The Wicked Flea (20 page)

Standing just in back of me, Wilson caught his breath.

“The lying bitch isn’t anyone anymore,” George Trask said. “Sylvia Metzner is dead.”

Chapter 26

“I owe you one for that.” Wilson did indeed look pitifully grateful. He was referring, I felt certain, to my discretion in not telling Mrs. Waggenhoffer that the late Sylvia Metzner had been his mother-in-law. If I’d spoken up, the Trasks would probably have given him a hard time, but I’d have bet anything that Mrs. Waggenhoffer was the one he cared about. As it was, he’d been presented to that formidable lady as the owner of the admirable Pembroke Welsh corgi bitch who’d just gone Best of Breed, and I hadn’t spoiled Mrs. Waggenhoffer’s glowing first impression of Wilson by announcing that he was also the son-in-law of a backyard breeder of dysplastic golden retrievers, in other words, the kin by marriage of scum.

Wilson and I were once again outside the freestyle ring. This time, Llio was with us, mainly because her owner had used her as an excuse to escape the scene with Mrs. Waggenhoffer and the Trasks. A dog, of course, is a great social convenience when it comes to gracefully fleeing any awkward, nasty, or boring situation that occurs indoors. All you do is glance at the dog, slap an expression of urgency on your face, and cry,
Sorry to rush off, but my dog needs to go out
—
now!
Who’s going to argue with that? Off you go!

Displaying the opportunism drummed into me by Alaskan malamutes, I’d seized on Wilson’s departure as the chance to make my own retreat. Offering no explanation, I’d simply told Mrs. Waggenhoffer that I’d see her later. Then I’d tried to disappear. Unfortunately, I’d made my move so fast that when Wilson had happened to look back, he’d spotted me and waited, and I’d been unable to shake him. Here he still was, outside the freestyle ring. Inside, a thin woman in black and white and her black-and-white Border collie moved fluidly and rhythmically to the music of “Em-braceable You.” The very name of Rowdy’s intended! Well, the name of my intended for him, Emma, CH Jazzland’s Embraceable You, and at the risk of digressing, let me note that we dog devotees appreciate such apparent serendipity for what it really is, namely, a welcome reminder of the divine purpose and celestial harmony everywhere evident here in our happy constellation of Canis Major.

Where was I? In truth, scanning for Steve Delaney, who turned up at shows now and then, sometimes in obedience with his shepherd, India, sometimes alone. He liked to wander around and watch the competition. I ran my eyes over the crowd, but didn’t see him. In marrying Anita, he’d probably ended his dog-show days. Goddamn! So, he married someone else. But did he have to marry someone who hated dogs? With my own eyes, I’d seen Anita kick Steve’s gentle, timid pointer, Lady. On another occasion, Anita had stepped on Lady’s foot. Sneak that Anita was, she’d made sure Steve wasn’t watching. By now, he must have seen or at least sensed her viciousness.

“You don’t owe me anything,” I told Wilson. Irrationally, I blurted out, “No one owes me anything!” Ignoring the outburst, he said, “Yes, I do!”

“You didn’t decide to breed Zsa Zsa.”

“Neither did Mrs. Waggenhoffer,” Wilson pointed out. “But you can see why those people decided to go after her. She’s
very
eminent in goldens. And in the entire fancy. They probably imagine that people like her can get rid of irresponsible people like Sylvia.”

I must have looked startled. Someone
had
gotten rid of Sylvia.

Having evidently absorbed what he’d just said, Wilson looked embarrassed and added, “You know, stop them from breeding.”

“If only,” I said.

“Those people called Sylvia, you know,” Wilson confided. “And Sylvia treated them like dirt. Her attitude was that it was their dog, so it was their problem. She thought the whole thing was a big fuss over nothing. Sylvia
would
think that. You touch Zsa Zsa’s rear, and she hollers, and Sylvia never even took her to a vet—no shots, no heartworm test, nothing. And there she is, running around loose. She probably
has
heartworm, for God’s sake.”

With Sylvia dead, whose dog was Zsa Zsa? The sad, nasty golden was an inheritance no one would want. But who was inheriting the house? And anything else Sylvia might’ve owned? At a guess, Pia, Oona, and Eric, her three children, would inherit equally. But maybe not. If I’d been in the heirs’ situation, I’d’ve felt a moral responsibility to make things right with the Trasks; the cost of Charlie’s surgery would’ve felt like a debt that had to be paid. When it comes to dogs, though, and especially when it comes to responsibility for puppies, I get carried away. I struggled not to impose my exacting standards on Sylvia’s children. If they’d felt like helping the Trasks, I’d have admired them. But if Wilson, the only dog person in the family, sensed no obligation, it seemed highly unlikely that any of the others would assume responsibility.

“What’s going to happen to her now?” I asked. “To Zsa Zsa?”

“Eric wants to keep her. I told him he had to take her to the vet. Her hips are bad. You can tell by looking at her. Her elbows are probably bad, too. She’s obese. Her teeth are a mess. God knows what else. But I’m not having her around Llio unless Eric gets her shots and gets her wormed. At a minimum.”

The weird thing about Wilson’s take on Zsa Zsa was its strong resemblance to my take on him. Not that his hips or elbows were bad, but his teeth did need cleaning, and whenever I’d seen him, he’d looked as if he could use a good bath. At a guess, he wasn’t up to date on his tetanus shots, either.

“You know,” he went on, “you can’t blame those people, those Trasks.”

“I don’t. I feel sorry for them. How do they tell those little girls that their dog has to die because there’s no money for surgery? Or are they supposed to keep the dog the way he is? That dog is in pain. You can tell. And the pain is only going to get worse. It’s a degenerative disease. What are they supposed to do?”

“Sylvia bought our house twenty-five years ago,” Wilson said in a near whisper. “She bred that litter before I even met Pia, but Sylvia was living there when those puppies were whelped. So the people who bought the puppies must’ve come to the house.”

“And?”

“And so these Trasks knew where to find Sylvia.”

“Are you suggesting...?”

“They
could’ve.
And it’s not just that Sylvia sold them that puppy. It’s how she treated them when they called.”

“Did you actually hear the conversation?”

“Sylvia’s end of it. And what she said about it after. She thought it was a joke. She was nasty. Condescending. The truth is that Sylvia was a condescending person. She had no sympathy for people who were less fortunate than she was. You couldn’t blame these Trasks if they wanted to get back at her. Well, if they just
hated
her, you couldn’t blame them. But you know, they could’ve hung around the house and watched until they saw her go out. Alone. They
could’ve
.”

“Not all of them,” I said lightly.

“That old man looks like the brightest of them.” With some misgivings, I said, “George, that’s his name. George Trask. I know what you mean. He has some spark.”

The matching black-and-white Border collie team bowed and drew loud applause. Wishing I’d been free to give their performance my full attention, I joined in. Picking up on the break as a cue to move along, Llio trained her intelligent eyes on Wilson’s face and shifted on her short Corgi legs. I wished that Wilson had her social savvy. For one thing, if I couldn’t really watch the freestyle demo, how was I going to write about it? For another, greatly though I admired Llio, I just didn’t like Wilson. For one thing, his dirtiness repelled me. I shower all the time, and my dogs are so clean that you could eat off them, at least if you didn’t mind picking a few hairs off your tongue. For another, I didn’t like his bootlicking attitude toward Mrs. Waggenhoffer and, to some extent, toward me, too.

Idly reflecting on my preference for clean, proud men, I felt a wave of longing for Steve Delaney and was busily pining for his subtle odor of veterinary disinfectant and his total incapacity for sucking up to anyone when Wilson interrupted my romantic musing. “The more I think about it,” he said, “the more I think... look, you know what?”

Slovenly, bootlicking, and vacuous, too. Q.E.D., as certain residents of Cambridge say. Aloud! Which reminds me, Wilson was pretentious, too. The million-dollar crate? To my annoyance, he persisted in building a case against the Trasks, especially the elder Mr. Trask, as the culprits in Sylvia’s murder. Until then, I’d assumed that Wilson’s powers of imagination extended maybe as far as envisioning Llio’s taking a Group I—first place—later this same afternoon. To my surprise, he elaborated on his murder-by-Trask theory with lurid relish. “That George plans it, and they lurk around, the two of them, George and the son, what’s his name—”

“Tim,” I supplied.

“Whatever. And they follow Sylvia into the park, and the plan is, see, that they’re going to
threaten
her with the gun. So there she is, saying a few last words over Ian’s ashes, you see, that’s why she’s off the beaten path, so to speak, so she can have a few, uh, reverent moments alone and not just dump him in the dirt, and these guys sneak up on her. And it’s the young one who’s holding the gun, but the sneaky old man does the talking. ‘Fork over the dough, or you’re dead meat, Sylvia!’ ”

Dead meat?
Everything about the proposed scenario struck me as ludicrous. Among other things, I couldn’t see George Trask turning over control of anything, including a gun, to someone else. Besides, as I knew and Wilson didn’t, the Trasks had already concocted a scheme to get the money for Charlie’s surgery, namely, the plot into which Kimi had unintentionally leaped.

“Only,” Wilson continued, his little eyes bright with enthusiasm, “the son, Tim, he’s not the cool customer the old man is, and he panics, and his finger jerks, and BANG! The gun goes off! And Sylvia drops the urn and smashes it, and she goes, uh, tumbling after.” He blinked as the Jack-and-Jill phrase registered on him.

“Wasn’t Sylvia shot twice?” I asked.

“Well,” said Wilson, “once they shot her by accident, they had to finish the job, didn’t they? When they saw what they’d done...”

Just like Lizzie Borden,
I thought.
And when she saw what she had done...

“She gave her father forty-one,” I blurted out.

“What?”

“Nothing,” I muttered.

“Someone’s got to go to the police about this,” Wilson said.

I brought a finger to my lips. Only a few yards away, Brianna Trask and the children, Di and Fergie, were easing their way to ringside. Once again, I cursed Wilson for interfering with my freedom to watch the performances. In the ring now were a tiny Asian woman and her P.B.G.V—Petit Basset Griffon Vendeen, low to the ground like the familiar basset hound, but with a wiry coat and other more subtle differences. Same sense of humor, though! The music was country, a song I didn’t recognize with themes I did: loss, cheating, and revenge. The dog was fantastic. He heeled on the handler’s right, switched to the left, spun around, raised his right forepaw, then his left, and took a flashy bow. Fantastic, yes, but probably no better than my dogs could be... with a little work. Rowdy and Kimi were bright and agile, and not to brag or anything, but their heeling was already close to dancing, and as to showmanship, Rowdy, in particular, glittered with charisma. The tiniest bit of work, and my dogs...

The faces of the little girls interrupted my dreams of glory, probably because their expressions were identical to mine. With enchantment in their eyes, they followed the P.B.G.V.’s exit from the ring. Little Di’s high voice rose above the applause. “Charlie can do that!” she announced. “Charlie can do that, only better!” Her pride in her dog was as strong as my pride in Rowdy and Kimi. The difference was this: my dogs were sound and healthy, whereas Charlie couldn’t walk without pain, never mind dance.

Turning to Wilson, I said quietly, “This family had every reason to hold a grudge against Sylvia, and since they’re here today and going after Mrs. Waggenhoffer, it’s obvious that they want moral satisfaction, justice, something like that. And they must’ve had it in for Sylvia, too. But they did not kill her for money, Wilson. They’ve already got a plan for that. I know because I stumbled into it. Well, I didn’t. My Kimi did.” As objectively as possible, I summarized the incident at S & I’s Burgerhaven and described the article in the paper about the lawsuit. “What they’re up to,” I said urgently, “isn’t exactly ethical or admirable. But they’re desperate. Those children love that dog! And these are children who have almost nothing. I know it’s not right. There’s no reason why the restaurant should suffer. And even if the Trasks
had found
something revolting in the food, I’m not sure that suing S & I’s would be the best thing. But I’m in no position to judge. And I obviously can’t go to the police or the courts or whatever, because I
know
what the Trasks are up to, but I don’t have any proof at all. But when you see those little girls with the dog, and when you listen to them and hear how much they love him, you can see why the grownups would stoop to this phony lawsuit. Wilson, it’s obvious that after they called Sylvia and didn’t get anywhere with her, they gave up on her, and they decided to go after the breed clubs and the kennel clubs, for the moral satisfaction. They hatched this scheme—”