Bessie Mae's Dog

Bessie Mae and Julia grew up together, became secretaries and married; Bessie Mae to a lawyer who became a district court judge (who died of a heart attack as the story was beginning), Julia to the owner of a boutique. Julia had three children (the youngest, Aaron was a lawyer), and Bessie Mae had none so she and her husband became spare parents for Julia's family. When Harold died, Julia suggested that Bessie Mae get a pet as a companion, and so the story began with Julia narrating.
Imagine a dirty, bedraggled waif of a puppy in an animal shelter as the central figure in a case of fraud, intellectual theft, murder and destruction of a major pharmaceutical company's laboratory.
It wasn't his fault, but he was a central figure when a young researcher's formula for a cure for certain types of cancer was stolen and patented by the owner of Rogitech Labs. When it became apparent that the formula was valid but would need at least two years' work before FDA approval, Weldon, the owner of the labs, decided he needed money now and sold spaces on the list of people who would get first dibs on the formula to those who had no other chance for survival. The treasurer Jeffrey Katz was aware that money was being siphoned off but had no way to prove it. He was told to make a second set of books that would show massive increases in costs to the lab, but he had no paperwork to back it up and assumed that he was being set up and was planning to get out. He was also aware that the formula that was supposed to be costing so much belonged to the young man who had brought it in and wasn't aware that Weldon had patented it as belonging to Rogitech. When it became clear to Weldon that his dream of instant money was two years in the future, he decided to take what he had already scammed and get out after, making it look like Olaf Dalgren, the oncologist he had hired to do the work, had destroyed the lab and run off with the money. That worked until the body of the man was found in a Dumpster twenty-two miles away, but Weldon was gone by then, and Katz was on the hook.