Блейз Клемент - Duplicity Dogged Тhe Dachshund

She said, “I tried to get the Powells to take care of this before they left, but they just couldn’t.”

“They knew?”

“Mame has several malignant tumors that are growing larger every day. They’re pressing on her spine, and now it looks as if they’ve affected nerves to her legs.”

I felt a flash of anger. How dare the Powells go off at a time like this and leave Mame with somebody who wasn’t family? After a lifetime of love and devotion, Mame deserved better.

As if she read my mind, the vet said, “No two people handle death the same way. They just couldn’t face it.”

“It won’t be any easier for them when they come back.”

Softly, she said, “I’m not sure they’re coming back. Before they left, they made a point of telling me they were members of the Hemlock Society, and that they’d always wanted to end their days in Italy. I think they were telling me they’d made plans to die there.”

Our eyes met, and then we quickly looked away, both of us too young to want to dwell on the question we would ultimately face. Personally, I plan on dying the way my grandparents did. Both of them dropped dead in the midst of active lives, vital one minute and gone the next. But back in some forbidden recess of my mind is the awful knowledge that not everybody is so lucky. If I’m not one of the lucky ones, will I try to hang on to youth like the man who killed Todd and Christy because he refused to quit driving, or will I take the way of the Powells? I don’t know. Like Scarlett O’Hara, I’ll think about that tomorrow.

I looked at Mame again. I thought of the fatal drug in Conrad’s body. I thought of Mame chewing on Conrad’s finger. Guilt tightened its fingers around my throat and made my voice tight.

“Just a few days ago, Mame went for a walk and ran into the woods. She was frisky as a pup.”

The vet smiled down at Mame and stroked her neck. “Had a good last run, did you? Good for you.”

“Could it have been too much for her?”

She looked up at me and shook her head. “This has been coming for a long time.”

“Can I stay with her while … ?”

“Of course. You can hold her and talk to her while she goes to sleep.”

She unbuckled Mame’s collar and handed it to me. I sat on the examining table with Mame cradled in my arms, while the vet slipped a needle into a vein. The vet stepped out of the room, and Mame looked into my face with clear eyes, unafraid and perhaps relieved.

Softly, I sang, “Put the blame on Mame, boys, put the blame on Mame.”

I sang the same words over and over until Mame’s eyes closed. Then I sang them a few more times just in case her spirit was hovering around listening.

The vet came in and took Mame from me. “The Powells made arrangements before they left,” she said. “You don’t have to do anything else.”

I slid off the table, tears streaming down my face. “She was a sweet little dog.”

“She was.”

I stopped at the receptionist’s counter long enough to fill out one of the blank checks Judge Powell had signed for emergencies. I knew he had loved Mame dearly, and so had Mrs. Powell, but I didn’t think they had been fair to her at the end.

I was still leaking tears when I opened the front door and collided blindly with a man coming in with a cat. I muttered a quick apology and slipped past him to the parking lot. As I opened the Bronco’s door, Ethan Crane’s voice sounded behind me.

“Dixie? Sorry I didn’t recognize you back there, I was concentrating on my cat. Had to leave her to get her toenails clipped.”

I wiped ineffectually at my streaming eyes. “I didn’t recognize you either. Had something in my eye.”

He touched my shoulder. “Is something wrong?”

The next thing I knew I was bawling and babbling while Ethan had an arm around my shoulder and was patting me and making soothing noises.

“The vet said she would have died anyway but she doesn’t know about her chewing on Conrad’s finger … it had that drug in it that kills in just seconds, and maybe Mame broke the skin … I don’t know, she could have … I didn’t look, I should have looked … maybe she got some of the drug in her system, maybe that’s what really killed her … I shouldn’t have left her at home alone … the Powells were going to go off and kill themselves anyway … I should have paid somebody to stay with her and they would never have known … it’s just plain mean and selfish to do that, you know?”

Ethan pointed to a Starbucks at the edge of the parking lot. “Dixie, you need coffee.”

With his arm still around my shoulders, he guided me across the blacktop and put me at a minuscule table outside the Starbucks front door. He ducked inside, and by the time he came back with two coffees, I had got myself under control. He spilled a handful of cream and sugar containers on the table and took the other chair. For a minute or two we were busy with the coffees, and then we were stuck in one of those awkward moments when nobody can think of what to say next.

I said, “Sorry to disintegrate on you like that.”

“No problem. I’m sorry about your dog.”

“She wasn’t mine, actually. I was taking care of her.”

“I’m still sorry.”

I looked directly at him for the first time. No doubt about it, he was extraordinarily handsome, but his face wore a new look of tension.

I said, “I guess you’ve heard about the arrests at Leo Brossi’s call center.”

He huffed a mirthless laugh. “Brossi’s not the big fish. Denton Ferrelli’s the one they should be after.”

“You didn’t say that when we talked before.”

Humility obviously wasn’t Ethan Crane’s long suit. He gave me a long hard look that seemed to be contemplating whether he could get away with lying.

“I didn’t know then what I know now.”

“Now that you have new information, could you share it with me?”

I thought I did very well to keep the acid off my tongue when I said that. I guess he thought so too, because he gave me a hint of an approving grin.

25

Ethan said, “What I’ve learned is that Denton Ferrelli has a history of smelly financial deals, and he always has help from organized crime and corrupt politicians. Like he brokered around five billion a year in deposits into savings and loans all over the country. But first he got an agreement that the S and Ls would lend the money to people he named. Every one of them was somebody with the Mafia.”

My eyes got big at the word Mafia , and Ethan smiled grimly.

“Like they say on the street, Denton has connects. Not just with the mob but with a lot of politicians. Dirty money goes into a bank or a savings and loan, comes out clean through unsecured loans, and goes into the pockets of crooked politicians. Then they use their clout to help the people who bought them.”

“What about Leo Brossi?”

Ethan held up two fingers squeezed tightly together. “Denton and Brossi are close. A few years ago, Leo Brossi got a Miami bank to loan him four million dollars with nothing but his personal guarantee as security. On the day the loan was finalized, Brossi loaned the same amount to a real estate company owned by Denton Ferrelli and Wayne Black.”

“The same Senator Wayne Black who was playing golf with Denton when Conrad was killed?”

“The same, only he wasn’t a senator then. Now get this: Ferrelli and Black used the money to buy a building in Miami’s prime financial district. They never paid a dime on their loan from Brossi because their deal with him only required them to repay the loan if the cash flow from the building was sufficient to cover it. They claimed it wasn’t, so Brossi then defaulted on his four million bank loan.”