4 Woof at the Door (18 page)

He searched my eyes, and seemed to find whatever sincerity or confidence he was seeking, because he nodded. “If you’re sure you’ll be all right.”

“I will be.”

“You…said you had something you needed to say to me?”

I gave him a passionate kiss, then said, “Thank you.”

He smiled. “I’m not sure what you’re thanking me for, exactly, but you’re welcome.”

As much as I wanted to augment the conversation with an “I love you,” the words wouldn’t come. And Russell wasn’t going to prolong this sweet agony any longer. He got in his car, which was blocking mine in the driveway, and drove off.

As I rounded the Atkinsons’ corner lot, I peered through this side of the fence opposite the Bellinghams’ property. Here the Atkinson’s privacy fence gave way to split rail and wire mesh, and I spotted Hank leaning against a tree, watching Paige who was kneeling on the grass, a short distance away. I came through the gate, rather than ringing their doorbell.

Hank straightened and looked at me. “Oh, good. You’re here. Now maybe I can get going. Paige wanted me to keep her company, but I’m meeting some of the guys for softball practice.”

“I take it, then, you found Sammy?”

He pointed at the stack of logs in front of Paige. The Atkinsons’ dog had built an intricate den underneath the log pile by the side of the house. Sammy was nursing six brown-and-white puppies.

“This is quite a den,” I said as I looked at it. “There’s even a back entrance. Sammy must have been working on this for quite a while. Didn’t you know it was here?”

“Nope. There’s a back entrance?” Hank said. “Hope she didn’t dig up any of the….” He knelt and looked inside. “What’s that? It’s too big for another puppy.”

I joined him and saw a familiar-looking pointed muzzle. “Come here, boy,” I called, “Come on.”

Another dog came out of the den. It was Beagle Boy. I now had a vague memory of letting him out through the back door before the police came to Beverly’s house. I’d lost track of him after that.

“How did he get in here?” Hank asked testily. “I thought I saw a tunnel under the fence, but it was too small for Doobie or for Sammy. He must have cut through Bellingham’s lawn.”

“The puppies are smaller than I thought they’d be,” Paige said, looking in the front of the den. They’d probably been so worried about how to handle their nursing dog that they didn’t even look this close till now. “Also darker. They have such narrow bodies. They look like wet rats.”

Hank went back around to join her. “Yeah. Kind of like…baby Beagles.”

I swept Beagle Boy under one arm. “I think I’ll just take B.B. home with me for the time being.”

“Wait a minute!” Paige shouted. “A Beagle? Is there some way….” Both Paige and her husband stared at Beagle Boy, mirroring each other’s expressions of shock and disgust.

“Allida?” Hank asked. “Can a male Beagle and a female Samoyed mate?”

“Yes.” And it was pretty obvious that the proof was in the puppies. “Listen, this isn’t my area of expertise. You need to take the puppies and Sammy to your vet the day after tomorrow and get them all checked out. Okay?”

“Beagle-Samoyeds!” Hank grabbed his head in anguish. “I was hoping for white wolves! And now I’ve just got furry, white wieners!”

Hank stormed off without another word. I stashed Beagle Boy in my car for safe keeping, then Paige and I managed to set up a reasonably good whelping area in the Atkinsons’ mud room. We carried the puppies in on blankets, and Sammy waddled after us. Paige seemed sufficiently impressed with how cute and helpless the tiny newborns were that I was sure she’d protect them. Just in case Hank had other ideas, my parting words to Paige were, “The puppies need to stay with Sammy for seven weeks. I’ll keep checking in on them from time to time.”

I drove home, Beagle Boy making quite a racket in my back seat. I should probably have taken him to the Humane Society, where they would keep him for a week until a relative stepped forward to claim him or they’d put him up for adoption. He was my last link to Beverly, though, and I could take care of him for a while. Unless Mom objected, that is.

I parked and carried him inside. The living room was quiet. The dogs must have all been in the back yard. “Mom? I’ve brought home a house guest,” I called.

“Is he or she bigger than a breadbox?” she called back. Her voice sounded as if it were coming from the basement. She was probably doing laundry. Mom was fairly difficult to faze, and I’d been brought stray animals home many times throughout the years.

“About the same size, when he’s lying down.”

She came up the stairs and I let Beagle Boy get acquainted with his new environment. He ran around sniffing everything, including Mom’s ankles.

“Is this Beverly’s dog?” she asked gently.

“He used to be. His name’s Beagle Boy. Or B.B. for short.”

“Come on, Beagle Boy,” Mom said, heading to the back. “Let’s introduce you to the gang.”

Monday morning, I drove to my office early. I wasn’t expecting any clients for another couple of hours, but felt the need to check in with the couple of client calls I’d missed on Sunday afternoon to make sure everything was all right. Russell’s car wasn’t in his space, so I’d apparently beaten him to work.

I got out of my car and locked it. The morning had dawned bright and cloudless, the temperature already sixty degrees, even at eight a.m. There was somebody sitting on the steps, as if waiting for me to unlock the door. As I neared, I recognized the woman, even from the back. She wore the same dusty overalls and her hair was still pulled back into a pony tail.

“Rebecca. Hi.”

She looked up at me. Her eyes so red and puffy it looked as though she had been crying nonstop for twenty-four hours. “Allida, hi. Sorry to bother you. I just didn’t know where else to turn.”

“That’s quite all right. I’m so sorry about Beverly. She was a terrific person.” I unlocked the door and held it open for Rebecca.

“Not really. If you knew her well, you’d know she was just who she was,” Rebecca said as she brushed by me. “Someone with her fair share of both faults and strengths, like all of the rest of us.”

I let the door swing shut behind me and offered to make some coffee. She shook her head and dropped into the nearest chair. I leaned back against the counter, watching her, trying to decide if I should ask the question that nagged at me. It wasn’t any of my business, but might have had something to do with Beverly’s murder. “Yesterday, I got the impression that you and she were more than business partners.”

Rebecca stared at me with empty eyes. “Beverly was straight, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Her voice was almost a growl.

“I didn’t mean to imply anything hurtful. You obviously cared deeply for her, and I’d like to help the police hunt for any possible connections between the murders.”

“Such as ex-lovers,” Rebecca said, her voice more weary than anything else. “She was like a sister to me. She was everything I wanted to be. I didn’t mean for it to happen. None of this. I don’t know how everything went so wrong.”

The words chilled me. “Do you know who killed her?”

“No. I just…it’s my fault. I should have confronted her.”

“About what?” When she didn’t respond, I asked, “The lawsuit?” taking a reasonable guess.

She shook her head. “You can’t possibly understand. Nobody could. I want her memory to be….” She bit her lip and paused. “The police, the press, they’ll just vilify her. And me.”

My mind raced. I had the inescapable feeling I was about to learn things about my late friend that I really didn’t want to know.

“I set the whole thing up. In the Bellinghams’ kitchen. I’m the one who did it, but it was her idea, too. I was hoping it would be Ty who got hurt, not Cheshire.”

It took me a moment to unscramble my thoughts. Rebecca was talking about Chesh’s accident, not Ty’s murder. “Why would you deliberately booby-trap your own construction site? You were obviously going to be held accountable at some point.”

“I just wanted to make him trip, maybe bruise himself up a little. Sprain an ankle, maybe. He deserved it. He treated everyone like dirt, and he was always threatening to feed Beagle Boy to Doobie. I couldn’t take it anymore. So one day, I set a board on pencil rollers, figuring he’d step on it. But Chesh stepped on the board, fell on her ass, and cracked her tailbone.”

“Having your kitchen under construction probably makes lots of people cranky. It’s impossible to believe you’d booby-trapped your own construction site, just because Ty was a creep.”

She winced and shut her eyes. “The police didn’t believe it either. But he really was capable of throwing B.B. to Doobie and egging him on.”

“Why did Beverly keep working for Ty? Why didn’t she have him arrested for threatening to kill her dog?”

“The problem was bigger than that, but we didn’t have any proof. We didn’t know how else to stop him.”

“Stop him? From the dog fighting, you mean?”

Her eyes widened and she gaped at me. “Yes. You knew about that?”

“I found out only recently, but I don’t understand—”

“See, Beverly claimed she felt the same way that I did about it, that she’d already notified animal control. One day, about three months ago, I came over to her place, and she had a pit bull. She told me he was Ty’s. That he’d adopted the dog and was angry to discover the dog wasn’t a fighter. She’d volunteered to take care of it so that she could protect it from Ty. A couple of days later, she told me that she’d found a home for it.”

“Are you sure? I asked Beverly about that pit bull just yesterday, and she told me something completely different.”

“I know. She called me yesterday. She gave me a feeble excuse for calling, said that she wanted to go over today’s schedule and ’make sure we’re on the same page,’ but she never does junk like that. Then she says to me, ’By the way, if Allida Babcock should happen to ask you about Ty owning a pit bull, tell her you don’t know anything about it.’”

“But that’s…weird. If she wanted to cover up for her own role in this missing pit bull, why tell you not to mention it? I believed her when she lied about the dog. I would never have thought to ask you, too.”

She leaned forward, elbows on knees, to look directly into my eyes. “I know. That’s what bothered me so much. When I asked her why she wanted me to lie about the dog, she said that you were such a straight arrow you’d insist on following up on the woman she gave the dog to, and she didn’t want you to bother her.”

“She used the phrase ’straight arrow?’” I asked, my stomach tensing.

“Yes.”

That was the same wording Larry Cunriff had used to describe his boss, Damian. I began to worry that Rebecca’s tale could have some truth to it; that Larry and Beverly had been familiar enough with one another that they were picking up on each other’s pet phrases.

“So you concluded that Beverly did something illicit with the pit bull? Sold it to a dog-fighting ring herself?”

Rebecca frowned. After a pause, she said, “That was the only reason I can come up with for her to be so worried about you tracking down this pit bull. The more I thought about it last night, the more I decided Rebecca might have played me for a chump. Gave me this whole song and dance about how despicable Bellingham was to turn dogs into a blood sport.”

“Did you ever report this to the police, or at least to animal control?”

She shook her head. “I was going to, but, like I said, Beverly convinced me that she’d already called. Then, once I began to suspect she was part of it, I didn’t want to tell the police and damage her reputation. So, I kept quiet.” She stared at me, checking for my reaction.

Frankly, my emotions were in something of a tailspin. I didn’t want to believe any of this. Was that because it was unbelievable? Or was it merely my natural reluctance to accepting something so heinous about a friend? “Why are you telling me this, Rebecca?”

“It’s killing me to keep it to myself. I have to tell somebody, and I don’t know who else to turn to.”

I pulled out my desk chair and sat down. Dozens of images of Beverly playing with dogs back when we were in high school together or recently with Beagle Boy popped into my head. That kind of affection can’t be faked; even if she could have fooled me, she couldn’t fool her own dogs. “Rebecca, I admit that I never knew Beverly all that well, certainly not as well as I once
thought
I did. But I absolutely cannot believe she had anything at all to do with a dog-fighting ring.”

“Neither can I. I think she was playing me for a fool, all along. Don’t you see?” She wrapped her arms across her midsection, rocking herself from her position on the edge of the chair. “Beverly was in on it.”

“In on what?” I asked.

“Ty’s murder. But her partner in crime killed them both.”

Chapter 13

Rebecca’s eyes looked glassy. She seemed to believe her own words, but maybe she was completely nuts. I’d prefer to believe that, as opposed to my friend Beverly having been a murderer.

“Rebecca, do you have any proof that Beverly plotted with someone to murder Ty Bellingham?”

“No, but I’m pretty sure that’s what happened,” she said, her voice a dry whisper.

To give myself a reason to turn away from her, I rotated in my seat and snatched the first item my gaze fell upon—a paper clip. I mangled it between my fingers. “I can’t believe that. Even if she was involved in dog fighting, which I also can’t believe, she had no reason to kill Ty Bellingham.”

My words seemed to shake her out of her zombielike state. She glared at me and said purposefully, “The booby-trapped flooring was her idea. There was this crazy power struggle going on between Ty and Beverly. I think she told me the whole story about Ty and Doobie and the dog fights just to enlist my help in punishing Ty.”

“So who were her accomplices? And how did you know she was involved? Did she confess to you?”

“No, but I know that she’d been talking to some man that worked for the wolf owner. I think she was cooking up something with him.”

“Larry Cunriff?”

Her eyes widened in surprise. “Yes. That’s the name. She had to pay him off to get the wolf. I think she was the one who unlocked the dog door so that Larry could get the wolf inside, and she also cut his phone cords so Ty couldn’t get help.”