Bloodlines (20 page)

The phone rang. Gloria was elated. “I decided I’d just show up there, not call, just show up, and—”

“You didn’t have directions,” I said sourly.

She was breathless with excitement. “I just went out there, and I thought I’d ask at a gas station or something, but I didn’t even need to. I saw the sign, and I just walked in, and the most amazing thing happened. It was the most amazing thing I’ve ever seen in my entire life.”

“Oh,” I said.

“You know how there’s this sort of front room? In the front, there’s like a little shop. And the puppies are in the back.”

“Yes.”

“Well, I just sort of walked in, and there wasn’t anyone there, and then I heard people’s voices in the back, so I went there. And you won’t believe it.”

“Try me,” I said.

“This guy?”

“Ronald?”

“Yes. He was … I guess he was supposed to be cleaning out the kennels, only I guess, while he was, they started having a fight.”

“He and Janice Coakley?”

“Yes. And you won’t believe it.”

“I might,” I said, “given the opportunity.”

“The
second
I walked in, the exact
second
, he had this sort of little shovel in his hand, and it was, uh, full. And Mrs. Coakley … I guess she’d just said something to him? And he just hauled off and threw it at her!”

“The shovel?”

“No! The, uh, the … everything that was in it!” Gloria finally found the lost word. “Pooh! He threw this gigantic shovelful of dog pooh at her.” Gloria caught her breath and added, “And he didn’t miss, either.”

“Janice Coakley must have been a little provoked,” I said.

“Provoked! I thought she was going to kill him. All I could think of was this woman that was murdered at Puppy Luv, and I thought, wow, there’s going to be a whole series of murders in pet shops, and here I am—”

“But she didn’t.” I stopped. “Or … My God, she didn’t, did she?”

“No, of course not. What she did was … It was just like a movie. She pointed her finger at him and yelled, ‘Ronald, you’re fired!’ It was totally amazing.”

“I can imagine,” I said.

“So then, honestly, it was incredible. He just left. He walked out. Just like that. And so I helped her get cleaned up, and she hired me.”

“Just like that?”

“Not exactly. It took a while. She was sort of upset.” Gloria’s voice dropped. “She was crying. It was sort of awful. And then a couple of the puppies threw up, and that’s basically how I got the job.”

“How?”

“I asked her if she wanted me to clean up, you know, after the puppies.”

“And she just hired you? Just like that?”

“Sort of. I’m, uh, kind of on probation. I’m temporary. But it was really amazing.”

Lucky, yes. Amazing? Not really. Just the work of the great semantic palindrome. You know what a palindrome is, don’t you? The same thing spelled backward and forward.
Madam, I’m Adam.
And
semantic
is meaning, right? So a semantic palindrome
means
the same thing both ways. Anyway, the truly amazing thing is that, so far as I know, in the entire English language, there’s only one example. Yes, you got it. Divine intervention.

After I’d reminded Gloria of her tasks at Your Local Breeder, I called Buck, who always comes through when I really need him, which is to say, whenever I’m desperate for help that has anything to do with a dog. Icekist Sissy’s story started as I’d expected. The breeder was, of course, Lois Metzler, and the first owners were Mark and Linda Ames, Lois’s yuppie couple. Sissy’s ownership had been transferred to Joseph Rinehart. The surprise was that he still owned her.

“Then he must have leased her,” I said. “He leased her to Walter Simms.”

Have I lost you? According to Section 1 of the AKC rules on registration,
breeder
means the person who owned the puppy’s dam when she was bred, unless the dam was leased at the time of breeding. In that case,
breeder
means the lessee.

My father continued. “Princess Melissa Sievers. The breeder is this Walter Simms you asked me about. The owner is Edgar Sievers. No transfers, nothing else.”

“And Simms? Did you find out …?”

“I had a hard time prying this much out of her. They’re getting more close-mouthed down there than they used to be.”

“It’s okay,” I said. “This is a lot. It’s a big help. Thank you.”

When I hung up, those tall New England trees finally took root. The horizon narrowed and rose behind fat-bellied Walter Simms. A breeder like Lois Metzler or Betty Burley might well ship a bitch across the country to be bred to the perfect stud. Leasing might be part of the arrangement. But Rinehart? Although he lived nearby, Lois and I had never heard of him; in the world of malamutes, he was no one. I finally got it. People like that don’t lease their bitches to breeders halfway across the country. Why would they? If Rinehart had leased Icekist Sissy, then the lessee, the sow-faced, female-breasted Walter Simms, wasn’t some puppy farmer in the Midwest. Toto was a Cairn, of course, not a malamute, but I spoke Dorothy’s words aloud to Rowdy and Kimi: “Guys,” I said sadly, “something tells me we’re not in Kansas anymore.”

If you’ve ever consulted the USDA list of puppy mill operators and brokers—pardon me once again, Class A and B animal dealers—you’ll understand why I rechecked the damned thing. There are so many thousands of people listed that any one name is easy to miss. Last time, I’d started with the nearby states. If Walter Simms’s name had been there, my fresh eyes and brain should have caught it, but, then again, I’d expected to find it, if at all, in the notorious Big Six—Iowa, Nebraska, Kansas, Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma—or possibly in Illinois, Indiana, Colorado, Minnesota, the Dakotas, or Pennsylvania, anywhere but right here in New England. This time, I began with Class A dealers in Massachusetts. Simms wasn’t listed. Then I turned to Massachusetts A dealers. Walter Simms wasn’t one. But Rinehart was. Like a lot of other dealers, Rinehart had a blank to the right of his name, under the heading “Doing business as,” but an address is evidently mandatory. Rinehart’s was 688 Boston Road, Westbrook. Westbrook? Coakley. Your Local Breeder. The same. How had I missed it the first time? By scanning five or six thousand
names.
By ignoring addresses.

NYNEX information for Westbrook had no listing for a Joseph Rinehart. In an effort to spare myself the
drive out there, I also tried the Boston yellow pages under pet shops, kennels, kennel supplies, animal transportation, and a couple of other headings, but neither Rinehart’s name nor the address in Westbrook appeared. I wanted to stay home with Rowdy and Kimi, and, to tell the truth, I didn’t want to groom them, train, or even write about them. I was halfway through Donald McCaig’s
Eminent Dogs, Dangerous Men: Searching Through Scotland for a Border Collie.
I ached to lie in bed with the book in my hands and my dogs at my feet.

Reluctant and tired, I went anyway. Enthusiastic and energetic, so did Rowdy and Kimi. Afraid to drive alone at night on dark country roads? Get a dog! Better yet, get two! The song says that you’ll never walk alone. As it neglects to point out, you’ll never drive alone, either. Anyway, dark it was. By the time we crossed into Westbrook, the night was so black that I had trouble shaking the perception that my headlights were failing. Whenever a car approached and I courteously switched from high to low beams, the road ahead looked like an unilluminated tunnel with invisible walls. Then, as soon as the car passed, I’d put on the high beams again, not just to see where I was going but to reassure myself that the headlamp bulbs hadn’t suddenly burned out.

Before leaving home, I’d consulted the map of Westbrook in the
Universal Atlas
and discovered that Boston Road was the same one I’d followed to the turnoff for Bill Coakley’s just the day before, the pretty-here, ugly-there route that the stagecoaches between Westbrook and Boston must have taken two hundred years ago. Now, though, the night hid yesterday’s low hills and stretches of woods, and the tiny windows of the gentrified farms shone like penlight beams in an endless cavern. It seemed to take hours to reach that bright strip of fast-food joints. Except maybe in the eyes of the CEO of McDonald’s, arches have never shone more golden than they did that night.

I’d eaten an entire Emma’s pizza, minus a few bits
of crust; when I slowed down and peered at the McDonald’s on my right, I wasn’t trying to decide between a Quarter Pounder and a fish sandwich. Rather, I was looking for a street number. The McDonald’s had none, but its next-door neighbor, Cap Heaven—truck caps, what else?—was number 670. Rinehart was 688. His place must also be on the right, not far ahead.

But I didn’t need a street number. I’d passed the place on my way to and from Bill Coakley’s. Its signs were so big and obvious that I almost missed them. Both were fastened to the same two tall, thick posts at the edge of Boston Road. The top sign read:

RINEHART MOTOR MART
Quality Pre-Owned Cars and Trucks
Sales, Service, Parts

The sign beneath had slightly smaller lettering:

Rinehart Auto Body
Expert Collision Repairs
Refinishing Specialists
Down Draft Spray Oven—
Modern Baking Facilities

Baking facilities?
Don’t ask me. Cars aren’t my specialty. Dogs are. But even after I realized that spraying and baking must have something to do with repainting automobiles, that bottom line felt sinister, especially the word
oven.
The situation made me vaguely sick. I’d found a dealer in used cars. A
body
shop. That word ate at me, too.
Body.
I kept rereading the sign, as if repeated exposure would somehow make everything fall into place, but the words became increasingly absurd and ludicrous.
Collision. Parts.
And
Pre-Owned.
My God, I thought, when you read between the lines, it’s not about used and smashed-up cars at all. It’s about secondhand dogs. Parts and service.

After a minute or two, I came to my senses, looked
beyond the sign, and realized that Rinehart Motor Mart was exactly what it claimed to be: an auto body shop and used-car lot, and a big one at that. The sign by the road was like a goal post at the end of a football field so jammed with late-model cars, vans, and pickups that I almost expected college kids to pile out for the post-game party. But the white numbers chalked on the windshields spoiled the effect. A big orange sticker on a Bronco much newer than mine advertised it as a special of the week. Another special was a long black limo that even I was able to identify as a Cadillac. In the brilliant, theft-deterring floodlights, I also picked out a few of the cozy house-on-wheels vans I always envy when I see them in the parking lots at dog shows: a Ford Aerostar, a Plymouth Voyager, and a luxurious Toyota something-or-other that looked showroom new and big enough to sleep six or eight malamutes, one lean woman, and her ardent vet in perfect comfort and near privacy.

I’d pulled to the side of the road. Now I got out and stared, and the anomaly hit me again: I wasn’t here to gather daydream material about the perfect dog-show van, which I could, in any case, customize in my sleep with no help from Joe Rinehart. I was here because I’d found Rinehart’s name and this address in the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s list of Class A animal dealers in Massachusetts.
This
address? Beyond the car lot was an ugly brick two-story flat-roofed building that obviously housed the auto body shop and the car-lot business office, but I was too far away to see whether there was a number on the door. But this
had
to be the right address. The name
Rinehart?
Not far beyond Cap Haven, definitely number 670? After this was a Pizza Hut. Anything beyond the Pizza Hut would certainly have a number higher than 688.

I could have clambered over the metal barrier and crossed the car lot to check out the building, but the floodlights deterred me. I didn’t intend to steal a car, even the enviable Toyota van, and I didn’t intend to be
mistaken for a car thief, either. I looked around and spotted a service road that ran between the car lot and the Pizza Hut. I returned to the Bronco, pulled ahead, and turned down the service road, a roughly paved drive that took me past the auto body shop and beyond the reach of the fast-food and car-lot floodlights. Once again, the low beam of my headlights was too faint to penetrate the darkness. I switched to high beam and made out a scrubby, rutted field ahead, a few rusted oil drums, a dented blue dumpster, and, around the rear of the auto body shop, a high fence of heavy wire mesh. I pulled into the field, turned the Bronco around, and was just starting to jolt back in the direction of Boston Road when a loud engine started up and a set of bright headlights came on in the fenced-in area behind Rinehart’s. I stopped the car and watched. A section of the wire fence turned out to be a gate. Someone must have opened it while I was turning the Bronco around. An oversize dark van with no rear windows—a panel truck, I guess it’s called—backed out. The driver’s door opened. My high beams caught the tight jeans of a young guy with a good body. Parts and service, I thought. Truth in advertising. I watched him swagger to the gate, close it, and start back to the van. He wore a baseball cap on backward and a denim jacket with fleece around the collar. He moved well, and his face was old-movie handsome. He looked a little like a definitely oily James Dean—not that I have anything against greasy vitality, of course.