Oodles of Poodles Read Online Free PDF Page B

takes were done in a manner where the dogs seemed safe enough despite their excitement in running down the street and barking, with no cars following.
    Matt arrived around lunchtime. L.A. Animal Services didn’t generally show up on movie sets, but I still managed to get him okayed to join us as a friend of Dante’s. They had met and seemed to get along fine, even if they weren’t buddies.
    Matt is six feet tall and nice looking, with brown eyes and short, dark hair. I liked seeing him in his official uniform—khaki shirt, green slacks, and jacket, with lots of patches and badges to show he was a captain in Animal Services.
    And, yes, I’d seen him in a lot less.
    I introduced him to Grant and saw them size each other up but we were all on friendly terms as we observed the filming.
    If I’d been asked, I would have said that Marford had just been goading Grant, Niall, and Carlie. The takes even after lunch all seemed pretty mellow. Apparently Marford was in agreement. He wasn’t allowing any animals to be harmed. No cars were filmed with the dogs. As Grant had insisted, the scariest parts of the scenes for the canines would be added later by animation.
    Take after take, cute poodles dashed everywhere, apparently running away from the bad guy. I could just picture how it would all look up on a movie screen when the film was done, hear in my head how the narrator, in Sheba’s point of view, would describe what was happening. It would be exciting and poignant and great filmmaking, or at least it had that potential.
    But then came the last take. It made my blood freeze. Cars were used. And those sweet little poodles seemed much too close to the rolling wheels of at least one of them.
    Grant called a halt to the filming. To my surprise, Marford agreed. Or maybe he thought he’d gotten the scene the way he wanted it.
    “We’ll resume here tomorrow,” he said. “There are a couple more scenes that’ll be shot on the streets here under our permit.”
    “No more endangering the animals, you freak,” Carlie demanded. “That last shot—it was scary. They could have been hurt, or worse. No more of this or even if you get the seal of approval from American Humane, I’ll make sure you’re depicted on my show as the monster you are.”
    “None of the animals was hurt,” Marford insisted. “My drivers were careful. Everything is fine.”
    “It’s not,” Carlie said. “Don’t even think about doing that again, or you’ll be sorry.”
    Her crew, no doubt, got that on camera.
    Which turned out not to be a good thing.
    Somebody killed Hans Marford that night.

Chapter 4

Unsurprisingly, I didn’t expect that.
    I didn’t like it either. In fact, I felt pretty awful about it. Hans was dead.
    It wasn’t clear at first whether he’d been murdered or the subject of a hit-and-run accident. I suspected the former, though, and so, apparently, did the cops.
    Sure, he hadn’t seemed as devoted to protecting animals as I’d have hoped for a director of the kind of film that Sheba’s Story would be, but at least he hadn’t allowed the dogs to be put in danger for most of the day.
    Although I’d been concerned that his last take would be a harbinger of others to come…
    Maybe someone else had felt the same way. But kill him for it? That seemed much too extreme.
    Yet people sometimes murdered with even less motive.
    The way I learned about Hans’s demise was rather unexpected, too. Matt told me.
    His affiliation with the film production was even more tenuous than mine. But he’d learned about it in his official capacity.
    “One of the crime scene investigators from the LAPD called Animal Services around four A.M. ,” he told me as we spoke by phone early the next morning before I left for HotRescues. We’d postponed our dinner plans the previous night.
    Talking on my smartphone at this hour was becoming a habit, one I’d be glad to break. Yesterday’s call from Dante had changed the schedule of my entire day.
    So