“Look, there’s another old lady,” he said, pointing in the direction of Ida Baumgartner, one of Odelia’s dad’s most loyal patients. “Let’s help her cross the road.”

  “Let’s not,” I said. “Instead, let’s help Odelia solve some case—next time she has a case to solve, that is.”

  “You mean like finding out who’s sending pictures of sausages to her friend Rose’s phone?”

  “Exactly,” I said with a smile.

  8

  Odelia walked into her uncle’s office and found the big man seated behind his desk and scratching his nose, looking a little discombobulated. He glanced up when his niece entered and said, “I thought you’d be dropping by.”

  “Have you got more news about Dino Wimmer’s death?”

  “I have, but you’re not going to like it.”

  “So it was murder,” she said as she took a seat.

  “No, it wasn’t. He’d swallowed down those pills and that’s what killed him.”

  “Oh,” she said, and frowned at her uncle.

  “Yeah. Stomach contents reveal the remnants of what probably was a so-called smoothie, and enough sleeping pills to kill an elephant. The glass on his desk contained traces of the same smoothie and those same pills. Fingerprints on the glass are his. Fingerprints on the suicide note are his. So that’s it, Odelia. Case closed.”

  “Okay.”

  “See? I told you you wouldn’t like it.”

  “The thing is, Rose just came to see me.”

  “And?”

  “And she’s still convinced her dad didn’t commit suicide. She seems convinced he was murdered. And now she wants me to catch his killer.” She heaved a deep sigh. “Problem is, there’s absolutely no evidence to back up her claim.”

  “Do you want my opinion?”

  “I do,” she said with a twinkle in her eye.

  Uncle Alec grinned and patted his practically bald head, making sure those few remaining wisps of hair remained in the right place. “I think it’s only natural for a girl like Rose to be convinced her dad was murdered. I mean, what’s the alternative? That he killed himself and left her all alone? That’s very hard to stomach for anyone, and definitely for a girl as young as she is—practically a child.”

  “I know. So what do you suggest I do?”

  “You could tell her the truth: that her dad wasn’t the victim of a crime, and no matter how much you want to help her, you can’t take a case that’s only going to lead nowhere.”

  “Or I could take her case, and prove once and for all that her dad wasn’t killed,” said Odelia.

  “What’s the point, honey? You’re going to waste a lot of time proving something that’s already obvious from the evidence.”

  She scooted forward in her chair. “So he died from the same pills that were in that pill bottle on his desk, right?”

  “Yep, that’s what the coroner said.”

  “What about the note? Did you check the handwriting?”

  Uncle Alec hesitated.

  “See? That’s what we need to ascertain so we can put Rose’s mind at ease. Make sure that all the facts align and that there is no room for doubt.”

  Uncle Alec tapped the desk. “So you’re going ahead? You’re going to take this case?”

  Odelia shrugged. “I feel like I have to. She’s so devastated by the loss of her dad. If only to put her mind at ease, I feel like I can’t just tell her to get lost.”

  “No, I see what you mean,” said her uncle, then shrugged. “Fine. You do what you have to do, and if there’s anything you need, just tell me and I’ll see what I can do.”

  “That’s great. Thanks, Uncle Alec.”

  “Sure thing, honey.” He glanced out the window, and frowned. “Why is it that every time I look out this window I see those two cats of yours lounging on the windowsill listening in on all of my private conversations?”

  Odelia glanced over to where her uncle was looking, and found Max and Dooley intently staring back at her, the way only cats can.

  She laughed. “Oh, you guys,” she said as she walked over to the window. “So now you’re spying on me, too?”

  She opened the window a crack and let them into her uncle’s office.

  “Honey, I don’t think that’s such a good idea,” said her uncle, but before he could stop her, Max and Dooley had already jumped down to the floor and were padding around, sniffing here and there, and generally making sure they were well acquainted with their new surroundings.

  “Please tell me they’re not going to become fixtures here,” said Uncle Alec. “I’ll be the laughingstock of the precinct. They’ll call me the cat chief from now on.”

  “Just for a little while,” said Odelia. “They like to get a feel for the place, and then they’ll be out of your hair.”

  At the mention of hair, Uncle Alec sneezed.

  “I didn’t know you were allergic,” said his niece with a grin.

  “I’m not—at least I wasn’t. But maybe now I am?”

  “So are you going to take the case?” asked Max, once he’d completed his examination of the office and found it to his liking.

  “Yes, I am,” said Odelia. “There may not have been a murder, but clearly Rose thinks there’s something fishy about her dad’s death. And if only I can convince her that it was suicide and not murder, she’ll be able to move on.”

  “I think he was murdered,” said Dooley, who’d jumped on top of Uncle Alec’s desk and was now sniffing at the Chief’s framed portrait of Mayor Butterwick, his girlfriend.

  “You do?” asked Odelia. “How so?”

  “I think he was murdered by the same man who sent that picture of a sausage to his daughter,” said Dooley. “I think we should be looking for Dick, Odelia. Dick is our guy.”

  “There was no piece of sausage in his throat, Dooley,” said Odelia. “He didn’t choke.”

  “Oh,” said Dooley, processing this.

  “What is he saying?” asked her uncle, watching with a worried eye as Dooley placed his tush on top of his files and started licking himself.

  “Dooley thinks we should be looking for Dick,” she said.

  “Dick?”

  “The man who sent Rose pictures of his sausage,” said Odelia with a wink to her uncle.

  “Oh, right,” he said. “If I catch the bastard who sent those…”

  “Any clues on his identity?” asked Odelia.

  “Nothing. Chase handed over Rose’s phone to the brainiacs at the cybercrime unit. They’ll work their magic and hopefully come up with a name and address.” He grimaced. “At which point we’ll come down on this Dick like a ton of bricks.”

  “Yes, nail this sausage man,” said Dooley sagely. “That’s my advice, Odelia.”

  “Oh, brother,” Max muttered.

  Dooley had taken a sip from Uncle Alec’s coffee, and suddenly sneezed—into the Chief’s cup. “Better don’t drink this, Uncle Alec,” he said, making a face. “This stuff will kill you.” And then he smiled at Max. “Another good deed done!”

  9

  We finally had a case to work on—exactly what I needed right now, what with Dooley’s string of good deeds making me antsy and worried about his safety—not everyone responds with Uncle Alec’s equanimity at having their morning coffee spoiled.

  “So where do we go next?” I asked when we’d walked out of the police station.

  “Well, seeing as I need to disprove that Rose’s dad was murdered,” said Odelia, “and the only way to disprove a murder is to try to prove it and fail, I thought we might go and see a specialist.”

  “An eye specialist?” asked Dooley, interested.

  Odelia smiled. “I thought we’d go and see my dad. He was, after all, Dino Wimmer’s doctor, and might be able to tell me more about the man’s state of mind when he died.”

  “Oh, right,” said Dooley, who was clearly firing on all cylinders today.

  So we set paw for Odelia’s dad Tex, who has his doctor’s office nearby, and soon walked in to find Odelia’s gran seated behind the reception desk, busily enjoying a game of scrabble. It was a nice change of pace from her usual game of Solitaire, I must say.

  “What are you doing here?” Gran snapped in her customary pleasant welcoming way.

  “I need to talk to Dad,” said Odelia. She directed a curious look at the door to the inner office. “Is he busy?”

  “He’s always busy. You’ll have to make an appointment.”

  “Oh,” said Odelia, clearly disappointed.

  “Why do you need to see him?” asked the old lady. “Are you dying? Do you have a disease you haven’t told me about? Is it cancer?”

  “Cancer!” said Dooley. “You’re not dying, are you, Odelia?”

  “No, I’m not dying, Dooley,” said Odelia, directing a censorious look at her grandmother, silently scolding her lack of tact. “If you must now, I’m working on a case.”

  “A case? And you didn’t tell me? You didn’t tell your loyal sidekick? The Dr. Watson to your Sherlock Holmes? The Captain Hastings to your Hercule Poirot? And why, may I ask, is it that all these famous detectives are men, and their sidekicks, too? It’s not fair!”

  She was right, of course, though in our case our main detective was clearly a woman, in the form of Odelia, and her sidekicks—plural—were cats, which was definitely a departure from the norm.

  “Well, it’s not really a case,” said Odelia. “Well, it is and it isn’t.”

  “Oh, please make up your mind,” Gran grunted irritably. “Is it a case or isn’t it a case?”

  “A man committed suicide last night.”

  “I heard about that. Dino Wimmer. The banker.”

  “And now his daughter Rose thinks it wasn’t suicide but murder and she wants me to investigate and bring the alleged killer to justice. Only I’m not so sure she’s right. And so I’m going to try to prove that he was murdered and thereby prove that he wasn’t, see?”

  Gran blinked a couple of times, then frowned. “You’re nuts,” was her opinion, and then hollered, “Tex! Your daughter is here to see you!” And then she sat back down behind her desk, watching with satisfaction how the door to the inner office was yanked open and a distraught-looking Tex appeared. His shock of white hair was tousled, and his face flushed.

  “Odelia, honey. What ’s wrong? Are you all right?”

  “She’s working on a case and needs your opinion,” Gran explained. “In other words she needs you to dish the dirt on one of your patients. Dino Wimmer—remember him?”

  “Sure, Dino.”

  “He died last night. Offed himself by popping a bunch of pills.” She gestured with her head to her granddaughter. “In you go. And make it snappy. We don’t have all day, you know.”

  Odelia, if she was annoyed by her grandmother’s remarks, didn’t show it. Then again, if you’ve lived as long as she had in the company of the woman, probably nothing she said or did had the power to surprise her. So we all filed into Tex’s office and as Odelia took a seat and Tex rounded his desk and did the same, Dooley and I glanced around, sniffing here and there and generally getting a good feel for the place. It had been a while since we’d been in there and it needed careful examination.

  “So Dino Wimmer,” said Tex, folding his hands as if in prayer and resting them on his desk. “What do you want to know?”

  “The thing is Dad, his daughter seems to think he’d never kill himself. She thinks her dad was murdered. Any thoughts?”

  The good doctor frowned. “Thoughts…” he murmured. “Thoughts…”

  “You know—what was his state of mind? Do you think he was in such a bad way that he wanted to end his life?”

  Tex studied the ceiling for a moment, as if to draw inspiration from the dead fly that was stuck there, dangling from a single leg, the poor thing. “Um…”

  “Look, I understand if you don’t want to tell me,” said Odelia. “Doctor-patient privilege and all that. But I just need to know if there’s even the slightest possibility that the man wasn’t responsible for his own death and that the suicide was staged. “

  “Well, all I can tell you is that Dino Wimmer was probably the last person in the world to want to take his own life,” said Tex, finally having accessed that part of his brain where his patient files were stored. “Because he’d told me just last week that he’d made an important decision. He hadn’t told his wife yet but he was finally ready to take early retirement and move down to Florida to start a second, more leisurely stage of his life.”

  “Florida?” asked Odelia, visibly surprised. “That doesn’t sound like a man who’d kill himself, does it?”

  “No, it most certainly doesn’t,” said her dad.

  “He didn’t have a recent health crisis or something? Some terminal illness?”

  “Nothing of the kind,” said Tex. “The man was under a great deal of stress, owing to his line of work. But apart from a minor cholesterol issue and that stress—which he planned to resolve by taking early retirement and moving his family down to Florida—he had nothing to worry about. He was, all things considered, as healthy as an ox. Healthier, probably.” He smiled before himself, then eyed the cross trainer located in a corner of his office with fondness. “His wife sold me on this wonderful piece of machinery.” He gestured to the device. “Said I looked a little peaked lately, and told me I should be more active—work out more. So I bought this thing on her instigation and have been faithfully putting in my daily minutes in between patients ever since.”

  Odelia smiled. “Dad, don’t tell me you’ve been working out?”

  “Yes, as a matter of fact I have,” he said proudly. “And my resting heart rate has returned to the safe zone. It’s a miracle machine, and I can recommend it to anyone.”

  I noticed a small television set had been placed on top of one of the metal cabinets in Tex’s office, and was displaying an episode of Diagnosis: Murder. Looked like we’d disturbed Tex in the middle of a workout, which explained his flushed appearance.

  “Look, Dino Wimmer was happy, healthy, and full of zest and zeal. The only thing that seemed to trouble him was the fact that his daughter was dating some weirdo, as he called him, and some minor trouble at the office, which he said he’d deal with forthwith. So if you’re asking me if the man committed suicide or was murdered, I’d go for the latter.”

  “But who would want to murder him?”

  “That,” said Tex as he spread his arms, “I cannot tell you, honey. That’s your department.”

  On the small television screen Dick Van Dyke was staring intently at a knife which had been removed from a dead man’s back. It seemed like an ominous sign of things to come: if Dino really was murdered, this case had just turned into a murder inquiry.

  10

  Odelia walked out of her dad’s office feeling a little heady. So it was entirely possible that Rose had been right after all. How surprising. But that also meant that she would now in earnest have to start looking for the killer.

  She still found it hard to wrap her head around the fact that Dino Wimmer had indeed been killed. It changed her entire outlook on the case. And as she was still thinking through the ramifications of this discovery, she caught sight of her grandmother’s face. The old lady looked bored. Bored and unhappy. And so in a flash of inspiration she said, “I need your help, Gran.”

  Gran immediately perked up. She even sat up straighter, as she’d been slumped in her chair, working out some scrabble clue. “You do? What do you need?”

  “I think this case has just officially turned into a murder inquiry. And I’m going to need all the help I can get to bring the killer to justice—if indeed there has been a murder—the jury is still out on that one, so to speak.”

  “You need my help catching a killer? Yes!” said Gran, actually pumping the air with her fist. “Tell me what you need and I’ll get it done. If you need me to squeeze some witness for information, I’ll squeeze him like a lemon. If you need me to lean on some heavy to give me the lowdown on the victim’s financial situation, consider it done.”

  “I’m going to need to talk to all the people involved in the case,” she explained, “and to save time I think it’s best if we split up in teams. Could you and Scarlett maybe talk to Dino Wimmer’s neighbors? Ask them if they saw something last night?”

  “Suspicious activities,” said Gran, nodding seriously. “I like your thinking, honey. And I’m way ahead of you. I’ll call Scarlett right away and we’ll start canvassing that neighborhood like it’s never been canvassed before. Consider it done!”

  And without further ado, she grabbed her coat and was out of there, even before Odelia could supply her with some more details about the case.

  And so when Dad stuck his head out of his office again moments later, and saw that the reception desk was unmanned—or unwomanned—he asked, “Where is your grandmother?”

  “Um, I’m afraid I may have done something to deprive you of your receptionist, Dad,” she said sheepishly.

  Dad shrugged. “What else is new?”

  And as she walked out of the office, her mind was already whirring with possibilities. In fact she was thinking so hard she hadn’t even noticed Max and Dooley were still following in her trail, deftly trying to keep up as she took long strides in the direction of… She suddenly halted, and both cats bumped into the back of her legs.

  “What’s going on?” asked Max.

  “Why did you stop?” asked Dooley.

  But since she couldn’t very well start talking to her cats in the middle of the street, lest someone call the loony bin, instead she gestured with her head in the direction of Main Street, and it was a testament to her furry friends’ perspicacity that they immediately caught her drift, and crossed the street on a trot in the direction of the General Store, where they could talk to one of their fellow feline spies.

  Odelia, meanwhile, set foot for the local branch of First Financial Crest, where until yesterday Dino Wimmer had spent his days catering to his clients’ financial needs.