Chow Down (A Melanie Travis Mystery)

Does she have any titles there?”
    “Just one. Faith has her CD.”
    CD stood for Companion Dog and was the most basic of the obedience degrees. Even so, it was an achievement. A dog had to be pretty well trained to make it that far.
    “It’s a start,” said Chris. He didn’t sound impressed. Since he’d recently met with the Reddings and their triple-threat Brittany, I could understand why he might not be.
    “You saw Simone earlier, right?”
    I nodded.
    “She gave Faith some Chow Down to taste?”
    “Yes.” Deliberately, I didn’t elaborate.
    “How’d that go?”
    So much for the not elaborating thing. “Okay.”
    “Just okay?”
    There was no point in beating around the bush. I was certain the committee members would be comparing notes later.
    “Faith didn’t fall in love with the product right away. But that’s pretty normal for her. It usually takes her some time to decide whether she likes a new food or not.”
    “Finicky, huh?”
    “She can be.”
    “I know what you’re thinking,” said Chris. “That a little thing like that is no big deal. But at this level, everything counts. It has to. This contest is important to me. It was my concept and it’s been my baby since the beginning. I really care about the end result. And it wouldn’t say much for the dog food, would it, if the company’s own spokesdog didn’t love it?”
    I sat quietly through Chris’s lecture. But that, coming on top of what I’d learned from Cindy—that Faith hadn’t been one of the finalists Chris had backed—put me on the defensive. All at once I found myself wondering if Faith wasn’t the only one who’d had a problem with her initial sample of Chow Down.
    “How’d the others do?” I asked.
    “Pardon me?”
    He’d heard me. I knew it and he knew it.
    “I’m just curious,” I said casually. “Brando, Yoda, MacDuff, Ginger—how did they do with their first taste of Chow Down?”
    Chris hesitated, as if trying to decide how much to reveal. Then abruptly he seemed to realize that his silence itself was telling enough.
    “Some handled it better than others.”
    I waited in silence. After another minute, Chris continued.
    “Brittanys aren’t big eaters, at least that’s what the Reddings told me. And Brando, well . . . one look at Ben and you can pretty much see that that dog’s been spoiled beyond redemption. But they’ll come around in time. They’ll have to, otherwise what would be the point?”
    I wondered if it was just coincidence that the contestants Chris outlined as having problems were the ones he hadn’t chosen in the first place.
    “What about MacDuff and Yoda?”
    Chris smiled happily. “MacDuff was fine. He’s always fine. Pretty much no matter what you ask him to do, that guy’s a pro.”
    “And Yoda?”
    “She did great. For such a small dog, she really packed it in. Then she danced around on her hind legs and asked for more.”
    “I’m happy for Lisa’s sake,” I said. “Actually I was surprised to see her today. You know, so soon after what happened.”
    “Me, too. None of us expected her to show up. And of course we’d have understood entirely if she hadn’t. But Lisa was very determined to go on. That’s what she told us. She was sure it was what Larry would have wanted her to do.”

    I’ve always done my best thinking when I’m driving in the car. Maybe that’s why it wasn’t until twenty minutes later, when Faith and I were on our way home, that something occurred to me. When I’d seen Lisa earlier outside the dog food company, she hadn’t had Yoda with her. So the Yorkie couldn’t have sampled Chow Down that morning like the other finalists had.
    Yet Chris was certain that Yoda had tried the product and liked it. I wondered when that had happened.

11
    A fter Faith and I got home, I realized something else. Despite the numerous topics I’d talked about at various meetings that morning, the one thing that hadn’t come up in our conversations was any speculation about Larry Kim’s death. Oh, we’d danced around the subject a bit, spoken about how bad we felt for Lisa, and discussed the fact that she’d elected to remain in the contest.
    But like the proverbial elephant in the corner, everyone had avoided mentioning the obvious questions that still remained. What had Larry been doing in the stairwell? Had another person been there with him? And why might someone have wanted to push him down a flight of steps?
    I wondered whether the police had