Ник Сайнт - Purrfect Sidekick. Purrfect Deseit. Purrfect Ruse [calibre 5.14.0]

“Oh, yeah. The keys to the city guy. He’s some kind of prince or king, right?”

“He’s a British blue blood, though I don’t think he’s a prince exactly, or a king. Merely a lord. Apparently they’ve got a lot of those over in England.”

“They probably create them in a factory outside London,” said Mr. Ed. For a moment he didn’t speak, and judging from the thought wrinkles that appeared on his sticky green brow, he was thinking hard. “What if Bojanowksy and Bonikowski were in on the whole thing?”

“What do you mean?”

“What if they set this whole thing up, along with Bob? I mean, what are the chances of Bob’s cousins being in town the same time he is? Or do they always travel in packs?”

“They mentioned they were here on holiday, along with their cousin. Though I also saw them at Town Hall, where they were working as waiters handing out finger food.”

“So they claim to be tourists, and yet they’re waitering. Doesn’t that strike you as odd?”

I shrugged. “Maybe they needed to make some extra money. Vacationing in the Hamptons can be expensive.”

“Mh,” said Mr. Ed. “Don’t they have jobs at home? What do they do?”

“Bojanowsky is a customer success manager at a furniture store. And his cousin is between jobs at the moment and has been paying the bills by temping as a manny.”

“Not exactly high-powered careers,” Mr. Ed mused. “Or high-paying ones.”

“That doesn’t mean they’re criminals,” I pointed out.

“It doesn’t,” he conceded. “So… tell me again what they said happened?”

“The cousins say they’re the victims of an attack carried out by Johnny and Jerry, while the latter claim the cousins were attacking Hilbourne and they saved his life.”

“I’m inclined to believe your Johnny and Jerry, Max. Call me prejudiced but any cousin of Bob Rector is a bad egg in my view. So there was blood on the carpet, and the cousins were caught… doing what exactly to this Lord Hilbourne?”

“Holding him upright, as he appeared to be on the verge of collapse. Which caused our two homegrown crooks to conclude the cousins had been beating the guy to a pulp. Which they hadn’t, as there wasn’t a mark on him. Not a scratch or a dent or even a single tiny bruise. But he did suffer an aneurysm. And he did lose a lot of blood and is now in a coma.”

“Mh…”

Mr. Ed’s tentacles were gently waving. Did you know that snails possess no less than four tentacles? Two on top of their head that contain their eyes, and two smaller ones they use to smell stuff on the ground. Mr. Ed’s big tentacles were now pointing at the sky, as he was momentarily locked in silent contemplation, while the smaller ones were idly sniffing at the mulch under our feet. I could tell he was thinking hard. I was thinking hard, too. So there you have it—cat and snail, both thinking hard, pooling resources.

“So what do you think?” I said finally.

“I’m suddenly reminded of the fact that Bob was an engineer.”

“He was?”

“Mh. He once told Evelina he used to work for some big tech startup.”

“You didn’t tell me that.”

“I didn’t think it was relevant.”

“Do you think it’s relevant now?”

He gave me a keen look. “Don’t you?”

I nodded slowly, putting together all the pieces of the puzzle.

We shared a long look. “I wonder,” he said, “what happened to the other watch.”

Chapter 37

We’d all gathered in Odelia’s cozy little home, which incidentally is also my home. I could have gone down to the police station to file a report, or even down to the Gazette to explain things to Odelia, but I felt it more prudent to save my strength. After all, I hadn’t eaten since breakfast, and I’d willingly surrendered my kibble to my housemates.

And so instead I opted to patiently await the return of my human from work, and when I told her I thought I’d solved both the crime of Bob Rector’s death, and of Lord Hilbourne’s mysterious illness, she immediately called her uncle, and the rest of the family, for a family meeting, something she said she’d been intending to do anyway, though she wouldn’t say why—probably wanting to surprise me with some great news about the wedding, I suspected. Like the fact that she’d found a different venue, which could host two or three thousand people, and a DJ who was used to playing big places like that, and a caterer who was ready to cater to thousands. And worked on credit.

And so it was that Dooley, Brutus and Harriet and myself were seated in front of the TV, and our humans were seated on the couch, wondering what all the fuss was about.

“So Bob Rector,” I said, “was the cousin of Wim Bojanowsky and Suppo Bonikowski, and I think in the end that’s what this whole case revolves around.”

Odelia dutifully translated my words for the convenience of Tex, Uncle Alec and Chase, a service Marge and Gran obviously didn’t need.

“I’ll tell you what I think happened,” I said, “and then you can decide if I’m right.”

“Sounds good,” Uncle Alec grunted. “This case is making me lose sleep—and what little hair I’ve got left on my head,” he added, patting his balding scalp.

“So the cousins must have heard that Hampton Cove had decided to award Lord Hilbourne the keys to the city, and also that the guy was loaded. And since Bob had been working on a very interesting new invention, they decided to put it to good use and test it out on Hilbourne.”

“What invention?” asked Marge.

“Well, this is just speculation on my part, but I suspect it’s some kind of device that impacts a person’s nervous system. Wear it, and the person on the other end has access to whatever your eyes can see and whatever your ears can hear. Amongst other things.”

“You’ve got to be kidding,” said Brutus.

“No, I’m afraid I’m not. It is, in fact, the only explanation for what happened. Or at least the most plausible one.”

“Only problem was that due to his busy schedule Hilbourne was a couple of days late in arriving, and so Bob and his cousins were left languishing in town, with too much time on their hands. Which is when Bob happened to meet Emma Bezel, who was on the lookout for a decent guy her sister could date. Bob very quickly discovered that Evelina was a millionairess in her own right, and so he and his two cousins decided to try their nifty little device on her, as a test run before they tackled Lord Hilbourne, the big fish.”

“So Evelina was the appetizer and Hilbourne the main menu,” said Gran.

“Exactly. Only Bob had taken a liking to Evelina, and didn’t want to subject her to a device of which he wasn’t sure if it worked exactly as intended. I think he must have felt that maybe, just maybe, there were still a few kinks to be worked out. And in the end he didn’t want Evelina to act as a guinea pig. Only his cousins didn’t agree with this assessment and decided to go through with the plan, overruling Bob’s reservations.”

“So why this whole kidnapping spiel?” asked Chase after Odelia had translated my musings.

“I think Bob put his foot down, at which point they decided to change tack and pretend that Bob had been kidnapped. A good old-fashioned kidnapping, after all, has never failed to bring home the bacon, and it didn’t fail this time either.”

“No, seventy-five thousand is a tidy sum,” Uncle Alec agreed. “So why kill Bob?”

“I think there must have been some kind of fight that broke out between the cousins, over who got what share of the money, and one of them must have pulled his gun and accidentally shot Bob. I don’t think it was their intention to kill him. But once they had, they had to get rid of the body, and make sure they weren’t implicated in any way.”