Ruff Way to Go Read online

  “Can I help you? Or are you just here to stare at my dog?” the woman asked in a voice dripping with sarcasm.

  Reluctantly, I returned my gaze to the woman before me. “Are you Susan Nelson?”

  “Yeah. What’s it to you?”

  How nostalgic. Though her looks had improved considerably, her grating voice hadn’t, which sounded to me like a car engine cranking over. Plus there were those unforgettable— and loathsome—ice-cold mannerisms of hers. “I’m Allida Babcock. We used to live in the same neighborhood.”

  “Allida Babcock?”

  “Yes.”

  “Well, I’ll be.” She gave me a sly smile. “Come on in here and let me take a look at you.”

  I had an involuntary shudder at her odd phrasing, which sounded to me like something out of The Beverly Hillbillies, but I stepped inside. The air reeked of cigarette smoke. We occupied the small square of warped green linoleum that served as the entranceway to the living room, where everything was as unkempt and shoddy as the outside of her house.

  “You’re the scrawny little kid I used to babysit for?” She eyed me at length, then laughed heartily and said, “You haven’t changed a bit.”

  “Nor have you.”

  The smile faded. “So, what all brings you to my humble abode?”

  I glanced again at the schipperke. Her dog’s paws would be just about the right size for the prints at Edith’s. The schipperke had become distracted by a prism’s rainbow on the wall, which came from a crystal hung from the window. The dog was leaping at the rainbow, trying to catch it. There were scratch marks on the wall, so this wasn’t a new activity.

  I decided to work my way gradually up to a discussion of paw prints at the murder scene and said the first thing that popped into my head. “My mother mentioned you were still in the area, and I thought I’d come by and say hello and apologize for that time I Super-Glued your shoes to the porch.”

  “That was you? Damn. I always blamed your brother for that one.”

  “I figured you would. That was the major reason I did it.”

  “Yeah, well, I know what it’s like to grow up with a sibling, believe you me. Mom and Dad are still pretty ticked, though. You’d be surprised how much work that all took to scrape the chunks of glue and repaint the floor.”

  Half kidding, I said, “I guess I should tell them how sorry I am. I’m somewhat overdue for giving them an apology.”

  She shrugged. “Couldn’t hurt. I’m telling you, they remember it well.” She held my gaze as if completely serious. That was what came from her parents’ leading too sheltered an existence—still being bent out of shape twenty years later over a childish prank.

  “We had a major upheaval yesterday in the neighborhood. Did your parents tell you about it?”

  She nodded. “Yeah. Mom called me and filled me in on all the sordid details. Was that you who found the body?” She acted mildly curious, nothing more. Perhaps she’d never even met Cassandra.

  “I’m afraid so. Did you know Cassandra Randon?”

  She shrugged. “No. Only in passing.” She gestured at the couch, which ran the length of one wall. Its once-purple velvet fabric was soiled, and a missing leg had been replaced by a cinder block. “You want to have a seat?”

  “No, thanks. I can only stay a minute.” All I wanted to do, really, was glean information about her parents’ relationship with Cassandra without tipping my hand.

  Feigning a casual attitude, I said, “I thought I saw your car in your parents’ driveway yesterday.” I was lying through my teeth, of course, and it would have taken no effort for Susan to stop and wonder how I could possibly know what type of car she drove. If she asked, I’d be in hot water, as I had no idea. But I had nothing invested in this relationship, anyway.

  “Yeah, I was there. Visiting. I come over and mow the lawn, water the flowers, drop off groceries. That sort of thing.”

  “I thought so,” I bluffed. “You were there when I was calling for help next door.”

  “I...” For the first time, she conveyed some emotional reaction, her round cheeks reddening. “I never heard you call for help, or I’d’ve done something. I must have been gone by the time you got there. Nothing much was happening when I left my parents’ place. But they told me the police arrived five minutes after I’d gone.”

  A two-or three-year-old had galloped into the room and was now playing “catch the rainbow” along with the dog. She was angling the light into one palm and trying to cup the other hand over the top as if the colors were a butterfly. The dog’s snaps at the colored light were barely missing the little girl’s fingers. Their actions made me too nervous to concentrate on Susan’s words.

  “Susan, I don’t mean to butt in, but if your daughter ‘catches’ that rainbow on her hand, your schipperke might bite her hand.”

  Susan gasped and grabbed the child’s hand, leading her out of the room. “Chelsea! Let’s go back to our coloring books, shall we?”

  I glanced over at the crystal to see if I could take it down. It was fastened to the top of the window frame, too high for me to reach without standing on a chair.

  While Susan got her daughter resituated, I took the opportunity to coax her dog over to me. “What a good dog you are,” I said, crouching down. The small black dog took a wide stance, held his—as best I could tell from my angle— ground, and started barking at me. This was classic behavior for the loyal-to-owners-but-wary-around-strangers personality traits I’d heard were so indigenous to the breed. Although I personally don’t put quite as much weight on breed personality profiling as some other canine experts do, it was useful in predicting behaviors, to a point.

  Susan came back into the room and immediately removed the crystal from the window, reaching it with no trouble. The show off. She laid it on the dirty sill and turned toward me with a furrowed brow. “So this explains why there’s all the scratch marks on the wall. I never realized that’s what Boris was doing.” Susan gave me a visual once over, her hands on her hips. “How did you know that he’s a schipperke?”

  “I’m familiar with most breeds. I’m a dog behaviorist.”

  “A behaviorist?” She snorted. “Is that some glorified term that lets you charge more for working as a dog trainer?”

  I waited a moment to keep from blasting her for her snide remark, then explained calmly, “Dog trainers do just that— basic obedience training. I specialize in dog behavior problems, which sometimes includes their inability to follow instructions.”

  “Huh. Well, I gotta say, I could sure use your services, if only I could afford them. Boris isn’t trained yet. We only got him a couple weeks ago. He barks like mad at everybody who comes to the house and seems to think he owns the place. We have to keep him out in the yard a lot, but then he barks and bugs the neighbors.”

  “Come on, Boris!” a little voice called. The girl raced through the living room, giggling as the much faster Boris did his best to stay behind her and interpret the rules to this game.

  “You know, I’ve got to say right off the bat that rambunctious, untrained dogs and toddlers don’t mix well.”

  “Ah, I’m not worried.” She flicked her wrist in the direction the girl had run. “She ain’t my kid. I’m just doing day care for a neighbor. See, I lost my job and I’m trying to scrape together some money to help ends meet.” She chuckled, but the sound was bitter. “I wasn’t kidding when I told you that I couldn’t afford to hire you.”

  “Does your husband work?”

  “Oh, sure.” The color rose in her cheeks. “He’s a real hard worker. He’s a contractor, you know, for carpentry, that sort of thing. It’s just that that’s a hot-or-cold kind of business.”

  “So is any self-run business.” My clients also tended to come in clusters.

  My mind raced as to how I could work the conversation around to paw prints. “Funny that I never noticed you over there in the past few weeks, but I guess you can’t really see much of your parents’ property from my mom’s p
lace. Do you bring your dog along when you go over there?”

  “Sometimes. Why? Did you see him running around on your property?”

  “No, I’d have noticed him, for sure,” I said with sincere admiration as he deserted the girl and returned to the living room to bark at me. Boris was a bright-eyed, healthy-looking dog. “What about yesterday?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Was Boris at your parents’ place with you yesterday?”

  She shrugged, but was now watching me with a wariness that matched her dog’s. “Why do you ask?”

  “There were some paw prints that I was curious about, that’s all.”

  “Paw prints? You mean, in the blood or something?” Her eyes lit up, and I got the impression that she was calculating how she could gain personally from this information.

  Her assumption that the paw prints had been made by the blood was not such a big leap as to implicate her, I decided. “No, nothing as dramatic as all of that. The...Cunninghams’ dog is missing and I’m trying to help them locate him.”

  Having tired, finally, of keeping an eye on me, Boris searched the wall for another rainbow and, not finding one, snatched up a sock that he’d found wadded up in the corner and dashed in a circular path through the house, seeing if anyone would give chase.

  “That’s it,” Susan said with a sigh. “Time to move this kit ‘n’ caboodle outdoors.”

  Fortunately, for I still hoped to glean information from her, Susan hadn’t called me on my earlier excuse that I could only stay a moment I silently followed her into the kitchen.

  “Come on, Chelsea. Want something to eat?”

  The child nodded, and Susan grabbed a lunch box off the counter and we all headed to the backyard, which was spacious and lovely. The lawn and gardens were in considerably nicer condition than the house. A garden on the incline of the side yard had tiers built with railroad ties and layers of hundreds of beautiful irises that must have come from Long’s Gardens, a world-renowned seller of iris bulbs in north Boulder that had been in existence for longer than I’d been.

  I brought out the piece of magenta-colored paper in my pocket and showed it to Susan, who was seated on the redwood picnic table bench across from the little girl. “Your parents gave me this note. Is it from your notepad?”

  She gave me an all-too-familiar-looking sneer. “No. Why all would you want to know?”

  Not wanting to divulge my true reason for asking, I felt my cheeks warm and offered a feeble explanation. “I was just trying to find out whose notepad it was. It didn’t look like your parents’ typical color scheme.”

  She shrugged. “My dad, probably—” She stopped, then said abruptly, “It isn’t mine. Didn’t you say earlier you could only stay for a moment?”

  She was suddenly hostile, either because I’d annoyed her or because the subject matter made her tense. “Yes, I do have an appointment at noon. I’d better be going.” While we spoke, the dog tore around the yard, chasing a butterfly. “Boris must be, what, ten months old?”

  “A little over nine months. How’d you know?”

  “He’s approaching his adolescent phase.”

  She snorted. “Runs in the family. My husband’s stuck in his adolescence.”

  Based on my desire to work with a schipperke, combined with the thought that my suspicions about Susan and her parents might be best resolved by getting to know her better, I tried to think of how to offer a trade of services. I couldn’t think of any particular construction projects that I had going at the moment, and having seen the condition of their house, I had doubts as to how motivated her husband really was. “So you take care of your parents’ lawn?”

  “Yeah.”

  “If you do decide you’d like me to work with Boris, maybe we can trade services. My mom’s been talking about hiring out the job of mowing for a while now. Maybe we could work out some sort of equitable arrangement.”

  Boris tore through the yard and crashed into the glass door, apparently not realizing it was shut. He yelped then raced back toward us. Before any of us could move, he leapt onto the picnic table, snatched the girl’s sandwich right off her plate, and dashed off. The little girl, in the meantime, burst into wailing sobs, pointing at the dog.

  Susan turned toward me as she rose to console the child. “How soon could you start?”

  Chapter 6

  We set an appointment for the next day, and I left for my house visit in Boulder. I often go to the dog’s residence, though sometimes, depending on factors such as the particular behavioral problem, the dogs are brought to my office. I charge more for the house visits, and they are usually much more advantageous for the dogs and their owners.

  Maggie, my client, was a gorgeous, albeit exuberant, golden retriever. I’d grown up with a houseful of goldens, so they were one of my favorite types of dogs—although my list of favorites often seems to correspond with whatever type of dog I happen to be with at the moment.

  This particular golden had become a hoarder of unreasonable proportions. She was “burying” her things—chew toys, rawhide bones, and other items she’d decided she wanted for herself, such as her masters’ shoes—in all sorts of inconvenient locations in the house. She was then constantly either scratching up the doors in pursuit of her various “bones,” or trying to defend them from anyone else touching them.

  The burying instinct can be a very difficult one to overcome. To not bury bones goes against the innate survival instincts that dogs are born with. Owners can opt to have me help train the dog to use acceptable limits, such as burying bones only in certain areas of the property. However, prior to my being hired, Maggie’s owners had put an end to all digging, which Maggie had translated to mean “no digging outside.”

  My advice to Maggie’s owners had been to spritz Bitter Apple on their shoes, take away her toys and put them out of her reach, and give her only one item to play with at a time. When playtime was over, they would immediately collect her one toy, regardless of whether or not she’d “buried” it. This regimen makes it very clear to the dog that the human owners and not the dog itself are in charge of the various belongings.

  We had been in the intermediate stages of the behavior modification regimen, which meant that Maggie was spending quite a bit of time whining at the base of the refrigerator, staring up at her box of toys with forlorn eyes. The owners were already discouraged. They had decided that they didn’t want to indefinitely maintain the practice of having to limit her toys to one at a time. Instead, the final stage of Maggie’s training, which we were now dabbling in, was to teach her to return her own toys to one location. Dogs can actually be trained to pick up after themselves in this manner, which makes for a nice parlor trick.

  During this session, I had Maggie’s owner bring down the box of her toys in my presence. Poor Maggie acted overjoyed and, as I’d fortunately forewarned, immediately set about laying claim to the rooms of the house by spreading out her things. Naturally, we had to do repeated fetching and returning of the toys to the box, until she gradually got the idea. Though I never admit this to my clients, the truth is, I appreciate these more stubborn canines. The eager-to-please and quick-to-learn ones mean fewer repeat sessions, and I charge by the hour.

  Afterward, I drove to south Boulder to meet with an obstinate poodle that didn’t tolerate strangers in the house. The owner’s grandchildren were coming for a visit next month. This was a matter of getting the poodle to make more reasonable concessions on where his particular turf boundaries were. I was working on reducing the boundaries until they were defined as his dog bed and the immediate perimeter.

  Once the poodle appointment was finished, I drove to my office, anxious to see Russell. The building we were in was a two-and-a-half story limestone structure on the corner of Ninth and Mapleton, just north of the Pearl Street Mall. We were in the half story, a walk-out basement built into the steep incline. Though real estate agents would call this location “nestled in the foothills,” our view through th
e small windows just below the ceiling went no higher than the ankles of sidewalk pedestrians. Russell didn’t need two full rooms and had given me the front room, so that he and his clients had to go through my office to get to his. The access to the bathroom was through his office, so it was something of a trade-off.

  His car was parked in the two-car parking lot that came with the rental, and I immediately got butterflies in my stomach at the prospect of seeing him. However, as soon as I went inside, the deep murmurings through our common wall told me that he was with a couple of male clients. Russell is a contract electrical engineer, so from my vantage point, this was likely deadly dull stuff they were discussing.

  My thoughts soon turned to the missing Shogun. If Trevor or Edith had had any luck finding Shogun, they surely would have contacted me by now. Nevertheless, I decided to call them and share my concern. I dialed Edith’s house, but there was no answer. I called Trevor, thinking I had no chance of finding him, that he’d be at work. To my surprise, he answered.

  Trevor began by telling me that Shogun still hadn’t surfaced and that he was “really worried.” Oddly, he didn’t sound even remotely worried, in contrast to his behavior last evening, and yet the dog had now been missing for almost twenty-four hours.

  “I’m so sorry to hear that, Trevor. My mother and I haven’t seen him in the neighborhood at all. I was thinking that, since your sister raised Shogun, he might have gone there. Where does your sister live?”

  “Oh, uh, she lives...way north in Campion.”

  That was odd. He’d said it as if she lived in North Dakota, and yet Campion was closer to Berthoud than Longmont, where Trevor lived. “I’d like to speak with her. I’m trying to introduce myself to dog breeders in the area to help my business anyway, and it might be helpful for me to talk with her about Shogun.”