The Persian Always Meows Twice Page 5

  “What if none of them want it?”

  He planted his hands on his hips, which were noticeably slim even in baggy blue scrubs. “Sounds like you’ve got a specific case in mind. You wouldn’t be talking about George DeLeuw? Oh gosh, that’s right—the newspaper said you were at his house!”

  A polite knock at one of the room’s two doors, and the vet tech put her head inside. “Mrs. Ostroff is here. The cocker spaniel with cherry eye?”

  “Thanks, Debby. I’ll be right with her.”

  I felt guilty to be keeping Mark from his other patients. “I don’t want to take up your time. . . .”

  “No, no, it’s a worthwhile question. I just saw DeLeuws’s cat once, when George brought him in for a booster shot. Harpo, wasn’t it? Beautiful animal. Nice disposition, too.”

  “Yes, and I’m afraid he’s going end up in a bad place, or maybe even euthanized. That’s the last thing George would have wanted. But while everyone is concentrating on solving his murder, Harpo could slip through the cracks.”

  Mark glanced briefly toward the door, and I knew he was thinking about the other patients waiting for him. “Tell you what. I’ll ask around, look into some of the options. Is there a number where I can reach you? I don’t think we have one on file. . . . ”

  Always prepared, I grabbed a business card from my purse and also wrote my cell number on the back. “I really appreciate your help, and I’m sure George would too.”

  “Crazy thing, huh? A guy like that, killed in his own house, in a quiet town like this?” Mark shook his head. “Okay, Cassie. I’ll call Dawn tomorrow when the kitten’s ready to go home. And I’ll also be in touch with you about . . . this other business.”

  I stepped back onto the sidewalk, feeling lighter, and not just because I’d left kitten and carrier behind. Tigger would get the treatment he needed, I should be getting information that would help me to look out for Harpo’s best interests . . . and Mark Coccia now possessed my phone number and had promised to call.

  All in all, a very productive morning.

  Chapter 6

  I headed back to the shop with a swing in my step, leaving my jacket open to the light breeze. The fresh air up here had taken some getting used to, compared to the other, more crowded New Jersey towns where I had grown up. I also enjoyed the absence of any really tall buildings in Chadwick. Even downtown, all I had to do was raise my sights a little to gaze out over rolling hills beyond. In any season, that view tended to improve my perspective in more ways than one.

  Passing the drugstore, which still had Easter decorations in its window, I noticed a woman up the block who definitely did not look like a native. Tall and slim, she wore a sophisticated, minimalist outfit no Chadwick matron would consider—a loose linen-colored tunic with wide-leg brown pants, a stylish cross-body purse, and wedge shoes. Even the cut of her super-straight, shoulder-length blond hair looked expensive.

  The other thing that set her apart was that she was having some kind of meltdown over her cell phone. People around here usually don’t have such intense relationships with their electronic devices. She kept moaning to herself, “No-o-o, no-o-o! ” and slapping the phone against her palm as if that would resuscitate it. Finally she slumped back against a nearby car, her face crumpled, as if on the verge of tears.

  When I lived in a more urban setting, I might have passed by, not wanting to get involved in someone else’s drama. But even though I’d only been a Chadwick resident for about four months, some of the town’s friendliness had rubbed off on me. And though this woman looked stressed, she didn’t appear dangerous . . . or crazy.

  Nearing her, I asked quietly, “Is something wrong? Do you need help?”

  She started, as if surprised that anyone had overheard her. “Oh . . . thanks. My stupid phone is dead, and I just realized I probably left my charger at home!” I must have looked puzzled—So, go home and get it?—because she added, “In California.”

  “Ah,” I said.

  She obviously needed to vent to someone. “It’s got my whole calendar and all my contacts! And I was supposed to confirm an important delivery today to my San Jose store. . . .” She blew out her cheeks in frustration. “Guess I won’t be doing that.”

  “You just need another charger, right? Mind if I take a look?”

  She paused, as if wary about trusting me, then handed over the phone. I’d held out a thin hope that it might be similar to my very basic model, but of course not. She had a top-of-the-line smartphone that could probably do everything but iron her hair.

  “I thought maybe I could just lend you my charger,” I said, “but guess not.”

  “Where can I even find another one around here?” she lamented. “Is there an electronics store out on the highway? But I don’t have time.... I have so much else to do today!”

  Tears finally welled up in her eyes, which were a distinctive silvery green that felt familiar to me. Fine lines fanned from the corners of her eyes and the edges of her lips, so I figured her to be around fifty. For someone so meticulously turned out otherwise, she wore no visible makeup.

  I felt helpless at her distress. “I’m sure it’ll be okay.”

  She blotted her tears on her sleeve and pulled herself together. “I’m sorry. I don’t usually carry on like this, but . . . my brother just died. I flew east to make arrangements for his funeral.”

  The poor woman! “Well, of course you’re upset. That’s probably why you forgot to pack your charger, too.” I had an idea. “Look, there’s a little electronics store a few blocks down, on a side street. I bet they could fix you up.”

  The blond woman glanced up and down Center Street and took in the humble mom-and-pop businesses with a tight, skeptical smile. “Oh, I really don’t think—”

  “Seriously, you’d be amazed at the stuff Emmy keeps in stock. It’s worth a try, right?”

  She weighed the small effort against her desperation. “Where is this place?”

  “Not far. I’ll walk with you.” I started down the block and coaxed her along like one of my finicky felines. “I’m Cassie, by the way.”

  “Danielle.” The woman offered a slim hand with a perfect French manicure. “It’s nice of you to do this.”

  On our way, I remembered her comment about an important shipment. “What kind of store do you have in California?”

  “I’m a fashion designer, and I have retail shops in San Jose and San Francisco,” she told me. “DeLeuw Designs.”

  I planted my heels, suddenly remembering where I’d seen those eyes before. “Oh my God. You’re George DeLeuw’s sister!”

  “That’s right.” Danielle laughed uncomfortably. “This really must be a small town.”

  “No . . . I mean, he was pretty well-known, but . . . I groomed his cat, Harpo.” To prove I wasn’t a crackpot, I fished a business card out of my purse and handed it to her. “I’m so sorry for your loss. I didn’t know your brother terribly well, but he seemed like a fine man.”

  “He did, didn’t he? Anyhow, thank you, Cassie.”

  I wasn’t about to mention that I’d found George’s body, because I didn’t think she needed that picture in her head. But Danielle brought it up herself, having heard about it from the police.

  “It’s been a double shock,” she admitted as we started walking again. “To hear that he’d passed from natural causes would have been one thing. But murdered!”

  “I think everyone here who knew him and worked for him felt the same way. At least the local police seem to be doing everything they can to figure out what happened.”

  Once we reached Emmy’s Electronics, I sensed that the store’s homey name and small square footage did nothing to boost Danielle’s confidence. Neither did the sight of the desktop and laptop computers and smaller, older-model flatscreens TVs that cluttered the front of the shop.

  “She does walk-in repairs,” I explained to Danielle. “These are probably fixed and waiting for customers to pick up.”

  Danielle glanc
ed restlessly toward the door. “Maybe I should drive out to the highway. This might just be a waste of—”

  Emmy bustled out then, a round woman with a curly mop of graying black hair and a cheerful, rosy face. “Hi, folks. What can I do ya for today?”

  Tentatively, as if she didn’t quite expect the shopkeeper to speak her language, Danielle explained her problem and surrendered her phone. Emmy turned it over in her pillowy but skillful hands.

  “Hey, that’s a nice one,” she said. “I think we got something that’ll work with this.... Just got a new delivery last week . . .” She hunted through the overlapping stacks of high-tech accessories that packed her store to the rafters. In just a couple of minutes she produced a sleek black device the size of a pack of cards. “This is portable, and it’ll have you recharged in two hours.” Emmy ripped open its molded plastic casing to let Danielle test it on her phone.

  DeLeuw’s sister couldn’t hide her surprise when the charger worked. She gladly paid what, for me, would have been a hefty price.

  I smiled through the whole transaction without once whispering, “I told you so.”

  “Thanks for your help, Cassie,” Danielle said as we left the store. “You saved me searching up and down the highway, which I don’t know very well.”

  “Don’t mention it,” I said. “You’ve got enough problems right now without having to stress over your phone.”

  Back at her car, a rental, she hesitated. “I’d like to buy you a coffee or something, but—”

  “That’s okay. I need to get back to my own shop, and you have a lot to deal with today.”

  “I do.” She looked down with a sigh at the sidewalk.

  “Nice meeting you, though,” I told her. “Good luck with . . . all the arrangements.”

  After we’d parted, I reflected on Danielle’s odd response when I’d said her brother seemed like a fine man.

  “He did, didn’t he?”

  Strange way to put it! I thought. But heck, she’s in mourning and under a lot of stress. It probably just came out wrong.

  * * *

  Back at the shop, I apologized to Sarah for being gone so long and told her about encountering DeLeuw’s sister. She agreed that it was one heck of a coincidence.

  Then, with no more time to waste, my new assistant and I donned our official CCC smocks to groom Mystique, a boarder due to be picked up that evening. The stunning Birman cat provided us with a different experience from Mango, being a semi-longhair with a mellow temperament.

  “I’ve never seen one like this before,” my assistant commented, still with a girlish fascination. “Her coloring is so pretty, like a Siamese’s. Look at those blue eyes!”

  For a second I recalled Mark Coccia’s sexy eyes, also unexpectedly blue, then snapped myself back into professional mode. “Some people think Birmans were developed from Siamese, maybe crossed with Persians, a long time ago,” I told Sarah. “And see how her legs are dark, but with white feet?”

  Mystique was so accustomed to being groomed that the two of us didn’t need a harness to keep her on the table. The milky fur that covered most of her body had stayed pretty clean during her visit, so we mostly combed her to get rid of any dead hair and fluffed her up with baby powder. One of the things I enjoy most about my job is the beauty and variety of the animals’ fur. Mystique’s was silky, without the lush undercoat of a Persian like Harpo. Even among nonpedigreed shorthairs like my own three cats, Matisse’s calico coat had a light, soft quality, while Mango’s tabby hairs felt a bit crisper and Cole’s black fur lay flat and smooth as satin. I’d be able to recognize any of my pets simply by touch.

  We had just finished primping the boarder when I heard a knock at my back door. “That’s got to be Nick,” I told Sarah. “Can you put Mystique back in her cage while I talk to him?”

  “Sure.” My assistant hugged the Birman with both arms, as if she might find it hard to say good-bye when the cat’s owner arrived.

  I found my thickset, balding handyman already checking out the wobbly post on my back steps. “Thanks for making time to come,” I told him. “My friend Dawn leaned on that rail the other night and almost took a spill.”

  “Might be able to fix it with just a bolt or a bracket.” Nick stroked the short fringe of his gray mustache. “I’ll have to check underneath to see.”

  He had pulled his JANOS HOME REPAIR panel truck into my parking lot and opened the doors to get his toolbox. When he turned back around, I noticed his eyes looked red and tired behind his wire glasses. He spent a minute crouched next to the low flight of steps with a flashlight and a few mutters of concern.

  Surfacing, he told me, “I probably can secure it okay for now, but that old wood’s starting to split. You really need a new post. I can make you one, but I might not get back here to install it until the end of the week.”

  “That’s fine,” I assured him. “Do what you can now, and replace the post whenever you’re able. I know you’ve got a lot on your mind these days. How is Dion doing?”

  “He’s home, anyway.” Rummaging through different-sized brackets in his toolbox, Nick shook his head. “I still can’t believe anyone could accuse him of murder! That Detective Bonelli, she’s new around here. Just joined the force about six months ago.”

  Only a little longer than I’d been in town, but I got Nick’s point. “She doesn’t know the locals, I guess, so she suspects everyone.”

  “Course, I s’pose she’s got good reason.” He paused, a bracket in his hands, and sighed. “Damn, this is all my fault.”

  That made me stand up straighter. I couldn’t help noticing all of the hammers, saws, crowbars, and other potentially lethal objects stockpiled in the back of Nick’s van. And for a guy around sixty, he still looked strong enough to wield something like that with plenty of force. “Why do you say that?”

  “ ’Cause I told him to go over there. Now I wish to God I never mentioned it!”

  “You told him to go to DeLeuw’s house yesterday?”

  “No, no. Like, a month ago.”

  I leaned against the stairs’ more solid railing, across from where Nick was working. “Why? And what would that have to do with George’s . . . death?”

  Nick sat on the gravel next to the steps and reached underneath with a bracket to see if it would do the job. “Dion has this idea for an invention, some kind of computer code that’d be real hard to crack and can handle big files or something. I don’t understand much about it, but he thinks it could be a big deal. First, though, he needs money to develop it and patent it. Neither of us has got that kind of cash, so he needs a backer.”

  “Okay.” I also didn’t know much about patenting an invention, and even less about computer codes, but it all sounded logical.

  “I say to him, ‘Why don’t you talk to that DeLeuw fella? I heard he used to work on Wall Street and he knows some people out there in California, in Silicone Valley.’ ”

  I could hardly blame Nick for this malaprop, because he’d probably had a lot more experience with caulk than with high technology. And how could I feel superior when even I had no idea what “silicon” was?

  He drilled under the steps for a minute, then took a break to continue his story. “So Dion goes over there, tells DeLeuw about his idea, and shows him the plans. I guess DeLeuw seemed interested and said he’d discuss it with his Silicone Valley buddies. After that, Dion checks with him every coupla days, e-mailing or calling. DeLeuw keeps telling him the computer guys are still testing the system and making up their minds. Finally he goes over there in person and DeLeuw blows up at him. Says these things take time, and if Dion doesn’t stop bugging him, he’s gonna just tell the California company to forget the whole thing.”

  Hardly a motive for murder, I thought, unless Dion was a major hothead. “He must have been pretty disappointed—”

  Nick cut me off with a wave of his cordless drill. “But Dion reads all the computer-business news online. Last week he saw that some Chinese electronics firm
came out with a new system that sounds just like his idea. So he thinks DeLeuw went behind his back and made a deal with somebody else, cutting him out.”

  That did sound like a good reason to lose your temper. “And somehow the police found out about all this?”

  “Some people who worked for DeLeuw—his housekeeper and his assistant—they remembered Dion coming over that first time and then phoning and e-mailing a lot. The assistant guy said Dion kept ‘hounding’ DeLeuw about the invention. Made my boy sound like some kind of dangerous lunatic, which he’s not! Besides, no matter how mad Dion got, he’d never hurt anybody.”

  I let Nick position the new bracket and screw it into place before I asked, “He could use a good alibi. Where was he yesterday afternoon?”

  “Eh, where else? At our house, in his office in the basement, working on his computer. He said he was debugging a game for a client and was—whatcha-call-it—online. He told me his computer would have a record of the times he’d had the game open, modified the files, and stuff.”

  Of course, these days a person could be parked in his car and still be using a laptop or an iPad. It was hard to imagine a guy calmly playing a computer game right after having a violent argument and killing someone. But if Dion was clever enough to come up with a sophisticated encryption system, maybe he even could falsify the times he’d been working on his computer.

  “At least you can vouch for him being at home, right?” I asked Nick.

  “Sure, but how much do the cops trust me? I’m his dad. Besides, Dion’s got a separate door to go in and out of the basement. It’s convenient, because clients sometimes visit him. So if someone asked me to swear under oath, did I know he was in the house that whole afternoon . . . I guess I couldn’t say for sure.” His stubborn pride resurfaced. “Still, I know my boy, and that’s enough for me.”

  I heard the frustration in his voice and felt sad that he had to go through this heartache. “Maybe when they find the murder weapon, it will have somebody else’s fingerprints and that will clear Dion.”