Chow Down (A Melanie Travis Mystery)

speaking. “I guess you thought that if you could eliminate Yoda, MacDuff would have a clear path to winning the contest. Is that why you pushed Larry down the stairs? Were you hoping to injure Yoda so badly that she couldn’t continue to compete? You ended up with more than you bargained for, didn’t you?”
    The phone on Chris’s desk rang. Looking murderously at Simone, he reached over and picked up the receiver.
    “I’m on my way,” he said. “Yes, she’s here, too. We’ll be coming right down.” There was a pause, then he added, “No I haven’t seen Faith or Melanie. I don’t know where they are.”
    “They went to the conference room,” Simone said. “That was at least ten minutes ago.”
    “No, we didn’t.”
    Faith by my side, I stepped through the doorway. I’ve never been very good at skulking around, and besides, I wanted to hear Chris’s reply, too. Simone might let him get away without answering her questions, but I wasn’t about to.
    “Oh, fu—” Chris looked up. Then he turned back to the phone and said, “No, nothing’s wrong. Melanie’s just shown up. We’re all on our way.”
    “How much did you hear?” Simone asked.
    Chris hung up the phone and walked out from behind his desk.
    “Everything. Except the answer to your last question.”
    Chris turned his back on Simone and looked at me. “Seriously. You didn’t believe all that garbage she was saying, did you?”
    “Most of it.”
    “You think I killed Larry Kim?”
    “Someone did. Why not you?”
    “What would I have stood to gain?”
    “I don’t know yet. But I do know that you really wanted MacDuff to win the contest. Just like Simone really wanted Yoda to win. Maybe you had some sort of deal going with Dorothy.”
    “Goddamn deals.” Chris snorted out an exasperated sigh. “I’ve heard enough of that crap to last me a lifetime. I’ll tell you what the deal was that I had going with Dorothy. If I could get MacDuff to win the contest, my mother would get off my back. How’s that for an incentive?”
    “Your mother?” Simone looked just as puzzled as I felt.
    “What does she have to do with anything?”
    “Dorothy Foyle is my aunt. She’s my mother’s dotty sister, excuse the pun. When she was busy traveling all over the place showing MacDuff, my parents never saw her, which suited them just fine. Then MacDuff got old and got retired and suddenly Dorothy had time on her hands. For the past several months she’s been calling every day, dropping by my parents’ house to chat, and basically driving my mother nuts. And when my mother’s unhappy, everyone else around her had better watch out.”
    Every once in a while it was nice to be reminded that I wasn’t the only one with problem relatives.
    “Next thing I know, Dorothy comes up with this big plan. Or maybe it was my mother’s plan. Who even cares anymore?” Chris reached up and raked his fingers back through the sparse hair at his crown. His frustration with his family was so palpable that I couldn’t help but feel sorry for him.
    “Wouldn’t it be nice if MacDuff could be on television? Wouldn’t that be a wonderful outlet for his talents instead of just letting them go to waste? As if a dog his age has any ambition left. For Pete’s sake, he’s nearly fifty in human years. Let’s see who we know who has connections . . . What about Chris? Surely he could be useful somehow. He works for a major dog food company . . .”
    Chris was rambling on, almost talking to himself now. Simone was staring pointedly at her watch. She was probably wondering how much longer Doug could continue to hold up the press conference. As for me, I was waiting for Chris to get to the point.
    “So my aunt and my mother sit me down at the kitchen table and feed me cake and tell me all about this supposedly brilliant idea they’ve cooked up between them to hold a contest—”
    “Wait a minute!” Simone cried. “You mean you had the nerve to put me through the wringer for taking credit for your idea and it wasn’t even yours to begin with?”
    “Yeah, something like that.” Chris’s watery blue eyes blinked behind his wire-rimmed glasses. “Ironic, huh?”
    Sheesh, I thought. These two deserved each other.
    “And then what?” I asked impatiently.
    “And then,” Chris said, “Simone grabbed the idea for the contest and ran with it. Next thing I know, not only was I not getting any credit but Dorothy and MacDuff weren’t winning either. Talk about