Martyn. What about the other two? Can you figure out something that makes sense where Cathy killed them all? You know, I was thinking along those lines at first, the black widow spider bit. But I can’t get it to make sense.”

  “That’s because you’re convinced it’s a man.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “Fewer assumptions that way,” he said. “If it’s business, killing off the competition, it’s easier to believe, more straightforward.”

  “Occam’s razor.”

  “Exactly.”

  “Except that that’s science. This is human emotion, twisted all out of shape. So in this case, choosing the simplest explanation may not lead us to the killer. It’s true that sometimes—often—the cops find someone dead, they go right to the doer, the husband, the boyfriend, the business partner, the whatever. And sometimes the trigger is something that to others would seem so small, the sting of an insult, something said in front of others that causes humiliation. Or worse, the insult resonates in the heart of one human being, because it turns out it’s something they have always secretly believed to be true about themselves.

  “But there are times when the motive is convoluted, complex, dense, the result of an event that happened long ago that floats back up to the surface after years of remaining buried, God knows why. Sometimes—”

  “I get it, Rachel.”

  “Well, I don’t. I don’t know who, and I don’t know why, and it’s eating me alive. It’s hell not knowing, not being able to stop it.”

  He shook his head. “No, Rachel, it’s work. Hell is something far more personal.”

  It was personal for me. But I didn’t say so. Chip was looking elsewhere, thinking other thoughts. Besides, Detective Flowers was headed our way.

  “They’re going to talk to us separately,” I said. “Leave out the part about the passkey, okay?”

  “Count on it,” he said. He slid his hand into his pocket and slipped the passkey into my hand. “I wasn’t planning on mentioning violating the crime scene either. So unless they sweat it out of me, I’ll see you at breakfast.”

  “Okay.”

  But I wasn’t thinking about breakfast. I was thinking about what he’d said a minute ago, that I was convinced it was a man. I began wondering if the cops would be thinking the same way.

  I turned my back to the approaching detective. “Say we were together all night,” I whispered.

  “We were,” he said. But he wasn’t looking at me. He was looking over my shoulder.

  I could hear her heels clicking on the pavement. I turned around. She had great legs, for a cop.

  “Ms. Alexander, Mr. Pressman, I didn’t expect to be seeing either of you again so soon.”

  There was a bit of early-morning frost in her voice.

  Too much, if you ask me.

  And now it was too late to tell Chip to leave out the part about us both falling asleep. If he included that little detail, I couldn’t be his alibi.

  Nor, should it be necessary, would he be able to be mine.

  23

  WHAT’S WITH YOU PEOPLE? HE ASKED

  I sat in the back of the auditorium, slouched down in my seat, my ankles resting on Dashiell’s back, listening to Sam introducing Chip. Even from this far back, I could see that her hands were trembling, and I could hear the strain in her voice, but she was a trouper at heart, and the threat of bankruptcy aside, she knew that for all our sakes, the show must go on.

  When she finished talking about Chip, and while the audience were putting their hands together to give him the warm welcome she’d suggested he so richly deserved, she left the stage and took a seat in the front row, off to the side. Right next to Woody Wright. I wanted to talk to her alone, so I sent Dashiell to get her.

  Chip had gotten up, and so had Betty. When he walked up to the mike, she did, too. Only a couple of people had noticed. I could hear them laughing, and when Chip did, he looked down at her standing at his side and shrugged.

  “Shepherds are more prone to allelomimetic behavior than most other dog breeds,” he said, “and this is as good a place as any to begin this morning.” His posture was relaxed, and so was Betty’s. When he looked around the room, making eye contact with one person in the audience and then another, Betty did too. Monkey see, monkey do. Which was the principle of allelomimetic behavior.

  Dashiell was making his way down the aisle to where Sam was sitting, walking slowly, wagging his tail as he walked, the note I’d written her rolled up and stuck under his collar, sticking up over his head like a feather.

  “This means that the dog views herself, in this case, as a member of a group, and acts the way the other group members behave, especially the highest-ranked member of the group. In Betty’s case, that’s me, and this morning we are going to talk about why that’s appropriate, but also about how that can sometimes be the cause of the aggression we are trying to stop.

  “It’s mostly the attitude of alpha that is aped, which of course means that if you are alert, worried, angry, relaxed, frightened, or happy, your dog will tend to be, too. In Betty’s case, well, she also tends to mimic postures and activities. Which is sometimes humorous. But it is the mimicking of attitudes and feelings that is the real issue for us today.”

  I watched Sam pull the note out of Dash’s collar, read it, and then turn around to look for me. She whispered something to Woody, then got up and followed Dashiell back to where I was sitting.

  “I need to check the phone records. Can you get them for me?”

  “Rachel, what on earth is happening here?”

  “What did the police say?”

  “Not much. They’re asking questions, not answering them. Did they talk to you?”

  I nodded. “They did. But I’m still on the loose.”

  “We all are. But I’m starting to wonder if we all should be.”

  “Me, too. That’s
why I need the—”

  “I’ll be right back.”

  I looked around the auditorium for our dwindling group. I spotted everyone but Cathy, but I could pretty well guess where she was and what she was doing.

  After Sam handed me the phone bills and went back to her seat in the front of the auditorium, I slipped out the back and headed for the elevator. After walking all the way up to the roof, I didn’t want to see the stairs again for a while.

  Jimmy tucked himself against the wall and pulled the gate closed.

  “Three,” I said.

  “I know. I know.” He was looking forward, not at me and Dashiell. “What’s with you people?” he asked. “You’re dropping like flies.”

  We landed on three, and Jimmy opened the door. The hall was empty as far as I could see, all the way to the bend.

  “How’d that feller get up on the roof this morning? That’s what I want to know. It’s locked up tight.”

  “Was that what the police said, that he jumped off the roof?”

  “Insurance,” he said, sounding just like his dad. “Got to keep it locked.”

  “Is it possible someone left the door unlocked?” I asked him. “You know, last time they were up there, checking the exhaust fans or whatever.”

  “Door self-locks. Just like the rooms. Closes and locks without a key.”

  “Anyone missing a passkey?”

  He stuck his skinny neck out of the cage, checking out the empty hallway. Then he stood straight as a lamppost in his little corner, chin in, hands on the wheel. “I wouldn’t know about that, missus,” he said.

  Yeah, right.

  “I thought maybe your dad might have mentioned something,” I said, sticking my hand in my pocket, pulling out a twenty, folding it in half, then in half again. Money talks, they say. I wanted to see if it was so.

  Jimmy cleared his throat. “Didn’t,” he said. “The mean old coot. I hardly talk to him, if I can avoid it.”

  “Well, thank the good Lord you’re an adult. At least you don’t have to live with him.”

  “But I do. It’s my duty, he says, as his son. What kind of a man would leave his old da alone? he asks me, any damn time I even think about moving out. He can read my mind, that one. And he’s mean. Always has been. He’s not going to change now.”