“No, I’ll take care of Mr. Werzel,” I said. “I’ll tell him about you thinking it was mine and giving it to me. Which is the truth—I’ll just let him think I was the one who identified it as his camera.”
“Thanks,” he said. “I promise I won’t ever do anything like this again.”
“One thing,” I said. “Did you mess with his pictures?”
He shook his head.
“I didn’t even look at more than the first one or two,” he said. “I could tell it wasn’t yours.”
“Good,” I said. “I want to be telling the absolute truth when I say that you had nothing to do with the missing pictures.”
“But how do you even know there are any missing?” he asked.
“There may not be now, but before I give this back to him, I plan to look through all of them and delete any that I’d cringe to see published in the Trib. For instance, I remember him taking a picture of my rear end when I was bending over to see if Spike was bleeding to death.”
Eric grinned.
“So you’re going to do the same thing I was going to do.”
“You bet. Now run along and sin no more. Leave that to me.”
“Thanks, Aunt Meg.” He hesitated, then reached over to give me a quick hug before turning to go.
“Oh, Eric—can you do something for me?”
“Sure.” He paused in the doorway.
“If you see Michael, could you get him to send someone up with the key to the office?”
Eric grinned.
“So you can keep people like me from bothering you,” he said.
“So I can lock it up when I leave,” I said. “We’ve got all the presents here—including yours.”
“Oh, in that case—yeah, I’ll find him,” Eric said. He closed the door behind him.
I stood up to look over the desk at Spike. He was still under the chair, curled up so tightly he looked like a black and white fur hat.
“You’re a lot of help,” I said. “Next time, bark, will you?”
He ignored me.
I sat back down to examine the camera.
Chapter 29
Luckily, since Werzel’s camera was the same make and practically the same model as my own, I didn’t have much trouble turning it on. Not exactly a professional photographer’s camera. No wonder Werzel had been so desperate for his lost photographer to show up.
Though it was odd that even after the real photographer arrived, Werzel continued looking so insistently for his camera. Especially since he wasn’t much better a photographer than I was. His photos didn’t have as many of what Michael called “unidentified flying pink sausages”—pictures in which I’d accidentally put part of my thumb or forefinger in front of the lens—but just as many of his shots were ever so slightly out of focus. Or noticeably askew. Or awkwardly framed. The occasional shot good enough to print looked more like an accident than anything else.
I deleted half a dozen embarrassing or unflattering shots of myself and others—shots sufficiently in focus that some editor at the Trib, in an evil moment, might have considered using them. Of course, by the time the news about the murder had broken, the photographer had arrived, so odds were the Trib wouldn’t need any of Werzel’s shots at all.
Except, of course, for the shots of Ralph Doleson while he was still alive. Those might have a news value that outweighed their poor quality. My temper flared all over again when I saw the shots of Doleson booting poor Spike out of the pig shed.
Perhaps it was a pity I’d decided to wait until after the parade to report Doleson for animal abuse. If I’d dragged one of the several nearby police officers over to have him arrested on the spot, maybe he’d still be alive.
No use second-guessing things like that, and it wasn’t as if it was my fault the killer had found Doleson alone. Like Ebenezer Scrooge, he’d helped seal his own fate by the way he’d lived.
Werzel had snapped a couple of shots of Spike lying in wait outside the pig shed, and then a rather nice shot of Clarence ministering tenderly to the small evil one. And another predictable but amusing shot of Spike sinking his teeth deep into the heavy leather gloves Clarence had taken to wearing when treating his more savage patients, like Spike and the zoo’s wolverines.
I reached over and plugged the card reader into Michael’s computer. The shots of Spike and Clarence were too good to let go. Before I gave the camera back, I was going to keep copies of them for myself.
I turned back to the camera and clicked ahead. Another couple of photos of Spike, none of them as good as the first few. A distant shot of Michael, Dr. Blake, and the chief on their camels.